Osama the Gun Read online

  Even I could recognize that this was not an impressive collection of firearms. Small revolvers. Automatic pistols that seemed to have passed through many hands down through too many years.

  “Show us yours,” someone demanded, and at once all eyes were upon me.

  Without rational thought, I proudly drew the mini-Uzi and reveled in the cries and sighs of jealously greedy admiration.

  “This is the mini-Uzi steady-slide camgun,” I proudly proclaimed woozily. “Aimed by the eye of Allah the Implacable, firing costly flesh-coated uranium bullets that never fail to hit their mark.”

  Though these men, and perhaps even the women, must have known that I was babbling nonsense, this gibberish was greeted with no less drunken cries of approval.

  “Show us,” said Kasim-Pierre in a voice of command, and he prised me off the couch, and dragged me staggering to a window, with everyone else present crowding together behind us.

  He opened the window. At this bleary hour the narrow street outside was entirely deserted and no lights were in evidence in the buildings across it. No one would dare leave a scooter or bicycle or motorcycle unattended on such a street in a quartier like this and there were only three parked cars visible from this vantage, one of which, with its broken windows and windshield revealing heaps of rubbish within, and its missing tires, was clearly a derelict.

  “That will do as a target,” Kasim-Pierre said, pointing to the wreck.

  I had both longed and feared for this moment to arrive, but in my present state, I feared nothing. I could not manage to hold the mini-Uzi one-handed steady enough and long enough to allow its aiming mechanism to lock on to even such a large target and felt the steady-cam struggling to compensate, so I held my right wrist with my left hand to steady the gun.

  Even so, the barrel wavered this way and that like an orchestra conductor’s baton until I managed to steady the weapon for a count of ten to allow it to lock on.

  I squeezed the trigger. I squeezed it too convulsively.

  There was a surprisingly quiet sound like the popping of a string of balloons mixed with a series of sharp bangs as of a tin-smith punching through metal with the inhuman speed of an assembly line robot. I felt no reaction from the gun in my hand at all. A jagged hole the size of a dinner plate had appeared in the hood of the wrecked car.

  There was drunken cheering behind me. Hands slapped my back. A few lights went on in the building across the street, windows opened, heads peered out for a moment, were immediately withdrawn, the windows slammed shut, the lights extinguished.

  The atmosphere in the apartment changed abruptly. I found myself sitting on the floor, the focus of a semi-circle of all the people present doing likewise. I was trembling with anxiety at what I had done but there was also a warm floating feeling that was somehow erotic. My head was clearer. The inebriated atmosphere had likewise vanished. All at once a drunken party had been transformed into a council of jihadis. And I had been thrust into a position of some authority.

  The cock of the walk. Ali’s magical thinking. The magic of the gun. These people believed it and so it became true.

  “When can the Caliphate deliver us such guns?” someone demanded.

  “And how many?”

  “And what will they cost?” said Kasim-Pierre.

  Strangely enough all the alcohol and kif which I had consumed and so befuddled my mind now in the afterglow seemed to sharpen it, to give me strength and courage. Perhaps it was the magic of the gun, or perhaps Allah in that moment chose to speak through me. I had heard that the Sufis claimed that such intoxication could open the soul to such Holy Communication in the proper circumstances. And surely this was one of them, for there was no Caliphate or Ali here to command my words, only the All-Knowing.

  “The Caliphate seeks not to sell you weaponry for money like a trader in a souk, you are poor, and we are rich, and you must pay in different coin—submission to the Will of Allah.”

  “As transmitted to us by the Caliphate, no doubt,” Kasim-Pierre said sardonically. “But how many? And when?”

  “As to how many, this will be determined by factors beyond my present knowledge. As to when, that is the question the Caliphate has sent me here to ask of you.”

  “No problem,” Kasim-Pierre said to general laughter, “we’d be happy to take the first delivery tomorrow.”

  “The mission of the Caliphate is to unite the whole world under the beneficent rule of Allah,” I told him. “That is our jihad. But what is yours? This we do not know, and that is the question which must be answered before we can accept you as true brother jihadis.”

