Osama the Gun Read online

  Perhaps there was a third, or even a fourth, I don’t remember, for what came to pass afterward occurred as if in a dream, or at least remembered as one remembers a dream, as disconnected sights, sounds, and feelings surfacing from time to time from a dark ocean of forgetfulness.

  We were out in the street again heading farther eastward. The boulevard grew ever darker, the street lights farther between, some of them broken, there were fewer prostitutes now, and they were uglier, standing in the mouths of alleys, lifting their short skirts or palming their breasts as we passed, cursing us and making rude gestures when we ignored their blandishments, and the hard-looking Frenchmen gave way to little roving packs of drunken French adolescents, striding with unconvincing arrogance to mask their obvious unease.

  A whore on her knees before a shadowed figure deep in a dark alley. Two men who seemed to be Arabs doing up their pants as they emerged from another. A woozy, drunken fist-fight between French and Arab boys on the other side of the boulevard.

  Deeper and deeper and darker and darker. A descent into the pit of some Hades that had me longing for another calva, or perhaps more than one, to dispel the fear that had replaced the glow of blissful beneficence. Fear not so much of the denizens of this darkness, as fear that Allah would punish my transgression by making me one of them.

  “I think we have gone far enough,” said Ali. “Much farther and it’s all junkies and diseased transvestites. That one over there is as bad as we can find without overdoing it.”

  That one was a woman who looked to be in her middle years slumped against the wall of a building forming half the entranceway to an alley, drinking something out of a bottle. Her face was dark, not quite African but not Arab either, yet her hair was so blond as to be almost white. She wore a shiny silver blouse made of some plastic, high black plastic boots, an obscenely short skirt of the same material, and her bare, stocky legs were painted or tattooed with green patterns vaguely resembling encircling serpents.

  Ali approached her, spoke with her for a few moments, handed her some currency, then shoved me towards her.

  “Fuck her,” he said. “That’s an order.”

  When I recoiled in horror, he drew his pistol and prodded me in the small of the back with it.

  The next memory that I allow myself is being dragged into the depths of the dark alley by a woman whose powerful rosewater perfume failed to mask the reek of sweat and alcohol and worse things yet. I could not see her face, which I surmise was a mercy. I could see little of anything.

  Hands roughly undoing the belt of my trousers. Breasts pressed up against my chest. Then thighs. A hand behind my back pressing my buttocks forward. Another working my manhood as a shepherd would milk the udder of a goat. Helpless physical arousal in the face of rising gorge and unspeakable shame.

  Wet warmth surrounding my member. Rocking motion against me. A rising itch of mechanical pleasure. A quick release that left me reeling drunkenly with nauseating vertigo and self-disgust.

  If I vomited, I don’t remember. My next memory was of being in a taxi with Ali. His face appeared to me as the visage of Satan, leering and laughing.

  “Why have you done this to me?” I bleated piteously.

  “Think of it as an inoculation against lesser sin, for nothing will be worse after this,” he told me. “Or think of it as preparation for doing what you must in the service of the Caliphate and Islam, if it makes you feel any better tomorrow. You have no need to know how just now, but if our handlers really know what they’re doing and Allah wills it, you may understand later.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I was awakened too early the next morning by the insistent clamor of the security system intercom. I was in my own bed without remembering how I had gotten there, with a throbbing headache, a vile taste in my mouth, and a worse one in my soul.

  The intercom would not give over its demand for attention, and the buzzing made my headache worse, so I was constrained to answer it against my will.

  It was a delivery of something. Dazedly I agreed to accept it without bothering to ask what it was so that I could be left alone. Two deliverymen arrived with four large cartons. I signed for them and did not open them to see what they were until I had fortified myself with several cups of coffee.

  When I did, I discovered to my horror and no little fear, that they contained a dozen bottles of white wine, a dozen bottles of red white, and two dozen bottles of assorted distilled alcoholic beverages. I did not need a gift card to know who had sent them.

