Arab Jazz

by Karim Miské, Sam Gordon

Genres: City Life; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Kosher sushi, kebab stands, a secondhand bookstore, and a bar: the 19th arrondissement in Paris has all the trappings of a cosmopolitan melting pot--a place where multiethnic citizens live, love, and worship alongside one another. But dark passions are brewing beneath the seemingly idyllic vision of peacefully coexisting ethnicities. Ahmed Taroudant is an archetypal French Arab-non-observant, unable to reconcile his conflicting identities, and troubled by the past. A crime fiction connoisseur, Ahmed is engrossed in his latest book when he finds blood dripping from his upstairs neighbor's apartment. There, Laura Vignole is found brutally murdered, with a joint of pork placed near her body, prompting the obvious conclusion that the killer had religious motives. As the neighborhood erupts into speculation and gossip, Ahmed finds himself first among many suspects. Detectives Rachel Kupferstein and Jean Hamelot attempt to untangle the complex web of events leading up to Laura's death, but truth is hard to come by, with each inhabitant--an Armenian anarchist, a Turkish kebab-shop owner, and a Hasidic Rastafarian--reluctant to reveal anything. Determined to clear his name, Ahmed joins the detectives as they investigate the connection between a disbanded hip-hop group and the fiery extremist preachers clamoring for attention in the streets. Meanwhile, an ecstasy variant called Godzwill is taking the district by storm. In his debut novel, Karim Miské demonstrates a masterful control of setting, as he moves effortlessly between the sensual streets of Paris and the synagogues of New York to reveal the truth behind a horrifying crime.

Release date: April 12, 2016

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

Ahmed is looking at the clouds in the sky, the clouds, the wondrous clouds, floating up there.

*

Ahmed loves poetry, even if his memory of it consists of fleeting snippets that bubble occasionally to the surface of his soul. Lines often return of their own accord, without author or title. This one brings back Baudelaire: something about a stranger, freedom, something English. Baudelaire was his favourite writer back in the day, along with Van Gogh and Artaud. Debord followed later. And then he stopped reading. Well, almost. Nowadays – when he goes downstairs, at least – he buys Le Parisien. And stacks of translated English-language pulp thrillers: Connelly, Cornwell, Coben. The names swirl around his head so much he gets the feeling he is reading one and the same novel, with the odd exception. And that’s what he wants. To lose himself by devouring the whole world in a single, uninterrupted story written by others.

He gets his fix from the second-hand bookshop on rue Petit, a tiny store from a different age that has miraculously survived between the Lubavitch school complex, the Salafist prayer room and the evangelical church. Possibly because Monsieur Paul, the old Armenian anarchist who runs it, does not fall into any of the categories of luminary now holed up in the neighbourhood. And because he sells his irreverent literature by the kilo, which makes him seem more like a greengrocer than a dealer of Satanic texts. From time to time, the bookseller chucks in an extra copy without mentioning it. Ellroy, Tosches, an unpublished Manchette. Ahmed blinks very slightly. He is grateful to his dealer for not letting him go completely under. These authors he remembers.

*

He hasn’t gone downstairs today. There are still a few bits in the fridge: a baguette; some ham tortellini; a salmon and spinach quiche; enough butter for three bread tartines; some leftover strawberry jam made by Laura, his neighbour upstairs, a girl he might have loved if he still knew how; a pack of Evian; a bar of hazelnut Ivoria dark chocolate; five Tsingtao beers (sixty-six centilitres); a half-bottle of William Lawson (seventy-five centilitres); three bottles of wine (red, rosé, sweet Monbazillac); and three cans of Almaza alcohol-free beer cowardly left behind by his cousin Mohamed before he took off for Bordeaux eight months earlier. Not forgetting a packet of Tuc crackers, the remains of a saucisse sèche, two thirds of a Valençay cheese, half a litre of skimmed milk and a few crumbs of Leader Price muesli. Plus, of course, the obligatory box of Gunpowder green tea and some Malongo filter coffee. Just enough to keep him going until he has polished off the three kilos seventy of books he bought from Monsieur Paul the day before.

