The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe (5 page)

The Indian placed his tray on a coffee table, took off his jacket and tie, and sat on a comfortable green sofa. Across from him, a fake plastic television sparked his imagination. He pretended to switch it on so he could watch the latest Bollywood blockbuster while he had his smoked salmon, that strange but tasty little fluorescent orange fish, which he was eating for the second time in his life and the second time that day.

It had not taken him long to get used to luxury.

Once his meal was finished, he stood up and stretched his legs by walking around the table. It was while doing this that he noticed something on the bookcase behind the sofa that looked different from the books.

It was a newspaper—a real one—that someone must have left there. Alongside it were rows of the fake books, those plastic bricks he had seen earlier that day in other bookcases on display in the store.

As he did not speak French, he would not even have bothered opening it had he not recognized the inimitable front page of the American newspaper the
Herald Tribune
. This could be an entertaining evening, he thought. He
was far from imagining just how entertaining it was going to be, though not for the reasons he expected.

Ajatashatru pretended to switch off the television and began reading the news. He could not bear the television being on when he was not watching it; where he lived, electricity was a rare commodity. He read the article on the front page. The president of France was called Hollande. What a strange idea! Was the president of Holland called Mr. France, by any chance? These Europeans were decidedly odd.

And what was he to think of this former ice dancer who, each year, on the anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death, moonwalked over five and a half thousand miles from Paris to the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery, in a suburb of Los Angeles, where his idol was buried? Ajatashatru was no geography expert, but he found it hard to imagine how the man would continue to practice that famous dance move while crossing the Atlantic, whether he was on board an airplane or a ship.

Seized with a bout of nervous laughter and an irresistible urge to urinate, the Indian got up from the sofa and, in his socks, traversed the showcase living rooms—without moonwalking—in the direction of the toilets.

But he never reached them.

Voices and the sounds of footsteps coming from the main staircase suddenly broke the silence, momentarily transforming Ajatashatru’s narrow chest into the stands of a football stadium during a big match. Thrown into a panic, he looked all around and then hid inside the first wardrobe he saw—a sort of blue metal, two-door luggage locker, the signature piece of the all-new “American Teenager” collection. Once inside, he began praying that they would not notice his jacket, which he had left on the sofa a few yards from where he was hiding. He also prayed that they would not find the remains of his TV dinner on the table. Most of all, he prayed that no one would open the door of the wardrobe. If they did, he would say that he had gone inside to measure its dimensions, and that he hadn’t noticed time passing. He took a wooden Ikea pencil and a meter-long Ikea paper ruler from his trouser pocket and remained motionless in the dark, expecting to be discovered from one second to the next. Inside his chest, the football supporters were smashing up their seats. Outside, the voices drew closer, and seemed to surround him. But in the end, no one discovered he was there. Perhaps it would have been better if they had.

Julio Sympa and Michou Lapaire, the manager of Ikea Paris Sud Thiais and his chief designer, climbed the stairs that led to the showcase rooms, followed by a herd of men and women in yellow T-shirts and navy cargo trousers.

They were working late because they had to install a new collection.

Julio Sympa, who was six foot six and had climbed Mont Blanc four times, stopping at the top each time to read
Why I Am So Cold
by Josette Camus before going back down eight hundred and fifty-three pages later, paused in front of the “American Teenager” bedroom and pointed in several directions before continuing on his way.

Michou Lapaire, who always wished he had been born a woman, wrote down, in a pink notebook, the furniture pointed out by his bombastic boss.

While this was happening, the members of the technical team, most of whom had undoubtedly
never heard of
Why I Am So Cold
by Josette Camus or wished they had been born a different sex, put on their gloves, unrolled the bubble wrap, and moved the crates that would be used to protect the furniture during transportation. Due to a shortage of time, the manager had given instructions not to disassemble the furniture (at Ikea! Can you believe it?) but to pack it as it was in the large wooden crates. This way, they would avoid the physically and mentally exhausting process of disassembly and reassembly.

