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She stops in at aboulangerieto get a fresh baguette for later, then walks the ten minutes home, past little shops and cafés, the traffic honking and burbling along, a number of local women dressed in chadors. Though a few walls bear graffiti from the Front National, France’s right-wing anti-immigrant party, Nadia (who is Muslim but hasn’t entered a mosque in years) still loves this part of Paris. To those who painted the walls in hate, she wishes she could say, “Why?” These poor people from Algeria, Chad, and parts of North Africa, they were once part of the French Empire. And that empire is responsible for the colonialism and destruction that broke these families and brought them here.
Nadia arrives at her little three-story apartment house at 4 Rue de Torcy, a small yellow building with black shutters and narrow balconies. Before she can enter the door to her first-floor flat, the building’s owner—Madame Juliette Therien—bustles out, holding a colored sheet of paper in her plump hands.
“Mademoiselle Khadra, working late again, eh?”
“That I am, that I am,” she says, the baguette under her right arm, her large purse over her left.
“Well, I need to show you this,” she says, waving the paper in the air. “The electric bill, it came today, eh? But I opened yours by mistake. But look! Look!”
Nadia takes the Électricité de France (EDF) utility bill, thinking,Oh no, you silly, snoopy old bird, that was no mistake,and glances at the six-page printout with the familiar blue-and-orange EDF logo in the upper left corner. “Look! Look! You are using three times as much power as me!” says Madame Therien. “And four times as much as the Urbi family!”
Yes, yes,Nadia thinks,the poor Urbi family, migrants from Benin, shoved into the second floor while Therien resides on the top floor like a queen.The Urbis are loud—playing music at all hours, their children stomping overhead—but not once has Nadia complained.
Nadia doesn’t want to make waves, draw attention.
“I don’t see the problem,” Nadia says. “I pay the bill every two months. Why should you care?”
Her landlord folds her beefy arms. She’s a heavyset woman who wears lots of makeup, exaggerated painted-in eyebrows, and billowing dresses in bright colors,and nearly always, her bare, leathery feet in open-toed sandals.
“I’ll tell you the problem,” she says. “Whatever you’re doing in my cellar, it’s putting a strain on my poor building and its wiring and circuits.”
“I doubt that.”
Madame Therien shakes her head. “I can’t take that chance. I must insist that I go into the cellar, see what you’re doing down there.”
Sweet Allah no,Nadia thinks. She says, “Please…it’s delicate work, doing research for my doctorate. You might…ruin something, even by accident.”
“It’s my building, my cellar.”
Nadia smiles as best she can. “I promise…Madame Therien, my work is almost at an end. In a few days…you may inspect the cellar as much as you wish. And in two months I will show you my EDF bill. You will see it drop significantly.”
The old woman waits, then reluctantly nods and smiles back. “If you say so, Mademoiselle.”
“Merci,”Nadia says, brushing past her landlady to undo the three locks on her door. (An additional deadbolt had been installed at Nadia’s expense last year.) Madame Therien is just starting to say something more when Nadia closes the door behind her. Her landlady isn’t a bad sort, just lonely, and she loves to gossip and advise—from her lengthy life experiences!—on how to find a man.
“And keep him!” she would insist.
Nadia has never had the courage to tell her that she has no time for a man in her life, not at this moment. When her work is done, then she will find the right man for her—a man to love and cherish for the rest of her life.
A few minutes later, Nadia is in the cellar, feeling at ease. The door to the apartment is locked. The door to the cellar is firmly closed. She turns on the overhead fluorescent lights,click-clicking into life, as she looks with satisfaction at her homemade laboratory and facility.
Two refrigerators, brought in when her landlady was on vacation in Provence. Four autoclaves. A long metal table with various tools and instruments. Centrifuge. Respirator masks, elbow-length rubber gloves, clear plastic face masks. Piles of round agar dishes for growing spores. A waste cabinet, securely fastened, plus an open biosafety cabinet where she has carefully worked these past months to remove and process what she has been growing.
A stolen gift from the Institut Pasteur.
Anthrax, which she has carefully and methodically processed into a biological weapon.
Nadia steps forward to the table, where a number of metal trays each hold scores of glassine envelopes containing a gray powdery substance.
She gently touches the envelopes.
And hears footsteps overhead.
Oh, no!
Nadia walks quickly across the cellar floor, but no—the door from the kitchen opens, andthump, thump, thumpMadame Therien comes down into the cellar. “Ah, my girl, I was hoping you could join me later for…my dear, what is this? What are you doing here?”
Nadia swallows hard, tries to keep her voice light. “Like I told you before, Madame, this is part of my—”
