The Sixth Station, page 27
He handed me a cylinder. “Flash grenade. If it comes to that, go to the doorway, pull this, and throw.”
The man who had remained on the outer wall came into view and fired into the turret above us, as Pantera picked him off.
The third must still have been moving around toward the courtyard and the southern slope. Pantera held me back.
“Use it if you need to,” he said, referring to the grenade. “It will cause temporary blindness and deafness in the enemy and give you time to get away.”
He then slipped out of the walls through the opening. When he reached the courtyard, I could hear him heft himself up to the courtyard wall with his arms. Then silence.
I took up his former position behind the arrow slit. The armed man started back; I could see his shadow. He looked up and pointed his gun. Did he see Pantera? I didn’t wait to find out. I put my pistol into the arrow slit and squeezed the trigger. I saw him go down. But he wasn’t dead. He was writhing and bleeding from his chest. I could hear him moaning like a wounded dog. He rolled over, got a bead on where the shot had come from, and aimed into the arrow slit.
The shots hit the rock wall millimeters from the slit. From on top, automatic fire blasted the stone wall, and then nothing.
Was he up? I couldn’t look out, or he’d shoot me. I picked up the grenade and slowly crept back to the opening. If he made it into the courtyard somehow, I’d hurl it and then shoot.
Oh, God.
As I was feeling my way against the stone wall, a shot rang out from above. I heard a scream of agony, then silence. Someone had died.
Is it Pantera? Is it the shooter? What do I do?
Just then, Pantera called out as calmly as if he were calling Kmart shoppers to attention: “There were three. All dead.”
“You sure they’re dead? How do you know?”
He moaned back, “Do I tell you how to type?”
“Asshole!”
I could hear him walking and heard him jump back down into the courtyard. He called to me to come back out. Right. Nothing would make me willingly move out from the safety of the inner wall, and, in fact, I scrambled farther in and crouched.
“It’s me, for God’s sake. I told you they’re dead. I’m coming in—it’s fine,” Pantera said. “We’ve got to go.”
I made my way to the opening, gun pointed, and saw Pantera entering. “Who was that? Why did they shoot at us? It was my fault for turning on the phone!”
“Not unless they could climb a mountain in a single bound—they were here—although the signal probably gave them our exact location.”
“I’m so sorry. But I may have killed someone.”
“Don’t get crazy.”
“Who were they?”
“Sent by the same people who also convinced Hussein, Bar-Cohen, and Pawar to lie in 1982.”
“What does that mean?”
“Like the wise man said, ‘All the powers in the world.’”
It hit me then: Three astronomers showed up at the house when they saw a star and found an unwed mother and her baby. And that birth would threaten all the powers in the world. History repeating? This was too much.
“The rest of them—and probably the French authorities—will be up here soon,” he said, taking binoculars from his backpack and surveying the area below. “Let’s move. They’re already here.”
“What do you see?”
I grabbed the binoculars from him and could see dozens of police cars arriving at the bottom of the mountain.
“It will still take them forty-five minutes to get up here. But the choppers will be surveilling. They’ll drop troopers.”
I could hear them already approaching in the distance.
“What do we do? We’re trapped. They’ll get us on the way down!”
At that, Yusef unhooked the webbing harnesses and instructed me to put one on and lock it, which I did. He did the same. He went back inside the wall and came back out rolling a wooden wheel of rope.
“We’ve been preparing for this.…”
“Thanks for inviting me along. We killed three people.”
“Will you cut it out? Next time you should let them kill you. Or I will.”
He motioned for me to move, and I helped him maneuver the wheel up and over the courtyard wall and heft it back out onto the outer rim.
We pushed the wheel to the impenetrable, sheer cliff side, and he unraveled it—hundreds of feet of rope—and then cut it in half, looped each around a turret, secured them with knots, and attached them to our rappel devices on the harnesses. He anchored various other things, while I stood in shock, looking straight down into a four-thousand-foot drop.
He tested both the ropes and the devices, unclipped the daisy chain from the anchors, and said, “Get in position.”
“What position? I can’t!”
He took me by the shoulders, pushed me to the edge, and turned me around so I was facing the castle and standing with my back to the drop.
“Now, place your left hand around the rope.… Okay, good; move it down six inches above the rappel device. Move your left hand between the clip and the anchors.”
I did as I was told, shaking every step of the way.
“Okay, good. Now grab the rope that hangs down out of the rappel device with your right hand—that’s your break hand—and slide your hand on the rope back to your right hip and wrap the rope slightly around your right hip.”
I was getting better at taking orders, and was doing fine following the next few directions—until he said, “Now step back off the edge.”
“What? No!”
He locked himself in next to me on the next turret and came alongside of me. “Step off!”
I didn’t budge. “Goddammit—step off, Alazais! You’ve done it before.”
“I haven’t done it ever before, so fuck you!”
Yes, you have. Just not in this life. The dream … the dream.
I rechecked the harness and then took the biggest step of my life. I turned my back to the mountain and fell backward—and put my future once again into the hands of the assassin.
Holding on for dear life and letting myself down slowly, I began to rappel downward. Or creep downward, is more like it.
