by Mike Bond
We came to an ancient arched stone bridge over a freshet. “For six hundred thousand years,” she said, looking through the tangled dark brush of the creek to pools of dying sunlight, “we humans have fought for this place.”
The wind down the creek bed was cold and scented with mossy leaf rot and pine. “In the 1930s,” she said, almost as if seeing it now, “a couple lived on that island, very rich art collectors. One of them was French, the other American. I forget who was who.” Anne started walking back toward the car. “When the Germans invaded, Hermann Goering came personally to the island to take their paintings. They died in Auschwitz ...”
From a bend in the Seine we looked upriver to Richard’s castle gleaming in the afterglow of the sun. Tall on its stony peak, coppery gold against the dark forested hills behind it.
“Give me a minute,” she said. “To call Mamie and the kids.”
She stood aside in the shadows and I went down through the dew-wet grass to the river edge where the water roiled and eddied. Ducks sitting along the shore began to move into the water so I headed back up to Anne.
She shut her phone. “Why,” I asked, “are we here? Why?”
She snatched my arm, fingernails biting in. “Let’s go to the car and I’ll show you. But first I wanted you to see these beautiful old homes, this great castle, this magical place called France that we’re fighting for.” She glared at me. “Come on, dammit. I’ll show you why!”
We drove away from the Seine up a broad avenue lined with chestnut trees about two klicks to Le Grand Andely, a larger town of gray concrete buildings – once a magnificent medieval village, she said, firebombed in 1940 by the Germans as part of a plan to destroy all the towns along the Seine.
At the top end of town stood a small Gothic cathedral of perfect proportions. “The Germans damaged it, but it survives ... There were Roman villas here, Neanderthal clans –”
I scanned the darkening hills on both sides, their jagged teeth of concrete housing towers in the last orange rays of the sun. “Turn there,” she said, pointing to a narrow, battered alley between two of them.
More Than You Know
NIGHT HAD FALLEN, a few dirty stars poking through the haze. I parked the Beast in a far corner of the sandy parking lot between two welfare towers, in front of Batiment 2C. “Now what?”
“Two things,” she said quietly. “First: if I ever call or message you the words take tomorrow off, that means come here at once, park right here, and a man will come out wearing an OGC Nice soccer shirt. You will take him immediately to DGSE. You will be totally responsible for his security till he gets there. Got it? Repeat it.”
I did, twice.
“Second: We all know Mack had something going here. We’ve geo-located him to this building last month. But couldn’t see in.”
“No links?”
“We did a rundown on every resident and find no connection with our lists of fundamentalists or sympathizers.”
“A building this size, has to be some.”
“Not even one. We’ve picked up a lot of DNA, done some good listening. So far no hits.”
“Thierry knows all this?”
“Of course.”
I exhaled slowly. “Why didn’t you guys tell me?”
“We had to be sure.”
“Of what?”
“What side you were on.”
“I’m on both, US and France.”
“We’re not the same.”
“Who says?”
“We can’t be ... What about Harris?”
“Says he doesn’t know.” I watched her. “Did Gisèle?”
She shook her head, eyes on the graffiti writhing across the pale concrete walls. “You’re the one who said she didn’t.”
“You’re saying no one knows,” I insisted, “what Mack was doing here?”
“I planned to ask him, the day he disappeared. He was you, not us, but we were staying straight with each other. At least that was the deal ...”
“You haven’t stayed straight with me.”
“I have.” She looked at me out of those dark oval eyes. “More than you know.”
“Then tell me what I don’t know.”
She unclipped her seat belt. “First we check out this place.”
It was the kind of building you see by the thousands in France, concrete towers for people the government keeps letting in but has no jobs for, places where the wattage is low, there’s blood on the stairs and drug wars in the courtyards. Hallways smelling of urine and rodents, many doors broken and fixed with steel plates. The carpet sticky with old grit.
Where even the younger girls are veiled. Most of the graffiti is in Arabic except the promises to kill the French.
We climbed to the eighth floor, Anne behind me with a scarf around her hair and face, showing only her dark eyes. At the top two steel doors squealed open onto a pallid hallway. “They could be here anywhere,” she said.
“Who?”
“Mack’s connection.”
“You saying it was drugs?”
“In Islam it’s good to sell drugs to the infidels. To fund the jihad ... The stuff comes in on trucks. And goes out in little plastic packets.”
“All this,” I sighed, “has nothing to do with Mack.”
“Imagine he was trying to find his way into a group that might be linked to Mustafa, what better way than to be some yokel American looking for hash?”
I looked at the scarred, graffitied walls. “We’re not just playing cops and robbers here ... what are we up to?”
“Hopefully.” She knocked on a battered door. “We’ll soon figure that out.”
—
IT TOOK THREE HOURS. We knocked on every door and some of them answered. Anne showed them Mack’s photo and asked if they’d ever seen him. Said he was her boyfriend and he’d gone away and she wondered if he’d gone with someone from here. And I was his brother from America and we would pay a thousand euros to anyone who could help us find him. Said it first in French then in Arabic, for those who didn’t know French.