While the technical workers busied themselves lifting up the blue metal wardrobe and putting it inside a much larger wooden crate, a gentle splashing sound could be heard, like water trickling from a tap. If one of them had opened the wardrobe, they would have seen Ajatashatru in a very unfortunate position, standing up, huddled into a corner, concentrating on giving free rein to his bladder’s imagination while he was carried, rather shakily, an inch or two above the ground. It is as difficult to piss in a wardrobe as it is in an airplane, observed the Indian, who never would have believed that he would one day be in a position to make such an observation.

Anyway, no one opened the wardrobe door.

“When you’ve finished doing that, I want
someone to fix that leak,” said Julio Sympa, who had excellent hearing.

Then he pointed at a bunk bed, a few yards away, as if he were sentencing it to death. Which was more or less the case.

At that very moment—in other words, at the precise instant that Julio Sympa was pointing at the bunk bed as if he were sentencing it to death, which occurred at 11 p.m. on the dot—Gustave Palourde parked his taxi by the side of the road, checked that his windows and doors were locked, and, rubbing his hands, prepared to count the day’s takings.

This was his little post-shift ritual, a satisfying conclusion to a day of hard work. Ever since his wife, Mercedes-Shayana, had one day caught him, in their house (which was what they called their trailer), counting his money after a day’s work, and, having found his hiding place, stolen quite a lot of the money to buy herself a crocodile calfskin bag, Gustave had got into the habit of doing it this way. Best not to tempt fate, as he told his colleagues after this incident, though what he really meant was best not to tempt Mercedes-Shayana.

Having counted his takings, the old gypsy
glanced at his notebook and noticed that the total on the paper did not correspond with the amount of money in his hands. Somewhat vexed, he recalculated several times, first in his head and then with the calculator on his mobile phone, but the result was always the same. There was a difference of one hundred euros. He rummaged through the makeup bag he had “borrowed” from his wife (a simple act of compensation), in which he kept all his change, then he searched his wallet, and, increasingly anxious, felt around under his seat, under the passenger seat, in the glove compartment, and finally, in desperation, in the hollow around the gearshift. But all he found was dust.

One hundred euros. Gustave thought again of the green note that the Indian had given him at Ikea. That had been the most lucrative trip of the day, so he couldn’t have given it to another customer in change.

“And if I don’t have that damn note, then …”

It did not take the gypsy long to realize that he had been the victim of someone more crooked than him. He went through the scene again in his memory. The Indian handing him the note. Him taking it in his hand. Him opening his wallet and sliding it inside. The Indian waving his arms to show him something. Him
looking. Him not seeing anything very interesting. Him thinking that the Indian was a bit of a loony. Him putting his wallet away. Him leaning over the glove compartment to pick up a business card.

“That scoundrel!” exclaimed Gustave. “He only waved his arms about to distract me while he took his note back.
Cabrón!
”
*

If there was one thing the Parisian taxi driver could not stand, it was being taken for a ride when he was the one giving the ride; being swindled when he should have been swindling. He swore, on his honor as a gypsy, he would find that Indian without delay and make him eat his turban.

As he did this, he stroked the little statue of St. Sarah, the patron saint of gypsies, which hung from his rearview mirror. When he drove off at top speed, she banged against St. Fiacre, the patron saint of taxi drivers, who hung next to her.

For the entire duration of the journey back to his house (trailer), Gustave cursed the Indian under his breath. He didn’t even listen to his Gipsy Kings CD, which he always kept in the
CD player. That’s how annoyed he was. As he waited for a traffic light to turn green, an idea took seed in his mind. Having made his purchases in Ikea, the Indian might have used the Gypsy Taxis business card that he had given him. If so, one of Gustave’s colleagues would obviously have driven him. So, all he had to do was ask where they had dropped him off, and he could go there, find him and give him a good hiding. Without a second thought, Gustave grabbed the radio transmitter.

