Goodbye Paris

by Mike Bond

  She was unforeseeable – angry one moment and cheery the next. Her smile lit up a room; her scowl made me fear for my life. I’d left Tahiti happy to be free of three women: how was it that I suddenly cared about this one? When she clearly wanted little to do with me?

  “And what do we do,” she said, “about your folks?”

  “Not yet,” I said, returning to the present.

  She sat forward jiggling the table. “But?”

  “But what?”

  She grimaced. “We’re not supposed to shut them out.”

  I was sick of this. Dizzy and sick with weariness and time change. Scared I couldn’t save Mack and Gisèle, disgusted at every instant wasted. That I’d lose Mustafa too. “We’re just confirming hunches,” I sighed. “Before we waste their time.”

  “Mother of Christ,” she whispered.

  I took this in, watching the frenetic pirouette of vehicles around the square, the determined faced-down passersby, the threadbare clientele of this bar in a place more Algiers or Dakar than Paris.

  It couldn’t have happened by accident, this tidal wave of poor hungry people shaking France to its foundations. This fast-growing minority that hates it. Somebody had wanted this, but who? What were they getting out of it? From whom?

  Anne squeezed my hand, her own strong yet gentle. Like her, powerful but slim. “Are there possibly people,” I said, “within the government, a political party ... behind all this?”

  She looked around, at the immensity of it. “All this?” Shook her head. “Too big for us to deal with.”

  “But if it’s the cause ...”

  “Right now we’re battling the consequences. Which are a catastrophe ... An avalanche of catastrophes, each bigger than the last ...” She shook her head, a rejection. “We don’t have time to analyze why ...”

  “But that’s how you win.”

  “Win?” she snorted. “We’re just trying not to lose.”

  It was getting dark and starting to rain, car headlights dancing foggily around the gray monument. “Even now, we can’t keep up with the thousands of crazies we have to watch,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “More than twenty thousand, to be precise. And lots more coming back ...”

  “Twenty thousand what?”

  “The S File. Twenty-two thousand Muslims with terrorist links, many who’ve gone to Syria or Iraq and returned. A lot of them we don’t even know where they are.”

  “Like Mustafa.”

  “And we’re already spread so thin we can’t begin to cover them all. While the government keeps cutting our budgets.” She nodded fiercely, as if she’d made a point. I followed her gaze through the misty evening toward the bedraggled statue and fountain of La République, thronged by bongo drummers, beggars, and illegal Africans selling weed and trinkets. I tried not to remember when I’d been here before, when the glorious statues of dolphins graced the elegant granite square. Now there were store windows advertising “Wall Street English.” On the other side, cafés, banks, restaurants, sporting goods stores, a few meandering cars, Arabic graffiti sprawled across doors, walls, gates shutters and half the vehicles hunched along the dogshit curb.

  “Who funded it?” I persevered. “Who got paid? To trash this once-beautiful place, to trash France?”

  She gave me one of those dreary you’re a dreamer look, as if to say that I might as well try to walk to the moon.

  “Who won?” I said. “Who lost?”

  “Pono.” She squeezed my hand again. “Let’s not get in over our heads.”

  But the only way to get things done, I’ve learned the hard way, is get way in over your head.

  France had spent hundreds of years and millions of deaths fighting Islam. Originating about 620 under Mohammed, Islam had conquered in its first 100 years most of the globe between China and the Atlantic – the largest, fastest territorial conquest in human history – from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iran, across all the Middle East to Turkey and up into Central Europe, across North Africa to the Atlantic. An empire drenched in blood and fear that by 720 had spread to Spain and Portugal and north into France, raping, pillaging and burning its way toward the complete conquest of Europe. Till Charles Martel, Charles the Hammer, stopped it dead at Tours, only 125 miles from Paris, in 732. The battle that saved Western civilization.

  And now to invite this danger back to undermine your own nation, the way of life of your people, your culture going back thousands of years, seemed nothing short of treason.

  Catastrophe

  HAD TO CALL Major Hair-Ass, so I left Anne at our sidewalk table and ducked into a stone doorway down the street.

  He seemed less than elated to hear my voice.

  “I’ve been checking around where Mack’s car was found,” I said.

  “French already did that.”

  “They didn’t get everyone.”

  “You’re wasting time.”

  “There’s a café here, the patron ID’d Mustafa.”

  “The one they lost in Fontainebleau? He may have nothing to do with Mack and Gisèle.”

  I stared at the phone with hatred, softened my voice. “Why do you think that?”

  “Why do I think it?” I could feel his dislike. “Because I’ve been at it a Hell of a lot longer than you, buddy-boy. That’s how I know.”

  I glanced at the doorway’s ancient pitted limestone blocks and reminded myself how much I might need him to help save Mack and Gisèle. “So who’s on this?”

  “I told you already. Somebody has to go first. For this, it’s the French.”

  I remembered heart-wrenching tapes I’d heard in SF training that were from way back in Vietnam, the voices of Marines in a firebase being overrun as they called in artillery and air strikes on their own position. Stoic, no screaming. Realizing they’d been abandoned and were about to die.