  There were mutters, shrugs, furtive looks, around the semi-circle of French Arabs, but no one found the words to speak. It seemed I must descend to the tactical pragmatic.

  “I’ve joined you in an action in the service of some goal that I cannot understand, nor does anyone else seem to either. I’ve seen your weapons, such as they are. What do you do with them?”

  Uneasy mumbles, downcast eyes; once again no one found words.

  “If the Caliphate is to supply you with more advanced weaponry…and perhaps even explosives, is it not reasonable to demand that we know what you would do with them?”

  There was a long uneasy silence. It was Michelle, a mere woman, who presumed to break it in the presence of these phallocratic self-styled jihadis, and in a tone of no little exasperation.

  “They’re ashamed to tell you, Osama. They commit petty burglaries and cheap pharmacy robberies. They break store windows and scrawl graffiti, you saw that yourself. They drink beer and smoke kif and dream of overthrowing the government when they’re not…trying to get into the Tour d’Argent like good little Froggies.”

  “That’s not so!” shouted Kasim-Pierre. “We have a mission! We have a strategy!”

  “Oh yeah, then maybe you can tell our agent from the Caliphate just what the hell it is. I’d like to hear it myself.”

  Kasim-Pierre glared at this woman, perhaps even his mistress, daring to challenge the caid in the presence of his warriors. Then he took a deep breath, looked around, and spoke like one.

  “Have you ever heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang? They were a small group of German Marxist revolutionaries. They robbed banks, they kidnapped people, they killed leaders of their so-called class enemy.”

  I had never heard of these people. “Thugs and gangsters and Communists.…”

  Kasim-Pierre nodded. “Thugs and gangsters and Communists. But they had a goal and a strategy. The goal was to achieve a Marxist revolution in Germany. The strategy was to make themselves noticed and feared, so that the German government would be forced to adopt harder and harder measures against them, turning itself into a police state, which would turn the German people against it.”

  “But they failed, didn’t they?” someone said.

  “They failed,” said Kasim-Pierre, “but Osama bin Laden did not. With a single stroke against the Twin Towers, America was turned into just such a police state. Those jihadis created the Great Satan, and by so doing, turned the world against America.”

  Nods and cries of approval.

  “Things had to get worse before they could get better.…” I muttered. It made a kind of terrible sense…but…

  “But the Americans have not risen up against their evil government,” I reminded him.

  Kasim-Pierre smiled. “The Americans do not have an ally stronger than their satanic government. We just might…”

  “The Caliphate…” I was beginning to see why this man was a caid.

  “The Caliphate… With its weapons. With its oil that the Great Satan must continue to buy with its grain if it is to remain the Great Satan. Which France must also have if it is to remain a legend in its own mind…and which it must buy with money, not food, thanks to Argentina and Canada and the Great Satan itself. Which the Caliphate has no pressing need of.�
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  “What are you suggesting?” I said. “An oil boycott of France? Surely you must know that such a thing is the province of the Caliphate Council or the Caliph himself.”

  “You asked what we would do with your weapons. I swear to you, I swear to the Caliphate, we would make ourselves noticed. That was why Notre Dame. To be noticed. If the French will not welcome us, we’ll force them to notice that millions of us are here, to fear us, to take us into account, at the petrol station if nowhere else.”

  “But how can you imagine that this will make France accept you? Surely all it will accomplish is to make you hated.”

  Kasim-Pierre snorted. “Enough worrying about being hated! Enough kissing ass to be accepted! The one thing we have never been in this country is needed!”

  “Needed?”

  “Needed, camel-jockey! If the petrol pumps run dry, who can the French turn to to plead with the Caliphate to turn them on again? They must throw themselves on our mercy, Osama. When only the beurs can intercede for France, they must kiss our Arab asses, and be grateful for the privilege.”

