Bastille Day, page 4
I was listening to U2 as I ran, the album Songs of Innocence that appeared on everyone’s iTunes account a couple of years back. Some people were upset about that, but not me. Who wouldn’t want a free U2 album? And they’re so good for running, the rhythm section like feet pounding the pavement—or like a heartbeat.
The paving alongside the river was cobblestoned and uneven, and I stepped carefully as I ran. Uneven surfaces can wreck your knees, as I knew too well. Then up some stairs, along the Voie Georges Pompidou, across the Seine again at the Pont Mirabeau, and back home past the Tour Eiffel to 13, rue Edmond Valentin, where I panted up the front steps, past Fantine, now polishing the brass of the gateway—honestly?—“Bonjour, bonjour”—up the stairs to my apartment, took off my running clothes, and wedged myself into what was quite possibly the smallest shower in Europe. If I gained five pounds, I would find it impossible to squeeze through the door.
Then I put on my dark blue suit, a red and blue Repp tie Kelly had got me at Brooks Brothers, slipped on my cordovan Oxfords. I was a different person now. I could take on the world.
That lasted for all of about ten minutes, which was about how long it took me to walk from my apartment to the studio, near the Quai d’Orsay and behind the Assemblée Nationale.
“Bonjour,” I told the security guard, Raoul, who had been at the desk the day before when Rob brought me back to get my keys and cards and meet the staff.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Jones,” he said as I buzzed through the security gate.
I took the elevator up to five, bonjouring continuously past the front desk and down the hall to the bullpen where I’d be working with reporters and support staff. Rob had an office—a big one—with a view of the Seine and the Place de la Concorde. There were a couple of studios, an editing suite, and some gear rooms. We had the whole floor. It was a nice spread, much nicer than the station in Dallas, and not just because of the view.
I sat down at my new desk, a blank expanse waiting to be filled.
I had nothing to do yet, nothing working until the Bastille Day festivities. I pulled out a legal pad and began brainstorming leads for stories, how I was going to get them, who I needed to talk to. If I was going to report on terrorism in Europe, I had a lot of ground to cover.
For the first time in my life, I could not wait for the morning editorial meeting. At ten we sat down, Rob, the promo producer Edgar, the web content editor Rianne, and the other reporters. They all had pitches, were following stories that mattered. Politics and culture and—
And I would be going live tomorrow for our fireworks coverage. It wasn’t exactly an awe-inspiring start. But at least Rob informed the table, “And after that, he’s going to start digging on terrorism and counter-terrorism stories. He’ll be talking to you about that in the coming weeks.”
That was why I had come, what Rob had sold the network as my expertise. It was going to mean talking to Algerian separatists and Muslim clerics and French law enforcement and rabbis and politicians. It would be real news gathering, and I discovered that I was excited about doing that again.
About doing work that mattered.
But for today, I was just doodling on my legal pad. And dreading our dinner.
“Come over to the house at seven,” Rob told me when the meeting broke up.
“Do I have to? Is this a condition of my employment?”
“No. And yes, you have to.” He shook his head at me. “Come make a friend. And I want you to meet Brigid.”
“I met Brigid at the wedding.”
He laughed. “Cal, you weren’t at the wedding. I was married before I left for Iraq.”
“I could have sworn I met her at the wedding. I’m Facebook friends with her.”
“Well, come meet her in real life. And Allison is smart. Funny.”
“I notice you don’t say beautiful.” I had a vision of my uncle’s enormous Walmart women in stretch pants.
He just smiled and waved goodbye.
“Great,” I said. “Faaanntastic. I’ll see you at seven.”
4.
Paris
July 12, 2016
Tuesday
I left work at five, walked back to the Champ de Mars café down the street from my apartment, and settled at a table on the corner.
“Un kir, s’il vous plaît,” I said after my waiter dropped off the menu.
I took a quick look at the menu, but we would probably have an apéro—a drink with some nibbles—at Rob and Brigid’s, then go out for dinner itself, so I didn’t need anything to eat. “Juste un apéritif,” I told him, handing the menu back.
