Too bad she doesn’t know that ever since Juliette was a little girl, she’d heard that truth a thousand times. At school or in Sandrine’s family, there was no dearth of allusions to it. She knew who Victor Boussagol was and what he looked like. Sandrine is torturing herself for nothing. Or she’s torturing herself too late.
CHAPTER 17
Elias answers the police summons without a lawyer to try to play down the situation, and he goes there by bus. Two hours on the road separate Tel Aviv from Netivot, that little town in the Negev a little over three miles from Gaza, and even if it isn’t at the end of the world, when you want to go there, it takes all day. Despite the quantities of missiles it received from Hamas, Netivot has remained a place both calm and strange, where you sometimes meet transsexuals who’ve had very successful surgery. There Elias knows a certain Levana, a good-looking blonde with the voice of an ogre, very nice and ultrafeminine, who doesn’t always make you pay for a blow job. A real subject for an Israeli film, that Levana: born in a man’s body, but also into an ultraorthodox family who called it the work of the devil when she decided to change sex. Levana became a woman nonetheless. Her seven brothers accepted it, since she supports them financially while they twiddle their thumbs pretending to study the Torah.
As he doesn’t want his absence to make waves at H24, Elias calls in sick, except that he’s obliged to admit to Olga that he’s going to the cops in Netivot. She frowns, quick to sense something wrong.
“Why the cops?” she asks first. “It’s a terrorist attack, not a crime.”
“The Shabak reclassified the attack as a criminal case.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, no reason, just didn’t want to worry you.”
“Eli darling, trust me, please,” she says, putting her arms around him. “Tell me what really happened. You can’t leave me out of this. I’m your woman.”
“Don’t forget, they wanted to slit my throat.”
“But you say yourself the Shabak doesn’t think it’s a terrorist attack.”
“So what?” Elias replies. “It’s still attempted murder, right?”
“Yes, but why? Why did these guys want to kill you?”
“To steal the car, that’s all. Why complicate things?”
Another source of unease is growing between them—the bracelet he wanted to give her when she returned from Gérardmer. Olga doesn’t dare ask for it, of course. She’s too sensitive for that. But still…
Why doesn’t he give it to her again? Well, so as not to admit it’s precisely because of that damn piece of jewelry that it all happened. Elias is more or less convinced it brought him bad luck. Ill-gotten gain, an unlucky object, a jinx, whatever, he has to give it away, sell it back, or fence it, anything except give it to Olga again. He loves her so much! If she left him again, this time he’d really commit suicide.
“Do you know the two individuals who tried to assassinate you?” the Netivot policeman asks him directly.
“Never saw ’em before,” Elias answers.
“They’re saying they know you.”
“From where?”
“They say you sold them a car and you returned to take it back in the middle of the night.”
“What car?”
“The four-wheel drive you had when you got to the artificial dune.”
“Baloney. That car is still at H24.”
“You’re not getting what I’m asking: Did you sell them the car and then take it back?”
“I never sold a car to anyone.”
“That’s not exactly what I’m asking. Listen up. This is my question: Did you sell them that car? Answer that already.”
“Well, no.”
“So you couldn’t take it back from them?”
“That’s logical.”
“OK, so I’ll let you go. But I’m going to have to check your schedule. Where were you the night of the theft?”
“When was that?” Elias asks, seeing the trap.
“The night of November fourth to the fifth.”
Elias looks at his calendar in his phone. “At home.”
“You have witnesses?”
“No. On the fourth, I got back to Tel Aviv around eight, and I went to the station the next day because the car had a problem.”
“What problem?”
“I don’t know anything about cars, but the engine kept misfiring, so I brought it back to the station garage.”
“OK, would you sign here, thanks, yalla, you can go.”
It was only five minutes of questioning, and yet Elias leaves exhausted, sure the truth will soon come out. Explode, even. Not that the cops can confound him, but his guilty conscience has reached its limit. When he gets to the bus stop, he turns around and heads back toward the police station to confess everything. Suddenly he can’t stand the torment, all this shit. Sick of this business! Resigned to spend three or four months in preventive detention, he just hopes with a good lawyer he’ll quickly be released on parole. Then there will be a trial and then who knows? Probably a suspended sentence since he’s never been convicted of anything before, and the two Bedouins did try to cut his throat, after all. Of course he’ll also lose his job. Not tragic either. But Olga? How will she take it? Will she support him? Will they remain lovers? Elias has a secret admiration for the wives of bad guys: the most faithful imaginable, the most in love, in fact. But Olga is so young. So bourgeois, too. Not a bad-guy’s wife for anything in the world. At least, that’s what he imagines.
At the idea of losing her a second time, he gets nauseous and throws up his whole breakfast at the foot of a tree. A few passersby stop and ask if he needs help, but he shakes his head and stands, telling himself, “Shit, I’m not gonna go into the slammer and lose Olga again! Sleep outside, own nothing, no problem. Jail, no! Never!” Anything but prison. He’d rather have a guilty conscience 24-7. So he goes off again in the opposite direction and barely catches the bus back to Tel Aviv. If the truth is really going to come out, then let it! But he’s not going to help.
When he’s back in town, he walks to Kerem without even telling Diabolo he’s coming, to tell him from now on they’d better not be seen together. And avoid calling each other. Cut off all ties, in fact. Not hang out with a bunch of Frenchies anymore. But Diabolo finds that pretty funny.
“Oh, I see, the closet. Y’know, I know all about that. I’ll go there instead of you. Come on, I’ll make you a Nespresso.”
“I don’t want a Nespresso!” Elias says. “Maybe you don’t give a flying fuck about the police, but me, it’s bugging me out of my mind, the judges and all that shit. I’m outta here. And don’t call me anymore, please, Diabo. Never again until it’s over. Ciao.”
As he’s leaving, he walks by Dina Aziza, who’s coming out of her room in bare feet and a black bra and matching sweatpants, still jet-lagged, it would seem, and he stops to look at her. Even more beautiful in real life than in a photo. Gracefully muscular, satin skin, almond-shaped green eyes—in short, a wonder. She smiles at him furtively and goes to make coffee at the machine. Diabolo goes over to her like a landlord, nonchalant but possessive, and gives her a long kiss on the neck. She smiles at him nicely but looks at him in such a way that he does not go on. Then he walks Elias down to the street.