“I don’t have any details,” said the press officer. “Our people in Paris say it’s serious. They have issued a security alert, I don’t know why. I’m sure it will be on the radio. I’m very sorry. Perhaps you will come back and finish the interview another time.”

I shook Dr. Navarre’s hand, certain that we would never meet again. By the time he solved his prion problem and had a real cure I would be long gone from Paris and onto another assignment. He looked so sad as I walked away, I realized that his laboratory must feel like a kind of prison. I felt sorry for him, left alone with his mice and his keepers. But as my Arab friends used to say, the camel train must move on.

As I was walking back to my car the cellular phone in my briefcase began to ring. It was Pascale, my news aide in the Paris bureau. Her voice was shaky. She said she wanted to read me a bulletin that had just moved on the Reuters wire. A dozen hostages had been seized on the Rue Lamennais at Taillevent, perhaps the most famous three-star restaurant in Paris. The hostages included members of the restaurant staff, as well as some diners who had lingered too long over lunch. Police had surrounded the building. The identity of the hostage takers and their demands were unknown.

I told Pascale I would be back in the bureau as soon as I could get there. She asked if she could go home early, and I said yes. She was frightened; she had a young daughter—we weren’t paying her enough money to ask her to take any risks.

2

2

All the traffic was going the other way, out of the city. Even in the Bois de Vincennes, the outbound traffic had spilled over into three lanes, leaving just one in my direction. They were fancy cars, mostly—Mercedes and big Citroëns. The radio news was still upbeat—the police had surrounded the building, the situation was under control—but Parisians seemed to know instinctively that this version couldn’t possibly be right. Something dangerous was happening in the center of the city; only fools and poor people would stay in harm’s way and risk the consequences. The traffic jam in this manicured park was a reminder that France, behind its neat hedgerows, remained a Mediterranean country—a place where people knew things without being told, where the official version of events was assumed to be a lie. It was like Beirut in that way; the Lebanese warlords always seemed to know which part of the city would be shelled on a particular evening, and managed to stay away. The rich people who knew things never got killed in that war, or in any war.