Osama the Gun Read online

  It would seem that my tracks had been covered. With the police at least. But the phone kept ringing all day, and I was sure it was Ali, who must have known immediately from the description of the damage to the police car whose weapon had been responsible. Even the best of liars surely could not convince him otherwise, nor was he an all-forgiving priest to whom I could confess without fear of consequences, so I did not answer.

  When I was not watching the news channels, I prayed to Allah in an unclear manner; to forgive me for what I had done, or to persuade me that I had acted in defense of myself and my fellow jihadis. No answer was forthcoming from the Merciful. Or maybe it was, through the instrument of television.

  Perhaps to show the face of the “evil” in the absence of an arrested perpetrator, the fiercest and most radical mullah they could find was interviewed for a few brief minutes.

  Fully bearded, wearing a green robe, wild-eyed with defiance, he declared that according to the Koran, the killing of infidels in the course of a jihad against them, far from being murder, was a noble act, and had the gunman been slain in the act, he would have been transported directly to paradise.

  When the interviewer expressed her horror and outrage, before he was quickly cut off, he slyly pointed out that were the very same incident to have occurred in wartime combat, the French Army or any other would have awarded the soldier in question a medal for courage and gallantry in the face of the enemy.

  I could not find the flaw in the logic, though my soul remained troubled. I prayed to Allah to resolve this conflict between my mind and my heart, and He seemed to answer. If I had truly acted as a jihadi, then what I had done was not murder, but a permissible soldierly act on a Holy War’s field of combat. Convincing myself that armed robbery was such a field of honor, however, was a less certain matter.

  But at least the next time the phone rang, I summoned up the courage to answer, knowing I would have to sooner or later, and if Ali was no priest, I felt the need to confess to somebody.

  However, it wasn’t Ali, it was Michelle, who conveyed an invitation from Kasim-Pierre to be at the St. Denis storeroom that night in a manner that made it seem like an order, filling me with no little trepidation.

  I found myself answering again when the phone rang a few minutes later, and this time it was Ali.

  “Don’t bother to tell me it wasn’t you,” he told me angrily. “You lied to me when you told me you weren’t involved in these Ski Mask Jihadi robberies, don’t insult me further by denying it.”

  In great fear, but also with a sense of equally great relief, I poured out the whole story. There was a long silence. “That was very stupid of you, my young friend,” Ali finally told me in quite a different tone.

  “I told you, Ali, I had no choice,” I found myself whining.

  “You chose to hide what you were doing from me, Osama. That was very stupid. Don’t do it again. What do you think I am, a teacher in some boys’ madrass who’d rap your knuckles with a switch?”

  “I…I was afraid I was disobeying orders.…” I stammered.

  “What orders? I don’t remember giving you any orders to the contrary. You were ordered to gain the confidence of these gangs, and you succeeded. The Caliphate Council was quite pleased with this whole Ski Mask Jihadi business.”

  “It was?”

  “If you had told me what you were doing, I would have told you that, and you would have saved yourself much agony. Whoever thought it up was either a genius or had intimate knowledge of Mexican history.”

  “Mexican history?”

  “One of their endless revolutionary groups designed a hooded costume like that of a comic book super-hero which was worn by any number of agents in the commission of actions so that no one could ever know who was inside it or how many such Heroes of the Revolution there really were. Voila, the Ski Mask Jihadi!”

  “They approve of the whole thing…?”

  I could hear the Gallic shrug in Ali’s voice. “Up to a point. Now, though, I’d imagine that the Ski Mask Jihadi will have to retire to whatever paradise is reserved for comic book super-heroes. I wouldn’t want to go around Paris wearing the green now even if I were Irish. You’ve messed up a good thing, Osama.”

  “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “Fault doesn’t enter into it. We’re all responsible for the consequences of our own actions. That’s in the Koran, isn’t it? If not, it should be.”

  “You’re going to report it?”

  “Of course I’m going to have to report it!”

  “What will they do?” I asked fearfully.

  Again I could hear the shrug in his voice. “I have no idea what…they will do. They don’t tell me till they do it.”

  “Well then what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Carry on, my good man, as the British colonialists would have said,” Ali told me with a little laugh, “carry on carrying on. And that is an order.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I left the mini-Uzi behind when I went to St. Denis that night, for I was dressed for the occasion as an ordinary beur, and while I feared that I just might need it for protection, the random street searches by the police were certain to have been stepped up, and I had a far greater fear of being caught with the exotic murder weapon.

  I did not know what to expect. I had saved four jihadis from the police but in the process, as Ali had pointed out, I had rendered our most successful tactic thus far no longer feasible. So my hand trembled as I rapped on the storeroom door.

  When it was opened I beheld a crowded party in progress.

  The storeroom was as jammed with people as a rush-hour Metro car; Kasim-Pierre and his entire gang, Michelle, all the caids I knew and their entourages, and many other men and women besides. The air was dense with the fragrant perfume of kif to the point where the cigarettes stuffed with more that were being passed seemed superfluous. Everyone who didn’t have a can of beer had a plastic cup of stronger stuff. The babble all but drowned out the Rai music playing at high volume.