Her photo of Mack was the same I’d shown Bruno, Mack sitting on the Indian, big and muscled in a black AC/DC T-shirt, a sunny smile full of white teeth. A broad, deeply tanned face, bright black eyes. A woman’s hand over his shoulder but that part of the photo had been cut away.
“Is that you?” I pointed to where the photo had been cut.
“That’s Gisèle, on the back of my bike.”
“I know it’s your bike.”
“Then what’d you ask for?”
Behind the first door a man with a bushy beard in a sleeveless undershirt would not let us in. He peered at Mack’s photo a moment, biting a lower lip with a lone, twisted tooth.
From the room behind him came TV whisper, a child’s complaint and a woman’s soft murmur. He shook his head and shut the door.
The next door did not answer. The third was a gaggle of five children, no adults. No, the kids said, never we see this man.
They were all the same. On the fifth floor a woman with a bruised face looked at us in an instant of hope and faced away. Many apartments had children but no adults. Hashish smell lay heavy on the chilled moldy air, and scents of North African and Senegalese cooking. And in the whole bare building a kind of hollow acceptance that this, like these sordid gray mildewed walls, is what life is.
And no one had ever seen anyone who looked like Mack.
—
WERE THEY DEAD, Mack and Gisèle? Or were Anne and I chasing phantoms in Normandy while they were still alive but undergoing what?
What was I not seeing?
We took the A13 back, exiting the St. Cloud tunnel with Paris spread before us like a million chandeliers. And towering over them the pinnacle of France, the world’s most-beloved structure blazing its message of beauty and freedom to eve
ryone.
What if I had to give up Mack and Gisèle to save the Tower? And how many lives?
In the end, would that be the deal?
We grabbed a quick meal on the Champs Élysées, Anne halting me on the broad sidewalk under the young trees to look up and down the world’s most beautiful avenue, the Louvre at one end and the Arc de Triomphe at the other, with the Défense Tower beyond, they and the vast city around and beyond them all glowing with the brilliance of human life.
We do all this and so much more. We could be gods.
—
AFTER MIDNIGHT I pulled up the Beast in front of Anne’s place on a side street off the Rue du Temple in the 3rd. She checked her watch. “Early for us.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed tired eyes, dry numbed skin.
“I keep running it through my head,” she said, “everything Mack and I did, everything he said, but can’t find a connection. I’m so exhausted ...”
I looked at her, magnificent in all her weariness and pain. “You need sleep. More than anything, sleep.”
“This is what I was trained to do.” She looked at me pleadingly. “And I can’t find a clue. No witnesses, no data trail, no pix, nothing. What am I doing wrong?”
I scanned the Beast’s beat-up blue dashboard. “You’re not doing anything wrong.” It’s like a wound, I wanted to add, how it takes over your every instant with its howling demand. But no, the wounded don’t need to tell each other how bad they hurt.
She glanced at me, at her front door. “You don’t need to drive all the way home.”
I smiled, took her hand. “What a wonderful idea ...”
“But,” she whispered, “we have to be quiet ...”
Through a coded doorway up half a flight to the elevator cage. A tiny elevator where it was hard not to rub against each other.
A third-floor tiled landing and four large bolted doors. She unlocked the left into a red-painted hallway then a wide living room and dining room across from it, kitchen to one side, and two doors at the end of the hall.
“Mamie sleeps in there,” she whispered, pointing to one door. “And André and Julie in the other.” She opened a convertible couch in the living room with a narrow bony mattress on coiled springs. “You sleep here.”
“Where are you sleeping?”
“With one of the kids.”
I took her hand. “No you aren’t.”
She looked at me, startled. “We have to be up in three hours.”
I held her hand. “I’m lying down with my clothes on. You too.”
She shrugged, turned toward the bathroom. “Have to pee.”
She came back and stretched out on the bed and arranged a pillow under her head. I took the other pillow and lay beside her, bedsprings squeaking, and held her in my arms. She didn’t protest and quickly fell asleep, breathing softly, her body warm against me. I kissed her nose, breathing in the rough fragrant essence of her, and lay with my right arm across her slender waist despite the pain it caused my bullet-damaged shoulder. I couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to, couldn’t understand why being there with her made me so happy.
—
FROM A DEEP SLEEP she shook me, a lean breast against my ribs. Outside still dark, the streets silent. “I just had a dream,” she whispered. “Have to tell you ... before I forget ... Mustafa’s staying in a squat not far from République, or that Mack and Gisèle are ... or ...”
“Anne!” I whispered, “say it!”
She was asleep. Mustafa in a squat not far from République. Mack and Gisèle ...
I watched her as she snored softly beside me, something so holy in her aura of sleeping woman and mother that I was overwhelmed. As by the tasks before us.
Morning came too early, naked, cold and dark. The springs wailed as she climbed out of bed. A toilet flushed, a brief rush of shower and then the smell of coffee and she came back and kicked me. “Out of bed. Or I fold you up in it.”
That sounded like a fine idea. But I sat up slowly, tugged on my shoes and realized they were on the wrong feet so I tried again. There came a whack upside my head that made my brain ring, but it was just Anne – “Hurry! I don’t want my kids coming out and you there still half-asleep!”