Ahmed is dreaming right now. He is watching the wondrous mid-afternoon clouds and he is dreaming. His mind is drifting away from the neighbourhood where his life has stood still for five years. The detachment he longs for is fast approaching. Watch the clouds, read, sleep and drink once evening has fallen. Little by little he has managed to distance himself from television, from screens. He knows very well that books have colonised his thoughts, but still he needs them. It is too soon for Ahmed to face his demons alone. Other people’s horrors, other people’s sick imaginations allow him to live with the monsters crouching in the back of his head.

Slowly his mind takes off, soaring towards the far-off lands of his ancestors. The impossible source. The outbound journey is direct, free of obstacles. Ten kilometres up and he strains to see fields, mountains, water, rocks, and finally sand. A hundred dunes into the desert, he begins his descent towards the great blue erg. All of a sudden he sees camel-skin tents, men, beasts, slaves. That biblical race, at once so coveted yet so horrifically cruel. That mad world that is both him and the opposite of him. That contradiction. Ahmed keeps a sensible distance, content as with every journey to glide at a safe height above the encampment of his distant cousins. He hovers incognito, floating among the desert’s keepers and the heavy-winged vultures who still recognise him as one of their own.

*

The man-vulture wheels in the cloudless sky and observes the changes since his last visit. The air is different, denser. Throughout this hazy territory populated by rebels, carved up into different states, men and vehicles appear ready for war: combat gear and Kalashnikovs. Nothing new there. What is new is the length of some of their beards, the sermon delivered after the communal prayer towards the rising sun, the eyes which flicker disconcertingly between fever, certainty, anxiety, elation and unfathomable suffering. The tragic irony of the desert warrior has given way to an existential dismay that is as thick and heavy as tar, uniting them in a self-loathing which – depending on their disposition – either shrouds them in darkness or blinds them with light. This has replaced the air they breathe. Ahmed is already holding this invisible, noxious gas in his lungs, its effects beginning to register. But he refuses to surrender, to bid farewell to his secret garden, his little bit of sand, his inner purity. He delays; dawdling, loitering. And then, behind a tent, the final decisive image, the grotesque depiction he cannot bear to face. A black, bizarre shape is huddled down there, a shape with no start and no finish. A sort of phantom, maybe human, maybe feminine, its eyes, covered by the darkness of a veil, turned to the sky. The mask-woman’s invisible eyes bore into his, a salvo of pure horror, perfect anguish. The man-vulture hesitates. Overcome by lethargy, he tears towards the ground at great speed, capable only of expressing the desire not to fall. His winged companions look on. They know those veiled eyes have shattered the traveller’s fragile invulnerability. Reminded of their duty as gatekeepers of the frontier between the worlds, the celestial scavengers flock to him, forcing him back up into the sky.

HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER!FORWARD! FORWARD! FORWARD!DON’T TURN BACK!

Driven back at tremendous speed to the outer limits of the aerial realm by his former fellow kin, Ahmed knows that from now on he is banished. At liberty to explore Siberia or Patagonia, but no longer welcome in these parts.

Laghouat, Ain Ben Tili, Meroe, Tiris, Tassili, Goulimine, Cyrenaica, Sicily, Ibiza, Olbia, Bonifacio, Valetta. Each time the return takes many twists. This time more so than ever.

Ahmed needs to process it, to stagger the time between the mad world of there and his presence here, now. High above Valetta, some turbulence brings him back to reality with brutal abruptness. Could be a line from a poem by Desnos: “High above Valetta, a tempted Templar let himself fall.” Forget and carry on . . . In any event, he won’t mention it in his testimony, his confession, not that there will be one. And anyway, who would understand?

And so it is in the Valetta of Paris 75019 that he feels the first drop on his upturned face, his half-closed eyes gazing up at the sky. The second comes crashing down onto the gleaming sleeve of his djellaba, a present from his cousin Mohamed. Ahmed looks down and watches the scarlet stain spread across the white cotton. It’s not rain. A third tear strikes him on the end of his nose. He tastes it. It’s blood. His eyes slowly move upwards, as if they know the sight that awaits them. A motionless foot is hanging two metres above him. It sits at a peculiarly obtuse angle to the ankle, itself patterned with a kind of geometric henna tattoo. On the tip of the big toe, the next droplet is forming, waiting to fall on his forehead. He moves aside, letting it splash onto his white lily, the only thing to adorn his balcony. Laura’s blood inscribes itself on the immaculate flower. And Ahmed comes back to Earth. He glances at the wall clock, round and green with a metal frame that only displays the number four. 9.15 p.m. That voyage lasted some time.