  I stood outside the doorway for a dumbfounded moment.

  Michelle was the first to notice when I stepped inside. “Osama the Gun!” she shouted.

  All sound save the music ceased for a moment as everyone froze in their tracks. I felt the pressure of all eyes upon me.

  “Osama the Gun!” someone else shouted.

  “Osama the Gun! Osama the Gun! Osama the Gun!”

  The whole room was chanting it. Women ululated. Some of the men made inexpert passes at emulating them.

  “Osama the Gun! Osama the Gun! Osama the Gun!”

  Feet stamped rhythmically on the worn wooden floor.

  “Osama the Gun! Osama the Gun!”

  And then the whole room was rushing forward to embrace me.

  My comrades had spoken and it was as if the voice of Allah spoke through them. The great weight that my soul had been bearing was lifted from me. I was not a murderer. I had acted without thought and thereby surrendered to the Will of Allah and become what He meant me to be.

  I was a jihadi.

  I was one of faceless men inside the super-hero mask of the Ski Mask Jihadi.

  But I was also Osama, the Gun of Allah.

  Not an agent of the Caliphate but a Holy Warrior of Islam.

  * * * *

  But the actions of the Ski Mask Jihadis were now at an end, or so it seemed. The check-cashing agencies demanded police protection, and when the police were slow in providing it, they all shut down for a week until they got it. It was worth your life to wear anything green, let alone ski masks, outside the deepest hearts of the Green Zones if you looked like an Arab, and dangerous enough even if you didn’t. The Paris police, and now the National Police, were everywhere, and if you looked like an Arab, your chances of being stopped, searched, and having your identity papers checked against computer records were better t
han even inside the Périphérique.

  Lone Arabs caught outside the Green Zones were subject to beatings and worse, women in burkas were taunted, assaulted, and raped, and there were murders that the police were loath to bother trying to solve. The Grand Mosque lost most of its French customers, and the restaurant was shut down. Beurs with jobs outside the Green Zones feared going to work, and absenteeism among them reached over fifty percent.

  There were daily demands by the Caliphate that the European Union government put a stop to the persecutions of Arabs by the French, but there was no mention of a threat to cut off the oil to France. There were a few riots and demonstrations by Pakistani British subjects and German Turks in support of the beurs, and when they were roughly put down by armored police with clubs, tear gas, and water cannon, the Caliph declared that the “European Crusaders” had no will to protect the EU’s thirty million Muslims, and kindly offered Turkey, Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia immediate admission to the Caliphate and its protection, which was swiftly refused.

  I received no communication from Kasim-Pierre for two weeks during this undeclared state of siege, until I was finally summoned to the St. Denis storeroom. Once more I had no idea of what to expect. Was I still Osama the Gun, the hero of the Ski Mask Jihadis, or had I now become the man who had made further action impossible and thrown the initiative into the hands of the French authorities and their police? I myself could hardly find it unjust if I were greeted as a bumbling fool.

  There were a dozen men at the meeting, all the caids that I knew, some who I didn’t, and no one else. They were seated on a semi-circle of crates when I arrived, and there was an empty one in the focus of the circle, to which I was motioned by Kasim-Pierre, and I feared I had been summoned to some sort of trial from which I might not emerge alive.

  It proved to be nothing of the kind.

  “It’s time you unmasked, Osama the Gun,” Kasim-Pierre said. “We all know you are an agent of the Caliphate, and no minor one either, and now you must speak as the voice of the Caliphate, and listen as its ear. What will the Caliphate have us do now, and more importantly, what will the Caliphate now do for us?”

  “What would you have…us do?” I found myself asking, instinctively or unwittingly speaking as if I fully was what they believed me to be.

  “You know what we want,” growled a caid I knew as Tarik. “A shipment of guns like yours, Osama the mini-Uzi—”

  “—and an oil boycott!” added Kasim-Pierre.

  “To do what?” I demanded.

  “To take the battle to the enemy!”

  “To accomplish what?” I answered scornfully. “An armed uprising by a few hundred men at most? You think the French wouldn’t bring in their army? You think a few hundred mini-Uzis against tanks, well-armed infantry, and helicopter gunships would be anything but a one-sided slaughter?”

  “We would be noticed!” declared Kasim-Pierre.

  “Our dead bodies would certainly be noticed,” I told him. “And those of the innocent Arab men, women, and children who would be caught in the fighting.”

  Kasim-Pierre glared at me quite coldly and spoke even more so. “So be it. Such a bloodbath would finally get the Caliphate off its ass and cut off the oil, wouldn’t it?”

  Would it? I had no idea. Would the Caliphate even supply weapons? I didn’t know that either. Worse still, could I countenance instigating such a cold-blooded tactic even if it would?

  But they were all regarding me intently, challengingly yet also respectfully, and I realized that in their eyes I was Osama the Gun, emissary of the Caliphate, and as such, when I next spoke, it would be taken as the voice of the Caliphate itself, true or not, and there was no escape.

  I prayed to Allah for guidance. But the only words that came into my mind were not His but those of Ali:

  Shit where the enemy eats.

