by Mike Bond
She grinned, and for an instant I saw her as she might have been, if she’d grown up free. A pretty college grad, boyfriends, a car. Very smart, maybe a young executive, a doctor ... Someone who would give back to the human race.
“Yasmina.” I faced her thinking of what Nisa had said. “You’re brilliant and perceptive, and you have a great kindness for others – please don’t destroy yourself, please don’t deprive us of you ...” I had to slow my words ... “We need you to make a better world ...” I stared at her. “You can have a good life, Yasmina. You can make the world a better place –”
“You tell them.” She nodded at the door. “We’ll give them a list what we want. In return for Mack and Gisèle ... And to save Paris?” She gave me a sideways grin, a cute high-schooler at an apple-dunking contest. “And the world? One never knows ...”
I backed toward the door. “They’re still alive?”
She flashed her eyes, mischievous again. “Why do you care? We’ll all soon be dead.”
“You didn’t answer me.” I reached out a hand that she slapped away.
She waved the Sig. “Go tell them what I said. And that they’re to move out of our quartier, leave us alone.” A gypsy smile. “And don’t forget your trousers on the way out.”
I shoved on my clothes in the hall, dashed downstairs into the street’s arc-lit night, my hands over my head, fearing all the guns waiting to shred me into a bleeding pile of dog meat.
“Hold off!” I yelled. “She wants to talk!”
A huge blast smashed me to the sidewalk grinding my face through broken glass and grit, a howling thunder that blew windows into the street and set off a wail of car alarms, a scream of broken pipes and the clatter of roof tiles, one that smashed my right hand and another that punched me so hard in the back I feared I’d die.
There was a terrible pain deep inside each howling ear; I was choking on blood because I hadn’t expected the explosion and hadn’t opened my mouth to keep from biting my tongue. Bitch how it hurt. I kept spitting blood that widened to a black puddle against my cheek on the dirty concrete.
The GIGN guys had come down the wall. And Yasmina had blown herself up.
—
NO GIGN CASUALTIES – they have a knack for staying alive in the most lethal circumstances – but pieces of Yasmina were broadly distributed over the neighborhood – her trachea wrapped around a light pole, a chunk of her left pelvis on the indented roof of a parked Renault Espace, her teeth buried in the wall of the apartment building across the street.
My forearms stung from my slide across the street when Yasmina’s bomb went off. I had a lump over my right eye that only hurt bad when I pressed it. My ears howled like they always do after an explosion.
Most of all I felt bitter and saddened by the possibility that Yasmina had been a good soul caught in some web we couldn’t unravel, and now we’d lost her.
This beautiful young woman and the best lead we’d had in Mack’s disappearance, the only lead. Fury surged like bile up my throat – at Anne and DGSE and ATS – I had begged her, begged them, not to go in on Yasmina.
Just like they’d frightened off Mustafa, barely a day ago.
What was I missing?
I sat on the cold limestone steps of the building next door while Anne paced and swore, her heels clattering on the uneven bricks. The street now broadly lit by searchlights where cops and lab people in white gowns stepped carefully. Other cops were going through the nearby apartments with dogs, looking for guns amid loud protestations in Arabic and the sibilant howl of women.
More cops were sweeping the roofs, hunting the back alleys and scanning the windows. Amid the din of sirens, yelled commands and vehicles, I could hear the chatter of Arab radio from nearby apartments, called-in Emergency requests and Twitter feeds about tragedy, outrage, this latest attack on Islam ...
Bad as the worst part of Cairo.
The deeper I got into it, I realized, the farther I’d be from the truth.
And the more in danger.
—
“WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?” I snarled at Anne as she paced past.
She yanked her phone from her ear and stared fiercely at me. “You could’ve had a whole lot of our guys killed –”
“I told you hold off!”
“You didn’t say she was wearing C-4!”
“How the Hell could I? I didn’t have time. You bastards went in too soon.”
“It wasn’t,” she grimaced, “us.”
“What?” I yelled again. “Then who?”
“You have a lot to learn.” She snatched at my elbow. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I seethed. “You and your friends have screwed up and I want to know why!”
Eyes flashing, teeth bright, she looked like a cornered wolf. “That’s the last thing you want to know.”
“First you frightened off Mustafa,” I hissed, “now you’ve killed the only person who could help us find Mack and Gisèle!”
She snatched at my sleeve. “We’re tired. Let’s go home.” It seemed so enticing, to lie there talking it through, finding the meanings. To come down from this night of terror and adrenaline. “No,” I snapped. “I’m not going anywhere with you till you explain.”
She cocked her head, almost whimsical. As if I had to be taught my own lesson. “All right then. See you at eight.”
04:22. I’d get nearly an extra half-hour’s sleep if I went with her instead of all the way back to Passage Landrieu. But when I looked up she was already small in the distance, then gone in the darkness.
I wandered back to the Beast, slid into its frigid seat, hung my cop radio on the rearview mirror and slowly trundled westward through late-night Paris. That once had been a place of great joy and beauty, and now felt raw with danger, hatred and loss.