*

Well-thumbed books cover the walls of his studio flat. In the absence of a bookcase, he just piles them up. His living space recedes as his reading progresses. He is keeping count: two tonnes and five kilos of paperbacks, all bought from Monsieur Paul. He’ll stop when he hits five tonnes. According to his calculations, by that point he’ll have just enough space to get from his mattress to his front door. When that day arrives, Ahmed will close the door, post the key back through and leave, never to return.

He realises immediately from the awkward angle of the foot that Laura is dead. Thanks to his books, he has picked up a few of the basic rules for such dire circumstances: don’t leave a single trace; no fingerprints. And all the rest. A second thing is immediately clear to him: they want to pin the blame on him. This certainty wells up from somewhere in the outer reaches of his consciousness, a place where a whole host of tiny, almost imperceptible signals have built up . . . throwaway lines uttered in passing. Sam the barber’s smile, which burns into the nape of his neck the second his back is turned. Or, in the corner of his eye, a complicit glance between two supposedly sworn enemies. Small, unsettling things like that, which he realises take on some greater significance in light of Laura’s death. But what significance? Reluctant to make himself the prime suspect, he decides he will not flee, but he does need to know more, to determine the nature of the conspiracy and work out why they want to implicate him. Laura is still bleeding – the murder is recent. He is sure the killer wants to incriminate him, the victim’s neighbour, but no doubt he’ll want to cover some ground before calling the police or the press. Ahmed has a key to the girl’s one-bedroom flat. He goes upstairs. The door is slightly ajar, creaking in the wind.

He pushes it open with his shoulder, making sure his skin doesn’t come in contact with anything. He has to see for himself. To experience it. The window at the far end of the flat is wide open, a terrible breeze working its way down the passage. The grey sky suddenly fills with the dark clouds gathering over parc de la Villette. A distant growl of thunder. He has to act fast. In the centre of the main room, the table has been painstakingly laid for two people. An open bottle of Bordeaux, glasses two-thirds full. An uncooked pork joint sits on a white porcelain platter, bathing in a red liquid, a black-handled kitchen knife stabbed through its middle. There’s almost a hint of farce about it. The unreal fusing with the real. The young man lurches forward, looking for something to steady himself. His hand is about to grab the back of the chair when a little voice calls him to order. No prints, man, no prints! He steps back, turning his head to find his own face staring back at him, reflected in an oval mirror hanging on the wall to the left. It has been a long time since he’s looked at himself. He is surprised by his gaunt cheeks, his complexion that looks more like soil than bronze, his six-day beard. But something else strikes him: he’s handsome. Sure, the few women he had been intimate with had often said things like “You’re good looking” or “Ahmed, you’re a handsome guy!” Suddenly, those unimportant words from a different life take on a new meaning. His slightly frizzy hair, his full lips, his gentle eyes: they all come together harmoniously. Other features, too, that he’s unwilling to detail. He is moved. He remembers Laura’s gaze, and how closed his heart was to her. He turns away from his reflection and heads for the balcony.

And beholds the horror he knows he must face.

She is upright, tied fast to the other side of the railing with white electrical cable. He moves towards her big blue eyes staring into the abyss. It is as though he is seeing her for the very first time, as if death alone could show him her face in all its soft, benevolent, supreme beauty. He recalls her discreet efforts to make her feelings for him known. Pain and suffering grip him. Only when presented with her irrevocable absence does he realise his love for her, and, worse still, her affection towards him. And the closeness he felt for her and that she understood despite his blindness. She was beautiful. They could have fallen in love. His heart is broken and enlivened at the same time. He reaches for her cheek, but stops a few millimetres short. Returning to his senses, to prudence, a thought wells up inside him, a cliché, but one he claims for himself that very instant. I will avenge you, Laura. He moves half a step closer to the nightmare. The young woman is naked except for a crimson T-shirt. Her mouth gagged, chest seemingly untouched. Her underbelly is nothing more than an enormous gash that has now stopped dripping onto Ahmed’s balcony.

