Osama the Gun Read online

  Kasim-Pierre would press me for weapons from the Caliphate, I would put the delay off on my “handlers,” who would not provide them until I could give them concrete information on how they would be employed. Talk of a Caliphate oil boycott faded into the background, only to be trotted out under the influence of more than usual drink and kif.

  My assignations with Michelle became fewer and fewer, the pillow-talk before and afterward becoming more and more tenuous and vacuous, as if whatever there had been between us had been but a mission which she had long since accomplished.

  And who was I to blame her, for after all, had I not been a cover story on a clandestine mission throughout myself? At least she had never pretended to be other than what she really was, whereas I had been following orders transmitted by Ali from handlers unknown whose true ends I “had no need to know.”

  Nor did I know now. Ali was cynical about the Caliphate which had sent him here on a vague mission that he professed to believe was not only futile but based on ignorance, caring about nothing more than prolonging the luxurious life it afforded him as long as possible. “Gone native,” as he himself would say.

  But he had really not gone native at all. With his Swiss bank account and his fine French wardrobe, far from assuming the identity of a native French Arab, he had become a faux Frenchman, not a faux beur.

  And me? With my fine apartment whose location my beur comrades were never even told? With my Swiss bank account? What was I?

  The changed atmosphere came to seem normal—the unfriendly looking-away by the people I passed in the hallways of my apartment building, the fear in their eyes when I entered the elevator with them, the threatening and lidded looks cast my way on the streets of Montmarte, the random demands for papers by the police that my Arab face occasionally drew despite my good clothes.

  Had Paris changed or had what had always been there been stripped of its mask of civility?

  Be that as it may, something was changing in me. I grew ashamed of my luxurious apartment. Ashamed of the quartier in which I was living my lie. I had worn the plain jeans, T-shirt, and blouson of the beurs when my mission took me into their presence as a disguise, dressing like a Frenchman at all other times. Now I found myself dressing like a beur when I ventured into the Place Clichy, the rue de Rivoli, the cafes of St. Germaine.

  Had I to do it over, I would have dressed thusly meeting Michelle outside the Tour d’Argent, like her in her burkah, as an act of solidarity, a gesture of defiance.

  What was my true loyalty? To the Caliphate in whose service I had insinuated myself into the circles of Kassim-Pierre and his beur comrades or to the beurs themselves, to that which Paris was now forcing me to become, to recognize what I had always been in the eyes of the Frogs?

  What cause should I serve in my heart?

  The easy answer was that of Allah.

  I had been taught as a boy that to serve the Caliphate was to serve the Will of Allah and had always accepted it without question as the duty of the faithful Muslim. But now I found myself wondering if Kasim-Pierre and his comrades were truer servants of Allah’s Will than I.

  The word “Islam” can be taken to mean “Surrender to the Will of Allah.” But did that really mean blind obedience to the worldly power that professed to know what that was? Was I serving the Will of Allah the All-Knowing or that of merely a government of men whom Ali considered ignorant and clueless and the beurs “sand-niggers” who were part of the problem and had thus far refused to aid their cause at all?

  * * * *

  I spoke nothing of these misgivings to Ali, I avoided speaking with him as much as possible during the next few weeks, for I spent them “going native” after my own fashion. I returned to my luxurious Montmarte apartment only to sleep, spending my days and far into the night with Kasim-Pierre and his cohorts in apartments, in cafes and tabacs and the cheap restaurants we frequented, and in the storeroom in St. Denis where I had first met him, trying to make myself truly one of them.

  The storeroom, I now learned, was rented in common by several such loose bands and served as a kind of “hiring hall” for self-styled jihadis of the so-called “urban guerilla warfare.” Much kif was smoked, much beer drunk, and stronger drink as well, necessary to convince ourselves that we were really doing anything of significance, for the endless words spoke far louder than the pathetic “actions.”

