Arab Jazz Read Online Free Page A

Bunker’s—to the kitchen department, the primary objective of the expedition that was, as he now realizes all too well, doomed to failure. Rooted to the spot, Jean had stared at the young, bearded, and highly competent employee charged with designing the kitchen of his dreams. Lost for words; voice and mind failing. He had gotten down from his kitchen bar stool, nodding vacantly in the direction of the salesman before going to the Swedish food shop on the ground floor to buy himself some crackers, a tube of anchovy paste to spread on them, and a bottle of Absolut vodka that he had begun to drink on the RER. train and then finished at home, stretched out on the only rug in the apartment in the twelfth arrondissement where he’d moved three months earlier. A one-bedroom so bare you’d think it uninhabited. The morning after had been as difficult as it had been emotional, but ever since, he felt calmed and contented at the sight of his kitchen’s sole storage unit: a two-doored white Formica cupboard, perfectly ample for his cutlery and provisions. This thought brings him peace, helps him put some distance between himself and the murder. Soon he will be able to face it.
    Rachel is following her own course. At first, the sheer monstrousness of the crime numbed her, making it possible for her to act, to do what was required of her. Cordoning off the apartment, proceeding with the first futile lines of questioning, getting curious bystanders to back off. Only when they were giving their report to Mercator did the pain creep up on her. Like after a trip to the dentist, when the effects of the anesthetic wear off. Then she and Jean had a few drinks, talked shit to each other; she’d dipped into the virtual world, listened to the music of her teenage years. Not a lack of awareness—just a distancing process. Now, at this still, latter stage of the night, she recalls in her mind’s eye the events that took place before her call-out to join Jean at the crime scene. She skims over her late wake-up and midday arrival at the commissariat to dwell for a short while on what ought to have made up the main part of her day: the arrest at around 2:00 p.m. of a small gang of pot dealers on place des Fêtes. A routine operation that had been a week in the planning, and which was aimed at bolstering government statistics. The vendors—small-fry retailers—were in possession of pathetic quantities and could not have seemed more docile. Rachel stayed in the background, absentmindedly overseeing the successful completion of the operation with her police judiciaire hat on. And then her gaze met that of the gang leader, a handsome young man of twenty-five with kind eyes and a smooth ebony complexion. She let him check her out, just for a split second. Each looking at the other from different sides of an invisible barrier that did not block out all potential for attraction. A fleeting sensation that she had stored to one side, saved for later, and which is coming back to her now through the curling smoke of her cigarette.
    A fleeting sensation that brings her back to herself, the schoolgirl at lycée Henri Bergson who would avoid the company of the overly fair-featured girls in her class, and whose best friends were Marcel and Ibrahim, the neighborhood’s go-to guys for soft drugs. In July 1987, having just seen on the school bulletin board that she’d been awarded her baccalaureate with distinction, Rachel calmly announced to her parents that she would not be joining them on their vacation to Port-Bou. A memorable fight had ensued, with the result that father and daughter nearly came to blows—and it would have taken a real expert to judge who’d have come out on top in this near-miss contest, since despite all of Léon Kupferstein’s 190 pounds of muscle, Rachel turned into a veritable ninja whenever she flew into one of her rages. She had managed to get her colossal father to back down, and two days later she was standing on Platform 16