HE CAME IN through the bathroom window, as in the Beatles song. He was tall and rangy, his ears half-chewed off and his muzzle braided with scars. He even had scars on his chest, from which I deduced it must have been one Hell of a catfight. Or he beat up a Doberman.
He was that kind of cat. Long-legged, intensely affectionate. Would never eat without first purring and rubbing his muzzle against our faces, to thank us for the meal.
He was not even an alley cat. Far worse, he was a roof cat.
The kind who survives on the rooftops of Paris. Amid all this lovely scenery of haphazard tilting tile and slate mansards with the Eiffel Tower in the distance – the postcard you see in all the Paris gift shops – these roofs harbor thriving condominiums of rats, mice, pigeons and other deplorables, and a rooftop cat’s job is to get rid of them.
This he does by scrambling after a wily long-tailed rat across rain-slippery gutter at two a.m., with a 200-foot drop at the edge, or up a near-vertical slate mansard with the same drop below. The kind of guy who leaps across lightwells between two buildings to snag an unwary pigeon. Who will cross a kilometer of rooftops, streets, and lightwells toward the fragrance of a female in heat.
And kill any other male who shows up. And defend his own rooftops to the death.
We called him Stranger. As in Camus’ L’Étranger, whose protagonist is Meursault, Leaps over Death, which this cat did every day on the rooftops. And as in Stranger in a Strange Land – he who is king among the aliens.
Though like most males all he really wanted to do was make love, hunt, eat, wander, and sleep. That’s what’s known as the good life. What we lost in the Garden of Eden.
Normally he arrives about 02:00, just as Anne and I are falling asleep. Diffident and anxious not to intrude, he leaps down from the bathroom window onto the toilet lid, patters on soft feet along the hall to the bedroom and hops on the bed, arches his back and kneads his claws into the bedspread till she goes to the fridge and digs out some hamburger and milk and puts it on the floor.
Usually up before six, we were on the phone or video or out on the streets or at ATS or DGSE before seven. On these early risings Stranger lounged on the bedspread sleepily digging his claws. He’d yawn and rub his eyes with a forepaw as if to say I can’t believe you’re really doing this. And go back to sleep.
We gave him scraps of foie gras and duck rillettes and raw grass-fed beef.
And what he gave us was the gift of loving company when all seemed lost.
—
“THE RED CLIO,” Tomàs said, “was stolen two days ago in Melun. We found it this morning in a side street.”
It was 07:20. In his office, Anne and me, both so tired we could hardly sit straight.
It made me furious that Tomàs could go so long without sleep and we couldn’t.
“They took her there and met another car,” I said.
“And left the Clio,” Anne added wearily.
“We’re checking the whole neighborhood. So far no one saw a thing ...”
“Of course.” She shook her head.
“Prints?” I said, trying to be upbeat.
“The usual mess, takes a while to sort out. Not likely much we can use. But we’re checking all the DNA for matchups in our base ...”
“How long?”
“Could take a week, no matter how fast we go.”
—
“SO HOW did France get overrun so fast?” I asked Harris in his office later that morning as a bright sun cleared the rooftops of Faubourg St. Honoré and literally poured in the window. I’d given him the latest on Gisèle and the smashdown of the Avon HLM.
“Overrun?”
“Thirty years ago there were hardly any Muslims in France, and now they’re nearly fifteen percent of the population and growing fast. How did this happen?”
He shrugged, always a man of few words. “You know the usual answer. When France left Algeria in ‘62 it stranded millions of pro-French Algerians, all now at risk of being slaughtered by the new regime. So many were brought to France, a million maybe. Then the government decided to let in anyone from a former colony, and then succeeding governments allowed them to bring in their families, and every Arab is related, so they say ...”
“And what’s not the usual answer?”
“Some folks wanted it to happen.”
—
“I MAY HAVE SOMETHING.” Mitchell, as usual very laid back, but you can always tell from that hesitation in his voice that he’s onto something. Like how you ease out your breath when you’re aiming at someone from 600 yards and trying for a head shot.
I’ve always wondered what it feels like, a head shot.
It was mid-morning in Paris, late evening in Honolulu.
