Malavita

  “Roses – they need attention all the time,” the man said, to break the silence.

  Frederick didn’t know what to say, except:

  “We’re American – we moved in yesterday.”

  “. . . Americans?”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Why did you choose France?”

  “Me and my family, we travel a lot, because of my job.”

  This was what Frederick had been working towards. He had come out into the garden with the sole purpose of saying a word, a single word. Since finding the Brother 900, he couldn’t wait to introduce the world to the new Frederick Blake.

  “So – what’s your job?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “A writer?”

  There followed a delicious moment.

  “That’s fascinating, a writer . . . Novels, I suppose?”

  Fred had anticipated the question:

  “Oh no, that might come later. For the moment I write history. I’ve been commissioned to write a book on the Normandy landings, that’s why I’m here.”

  As he spoke, he stood slightly turned away, with an elbow on the fence, and a false air of humility, intoxicated by his new and rapidly inflating status. By introducing himself as a writer, Frederick Blake thought he had solved all his problems. A writer, that made perfect sense, why hadn’t he thought of it before? In Cagnes, for example, or even in Paris. Quintiliani would think it was a brilliant idea.

  The neighbour looked around for his wife so that he could introduce the new writer neighbour.

  “Yes, the landings . . . You never get tired of hearing about those days. Here in Cholong we’re a bit far away from where the main operation was.”

  “The book will be a sort of homage to our marines,” said Fred, to cut the conversation short. “And by the way, my wife and I are going to organize a barbecue, to get to know everyone, so please pass the word around.”

  “Marines? I thought there were only GIs in the landings.”

  “I want to write about the whole army, starting with the navy. Anyway, don’t forget about the barbecue, eh?”

  “I suppose you’ll have a chapter about Operation Overlord?”

  “? . . .”

  “There were something like seven hundred ships, weren’t there?”

  “A Friday would be perfect, next week if you like, or the one after, we’ll be expecting you.”

  Fred slipped back towards the veranda. He was beginning to wish that he wrote novels.

  *

  At around five, when school was over, Warren was still seething over the loss of his pocket money. All the things he could have done with the money . . . Well, what exactly? He could have chewed some gum, read an intergalactic war comic called Gamefight, gone to see another American film full of “fuck”s – but what else? As a passport to minor pleasures, the ten euros didn’t amount to much, he had to admit that. On the other hand, it meant an enormous amount in terms of humiliation, pain and loss of dignity. After leaving the gates of the lycée, Warren mingled with different groups, recognizing some of the faces, getting himself introduced to new ones, shaking hands and making deals with some of the “big ones” from the senior form, the football team especially, who had become local heroes since their victory in the regional league.

  Give them what they need most.

  Warren, from the vantage point of his fourteen years, had learned one lesson from his elders. To Archimedes’ proposition: “Give me a fixed point and a lever, and I will lift up the world,” he preferred a variation perfected by his forebears: “Give me some money and a gun, and I will rule the world.” It was just a question of time and organization. In order to achieve synergy and increase complementarity, all he needed to do was to know how to listen, discover each person’s limits, spot the gaps in their lives, and decide how much to charge for filling them. The more solid the base he could build up, the quicker he would rise to power. The pyramid would build itself and raise him up to the stars.

  For the moment it was a question of wielding the carrot – the stick would come later. Most of the pupils left the gates, some of them trailing towards the café, a few lingering to wait for the ones who came out at six. Amongst those was a group of seven boys gathered around Warren.

  The biggest one needed better marks in maths so as not to repeat the year, but his parents couldn’t afford private lessons. The toughest, a winger in the rugby team, would do anything to be friends with Laetitia’s brother, who was standing next to Warren. The brother in question would do anything to own the autograph of Paolo Rossi, which was in the possession of Simon from 1B. Simon from 1B was quite willing to surrender it in exchange for help with a personal vendetta against the boy who had targeted Warren. Another one, regarded as the lycée oddball, a mostly gentle boy who sometimes suffered from violent explosions, would give anything he had to be included in a group, any group, to be part of a gang, to no longer be the eternal outsider – and Warren was offering him this possibility. And the last two had joined the group for reasons they preferred not to divulge in front of Warren, who couldn’t have cared less what they were.

  The rugby player knew where the three gangsters always hung out after school – a park, which they regarded as their private territory and to which they controlled access. Less than ten minutes later, the three were on the ground. One had vomited, the other was writhing in pain, and their leader was on his knees, sobbing like a baby. Warren told them to bring a hundred euros the next morning, by 8. The sum would double with each half-day’s delay. Terrified of angering him again, they thanked him, keeping their eyes to the ground. Warren could see already that these three would become his most faithful sidekicks if that was what he wanted. Once an enemy had paid homage, you had to allow this escape route.

  If Warren hadn’t been able to build up the foundation of his enterprise that evening, he would have sorted things out with those three on his own, with just a baseball bat. And he would have explained to anyone who had tried to stop him that life had offered him no other choice.

