Murder in Belleville

Saturday Evening

THE DEAD HAD IT easy, Bernard thought, shuffling his files together on his office desk.

Dead easy.

But that wasn’t true. He wished it were. Outside his window, along the gravel paths, the trees’ shadows wavered and lengthened. He tossed the empty pill bottle in the trash—he needed more or he wouldn’t sleep.

Visions of his nounou, the caramel-faced Berber nursemaid who’d diapered and fed him, flashed in front of him. He saw her gold-toothed smile, warm and welcoming. Her eyes crinkling in laughter when he’d tickle behind her elbow on her soft, dark skin. How she’d save him the first of the season’s figs, swollen with seeds, and a fistful of golden white grapes from Lemta. He heard the hoarse notes of her song, one he’d never understood. The song, she’d said, told of the Atlas Mountains near her village, jagged, purple, and massive. And how the chergui, the dry and burning east wind, whipped the land and inflamed spirits.

His nounou had taught him games the nomad children played in the desert. For hours they’d sit in the cool turquoise-tiled courtyard under the whitewashed arches by the fountain, playing pebble toss and hide the waterskin.

And then the last vision that he’d tried to forget—his nounou’s head impaled on the fencepost of the Michelin factory, in a row by others accused of sabotage by the gendarmes. A cloud of black flies on her slack jaw revealing the gold tooth glinting in the sun, his mother’s screams. How his mother made them all run to the harbor. But there were no ships.

How could an illiterate woman who spoke a Berber dialect be a spy? he’d overheard his mother ask his stepfather over the dinner table years later. Every dinar nounou earned, his mother continued, she’d sent to her family in the village.

Roman had said both sides paid and made bad mistakes. “France will reap the dividends in the future,” he’d said. For a former soldier that seemed charitable. In fact it was the only charitable thing about Algerians Bernard ever heard him say.

And he’d been right, Bernard thought. He dealt with that dividend in Notre-Dame de la Croix.