*

The wind blows and threatens as flashing lights fill the street. The murderers haven’t hung about. Taking his leave, Ahmed is horrified to notice that the three orchids he took such meticulous care over when Laura was away have been decapitated. Only the stems remain, bunched up in their plastic pots on the kitchen work surface. He looks for the heads of the flowers but doesn’t find them, removes himself painstakingly from the apartment, makes his way downstairs and shuts the door just as someone calls the lift. He left no prints whatsoever. A rumble of thunder. The first drops fall heavily, dousing the lily. Ahmed closes the windows and shutters, removes his stained djellaba, turns it inside out and rolls it into a ball – stains on the inside – before stuffing it into a plastic bag, one from the Franprix supermarket on the corner. Tomorrow he’ll get rid of it, before the police obtain their search warrant. He puts on his well-worn Brooks Brothers pyjamas, the last present from his last girlfriend, the mystical Catarina, before he gets into bed, closes his eyes, and falls asleep. He needs to dream now. Laura is dead. He must live. He no longer has the choice. His dreams will mark the way. Ringing. Knocking. “Police, open up!” He doesn’t hear. Pigs. Scum. Their paths have crossed for some time. Avoiding them now will be a struggle. For the first time in years, Ahmed hasn’t needed a drink to get to sleep. Albeit a fitful sleep. Death, that grim tyrant, is keeping watch, looking on with glee. He resists, refusing to give himself over. Death moves aside for another: an insidious beauty, a bewitching spy, his customary night-time visitor. There is never any penetration in his dreams. No nudity even. Just dampness. Tonight he stands firm, however, holding his seed and his nerve. And the ghosts retire in their fury, warning of worse to come. Frozen darkness, wind, rain lashing against the shutters and in his head. Lightning. Grimacing face! Iblis appears then disappears. The sleeper groans, his tongue scraping across incisors and molars. He stirs but he doesn’t wake. Shazam. The livid face of the killer lights up. Ahmed opens his eyes, dazed. An unpleasant sense of déjà-vu. Time to forget. The fleeting image retires to a deep corner of his skull. He knows it. It will guide him.

The sound of footsteps upstairs. Police officers moving about. Detectives and forensics officers.

“What kind of crime is this? Why the pork joint? All the damn Jews and Arabs around here, they’re all as nuts as each other. As soon as you leave the Bunker, all you hear is: ‘Salaam alaikum, officer’, ‘Shalom, officer’. Fucking hell, I can’t wait to get back to picture-perfect Roscoff. I don’t know about you, Rachel, but they drive me crazy. Totally crazy. I just don’t get this pork thing. It’s too much. As Goebbels said . . .”

“‘The bigger the lie, the more it’ll be believed,’” Rachel says, cutting him short. “I love it when you quote Goebbels. It’s one of the few things that makes life bearable. Right, let’s get out of here, we’ve got a report to write.” Ahmed hears and doesn’t hear. He knows. He sees red-headed Rachel and brown-haired Jean. They’ll do what they can, i.e. not much. Or a lot. Tomorrow at six he’ll have to dispose of his djellaba. For now, though, it’s good night, lieutenant. Laila saida . . .

3.45 a.m. If the dead of night exists, it is now. Lieutenants Hamelot and Kupferstein are smoking light contraband cigarettes, gazing up at the stars on the inner terrace of the Bunker, the commissariat in the nineteenth that is their workplace.

On their return they were summoned by Mercator, who had been waiting for them in his office, a sparsely furnished room with off-white walls. He was drawing circles. His way of filling time and space. All the local officers are aware of this obsession, and they know not to interrupt it. As Hamelot has pointed out to Kupferstein, the chief always follows the same modus operandi. First the paper. He never stoops to tracing his circles on office paper. No, he goes to the stationer’s at Bon Marché to buy his very own pads of Clairefontaine “C”: bright-white laid paper, ninety grammes. Then the pen: a Sheaffer Legacy Heritage fountain pen. As for the rest, it’s just a matter of watching him in action. One circle per page, always in the centre. And always the same size. The sheets piled up in a perfect stack to his right, not one out of place. Perched behind his varnished ebony desk, Mercator looked like a sort of enigmatic deity. As ever, there was that feeling with him that each gesture carried meaning. This air of mystery is precisely what makes him powerful. He’s like a parchment covered in hieroglyphs – there for all to see, yet thoroughly indecipherable. This is what gets Jean going. Like any good rational communist, he cannot resign himself to not understanding. He gathers up all the clues concerning his boss, the idiosyncrasies that only deepen the mystery, much to Rachel’s amusement. With an enigmatic smile, she would remind her partner that the secret is that there is no secret. She likes to think of her employer as a sort of Zen master, herself the idle observer. This is a constant source of relaxation.

