Osama the Gun Read online

  “So what do I do now?”

  “You are authorized to let your cover be blown, my young friend,” Ali told me. “But make it credible. Enjoy the seduction, let her take her own sweet time, that should be no great hardship, I’d volunteer for the mission myself were I twenty years younger. It must happen shall we say in the truth of the night.”

  And so I did for another three weeks, enjoying the love-making, if one might honor it thusly, entirely in my own bedroom now and mercifully without benefit of the American drug, and beginning to enjoy the verbal fencing match as well like a proper cinematic secret agent.

  Slowly, gingerly, the pillow talk began to turn subtly political. Michelle had already “rubbed my face” in the place of “ragheads” in high French society outside the Tour d’Argent, now she drew a rough if not unsophisticated lesson from it.

  “What do you think, Osama, if I had showed up dressed like Madam Bovary fresh from the Ritz, would we have gotten in?”

  “Only if we had bleached our Arab faces…?” I ventured.

  “Wrong, Osama. A black African couple would’ve gotten in if they played the game by their rules. The Frogs aren’t racists, look at the flics.”

  “The cops?”

  “There are five times as many French Arabs as French Africans. There are five times as many African cops as Arab cops. You figured out why?”

  “Because we’re the niggers here? Sand-niggers?”

  “Wrong again. You’re the sand-nigger, but you and your refugees from the Caliphate play their game and dress for it. I’m a second generation beur and I won’t. If you’re an Arab Frenchman, c’est cool, if you’re a French Arab, stay back. The blacks from Junglebunnyland want to be French like them, but we want to be French like us. Vive la difference!”

  Vive la difference, she insisted a few nights later, was the usual French hypocrisy. “They look down their noses at the Americans for having no culture, but what they really mean is that the Great Satan doesn’t have a culture like theirs. It may be full of rednecks and Holy Rollers in bedsheets, but it’s also got Spanish TV and Kwanzaa, and the president even has to throw a dinner party for the beginning of Ramadan.”

  “You’re telling me the Americans are less racist than the French?”

  “No, but they’re up-front about it. The niggers and wogs and mexes and whatever there wouldn’t let themselves be melted down into bouillabaisse, they made it a two-way street, they kicked ass until they shoved themselves down the Yankee throat.”

  “And where did you get such an idea about the Great Satan?” I had never heard anyone speak thusly about America, let alone an Arab.

  “From their TV and movies and music, where else, Osama?”

  It went on like that, Michelle seemingly bent on establishing herself as a revolutionary in the raw, a “rebel without a cause,” as the classic American film had it, or perhaps a cause too vague and incoherent to have a name.

  Could I turn that into the cause of the Caliphate, whatever that might be in the hopeless situation here? Indeed was she leading me in that direction?

  Finally, she seemed to be leading me somewhere, at least back to her apartment, where we hadn’t been since that first night. And she prepared four lines of the Great Satan’s drug, and far from protesting, I poured us large glasses from the bottle of cognac I had brought with me to wash it down as we squatted facing each other on the floor cushions, for I had determined that now was the time to allow my cover to be blown, and seeming thoroughly addled would make it all the more credible. Indeed being addled might be just what was called for.

  So I inhaled my share of the devil drug, allowed it to take me away up into itself, and washed it down with a swallow of cognac to augment the feeling of cinematic spiritual derring-do with what is called “Dutch courage” for reasons I have never been able to fathom.

  “What do you really want, Michelle?” I ventured. “Five million Arabs to march on the Élysée Palace and the National Assembly and TF1 singing We Shall Overcome in French and the Marseillaise in Arabic?”

  She laughed, but bitterly. “This is France, not America, it’d be like trying to punch your way through soup. Ah oui, bien sur, they wring their hands in the left-wing press, appoint a study committee of official intellectuals, and it all closes up behind you.”

  “What then?

  “There’s an old song, you probably were never allowed to hear it in sand-nigger land. ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it. I want to destroy Park Savoy.’”

  “Park Savoy?”

