The room was clean and tight. Two double beds with patterned white coverlets, a mirror over a set of drawers, a little desk, and a small TV.
It seemed like it was built to accommodate people smaller than the two large SEALs.
Ten minutes after they arrived, as Crocker was studying a street map, the phone rang.
The girl at the front desk said, “Your car has arrived.”
“Thanks.”
Crocker left Akil in the bathroom and returned to the lobby. A tall, attractive young North African woman stood waiting. Jet black eyes, hair, and eyebrows. High cheekbones. She looked like she was ready to break in half anyone who bothered her.
“Are you the one who brought the car?” Crocker asked.
“Yes, I am,” she answered with a British accent. “Follow me.”
He trailed her out onto the narrow cobblestone street. Parked along the curb was a little green Renault that looked about the size of a bathtub.
“You couldn’t find anything bigger?” Crocker asked.
She handed him a set of keys. “My number is in the glove compartment, if you need me.”
His eyes followed the back of her tight black pants until they disappeared around a corner, then he crossed the street and entered an Internet café. Ads in the windows advertised cheap long-distance rates to Algeria, Morocco, and the Comoro Islands.
With the smells of the port wafting in the front door, Crocker logged into his e-mail server. As he waited for his password to clear, he noticed that the patron before him had visited www.aljazeera.com. Other destinations included a variety of porno sites.
His e-mails appeared. Mancini, Ritchie, and Davis were already growing antsy in Islamabad, wondering if they could return home since Crocker didn’t seem to need them.
“Wait another couple of days. I might require your services,” the team leader wrote back.
Entering the address “Club Rosa–Marseille” and pressing Search, Crocker entered an amateurish website that featured videos of local bands like Carpe Diem, 13 Departement, PSYA4 De La Rime, IAM, Bouga, Fonky Family, and the Mystik Motorcycles, news about upcoming motocross racing events and meetings, and ads from people selling motorcycles.
Crocker and Akil ate lunch—fresh seafood couscous—at a restaurant across from the docks. Then, with Akil consulting the map and giving directions, Crocker drove the tiny Renault through the cramped Noailles quarter lined with Arabic and Indo-Chinese shops, then north into a spiral of low-income French HLM housing. Sandstone-colored high-rises with Spanish tile roofs swallowed them up. All seemed to have laundry flapping from clotheslines on their balconies.
The monochromatic building scheme was interrupted by colorful signs in Arabic. They passed a number of stores selling fake Nikes and Diesel jeans, and makeshift cafés filled with dark-skinned men with faces lined from the sun. They wore button-down shirts with short sleeves and pressed dress slacks.
The young people, in comparison, were dressed like urban American teenagers. Muscle shirts, baggy tees, baseball caps. Some of the young women were veiled; others wore skimpy tank tops and low-rise jeans.
Crocker remembered hearing that Marseille was the most ethnically diverse city in France. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Phoenicians had taken refuge in the city (then known as Massilia) when the Persians destroyed Phocaea in the sixth century BC. Then as now the city was a haven for immigrants—back then Greeks, Romans, Genoans, Spaniards, and Venetians, in more recent times German and Polish Jews, then Vietnamese and Cambodians, followed by a huge influx of North Africans, predominantly Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians.
He’d also heard that 20 percent of the population lived below the poverty line and something like 40 percent of young people between eighteen and twenty-five were unemployed. Different cultures grew up with different values. But all values frayed in the absence of hope.
Akil asked Crocker to stop near a group of Arabic-looking boys stripped to their waists who were working on an old Fiat sedan.
“How come? You lost?”
“We’re looking for the Club Rosa,” Akil said to the boys in French. “Can you tell us where it is?”
A skinny kid wearing a Yankees cap pointed them down a narrow alley. “Down there. Turn right.”
The Club Rosa was housed in the garage of one of the sandstone-colored high-rises. Posters of Tupac Shakur, Al Pacino in Scarface, and motocross world champion Yves Demaria hung in the window.
Crocker knocked and entered. Two young surly-looking guys smoking cigarettes sat at a table working on a hard drive of an old Dell computer as a replay of a Marseille-Lyon football match played on the TV in the corner. A foosball table stood on the other side of the small, linoleum-floored room. Behind it hummed an old refrigerator. Posters of motorcycles and models in bikinis decorated the stained beige walls.