Little Rebel E-Book

Jérôme Leroy

• Herausgeber: Corylus Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 108

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Divided along so many social fault lines, a city in the west of France is a tinderbox of anger and passion. As the tension grows, things go badly wrong as a cop is killed and a terror cell is scattered across the city. A school on the deprived side of the city is caught up in the turmoil as students, their teacher and a visiting children's author are locked down. Making his first appearance in an English translation, Jérôme Leroy gives us a subtle and sardonic perspective on the shifts taking place in politics and society in this disturbing novella.

Leseprobe

Little Rebel

Jérôme Leroy

Corylus Books

Copyright © 2021 Corylus Books

Little Rebel is first published in English in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Corylus Books Ltd, and was originally published in French as La Petite Gauloise in 2018 by La Manufacture de livres.Copyright © Jérôme Leroy, 2018Translation copyright © Graham H. Roberts, 2020Jérôme Leroy has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.All characters and events portrayed in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or not, is purely coincidental.Cover art by Barry McKayCorylus Books LtdISBN: 978-1-917586-18-4

Little Rebel

By Jérôme Leroy

Translated by Graham H. Roberts

‘The present instruction is intended to bring together in one single document the measures designed to combat the terrorist threat, and to explain how they relate to the National Security Alert System, and the Education Ministry’s Crisis Management Procedures. It replaces the three directives cited heretofore, which are hereby annulled. Only the directive n° 2015-205 of 25 November 2015 relative to the Emergency Situation Safety Procedure (ESSP) remains in force.’

Official Bulletin of the French Education Ministry, 13 April 2017.

‘This perfectly formed democracy constructs its own inconceivable enemy, namely terrorism. It wishes, in other words, to be judged on its enemies rather than on its achievements.’

Guy Debord, Notes on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)

‘Maybe I’ve got it wrong. But I continue to believe that we are all in danger.’

Pier Paolo Pasolini, last interview, given on the eve of his death, 1 November 1975.

The reason why the head of Mokrane Méguelati, a police inspector attached to the regional office of the French Directorate for Internal Security, has just exploded under the impact of a 12mm calibre bullet, fired at an initial speed of 380 metres per second from the Taurus 51cm barrel pump-action shotgun of local police officer Sergeant Richard Garcia, is very probably linked to distant geopolitical conflicts. Conflicts playing themselves out thousands of miles away from this suburb perched high on a hill overlooking this port city in the west of France, a city now gripped in a heat wave, and which is known for its appallingly high levels of unemployment, the slow death of its shipyards and its reconstruction in an elegant Stalinist style after the Allied bombings of 1944.

Still, there’s now a lot of brain tissue spread over the tarmac of this hilly street, renamed rue Jean-Pierre Stirbois in honour of the National Front’s former Secretary General by the city’s newly elected mayor – a member of the Patriotic Bloc party – but which many local residents, in their indifference to the new regime up at City Hall, continue to refer to as rue Emile-Pouget, named after a long gone anarcho-communist.

‘You saw that, didn’t you, Cindy?! You saw there was nothing else I could do?! I mean a fucking Arab running towards us, waving his arms about, with a gun in his hand. And just after we got that call about the shooting in the area! You saw, didn’t you, the way that fucking Arab was waving his arms about? We had every right to shoot, didn’t we?’ asks Sergeant Richard Garcia anxiously.

Cindy Lefèvre sighs with relief, despite the presence of Mokrane Méguelati’s corpse, and the reek of Richard Garcia’s body odour. The thing is, Cindy Lefèvre had been rather scared when she saw an Arab appearing out of nowhere just a few yards in front of them, waving his arms about, with a gun in his hand, even though he was actually quite cute judging by his reflection in the headlights of their Dacia Duster 4x4, marked Municipal Police. She had been the one driving on account of the fact that Sergeant Richard Garcia, who would normally never let a bird drive, is going through a bit of a conjugal crisis right now, and spends his time speaking to his wife or texting her on his mobile.

Cindy Lefèvre also sighs from fatigue.

It’s been five years since Cindy Lefèvre joined the local police force in order to earn a living while studying law in the hope of passing her Category A National Police Force Exam. But as time goes by, Cindy Lefèvre finds herself increasingly exhausted and she’s already failed that exam – twice. To add insult to injury, since the Patriotic Bloc got in at City Hall they’ve started recruiting guys like Richard Garcia as policemen, ex-servicemen the army no longer wants but who are cousins or brothers-in-law of somebody in the mayor’s office. Pains in the neck, cretins, not nasty – well not necessarily nasty – but idiots all the same. Like this Richard Garcia who rushed over here when HQ told them about the shooting – ‘the lads in the Serious Crimes Unit will need back-up’ – whereas ‘the lads in the Serious Crimes Unit’ think Sergeant Richard Garcia is nothing but an idiot, a pest and an interfering arse-licker.

Lights are already being switched on all down the rue Jean-Pierre Stirbois (formerly the rue Emile-Pouget). ‘The 800’, as this part of town is called, is inhabited by nice, easily frightened pensioners and lower middle-class people, who live in detached houses that have seen better days, just a few hundred metres from a row of tower blocks with a bad reputation. It's a kind of Indian reservation full of local young drug addicts, radicalised psychopaths, benefit junkies, women in turbans, and blokes who look like they’d slit a priest’s throat given half the chance, or else mow down fans at a rock concert with a machine gun, or drive a 19-tonne truck through a crowd of people on a seafront on the evening of Bastille Day.

