Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  “I doubt it will surprise you to hear that it’s military issue and not for sale.”

  Kasim-Pierre handed me back the Uzi and regarded me with the look of a trader in a camel-souk. “Oh yes it is,” he said. “And many more like it, and other such things also, or you would not have shown it to me. For these, we will pay in more than money or drugs or maidenheads. For these we will pay in blood if need be. For these to serve our cause, we will serve the cause of your Caliphate whatever it may be. Do we have a deal, brother?”

  “I doubt you will be surprised to hear that I have no authority to make policy like that on my own. But I will convey your offer to my superiors with a favorable recommendation, for whatever that may be worth.”

  “You’ll inform your superiors, will you?” Kasim-Pierre said, eyeing me dubiously. “Why do I not like the sound of that? After all, I have no way of knowing if you are not something else…Sûreté, French military intelligence.… What proof can you give me that you are what you claim to be?”

  “If you have a Koran, I would be willing to swear it with my hand upon the Holy Book,” I told him. “If not, would not an oath on the name of Allah make do?”

  He regarded me as if I were a very dead fish in a fly-ridden souk. “A French Catholic flic, if that is what you are, would swear a lie on the Koran without the slightest hesitation and without fearing for a moment for the state of his soul.”

  “That is the truth,” I admitted. “What then must I do to prove myself?”

  Kasim-Pierre shrugged. “To tell you the truth, right now, I have no idea. But I’m the caid, am I not? I’ll figure something out. You’ll be contacted when I do.”

  * * * *

  “Our handlers are not about to give weaponry of any kind to a nameless group without even knowing what they are about, or if they are about anything but graduating from low-grade theft and petty pillaging to armed bank robbery,” Ali told me. “Though things being what they are not, I suppose you never know. Certainly I don’t.”

  “But what is the Caliphate really about here?”

  Ali gave one of his endless Gallic shrugs. “We are dealing with fantasy here, my young friend. Our glorious Caliphate Council sincerely believes that its ultimate goal is to convert the entire world to Islam and extend the beneficent rule of its own righteous self to every living human being on Earth. But that is a hashish dream. Between that dream and its realization stands, among lesser obstacles, America. The military hegemon of the planet. Pakistan may have given the Caliphate its Islamic nuclear arsenal, but it is nothing compared to what the United States commands. Nor can the Great Satan be defeated in conventional warfare, for their weaponry is anything but conventional.”

  “Like this gun?” I said.

  We were sitting in my living room drinking cognac and watching a glorious sunset painting the city below us golden, made all the more so by the smog-layer through which it was descending, turning the scattered clouds mauve and purple. I was cradling the mini-Uzi on my lap as if it were Aladdin’s lamp confining the magic of a djin; Kasim-Pierre certainly thought so.

  “He was willing to trade a virgin sister for it, had I demanded seventy-two virgins, I believe he would have done his best to comply.”

  I picked up the Uzi one-handed and aimed it at the sun as if preparing to fire it. It was heavy enough to make my hand tremble slightly but I could feel the vibration of the steady-cam mechanism canceling the vibrations out and keeping the barrel as steadily aimed as if held by a statue of stone.

  “Put that thing down!” Ali cried. “Point it at something for ten seconds and some laser or GPS system locks on. Pull the trigger lightly and it fires one fleshette and the slide piston dampens the recoil to nothing. Hold it down and it fires a stream of fleshettes with the same accuracy. And it is only Israeli technology. To the gun-mad Americans, it is something for the gun-racks of their rednecks’ pick-up trucks. That is what the Caliphate would be up against on even a low-level field of battle.”

  “Then why have you given me such a thing?”

  “For the magic,” Ali told me, “not to use it. And certainly not to put an arsenal of the things in the hands of this Kasim-Pierre and his gang. To tantalize them. To give you the power. As the Freudians would have it, it is your prick, the prick of the Caliphate, bigger than anything they can holds in their hands. And in the eyes of these young beur phallocrats, it can make you the cock of the walk, as it were.”

