As I approached, the site nearly left me breathless. Rising above the walls was a city that looked like something out of a medieval tale, with an intact castle, dozens of turrets, drawbridges and, yes, miles of walls rising above the landscape.
After following about six thousand signs pointing this way and that and ending up back where I started, I realized that all signs for CITÉ meant the city itself and not the hotel.
After several misses, I finally figured out how to get to the hotel parking “lot,” which was sort of a grassy knoll (I always wanted to use those words in a sentence that didn’t relate to the assassination of JFK), and parked the car as Pantera had directed at the foot of the wall.
An attendant came by and asked the name of my hotel and then called it into a walkie-talkie thing. Within minutes, a car came by to pick me up. There were no cars inside the walls except for the one or two delivering guests to hotels. Visitors and residents of the city all parked outside the walls in designated areas and walked in through the ancient drawbridge entrance.
The Hôtel de la Cité looked like a palace with giant arched, leaded-glass windows on a cobblestone street.
There were hundreds of shops, restaurants, bars, several cathedrals, and a basilica, and, yes, a fortified castle within the city walls. Think real-life Disney World minus the annoying furry characters.
The interior did not disappoint. Disappoint? It was overwhelming. I walked into a lovely lobby with a cozy library bar and fancy restaurant on the lobby level.
I approached the front desk, gave the name Alazais Roussel, and suddenly the staff was all over me like a bad smell—but in a good way for once.
Astonished to see I just had that one measly carry-on bag, the bellman nonetheless made a big deal of carrying it to my room and attempting unsuccessfully to wrest from me my red satchel with my iPad, Sadowski’s phone, and, oh, yeah, that same Gap scarf.
Did I say “room”? Think suite.
Thank God this isn’t on my tab.
It was huge, with a beamed ceiling and a giant king-size bed (probably had belonged to an actual king) covered in luxurious fabrics, with a carved mahogany headboard that reached to the ceiling. The floor was tiled, and the white marble fireplace had already been lit. Beyond that, a desk and several comfy velvet easy chairs in gray with a matching loveseat were set around a leather steamer trunk. It had high-speed everything, from Internet to an even-higher-speed Jacuzzi tub roughly the size of an Olympic pool.
The bellman (Pierre, of course) opened the curtains to reveal a huge terrace complete with red padded lounges and a table and chairs.
A little bit of heaven in the middle of my hellish life.
I tipped Pierre, who seemed reluctant to leave, and I had to say about fourteen hundred mercis before he got the hint.
What now? Wait and see what Pantera’s got up his sleeve? Right. Like hell I will.
I took out the tablet, sat down on the bed, and checked Sadowski’s voice mail, despite Donald’s plea to stay “off the grid.” Message from Dona: “This crazy thing happened. Randy Mohammed pulled me aside as we were leaving court.…”
If she’s already calling him “Randy,” God knows what she got out of him. The woman is irresistible to men.
“He said, ‘Tell Ms. Russo that Mr. ben Yusef says to “Go forth and trust the man who raised him.”’”
That was it.
I checked the e-mail. Nothing. I sent one off to Donald. “Image of Yusef Pantera anywhere over the last, say, forty years in any archives anywhere?”
I logged off and turned the TV on to CNN International. The anchor, Seema Ving, said, “Coming up, our lead story. They are calling it the miracle of Demiel ben Yusef. But is it a hoax?”
As they broke for commercial, they ran footage of riots around the world, all in the name of ben Yusef. The final image was of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. My old neighborhood looked like a war zone. So much for peaceful and orderly.
After a bunch of ads for investment companies and medicines that seemed to make you ride a bike in slow motion while waving backward, Ving was back with the lead story. And I nearly fell off the bed.
“After court closed for the day,” she reported, “an event occurred that many are calling a miracle. It involves the children who had been brought into court on the first day of the ben Yusef trial.”
Filmed footage of the children as they’d been wheeled into court that first day splashed across the screen. Even though I’d seen it in person, I needed to turn my head away for a moment—it was that horrific and heartbreaking, even on video. There was the little angel without a mouth and hard plastic skin where once a beautiful little girl had been; and the little boy with the beautiful face whose eyes were rolling in his head as he lolled in a wheelchair, clearly brain-damaged; the blind kids being led by mothers; the miniature motorized wheelchair with the five-year-old girl strapped in to keep her upright.