by Mike Bond
ANNE was powerful, brilliant and exciting but I didn’t trust her. And she worked for Thierry, who despite our years as comrades was hiding something I needed to know.
Was someone above him interfering in our investigation? Or someone like this Raqmi guy, France’s latest media darling?
Meanwhile, Harris was either stupid or pretending to be.
And Mustafa was steadily advancing on his goal to destroy Paris. While Mack and Gisèle were suffering or maybe dead. And Bruno had been killed.
Back in Passage Landrieu I downed a last glass of Russian vodka, finished a container of wild cherry ice cream, stared at the blue-flashing Eiffel Tower and let my subconscious take over.
I must have been very subconscious because when I brushed my teeth I mistakenly used boxing liniment instead of toothpaste. It had a stinging bitter taste plus many unattractive additives, all of which set my tongue afire and banished any further rational thought.
—
BUT NO SOONER had I crawled bone-tired and tongue-seared into bed than Highway to Hell, the ringtone on my phone, went off. 02:08, Anne, so I had to answer. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I mumbled, trying not to use my tongue.
“We found her.”
“Gisèle?” I struggled awake.
“Yasmina Noureff. Her with the blonde-dyed bloody hair in Mack’s car.”
“Maybe the gods are with us.”
“She in a fourth-floor apartment of a five-story walkup in St. Denis, 23 bis Rue Fontaine. We’re going in in 42 minutes.”
“No! You can’t!”
“It’s not up to me –”
“That’s crazy! What if Mack’s there? Gisèle? You have audio? Infrared?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t like setups.” She spoke closer to the phone, as if sharing this: “We don’t have anything, just her location.”
“You should wait! See what she does –”
“About Mack and Gisèle? We grab her, make her talk.”
“That’ll take days ...”
“I’ll be at Rue Fontaine just around the corner from Boulevard Carnot in St. Denis. Look for the Indian.” She puffed a cigarette. “Unless you and Harris want out.”
02:16. I leaped into the Beast banging my head on the armored sun visor and tore across the Alma Bridge up Avenue Marceau past all the beautiful carved stone buildings bathed in somber light, to the Arc de Triomphe then Wagram – more lovely buildings, tree-lined sidewalks and closed cafés to the Péréphérique, holding my phone against the steering wheel trying to follow the little red line to St. Denis, sacred burial ground of the kings of France, now a Muslim ghetto. And where the woman lived whose blonde-dyed black hair had been spattered with Mack’s blood.
02:31. The Indian stood nose-in at the curb, just another nasty bike in a dangerous neighborhood. I parked at the hydrant across the street.
Anne came out of the shadows. “You’re just an observer.”
“Fuck that. She’s mine.”
“Not if we take her down.”
“Screw you. I’m calling Harris.”
She snorted. “He wouldn’t even have toilet paper if we didn’t send it to him.”
I felt a flame of patriotic rage. “Not true.”
A complicit, low-eyed smile. “You know it is.”
“You’ll ruin everything –”
“There’s been an emergency gas leak. Two guys in Gaz de France uniforms are checking every kitchen on that stairwell.”
“At two-forty a.m.? She’ll see through that –”
“No matter. While she’s dealing with them we have eight guys on the roof ready to come down the lightwell through her bedroom window.”
I scrambled to think of something, to avert this. “Call Nisa.”
“Call Nisa?”
“Let’s see what she says. How can we get in there without hurting this Yasmina?”
She looked at me with incredulity. “Are you fucking nuts?”
I called Thierry. “Nisa’s already on,” he said. “I’ll patch her in.”
“Okay, Nisa,” I said. “What do we do?”
There was silence. I feared the connection had dropped. “Pono,” she said in Arabic, “do you speak this?”
“Not the Algerian dialect,” I answered in my accented Arabic. “Mine’s Iraqi.”
“Speak French,” Thierry broke in.
“They’re talking bullshit,” Anne said.
