Free The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe by Romain Puértolas Page B

peanuts and two boxes of chocolate-covered doughnuts. This was all the UKBA’s officers needed to repatriate the crooks, in accordance with international readmission agreements, to the illegal aliens’ last known country of stay—in this case, Spain.
    In this way, some illegals are sent back to the country they have just traveled from, in application of the Chicago Convention, while others, more rarely, are sent back to their country of origin. Back to square one.
    In this particular case, the police knew perfectly well that the truck they had stopped was coming from France, because they had caught it on its way out of the Eurotunnel. For that reason alone, they could have sent the immigrants to eat their peanuts and their chocolate-covereddoughnuts in the country of the frog-eaters, whose border was like a sieve. That would have taken an hour at most and would have cost nothing, or very little.
    However, repatriating them to Spain, even if it was more expensive for the state, had considerable advantages for the British authorities, who had been trying for some time to send illegal aliens as far as possible from their borders. They knew perfectly well that such people would, as soon as they were free, make another attempt to enter the United Kingdom. If they could have built a giant catapult capable of propelling the immigrants thousands of miles away, they would have put them all in it without a moment’s hesitation.
    “An airplane chartered by the aviation police is going to take you back to Barcelona,” the policeman informed him, and then terminated the interview.
    So it was that, a few hours later, as the sun was looming on the horizon, the fakir found himself on the windy runway of a small airport in Shoreham-by-Sea, near Brighton, on the south coast of England.
    If you squinted, it was possible to see, on the other side of the Channel, the bluish, evanescent outline of the land of the Gauls.
    The bluish water.
    The bluish sky.
    The bluish seagulls.
    The bluish faces of illegal aliens.
    Or, at least, that was what Aja saw through the smoky, bluish lenses of his sunglasses, which he had pieced back together. They had been returned to him, along with the rest of his personal effects, firstly because he no longer represented a threat to himself or to others, and secondly because he would soon be free. They had even given him back his counterfeit €100 note, judging that it was so badly printed (and on only one side!) that nobody could possibly be fooled by it.
    The fakir was sitting in an airplane, no longer handcuffed, between an asthmatic Moroccan and a flatulent Pakistani. Curious to know precisely what kind of fire he was likely to land in, having been thrown from the frying pan, and also to pass the time, the Indian asked his dear companions a long list of questions about Barcelona. What was there to see? What was there to do? Could you swim in the sea at this time of year? Was there a monsoon season? What was a doughnut? Oh, and did they have an Ikea?
    But none of these questions was answered. Not because the two illegal aliens did not feellike chatting—quite the contrary—but because neither of them had ever set foot, or even the tip of his little toe—in Barcelona, or even in Spain.
    The Pakistani had arrived in Europe via Brussels Airport, carrying a fake Belgian passport, and reached England hidden in a truck, between two pallets of cabbages. But the British authorities had found a fan on his person (he could not stand the smell of cabbages) and that was all they needed to decide that he had come from Spain, because everyone knew that only the Spanish still used that old-fashioned, manual form of ventilation.
    As for the Moroccan, he had entered the Schengen Area from Greece, having first been all over the Mediterranean basin. He had crossed the Balkans, Austria and, finally, France, hidden in the false floor of a Greek tourist bus. But the English had found a small wooden spoon in his pocket, the