Vitry-sur-Seine, France
I'd been to Vitry-sur-Seine before. It's tucked into an industrial zone southeast of Paris, one of those innocuously named "cites" where the French hide the North African Muslims who do all the nation's dirty work. We'd caught some "chatter" that Algerian fundamentalist groups were using a place called Carthage Voyages to pick up cash and make travel arrangements. The French busted it a couple times but the owners refused to talk. The French even tapped the phones and still got nothing. I'd gone out myself after hours to have a look, but the owners, whoever they were, seemed to be the model of discretion.
When I got there this time, Carthage Voyages had yet to open, but at kast it hadn't moved or-by the looks of the tidy counter inside, packed With brochures-closed down. I crossed the road and ducked into a cafe full °f Algerian and Moroccan workers in blue overalls, smoking their Galois and sipping triple espressos. If there was a word of French being spoken, I c°uldn't hear it. I ordered my own triple, in Arabic, the closest I could
come at the moment to belonging to anything, and settled myself at a table in the front window with a two-day-old copy of El Khabar, a mouthpiece of Algeria's military dictatorship.
I was still at it forty-five minutes later, working on a second espresso, when a woman in a burka stepped off a bus at the corner, seemed to glide down the street inside her shapeless tent, stopped to study the window displays at Carthage Voyages, then unlocked the door and began turning lights on. The clock over the coffee bar read exactly nine-thirty as I paid and left.
"May I help you?" the woman asked when I entered. Like her expression, her tone of voice was unreadable.
"I need a ride to Italy. Trieste." (Never tell anyone where you're really going if you don't have to.)
"I don't have a car."
"Later?"
She didn't say anything-just picked up a phone, dialed a number, and spoke Berber-laced Arabic so rapid I could barely catch it.
"Tomorrow morning, six a.m., here," she said finally, a statement, not a question. She seemed used to people who had run out of other choices. Living among French infidels had also taught her not to cultivate curiosity.
I said good-bye and wandered up the street, hunting for a sex shop. I was looking for a woman maybe six feet tall, something in an inflatable latex.