SHE LAY TWISTED under the bike in a pool of blood behind a yellow tape barrier under the psychotropic flashing red and blue emergency lights of police cars and ambulances. Face-down, legs crumpled, feet sideways, jacket bloodied from the bullet hole in her spine and from another in the back of her helmet through the middle of her brain.
If I’d been with you, this never would have happened.
“Two guys on a big black bike,” a cop said when I showed him my DGSE badge. “Black jackets, black helmets. Came up behind her.” He nodded at the sidelines. “We’ve got a witness.”
“She always checks her mirrors,” I said. “Nobody comes up behind her.”
He nodded at her body. “These guys did.”
I stepped over the yellow tape and knelt to her, hands and knees in her blood, horrified by her smashed bloody face. Her cheek had crushed against the gritty paving stone, her mouth of shattered teeth draining blood.
If I’d been with you, this never would have happened.
It wasn’t Anne.
I looked again, stunned, horrified, beyond joy. “Don’t touch her!” the cop yelled. I yanked back my hand, bent to the rear of the bike to check the plate.
75 – Paris. Anne’s.
I knelt to the dead woman again. She wore the shocked expression of not knowing what had happened.
“C’mon, buddy, back off,” the cop said.
“This is my partner’s bike and helmet. But it’s not her.” I felt suddenly sorry for this dark-haired girl with the smashed face. And so happy it wasn’t Anne I was trying not to cry.
I stood dizzily, streetlights dancing in my eyes, remembered to breathe, tried to wipe the dead woman’s blood from my hands onto my jeans. Stupidly realized I could call Anne. Because she wasn’t dead.
She answered right away.
“Where the Hell are you?” I almost screamed.
“Somebody stole my damn bike. I’m so pissed! Thierry’s giving me a ride home.”
“You were dead ...” I couldn’t stop choking. “You were dead ... fifteen minutes ago. You just came back to life ...”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The girl who stole your bike? She was wearing your helmet, too, when somebody shot her in the back of the head ten minutes ago, Porte de la Chapelle.”
“My God!” Anne caught her breath. “They thought she was me.”
I tried to wipe the woman’s blood from my knee. “They thought she was you.”
“Oh God, the poor girl ...”
“When they find they killed the wrong person they’re coming back for you.”
“Fine with me.”
“As bait? No way.”
“Anybody comes after me, they die.”
—
I WAITED on the sidewalk outside her place till Thierry dropped her off then I hustled her inside. We rode the clanking elevator to the third floor holding each other, her damp hair against my chin.
“I thought you were dead,” I whispered.
She burrowed her face into my shoulder. “For how long?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. Till I saw her face.”
“I’m sorry.” She gripped me tighter. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
The elevator opened. Anne unlocked her door. “We have to be quiet.”
In the apartment she unfolded the sofa bed and briefly smiled at me out of the darkness, big white teeth and wide generous mouth, black eyes sparkling with the distant glow of a single streetlight. She who had died and come back to life, I who had lost her and found her again.
Her odor, the heat of her, was like fire. Taking off her clothes, she was the first woman I’d ever known, the best, the one different from the rest. She eased out of her blouse and slid down her skirt, smiling and kissing me, kicked her skirt aside and stood back in pink see-through underpants that showed her dark crotch.
We kissed standing there, again and again, my palms inside her underpants gripping her ass as she shoved her hips against me and her tongue against mine and her breasts into my chest, my cock hard in the cleft of her thighs.
She lay back on the bed and I kissed between her thighs through the underpants, licking them wet, the insides of her thighs, her lovely hairy crotch. She bent up her knees for me to pull the panties off, then twisted her shoulders for me to take off her bra. I kissed her breasts and nipples and her lovely soft skin all over, kissed the lovely tiny fuzz of her belly button and down into her lovely crotch, rubbing my lips softly and licking as she eased, moaned, sighed and rocked her hips to my tongue, then finally arched back and gasped, sighed, spread her legs and softly relaxed. We snuggled and caught our breath and then she slid down and took me in her mouth, the most indescribably delicious feeling, then we rolled around a while taking turns and ended up fucking like the pastor and his wife, me on top, while the couch squeaked and howled like boiling monkeys. “We’ll wake Mamie,” she gasped. “Let’s get on the floor.”
