Girl Stalks the Ruins

by Jacques Antoine

  “Ce sont les fugitifs que tout le monde cherche, Nassim. Que font-ils ici?”

  Nassim turned to Akram, and then back to his uncle. “We didn’t know you were stopping by this evening.”

  “Yes, fine,” his uncle growled, now speaking in heavily accented English. “But what are they doing here? All of Paris looks for them.”

  “They were in trouble, uncle Hassan… and I owe them…”

  “Owe them? What could you possibly owe them? How do you even know who they are?”

  Nassim and Akram huddled with their uncle and sorted out a long story, and Perry helped the second man sit upright. Yasmine brought a glass of water, and he began to breathe a little more easily. After a few more minutes of intense discussions with the nephews, uncle Hassan grunting and growling the whole time, he turned to address Emily and Perry.

  “Je suis désolé, but you must leave this place, tout de suite.” He paused to consider them, and especially Emily, who had just confounded his attempt to secure a threat, and now assisted the man he’d brought with him. The calculation underway behind his eyes seemed to find no easy resolution. “I do not understand what brings you here, but it will go badly for my nephews if you are discovered here.”

  “What is it, Uncle?” Akram asked. “Yasmine was just getting dinner ready.”

  “There is no time for dinner. The reason I came…” Hassan looked again at Emily, and the implications of their presence for his errand seemed to confound him. “… I came to warn you, the Police Nationale is preparing a major intervention at this complex.”

  “Tonight?” Nassim’s eyes opened wide.

  “They contacted the GIGN for support. They have a tip that one of the attackers from the Louvre is hiding here… and with these two here, too, it looks bad. It will be the usual roundup of the usual suspects, and Yasmine and Bilal don’t need to go through this again.”

  “GIGN?” Emily asked.

  “The… comment c’est dit… intervention group of the Gendarmerie,” Hassan said.

  “It’s like a national SWAT team,” Perry explained.

  “Uncle Hassan is Lieutenant-Colonel in the Gendarmes,” Bilal crowed. “Isn’t that right, Uncle?”

  “But, Uncle… that tip…” Nassim’s voice trailed off.

  “We were there,” Perry said. “We were at the Louvre when the attack happened.”

  “They saved Nassim,” Bilal said.

  “They helped me slip out unnoticed, before the police could find me. They would have blamed me for everything.”

  “The people who carried out the attack…” Perry laid out his version of events, and the facts as he saw them. “These weren’t typical terrorists. They acted more like special forces. It was all very coordinated, and they were using weapons from your armory.”

  “Are you saying it was Gendarmes?” Hassan’s indignation glared from his eyes, and he practically needed to be restrained, at least for an instant. Emily stood up, now that the second man, who turned out to be Hassan’s aide, could breathe comfortably.

  “We’re saying it was coordinated,” she said. “We don’t know who was behind it, but it certainly wasn’t Nassim… or us.”

  “It can’t have been … how do you say… an inside job? Not from inside the Gendarmes.” Hassan rubbed his forehead. “We must move… maintenant. Akram, you and Yasmine must clean up the kitchen. It cannot appear like a hasty departure. Nassim… and you two… help me rearrange the furniture. No sign of a struggle must appear.” When no one moved immediately, he growled: “Vite! It is a matter of minutes. We must not be found here.”

  Once they’d cleared the elevator in a lower basement, Nassim led the way to a connecting tunnel between all the buildings in the complex. A dank passageway, thankfully straight, since there was almost no illumination from sparsely placed fixtures, they ran as fast as silence and safety permitted. When they exited from a service entrance several yards from the main building, the first armored vehicles and vans had arrived at the far end of the complex, lights flashing in the distance.