“Thierry,” Nisa said in French, “Why not let Pono talk to her? He’s trying to find out about his friend – it’s personal, not political, not religious – Pono, you can remind her that the protection of friendship is very important in the Koran ... mention the old one, Your friend is he who mentions Allah to you in your presence and you to Allah in your absence.”
I was so wired my hand was shaking. “I will mention her not to Allah, but to GIGN. So they don’t kill her.”
“Thierry!” Nisa’s voice rose. “You must let Pono talk to her. To save this girl. Look, Pono,” she added quickly in Arabic, “she’s just a girl. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
This just wired me more. “I’m going in.” I looked at the wall of police and the Special Forces guys in black. “No matter what these guys think.”
“Save her, Pono.”
“He can’t –” Thierry said.
“Thierry!” Nisa snapped, “you must convince them. These police.”
“I don’t have a choice here,” Thierry said.
“Yes you do.”
“Don’t go there,” he said sharply.
“Pono,” Nisa said, “you save this girl.”
I turned to Anne. “Let me talk to Yasmina.”
She faced me. “What about?”
“About the rest of her life in prison. As opposed to leveling with us. About maybe saving Mack and Gisèle, if she knows where –”
“She won’t talk to you. Or she’ll kill you.”
“That’s when you come in. With all your boys down the lightwell. The flashbangs and stun guns and all the live shit that will tear everything to pieces.”
“When?”
I thought of Mack and Gisèle. “After Yasmina’s killed me.”
02:47, three minutes to go. “Let’s hold off,” Anne said. “Nisa wants someone to talk to Yasmina. Pono wants to try.”
“He’ll get killed.” Thierry’s voice on the other end, hard-edged.
“Here!” She held out her phone to me. “You talk to him.”
“I’m going to knock on her door,” I told Thierry, “and tell her I’m American, a friend of Mack’s. That I just want to know where he is. And if she helps me I’ll make sure you guys go easy on her ...”
“She’ll kill you then come after us.”
“You afraid of that?”
He scoffed. “Of her killing you, yes.”
“But if she dies you’ll never find Mack and Gisèle.” I felt a rush of inspiration. “If I can bring her out alive, and we learn about Mack and Gisèle? And maybe Mustafa?”
“Let me think about it,” he said as I walked down the empty cordoned street toward 23 bis.
The first line of cops clearly meant business. The kind who’d shoot you if you walked away. They were all big and very tough and had nasty weapons they clearly wanted to use. “DGSE!” I snapped, trying to sound French and showing the ID card Thierry had so unwisely provided me.
The second line of cops was of course CRS, the national riot police, and if you thought the regular police were tough and nasty you don’t want to meet these folks. I swear they must have all been from Corsica or Alsace – a mix of brute strength and cagy wisdom that wasn’t going to let any asshole through without a 21-carat ID and a bulletproof reason to be there. One of them laughed when he saw my DGSE card. “What, you want to give out parking tickets?”<
br />
“Let us through.” It was Anne, a step behind me, her ID in their faces. “And get out of our way.”
The final line was simply two GIGN guys in black Kevlar. She locked her arm in mine as we neared them. “Yasmina’s a jihadi,” she whispered. “Doesn’t care if she dies. Wants to.”
I thought of Mack and Gisèle. “Lots of things are worse than death.”
“Do as I say.” She gave my biceps a little squeeze; it was like being caught in a forklift. “Or you’ll find yourself back at the Farm with your dick in your ear before you remember leaving here. Or you’ll be dead.”
That reminded me of motorcycle rides with her, I started to say, but she was already shaking hands with the two GIGN guys. “Why are we standing down?” one said.
“This guy,” she poked me, “he’s going to talk to Yasmina.” She looked at them. “A lot of lives can be saved.”
“Hold on.” He punched his phone.
She held his wrist. “I’m calling Thierry. It’s his game, and he says it’s okay.”
