Osama the Gun Read online

  She parked the scooter in the basement garage, secured it to a pylon with a heavy chain and lock, and we took an elevator that smelled as if it doubled as a pissoir to the fifth floor, and emerged into a long hallway of many doors redolent of roasted meat, garlic, turmeric, and sandalwood incense.

  Michelle opened a door no different from any of the others. “Welcome to the boudoir of Paradise,” she said. “You won’t find even one virgin houri around here, but we’ll see if we can’t make do.”

  We entered directly into a living room past what the French called an “American kitchen;” a stove, a refrigerator, and a sink piled with dirty dishes inadequately concealed behind a false-wood bar. The walls were painted pale lavender, the ceiling was white, the illumination was two cheap halogen lamps. There was an emulated Afghani rug hiding most of the brown linoleum floor and a black plastic couch. There was a profusion of Arabic style floor cushions and low wooden tables, apparently purchases in Pier 1 Imports or a low-end souk. A television, sound system, and phone, no computer. A miniature glass hookah.

  On the walls were posters of some western film stars I didn’t recognize and a mocking one of Osama bin Laden playing a Kalashnikov-shaped guitar.

  And a real Kalashnikov hanging beside the single large window.

  “Is that thing loaded?” I asked uneasily.

  “Didn’t your father tell you never to point a gun if you weren’t prepared to use it and never leave an unloaded one around to grab when you might need one?”

  Michelle gently pushed me down into a nest of cushions on the floor, went to a table drawer, produced a vial of white powder, a little stone slab, a knife, and a silver straw. She laid out two lines of the powder with the knife, snorted one up, and handed me the stone.

  “Relax,” she told me when I regarded it dubiously. “It’s not raw Colombian stuff, it’s genuine eptified American coke, just like them to come up with a certified non-addictive synthetic. You’re not going to turn into a pussy on me, now are you?”

  There seemed nothing for it, so I snorted the stuff. There was no burning or discomfort. For a moment I felt nothing at all.

  “Well, Ali Blah Blah, don’t you want the answer to your question?”

  The cocaine mounted to my brain through my bloodstream. I felt a sudden surge of superhuman energy and well-being. “My question?”

  “What does a Scotsman wear under his kilt?”

  I goggled at her in incomprehension. When she doffed her burka I learned the answer.

  The answer was nothing at all.

  “I’ve showed you mine,” she said, standing there in all her nude nubile glory, “now you show me yours.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t expect to fuck me with your pants on, do you?”

  She stood there with her hands on her hips regarding me appraisingly as I awkwardly removed my clothing, and when I had finished, she was on me like a panther, bowling me over on my back, spread-eagling my arms with her hands, rubbing her pubes against mine and her breasts against my face, and before I could begin to do more than nibble briefly, she was riding me as if I were a mare.

  Groaning, I helplessly spent myself briefly, much to her displeasure. She frowned, shook her head ruefully, dismounted, grabbed the lip of the sofa, unfolded it into a bed, drew me up by the hands, and threw me down upon it.

  She then fell to ministering to my flaccidly embarrassed manhood with well-schooled fingers, alas to no avail. Throwing up her hands in frustration, she left the bed, prepared two more lines of the Great Satan’s drug, fetched the stone, and thrust the straw into my left nostril. I inhaled the drug, and as I did, she took my limply treasonous member into her mouth and fell to sucking on it like a small child with a stick of sugar cane.

  I willed my manhood to arise to the occasion, but while the spirit was aroused, the flesh stirred but weakly. She paused her ministrations, looked me in the eyes as if waiting for some signal, and then, as the cocaine lit up my brain, she thrust a finger into my rectum, the drug sent a surge of manly power downward through my body, I sprang to immediate attention, and thereafter the mare that I had been performed like the stallion I was meant to be.

  “God bless America!” she cried at the height of her first orgasm.

  There were more, hers if not mine, for there were more lines of the Yankee powder, and at length it turned my member into something entirely disconnected from the rest of me or even pleasure, the piston of an indefatigable engine.

  How long we made love, as at least gallantry would put it, I do not remember, but it was not only much longer than the horror that had occurred at gunpoint in that foul alley, not only infinitely more pleasurable, but far longer than even my most inflamed virgin fantasies had ever imagined, and it ended in an exhaustion so profound that I immediately fell into the deepest of sleeps.

  Here there was no muezzin’s summons, but the need to urinate awoke me at the hour of the dawn prayer, with the first rays of dawn leaking through the dirty glass of the window, and I took it as the direct summons of Allah to a most errant Muslim.

  I went into the bathroom to relieve myself and cleanse myself for the ritual, turning on the light in the windowless cubicle. Only as I was washing my hands did I notice what was lying among the creams and make-up and scents on the shelf above the sink.

  A man’s razor, shaving gel, after-shave lotion, and sportsman’s deodorant.

  CHAPTER 7

  I made no mention of what I had found in the bathroom when Michelle awakened. When we parted, we exchanged phone numbers and I promised to invite her to my own apartment, a promise I was not sure I was going to keep, for in the morning after the flesh was all too willing, but the Muslim spirit chided its treachery.

