and a rest, later on before we eat we can take a walk so that I can show you around the quarter and talk about the arrangements we’ve made for the next leg of your journey.”
He showed Ennis to his room and left him.
“Take your time and when you’re ready we can check up on the mural to see if there’s any news, I mean about you.”
There was nothing special on the news programme, eight days had passed since he had been on the run and there was little probability that his case interested the media, or that the authorities gave him a high priority.
It was just after eight as they walked slowly towards Place du Trône under the shade of the trees the lined the boulevard, the heat of the afternoon still hung heavily in the air.
“I see you haven’t shaved, I suggest that you keep that beard, I imagine your photo is displayed in just about every Commissariat in the country.”
Ennis was surprised to see La Grinoterie; a small Chinese restaurant with an unlikely name was still there, he remembered it from twenty years earlier.
“There are still Chinese here?”
“Yes,” Guiglione laughed, “they know how to survive all kinds of situations. Ethnic restaurants have a special dispensation for non-Gallos, otherwise they wouldn’t be Chinese or Indian would they?”
“I suppose not.”
“There’s dozens of exceptions to the Ethnic laws. Fortunately otherwise life would be dreary, few French know how to cook today.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Frozen or pre-cooked meals are the rule, you don’t find the quality of MacDonald’s today!”
They went into the Grinoterie; the decoration had barely changed in twenty-five years. Ennis thought he recognised the elderly Chinese behind the bar at the payment register. The waiter showed them to a table and ordered two Qing Dao beers whilst the studied the menu. The restaurant was full and noisy; it was just as popular as Ennis had remembered it before.
“What do you want to eat?”
“It’s up to you.”
Guiglione ordered. The meal was good; each dished was guarantied prepared in the kitchens of the Tang Frères in Paris with ingredients flow in from Saigon. The dishes were deep frozen and distributed to the restaurants they controlled in all the towns and cities of the Nation.
They ordered coffees and Guiglione flipped over the pages of the Nation Soir he had bought on the boulevard.
“Listen!” he said, and then read an article to Ennis.
“Arms found in Paris. Pan-Arabist group suspected of trafficking. Based on information supplied by the Ministry of the Interior, the special anti-terrorist unit of the RASE raided a house in the Zone, discovering an arms cache belonging to the terrorist organisation El Assad. The authorities have reason to believe that the American journalist and sympathiser of the Pan-Arabist terrorist groups, John Ennis, also wanted by the police of Algharb for murder, is suspected of being implicate in the affair. According to police sources Ennis is believed to be hiding in Paris.”
Nowhere could France’s de facto segregation be seen clearer than in Paris, simply by crossing the cours de Vincennes that separated the 20th district from the 12th district. The suburban districts that adjoined them were Montreuil and Vincennes were the same type of segregation existed. Montreuil was densely populated with Neos and infiltrators from the Maghrib and black Africa, its streets and houses were run down, the customers of its shops were those with the lowest incomes. The street market was little different from that which could be seen in Casablanca, stalls selling all kinds of cheap goods and second hand bric-a-brac. The shoppers came from every corner of the underdeveloped world: East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, and all parts of Africa.
They were the new proletariat, unrepresented in France, statistics classified as social problems. The French Communists and their philosophy were light years away from the understanding or wanting to understand such people, and even further from their needs.
The neo-proletariat, as the Communists called them, or Neos, as they were pejoratively referred to by the Renaissance Party, had little in common with the few old fashioned Gallo Communist workers that remained who equally had nothing in common with Africa or Islam.
The Metro line N°1 ran from Chateau de Vincennes to La Defense, passing through the heart of the city via Bastille, Hotel de Ville, Louvre, Concorde, Champs Elysée and the wealthy district of Neuilly. The line was an example of how the different populations were separated. From Monday to Friday during the office rush hours the passengers were almost exclusively confident, smart, well-dressed Gallo white-collar workers. On all days including Saturday and Sunday from six to eight in the morning the carriages were filled almost exclusively with lowly service workers, shabby, sad faced Neos, it was they who did the dirty jobs, cleaning offices, maintenance, in restaurant, on building sites or in transport and delivery, they carried out all the low paid manual tasks necessary for the daily life in a great city, naturally they were supervised by the Gallos.
A great many of the Gallo Parisians were Bobos, bourgeois-bohemians, and would have vigorously protested if they had been accused of being racist, of course they were, but outwardly they defended leftist notions of integration and assimilation of the Neos, on the condition that they did not live near them, they did not want them as neighbours, they did not want their children in the same schools.
Even though there were mixed marriages there was no middle ground, they were accepted to the better side of the class divide, or they drifted over to the under-class that the Neos formed.
In the 16th district a Gallo shopped at one of the expensive delicatessens where a roast chicken cost the equivalent to half a day's wages for a Neo worker, at the same time in Montreuil an African infiltrator struggling to survive hawked eggs on the pavement of a side street selling them one by one to other infiltrators.
That was nothing unusual in a big city except that France, by proclaiming equality and fraternity, had projected itself as the defender of the weak and poor against social injustice. That had been fine when France had been populated by Gallos and the little brown brothers had lived on distant shores, but once they knocked at the door in Paris poor and hungry they were turned away, ignored except in the Bobo press who cries of protest were as false as their desire to have them as next door neighbours in the smart districts of Paris.
The Parisians were more Bobo than other large city of France, or than any other department of the Region, Ile de France, where Paris lay. It was logical, the poor and lower classes had been slowly forced out of most districts of Paris by economic pressures, the high cost of property and rents, the lack of social housing. The only districts where the Neos remained predominant were the 18th, 19th and 20th, where housing was still affordable, but even those districts were under pressure as the price of property rose and the number of jobs available fell pushing the Neos into depressed and sinister ghettos where social workers and police feared to tread.
It is necessary to explain the administrative structure of Paris to understand how the barriers were built. Paris lies at the centre of an administrative Region called Ile de France. The city is one of the five administrative Departments of the Region. Paris itself is divided into twenty districts, called in French: Arrondissements, number from one to twenty in an outward spiral starting with the 1st Arrondissement in the centre. Each Arrondissement is divided into four quarters and each named according to local history. Those in the centre are the smallest in surface and population and the largest laying on the outside of the spiral.
Each Quarter had its own identity and traditions so that even in the Arrondissements that were dominated by Neo populations there were Quarters that were almost entirely Gallo, such as Les Buttes de Chaumont, which was also the home to a large number of Jews.
The property market functioned by Quarters, which often resulted in sharp demarcation lines between Gallo and Neo populations, thus forming social and economic barriers.
As the two populations retrenched behind those invisible barriers so the difference between them was accentuated.
The authorities sought to integrate the Neos through the school system; the result was that when the concentration of the Neos became too great the level of achievement fell. It was an inevitable consequence given the family background of the Neo's children, where the French language was not that of their parents, who themselves were mostly from simple families with little formal education.
The Gallos withdrew their children from the integrated schools placing them in denominational schools, mostly Catholic and Protestant, which were paying, though the fees were generally modest, and they were naturally open to Christians though there were a few Jews and a small number of non-Christians were accepted.
After Oil
The rich world had slowly entered the nuclear-hydro economy with the cheap production of hydrogen for fuel cells that powered vehicles and generators that provided buildings with heat, light and air-conditioning. The first units were commercially available in the early years of the century and they real started to make real inroads to the market after the second round of Middle East Wars. The supremacy of the internal combustion engine was over though it would take another half a century before oil fuelled vehicle and