  “What’s with Mack and Gisèle?” I finally said.

  “Not a damn new thing.”

  “You sent out word?”

  A moment of silence. “Word?”

  “To all the nutcase imams and mullahs and Islamic websites and all these other crazy fundamentalists in France and all across Europe! To the fucking terrorism funders in Kuwait, Saudi and all those places! That we want Mack and Gisèle back!”

  “I told you: we don’t have the resources.”

  I huffed. “You mean Mack was SF, not yours. Therefore he’s not your problem –”

  “No,” Harris said tiredly, “not that. The ‘truth’ we’re getting from the French is no more bad news about Muslims.”

  “Which French?”

  “All the way from the Imam-in-Chief.”

  I snickered. That was a joke, coming from Harris. “But you’re letting the French run it all, carry the ball, as you’d probably say ... ?”

  “I hate football analogies.” Harris exhaled tentatively, as though his stomach hurt. “Particularly from guys who’ve never played the game.”

  “I have.” I tried to reach him across uncountable dimensions and technologies. “So why are we throwing this game?”

  You could feel him stiffen, right down the digital wave. “You give us everything you can learn inside the French system. That’s your job.”

  “My job is to help find Mack and Gisèle.”

  “Says who?”

  “Me.”

  “You? We don’t give a shit about you!” He stumbled for words, in frustration. “It’s the big picture, you idiot! And you just don’t get it. Just like you didn’t get it before!”

  “You mean when you crookedly sent me up?”

  He laughed bellicosely, and I reminded myself, Never stop hating him. Not that I ever had.

  He sighed like a patient father with a stupid, stubborn son. “You can be sure, if needed, we’ll be there for you.”

  “Good to know.” I rub
bed my aching back against cold stone, watched the serpentine mist slink up the ancient streets and hide Les Quatre Vents behind a veil of foreboding, the few cars like scavenging sea creatures with darting yellow eyes.

  —

  “IT’S YOUR BALL,” I told Anne amiably when I got back to the café.

  “C’est notre ballon? Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?” (What does that mean?)

  I told her most of my call with Harris. “Shit,” she said, then, “Okay, have it your way.”

  “It’s not my way. It’s Harris, Home Office.” I looked across La République at Les Quatre Vents. “Too dark, too much fog, can’t see it well. Have to go back.”

  She stood. “Me too.”

  I held her arm. “No chance. You’d stand out there like tits on a boar.”

  “What?” she cocked her head.

  “Comme des tetons sur un sanglier,” I tried, but she’d stopped listening.

  She yanked out her phone. I pointed at her. “You bring in a team and I’ll shoot you, I swear. With a water pistol that fires yellow dye you can never wash off.”

  She gave me the finger, stood and walked away, turned back. “I’ll be in the car.”

  I gave her back the finger, stepped out into La République and almost got hit by a woman on a bicycle with no light. “Asshole!” she yelled as she zipped past, her wet raincoat buckle slapping my face.

  —

  LES QUATRE VENTS was warm and cozy. Seven men at the bar, four Arabs and three old black guys. Somebody’d been recently smoking hash, and its odor on his clothes had sunk into the room.

  Seven tables, four empty and three with guys sitting round them, all Arabs. Espresso cups with cigarette butts squashed into their dregs, empty pastis glasses, cigarette foil on the floor – even though inside French bars there’s supposed to be no smoking.

  I leaned against the counter. Bruno came over with a Bergerac moelleux. “Nobody here you care about.”

  “Who are those guys?”

  He capped the bottle, glanced at the flyspecked clock on the flyspecked wall. “Come back ten-thirty. Before that you’re wasting your time.” He slapped huge palms on the counter, snatched my glass. “That’ll be ninety centimes.”

  I put down a euro coin with a German eagle on it and walked out, sucking in the salty cold Paris night.

  —

  ANNE WAS WAITING around the corner in an old brown Opel too beat-up to look cop.

  “Nobody yet,” I said as I slid into the battered passenger seat. “I go back at 22:30.”

  She checked her watch. “Two hours and ten minutes ...”

  “You go grab something to eat, I’ll keep watch. Then we reverse.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  I scanned the street again. “Damn work rots your guts.”

  “Mack used to say that.”

  “We used to say it about Afghanistan.” I watched the mist thicken on the windshield and listened to the silence between me and her. It was charged, this silence. Resolute. Not the silence of peace.

  “Mack talked about you,” she said.

  “I hope you didn’t believe him.”

  “Gisèle too. That twice you saved his life ...”

  I tried to remember when this was. “He exaggerates sometimes.”

  “Yeah?” she smiled, tugging a curl of dark hair under her chin. “And that lots of women have the hots for you ...”

  “More lies.”

  “No doubt. I’m glad I don’t.”

  I grinned. “Me too.”

  She switched on her phone. “Now what?” I said.

  “Calling the kids.”

  I tried not to listen but her voice with that incredible strong softness to it resonated in my ears and wouldn’t be shut out. First with André about his math and that if this other kid was being nasty, just ask him what have I done to offend you ... Then with Marie, Listen, Chérie, La Fontaine is fun, you must try, then a few words explaining why ... He has so many double meanings ... To both kids, I’ll be home soon, we’ll have a long weekend ...

