9:26 P.M.
Christos’s old Renault 5 moves slowly through Les Hauts de Saint-Louis. He slows down even more at the tight bend on Rue des Combavas. A dozen Cafres, beer in hand, are standing halfway across the road, waiting for one of the white plastic tables to become free outside the mobile snack bar. Above the tables, a rainbow-colored sheet of canvas is strung between two palm trees.
Rainbow nation, my arse, thinks Christos.
Another three bends to go.
The few high-rise buildings give way to houses, tiny corrugated-iron constructions surrounded by gardens that are more like rubbish tips: rusty bikes; flowers rotting in pots; rubble and scrap metal.
Slum villages, the casuarina trees masking the worst of it.
Christos cuts across the next bend. He only really understood Réunion Island the day he got a bird’s-eye view of it; not from a helicopter, no need—he simply used Google Maps. He discovered the flat satellite image of the island, covered by thousands of little white squares: houses, all identical, surrounded by the same tropical landscape, bathed in the same golden sunshine, with only one distinguishing detail: sometimes there was a little blue oval next to the white square, sometimes not. From above, the equation is simple: the closer you get to the beach and the closer you get to the lagoon—where you can swim without fear of rocks, sharks or currents—the more houses there are with a blue oval next to them. There is no exception to this rule: the density of swimming pools on the island is strictly in inverse proportion to the theoretical need for one.
At the station, Christos had shown this map to Aja, who had merely shrugged. But he found the pattern incredibly significant. “One island, one world,’ Réunion’s tourist slogan proclaimed. And, fundamentally, that is not untrue. A representative sample of the inequalities between the people of five continents is gathered here, over twenty-five square miles.
A human laboratory.
This island is a terrace at the edge of the world, where you can sit and observe humankind. In the shade, while wearing flip-flops, and drinking a glass of punch.
Christos parks on Rue Michou-Fontaine, a gently sloping alley lined with rusted cars. Imelda’s house is the fourth in the street. There are three youngsters smoking outside it, sitting on the three worm-eaten planks that serve as steps.
Nazir is the eldest of Imelda’s sons. Fifteen. Long legs, like a heron in shorts. He blows out a mouthful of smoke and looks up at Christos.
“Hey, you’re here, Chief Inspector Derrick!” he says, referring to the popular German TV show. “Aren’t you supposed to be out catching public enemy number one?”
Fifteen feet away, a radio placed on a plastic container bellows out noise. The hunt for Martial Bellion is clearly this evening’s entertainment.
Nazir sucks at his cigarette and goes on:
“And here I was, thinking you were James Bond . . .”
Christos puts his foot on a step.
“I’m going to bed, kid. Even Derrick sleeps, eats, and shits. So does James Bond, for that matter.”
Nazir’s two friends giggle. Not Nazir. He’s too cool for that.
“I don’t get what my mother sees in you. A Zoreille, a cop. And a dick.”
Christos climbs two steps, then looks down at the teenager.
“But also a romantic. Learn that lesson, kid. Sleep, eat and shit, but do it romantically. That’s the secret. Now give me a drag of that.”
Nazir pinches the joint between two fingers and hides it behind his back.
“Don’t touch it, man. It’s illegal, ain’t that so?”
“All the more reason. Don’t forget you’re talking to a sworn officer of the law.”
The boy’s eyes sparkle with defiance.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah! In fact, you can forget the joint. Just give me the bag of zamal you’ve got stuffed in your pocket. I’m confiscating it!”
Unfazed, Nazir takes a ball of compacted leaves from the pocket of his shorts. He waves it in front of the policeman.
“You talking about this, man? I’ll let you have it for 150 euros. It’s worth twice that much, but since you’re almost family . . .”
Christos holds out his hand.
“Deal. I’ll give the cash to your mother.”
“Bullshit.”
The plastic packet is returned to the boy’s pocket. Nazir has kept just a single leaf between his thumb and his index finger.
“Here you go, Derrick. On the house! Freshly picked from our garden this morning.”
When Christos enters the house, cigarette in hand, Imelda has her back to him and is leaning over the sink. The three children, Dorian, Joly and Amic, are sitting on the edge of the table.
