Goodbye Paris

by Mike Bond

  I grinned and got a quick smile from Tomàs in return. All this, too, was old news.

  Below medium height, dark-rimmed thick glasses halfway down his nose, Tomàs was a bit too soft and roundish to be French. According to Anne he was the son of a Czech coal miner who emigrated to France after the Soviets crushed the 1968 spring uprising. He was fluent in several North African Arabic dialects, and led teams that had tracked and broken five major terrorist networks.

  He pushed his glasses up his nose; they slid back down again. “And you, big old America, you have these problems?”

  “We don’t really have many home-grown terrorist networks,” I said, “though we’ve had lots of attacks. But our Muslim population is growing very fast, gone from 2.5 million to 4 million in the last ten years. According to surveys thirty percent of American Muslims believe terrorism is justified ... But that’s still over a million people who believe that terrorist attacks, even in our own country, are legitimate.”

  Tomàs nodded. “It’s over fifty percent here. Yet we have Europe’s largest prison population. Our jails are so overcrowded we’re letting out nasty people because we can’t keep them all. Not terrorists, but lots of killers, rapists and other felons who go right out and do it again.”

  “I’m headed back to the office,” Anne said. “Call me if you find anything.” Halted at the door. “Anything.”

  She walked away, elegant and slim, beyond reach. With that funny knack of making you miss her even when you’re mad at her, as I had been several times before last night.

  “We’ve taken your computer portrait of Mustafa,” Tomàs said, breaking the strain, “and matched it against faces that show up on our algorithms from cameras all across Paris.”

  “How many?” I asked, not wanting to know.

  “Only about thirty-five hundred.” Tomàs rubbed his palms felicitously. “So it won’t take long.”

  For hours I sat in front of that softly illuminated screen. When my eyes stung too badly or got too blurred, I stumbled around the darkened room tripping over chair legs and cords till my vision came back.

  It was afternoon. I stood, waited for the dizziness to stop, stretched, touched palms to toes, arched my back, and twisted my head from side to side to lessen the ache in my neck. In the WC, I took a leak and washed my face in cold water and dribbled some of it down my back. Sat at the damn screen again and took another hit of the ATS’s bag-in-the-box Côtes du Rhône.

  And there he was.

  It wasn’t just seeing him, it was the feel of him. He wasn’t exactly what I’d expected, but close. Every person has a unique aura that we sense in each other. In him it was the innate swagger, the self-deification. A man for whom the rest of us are ants. A person so completely dehumanized he dehumanizes us too.

  Anne returned and together we leaned over the screen, she, Tomàs and I, bumping shoulders and biting back the elation of a possible hit.

  It was him: the retreating, lightless eyes and high bony cheeks, the grim lips, the steady sneer, how he swung his broad shoulders against the crowd, the way his feet toed outwards carving him space, his lock-kneed stride.

  He wore a thin black leather coat with a collar up to his ears. His frizzy hair was short, well-trimmed. No beard, just the hard angularity and sullen mouth that had stared down the AK barrel at me seven years ago, as he did so often in the weeks after Mack and I were captured and frequently dragged out to be shot or have our throats cut, only be “spared” again and sent back to our cells.

  I felt again the cold regret I hadn’t killed him when I’d maybe had the chance, and that now I could. Kneeling bound and cuffed before him, I’d flinched at every nuance in his speech, every tightening of his finger on the trigger. Now, however, it wasn’t a bullet in the back of my head, it was Mack and Gisèle, the Eiffel Tower. Paris. The future.

  In this 7.2 seconds of video Mustafa was bobbing at a steady pace along a crowded sidewalk with a busy boulevard beside it. There were store signs and parked cars and cafés and a Crédit Agricole bank. “Where?” I said.

  “Boulevard de Magenta, two blocks from La République. Yesterday, 4:17 pm.”

  “That sidewalk,” Anne blurted. “That’s where I saw him!”