  Then Mamie’s fiery voice slicing through the wavelengths. Their two voices intertwining as I watched out the Opel’s windows for danger and tried not to listen – this sharing and harmony among women so different than among men.

  She killed the phone and sat up in her seat. “Damn, life is complicated.”

  I chuckled. “No shit.”

  No one was wandering the foggy streets. My body sensed no danger. “In the last few weeks,” I said after a while, “since Mustafa got ID’d coming into France and you started working with Mack, was there never any clue this might be coming?”

  “I’ve gone over it a thousand times. We shared what we could, each staying within our borders. If there’d been something I would’ve known.”

  “How’d you work it?”

  “Mack brought in all your international stuff, I did the local and national. We made a good team.”

  Already it hurt to think of Mack as if we’d lost him, this hulking generous guy I loved like the brother I’d never had. If you weren’t so fucking stupid, he’d told me one time in a Hanoi hooker bar, I’d think we were related.

  I smiled at that. “In danger he was good to work with.”

  “He was super-smart, wise, careful, caring.” She faced me, sudden tears in her eyes. “You think it’s not killing me, this?”

  “You knew Gisèle?”

  “I had dinner with them a couple times, lunch once just her and me.”

  “Do you think he was fucking this woman with the blonde-dyed black hair?”

  “No way.” Anne shook her head. “Mack and Gisèle had this intense erotic focus on each other ... No one was gonna break that up. You even got near it you got electrocuted. It heated up a room. And the funny thing was they didn’t know. We’d sit there having couscous and I’d suddenly wonder why the room was so hot, looked up and there they were, Gisèle and Mack, staring at each other ...”

  “So what was hardest, working with him?”

  “Hardest? He had to work for Harris. That was the hardest.”

  “Why? He could’ve gone outside, made three times the money.”

  She tilted her head in agreement. “But he was like you, Mack was.” She brushed away a tear. “So damn stupid he always did what he thought was right.”

  I smiled with love and sorrow.

  We’d been using the past tense about Mack. I feared it was true.

  —

  “MAYBE MUSTAFA won’t show.” Anne flipped on the wipers to clear mist off the windshield. “It’s like so much of this work ... for damn nothing ...”

  “True.” It was nice to have it in the open, this truth. “Then what drives you so hard?” I had to say it, tired of it hanging between us like a lead curtain.

  She nodded, eyes on the street. “After Éric was killed I was ... useless. They gave me a month off, then I came back and was useless and they gave me another month. Every night, every day, every moment I was choked by this most barbarous sorrow ... While having to be there every minute for the kids, make it easier for them ...” She stopped to watch a single car waver its way toward us down Beaurepaire, rolled down her window and pulled out her Glock till the car passed.

  “Then I realized” – she slid the Glock back in its holster – “that the only way I could survive was to find the ones who killed Éric. And kill them one by one.”

  This was the first I’d heard that her husband had been murdered. “Like the Israelis did to the Palestinians after Munich,” I said.

  “It was right, what they did.”

  “Dead killers never kill again.”

  She bit her lip, scanned the street. “After two months of sorrow I showed up at the office and said I can’t leave this job. Not while the people who killed Éric are still out there.”

>   “And the kids?” I said.

  She sat back. “What about them?”

  “How they doing?”

  “Two years after their father’s death? They miss him every day. Like I do.”

  Perhaps this was meant to make me keep my distance, but it only made me like her more. “You going to find another man?”

  She scoffed. “You are a prick, aren’t you?”

  “Kids need a father. Not just a Mom.”

  “What do you know about kids?” She pushed back against her seat and clenched the steering wheel. I thought she was angry, then she turned and gave me a look of such kind affection that I leaned across and kissed her, softly, delightedly when she didn’t pull back, just put her fingers to my cheek, ready to restrain me or simply an affectionate touch.

  The taste of her lips, soft yet resistant, relenting and pushing back, the taste of her tongue, her saliva warm and welcoming, dissolving in mine, made me shiver, her silky hair caressing my cheek, her slender neck in the crook of my arm.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she snapped, pulling back.

  “Why not?” I said stupidly. “Kiss me again.”

  She sat facing forward, a hard look on her face. “We’re here to hunt terrorists. Not to act like teenagers in Daddy’s car on some dark street.”

  I took her hand. It was rough and clenched, a little chilled. “Since Éric died, have you made love with anyone?”

  She gave me a nice crack alongside the head. “Who you think you are, asking such questions?”

  “Have you?”

  She sat there fuming. In the darkness I could barely make out her features, her profile with its high brow topped by curls, her sharp nose, her full lips and strong chin. She turned to me, dark eyes glistening. “Why do you ask such questions?”

  “Look, Anne, the deuil is over.”

  “You! What do you know about grieving?”

  I told her, of friends lost in firefights and a beloved father recently dead. She sat there, hands gripped in her lap. “We’re all the walking wounded,” she said finally.

  “Have you?”