The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe (10 page)

Just like Alice, the fakir had passed through to the other side of the looking glass—or, to be
more accurate, the baggage depot. The machine that vomited bags had swallowed him like a common suitcase that had already been around the carousel, unclaimed by anyone.

His face burned with pain.

Gingerly, he touched his cheek. A multitude of tiny ice crystals, probably thrown from the cooler at the moment of impact, had lodged in the scars left behind by the chronic acne that had ravaged his face when he was a teenager.

The left half of his face was numb and frozen, as if he’d been smashed in the face with a cooler, which was in fact the case, or as if he’d been hit by an iron that had been left too long in a very cold room, which is, I acknowledge, a very odd analogy.

Goodness gracious! he thought suddenly. Because while it was true that he had managed to escape the madman and his harpies, there was perhaps worse yet to come.

Indeed, he now found himself in the secure (and thus forbidden) zone of a major European airport, which was not the best way of keeping his promise to return to the straight and narrow.

If any police had passed by at that moment, they would have seen a poor man’s Aladdin who had swapped his magic carpet for a baggage carousel. And if the Spanish had been as competent
and efficient as their English counterparts, as soon as they had overcome their shock, Aladdin would have found himself—before he had time to say “Phew,” and in accordance with the same international readmission agreements that had caused him to be sent here—somewhere between the North Pole and Iceland, for the good and simple reason that he had been discovered with little ice crystals embedded in his cheeks.

So, like a criminal seeking to rid himself of damning evidence, the fakir vigorously rubbed his face with the sleeve of his shirt while the carousel continued to carry him along its meandering path into the depot.

Tom Cruise-Jesús Cortés Santamaría had spent the past five minutes looking at himself in the rearview mirror of the little red-and-yellow golf cart belonging to the airline company Iberia.

Though he was only twenty-eight, he thought he had aged overnight. Large dark rings shadowed his eyes like two parentheses that no longer had the strength to stand straight. This job insecurity is slowly eating me alive, he thought. I need a permanent contract.

As he was about to drive back into the baggage depot, a man carrying a cooler strode toward him. He was accompanied by a woman in a flowery dressing gown who looked like she had just got out of the bath and a teenage girl dressed like those professionals he saw by the side of the road on his way to work.

“Señor, my suitcase has been eaten by the machine,” said the man in fluent Spanish with the hint of a French accent.
Having decided not to let the Indian escape him this time, this was the only excuse Gustave had come up with to enter the secure zone of the baggage depot. His large beer belly and lack of physical fitness prevented him jumping onto the carousel and following his enemy directly.

“Just wait a bit, it’ll come back out,” the baggage handler replied, tired of always having to respond to the idiotic requests of passengers whenever he was unlucky enough to find himself on this side of the terminal. “The carousel goes around in circles.”

“I know, I know …”

“But if you know, then why—”

“Yes, but the problem is that my daughter is hypo!” the Parisian taxi driver improvised, having seen that his plan A was not going to work.

“Hyper? She looks pretty calm to me. Not to mention very pretty.”

Flattered, Miranda-Jessica gave a shy smile and bowed her head, her cheeks aflame. The young Spaniard was very handsome in his blue uniform. Almost more handsome than Kevin-Jésus.

“Not hyper—hypo!” the gypsy corrected him, shouting to demonstrate the urgency of the situation. “Hypoglycemic! My daughter is diabetic! She needs a GlucaGen injection right
away to get her blood sugar levels back up! And the GlucaGen is in the suitcase!”

He had always wanted to replicate an episode of
E.R.
, his favorite American TV series. The long-awaited day had finally arrived.

“She doesn’t look sick,” replied the baggage handler, unfazed by the man’s exigent demeanor.

Gustave elbowed Miranda-Jessica, who immediately lifted up her head and put on the most pain-filled expression she could manage.

“OK, I’m going,” said the baggage handler, who preferred to give in to the tourist’s demand rather than stay there and talk about it.

And, anyway, the girl was very cute.

He started up his golf cart.

“I’m coming with you. You don’t know which suitcase it is,” said Gustave truthfully, placing the cooler on the floor and his large backside on the passenger seat.