  Loud cheers rang out at this, the waving of fists, and then of pistols. Michelle, who had spoken so contemptuously, now regarded Kasim-Pierre with newfound respect, or perhaps had recovered something that had been lost.

  My respect had been earned too, though there was something in this grand vision that remained elusive, that made it seem like the kif fantasy it certainly might have been under the circumstances. Something was missing, something I could only perceive by its absence.

  “But…but…all this depends on the Caliphate withholding its oil,” I muttered. And then more firmly, “But why would the Caliphate do such a thing?”

  Kasim-Pierre regarded me with eyes that became lidded, behind which I could sense that missing something, though not at all what it might be.

  “The Will of Allah,” he said sardonically. “You ask us to submit to the Will of Allah, will the Caliphate not do the same?”

  “I do not know the Will of Allah, and you presume to say you do?”

  Kasim-Pierre laughed. “Give us the means, and we will make it so, Osama,” he said quite coldly. Again the lidded-look, hiding the same dark secret. “Inshallah.”

  “Inshallah!” shouted his pistol-waving jihadis.

  “Inshallah,” I murmured.

  Theirs was a war-cry. Mine was a prayer.

  For without quite knowing what I was praying for, I found myself praying to Allah to indeed make it so.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Do you think you could get me some of the kif that this Kasim-Pierre is smoking?” Ali asked me after I had reported that night’s events over lunch at a large brasserie overlooking the Place Clichy. “It must be better than what the Caliphate Council has got, maybe we should ship them some. Scores of Caliphate agents here for years without a clue of how to accomplish anything, and the leader of nothing more than a street gang comes up with a brilliant geopolitical strategy worthy of Osama bin Laden.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “If the Caliphate cut off the oil to France, the French would indeed have to appeal to its Arabs to intercede with their Muslim brothers on their behalf, and if the Caliphate heeded their plea, they would be transformed from despised outsiders into the saviors of La Belle France. Too bad it can’t happen.”

  The Place Clichy was one of the largest squares in Paris, and in my eyes at least epitomized the contradictions of so-called “French Culture.”

  There were several large old brasseries like this one around it, all brass and wood and waiters in black tuxedos that were so traditionally “French” that they seemed preserved in time to cater to the tourists that flocked to the movie theaters and grand luxe boutiques, yet there were also grimy low-grade restaurants sending the foul odor of reused kitchen grease out into the street. Seafood platters on mountains of ice and elegant French cuisine served with wine and champagne in silver ice buckets, and cous-cous and mergeuz with cans of beer. Rich tourists and student backpackers from all over Europe, French businessmen on expense accounts and cheap whores from nearby Pigalle. Pale faces, black faces, Arab faces.

  The real face of the France I had come to know.

  There was a major Metro station but the square was clogged with cars, trucks, buses, scooters, motorcycles, a continuous din of traffic and haze of petrol-fumes. The French congratulated themselves on having gone to nuclear power to generate their electricity a lifetime ago and their system of high-speed trains and metros running on it and sneered down their noses at the stupid Americans, still so dependent on oil from the Caliphate. But the France outside this brasserie’s glass windows would grind to a halt without Caliphate oil too.

  “Why wouldn’t it work, Ali? The French need Caliphate oil. What other choice would they have?”

  “What on Earth would be in it for the Caliphate?” Ali demanded in some exasperation.

  “Solidarity with their oppressed Muslim brothers…?” I suggested lamely, feeling the fool even as the words escaped my mouth.

  “Ah, the innocence of youth,” Ali sighed, gesturing to our waiter, who poured us both fresh glasses of white wine from the bottle in the ice bucket. “Do you know what the Americans are doing in Nigeria?”

  “What do the Americans have to do with it? We’re talking about the French.”

  “Nigeria may not be part of the Caliphate, but it has a Muslim government. It also has oil. But that oil is in mostly Christian provinces. So the Great Satan foments a separatist Crusader revolution and supports it with its robot warships, its robot airforce, its robot tanks, everything short of its own flesh and blood gunfodder, which the Biafrans supply in abundance, and what does the Caliphate do?”