  “Quickly, this way,” Hassan hissed at them, and his aide led the others to a minivan with darkened windows down a dark alley. But he blocked Emily’s path. “I do not believe your tall tale for a moment. I ought to arrest you now, but you seem to have been of some service to my family, and…. if I encounter you again…” He paused again, tilted his head to consider her face, as if he meant to look directly into her heart for some indication of the proper course of action. “Do not attempt to board a train at St. Denis. Le metro will be guarded. Allez, allez. Restez pas ici.” With that, he turned back toward the minivan, and they drove off without headlights.

  Chapter 11

  Les Banlieues

  “As if he could have arrested us,” Perry muttered from the relative safety of a crowded commuter train heading out of the city. “Hadn’t we just disposed of him and his man?”

  He glanced sheepishly towards Emily, who’d managed to secure a seat a few feet away. Would she have glowered at him for that remark? Of course, what he said was true, but the cost of fighting it out with Col. Hassan in that alley might have been too high for the others, for Nassim and Akram, not to mention Yasmine and Bilal. Fortunately, she probably hadn’t heard, engrossed as she was in a phone call, presumably with Michael. The fact that she was speaking Japanese, as far as he could tell, meant that Yuki was on the other end, translating between them. This was intended to prevent any eavesdropping, since the odds of finding a Japanese speaker on a random train in Paris were probably slim.

  She extracted the sim card a moment later, and slipped it between the seats. The battery and the now inert phone went back into the plastic bag full of burner phones she’d acquired from Nassim’s friend, Jabari. Perry figured it would probably be safe enough to use each phone more than once, but Emily seemed to have ratcheted up her security precautions.

  She consulted the guide book, and then caught his eye and gestured toward the end of the car. On the landing between carriages, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on tight for a brief moment. The noise of the rails clattered around them, and she kissed his neck and pressed her lips to his ear. “We need to change trains.”

  “Where are we headed?”

  “Versailles.”

  “Are we tourists again?”

  “If only,” she snorted. “Michael has arranged a meeting with his contact from MI-6 in the gardens tomorrow morning.”

  “Is that a good idea? I mean, won’t there be lots of police and cameras?”

  “… and tourists. We’ll just have to blend in.”

  “How do we find him?”

  “Michael’s still working out the details. For now, we need to find a lodging.”

  Outside the train station in Versailles, they walked along the busy Rue des Chantiers toward the central artery of the city, the Avenue de Paris. Of course, Emily had been right; tourists crowded the sidewalks, though no children could be seen at this hour. After a few turns, and even more blocks, she flipped the pages of the guidebook again.

  “There’s a hostel down this way.”

  “No more five-star accommodations for us, I guess?”

  “Cash is king in a hostel, and maybe they ask fewer questions.”

  Perry stopped in his tracks a few steps from the doorway Emily had been angling for, and gestured to an industrial looking brick building across the street. “That sign… Gendarmerie… doesn’t it mean…”

  “Maybe it’s better to be close than far away,” she offered, with less conviction than he’d hoped to hear.

  The front room of the hostel, too small to merit the term ‘lobby,’ practically bulged from all the backpacks, and the young people attached to them. A chorus of different languages greeted them, and Perry picked out French and German among them, though he hardly knew what they were saying. He glanced around, and saw another room, a sort of parlor, or perhaps a common room, with worn out chairs and sofas, all occupied by guests, he supposed.

>   By this time, Emily had squeezed through the crowd to a reception desk, and appeared to be deep in negotiations with a heavy set, older woman who struggled to make herself understood by the Chinese girl standing next to her. Emily appeared to be mediating in some capacity. Eventually, money changed hands, and the girl stepped away.

  “My husband and I wish to stay two nights,” Emily said. A frisson of perplexed satisfaction rushed over him as he heard those words. It was an imposture, of course, and she could as easily have said he was a ‘friend.’ But to imagine that she thought of this falsehood first gave him a bit of a thrill.

  “Only common rooms left,” the woman said. “How do you say… unisex?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Eight bunks… les toilettes et la salle de bain sont au bout du couloir.”