  *

  Maggie went into the shop in the avenue de la Gare, picked up a red basket, pushed through the gate and looked for the refrigerated section. She was tempted to buy some escalopes with cream and mushrooms to make a change from her usual cooking. Unlike Frederick, Maggie was one of those people who, when in Rome, did as the Romans did. Having immersed herself in the local press and architecture, she was now prepared to explore local cuisine, and risk the fury of her family at the dinner table. But she did, by reflex, go to the pasta shelves, and studied the no. 5 and no. 7 spaghetti, the green tagliatelle, the penne and a whole range of shells and vermicelli that she had never quite seen the point of. Feeling slightly guilty, she picked up a packet of spaghetti and a tin of peeled tomatoes, in case her menfolk complained. Before heading for the cash desk, she asked a shop girl where she might find peanut butter.

  “What?”

  “Peanut butter. Perhaps I’m not pronouncing it right.”

  The young woman called the manager, a man in blue overalls.

  “Peanut butter,” she repeated. “Peanut butter.”

  “I understood.”

  Like every morning, this man had been up at six to receive the deliveries and unload them into the storeroom. He had then logged the staff arrivals, motivated his troops and greeted the first customers. In the afternoon he had met two wholesalers, and been to the bank. Between four and six, he had personally rearranged the chocolate and biscuit section and checked the resupply, which hadn’t been properly done. In other words, the day had gone smoothly. Until now, when this unknown woman had come in asking for a product he hadn’t got.

  “Put yourself in my place, madam. I can’t stock all the odd things people ask me for. Tequila, surimi, fresh sage, buffalo mozzarella, chutney, peanut butter, God knows what else. It would just rot in the storero
om until it got past its sell-by date.”

  “I just wondered. So sorry.”

  Maggie went off to the back of the shop, embarrassed at having created a sense of awkwardness over something that wasn’t worth it. The peanut butter wasn’t the slightest bit urgent, her son had plenty of time to make fancy sandwiches – she had simply wanted to do something nice for him on the first day of school. She quite understood the manager’s point of view. Nothing was more exasperating than tourists with their food fads, and all those others who turned food into some sort of nostalgic icon, or stupid chauvinistic symbol. She had hated the sight of her compatriots in Paris crowding into fast-food outlets, complaining that they couldn’t find the sort of food they stuffed themselves with all the rest of the year. She saw it as a sign of terrible disrespect for the country they were visiting, particularly if, as in her case, it was providing her with an asylum.

  She thought no more of it, and continued around the shop, filling her basket, stopping at the drinks shelf.

  “Peanut butter . . .”

  “And then you wonder why one American in five is obese.”

  “And Coca-Cola . . .”

  The voices were close by, just behind the stack where Maggie was reaching down for a pack of beer. She couldn’t help listening to the hushed conversation between the manager and two of his customers.

  “I’ve got nothing against them, but they certainly make themselves at home wherever they are.”

  “Of course there were the landings. But we’ve been invaded ever since!”

  “In our day, and for our generation, it was nylon stockings and chewing gum, but what about our children?”

  “Mine dresses like them, enjoys the same things, listens to the same music.”

  “The worst thing is the food they eat. I cook something they like, and all they can think of is to leave the table as quick as they can and rush off to McDonalds.”

  Maggie felt hurt. By treating her as a typical American, they had cast doubt on all her goodwill and efforts at integration. It was a cruel irony, particularly for somebody who had been cast out of her country and had lost her civic rights.

  “They’ve got no taste in anything, that’s for sure.”

  “Barbarians. I know, I’ve been there.”

  “And if you tried to settle there,” the manager concluded, “just imagine how that would go down!”

  Maggie had suffered enough in the past from all the sidelong glances, the muttering behind her back, the general sarcasm when she appeared in public, the wild rumours which were impossible to disprove. This unlucky threesome had unwittingly stirred up all these memories. The paradox was that if they had invited her to join in their conversation, she would have agreed with a lot of what they said.

  “And they want to be the masters of the universe?”

  Without revealing anything, she went over to the household-goods section, added three bottles of paraffin and a box of matches to her basket, paid at the cash desk and went out.

  Outside, the last rays of the sun were disappearing and afternoon was fading into evening. The staff were beginning to feel tired, the customers were hurrying along, everything was as usual on this March evening at six o’clock, the same rituals, the same sleepy atmosphere.

  So what was that smell of burning rubber that was just beginning to reach the nostrils of the cashiers?

  One of the customers gave a great scream. The manager looked up from his order book and saw a strange curtain of fire undulating over the shop window. An impenetrable curtain of leaping flame began to spread into the shop.

  A warehouseman reacted first and called the fire brigade. The customers looked for an emergency exit. The cashiers just disappeared, while the manager, for whom the shop and his life were one and the same thing, stood paralysed, hypnotized by the red-and-gold light dancing before his eyes.

  The Cholong-sur-Avre volunteer firemen were unable to save the awnings, the display or the merchandise. In fact nothing was saved from the fire, except a case of slightly bruised Granny Smiths.

