Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

If you don’t know what cold sweat is, I advise you to live through this kind of moment. No doubt Gandolfini was going to play with me a little and then reach the obvious conclusion: if I wasn’t home, it’s because I was tearing my poor neighbor to shreds across the street. I had learned his name in the meantime. At least I could now put a name to my crime: Antoine Julien.

Despite the fear gnawing at my insides, I told the cop he was right, it’s true that I was on edge that night and I decided to calm myself down by taking a walk. I told him about the quiet of the narrow streets free of cars at night, the sweetness of the sea breeze. You could even say I put on a lyrical, romantic show, and I ended by explaining that if I hadn’t said anything about it Friday morning, it’s because I was afraid he’d misinterpret my wanderings.

There was a long lull in the conversation. My eyes were riveted on the tips of my shoes, his were still fixed on my humble person.

“See,” he said, “you can do okay when you want to. You did well not to continue your lie of omission, Monsieur LaMarca. It would have made you extremely suspicious, because guess what? You were seen at 2:35 a.m., walking down the Montée des Accoules. ”

I smiled inwardly at the paradox of “walking down the Montée”—the “ascension” des Accoules — and at the fact that at two thirty that night, I was beating up my neighbor in his apartment and certainly not walking down the Montée des Accoules.

“Monsieur Romuald Lopez, a homeless man who was lying there, recognized you. He knows everybody in the neighborhood and he’s absolutely positive. So, I wondered what you were doing outside even though you stated that you never left your apartment. You get my drift?”

“Mmm,” I said, close to fainting.

“Now, it so happens that at 2:25 a.m., Monsieur LaMarca, your unfortunate neighbor Antoine Julien was facing his murderer because that’s exactly when he sent a distressed text message to a certain Diego, a heavy he was doing business with, saying, and I’m reading: fuk crazy guy here y. 2:25 a.m. on one side, 2:35 on the other, for the moment I’ve got to think you probably weren’t at your neighbor’s place at the time of the crime, even though it’s only a matter of a few minutes. So unless things change I’m not holding you. But you have to remain at the disposal of the police, and of course do not leave Marseille.”

I shut up and blessed the lenient nature of Inspector Gandolfini. But what followed would turn out to be something even more pleasant.

I left the Évêché free as a bird. I stopped on place de Lenche to have a beer and nibble on some peanuts. The usual crowd was hanging out there — a few artists, a handful of tourists, and some neighborhood people you wouldn’t want to associate with. Maybe even that guy Diego was around, busily planning a couple of nice illegal jobs. Diego. to tell the truth, that name rang a bell. From my experience in rummaging around in the history of the local milieu, I’d picked up a lot about the past, but also the present. Diego, Diego. I went back home fast. I had to review my personal archives right away.

I found him under his real identity, Jean-Louis Younger, in an article from a few months back that mentioned drug dealing. He seemed to be the local kingpin. A promising suspect for the police, surely more interesting than an innocuous little teacher like me. But I couldn’t leave everything to chance, better to give it a little help. Younger had gotten six months with probation, so he was around somewhere. It was up to me to show he was the guilty party. A call to my friend Blanco, Chief Inspector Blanco, was imperative. The conversation with Gandolfini had given me a good kick in the butt, a shot of adrenaline. I forgot my qualms, my feelings of guilt. Now I had to get out of the mess I was in, avoid being identified as the real perpetrator. So I called my friend Blanco. We’d gone to college together, but not for long. He’d stopped after he got his degree in history and took the exam to become a police inspector. And passed it. We’d kept in touch, not very regularly but always in a friendly way. Blanco was appointed to Marseille. I called him to meet over a pizza the next day.

On a little square just above city hall, a discreet family restaurant beckoned. The waitress took us up to the second floor. Blanco looked in good shape, his ironic smile still fixed at the corners of his thin lips. He didn’t really appreciate my trying to get information about an ongoing investigation out of him, but I was sure a good pizza and a few glasses of wine would activate his vocal cords. Blanco was a chatterbox who didn’t know he was one.

According to Blanco, Jean-Louis Younger sent one of his emissaries over to poor Antoine Julien to collect a debt of tens of thousands of euros and it went wrong, so wrong Julien died. Younger could get sent down for accessory to murder, illegal drug trafficking, and criminal conspiracy — and this time, no probation. The cops would be delighted to collar him, without being too fussy about the exact timetable of other possible perpetrators. From Blanco’s smirk when he said that, I clearly understood he’d be ready to hang the murder on Younger’s man without batting an eyelash. The emissary in question answered to the name of Crazy Toto, which in local talk marked him as a troublemaker, a guy with a bad temper. Only problem, this Toto was nowhere to be found at the moment: there were reports of him in Paris, in Cadaquès, Spain, and some even said he left for Turkey to bring back a shipload.

Blanco winked at me with his famous smile, and explained that he knew exactly where to find Toto: in a furnished room on rue Paradis. He suggested I reserve a table at the restaurant of the new MuCEM (Musée des Civilisations Européennes et Méditerranéennes) that had a sea view and a three-star chef, for he was definitely going to get me out of the fix I was in.

I didn’t try to understand how Blanco knew so much about this case. I knew he had some weight in the local police but between the official hierarchy and deals with the unions, I could never tell with any certainty what kind of real power my friend actually had. I didn’t even ask him about Gandolfini. Like a good chatterbox, he’s the one who spilled the beans, and this time without the smile: “Gandolfini’s going to have to back off, he’s not on this case anymore, he’s out, ba-da-bing! He’s mixed up with some murky debts at the Casino Barriere de Cassis and the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale — the police of the police — are all over him. He’s now persona non grata at the Évêché. They asked me to take over some of his current cases. So it’s simple: tonight we didn’t see each other and I’ll call you for that invitation when your case is cleared up. Don’t worry, as soon as I get my hands on Toto, it’ll be a done deal. We’ve been trying to get Younger for a long time and now both of them will spend a little time behind bars. And don’t bother to try to find out how we’ll do it, we’ve got the text message and he’ll tell us the rest.”

A new wink, back to the smile, two glasses clink. It’s like the case was already closed.

4

A few months later, everything was okay. Crazy Toto was convicted and just like Blanco had predicted, the police were able to get to Younger, a.k.a. Diego, and send him down for accessory to murder. Nobody bothered me anymore, and though I wasn’t very proud of what I’d done, I was glad I could continue living in total freedom. The neighborhood was quiet again and the death of poor Antoine Julien was forgotten. His apartment had finally found a new buyer. A Swede had moved in, attracted by the new trendy aspect of Marseille, which was making the whole city and Le Panier in particular one of those spots on the planet that attracts rich Anglo-Saxons and Germano-Scandinavians longing for authenticity. On place de Lenche and rue des Pistoles, English and French were replacing Arab and Berber in daily exchanges, Corsican and Italian having long been assimilated into the local yet very international French. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little but not much: my taste for geography might make me overestimate the number of different nationalities who go by under my windows, and I keep dreaming of a world where coming from somewhere else wouldn’t be a stigma but a subject for joyful curiosity.