  “Wrong move, you should have waited for her to ask you,” Ali told me at the required debriefing. “But no great harm. Wait about a week for her to call you, and if she doesn’t, call her and invite her up for a week or so afterward, and not on the weekend.”

  I regarded him in blank confusion.

  “They didn’t teach you this game in the Caliphate, since no one there knows how to play it either, but all things considered, you’re not doing all that badly.”

  “Am I? I don’t even know what so-called ‘game’ I’m supposed to be playing. Or toward what end.”

  “Perhaps this Michelle was instantly smitten by your manly charms, though you’ll forgive me if I find that a dubious proposition. Much more likely she smelled money according to plan, no one has a keener nose for that than a Frenchwoman of modest means, Muslim or not, and we drenched you with chum as if fishing for shark. And perhaps, unexpectedly, one may have taken the bait.”

  “What in the name of Allah are you talking about? Fish? Sharks? Chum, whatever that is?”

  “The easy pick-up. The male toiletries in the bathroom. The American eptified cocaine. And of course the Kalashnikov on the wall.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning this woman would seem to be connected one way or another to a man with access to a synthetic far too expensive to be used as a recreational drug by a woman of her apparent means and at least a perceived need for serious weaponry.”

  “Unless the drug and the gun are hers.”

  Ali shrugged. “Which would amount to the same thing. Perhaps what we have here is simply a drug gang reaching out for rich customers one at a time, or just maybe…something else…”

  He told me that while most of these beur brat gangs seemed to be unemployed or marginally employed young beurs, some of them trading in drugs, burglary, car theft, and petty robbery, and venting their rage against the “Frogs” with acts of vandalism, and random violence, at least they were enemies of the status quo, or rather the status quo had made enemies of them.

  “So pathetically non-existent as our real knowledge of these circles is that we’ve taken to reading graffiti, song lyrics, T-sh
irt proclamations and the like as if they were tea leaves, the tea leaf readers back in the Caliphate have convinced themselves that some of them just might have a crude political agenda, or at least be open to being given one. Which is why you were commissioned to play the rich young reprobate, the fatted young calf, the willing young mark.…”

  “To reach out to them.…”

  Ali nodded. “But there just might be something out there reaching out to us.…”

  * * * *

  I followed Ali’s instructions for four days, praying to Allah for Michelle’s call to come, praying that it never would, praying for Him to resolve the struggle within my heart between lust and righteousness, between lasciviously self-serving loyalty to my duty as an agent of the Caliphate and faithfulness to His Word. How could performing my duty to Allah’s chosen government on Earth require me to defile myself as a Muslim?

  Of course, there was both more and less to my torment than this moral conundrum, for I had already defiled myself quite thoroughly, and while my soul wrestled with it, my flesh spent what seemed every waking hour and no few obscenely dreaming ones longing for more.

  Four days of this was as much as I could withstand. I called Michelle, got her answering service, and waited a frustrating several hours for her to call back. When she did, and I invited her to my apartment as promised, she countered by boldly suggesting that I take her to dinner at a restaurant of her choosing called the Tour d’Argent.

  How bold it was I did not realize until I met her outside this establishment on the Left Bank of the Seine.

  I had made a reservation as she had instructed and arrived suitably attired as a Frenchman of means, for upon consulting Ali, I was told that while “Tour d’Argent” meant “Silver Tower” in formal French, less formally, and more truthfully, it could be translated as “Huge Pile of Money,” which was what dinner there would cost. “Quite the presumptuous gold-digger, our little Michelle!”

  She arrived wearing a full black burka with the hood covering her hair and even a veil.

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur, but it seems we’ve overbooked this evening, and cannot honor your reservation,” I was told by a doorman ridiculously dressed in antique western military garb and gold braid.

  “I’ll have a word with the maitre d’ then,” I replied, assuming in the Arabic manner that this was a demand for baksheesh in the French manner, and offering up what I believed was required.

  “I’m afraid not, Monsieur, and I am not permitted to accept gratuities,” the doorman told me with a hauty sneer. “Of course you may try again another evening, but.…”

  “But what?”

  “But I doubt you would find our cuisine or ambiance at all congenial, Monsieur. However I can recommend the excellent cous-cous at Dar Magreb, only two blocks from here, much more to your taste, I’m sure.”

  Enraged at this nakedly racist insult, I attempted a French translation of what would have been an appropriate response in Arabic. “A kebab of your liver on a skewer would be more to my taste if pissing on it could render it halal, son of a dog!”

  “Maybe you’d prefer jailhouse food, raghead! You’ve got about two minutes to be out of my sight before I call the flics!”

  “May Allah turn your penis to a mergeuz and serve it up to you on your wedding night!”

  At which point, the doorman hit a button on his cell phone, and Michelle, who had remained utterly silent throughout, grabbed my arm before it could come to blows, and led me away, fuming with rage, to a modest bistro nearby which she had obviously previously selected, where we were seated immediately.

  “What was the meaning of that charade?” I demanded in a fury.

  “Do you really have to be told, camel-jockey?” she said, and forthwith ordered a cheap carafe of the house wine.

  “But why deliberately provoke such an outrage?”

