Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

In fact, the more time passes, the more bread I make from drugs. I must have a flair for business because I always manage to find the best product and deal it to the right people, the ones who aren’t going to bug me with whining phone calls at three a.m. or trigger a raid on my studio. Its windows look out on the park, my wonderland of long ago, today disenchanted by the disaffection of my queen.

I go out, a lot. And I have as many girls as I like: sluts, not shy at all, but also bourgeois girls who remind me of Alice without being her. I fascinate them with my tough-guy demeanor, my dark curls, my eyes that always look like they’re lined with kohl, and the casual way I pick them up at those parties where everybody waits for me because I dispense pleasure and dance, white powder, crystals, and multicolored, monogrammed pills.

If I didn’t have moments of solitude where I can have a smoke at my window, waiting for the growl of the tigers, the cries of the monkeys, or the squawking of the parrots from the nearby zoo, I might lose myself completely in that futile life — a life not so different from my parents’, when you come right down to it.

Sometimes I take the card Alice gave me years ago out of my wallet. I finally learned, without even trying, that it was the sixteenth Major Arcana card of Marseille tarot — in other words, the Tower, the most frightening card in the deck, the one that foreshadows the end. But when you’re twenty, who can believe your end is near or even possible? I am immortal.

I lead a dangerous life all right, but I think I don’t take useless risks. I never re-up in the projects, where they draw a gun on you at the drop of a hat for five kilos of grass or two thousand euros; I have regular customers in pretty unexpected spots, a village in the hills over Nice and another north of here in the Drôme: I do business with two fifty-somethings who look like ordinary folks, even if I suspect them of running their own drug deals that go way beyond the borders of the region. The less I know about them, the better.

Among other precautions, I take care to remain anonymous. Nobody knows me by my real name, since I call myself Ousmane, Nassim, or Farès: the bourgeois boys are flattered to buy their shit from an Arab. They feel like they’re slumming it, like they have a foot in the North End through their dealer. They’d be very disappointed if I confessed that all I know about La Busserine or the Micocouliers projects is what I read in the papers, just like them — just like all those assholes excited by Kalashnikovs and Škorpions but who’ll never get to see one up close.

I’m twenty. There’s nothing exciting or glorious about my life, but all things considered, I like it better than my parents’: I blow more money than they’ll ever have, I don’t have schedules to follow or loans to strangle me. I deal drugs, and if that doesn’t exactly open up professional possibilities or prospects for the future, strictly speaking, nothing prevents me from transforming myself later in life, when I’ve put a little bread aside. We’ll see what turns up.

One ordinary evening, I show up at Maël’s, a regular customer. He’s just a little older than I am and I like him. His parents have a beautiful house in La Pointe-Rouge and a boat somewhere or other, so they go sailing six months a year, leaving the key to the house with their son and feeding his bank account so generously that poor Maël spends his time throwing parties in Mom and Dad’s triplex and flunking all his exams in architecture school.

He opens the door and his face lights up when he sees me. That’s the way Maël is, always happy, always in a good mood, always polite and considerate. For him, I’m Farès, and we do business quickly in one of the rooms upstairs. He and his pals live on coke and MDMA and pay cash on the spot — never any fuck-ups.

“You want a drink? Anything you need is downstairs.”

I appreciate his not throwing me out as soon as the transaction is over — after all, we’re not buddies. I suspect he’s one of those guys who thinks I’m a big shot in the projects and he enjoys showing me off a little at his parties.

“You didn’t tell anybody who I am, right?”

“Relax. I’ll say I know you from volleyball.”

Yes, Maël drinks like a sieve, smokes a joint as soon as he gets up, and snorts line after line, but he’s healthy as hell — plays sports and eats organic.

In the rooms on the ground floor, the party’s going strong. People are sprawled out all over, the ashtrays are full and they’re smoking like mad. Like all parties everywhere in the world, the girls are the only ones dancing, slowly, and without much enthusiasm. One of them turns around when I come in and stops rolling her hips: it’s Alice, and she comes right over to me.

“Salvatore! Hey, what a surprise! What’re you doing here?”

I can understand why she’s surprised; so am I. Not about being here, but about her recognizing me, coming up to me, wanting to talk to me instead of acting remote the way she has been for the past four or five years on the rare occasions when I’ve bumped into her between Chartreux and Cinq-Avenues.

“I’m Farès, not Salvatore: you must be confusing me with someone else.”

As she stares at me wide-eyed, I drag her toward an empty bedroom.

“You’d do me a favor if you didn’t tell anybody what my real name is.”

She bursts into joyous laughter. “Okay, now I know who you are: you’re Maël’s dealer. He told me you were going to come.”

“What an asshole!”

“Nothing to worry about with me. You got any coke?”

“Go see your pal about that.”

She laughs again, as if I’m the funniest guy in the world, while I look her over from head to toe. She’s become slender, without losing her childish cheeks or rounded arms — not to mention an ample chest. She follows my look with amusement, adjusts her little top to cover her cleavage, and leaves me standing there.

I spend the rest of the evening watching her. She goes from one group to the other, relaxed and easy, with a glass in her hand and a cig in her lips. Given the size of her pupils, I suspect she went upstairs to do a few lines in Maël’s parents’ big bathroom, where the action seems to be. I don’t care: that shit, I sell it, I don’t use it, and this is the secret to my relative prosperity.

From time to time Alice comes over, talks to me, smiles, and exchanges banalities that make me feel good. I don’t know if I can be fully objective about her, but I find her a hell of a lot classier than the other girls, less vampish, less zonked out: she doesn’t kiss her girlfriends on the mouth, doesn’t dance like a striptease artist, doesn’t throw up in the sink, and doesn’t pull me aside to assure me of her eternal friendship with that sentimentality of drunks and cokeheads that I’ve grown to loathe.

When it’s five a.m. I finally decide to split. I don’t want to know how she’s going to end the evening, nor with whom. She catches up to me at the door: “Salvatore, wait a minute!”

“What?”

“Leave me your phone number.”

“Okay, if you don’t give it to anyone else.”

“You really think I’m so stupid?”

At that, we part, and I go back home on my scooter, taking a few one-way streets the wrong way in the pink, glorious dawn, riding alongside the Corniche, passing les Catalans, the port, the Canebière, and ending up at the Cinq-Av’ café, where I have a double espresso and a croissant — to celebrate the sunrise and play the film of last night over and over in my head, Alice’s attentions to me, her smile, her breasts just begging to escape from her shirt, her way of dancing without showing off, aware of her effect on me. Alice.