“It’s reciprocal,” Mustafa fired back.
“Look, right at this moment, it’s you and me. We have about an hour before the lieutenants learn about what’s happened and try to get in touch. Maybe less. If one of them sold out information to have me killed, we need to be fully prepared by then.“
“How do you plan to identify the traitor if he’s inside the organization?”
“Well...we spend the next hour reaching out to all insiders we have within the Aydin family and their network. And also to the insiders close to the other British gangs. They must have missed something. Have them sniff around and report to you exclusively. We bypass the lieutenants for everything until we have more clarity. In the meantime, inform your men that we’re switching to code black. No sharing intel with the lieutenants’ men until further notice.”
“You want to form a black squad?” Mustafa asked, only half-surprised.
"Temporarily... Hopefully, we can disband it in a week's time," Zakariya said.
Mustafa was glad his brother had come to him right away. He was ready. “I see...Just like old times,” he said.
“Yeah, just like old times.”
“So, who do you think did it?” Mustafa insisted.
“Djib is probably the most rebellious of the lot. I find Rayyan much too docile. The other two are easier to read, but I could be wrong. And there’s something else...” Zakariya made sure he had his brother’s full attention. “I’ve had a persistent doubt about one of my own employee at Castellane Investments...I’ll handle that myself.”
“It’s all settled then. Let’s do this!” Mustafa’s raucous voice exuded determination. He had a new purpose and was eager to pour its whole being into it.
ACT II
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” – Mark Twain
CHAPTER 28
There had been one common thread running through his early life, a thread that had set the foundation for his later years, Zakariya later realized. Revenge.
Everything around that was just an overwhelming chaos he tried to navigate as best as he could. A constant fight for survival that had formed the basis of his character and values.
Zakariya Mansouri's earliest memory was that of the intense pain oozing from a fork planted in his groin. A five-year-old Mustafa was standing in front of him. He removed the bloodstained pointy weapon from the toddler's leg and ran away.
This incident had dictated Zakariya’s cautious behavior toward his brother for most of their childhood, and subconsciously or not, he suspected Mustafa had tried to make amends ever since.
He only learned years later that Mustafa was in fact only his half-brother. They both shared a rather frivolous mother from Algerian origin. Nour Mansouri was a ravishing fair-skinned woman with a dark frizzy mane. She had migrated to France with her own father as a child after being expelled from Algeria following the end of the French rule over North Africa in the early sixties. The pied-noirs – or black-footed – as they were referred to, encompassed all Christian and Jewish populations of European descent who had emigrated to the French protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia and in French Algeria, and who were forced to return en masse to mainland France once Northern African countries gained independence. The upshot of this unprecedented wave of migration had been thousands of uprooted and split up families who lost their identity and traditions.
Nour Mansouri had only two sons, but she had collected her fair share of relationships and misfortunes since moving to the Parisian suburb with her late father. So much so that her entire life felt like an unending struggle to make ends meet, with her only momentary respite coming in the form of casual flirtations.
Her two boys never met their progenitor, but they had established one thing early on. They didn’t share the same father. Mustafa was taller, and his facial features suggested his progenitor was a fierce African man with a skin dark as night, probably from a sub-Saharan country.
Zakariya might have been mixed race as well, but the line was less obvious than for his brother. He looked just like a regular Arab kid. His only distinctive feature was extraordinarily fair eyes that bestowed upon him a coldness that contrasted with his fawny-brown skin.
The family shared a tiny, low-cost two-bed council flat on the eighteenth floor of a ho-hum tower in the middle of one of the most dangerous ghetto of the Mantes-la-jolie housing estates. The concrete complex had been built in the fifties and was housing over eight thousand deprived families, mostly immigrants from Northern Africa, and families on the fringe of society.
During the twenty years she had spent in the area, Nour Mansouri hadn’t met one person that wasn’t looking for a way out. Few ever succeeded, and locals would call themselves the wasted lives. During election time, politicians would visit the council estate under heavily-armed escort and never come back. The police, for their part, simply did not show up at all.
Over three quarters of the ghetto’s population had no diploma and the unemployment rate was double the country’s average, and double that for the under twenty-five. In the face of such bleak employment prospects, the trapped youth only conceivable gateway to a decent life was the opiate business. Unfortunately, for inexperienced gullible kids, falling under the grip of ruthless drug dealers usually proved to be a blessing in disguise.
At age five, Zakariya understood that his share of motherly love would shrink further, as they all welcome a young baby girl – Yasmina – to the family. Once more, Nour Mansouri remained secretive on the identity of the father.
The siblings would often speculate about their progenitors, and most of the adult men in their council building would at one point or another come under their scrutiny. Regularly, men they had never seen before would sleep over at the family’s small apartment.
The cheeky brothers would send Yasmina to interrogate the men, knowing full well that the kid's irresistible cuteness and innocence would play into their hands. But the men were always coy and declined to give anything away, as if they had received strict instructions.