Tom Cruise-Jesús Cortés Santamaría looked for a moment at the person sitting next to him: a small man, in his fifties, wearing cheap black trousers with darts and a black shirt. A large gold chain (the kind that are used to moor yachts) and a thick carpet of salt-and-pepper chest hair could be seen in the V at the top of his shirt. Had it not been for the cooler and the way the two
women looked, the young man would have bet that this Frenchman was on his way to a funeral.

And then it hit him.

“Are you
gitano, hermano
?” he asked, almost certain of the answer.

“Well, yeah!” replied Gustave, as if this were obvious, wiggling his thick fingers covered in gold rings. “Of course I’m a gypsy.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” said Tom Cruise-Jesús Cortés Santamaría, suddenly cheering up. He, too, wiggled his long fingers covered in gold signet rings, as if this were a secret code they shared.

Then he raced his turbocharged golf cart through the terminal. He was always first in line when it came to saving a pretty, young gypsy girl.

Overcome by curiosity, Ajatashatru had opened one of the mysterious cardboard boxes that were piled up next to him on the carousel and labeled, in pretty red-and-gold lettering,
ensaïmada mallorquina
.

To his surprise, it turned out to be a sort of large brioche, its shape somewhere between that of a snail and Princess Leia’s hairdo, its circumference more or less the same as a 33rpm vinyl record.

He took a bite. It was delicious. The cake was a bit floury and stodgy, but accompanied by a little water it would have been fine. The problem was that he didn’t have any water.

As he wondered how people could check in mountains of brioches as ordinary luggage, and how the baggage handlers could load them in the airplanes without eating a couple, he heard the purr of a car’s engine.

In an agile movement, he leapt from the carousel. It was high time, anyway, as the carousel
was about to take him back to the other side of the terminal, where the Parisian was undoubtedly waiting for him with his deadly cooler.

A quick glance to the left, a quick glance to the right. Nothing. Nothing except for that brown leather trunk, as big as a fridge, that was passing a few yards from him on a carousel going in the opposite direction. Without a second’s thought, he jumped on it. As luck would have it, the trunk was not padlocked. He unzipped it while looking back over his shoulder. A little red-and-yellow golf cart was coming toward him. The driver and the passenger, whose face he couldn’t see properly, seemed not to have noticed him.

Inside the trunk was a portable wardrobe full to the brim with clothes. A wardrobe! Aja thought, his eyes glimmering with disbelief. He grabbed armfuls of the clothes and their hangers and threw them in a pile behind the carousel. There were elegant dresses, expensive lingerie, elaborate and well-stocked makeup bags. This probably belonged to someone important, or rich, or both.

The fakir got into the trunk, half an
ensaïmada
in his hand, just in case, and zipped it shut from inside. He had never been in such a big trunk in his life. He did not have to dislocate his
shoulder, as he usually did when he was preparing to get inside his magic box. He exhaled. At least no one would be skewering this box with long, sharp swords. Well, not unless the Frenchman got his hands on it …

While the plebs continued to file between the seats to take their places on the airplane, like a centipede in Bermuda shorts and sandals, Sophie Morceaux, who had been the first to board, was already sipping from a glass of cheap champagne in the second row.

A passing Italian, speaking very loudly and waving his arms around, sent a minuscule particle of dust flying into one of the beautiful actress’s green eyes. In touching her eye to remove the irritating dust, she accidentally dislodged her contact lens, which instantly disappeared in the jungle of blue carpet on the floor.

The young woman spent several minutes kneeling on the floor, between two chairs, scratching around in the wool fibers with her long, slender fingers, until a flight attendant finally came along to help her. The result was no better, however, and Sophie Morceaux was forced into the horrifying realization: she was now one-eyed. Which was unbearable, I’m
sure you’ll agree, for an actress who had not even been in
Pirates of the Caribbean
.

While the passengers moved toward their places, the flight attendant swam against the tide like a salmon and spent a minute or two on the gangway in discussion with a woman wearing a fluorescent yellow vest and large headphones over her ears and holding a walkie-talkie.