  “I ask again, why are we doing this?”

  One more exasperating Gallic shrug. “Perhaps the Caliphate is trying to do much what these French beurs are trying to do. They feel themselves a helpless minority confronting a French system they have no hope of replacing with rule of their own, the Caliphate has no hope of conquering the Great Satan or even only his little Christian European imps. Neither has the faintest idea of what to do, so they try to strengthen themselves somehow while awaiting they really know not what.”

  “Where is the sense in that?”

  “Look not for sense where there is none, my young friend,” Ali told me. “This is magical thinking. The Caliphate believes in such magic, and though they might deny it, I believe that somewhere buried deep within them, your beurs believe it too. And after all, it worked once, did it not?”

  I goggled at him in incomprehension.

  “The famous victory of 9/11. A few jihadis transformed the most admired nation in the world into the most hated, the most dangerous model of democracy, the arch-enemy of Koranic Islam rule, into what is considered by the world a paranoiac police state, the face of the so-called City on the Hill into that of the Great Satan. Not bad for a single thunderbolt from the Holy Warriors of Allah, Osama.”

  I drained the rest of my cognac to stabilize the trembling grip of my mind on these revelations to he who had been a boy who knew nothing of the world but what he learned in the madrass and the contraband fiction of the enemy what now seemed an eternity ago.

  It did not really help.

  “What am I to do now, then?” I asked plaintively, in an effort to bring things down to a pragmatic matter which I could hope to comprehend.

  “Infiltrate this group,” Ali told me. “Find out what it is about. Seek to rise within it.”

  “And then?”

  Another Gallic shrug, but then he spoke as a Muslim. “Await further orders from the Caliphate as the Caliphate awaits the Word of Allah, as in the end, do we all, do we not? May it come before the sun burns out, or at least before all the oil is gone.”

  * * * *

  The summons from Kasim-Pierre was not long in coming. But it came from Michelle, and cryptically, for the Sûreté could tap any land-line it chose, and cell phone security was even worse.

  “Meet me at ten tonight at the Metro station where you first entered Paris, I promise you a real hot time, lover.”

  The St. Michel Metro station was a vast underground maze with many exits, and there seemed to be more than one for Notre Dame. I followed the signs as best I could, but exited northwest of the cathedral, with the vast square, all but empty now except for a few pedestrians scurrying across it, between me and the rendezvous point. The central police station for all of Paris stood across a street close by where I came out, which did not seem like a good omen.

  I hurried across the square past Notre Dame to the station exit on the quay where I had first emerged onto the surface of Paris. There were five men with back-packs lurking about suspiciously and therefore nervously. One of them was Kasim-Pierre. The others were Arabic-looking men, all well under thirty, dressed up in jackets proclaiming their loyalty to various sports teams in English, with cameras slung conspicuously about them, in a ludicrous attempt to disguise themselves as foreign tourists. Michelle was not among them.

  “You’re late, but at least you’re here,” Kasim-Pierre growled at me, handing me a dark blue ski-hood. “Don’t put this on until we’re
inside and I put on mine. Then draw that Jew gun of yours, wave it around, but don’t use it unless you absolutely have to. We don’t want the sound of gunfire drawing the flics. Allez!”

  I followed Kasim-Pierre as he and his four henchman ambled towards the entrance to the cathedral, snapping pictures with their cameras in the darkness like particularly stupid tourists. There was no guard by the heavy and open door, beyond which was a partition forming the cross-bar of a T, the arms being short passageways into the interior. We took the one to the right.

  I had never been inside a Christian church before. The vaulted stonework ceiling towered above me into shadows, forming a high cavern that stretched away to a richly decorated and draped wooden altar at the far end. Colorful stained glass windows and little alcoves lined the walls, dimly visible in the wan night lighting. There was a huge pipe organ for music with which, I had heard, the Christians polluted the purity of their prayers. Between the entrance and the altar were rows of wooden benches as if in a movie theater in some primitive country, where a few people huddled in devotion, or perhaps merely for shelter, for by the look of them, they were mostly derelicts.

