32
7 NOVEMBER 2003
11:34A.M.
4627 WAREHOUSE, ST. DENIS
BY 7:30, REUVEN’S CORSICAN IN CHIEF, who identified himself to Tom simply as Milo, had assembled a twenty-five-man crew of carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, and painters in the 4627 warehouse. Milo was built like a whiskey barrel. He stood about five-foot-nine and his upper arms were as big as most men’s thighs. His plaid flannel shirt was open halfway down his hairy chest, revealing a jewel-encrusted crucifix suspended from heavy gold links wrought in the style of an anchor chain. The links were as thick as a baby’s fingers.
Milo smelled of tobacco, garlic, and brandy. Under what Tom took to be his perpetual five-o’clock shadow, a long, nasty scar ran from just behind his right ear, across his cheek and lower lip, all the way to the upper left corner of his mouth. The upward thrust of the scar gave the Corsican a decidedly sinister yet slightly goofy look-Tom was reminded of the ludicrous expression frozen on Jack Nicholson’s face when he played the Joker in one of the Batman movies.
At 7:55, Tom gave Milo a rough floor plan of what he wanted. The Corsican asked half a dozen brusque questions, then summoned his people-most of whom looked like his relatives-into a scrum. Milo made a short speech, then barked a series of orders in a dialect Tom found completely impenetrable.
Just after noon, Tom’s cell phone rang. “Game on,” Reuven’s voice boomed. “Arrival this evening.”
“Bon.”Tom tried to shield the phone from the noise of the air hammers and circular saws and continued in Arabic. “Is our friend bringing the perfume and the CD?”
“Both,” Reuven said. “No problem.”
“What about the other place?” Tom was talking about rue Lambert.
“No movement. No developments.”
“When do I see you?”
“Later. I have errands to run. Bye.” The phone went dead in Tom’s ear. He turned and looked with satisfaction at the progress being made. The warehouse now resembled a movie set. Lights, some of them big scoops covered with colored gel, others with barn doors to limit and focus the throw of the light, hung from scaffolding. There were walls joined together by oversize clamps and ramps covered with padding to mask any sound of footsteps. The vehicles had all been moved to one side of the place so there was ample room around the perimeter of the set. As Tom watched, two Corsicans strung speaker wire for the two amplified subbass speakers that from above could create a cornucopia of wall-vibrating sounds running the gamut from the window-rattling noise of about-to-land military aircraft to the ominous rumble of close-by thunder. Another pair of laborers were un-coiling flexible plastic air-conditioning conduit, which Salah would use both to create heat and cold in the cell and interrogation room and to pump in the manipulative odor ofparfum pénitentiaire that would create the requisite feeling of dread in Yahia Hamzi.
7P.M. The interrogation center was ready for painting. Tom did a walk-through. It was quite remarkable-as if a little piece of Qadima prison had been flown from Israel and enclosed in a well-insulated outer shell here on the St. Denis-Aubervilliers border. From the outside, you were obviously looking at a stage set. But from the inside, the place was totally, frighteningly, realistically convincing. It was built around a corridor about twenty feet long. The corridor walls were real masonry-except the cinder blocks were a half-inch-thick facade. The floor was covered with thick rubber pads.
At each end, the corridor took a ninety-degree left turn-which ended after only four feet. But Hamzi wouldn’t ever be allowed to discover the ruse. On the right side of the corridor were four scarred steel doors, each one with a peephole five feet above the ground, and a food slot at waist level. Three of the doors were dummies-there was nothing behind them. The fourth led to the cell they’d keep Hamzi in.
Seven feet from the end of the corridor on the left-hand side was the doorway to the ten-foot-square interrogation room. They’d poured quick-setting concrete over inch-thick plywood to make the flooring. The door was made of solid steel and clanged like a prison door should when it was slammed shut. The furnishings were as close to Qadima as Milo’s crew could get their big hairy hands on. There was a utilitarian gray metal desk and two olive-drab straight-backed metal frame chairs. The legs of the interrogatee’s chair had been cut down before the chair itself was bolted into the floor so that Hamzi would sit three inches lower than Salah.
There were three video cameras hidden in the walls. Concealed in the center desk drawer was a voice stress recorder, whose remote readout screen Salah could see simply by glancing down. The temperature of the interrogation room could be adjusted within minutes to whatever Salah wanted.
Down the hall was Hamzi’s eight-by-six-foot cell. The cell was designed and furnished to Reuven’s specifications, which he’d phoned in at about two. There was a steel bed frame, on which rested a one-inch-thick mattress made of cheap foam covered in itchy, urine-stained canvas, a threadbare blanket the size of a bath towel, and a pillow that reeked of old vomit.
The cell’s floor, like the interrogation room’s, was concrete. And the bed, which sat jammed against the sidewall, was bolted into it. Four air vents played directly into the small space so that no matter where its occupant might try to hide, there would be an unending flow of cold or hot air. Directly under the bed was another small vent, camouflaged to look like an unused drain built into the floor. It was connected to the plastic conduit they’d use to pump the dread-causing odor into the cell.
The ceiling, which held three clusters of lights encased in dirty, thick, protective covers, was nine feet off the ground. Across from the bed was a single, perpetually dripping spigot that emptied into a six-inch open drain in the floor. The drain was rigged to clog on command. Next to the drain was a metal pail-the cell’s toilet. High on the wall above the spigot was a single frosted windowpane covered by bars and grime-covered wire mesh. The outside lighting could be adjusted-evening, morning, nighttime.
Then there were the speakers. They were positioned behind the walls and above the corridor. From a sound console in the control room that was being built in the warehouse office, every sound, from hobnail-boot steps, to the sounds of torture, to the traffic noise outside the “prison,” could be controlled.
The painting was critical. The cell had been finished in rough plaster that resembled the stuccolike material common to prisons all over the Middle East. Now it had to be “aged,” then covered with Arabic graffiti that had to appear as if it had been encrusted many times over with paint to remove the offending marks. The subtext of the cell was “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
For its part, the interrogation room had to evoke a grungy, penal-institutional reaction that would-on sight alone-convince Hamzi that the only way he’d survive his ordeal was to tell everything he knew. To help achieve this, Salah had sent instructions to have the room painted in a drab, phlegmlike green.
As a further inducement, on Salah’s instructions, one of Milo’s Corsicans visited a butcher shop where he bought a kilo of fresh beef liver. The liver was perforated with a fork, then the bloody offal was sponged onto the floor adjacent to the chair. The resulting blood puddles were dried with a hair dryer to darken and age them, and then swiped with a towel, as if someone had tried to clean up the mess but hadn’t quite succeeded.