by Mike Bond
“You’re fucking nuts,” I fumed, and walked out.
Early in the Game
MUST’VE WALKED a mile before I finally sat at a café near Pigalle, sweaty, thirsty, and hungry to understand.
Somebody was lying.
Maybe everybody was lying.
Had Harris really not known about Normandy? Was Mack not really working for him? Or for DGSE? More non-accountability? Who was telling the truth?
Simple spying, Harris wanted. You watch how DGSE operates and feed it back to the Agency, who apparently in this matter couldn’t find their dick in a rainstorm.
Nothing new there.
I would no more betray the French, I’d silently told him, than my own beloved country.
—
I’D ORDERED a second Ricard when Anne called.
“What’d he say?” as sharply as ever.
“They’re letting you guys take the lead.”
“What?” Her voice went up an octave. “What!”
“Hey, be nice. They’re offering tech support.”
She spat. I heard traffic in the background, a big boulevard. “Where are you?” I said.
“La République.”
“Nothing yet?”
“It’s early in the game, Pono.”
No it’s not, I nearly said. “Nobody recognize anything?”
“Not Mack, not Gisèle, not the BMW.”
I started walking toward the nearest Métro. “I’m going straight to Rue Beaurepaire, where the car was found.”
“Our people have already interrogated everyone there. No one recognizes a damn thing. As if they’re blind. How does that car suddenly get parked there, and nobody sees?”
“I’m going to try a different angle.”
“What angle?”
I didn’t know. “Tell you when I get there.”
“Tant pis,” she snapped. Which means anything from too bad to tough shit, often used sarcastically.
“I’ll call if I find something.”
“No.” Her voice rose. “Call me when you think you find something.”
I didn’t know how to say fat chance in French so I just said, “Tant pis.”
—
ON THE WAY I stopped in a bookstore for a copy of Submission. “You must read it,” the woman behind the counter said. “Finally someone is speaking the truth.”
“What is the truth?” I wondered aloud.
“The truth is we’ve had enough.” She took my money and gave me change. “Everyone knows somebody who’s been killed or handicapped by the terrorists. My cousin Barbara was on the Boulevard des Anglais when that Muslim killed eighty people with a truck and injured a hundred more. Both her legs are cut off above the thigh. She’s twenty-nine, with a husband and three kids. She can’t work as a teacher anymore, can’t take care of her kids, can’t be a wife to her husband ...”
I felt my guts congeal, didn’t want to hear this. “She and her family were there,” the woman went on, “celebrating July 14, our national holiday. The Boulevard was full of happy families, lots of kids running around ... lots of tourists who got killed too ...” For a moment she said nothing, then, “How could one man do this? How could he kill and injure all these people? Why?”
I shrugged. “Allah told him to.”
She nodded. “Yeah, Allah told him to. And we have eight million Muslims now. At least half of whom do whatever they think Allah, or the Koran, tells them to.”
I looked at her, a pretty face lined with strain, graying auburn hair. “Where do we go from here?”
She scoffed. “Most French people want the mosques closed, they want the imams and the terrorists sent home. But our government? They care more about their image in the eyes of the media than they care about the French people they’re supposed to represent.” She puffed, a mix of rage and discontent. “The government doesn’t represent the people.”
“Maybe they never have?” I had to add. “Few governments do.”
“Things have to change,” she said angrily. “One way or the other, things have to change.”
“That’s difficult,” I said. “Under the circumstances.”
“We’ve had revolutions before. Maybe it’s time again.”
—
LES QUATRE VENTS was the seventh café I got to. A block off la République, on Rue Beaurepaire, near where Mack’s BMW had been found. It was a lovely name – The Four Winds – reminiscent of the days you read about in the 12th century troubadour stories, when the Four Winds of the Earth were a known fact. Pinned inelegantly between three streets, it was ancient, from long before Baron Haussmann destroyed Paris by trying to make it beautiful.
At five in the afternoon Les Quatre Vents had few clients – two Arab kids playing hooky at the foosball, an old black man caressing a half-glass of red, two hookers getting lit to start the evening, a gray-haired woman in a pink beret with two plastic grocery bags and a cognac.
The patron was a beefy guy in a red wool vest with lots of little coats of arms on it. He had big red-haired forearms, a red beard, curly red hair and a round scarred face with a broken front tooth. I asked for an express and a glass of monbazillac, a sweet Dordogne white wine served cold, often with foie gras but that’s great by itself.
“Non.” He waved a negating finger, “I have a better one.” He snatched a pale bottle from the reefer. “Bergerac moelleux. From last fall. Exquisite, the taste of terroir –”
“I’ll take two.”
Nodding surprise, he poured two tall thin cold glasses and set them side by side between his huge fists, waiting for me to taste it.
“One’s for you,” I said. “For the suggestion.”
He laughed and tossed it off and wiped broad lips with the hairy back of a hand. “What you want?”
I tugged an envelope with pix of Mack, Gisèle, the BMW, and my reconstruction of Mustafa from my shirt and spread them out before him.
