“He went back to his cell. The investigating magistrate will question him again. We’ve got time. Remember, criminal proceedings have been started, which means they can be held in pre-trial detention for a year, so nobody’s in any hurry. They’ll call you. I’ve put a note in the file . . . So, you didn’t answer me, where did you learn Arabic?”

“Well, my nanny taught me to speak it between the ages of six and seventeen. After that, I studied it.”

“My son had an Algerian babysitter too. She used to talk to him in Arabic so he still knows a few words. But that’s a far cry from being able to speak it fluently . . .”

“Well, my nanny was a man, and he didn’t just babysit me, he raised me.”

“Really?”

“Yes, a man.”

“So what was his name, this nanny?”

“Bouchta.”

I had not said that name for a very, very long time. Not out loud anyway, because sometimes I would call it out in my sleep if I was having a bad dream. Curiously, now this whole episode is behind me, I don’t do that anymore, but at the time, after twenty-five years of lethargy, while I was in the process of resuming my position in the Mafioso continuum of my family, my brain was behaving like an old sponge. If I squeezed it, a flood of memories would emerge . . .

Bouchta . . .

Oh, my Bouchta . . . my dear Bouchta.

A mediocre homemaker at best, my mother did absolutely nothing around the house, and certainly didn’t do any cleaning. My father didn’t hold it against her, quite the contrary: the wife of a pied-noir upon whom fortune has smiled should not have to ruin her fingernails scrubbing pots and pans. On the other hand, she ought to know how to manage her staff — which she didn’t do either. If I had to sketch a timeline of my younger childhood years, it would consist of a succession of maids, scoldings, accusations of breakages or theft and slammed doors. In the end, exasperated by the permanent state of chaos that reigned in our house — whether it was the Portuguese woman loathed by our Doberman, the deaf Polish woman or the slob from the Creuse — my father decided to settle our domestic affairs once and for all, and left for Tunisia to buy Bouchta.