“It’s not his game. It’s ours.”
She grinned and handed him her phone. “Don’t even dream that.”
“How you been?” the other said, his voice sepulchral behind his mask. Proprietorial, someone who knew her. I caught myself in an instant’s silly jealousy.
“I’m fine,” she said tiredly. “How’s your Ma?”
“Better. I’ll tell her you asked.”
I could hear Thierry’s voice on her phone, patient and weary. “Yeah,” the first GIGN guy said, “she’s right here.” He gave Anne back her phone. “He’s on his way. Says let this guy go in. But you don’t. He gets ten minutes. The instant anything triggers we all go in.”
“I’m good with that,” she said steadily, looked at me.
We walked arm in arm to the empty dark sidewalk smelling of rats and piss, to 23 bis and up the four crumbling concrete steps to the door. “Please come back.” She squeezed my wrist. “Please come back.”
I looked at her, trying to take all of her in, everything. Fearing I wouldn’t come back. My heart thudded, my wrists were slick with sweat. What’s said about your life passing before you, in a sense it was true: in her eyes was the reflection of my whole life, a moment’s infinite cameo.
The door hung half-open, the lock and jamb smashed long ago. Inside the dark hallway smelled of Moroccan spices, burnt meat, spilt sewage and decaying garbage. The stairs were grungy. I halted at the fourth floor, scared and doubting myself, expecting a bullet any moment.
The light down the stairwell was faint, almost hazy.
I knocked.
No answer.
“Yasmina!” I called in French. “My name’s Pono. I’m a friend of Mack’s. I’m alone and not armed. I just want to find out what happened to Mack.”
So silent I heard water dripping from a pipe. A distant siren on the Péréphérique, an Airbus descending for CDG, the throaty rattle of Arabic radio through a skinny wall. “Yasmina!” I knocked again, almost whispered. “I’m Mack’s friend, just want to know what happened to him. And his wife – she seems a lot like you –”
“I’m here.” A woman’s voice behind me, a faint North African echo. “Take off your coat. Show you have no weapons.”
The voice came from up the stairs behind me but no one was there. A pinhole camera in a wall. Micro-speakers, at least three.
“Why are you waiting?” Her voice soft, sedulous, authoritarian. “Take off your coat.”
I did as I was told.
“Take off the shirt and the one under it.”
Again I complied.
“Pull down your pants. To your ankles.” This was obvious: to check I wasn’t carrying a gun. I don’t wear underwear, but she made no comment.
“That knife,” she said, referring to the Kabar sheathed on my calf. “Keep your hands away from it.”
“Enough of this,” I said. “I’m clean. You can shoot me and check my body if you want. But I’d like to talk to you first.”
“You piece of garbage. Why should I talk to you?”
“Not only for Mack and Gisèle. For you, too.”
“To Hell with Mack,” she spat. “He’s betrayed me.” Her intensity made her seem more valid, more in the right.
But she’s not, I reminded myself.
She’s a psychopathic killer.
And wants to kill you.
“How did he betray you?”
“Hah! If not, how are you here?”
How easily we fall into situations like this. Infused with super-courage to protect loved ones, friends, a clan or nation. Embracing our own often-painful deaths as we charge the enemy, snarling and screaming and dying for the chance to kill them.
“Take off all your clothes and leave them in the hallway. Unsheathe that knife and leave it there too.”
I did.
Two double bolts snapped back and the door cracked open.
Farther from the Truth
“HANDS ON YOUR HEAD.”
It was silly but I did it.
“Get in. Shut the door.”
She wore faded jeans with torn knees and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt with a homemade C-4 vest strapped around it. And held what seemed to be a detonator in her left hand and a Sig Sauer 9mm in her right. Her hands were long and thin-fingered and her face very white. She had long dyed blonde hair showing along the edges of her black headscarf, black eyes and the pale beauty of someone who has just died.
“Thank you,” I said. “I would like to do as much for you as you do for me.”