Mustafa eventually grew tired of playing detective and stopped playing the game without notice. From then on, he refused to address the subject of their unknown fatherhood, a change of heart that intrigued his brother and sister profoundly. They both inferred he had found something out and was deeply annoyed by it. But in spite of their insistence, he remained silent as a grave.
By that time, Nour Mansouri was working three part-time jobs. By day, she successively assumed responsibilities as a teacher’s assistant and a genitor at the local school, and in the evening, she would wash dishes in a tiny café two hours away in Paris’ seventeenth arrondissement. Thankfully, the harshness of life in the housing estates brought struggling single mothers together, and the tight community was providing solutions for the most common everyday problems.
She was grateful that, through French law, a woman in her situation was entitled to the equivalent of almost five hundred pounds per month in family allowance and housing support. More worryingly though, she anticipated that keeping her kids away from drugs would soon become a new full-time occupation; one she did not look forward to. Drug trafficking was rife in the ghettos of Mantes-la-jolie and the neighboring suburbs. And the dealers, those dirty dogs, could always find a useful purpose for anyone, however young and helpless.
CHAPTER 29
Nour Mansouri’s daily morning prayer was always a meticulous step-by-step ceremony. First, she would kneel by the side of her bed and press her palms together. She was a pious Christian, but she had never adhered to the idea of organized religions. For her, the attempt to access the divine had to be a private endeavor, practiced in the confines of one’s home.
She would clear her mind from any superfluous thought, and let a feeling of gratitude pervade her being. Not any sort of gratitude, the simplest form of gratitude. That of being alive. She would address God directly, even though she had never thought of the Almight
y as a physical being, but rather as an omnipotent and benevolent entity devoid of form and matter. Then, she would turn her focus to her children, visualizing them in perfect health, gleeful, thriving. The purpose of the exercise was to supercharge her soul with light, and diffuse it to her love ones.
Her evening ritual was a different sort altogether. These supplications were stained by fear and motivated by the recognition that God had a dark side. Her plea would systematically veer toward Yasmina.
After a day in the poverty-stricken neighborhood, where the dreadful plight of young girls was exposed to the sight of all, she would be infinitely grateful that God gifted her daughter with two strong brothers to protect her. On her way back from the café, Nour would close her eyes in the always-crowded trans-city bus and pray silently.
When she finally reached her apartment block, often after one in the morning, the opioid trade would be in effervescence in the many squares and halls of the ghetto. Drug deals would be concluded in plain sight, and dealers would effectively oversee the pedestrian and vehicular traffic.
A month earlier, Nour had bumped into a conspicuously underage boy right in front of her council tower. Then, she strode with firm steps toward the boy eager to reprimand him for dawdling outside past midnight and lurching of the sort. In a moment of horror, she noticed that the boy was brandishing a shotgun, and she hurried back to her building. She then ran to the lift and did not look back once. That night she did not sleep.
Of course, she had sounded the alarm more times than she could remember, as had other mothers. They had even formed an association aimed at pacifying the neighborhood through dialogue, and had done their best to raise awareness of the illegal trades booming all over the Mantes-la-jolie concrete jungle. The group dissolved after three of the founding mothers reported to the weekly meeting with severely bruised faces and a heartbreaking resignation.
Zakariya and his siblings were hardly blind to the ongoing trafficking, but if anything, it was their mother's constant state of fright that deterred them from sticking their nose too close to the fire. Mustafa had lost any curiosity for the unusual activities at roughly the same time as he had forsaken any intention to find out about their fathers. Strangely enough, it was also around that period that he noticeably hardened himself. His usual bubbly and clumsy self had been replaced with a puzzling solemnity. He just stopped laughing.
Mantes-la-jolie was overall a pretty commune, with its flowery houses and its twelfth-century church of Notre Dame overlooking the river Seine. French middle schools typically rang the end of the day of learning at four P.M., and kids would flock outside, eager to return to their home, kick a ball in the street or play games at one of the few recreation centers.
This was not the Mansouris’ daily routine. They would impatiently wait at the school’s premises until one of the women from their community appeared – always mandated by their mother. Then the woman would walk them back to their tiny apartment in the ghettoized housing project of Val Fourré.
Not until the age of ten had Zakariya realized why the area he was living in inspired such fright in outsiders. Admittedly, it was populated by drug dealers, addicts, delinquents, and a host of other disreputable sorts. But they were all doing their own things; there were no visible evil intents involved.
One day, escaping the oversight of their escort, Zakariya decided to properly explore the sub-city they lived in but barely knew. He strolled around for a while but rapidly lost interest in his exploration quest. The squares were barren, only ornate by cemented benches and what looked like dryland vegetation.
As he jogged back toward the laggards, Zakariya was lured toward the passage between two towers by the sound of deep voices. He got closer, animated by a cautious curiosity. At first, he was unsure what he was looking at. A group of youngsters – five, maybe six – were gathered in a circle, as if wrangling. He edged closer, and once he realized that he was witnessing a brutal beating, he tried to run away. Instead, he lost his footing and toppled, alerting the smallest of the band, who was only observing the dirty deed from a distance.
