Goodbye Paris Read online

  “I was out there,” I protested. “It came out of nowhere. I had to try –”

  “You dumb fuck,” she said, driving off with more than necessary acceleration from the sandy parking lot of surfer vans, leaving a little rubber on the highway like she often does with her platinum 911.

  But that was back in Maine. Another lifetime though just weeks ago. This was an aged white Toyota minivan full of diving gear, beach towels, and six-packs of Hinano beer. And laying rubber was not one of its strong points.

  When we got to our beachfront bungalow, Lexie and Abigail were waiting on the lanai. Unfortunately neither looked any happier than Erica, and I had a sudden desire to head back to the beach.

  “I’m out of here,” Abigail announced. She’d been back to her old ways, hustling surfer dudes on the beach and turning most of them down.

  “I’m so glad I have to start teaching again,” Lexie said.

  “You want to go back to that freezing place?” I queried, voice rough with salt, thinking how cold it was now in Maine but the surfing might be good. In a wet suit.

  Lexie scowled at the other two. “I never would’ve come ...”

  “Me neither,” Erica added. “I thought you invited just me.”

  “I did, each of you, one by one. And one by one each of you said no. Then you all came,” I protested, but nobody was listening. I stubbed my toe on the threshold going into the house, poured myself a tall glass of Tanqueray, discovered some ice cubes that weren’t half-melted or covered in fish scales, found a half-smoked joint, and sat on the lanai watching the magnificent fiery sun sink into the miraculous orange sea. Thanking God or whoever, for this. And that I was still alive.

  As regards my three bedmates, I’d always assumed that the best of all possible worlds would be to live with three brilliant, independent women.

  It turned out different than I’d expected. And much more fatiguing. Maybe because I was over thirty, a little past my prime, with many broken bones to prove it.

  And I’d already done several tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, so I hated war.

  And here I was back in a war zone.

  True, the erotic part was fabulous. It wasn’t like those silly porn movies, one guy with three women where the women are doing it to each other too. No, these women weren’t at all interested in that – in fact had come to actively dislike each other but had one common priority: to screw me to death.

  When all I’d done was love them.

  And all I’d wanted was to live a quiet life.

  And surf every day.

  “Oh by the way,” Lexie said, yanking at her long blonde hair as if wanting to kill it, “you got a call from some guy in Paris.”

  “Paris?” That magical city on the other side of the world I loved so much.

  “He said his name was Mack. Said you’d know.”

  Mack. One of the bravest, kindest, smartest Special Forces guys I’d ever served with, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. What could he want? What was he doing in Paris?

  Already it wasn’t right. That he’d leave a message on an open line.

  Bad News

  MACK NEVER MADE MISTAKES. Big and kindly but ruthlessly efficient, he could be hilarious and emotional, and was always reliable, truthful and generous. Never once did he abuse a prisoner or risk collaterals, yet we were safer with him than nearly anyone else.

  An enigma. That this huge guy could be so disciplined and dangerous, yet full of kindness and courage, and absolute determination to make the world a better place even at the risk of his life. A life which he loved intensely, from French cafés to the stark mountains of Afghanistan. He loved the rough kindness of the Afghani people yet killed those who attacked us. Most of all he loved the girls we used to meet on R&R in places like Bangkok and Sydney, and whom he tried to bed, every one. Till he met Gisèle, a French medical worker in Waziristan, with whom he fell instantly in love. As if she were the only woman he’d ever known.

  All of us Special Forces guys had learned what we could about combat medicine – to save each other’s lives. But Mack tried to heal everyone – American or local – spoke good Afghani and some Arabic. And no matter how hot the situation, Mack was there too, risking whatever it took for his buddies.

  As we did for him.

  —

  TAHITI IS 11 HOURS behind Paris, so seven-twenty in the evening here was six-twenty a.m. tomorrow in Paris.

  I called a number that validated me then connected to another. I gave them Mack’s name and ID and they patched me through.

  His number rang and rang. Then he answered.