  “I have seen on the news that the Caliph himself denounces these soulless Crusaders.”

  “To the great discomfort of the Americans, who of course are shamed by such denunciation from the champion of Islam!” Ali said sneeringly. “But it doesn’t cut off the oil fueling their Satanic machineries, now does it?”

  “It needs their grain. But what does the Caliphate need from France? Nothing!”

  Ali nodded his agreement. “Nothing. But what would the Caliphate gain by cutting off its oil sales to France? Also nothing. As it is now, France at least sees itself as America’s moral superior, denouncing what they’re doing in ‘New Biafra,’ and turning a blind eye as their arms merchants ship weapons to the Nigerian government.”

  I took a long sad drink of my wine. “You are saying it is pointless to pass Kasim-Pierre’s proposal to the Caliphate?”

  Ali laughed. “Pointless? But no, it may be pointless to the Caliphate who will no doubt ignore it, but not pointless to us, my innocent young friend! At long last, we have something concrete to report back to justify our existence here. So I will convey your report back to the powers that be, who will ignore it, you will continue to play your game with your beurs, we will continue to enjoy our pleasant life in La Belle France, and so the game goes on.”

  He drained his glass. “Speaking of which, it’s time for dessert. I can recommend the profiteroles au chocolate. With cognac? Or perhaps an eau d’vie? They have frambois sauvage here. You don’t find it everywhere.”

  * * * *

  The game did go on, or rather games, since there were several of them developing at cross purposes, which neither I nor the news coverage could really understand.

  Thugs or students on scooters threw bottles of shit through the windows of the Grand Mosque restaurant. Christian retaliation for Notre Dame, or the action of Muslim purists?

  Kasim-Pierre professed to know nothing, but seemed self-satisfied about it, and organized a retaliatory action in which I was ordered by Ali to take part. Four cars were stolen, three of us were loaded into each of them, drove up to the church at Saint-Germaine-des-Prés in the heart of the tourist district at five o’clock in the mornin
g, dashed out and threw large plastic bags filled with a slurry of cow blood and piss over the fence at the wall of the church, drove off at high speed for a few blocks, left the cars, and dispersed on foot.

  The next day there were twenty-four-hour police guards placed around all the major churches in Paris. That night a madrass in Clichy-sur-Bois was fire-bombed. The day after that, some other group did likewise to a lycée in the 16th arrondissement, a bastion of wealth and privilege.

  The authorities then announced that DNA analysis of the feces thrown through the windows of the Grand Mosque restaurant proved it to be that of swine. Right-wing Christian hooligans known to the police were arrested in droves and released. Muslim youths were dragged off the banlieu streets, questioned, beaten in custody, or so some claimed, and likewise released without charge. The President, the Mayor, imams and mullahs, sports stars and popular entertainers, appealed for calm.

  There were no further dramatic incidents for a time, but brawls and fist fights broke out between Christians and Muslims in borderline schools where they mingled, there were some ugly incidents at a football match, knifings, beatings, and rapes which seemed chauvinistically motivated, squads of soldiers accompanied police in random searches in the Metro, the police themselves took to patrolling the Arab banlieus in cars, rather than afoot.

  For weeks Paris was a cauldron of mutual ill-will between Christians and Muslims, the police and the beurs, that simmered ominously without boiling over. The graffiti that had always festooned the grimy outlying Metro stations, the public housing projects, night-time shop window shutters, turned crudely political. “Fuck the Frogs,” “There is no God in France and Profit is its Prophet,” “Death to the Infidels,” on one side, “France for the French,” “Mohammed Eats Shit,” “Allah Allez,” on the other.

  I found myself spending more and more time with Kasim-Pierre and his group of would-be jihadis, gathering in small idle groups in apartments or tabacs in the banlieus or the few Arab districts within the Périphérique, the ring-road enclosing the twenty arrondissements of Paris that had long symbolically but effectively walled off “Paris for the Parisiens” from the sprawling beur-ridden banlieus that surrounded their City of Light.