  “I will tell you what the Caliphate wants you to do now,” I lied, “and it is what you want to do, take the battle to the enemy.”

  Nothing but an expectant silence.

  “The Caliphate will not supply you with weapons until you have proven your courage and ability to use them in Paris, inside the Périphérique, in all of Paris,” I told them. “The Champs Élysée, Madeleine, St. Germaine, the Louvre, where the Frogs live, where the tourists are, everywhere.”

  “How?” more than one caid demanded.

  I had spoken without knowing how. I emptied my mind of all but a prayer to Allah, imploring Him to speak through me, and praise be to Him, the words seemed to emerge from my mouth before I thought them.

  “The Frogs must be taught to fear the Ski Mask Jihadis where they live and where the tourists abound.”

  “They fear us already, thanks to you, Osama the Gun,” Saddam growled. “They fear us so much that the flics are everywhere and we can’t do a damn thing!”

  “Greater than the fear of the enemy you see is the fear of the enemy you cannot see but who is everywhere,” I told them, the words flying from my mouth. “Greater than the fear of the Ski Mask Jihadis is the fear of the Mask of the Jihadi itself.”

  “Mystical bullshit!” someone growled.

  But Kasim-Pierre held up his hand for silence, caught in my spell. And so was I, for now I knew what I was going to say next. “We make them fear the face of the Jihad itself.”

  “More mystical bullshit! Who do you think you are, the mad Sufi mullah Nasrudin?”

  There was wan laugher at that.

  “Shut up!” roared Kasim-Pierre. “How do we do that?”

  “Graffiti bombs,” I told them. “Smearing the Islamic green Mask of the Jihad itself on the Arc de Triomphe, inside the Louvre, Trocadero, the grand hotels, the Metro stations, the buses, the bridges, the churches, everywhere, and with the words in French, not Arabic—‘Allah the All-Seeing is watching you.’”

  There was a long moment of silence. Kasim-Pierre grinned. So did perhaps half of them. The others seemed not to know what to think.

  “All well and good, if it was possible,” said Tarik. “But it isn’t. The flics are everywhere. We start throwing graffiti-bombs in places like that and we’ll all be arrested within two days!”

  Growls of agreement, the shaking of heads. I, or whoever or whatever had spoken through me, had not thought of that. I had them, and now I was about to lose them. There was nothing for it but another leap of faith but now I knew I was on my own.

  “Timers,” I told them. “Graffiti-bombs with timers slyly planted everywhere when no one is looking, set to go off long after the sower is safely gone.”

  “Very clever,” said Tarik. “The only problem is such things don’t exit. Has anyone here seen them for sale?”

  The silent shaking of heads. No one had. Nor had I. But from my training in the spy school I knew that the Caliphate possessed all sorts of such timers designed to detonate explosive charges. Surely it would be a simple matter to adapt them to graffiti bombs.

  If the Caliphate would supply them. This was nothing like an oil boycott. Why wouldn’t it? And yet…

  And yet I had no way of knowing. And I had absolutely no authority to do what I was about to do. It would be an act of the grossest insubordination. If Allah was not with me now, it could mean my head. No act I had ever committed required more courage that the words I then spoke.

  “The Caliphate will supply them. You have my word.”

  “Your word?” sneered Tarik.

  “Your word, or that of the Caliphate?” demanded Saddam.

  “Are you finally admitting that they are one and the same?” asked Kasim-Pierre in quite another tone.

  How far was I willing to go? I had already lied to these men but it was a lie that the Caliphate, Inshallah, could convert to the truth. If I lied now, I would be telling an irrevocable falsehood to comrades in arms who had now accepted me as a fellow caid, and I found that this was something I cou
ld not do.

  “The word of Osama the Gun,” I told them truthfully. “If the devices are not delivered, I will shoot myself with my own gun and be denied admission to paradise for taking my own life.”

  There was a stunned silence.

  Tarik produced a rumpled pocket copy of the Holy Book, stood up, and held it out before me. He did not speak. No word was needed. I stood. I placed my right hand upon it. “This I swear upon the Holy Koran.”

  Another moment of immobile silence. Then one by one the caids rose to embrace me. The looks in their eyes as they did told me I was no longer merely one of them. I was in command now. I was Osama the Gun, Caid of caids.

  Or so they now believed.

  It was up to the Caliphate, Inshallah, to make it so.

  * * * *

  Ali arose and went to my living room bar without invitation when I finished telling him what I had done. He poured himself a large drink of whiskey, downed half of it, poured another glass and offered it to me.

  I declined with a shake of my head, not tempted at all, for I was a Holy Warrior of Islam now, was I not, having truly surrendered my life to the Will of Allah, and even though I knew that it might be a very short one, my soul was tranquil, my heart was at peace.

  “You are a madman, of course,” Ali told me. “Mad as an idiot is mad or mad as a dervish is mad, remains to be seen.”

  “Allah will decide,” I told him.

  “The Caliphate will decide, surely even you are not crazy enough to still believe they are one and the same.”

  “If they defy the Will of Allah, it will be on them, not me.”