“We have to fight them,” she declared more than once, shaking her bony fist. “France cannot be destroyed. We must throw them all out!”
When I finally got a word in edgewise, I managed to ask her if she had a cell phone, and she shook her head and muttered something dismissive about them that I didn’t get.
The Suzuki stayed on the N3 for five or six miles before taking the N370 north. Madame La Bruyere trailed them like a pro, keeping three, four, and sometimes five cars between us, and all the while fuming about the “Muslims and immigrants” out to destroy her beloved country. Indeed, when she saw the two women get off at the Sevran exit and head east, Eloise went into a minor tirade about the area and the immigrants who lived there.
She drove us down the Boulevard de Stalingrad, past shabby shopping malls and drab clusters of high-rise public housing projects. Judging by the broken shop windows and charred cars along the route, Sevran had been a hub of violence the night before.
The people on the sidewalks seemed tense, in a hurry to be home and off the streets as armed French soldiers prepared for curfew. I thought about having Madame La Bruyere stop so I could tell one of the soldiers what was going on, but feared losing track of the two women.
The Suzuki took a left and headed north on a side street. We lost them several minutes later, when an ambulance blocked us from following them onto the narrow, windy Rue de Rougemont.
“Où sont-elles?” Madame La Bruyere kept saying, meaning, “Where are they?”
I was peering anxiously down every alley and side street and didn’t see the women anywhere. I feared we’d been spotted. A sinking sensation was drilling through my lower belly when the road bent hard left. Going around that tight curve, I got a good look down a lane that led to an old church.
The Muslim women had parked, back bumper facing the wall of the church. They were out of the vehicle, toting those heavy shopping bags, and heading from right to left and out of my vision.
For a beat I couldn’t remember the word for stop, but then sputtered, “Arrêtez! Arrêtez!”
Madame La Bruyere screeched the old Citroën to a stop. I kissed her on the cheek, jumped out of the car, and said, “Merci, madame!”
Chapter 85
Sevran, northeastern suburbs of Paris
7:10 p.m.
TEARING THE RED hoodie off so that I was again down to that white dress shirt, I ran down the lane into the churchyard, where several other cars were parked as well. The Suzuki was next to a closed green gate that blocked access to a larger parking lot and a brick building immediately north of the Saint Martin Church.
Two police cars were parked in that lot, along with two small white sedans. I could see a well-traveled route beyond them. A bus sighed, caught gear, and then roared past the mouth of the bigger parking lot.
Figuring the women had gone to the main route, I jumped the gate and ran through the lot to a large traffic rotary with a park at the center.
The bus stop was to my left, along with an Asian grocery store and a clothing shop, both closed, and a pharmacy, still open. When I looked right, I was surprised to see another police car, and more surprised to realize that I was right in front of the Sevran police station.
Had they gone in there? Did I have this all wrong?
I hurried inside to check. The officer behind a pane of bulletproof glass was on the phone but lowered it when I adopted a prayer pose. When I asked in halting French if two Muslim women had come inside, she looked down her nose, shook her head, and immediately lifted the phone to her ear again.
I tried to talk again, but she held up her finger and turned away from me.
Frustrated, I went out onto the sidewalk. Where the hell had they gone?
There were three people at the bus stop now: an elderly man wearing a turban, a young Vietnamese girl, and a woman with long, braided reddish hair. She wore a laborer’s clothes, leather boots, tan canvas pants, and a denim shirt. She had her back to me and was smoking.
A heavyset blond woman wearing heavy makeup, a white pantsuit, and carrying a large black purse was coming down the sidewalk toward me. A mother and child exited the pharmacy, and I headed their way. As I walked by the bus stop, the woman with the reddish braids flicked her cigarette into the gutter, and squatted to rummage in a stonemason’s bag at her feet.
I kept going. The blonde in the pantsuit passed, giving me a quick, bright smile. Sweet perfume lingered in her wake. The lights in the pharmacy went dark. A bus approached. I wanted to punch something.
Had they circled me? Gone back to the car? I could go there and sit on it, or just go back to the police station and make the officer understand the situation.
Changing direction, I followed the bus to the stop, seeing the four people board and wondering if the Muslim women had gotten on the first bus I’d seen leaving the area.
I thought about the pale blue gravel that had fallen off the Suzuki’s bumper. It was definitely ammonium nitrate fertilizer. I’d tasted and smelled remnants of the stuff in the air after IED explosions back in Kandahar.
But if they’d left the area with the bags…
Oh, Jesus. I had it wrong.
I took off toward the police station. The bus doors closed. As I came abreast of the bus, it began to pull away. I happened to glance at the windows.
The woman in the work clothes, the one with the reddish braids, was sitting in the third row from the front, looking out the window at me. She was exotically beautiful, with haunting nickel-gray eyes and high cheekbones across which stretched burnished, dusky skin.
As the bus drove off, I was puzzled by the sense that I had seen her somewhere before…
I began to sprint after the bus, trying to get a better look at her. But crossing the mouth of the narrow parking lot next to the Sevran police station, I understood that I was too late. I’d never catch up.
I staggered to a stop just beyond the entrance to the parking lot, right in front of the station, and was sucking wind, cursing, and watching the bus disappear into the dusk when the car bomb erupted.
Chapter 86
THE BLAST THREW me off my feet and to the pavement. Shock waves pounded through my back, deafened me, and rattled my brain for several minutes. And I took some body shots from falling debris.
But thanks to the northwest corner of the Sevran police station, which stood between me and the parking lot and the Catholic churchyard where the robed women had left the Suzuki, I was otherwise uninjured.
There was dust and debris everywhere, and that acidic fertilizer smell permeated the air like humidity on a stiflingly hot day.
Struggling to my feet, I saw that all traffic on the roundabout had come to a halt. People were outside their cars, covering their mouths, or stretching them wide to scream. But I could barely hear them. Their voices were drowned out by a high-pitched ringing in my ears.
Still in a daze, I stumbled a few steps and looked into the parking lot. Through the thick cloud of dust, I could see that the entire front of the church had been blown inward, collapsing the roof. A large jagged hole had been opened in the rear sidewall of the police station.
A policeman staggered from it, covered head to boots in dust and plaster. His face showed blood from a nasty scalp gash.
I went to him, tried to talk to him. But he looked at me as if I were a creature in a nightmare, and walked dumbly past me. I looked into the hole, into the dark hull of the police station, seeing human silhouettes amid the wreckage.
I threw my sleeve across my chest and fought my way in across the debris, finding an officer dead at his desk and the pieces of a dead man in a holding cell. Then I spotted the desk officer who’d ignored me minutes before.