  But why? Why was Ali determined to turn me into a drunkard and a whore-monger?

  I phoned to ask him, was redirected to his cell phone, which passed me on to its voice-mail system, leaving me to confront his temptation without explanation or ally save Allah, if He would deign in His beneficence and mercy to forgive me. I prayed for guidance, but all that came was the certainty that if I poured these bottles of alcohol down the toilet again, more would only arrive sooner or later.

  Out of sight, out of mind, or so I told myself, and unpacked the bottles and stowed them away in the living room and bedroom bars. But once this task was done, I chastised myself for my cowardice. What sort of Muslim was I to face temptation in such a craven manner?

  I retrieved a single bottle of cognac at random, and set it on a table in the living room before my prayer rug, so that I would confront it five times a day when I turned towards Mecca, thus testing my courage against temptation and turning it into an expiation of my sin offered up to Allah with each prayer.

  It was a week before Ali answered any of the messages I had left, during which I remained mostly closeted in my apartment, praying the required five times a day in the prescribed manner, but also spending long hours in a different sort of prayer, contemplating that bottle of cognac and seeking illumination as to why I so feared it.

  It came but slowly. I had tasted the fermented juice of the fruit, and learned why Allah in his wisdom had forbidden it. I had enjoyed the taste and harmless glow of the wine, but it had led me down the boulevard to that first calva, after which I was drunk, and helplessly led to become even more so. I feared that bottle because I now knew that there was pleasure in it, and even a kind of beneficence, but it was only beneficent if you controlled it, not it you.

  Why have you done this to me? I had demanded of Ali. And he had told me that it was an inoculation against lesser sin. And now it seemed to me that I understood. But he had also told me that it was in preparation for doing what I must in the service of the Caliphate and Islam. And I was in France and had been ordered to play the part of a reprobate playboy. There would surely arrive situations where my cover identity could not be maintained if I refused to partake of alcohol entirely.

  There was a djin in that bottle that could destroy me, which was why Allah in His wisdom had forbidden alcohol to the Faithful. But for the role I had been chosen to play in the service of Islam, I must master it.

  And so I took to pouring myself a single small glass of cognac after the sundown prayer, sipping at it slowly as the lights of the city came on below. The warm glow whispered in my ear that it would be even more pleasant to have one more. But I would not listen. I was not seeking my own pleasure. I was doing my duty, no less and no more.

  * * * *

  Ali never did call back. Instead he appeared in person following the sundown prayer so that the half-consumed glass of cognac was in evidence as he entered the living room. “I see that progress is being made,” he told me approvingly. “But one does not enjoy cognac in a tumbler as if it were whiskey.”

  And he went into the kitchen and emerged with two huge tulip-shaped glasses whose purpose I had yet to fathom and filled but a small part of their volume with cognac, which, however, was still more than my daily allowance.

  “Like this,” he told me, sticking his nose in the glass and inhaling before taking a sip. I did likewise, and learned that the fumes them
selves were aromatically intoxicating like a fine incense.

  We sat there sipping cognac for all the world like two Frenchmen before he spoke again.

  “You now have a need to know something that you didn’t before, and now perhaps you may be ready to begin to handle it.”

  Whether the Caliphate maintained other such cells in France even Ali had no need to know, but if they did, they were no more effective than this one in accomplishing whatever it was that the Caliphate sought to accomplish here. However, there did exist in the rougher and poorer Arab suburbs or “banlieus” disaffected and largely unemployed youth formed into small gangs, none of whom were particularly enamored of the Caliphate, but some of whom were incoherently political to the point of being enraged against the French state.

  “Why would the Caliphate send such a young innocent to France as an agent? The answer is that our handlers wish to penetrate such circles, for which youth is required but not innocence, and hopefully I have disposed of that.”

