The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe (16 page)

Arriving in the hotel lobby, he passed the reception desk and sped toward the exit, once again failing to even notice the beautiful but rather surprised actress who was waiting to eat lunch with him.

At that moment, Sophie Morceaux was watching, openmouthed, as Ajatashatru rushed from the hotel, carrying a briefcase. As Hervé had just told her the good news about the €100,000 advance, it seemed clear that her new friend had fled with the bread, made a dash with the cash, decided to go with the dough. This felt like a smack in the face to her. Sophie’s concepts of friendship and trust had been dealt a severe blow. How could he do this to her? She had taken him in, given him a room, a handsome suit, her affection and her time. She had even found him a publisher merely by batting her eyelashes.

She sighed. After all, this man was essentially just an illegal alien, a petty criminal. What did she expect? A leopard can’t change its spots. She felt betrayed, thrown away like a used Kleenex, and she promised herself she would be more wary toward the next Indian who came out of her Vuitton trunk. Enough was enough! In a rage, she threw her copy of
On Winter Mornings
the Rabbits Yelp Lugubriously on the Road
by Angélique Dutoit Delamaison to the floor and went to shut herself up in her room.

At that moment, Gérard François was weaving his moped through Rome’s nightmarish traffic. Tied to his luggage rack was the contract signed by the unusual writer. He could already see the best-selling novel stacked high on the shelves of the world’s largest bookstores, and translated into thirty-two languages, including Ayapa Zoque, an ancient Mexican dialect spoken by only two people in the world, neither of whom could read.

At that moment, Ajatashatru was running toward the gardens he had seen from the window of his room. He had never run this fast in his life before. Particularly not while holding a briefcase containing €100,000.

At that moment, Hervé was in his room, swallowing the last mouthful of whiskey from the minuscule bottle he had taken from the minibar. He was drinking to forget, but it wasn’t working. Again, he thought about Gérard François’s tanned complexion, his thick, moist lips. Why were his most handsome friends all heterosexual, handsome and, above all, friends?

At that moment, Gino, knife in hand and head still spinning slightly, was hurtling down
the hotel’s stairs in pursuit of the Indian who had stolen from and humiliated his cousin, and was now reoffending, at his expense this time.

At that moment, Ajatashatru was still running.

At that moment, Captain Aden Fik (who?), at the helm of his freight ship flying the Libyan flag, was skirting the Italian coast, glad to be on his way home after three months at sea.

At that moment, Gustave Palourde was deep in discussion, over a good garlic chicken—
un pollastre a l’ast
—with the father of the young Catalan baggage handler about the marriage that would unite their respective progeny, and therefore their families.

At that moment, Miranda-Jessica Palourde, soon to be Miranda-Jessica Tom Cruise-Jesús Palourde Cortés Santamaría, was putting a half-eaten chicken thigh back on her plate and greedily licking her fingers while eyeing her future husband, who was sitting across from her.

At that moment, Mercedes-Shayana Palourde was shedding a few tears and deciding to give Sophie Morceaux’s chic underwear to her daughter for her wedding night.

At that moment, Tom Cruise-Jesús Cortés Santamaría was lost in contemplation of his future wife, who was lasciviously licking her
fingers as she ate a chicken thigh. Had he been Hindu, he would have had no hesitation choosing which animal he would like to be in his next incarnation.

At that moment, Ajatashatru wondered if he would ever stop running.

In Sanskrit, Ajatashatru means
He whose enemy is not born
. But he was really starting to put the lie to his name, given all the enemies he was accumulating.

When he lifted his eyes from the rough path on which he had been running since entering the Villa Borghese gardens, the Indian noticed that he was in the middle of a small, circular clearing.

He looked left, then right. Exposed and defenseless, he thought he was done for. But this was not the end of his race. A few yards ahead, taking advantage of the treeless area, the Italians had installed a huge hot-air balloon. It was blue, decorated with classical golden motifs. Just beneath it, attached by thin ropes like a thousand golden threads, a basket that was fixed to the ground shivered slightly in the wind. This was the first time that Ajatashatru had seen such a contraption in reality. He had seen one in the film
Five Weeks in a Balloon
, though, adapted from Jules Verne’s novel of the same name.