  Every few days, there was a “mission” which more often than not would consist of graffiti-bombing Metro stations, bus stop kiosks, advertising hoardings, and the like, by Kasim-Pierre’s group, by others, and I took part in many of them in an attempt to earn a position of trust, for my identity as an agent of the Caliphate was common knowledge.

  Occasionally there were harder and more dangerous missions. Breaking into a garbage truck garage late at night, pouring sugar into the gas tanks, and taking credit for the destruction with the usual graffiti. Tossing petrol bombs through the gratings of outlying Metro stations closed for the night. Smashing the windows of stores in the Arab quartiers and banlieus known to be owned by outsiders and looting them. Burning parked delivery vans and cars deemed too luxurious to be owned by the Arab inhabitants. Stoning the few taxis that now presumed to venture into what we had taken to calling our “Green Zones.”

  For these missions, I always volunteered, and after a while, was always accepted, even when the band was other than Kasim-Pierre’s, for the mini-Uzi made me a valued addition, to the point where I came to be called “Osama the Gun,” though fortunately I never had cause to fire the thing.

  At length I became trusted enough to be invited along an “action” which could only be justly described as a threadbare cloak covering outright robbery.

  The invitation came from a gang leader who called himself Saddam; well into his thirties, hard-looking, boastful of his arrest record and time spent in prison, a professional criminal supposedly turned jihadi. The mission was to rob one of the rundown little check-cashing and electronic fund-transferring agencies that abounded in the poorer quartiers and banlieus.

  “Don’t look like much, but they have to start with plenty of cash in the morning, they can’t afford armored car services, they exploit our Muslim brothers who don’t have bank accounts or credit cards, and they’re real soft targets. All you have to do is hold the deliverymen at gunpoint. Don’t worry, they’re not about to argue with that gun of yours, Osama, to protect some one else’s money.”

  This “invitation” was made in the Denis storeroom in front of over a dozen people including Kasim-Pierre; there was approving laughter and something more, a collective study of my reaction that made it clear that this was a sort of initiation.

  I glanced at Kasim-Pierre for guidance. “Those bastards collect a percentage of every check they cash, you could call it interest, now couldn’t you?” he told me slyly. “And that’s forbidden by Islam, so the usurers have got it coming.”

  He turned to Saddam. “I’ll donate a graffiti bomb to the cause programmed with the appropriate citation.”

  Everyone laughed at that, and I knew I could not refuse.

  Kasim-Pierre procured bright green ski masks, which was hardly a popular color for such garb, and donated them too, “to make it clearly an Islamic action.” Saddam, myself, and two others of his band, crouched down behind a parked car across the street from the shuttered agency, deserted in the early morning hour, donned our masks and smoked kif and passed a bottle of calvados while we waited.

  An ordinary Renault pulled up. Two men got out. One carried a canvas sack. The other held a pistol negligently at belt level.

  Saddam slapped me on the shoulder. Well-fortified with both Dutch and Arabic courage, I drew the mini-Uzi, leapt up, dashed across the street screaming “Drop it!”

  The two men whirled around at the sound, the one raising his pistol, but before he could bring it to bear, I was upon him, and he was staring into the barrel
of Osama’s Gun no more than two feet from his face.

  One look at the mini-Uzi produced abject terror. In the next moment, he shrugged with a rather wry expression and tossed away his puny weapon. The other man did not have to be told to drop the sack of money.

  Saddam snatched it up, one of his men tossed the graffiti bomb against the shuttered window, and off we ran, as quick, simple, and easy as that.

  “Slick and smooth as a baby’s shit-smeared backside!” he told me, laughing uproariously.

  For a week or so after that, a dozen or so such credit-agency robberies were carried out, by Saddam’s gang, by other groups, though not Kasim-Pierre’s, for they were sources of easy funding, and supposedly Islamically-correct actions carried out by jihadis under the colors of Islam. The services of Osama the Gun were in great demand for such, and while I could not take part in all of them, I did play my part in three more which went just as safely and smoothly.