He brought my drink, and I sat and watched the traffic, foot and car, moving down the avenues. I took a sip. Kir is made with cassis—raspberry liqueur—and white wine, so it’s light and berry-flavored. A Kir Royale is cassis and champagne, also good. The French think hard liquor numbs the palate. Maybe they’re right. It numbs plenty of other things too, some of them, thankfully, things that need to be numbed.
It had been just over six months since the terror attacks in Paris, and it might have seemed to some as if things were back to normal except for the occasional squads of four soldiers marching down the sidewalks with their automatic rifles. The city was quiet, but it was also plain to me that security remained high. Rob had told me that the American Cathedral had hired armed guards for their Christmas services, that the bishop had broken bread at the altar while men in body armor patrolled the sidewalk outside. But at this moment, an American couple—was this that couple from Harry’s?—sat at the table next to me, waxing rhapsodic about the view from atop the Eiffel Tower in thick Midwest accents as they sipped their red wines.
An Algerian man, his wife, and their children, the females all wearing head scarves—France has outlawed the full burqa in public—were eating an early dinner. The boy was complaining that he didn’t like frites. Who doesn’t like French fries?
Behind me, a British guy in pressed khaki shorts and a pink Izod shirt was complaining about banking or the stock exchange or some other such financial thing into his cell phone. Someone had neglected to buy something—or had bought too much of something—and in his precise and civilized way, he was giving that other person holy hell. “When you call me back,” he said, as crisply as starched linen, “I want it to be as though this never happened. Are we clear?”
Crystal.
And a father leading an enormous family—mother, wife, at least five children stair-stepped down from ten years old—slid into three unoccupied tables near me, chattering in Spanish, the father telling the kids to sit down and shut up, the mother saying soothing things about how they were going to have sorbet, wouldn’t everyone feel better after they had some sorbet?
It was hard to imagine that this street scene could be shattered by violence—until I started imagining it.
You know, Iraq was not always a ruin. Once, people in Fallujah walked down the street talking and laughing. You could walk into a kebab restaurant without all conversation stopping like in an old Western movie, and no one in the room would be planning to kill you—or looking as if they were.
But just months ago, right here in Paris, people were dancing at a club, and sipping coffee at a café, and watching a football match, and suddenly death was there with them.
That car driving slowly past now—that car could be ready to explode.
That man on the sidewalk—he was Arab. And he was looking right at me.
Wow.
Jack was right. I needed to let this go.
And yet, there I sat.
I took another sip of my Kir. It was not nearly enough.
There were things to be said for hard liquor.
Alcohol was strictly forbidden in Iraq. Officially, any member of the military and everyone housed on military bases was barred from owning, making, drinking, or selling it. But unofficially, just like in Vietnam, people who were getting shot at wanted to take the edge off, so you could always get something. Sometimes we had “hajji juice,” a clear local moonshine smuggled in for us by contractors or bought from Iraqi soldiers. You never knew how potent it would be; sometimes it hardly budged you. Sometimes it knocked you over. And a bad batch could rack you up.
You took a lot on trust with hajji juice.
Sometimes we bought gin and whisky and vodka on the black market, carried down from Europe or up from Africa. You could get your hands on Efes Beer from Turkey, a Pilsner that reminded me of Miller High Life, which is decidedly not a recommendation. Sometimes we asked friends back home to send gin or vodka in economy-size mouthwash bottles with a little food coloring to disguise it. Sometimes someone managed to smuggle something in their luggage when they came in country, although you could also get caught doing that.
A reporter would get sent home.
A soldier would get court-martialed.
At night we drank, soldiers with soldiers, reporters with reporters, and sometimes all together.
Sometimes you got a truer story if you liquored up the men.
And of course, sometimes you just got bullshit.
We called the guy who usually smuggled in our hajji juice Faisal, not because it was his name, but because one of the reporters who covered the Middle East in the beforetime thought he looked like old King Faisal of blessed memory—beak of a nose, bushy eyebrows, goatee, all that. Our Faisal was also graying, dignified, and took our money with hauteur, like he was doing us a favor in accepting payment.