  Salim, a foppish sort in his late fifties, or at least such was his cover identity, someone whom I had met but never spoken to, hosted occasional soirees where our Caliphate comrades mingled with such young “beurs”—perverse French disparaging argot for “Arab,” which they had even more perversely adopted for themselves—who were there to provide “rough trade” pleasures for them while enjoying their hospitality and attempting to bilk them of what they could.

  “You will stand out for your youth, and your mission will be to allow yourself to be seduced and taken economic advantage of while in return, after you have gained their confidence, seducing them politically, ideally turning a group of them into a native cell, which the Caliphate can put to its own uses here, if it ever figures out what that might be.”

  * * * *

  Salim’s “soiree” was held not in his Montparnasse apartment, but in an abandoned warehouse in the “bad” part of Montreuil, a suburb that was haute bourgeois where it abutted Paris, less haute the farther away from the Peripherique you went, and “edgy” out here on the fringes of more ominous beur and African suburban banlieus.

  The “abandoned warehouse” was really what Ali called a “disney.” It had started out as the real thing, an empty cubical space with exposed concrete walls stained with rust from crumbling exposed girders and a grimed and sticky asphalt floor, but elaborate movie-set lighting depended from the ceiling, there were long bars along two walls, tables and chairs either bought from a cafe supply house or stolen from the real thing.

  There was a bandstand where an Arab band played “Rai,” the music favored by the beurs; western electrified guitar and keyboard “rock” with far more intricate dervish-like drum rhythms with a male singer in a black leather burnoose open over his bare chest singings angry lyrics in a melange of Arabic and French which I doubted anyone but himself could really understand.

  The guests were a mixture of well-dressed refugees from the Caliphate, all of them male, and all of them at least a decade older than myself, swimming nervous in a sea of young “beur brats” from the deep banlieu.

  The men wore T-shirts with gang names, obscure celebrity photos, or political slogans, black leather pants or jeans in bright Islamic green, some few Arab headdresses with collections of buttons, and some of them sported daggers at their waists in the manner of the Yemeni.

  And perhaps a third of the beur brats were young women, some dressed in the manner of the men, but more than not wearing burkas and some even veils, that would nevertheless have gotten them arrested anywhere in the Caliphate; form-fitting black leather burkas that fed the lascivious imagination, translucent plastic burkas in pastel colors that left little to the imagination, burkas decorated with metal studs at nipples and pubes.

  Everyone in the warehouse was Arab. Yet those of us from the Caliphate stood out like American tourists in a Turkish souk. I had never beheld such a scene or dreamt that one could have existed. I was nervous, daunted, but also aroused and excited.

  Ali had instructed me to get drunk, or at least be seen to be drinking alcohol, and act drunker than I was. The former seemed too easy to accomplish; wine, beer, and distilled spirits were readily available, and the closed air soon became a fog of hashish smoke. I carefully stuck to the wine, sipping at it gingerly, and meandering listlessly about like the lost soul I felt myself to be.

  The men danced with each other in groups, aggressively, wildly, challengingly, like village Africans or dervish warriors working themselves up into a frenzy, while the women danced alone in isolation to the same music like the denizens of a harim competing for the attention of the sultan, though here for the ogling of what after a few glasses I had already come to think of as the dirty old men of our cell.

  Ali appeared out of the cannabis mist and replaced my empty glass with a full one of what appeared to be red wine. It wasn’t. Only later did I learn that this was the favored drink of this demi-monde—“camel piss,” wine mixed with vodka infused with hashish.

  It went straight to my head and thence to my body, erasing thought and fear with it, so that I no longer stood outside watching a movie but was absorbed into the scene by the music, and without remembering how or when, I found myself dancing with a group of the men, quite ludicrously no doubt, for several of them formed a circle around me, throwing phantom blows as in a karate class, grimacing, snarling.

