The Godmother Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE GODMOTHER

  ‘Readers will be anxious about the fate of the forthright, sympathetic Patience up to the final page. It’s no surprise that this novel won France’s most prestigious award for crime fiction.’ —Publishers Weekly starred review

  ‘A fabulous noir – more Balzac or Joyce Carol Oates than Simenon.’ —Le Point

  ‘Rigorous, superbly plotted by an author who clearly knows the territory. Vivid, smoky dialogue and a sly ending that ticks all the boxes … Masterly.’ —Le Figaro

  ‘Devourable in a sitting and tastes deliciously like one of the narrator’s beloved Rothkos – dark at its centre, pulsing outward through all the more complex flavours.’ —Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner

  ‘A perfect little slice of French noir, written in crisp, astringent prose from which unfurls a story much more complex than its 200 pages suggest. Expertly plotted, The Godmother is the most compelling crime novel I’ve read in years, rich with the sort of idiosyncratic detail only a criminal lawyer like Cayre could know. It eschews the moral reductionism of most drug narratives, laying bare the hypocrisies of the system itself. Patience Portefeux is a wonderful combination of wit, courage and sly subversion, surprising us all the way to the end.’—Fiona McGregor, author of Indelible Ink

  ‘The Paris of Cayre’s The Godmother is a spicy mix of cultures and classes so deftly evoked you can smell the cigarettes, coffee and Moroccan hash, taste the kebabs and Chamonix Orange cakes, feel the summer sweat trickle down your back and the hot asphalt stick to your feet. Reading this novel is a visceral delight.’ —Angela Savage, author of The Dying Beach

  ‘Patience Portefeux is a woman you won’t easily forget: tough, fearless and flawed, a modern-day heroine you’ll find yourself rooting for from beginning to end.’ —Anna Jaquiery, author of Death in the Rainy Season

  HANNELORE CAYRE is an award-winning French novelist, screenwriter and director, and a practising criminal lawyer. Her works include Legal Aid, Masterpieces and Like It Is in the Movies. She has directed several short films, and the adaptation of Commis d’office (Legal Aid) is her first feature-length film. She lives in Paris.

  After working as a lawyer in Sydney and London, STEPHANIE SMEE made her literary debut with an English translation of the Countess de Ségur’s Fleurville trilogy. Her most recent translation, Françoise Frenkel’s rediscovered WWII memoir No Place to Lay One’s Head, was awarded the JQ-Wingate Prize in 2019.

  Published by Black Inc.,

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Editions Métailié, Paris, 2017

  Originally published in France in 2017 as La Daronne

  Copyright of the English translation © Stephanie Smee 2019

  This edition published in 2019

  Hannelore Cayre asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781760641610 (paperback)

  9781743821022 (ebook)

  Cover design by Akiko Chan

  Typeset by JaM

  For my children

  Contents

  1. Money is Everything

  2. Say, What Have You Seen?

  3. Where There’s a Will, the Intrepid Jewish Woman Will Find a Way

  4. The Chameleon That Snoozes, Loses

  5. You’ll Be Hungry Again in an Hour

  6. Talk Doesn’t Cook Rice

  7. Mambo

  1

  MONEY IS EVERYTHING

  My parents were crooks, with a visceral love of money. For them it wasn’t an inert substance stashed away in a suitcase or held in some account. No. They loved it as a living, intelligent being that can create and destroy, that possesses the gift of reproduction. Something mighty that forges destinies, that separates beauty from ugliness, winners from losers. Money is Everything; the distillation of all that can be bought in a world where everything is for sale. It is the answer to every question. It is the pre-Babel language that unites mankind.

