by Mike Bond
“What, fucked other guys? Of course. I’m not a nun.”
“So make love with me.”
She instantly shook her head. “With you it would be different.”
“How so?”
“With them I didn’t care. The relief of an orgasm so I could go back to hunting the ones who killed Éric.”
I caressed her cheek. “I’ll give you tons of orgasms ...”
She looked at me earnestly, shook her head. “With you it’s different. First of all, we’re working together ... not supposed to.”
I took out my phone and starting punching numbers.
“What are you doing?” she said nervously.
“Calling Thierry, asking if it’s okay.”
She slapped my hand. “Stop that!”
I shut the phone, kissed her again. My whole body ached for her. “When you want to, I do too.”
She flipped on the wipers, turned to face the street. “Watch that damn door. I want to get this bastard.”
I felt a little foolish having let myself go like this. But I liked her too much to not speak. “Wonderful as you are, Anne, you can’t be a mother and father too. Plus you’re working thirteen, fifteen hours a day?”
“Just till I find the ones who killed Éric.”
“That could take years.”
“We’ll get there.”
“Then?”
“We’re going to take a long vacation – Argentina, New Zealand, Bhutan, all those wonderful places humanity hasn’t yet destroyed.”
“Don’t wait too long.”
She snickered, that French half-hiss that conveys more meaning than some dictionaries: disgust at human “progress,” or at my comment, or at time itself which will not stop until it kills us all.
Kiss Him Goodbye
SHE GOT OUT of the car, pacing and making calls, tossed the butt in the gutter and climbed back in.
“You stink,” I said.
“Fuck you.” She nodded at Les Quatre Vents. “Maybe I’ll go in now.”
“Shit no!” I sat up in the Opel’s creaking seat, rolled my shoulders, stretched a weary neck. “You’ll stand out ...”
“Like tits on a boar, I know.” She grinned white teeth, half-shadowed in the streetlight through the windshield. “We’re already in ... See that third-floor apartment over Rue Thomas? That’s us. And we already have two guys in Bruno’s basement. And a guy up in the mezz ...”
I turned away. “You’re going to ruin everything.”
“See that green taxi with tinted windows, over my left shoulder, forty meters? We have five guys in there ready to go. What you worried about?”
I shook my head, weary in every molecule. “Kiss him goodbye.”
—
AT 22:30 I left her in the Opel, returned to Les Quatre Vents and stayed till it shut at 01:25. I watched for any of Anne’s people but saw no one on the mezzanine and no one looked out of place.
Mustafa never showed. Nor any of his buddies.
I told Bruno goodnight and stepped into the rainy cold darkness. The fires of the rioters on La République smoldered and stank on the wet wind. Riots all the time now in Paris. Why don’t the cops, I wondered, clear them out? Who tells the cops not to? Why?
I got into the Opel. “You assholes chased him off.”
She shook her head. “He just didn’t show, that’s all.”
“It was a stupid move.” I was angry but there was no way to prove he’d been scared off.
“We may have tracked down the hair.”
“What hair?”
“The woman who hit Mack. The lab says she dyed it blonde but it was black. And we have a possible DNA match: Yasmina Noureff. Born in Reims of illegal Algerian immigrants, twenty-two ... used to live in Seine St. Denis. It’s where many of the 2015 terrorists lived, a huge Islamic stronghold north of Paris –”
“I know about Seine St. Denis,” I said irritably.
“We originally got her DNA off the side of the toilet in an apartment she lived in for a while. And where two cousins of one of the Charlie Hebdo killers spent time.”
“Where’s she now?”
“I wish we knew.”
“What might be the connection?”
“Connection?”
“Her and Mustafa?”
She puffed, rejecting it. I felt dazed, wondered how long since I’d slept. Tonight’s possible failure and my fury at DGSE’s quick setup for maybe blowing a chance at Mustafa choked me; I felt betrayed, that Anne had somehow betrayed me too.
