The Black Widow

THE NAME ON THE RECTANGULAR paper sign read MORESBY. Christian Bouchard had chosen it himself. It came from a book he had read once about wealthy, naive Americans wandering among the Arabs of North Africa. The story ended badly for the Americans; someone had died. Bouchard hadn’t cared for the novel, but then Bouchard was the first to admit he wasn’t much of a reader. This shortcoming had not endeared him initially to Paul Rousseau, who famously read while brushing his teeth. Rousseau was forever foisting dense volumes of prose and poetry upon his ill-read deputy. Bouchard displayed the books on the coffee table in his apartment to impress his wife’s friends.

He clutched the paper sign in his damp right hand. In his left he held a mobile phone, which for the past several hours had pinged with a steady stream of messages regarding a certain Dr. Leila Hadawi, a French citizen of Palestinian Arab extraction. Dr. Hadawi had boarded Air France Flight 1533 in Athens earlier that afternoon, following a month’s holiday in Greece. She had been granted reentry into France with no questions about her travel itinerary and was now making her way to the arrivals hall of Terminal 2F, or so said the last message Bouchard had received. He would believe it when he saw her with his own eyes. The Israeli standing next to him seemed to feel the same way. He was the lanky one with gray eyes, the one the French members of the team knew as Michel. There was something about him that made Bouchard uneasy. It was not difficult to picture him with a gun in his hand, pointed at a man who was about to die.

“There she is,” murmured the Israeli, as though addressing his footwear, but Bouchard didn’t see her. A flight from Cairo had arrived at the same time as the flight from Athens; there were hijabs aplenty. “What color?” asked Bouchard, and the Israeli replied, “Burgundy.” It was one of the few French words he knew.

Bouchard’s gaze swept over the arriving passengers, and then at once he saw her, a turning leaf afloat a rushing stream. She walked within a few feet of where they were standing, her eyes straight ahead, her chin raised slightly, pulling her little rolling suitcase. Then she slipped through the outer doors and was gone again.

Bouchard looked at the Israeli, who was suddenly smiling. His sense of relief was palpable, but Bouchard detected something else. As a Frenchman, he knew a thing or two about matters of the heart. The Israeli was in love with the woman who had just returned from Syria. Of that, Bouchard was certain.

She settled quietly into her apartment in the banlieue of Aubervilliers and resumed her old life. She was Leila before Jalal Nasser had approached her at the café across the street, Leila before a pretty girl from Bristol had spirited her secretly to Syria. She had never witnessed the horrors of Raqqa or the tragedy of Palmyra, she had never dug shrapnel from the body of a man called Saladin. She had been to Greece, to the enchanted isle of Santorini. Yes, it had been as lovely as she imagined. No, she would probably not return. Once was quite enough.

She was surprisingly thin for a woman who had been on holiday, and her face was stained with evidence of strain and fatigue. The fatigue would not abate, for even after her return, sleep eluded her. Nor did she regain her appetite. She forced herself to eat croissants and baguettes and Camembert and pasta, and quickly she regained a lost kilo or two. It did little for her appearance. She looked like a cyclist who had just completed the Tour de France — or a jihadist who had just spent a month training in Syria and Iraq.

Roland Girard, the clinic’s ersatz administrator, tried to lighten her patient load, but she wouldn’t hear of it. After a month in the upside-down world of the caliphate, she longed for some semblance of normality, even if it was Leila’s and not her own. She discovered that she missed her patients, the inhabitants of the cités, the citizens of the other France. And for the first time, she saw the Arab world as they undoubtedly saw it, as a cruel and unforgiving place, a place with no future, a place to be fled. The vast majority of them wanted nothing more than to live in peace and care for their families. But a small minority — small in percentage, but large in number — had fallen victim to the siren song of radical Islam. Some were prepared to slaughter their fellow Frenchmen in the name of the caliphate. And some would surely have slit Dr. Hadawi’s throat if they knew the secret she was hiding beneath her hijab.