  “Saw him?” I said.

  “In my dream.”

  —

  “DO YOU PRAY?” Mustafa said. “You’re an infidel, not a person – we all know that – do even you pray? Here, now, with my rifle muzzle ten centimeters from your left eye – and yes, you can keep staring straight ahead but it will not save you – do you pray?”

  All was terror of that horrible piece of steel smashing through my head. “When I know I am dying it makes me love peace. That we could avoid all this.”

  He moved back, readying to shoot.

  Does the brain have time to feel, when the bullet smashes through it?

  “Do you pray?” he repeated. Insistent now.

  Is this how I’m going to get it? For the wrong answer? “Of course I pray. Fear makes us pray. We can’t help ourselves.” I could have told him I’d do this whole Iraq thing again, die again, to stop him, but it wasn’t true.

  All I wanted was to live.

  —

  I CAME BACK to the now, this darkened room at the new ATS HQ.

  From the far corner of his cave Mustafa smiled white teeth. “Don’t fear, I’ll be back.”

  “With this video,” Tomàs was saying, “we can create good images of him, much better than your portrait. Question is, do we spread out and show it to people in that area, see if anyone’s seen him?”

  “Then, like before,” Anne said, “we scare him off.”

  Just the reminder infuriated me, and that she was now admitting they’d fucked things up. “No,” I said. “Let’s take the best images you create and run them through all your street camera footage again. There should be greater precision, we might turn out more positives, places he’s been.”

  “We are already doing that, of course.”

  “And tying in the cell tower hits on his phone ...”

  “That too.”

  “This is the best news we’ve had in days,” Anne said.

  From the back of his cave Mustafa smiled mockingly. “Inshallah.”

  The Tipping Point

  “EVERY EVENT is rooted,” Nisa said, “in what happened before. We can’t understand today without knowing the past. Like Anne said about Hitler: we could have stopped him early, but no one had the courage. French politicians were all for appeasement, some were even being paid off by the Germans, like they are by Islam today.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Thierry admitted.

  It was late afternoon and we were back in his office with the orange sun melting into the room. “The catastrophe that happened,” Nisa went on, “the sixty million deaths, the destruction of much of the world, did not need to happen. And for instance” – she leaned forward, jiggling her bracelets – “if no World War Two, no murder of six million Jews, so no need to create Israel, perhaps less war in the Middle East, no?”

  Thierry laughed. “Remember what Yasser Arafat said? ‘As long as Israel exists there will always be war in the Middle East. And even without Israel there will always be war in the Middle East.’”

  “So where,” Anne said sharply, “do we go from here?”

  “France has absorbed an enormous number of migrants in a very short time,” Nisa said. “It needs years, decades, to integrate what it has taken in. Who was it, some Prime Minister, said ‘France cannot take in all the misery of the world’?”

  “If you are concerned about the spread of Islam in France,” I said to Nisa, “why are you still a Muslim?”

  She turned toward me, her face half-lit by the window, dark-hued, fine features full of recognition and sorrow, awareness and fatality. Slender, strong hands, a topaz ring on the right finger. Nothing on the left
.

  “I grew up in a normal Muslim home. It wasn’t Salafist but it was strict. Starting at age ten I had to wear the hijab – the head and hair cover – and the abaya – a long cloak covering the body to the feet – at thirteen. The niqab – the face veil covering all but the eyes – I wore from the day I began high school.”

  “You had no choice, about this?” Anne said.

  “There was no choice. In the projects from the age ten or so it was always understood, wear the niqab or be raped. ‘You weren’t wearing a veil,’ the rapists said. ‘It’s your fault – you provoked my desire.’”

  “So,” I repeated, “why are you still a Muslim?”

  “Most Muslims in France, all they want is peace and to be left alone.”

  “Left alone?”