  “To rub your face in it, Osama.”

  “But why, Michelle?”

  “To save you some time,” she told me, displaying the anger she had withheld during the act. “Because you were going to get your Arab face rubbed in it sooner or later. You exiles from the Caliphate wouldn’t be here unless you could prove you were rich, so you think you can buy your way all the way inside, but we were born French citizens and so were our parents and maybe even our grandparents, and we get doors slammed in our faces that only a beur even knows are there. Liberte, egalite, fraternite, camel-jockey, but no ragheads need apply.”

  “But why submit me to such embarrassment?”

  “Oh, you’re embarrassed to be seen in public with a righteous Muslim woman?”

  “You know full well what I mean!”

  “Think of it as a test of your manhood, Osama bin Osama, aren’t all you phallocrats from the Caliphate into that?”

  She abruptly doffed her veil and hood and flashed me a smile that was absolutely radiant. “And you passed it with flying green colors. I just loved his prick as a sausage on his wedding night!”

  She laughed, and I could not help but laugh with her. “The liver kebab with piss sauce wasn’t so bad either, now was it? Arabic is a much better language to curse in than French, I hope too much of the insult wasn’t lost in translation.”

  * * * *

  An assassin’s pistol in a Caliphate souk, a drunken fuck in a foul doorway, a night of passionate drugged sex, and now an altercation outside a pretentious French restaurant, was there no end to these bizarre rites of passage from boyhood into full manhood?

  It seemed not, for after we finished our dinner, the carafe of wine, and cognac with our coffee, and repaired to my apartment, over yet more cognac, Michelle spoke to me more candidly than she ever had before.

  “This place is just as I had imagined, but don’t you imagine that I haven’t been inside an apartment like this before.”

  And I found myself doing likewise. Up to a point. “Don’t you imagine that even a camel-jockey from the Caliphate is so naive as to take you for an innocent young maiden.…”

  “Or a prostitute? Or at least more interested in what your money could buy than your overwhelming manhood?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “But you thought it, you would have been a fool not to,” she said gently. “Everyone knows what Salim’s parties are all about.”

  This gave me pause. How much did she really know? Judging from my own observation and Ali’s admission of our pathetic cell’s ineptitude at penetrating her circle, it was certainly credible that she, or whoever belonged to the American drug and Russian Kalashnikov in her apartment, might be on to its futile game.

  “Do they?”

  “The rich refugees from the Caliphate are after young beur ass, and we’re after a little luxe, money might not change hands, but it’s a kind of souk trade anyway, now isn’t it…?” she said, with a mask of such blandly wicked innocence that I found it impossible to believe that there was not something teasingly more behind it.

  “Is that all that there is between us?” I ventured, feeling that she was enticing me into some shadowy verbal dance.

  “If it were, would I have worn a burka and denied myself a free meal at the Tour d’Argent?” she purred, laying a hand on my thigh.

  “What then?”

  “You obviously weren’t one of…them. Ten years too young. Crazy enough to try dancing with the boys. Waiting for the Madhi, as you said, and faking trying to have a good time.”

  So she saw right through my cover identity. But did she see what was behind that mask? This was becoming dangerous. I had no instructions as to how to proceed if she did. There seemed nothing for it but to follow her rather than lead through this dance.

  “And was I faking it in your apartment afterward?” I ventured in a seductive tone, laying my own hand on hers, still resting on my thigh.

  “You’re not very convincing about a lot of things, Monsieur Osama
bin Osama,” she said, regarding me coolly. “You claim you had to escape from the Caliphate because you committed adultery with two wives of the same man, and pirated the family fortune on the way out, but take it from a girl with experience with both, I find it hard to believe you as a cocksman and a thief.”

  Never had I been so insulted and praised in the same breath.

  She grinned at my discomfort. “Hey, come on, Osama, you’re probably not as bad an actor as you seem.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Take it as a compliment, camel-jockey. Can’t blame the actor for the script. Only a sand-nigger would believe a guy like you could sell a story like that to a girl like me.”

  “Sand-nigger!”

  “Oh, we haven’t heard that one before, now have we? It’s what we beur brats call a son of a mullah who’s never been outside the Caliphate and thinks we were born the day before 9/11 and slam bang thank you ma’am is playing the Sheik of Araby.”

  “And I am such a pitiful lover?” I found myself whining, half cringing in embarrassment, half to change the subject away from one that otherwise would seem to be about to go further than it should.

  “Don’t take it so hard, lover, you’re a fast learner,” Michelle said, sliding her hand downward. “Or take it as…hard as you like. Ready for your next lesson, now aren’t you?”

  * * * *

  “Excellent,” Ali told me when I briefed him.

  “Excellent? It would seem she’s penetrated my cover with ridiculous ease.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she has, but it’s going more rapidly than we could have hoped for. It also would seem that we’re dealing with people as clever as we are, or hopefully more so, which is all to the good.”

  “Needless to say, Ali, I don’t follow you at all.”

  Ali laughed, and poured us both second cognacs. “If your unconvincing cover story has been penetrated, it obviously means that they believe you to be an agent of the Caliphate. And they’re interested in making contact, interested, but careful.”