Down on the oriental carpet atop the rattly ancient herringbone parquet. Being totally exhausted made it even deeper – we were too fatigued to fight it, and it took us down a hot red tunnel of total abandonment and bliss. Plus the first time with someone new is always hot. You come out of it burningly alive, fiercely awake, totally released.
Silly as it sounds, at the end we came at the same time.
What joy.
—
“YOU HAVE TO CHANGE everything,” I said. “You have to start a new life.” It was still night and we were holding each other under the down coverlet on the bumpy mattress. The awareness of how miraculously she’d escaped death, of the skill and determination of her killers, and the risks she now faced were beginning to sink into both of us.
“When I got back to where I’d parked the bike,” she said, “it was gone. I walked up and down the street, wondering if my memory was bad ...”
“Your memory’s never bad.”
“Then I realized in that neighborhood things get stolen all the time ... I was so angry, after losing Yasmina, all that ... I called Thierry, he had arrived at the scene, he came right over ...”
“The two guys in black, they must have followed her, that girl, as she took off on your bike.”
Anne shook her head sadly. “Poor thing.”
“Did they want to kill you because of our investigation? Did they know it was you?”
She nodded. “Seems so.”
“Or was it because of your husband, fear you’d track down his killers?”
“That had nothing to do with Mustafa ... Éric had identified a Chechnyan gang in the Pyrenees, they were selling heroin from Spain, pushing terrorism and burning synagogues, had killed a couple of policemen ...”
“And they killed him?”
She didn’t answer, then, “I’ll send Mamie and the kids to Normandy,” she whispered, lips against my shoulder. “Chez Cousine Claudine. Nobody will find them there.”
“And you?” I wanted to ask her more about her husband, but now wasn’t the time.
“I’m staying here, let them come to me ...”
“No. They’ll get you.” I kissed her forehead, gentle skin over hard bone, imagined her pulsing brain beneath. “We have to find another place. And I’m not leaving you. Not for one moment.”
“You want more sex, that’s all.”
“I’d be crazy not to.”
She laced an arm between my ribs and shoulder. “My job hasn’t changed. Nor has yours.”
She was right, as usual. But no matter, I wasn’t leaving her alone.
She soon was breathing softly, the fatigue lines of her face easing in the first glimmer of dawn. 05:29 ... another hour then get up. I nestled against her, breathed in and out with her till our heartbeats came together, inhaled the different fragrances of her hair and the glossy scents of her skin. And feared this was all fantasy due to shock and horror, and any instant I’d wake up to the real Anne twisted in a pool of blood beneath the bike.
Reborn. I prayed thanks for Anne’s life and sorrowed for the other girl.
—
TWO HOURS LATER I stomped into Thierry’s office, Anne unwillingly behind me. Nisa was standing by the window looking angry. “Why’d you guys hit Yasmina’s?” I almost yelled. “When I was trying to talk with her?”
He gave me a curious look, as if how stupid can you be? “We were told to.”
Anger surged from my skin, my bones, the grimace on my face. “By who?”
Nisa said nothing. Thierry eased back in his chair, as if to gain time. “France isn’t one country.” As if he were telling me something personal and deep, a divorce in the family. “France is not France. Not anymore.”
I was too ravaged by Anne’s near-death, Yasmina’s death and the missed chance to get Mustafa, to follow such circumlocutions. “I don’t care.”
He gave me a bleak look. “Use your head, for something besides knocking down doors.”
Too angry to sit, I stood by Nisa peering out the stained, streaked window at the courtyard where rain spattered puddles and ran rivulets down the curb. “I’m telling Harris everything.”
Thierry laughed. “That won’t matter. And he won’t believe you.”
He was right: I was a man without a country. Nowhere would anyone believe me.
“Listen to him, Pono.” Nisa’s voice had that element of bad news that must be given gently. “We’ve been arguing about the same thing, but Thierry’s right.”
I was still furious. “Right about what?”
“For years the ultra-left has run France,” she said. “Under the surface they still do. They hate what France is – a world power, intellectual, scientific, cultured, financial, military, driven largely by white men and women. Instead they want inclusion, multicultural diversity, no borders, no nations, no capitalism, the forced merging of all peoples into one world. But this new Islam doesn’t want to merge, they want to dominate. This new Islam’s not a religion, it’s a conquering ideology, a culture and law that feels itself superior, wants to crush all others.”
I shrugged. “It’s always been that.”
