Russian Spring (87 page)

This demonstration had started assembling in the early evening. In place of the throwing-sticks and shit buckets and anti-American banners, there were posters of Nathan Wolfowitz, dozens of large American flags, and tens of thousands of little paper ones in the hands of the demonstrators, which, according to some sources, had been distributed by the Embassy itself.

Those demonstrators had assembled in the parkland between the Champs-Élysées and Avenue Gabriel, but for this one, the French government had actually closed the Place de la Concorde, and the vast concrete expanse was wall-to-wall people.

Ceremonial Garde Républicain horsemen in their dress uniforms, complete with sabers, shiny brass helmets, and long riding cloaks, lined the Place between the Champs-Élysées and the Avenue Gabriel, even their horses held at stiff attention. In the center of the formation, two cavalrymen held French and American flags flying from ornate bronzed standards.

And Bobby arrived on the scene, not by Métro, but riding atop the camera truck that StarNet had rented for the occasion, a van with a platform atop it for Bobby, his French cameraman, and the satellite uplink disc. The StarNet logo had been postered to the sides of the van, and an American flag flew from a tall whip antenna above it. The American Embassy, which it seemed these days could arrange anything, had assured StarNet that this would get its crew instant red-carpet treatment from any French police agency, on orders issued by the Première and the Mayor of Paris themselves.

When the StarNet truck found itself blocked by the crowd at the Rue de Rivoli entrance to the Place, far across it from what would be the main photo opportunities, Pierre Pham, the loan-out producer from Antenne 2, inside the van, made a quick call to somewhere, and
less than five minutes later, four Garde Républicain horsemen made their way through the unprotesting throng, bracketed the van, and escorted it slowly but surely across the square to the scheduled head of the march, ushered along by a sea of waving flags, and wild cheering.

“This is Robert Reed in Paris, and what an incredible scene this is in the Place de la Concorde, as what Paris police estimate as at least half a million people gather here to show their support for the United States and President Wolfowitz,” Bobby began when the uplink was established.

The flics, so it seemed, had actually been waiting patiently for the cue from his own producer, for the horseman at the right front corner of the van leaned down toward the open window, said something into his wrist radio, and the line of equestrian troops blocking the entrance to the square moved out up the Champs-Élysées at a slow ceremonial canter behind their twin flags.

The crowd began marching up the avenue behind them, waving their American flags, unfurling banners, throwing flowers, hats, paper cups, Wolfowitz buttons in the air, shouting, and screaming, and chanting incoherently.

“Lay back a little and let the front ranks get ahead of you,” Bobby heard Pham tell the driver through the intercom circuit. “I want this from over the heads of some crowd.”

The van stopped for a few minutes to let the head of the procession get about a hundred meters ahead of it, then inched forward at walking speed into the Champs-Élysées itself.

Before Bobby, the crowd filled the broad avenue and overflowed the sidewalks, thousands of little paper flags turning the Champs-Élysées into a rolling river of red, white, and blue.

And then there was a sound all too familiar to Bobby from his stay in Los Angeles, but one he never thought to hear in Paris, where all overflights were long forbidden—the deep bass dragonfly drone of approaching helicopters, a sound made utterly ominous by endless footage from the Latin American war zones.

Four helicopters flying loose formation like gunships dodging ground fire swooped low over the marchers and up the Champs-Élysées at a walking pace, scattering something that looked like silvery confetti.

“What the hell?” Bobby muttered into his open mike. His visceral reaction had been to a cloud of rockets and gouts of napalm, but instead he was seeing fairy dust.

“Get a shot of those choppers!” he screamed at his cameraman.

“Je ne suis pas un imbécile!” the cameraman shouted back.

Bobby glanced down at his monitor to catch the zoom-shot. In the
shaky close-ups, the insignia on the helicopters were clearly visible as the cameraman panned across them in sequence. The StarNet logo, looking as if it had been stenciled on quickly at the last minute. The French Air Force. French National TV. And, incredibly enough, the colors of the United States Marines.

