Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  PARIS

  * * *

  METRO

  A Novel

  WENDELL

  STEAVENSON

  For Three Linas. Lina Sinjab, Leena Saidi, and Lina Attalah. One Syrian, one Lebanese, one Egyptian; one Sunni, one Shia, one Christian. All journalists, all brave and strong and smart and indomitable. They sheltered me and fed me in Cairo and Beirut and Damascus, taught me, encouraged me, helped me in a hundred ways, and were my friends when I needed friendship. War and riots and arrests, boyfriends and broken hearts and road trips. If only the whole world was made up of Linas. What a brilliant party it would be.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  BAGHDAD

  PART II

  BEIRUT

  PART III

  PARIS

  PART IV

  KOS

  PART V

  PARIS

  PARIS METRO

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  Zorro called at six in the morning.

  “They’re holed up in an apartment in Saint-Denis. The police have got them surrounded.”

  “Oh God, not again.” I was tired red-rimmed sore angry asleep. I got out of bed and dressed automatically. Jeans and a sweater, windbreaker, sneakers, old habits, muscle memory; I pulled the laces tight and double-knotted in case I had to run.

  Jean called, “I’m on my way now. Twitter says lots of gunfire. The address is 8 rue du Corbillon. C-O-R-B. Like corbeau, like a crow.”

  I went into Little Ahmed’s room at the end of the narrow corridor. In the dark predawn, blue sailboats flew across the wall. I had painted them when we had first moved in. Blue is the color of sleep, his father once told me. Little Ahmed was lying on his back with his arms tight against his sides. His funny rigid sleeping position. I used to tease him he slept like a soldier. His black brown hair made paintbrush tips against the canvas of the pillow. His eyelashes—impossibly long, adorably, ridiculously long; we are going to have to mow them! Blink and you turn into a fly catcher!—made dark moons of his closed eyes. Dream boy. Thirteen years old, grown taller than me, his feet stuck out over the end of the bed, bear cub fur shadowed his forearms. Not a child anymore.

  “Ahmed, wake up.” I shook him gently. He made a trumpet snort but did not open his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve got to go—” At this he opened his eyes, sleepy dust, and mad at me.

  “Don’t go again.”

  “You’ll be OK. Breakfast, school. Call me when you wake up.”

  “You already woke me up.” He propped himself up on one elbow.

  “Will you be OK?”

  “No. I won’t,” he said, clear and accusatory. “I’ll take all the emergency money hidden in your father’s old copy of Darkness at Noon and burn the building down and run away and join my friends in Syria.” I kissed him on his forehead and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.

  “See you later,” I said, and went out.

  The streets were dark and empty. I looked for a taxi, but there were none. You can wait your whole life at a Paris taxi rank while taxis drive past, insouciant bastards.

  There was a tent camp struck in the crescent park by the canal. A group of refugees—East African, high cheekbones, every face a sculpture—were drinking from cans of beer and throwing boules in the gravel courts under the streetlamp. The boules made dull steel thudding clicks against each other when they collided. The quayside cafés were closed, tables and chairs stacked inside or chained up for the night. Elegant stone swags above, below metal shop grilles covered with ripped posters and sprayed with #JESUIS, which I mistook, at first glance, for Jesus. The city was sleeping and not sleeping. Lying awake with one eye open pretending to be asleep. Breathing and holding its breath. On the wall I saw a stencil graffito of a gun with a croissant as a trigger firing plump little madeleines as bullets. A dog barked at another, smaller dog. Finally a taxi appeared.

  Saint-Denis was only four miles away, but I had never been there. Maybe because it was so close. It would have been easy to go and therefore I didn’t bother. I should have established a network of friendly imams and community organizers and deradicalization activists. I should have made Muslims and the banlieues my beat. But after all the years of living and reporting in the Middle East, I was fed up with the familiar. I kicked myself in the third conditional tense. Past; not done, can’t be undone, is done. In any case, Paris was supposed to be a respite, non?