They absolutely had to find Sophie Morceaux’s Vuitton trunk and bring her the toiletry bag from the outside pocket.

Luckily, it had not yet been loaded on the airplane. At the bottom of the gangway, the chief baggage handler explained to the woman with the walkie-talkie that the trunk was being given special treatment, in view of its owner (it was not every day that you had the famous and beautiful actress Sophie Morceaux in your airplane), and was therefore not traveling with the rest of the suitcases in the large metal AKH containers. He then pointed to a beautiful brown Vuitton trunk, the size of a small refrigerator (22 × 50 × 22 inches), perched on a trolley.

The Spanish woman rummaged around in the outside pocket of the trunk, took out a matching toiletry bag, and zipped it back up again. This was the first time she had ever seen such a luxurious piece of luggage. With her
miserable salary, and in these lean times of economic crisis, she knew she would never be able to buy anything like it. She could barely even afford the toiletry bag, in fact.

“OK, we’re done,” she told the chief baggage handler, who, aided by two other men, loaded the trunk into the only heated, ventilated and pressurized baggage hold on the airplane.

If, in the dark depths of that trunk, sandwiched between a pair of underwear and a piece of
ensaïmada
, Ajatashatru had called for a genie, the genie would have said to him, in a voice as deep as Barry White’s: “Fakir, I have some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is that you have been put in the only heated, ventilated and pressurized baggage hold on the airplane, which means you will not have turned into an ice cream by the time you arrive at your destination. The bad news is that you will never see Barcelona, because you have just been loaded in the hold of an airplane that is taking off shortly for an unknown destination. Here we go again!”

The scene had lasted only a few minutes, but when Gustave Palourde and Tom Cruise-Jesús etc., etc., entered the baggage depot, the Indian had disappeared.

Gustave, who felt bad about lying to a fellow gypsy, had told the baggage handler the truth as soon as he got in the golf cart. And the truth was that he wanted to beat the shit out of the foreigner who had conned him out of €100. The young Spaniard, for whom blood ties were the most sacred of all and who never missed an opportunity to beat the shit out of somebody, rallied to the cause of his blood brother without any further explanation. Besides, he had been relieved to find out that the pretty teenage girl, who was not diabetic, was also not in any danger.

And so, excited by this impulsive manhunt, the two gypsies drove through the labyrinthine corridors in search of the Indian who had once offended one of them.

Gustave no longer had his cooler handy, but in his pocket he was caressing the ivory handle of his beloved Opinel knife, which he had joyfully recovered from his luggage after disembarking from the airplane. If the thief did not pay him back what he owed him, plus interest, he would not hesitate to put so many holes in him that he could be used as a sieve.

The two men had soon examined the whole of the carousel inside the depot, but still without discovering any trace of the crook. A baggage handler walked past them, and the young Spaniard asked him if he had, by any chance, seen an Indian, tall, thin and gnarled like a tree, with a mustache and a white turban on his head.

“The only Indian I can see is him!” replied the man, pointing an accusatory finger at Gustave. “What is he doing here? He’s not allowed on this side.”

“I know, I know, but we’re looking for a suitcase containing a Gluco … um, sugar for his daughter, who’s having a fit,” the young gypsy lied.

“Oh, I see …” Then a few seconds later: “But hang on, what does all that have to do with the Indian?”

Tom Cruise-Jesús did not know what to say.
But he did realize that he would never be given his permanent contract if he got mixed up in crazy adventures like this. So he backed off.

Just as he was about to accompany the Frenchman to the passenger zone and forget this whole unhappy episode, his eye was caught by a pile of clothes that had been thrown to the floor near one of the baggage carousels.

More out of professional conscientiousness than suspicion, he stopped his golf cart and went to pick up the clothes. They turned out to be elegant ball gowns and some rather enticing sexy underwear in a size 8, which made him imagine that their owner was probably not too ugly.

“What is all that?” asked the taxi driver, who had gone over to join him.

“I don’t know. It looks like someone threw all this away without really looking at it. These are some nice threads. I’m pretty sure they must belong to someone rich, or important, or both. Definitely a woman, anyway, and probably not an ugly one, if you want my opinion.”