Because no one was killed, they were kidding about it in the queue at the Gare du Nord.
Twelve hours had passed since a trio – at least – of malfeasants had plotted and executed what the sign boards at the station were calling “a coordinated act of malice,” setting fires at signal boxes along the high-speed rail lines to the north and east and west, knocking out power to the trains. But there had been no casualties other than to the timetable, so that when I asked a woman from the Société nationale des chemins de fer français whom she thought was responsible for the deed, she giggled and pointed and said, “I think it was you!”
“Maybe it was the Far Right,” another woman surmised. (French politics is a tripartite mess.) “Maybe it was the Far Left. They’re both troublemakers.”
By now – it was 2 p.m. on the dreary, humid opening day of the Olympic Games – everything at the Gare du Nord was nearly back to normal. The Eurostar to London-St. Pancras was running on schedule. So was the flyer to Cologne. The departure for Lille was 30 minutes late, but probably not late enough for LeBron and Steph and the rest of the Dream Team to miss Sunday’s tip-off against Jokić and the Serbs. All in all, it had been not much worse than a blizzard at Pearson or Dorval.
Officially, there were as yet no answers. The SNCF and the French security apparatus already were consumed with the perhaps-impossible burden of protecting an open-air fluvial parade of nations through the heart of a medieval metropolis – lest the Parisians be accused of staging something as predictable and gauche as a mere stadium ceremony like the English or the Spanish or the Greeks – followed by 17 days of widely dispersed competitions. So their chiefs offered the usual boilerplate about how the state had “concentrated its personnel in Parisian train stations” while politicians sounded an all-points “J’accuse!”
“This attack is not a coincidence, it’s an effort to destabilize France,” snarled a local officeholder. The Prime Minister vowed that his gendarmes would “find and punish the perpetrators of these criminal acts.” But no one had yet been found or punished and now everyone was a suspect, fellow travelers on the Orient Express.
In the departure hall for Blighty, travelers were relieved but sanguine about what the next act of malice might bring.
“It’s going to be horrible,” a British traveler of Malaysian origins named Sandra Jayacodi was saying. “We thought it was best to leave. When we planned this trip, we did not know that the Olympic Games were happening at the same time.”
“Sandra,” I told her, “they have been planning this for seven years.”
“That shows you my interest in the Olympic Games,” she said.
What interest the jihadists and their kindred killers of many stripes have in these Olympic Games, we do not yet know. Neither France nor Britain nor the rest of Europe has been spared their depredations over the decades, so it was not a surprise when I asked a German woman who was about to board the train for Cologne if her city had experienced a terror attack and she shrugged and said, “not yet.”
A man named Vinod Purohit was shepherding a sizable contingent of his fellow Rajasthanis back to their British domicile.
“When we got the notification this morning that said ‘Your journey might be interrupted,’ we got really scared and thought it better to go,” he said. “They are making Europe a hostage for no reason.”
By 5 p.m., Parisian time, the Reuters news agency was citing “two security sources” who surmised that “the mode of attack meant initial suspicions fell on leftist militants or environmental activists, but cautioned they did not yet have any evidence.”
Meanwhile, Vinod Purohit and his accompanying friends and women and children only wanted to travel under the Channel and home.
“Do you think there are more villains or more heroes in the world?” I asked him, as Paris braced for something that could be much worse than a late train to Lille.
“Certainly, there are more heroes than villains in the world,” he answered hopefully. “In this station, there are ten thousand who could be heroes.” And he told me a story about how his father had rescued a 12-year-old Sikh girl from an angry mob after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984.
“Purohit means ‘priest,’” the voyager said. “But I am not a priest. I’m a pharmacist.”