That’s him, I said, ducking behind the Ronin’s seat as if I were not in disguise. Gray overcoat. Le Cao Boi slammed on the brakes, and I bounced off the back of the Ronin’s seat and landed on my side, with Bon cursing as he, too, was flung about, though he was wise enough to hold steady to the door handle. Regaining his footing, he flung open the sliding door, exposing me, and then jumped onto the street. I sat up and made eye contact with the uncomprehending Mona Lisa, who, as a professional gangster, should really have comprehended. Bon thrust his side against the Mona Lisa, bringing the two of them tightly together in seemingly brotherly or friendly contact, which allowed Bon to jam the muzzle of his P38 into the Mona Lisa’s side without anyone seeing, and in the moment that the Mona Lisa froze, trying to decide whether to run, stay still, or do as Bon told him in French—Allez! Dans le camion!—I leaped out of the van and threw my arm around the Mona Lisa and jabbed my revolver, which had been his revolver, into his other side and propelled him toward the van. He began to yell, but the Ronin, who had slid into the back of the van, seized him by the lapel of his overcoat and pulled him in. Grab his cart, the Ronin said, and while Bon jumped back into the van, I turned around to do exactly that. As I did so, I saw a man in a beige raincoat emerging from a nearby doorway, old and bent over in the shape of a comma, shouting at me. My first instinct upon seeing him was to think, Arab. And what did he see, or whom? Surely not Asian or yellow, for I was disguised. No, what he saw was my universal identity, the burning light of my undisputed self that shone through the lampshade of my skin, embodied in the last word he uttered: Stop, you bastard!
After a half hour’s drive we came to another marginal gray world of warehouses, which was not the belly or even underbelly of Paris, nor its armpit or belly button, but rather the crack between the city’s buttocks, the space that one hardly ever saw and almost never thought about. This damp, musty crack might have been the same soulless neighborhood where the Mona Lisa had kept me captive, but since I never saw that neighborhood in daylight I could not be certain.
Forget you know where this place is, Le Cao Boi said when he parked inside a gray warehouse with neither name nor personality, its exterior matching the pallor of the sky.
The Ronin said, Get him, pointing to the Mona Lisa, arms bound behind his back and a sack over his head.
Bon and I stripped off our disguises, stuffed them back into the garbage bag, and put on our own clothes. Then the four of us marched the Mona Lisa deeper into the recesses of the warehouse, past pallets towering with crates marked COFFEE, to where a couple of dwarfs were emerging from an office, wearing overalls, masks, and goggles.
What are they going to do? I asked.
Repaint the van, said Le Cao Boi. Les Frères Chien are history. They’ll paint it yellow.
At the back of the office was a door that led to a storeroom, and at the back of the storeroom was another door leading to an empty, windowless, cavernous room, suitably chilly for wine and for torture. Shoved by Le Cao Boi, the Mona Lisa sprawled onto a cement floor lit by a single overhead light, a minimalist stage ready for an avant-garde drama by the likes of Samuel Beckett, who was already something of a sadist when it came to torturing his spectators. I had seen Happy Days and Waiting for Godot staged by the theater department of Occidental College, and I had been absolutely flummoxed. What happened? Nothing happened! But if nothing happened, why could I not forget the plays, even now?
The Ronin turned to me, winked, and whispered, We’ll soften him up for you. Then he said, loudly, Take off his hood.
Why was there always a hood, even if it was oftentimes only a sack? How many times had I seen prisoners with their heads cloaked, stumbling along blindly or, as now, shuddering on the ground? After the Mona Lisa was forced to strip, the Ronin and Le Cao Boi took turns with their fists and feet, as well as with chains, the Louisville Slugger, and the occasional bad poem by Le Cao Boi, pausing now and again for beer and snacks. Bon and I leaned against a far wall, squatted, sat on the floor, smoking cigarettes and watching.
You know what I’ll regret? Bon asked.
What? I said.
That I won’t get the chance to do this to the faceless man.
I, always the man with a plan, could not come up with a plan. I put on my Bruno Magli shoes and tried again to think of a plot that could save Man and keep my secret from Bon, but it was distracting to see and hear the Mona Lisa, who groaned, moaned, flopped, rolled, begged, screamed, and sobbed while the Ronin and Le Cao Boi cursed, jeered, laughed, joked, chortled, and snapped some Polaroids of their work. When at last the Mona Lisa was unconscious and I could finally hear myself think, Le Cao Boi wiped the sweat from his brow and the blood from his knuckles and said, All right, your turn.
For what? I said, although I knew for what.
You crazy bastard, he said with a laugh, punching my arm. You could be a little more enthusiastic. You get to have him all to yourself for a little while. A nice little gift from the Boss, huh? He figured you’d want some sweet revenge.
