“BE READY,” the new fax said, Gisèle’s same unwilling backward script. “Starting tomorrow Pono must be ready for the exchange at any time 24 hours a day. After he is contacted he should make no calls or messages or emails or other connections with anyone. My keepers will know if he disobeys and they will kill me. They will contact him by calling twice with one ring on his DGSE cell, then a third time twice. Then the fourth time he must answer. If that is not acceptable my keepers will kill me.”
“There’s no trial run,” I said. “If I don’t show up they kill her, right there.”
Thierry nodded. “Probably.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Anne put in.
I wanted to snap at her, tell her nothing’s sure, but we both already knew that. Like nothing’s sure about what would happen if I made the exchange. Except we’d all be dead.
Had to be a way to rescue of Gisèle without everybody getting killed.
Had to be a way.
It depended where they wanted to do the exchange. It would be whatever worked best for them. And what was most difficult for me.
Had to be a way.
—
“THE EXCHANGE will be near Mustafa,” Thierry said. “So he can intervene, if necessary.”
Anne turned to me. “He’s going to want to personally ID you.”
“At that point I’ll have no weapons – I’ll be screwed.”
“In Fontainebleau,” Thierry persisted. “Or Les Andelys.”
“Or La République. Or Seine-St. Denis ...”
“For them that’s the smartest,” Anne said. “On every street there’d be a hundred guns aimed at us.”
“We have to say no,” Thierry sighed. “To whatever they offer. Till we get something we can work with.”
Anne huffed. “Good luck.”
—
“THE DEAD MAN’S WIFE,” Tomàs said. “She came in and our guys showed her some pix.”
“That was nice of them,” I said stupidly, too tired to care.
“No one she knew except one guy,” he said teasingly.
“Okay, okay ...”
“You’ve met him, I think. Sort of.”
“C’mon, out with it.”
“Our hero, the head of MADS.”
“What?” I was suddenly awake. “Rachid?”
“She says maybe a month ago, he came in one night. Shook some hands, chattered a bit in Arabic and walked out.”
“Chattered with who?”
“Bunch of guys. She couldn’t identify any of them. Said it was like some kind of politician, visiting his public.”
“Nothing we can use?”
“Nah. Just more background.”
—
MY EXCHANGE for Gisèle would happen at any time starting tomorrow. When soon after I might be dead. What was important, in these last hours? The kids and Mamie.
We jumped on the Indian and tore out of Paris past St. Germain-en-Laye, then Mantes like a bad ghetto one can soon barely remember.
Lyons-la-Forêt is only 65 miles from Paris but another world. Viking land where thousands of years of war has created tough survivors. In the middle of Normandy, the Forest of Lyons was what remained of the ancient oak wilderness that once covered northern Europe with a canopy so tall and vast that when Julius Caesar and his legions trekked from Paris to the Rhine they did not see the sun for forty days.
Today Lyons la-Forêt has still a bit of that: beautiful glades in all directions over undulating hills and wide verdant valleys broken here and there by wheat fields green in the lustful spring sun.
Cousin Claudine’s was a 350-acre goat farm of mixed fields and forests, an ancient, toppling stone barn and late medieval house with a Norman tower standing over it like a watchful timeworn knight.
Beside the barn a cage of snails ready for the saucepot, a vast chicken house, expansive goose and turkey pens, and behind it rolling pastures where goats grazed on spring grass.
The kitchen was at the back on the ground floor, yard-wide paving stones, a huge black woodstove. It smelled of oak smoke and fresh herbs. Everything was cavernous – the height of the gnarled oak beams, each ancient foot-worn stone, the spiral oak staircase ascending into darkness, the souls of all the humans who’d lived here nearly a thousand years. Every fear and sorrow, every joy and full stomach, every runny nose, sad death, and wonderful orgasm. All here, in these cold stone walls.
Till now I’d had little time with Julie and André, and then they’d seemed distant and shy. But now, perhaps due to their relative isolation (Anne had decided not to put them in the local school because Mustafa’s people might somehow be able to trace it), they took my hand and showed me the farm, introducing me to goats, chickens, an old mare whose back they climbed on together, an irritable donkey and lots of gobbling turkeys.
