A World I Never Made

by James Lepore

  “I did get the autopsy,” said Raimondi, like any good poker player knowing when to fold and on which issues, “but it was the Moroccans” idea—the possibility of a faked suicide. I just passed it along. Where is she? Nolan:”

  “In a house in Courbevoie:”

  “Have you told LeGrand?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? This is highly unusual:”

  “I wanted an excuse to see you again. I feel I behaved badly the last time we spoke.” This statement fell more easily from Catherine’s lips than she thought it would. She had been prepared, for one thing, and for another she was beginning to look at Charles Raimondi with professional suspicion. Her instincts as a detective overrode all personal qualms. Raimondi could easily have faxed a copy of the autopsy to his counterpart at the Moroccan Foreign Office, someone who knew that the real Megan Nolan had been pregnant. How else to explain the two Arabs following Pat Nolan? She had no doubt that Raimondi would take the bait, his sex appeal and charisma, in his own mind, too much for any healthy young woman to resist for very long.

  “Well,” Raimondi replied, a slight smile crossing his lips,“in that case I will square it with Inspector LeGrand:”

  “Thank you:”

  “Is Nolan alone?”

  “I believe so:”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  “No, I came right to you. What about Europol? Shall I notify them?”

  “No. I will take care of it:”

  Catherine glanced out the window to see if Raimondi had brought along his bodyguard or any kind of backup. It seemed almost certain that he had not. His black sedan sat silently at the curb, empty. No plainclothes police or Foreign Office security types were to be seen within a hundred meters of the café’s entrance. One of Catherine’s calls this morning had been to Pierre Torrance, a colleague from her police academy days, now assigned to Europol’s antiterrorist unit in the Hague. He had assured her that no investigation involving a terrorist named Rahman al-Zahra was underway in France, as by law his task force was required to be notified if it were.

  “I am beginning to wonder, Charles,” she said, “are you DST yourself? Is the Foreign Office your cover?”

  “My dear Catherine,” Raimondi replied, affecting an innocent smile and raising his eyebrows in mock astonishment, “you are too smart for your own good, but I am afraid I must disappoint you. I am a liaison, that is all. Now tell me, how did you find our Megan Nolan?”

  “The father led me there:”

  “I see. Is he still at Le Tourville?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Tell me about the house and the neighborhood:”

  “It looks shuttered, possibly abandoned. The neighborhood is quiet, working class:”

  “Is she there now?”

  “I saw her go in this morning carrying groceries. She was walking:”

  “No car?”

  “No, I believe not:”

  “The address?”

  “121 Avenue des Ormes. Shall I pick her up myself, or shall I coordinate with DST? I will need help in any event:”

  “I will take care of it:”

  Catherine feigned confusion, hesitating a second before speaking. “What will be my role?”

  “None, I’m afraid:”

  “But Charles, I found her. It would be good for my career.” These words did not come so easily to Catherine. They smacked of begging, of prostration before the superior male. But she needed to be convincing, to dull Raimondi’s already dull senses.

  “You will get credit internally, my dear. I will see to that. But this is from on high. When it is done, I will buy you dinner. Perhaps we can get away.”

  “Oh, Charles ...”

  “Tut, I must go.”

  Catherine, confident that her Oh, Charles had conveyed the right mix of disappointment, sycophancy, and sexual coyness, watched as Raimondi pulled his cell phone from his coat pocket before even getting into his car. He spoke hurriedly into it, then got in, started up the engine, and drove away.

  Twenty minutes later, Catherine and Pat Nolan were sitting in Catherine’s unmarked Peugeot, parked diagonally across the street from 121 Avenue des Ormes, in a neighborhood that was neither quiet nor quite working class. Bounded on one end by a small public housing complex and the other by an electrical transfer station, it had an air of hopelessness about it. Even the old elm trees that lined it, their branches bare under an increasingly lowering sky, seemed resigned to the litter swirling on the street and the dead-end poverty of the housing project. A group of boys kicked a soccer ball around in a chain-link-fenced enclosure while three older men watched and smoked.

  Catherine had hurried Pat out of the apartment and into her car, making the five-mile trip through morning traffic to Courbevoie in fifteen minutes. On the way, she had remained silent, except to tell Pat that they would soon find out whether or not the investigation into the whereabouts of his daughter was as straightforward a matter as Inspector LeGrand said it was. She had last visited the house she had selected for the DST to raid right after her husband’s death in May. Her first real boyfriend had lived in it while waiting tables and writing a novel. She had lost her virginity in its loft bedroom and thought at the time that life—and the future—were full of romance. When Jacques was killed, it was the loss of her girlhood that struck her out of the blue, like a sharp blow. His death, sad enough on its own no matter how she felt about him, echoed all of her losses—of her parents, especially her father, and of innocent love in her life. Her grief had brought her to 121 Avenue des Ormes, which she stared at for a long moment, sobbing at the sight of its boarded windows, peeling paint, and tiny lawn of knee-high weeds.