  “The English version of the Tour d’Argent, Osama.”

  “Riots in the streets?”

  “Been tried in ’05, and all that it did was give the Interior Minister a hard-on.”

  “So?”

  She shrugged. “So, like you said, we wait for the Madhi and try to enjoy ourselves in the meantime.”

  Perhaps it was the eptified cocaine and the cognac, but it seemed she was approaching the previously unapproachable or daring me to do so. For the first time, I prepared two lines of the drug myself and inhaled my share to fortify myself to venture onward.

  “What do you really want from me, then, Michelle?”

  She snorted up that which I had prepared for her.

  “What do you really want from me, Osama?” she asked.

  She sat there for a long silent moment staring me straight in the eyes, appraisingly, yet not without a species of affection which might have been something like hope.

  I could have responded with a passionate kiss. I could have thrown myself upon her like a primitive barbarian. I knew that if I did either, what was about to happen would have been pushed aside and acknowledged by neither of us.

  I sat there silently not looking away.

  The moment had arrived.

  But we both knew that the next move must be hers, not mine.

  “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet,” she said, “but what proclaims that it rules in His name needs its human…agents.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I replied.

  “Enough, Osama, or whatever your real name is! You show up here with a ton of money and a fancy apartment like the old farts at Salim’s parties, but ten years younger than any of them, and a story about how you got them and why you’re here that doesn’t hold up in bed for a single orgasm.…”

  She stood up and began undressing and spoke no more until she stood nude before me. “Now you get naked,” she said. “That’s an order.”

  Perhaps it was the natural man arising to the natural occasion despite the unnatural political freight it carried, but I found it an order I was eager to obey on both levels, and without another word being said, we stood there nakedly confronting each other. Truly naked to each other for the first time.

  “You’re an agent of the Caliphate, I know it, you know that I know it, and either you admit it right now, or you’ll never touch this naked body again,” she told me.

  I knew she meant it, but I also knew she knew I had no reason either of manhood or duty to refuse. Still, while the visible state of my arousal made it ridiculous, it seemed to me that I should put up a final show of resistance, for erotic reasons if no other.

  “An agent of the Caliphate is trained to resist the most severe torture,” I told her, with a deliberate grin glossing the line from some Hollywood movie.

  “Oh yeah, well resist this, Osama!” she said, grabbing hold of my member, pulling me forward, and then atop her on the floor, where we both broke into uproarious laughter, followed by the most lustful bout of passion we had experienced together, our physical release the shared climax of a mutual release of long-standing tension of the spirit, so that one might even have called it making love.

  CHAPTER 8

  Two days later, Michelle called to tell me there was someone who wanted to meet me, who
I had to meet, and she spoke as if that someone were standing over her. I told her I’d call her back within the hour to arrange the meeting, and immediately called Ali.

  “Dress tough, or at least as tough as you know how,” he told me. “Admit you’re an agent of the Caliphate, or at least don’t deny it. And bring your gun.”

  “My gun…?”

  “Better safe than sorry…what kind of gun do you have, anyway?”

  “An ordinary .38 caliber snub-nosed pocket revolver.”

  “That won’t do. I’ll send over an Israeli mini-Uzi slide-gun with a steady-cam grip and a magazine of fifty small-caliber high velocity spent-uranium hollow-nosed fleshettes. Very impressive. And if you have an opportunity to flash it, take it, these boys would love to have such a toy.”

  “The Caliphate has access to advanced Israeli weaponry?” I exclaimed, quite astonished.

  Ali laughed. “The Israelis have always been equal-opportunity arms merchants,” he told me.

  When I called Michelle back, she gave me an address in St. Denis, an apartment number, and a door code, and told me to be there at ten o’clock that night.

  Two hours later, a courier delivered the mini-Uzi. It had a slim eight inch barrel, a grip molded to the shape of my hand like that of a little video camera, and the firing mechanism slid back and forth over the grip, apparently spring or piston loaded. I had never even seen such a thing before, and holding it in my hand filled me with a sense of power both terrifying and exhilarating. If I feared my gun, what effect would it have on anyone I pointed it at?