I spoke with Faisal a lot. Like Nadia from the bar, he’d been educated in the States, gotten an engineering degree from Cornell, worked for Saddam, and he lost everything when the Baathists were thrown out. He knew people, and knew people who knew people, on both sides of the insurgency. Sometimes he gave me a lead when I needed one, and I paid him extra for our booze. He needed that money to take care of his family, his wife, their children and grandchildren, although you would not have known it from his manner, or from the things he said about Americans.
He never bothered to hide his contempt for us, his anger at our coming to Iraq. If he were younger, he told me, he would be an insurgent, fighting to take his country back. He would be trying to kill me, just like so many of his countrymen.
“One day,” he used to tell me, “you Americans will be gone. Either we will throw you out, or you will get tired of us killing you. Americans do not have a stamina for being killed.” And eventually, he was right. Folks back home got tired of seeing American troops on casualty lists, and we pulled most of them out of the Middle East. And didn’t that just inaugurate a new dawn of peace and stability?
Not that Faisal was there to see it, or to celebrate it. One day he just didn’t show up with our moonshine. I put out some feelers, made some visits. He hadn’t come home the night before. No one had seen him for days. His wife was frantic, grabbing at me like a madwoman.
He turned up four days later, a bullet in his head, his fine nose broken, his face bruised and bloody. He’d been caught by some Sunnis—I actually interviewed them later—who killed him as a collaborator.
Or maybe because he was Shiite. It didn’t matter, ultimately. Either way, he was dead as Herod. And we did mourn.
Him, for a moment or two.
Our reliable supply of hajji juice, until we found another guy.
That one died in a car bombing. Another was shot by men with their faces wrapped as he drove in toward the Green Zone. After that, I started buying alcohol from the men in my unit. It cost more, I couldn’t get as much, but I didn’t care.
I didn’t want anyone else killed just because I thought I needed a drink.
I finished my Kir, checked the time. It was almost seven. I checked the Google map on my phone, saw Rob’s place was about an eight-minute walk, and asked for the check: “L’addition, s’il vous plaît.”
“I do hope everything gets sorted,” I said over to the British investment banking type, who was sitting, still, with his foot tapping, transmitting his fury to the Earth.
“It had better,” he snapped, but then he realized that he had snapped at me. “Sorry, old boy,” he said. “I came here to relax. To unwind. And you see how well that is going.”
“I feel you,” I said. “Cheerio and all that.”
Rob had a high-floor apartment with a balcony. I actually saw him—or he saw me—on it, and he called down to the street, “Care for a drink?”
“Oh yes,” I said. Someone buzzed me in, and I walked upstairs.
At 5A, I started to knock, but the door opened and a vaguely familiar buxom blonde woman threw her arms around me.
“Brigid?” I said.
“Of course, Calvin,” she told me. “My goodness. Come in. We are so pleased you are here. Rob has talked of nothing else for a month.”
“Oh, surely that’s not true,” I said. But I went inside, and there, on the balcony, stood Rob with a tall and not unattractive woman in her thirties, dark hair, gray slacks and a white silk blouse, who was introduced to me as Allison. She was British—I hoped she hadn’t just been talking to the banker on his cell—had studied at Oxford Christ Church, was working for an international development agency in Paris.
Brigid had set out some green olives, some Camembert, some dark bread, a bit of saucisson, sausage. It was a fine apéro, and I plated a little of everything while Rob was finishing my drink, an Old Fashioned.
“With Bulleit,” Rob said. “The way you like it.”
“An extra dash of Angostura?”
“Even so.”
Allison was drinking a gin and tonic with a slice of lemon, British style, and then everyone was seating themselves around the coffee table. Like every apartment in Paris, this one was cramped, although unlike mine, Rob’s apartment had an easy clear view of the Tour Eiffel.
“So Cal has just arrived,” Brigid said, “and we are celebrating.” We toasted each other.
