This time, I received an invitation – or at least I think I did. As I poured out the last of a 2009 Bordeaux, white tartrate crystals at the bottom of the goblet seemed to spell a message on a background of purple dregs: “Pont dA 11 Nov 12am R.”
I blinked and gave the goblet an inebriate second glance, but the wine diamonds had sunk into the slush and the ghostly message had blurred.
“The Pont d’Alma – the entrance to the Paris sewers – at midnight on the 11th of November,” I translated the shorthand that only could have come—the Devil knows how—from the Ghost of Cardinal Richelieu, my ghostly interlocutor on so many past occasions.
And so, an hour before midnight on the appointed day, I jimmied the rusted lock on the grate in front of a small spiral staircase under the Pont d’Alma. Clad in hip boots and waders, I picked my way down the slippery steps to the Paris sewers, clumsily balancing a magnum of Chateau Petrus antique copper spittoon.
I passed the sewers and found the ancient stone stairs that led ever downward, under the medieval archways below the sewers, through archways dense with hanging moss, through levels too numerous to fathom, until I reached Richelieu’s haunt: The ancient ossuary of the Carthusian monks, a tiny, dank, airless, ghost-infested lair. Shivering, I caught my breath.
I planted the spittoon firmly in muck of indeterminate depth on the ossuary floor and uncorked the wine. Presently a tremor came through the viscous air. I poured the Chateau Petrus into the spittoon. A gelatinous object of indeterminate shape approached and inserted an appendage into the neck of the spittoon. The translucent object turned the red of a cardinal’s cassock. With a loud plop, there emerged the head of the Ghost of Richelieu.
“It’s nice of you to come,” the Cardinal said. “Armistice Day evokes une langueur monotone. During the War, we had so many new faces here.”
“Eminence, why have you summoned me?” I ventured.
“Spengler, do you remember what I told you at our last seance?” the ghastly Cardinal replied. I had consulted the Cardinal on October 9, two days after Hamas attacked southern Israel.
“I cannot forget it: You said that Israel would make life in Gaza so difficult that a large part of the population will leave, or that Israel itself will become unlivable, and Israelis will leave.”
“Bingueaux!,” said Richelieu with a lilt that recalled Maurice Chevalier. “It took less than a month! Less than a tenth of the civilian population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip is left. Nearly a million have fled to shelters in southern Gaza. The Israelis moved first and moved fast, and emptied the stronghold of Hamas of its people. It does not matter how long the fighters of Hamas hide in their tunnels. They are trapped and will die there.”
“But Eminence,” I objected, “was this really a stratagem of war?”
Richelieu emitted a sneeze that projected tiny bubbles of ectoplasm from his spectral nose. “The editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Aluf Benn,” calls my plan a “tie-breaking” move by the Israeli Army:
The October 7 massacre committed by Hamas in the Gaza border communities and the abduction of hundreds of Israelis to Gaza gave Israel domestic support and international legitimacy to deploy unprecedented force, in firepower and duration.
Even if some cease-fire is soon declared under American pressure, Israel will be in no hurry to withdraw and allow the population to return to the northern Strip. And if they do come back – what will they come back to? After all, they will have no homes, streets, educational institutions, shops or any of the infrastructure of a modern city…
Israel is acting to strike at the Hamas forces barricaded in the tunnels, and will try to hunt its leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif. But the move intended to bring about the collapse of the organization and dismantle its ability to rule Gaza is the instruction given to one million residents of the northern Gaza Strip to huddle together in the southern part of the strip.
“Some will call it genocide, Eminence,” I said.
“Genocide? What!? What do these cretins know about genocide? I could teach them a thing or two about genocide! I paid the Dutch in 1624 to fight Spain, I paid Christian VI of Denmark to invade Germany in 1626, I paid Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden to enter the war in 1630, and when Gustavus fell at Lützen in 1632, I paid Prince Bernard and his mercenaries to attack again. By 1635 Germans were starving and eating the newly buried dead. There weren’t enough Protestants to pursue the war, and I finally had to send my own troops in to keep the war going.”
“Both we and the Austrians exterminated hostile populations,” the Cardinal fulminated. “Our opponent, the Imperial General Tilly took Magdeburg in 1631, and only 5,000 of the 25,000 townspeople were still alive the next day. Pope Urban VIII wrote to Tilly, ‘You have washed your victorious hands in the blood of sinners.’ Religious hatred endured until the middle of the 19th century; you can still admire the bronze statue of Tilly in Munich, erected by the Wittelsbach king in 1844.”
“My colleagues and I reduced the population of Germany and its neighbors by two-fifths in the space of just Thirty Years! And they say that sending civilians to live in tents is genocide!”
“What about the bombing of civilians in Gaza, Eminence?”
“No one will complain too loudly about that, mon ami,” snickered the Cardinal. “The Americans do that sort of thing before breakfast. When they invaded Iraq in 2003, the first few weeks of bombing killed more than 8,000 civilians, with the blessing of a half-dozen of America’s allies. We do not know how many civilians died during Israeli bombardments, but that is what the Americans with their gift for hypocrisy call collateral damage.”
“But how will this end?” I asked Richelieu.
“The refugees will sit in their tents in southern Gaza as a portent of shame for Hamas until someone decides to put them somewhere else. Northern Gaza will remain in ruins, as a monument to the impotence of Hamas. The wealthy Arab states will give alms and wag their fingers at Israel and privately enjoy Hamas’ humiliation. The people will go somewhere. Perhaps the Egyptians will be bribed to take them. It really doesn’t matter. Everybody has to be somewhere.”
Richelieu sneezed again and again, and the little bubbles of ectoplasm began to fill the tiny ossuarium, driving out the air. I gasped for breath as the Cardinal grinned, his purple cassock turning translucent. I awoke next to an empty bottle of Calvados.