“You guys have totally screwed up,” I said.
“What?” In the half-darkness her face showed veiled astonishment. “We’re the ones screwing up?”
I faced her. “Four reasons.”
She gave me the finger. “Go ahead.”
“First, instead of following Mack and Gisèle’s trail when it was hot, why did you insist on a sidewalk sweep in Fontainebleau? Just because you’d lost Mustafa there?”
“That was part of it, yes.” She leaned toward me, her face nasty and sharp. “But mostly I sent us down to Fontainebleau because that was my gut. I work on my gut. Usually I’m right. Mustafa was there that night. I’m sure.”
“I doubt it. Second, why did I find the Mustafa connection easily at Les Quatre Vents? And you, DGSE, with your billions of euros, didn’t?”
“Like I said!” She pounded the steering wheel. “When we interrogated every café near where Mack’s BMW was found, including – three times – Les Quatre Vents, that was before you did Mustafa’s visual. We had no likeness of him, weren’t sure of a link ... And at that point we were frantically trying to find witnesses to what happened – the BMW, Mack, the blonde-dyed woman, the whole mystery ... And you haven’t helped.”
“And three, why did you specifically tell me not to bother going there? When Mack had vanished while investigating Mustafa?”
“I told you not to bother because we’d done it three times already! And I wanted you out looking for Mustafa. Because you” – she jabbed a finger at me – “are the only one we have. To find him.”
“And four – why did you put a team on Les Quatre Vents when I specifically asked you not to, or to at least tell me if you were going to?”
“That was over my head. Happened too fast. I told them not to, but the bastards at the top want clean, fast arrests and no news. France does not have a Muslim problem – remember?”
“What bastards at the top?”
“Shut up.”
The more I thought about it the angrier I got. We’d had a chance to maybe grab Mustafa, thus maybe save Mack and Gisèle, and we’d blown it. She and DGSE, and somebody at the top, had blown it. I stared furiously at the Opel’s ratty dashboard, unlocked the passenger door. “I’m walking home.”
“I should drive you but I’m damned if I’ll bother.”
I grinned, aching to take her in my arms, this lovely woman with the hard, pained face. But I was too angry. “This sounds like the basis of a long relationship.”
“You ignorant bastard!” Tears gleamed in her eyes. “How could you know what’s going on? How could you know?”
Maybe I’d misread her. Misread everything. I held my head in my hands as if it would break. “Why, Anne? Why do they do this? Why?”
“It’s part of the catastrophe.” She bit her lip. “The catastrophe that’s happening to France.”
My fury about the setup washed back over me. I shoved open the passenger door. She gave my cheek a friendly pat. “See you at seven.”
I slammed the door and walked up the alley away from her. She backed up a moment after me then stopped. When I reached the corner she was gone.
Nothing Wrong
I TOOK A DEEP breath; my injured shoulder relaxed; energy pulsed through me. Free. Why did she make me feel like I
couldn’t breathe? Or was I just paranoid?
Paranoia in ancient Greek means outside the mind. Isn’t this what all these Buddhists and other meditation types are telling us to do? To widen our understanding?
So paranoia can be good. Tells us to watch out even when we see nothing wrong.
If our ancestors hadn’t been very paranoid all the time we wouldn’t be here.
And paranoia was telling me something was hidden in the French response to Mack’s and Gisèle’s kidnappings. And something in Anne I couldn’t read, that evaded the information-sharing agreements we had at all but personal levels.
What did she know that she or they didn’t want me to know?
Why had Major Harris wanted me here? Why had he agreed that Mack should ask me? Had he now asked Thierry to run me up a dead alley? No, Thierry would never do that without telling me. Or was there somebody higher up, in France, who didn’t want me in this?
How would they even know about me?
Were they who ordered the setup on Les Quatre Vents, and blew our chance to grab Mustafa?
What was in it for them?