“Christos, for God’s sake!” shouts Imelda, without even turning round. “Your cigarette!”
The policeman sighs.
“Not in front of the children! Or Nazir for that matter—I heard everything you said, you know. He’s only fifteen. You shouldn’t be encouraging him. You’re a role model.”
Christos coughs.
“A role model? Is that it? How about his adoptive father while you’re at it? Don’t use that psychological blackmail with me, Imelda. Please.”
The dishes bang against the chipped ceramic and the cutlery falls into the sink with a clatter.
“Well, anyway, would you stub out your ciggy. And tomorrow, please confiscate his pack of zamal and pull all the plants up in the garden. If you don’t want to act like his dad, at least act like a police officer.”
Christos crushes his cigarette butt on the floor. He grabs the bottle of Charrette rum, then collapses onto the wooden stool.
“Fucking hell, what an evening.”
Imelda turns around and, in one smooth movement, picks up all the glasses and plates from the table.
“I listened to the news. Things are heating up in Saint-Gilles. I didn’t expect you back so early.”
The white rum burns the second lieutenant’s palate.
“One less cop playing hide-and-seek isn’t going to change things much.”
Imelda shrugs. She strikes a match and lights the gas under the aluminium stewpot.
“I bet you haven’t eaten, have you?”
Christos shakes his head. He adores this Cafre goddess. He adores her curry. He adores resting his arse in this crappy little house.
He has barely finished his glass before little Joly jumps onto his knees. Her long, frizzy hair smells of coconut shampoo.
“Can you tell me a story about a bad guy?”
Christos moves the bottle out of the child’s reach.
“A real bad guy?”
“Yeah.”
“A story about a bad guy who kills Creoles with a big knife. Who kills his wife so he can have their daughter all to himself?”
Joly bursts out laughing.
“Yessss!”
Imelda tidies away the dishes, placing them inside the Formica sideboard. Through the distorting glass of the rum bottle, Christos can see nothing but her queenly arse. God, he wants her, right here, right now.
Joly tugs at his sleeve.
“Hey, are you looking at Maman’s bum or are you telling me a story?”
Little minx!
Christos jokingly tries to push the girl off his lap. She collapses with laughter. Dorian and Amic get back in the ring and start wrestling each other again.
“Careful, it’s hot,” Imelda warns Christos, placing the bowl of curry in front him. “O.K., bedtime, you lot!”
The kids’ protests are cut short by a threateningly raised dishtowel.
Imelda turns towards Christos.
“Later, when we’re alone, I have to talk to you. Seriously.”
“Just tell me now.”
Imelda continues with the same tone of voice, perhaps with an added hint of excitement.
“I need to talk to you about your case, you idiot, the killer at large! There’s something in the story they keep telling on the TV that bothers me. Something odd that no one seems to have thought about . . .”
9:53 P.M.
Twenty minutes’ rest. That is what Aja has given herself.
Watch in hand.
She has decided to get out of Saint-Gilles. As she often does, when she needs to take stock, she has driven her 206 to Saint-Paul and gone for a walk as night falls, around the deserted sailors’ cemetery, around the empty marketplace, to the Grotte des Premiers Français, the cave where the first French settlers supposedly lived, which is buried under the casuarina trees.
Aja has just called home. Everything is fine. Tom is looking after Jade and Lola. Aja hates phoning like that, summing up a whole day in three sentences, hanging up almost straight away in case someone else is trying to get through, then rearranging in her mind the words spoken by her sympathetic husband and her two excited little girls.
Take care of yourself, darling! We saw you on the TV, Maman . . . don’t worry, darling, I’ll take care of it. When are you coming home, Maman? The girls wanted to wait for your phone call before they went to sleep. Papa read us Ti-Jean, Maman, and then he found the chameleon, it was hiding under the stones behind the house . . . Blow a kiss to Maman, girls, she has to go now.
Tom is perfect.
Tom has been a schoolteacher for the last six years in Les Hauts de Saint-Gilles. He looks after five- and six-year-olds at a primary school. He is calm. Reasonable. Sweet. Often, she wonders why such a perfect man puts up with a girl as annoying as she is.