As I looked down on Julie’s glowing pigtails and André’s short dark hair and felt the warmth of their small hands in mine, I realized I was beginning to care deeply about them. And fear for their safety.
We had dinner in the old kitchen, nettle soup then fresh raw goat cheese on lettuce that half an hour ago was in the ground, then lamb so tender and juicy it reminded me of what meat used to taste like, with beets, broccoli, and all that other funny green crap they grow here too.
Cousine Claudine I loved right away, as if we shared ancient roots. White hair clipped page-boy short, a wrinkled sunny broad face with sharp black eyes and a humorous twist to a wide mouth.
The food came in an avalanche, each course punctuated by the Norman trou, a shot of hundred-proof calvados that goes down like fire and reduces to ash anything you already ate.
The oak smoke, marjoram and rosemary, granite air and goat manure odor from the barn and the memory inherent in these ancient stones all told me that if we survive the Hell we’re in we too can live like this.
Just love each other and be happy.
Anne was an angel from a 16th century Dutch painting sitting with her children on a wooden bench in the medieval stone kitchen – the slant of her head and tumbling mahogany hair against an ancient window’s golden sunset – she was the Madonna, Priestess of Life, the eternal mother’s transcendent love, her subconscious gift beneath that love like the subterranean rivers that feed a valley. How could I refuse the joy that soared through me just to see her sitting with one arm around each child? Most of all I wished her husband could be there, as they too wished. But knowing he could not, and that he would want me to love his wife because he wanted her to be happy, I felt happy too, and deeply wished I’d known him. Wished that I’d been their friend. Now, if I cared for his children? Tried to give them what he would?
That was enough for me.
How good to live like this, in the depth of love and understanding. Which made me even more determined to come out of this horror with everything we could.
—
HOUR AND A HALF LATER we were back at the Place du Commerce and half asleep when Stranger dropped in off the roof.
He checked the kitchen and hopped on the bed giving us an annoyed patient look. We’d come home late and not put out his dinner. But as a good friend he pretended not to mind. Sat licking his left front paw as if that’s what he did every night at eleven-thirty. “Liar,” I told him, and fell back asleep.
—
“I KNOW WHERE he is!” Anne sprang up in bed staring out the window at the Tower’s half-lit skeleton.
“Who?” I sat up looking around.
“Mustafa. Just saw him. Dream.” She slipped naked in the moonlight from the bed to the window.
I shook my head trying to wake up. “Where?”
“Champ de Mars. Walking up an alley of trees, staring up at the Tower.”
We scrambled into our clothes, grabbed our guns and mikes, ran downstairs to the Beast and raced the wrong way up Rue du Commerce to La Motte-Picquet and pulled over on a side street right off the Champ de Mars.
“You want to call Thierry?” I said.
“Not for a dream,” Anne huffed, looking nasty and pissed off in black leather, black sweats, black Kinvaras, a black Glock under her jacket and her black hair all tangled with sleep.
I glanced at the Tower, nearly invisible in fog but for its beacons like lost lighthouses. “Okay then. You right, me left.”
We’re almost the same height so we looked straight into each other’s eyes. Hers were black and flashing; she exhaled a ferocious intensity that made me love her and fear for her. “You see something, you tell me,” I said. “You don’t do a fucking thing.”
She gave me a feral grin. “If it’s Mustafa?”
“Not without me.”
She laughed and we slipped into the dark alleys of trees on each side of the Champ de Mars, the Tower rising like a dark steel god far overhead, the long grassy park naked in moonlight, pebbles on the path glowing like crystals. There were the usual drunks sleeping against the trees, hustlers doing hash deals in dark corners, a hooker arguing with four African guys, a few illegals pandering toy Towers to the last straggling tourists.
No Mustafa. Just the same sad travesty of this beautiful place where cops don’t go at night. Stink of piss and stale beer, rotting leaves and rain, the Field of Mars, sacred to the God of War. And the Tower high above it all.
“Nothing,” I said into my radio.
“Me neither,” she said.
“In the dream, where’d you see him?”
“Over here by the pony rides.”
“I’ll circle to you.”
Seven minutes later I came up to her. “I’m an idiot.” She leaned against me.
“Let’s go home.”
“Yeah.” She nestled against me. “We haven’t fed Stranger.”
“Imagine the trouble we’d be in, if we forgot his dinner ...”