The Godmother

A Crime Novel

Hannelore Cayre

Translated by Stephanie Smee

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

Mambo

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

For my children

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 fifteen years could cope with being stuck in a truck’s cab for thousands of miles, and would defend his cargo with his life.