  They had lost everything, it must be said, including their country. Nothing was left of my father’s French Tunisia, nothing of my mother’s Jewish Vienna. Nobody for him to talk to in his patouète dialect, nor for her in Yiddish. Not even corpses in a cemetery. Nothing. It had all been erased from the map, like Atlantis. And so they bonded in their solitude, putting down roots in the no man’s land between a motorway and a forest, where they built the house in which I was raised, grandiosely named The Estate. A name that conferred the inviolable and sacred trappings of the Law on that bleak scrap of earth; a sort of constitutional guarantee that never again would they be booted away from anywhere. The Estate was their Israel.

  My parents were wogs, vulgar foreigners, outsiders. Raus. Nothing but the shirt on their back. Like all those of their sort, they hadn’t had much of a choice. Either gratefully accept any job they could get, whatever the working conditions, or else engage in some serious wheeling and dealing, relying on a community of like-minded people. They didn’t take long to make up their minds.

  My father was the General Manager of a trucking company that traded under the name Mondiale, with the slogan ‘Everything. Everywhere’. You don’t hear the job description ‘General Manager’ anymore (as in What does your dad do? He’s a General Manager…) but in the ’70s, it was a thing. It went with duck à l’orange, yellow polyester roll-neck jumpers over mini-culottes, and braid-trimmed telephone covers.

  He made his fortune sending his trucks to the so-called shit-hole countries of the world, with names ending in –an, like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, etc. To get a job with Mondiale you had to have first done time, because according to my father, only somebody who’d been locked up for at least 15 years could cope with being stuck in a truckie’s cab for thousands of miles, and would defend his cargo with his life.

  I can still see myself as if it were yesterday. I’m standing next to the Christmas tree, wearing a little navy-blue velvet dress with my patent leather Froment-Leroyer shoes, surrounded by scarred types clutching pretty little coloured parcels in their stranglers’ hands. The administrative staff of Mondiale were all of similar ilk. They consisted exclusively of pied-noirs, my father’s French colonial compatriots, men as dishonest as they were ugly. Only Jacqueline, his personal assistant, added a dash of glamour to the tableau. With her large, teased-up chignon, into which she would coquettishly pin a diadem, this daughter of a man condemned to death for wartime collaboration had a flashy look about her that stemmed from her Vichy childhood.

  This cheerful, unsavoury team, over which my father presided with a romantic paternalism, allowed him to engage in the covert transportation of so-called extras. So, in the years leading up to the ’80s, Mondiale and its royally remunerated employees got rich, first bringing over morphine base in league with my father’s Corsican pied-noir mates, then branching out into weapons and ammunition. Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan… I’m not ashamed to say, my very own dad was the Marco Polo of the thirty glorious post-war years, reopening the trade routes between Europe and the East.

  *

  Any criticism whatever of The Estate was seen by my parents as a symbolic attack, to the point where even amongst ourselves we never so much as alluded to the slightest negative aspect of its position: not the deafening noise of the road which meant we had to shout to make ourselves heard; not the black, sticky dust which seeped into everything; not t
he house-rattling vibrations, nor the extreme peril of those six lanes which made the simple act of getting home without causing a pile-up a minor miracle.

  My mother would start to slow down three hundred metres before the gate, reaching the driveway in first gear, hazard lights on, amidst an angry hail of horns. My father, on the rare occasions he was there, practised a form of vehicular terrorism in his Porsche as he braked, his V8 screaming as he decelerated from two hundred to ten in a matter of metres, forcing whoever had the misfortune of following him to swerve terrifyingly. As for me, I never had any visitors, for obvious reasons. Whenever a friend asked where I lived, I lied. Nobody would have believed me anyway.

  In my child’s mind, we were somehow different. We were the People of the Road.

  Five different events, taking place over 30 years, confirmed our singularity. In 1978, at number 27, a 13-year-old boy massacred his two parents and his four brothers and sisters in their sleep with a garden tool. When he was asked why, he replied that he’d needed a change. At number 47, in the ’80s, there was a particularly sordid affair involving an old man who had been locked up and tortured by his own family. Ten years later, at number 12, a ‘marriage agency’ set up shop; in fact, it was a prostitution network of Eastern European girls. At number 18, they found a mummified couple. And just recently, at number 5, a jihadist weapons cache was uncovered. It’s all in the papers. I’m not making any of it up.