  The mini-Uzi came with a black leather harness that fitted the holster into my armpit, where it lurked uncomfortably but reassuringly. I put on a pair of jeans, the dirtiest white shirt in my laundry hamper, and a brown leather blouson, and rather than arrive by taxi, I took the Metro to St. Denis at the appointed hour.

  The station I got off at was the grimiest I had seen in Paris, and the street onto which I emerged was dark, strewn with garbage, the remains of wheel-less bicycles and scooters chained to signposts and railings, and smelled of rancid frying oil and petrol fumes.

  The address I had been given was on a deserted side street, the code opened the graffiti-covered door to what seemed to have once been a building housing small industrial lofts, the apartment number was on the fifth floor, and there was no elevator. The buzzer didn’t work, and I was reduced to banging on the door.

  After the metallic clicking and clacking of several locks, the door opened and a man wearing jeans and a tight green T-shirt displaying his muscular build stood in the doorway. He was perhaps five years older than I, with an olive complexion and an unshaven look that was not quite a beard, and his skull shaved to matching stubble. He held a Kalashnikov negligently by the strap, and I had little doubt that it was the one that had been hanging on the wall in Michelle’s apartment.

  “Kasim-Pierre,” he said.

  “Osama.”

  What he led me into was an abandoned storeroom. The only furniture was a scattering of old wooden packing crates and the only light a halogen floor lamp turned all the way up as if for an interrogation. The flooring was weathered gray planking, the ceiling pressed gray tin, the walls lined with empty metal shelving. Kasim-Pierre sat down on a packing crate next to a six-pack of cheap French beer. I sat on another facing him.

  “Where’s Michelle?” I demanded.

  “She’s not here,” he said in a manner that made clear it was all he was going to tell me.

  The whole scene was threateningly ominous, but so much so that it seemed to have been crafted that way, and was therefore pathetic; instead of the desired effect, I felt as if I had walked into a movie. A bad movie.

  “I’ve been told you’re an agent of the Caliphate,” said Kasim-Pierre.

  “I haven’t been told anything about you at all.”

  “I’m the caid.”

  I had never before heard the Arabic word for “leader” or “Don” as the Italian mafia would have it, spoken as if it were French. I had learned a small something, but I needed to learn much more.

  “The leader of what?”

  He shrugged, with a wry grimace that made him seem human for the first time. “Of whatever I can put together at the time,” he told me. “Caid of those who call me caid. And you, what do you command?”

  “You haven’t demonstrated a need to know.”

  Kasim-Pierre laughed. He opened a can of beer, took a drink, opened another, offered it to me. “Have a beer?” he said. “Or am I offending a pure Muslim?”

  “I still count myself a Muslim, Inshallah, but I lost my purity a while ago, surely Michelle has told you that much,” I said, taking the beer, and as I heard these words leave my mouth, I was struck by their truth, a truth I knew that I must spend much time praying over later. “And you?”

  “A jihadi. That’s what we’re here to talk about, isn’t it? The Caliphate’s Jihad and ours.”

  “And whether they’re one and the same.…”

  “Look, Osama, I don’t give a load of camel-shit about whatever your sand-nigger mullahs think their Holy Cause is, I’m an Arab first, a French Arab second, and Muslim a distant third, just so we understand each other, and our cause is political. Like that saying they’re supposed to have where you come from, brother against brother, but brothers together against the enemy. Or cousins. Or something like that. And up till now, the Caliphate has been part of the problem, cousin.”

  “How so…brother?”

  “Don’t brother me just yet, Osama. How so? Because the Caliphate is to the Frogs what black-face minstrel shows were to the Americans, only worse. Thanks to the Caliphate, when they see beurs, they see a horde of ragheaded sand-niggers waving scimitars and Kalashnikovs, squeezing their balls with the price of what’s left of the oil, and proclaiming a Holy Mission to turn the whole world bowing to Mecca and flushing all that good French wine down a Turkish toilet. Like they say somewhere or other, it’s like having Judas Iscariot for your Minister of Information.”