And what they were dropping, Bobby realized a moment later when the strains of the “Marseillaise” began to play at an ear-killing tinny high volume, was a huge cloud of “mouches du pub,” tiny self-contained radio receivers and speaker systems about the size of a ten-franc piece that were usually used to torment crowds at street festivals with commercials.

But now the damn things were being put to a far less obnoxious use. The French national anthem, as played by a full orchestra, was being broadcast into thousands of mini-speakers scattered all along the line of march, and the crowd was picking it up, an immense collective voice belting out the words from the bottom of their hearts.

“I don’t know if you can hear me over all this,” Bobby shouted into his mike, “so I had better just shut up and let the people of Paris speak for themselves.”

Up the Champs-Élysées for a long block, and then a crush at the head of the procession as it turned onto the narrower Avenue de Marigny, and oozed around the corner onto the even narrower Avenue Gabriel, reversing direction as it approached the American Embassy.

The Marine guards, who had been so conspicuously in armed evidence around the compound wall before that other demonstration, years ago, were now nowhere in sight, and as the head of the march reached the street outside the Embassy building itself, and the van took up a camera position in the middle of the crowd, Bobby realized, in some befuddlement, that the flagpole above the Embassy was empty.

When Bobby glanced at his monitor to catch the overhead shot from the StarNet helicopter, he gasped in the throes of an emotion he could scarcely contain. It might be corny, it might be cleverly engineered for the benefit of the TV audience, but it still took his breath away.

The crowd had piled up for the length of the Avenue Gabriel. It stretched clear around the corner of the Avenue de Marigny, down the Champs-Élysées, and back into the Place de la Concorde itself. The entire area was one vast sea of people. From overhead, the little American flags were a pointillist ripple of red, white, and blue. Half a million voices and about as many mini-speakers joined in a rendition of the “Marseillaise” that rocked him to his kneecaps.

“There must be half a million people out there,” Bobby babbled
into his microphone. “Oh, God, this is incredible, I’ve never seen anything like this before, you can feel the energy coming up at you in waves, the emotion is enormous, ladies and gentlemen, the whole city has gone crazy. . . .”

It seemed to go on forever, the shouting, the singing, the flags waving. There was no thought of any opportunistic politician trying to stand up and make a speech in the middle of this.

And then the “Marseillaise” slowly began to die away. In a few minutes, there was an eerie pregnant silence.

And then, another song began to play on all those mini-speakers, and after the first few bars, half a million voices were singing the words to the revived golden oldie.

The song at the top of everyone’s chart, the max-metal version of “God Bless America.”

Bobby’s eyes filled with tears as he heard the people who had once scorned him welcoming him home.

“God bless America,
Land that I love . . .”

People in the crowd were turning on flashlights, thousands of brave little beacons waving in the darkness that surrounded the eternal City of Light.

“Stand beside her
And guide her . . .”

Flashlight beams converged toward the Embassy building, toward the empty flagpole. Most of them were consumed by the darkness, but enough of them were high-powered halogen beams to bathe the void at the top of the pole in a perfect Hollywood spotlight.

“Through the night
With a light from above. . . .”

The crowd was singing it in a mighty collective French accent that at any other moment would have been quite ludicrous, but now, to Bobby’s ears, it was the sweetest sound he had ever heard.

And then, slowly, majestically, the Stars and Stripes began to ascend the flagpole, unfurling in the breeze as it rose against the dark sky.

“From the mountains,
To the prairies,
To the oceans white with foam . . .”

Bobby didn’t even realize he was singing into an open mike, as the American flag ascended to the top of the flagpole, as rockets exploded star shells over the centre ville, Roman candles whooshed up out of the crowd, a million firecrackers went off, as the people of Paris and Bobby himself bore witness to the impossible event that they themselves were creating as they sang the long-lost light back into the world.

“God bless America,
My home, sweet home . . .”

Oh yes, the cynical journalist in him knew that it was hokum, kitsch, a set piece written and produced by whomever Wolfowitz had hired as his media advisor in cooperation with his fellow flacks in the French government, something that would have made Bobby puke in Berkeley.