“Rob tells me you are the best reporter he ever saw in the field,” Allison said, after we’d all offered our saluds.
“That’s guaranteed to embarrass,” I said. “I was just trying to measure up to the level of my competition.”
I raised my glass to Rob, who had in fact been a kickass reporter back in the day.
“It’s true,” Rob told Brigid. “I’ve never seen anybody else who could keep his head and keep reporting when things went bad. And they went very bad toward the end.”
“They did,” I agreed. “But in Texas, I did more weather remotes and less car bombings. So it all evened out eventually.”
An apéro in Paris is like a dinner party, except that it’s a predinner party. Dinner comes later, 8 or 9 in France. The highlight of an apéro is conversation, although the excuse is an aperitif and something to hold you over until you eat the genuine meal. The apéro is, someone said, the French religion, which might be true, since religion certainly isn’t the French religion.
Brigid had managed to place Allison and me across from each other. Well played, I thought.
“Allison,” I asked, “how do you know these good people?”
“From church,” she said. ‘Rob and I both serve on the vestry.” She saw my blank look. “The governing board of the American Cathedral.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking sideways at Rob. “I thought you brought me to France. But apparently I am back in Texas, where the most important question you can ever ask is where someone goes to church.”
“There’s a big expat community that gathers around the American Cathedral,” Rob explained. “Americans, Brits, Australians, Kiwis. Some are religious. Some aren’t. But they all like having a little piece of home.”
“It’s a lovely spot as well,” Allison said. “The Dean’s Garden is one of my favorite places in Paris. Gorgeous hydrangeas. Very peaceful. Sometimes I just sit and think.”
“Well, I can’t wait to see it,” I said. “Allison, are you by any chance watching the Bastille Day fireworks from the tower?”
“Of course,” she said. “Never miss it. It’s the best view in Paris.”
“Of course,” I said. I looked at Rob and then across at Brigid, both of whom had looks of smug satisfaction on their faces.
But see, it turns out Allison was all right. She was not a voracious manhunter, and if I had been represented to her as a possible prize, she did not seem to be trying too hard to collect it. Perhaps it was her British reticence, or perhaps she just got a good look at me and saw I wasn’t much of a catch, but whatever it was, I was thankful. I liked talking to her.
Moreover, she was crazy smart, and as I mentioned, I now try to surround myself with the smartest people I can find to make up for my tendencies toward laziness and ignorance. Thanks, Dean Mottola. She was an expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union, and I had to ask only a couple of questions out of my ignorance to find that Russia was on the move, that Putin was as great a destabilizing force in her eyes as any fundamentalist terrorism around the world, and that the world itself could not be righted until he was reined in somehow.
“James Bond,” I sighed. “We need you now.”
Our dinner too was lovely. We walked to this neighborhood restaurant that apparently Barack Obama had made everyone’s neighborhood restaurant in Paris. La Fontaine de Mars it was, and we were shown to our table at 8:30, on the terrace looking across a plaza with, I suppose, the titular fountain. “Another of my favorites is just up that street,” Rob said, motioning with his head. “The former chef for the American embassy opened his own place. Excoffier.”
“Escoffier? Like the chef from the Ritz?”
“No. With an ‘x.’ Philippe Excoffier. Brigid and I have date night there at least once a month. The soufflés are to die for.”
“It is one of my favorites too,” Allison said. “I eat there once or twice a week.”
Dinner at La Fontaine was simple French country food, lots of it, and it was actually very good. Mr. Obama did us right. After opening with duck pâté for the table, Allison and I had duck confit, and Rob and Brigid shared a huge cassoulet, a duck, ham, sausage, white bean, and vegetable stew. Brigid was quiet, but funny; she had a way of listening and then reflecting back something someone had said earlier with a new twist, a new insight. Rob was jovial, at his hosting best, making sure everyone had enough and too much of everything. I was reminded again why we had become friends in Iraq. Some people make your life easier and better, and Rob was ever one of those people.
