A Long Night in Paris: The must-read thriller from the new master of spy fiction

by Dov Alfon

  It was an odd sight, and an even stranger coincidence; the commune of Créteil may have been inhabited by immigrants from all cultural backgrounds, but it was not blessed with Chinese businessmen. Mme Abadi felt a shiver crawling up her spine and went to sit on the sofa, in the dark living room.

  Notifying the police would be ridiculous, that much was clear. She called Mme Zerbib, who never slept though not even the faintest noise ever emerged from her apartment; in that respect she was the ideal neighbour. She picked up after less than two rings. “Good evening, Mme Abadi.”

  They called each other Mme Abadi and Mme Zerbib even though they had been friends for more than twenty years.

  “Good evening, Mme Zerbib. I apologise for bothering you this late.”

  “You never bother me, Mme Abadi.”

  “And yet, it’s a very un-Catholic hour.”

  They burst into laughter. It had been a running joke between them ever since Mme Zerbib first heard that French expression.

  “I’m just a little worried, because I’m standing by the window and see two people looking at the building, two Chinese, and after today’s attacks in Paris, it makes me uneasy.”

  “That’s completely understandable,” Mme Zerbib said, but Mme Abadi heard in her voice a certain tone of surprise.

  She quickly withdrew. “No, it’s truly nonsense, I’m so sorry I called you, it’s been a long day. I’ll go to bed now.”

  “Why don’t you come over and sleep here?” Mme Zerbib suggested, always quick to take any chance to alleviate her own anxieties. “It might make you feel safer. After all, two Tunisian Jews in their prime, what could Chinese terrorists do to us?”

  Mme Abadi laughed politely. In truth, the joke only increased her anxiety.

  “Thank you, Mme Zerbib, but my husband’s already gone to bed and I’ve never slept without him, so two Chinese aren’t going to make me start now.”

  After lengthy parting words she dialled her son. She very rarely bothered him, but since he was in Paris, she felt she might as well. There was no answer, and after the fifth ring she reached his voicemail. She did not leave a message.

  She went back to the kitchen to make herself some lemon verbena and chamomile tea. While the water was boiling she looked out of the window again. The men were no longer there.

  Chapter 75

  With its bright colours, its water-spraying creatures, its absurd rotation, the fountain was as twisted as the story behind its construction.

  In 1978, the city of Paris commissioned five modern fountains. Only one of them was built. Opened in 1983, its official name was “La fontaine Stravinsky”, but everyone called it “the Pompidou Centre fountain”, or “the colourful fountain”. The Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely was known for his darker works – mostly made in black metal – and after winning the tender he imposed an unexpected condition for delivering the piece: that the city commission sculptures for the fountain from his wife, the artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

  The change in the tender’s terms entailed a number of adjustments, including disconnecting the fountain from the regular power grid and using very low-power electric motors to avoid electrocuting children. Providing the necessary power for twelve heavy statues to spin on their axes was an engineering challenge. But it was the right thing to do in terms of safety, and eventually everyone was pleased.

  Everyone but Erlang Shen.

  He exchanged his torn clothes for the green uniform of the city’s sanitation workers and ditched his pushcart for a plumber’s toolbag. At first, he refused to believe what he had read about the fountain; only after stepping into the water and checking it himself did he realise he would have to come up with a different solution.

  The pool was large but not deep. In the bright light of the street lamps it was easy to see that the colourful animals were not screwed into their strange black bases, they were simply placed on top of them, with a low-power cable next to the bases to conduct the necessary power from the motor attached below.

  The Firebird. The Elephant. The Mermaid. The Clown’s Hat. The Frog. The Heart. The Fox. Death.

  All the characters from “The Rite of Spring” spun past Erlang Shen and spat jets of water at him, ruining his meticulous plan.

  With only twenty minutes left before the rendezvous the blonde had scheduled with her handler, Erlang Shen stepped out of the pool, picked up his bag and started walking towards the corner supermarket that was still open. He was hoping they had a toaster.

  Chapter 76

  The blonde was also on Abadi’s mind. In fact she visited him three times, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

  First when she was documented entering the hotel with her hair gathered under a hood that hid her face. She was wearing black and nothing stood out about her appearance other than her height and giant shopping bag.

  She appeared to him a second time when she was caught in the footage of the camera installed on the hotel convention floor, dressed in a red suit whose colour resembled the one she had been wearing in the El Al security officer’s footage.

  “Merde,” Léger called out.

  She looked different now, nothing like her appearance when she first entered the hotel. She was as glamorous as a shampoo model, her shining hair flowing over her shoulders, her endless legs marching across the fourth floor’s wall-to-wall carpet as if she wanted to check the exact length of a property she had received by divine decree.

  And finally a third time, in the hallway leading to Rav Turai Yerminski’s room, blurring the camera’s focus. Once the image had sharpened, the lens revealed a tall blonde in a short red uniform and matching heels taking out of her bag the ultimate fashion accessory: a long, golden pistol that Abadi instantly identified as the American model of the Desert Eagle, an Israeli semi-automatic. It was so beautiful that no Hollywood movie or computer game could be without it. With that gun in her hand, the blonde looked almost too perfect. She knocked on the door with the golden butt, and when the door opened the camera caught, for a split second, the profile of the poor victim as he saw the barrel in front of him. The blonde went in, closing the door behind her.

