Aïssa Benamer is alone. Crew cut, green eyes, broad wrestler’s shoulders, off-white Lacoste polo shirt, impeccably pressed, pleated beige pants from the Gap. He’s sitting with his legs outstretched, his sky-blue Timberland boat shoes crossed on his empty desk. By all appearances, an ex-Phalangist militiaman from Lebanon turned sailing club manager in the Vendée, or a former Israeli army officer who has reinvented himself as the head of security at a provincial shopping center. But no. Benamer was born to peaceable Kabyle hoteliers from Saint-Chamond. He joined the police in 1983 (the year of the pro-equality, anti-racism march that he followed on the television absentmindedly and without the least interest despite his brother, Lounès, being one of the spokesmen) after securing his law degree from Université Lyon 3 and completing his course at police training college. Nowadays, as commissaire central adjoint for the eighteenth arrondissement, he’s not far from the top.
But he is aiming for something more than that. Benamer is too scornful of other people to take any interest in honors. Or in order, or goodness. Or even in money. No, his reason for being is power. To hold it and wield it in all its forms. As chance would have it, his first posting meant serving under Frédéric Enkell, who immediately recognized in him the disciple he had always hoped for. Despite being a devout atheist, Enkell was, in his own way, a mystic. For him nothingness was evil. After observing him for three months, the Alsatian arranged for the young Kabyle to commit a fatal blunder, just so he could cover it up. This murderous initiation was the perfect rite of passage: it gave the promising pupil a taste for blood and, more importantly, for the unpunished crime, a field in which Enkell had been quite outstanding for the past twenty-five years (twenty of which with Benamer by his side), trafficking and murdering away without even the stirrings of an internal inquiry. All the while Enkell never stopped climbing the ranks with every new posting, each one in a challenging neighborhood. From Aulnay-sous-Bois to the fifteenth arrondissement in Marseilles, from Vénissieux in Lyon to the eighteenth in Paris. Benamer had followed him everywhere, his apprentice in every department of the criminal world: procuring; dealing stolen goods; trading sketchy favors; trafficking arms; drugs; blackmail . . . No gaps in their repertoire. Their strength? Always knowing when to pull the plug and take out the two or three civilians (never more) who had acted as their middlemen. And, every time trouble really started brewing, Enkell always managed to nip any investigations in the bud. Benamer didn’t know who was protecting him or why. His guess was that it had something to do with his role in liquidating certain people on request during the rather turbulent period straddling the Giscard and Mitterrand presidencies, just before he met Enkell. It didn’t really matter: sometimes it was no bad thing to be in the dark about the odd detail.
Currently, and for the first time, a sort of evil eye is on them. It started with the Vignola girl seeing something she ought not to have seen, which forced them to silence her for good. Not really the evil eye as it all comes down to the fact that they strayed from their usual prudence by agreeing to let a colleague in on their enterprise. Agreeing is not the right word. Francis Meyer, known as “Le Gros” on account of his great fatness, twisted their arm. He had some very precise information relating to a big part of the duo’s activities over the past fifteen years or so. Information that he can’t have gleaned by himself. Enkell knew Meyer’s father by reputation. “Handsome Roger” had been mixed up in every murky affair in the Parisian police from 1942 to 1973 and, in spite of his ninety years of age, he continued to ensure his son enjoyed considerable degrees of protection. So there was no chance of getting rid of the killjoy. And, in fairness, the business venture Le Gros brought them via Sam Aboulafia, a Jewish barber in the nineteenth, was gold dust. From the start, Enkell had been clear about the rules of the game: eliminating any nonpolice accomplices who could link it back to them, starting with Sam. Le Gros loved the idea. With the exception of the deviant Jehovah’s Witness, this deal involved a bunch of Arabs and Jews who he’d be delighted to take out—or at least have someone else take out. Because Francis Meyer had “forgotten” to warn Enkell and Benamer about one detail: he was in the habit of entrusting such matters to his younger brother, Raymond, who had unjustly failed his police entrance examination despite his evident skills in handling bladed weapons. The problem was that Raymond was extremely partial to every type of drug. And his big brother, who never refused him anything, had provided him with a few of the pretty blue pills that were to make them their fortune. The result? While the plan had been to make Laura disappear without a trace, Raymond—under the influence of Godzwill—had turned the young woman’s murder into a veritable work of conceptual art. And this made it impossible to hush up.