  More negotiations ensued, which Perry tried not to interfere with, since Emily seemed to have worked out some sort of relationship with the woman, having just solved a language problem for her. When the woman asked for identification, as the local laws undoubtedly required, Emily shrugged and smiled innocently, and he glimpsed the depth of her strategy. She meant the woman to recognize her falsehood. He couldn’t help smiling at it, though the pleasure he’d enjoyed only a moment earlier vanished, and he even felt a tiny touch of embarrassment at having indulged it. Was he blushing? The woman turned his way and he ducked his head, and began to wonder if Emily had manipulated him, too. She needed a certain facial expression from him, and she knew how to get it.

  “The storage locker is this way,” the woman said, as she extricated herself from behind the desk.

  “There is no need,” Emily said, holding up the little pack they’d brought from Paris. “We checked our packs at the station.”

  The inventiveness of her improvised story couldn’t fail to impress. Each detail introduced to elicit sympathy, or to deflect curiosity just enough to allow them to pass with the minimum notice. A young couple on a romantic getaway, not enough money for a hotel, but paying for two nights when he knew they’d probably leave at the crack of dawn.

  A late meal at a cafe on the Avenue de Paris would allow him to catch his breath, so to speak. But on the walk over, she spotted her face on a newspaper at a sidewalk kiosk. The TV screen in an electronics store window further along the same block was tuned to a news channel. Talking heads delivered the news in silence, as her face and his hung behind them. He couldn’t read the captions trailing along the bottom of the screen. It was probably safe to assume they announced some sort of fugitive alert.

  “The French police can’t seem to do anything right.” Perry turned to see a couple he recognized from the hostel, young, maybe early twenties, rumpled clothes, worn hiking shoes, and fresh faces still shining with the glow of youthful adventures to come. The young man spoke English with what he took to be a German accent, and his mind flashed to Dieter and Anneke. Could this be a setup? It was a ridiculous thought, of course, but he was on high alert.

  “What are they saying?” Emily asked. “Do you know?” Just then the scene on the TV cut to images of a well-dressed man, and then a woman, speaking into reporters’ microphones.

  “It’s election coverage,” the young woman said. “It’s so funny, the leftist candidate defends the police, and the far right candidate blames them.”

  “The world feels like it’s upside down,” Emily offered.

  Perry waited to see if this young couple would be able to identify them from the images on the news, if a glimmer of startled recognition would appear on their faces. What would Emily do then? Fortunately, nothing of the sort happened, and he was reminded that people often fail to connect two-dimensional images with people in real life. A moment later, they walked on, and he was able to steer Emily in the general direction of food.

  The waiter had barely time to bring menus before Emily ordered for them: “Deux plats du jour, s’il vous plait… et d’leau.” The waiter nodded and returned to the kitchen, and Perry gaped at her.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know, speak in tongues.”

  “I just remembered a few phrases from the guidebook, and I figured we didn’t really want to pore over menus we don’t understand.”

  “But when you say stuff, it sounds like real words, you know… like other people can understand you.”

  “Yeah, well, you know… once you learn another language or two, you stop worrying about sounding just right… and it gets easier.”

  The waiter returned a couple times, bearing glasses of water, and table settings, bread and butter, and Emily stayed quiet until he brought the main course a few minutes later. Perry scanned the tables around them as discreetly as he could, glancing up and down the sidewalk now and again. He could feel her nerves, her restlessness, as if she were a coiled spring, ready to leap out of her chair like a cat in a thunderstorm. They ate in a hurry, and he barely noticed whether it was meat or fish.

  “We have to change our look,” he said.

  “I know.” Her eyes seemed to tick through a list of options, until she settled on one, and when the waiter returned to clear the table, she asked him for directions. “Pharmacy?” When he left, she placed three twenty euro notes on the table, which was probably twice the bill, and pulled him out to the sidewalk. “Let’s go.”