You’re not annoying, he always replies. You have integrity.
Integrity . . .
Aja sometimes has the feeling that she is married to a punching ball, very stable at its base, and the harder she hits it, the faster it bounces back. Intact. A beautiful, black velvet punching ball. A wonderful father. A tender lover.
Aja does not like sleeping without Tom.
Except when a killer is loose on the island, with a girl of Lola’s age.
She checks the time on her watch. Seven minutes left. She has no reason to stress out: Morez is under orders to call her immediately if new evidence is found. But for the moment, there is radio silence.
Aja walks towards the Grotte des Premiers Français. In the distance, she can see the port at Pointe des Galets. According to legend, this is where the island’s first inhabitants landed. The Bourbon Island, as it was known at the time, was uninhabited—no natives for the colonies to massacre. The island was simply a jewel in the middle of the ocean, belonging to no one. Or to everyone.
Aja walks past the sailors’ cemetery. Her car is parked at the other end. She learned quite recently that her great-great-grandfather was buried here, in a little tomb surrounded by the graves of pirates. Abhi Purvi, her ancestor, arrived on the island in 1861, during the period of indentured servitude: the local, politically correct term used to describe slavery after it had been outlawed by the French Republic. After the Africans and the Tamils, thousands of Zarabes were brought over to work in the sugar cane fields. This was just before beet sugar production took over in France, causing almost immediate ruin for the island’s economy. In an ironic twist, in this fledgling globalized economy, thousands of slaves suddenly found themselves unemployed. Aja’s great-great-grandfather attempted, like other Zarabes, to make his fortune in the fabric trade. Ethnic solidarity. He got into the niche market of creating straw plaits to make hats. This enabled him to survive. Which was better than most Creoles managed; many were dying of hunger.
Jalad, Abhi Purvi’s son, picked up the paternal standard. Straw hats would be sold as long as the tropical sun beat down on people’s heads. He married in 1906 at the Noor-al-Islam mosque in Saint-Denis, the oldest in any French territory. He bought a plot of land in Saint-Gilles, without knowing that just opposite this rocky patch of earth by the side of a filthy little gully, the Zoreilles would build the Saint-Denis train station. His first thought was to move, because of the noise, the crowds and the smoke. Then he got used to it. In the end, he rented his house to inhabitants of Saint-Denis who wanted to spend their weekends at the lagoon. Five years later, in 1912, he abandoned the straw hat business and built a seven-room guest house.
Faris, Aja’s grandfather, was born in 1915 in a large, colonial-style house in Les Hauts de Saint-Gilles. The Purvi family’s business was at its peak. Not only the railway, but also the ocean liners that came into the Pointe des Galets port, continued to bring a select flow of tourists, business executives and middle-class families in search of an exotic experience. In 1937, Faris laid the first stone of a Réunion Island hotel worthy of the name, and the hotel opened two years later. His first guests stayed longer than expected: they were rich Europeans fleeing the Nazis, most of them Jews—the only religion that had been missing on the island.
Aja’s father, Rahim, came into being the same year as the Hotel du Lagon, in 1939. An only child, he found a sister of his own age, Sarah Abramoff, in the daughter of a Jewish businessman who had taken refuge in the hotel during the war and had decided not to leave the tropics for the nascent state of Israel. Between the corridors of the hotel and the lagoon, they grew up together, inseparable. For Faris, Aja’s grandfather, the marriage between Rahim and Sarah was already arranged. His business sense, allied to the bank account of the father-in-law, would allow him to create a successful union between Jews and Muslims the like of which only Réunion Island could produce. The promise of a tourist empire in the Mascarene Islands. When they turned eighteen, Rahim and Sarah were sent to the United States to study international business. Same college, same class. Rahim was shy and obedient, but less fascinated by the family business than by his supposed artistic gifts, which were expressed in collages of colored ceramic. Sarah, for her part, quickly gave up the zouk of her childhood for the pop music of the Beach Boys. She never returned. She got her hooks into a blond Californian and moved to San Diego. So that was the end of the dream. Her father, Natane Abramoff, left Réunion in 1967 and went to live in Tel Aviv. Rahim came back alone from the United States, without a dollar or a diploma to his name. And to top it all, no sooner had this unworthy son returned than he fell in love with the most beautiful girl at the hotel: Laila, a very young, illiterate Creole who cleaned the toilets there. His father was disillusioned and angry, but his threats made no difference. Rahim, who had never dreamed that a girl as pretty as this would even give him a second look, stood up to his father for the first time. To get away from the family’s ire and the sarcastic comments of the Zarabes, he set sail with Laila for Madagascar. To make his fortune in the world of art and ceramics, he hoped. Again, though, he failed. Instead he scraped a living by transporting rocks for the construction of the dam in Lake Alaotra. He did not return to Réunion until six years later, upon his father’s death. Laila was pregnant with Aja then. Once more he was penniless. Jobless.