  “That’s not fair! That’s not true! You’re blaspheming against Allah! You’re insulting Islam!”

  “Not true? You’re going to tell me that if the powers that be in the Caliphate got their hands on Aladdin’s lamp the first thing they’d make the djin do wouldn’t be to turn the whole world into Planet Islam?”

  I drank deeply of the beer, hoping it would empower me to refute this slanderous outburst, but it was not cocaine eptified by the Great Satan nor even French cognac. “And what would be wrong with that?” was the best I could manage. “Would not such a world converted to Islam be Allah’s Paradise on Earth?”

  “Whose Paradise, cousin, whose Islam?” Kasim-Pierre fairly shouted. He took a drink of beer, and then spoke in quite a different tone, almost that of a teacher in a madrass.

  “Look, two thousand years ago Allah dictated the Koran to a member of a primitive tribe of phallocratic illiterate warriors who got it confused with their own petty tribal culture and imposed both on half the world with the sword. Burkhas! Purdah! Your wives are as much your property as your camels, behead anyone who steals one or fucks the other. The beer you’re drinking will turn you into raving maniac. If that’s your Islam, brother, it’s sure not mine.”

  “And what is your Islam, then?” I demanded, outraged at this blasphemous slander.

  “French Islam,” Kasim-Pierre told me. “We pray to Allah facing Mecca, we go to the mosque, we fast during the daylight hours of Ramadan and party at night, maybe we don’t eat pork except in Chinese restaurants, and other than that, we’re French.”

  He shrugged, he sighed. “If only they’d let us be.”

  “So why am I here if you so loathe what the Caliphate stands for?”

  Kasim-Pierre stared me straight in the eye as if searching for the humanity within me. I did likewise, and somewhere down beneath the anger and the b
lasphemy and the heresy, I sensed the glimmer of it within him.

  “Because there’s one thing the Caliphate stands for, or says it stands for, that we believe too. That all Muslims are brothers. All Muslims. Brothers against those who hate us. Brothers against those who treat us like niggers. That’s the soul of Islam. Without it, Islam is nothing.”

  “Inshallah,” I found myself muttering, “let it be so.” For strange as it may seem, I heard his words as a kind of prayer. “In that we are indeed brothers,” I told him, “praise be to Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.”

  “We’re looking for beneficence, camel-jockey, not mercy. Whatever else the Caliphate is or isn’t, it’s Muslim, it’s Arab, it’s rich, and it’s strong, and we’re Muslim, Arab, poor, weak, and oppressed. What we want from you is a big brother. But you came to me. What in hell can you possibly want from us?”

  I found to my dismay that I did not know. No one had told me. Ali himself professed not to know. Perhaps neither of us had the famous need to know. Or worse, perhaps nobody knew. Perhaps the Caliphate was reaching out with no more than a blind prayer. And so I prayed to Allah to move me blindly like the pawn on a chessboard I felt myself to be.

  I found myself taking a long drink of beer and then mopping at my dry brow. “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” I found myself saying, and I removed my leather jacket.

  Ali’s eyes widened as he beheld the mini-Uzi. “What is that?” he exclaimed.

  “An Israeli mini-Uzi slide-gun with a steady-cam grip and a magazine of fifty small-caliber high velocity spent-uranium hollow-nosed fleshettes,” I said, parroting what Ali had told me authoritatively as if I were an expert in such matters and knew exactly what I was saying.

  “May I…?” Kasim-Pierre said dreamily, holding out a supplicating hand.

  I hesitated. He handed me his Kalashnikov. I handed him my Uzi.

  “I have heard of this weapon,” he said softly, holding it in his right hand, and running his left hand over the barrel, the sliding firing mechanism, reverently, “but I have never hoped to even see one. How much do you want for it? Money? Drugs?” He laughed. “My sister’s virginity if I had one?”