  “By other fundamentalists trying to radicalize them. By the mosques and Salafist brotherhoods and the charities and all that ... And there’s more and more pressure to conform, to observe the holidays, come to the mosque, to radicalize. And those who don’t, well, bad things happen to them.”

  Thierry smiled, tapping his pencil eraser. “What’s the point?”

  “The Tipping Point, that is the point,” Nisa said. “Once you reach that point it’s too late to go back. Like when a dam, it breaks?”

  Thierry nodded gloomily. “Are we there?”

  “Not yet. But close.”

  “How would this dam break?” Anne said.

  “Think of these Lost Territories of France. No matter what you try, they keep getting bigger. And more separate from France, more aggressive toward it. True?”

  “We’ve had double the attacks this year,” Thierry said, “that we had last year. And four times two years ago.”

  “But there’s no single brain, or group, organizing all this,” Anne said. “Is there?”

  “From the Salafist viewpoint it’s God’s will. But ... it’s organized from the Middle East. The Salafist charities, the hawala donations, all of this is coming together at a very high level. There is a plan. Not as Westerners might think, but a long-term strategic understanding among immensely powerful people, both the religious side and the fantastically wealthy ruling families, both whose only goal, like all religions and ruling families, is to stay in power. And many of them deeply believe in Islam, that it must take over the world.” She raised her hands, dropped them. “And this huge success in expanding Islam worldwide creates the belief of being God-chosen. Which leads to more expansion, a combination of soft and hard conquest ...”

  “How,” I said, “has this happened, in France?”

  “France?” she exclaimed. “France is, what you call it, the poster child of Islamic expansion? First you have enormous immigration over a short time, before people can react, then everything gets built – mosques, madrasahs, other schools, prayer cells – all funded by the Middle East. And once this is rooted you begin influencing politicians and media, to convince everyone that this enormous invasion is not a threat. That it’s the duty of every French citizen to help these poor Muslims as they plan to take over your country.”

  “There is no middle way?” I said. “French Muslims who don’t want to take over?”

  “Read the latest polls. Half of French Muslims want France to turn Muslim.”

  “That’s half of over eight million people,” Anne said.

  “Are there no moderate leaders?”

  Nisa raised her hands, questioning. “There are media darlings like Rachid Raqmi, who everyone believes is working for peace –”

  “Him,” Thierry said disparagingly.

  “Officially, he’s an official voice for moderation. For inclusion, that violence is not the answer.”

  “President of the Muslim Anti-Discrimination Society,” Thierry put in.

  “MADS?” I smiled at the acronym.

  “The usual fish soup,” Nisa said. “Socialists, anti-Semites, Islamic groups, anarchists, urban crazies, political celebrities and far-out intellectuals. Funded by Salafists in Saudi, Dubai, the Emirates, Kuwait, places like that. They protest what they call anti-Islamic information in the media, in the government. Because no one is supposed to say these killers are Muslims. Or that the murderers at Bataclan were spouting the Koran as they blew kids’ brains apart. That looks bad for Islam, so they don’t want it out there.”

  “They go on TV,” Thierry said, “and complain about anti-Muslim bias while Muslims are killing hundreds of our people, and everyone feels sorry for the poor Muslims and not for their victims. They control the vote in Muslim areas and no one can get elected there without them. They’re tied in with the Socialists and that’s why we can’t pass anti-terrorism laws ...”

  “That’s all true,” she said. “But if we can use him?”

  “How?”

  “The media loves him. They think he’s trying to make positive change, diminish the influence of Salafism and terrorism ...”

  “Solutions to what?” he countered. “This is a guy who talks about Muslim poverty but lives in a magnificent townhouse in the Seventh and has a country home in Fontainebleau Forest. He says he’s a devout Muslim but screws infidel women, drinks heavily when no one’s looking ...”

  “Most Muslims do,” I said dismissively, and turned to Nisa. “You don’t sound very optimistic either.”