“Let some of the rope in your right hand slide up through the rappel device,” he ordered as he hung next to me. As I did this I felt myself sliding more easily down the rope.
When we got partway down, and we ran out of rope, he swung into me, grabbed me around the waist, and together we swung over to an overhang and stepped onto it, grabbing onto branches.
“Now what?” I said, shaking.
“Now we unhook ourselves and make our way down. We’ve gone through the worst of it.”
He tied one end of a piece of the rope he’d taken from the welding shed to me and the other end to himself, and we began creeping, crawling on ledges that were no more than six inches wide at some points, until we finally got to level ground some one thousand feet up. The choppers were above us, but even I knew nobody in them would be looking on this side, and even if they were, they wouldn’t see us in all the tangles of brambles and the jutting rocks.
“Toss your gun.”
“No.”
“Yes, leave the gun.”
“And take the cannoli?”
With that he grabbed my gun and tossed it along with his into the brambles.
“Why did you do that?”
No answer.
It took an hour more of descending on hands and knees before we could see the valley clearly. In another half hour, we touched ground. Happy to be alive but in pain from the gashes on my knees, which had opened wide, I still kissed the ground.
He untied us and said, “Now let’s go see what’s going on.”
“What?”
He took the water and disinfectant towelettes out of his backpack, redressed my knees and hands, cleaned my face and his, dusted us off, reached into his bag, and pulled out a terrible hat, which he pulled over my terrible hair, saying, “A bonnie boonie.”
Jeez. Loony is more like it.
He grabbed my hand and began walking me, or more accurately pulling me, around the perimeter. I could see dozens of flashing cherry lights atop cop cars, ambulances, armored vehicles, and even a tank assembled in the Valley of the Burned, where they’d set up a command center, as the cops prepared for all-out battle. With us.
Instead of sneaking back around the backside of the mountain, Pantera tightened his hand around mine in that death grip and, almost at a run, began dragging me toward them in the valley.
Like the Cathars walking into the flames!
“We’re heading right back to the—” I tried saying, but he wasn’t listening. I attempted to break free of his grasp, but it was useless. At a run now, dragging me with him, he began waving to the cops. In less than ten seconds I’d be in their hands—the hands of the authorities I’d been ducking for days, who were out for blood.
“You lying traitor,” I screeched, as he rushed us into the fray, still holding my hand.
32
“Ta gueule! Seriously. Trust me.” He actually said this as he was dragging me against my will into the hands of the authorities.
Trust no one.
He loosened his grip on my hand and then squeezed it—as opposed to crushing it—and put his other arm around my shoulder, draping it like a boyfriend would, as he forcibly “strolled” me quickly to the first cop we came up to.
Like a big buffoon, he said way too loud in the cop’s face—or this is what I thought he said, but my French is worse than, well, anything:
“Qu’est qui se passe? Pouvez-vous nous prendre en photo moi et ma femme? C’est comme dans un film!”
The cop was having none of whatever it was, and threatened (or it sounded like a threat anyway): “Mais c’est ridicule! Reculez! N’approchez pas. C’est une scène de crime, vous devez quitter immédiatement les lieux sinon nous allons ce faire arreter.”
“Juste une photo, s’il vous plait. Nous avons traversé tout le village dès que nous avons entendu les sirènes.”
“Sortez ces civils d’ici immédiatement.”
At that, two cops came over and forcibly escorted us out of the Valley of the Burned and then out of the area entirely.
If you ever trust anyone, maybe this should be the guy.
As we headed back down the paved part of the mountain road to the bottom, I turned to him.
“Damn! You are good.”
“You have no idea.”
“No, seriously. Really good.”
“And seriously, I know that. Let’s move,” he urged, pushing me beyond my physical capacities right then. Or so I thought. I didn’t realize I hadn’t even been tested yet.
We hurried back to the boarding house at a jogging pace. I packed up my nearly nonexistent belongings, changed into my only other pair of jeans, and met him back downstairs.
“We’ll take two cars. I don’t want you to follow me, but I highlighted the route for you in yellow. We’re going to Carcassonne. It’s a fairly straight route, so don’t get lost. We can’t communicate by cell. Strictly off the grid, old-school.
“When you get to the city, there is parking at the foot of the village outside the walls.”
“Walls?”
“It’s a walled city. But tell them you are staying at Hôtel de la Cité, and you will be directed to a private area immediately outside the wall and they’ll send a car or van to get you. I’ll meet you there.”
“What name should I use to check in, and should I use Sadowski’s ATM card?”
“It’s all taken care of. Just tell them you are Madame Roussel and that you would like your room key.”
With that he got in his red Citroën and slowly pulled out of sight. I assumed by now everyone in the village of roughly one hundred citizens knew everything we’d done, hadn’t done, and were about to do. Or maybe the French weren’t like small-town folk everywhere else on the planet.
There wasn’t a soul in sight, and I assumed that whoever was there had by now gone up to the mountain to see what all the excitement was about.
