Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  _____

  I was shunted from cell back to interrogation. I tried to collect myself, to recollect, to think. Paltoquet resumed his questioning about Ahmed. What was the nature of his work for the United Nations? Why did he have an Iraqi diplomatic passport? What was the last time that Ahmed had been in Syria?

  “Are you aware that he has traveled to Damascus four times in the last year.” I said I was not.

  He put before me a list of four names: Mahmoud, Mohammed; Masoud, Ahmed; Abdul, Hamid; Hamoud, Mohammed.

  “Do you recognize any of these?”

  “They are common names. They could be anyone.”

  He took out several photographs from a file. Faces blown up from low-resolution stills, blurry. One was in profile, another had deep shadows that blacked out his eyes. I looked closely. They seemed to be surveillance shots, one was so indistinct and striated it must have come from a CCTV camera.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Look again.”

  “It’s hard to tell. People look different in real life.”

  “What about this one?” He pointed to a picture taken in the dark. Black wool ski hat, pulled down like a burglar. “It’s Abdelhamid Abaaoud,” said Paltoquet, looking at me carefully. I opened my palms in a gesture of nothing. “This picture was taken by Zorro Thorpe, outside the Bataclan theater on the night of November 9.”

  “So?”

  “Your cellphone was located at the same location at the same time.”

  “I turned it off.”

  Paltoquet made a small shrug, “Yes, we know that. What is your relationship to Zorro Thorpe?”

  “Friend. Colleague.”

  “You did not make contact with him outside the Bataclan that night?”

  “I was hiding in a bush in the park. He was too far away. I didn’t want to cry out. There was a lot of shooting. There were police everywhere.”

  “You did not make contact with the police.”

  “No.”

  “We have asked for witnesses to come forward.”

  “I didn’t see anything specific. I didn’t—”

  “Why didn’t you tell your friend and colleague Zorro Thorpe that you had seen him?”

  “I did—I didn’t not tell him. It didn’t come up.”

  “He was surprised to discover that you were at the same place at the same time that night. At first he denied to us that you were there. He said you could not have been there because he would have seen you or you would have told him. But you were there. And so was this man—”

  He pointed again to the dark wooly-hatted face of Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

  “Orange sneakers,” I said. I understood now, two pieces fitted together. “He was the one standing there wearing orange sneakers. Yes, I saw him. He was talking into his mobile phone. He was worried but also calm, he kept looking down the alley. I thought he must have known someone inside the Bataclan, I thought he was trying to find one of his friends.”

  “You did not approach him or talk to him?”

  “I was on the other side of the police cordon, there were police everywhere, there was constant shooting. I couldn’t have crossed the street to where Zorro and he were—”

  “How long did you hide in the park?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A long time.”

  “You were in the vicinity of the Bataclan theater for three hours and seventeen minutes,” replied Paltoquet, reading from a sheet of paper in front of him. “And all that time you were hiding under a bush?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did not make contact with anyone?”

  “Make contact?”

  “Talk to someone.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You are a journalist. Didn’t you need to report, find quotes?”

  “I don’t know.” Why hadn’t I?

  “You have not written about that night. You are a journalist who doesn’t write a report as an eyewitness to a major terrorist attack—”

  “I did not see anything!”

  “—who knew very well that she had seen the main perpetrator of the attack.” He took a stapled sheaf of my articles out of his file and pointed at my story from Saint-Denis about Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

  “I had forgotten about the orange sneakers.”

  “You had forgotten.”

  “Yes.”

  “What else have you forgotten?”

  _____

  Back in the cell, the ant wandered aimlessly. The bread was soft and sliced and I rolled it into dough pellets between my fingertips. The toilet hole was calcified with solid yellow piss, but I imagined it as a tunnel to freedom like in The Shawshank Redemption. It is true you get used to anything. The ammonia cesspit smell had receded to a familiar fug, so that the clean air outside in the corridors smelled aseptic, razored, and unfriendly.

  _____

  In the next session Paltoquet had a new yellow file beside his elbow. Whippet sipped a can of Red Bull. Normal service resumed. More pictures of men with black beards. Ahmeds in a haystack.

  “This man,” Paltoquet pointed. Charcoal-shadowed eye sockets. I shook my head.

  “This one.” Low V hairline.

  “No.”

  Baby face, smirk smile, razor stripe across one eyebrow.

  “No.”

  “Look again.” I looked again. “He would have been thinner when you met him.”

  “Give me a clue.”

  “Mohammed Ahmed Khalil.”

  “Mohammed—”

  “Yes. Several phone calls were made from your cellphone to his father’s cellphone in Lebanon.”

  “From Kos.”

  “Between August fifteenth and twenty-third.”

  “Is that what this is about? I met Mohammed by chance.”

  “By chance?”

  “On Kos on the beach. It was a coincidence. It turned out I knew his father in Lebanon. I called his father. That’s what the calls were. His father said he had been in Syria—his father said—” But what had his father said?

  “Please repeat the details of your conversation with his father.”

  “I can’t remember. The line was bad. He was vague. Mohammed vanished on me. He disappeared.”

