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.”