I crossed the Boulevard Saint-Martin barely ducking traffic and turned down Rue de Turbigo toward the Seine, seeing only the dirty sidewalk, cigarette butts, candy wrappers and pigeon shit, the leaning mildewed buildings and sleeping cars, furious and unable to understand what had happened.
Ahead on the old tired street of ancient stone buildings was the 15th century tower famous in military lore, where the Duke of Burgundy, Fearless John, murdered his cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who had taken refuge there.
You can’t hide forever from people who want to kill you, the tower said. The better solution is Get them first.
Rain washed my face and soaked my clothes. I turned back toward Sébastopol and downhill toward the Seine, crossed the magical square in front of the Hôtel de Ville and crossed the Pont d’Arcole over the Seine to the grim remains of Notre Dame all bathed in darkness. For a while I stood at the barrier in front of the cathedral, lost in its majestic façade and the soaring intricate towers, tried to imagine its creation, each of the thousands of stone carvings, the scintillating windows all celebrating the beauty of the spirit.
This enormous work of art that people built eight hundred fifty years ago – could we recreate it now?
No way.
—
ALONG THE SEINE the underpasses were clogged with miserable people trying to stay out of the rain under blue tarps and cardboard. One was holding out his hand to passing cars; I kept going, stopped and went back.
He didn’t speak French but a little English. I gave him ten euros and the others began to cluster around me. I gave them a bit more till my money ran out.
“Where you from?” I said to him.
“Congo.”
“How did you get here?”
“My family save money. To come in a boat across the water. To England.”
“Why England?”
“No hope at home. No food. Just hunger.”
The others stood around us, watchful, expectant, as if I could deliver them somehow. “You English?” one said. “You take us there?”
“No.” I watched their eyes drop. “I live here,” I lied.
“We go England,” another said.
England can’t take you, I wanted to say. They can’t take any more. “In a few years,” Nisa had told me, “there will be two and a half billion Africans, another billion in the Middle East. Most of them starving. There’s too many people and will never be enough food. They all want to come to Europe.”
“In most of these places,” Thierry had added, “they refuse the idea of birth control. For the men, many children is proof of manhood.”
“Yes,” she’d nodded. “No matter how many of them die.”
The misery of overpopulation, I thought miserably. With no solution. I found an ATM on the next corner, went back and divided two hundred euros among them. “Go home,” I wanted to say. But couldn’t.
I turned and walked on.
My phone vibrated, a non-traceable number, hopefully Anne.
“Just checking in,” a gravelly voice. Major Hair-Ass.
“Christ,” I sighed, “it’s two-twenty ...”
“If you’re up,” he chuckled, “why shouldn’t I be?”
“Go to sleep,” I huffed. “I’ll call you at 08:00.”
“Anything new?”
“Not a thing.”
“You doing okay?”
This checked me. “Working the same deal. Headed home.”
“He didn’t show.” It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t know why. The French, they screwed it up.”
“That’s what we’re going to tell them. But it isn’t true.”
“We can find out.”
“Go home. Get some sleep.”
How could he know I hadn’t been at home? I hadn’t spoken to him since yesterday afternoon. “No need for you to be up,” I said, pushing back.
“Of course I’m up. Just like you.”
“Why?” I wanted to ask him, What are you afraid I might find out? But I shut down instead.
I grabbed a cab at St. Michel. Harris had to have a bug on me somewhere, to know so much. Son of a bitch, I was going to ditch it.
The cab driver was playing Arab rap on the CD, mouthing something about Hang the whites and Death to the Jews. “Is that about Israel, that song?” I said.
“What?” He turned it down, faced back at me.
“Is that song about Israel? Death to the Jews?”
“It’s about Notre Dame. The Jews destroyed it. Everybody knows that.”
“That’s not true –”
“It is true. Predicted in the Koran.”
“I’m a journalist from Ireland and I’d like to know what you think of France today, la Situation?”
He eyed me in the mirror. “What you ask?”