“Calling all units (he had copied this phrase from
Starsky & Hutch
), have any of you picked up an Indian today—crumpled gray suit, red tie pinned to his shirt, white turban on his head, huge mustache, tall, thin and gnarled like a tree … a Hindu, basically—from Ikea Paris Sud Thiais? This is a code T (for
Thief
), I repeat, a code T (for
Twat
). Everybody understand? That’s a code T (for
waiT Till I geT my hands around your ThroaT, you filThy Indian Thief!
).

“I can’t believe I trusted a
gorgio
, never mind an Indian, for a journey from Roissy to Ikea! I’ll never do that again,” groaned the taxi driver, while thinking that such an event must happen about as often as the appearance of Halley’s Comet (which was next expected on 28 July 2061), and that perhaps it was not such a great
idea, after all, to talk about this at dinner with his wife and look like an idiot in the eyes of his daughter, who already thought he was a bit of a jerk.

A few minutes elapsed, but none of his colleagues working that afternoon said they had picked up the mysterious passenger. So, Gustave calculated, either he had used a different taxi firm, or he had hired a minivan, or he was still somewhere in the industrial zone. In the first two scenarios, he thought, there is nothing I can do until tomorrow. But for the third, I could go and see if there’s a hotel near the store. I’m in the area anyway, and it’ll only take me ten or fifteen minutes.

The car noisily skidded through a sudden U-turn while St. Sarah pressed herself for several seconds against the body of the smiling St. Fiacre.

When Gustave arrived outside Ikea, a large freight truck was leaving. He pulled to the side and let it pass, blissfully unaware that inside it was a huge wooden crate which, like a Russian doll, itself contained a metal wardrobe which, in turn, contained the Indian he was looking for.

He started up again and drove around, but saw nothing suspicious. A very large and closed furniture store, a Starbucks which was open but
empty … you could find almost anything here. Anything except a hotel. Anything except a tall, thin Indian, gnarled like a tree, in a suit, tie and turban, who conned honest French gypsy taxi drivers.

There was a residential estate on the other side of the road, but unless he knew someone who lived there, the thief could not be there.

Then again … thought Gustave. You could never be sure, with this kind of person. With his slick charm and his magic tricks, he might have taken refuge with one of the residents for the night.

Just in case, he drove his Mercedes through streets lined with pretty houses, losing at least five minutes in that labyrinth of homes, and came back out on the main road on which he had begun.

He had to sort this problem out as quickly as possible, because the next day he was leaving for a family holiday in Spain. So he saw only one solution: he would have to call in the professionals.

The national police’s new charter for welcoming the public stated that, from now on, every French citizen had the right to file a complaint about any kind of infraction whatsoever, no matter how futile it might be, at the police station of their choice. It was the duty of the policeman, who had no rights, to register the complaint, no matter how futile he might consider it, and, in particular, not to send the plaintiff to another police station in order to get rid of him, which had been standard practice before the charter. So, for the past several months, there had been an unpleasant tension between the irate victims, fed up of waiting in lines that moved no more quickly than those at the post office or the local butcher’s, and police officers embittered by the fact that they were mere humans rather than octopuses, because at least if they had eight tentacles they would have been able to type several statements at once. This tension grew even worse after nightfall, when the number of police
stations open to the public diminished as quickly as an ice cube melting in Kim Basinger’s navel, funneling all the victims of crime in Paris into one single point—something the new charter was expressly intended to avoid.

No less than three hours passed between the moment when Gustave made the decision to notify the police and the moment he triumphantly signed his statement in the presence of the officer on duty.

Very concerned not to damage the harmonious relationship established by local police with the gypsy community located on the other side of the ring road, the policeman had immediately dispatched the night officer and a colleague to Ikea, accompanied by the victim, in order to inspect the video recorded by the store’s security cameras during the day. They were going to find him—that damn Indian fakir who’d come here stirring up trouble with their minorities—and they were going to make him pay back what he had stolen from the taxi driver, right down to the last centime.