Yeah, right.
In Fort-de-France, my mother didn’t have a job so I’d send over piles of money to feed my two brothers. Incognito: She thought I was a nurse at the Hôtel Dieu hospital. I’d open my legs, I’d go, “Oh, honey, yes, yes,” and the bread left for Martinique.
One fine evening, I was crying over my cup of coffee in a café on rue Montmartre when Mister K, the Halles dealer, planted himself across from me.
“You’re depressed, Vania.”
“I’m fucked. All my bread goes to my family.”
“You’re not a social worker, let ’em fend for themselves.”
“I don’t know what to do. Maybe I’ll go back to the islands.”
“I can help you.”
“I can’t deal anything except my ass.”
“No. You’ll be a mule. We load you with coke, you walk the street, my dealers come and get their stuff from your handbag.”
“Ain’t right for me.”
“The guys don’t risk a thing and the neighborhood cops know you: You’re clean. Perfect for dealing.”
I said yes.
The red lung of bars.
The crazy bums.
The buzzing junk.
Nothing had changed but everything was different for me. I was Mata Hari, the spy in mortal danger. The impatient street, the sweating butcher, everything was a problem. I had eyes in the back of my head.
And all the time I was at work with a john, while the guy crazy for ass grunted away between my thighs, my purse got hypnotized I’d stare at it so hard.
Mister K loaded me up at 7.
His three dealers would pick up their dose at 11, noon, and 5. Just like that, I’d double my month, buy clothes, white underwear for Sundays. The pimps knew I was on Mister K’s team and left me alone.
I began heading down into the bowels of the metro to do K a favor. And once there I dove deep into the end of the night of drugs and sex.
Staggering corpses.
Crackheads.
Doberman fuckers.
The dregs of the earth were surviving in passageways abandoned by those who lived the real life. In that underworld, nothing was the way it had been before. The cops, for example. That’s how I met Nico.
I had my own way of doing things under the C line.
Caches for deals.
Grungy mattresses out in the open for Peeping Toms.
The temperature could climb up to ninety-five so I’d work half naked. Then one morning this guy showed up. Curly dark hair, wrinkled suit, Hawaiian shirt. Very supple, with a springy, silent way of walking.
“Hi, Vania. I need twenty grams.”
“You new here? Never saw you before.”
“I’m Mister K’s new little star. I show up and the market skyrockets. Come on, gimme the shit.”
I hesitated. We were between two shifts and this guy turns up, all cool, like. Okay. I opened my purse, laser-beaming the place.
“Come closer and take two bags.”
He clung to me, slipped his hand into my purse, and planted a Sig Sauer into my cunt.
“Don’t move. You’re busted, baby. Stone cold.”
“You... you’re not even a cop!”
He took his hand out of my bag and waved his card in my face.
Shit. Fuck.
Legs like cotton.
I thought of mom.
Of the smell of the slammer.
Of Mister K, of course.
Then Nico made me step back into a boiler room, confiscated my Prada purse, and threw me a mega-slap right on the cheekbone.
His body on mine.
His hands all over me.
His macaroni in a fury.
Our breath enraged.
I was pounding on him with my fists, he was ramming his gun into me. He managed to get off, but he had to suffer for it. We were looking at each other like two wild beasts in a den. I hated him.
“You raped me, you fucking son of a bitch.”
“Whores can’t be raped. I forgot to pay, that’s all.”
He took the shit out of my purse. Fifty grams in small bags. A smile like a worm.
“You busting me?”
“Don’t know. I have to think.”
“Hurry up, I have to change.”
“Here. I got two solutions. I cuff you, you take a vacation at the Fleury-Mérogis big house and do some time there. Or I haven’t seen a thing but you have to be real nice to me.”
“You want to fuck me for free.”
“No. I want my cut.”
“On the shit?”
“Coke’s over for you. Besides, it wouldn’t look good for a narc-squad cop in the Saint-Denis sector to get his cut on shit. No, I want my share on the tricks.”
“I have to support my family and I don’t make much.”
“Forget your family. I’m your family now, baby. Also, no more cheap whoring for you. Your black ass deserves better. It’s your choice.”
“Anything but jail.”
He threw my purse back to me. I got up, my face all bloody.
“What do we do now?” I said.
“Nothing for the moment. My name’s Nico Diamantis, I’ll be in touch.”
“Great.”
I went back up to daylight. I was walking through the shady streets, heart in pieces, face smashed up. As I passed by the girls, they’d go like, “Jeez, Vania, you got beat up real bad.” Right.
Mister K met me on rue des Lombards. I was so fed up I told him everything from behind my latte: the coke gone, Diamantis breathing up my ass, and the deal down the drain.
He stayed calm; he’s a guy from Lagos who shook hands with Fela Kuti when the Black President didn’t have a clue about AIDS.
“You told me the truth, Vania. Relax, fifty grams isn’t much. Do like this dirty cop says but watch your ass. I got a feeling it’s not doing too well.”
He slipped out into the night and I stayed there like an idiot whining over my future as a cocksucker.
Nico called me on my cell three days later.
“How’d you get my number?”
“I’m a cop, that’s my job. Meet me in twenty minutes at Ciné Cité. First row of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; move it.”
He started to stroke my thighs when Tommy Lee Jones gets shot. Then he explained to me how I was to live from tomorrow on.
“I’ve figured the whole thing out. I’m gonna post your contact info up on the Internet. Contacts by e-mail only. After that I’ll drop a card like, Vania, all positions. Leave a message at... to all the rich ones. I’ll get you a second cell just for tricks; I have a pal at Orange. You give up the street, you buy yourself new clothes and wait for the john. You’re like a star, see. You’ll do home delivery but you’ll limit pussy delivery to Paris. Not bad, eh?”
“Yeah. How much do you take?”
“I take everything and I leave you enough to live nicely.”
“What? You’re out of your fucking mind!”
“I had the coke bags analyzed, your fingerprints are all over them. What’s that you were saying?”
Shit, shit, shit.
After that, I worked and shut up.
I bought my panties at Chantal Thomas: fifteen grams of muslin and tons of fantasies.
Sometimes I took the subway across Paris, other times when the dough came in big, I’d take a cab. Three weeks later, as I was leaving the duplex of a producer on rue de Ponthieu, I got beat up by two scumbags. The dough and my youth disappeared in five minutes.
Nico didn’t like the fact that the bread had evaporated.
He got me a chauffeur.
Keller.
The six-foot, two-hundred-pound type. He looks like the killer with the pipe in Charley Varrick.
Keller picks me up at home, rue des Lombards, and drops me off at my client’s place. While I’m performing, he waits in the car, smoking stinky cigarillos and catching neo-bop jazz on the radio. One day, before I got out of the car, I leaned over him behind his wheel.
“Hey, Keller, don’t you get ideas, sitting in your Italian coach while I get screwed front and back by all these guys?”