  Though this was a temple of the infidels and reeked of apostasy and blasphemy, I had the irrational feeling that I was indeed in a holy place, or at least it invoked in me the notion that I should pay it the respect one must upon entering a mosque, but, looking around, I saw no provision for performing the ablution except for an entirely inadequate washbasin on a stone pedestal, and none for storing removed shoes. What I did see immediately by the entrance, of all blasphemous things, was a closed kiosk purveying cheap souvenirs. The effect was deeply and contradictorily disturbing.

  But there was no time for reflection, as Kasim-Pierre donned his ski-hood and drew a small pistol, the others followed suit, and I immediately masked myself too, though with a moment’s hesitation in drawing my mini-Uzi in public for the first time, and in a house of worship, however misguided.

  And then my companions were screaming “Allahu Akbar!” waving their weapons with their unclean left hands, tossing what I wrongly assumed were grenades with their right in all directions, and dashing down the central aisle towards the altar.

  But they were not explosive grenades, they were programmed graffiti bombs such as small boys might purchase anywhere to plaster walls with pictures of sports stars, cartoon characters, or obscene slogans. These, however, splattered green paint on the walls, the alcoves, the floor, the stained glass windows, spelling out “Allahu Akbar” in cursive Arabic and the Roman alphabet.

  The people on the benches arose and fled screaming every which way before us as we howled down the aisle toward the altar waving our guns and shouting, nor did I refrain from doing so myself, lost in the ecstasy of my own weapon’s power reflected on terrified faces, experiencing for the first time in my life the thoughtless glory of the jihadi in action.

  As we approached the altar itself a gray-haired priest in his satanic black robes emerged from somewhere as if to guard it with his body, brandishing not a pistol, but a silver cross depending from a chain around his neck.

  “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be gone from this House of God!” he shouted in a frail quavering voice.

  I found myself transfixed by this display of bravery, but nevertheless found myself pointing my gun at him threateningly, while the others, entirely indifferent to this apparition, tossed more graffiti bombs at the altar, at the great cross behind it, the pews and the walls beyond with their stained-glass images, splattering praise of Allah everywhere in wet green paint.

  And then, with my finger vibrating on the trigger, I felt the vibration of the Uzi’s targeting mechanism locking on and saw the steady-cam adjusting the barrel to my minute tremors. The priest became an old man, bent over and sobbing in despair, and I stood there numbly praying to Allah for I knew not what.

  It seemed to last an eternity, but it was only a brief moment, and then Kasim-Pierre and his henchmen were dashing back up the aisle to the entrance become the exit and I with them.

  As we left, Kasim-Pierre extracted a green plastic sack of something with white lettering on it and tossed it onto a wooden box close by the stone wash-basin.

  We dashed out of the cathedral towards the Metro station, tossing away our ski-hoods, but we did not enter when we reached it. Instead, one of the men lit a petrol bomb, and flipped it bouncing down the stairs as we ran away from the quay past a gated park, Kasim-Pierre and his men slipping off their back-packs, doffing their sports jackets, tossing them into the gutter.

  As soon as this had been accomplished, Kasim-Pierre slowed to an innocent walk, and we all did likewise, with black smoking billowing up behind us and the sound of approaching sirens in our ears.

  “What was that green sack you threw?” I demanded of Kasim-Pierre.

  He laughed. “A donation of five hundred euros for the poor box in the name of Allah, the Beneficent,” he told me. “To make them think about it.”

  To think about what, I could not imagine, nor could I believe that he truly did either.

  We proceeded up a side street to a supermarket delivery van obviously stolen for the purpose. The rest of us piled into the back amidst the cartons and debris, while Kasim-Pierre drove off, through a maze of narrow one-way streets, past a half-crowded cafe, and onto the Boulevard St. Germaine, a main thoroughfare even at this hour, obeying the speed limit, stopping at red lights, for perhaps a dozen blocks, and then parking it beside a large vaguely Arabic-modern edifice with a large concrete courtyard identifying itself, ironically or not, as the “Monde Arabe.”

