One Slip, and He’s (French) Toast

The guard led me to a room. I’d be sharing it with another prisoner. As we entered, the hulking man who was to be my cellmate stopped staring out the window at the planes taking off long enough to turn and eye me icily.

Even the guard seemed taken aback by this guy’s expression. He led me to another room, vacant because the shower was broken. I didn’t mind because I wasn’t staying. I stowed my luggage under the bed. Then I too took up a position at the window, gazing through bars at the outbound traffic lifting off from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.

My wife, Lynn, and I had meticulously planned this trip to France in the summer of 1997. Lynn had sifted through years of accumulated travel articles to find accommodations: a castle in Bordeaux, a country estate in the Dordogne. Our route would take us from southwest France through Provence to the Co^te d’Azur, where we would stay at the Colombe d’Or hotel in the hilltop village of St.-Paul-de-Vence. From there we’d make day trips to places like Nice and Cannes. The final leg would bring us back to Paris for two days in the City of Light.

In the weeks before we left, I got used to being awakened at odd hours of the morning by our fax machine, receiving confirmations and detailed directions from France.

We stepped off the 11-hour Air France flight from Los Angeles to Paris feeling pretty good, having maintained a carefully timed regimen of remedies to ward off jet lag. Our new bags, purchased after much consideration and testing, rolled smoothly on shiny plastic wheels toward customs and the connecting flight.

That’s where we got the news, from a boyish-looking policeman in a glass booth: “Your passport is expired.”

This, of course, could not be true. I grew a patronizing smile as I fumbled for my reading glasses, but my smile withered as the truth became apparent: He was right. Mouths open and staring blankly at each other, Lynn and I flashed back to the moment weeks earlier when I asked her whether our passports were OK. “I checked, and yours is good till ‘98,” she said.

Did I mention my wife has dyslexia?

Maybe the Air France agent at LAX who checked our passports was dyslexic too.

My passport, issued in February of 1987 and expiring in 1997, contained the digits that a dyslexic person might read as 98.

“Stand over there,” the customs officer told us. He seemed older now, a figure of authority.

Lynn later described it as like a scene from the movie “Midnight Express.” To me it was more reminiscent of early television comedy. During the hour we waited to be escorted to police headquarters, she and I tried variations on the refrain: “Oh [Ricky], this is all my fault!” and “Don’t worry [Lucy], everything’s going to be all right.”

But it wasn’t. I didn’t say anything, but I knew the cops meant business when they held up the connecting flight to Bordeaux for an hour to retrieve our bags. And I didn’t say much at police headquarters, where Lynn explained in French and English that she had misread my passport. Obviously we were not outlaws, just tourists with elaborate plans for a vacation in France. Just look at the faxes!

My wife was addressing the stout, red-faced officer who gave orders and his tall, unflappable assistant who carried them out. The radish and the cucumber. And like vegetables, neither was in any way moved. We were, however, allowed to go to a nearby pay phone to call the U.S. Embassy.

Things seemed to be looking up when we got through to the U.S. Consulate, which handles travelers’ crises. We spoke with a fellow who said his office could issue me a new passport on the spot. Just bring in my expired passport and new photographs.

Well, that pretty much settled it, I thought, as we headed back to tell the officers. They listened politely before handing me the detention papers to sign. No, I would not be going to the embassy. I was to be sheltered in a hotel for the night, under police supervision, and dispatched back to the U.S. on the next Air France flight to Los Angeles. My wife (this brought a smile to their faces) was free to continue her vacation. I signed. As they took me away, Lynn stuffed my hand with 1,000-franc notes, in case I needed cash for room service.

Technically, I suppose you could say it was a hotel. The detention center was in the basement of a hotel property near the airport. But it had the unmistakable look, feel, smell and general population of a jail. Up to this point, I had kept my cool. Now I was shaken. As I walked in, a guard holding a phone shouted my name. It was Lynn, calling from a nearby hotel where she had taken a room. I tried to reassure her.

A few minutes later, a guard called me back to the phone. It was the fellow from the embassy. He’d had a call from Lynn. She was hysterical. I should call her immediately. He gave me his home phone number “just in case.” In case of what, I wondered, as other inmates circled.

