Away Running (21 page)

Still nothing from Aïda.

I turn my cell off.

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The train is crowded, but at Villeneuve station it’s even more packed, both platforms filled with people, North African and African and white, filing out the exits—old people in traditional robes, kids like us in jeans and T-shirts, city workers in green jumpsuits. I wonder if they’re Monsieur Oussekine’s co-workers.

Outside the station
grands frères
from the Cinq Mille are giving away white T-shirts,
Morts pour Rien—
Dead for Nothing—printed in block letters across the chest. Police in riot gear—bulletproof vests, body armor, plastic shields—stand clustered in groups. Even more are in their white buses. They stare out over the crowd.

The Diables Rouges are set to rendezvous at the Beach. Free and I stand in line for our
Morts pour Rien
shirts, and then we head that way.
Le Monde
talked about “an urban disturbance,” broken windows and torched cars,
but everything looks pretty much the way it always does. On one corner, Free points out what’s left of one of the city’s plastic trash bins—a dark green circle, melted onto the sidewalk.

We head up Rue du 19 Mars 1962. At the end of the block are two unmarked cars full of cops. “It’s funny,” Free says. “They just sit there, like they’re waiting.”

“Must be scared of the march.”

“With all these folks here?” says Free. “I’d be scared too.”

There’s already a big gathering when we arrive at the Beach. Many faces look familiar—friends and family of teammates. I see most of the guys that we were with when the cops charged us. Jean-Marc. Ibrahim. Off to the side, crying, is Adar. And the reality of it hits me again, suddenly, harder than any hit I’ve ever taken. Moose is gone. Mobylette too. Maybe Sidi.

I turn my phone back on. There are more messages, but I ignore them and punch out a quick text—
Please know I am thinking about you
—and send it to Aïda.

More and more people arrive. We’re seventy or eighty now, milling around, greeting one another with handshakes but staying mostly silent.

It’s nearly four when Monsieur Lebrun finally climbs the bleachers, Yaz behind him. Behind Yaz is an imam. He wears a dark turban and has a bushy beard.
Monsieur Lebrun speaks into a bullhorn, his voice crackling. “We’re here to pay respect to fallen…Be respectful of…”

The imam follows. “The families are grieving…Our unity and silence must honor…”

I don’t really hear much of it, or maybe it just doesn’t stick.

Coach Thierry and one of the senior team players unfurl a twenty-foot banner that reads the same as the white T-shirts everybody is wearing:
MORTS POUR RIEN
. The rest of us crowd behind. We exit the Beach and slowly head toward the substation. It’s not far, but it takes nearly twenty minutes to get there, the mass of us making the going slow.

A huge crowd is already there. The mayor of Villeneuve stands near the front. We wait in silence for a while; I look at the gray sky. Finally the mayor lays a wreath on the wall Moose and Mobylette and Sidi climbed over. He makes a short speech, offering condolences to the families, reminding us about the fragility of life.

“Like we don’t know already,” says Free.

“
Tchut!
” Coach Thierry snaps.

The mayor heads the procession, beside the giant banner. Our march is really a kind of side-to-side rocking, the size of the crowd so huge and the pace so slow. We number in the hundreds easy, hundreds and hundreds, pushing in the direction of the town center. Free and I
are forty or fifty people back from the front, with our teammates.

We walk past six-floor walk-ups, rows of bunker-like bungalows. People stare from windows. A few hang sheets made into impromptu signs:
Morts pour Rien
. One reads:
Nos Fils!
—Our Sons. Some watchers join us.

On the Rue de Sévignié two busloads of cops wait for us. Two more arrive as we push onto the street.
CRS
in full gear line both sidewalks. Behind their helmets and visors, they remind me of Cylons, and because the street is so narrow, they seem right on top of us.

We ignore them and march on. The crowd gets pretty dense; people start spilling up onto the sidewalk. The cops use their shields to force them back into the road. Some shove with their telescope batons. They bark at us to stay in the street. The police have set up metal crowd-control barriers at the corner that force us to go left, toward the Charlotte Petit roundabout.

Jorge, next to me, grumbles, “Dirty pigs. This adds a good kilometer to our route, through Ville-Blanche.”