  According to the camera system’s internal clock, she remained in the room for forty-three seconds, not nearly enough time for a methodical search. Was that why the Chinese returned to the scene of the crime? To look for something Yerminski had left behind? He came out of the room first, his hands raised. The blonde must have said something to him, because he suddenly lowered his hands and started walking briskly towards the lifts. He was pale, wearing jeans and a sweater, no jacket. She came out with her weapon drawn, then switched hands and put the pistol in the bag, once again switching hands to keep the gun inside the bag while pointing at Yerminski’s back, as if balancing a tray. It looked a bit strange, but not strange enough for the security guards in the lobby to detain her as she left.

  While Léger’s men barked conflicting orders into the radio and uploaded the kidnapper’s blurry face onto the software, Abadi focused on Yerminski. He paced along, baffled but brisk. At such a moment, didn’t survival instinct dictate a slow walk, the shuffling of feet, a staged fainting? Some kind of resistance, if only passive? Abadi could not but wonder what these young men were made of. That morning Yaniv Meidan had marched confidently to his death with an incredible level of stupidity, oblivious to the red flags waving above the head of the blonde who led him to the lifts. Fewer than five hours later Rav Turai Yerminski approached different lifts with a similar blindness.

  “He took the bait hook, line, sinker, fisherman and island,” Léger said.

  “Maybe your men will find it easier to look for an island than a fish,” Abadi said.

  “Not so,” Léger said. “I have no doubt we’ll find him, only he won’t be alive. If the Chinese meant to kill him this morning at the airport, they must certainly be in a hurry now, twelve hours behind schedule.”

  It was 11.30 p.m., Monday, April 16.

  Chapter 77

  In Melbourne,
Australia, it was 7.30 a.m., but it was hard to tell that in the conference room. On the management floor of all the casino houses owned by the empire that Uncle Saul had founded, as on all the casino floors below it, there were no clocks on the walls, no windows facing out, and even the closed-circuit T.V. screens were set so that the electronic clocks would not appear on them.

  Saul Wenger had not chosen the nickname “Uncle Saul”, it had been given to him by the Israeli security guards on his first visit to Jerusalem. But he liked it, because it implied generosity, the wisdom of age, perhaps even a certain frisson of darkness. Until then, out of earshot, he had been called “le Petit Suisse”, a diminutive if ever there was one. But “Uncle Saul” was not really Swiss, and although he was still skin and bone, and was short in height, he was certainly not small anymore, not with a net worth of twenty billion euros.

  Other casino moguls might like to say they had been “raised in a poor but loving family”. He couldn’t say as much. According to his birth certificate, he had been born eighty-three years previously in the dispensary of a camp for displaced persons near Geneva. His father was described as “unknown”, his mother, as “G. Wenger”, a 23-year-old Alsatian refugee, who had died in labour.

  Was she Jewish at all? Was he? The official papers couldn’t say. When Saul was three, the Swiss Confederation expelled all foreign refugees, and he was added to a group of Jewish orphans cared for by an American philanthropic organisation. They travelled to Trieste and took one of the last boats to Shanghai, a divided territory where no visa was required. There, in the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, he first learned to count.

  By the age of ten, Saul could speak French, Chinese, Japanese and Italian. He could read and would forge papers for other refugees in exchange for food. All the children he knew were in the same horrendous state, near starvation, and none of them had ever known anything else.

  This changed dramatically after Pearl Harbor. The U.S. aid workers who helped the refugees and managed the local school were expelled from China, and as they strove to help the children they had left behind, one of them alerted the Swiss consul to the incongruous presence of a Swiss-born child in the Japanese sector. Saul found himself separated from the rest, and within a week he was on board a luxury liner, escorted by the consul’s wife, who took it upon herself to bring him back to the land of his birth, perhaps as an excuse to return to safety herself.

  The official from the Ministry of the Interior was waiting for them at the border. He thanked the consul’s wife for bringing “little Saul” home, caressed his head and explained that a place had been found for him at Le Rosey, a prestigious boarding school nearby. Saul kissed the consul’s wife goodbye and was not very surprised to find himself, two hours later, interned in a forced labour camp.

  As a result of his age, he was moved within a week to another camp, and then another. In all, he changed camps on seven occasions, until he was put in the care of a foster family on whose farm he laboured for long hours and without pay until the end of the war. So, no, he could not even say he was raised in a poor but loving family.

  Could anyone understand this? Saul Wenger sat at the head of the table and looked at his executives, who always looked half asleep in the morning conference, as if 7 a.m. were not the perfect hour to start the day. He often toyed with the idea of firing them all and appointing interns, if only for one quarter, to see if his men were in fact making any contribution to the company’s profits. His guess was that they were all dispensable.

  He had learned a lot from his childhood years during the war and, most importantly, he had learned to pay attention to details. People were bored by them, and he knew how to take advantage of that: numbers, small print, delivery dates, exchange rates. He was, to this day, a manager of details, and he left it to God and statistics to look after the bigger picture.