  How come all these people had chosen to live in that particular spot?

  For some of them, my parents included, the answer was simple. Money likes the shadows and there are shadows to spare along the edge of a motorway. As for the others, it was the road itself that drove them mad.

  We People of the Road were different. If we were at the dinner table and heard the screeching of tyres, we would stop talking, forks suspended in mid-air. Then would come the extraordinary sound of crunching metal, followed by a remarkable calm, as other drivers, with an air of funereal restraint, processed slowly past the tangled mess of chassis and flesh those people had become; people who, like themselves, had been on their way somewhere.

  If it happened outside our place, around number 54, my mother would call the fire brigade and we would leave our meal unfinished to go to the accident, as she would say. We would bring out our folding chairs and meet the neighbours. On the weekend, it would usually happen around number 60 where the most popular nightclub in the area had set up, with its seven different dance zones. Nightclubs mean accidents. Lots of them. It’s crazy how often blind drunk people would pile into a car only to die there, carrying away with them those happy families who’d set off on their holidays in the middle of the night so they could wake up at the seaside.

  So, the People of the Road witnessed up-close a considerable number of tragedies involving the young and the old, dogs, bits of brain and bits of belly… What always surprised me was that we never heard a single cry from any of the victims. Barely a muttered oh là là, even from those who managed to stagger up to us out of the wreckage.

  During the year, my parents would go to ground like rats within their four walls, devoting themselves to tax-saving schemes of avant-garde complexity and closely monitoring the smallest external display of wealth. In this way they hoped to keep the Beast off their scent, luring it away to fatter prey.

  Once we were on holiday, though, out of the French jurisdiction, we lived like multi-millionaires alongside American movie stars in Swiss or Italian hotels in Bürgenstock, Zermatt or Ascona. Our Christmases were spent at the Winter Palace in Luxor or the Danieli in Venice, and there my mother came to life.

  As soon as she arrived, she would head straight for the luxury boutiques to buy clothes, jewellery and perfume, while my father did his rounds, harvesting brown paper envelopes stuffed with cash. In the evenings, he would draw up at the front of the hotel in the white convertible Thunderbird that somehow managed to accompany us on our offshore peregrinations. The same went for the Riva, which would appear as if by magic on the waters of Lake Lucerne or the Grand Canal in Venice.

  I still have lots of photos from these Fitzgeraldian holidays, but there are two that convey it all.

  The first is of my mother wearing a pink-flowered dress, posing next to a palm tree that’s cutting the summer sky like a green spray. She’s holding up her hand to shield her already weak eyes from the sunlight.

  The other is a photo of me beside Audrey Hepburn. It was taken at the Belvedere on August 1st, Swiss National Day. I’m eating a huge strawberry melba ice cream drowning in Chantilly cream and syrup, and there’s a magnificent fireworks display which is reflected in Lake Lucerne. My parents are on their feet, dancing to a Shirley Bassey song. I’m tanned and wearing a blue Liberty dress with smocking which brings out the Patience-blue of my eyes, as my father had taken to describing their colour.

  It’s a perfect moment. I’m radiating well-being like an atomic pile.

  The actress must have sensed my immense happiness because quite spontaneously she came to sit next to me and asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  ‘A fireworks collector.’

  ‘A fireworks collector! But how are you planning to collect something like that?’

  ‘In my mind. I’m going to travel the world and see them all.’

  ‘Why, you’re the first fireworks collector I’ve ever met! Enchantée.’

  Then she called over one of her friends to take a photograph so he could immortalise this unscripted moment. She had two copies printed. One for me and one for her. I lost mine and forgot it had even existed until I happened to see hers again in an auction catalogue, with the description: The Little Fireworks Collector, 1972.