  I found myself attempting to do likewise, making a fool of myself, turning the grimaces into open laughter, as the fists came closer and closer until they were all but grazing my clothing and my chin. Dizzy from the drink, the music, and the motion, I attempted to reply in kind, and mistakenly made grazing contact with an arm, and—

  A hand yanked me out of the dance.

  It was attached to a girl. “What’s a randy young cock of the rock doing here with a flock of dirty old roosters like them?” she said, nodding in the direction of the men drooling after the female dancers.

  She wore a plain green cotton burka that modestly concealed everything from neck to floor and even had a hood pulled over her hair but no veil, and her face was arousing enough to explain why such a visage must go veiled in the Caliphate. Olive skin as perfect and glistening smooth as the finest of silk. Huge luminous dark eyes set off with blackened lashes and brows gently arched like the outstretched wings of a soaring falcon just before the stoop. Full rouged lips from which drooped a cigarette leaking hashish smoke.

  I stood there transfixed by this houri from a banlieu version of Paradise, unable to speak.

  She laughed. “Straight from the sands, aren’t we, camel-jockey?” she said.

  “It shows…?” I stammered.

  “Like a virgin in a whorehouse,” she told me. “You aren’t one, are you, that would be too much beneficence to ask from merciful Allah.”

  “N-no…” I stammered.

  She laughed again. “Don’t worry about it, you seem like the next best thing.”

  She pulled me to the bar like a balloon on a string and ordered us camel piss. “I’m Michelle, bred, born, and bored in Auberville, daughter of a halal butcher and a femme de ménage, working at this and that when I can find it, collecting the SMIC when I can’t, which is most of the time. And who are you?”

  “I’m Osama,” I told her.

  “Osama bin Osama, aren’t you all?” she said teasingly, but rather truthfully, for in the Caliphate “Osama” had all but replaced “Mohammed” as the most popular name of choice.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I told her, essaying an attempt at sophistication, “for we are all Sons of Osama, are we not?”

  “Speak for yourself, raghead.”

  And so I did, resorting to my prepared cover story to loosen my tied tongue.

  I told her that I was a son of a wealthy family who had made the mistake of cuckolding a minor prince with his second wife and then being fool enough to betray her with his third, arousing the ire
of the second to the point of risking stoning by taking the vengeance of confessing to her husband and pleading for his mercy.

  She seemed delighted with this tale in a manner that I found most arousing.

  “Being ‘branche,’ as they say here, I used my technical knowledge to transfer a quarter of the family funds to a bank account in Switzerland, and managed to escape. And here I am to tell the tale.”

  “Doing what?”

  I shrugged. “Waiting for the Madhi, perhaps, and enjoying myself until he arrives.”

  “Aren’t we all?” said Michelle. “But I don’t see him around here, do you?”

  “Perhaps he sleeps within some unknowing vessel even as we speak, hidden beneath ordinary robes as your burka hides treasures unknown.”

  Michelle gave me a narrow glassy-eyed look which made me feel that my words had gone beyond the shallowness of the character I was supposed to assume, as if I had clumsily strayed from the rules of our verbal dance.

  “And why does a girl like you hide inside a burka?” I asked in quite a different tone to mask my mistake. “You’re certainly not straight from the sands of the desert. What do you wear beneath it?”

  “Into fancy underwear, are we?” she said, and the awkward moment passed.

  “Given the chance. But come, what does a Muslim beauty from the French banlieu wear under her burka?”

  She laughed a throaty laugh. “What a Scotsman wears under his kilt.”

  “And what is that?” I blurted, quite perplexed.

  “Come with me, oh Son of Osama, and find out.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Michelle had a scooter waiting outside, and I mounted behind her, clumsily hanging on to the sides of the seat rather than presuming to wrap my arms around her waist as we zipped and slid through side street traffic, down a commercial avenue of shops shuttered for the night, more and dingier side streets, to a series of apartment towers whose pastel aluminum walls had long since grimed to gray, deeper in the outer banlieu than I had yet penetrated.