  “And you claim you have had no subsequent contact with him.”

  “No.”

  “You do not recall the surname this Mohammed used to register with the Greek authorities or the name of his uncle in Hama.”

  “I never met the uncle in Hama. I only heard about him.”

  “And your husband did not mention him to you.”

  “He’s not my husband.”

  “Even in 2011 when you were in Syria together. We believe this is the first time your husband met him in Hama—”

  “Is this about Ahmed?”

  “Just answer the questions. You received a call from a German cellphone number at eight twenty-five in the morning of October thirty-first.”

  “What has Ahmed done?”

  “The phone call on October thirty-first.”

  “I don’t know anyone in Germany,” I said. “I didn’t receive a call from Germany.”

  “It is a matter of record.”

  “I do not remember any phone call from Germany.” Did I? Had I forgotten that too?

  “The call lasted forty-two seconds. The mobile phone was located in the main refugee processing center in Düsseldorf.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember.” He drew out his syllables. I could see he did not believe me.“Your inability to recollect certain details creates certain discrepancies,” he said.

  “Why am I detained? What is really going on here? If I understood the reasons for our arrests, perhaps I could explain myself better. What is it? Is it something my son has done? Is it a connection with my ex-husband? Is it a megadata mistake because there are Daesh websites logged against my IP address? Has some algorithm connected things that are not connected?”

  “Madame,” replied Paltoquet
firmly, as if my outburst was distasteful, emotionally inappropriate to his diligent professionalism. “I will ask the questions and you will answer them.”

  “Where is Ahmed?” I began to rebel.

  “You told us he was in Baghdad.”

  “My son Ahmed.”

  “He is being taken care of.”

  “Who is taking care of him?”

  “You are tired,” Paltoquet looked at his watch. “I am going to send you back to the cell to sleep.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Four.”

  “Afternoon or morning?”

  He did not answer.

  FIVE

  The glass wall of my cell gave a view onto a white-tiled wall. My thoughts bounced against it, like boomerang daggers. I was caged in a see-through box. My imagination turned my ant into an antelope, a patronus, who could leap through walls. The mind is shut in a head, inescapably (on pain of death) attached to a body, now locked up in a cell—but still it can go wherever it likes. Isn’t that amazing?

  I lay on my tummy and considered the links in the chain that Paltoquet was forging. Think, Kitts, think hard! It’s the only thing you can do. I scratched at a ragged cuticle.

  Sleep deprivation is the oldest trick in the book. Rubashov himself had employed it when he was interrogating prisoners. An easily arranged torment. Perhaps I could hide behind a false wall—a mental construct. Close your eyes and build the wall brick by imaginary sheep-counting brick. The windowpane door in the glass wall clanged and a heavy bundle of keys jangled like an alarm clock. I was about to dive off the cliff to escape from Devil’s Island and swim to the island of Monte Cristo. Of course Paltoquet was the devil. The mole on his cheek marked him out, like a small gobbet of shit.

  I considered a hunger strike, I considered passive resistance, I considered violence. The efficacy of these options seemed doubtful. Rubashov had been a torturer himself; he understood that resignation was the only sensible course of action.

  Round and round everything blurred, dizzy. Like twirling on a dance floor and trying to find a mark to keep your focus, but the scenes just shuffled glimpses. Where was Ahmed now? Baghdad, Damascus, Hama? A trail of postcards, but the postmarks never matched the picture. Phone calls that went straight to voicemail. Bleeps and clicks on the line. What was he doing all these years, to and fro, go-between, but between who and where? Parties, interests, shadows. Cross-hatching the enemy of my enemy and crossing lines. Ahmed had always been a liar.

  “All Iraqis are liars.” Who had said that?

  _____

  “An Iraqi military doctor called Muntazzer—” began Paltoquet. His face was the color of uncooked pastry, doughy pouches under his eyes. His sidekick whippet’s face was the same plain buff as the paper on which he took notes. There was no window in the interrogation room. The fluorescent light gave off a sickly glow. My eyes ached. My back ached. Everything hurt. Was this the second day or the third?

  Paltoquet had a sheaf of paper in front of him that I could see contained my recent email correspondence. “When was the last time you saw Muntazzer.”

  “More than ten years ago.”

  “Where?”

  “In Baghdad. I didn’t see him after we left Baghdad.”

  “According to your information, your husband visited Marseilles in October 2010.”

  “Did he? We were divorced by then.”

  “Muntazzer al Samarrai was still living in Marseilles. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “And your husband never mentioned meeting him there?”

  “No.”

  “You met Muntazzer’s son, Oberon, in Iraq in 2004.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “Twice.”

  “You were aware that he was leading a group fighting against the Americans.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are an American. And yet you did not inform the American authorities in Baghdad.”

  “I was a journalist. Neutral. I wrote about him. It’s called protecting your sources.”

  “You were against the American occupation. You had sympathies with the insurgents. Perhaps this contributed to your conversion to Islam.”

  “You are making inferences that are not true. I became a Muslim to get married. It was entirely expedient. It was a piece of paper, it meant nothing to me.”