The cold made me shiver and I thought of lying on my surfboard in the rolling cool green waves under a warm Tahitian sun.
Surf for hours and never think of anything but where you are right now.
I’d turned off the Péréphérique onto Porte d’Auteuil when the radio call came through. “Officer down, north side of traffic circle, Porte de la Chapelle. We need ambulance, homicide and forensics. We’ve blocked off the intersection, so come up Boulevard Ney.”
I pulled over fast banging into a new black Mercedes whose alarm began to yowl. “Identify the officer,” I yelled.
“Undercover. Female. Red motorcycle. Over.”
Silent and Deadly
SHE LAY TWISTED under the bike in a pool of blood behind a yellow tape barrier under the psychotropic flashing red and blue emergency lights of police cars and ambulances. Face-down, legs crumpled, feet sideways, jacket bloodied from the bullet hole in her spine and from another in the back of her helmet through the middle of her brain.
If I’d been with you, this never would have happened.
“Two guys on a big black bike,” a cop said when I showed him my DGSE badge. “Black jackets, black helmets. Came up behind her.” He nodded at the sidelines. “We’ve got a witness.”
“She always checks her mirrors,” I said. “Nobody comes up behind her.”
He nodded at her body. “These guys did.”
I stepped over the yellow tape and knelt to her, hands and knees in her blood, horrified by her smashed bloody face. Her cheek had crushed against the gritty paving stone, her mouth of shattered teeth draining blood.
If I’d been with you, this never would have happened.
It wasn’t Anne.
I looked again, stunned, horrified, beyond joy. “Don’t touch her!” the cop yelled. I yanked back my hand, bent to the rear of the bike to check the plate.
75 – Paris. Anne’s.
I knelt to the dead woman again. She wore the shocked expression of not knowing what had happened.
“C�
�mon, buddy, back off,” the cop said.
“This is my partner’s bike and helmet. But it’s not her.” I felt suddenly sorry for this dark-haired girl with the smashed face. And so happy it wasn’t Anne I was trying not to cry.
I stood dizzily, streetlights dancing in my eyes, remembered to breathe, tried to wipe the dead woman’s blood from my hands onto my jeans. Stupidly realized I could call Anne. Because she wasn’t dead.
She answered right away.
“Where the Hell are you?” I almost screamed.
“Somebody stole my damn bike. I’m so pissed! Thierry’s giving me a ride home.”
“You were dead ...” I couldn’t stop choking. “You were dead ... fifteen minutes ago. You just came back to life ...”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The girl who stole your bike? She was wearing your helmet, too, when somebody shot her in the back of the head ten minutes ago, Porte de la Chapelle.”
“My God!” Anne caught her breath. “They thought she was me.”
I tried to wipe the woman’s blood from my knee. “They thought she was you.”
“Oh God, the poor girl ...”
“When they find they killed the wrong person they’re coming back for you.”
“Fine with me.”
“As bait? No way.”
“Anybody comes after me, they die.”
—
I WAITED on the sidewalk outside her place till Thierry dropped her off then I hustled her inside. We rode the clanking elevator to the third floor holding each other, her damp hair against my chin.
“I thought you were dead,” I whispered.
She burrowed her face into my shoulder. “For how long?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. Till I saw her face.”
“I’m sorry.” She gripped me tighter. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
The elevator opened. Anne unlocked her door. “We have to be quiet.”
In the apartment she unfolded the sofa bed and briefly smiled at me out of the darkness, big white teeth and wide generous mouth, black eyes sparkling with the distant glow of a single streetlight. She who had died and come back to life, I who had lost her and found her again.
Her odor, the heat of her, was like fire. Taking off her clothes, she was the first woman I’d ever known, the best, the one different from the rest. She eased out of her blouse and slid down her skirt, smiling and kissing me, kicked her skirt aside and stood back in pink see-through underpants that showed her dark crotch.
We kissed standing there, again and again, my palms inside her underpants gripping her ass as she shoved her hips against me and her tongue against mine and her breasts into my chest, my cock hard in the cleft of her thighs.
She lay back on the bed and I kissed between her thighs through the underpants, licking them wet, the insides of her thighs, her lovely hairy crotch. She bent up her knees for me to pull the panties off, then twisted her shoulders for me to take off her bra. I kissed her breasts and nipples and her lovely soft skin all over, kissed the lovely tiny fuzz of her belly button and down into her lovely crotch, rubbing my lips softly and licking as she eased, moaned, sighed and rocked her hips to my tongue, then finally arched back and gasped, sighed, spread her legs and softly relaxed. We snuggled and caught our breath and then she slid down and took me in her mouth, the most indescribably delicious feeling, then we rolled around a while taking turns and ended up fucking like the pastor and his wife, me on top, while the couch squeaked and howled like boiling monkeys. “We’ll wake Mamie,” she gasped. “Let’s get on the floor.”
Down on the oriental carpet atop the rattly ancient herringbone parquet. Being totally exhausted made it even deeper – we were too fatigued to fight it, and it took us down a hot red tunnel of total abandonment and bliss. Plus the first time with someone new is always hot. You come out of it burningly alive, fiercely awake, totally released.