But even that couldn’t make it any less real.

For Bobby, and, he suspected, for anyone who had been here this night, or even watched the StarNet coverage on television, this was a moment beyond the ability of the pros to create without the heartfelt collaboration of the audience. This was the real thing. This was magic. This was the true return of his country to where he had always longed for it to be in the eyes of the people who had scorned him as a gringo, and the true healing of the deepest wound that
this
country had inflicted on his own heart.

“God bless America,
My home, sweet home!”

And so it was.

Mais Paris aussi, mes amis, Paris aussi.

And now, for the first time in his life he found he could do it and really mean it.

“Vive la France!” Robert Reed shouted to the whole wide world via his satellite uplink as the song ended. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help it, I’ve never felt like more of an American in my life, but tonight I’m feeling like a Frenchman too! Aren’t you?”

GRINGOMANIA!

Last night’s demonstration at the American Embassy may have been carefully staged and lavishly produced by the American media-masters, but what happened afterward was truly spontaneous. When the semi-official
event ended with the raising of the American flag, a hundred thousand people at the least poured up the Champs-Élysées, gathering strength from onlookers, and staged a wild party in, around, and atop the Arc de Triomphe that didn’t wind down till the early morning.

Dozens of similar demonstrations took place all over Paris. It was impossible for an American to pay for a drink anywhere in the city, and indeed, many Parisians were to be heard putting on American accents in English and getting free drinks too. Paris has seen nothing like it since the liberation of the city from the Nazis. Gringomania may be just that, and in the end, Nathan Wolfowitz may not save the world from nuclear holocaust, but at least it has served as the excuse for the wildest night of partying this city has seen for a hundred years.

—Robert Reed, StarNet

It had been impossible for Sonya, even as the head of Red Star’s Paris office, to get through to the head of the Tass bureau on the videotel. Everything was in turmoil, and Tass wasn’t speaking to anyone.

She could well imagine what was going on there, which was to say the same thing that was going on at Red Star and, no doubt, in the offices of every Soviet organization in Paris, only that much worse. The sense of isolation was terrible, from the hostile country in which they now found themselves, and from Moscow itself.

It would be worth your life to speak Russian on the streets now, and a Russian accent was enough to get you barred from a half-empty restaurant. French associates were frostily polite on the videotel. Business was at a standstill.

Moscow itself, when it spoke at all, spoke in a babble of conflicting directives in which one could easily enough read the state of panic as the powers that be in the Red Star Tower, that notorious collection of Eurorussians, attempted to do what they could to save the Russian Spring, while trying to cover their asses as best they could in case the Eurorussians lost the election, while the military government, and all that it implied, glared ominously over their shoulders.

How much worse for the poor bastards at Tass, who were charged with both reporting the bad news and putting the best possible public face on it!

So it was not so surprising that even Sonya couldn’t get Leonid Kandinski on the videotel. If
she
were the head of the Tass bureau, she would be doing her best to find a hole to crawl into and pull in after her.

Finally, she went over to Tass herself and bullied her way through
the death-house gloom into his office. Kandinski, a balding, heavyset man in his early fifties, looked as if he had slept in his suit. His eyes were red, his face was stubbly, and his desk was littered with empty Styrofoam coffee cups, the big onyx ashtray overflowing with cigar butts. The place stank of stale tobacco smoke, sweat, and paranoia.

“Well, what do
you
want, Sonya?” Kandinski demanded. He fished a cigar out of a drawer, bit off the end, spit it on the floor, lit up, and actually inhaled off the vile thing.

“I’ve got a story for you, Leonid,” Sonya said.

“Wonderful!” Kandinski moaned. “Just what we need!”

“You’ll like this one,” Sonya told him.

“Of course I will!” Kandinski drawled sarcastically. “I’m a modern Soviet journalist, aren’t I? Nothing like another hot little item to brighten up my day! Don’t tell me! Let me guess! What is it this time? Another passionate demonstration of support for Nathan Wolfowitz? Another shit-throwing incident at the Embassy?”