“Like I told the other cops,” he said, “I don’t recognize this couple. Never seen them.” He turned to check the other tables inside and out, the busy street beyond the wide windows. “And that car got towed away before I came on shift. But” – he jabbed a red-knuckled finger at Mustafa – “this guy I’ve seen.”
Nothing Short of Treason
“WHEN?” I said, afraid he’d stop talking.
“Thirty-one years I been here!” The patron slapped huge palms on the counter. “This bar.” He glanced around at the football banners and trophies and photos on the wood-paneled walls. “Sure, it’s near La République. But it didn’t use to be like this.”
I tried to slow my pulse, nervously watching Mustafa’s picture on the counter as if it might disappear, or the patron might change his mind and say Never seen him.
“This guy.” I nodded at Mustafa.
“Let me explain ...” He glanced at the window, then back to Mustafa. “This whole neighborhood was one big family. When people came in I greeted them like family, cared for them like family. I didn’t overcharge and everyone loved it here and it was always a warm place for companionship and a chat. We cared and watched out for each other. Now all the French people are gone, or dead.”
“It’s true in lots of places.” I glanced at Mustafa. “This guy ...”
He held up a palm. “Now when my wife walks down the street she gets spit on for not covering her head. For going out without a man to watch over her.” He swiped at the bar. “Like that famous writer said, Islam makes people unhappy. And now they want us all to be unhappy too.”
I glanced out the dappled window at the old, tired façades, the walls of graffiti and dirt. “Can’t you leave?”
“In this economy? Go back to St. Malo? What would I do?”
“There’s no jobs in St. Malo?”
He laughed exasperatedly. “Go there, try to find one.”
<
br /> I nudged Mustafa’s picture.
He snatched it in his rough red fingers, and I feared he’d crumple it. But he only stared at it more closely, from several angles.
An old man with a cane came in. The patron drew him a pression and came back. “He showed up” – he shrugged – “maybe six weeks ago. A top guy, the way these others kiss his ass. Another bigmouth lecturing a table of hairy acolytes about the moral depravity of France, and how true believers are going to punish us for our unveiled women in short skirts who drive everywhere as if they were men. Women rutting with men not their husbands.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said. Six weeks ago was just after Mustafa’s Passat had vanished in Fontainebleau Forest.
“So what do these guys do instead?” He spread his hands wide, seeking explication. “They fuck each other.”
“This guy,” I said, trying to seem relaxed, elbows on the counter, “he comes here?”
A hard grimace and a glance round the bar. His red face swung back to me. “My daughter grew up here, a lovely neighborhood back then. A star student. Now she’s come back to teach fifth grade in the Nineteenth, but it’s got so bad she can’t even do her class. The Arab boys, they attack everything. They throw crap ... they don’t show up for school, they beat up other kids because they’re not Arab. The Jewish kids got attacked so many times the families all left, many gone to Israel. The Arab girls, they beat up any girl, Arab or not, who wears a skirt, shows her hair or listens to music.”
He glanced away, back at me. I felt a rush of empathy. “One morning,” he rasped, “my daughter comes in to teach her class and someone’s shit on her desk.” He rapped meaty knuckles on the bar. “Why would anyone do that? When all she’s trying is to give them knowledge so they can get a job, a life that’s not a mix of welfare and crime? Why?”
I shook my head. “I have no answer.”
“It’s happened so fast,” he said. “In only thirty years. How?”
“This guy ...”
“These guys, the bad ones, they’re always coming through. They walk down the sidewalk with a mattress on their shoulders and disappear into one of the squats that’ve taken over the neighborhood. How many squats?” He raised his hands. “Right here? Hundreds. If not more.”
He poked Mustafa’s picture with a hairy forefinger. “This guy came, like I said, about six weeks ago. Then not for a while, then this week twice, met with a group of local wiseguys for an hour or so, then left with one of them.”
“With the same guys?”
“Yeah, the same.”
“He have a beard?”
“No, clean-shaven. But I think it’s him.”
“When?”
“Last night, is why I remember. And two nights before. Like I said.”
“What time?”
“Late, near midnight.”
“These other guys, you see them often?”
“Once a week maybe. They like to come in and run the neighborhood from my bar. Gives them a sense of power.”
I couldn’t believe that Mustafa, who must have known we were hunting him, would show up in Paris. But perhaps he scorned us, thought he was safe. After all, we weren’t far from the Islamic strongholds that French cops don’t enter. “What’s the second language in Paris?” goes the latest joke. The answer of course is “French.”
I went outside and called Anne. “Mon Dieu!” she gasped. “We should’ve run all the interviews again, after we got your Mustafa picture. It’s my fault –”
“Now maybe we can get him.”
“You’re an angel to have thought of this ... Okay,” she said, thinking fast now, “we insert a team, set up a site ... What’s it like, this bar?”
I described Les Quatre Vents. “Okay,” she repeated. I imagined her intently pacing, phone clamped to her face, a dead Gauloise between her fingers. “The basement – what’s it like? Is there an upstairs? Mezzanine? The building, how many stories? Give me the address, I’ll pull it up ... Mon Dieu Pono this is the best news in days – Merde! – I’m on my way!”