  “So why,” I asked, “you call in the middle of your night?”

  “I don’t sleep much these days,” he answered in his rough, gruff voice, as if you’re talking to a grizzly bear. And he looks like one too, except bigger and stronger. “What you doing in Tahiti?”

  I told him about the Tahiti Tsunami, the world-famous invitational longboard contest I was competing in and also reporting on for Surfer News.

  “Who’s that woman answered your phone?”

  “Lexie – you remember Bucky?”

  “That shithead –”

  “He saved my life.”

  “Then sent you to Leavenworth ...”

  “Anyway, she used to be his wife. And before that she and I had a thing, between two of my tours.”

  “She didn’t seem to care if you were living or dead.”

  That made me chuckle, which hurt my salt-abraded throat. “Damn near did die.” I told him about the monster wave that had taken me down. “What’s with Paris?”

  “Anybody on board?”

  I glanced around. The three women were out of sight, probably all sharpening knives in the kitchen. “Nope.”

  “I got good news and bad news.”

  “What’s the good?” I said, knowing it would be, as always, outweighed by the bad.

  “After we pulled out of Iraq, I switched to Home Office –”

  After we left Iraq meant 2011-12, when Obama pulled the plug. Home Office is the CIA, loved and hated by nearly every SF guy. “That sucks,” I said. My own relationship with the Agency had been less than amorous, due to a few “goatfucks” as we call them, the unhappy clash between intelligence and covert action.

  “– and they assigned me here, DGSE liaison.”

  DGSE, La Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, is in many ways similar to the CIA, but smaller, and more focused. For years it’s fought the spread of Muslim terrorism while also battling the interference and incompetence of most French politicians and the nutty politically correct media, all who make its existence almost impossible.

  Its counterpart, DGSI, La Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, like the FBI is responsible for domestic security, as are many smaller overlapping agencies, including ATS, the Anti-Terrorist Section of the Paris Police. Like ours, French intelligence agencies fight over turf, data sharing, and other allegedly cooperative efforts, but they’ve learned to work together better as terrorist attacks continue to increase.

  “You’re a lucky guy,” I told Mack, meaning anyone who works with DGSE and lives in France is lucky, even if they have to work for the CIA.

  “Remember Thierry St. Croix?”

  “Of course, God love him.”

  “Well, he’s now my opposite at DGSE.”

  More good news. Thierry was a French officer Mack and I had worked with in Afghanistan, attached to the Lafayette Brigade stationed at FOB Nijrab in the high steep mountains near the Paki border. About five-ten, lean and muscular, a ragged face, a scar down the right cheek and another under the chin, a typical French soldier, tough and duty-driven, but with an off-hours joyous side that made me grin just to think of him.

  I’d learned to love France early in life, having gone there the first time with Pa and Ma
after high school freshman year. Pa had been invited to the military college at Saint-Cyr to talk about covert operations. Even though he’d been out of the SEALS nearly ten years by then, everybody wanted him to speak, all over the world. Afterward we spent a week in Paris and climbed the Eiffel Tower and stood stunned in the ethereal beauty of Notre Dame, and rode the Métro and ate tons of pastries and went to the Louvre and lots of other haughty places, to bars and cafés smelling of pastis and cigarettes, to strange restaurants with hauntingly beautiful odors.

  Then my junior year my parents, fearing I was becoming a Hawaiian “surfer punk” as Pa kindly put it, sent me to a bilingual high school in Paris. I disliked the studies but loved France, skipping classes to hike the Alps, surf at Biarritz, and climb the perfect limestone cliffs of the Lubéron and Mont St. Victoire.

  Given my French experiences, and as Thierry was also a climber, we soon established a deep rapport during the long winter months in our Forward Operating Base in those deadly mountains.

  “And the bad news?” I added, taking my mind off Thierry.

  “Mustafa al-Boudienne,” Mack said.