  Patrick Nolan had not pressed her for additional information, intuiting perhaps that Catherine’s professional life hung in a balance that required silence in order to be accurately measured. Jacques’s quiet interludes were rare, his questions seemingly unending. She had learned from living with him that it required a certain self-possession to simply keep quiet, a trusting nature to let questions go unasked. Neither of which he had possessed. She could see from Nolan’s eyes and his body language that he was thinking, thinking intently, and that he would soon want answers. But meanwhile he was still, occasionally glancing at Catherine but otherwise watching her old lover’s house with a calmness that belied any curiosity. Their silence did not last long. Within five minutes, a dark blue BMW sedan pulled up in front of 121 Avenue des Ormes. From it emerged four men, all Arabs in their mid-to-late twenties. One of them had a bandage above his left eye.

  “Our friend,” said Pat.

  “What?”

  “From last night:”

  Now Catherine took a closer look at the man with the bandage. It was indeed Ahmed bin-Shalib, the man who had accosted Pat, whom Pat had struck with the wrench, who had run off into the night. The man who had beheaded Michael Cohen in Karachi.

  “Yes,” she said. “Our friend.”

  The four men split into teams of two, one team going around back of the house, the other to the front. The two at the front drew nine-millimeter pistols from their jackets before kicking in the door and entering with the swift and sure movements of a professional SWAT team. A few minutes later all four men emerged through the narrow side yard, entered the BMW, and drove off. The front door of 121 Avenue des Ormes swung askew on one hinge. The boys at the end of the block were still playing soccer, the men still smoking and talking, and the litter on the street still swirling as the first heavy flakes of wet snow began to fall.

  ~10~

  MOROCCO, MARCH 3, 2003

  Megan and Abdel al-Lahani sat sipping coffee in the bright morning sunlight on the balcony of Lahani’s fourth-floor penthouse in Casablanca’s old city. Below them was a small courtyard used by local housewives to hang laundry. The courtyard was surrounded on all sides by buildings similar to Lahani’s. One of these was smaller, which afforded a view from Lahani’s balcony over a series of jumbled rooftops to the
tall buildings—hotels and office towers—that surrounded Casablanca’s main square, from which all of the city’s major avenues radiated. In the distance beyond the square was the airport where jets had been landing and taking off all morning. Lahani had returned the day before and Megan had spent the night with him. Breakfast had been served by the same grim-faced native woman, wearing the same dark blue hooded djellaba, who had served them dinner at Lahani’s house in Marrakech a month ago. Megan had been in the bathroom earlier, the door half open, peeing, and had seen the woman—Lalla, she remembered was her name—silently enter the apartment using her own key, and just as silently enter the galley kitchen and begin making breakfast.

  “So you have turned up nothing on your terrorist groups?” Abdel al-Lahani asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Megan replied.

  “What were they called again?”

  “Al Haramain and Salafist Jihad.”

  “Yes, I remember now. And Professor Madani was of no help?”

  “No. He was very nice, but these groups were completely unknown to him.”

  “And the Falcon of Andalus?”

  Megan smiled wryly, her thoughts rapidly going over the ground she had covered in the last two years of her life. Her last article prior to 9/11, for Cosmopolitan, was entitled, “Octopussy: The Search For Your Eight Ultrasecret Erogenous Zones.” Now she was writing about Muslim hegemony in Europe and looking for a terrorist mastermind who called himself the Falcon of Andalus. Which search, she wondered, was more delusional?

  “Of course he knew of him as a historical figure;” she replied, ”but he knew of no myth of his returning to reconquer Spain:”

  “Did he take you seriously? He is a good friend, but his scholarship comes before all else:”

  “Yes, he had read my work and spoke well of it:”

  Since 9/11, Megan had published four lengthy, well-researched pieces in respected online political journals, in which she had explored the threat posed by the densely packed Muslim communities that had sprung up over the past decade in Europe’s major cities. It was in and around Madrid’s Moroccan-dominated Lavapies neighborhood that she first heard of the mysterious Al Haramain Brigade and the even murkier Salafist Jihad movement, both, it was said, based in Morocco and both dedicated to the reestablishment, by force, of Muslim authority on the Iberian Peninsula. It was a matter of faith, she was told, among Madrid’s emigrant Muslim proletariat, that Abdur-Rahman al-Zahra, the Falcon of Andalus—the greatest of all Muslim caliphs in Spain, dead some twelve hundred years—would soon return to lead a Muslim army in the retaking not only of Spain but of Portugal and parts of southern France as well.

  “I don’t think they exist, these groups. Not in Morocco,” Lahani said.

  “You mean these specific groups or terrorist cells in general?”