It’s 40 minutes past midnight, Cindy Lefèvre tells herself.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Garcia tries to remember the procedure to be followed in this kind of situation. What with his marital problems, the two cartridges ejected from his Taurus ST12 tactical pump-action shotgun which testify to the fact that he did indeed fire but missed the target with his first shot, and the corpse of the fucking Arab who’s lost his face, towards which Cindy Lefèvre advances cautiously, her 7.65 calibre PA Unique police pistol clutched in her hand, Sergeant Richard Garcia is a little lost. Despite appearances, and contrary to what he would have his mates in the Serious Crimes Unit think, he never once found himself in the front line with the Special Forces during his entire military career.

Sergeant Richard Garcia, who sees himself these days as a defender of the West against the Great Replacement (he’s been reading the claims of Renaud Camus on the internet), ought to be pleased that he’s killed an armed Arab who was very probably a left-wing Islamist terrorist. 

In reality, however, Sergeant Richard Garcia feels upset more than anything, even slightly nauseous, at the sight of the corpse’s face that he’s blown wide open, illuminated by the Duster’s headlights. Sergeant Richard Garcia tries to put his anguish into words, following the recommendations of his psychiatrist, a woman he goes to see every week on his wife’s suggestion.

‘I’m a little upset, and even slightly nauseous,’ he announces into the heat of the night, which smells of the salt and the oil rising up from the terminals of this port city down at the bottom of the hill. 

‘What’s that you’re prattling on about?’ asks Cindy Lefèvre, who is now leaning over the Arab’s faceless corpse.

Sergeant Richard Garcia is not at all sure whether she has the right to go interfering with the body of that dead would-be terrorist before the experts get here. But Cindy Lefèvre must know what she’s doing.

After all, Cindy Lefèvre sits exams.

‘What’s going on? Was that shooting I heard just now?’ a pensioner asks them suddenly, with a voice that sounds like he’s under siege, looking down at them from the skylight window of his solid, stone-clad detached house.

‘Stay indoors, sir, it’s safer!’ orders Sergeant Richard Garcia, in a voice that he wishes sounded more virile, but which veers pathetically off towards high-pitched, on account of his anxiety.

‘Is it those tower blocks again? ISIS? CGT union troublemakers?’ The doddery old resident of 424 rue Jean-Pierre Stirbois (formerly rue Emile-Pouget) continues in his best siege-mentality voice.

Sergeant Richard Garcia doesn’t answer him. Sergeant Richard Garcia looks at Cindy Lefèvre, who is now kneeling over the corpse. Sergeant Richard Garcia admires Cindy Lefèvre’s rather large rump, its curves sumptuously embraced by the navy blue combat trousers of her uniform. A rather large rump it is too, but just the kind he likes. He feels the first vague stirrings of a hard-on; it’s been months since his wife has let him have sex with her, and Cindy Lefèvre doesn’t just have a voluptuous arse – you can have a conversation with her, as well.

Sergeant Richard Garcia suddenly imagines himself approaching her there, in the night, and sticking it up her while standing over the sodding dead Arab, the pair of them going at it under the lustful eye of that pensioner who thinks he’s under siege, the entire scene caught in the Duster’s headlights, high above the brightly lit port city which smells of salt and oil. Sometimes his fantasies are like something out of a Pasolini film.

Sergeant Richard Garcia has a proper hard-on now, but his erection suddenly vanishes into the night, along with the dreamlike vision of Cindy Lefèvre’s ample behind, when Cindy Lefèvre gets to her feet and turning towards him, says,

‘Richard, I think you just shot a cop.’ 

*

It is at this point that we must say goodbye to Sergeant Richard Garcia and his colleague Cindy Lefèvre. Theirs is only a minor role in our story; we have included them merely in order to help the reader better understand the historical period, the place, and the violent atmosphere of both.

If the reader were really keen to know more, an omniscient narrator could reveal that in the years following the above related incident, Cindy Lefèvre, tired of failing her police officer’s exams, will leave the port city after marrying a general practitioner ten years her junior, and will go to live with him in a village somewhere in the South of France. In the 2020s Cindy Lefèvre will publish two volumes of poetry with a leading Parisian publisher, which will be well received by connoisseurs of the genre.

Sergeant Richard Garcia will not be prosecuted for blowing Captain Mokrane Méguelati’s head off. Nevertheless, the Patriotic Bloc bigwigs up at City Hall, worried about their public image, will force him to resign from the municipal police force just a few months later. Sergeant Richard Garcia will become a security guard at the Blue Note, one of the port’s nightclubs, located in the trendy part of the city near the old arsenal. During a student party held at the club, the security guard Richard Garcia will meet a girl enrolled on a Master’s programme in international law whom he will save from being gang raped by a group of business school students who’ve drunk too much wine, and whose ideas of sex have been formed at a very early age, thanks to websites such as YouPorn and iWank. Richard Garcia will kick fifty shades of shit out of them and will help the crying girl, who will have a split lip, and will be crawling around on the floor between two large wheelie bins when he comes to her rescue, to put her clothes back on.

Despite their difference in social class, the girl will fall in love with the divorced security guard, and change him forever. Richard Garcia will shed both four stone and his extreme right wing views. He will follow his newfound love, now an expert in NGO law, as she travels the world on various humanitarian missions. The last we heard, Richard Garcia was helping out at Idomeni, a transit camp for migrants in Macedonia.

On the other hand, it may well interest the reader to know just what Inspector Mokrane Méguelati of the French Directorate for Internal Security was doing out at The 800, on a June evening as soft and gentle as the first stirrings of love in a song by Charles Trenet, before having his face ripped off by a .12 calibre bullet and receiving full posthumous honours from the local Préfet and the French Interior Minister during a moving ceremony at which a letter will be read out, signed by the President himself, who will be unable to attend, owing to an official visit he will be undertaking at the same time in some oil-rich emirate.

*