by Mike Bond
“Yet you lived here with Sophie, God bless her – it doesn’t give you sorrow?”
“And Leo too.” The thought was like a knife in his heart; fourteen years later he could still twist it any time he wanted.
Paris the capital of the world, étoile du monde, where joy and beauty came together with a deep understanding of life. Of what mattered: love, wisdom, fun, food, sex, family, history – and the great ideas that had made the western world – all wrapped up in one city.
“Tonight,” she said, “where shall we go to dinner?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “You’re still a little beat up – you want to?”
She smiled, and in her smile all the beauty of their lives together was mirrored – and on top of that he’d saved her from sure death, impossibly saved her. “If we stay in the apartment,” she said, “I’m going to have to eat your cooking.”
There was a nice little café on rue de Charonne, he remembered, an easy walk from the apartment. “What will you have?”
She thought a moment. “Anything French would be wonderful...maybe paté, foie gras, a salade noisettes... then just a steak frites, how could anything be better than that? And for sure a chocolat liegeois for dessert...”
“And to drink, Madame?”
“Ah, what joy French wine, to be able to go anywhere and choose something magnificent, not expensive, just delicious, fulfilling, memorable, the deep taste of the soil of France...”
“You didn’t say what kind –”
“Any Côtes du Rhone, just simple and beautiful.”
His heart overflowed, with Isabelle, with Paris, with the joy of finally being free. Simple and beautiful. Safe.
They squeezed with their bags into the apartment building’s tiny elevator and took it to the third floor. It was simple too, the apartment, a living room, dining room and kitchen, two bedrooms, a vase of white roses on the table the Home Office staff had put there, a fresh baguette, a bottle of Saint-Émilion and a round of brie on the counter, a Saint-Véran in the refrigerator. “God bless Home Office,” she said. “All the necessities of life.”
While she showered he sat on the leather sofa in the living room and called his old friend Max Ricard at DGSE, La Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. “Alors, vieux salaud,” he said, “je suis de retour.” Hey, you old bastard, I’m back.
“Toi,” Ricard said. “Qu’est-ce que tu fous ici?” What the fuck are you doing here?
“It’s great to hear your voice. Have you stopped smoking?”
“Have you stopped fucking?”
He told Ricard briefly about Baghdad, what had happened to Isabelle, that she’d been saved and now they were out for good. “No more damn terrorists,” he added.
“That’s like saying no more taking a shit.”
“You guys still in good shape?”
“Sure. We’ve got the worst president in history, a Socialist who thinks all problems with the Muslims are due to evils on our part.”
“I remember you said that years ago, when the Arabs were bombing the Metro.”
“It was true then too, another Socialist president blaming his own country because a group of fanatics hated us.”
“Same with us. Obama won’t even use the word Islamic no matter how many times they attack us.”
“He was CIA, Obama was, back in Pakistan, between college and law school.”
“We’re not supposed to admit that.”
“Well now France has a foreign minister who says that for young French Arabs to join ISIS is not a crime.” Ricard coughed, raspy. “And an attorney general says it’s understandable that young Muslims hate this country.”
“Of course they do – you give them free housing, education, health care, welfare even if they’re illegal immigrants. No wonder they hate you.”
“The general idea is that we’re responsible for everything wrong that goes on in their dysfunctional lives. They won’t go to school because it offends their Islamic culture, then they’re furious when they can’t get a job... you know all this.”
“Plus ça change...”
“Get this – I recently asked a Socialist minister, a guy close to the President, supposing a group of terrorists kidnapped your family and were going to kill them in twenty-four hours?”
“Max, that’s what I’ve just been through.”
“And I added, but you’ve captured one of the terrorists, and if you torture him he’ll reveal where your family is and they’ll be saved. So would you do it?”
“Of course he said yes...”
“He said no.”
“He said no?” It was incomprehensible. That a man would sacrifice his own wife and children. Jack was at a loss for words.
“He said France doesn’t lower its morals to save one family. So I said, supposing you could stop a terrorist plot, save hundreds of people if you just torture this one guy?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“He said no.”
“He’s saying hundreds of people must die to protect his little PC morality?”
Ricard coughed again. “When are we ever going to be free of this?”
“Like I just said, I’ve done my part. I’m free of it.”
“Of course,” Ricard said mildly.
“We should get together sometime, a glass of wine somewhere? I’d like you and Isabelle to meet.”
“Things are rather hot lately,” Ricard said in his raspy voice. “Lots of bad static.”
Jack felt himself tense. “Who from?”
“Something from Ankara, saying trouble’s on the way. Your people too, some serious warnings. About some guy named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, back from Syria through Belgium.”
“Can I come by, sometime, we can chat about it if you like?”
“Eight o’clock tomorrow?”
That was early; Jack had been looking forward to sleeping late. Getting slowly reacquainted with life. “I’ll be there.”
He killed his phone and glanced out the window at the early evening sky between the stone buildings. For Ricard to have wanted him there so quickly meant it was something bad.
But I’m out of it, he told himself. Forever. Following the path with heart.