“But no setup,” I said. “You and I meet first, figure it out.”
“Any minute Mustafa could come walking through those café doors. Or later tonight. We have to cover this!”
“We do a big team it’ll spook him ... He’s got a sixth sense –”
“We don’t spook people. We take them down.”
“Right now, he’s mine.”
“No way. He’s on our soil.”
“Just get over here. I’m headed to a café on the corner of La République called The Pinnacle, where I can see both exits of Les Quatre Vents. If you can’t find it call me back.”
—
CARS AND TRUCKS CLATTERED past on La République, buses growled and vans rumbled. I sat at my café table in their racket and stink and tried to figure what to do.
If we brought in a team someone would know – most Muslim neighborhoods have excellent sentry networks – and Mustafa would vanish. If his guys came back to Les Quatre Vents, what could we learn? Unless we sent them to someplace empathetic like Morocco, it would take too long to find out.
Far better to tail Mustafa when he left the café, to where he was staying. To grab more folks. Maybe even Mack and Gisèle.
But DGSE wouldn’t take the risk. The steel nerves to have a major terrorist in your net and let him go to see where he went. DGSE would want action. Anne’s guys in the cellar. And on the little mezzanine with its red flowery wallpaper, its narrow wooden staircase and white piano in the corner beneath it. Her guys going in one at a time like café regulars, scruffy losers, who would be at my side if Mustafa came in. And if we did get contact, DGSI and GIGN would be out there to block the streets, commandos up and down the sidewalk and both sides of the back door.
Take them all down, then weed out the chaff.
Because France is already, thanks to Islam, a police state.
Anne pulled up another scratchy aluminum chair and sat beside me. She was puffing and her forehead was sweaty.
“Where’s your damn Indian?” I said.
“I’ve got an undercover car.” She coughed, puffed a bit more.
“You should quit smoking.”
“Fuck you.” She nodded her chin at Les Quatre Vents. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Tell me everything about it.”
I told her what I remembered. “Shit,” she snapped, huddling forward. “That’s all you got, from that place?”
“I was trying to get him to talk,” I said defensively.
“You have to see better, Pono.” She scanned me earnestly. “It could save your life. Mine too. Lots of people’s lives.”
“Goddammit I’m the one who found him.”
“True. You did.” She stood. “I’m going to wander in there. Back in ten.”
I checked my phone. 16:17 already. Mack a prisoner 29 hours. Gisèle 25. And what was I doing about it?
Over the top of Le Monde I checked that no one was coming in or out of Les Quatre Vents. Then a line at the top of the page caught my eye: “Corsican gangs attack Muslims.”
The article was about a gang of racist Corsicans that had demonstrated outside a welfare housing project of Muslim immigrants. You had to read all the way to the end of the article to learn the reason the Corsicans were protesting: a bunch of young North Africans from this project had set a pile of tires on fire in the middle of a street, ambushed the firefighters who arrived to put it out, tried to kill them with steel bars and bats and burned the fire trucks. And that was the cause of the “demonstration” by the “racist” Corsicans.
The media is getting just like the law: you have to read the fine print. Which most of the time ain’t there.
—
ANNE SAUNTERED BACK. “Let’s call Thierry.”
“No
way.” I put down Le Monde. “If we bring in a team it’ll spook Mustafa and we’ll never see him again. And he’ll keep killing people.”
She waved at the waiter, ordered a beer. “You want something?”
I glanced at my empty espresso. “Yeah.” I turned to the waiter, a tall skinny West African in a frayed brown-and-red sweater vest. “You got Bergerac moelleux?”
“Non, Monsieur.” He pointed a skinny ebony forefinger at Les Quatre Vents. “You must cross the street to get that.” He looked down at me. “A sauterne, instead?”
“A Ricard.” I watched him leave then turned to her. “Let’s you and I decide how to do this. Then we call Thierry.”
“How to do this? We put people in the cellar and in the back of that mezzanine. Once you ID him we grab him. That’s how we do this.”
“I want to protect the patron.”
“Bruno? He’s cool.”
It annoyed me she already knew his name. “Where would you set up? All the apartments around here are crammed with people ... You think you won’t be seen?”
“It’s just you and me.” She shrugged. “And my people in the cellar and up on the mezzanine.”
“How many?”
“Three on the mezz. Maybe five in the cellar. A few others in cars outside. Same old same old.”
“Way too many! We can’t without somebody seeing!”
“It’s what top management’s going to want.”
“Thierry doesn’t want it –” I sat back exasperated. This was stupidly going south. “Okay, let’s do nothing! Pretend it’s a dream, that the guy who looks like Mustafa is really a high school soccer coach. We should bother the big guns for that?”
She eyed me. “What are you saying?”
“Let’s be sure it’s real. Before we call Thierry.”
“No chance,” she scoffed. “He’d have us shot. First me.”
This made me grin and like her even more as she leaned back in the skinny aluminum chair in her black leather jacket and black leather boots watching me and Les Quatre Vents at the same time, as well as everyone sitting on the terrace or walking or driving past, all the while looking innocent and bored as Hell.