Showdown Time

I’ll never forget the time I was almost gunned down by the Parisien police. To say that it was all a bit of a mix-up would probably be understating things, but it wasn’t so much of a mix-up in that I wasn’t their intended target, for I was. The confusion arose from the police’s misunderstanding of why I was in Paris in the first place. I had actually travelled there to deliver a lecture to the Montgolfier Institute, situated in the rue Pestalozzi. The lecture was on the subject of the world’s first ever air disaster, the infamous Hot Air Balloon Fire of Tullamore in County Offaly, Ireland which occurred in 1785. Fairly innocent stuff, you might think, but events took a rather obscure turn during my stay.

A friend of mine from Oxford, Maggie van Junger, had disappeared. Her mother, Olga, had - for reasons best known to herself - decided that Maggie had been kidnapped and taken to Paris. Olga had telephoned me and asked me to attempt to trace her daughter while I was staying in the city. Reluctantly, I agreed – despite already knowing that Maggie was really in hiding from her mother, whom she despised. I was staying as a guest of an old undergraduate friend of mine – Professor Caroline “Fatso” Wartburg – in her apartment on the Boulevard des Batignolles, and one drunken evening we decided it would be amusing to play a game on Maggie’s mother by pretending that we were on the trail of the kidnappers.

We wove a farcical (to us) story of intrigue and calumny, claiming that we had been contacted – through a drug dealer in a gay nightclub – by a member of the kidnap gang and that we were getting steadily closer to discovering Maggie’s whereabouts. The information that we dripped to Olga by telephone over those days was sparse and sketchy (deliberately), but our almost fatal mistake was that we had not made provision for the fact that Olga was barking mad, and hysterical to boot. Frustrated that our eventual discovery of Maggie – alive or dead – appeared to be about as elusive as the Gardens of Hesperides, Olga had apparently taken matters into her own hands.

Unbeknown to us, she had telephoned the Chief of Police in Paris (or some such high-ranking official) and explained to him that her daughter was being held captive by an evil gang, whilst her agent in the city (that would be me) was making poor efforts in his attempt to rescue her. Unfortunately, Olga’s command of the French language was pitiably poor (despite claiming to have been at Finishing School in Switzerland), and so in her garbled fashion she unwittingly succeeded in convincing the poor man that a) her daughter was a member of the Dutch Royal Family (Olga also claimed to be related to European aristocracy); and b) that I, Richard Pilgrim, was the actual terrorist holding Maggie captive in an apartment on the Boulevard des Batignolles.

Before anyone could say sacré bleu, the boulevard was cordoned off, and hundreds of armed marksmen had surrounded the building. Fatso and I were at first amused by the commotion, watching as we were from the upper windows which we had opened to allow us some respite from the stifling Parisien heat. Then we saw a man in a hat and raincoat – clearly in charge of the operation - bellowing into a megaphone. You can imagine my horror when I recognized the amplified echoes of my own name bouncing between the high buildings. I was being urged by this man to “come out with my hands up”. My first instinct was to head for the fire escape, but Fatso was right – it would only have made matters worse, and I would undoubtedly have been shot.

I can tell you, I have never felt closer to death than that moment when we both tentatively emerged at street level, hands above our heads, and saw a hundred police officers raise rifles to their shoulders, obviously waiting for the command to shoot.

It was a sobering experience. Fatso and I were arrested and spent two days in jail before the whole sorry mess was unravelled. It was only after the intervention of a man from the British Embassy that we were allowed to go free, and we were told that we were extremely lucky not to have been charged with wasting police time. Olga, of course, escaped scot free and Maggie – well, I never spoke to Maggie again.

So from Horace today: He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.