  The “Ski Mask Jihadis” became an important news story, though peculiarly enough the employment of an advanced weapon like the mini-Uzi in four of them was never mentioned, perhaps because it was excised from the police reports to the press to prevent greater panic.

  Panic of a limited sort there was on the streets of the Arab quarters, though the robberies were always done before the shops were open to prevent casualties from “friendly fire.” Some of the shops closed their doors until the Ski Mask Jihadis were apprehended. To those with jobs requiring the cashing of paper checks, the Ski Mask Jihadis were thieves and serious nuisances. They took to demanding electronic transfers from their employers, but most of them had already been refused bank accounts, which was why they had a need for check-cashing services in the first place. But the Ski Mask Jihadis were heroes to unemployed beur youth, to the more radical mullahs, to the army of those French Arabs who made their living in the cash-only gray and black economy.

  As for the Frogs, there was the usual demand for the police to solve the crimes and arrest the perpetrators, but since the robberies all took place in what even the press took to calling the “Green Zones” and the Arab denizens thereof were in nakedly ill-favor now, there was little vehemence behind it, and Le Canard enchaîné, the satirical weekly, made it the subject of archly approving humor.

  I reported nothing of my part in these actions to Ali. Not that he was disapproving. “Amusing, really,” he told me. “This gang of armed robbers has done more to radicalize the beurs than all the silly graffiti-bombings and shit-throwing of the pathetic politicals. Now they have real heroes! All that’s missing are T-shirts featuring Che in a burnoose and a green ski mask.”

  He shrugged. “But obviously, of course, they miss the crude political point.”

  “Which is?”

  “As crude as it gets, my young friend, so crude that I believe it was framed by a crude American comedian. Don’t shit where you eat.”

  I stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Shit where the enemy eats. The French long ago somehow hypnotized the beurs into accepting the Périphérique as a wall separating the so-called Green Zones from their beloved Paris pour les Parisiens, when all along Metro tickets would take an army of them right through it. Even during the riots of ’05, the rioters and the gangs and the thieves were too polite or too thoroughly mesmerized to be so crass as to invade the City of Light, laying waste to their own quartiers instead. And so it was all a dismal failure. This seems to be more of the same. And thus equally futile in the end.”

  “How so?” I demanded. “Kasim-Pierre doesn’t think so.”

  Ali eyed me narrowly. “He’s not involved in this, is he?”

  “No,” I was able to tell him truthfully.

  Fortunately, Ali did not ask the obvious next question: “And you, my young friend?”

  For which I was grateful, for though I had succeeded in making myself a criminal, I was not so sure I would have been able to lie to him with a convincing face.

  And soon thereafter, Kasim-Pierre turned my “no” into what foresight would have required to be a more truthful not yet.

  CHAPTER 11

  The very next day, Kasim-Pierre summoned me to the St. Denis storeroom. We were alone. He told me that it was time he got into the “Ski Mask Jihadi action,” lest he lose status with the other caids.

  “Armed robbery is not my style, don’t think it is,” he told me in no little discomfort. “But to ease what’s left of my conscience, we’ll donate whatever we steal to…to…to the Father Pierre relief fund for the homeless!” He laughed. “A nicely confusing political statement.”

  In the brightening hours before dawn we rendezvoused on the Boulevard Barbès-Rochechouart, a main thoroughfare leading into the heart of an Arab quartier. Kasim-Pierre arrived in another stolen van with three men who I knew, Ahmed, Mohammed, and Karim, all young, all “virgins” to such action, all armed with cheap pistols, and all very nervous.

  Barbès-Roucheuart was a wide boulevard with a profusion of confusing no-parking signs, the target check-cashing agency was just around the corner on a side street, but Kasim-Pierre didn’t want to park on the boulevard.

  “Aside from being robbers, we want to be law-abiding citizens,” he told us with a little laugh. “We don’t want some flic writing a parking ticket to fuck up our getaway.”