  I had imagined the Saint-Denis of the Arabs-rioting-in-the-streets headlines would be a tower-block slum, but it turned out to be a pretty village consumed by the spread of the city. Cobblestones, tubs of geraniums, a grand Hôtel de Ville. In the gray haze of dawn, blue lights flashed and cast an eerie glow over the metal barricades and the white police vans. And over the police, hundreds of them: GIGN, CRS, RAID, which stood for Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence—Zorro, our pricking conscience, chronicler of the surreal and absurd, pointed out it was a series of euphemisms that unwittingly made up an accurate acronym. Black-clad robocops, Kevlar helmets, shatterproof visors pulled down, neoprene gloves with jointed armor panels on the fingers, earpiece comms, Glock pistols drawn, fingers resting alert on the trigger guards. The gendarmes had covered up the identification numbers on their epaulettes with strips of black Velcro. I saw army too, balaclavas, camouflage combat fatigues, desert boots on city pavements.

  The square was filled with the arms and armor of the French state. Behind the state, the press lined up in a row of satellite trucks, cables snaking underfoot, spotlights glaring at the clown faces of the standups. Behind the press, the people. A milling, grumbly banlieue crowd, headscarves and beards, early-morning dog walkers, mothers holding the hands of their children very tightly.

  I found Jean sitting on the steps of the cathedral where the French kings are buried. He was writing in his notebook with the steel ballpoint pen that Margot had given him when they got married. He had never lost it; even when he left it behind, the pen mysteriously found its way back to him. A waiter would appear running in the street, panting, “Sir! you forgot your stylo,” a taxi driver would leave it at the hotel desk. Its brushed matte finish was polished smooth in the places where his thumb and finger had rubbed against it, noting details of wars, for forty years.

  “The gunfire stopped about fifteen minutes ago. There were two or three big explosions.”

  “Shit.” I had missed it.

  I always missed it. Zorro used to tease me about this in Baghdad. “Don’t go out with Kitty,” he would tell journalists who had recently arrived. “She has some kind of protective shield—nothing ever hits her.”

  “But I never see anything happen,” I complained. (I complained!)

  “Zorro went looking to find a way in. But it’s a lockdown siege. They’re saying that it’s Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Zorro has nicknamed him Baabaa Black Sheep.” Jean’s thin lips compressed into his habitual wry dry half-smile, Oui c’est très drôle, here we are again. A great and terrible violence has occurred. Quelle surprise! Clap your hands together; applause, thunder. Now the work begins! Reaming sentences into paragraphs of clichés and conventions. “It’s a merry old go-round,” Jean described it once, “like one of those tape machines we used to have, when you could watch history loop as you recorded it.”

  The local kids were already selling mobile phone footage. Three or four of them gathered around us. A girl with long black Kardashian hair, kohl oval eyes, diamonds in her sneakers, scrolled through her twitter feed. A guy in a Gucci baseball cap shuffled from one foot to another.

  “Look at me! I look the same as him!” He showed me a screenshot of Abaaoud, smiling, thin moustache, guerrilla camouflage jacket, black ISIS flag behind him. They all laughed. I laug
hed too, because it was funny; he did look like him. Same long face, long nose, wet sand-colored skin. Not-Abaaoud cocked a thumb at the police line.

  “I’m gonna turn myself in. Man, that would totally mess them up!”

  The kids were high and garrulous.

  “My grandmother lives right opposite!” The girl tossed her long hair. She swiped the video on the phone; her multicolored fingernails clacked against the cracked glass. I bent to look closer, but I could only see a blank façade with two bullet holes star-bursted in the plaster. The girl gave me an earbud to listen. I heard gun shots, heavy caliber in clustered semiautomatic bursts, and an old woman’s frightened, labored breathing. Then the video fell down to the street, where three policemen were roughly pulling and dragging a man. The man was bent over, his head was forced down, he was barefoot and naked from the waist.

  “No wait here’s a good one, my friend just posted it on Facebook.” Another video of a blank wall. Through the earbuds I listened to a police voice shouting, urgent: “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  A woman’s voice shouted back, angry, defiant: “He’s not my boyfriend!”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend!”

  Gunfire sounded, flat percussive bangs, then drilling fusillades.