“What?” I said quickly, not wanting to wait.
“Our friend Thierry?”
“Like I asked you –”
“When I first dug into it, via his phone, personal computer, bank accounts, I was blown away, it was so fucking obvious –”
“What?”
“He was taking twenty thousand euros a month in cryptocurrencies from a bank in Qatar – right out in the open ... On his home computer he was hitting jihadi sites –”
“That’s for his work.”
“Nuh-uh. You look at the content and it’s clear it’s not in his job description. The way he quoted the Suras, stuff like that. Bad news.”
I waited. This was all somehow explainable. “Even worse,” Mitchell said, “Holy Christ, he had seven calls to a St. Denis number that had three calls last week to Abdel.”
“No way,” I said morosely.
“And one call to guess who?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Your friend Mustafa. On that same damn phone he used in the post office, when you guys first got the link.”
“I don’t believe it.” The idea that Thierry might have been sabotaging us was nuts. The Thierry I’d known in Afghanistan would always put his buddies first. Would never screw things up. Not ever.
Halfway around the world Mitchell snickered. “I didn’t believe it either.”
“What you mean?”
“It was a fraud. Somebody’s been setting him up, but it’s not well done.”
“You’re losing me, Mitchell.”
“They hacked his bank accounts and made deposits at certain dates, then wired them to accounts in Pakistan and Dubai set up in his name. From there the usual to the Caribbean then European banks. To somewhere safe in Switzerland. They made your buddy Thierry look like a crooked millionaire.”
“Why didn’t he see this?”
“He got a different version. Only bank investigators can see it. That and the French government, if and when they decide to take him down.”
“Why would they?”
“If he finds something inconvenient.”
It was all so easy, I realized, these days. “It doesn’t hold together ...”
“But looks good on the surface. Thierry doesn’t even know.”
“The phone?”
“They just hacked his history. My grandmother could do that –”
“Who’s behind this?”
“I’m not there yet.”
“You mean you’ve discovered this but don’t know who’s doing it?”
“That’s what I just said.”
So how to find whoever was spreading this rumor, Thierry’s alleged hits on jihadi sites, the falsified bank accounts and phone connections? They were doing this to render him ineffective, to banish him.
“How do we use this?” I said. “And counter it?”
—
WHEN THIERRY AND I went through a DGSE neutral site to check his accounts, nothing was amiss. No illicit payments. His cellphone had never been cracked.
“There’s nothing wrong here,” Thierry said angrily.
“There was.”
“You’re chasing phantoms.” He shook his head. “Keep your eye on the target.”
“There was.” I sat exasperatedly in front of his desk. “I swear it.”
He leaned back. “You getting enough sleep?”
“No.”
He stood, distanced, wanting me to leave. “Maybe you should.”
This was not the Thierry I’d known. Again, my instinct told me he was hiding something from me. Why? This was totally unlike him. Comrades in combat become nearly brothers. Afterwards, they don’t mislead or fool each other.
I hated being the bearer of bad news. Particularly when the bad news had vanished.
—
I WALKED OUT OF THIERRY’S OFFICE into a gray Paris afternoon. My phone throbbed. Mitchell once again.
“So what you got?”
“More background ... That ever since Mitterrand came to power in 1981 till Hollande and his nutty crew left in 2017, part of the government has intentionally sold France down the river. Because of the money they get from the Middle East.”
“Yeah, yeah, that we know.”
“And the media, led by Le Monde and public TV and radio, whose executives of course are appointed by the government, ran a vast campaign to convince the French that, One, millions of illegal migrants are good for the economy, which has turned out to be very wrong, and Two, that France’s long tradition of human rights protection demands that it respond with open arms to everyone – which turned out to be absolutely everyone, and thus disastrous.”
“Get to the point, bro.”
“Because most French media have long been subsidized by the government, the media stays nice. But there was one outlet that wouldn’t stay nice, that continued to speak the truth, however raw and unpleasant ...”
“Charly Hebdo.” This too was old news.
“And it only cost them twelve lives when those Muslims came through the door and shot them one by one.”
“What you’re saying is?”
“Either do what you’re told, or look out.”