“Too late for that.”
“You so sure?”
“You’re the one who has this place surrounded.”
“Not me. I didn’t want this.”
She false-smiled, as if the joke were on me. “I trusted him, you know? I trusted him.”
“Mack?”
“Who else?”
“What happened, Yasmina? Where is he?”
She shook her head. “No matter how many of us you kill, you’re still going to lose. You know that, don’t you? We’re invading you and we will win.”
“Of course you won’t. That’s why you’re cornered in a rathole in Saint-Denis while Paris goes on around you – people happily making love and eating and drinking wine and dancing and taking care of each other and their families and friends and this beautiful nation known as France ... All the things you hate ...”
“You’d hate them too, if you knew –”
“Knew what?” I said, but she didn’t answer. “Even many Muslims,” I added, “are doing these things – eating and drinking and making love and loving their families and France.”
“They,” she hissed, trying to find the right word, “they are not true believers.”
“But they are happy, hard-working, loving people! What’s wrong with that?”
“Everything!” she snarled. Her hatred had the same effect as moments earlier, of somehow authenticating her: She must be right, to be so angry.
I let my hands drop to my sides. “Why are we here?”
She giggled. “So I can kill you?”
“Where’s Mack? Gisèle?”
She raised the Sig. Despite myself I laughed. “One more score to get you in the door of Paradise? You know it doesn’t exist, don’t you, Paradise?” There was a chill in my body from knowing I had a good chance of being killed and couldn’t change it.
Yasmina looked at me with the condescending condolence of someone about to die. “Paradise is for Muslims. Not kaffir shit.”
“Enough of this, Yasmina – Mack’s been my friend for ten years – is he dead?”
An almost invisible shake of head. “I can’t say.”
“Gisèle?”
Again the nearly imperceptible head shake, a flick of her eyes toward
a corner of the wall and ceiling behind me.
Was it cameras? I didn’t look. “Yasmina – why did you hit him?”
“Maybe I didn’t. Did you ever wonder if they hit me too?” She raised the edge of her headscarf to show a black-and-blue gash above her temple.
“Why, Yasmina, who?”
She leaned against me an instant, shoved away. “If I knew, you think I’d be talking to you?”
“Why were you in the car, with Mack?”
She gave me the look one gives well-intentioned idiots. “Mack didn’t tell you about me? In that phone call?”
“What call?”
“When you were in Samoa, Tahiti, someplace like that.”
“You’re with Mustafa? It won’t work, Yasmina. You can’t destroy France.”
“Mustafa?” She looked at me venomously. “If you think that, go tell them what I say. Before I kill you.”
“If you’re not with Mustafa, then who?” I had a moment’s inspiration. “Rachid?”
“Rachid Raqmi?” she spat. “He who loves infidels?”
I felt no fear, only a strange sibling link with her. As if we were one blood, could be straight with each other, share this moment, two people caught in the same twist of fate.
Maybe it was this stupid idea that saved me: “You haven’t told me, what to tell who.”
“That we’re willing to discuss things. We have a terrible weapon we can decommission if you meet us halfway. We are not any more violent than you have been, in fact far less. What we require, simply, is Arabic language and Islamic religious teaching in all schools beginning at kindergarten, funding to triple the number of mosques so we can provide for our faithful. And no impediments to immigration. This has to be all agreed,” she added, “in the next two days.”
“Not possible,” I gasped. “The Fifth Republic –”
She glanced at my privates, somewhat shriveled by cold and fear. “Is that,” she snickered, “all you’ve got?”
“What have you got that’s better?”
“Sharia – don’t you get it? Don’t you see, it’s inevitable the whole world will be Muslim? Are you that blind?”
“And you, have you been cut?” I said, referring to the Islamic practice of cutting off the clitoris and parts of the labia so that women have no enjoyment in sex and are thus less likely to stray from their always-fearful menfolk.
