“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.”
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.
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.