  “Disperse!” Kasim-Pierre ordered, and only after we had exited the van did we exchange grins and high-handslaps before disappearing along our separate random ways into the safety of the anonymous night.

  CHAPTER 9

  I awoke for the dawn prayer the next morning and then turned on the television to watch the news channels. Ali appeared by nine o’clock with croissants and a great pile of newspapers and web channel print-outs.

  The news was full of the story of the “Notre Dame Desecration.” The press of the right and the center expressed its outrage, as did the conventional left. Even the radical left was constrained to do likewise, while muttering the usual platitudes about the danger and tragedy of “disaffected Arab youth.” The pathetic little Arabic press did the same, reversing the emphasis. The Imam of the Grand Mosque and all the little mullahs denounced it.

  Strangely enough there was no mention anywhere of Kasim-Pierre’s five hundred euro donation to the Catholic poor in the name of Allah.

  “This is France,” Ali told me, “where a president kept a mistress by whom he had a bastard daughter, and everyone knew about it, but there was not one word in the press until they appeared at his funeral. If a tree falls in the Tuilleries Gardens and it is not reported, officially it never happened.”

  I shook my head in befuddlement, and not only at this seamless omission. “What purpose could such an action hope to achieve?” I asked him.

  Ali shrugged. “You’ll have to ask your friend Kasim-Pierre,” he said. “But somehow I doubt he’ll be able to give you a coherent answer either.”

  Two day later I learned that he was right.

  This time it was Kasim-Pierre himself who called me, with an innocent invitation to a “party.” This took place the next night in a fairly large but dilapidated apartment in the Barbès-Rochechouart quartier furnished with couches and chairs that looked as if they had been salvaged from the street and ramshackle plastic-topped tables. There were posters of Osama bin Laden and beur luminaries I did not recognize on the paint-peeling walls and piles of newspapers and print-outs headlining the “Notre Dame Desecration.”

  There were about twenty people present when I arrived, five of them women, including Michelle, none of whom wore burkahs, cases of beer, bottles of whiskey, vodka, wine, and araq. Kasim-Pie
rre himself greeted me at the door, and when I stepped inside, there was an immediate silence.

  “This is Osama, our brother from the Caliphate, the man with the Israeli cannon,” he proclaimed, and the silence broke. Hard-looking men, none over thirty, converged on me, my palms were slapped, I was handed a plastic cup of whiskey, someone thrust a kif-laden cigarette into my mouth, names were offered which I forgot in the crush; I was somehow the hero of the hour.

  Plied with drink and kif, surrounded by welcoming new-found comrades in arms, questioned about the aid that would be forthcoming from the Caliphate, I soon became shamefully staggeringly and swaggeringly intoxicated, reeling about, drinking whatever was placed in my hand, smoking whatever was put in my mouth, boasting about what I remember not, the cock of the walk, as Ali had put it.

  I had never experienced such a glorious state in all my life. I had never been a center of attention. I had never felt such a sense of my own manhood. Indeed I had never truly felt myself completely a man before at all.

  Nor had I ever been intoxicated in this manner; physically reeling though I might be, my soul seemed to soar above my body into the glorified mist of the increasingly smoke-filled apartment, buoyed aloft by the swirling rhythms, snarling guitars and keening voices, of the Rai music that had begun to play when I had not been listening.

  Everyone else seemed to have achieved the same state of rapture, moving to the music if not dancing, eyes reddening, tongues loosening, so that I felt myself a veritable djin in a company of dervishes.

  Only once, and only for a moment, was I caught short by the fleeting sight of Michelle and Kasim-Pierre standing together side by side and regarding me coolly and calculatingly.

  At length the party began to die down towards a fatigued dawn, the volume of the music lowered, most of the revelers collapsed onto the couches, the chairs, or the floor, the drink flowed less freely, fewer kif cigarettes were passed and those puffed at lightly, and someone produced a pistol, and then half the men present were comparing weapons.