  This required driving right past the shuttered check-cashing agency and turning left on a one-way side-street to park the van, which only added to the palpable apprehension, and so we smoked some kif and passed a bottle of bad whiskey around before taking our positions crouched behind a truck across the street from the check-cashing agency.

  We donned our ski masks, drew our weapons, and fingered them tensely as we waited. We waited for what began to seem like forever. We passed the bottle and the kif again and waited some more, growing more and more tense, and all too intoxicated.

  Finally a small delivery van, windowless in the back, with two men visible in the front seats pulled up.

  The doors of the van opened. As the men on either side began to exit, Kasim-Pierre shouted “Allez!” and the tension exploded into action.

  We dashed across the street shouting and waving our guns as the man on the passenger side of the van was in the process of emerging with the money sack. But the man on the driver’s side ducked back behind the open door firing wildly with a pistol.

  Without thought, without even waiting for the targeting mechanism to lock on, I found myself firing the min-Uzi back at him. The delivery van door exploded in a shower of jagged metal fragments and the spent-uranium fleshettes emerged through the other side with enough force left to punch a gaping hole through the metal shutter of the check-cashing agency as the man with the money rolled under the van.

  As the five of us stood there frozen in our tracks and utterly transfixed, the back door of the van flew open and a third man emerged with a double-barreled shotgun.

  It was pure animal reflex, as of a leopard suddenly confronting a ravening lion leaping out at him from the jungle, or so I tried to convince myself later.

  “Shoot!” someone screamed, but I was already firing, and the man with the shotgun was blown in half at the waist, his upper torso falling backwards to the pavement as his shotgun blast flew harmlessly skyward, his lower body falling forward in a heap of gore and intestines.

  All thought of the money or anything else gone, we turned and ran, up the street, turning left to the parked van. By the time Kasim-Pierre climbed into the driver’s seat and the rest of us had piled into the back, I heard the faint sounds of sirens in the distance.

  Kasim-Pierre, his hand trembling, had no easy time starting the engine, and by the time he had, a siren was growing louder and louder behind us. By the time we were pulling away from the curb, a police car was turning the corner, and by the time we were able to start speeding away, it was accelerating towards us.

  “Stop the fucking flics!”
Kasim-Pierre shouted, and beginning to think again, however disjointedly, I had no doubt who he was commanding.

  I opened the rear door of the van. The police car was no more than ten feet behind and closing. This time I waited the requisite ten seconds for the aiming mechanism of the min-Uzi to lock on before I held down the trigger, not on the flics in the front seat, but on the center of the radiator grill.

  The fusillade blew the chrome grill and the radiator to flinders and did something to the engine behind it that sent black smoke steaming out of the hood and the flics rolling out of the car as we sped away, turning right, then left, then right again, to the sound of some sort of muffled explosion.

  Kasim-Pierre stopped the van without bothering to pull over, blocking a narrow street, we tore off our masks, and without a word needing to be said, debarked and scattered.

  * * * *

  The Catholics have a ritual called “confession,” where one may go to a priest, confess the darkest of sins in utter privacy and confidentiality, be given a penance to perform, and receive “absolution,” the washing away of the stain on your soul in the eyes of their god. Islam offers no such easy way out for the troubled conscience, a Muslim must confront the evil he has done and wage the jihad within his soul alone save for Allah. While the Catholic way may be more comforting, I had to admit, even as one who had committed the sin of murder, that the Muslim way was more just.

  I made my way back to my Montmarte apartment, and while in my agonized state, the alcohol supply within was a powerful temptation, I spent the day alternately watching the newscasts and praying.

  The news was full of the lurid details of the “Ski Mask Jihadi Atrocity.” There was footage of the wrecked police car and vague speculation on the nature of the weapon that could have fired straight through the radiator and halfway into the engine block, but no identification of the min-Uzi as the gun in question, odd because the uranium fleshettes should have given it away. There were no pictures of the two men who had died, only a disjointed interview with the survivor, in which he, being under the van, identified the gunmen as Ski Mask Jihadis, but could offer no further details.