  A few blocks down the avenue, she found what she was looking for, the pharmacy open late in this part of town. It was now as dangerous to wear sunglasses as not to. It didn’t take long to locate the hair products she sought, and a head scarf, and then bandages and plasters.

  “We can just get a first aid kit,” he said, pointing to a display at the end of the aisle.

  “Too bulky, and mostly not useful.”

  “And what’s that stuff?”

  “They have this great burn cream available over the counter here. You never know.”

  “How do you find out about this stuff.”

  The words were halfway out of her mouth – “Andie told me about it.” – before her expression turned dark, and he regretted asking. She’d been holding it together all day, not forced to think about her ‘other mother.’ This reminder was the last thing she needed just now.

  At the edge of his field of vision, he noticed the German couple from the sidewalk. Was this more than a coincidence? Versailles is not a large town, and maybe it wasn’t surprising to encounter other tourists more than once in this neighborhood. Still, if they were operatives, and working for the French police, or even the Gendarmes, why wouldn’t they just have swarmed them an hour ago, when they were exposed on the sidewalks?

  Emily had seen them, too, and tilted her head to catch his eye, as they moved to the register. Get in line behind them, that was the message, he understood clearly enough. Recognizing them was the safest thing to do, for any number of reasons. Emily came up behind him, having detoured to pick up one of those travel-sized bottles of laundry soap, the kind you use to wash out underwear in the sink of a hostel.

  “Great minds think alike,” she said, holding up the bottle, when the young woman turned to look in her direction.

  “Yes, it is washing day,” the young man said, pointing to a similar bottle in his girlfriend’s hand.

  Whatever else might happen, Perry appreciated the illusion. Emily had no intention of washing any of their clothes – she’d buy new clothes in the morning, and throw out the old – but this little device signaled an intention to linger in the common bathroom for a while this evening. Perhaps that would be a useful impression to leave.

  A sign by the front door of the hostel had announced a midnight curfew, though the woman at the front desk told Emily they no longer enforced it. However, a sign outside their room discouraged bathing after eleven o’clock. By that reckoning, and regardless of whether it was also still enforced, and not wishing to draw attention, Emily nudged him towards a direct return, once they’d secured their purchases. She purchased six shower tokens at the desk, and led the way upstair
s.

  “Shall I stand guard out here?” he asked.

  “No silly. I’m going to need your help with these,” she said, holding the scissors he hadn’t noticed earlier. “… and other things.”

  “I don’t know how to cut hair,” he hushed at her. “… not with scissors, at least.”

  The salle de bain turned out to be large enough to accommodate both of them, since its minimalism worked in their favor: just a sink and a bidet, and a handheld showerhead. The walls were tiled up to the ceiling, and a drain in the floor meant the entire room was really also the shower stall. As it turned out, Perry’s scissor skills were good enough to produce a reasonable approximation of a pixie cut, after she showed him how to use his fingers to get a uniform length.

  “Be sure to collect the clippings,” she said, while rummaging through the bag. “Every last hair.”

  Bleaching her hair took a bit longer, and not making a mess was the main concern – “Don’t forget the eyebrows.” – but even this was manageable in the end. After she’d collected all the trash, Emily pulled him close, and inserted a token to begin the shower. A hot rinse revealed how much tension still remained after an eventful day.

  She paid special attention to the bruises that were beginning to show from his struggle with Nassim’s uncle Hassan, each time awakening the memory of the injuries, and somehow inducing the pain to follow the water down the drain. She bore bruises, too, though he couldn’t imagine how she’d gotten them. Had Rémy’s men managed to strike at her before they eventually succumbed? Or Hassan and his man? Everything was moving so quickly he couldn’t recall seeing it. This was the illusion created by her decisiveness, always moving forward, not dwelling on past rebuttals from the world. He found one above her elbow, and kissed it in the water, another on the forearm. He turned his attention to a purpling rib, and she groaned as he massaged it gently, then kissed it. None showed on the back of her legs, but he crouched to address one on her thigh, and another below the opposite knee.