Gambetta - Where's Gambetta ?

It was sod’s law. We’d finished every night at 5pm, but on this particular day the client had wanted to finalise the latest draft of the contract and so we’d worked much later than I’d hoped we would. J and the kids would be at the Disneyland Paris hotel waiting for me. Will they have had dinner yet, I wondered. I was only an hour away.

The metro from Levallois wasn’t that busy despite it being a Friday night in one of the world’s most vibrant cities but as the train didn’t go anywhere remotely interesting it was probably normal. Line 3 obviously wasn’t a metro you took to one of Paris’s hotspots. Gambetta ? Where the hell was Gambetta? I needed to change at Villiers to get Line 2 which, in turn would allow me to get the RER to Disneyland. It was a bit of a treck but it would be worth it.

The station before Villiers, the train stopped at somewhere called Malesherbes and I noticed a black guy who got on because he kept looking at me. I’d also spotted two other black guys getting on at the other end of the carriage. They were obviously mates and yet they’d entered the train by two different doors. Something told me to place my foot on my PC bag. It was sitting on top of my holdall which held my clothes for the weekend and making sure it was secure with my foot on it wasn’t a comfortable way to sit but that PC held not only the result of 3 months work with the client but all my personal files – several years worth of data and pictures which were irreplaceable. Why hadn’t I bought that back-up drive last week?

Sure enough, within seconds of the train leaving the station, the black guy who was on his own started asking me a question about something on the metro map. I told him I didn’t speak French but he was insistent. He wanted me to stand up and look at the map and that would have meant taking my foot off of my PC bag. Something was going down here. I glanced in the glass partition which separated my seat from the door and saw one of the other black guys moving down the carriage. The guy at the metro map became more insistent. He was almost begging me to stand and converse with him. As I turned to talk to him, I put my right hand into my coat pocket and left it there. Another glance in the glass showed the second guy starting to lean over the adjoining seat as my attention moved to his pal. I took my foot off of my PC bag and sure enough within a nano-second the black hand had grasped the bag and was lifting it over the seats. As I turned, my right hand left my coat pocket and the razor sharp knife it was holding slashed at the guy’s hand.

Four fingers fell to the floor of the train. The fifth, hanging by a sinewy thread, let go of the PC case. It was just like slow motion. I looked at the bloody stumps on the wooden floor of the train and expected to see them wriggling just like a worm does when you cut it in half, but they were still. Then came the scream. A blood-curdling cry which caused all the other passengers to look round to see what had happened.

Just then the train pulled in to Villiers and I picked up my bags and got off. The guy who had tried to divert my attention with the metro map stood aside as I brushed past him. I continued my journey without incident.

Alas – that’s not the way it happened. I did stand up to talk to the guy at the metro map. I did lose my PC bag and I did spend the whole weekend in Disneyland Police Station making statements and cancelling bank and credit cards and organising new ones. And the client wasn’t very happy either! J and the kids, however, had a ball.