The Designer(56)

Then, shockingly, there was a shot. Someone had fired a pistol at the police. It was answered by a fusillade of shotgun fire from the CRS. Pellets rattled through the leaves around Copper, making her retreat along her branch in terror.

A second wave of police now poured into the square from a different direction, swinging clubs in disciplined savagery. There was the rattle of a sub-machine gun from the rooftops. This was getting serious. She clung to the trunk of the tree, praying not to be struck by either gunfire or rocks.

After a pitched battle of some fifteen minutes, the crowd began to yield. With faces covered in blood, some hobbling, people supporting each other as best they could, the demonstrators fled from the square, hotly pursued by the CRS, who were wielding their batons to deadly effect. It was a rout. As the crowd streamed away in all directions, figures were left lying on the ground among the discarded red flags, at the mercy of the horses’ hooves. Several were too badly injured to get up. Others were immobile. These were all dragged, along with the dozens who had been arrested already, to the police vans that were now careering into the area. The gendarmes were left in possession of the square.

Hanging on to her branch for dear life, Copper hoped to avoid detection. But other people had climbed into other trees and the police were rousting them out, one by one. It soon came to her turn.

‘Come down, you,’ a gendarme commanded, swinging his truncheon threateningly.

‘I’m a journalist,’ Copper said, waving her card shakily.

‘I don’t care if you’re Marcel Proust,’ the man retorted. ‘Come down.’

‘I won’t!’

The gendarme called over a colleague and by the humiliatingly simple expedient of shaking the little tree, they soon dislodged Copper from her perch. Furious, she was forced to clamber down before she fell. She was immediately grabbed by the two policemen, her helmet yanked off and her camera taken away.

‘Don’t you dare damage my camera,’ she said, grabbing the man’s arm. ‘I’m an American citizen.’

‘So much the worse for you,’ the first gendarme said contemptuously. He opened the camera and pulled out the spool, destroying the morning’s work.

‘You bastard,’ Copper flung at him, outraged.

He tossed the camera to his colleague. ‘Throw her in the van with the others.’



Twenty-eight hideously uncomfortable hours later, the door of her cell opened, framing a burly gendarme. ‘Where’s the American woman?’

‘Here,’ she said.

He jerked his head. ‘Come.’

Bidding farewell to her cellmates, with whom she’d been swapping tales of struggle all night, Copper allowed herself to be hustled down the stinking corridor.

‘Long live the Revolution!’ one of her cellmates called after her.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Copper demanded, trying to sound brave.

‘You’ve been discharged,’ the gendarme replied. ‘You’ve got friends.’

Her rescuer was waiting at the front desk wearing an impeccable camel-hair overcoat and a trilby.

‘Henry!’

‘Are you all right?’ Henry asked anxiously, examining her.

‘They took my camera.’

He held up the Rolleiflex. ‘I’ve got it back, don’t worry.’

‘And they destroyed all my photographs! I had pictures of police brutality in there. The world had a right to see them.’

Henry sighed. ‘Any injuries? Physical ones, I mean.’

‘Just a few bruises.’

‘Then let’s get out of here.’

‘Hold on a moment,’ Copper protested as he started ushering her out. ‘I’m not leaving everybody else behind.’

‘You can’t do anything for them,’ Henry replied. ‘They’re going to be charged tomorrow morning and they’ll probably all get six months in jail. Unless you want the same?’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong. Neither have they.’

‘I can’t help the others. But you – participating in civil unrest, refusing to obey police orders, resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer – it’s taken me two hours to talk you out of here,’ he said in a low voice. ‘They say you were armed.’

‘I was wearing a helmet. That’s not being armed.’

‘You really can be astonishingly na?ve,’ he snorted.

‘I didn’t want my brains knocked out by those bastards.’

‘Let’s go before they change their minds.’

‘I’m going to make an official complaint about them destroying my photographs.’

He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t. They’re already talking about impounding your camera.’

Reluctantly, Copper allowed herself to be hustled out of the police station by Henry. In his car, she was ill-tempered, partly through lack of sleep.

‘I didn’t need you to come and rescue me,’ she said ungraciously.

‘Has it occurred to you that if you were convicted, you’d be deported?’ he enquired.

‘The police behaved disgustingly,’ she said, evading the question. ‘I saw women being beaten with clubs.’

‘A policeman was shot yesterday in that demonstration. And there are half a dozen more in hospital.’