  “He’s dead.” I could still see the narrow, unshaven face, lean, hard, almost bronze-colored. The fanatic pitiless eyes smiling at me down the barrel of his gun. “The Foreign Legion got him. North of Mosul, you know where ...”

  “He’s alive and well, back in France. Planning to kill as many people as he can.”

  “Can’t be.” I had that feeling in the gut that comes from horrible news. “He’s an explosives guy, can kill thousands.”

  “Ten days ago we caught two jihadis sneaking back from Syria. They said he’s here. So we checked all the border cameras, found him coming through Strasbourg, six weeks ago.”

  I felt the sorrowed fear of facing a tidal wave with sand slipping from under my feet. “Why call me?”

  “You and I were the only ones to survive him. You saw more of him than me. You’re really the only one who can ID him.”

  “I wanted to kill him, back then. While we could.”

  “I asked our friends at DGSE. And got backing too from our side.”

  “No way. I won’t do it.”

  “All your expenses plus a nice fee?”

  “I don’t want to –”

  “Look, idiot, we know you’re broke. And we need you in Paris. To help us find Mustafa.”

  Mustafa had killed thousands of people in Iraq, including many Americans. ISIS’s top bomb-maker, he could tailor an IED so we couldn’t detect it, and as a result many young Americans went home in pieces, if at all. And because Mack and I had been his prisoners we were the most likely to ID him. But as Mack was blindfolded during our execution sessions and I was not, I was the best person left in this universe to recognize him. Because he’d killed everyone else who possibly could.

  But after multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, a bullet-smashed shoulder, plus two undeserved jail terms and various other miseries, I had no desire to get tied up with the Agency, which with all its constipated rules and feckless paranoias is a prison of its own. “Hey, I’m free. Making a nice living in surfing contests and writing articles, living with three women, all that ...”

  “Don’t you want to get Mustafa? Before he kills again?”

  It had been less than two months since the tragedy of Notre Dame, and the source of the fire was still unclear. True, part of the cathedral had been saved, but its mystical and magnificent core was gone, its spirit, gone after 850 years, gone forever.

  Stepping into its vast magical aura, in the ancient odor of the stones, the hazy incensed air, the eight centuries of prayer, sorrow and joy, took us to another time, another way of life.

  All destroyed now.

  It was losing a loved one you thought would never die. And now they were dead you couldn’t think of them alive again. Never again would there be that smoky, mystical connection, so that the people who had prayed here eight hundred years ago felt close to you. Were family.

  You could create a copy of what was lost, but it would be Disneyland. No way to replace the huge oaks cut in 1190 for ceiling beams. They don’t exist anymore. No way to reproduce the vast brilliant glass windows through which the light scintillated like the spirit itself.

  No way to reproduce the skill, art and love of workers 850 years ago. Who would probably regard us, if they could, with astonishment and scorn.

  The French government, having just lost the world’s greatest architectural treasure through stupidity, arrogance, negligence, laziness, and bad faith, raced to cover its ass. Fearing the fire might be due to Islamic terrorism, it had instantly announced, while the flames were still raging and the cathedral’s roof was collapsing, that the catastrophe wasn’t due to terrorism, although Muslim terrorists had recently tried to burn the cathedral down. The tragedy was due, the government insisted – long before anyone could possibly know – to workers renovating the roof. And when the director of the roof work stated that none of his crews had been near there before the fire, he was quickly silenced.

  Though I told myself I wasn’t here to sorrow over the loss of the world’s greatest architectural treasure, but to help protect Paris from a new danger, the ISIS bombmaker Mustafa.

  But sorrows live inside us, and over time they can grow. And as you get older, if you’re lucky enough to get there, they can take over your life. Ask my Pa. Who’s dead now, so you can’t. Ask any veteran with a scarred face, a limp, or who can’t sleep at night.

