Invisible Armies

Part 3: Paris - Chapter 15

"Danielle," Françoise says, her voice grim, "I am sorry to bother you, but we have a problem, a big problem."

Danielle looks up from her computer and steels herself. "What?"

"It is the accommodations. We have too many people coming from outside Paris, already hundreds more than we expected. We have no room for them, not even in the warehouse, we simply cannot keep more people there."

"I'll talk to Estelle. We'll rent another warehouse."

"There is no time. They arrive in only five days. We will be violating the law already, keeping so many people in one space. The owner of our warehouse will pretend not to see, but we have no more friends who will be so willing. I do not know what to do. These people, many of them cannot afford their own rooms, not in Paris, and we promised all of them accommodations. I know they say money is no obstacle but surely we cannot pay to put thousands of people up in hotel rooms."

"Maybe not," Danielle admits, though she isn't so sure, the mysterious foundation's fountain of wealth seems to be inexhaustible. "Let me think."

As she ponders she distractedly runs her fingers through her hair, which has grown to pageboy length in the last six weeks. An idea hits.

"How many volunteers do we have here?" Danielle asks. "A hundred?"

"Nearly."

Not enough. "And how many more in Paris who signed up for the newsletter?"

"Nearly two thousand."

"Send an email to them all. Ask them to volunteer to put up a guest for two or three nights. Have them send in addresses and phone numbers, we'll make arrangements to route the out-of-towners to the volunteers' places somehow."

"It will be chaos," Françoise says, offended by the notion. A short, curvy, curly-haired fashionista, Françoise is a finicky detail person; exactly what Danielle needs in her translator and right-hand-woman, but sometimes infuriating.

"Isn't it already? Just send the email," Danielle hesitates, "and forward all the addresses and phone numbers to me. And the emails of the over-flow people. I'll match them up."

"You have no time for this."

"Neither does anybody else. I'll make time. I'll have Estelle help."

Françoise shakes her head. "You are an amazing woman, Danielle, but I fear you will die young of exhaustion."

Danielle looks at her. She tries to remember if anyone she wasn't sleeping with has ever called her an 'amazing woman' before. She doesn't think so.

"I will send the email," Françoise says hastily, apparently mistaking astonishment for stern disapproval. She turns and exits Danielle's bedroom/office.

Danielle wants to bask in Françoise's praise, but she has no time. She returns to her computer and the sprawling Excel spreadsheet entitled La Défense 25 Apr that has eaten her life. With a sigh she creates a new page. In the past six weeks Danielle has learned more about Microsoft Excel than any well-adjusted human being would ever want to know. She never realized until she tried it that activism was so like accounting.

But someone has to do the detail work, and there is so much of it to do. They need thousands upon thousands of people in La Défense on what she has been thinking of as The Day. When she, Laurent, Angus and Estelle decided, six weeks ago, to stage a protest at the International Trade Council's annual meeting in La Défense, Danielle thought it was just a matter of sending out an email to the world's activist groups, telling them where and when, then sitting back and watching them stream down the street on the day.