Chourmo by Jean-Claude Izzo, Howard Curtis Read Free Book Online Page A

been to see? And why? It was unlikely that whoever it was he’d just visited was going to put his head out of the window and show himself.
    â€œHave you seen him before?” I asked OubaOuba, who’d come up beside me.
    â€œNever seen the guy.”
    The police siren could be heard at the entrance to the project. They were quick, for a change! The kids vanished in less than two minutes. Only the women, the children and a few ageless old people were left. And me.
    They arrived like cowboys. From the way they screeched to a halt alongside the group of onlookers, I guessed they’d been spending a lot of time watching
Starsky and Hutch
on TV. They must even have rehearsed that arrival, because it was so damn accurate. The four doors opened at the same time and they all ejected. Except Babar. He was the oldest cop in the neighborhood station house, and it was a long time since he’d enjoyed playing remakes of old cop shows. He wanted to reach retirement the way he’d started his career, without too much effort. And preferably alive.
    Pertin, known as Four Eyes by all the kids in the project, because of the Ray-Bans he never took off, glanced at Serge’s corpse, then stood looking me up and down.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?”
    Pertin and I weren’t exactly best buddies. Although he was a chief inspector, for seven years I’d been the person in charge of North Marseilles. His neighborhood station house had been no more than an outpost of the Neighborhood Surveillance Squad, which I led. He was at our disposal.
    From the beginning, it was war between Pertin and me. “In the Arab neighborhoods,” he’d say, “there’s only one thing that works, and that’s force.” That was his credo, and for years he’d applied it to the letter. “The thing with the Arabs, all you gotta do is grab one from time to time, take him out to a deserted quarry, and beat the crap out of him. They’ve always done some stupid thing that you don’t know about. You hit the scum, they always know why. That’s a damn sight better than a lot of ID checks. It avoids paperwork at the station house. And it does wonders for your nerves after the Arabs have been fucking you around.”
    According to Pertin, they were just “doing their job honestly.” That’s what he’d told the journalists the day after his team had “accidentally” shot down a seventeen-year-old Arab during a routine ID check. That was in 1988. Marseilles was up in arms about the blunder. That year, they thrust me into the position of head of the Neighborhood Surveillance Squad. I was the supercop who was going to restore order and calm to North Marseilles. I had to, because we were on the verge of a riot.
    Everything I did showed him that his approach was a mistake. But I made mistakes too, more than my share, by trying too hard to play for time, to be conciliatory. Trying too hard to understand what couldn’t be understood. Poverty and despair. I guess I didn’t act enough like a cop. That was what my bosses told me. Later. I think they were right. From the police point of view, I mean.
    Since my resignation, Pertin had re-established his power over the projects. His “law” prevailed. The beating sessions in the disused quarries had resumed. The high-speed chases through the streets too. Hate. The escalation of hate. Fantasies were becoming reality and any citizen, armed with a rifle, could shoot on sight at anything that wasn’t completely white. Ibrahim Ali, a seventeen-year-old Comorian, had died like that, one night in February 1995, running after a night bus with his friends.
    â€œI asked you a question. What are you doing here?”
    â€œSightseeing. I missed the neighborhood. The people, that kind of thing.”
    Of the four of them, only Babar smiled. Pertin bent over Serge’s body. “Shit! It’s your friend, the faggot! He’s