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.”Aimée turned.“Prayer time, you mean 7 A.M.?”“No one goes out.They pray at home or in the mosque.Like in our country.”“Your country?”“All the big girls wear chadors there.”“Where’s that?”“There’s a big blue mosque.I saw it, it’s far away.”Speaking Farsi, and a blue mosque.That might mean Tehran.The little girl’s hands twisted again.“My uncle lives there.We send him money but I’m not supposed to know that.”And then she skipped away beside the black chador.Tuesday EveningVATEL SAT BOLT upright, his chest heaving.Loud ringing had startled him.It was the phone; Ursana was calling him.Of course, this was all a nightmare, a terrible nightmare.Ursana was picking apricots in the grove or embroidering their baby’s clothes.“Roj bas,, Ursana,” he said, lapsing into Kurdish.“Allô.Vatel?”The words jolted him awake.Jolted him into awareness of the hot room lit by sparse evening light and the beeping of horns from the traffic on rue Saint-Laurent below his window.And the emptiness.She was gone.They were all gone.Glass shards twinkling like crystal were sprinkled over his security guard overalls that lay on the floor.“You there, Vatel?” asked Deranger, his boss.“Oui, Monsieur Deranger,” he said, recovering.He’d knocked the lamp over in his nightmare.Always the same nightmare.The white light, his father twirling, wearing the conical hat and flowing skirt, spinning in the old Dervish way.The dede, the Kurdish village seer of their outlawed Alevi sect, rocking on the red Kilim rug to the strains of the mandolin-like saz and beating a goatskin drum.His mother, her eyes closed, spinning near his father in the ritual cem, following the Alevi way of light.Their centuries-old worship of the sun and nature that stemmed from ancient Zoroastrian roots.And then the thuds of Turkish artillery pounding the village.The beaten-earth floor shaking.Vatel reaching out for his mother as she spun away.His warning shouts, which no one heard.The drum beating louder, rushing water surging everywhere.Rising up the whitewashed stone walls of their farmhouse.Ursana, his wife, holding the telephone, a smile on her face above the red slash of her slit throat, floating by, her belly ripped open and their unborn baby—“.rotating shifts, the duty guard en vacances,” Deranger was saying.“Alors, did you hear me?”Vatel caught his breath.“Of course, Monsieur Deranger,” he said.This wasn’t his village, no Turkish military was lobbing grenades, forcing Kurds to evacuate.This was not a damp prison cell, there was no knife under his fingernails nor electric cattle prod searing his flesh until he furnished names.“So you can work the early rue de Paradis security shift tonight?”Vatel gripped the sheets tighter.Rue de Paradis.and this morning’s discovery came back to him.The man’s body lying in the tiled doorway, his throat slit with the distinctive curling slash under his ear, a mark the Yellow Crescent left on “informers.” Informers like him.And he was a wanted man.“Much as I want to help Monsieur Deranger, I’m feverish, I woke up with the flu,” he said, putting the sheet over the receiver, coughing.“I’m too sick even to work my shift tonight.”“That puts us in difficult situation,” Deranger said, his thick voice low and raspy from the pack a day he smoked.“I’m sorry.Why don’t you ask Nohant?”“Nohant do a double shift? But that’s overtime.”“He always says he could use the money.” Vatel paused.He’d bring it up now.“I know the Cour des Petites Ecuries building needs staff, saw it on the board.I worked overtime there last month and I liked the hours.Can you put in for a transfer for me?”“Something wrong? Someone was asking about you.”Already? He gripped the phone.Did the Yellow Crescent’s tentacles extend here? Killing here, like they killed back home?“Non.Who?”“That’s all I heard from Nohant,” Deranger said.Papers rustled in the background [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]