  “I want five hundred,” said the Kardashian girl, looking at me and tossing her head so that her hair swept up and fell back into a black crescent.

  “We’re just print,” I told her. “Try the TV guys.”

  Jean was tapping on his phone. Long elegant fingers, a copper ver digris bracelet around his wrist, more white in his stubble than gray. He wore his experience of documenting man’s-inhumanity-to-man as comfortably as an old pair of jeans. Dispassionate, long-lens perspective; he could get frustrated, but he was never bitter—he had no reason to be. He loved Margot, Margot loved him, his children had grown up kind and intelligent, he had a house with a sea view. No, he was never bitter; that was my trench, he chided. I followed his gaze as he looked up at a helicopter chopping the dawn overhead.

  “It’s like it’s some kind of gratification for them,” he said, pointing his steel pen at the Gucci cap guy and the kohl girls. “It’s entertainment. Like it’s cool to be in the center of the action.”

  “Of course it’s cool. Why else would we have done it?”

  Zorro appeared and sat on the step next to me. His blond dreadlocks were tied back with a pink sparkly elastic band. A Syrian girl had given it to him in Greece last summer. Zorro had been on the beach at dawn photographing the dinghies coming in. The girl had stood apart, shivering, he had wrapped his red and white keffiyeh around her, and in return she had given him her pink sparkly hair band.

  “Bullshit. Police. Impossible to get anything except police. Oh, the police, there are hundreds; terrorists are more elusive.”

  I got up and wandered through the scene, notebook in hand. Hefty Maghrebi ladies, arms folded across their chests; old Berber men with gold teeth. Mothers worried that the schools were closed, what would they do with their kids? They had to go to work and the métro was not stopping at the station, and all of this—this. A woman with a flowered headscarf and gold dangling earrings swept her arm to encompass the invasion. A waiter was setting up tables on the terrace of the Café de Calife on the corner. Coffee would be good. A kid in a red leather jacket revved up on a moto, a group of police blocked his way, jabbing, pointing, ordering him back. He took off his helmet to remonstrate—Bambi eyes blinked, thick eyebrows, one razor-striped, and I thought for a second, It’s Mohammed from the beach in Kos!

  A crazy woman with curly hair pointed a claw hand at me.

  “Whites! Look at them gathering like vultures. All of them! Putains! What are they doing here? Come to take pictures of us like we are animals in a zoo. This quartier is ours!” The guy on the moto, the groups of flics, everyone in the café and the kids hovering about the TV crews all turned to look at me as if I was the perpetrator.

  When the Café de Calife opened, we set up our laptops on one of the outdoor tables. I had a habit of filing my stories under the names of Paris Métro stations, the better to confound hotel-room spies or officials at border crossings. The Paris Métro is full of destinations, forgotten heroes, old battlefields, and writers no one reads anymore. I kept a métro map tacked up on the wall above my desk, and it was fun to file things under apposites and to smile at correlations and ironies. VOLTAIRE for the Arab Spring, BONNES NOUVELLES for Gadaffi’s undignified death, PLACE DES FÊTES for the Fall of Baghdad, ÉCOLE MILITAIRE for Afghanistan in the winter of 2001.

  I opened a new file and began to type.

  File: VOLONTAIRES

  November 18, 2015

  French police killed three suspected terrorists and arrested a further eight people in a raid on a house in the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris this morning. Among the dead was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 29-year-old Belgian national, who French authorities believe was the mastermind behind the attacks on Friday night in Paris, at the Bataclan theater and at several bars and restaurants, which killed 130 people.

  “Another gangsta jihadi,” I said to Jean as I typed, “radicalized in prison. Poor boy, he had to grow up as a second-generation immigrant in a suburb. Free education and health care and the protection of the rule of law. The miserable injustice of it! Having to endure the oppression of a democratic state! I am so fed up with this narrative—”

  “Kit, stop ranting!” said Jean. “I’m too tired.”

  Zorro ordered another coffee, un double, fiddled with the catch on his pillbox and swallowed his morning dose of pharmaceutical heroin. His silver skull ring caught the first sun ray of the day.

