Page Content (OCR)
FRANCK 129 PURPLE JUSTICE RETURNS When the bell rang in the apartment, Salomon got up in his pajamas, opened the door and confronted the man every cop in France had been hunting for the last seven days. Franck Fontaine was confused and angry. Why did Salomon go back to bed when they should already be on their way to the market? Where was Prevost? And what would they do about the car, which was missing? Obviously it had been stolen with everything it contained! Salomon started crying, hugged his friend, and told him everything was all right; the station wagon was in the parking lot, and a whole week had elapsed! Confused, Franck had to acknowledge that he had a beard of several days' growth, and he saw that the red Ford was indeed safely parked. He stared wordlessly out of the window while Salomon sprinted down the road to get Prevost, who was in the middle of an all-night interview session with a local journalist, Iris Billion-Duplan, whose house is located close to the Purple Justice. All three of them rushed to the apartment and greeted Franck with amazement and emotion. They showed him the front-page headlines, which were printed about him in every newspaper in France. Since the phone service in the apartment had been disconnected because the bill had not been paid, Iris ran to the booth down the street to call Mamina and Franck's mother to tell them the news. Slowly the abductee pieced together his recollection of the events of the previous Monday. As all the media from Moscow to Brasilia would soon report in detail, he had looked in vain for the aerial phenomenon when he came out of the parking lot. He kept driving and soon noticed a luminous object, about the size of a tennis ball, floating over the cabbage field. He panicked and drifted to the left. As he came to the level of the ball, the engine died, and of course he was unable to restart it. The luminous ball came to rest over the hood of the car and Franck found himself engulfed in fog. He could no longer see the road or the landscape, and he could not open the car doors. His eyes itched, his eyelids became heavy, and he drifted into a deep sleep. He woke up in