The little man paced in his direction, and Zakariya’s heart started pumping frenetically. He was petrified.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” the dark figure asked. It was a kid’s voice. “Don’t stick around. You might just get hurt.”
Zakariya’s faced loosened up. The boy clearly had no ill intent, but he seemed to have a big mouth.
“I’m…I’m just going back home.” Zakariya mustered bluntly, after a long pause.
“Ok, get moving then. You’ve seen nothing, understood? What’s your name man?”
“Zaka...call me Zak. What’s yours?”
“Djib.” He looked back at the trashing with anxious eyes.
Zakariya’s limb still refused to move. He felt like a deer in front a car with headlights flashed at him.
“Really, you should go now.” The kid’s voice betrayed that he was as scared as Zakariya, if not more.
At last, Zakariya got back on his feet and cleared off without glancing back. He never spun off from his escort after that.
CHAPTER 30
The ghetto of the Val Fourré – one of many in Mantes-la-jolie – had everything to become a major hub for narcotics. Waves of poor residents rejected by the system, with no prospects for a better life. A complete abandonment from local authorities. And most decisively, its proximity with the largest opiate consumption center in the country – Paris.
Therefore, Nour Mansouri wasn’t surprised when drugs eventually came into her sons’ lives.
It was by accident that Zakariya became a cocaine receiver at the tender age eleven. As most evenings when their mother was toiling to maintain their strenuous living conditions, the Mansouri siblings were left to their own devices in the family apartment. They were expressly forbidden to get out, and their escort of the day was systematically instructed to see to it that they kept themselves busy in the flat. Nour knew all too well that boredom led kids into all sorts of troubles.
Mustafa was entrusted with the oversight of the brotherhood once the woman from the community left their premises. More often than not, Zakariya would take over responsibility for the siblings’ homework. They all saw it as a concerted effort, a self-evident separation of duties. The younger brother just picked things up quickly. Zakariya figured that he would have to learn what his older brother was studying at some point anyway, and he was solidifying his learnings from previous years by helping his sister.
The unintended consequence was that Zakariya was well in advance of his age group, which did not matter much in the Val Fourré, as his local teachers weren't trained in the detection of gifted children. At best, he was perceived as a disinterested pupil.
While the very act of solving problems, and figuring out concepts beyond his then capabilities brought him an undeniable joy, he was often longing for more action. Inside the ghetto, mothers kept their kids locked up out of fear, and the only ones left outside would be those with absent parents. Even adults were uncomfortable at the sight of that lot. Six, seven, eight-year-old kids with hard and cold look eyes, and often, facial scars that betrayed a stolen childhood.
Still, from the vantage point of his balcony, Zakariya would observe those kids getting the action he was yearning for. So he watched, attentively, the narcotics traffic unfold before his eyes, dealers and their network of foot soldiers getting busy at nightfall. The actors seldom changed, but he felt like no two nights were the same. Without realizing it, he was learning the ropes of the business. He was deconstructing the functioning of the anthill day after day. He would witness the multiple levels of the trade fusing and unmerging, from the wholesalers to the semi-wholesalers to the small dealers. Yet, the purpose of all that agitation somehow still eluded him. Until one evening, as he was studiously going through his brother’s mathematics assignment in their room.
He was slowly grasping the mechanics of first-order equations when the squawk of an im
pact on the patio door pulled him out of focus. Did someone just throw a pebble? No way, we’re too high up… They were on the eighteenth floor; no one could possibly be that strong.
He walked up to the window and peered through it. There was a small package on the floor of the balcony. Adhesive tape had been rolled over it in multiple layers. For some reason, there was a rope tied around it. It looked as if someone had dropped it from above.
He hurried outside and picked up the lost parcel, his curiosity mounting as he sat on the floor of the balcony and untied the entangled package. To his shock, the rope flew straight back up. Someone is pulling it up!
Before he had a chance to open the parcel and take stock of what was happening, he heard a loud knock on his apartment front door. He froze. A second knock. And then he heard a commotion in the living room.
As he rushed out of the bedroom, a voice said, “Here he is! Good catch, man.”
Mustafa, blocking the intruders’ path, had the face of a kid about to do something stupid. The two men in front of him were probably twice his weight but no older than twenty. They looked like they could break someone’s skull with their bare hands. Senegalese, Zakariya thought. Maybe Congolese. What the hell do they want?
"Calm down kid; we don't want you no harm," the tallest of the two said. Zakariya realized he was frowning, with his fists clenched. He loosened up, and the man went on, "In fact, we're here to make a deal with you."
Yasmina, who was standing in the corner, flashed a genuine smile, seemingly eager to hear more. Next to the kitchen counter, Mustafa’s face tightened.
The other man said, “Listen up, we want you to keep this package for us. Don’t open it. Don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it. Put it somewhere safe and leave it there. We’ll pick it up when we need it.”
Bad Blood Empire (Cold Blooded Series Book 2) Page 11