Rahim was welcomed back like a leper. Since his departure, the Hotel du Lagon, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, had been bought by a large, multinational company, one of whose shareholders was—ironically—Natane Abramoff. The manager of the hotel, now renamed the Athena, was a highly educated Belgian who couldn’t care less about the family’s heritage. He hired Aja’s mother because she was pretty, and incidentally because she knew the job and the place. He also gave Rahim piecemeal work, as and when Laila begged him, in his specialty: mosaics. Bathrooms, swimming pool, toilets. Aja remembers waiting patiently for her parents in the hotel corridors and seeing the other employees brazenly humiliating the son of their former boss. Well, it was only fair. Faris Purvi had not been the kind of man to be sentimental with his staff, and it was rare to see a Zarabe fail in business. She understood later that everyone considered Rahim to be an inbred degenerate who had only paired up with the most beautiful girl on the island in order to resuscitate his dynasty. Until she was ten, Aja’s parents had lived in Plateau Caillou, an area containing a few dilapidated buildings which was cut off from Saint-Paul and Saint-Gilles by a cliff face two hundred and fifty feet high; then they had moved to a house in Fleurimont, a little further away.
Rahim died at the age of fifty-two. Aja was seventeen at the time. He left behind him a poor family and a house in which every surface was entirely covered in tiles. It became a local curiosity. Her mother still lives there.
Aja goes to visit less than once a month. Tonight, her mother will have spent all evening watching the television news, proud that her daughter’s force is at the front line, and surprised, no doubt, by the disturbing coincidence: that the Hotel Athena should have been the scene of the crime.
Aja walks through the car park. Here, in a few hours’ time, the most beautiful market on the island will be set up, as it is every morning. Even now, she can detect in the air, or at least in her imagination, a whiff of spices: cardamom, nutmeg, turmeric . . .
The phone rings just as she is getting into her car.
Morez.
“Aja?”
“Yes, Morez?”
“I have some news!”
“You’ve caught Bellion?”
“No . . . No. Don’t get excited. But we do have some more information about his past. And guess what? Bellion has another death on his conscience. And my God, when it comes to being weighed down by guilt, I don’t think you could imagine anything heavier.”
10:13 P.M.
Christos’s body moves smoothly up and down under the sheets. Imelda’s body is hot, the folds of her skin are like a feather mattress, like a bath full of cream; he is swimming in a warm sea, rocked by waves; he is bathing in an ocean of amniotic fluid. Inside her, he becomes at once a lover and a foetus. He could stay like this for hours. Paradise.
“Can I put on the TV?”
Christos does not have time to reply: Imelda, without moving her body, which is trapped beneath him, stretches out her arm and grabs the remote control.
“You should be interested in this too, you know,” the Cafrine says. “Every channel on the island is showing images of the Saint-Gilles police tonight, instead of CSI: Miami.”
Well, quite . . .
“Do you realize you’re fucking Horatio Caine?” She turns up the volume.
“Shouldn’t you be out there?”
“No. We’re working in shifts. I’ll go back tomorrow morning, early. Full of energy. Aja likes to make sure her men get plenty of rest.”
Horatio Caine gives a long, powerful pelvic thrust.
“You don’t seem to be getting much rest at the moment.” Christos supports himself on his elbows and enjoys her voluptuous body. The television offers unfair competition, but he refuses to give up.
“There’s a little girl in danger, Christos.”