  “You did not meet Muntazzer’s other sons?”

  “No.”

  “You are aware they were also fighters.”

  “I guessed.”

  “Did you introduce your husband Ahmed to Oberon?”

  “No, he did not meet Oberon with me.” But he knew him—knew him from childhood—

  “But your husband is also from Samarra.”

  “No, his father was from there. He never lived there.” But he had visited Samarra: the cousin with the knife-sharp nose who held his wrist that day under the colonnade of the Shia shrine . . . he knew the restaurant on the riverbank with the best kebabs in Iraq . . . Oberon’s childhood anecdote, cheating him out of his Lego blocks. What games was Ahmed playing now?

  “Are you sure?” Paltoquet probed. “May I suggest that there are things about your husband you do not know. What do you know about your husband’s work?” He sat back, studying my reaction.

  “I know—” I began and then I realized I did not know, not really. “He works as a protocol officer for the U.N. Different envoys. Various missions. Sometimes short contracts; he complains about that. His expenses are always getting shuffled to different desks and then the reimbursement gets delayed. I know that, because then I don’t get the maintenance checks on time and he blames the U.N. bureaucracy. Once, he said he was like a troubleshooter. People who don’t want to meet for political reasons, he meets them separately, back channels.”

  “Are you aware that he is paid by the U.S. Defense Department?”

  “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe. In a certain way it makes sense.”

  “In what way?”

  “He was always a great admirer of the Americans,” I said. “He was—” He had been. But now?

  “What are his political beliefs?”

  “His political beliefs?”

  “Yes, his orientation. His views on the situation in his country, for example.”

  “He does not like the Shia government, their corruption, their ties to Iran—”

  “Go on, please.” Paltoquet leaned forward, and I had the sense of having been drawn into a more liquid conversation.

  I swam back a year, to summer 2014.

  _____

  Ahmed was in Paris just for one night; he had a flight to New York in the morning. He took Little Ahmed and me out for supper. We went to Le Petit Cambodge around the corner because he said he missed Asian spice and soy sauce. He had brought Little Ahmed a present of a wooden box with the minaret of Samarra inlaid in mother-of-pearl. Little Ahmed was not very impressed: it looked like a girl’s jewelry box to him, but we explained and he traced the lines of ascending spiral and nodded his approval.

  “I should have taken you there,” his father told him, “when I realized you were photographing nothing but curves. Samarra is where your grandfather is from. The banks of the Tigris—ah, the most beautiful place in the world—and the best kebabs in all the land! Now it’s impossible.”

  ISIS had just taken Mosul. Tikrit had fallen, Samara was occupied. The North of Iraq was now under their control. In the west they controlled the Anbar badlands of Ramadi and Fallujah. The Hiluxes fluttering black flags were gunning towards Baghdad. I asked Ahmed what the situation was like in the capital.

  “The Shia in the government are freaked out,” he said almost gleefully. “The Americans are scrambling to explain why no one saw it coming. All their money into the Iraqi army and it just ran away. I’ve been telling them for months, but—”

  “But what?”

  “They stopped pay
ing the Sunni tribes, they disengaged. It’s shortsighted of course, as usual. The Americans just want to be out of it these days—that’s the official White House line. But now they’ll have to get involved again.” It was a reasonable paragraph of analysis, but there was a purr in his tone, a certain satisfaction. Well, Ahmed had always hated the Shia parties. The oxymorons, he called them: severe and corrupt, incompetent and yet stuck-fast, in charge.

  “But isn’t everyone in Baghdad terrified?”

  “Is Beeby OK? What about Thayr?” asked Little Ahmed.

  “Thayr and his family have gone to Amman. Like lots of people, running away. Another phase of exodus. But they’ll come back.”

  “But you’re not scared, Aba!”

  “No, I’m not. ISIS will stop now—there are old hands at the helm, they know the limits. They’ve got the Kirkuk oil fields and oil to sell. They’ll make a deal with the Kurds.”

  “The same people making the same accommodations,” I said. “Like in Saddam’s time.”

  “It’s always about the money,” Ahmed said, repeating his war-as-economics mantra.

  “What are you doing in New York?” I asked.

  “U.N. response to ISIS summit. Watch the moon rise.”

  “What moon rise? An eclipse?” Little Ahmed wanted to see an eclipse because Rousse had told him that the moon was the only perfect circle in the world. Out of this world. Ahmed tousled his son’s hair.

  “No, Ban Ki-moon.”

  “Banksy Moon? Like a street artist?”

  “No, like the secretary-general of the United Nations, kiddo,” I said.

  “He’s Korean,” added Ahmed. “He’ll have to engage with Assad now. I’ve got to talk to the new special envoy. And then get him in the room with the right Americans.”

  “Who are the right Americans?”

  “The Defense Department—they still have some operational funds at their discretion, they love to play the margins, ignore State, tell the Senate committee after the fact. They’ll listen.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “Aha!” Bowls of steaming pho arrived. Ahmed rubbed his hands together in exaggerated anticipation. “Pork belly! Oh, I have been dreaming of it.”