Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

I was going to get the hell out, but he stood up and staggered toward me, half dazed, half mad.

“Hey, man,” he said. I wondered if he had any other words in his vocabulary. He started to push at me weakly, but apparently the weed and booze weren’t giving him superpowers. I pushed him away but he kept at it. I banged him once on the head with the book so he’d stop, then another. He kept going, the asshole. So did I. Bang, bang, bang! I began hitting harder, harder and harder. Man, it felt good. Until I saw him knocked out against the wall.

“Asshole,” I muttered. “Fucking asshole.” And I shrugged.

I pushed the book down over his throat, the spine against his glottis. I pushed hard, I wasn’t myself anymore, I hit, harder, I heard him gasping for breath, gurgling, I was beside myself, I crushed the book down even harder to make him swallow his trachea along with his birth certificate. Wasn’t moving anymore. Not at all.

This time he was really dead. It’s insane. I couldn’t have done that. Not me. I’m a calm guy, so calm. The most laid-back cat in the world.

Okay, so I hadn’t touched anything in the asshole’s room, I’d done it all with the book. All I had to do was get rid of it. No see, home free; I felt pretty calm, considering. Although not seen — that remained to be seen, as a matter of fact. The only hitch in this whole thing. They’d think one of his buddies had knocked him off, or several of them, under the influence. Of booze, weed, or whatever. I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse. I told myself that would surely come later, there was a chance I’d totally screwed up my life. We’d see. Then I thought I heard the stairs creak. I froze for a moment, I thought I saw a shadow go through the door and walk up to the floor above. I shivered violently, feverishly, and then I came to, made sure I didn’t touch anything, and left. The stairs creaked again. It was time for me to disappear. I left the door half open and went out, crossing myself and hugging the walls.

I walked around the block, then around another. To tell the truth, I was sort of dazed myself, and I walked without thinking much about anything. I went by the Vieille-Charité and the Hôtel-Dieu. When it’s not all narrow streets, the neighborhood is full of beautiful seventeenth-century buildings. I meandered through the streets to wherever the night led me. I walked by the famous Chez Étienne pizzeria, founded by a Sicilian immigrant. Closed at that hour, of course. Too bad, I really would have liked to get rid of my anxiety by biting into a pizza covered with anchovies, tomato sauce, garlic, and olives. Then I walked up to the place des Moulins. The streets were quiet. I avoided clacking my boots. I sat down on a bench. Thought things over. I had just killed somebody. The asshole surely had parents, a girlfriend, but no children, no, too young and obviously the type who doesn’t give a shit; that, at least, was good. I wanted to light up, but I don’t smoke. I looked at the windows on the square. All dark. It was close to four. I still had the book in my hand. I took a look at the author’s mug on the jacket. A lawyer who writes novels, you don’t see that every day, most of them just blab. I memorized his name just in case, then I moved down the narrow streets, crossed the passage through the Pouillon buildings to the waterfront, on the Vieux-Port. There I threw the book into the water. It swelled and sank fast. Exit the murder weapon. Exit a piece of myself too.

Then I walked back home.

I fell asleep in the peaceful silence, telling myself it sure had been a strange night.

To be honest, I’m not sure I slept all that well. When I woke up I saw myself again at that asshole’s place, closing out his case with the lawyer’s big thriller. I felt feverish and made myself coffee. Heart racing two hundred miles an hour. On the other hand, I was kind of pleased. A little like Dexter on TV: the feeling of a job that had to be done, and from then on you have to face the consequences, avoid making a stir, be discreet. Anyway, what could I have done? Complaining to the police again about my neighbor disturbing the peace would have been useless, I might as well piss into the wind — I had finally realized it simply wasn’t their problem.

But when a neighbor of the asshole discovered the body — like an idiot, I’d left the door open — I’m the one they came to see first. Routine questions and all that, but with pretty mean insinuations, like they were well aware that I didn’t like the neighbor’s noise and, “Sir, we’ve seen other cases like this, respectable accountants, nice little teachers too, who went postal for the most trivial reasons,” and maybe I’d decided to act on my own.

“Accidents can happen so fast, Monsieur LaMarca,” the inspector said as he checked my name on a card.

I shrugged, with a cup of coffee in hand. I answered nervously that I was in a hurry, work can’t wait. “The music stopped around two and I went back to sleep. End of story. I’m certainly sorry for that gentleman, but honestly, I can’t say I’m going to miss him.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I teach history and geography. In fact, I’m supposed to be at school in less than an hour.”

“What high school?”

“Pierre Puget.”

“Oh, I see.”

He saw what? I wondered. He was acting official, that’s all. But he let me go, to continue his investigation with the neighbor upstairs — Djibril — a Comorian who’d just created a start-up. Djibril didn’t give a damn about the neighbor’s music, he spent his nights with headphones over his ears, immersed in his own music and his wooly theories about making it big through computer science. He was developing tourist apps for Marseille and the Comoros; he’d just launched a guide to the Panier district for cell phones, with QR codes and the whole digitized shebang, and in fact he wasn’t doing so badly. He wouldn’t have much to tell the police; I could rest easy as far as he was concerned.

It was Friday, 10:35. I took off for school on my scooter at top speed, half to make time, half out of pure nervousness.

3

Three days later, the cops called to summon me to the Évêché, the police headquarters of Marseille, which is right behind where I live, at the border of Le Panier and La Joliette. I walked there around six thirty. It was nice out for that time of year, but I didn’t really have the heart to appreciate the weather. I wasn’t exactly anxious, but still, not 100 percent calm either. Who would be, in my shoes? The same inspector — from the CID, I learned that as I read his name, Kevin Gandolfini, on a prominently displayed plaque — received me in a room crammed with cabinets overflowing with papers. But his desk was all shipshape, a computer, a notebook, a pen, and a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. That made me smile: I had the same glasses at his age; it just goes to show how generations often replicate themselves.

“Monsieur LaMarca. sit down, sit down.”

He pointed to two wooden chairs which must have come from the Emmaüs charity stores and deserved to go back there.

“I asked you to come because there are new elements in the investigation and I have a few questions for you.”

Yeah, right. He looked me in the eye as he said this and I must admit I was worried stiff, even though I didn’t flinch. The guy was playing cat-and-mouse with me and wanted to claw me a little before he swallowed me up.

Gandolfini still hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “You didn’t tell me everything Friday morning, Monsieur LaMarca.”

“What was I supposed to tell you?”

“Tsk, tsk. Well, for instance, you’re sure you went back to sleep when the music stopped?”