Invisible Armies

Chapter 20

"This is war," she says. "Think about Jayalitha. Not just that they murdered her, and murdered her family, but remember why. She knew something. She found out something important, something that scared them so much they had to kill her. We have to find it too. We can't afford the luxury of being squeamish. We're the only hope of thousands of dying children. I wish there was some other way, but there isn't. We have to do this."

** *

Their Paris apartment is near the eastern edge of the 11th arrondissement, working-class Paris, half blue-collar whites, half African immigrants, both maintaining an uneasy truce that consists largely of staying out of one another's way. Danielle loves it fiercely. She loves the smell of boulangeries, the buzzing Wednesday and Saturday markets held along the wide median of Boulevard Charonne, the galleries and statues and architectural treasures around every corner, the quiet rubber-wheeled Metro and the glorious Art Deco signs that indicate its stations, the effortless style of French women, even though they always make her feel frumpy. She even speaks a little of the language, thanks to America's East Coast upper-class quirk of studying French rather than far-more-useful Spanish in high school.

She had been to Paris before, as a backpacker, and liked it well enough but was frustrated by crowded hostels, rude French service, long lines at the tourist-soaked Louvre and Eiffel Tower and other obligatory tourist stops. She thought it overhyped and overcrowded. But here, away from the theme-park city center, she understands that living in Paris, more than anywhere else in the world, means living surrounded by beauty. It already feels almost like home.

Two days after the La Défense protest, Danielle and Laurent leave their apartment for what starts as a short walk and turns into an epic journey. To the vast roundabout of the Bastille, then along Rue Rivoli, past chocolatiers and creperies and music stores and smoky little bars, until they reach the Gothic majesty of Hotel de Ville. There they cross the Seine onto Ile de la Cité, pass Notre Dame, and continue into the Latin Quarter, Danielle's favourite district, between the Seine and the Sorbonne, full of students, artists, bookstores and cinemas. After a long walk through the Jardins du Luxembourg they continue west along the Seine. Danielle feels like she is walking in a movie set, surrounded as she is by vast architectural wonders: the Eiffel Tower perching spiderlike ahead, the Musee d'Orsay and Les Invalides to her left, the Louvre and the Tuileries to her right, and the dark Seine coursing between them as it has for centuries. Since setting out she and Laurent have hardly talked, only walked companionably, sometimes hand in hand, in a silence which she knows she must eventually break.

Danielle takes a deep breath and says, "Laurent?" Laurent looks at her."Your plan? I don't know about it. I just don't know."

He nods, slowly. "I could sense your hesitation."

"It's not that I don't think it will work. I don't know if it's the right thing to do."

"It's the wrong thing," he says. "But less wrong than doing nothing."

"There has to be some other way."

"There probably is. But the alternatives are slow. Children are dying, Danielle. We don't have the luxury of time."

"Then..." She hesitates, knowing she is about to take the most cowardly road. But she can't abide any of the alternatives. "Then I don't want to be there. I'm sorry. I just, I can't, I don't have the stomach for it. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I don't want to be involved."

Laurent nods again, thoughtfully, as they walk past the gleaming dome of Les Invalides, Napoleon's tomb. "Let's take a little detour," he suggests.

He leads her halfway to Les Invalides, then veers left, to the Musee Rodin. The museum itself is expensive, but entry to the gardens is only one euro. Near the entrance, above a field of gravel, a vast iron sculpture looms. Danielle recognizes it. Rodin's masterpiece, the Gates of Hell. Two iron gates, in which tortured human forms lie half-suspended. Above them, a man sits with his head resting on his fist, contemplating the world. The Thinker. The larger, more famous version of that statue is some fifty feet behind them, but that piece was only a study for this masterwork.