Silly as it sounds, at the end we came at the same time.
What joy.
—
“YOU HAVE TO CHANGE everything,” I said. “You have to start a new life.” It was still night and we were holding each other under the down coverlet on the bumpy mattress. The awareness of how miraculously she’d escaped death, of the skill and determination of her killers, and the risks she now faced were beginning to sink into both of us.
“When I got back to where I’d parked the bike,” she said, “it was gone. I walked up and down the street, wondering if my memory was bad ...”
“Your memory’s never bad.”
“Then I realized in that neighborhood things get stolen all the time ... I was so angry, after losing Yasmina, all that ... I called Thierry, he had arrived at the scene, he came right over ...”
“The two guys in black, they must have followed her, that girl, as she took off on your bike.”
Anne shook her head sadly. “Poor thing.”
“Did they want to kill you because of our investigation? Did they know it was you?”
She nodded. “Seems so.”
“Or was it because of your husband, fear you’d track down his killers?”
“That had nothing to do with Mustafa ... Éric had identified a Chechnyan gang in the Pyrenees, they were selling heroin from Spain, pushing terrorism and burning synagogues, had killed a couple of policemen ...”
“And they killed him?”
She didn’t answer, then, “I’ll send Mamie and the kids to Normandy,” she whispered, lips against my shoulder. “Chez Cousine Claudine. Nobody will find them there.”
“And you?” I wanted to ask her more about her husband, but now wasn’t the time.
“I’m staying here, let them come to me ...”
“No. They’ll get you.” I kissed her forehead, gentle skin over hard bone, imagined her pulsing brain beneath. “We have to find another place. And I’m not leaving you. Not for one moment.”
“You want more sex, that’s all.”
“I’d be crazy not to.”
She laced an arm between my ribs and shoulder. “My job hasn’t changed. Nor has yours.”
She was right, as usual. But no matter, I wasn’t leaving her alone.
She soon was breathing softly, the fatigue lines of her face easing in the first glimmer of dawn. 05:29 ... another hour then get up. I nestled against her, breathed in and out with her till our heartbeats came together, inhaled the different fragrances of her hair and the glossy scents of her skin. And feared this was all fantasy due to shock and horror, and any instant I’d wake up to the real Anne twisted in a pool of blood beneath the bike.
Reborn. I prayed thanks for Anne’s life and sorrowed for the other girl.
—
TWO HOURS LATER I stomped into Thierry’s office, Anne unwillingly behind me. Nisa was standing by the window looking angry. “Why’d you guys hit Yasmina’s?” I almost yelled. “When I was trying to talk with her?”
He gave me a curious look, as if how stupid can you be? “We were told to.”
Anger surged from my skin, my bones, the grimace on my face. “By who?”
Nisa said nothing. Thierry eased back in his chair, as if to gain time. “France isn’t one country.” As if he were telling me something personal and deep, a divorce in the family. “France is not France. Not anymore.”
I was too ravaged by Anne’s near-death, Yasmina’s death and the missed chance to get Mustafa, to follow such circumlocutions. “I don’t care.”
He gave me a bleak look. “Use your head, for something besides knocking down doors.”
Too angry to sit, I stood by Nisa peering out the stained, streaked window at the courtyard where rain spattered puddles and ran rivulets down the curb. “I’m telling Harris everything.”
Thierry laughed. “That won’t matter. And he won’t believe yo
u.”
He was right: I was a man without a country. Nowhere would anyone believe me.
“Listen to him, Pono.” Nisa’s voice had that element of bad news that must be given gently. “We’ve been arguing about the same thing, but Thierry’s right.”
I was still furious. “Right about what?”
“For years the ultra-left has run France,” she said. “Under the surface they still do. They hate what France is – a world power, intellectual, scientific, cultured, financial, military, driven largely by white men and women. Instead they want inclusion, multicultural diversity, no borders, no nations, no capitalism, the forced merging of all peoples into one world. But this new Islam doesn’t want to merge, they want to dominate. This new Islam’s not a religion, it’s a conquering ideology, a culture and law that feels itself superior, wants to crush all others.”
I shrugged. “It’s always been that.”
“But now nearly fifteen percent of France is Muslim. Far more than the government admits. Over eight million. Of whom at least one in four are Salafists who believe every non-Muslim is a worthless infidel who should die. Recent surveys tell us that over half of young French Muslims think this.”
I finally sat, exhausted by it all. “Most Muslims in France are honorable and hard-working, happy to be here.”
She nodded, as if at an old riddle. “It doesn’t matter who’s the majority. Nor who’s most accommodating. It matters who has the media behind them.”
“Back in the late seventies and early eighties,” Thierry said, “when the Socialists realized they were out of step with the French people and would soon be out of office, they opened the gates and brought in all the North Africans they could, as the Arabs in gratitude would vote almost exclusively Socialist. In a national campaign with several candidates, two percent of the votes can be a huge margin, and having millions of Islamic voters can win the presidency though you barely get thirty percent of the total. It’s the only thing that’s kept the Socialists in power during many of these years,” he added with a wry smile.