As you might expect, pay phones in French jails do not accept 1,000-franc notes. Fortunately, a sympathetic man loaned me his calling card. He told me he traveled in and out of France routinely on a phony passport.

I calmed Lynn with the task of making more plans: She would join me on the next flight home. We would drive to the Napa Valley for our vacation. She would stop taking French lessons.

The night passed slowly. A lot of things go through your mind on your first night in the slammer. Besides the noise going on inside my head, the clatter of guards and inmates echoed loudly through the halls, making sleep impossible.

It should be noted, as we pause in my narrative to wait for the sun to rise again over the French countryside, that my case was not unique. In every conversation we had with the French authorities, it was pointed out that U.S. Immigration routinely orders travelers back to their place of origin for a host of reasons, many of them arbitrary. (There was the case of a French smoker sent home for lighting up in the plane’s lavatory.) It’s a game of tit for tat played between customs authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. On this particular day, we were tat.

The Air France flight to Los Angeles departed in midafternoon, so I was surprised when guards came for me at 7 a.m. I was whisked past a cart where other detainees sipped coffee. No time for that.

It was when I got to the airport that our luck began to change. A man introduced himself as an airport official. He said he was aware of what had happened to me and that it was regrettable. Perhaps something could be done to correct the situation. Meanwhile I was welcome to wait, without supervision, in the airport lounge until my embassy opened. He gave me his card. Did I have money? A credit card? Good.

In the waiting area, I discovered I could use my American Express card at one of the pay phones. I called Lynn. She was surprised to hear that I was now at the airport, drinking coffee and eating croissants on my own recognizance.

An hour passed before I saw my new patron walking officiously through the concourse. I waved hello, figuring he was at work on my case. Another hour passed before I saw him again. This time I flagged him down. “Did you call your embassy?” he inquired. “No, I thought you were doing that.”

I had better call now, he said, and have my wife do the same. The U.S. Embassy must contact the French Foreign Ministry. If the ministry decided I could stay, then the customs police were overruled. “But hurry. And please, don’t use my name.”

Don’t use my name? I headed for the phone and quickly reached the fellow at the embassy. Yes, he’d gladly make the call, but it would mean asking his counterparts in the French diplomatic corps for a favor. “They’ve asked me not to do this too often.” While he didn’t say it in so many words, I understood he would be drawing on his personal account of favors to save the vacation of a traveler who didn’t bother to check his own passport. Still, he was pleasant about it.

I got another coffee. The race was on. I told Lynn where I was in the airport (she wouldn’t be able to pass through security to get to me), and I began working the phones with new determination.

The man at the embassy was having difficulty getting through to the ministry. He had meetings to attend and other responsibilities, so he wasn’t always able to take my calls. After a few more tries, I got him on the line. He had spoken to the ministry and was waiting for an answer.

The plane would be boarding soon. Another call to the embassy. The ministry had responded, and the answer was yes.

I was led to Lynn, gushing tears on the other side of airport security. We hugged and kissed across a dividing partition. Over her shoulder, I saw the stout radish who had ordered me to prison arguing furiously with men in suits. When he stormed off in disgust, I knew it was official. “We won!” I said to Lynn in amazement.

“We’re going home!” she cried.

“We can’t leave now,” I said. The U.S. Embassy had spent valuable diplomatic capital on us. Besides, I needed her to take my old passport and extra pictures to the embassy. (I needed a valid passport to reenter the U.S.) She wouldn’t get back to the airport in time for us to board the flight to L.A. So we might as well go on to Bordeaux as planned.

As for the rest of the trip, what can I say? I’ve been to France before, but it was never as delicious. And I brought home some lessons worth passing along:

* Always check your own passport. Do it before you get the bag with the shiny wheels.

* If your only contact with a U.S. government agency has been the IRS, you may be pleasantly surprised at how helpful our Foreign Service can be for citizens in distress. Besides embassies in the capitals, there are consuls in major cities. Take along phone numbers for the ones you’ll visit.

* Along with paper money, take change. If you have a calling card, make note of the access code for the countries you’ll be visiting.

* Diplomacy is a fine art. If your wife makes a really big mistake, say nothing. That precedent will be useful when you make an even bigger one. No matter how much trouble she got you in, you may need her to get you out.