I found the WC and fell asleep on the seat till she banged on the door.
With her razor I managed a quick scrape of my face, tucked a salvo of her Nivea under each arm, brushed my teeth with the nearest washcloth and was ready to go.
Her son André was seven, I remembered, and Julie five. André was slender but solid, with truculent black eyes under a black mop, a chiseled face like a Roman statue, a muscular soft tread. Julie came out moments later, slim and athletic with a cameo face, blonde hair, and a shy, fearful air.
“This is my friend Pono,” Anne said. “He’s a surfer.”
“Oh yeah?” André offered, a little more interested.
“From Hawaii,” Anne added.
“I want to go there,” Julie said.
“Right now you’re going to school, remember?”
We sat at a wobbly wooden table as the first orange clouds began to glow beyond the rooftops. Anne had made strong Italian coffee with steamed milk to pour on top and we toasted last night’s leftover baguettes covered with butter and Bonne Maman wild cherry jam. Anne’s hair was all tangled and when she turned from the kids to smile at me it lit up the room.
The second bedroom door clanked open and a gray-haired woman in a black robe slippered down the hall. She too was slender, tall as Anne, a paler, wrinkled face. “Mamie!” Anne said. “You should sleep.”
“The coffee smelled too good.” Mamie went to the counter and poured herself a cup, then turned on me. “And you are?”
“This is Pono,” Anne said. “He works with me.”
“I see.”
Anne stood. “Julie, André, finish up! Pono and I will take you to the Métro.”
“I’ll take them,” Mamie said, “to the Métro.”
“We can go ourselves,” Julie said.
“I’ll be dead first,” Mamie said.
“Don’t say that!” Anne snapped.
Mamie scowled at Anne and me. “Out!”
“Mon Dieu!” Anne sighed in the elevator, fluffing her hair over her jacket collar and settling her pistol holster under her arm.
“She doesn’t like me, Mamie.”
“She doesn’t want me with any man. Afraid I’ll fall in love again and make more babies then my new husband will be killed like Éric. She’s Manichean, Mamie.”
“But she helps take care of the kids –”
“Without her I couldn’t do this. After Éric was killed they wanted to give me more time to be with the kids, get past the horror of it. Mamie said no, I’ll come and live with you and take care of the kids till you find the ones who killed Éric.”
“She was pretty fierce about taking the kids to school ...”
“She lost her father in the Algerian War and her husband in Iraq One, and now we’ve lost her son Éric too ... She has a very dim view of safety.”
Do You Pray?
WE WOKE THE BEAST and drove to 36 Rue du Bastion and the new home of the Criminal Brigade and Anti-Terrorist Section, the “ATS” of the Paris Police Judicière.
The PJ, as it’s called, had lived for many years on Île de la Cité, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame. Its historic edifice at 36 Quai des Orfèvres is famous in thousands of court cases, in movies and TV, and as home to Simenon’s renowned series of Inspector Maigret.
In a new location, argued its proponents, we can group all our various divisions, have an inside shooting range, good holding cells, enough room for everyone. Quai des Orfèvres is way too ancient, cold in winter, boiling in summer, full of roaches and rodents, lousy tech facilities, overcrowded ...
It now soared up in shiny newness at 36 Rue du Bastion,
which got its name from a fortified tower that stood here centuries ago in the stone wall defending Paris. The new HQ is dizzying to look at: a great shiny serpentine slithering monster in a snake’s new skin punching up into the sky over what had recently been railroad yards and before that the fortified wall, then pasture, and two thousand years ago a forest of oaks so tall and thick they blotted out the sky.
The new edifice still has that interior strangeness where things are jammed semi-temporarily, don’t yet fit, yet there’s still too much emptiness. Glossy crammed hallways, wide dark rooms of glowing screens, scowling faces pinned to bulletin boards. Business suits and Kevlar, computers and guns. Echoes, quiet conversations, a sense of intense purpose.
In one of the most secret sections of the French police, DGSI has built a database of the more than 22,000 S-List Muslims in France – those known to be involved in either planning or supporting potential terrorist attacks. In it is every detail they can find – vehicle plates, driver’s licenses, telephone numbers, camera sightings, criminal history, networks of contacts, and any other information that can be gleaned from the nearly infinite megabytes of data screaming every instant across their screens.
“Though the real number of probable terrorists is much higher,” said the ATS deputy chief, Tomàs Cribari. “And it’s not just the young men any longer; it’s often kids 14 to 18, who under the 1905 French law on the protection of minors can’t be held or punished for their crimes. And now young women too – crazy as it seems, given their jail-like existence – they’re the foot soldiers in some of these attacks.”
Tomàs looked at Anne. “Just like you guys, and DGSI too, we face increasing dangers with increasingly insufficient resources. The avalanche of trained terrorists returning to France from Iraq, Syria and Turkey is doubling every six months. And the home-grown radicals are increasing even faster ... and you can’t even talk to them because all they do is recite passages from the Koran and tell you you’ll be tortured in Hell forever.”