Overhead, a police helicopter appears out of nowhere. It flies real low in circles above us, its engine roaring, its rotors whipping up waste paper and dirt. The dust gets in my eyes. I hear Coach Thierry shouting over the helicopter’s rotors, something like “Remain calm…” and “…pay tribute to our teammates.”

At the roundabout, a cop in full body armor starts to laugh for no apparent reason. I don’t initially hear him, but I hear Jorge—“Our friends are dead, and you think it’s funny!”—and when I look, I see the broad, mocking smile through the clear visor. The cop is giving Jorge a you-want-something-with-me look.

I hear Free tell Jorge, “Relax,
mec
.”

Jorge is six-four and weighs at least two-sixty. “
C’est quoi ton problème
?” he snaps at the cop. “
Tu me cherches
?” What’s your deal? You want something with me?

“Let it go,” Free says. And I see Coach Thierry heading back toward us.

But it’s too late. Jorge says, “Fucking murderers!” and he spits into the cop’s visor. A plainclothes cop next to me, who I hadn’t noticed, pulls out and flicks open a steel T-baton and strikes Jorge on the back of the head—
plink!
Just like that.

Jorge’s head splits open, a bloody pink gash, and he collapses onto all fours.

It’s like everyone around me is suddenly still.

Then it’s all motion and commotion. “Dang!” I hear—Free—and then people are pushing, running in all directions. Screaming. A stampede.

I lean over Jorge, trying to protect him from the crowd. Free does too. Jorge is not out, but he’s dazed, sitting in the middle of the street, his eyes glassy.

The next bit happens in slow motion. I see from the corner of my eye the riot cop who was grinning, rearing back to take a broad swing at us with his T-baton. I raise my forearm over my face—it’s just instinct—but Freeman pops up and straight-arms him in the chest, which sends the cop flying back into the metal railing, his helmet askew, other cops dropping their batons to catch his falling body.

“Break!” Free screams, grabbing Jorge by the arm. “Go, go, go!”

Free and I are struggling to get Jorge to his feet. People jostle us. I hear whistles blowing—the cops. One sprays a canister into the air. I can feel my lungs fill with thickness, my eyes burning. But we have Jorge up, and we’re moving.

With the crowd, which is moving away from the roundabout. Away from where the mayor is, at the head of the marchers—which is where, it seems to me, we should be heading. They wouldn’t attack the mayor, would they?

I’m wiping at my eyes with one hand; Jorge’s arm is in the other. We’re trying to push out of this mess.

“Don’t rub,” Free shouts, his face scrunched and his eyes squinting. “The tears will clear the crap out.”

It’s hard to breathe. We’re all three coughing, pushing toward a nearby alley.
L’Allée du Côteau
, the sign reads. Men and women and kids, running. Cops among us, swinging. Jorge kind of gets his wits back, and he’s
running on his own now, crimson wet all over his face and his white
Morts pour Rien
T-shirt.

At the top of the alley, on Rue des Près, a pack of
CRS
runs toward us, full steam. We take off in different directions—Jorge in one, Free in the other. Not because we’re trying to split up; just because we do. I follow Free. We run along a row of closed-down warehouses and, at the top of the street, climb the cement stairs two by two.

We’re in a kind of plaza, the top of city hall visible above the buildings on the other side. Hardly anybody else here. No cops. We lean over, catching our breath, both of us still coughing from the pepper spray.

Free says, “What just happened?”

“Dang,” I say, my throat raw and burning.

“Dang is right,” says Free. “For real.”

MATT

Night is falling fast. The police helicopter flies circles above the plaza but ignores us. It points its searchlight at a cluster of hoodie boys that Free and I hadn’t noticed, huddled beneath a tree at the other end. When the light hits them, they run.

“Look,” Free says, pointing toward the Cinq Mille.

A chimney of orange-black smoke rises from between two of the buildings. Two fire trucks zoom past, sirens blaring, followed by a
CRS
bus. We dodge behind a tree.

“We got to get out of here,” Free says. “The
RER
, bus, something.”

“Cops were all over the
RER
earlier,” I say. “And will it even be running?”

We both take a knee beneath the tree.

“City hall?” I suggest.

“Cops will definitely be all over there.”

“But it’s where the march was supposed to end up. And the mayor will be there.”