“But now nearly fifteen percent of France is Muslim. Far more than the government admits. Over eight million. Of whom at least one in four are Salafists who believe every non-Muslim is a worthless infidel who should die. Recent surveys tell us that over half of young French Muslims think this.”
I finally sat, exhausted by it all. “Most Muslims in France are honorable and hard-working, happy to be here.”
She nodded, as if at an old riddle. “It doesn’t matter who’s the majority. Nor who’s most accommodating. It matters who has the media behind them.”
“Back in the late seventies and early eighties,” Thierry said, “when the Socialists realized they were out of step with the French people and would soon be out of office, they opened the gates and brought in all the North Africans they could, as the Arabs in gratitude would vote almost exclusively Socialist. In a national campaign with several candidates, two percent of the votes can be a huge margin, and having millions of Islamic voters can win the presidency though you barely get thirty percent of the total. It’s the only thing that’s kept the Socialists in power during many of these years,” he added with a wry smile.
I returned to my question: “So you let Yasmina be killed, with her own explosives.”
He spread his hands a few inches: “The official statement from this office will be that her death was of minor consequence. And we will determine there is no link between her and any terrorist group ... And no one to blame. That she was alone, a deranged woman ... This has nothing,” he smiled, “to do with Islam.”
He was sarcastically quoting the oft-repeated political mantra that the slaughter of hundreds of French citizens by Koran-chanting terrorists had nothing to do with Islam.
Even the present administration hadn’t changed this tune. If we’re nice to them, they kept saying, hopefully they’ll be nice back ...
“They set up Yasmina to die,” I said. “Didn’t they?”
Thierry sat back. “Who?”
“Someone higher up than you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I was so angry I couldn’t stop shaking. “That way there was no trail, no way to investigate links between her and the government’s Islamic friends.”
“You’re overstepping here, Pono.”
I kept seeing Yasmina in her silly Micky Mouse T-shirt and explosives vest, how close she’d been to giving in. To surviving. Had we not surrounded her. “That’s the only way to win.”
“She didn’t have the only trigger on the bomb vest ...”
“Who?”
“We think someone else in the building had the trigger. They told her she had it, but it was a dummy. The real trigger was downstairs, next door – we’re working on it, but with everything blown to bits it’s hard to tell.”
“They didn’t want her to spill,” Nisa said. “Was it Mustafa?”
Thierry sighed with fatigue, nodded. “Or somebody higher up.”
I took a slow breath. “And you’re letting it happen?”
“According to the government Mustafa doesn’t exist. People’s memories are short, we don’t need to bring him back, don’t need another homicidal Muslim taking up the front pages. Our rulers, that’s how they think.”
“So again, it was RAID who did the backup on Mustafa at Les Quatre Vents?” The elite unit of the national police – as opposed to GIGN, the anti-terror unit of the national gendarmerie – not that I gave a damn who was who. “It was them who blew our cover, spooked Mustafa?”
“We’re not sure Mustafa was even going there that night. Maybe he was in Fontainebleau, and it was somebody else?”
I walked out. There was nothing else to do. It was all so depressing, this tired old notion of politics more important than human life. I had seen this game played too many times in the military, where it had cost my friends’ lives.
The rain had worsened. I crossed Boulevard Mortier and down the tacky back streets of the 20th Arrondissement. The halal butchers and hooded women with downcast fearful eyes, their thick tent-like garments falling all the way to their feet, the cheap grocery stores of jingling music, the streaks of urine down old stone walls, the smell of fried meat and roach spray, the sharp-eyed men with long knives in their pockets watching from doorways, the old cars hunched by the curb like beaten dogs, it was all so alien, unlike France.
Never in my life, even in Afghanistan or in the horror of Mosul, have I felt so close to the truth. To what really goes on beneath the masks of life. That happiness is a temporary illusion and only pain and sorrow real. That we stand on air, on nothing. We think we’re alive but it’s illusion too, we think we’re important but that’s a farce. And death comes when it wants.
We’ve always known this, hated it, feared it, tried not to think about it. But like a friendly serpent it slithers back, poisons and enwraps us. While our hunger for happiness lures us along the tattered path of life like the mechanical bunny that dogs chase around a track.
But I’ve also learned in times of great challenge to turn the horror aside, rise above failure, the impossibility of victory. To laugh at fate, disown and refuse it.
Just because everything was going wrong that didn’t mean we couldn’t win.
We just had to think smarter. Move faster. Be more silent and deadly.