At the end of the village there was, as I should have expected, a police- manned roadblock. I showed my false passport, and they checked the car thoroughly. I told them in English, and then tried in Italian, that I had come to see the mountain, and then I made a big deal about trying to find out why all those cop cars and ambulances were there. Maybe it was the old-lady rocker hair that did it, but they just got annoyed and let me pass.
If there ever was anyone who didn’t look like a threat to anyone but herself, it’s you right now!
It is about fifty-seven kilometers (just over thirty-five miles) between the towns of Montségur and Carcassonne, but they may as well be on different planets. One is the kind of ancient rural village you can only find in France, and the other is the kind of ancient walled city you can only find in France. One has no commerce, while inside the other behind those ancient walls are high-end designer boutiques, hotels, and Michelin-starred restaurants doing business in stone buildings that were built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a city that was founded by the Romans in the first century.
As I approached, the site nearly left me breathless. Rising above the walls was a city that looked like something out of a medieval tale, with an intact castle, dozens of turrets, drawbridges and, yes, miles of walls rising above the landscape.
After following about six thousand signs pointing this way and that and ending up back where I started, I realized that all signs for CITÉ meant the city itself and not the hotel.
After several misses, I finally figured out how to get to the hotel parking “lot,” which was sort of a grassy knoll (I always wanted to use those words in a sentence that didn’t relate to the assassination of JFK), and parked the car as Pantera had directed at the foot of the wall.
An attendant came by and asked the name of my hotel and then called it into a walkie-talkie thing. Within minutes, a car came by to pick me up. There were no cars inside the walls except for the one or two delivering guests to hotels. Visitors and residents of the city all parked outside the walls in designated areas and walked in through the ancient drawbridge entrance.
The Hôtel de la Cité looked like a palace with giant arched, leaded-glass windows on a cobblestone street.
There were hundreds of shops, restaurants, bars, several cathedrals, and a basilica, and, yes, a fortified castle within the city walls. Think real-life Disney World minus the annoying furry characters.
The interior did not disappoint. Disappoint? It was overwhelming. I walked into a lovely lobby with a cozy library bar and fancy restaurant on the lobby level.
I approached the front desk, gave the name Alazais Roussel, and suddenly the staff was all over me like a bad smell—but in a good way for once.
Astonished to see I just had that one measly carry-on bag, the bellman nonetheless made a big deal of carrying it to my room and attempting unsuccessfully to wrest from me my red satchel with my iPad, Sadowski’s phone, and, oh, yeah, that same Gap scarf.
Did I say “room”? Think suite.
Thank God this isn’t on my tab.
It was huge, with a beamed ceiling and a giant king-size bed (probably had belonged to an actual king) covered in luxurious fabrics, with a carved mahogany headboard that reached to the ceiling. The floor was tiled, and the white marble fireplace had already been lit. Beyond that, a desk and several comfy velvet easy chairs in gray with a matching loveseat were set around a leather steamer trunk. It had high-speed everything, from Internet to an even-higher-speed Jacuzzi tub roughly the size of an Olympic pool.
The bellman (Pierre, of course) opened the curtains to reveal a huge terrace complete with red padded lounges and a table and chairs.
A little bit of heaven in the middle of my hellish life.
I tipped Pierre, who seemed reluctant to leave, and I had to say about fourteen hundred mercis before he got the hint.
What now? Wait and see what Pantera’s got up his sleeve? Right. Like hell I will.
I took out the tablet, sat down on the bed, and checked Sadowski’s voice mail, despite Donald’s plea to stay “off the grid.” Message from Dona: “This crazy thing happened. Randy Mohammed pulled me aside as we were leaving court.…”
If she’s already calling him “Randy,” God knows what she got out of him. The woman is irresistible to men.
“He said, ‘Tell Ms. Russo that Mr. ben Yusef says to “Go forth and trust the man who raised him.”’”
That was it.
I checked the e-mail. Nothing. I sent one off to Donald. “Image of Yusef Pantera anywhere over the last, say, forty years in any archives anywhere?”
I logged off and turned the TV on to CNN International. The anchor, Seema Ving, said, “Coming up, our lead story. They are calling it the miracle of Demiel ben Yusef. But is it a hoax?”
As they broke for commercial, they ran footage of riots around the world, all in the name of ben Yusef. The final image was of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. My old neighborhood looked like a war zone. So much for peaceful and orderly.
After a bunch of ads for investment companies and medicines that seemed to make you ride a bike in slow motion while waving backward, Ving was back with the lead story. And I nearly fell off the bed.
“After court closed for the day,” she reported, “an event occurred that many are calling a miracle. It involves the children who had been brought into court on the first day of the ben Yusef trial.”
Filmed footage of the children as they’d been wheeled into court that first day splashed across the screen. Even though I’d seen it in person, I needed to turn my head away for a moment—it was that horrific and heartbreaking, even on video. There was the little angel without a mouth and hard plastic skin where once a beautiful little girl had been; and the little boy with the beautiful face whose eyes were rolling in his head as he lolled in a wheelchair, clearly brain-damaged; the blind kids being led by mothers; the miniature motorized wheelchair with the five-year-old girl strapped in to keep her upright.