He doesn’t look convinced. Still, we start walking that way, fast but not running. Voices and odd noises fill the air. Spurts of laughter—one a high-pitched cackle. Glass breaking. Dogs barking, one baying. Down the street, Free and I see two cars side by side, burning. Four or five guys, hooded and with bandannas over their faces, dance around them. The windshield of one car explodes as we watch.

A police minivan arrives, and the hoodie boys dart away into an alley. The van slows to turn and follow them in. But it’s an ambush! A larger group, maybe ten hoodie boys, encircles the van and starts hitting it with sticks and metal pipes. And I’m like,
Wow
.

The van shifts into reverse, peels out backward, but it hits one of the burning cars.

A cop fires a Flash-Ball from his window into the hoodie boys—
pop!
—and a boy carrying a metal pipe takes a direct hit; he comes straight off his feet.

Another shot. This time the Flash-Ball splits a green plastic trash bin in two.

“Jesus, Matt, wake up!”

Free is screaming at me, tugging at my sleeve.

“We gotta break!”

We sprint away from the ambush as other police vans arrive. We hear a siren coming from the direction we’re moving in. Free cuts hard toward the Avenue des Quatre Routes—which leads away from city hall—but we’re sprinting like crazy, no time to discuss it. We’re just running.

The avenue is jammed with people going in every direction. There are thudding explosions and, before long, the smell of tear gas. A green municipal bus burns, orange heat and black smoke rising from it. People—passengers—stand huddled off to the side under the awning of a bakery, coughing, shielding their faces. A woman in a long coat lies on the ground. Two other passengers tend to her. She looks burned pretty bad.

A little farther on: a white tank-like thing, with a cannon in front. I only recognize what it is as the cannon fires full blast on us. The jet of water knocks me off my feet; it’s like getting rammed by a tree trunk. Free collapses backward too.

CRS
charge from behind the tank. I help Free up, but there’s nowhere to run, nowhere without cops or water spraying or people falling over each other.

“This way!” I scream, indicating the alley between the bank and the pharmacy, but there are people everywhere and suddenly no Freeman.

“Free?”

People pushing, running.

“Free! Freeman! Free!”

Cops swinging.

I can’t just stand here. I take the alley, Allée Victor Hugo, hoping this is the way he went, as it leads to the Cinq Mille. Somewhere familiar. That’s where we’ll find one another again.

But I end up face-to-face with a cop in full riot gear. Before I can dodge or duck or even flinch, he flips up the dark visor of his helmet.

“No,” he tells me, “that way,” pointing with his baton.

But it’s like a disconnect. I can’t make sense of his familiar face inside the dark helmet or fit the directions his mouth speaks at me with my immediate task, which is finding Free.

His hand is grasping my arm. “Listen to me, Quebec!” he says, and I recognize him finally: the cop with a brother in Montreal, Lieutenant Petit. “This isn’t a game. There’s a corps of
CRS
up there. Go that way instead. Now!”

And I do. I run toward the alley. It’s long, all the doors and shutters closed. I run past a burning car. The heat singes my cheeks.

Right, onto Rue Berlioz. There’s hardly anybody on the street, so I slow to a jog but keep moving. I try to call Free on his cell. Straight to voice mail.

Left, onto Rue Malraux. And there, just ahead, is about a dozen
CRS
, marching in the other direction. I stay far
enough behind that they don’t notice me. They turn the corner—and five hoodie boys with bandannas and scarves tied bandit-style over their mouths spring out from between two buildings! They pelt the cops with rocks, then run.

Toward me.

I’m running too.

The first of the hoodie boys catches up. We turn the corner together.

Helmeted
CRS
with dark visors masking their faces are there. They’re firing guns. At us!

The hoodie boy ducks behind a car. Me too. Gunfire pop-pops off the side of the car, off the wall behind us.

“Rubber bullets,” the hoodie boy says. “Don’t sweat it.”

Karim. I recognize his voice.

A helicopter whoosh-whooshes above, its searchlight looking for us.

Riot police beat their shields with T-batons and march to the cadence.

People at windows above throw pots and pans down at the police.

Karim pulls his cell from his pocket and flips it open, reads the screen. “C’mon!” he says and takes off. And I do too.