The previous day, standing among the crowds of tourists at Sacré-Coeur, confronting a livid Enkell, who had summoned him after the discovery of the grotesque theatrics surrounding the air hostess’s corpse, Le Gros seemed totally unfazed: “It gives him such pleasure, and anyway, it’s up to him to take care of it . . . He’s a guy that likes to make himself useful.” The commissaire central had thought it wise not to respond, and instead swore to himself that, however well-protected they might be, he would skin the two brothers alive when the time was right. He then charged his right-hand man with the task of “sorting out this fucking mess.”
Sorting out this fucking mess. Benamer takes a deep breath and recaps. The delivery to Holland had been successfully completed by Ruben, who had then gone to collect the latest batch from Vignola’s house in Niort before stashing it at the kosher products warehouse on boulevard MacDonald. A warehouse which connects to another—much more secret—via a door which only he and Enkell know exists, and to which only they have the key. If need be, they will be able to dissolve the pills in a few minutes and with the utmost discretion. As things stand, Ruben and his Hasidic pals are operational. Blissfully ignorant, not least because they’re convinced that the boxes contain tefillin, mezuzoth, and Torah scrolls. They could transport anything, with their beards, sidelocks, and hats placing them beyond all suspicion. Who would suspect a bumbling old rabbi? Anyway, the American woman has opened a new distribution network in Antwerp. Until things calm down, retail will have to be limited to Belgium and Holland. As for Paris, they’ll have to wait and see. Benamer’s plan had been to take out Vignola, Sam, and Haqiqi in one. Not such a sensible idea now thanks to the delirious antics of Meyer’s brother, which have served to put both Jews and Muslims in the spotlight, not to mention the Jehovah’s Witnesses, given the victim’s identity. Sam and Haqiqi can wait—nothing substantial links them to Laura. Plus, without them there’s no way of getting business back on track after this upset: the Jewish barber controls Ruben and the Hasidic mules; the Salafist preacher manages the network of dealers. Not so for Vignola, who’s pretty much no use to anyone anymore, and he wouldn’t last an hour and a half across the table from Rachel in the interrogation room. So he’ll need to be quietly taken out of the equation as soon as he arrived in Paris the next day.
The telephone rings. It’s Sam. Still living, albeit on borrowed time, Benamer thinks to himself, the morning’s first hint of a smile playing across his lips.
“Yes.”
“Can we meet?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Okay.”
Half an hour later, in the back room of a couscous restaurant on rue de l’Aqueduc, Sam is playing the smartass.
“Had the full lineup this morning! First there was Ahmed the dreamer, then your friends from the nineteenth, the Jew and the Breton. Ahmed bolted before his haircut was done. He was sweating. I made him think he was the ideal suspect. I can’t see him holding out in front of the police, especially if he hasn’t taken his meds: they could made him confess to anything.”
Benamer has never liked Sam, the idiot who reckons he’s cleverer than everyone else. He has to try hard not to betray his scorn at the man’s lack of judgment in thinking he’s capable of flogging an ideal suspect to Kupferstein and Hamelot, let alone in imagining that Benamer would be able to convince his colleagues that Ahmed is indeed guilty: that it’s an open-and-shut case . . . Thank you and good night! Maintaining an expression of intense, almost reverent concentration throughout, Benamer reflects upon how he’s going to kill Sam. Something simple, like a bullet in the back of the neck, but not without a little speech, some words to avenge all those long minutes spent entertaining his delusions of intelligence. Completely oblivious of what is going through Benamer’s mind, the barber brings his self-satisfied monologue to a close.
“In the end, I told Hamelot and Kupferstein that there was something suspicious about the way Ahmed had spoken about Laura the last time he was in for a haircut. The rest you know already. What do we do now?”
Benamer lets out a flicker of a smile.
“For the moment, you can just sit tight and do nothing—that would be an excellent start.”