  She raised her hands. “I am optimistic. I believe what we are doing now, right here, can make a difference. Look, I am a Muslim. A Muslim woman. I have certain cherished ideals. I want to nourish the good side of Islam – it can be a majestic and beautiful religion. It reminds me, always, to be grateful to God for this minute, this day, this life. To hear God’s teachings and obey them, not because it’s good for God but because it’s good for us. To follow the good things Mohammed said, to take care of children, protect women –”

  “Mohammed’s last wife he ‘married,’” I had to say, “when she was seven.”

  “It was the custom then.”

  “At least he waited till she was ten before he screwed her. According to the Koran.”

  She shook her head, said nothing.

  “It’s fine,” I added, “to have multiple cultures. Look at the United States, multiple cultures make us strong. But when one culture, in this case the Salafist ideology, where if you don’t believe in the Koran the sentence is death, grows strong enough ...”

  She shrugged. “Am I not the one who keeps telling you?” She looked at Anne and Thierry. “Islam in France today is not my Islam. This new Islam is not multicultural. It does not respect other religions or cultures. French Islam scorns France. It wants to destroy France and replace it with Islam.”

  “Never happen,” I said, wondering if this were really true.

  —

  OUR BEST HOPE was still Les Quatre Vents. Mustafa might even show up. Or one of his apostles. Someone we could take down silently and – let’s be honest – torture chemically, psychologically and physically till he spoke the truth. Then kill him.

  Wouldn’t you? Don’t tell me you’d turn the other cheek. He’d just plunge a knife in that one too.

  But you hope turning the other cheek will at least put you on good terms with God?

  God laughs, scratches his balls. Damn fools, he chuckles. Give them another thousand years of Hell.

  —

  SO BACK I went to Les Quatre Vents with Mustafa’s updated pix. But Bruno wasn’t there. Instead a heavy-set dark-haired woman in black. The place was empty.

  “He’s dead, Monsieur Rigard.” She batted away a tear. “Last night.”

  I almost fell, grabbed the edge of the bar. “How?”

  “He was going home after closing up this place. Like he always does ... They found him in the Canal St. Martin.”

  “Did he drown?” I asked, open-mouthed.

  “He was stabbed and beaten. Yes, those were the words they used, the Police. Beaten
and stabbed to death.”

  I tried to think. “He goes the same way, every night?”

  “It’s our old quarter, he refused to give it up.”

  I stared at her, disbelieving. “Who are you?”

  “His wife.”

  I stood there wavering. She stared at me. “You okay?”

  “I was just leaving.” I wandered out onto the sidewalk, traffic snarling past.

  If I hadn’t come around asking questions, wouldn’t he still be alive?

  And now we’d lost the trail, and a major witness. A good man.

  I sat at a café under an umbrella in the early evening rain and called Anne. A waiter came and I remembered how to say, “Un express.”

  “Oh Jesus,” she said.

  “We’ve been in the wrong dimension. This’s bigger, worse.”

  “Shit yes.”

  “We’re going to stop it.”

  She sighed. “Okay.”

  “No, we are. We have Mustafa’s video. Sooner or later he’s going to show on face recon and hopefully we’ll have folks nearby to bring him down.”

  “Hopefully ...”

  “Oh shit, you’re so negative.”

  “And you? So what the fuck are you?” With a click she was gone.

  I stared at the rainy street, rain in my eyes. Even now, if they’d been watching Les Quatre Vents, they could take me down. Two quick bursts from a passing motorcycle.

  For many years I’ve wondered what it felt like, that stitch of bullets across your chest. Plenty of times it had nearly happened.

  Forget that, concentrate on Mustafa. Because now we have 7.2 precious seconds of him walking along Boulevard de Magenta, two blocks from La République.

  So close I could almost smell him.

  Then I could see him, crystal-clear in my mind’s eye. He smiled down at me. The bullet was about to smash through my face. “Shall I shoot you in the right eye? Or the left?”

  Psycho Path