  “His girlfriend—she’s the interesting one,” Zorro said. “They are saying she’s the one who blew herself up—”

  “It’s not confirmed,” said Jean.

  “There are pictures of her in a bikini all over the web. Beach-babe bikini. Her family said she only started wearing a headscarf six months ago.”

  Jean signaled to the waiter and said, “Bring me a brandy.”

  The waiter shook his head, “Pas d’alcool, pas dans ce café non.”

  “You see?” I said triumphantly. “The thin end of the wedge! Accommodate, accommodate. It’s the opposite of assimilation. And now you can’t have a drink when you want.” Jean frowned. This was an argument we had been having for months.

  Jean said he would have a coffee instead. The waiter made a curt smile. Jean looked at me over the top of his black framed glasses, but I kept talking.

  “How many of these disaffected teenagers have to gun down innocent people before you stop saying it’s just a few bad apples who have got the wrong end of the stick? What does ‘radicalized’ even mean? It’s just one of those made-up media words that gets used to stand in for the bit you don’t understand—”

  “Shut up, Kit.” This time it was Zorro who said it. Indignant, I went back to my story.

  Abdelhamid Abaaoud was born in Belgium in 1987 and grew up in Molenbeek, an immigrant neighborhood of Brussels. His father emigrated from Morocco in 1975 and opened a shop in the area. Abaaoud attended a prestigious Catholic school, but was expelled for reasons that are unclear. In 2010 he was arrested for attempting to break into a garage. Over the next three years he was known to the police for his connections with drug dealers in the neighborhood and was imprisoned three times for petty crimes.

  By 2013, Abaaoud was in Syria fighting for ISIS. He appeared in an ISIS video, dragging corpses behind a pickup truck. Later that year, he recruited his thirteen-year-old brother, Younes, who traveled to Syria to fight with him. Sometime in 2014, Abaaoud returned to Europe (how is unknown) “in order to terrorize the crusaders waging war against the Muslims,” according to an interview he gave to the ISIS magazine Dabiq.

  French authorities now believe he was responsible for coordinating several previous failed attacks in France and Belgium over the past eighteen months. Intelligence sources have said that telephone
records indicate he was in contact with Mehdi Nemmouche, who shot and killed four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014, and with Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who shot and killed Aurélie Châtelain in the Parisian suburb of Villejuif in April 2015 in the middle of a failed attempt to target a church in the area. He has also been linked to Ayoub El Khazzani, who tried to open fire with a Kalashnikov on the Thalys train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris in August 2015, an attack that was thwarted when passengers, including three American marines on holiday, wrestled the gunman to the ground.

  After the attacks in Paris five days ago, Abaaoud’s fingerprints were found on a Kalashnikov abandoned in a rented black Seat car that was identified as being the vehicle used by the group of gunmen who shot and killed people sitting outside bars and restaurants in the 11th arrondissement. At 10:14 pm on the night of the attacks, CCTV footage showed Abaaoud and a companion going through the turnstile at the Croix de Chavaux Métro station, in the suburb of Montreuil, in the west of Paris, 200 meters away from the street where the Seat was later found.

  I looked up the footage from the métro on YouTube. Two figures moved in jerky slow-mo through the turnstiles. They were dressed in dark jackets and dark trousers and looked like anyone, anonyme. Except for Abaaoud’s bright orange sneakers—

  Paris Prosecutor François Molins has stated that Abaaoud took the No. 9 métro to the Place de la République station and that his mobile phone signal has been detected adjacent to the Bataclan concert hall, during the siege, from about 11:00 p.m. until 12:28 a.m.

  In the early hours of this morning the French police received information that Abaaoud, and several others involved in the attacks, were staying at No. 8 rue du Corbillon in Saint-Denis. Hundreds of French police and army were deployed and cordoned the street. Witnesses say they were woken up by heavy gunfire at 4:30 a.m. A violent siege ensued. Between 4:30 a.m. and 7:20 a.m., when Abaaoud blew himself up with a suicide vest, the police poured five thousand rounds of ammunition into the house.