  *

  Belle and her classmates left the lycée at the last bell. A few diehards leaned against the gates, cigarette in the lips or mobile in hand, in no hurry to go home, while others rushed off as quickly as they could. She walked some of the way with Estelle and Lina, and then continued on her own along the boulevard Maréchal Foch, without any hesitation about the route. Belle was one of those people who walked with her head high and a light step, curious about everything around her, convinced that the horizon would always be more interesting than the pavement. This attitude summed up her whole personality, this way of always going forwards, confident both in herself and others. She was the opposite of her brother, who would always be marked by the wounds of his childhood; she was able to stay one step ahead of her past, never allowing it to catch up with her, even at the most difficult moments. Nobody except her knew where this strength came from – the sort of strength that is so often lacking in those who have seen their whole lives turned upside down overnight. And even if she was still feeling the tremors from that earthquake, she certainly had no desire for victim status. Instead of wasting energy on regrets, she turned it towards her future development, no matter what problems there were to surmount. And nothing and nobody would stop her.

  An old metallic grey Renault 5 drew up alongside her. Inside it, some young people were trying to attract her attention. They were the seniors who, that same afternoon, had been so overcome by the sight of the new girl’s red bra. They had been determined to get to know her, to make her welcome and show her the sights.

  “No thanks, boys . . .”

  She walked on towards her house, amused by the thought of being picked up on the first day in the school. However, she had no need for reassurance about her charms – they had been there for ever, since the day she was born. Her parents had called her Belle, not realizing how apposite the name would be. So much resonance in such a small word. How were they to know that the name would be a problem in France? At that time neither Maggie nor Fred quite knew where France was.

  “Oh, please, please, Miss America!”

  They were so insistent that Belle began having doubts about the way home.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Rue des Favorites.”

  “It’s that way! Jump in, and we’ll drop you at your house.”

  She let herself be persuaded, and climbed into the back. The boys were silent for a moment, surprised at their success. They had expected a refusal, and were thrown by this unexpected turn of events. Perhaps this girl was less shy than the others, a bit more daring? Americans were so advanced in every way, especially when it came to morals. They glanced at each other surreptitiously and allowed themselves to dream.

  “Look, boys, we seem to be going the wrong way.”

  Instead of answering, they bombarded her with questions about her life before Cholong. They were tense compared to her, and filled the silences with random remarks; they sought to demonstrate their coolness and savoir-faire, to show that they were sophisticated men of the world; she was amused by such childishness. The car slowed down at the edge of the forest of Vignolet, by the main road that led towards Brittany.

  “Why are we stopping?” she asked.

  Night had suddenly fallen. The chatter had been replaced by suspicious silences. Belle once again asked them to take her home. The boys got out and quietly exchanged a few words. With a bit of luck they wouldn’t have to try very hard and it would all be like in a film, with a kiss from the new girl, perhaps a few caresses, you never knew, why not. And if it was no good, they could easily play the innocents. Belle was thinking about all the things she had to do when she got home: filling out the forms for the school records, working out her timetable and comparing it with her brother’s, labelling all her school books, making a list of what was missing – it would be a long even
ing. She stood leaning against the car door with her arms crossed, waiting for one of these two cretins to understand that the outing was over. Before giving up, they made a last attempt, and one of them put a cautious hand on Belle’s shoulder. She let out an exasperated sigh, picked up a tennis racket from the back seat, and with a perfect forehand smashed the side of the racket on the daring one’s nose. The other one, shaken by this sudden and violent gesture, backed away, but was unable to avoid a sort of backhand volley that nearly took off his ear. Once they were on the ground, their faces covered in blood, Belle knelt down to look at them, with the professionalism of a nurse. She had quite recovered her sweet smile and her goodwill towards her fellow man. She got into the car and, turning towards them once more, said:

  “Boys, if that’s the way you go about it, you’re never going to get anywhere with girls.”

  She drove off towards the main road whistling a Cole Porter tune, then left the car a hundred metres from the Rue des Favorites and walked the rest of the way. She met her mother at the gate coming back at the same time, and helped her carry in the shopping. Warren, arriving at the same time, shut the gate behind them and all three went into the house.

  Frederick, who was feeding the dog, with one knee on the ground, wasn’t surprised to see his entire family coming in at once. He said:

  “So – anything new today?”

  As if they had rehearsed it, all three replied in chorus:

  “Nothing new.”

  2

  How much is one man worth? What price a human life? To know what one is worth is like knowing the date of one’s death. I’m worth twenty million dollars. It’s a lot. But much less than I thought. I must be one of the most expensive men in the world. To be so valuable and to live a life as shitty as mine – that’s the worst misery. If I had that twenty million dollars, I know what I’d do with it: I’d give the whole thing away in exchange for going back to my previous life, before I was worth that much. The man who blows my head off, what will he do with the money? He’ll put it in property and go off to hang out in Barbados for the rest of his life. They all do that.