While Isabelle took a nap he walked the nearby streets, inhaling the lovely odors of coffee and fresh bread, the early evening sidewalks filled with people headed home, beautiful women in revealing clothes, children eating pastries with one hand as they held a parent’s hand in the other, teenagers chasing each other and laughing, an old man in a white raincoat smiling at them as they ran past, the ancient buildings leaning over them as if protective.
He couldn’t inhale it all, see it all, feel it all – it was too much. I’m home, he realized, not knowing why.
Maybe he and she wouldn’t go back to Argentina. Maybe stay here... raise their child in France? There was no more beautiful place on earth... Where else on earth was the joy of living more deeply celebrated, the brilliance of ideas, the passions of love and nature?
It was eight-thirty when they sat down at a table on the sidewalk in front of La Belle Équipe. “It’s so warm tonight.” She squeezed his hand. “In mid-November, to be sitting outside in Paris – can you beat it?”
To begin, he asked the beautiful blonde laughing waitress for two kirs, that wonderful drink of cassis and white wine, and a bowl of the little black olives from Nyon, then a bottle of rosé de Provence. “A glass of wine, a crust of bread,” Isabelle smiled, “and you.”
The nap had done her good; with every hour her bruises seemed to fade, her terror diminish. She had gone through pure horror at the hands of her ISIS kidnappers, had faced death at any instant. Tough as she was, he knew, the shock, terror and PTSD would be with her always.
“I’m not having any of that,” she’d told him. “I’m not going to tolerate it.”
“That’s wonderful, love,” he’d answered. But you don’t decide not to suffer. You just suffer terribly and pretend you don’t. As he had for
so many years since Sophie and the kids had died in the blazing and collapsing North Tower.
Now it was over. Now they could heal. The baby growing inside her, the docs in Baghdad had said, was doing fine. We’re going to build a new life.
“It was a movie,” she said. “La Belle Équipe.”
He glanced at the name over the door, gave her a questioning look.
“In the 1930s. Five guys out of work win the lottery. Instead of splitting the money they decide to buy a bar, fix it up and run it.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Pretty soon they’re not getting along, some of them bail out, the last two guys are in love with the same woman...”
“That’s never happened before.”
“So in the end one of them kills the other.”
“That’s never happened either.”
“But here’s what’s interesting: the Socialists were running the government and didn’t like the ending, so they made the producers change it to the two guys deciding that their friendship was more important than the girl... And the movie was a flop.”
“Served them right,” he laughed. “How you know all this?”
“I’m a journalist, remember?”
“So I’m told.” He snuggled his shoulders into the warmth from the heater overhead. He glanced through the plate glass windows at the restaurant’s interior of bare bricks and wood-framed mirrors, the tables of happy people eating, drinking wine, talking, expostulating, loving... “Only the French,” he said, “turn pleasure into a religion.”
She smiled. “What other religion should there be?”
“I called Max Ricard today, while you were sleeping,” he said quietly so no one else could hear. “He’s worried, expecting something to hit but they don’t know where... Ankara and Home Office have both sent warnings, nobody’s sure...”
“Fuck the Muslims,” she said. “I’m so tired of their homicidal repressive religion.”
“Probably they are too.”
“Imagine, telling people they have to totally submit to the nutty rantings of some woman-hating desert-maddened murderer from the seventh century? What’s wrong with their heads?”
“We’ve been through all that,” he said. “It’s over.”
“Not for the poor people in Syria it’s not.”
“Nor anywhere else in the Middle East, for that matter.” But it was GW Bush, Cheney, Powell, he wanted to remind her, Rumsfeld and all those other war criminals who’d killed a million Iraqis and five thousand Americans, and created ISIS with their evil lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction... and Bush’s father before them who’d enticed the Iraqis into invading Kuwait then slaughtered them by the hundreds of thousands... All for oil, power and ego. And the most amazing thing is that they weren’t in jail because of it.
“I’m done with it,” he repeated. “Let somebody else take over.”
“And the twenty-eight pages? You intend to forget about them?”
“If forty-six Senators from both parties can’t get Obama to release them, even though he promised he would, what can we do?”
“Even if they have incontrovertible evidence that the Saudis planned and financed 9/11, even their ambassador to the US? And that they’ve been financing ISIS, the Taliban, all those insane Islamic bastards ever since?”
He remembered the dream she’d had on the airplane from Amman, of him stepping in a stream and getting his feet wet. Like years ago in the Afghanistan mountains, crossing the stepping stone bridge when he’d been shot in the shoulder and Bandit had been killed. It seemed so strange, that by being shot he’d met Sophie, whose lover he then unknowingly helped to kill, and later he and she had fallen in love in Paris and he’d raised the son of the man he’d helped to kill. And even after Sophie had known this she’d stayed with him.
And he’d taken them from Paris to New York and their deaths.
Now Isabelle and he were in Paris. Was anywhere safe?
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I’m done with it.”
The beautiful blonde laughing waitress brought them delicious simple food, rillettes, foie gras in salad, steak frites for Isabelle, magret de canard for him, a bottle of magnificent Gigondas – “how can anything so inexpensive,” Isabelle said, “be so delicious?”
“It’s France,” he said. “That’s the reason.”