When it was hoisted up over a hundred feet from the ground, this hot-air balloon provided tourists with a panoramic aerial view of the Roman capital for the modest sum of five euros.

As luck would have it, the basket was still on the ground, and a few tourists were lining up to get in. There was no one inside at that moment, as the guide was very busy selling tickets.

Ajatashatru turned around. The gypsy was running toward him. He had put his knife away so as not to arouse suspicion, but the Indian was convinced that, once he got close enough, the fact that he was in full public view would not prevent him taking the knife out and running it through Ajatashatru as if the Rajasthani were a voodoo doll. Had he been performing one of his magic tricks, our ex-fakir might have been thrilled at such a prospect but, oddly enough, without a retractable blade and a few accomplices, the scenario lost much of its allure.

Without a second’s hesitation, the Rajasthani leapt into the wire basket.

The guide saw him and shouted: “Hey!”

The tourists saw him and gasped: “Whoah!”

Gino saw him and yelled: “Aha!”

Ajatashatru had been right. Regardless of all the witnesses, the gypsy pulled the switchblade from his pocket and held it in front of him, ready
to deliver the final thrust. Only a wire basket now separated the Indian from the blade’s sharp point. Utterly exhausted, Ajatashatru closed his eyes and bent down, his hands on his knees as he attempted to catch his breath. This is where my journey ends, he thought. The last thing he saw was the painting on the wall of his hotel room. All his dreams now were of peace and tranquillity. To his surprise, he found himself wishing that he could be reincarnated as a hay bale in a quiet field.

When Ajatashatru opened his eyes, he became aware that he was still alive and that he had not been transformed into a hay bale. His eyelids had shut just as the man had hurled his knife, blade first, at his stomach. But, instinctively, the Hindu had thrown himself backward, tripping over an obstacle in the process and falling horizontally onto the cold floor of the basket.

He remained in this position for a few seconds, finding it considerably more comfortable than standing face-to-face with a murderer ready to do him in for €100 and perhaps steal a briefcase from him containing €100,000. This was the second time in two days that he had used the “playing dead” technique. It was starting to become habit, a genuine combat strategy.

After a few minutes passed without the gypsy, the guide or any of the tourists climbing into the basket, Ajatashatru sat up and looked around him, speechless. He realized that the thing he had tripped over was in fact a large
cooler and that there were other objects on the floor, including a handle that opened a trapdoor and yellow carboys that undoubtedly contained reserves of gas.

The Indian climbed carefully to his knees and took a look through the holes in the wire basket. The hit man had vanished, along with the guide and all the tourists. Everything had vanished: the trees surrounding the clearing in the gardens, the gardens themselves, the houses, the hotel, Rome, the Earth … everything. Around the basket, as far as the eye could see, there was only powder-blue wallpaper decorated with little white marks. The sky.

The hot-air balloon had liberated itself from its shackles and, free for the first time in its long career in tourism, had risen into the air, leaving terra firma forever.

The writer leaned over the side a little bit. Below him hung the rope that, a few minutes earlier, had held the machine fast to the ground, and that someone had cut through with a knife. He was not dead, but was that a good thing, now that he found himself abandoned in the infinity of the firmament and at the mercy of a diabolical contraption that he had no idea how to work? Wasn’t this only a temporary reprieve before a death that was just as inevitable and far crueler
than being repeatedly stabbed with a knife on solid ground?

The Parisian taxi driver was not humane enough to wish his enemy a speedy death. He had probably ordered the hired killer to provide the Indian with a slow and painful end. And, spotting the balloon, the hit man had seen his chance to inflict the most vicious torture imaginable.

Ajatashatru did not suffer from airsickness or vertigo, thankfully, but seeing the houses as small as those plastic ones in Monopoly and the tourists as tiny as ants in sandals was enough to throw even the most Zen of Buddhists into a panic.