  Boar Pâté

  “PARIS IS ALWAYS a good idea,” Audrey Hepburn once said. Even from her movies you can tell she was a lovely person, and correct about many things, including Paris. So despite my sorrow at the loss of Notre Dame, and despite my previous miseries with the Agency I stuffed myself at 23:00 into a tiny cavity on Air Tahiti Nui, code-share Air France, to Los Angeles, an 8-hour and 15-minute Airbus ride. I soon fell asleep, as I’d medicated all my recent surfing injuries with my old friend Tanqueray, plus a large joint smoked before takeoff and whose benefits lasted most of the flight.

  And I dreamed of Paris. Its memory had kept me alive during those lonely Leavenworth months. Because jail is the absolute deprivation of freedom and Paris its greatest incarnation.

  Trying to stay sane at Leavenworth, I’d studied what I could get of French history, architecture, language, writers and wine. The medieval language of troubadours, the majesty of so many great minds like Villon, Montaigne, Hugo, and Zola to Giono, Camus, St. Exupéry, Malraux, and Némirovsky. It was they, throughout those long cold months, who’d kept my soul alive.

  Then a brilliant young lawyer and West Point grad took interest in my case, and thanks to her one cold November day six months later I stepped out the door of Deathtrap Leavenworth.

  The sharp thin Kansas air dizzied me, the view of blue sky and distant prairie burned my eyes. I felt sorrow and desperation for all the friends I’d left inside. I grieved and wept and felt great joy all the way on the bus to the KC Airport, bought a one-way ticket to Paris and stayed there till my last dollar ran out. Then I was stuck doing covert jobs which raised my blood pressure, anguished my soul and made my stomach hurt. When I could, I wrote articles for Surfer News and whoever else would tolerate my grammar, but that barely paid the rent of my lovely shack high over the blue Pacific, to say nothing of gas for my ancient Karmann Ghia, rusty but undaunted.

  The second time I got sprung, two years later, was from Hawaii’s most soul-deadening place, Halawa Prison. I’d been sent there for delivering weed to a wounded and handicapped friend named Mitchell and to other injured vets who needed it to kill the pain and PTSD. The person who sprung me from Halawa was the cop who’d put me there, once she’d found out the real deal. My first night of freedom I was sitting on my Honolulu lanai, delirious in my sudden unexpected liberty and getting hammered on Tanqueray and weed when she showed up in a black leather skirt with nothing u
nder and proceeded to fuck my brains out.

  Not that I had a lot of them anyway.

  But that’s another story.

  —

  THE ONE GOOD THING I got out of Halawa Prison was my nickname, Pono. In Hawaiian it means the right, good and moral way to live. When I ended up in Halawa I realized my outside life was over – I’d be forty-two when I got out, providing the system didn’t give me more time for some dreadful pointless reason. It was how I was going to live for a long time. At first I was crushed, hopeless. But after a few weeks I began to realize it was my fate and I had to make the best of it. And making the best means taking care of others, our kuleana – responsibility to the greater good. Though I was heartbroken, I tried to work with others, make their lives less heartbroken. And that’s why my fellow prisoners named me that.

  —

  AT 10:12 WEST COAST TIME we landed at LAX, where I dozed for five hours at the gate, then muddled aboard the next Airbus, a 380 which carries more people than a cruise ship, or so it seemed.

  In the belly of this monster I wandered like Jonah till I finally found my seat. Having lived two weeks with three energetic and sensual women, I still needed sleep, and the prospect of getting any in Paris was poor.

  Beside me was a woman in her late twenties, crewcut, rectangular steel rims, a wide thin mouth. High hard cheekbones, a peremptory dissatisfied air. Her elbow covered the whole armrest between us; I managed to keep my shoulder from touching hers.

  Flipping through yesterday’s Le Figaro, I was reading that one of the ISIS-linked killers who had assassinated a police couple two years ago in their home in front of their 3-year-old son had been released after four months in prison, when the woman made a tssk sound.

  I glanced at her. “It’s garbage, that,” she said in French.

  “Yes, it’s horrible ...”

  “They shouldn’t print it.”

  “Why not?” I was beginning to wonder where she was coming from.