But something felt weird. Out of place. By habit he scanned the passing pedestrians – laughing couples hand in hand, an old man with a wispy beard, a little girl walking a black poodle, an ancient limping Chinese woman, a kid on a skateboard.
It bothered him, this something; he wished he’d brought a sidearm, but everything had seemed so peaceful. And anyway Home Office didn’t want him carrying a gun in Paris. He sipped his wine, the raw ancient roots of Provence...
A black Seat slowed as it came down the street. “Isabelle!” he yelled.
Combat
AN AK BARREL out the Seat’s window, an Arab face of grinning hatred, a blasting muzzle as Jack leaped across the table knocking Isabelle to the sidewalk and covered her with his body amid the hideous twanging hammer of bullets and smashing glass and screams and clatter of chairs and tables crashing and the howl of the Kalashnikov and awful whap of bullets into flesh as people tumbled crying, it couldn’t be, this thing, he’d left this all behind.
But now the moans of agony, the tears, the sudden stunned silence of the newly dead.
He checked that Isabelle was safe and ran down the street after the fleeing Seat but it was gone, no man can outrun a speeding car.
The beautiful blonde laughing waitress lay on the sidewalk in a widening lake of blood, Isabelle hugging her and trying to plug the huge hole in her chest. “Hold on,” Isabelle was saying to her in French, “help is coming. Hold on, darling, hold on...”
Another young woman cradling the body of a tall black man in a blue track suit, people collapsed on their tables as if sleeping. Among the pile of toppled dead a man in a leather jacket against a wall, one leg still twitching. The silence, the shattered silence of the dead. And then the screams and anguish, of Heaven turned to Hell.
He fell on streams of blood and scrambled to her. “You’re okay?”
“Fuck yes.”
He ran from one victim to the next in an insane triage, who could he save and who was already gone.
There were so few to save.
AN EXPLOSION somewhere near made him run into the street reaching frantically for the gun he didn’t have. It could have been anything, that dull thud, hard to locate over the rumble of traffic in nearby streets, the distant howl of police cars and ambulances, blood squelching in his shoes, the cries of the hurt and dying.
Baghdad again, the World Trade Center, Fallujah, Beirut, London, Damascus, Madrid, Tunisia, Brussels, Kabul. He had no gun and there was nothing he could do but try to help those whose lives were pumping out of them in pools of darkness.
When the police came an officer posted a few men and told him the rest couldn’t stay; there was a huge attack elsewhere, Bataclan, the famous concert hall. “It’s war,” he said, fury in his eyes.
Jack told him who he was. “Give me a gun, I’m going with you.”
“Come,” the officer said, “but I don’t have an extra gun.”
“No worry,” Jack grimaced. “DGSE will give me one when we get there.”
He rode in the back of the police car as it screamed through the streets toward Boulevard Voltaire and the Bataclan, the radio a cacophony of horrified voices, new attacks, commanders trying to understand where to direct their men, where to send ambulances, how to stop the next bloodbath before it started.
The Bataclan was a bomb scene in Baghdad. The GIGN, France’s anti-terrorist commandos, had it locked down, were working their way foot by foot through a hail of bullets toward the doors.
“Glad you’re here,” Max Ricard said when Jack found him with a radio in one hand and a FAMAS rifle in the other.
For hours he did what he could, military f
irst aid to the wounded, and covered the dead. Pieces of flesh lay everywhere amid exploded steel and concrete, spent cartridges, in rivers of blood. He called Isabelle; she had quit La Belle Équipe when there was no longer anything she could do.
He was so angry and sorrowed he couldn’t breathe, reminded himself not to be furious now: be ruthless later, when it counted.
It was 04:35 when he left the blood-soaked streets outside the Bataclan and walked the aching lonely avenues back to the Home Office safe house where Isabelle had returned two hours before.
His eyes were blurred; it wasn’t teargas, it was sorrow. Sorrow for the poor happy innocent people who had died this night, the hundreds handicapped for life. He hadn’t cried in fourteen years – not since the night of 9/11 when he understood that Sophie, Leo and Sarah were dead. Now he couldn’t stop crying; it stunned him that his body held so many tears.
France at war again, Europe too, after seventy years of peace. The entire modern world against the enemies of civilization, against ISIS and the Saudis, Qataris and other Wahhabis. But a modern world handicapped by its own “good thinkers” – those who believed, as Max Ricard had described them long ago, that all the crimes of Islam were due to evils on civilization’s part. That Islam which enslaved nearly a billion women, slaughtered indiscriminately for the sin of not being Islamic, and embraced a worldview that would have sickened even a medieval European – these good thinkers who believed that this schizophrenic homicidal religion was actually tolerable and good.
Isabelle was sitting in a chair by the window watching the Paris night fade to day. He took off his bloody clothes and sat beside her, took her hand.
“How many?” she said.
“Maybe a hundred dead. Another three hundred severely wounded.”
“Oh Jesus Christ.”
“How many there?”
“At La Belle Équipe? Nineteen dead, another fifty wounded.”
“Our waitress?”
“She died in my arms. Just before her husband got there.”