Had there been no wind, the balloon would simply have hovered over the clearing in the Villa Borghese gardens. Instead, it drifted slowly but surely toward an unknown destination, carried away by Aeolus’s breath. It was now at an altitude of five hundred feet, and from there our hero could see the city limits, the fields surrounding Rome and some silvery reflections in the distance. It was toward those pearly flashes that the balloon was flying, at about ten miles per hour. Soon, Rome would be nothing but a memory, a tiny dot on the horizon. Yet another city that I won’t get to explore, thought Ajatashatru.

Above the Indian, the canvas globe gaped open like the mouth of a yawning octopus. In
Five Weeks in a Balloon
, he had seen that a wheel had to be manipulated occasionally in order to send flames or gas up inside the balloon. This worked on the principle of hot air rising above cold air, carrying the balloon with it. So he looked for the wheel, found it and turned it. Like an angry dragon, the fuel reserves breathed gigantic flames, which disappeared inside the darkness of the deep throat.

A hot-air balloon cannot be steered any more now than it could two centuries earlier. It drifts wherever the wind takes it. Its pilot knows where he is taking off from, but not where he will land. That is the whole appeal of ballooning.

Although the average length of a balloon flight is around sixty minutes, one can, depending on the amount of gas available, remain airborne for as long as two or three hours, sometimes even longer. A balloon generally travels between six and twelve miles in an hour, so it did not take more than three hours for Ajatashatru to reach the Mediterranean—which was, of course, the very moment chosen by the gas reserves to run out and for the contraption to begin its inevitable descent toward the deep waters of the sea.

The ex-fakir could do nothing to ward off fate. All he could do was watch helplessly as the balloon fell toward the threatening surface of the water. This was it, then: he was going to die. Drowned, because he had never learned to swim. Then again, what good would it have done him even if he could swim? The coast moved ever farther from view with each passing second. He would try a few clumsy breaststrokes, and then he would sink inexorably, like a stone, to the bottom of the sea.

So his journey ended here. All that, just for this.

The pretty blue surface was his finish line. But the pretty blue would soon change to puma red, and then to blood red. So, there was something worse than the syndrome of the truck that slowed down and stopped: the syndrome of the balloon that slowed down and fell into the sea.

Pulling himself together, he looked around for a life jacket but could not find one, because of course the balloon was not intended to do anything other than rise and fall in the same fixed place above Rome. Inside the cooler that he had tripped over, he found some cans of soda, useless in these particular circumstances. He tried opening the trapdoor, then almost fainted when he looked down into the void. He immediately
closed it again and waited, resigned to his fate.

He waited until the basket landed on the water and began to sink. Around him, the vast sea stretched out in all directions. In a few minutes, he would be trapped underwater inside a wire cage. In a few minutes, he would be dead. Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod would vanish from the surface of the Earth. His final disappearing act.

He looked out at the vast blueness. How many lives had been lost here? Fishermen, lone sailors, pilots who had run out of fuel, illegal aliens freezing on stowaway ships, all those hundreds of African illegals whom Assefa had told him about who disappeared each year between Libya and the Italian coast without ever having reached the promised land, their only mistake to have been born on the wrong side of the Mediterranean. So, there you go, he would die like them, dragged under by the cold water. One more body for the insatiable killer.

And then he realized that, if he died now, the world would remember him only as a con man, a thief, an egotist, someone who devoted his life to taking from others without ever giving anything in return. Was he ready to face the final judgment with this weighing on his conscience?
Your CV is not exactly great, Buddha would say, playing with his long earlobes.

No, he could not die. Not yet.

Not before he’d been able to help someone. Not before he had shown—to others, and to himself—that he had changed.

And then, there was Marie. He could not die before he had ever known love. That would be ridiculous.

In the space of a few seconds, his entire conversation with the Frenchwoman flooded back into his memory like a film played on fast-forward, and then he saw his cousin and his adoptive mother, all the happy moments he had experienced in their company, and then he remembered the less happy moments: the hunger, the violence, those men leaning over him and drooling, those clammy hands gripping him, those snakes biting him. His whole life passed before his eyes. A short life, so eventful but so vain. No, there was no way he could meet Buddha like this. He would undoubtedly be reincarnated as a cherry tomato on a skewer, a fate very different from the tranquillity of being a hay bale in a quiet field.