  “Terrorist cells in general:”

  “That’s absurd, Abdel. I’ve been through Sidi Moumin. There’s enough hate there to move Mount Everest:”

  Megan could see that her last comment did not sit well with her new lover. He did not like to be contradicted, his opinions dismissed out of hand as she had just done. It was an old story to Megan, and to humans in general. First we make love with someone, then we learn about them.

  “I am not Moroccan, Megan,” Lahani said, “but I have two homes here and I know it well. It is a liberal country. The parliament has some power. King Mohammed is benign. There may be some anger in the slums, but not jihadist anger, believe me. To attack this government would be an act of insanity.”

  “But they would attack in Spain, not here:”

  “Yes, but there would be brutal reprisals by the palace and the national police once it was discovered that Morocco was their home base. The country would become more secular, more repressive of fundamentalist Islam:”

  “Aren’t all terrorists insane though, not rational by definition?”

  “I doubt that even the best experts would say it was that simple.” The icy look that had appeared briefly in Lahani’s dark eyes had vanished. He was smiling again. A very handsome smile indeed, meant, Megan felt, not so much to charm as to pacify her. He will not be so easy to figure out, or control, she thought, and she smiled to herself at this thought, anticipating the contest ahead and the great lovemaking it would engender, like last night’s.

  “There is a neighborhood called Carrières Thomas,” Megan said, “where no one would speak to me. Will you come there with me? Someone might be willing to talk if you are with me:”

  “Yes, I will. There’s an extraordinary market there—dangerous but extraordinary—where I know some of the merchants:”

  “Good, you can introduce me. When can we go?”

  “Today, this morning if you like. But do not expect to discover any terrorists:”

  “You mean they won’t be wearing jihadist garb?”

  “Megan, I too have read your articles. I know you are a serious writer. I do not doubt that terrorists are incubating in Paris and Madrid. But this is an Arab country. Nothing is as it appears. Secrets here are the most valuable of currencies. The Arabs in Europe are outré. They will talk because they are isolated and perhaps desperate. Here you will get only polite nonsense.”

  “I understand. I appreciate your taking me. It’s a start.”

  As Megan was speaking, a phone in the depths of the apartment began to ring. When she finished, Lahani excused himself and left the balcony to answer it. Lalla had let herself out after serving breakfast. Thus far, not a word had been exchanged between the two of them. Megan rose after a bit to stand at the balcony’s railing. At the airport, the morning rush of jet traffic had slowed. Below, two women, their hoods draped around their shoulders like Lalla’s, were at opposite windows of the courtyard hanging clothes and talking to each other in Berber across the open space. Megan was not surprised to learn that Lahani had read her articles. She had expected him to look into her background as she had done his, finding on her laptop screen the home page of a Lahani Construction Company in Saudi Arabia, in business for more than fifty years, but containing no mention of a member of the firm named Abdel.

  Megan was happy that the old game was on. And she was sure that she would win, even though Abdel al-Lahani was obviously very powerful and used to getting his way. She might not get Lahani to grovel, as she had other dominant males, but he was in for several surprises. She would take his money if he offered it, though she didn’t need it—the nearly half million dollars she had in a Swiss bank would last a long time, and there were plenty of rich fools out there as sources of replenishment. No, more important—and more gratifying—she would use Lahani to help her track down and write about the Al Haramain Brigade and the Salafist Jihad. Perhaps the trail would lead to someone calling himself the Falcon of Andalus, who actually fancied himself the infidel-killing hero who would return the Moors to their days of glory in the West. Now that would be a hell of a story.

  Megan’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Lahani’s footsteps crossing the tiled floor of the large living room that led out to the balcony. She was wearing a deceptively simple pale green silk robe with nothing underneath. She untied its sash and was about to turn to greet Lahani, the beginning of a demure smile on her face, when a movement, or rather a sudden stillness below, caught her attention. Looking down, she saw that the woman at the window on the right was Lalla, who was now staring up at Megan, her face wearing its usual stolid, impassive mask. Megan pressed her body against the balcony’s wrought iron railing, as if to emphasize her sensuality, and nodded dismissively toward the servant. She did not like being stared at. Lalla nodded as well, ever so slightly, and withdrew Before she could turn, or consider Lalla’s behavior, Megan felt Lahani’s large brown hands on her breasts as he embraced her from behind. Her breath caught in her throat at his touch, and all thoughts of mythical falcons and sphinx-like servants vanished, replaced by a rush of desire.

  ~11~

  PARIS / RAMBOUILLET, JANUARY 4, 2004

&nb
sp; “Geneviève, Charles Raimondi:”

  “Yes, Charles:”

  “I would like to speak to Catherine Laurence. Can you patch her in, or have her call me?”

  “She has taken a leave of absence, Charles:”

  “A leave of absence? When did this happen?”

  “Just a few minutes ago. I put her on leave status while she was handling your case. You and I discussed it, if you recall. She asked that it be made official. I authorized it, of course. She actually never did take any time after her husband’s death:”