She starts the engine, pulls out of the parking spot, and swings an expert U-turn in the narrow street. The man’s eyes follow our movements, though he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t notice. His body tenses up as if he’s waiting for someone to hit him. I stare back. He doesn’t look like the monster I’d pictured, the man who kidnapped my dad, Feras the lion. But so much the better, so much the easier to get my hands around his throat when it comes time for that.
Yael slows down, lowers her window, and speaks to him in Arabic. It takes me a few seconds to work the translation in my head because it sounds so strange: “There used to be a store here that sold art supplies. Do you know where it has moved?”
The man looks at us warily, as if we’ve gotten the wrong guy; then he takes an uncertain step forward. I can see him more closely now. He looks barely twenty-five and has a spray of red pimples across his forehead. “The shop you’re looking for went out of business in March of last year,” he says.
“March?” Yael says. “Are you sure it wasn’t April?”
“No,” he says. “March.”
Yael scans up and down the street. “Get in the car, Hamid,” she says.
*
From the backseat, I can see he’s shaking—from the cold but also from something else. The pimples are more like red welts, like the product of some disease. “Where’s the usual guy?” he says. “I only ever speak to him. Jean-Marc, he called himself.”
“Relax, friend. Jean-Marc is on vacation, and I’m filling in,” Yael answers, placing a calming hand on his forearm.
He jerks his arm away. “Do you have someplace we can go? They’re looking for me,” he says, switching from Arabic to French.
“We can drive for a bit. You’ll be safe with us.”
“Safe? I’ve been hiding in basements for, like—two months, maybe. And why are there two of you? Jean-Marc always came alone.”
A gentle smile from Yael as she pulls into the evening traffic of a busy boulevard. It’s the warmest look I’ve ever seen on her. “She’s just a trainee, that’s all, Hamid. Nothing to worry about, okay?” Her voice is motherly. “Tell me why you’ve been hiding in basements.”
“Do you have any food? I don’t know when I ate last.”
“I can stop and buy you something,” Yael says. “Or give you some money.”
Hamid shakes his head. “Too dangerous. Look, forget food. You have to get me out. Tonight. Right now.”
“Why is it dangerous, Hamid?”
He looks at her, eyes narrowed. “Because they’re hunting me. Same ones. Same people who did … that other thing. Every time I try to step outside, there they are. I almost didn’t come tonight. One more minute, and you would’ve found a corpse waiting for you. I’m sure of that.”
“Someone’s after you because of what you did to the American?” she says. “Is that why, Hamid?”
“I didn’t do shit to anyone. Look, you’ve got to get me out of France. I want to go home.”
“Maybe it’s possible,” Yael says as if considering it. “But first I need to know what happened to the American.”
“I don’t know. We had coffee, went for a walk, then the van—”
“The van?” she asks.
“Yes, along the street. It was stopped, and there were two men, I don’t know the word, the kind who fix toilets.”
“Plumbers,” I say.
Yael gives me a look to stay silent.
“Yes, two plumbers. They carry a long pipe, block our way. But then two more come out of the van. One puts a needle in the American’s neck, and other one comes for me. They were good. Professionals.”
“It’s interesting you got away but the American didn’t,” Yael says.
“Get away? I run, and he shoots at me. Bullet cuts my shoulder,” he says, pulling his jacket and shirt aside. There’s a nasty-looking stitched-up wound, pink and purple giving way to green.
We pull up to a red light, and a motorbike pulls up noisily beside us on the passenger side, its engine chortling. There are two riders in tight black leather jackets and full helmets. The one on the back looks over at us and flips up his face shield. He’s good-looking, from what I can see of him, and he gives me a flirty wink before looking away.
Yael leans over to Hamid, taking a closer look at the wound. “You went to a doctor for stitches.”
“For a gunshot, a doctor will call the police. I saw a veterinarian I know who takes cash. He stitches me up like a torn shirt and gives me some pills for dogs. Does it look infected?”
“No,” she lies.
The light turns green, and we start moving. We’re somewhere in the industrial streets behind the Gare du Nord train station. The air smells of oil and fish.
“These plumbers,” Yael says. “Tell me about them.”
“They were Germans,” Hamid says. “That’s all I could tell.”
“Germans? How do you know?”
“Because they were speaking German—how else?”
The motorbike is back, gunning its engine as it follows us, coming up close to the rear bumper. Another light, and Yael slows to a stop. The motorbike pulls up again on the passenger side.
Odd how empty the streets are here in the evening, I think. I look over at the motorbike. The passenger looks over at us, his eyes invisible now behind the reflective glass of his face shield. He pulls his messenger bag around to the front and opens it. Then his gloved hands emerge gripping a strange, stubby object with a small opening at one end, which he points at Hamid’s window. It takes my mind a full second to realize it’s a gun, and just as I do, the world erupts in an orange ball of flame and exploding glass.
*
I’m pressed to the floor of the little Volkswagen. I can hear nothing and it’s mostly dark, but I feel the clacking vibration of cobblestones as we fly along the Paris streets. The wind is whipping around me in a silent tornado, and glass pebbles are everywhere, piled up in the contours of the seats, catching the light of streetlamps and looking like a king’s fortune in diamonds.
I see a hand covered in black ink reach between the front seats and grab my jacket. It pulls me up, and I’m staring at Yael, whose face is also spattered with black ink and whose mouth is shouting words I can’t hear. She takes my hand and guides it to Hamid, to his chest that is the source of the black ink. Three—no, five—holes, each the diameter of a dime, spit the stuff out, pour it, billow it. I nearly faint at the realization of what it is, but pull myself together and press down hard on however many holes I can cover with my hands, but this only causes the others to spurt even more blood. So I shift my hands to other holes, but it’s no use. Hamid’s eyes are still open and very alive, but every time he closes them to blink, I feel certain they won’t open again.
We’re racing down the winding, narrow streets of the empty industrial neighborhood, the cars parked on either side so close I could touch them. The motorbike is keeping pace, no more than ten or fifteen meters behind us, its headlight bobbing in the rear window like a pursuing ghost.
Yael makes a hard left, and I topple over, losing my grip on Hamid and crashing into the side of the car. The motorbike doesn’t so much as slow down as it takes the corner. My hearing must be returning because I hear the two engines like a shrieking opera duet between the Volkswagen’s tenor and the motorbike’s squealing soprano.