  That photo captured the promise of my former life: a life with a future far more dazzling than all the time which has now passed since that August 1st.

  After an entire holiday racing around Switzerland in search of an outfit or a handbag, my mother would spend the evening before our departure cutting off the labels from all the new clothes she had accumulated and decanting the content of her perfume bottles into shampoo bottles in case the inquisitors at customs demanded to know where we had found the money for all these fancy new purchases.

  So why was I called Patience?

  Because you were born at ten months, of course. Your father always told us it was the snow that had stopped him getting the car out to come and see you after the birth, but the truth is that after such a long wait, he was devastated to have a girl. And you were enormous… five kilos… a real monster… and so ugly, with half your head crushed by the forceps… When you were finally dragged out of me, there was so much blood it looked like I’d stepped on a mine. It was carnage! And for what? A girl! The injustice!

  I’m 53 years old. My hair is long and completely white. It went white very young, as did my father’s. For a long time I dyed it because I was embarrassed, then one day I was sick of having to keep an eye on my roots and I shaved my head to let it grow out. Today it seems to be all the rage… Whatever, it goes nicely with my Patience-blue eyes, and clashes less and less with my wrinkles.

  My mouth is slightly lopsided when I speak, so that the right-hand side of my face is a bit less wrinkled than the left. It’s the result of a subtle hemiplegia caused by my initial crushing. It gives me a slightly working-class look, which, together with my strange hairstyle, is not uninteresting. I’m fairly solidly built, carrying five kilos extra – after putting on thirty during each of my two pregnancies when I gave free rein to my passion for large colourful cakes, fruit jellies and ice creams. At work I wear monochrome suits – grey, black or anthracite – that are unaffectedly elegant.

  I take care always to be well-groomed so my white hair doesn’t make me look like some old beatnik. Not that I’m obsessed by how I look; at my age I find that sort of vanity a bit sad. I just want people to say to themselves when they look at me: Wow! That woman’s in good shape! Hairdressers, manicurists, beauticians, hyaluronic acid fillers, intense pulsed ligh
t treatments, well-cut clothes, good quality make-up, day and night creams, siestas… I’ve always had a Marxist view of beauty. For a long time, I couldn’t afford to be fresh and beautiful; now that I can, I’m catching up. If you could see me now, on the balcony of my lovely hotel, you’d think I was the spitting image of Heidi on her mountain.

  People say I’m bad-tempered, but I think this is hasty. It’s true that I’m easily annoyed, because I find people slow and often uninteresting. For example, when they’re banging on about something I couldn’t give a crap about, my face involuntarily takes on an impatient expression which I find hard to hide, and that upsets them. So, they think I’m unfriendly. It’s the reason I don’t really have any friends, just acquaintances.

  There is also this: I suffer from a slight neurological peculiarity. My brain conflates several of my senses, meaning I experience a different reality to other people. For me, colours and shapes are linked to taste and feelings of well-being or satiety. It’s a strange sensory experience, difficult to explain. The word is ineffable.

  Some people see colours when they hear sounds, others associate numbers with shapes. Others again have a physical sense of time passing. My thing is that I taste and feel colours. It doesn’t make any difference that I know they’re just a quantum conversation between matter and light; I can’t help feeling that they form part of the very body of things. Where others see a pink dress, I see pink matter, composed of little pink atoms, and when I’m looking at it, I lose myself in its infinite pinkness. This gives rise to a sensation of both well-being and warmth, but also to an uncontrollable desire to bring the dress in question to my mouth, because for me, the colour pink is also a taste. Like ‘the little patch of yellow wall’ in Proust’s The Prisoner, which so absorbs the character as he looks at Vermeer’s View of Delft. I’m convinced Proust must have caught the man who inspired his character of Bergotte in the act of licking the painting, but then left it out of his novel on the grounds that it was just too crazy and gross.