  For example, he did not himself know any of the hundreds of thousands of employees at his casinos, but could recite from memory each one’s salary according to role and seniority. Not a single payroll decision was made without his written authorisation. Wenger believed, until it was proven otherwise, that penny-pinching in the expense department necessarily led to plenitude in the profit department. His employees used to say behind his back that he was willing to lose a million dollars to save a dime; but while he very often saved dimes, he never lost a million dollars.

  They reached the third topic on the agenda, a carpet for the new lobby that connected the roulette rooms downstairs. The carpets in all Wenger casinos reflected the branding of the empire as tourist-friendly: illustrations of windmills in Holland, emblems of the monarchy in England, kangaroo prints in the Australian casino, and so on, in seventy-two casinos worldwide generating total profits of twenty million euros a day.

  Unlike the floor coverings in most private homes or office buildings, the carpets in Saul’s casinos were all loud, juxtaposing colours that clashed with asymmetrical compositions, objects that were definitely challenging to the eye. And indeed, the idea was for the gamblers to look at them as little as possible. Whenever a roulette player tried to take a break from the wheel, he would be met by blinding lights, noisy walls and disconcerting carpets. The difference between a plain blue carpet and a wacky red one could translate into millions of dollars a year. Saul Wenger was not one to underestimate the importance of a carpet.

  “I vote for sample four,” the C.F.O. said. He was an even bigger idiot than the others. There were eight carpet samples on the table, and Wenger did not even bother looking at number four. His executives pretended to be debating, as with every decision. He chose the loudest carpet, a blue geometric print with broken lines and asymmetric drawings of diagonal lightning bolts, sample two. His executives nodded enthusiastically, including the C.F.O.

  The decisions regarding the casino in Australia were not important, it amounted to a mere 2 per cent of his revenue. He had no casinos in Switzerland, where gambling was illegal when he devised his strategy. And he left Las Vegas to the moguls cutting each other’s throat there, the Adelsons, Packers, Wynns, all those born “into loving families”.

  The chief source of the empire’s revenues in recent years had been Macau, and that was now under threat. Alas, the carpets in all his casinos there were always red, a lucky colour in South East Asian culture, so his attention to detail concerned itself with more complicated matters.

  A beep came from the direction of the screen: the shift manager switched to camera 283, the one directed on the main roulette table. With one glance, Wenger took in the data displayed at the bottom of the screen: it was the fourteenth time in a row the ball had landed on black. Dozens of gamblers crowded next to the table, fighting to place their chips on what seemed to them a sure bet.

  Saul had not studied statistics and did not need to: he understood this intuitively, that the wheel had no memory at all, and certainly no desire to split the odds fairly. And that was why he had no sympathy for the pathetic souls downstairs, the ones waiting for the roulette ball to make a “fair” decision and land on red after choosing black so many times.

  There never has been justice in this world, and there never would be. And indeed, the ball rolled, rolled, hesitated and hesitated before finally landing on black for the fifteenth time. The only principle guiding the ball was that Uncle Saul had to make more money than all the players together.

  They moved on to the last topic on the agenda, his visit to Israel.

  Chapter 78

  The flashes of the military police car beacons behind her painted red and blue the rear view mirror, the car windows and the surrounding desert. Stretching ahead there was nothing but asphalt, and her jeep swallowed the white road lines underneath it as she drove south. Oriana could have continued like this forever without getting tired, here, in the almost complete darkness of the Negev.

  In the back seat, Rachel was sound asleep, wrapped in both their coats. Her lips were pressed against the metal bars of office on Oriana’s windproof coat i
n what looked like an enactment of the mezuzah ritual, or perhaps an erotic signalling of hunger. They had not exchanged a word since leaving Ashdod. The silence was as frozen as the desert wind that somehow found its way in through the closed windows. Every now and then a hostile howl was heard in the distance.

  On the dashboard, the tiny light of the Navran flickered. The voice came in several seconds before the image.

  “This is Abadi.”

  “This is Segen Oriana Talmor, Commander of the Fourth Army. All I need is a few fighter jets and I’m good to go.”

  “I considered arranging for you guys to arrive in helicopters,” she heard him say.

  An image of Abadi on the Navran’s screen accompanied the sound of his voice. Even though he was smiling, it did not look as though he was joking.

  “It’s O.K., I can settle for a convoy of twenty military vehicles, five military police motorcycles and one armoured personnel carrier with scary antennae.”

  “It has to have scary antennae. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t need it.”

  “But why do we need it?”

  “It’s all about branding,” Abadi said. He was walking somewhere fancy, and the Navran’s lens struggled to focus. “Let’s say you arrived in your own little car, unaccompanied. What would happen then? The guard at the gate would detain you for an hour. Then the Chief Network Intelligence Officer, who had already mouthed off to you, would argue about you asking questions, which would take another hour. And then they would answer nothing, or if they did, they would hide things from you. But when you arrive at the gate with dozens of investigators and policemen, a whole convoy of cars, motorcycles and a listening armoured vehicle, they’ll find it harder to dismiss you. And we haven’t even mentioned the drone hovering above their heads throughout.”