“Yes, and there are also drug dealers, paedophiles, kids dying of hunger in Les Hauts, slave drivers, and, if I have any time left over, drunk drivers and pimps hanging around outside schools. It never ends. So when am I ever supposed to get any sleep?”
Imelda moans a bit. She lets go of the remote control, and her eyes roll up towards the ceiling. Christos increases his pace. He knows by heart the sounds his partner makes; still a few seconds before the explosion. He loves it when Imelda’s body begins to erupt.
“He’s . . . dangerous,” Imelda gasps between two sighs. “Dangerous for his little girl. He’s already killed another kid. There’s . . .”
Christos’s head suddenly rears up from under the sheets.
“What? What other kid?”
Imelda takes a deep breath. The pressure falls again.
“The kid in Boucan Canot. Quite a few years ago now. Don’t you remember?”
No, Christos does not remember. Only people born and bred on the island are able to keep a mental archive of every news story printed in the papers.
“Please go on, my love.”
“This is just what I remember—it was at least eight years ago. An evening, I think. The father was watching his kid on the beach at Boucan Canot, or he was supposed to be watching him. They found the six-year-old boy the next morning, drowned in the ocean. No one ever found out what had really happened.”
Christos feels his erection melt like an ice lolly left out in the sun.
“Jesus Christ. Are you sure that the father was Martial Bellion?”
“Absolutely. Same name, same face.”
The policeman looks incredulous. Imelda continues: “Didn’t anyone on the force make that connection?”
“We all thought Bellion was a tourist.”
His excuse sounds almost unreal. They fall silent for a moment, the only sound coming from the television, which has moved on to some adverts. Christos’s hand grips a breast, and his lips tease the pink nipple.
Imelda protests weakly:
“For God’s sake, Christos, aren’t you going to call your colleagues?”
Christos feels the blood surge once again into his cock. This woman is a witch: all he has to do is touch her skin and he gets as hard as a rock. She must be hiding headless black chickens under her bed, melting candles in coconut shells, burning cubes of camphor before he arrives; the whole gamut of the island’s white magic.
“I’ll tell them tomorrow. First thing. I swear.”
He slips inside her.
“You’re mad,” she whispers. “You’re a disgrace to the force.”
“On the contrary, I have principles. A worker has the right to a break every now and then. What would it change, anyway, if I told them tonight rather than tomorrow morning? The guy has vanished.”
He puts his head against her shoulder, and ventures deep into the labyrinth of secrets that are held inside Imelda’s body.
10:32 P.M.
Imelda strokes Christos’s hair. He fell asleep just after he climaxed, as he always does. Continuing to massage his scalp with her fingertips, she reaches out with her left hand and grabs a book from the bedside table. Dirty, yellowed pages. Nemesis by Agatha Christie. She turns the pages without really concentrating. She is thinking about the case on the island. What they are saying about it on the television, what Christos has told her about it, the disappearance of that woman, Rodin’s death, that man running away, what the hotel staff are saying. It all fits.
The worn pages of the book are hard to separate. There is something fishy about those witness statements, though. Even back when that kid drowned in the ocean, certain details of the case bothered her. She must try to remember. Perhaps find the newspapers from the time. Old Marie-Colette, on Rue Jean-XXIII, has been keeping copies of every paper on the island for more than thirty years.
What was he called again, that child who drowned?
She turns the pages of Nemesis. Nazir found the book for her at a car boot sale in Saint-Joseph. Christos likes to call her his Cafrine Miss Marple. He doesn’t know how well the name fits: she reads more than a hundred novels a year. Everyone in the neighborhood brings her books, old copies mostly, as often as not with the final chapter missing. This case reminds her of a novel she read about ten years ago, Kahului Bay: the same story as Bellion’s, even if it took place in Hawaii. All the evidence seemed to be against this guy.
Except that there was another character, a witness who only turned up later in the story, altering the whole chain of events. As always, Imelda had guessed the solution long before the end, despite the author’s attempts to lead his readers down blind alleys.
Christos is snoring like a kitten.
Imelda has to get her brain working. Let’s start with the simplest thing first. Put her elephantine memory to use.
What was his name, that six-year-old kid?