I repeated the question. “You work for the government?” he said.
“Of course not. I’m Irish.”
He stared at me again. “You write what I say?”
“I can’t guarantee, but I’ll try.”
His lips tightened. Such guarantees should be easy. “We are not all terrorists, but we get blamed for everything. Some people” – he raised his hand – “they think all Arabs are terrorists.”
“The terrorists – do you agree with what they do?”
He inclined his head to say, That is the question. “We understand why they do this ...”
“Why do they do this?”
“Look at the evil, how these French live.” He opened the window, spat. “You are from far away – do your people act like this? Half-naked women walking free in the street like dogs in heat, as if they were as good as men, laughter and drinking, no prayer, no love of God ...”
“Where are you from?”
“Blida, in Algeria.”
I know where Blida is, I wanted to say. “But these people whom you call evil, they have let you come here and live in their home.”
“It was stupid of them.”
“And that song about the Jews?”
“The Jews are an offense against Islam. Everyone knows this. Even in our French mosques the imams teach us the famous line from the Hadiths, The Muslims will always fight and kill the Jews. Not a single Jew will hide behind a tree but the tree will call out, “You, Muslim, God’s servant, there’s a Jew hiding behind me, come kill him ...” He smiled back to me. “Is not true?”
“But terrorists kill everyone, not just Jews –”
“To the terrorists they are all infidels, who do not live the right way. The world will be better when everyone is Muslim.”
“But you fight each other all the time.”
“Only because of the infidels –�
��
“Look out!” I yelled as we headed for a crosswalk with three drunks stumbling through it against the light.
He stopped six inches from the last drunk, who yanked out his member and pissed in our direction. Sadly, the wind was against him. With a snort my driver spun around him, turned back to me. “You see, I would have passed in front of them.”
“What about Israel? Does Israel have a right to exist?”
He pulled over, twisted to face me. “You are a Jew?”
I felt compromised, at a crossroads. “If I am?”
He glanced forward angrily. “Get out.”
“Fuck you. Take me where I’m going.”
“Get out!”
I shot a few nice pix of his badge and face and license before he spun off in an unpaid huff. And I stood on the corner in front of the Église Saint-Sulpice feeling free again.
The last time I’d felt free – was it before that big Tahiti wave?
Does freedom always try to kill you?
I couldn’t answer such questions.
It was a quiet walk the last two miles to Passage Landrieu through the windswept foggy stone-cold Paris night. I was in the zone, exhausted, intense with fear for Mack and Gisèle and the impossibility of stopping what might happen. Just another penitent along these damp lonely streets with their centuries of lies and takeovers, the death of virtue on all sides.
Hair-Ass had to have a tracer on me. Where?
He and Mack had discussed me, and it was Hair-Ass who had sent me a ticket and a nice advance.
But why would he want me here when he knew I hated him? When he didn’t like me?
Was there some other reason he brought me here, something I didn’t know about?
In the apartment in Passage Landrieu I assiduously checked all my clothes but didn’t find a thing. It then occurred to my lizard brain that the tracer might not be on me but in this apartment. That would be why Hair-Ass knew when I was home. Supposedly both DGSE and Harris’s teams had swept the place, but what did that really mean? The last sweepers could have easily installed something. Or, as it was a safe house it probably was hooked up all the time.
Normally I use a signal detector to check a place the moment I enter. I have an old Spy Hawk that works great. But I’d come straight from a surfing contest in Tahiti and my wearying bacchanal with three brilliant women, where the last thing in my mind had been bugging devices. I’d left my Spy Hawk in Hawaii along with my lovely cheap and dilapidated house overlooking the magnificent blue Pacific, my surfboards, my ancient rusting Karmann Ghia, my good buddy Mitchell, and all my other friends and fellow veterans and beloved animals. I’d intended to pick up a detector from DGSE or from our own team, but everything had gone to Hell so fast when I hit Paris I hadn’t done it yet.