Mercator has the broad chest of a tenor with the voice to match. He’s no Pavarotti in either department; more like a jovial chorus member at the opera, or even a booming wine merchant on rue Daguerre. Rachel is right. The secret lies in the absence of any secret. The chief’s anatomy reveals all she needs to know about him and his relationship with life and power. You can read him like a children’s picture book. His eyes betray a formidable intelligence, as do his hand movements, which are precise though somewhat unrestrained. He’s a bon viveur whose fondness for meat is apparent in his cheeks, his full lips and his permanently flared nostrils, not to mention the folds bulging over his belt. Though he’s not exactly what you might call fat. The contest between fat and muscle is more or less even-handed. A little more on the fat side to lull the opponent into a false sense of security, and just enough muscle to swoop down on any prey at the opportune moment, on the basis that this is never strictly necessary. All in all, he is handsome in a way that is very much his own. Not ugly, but rather the reflection of a handsome man trapped in the body of a police officer. A glimmer of Brando’s Kurtz that has passed everyone by. Rachel spotted it immediately, and maintains it to this day. This is why Jean’s obsession with the chief’s M.O. makes her laugh, because for her it is merely the sum of Mercator’s combination of intelligence, hidden beauty and his policeman-like poise and sense of purpose.

That said, Hamelot’s a good police officer. A very good one. And he’s right on one point: the chief never does deviate from his M.O. His Sheaffer suspended weightlessly three centimetres above the page, he begins by scanning the surface intently. Then his eyelids close, he breathes in and he raises his weapon so it’s in line with his solar plexus. Three seconds of silence before he unleashes it, letting out a growl of sorts. In a single movement he marks out his circle, eyes still closed, breathes in again, lays down his pen, then lifts the sheet to eye level before finally opening them and surveying his work. An instant later he places it delicately on the pile to his right. It is done.

*

Rachel and Jean had stood rooted at the entrance to the office. Having freed his hand of his pen, Mercator motioned to them to come in and sit down. For him, reports have to describe everything, down to the most minute detail: the layout of the apartment; the precise position of the pork joint; features of the decoration (neutral and modern, no television, a bookcase where Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant took pride of place, the Miles Davis portrait, eyes closed, lips pouting, hands framing his face, opposite a reproduction of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”; and finally, the Air France stewardess uniform hanging in the wardrobe by the entrance). Rachel and Jean, struck by the horror of the scene, let him have his turn at experiencing it. Wedged into his black leather armchair, with its clean, sharp lines, the commissaire listened, distant and attentive, as always. Who knows where his mind had wandered. As they finished their report, his eyes clouded over, and he became more serious. He seemed to be contemplating a shadow that was slowly invading his office. A shadow he recognised, whose outline only he could identify. When they told him about the decapitated orchids, and how the heads had been placed in a triangle on the toilet seat, Mercator closed up completely. He dismissed Jean and Rachel with a few impersonal words, among them “report”, “seven o’clock”, “morning”, “enquiry”, “you two”, “you two”. The second time he uttered “you two” he looked them hard in the eye, then left the office in silence.

There began the Bunker’s descent into night-time. Hamelot and Kupferstein went for a few Kronenbourgs on the ground floor with the officers who had finished for the evening, then back upstairs to type up a few things. They ordered sushi and some more beers, Asahis. Then their memory began to fade. At 3.00 a.m., Jean won a game of solitaire. Sitting behind him, Rachel listened to “Pissing in a River” by Patti Smith on her pink iPod nano.

LET IT ALL GOBEGIN

In the silent night, the two detectives are sprawled out at opposite ends of the terrace, reclining in fluorescent metal-framed deck chairs. Green for Jean, orange for Rachel. They had encountered overdoses, crimes of passion, ordinary baseness . . . But Laura’s murder is their first experience of true horror. Right now it’s a case of confronting, of plumbing the depths of a soul. This murder must be tamed, nourished, pondered, infiltrated. Then reassessed. They must go beyond any ordinary fascination with evil. They are trying now, under the delicate crescent of the moon in the starlit sky on this night in June. Rachel is dreaming. If we were in love, we’d be scanning the sky for shooting stars. But that’s not how it is, and she has t. . .