I tried to be a little more enthusiastic, but I didn’t like sweets and was also not keen on torture, more commonly known as interrogation, less commonly known as fun. Let’s have some fun! This is what Claude would say whenever a new prisoner was brought to us. And because I was very good at my job, both as interrogator and spy, I would pretend to have fun, even if my game back then was precarious: attempting to extract as many secrets as possible while inflicting the minimal amount of pain on the prisoner. I thought I had succeeded, until I came face-to-face with the communist agent, as naked then as the Mona Lisa was now. The interrogation room where she had experienced so much fun at the hands and extremities of the three panting policemen, what they called the “movie theater,” was as brightly and badly lit as this room. Was it beyond hope that interrogators might understand the value of mood lighting?
The Boss said you’re a professional, Le Cao Boi said. Like we’re not.
You’re not a professional like he is, Bon said. He was a secret policeman. A master interrogator for the Special Branch! In his tone was pride, in our friendship, in my competence, in our mission to eliminate the threat of communism, which had somehow become entangled in this other project of gangsterism. Still, if Bon was proud of me, it might only be because I had never told him about the interrogation of the communist agent and, of course, had never told him that I myself was, or had been, the one thing he could never forgive: a communist. But did one ever cease being communist, any more than one ever ceased being Catholic?
I’m a professional, I said. Like a doctor.
If you’re a doctor, what’s your specialty? said Le Cao Boi.
Proctology, I said, which made Le Cao Boi, the Ronin, and Bon grimace a little, further evidence that as an interrogator, I always knew where to put my fingers, this time pressing a rhetorical thumb between their nether cheeks. That means I like doing my work in privacy, I added.
Take your time. The Ronin inspected a chipped fingernail. We’re in no rush. But it would be best to get your revenge before the Boss gets here.
When’s that?
Le Cao Boi shrugged. Whenever he feels like it.
What do you want from him? Bon said, nodding at the Mona Lisa.
Anything. And everything. He killed one of ours.
Which meant, as everyone knew, that the Mona Lisa must eventually die.
I was left alone with the Mona Lisa, except for one of the dwarfs coming an hour later with the interrogation materials that I requested: a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey, two bottles of water (one sparkling and one still), and the Mona Lisa’s grocery cart. This dwarf was named Biggie, for he was the tallest of the seven, which was not saying much. Do you know how far I had to go to get you a bottle of whiskey? he said. What’s a professional doing with a bottle of whiskey, anyway?
You don’t know anything about the work of professionals, I said, waving him
away.
Assured of no further interruptions except from my ghosts, I turned to two of my favorite leisure activities, drinking (#3) and reading (#2). Since seeing the eschatological muscle with his copy of Candide, I had picked up a pocket version of my own. I had read it at the lycée and enjoyed its human comedy greatly back then and even more so now. My sponge of a professor had actually dripped some lukewarm wisdom on my brow, for what he had once proclaimed to our class was true, that books meant something different when we returned to them later, leavened by life. Take this mordant passage, for example, which left me both cringing and chuckling:
“I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley—in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered—or simply to sit here and do nothing?”
“That,” said Candide, “is a big question.”
Big indeed! And even bigger than Voltaire’s question—but not as big as, presumably, the inexhaustible Negro pirates in his imagination—was the problem I sometimes had in hating the French. They were colonizing bastards, but they had given us words like this, even if these words might not be intended for a colonized bastard like me, only half French and half Vietnamese, a simple math problem that added up to inhuman, all too inhuman.
The Mona Lisa groaned. He was at last conscious, if groggy, lying on the floor, shaking his head and drooling a little, a patient awakening from being etherized on a table. I hauled him to a corner and propped him up. He huddled there, slivers of white eyeballs moving behind his eyelids.
How about a drink? This question, when addressed to me, always made me a little more cheerful. I sat on the cold floor next to him and poured a glass of whiskey. How about two?
I don’t drink, he muttered.
Men who did not drink always shocked me a little, but I tried not to be judgmental, even if he was missing out on one of humanity’s greatest inventions. I offered him water instead, and this time he agreed. I held his hand steady as he lifted the glass, and when I offered him a cigarette, he did not refuse. The water and the smoke restored him a little, and his eyelids opened a little wider.
Happy now? he muttered. You got me.
I haven’t been happy for a long time. You see, I’m a man with two minds—
Shut up.
—and I know how you feel right now. It’s my one talent—
Shut up.
—and I have literally been where you are, in case you’ve forgotten. But what you did to me was not the first time those things have been done to me. And I have done many things to many people, so I know what it feels like to be the one having fun.
Shut up.
Right now there are two of you. One is sitting here telling me to shut up. The other is somewhere up on the ceiling, watching our little play. You have to crack the egg to separate the white from the yolk, and you have been cracked. I am talking to the yolk. The white part of you is up there, a transparent ectoplasm, a substance with the slipperiness of semen—
Shut up.
You may not understand me, but you also do understand me. Don’t you?
Why don’t you just get it over and done with? he muttered.
Behind him my quintet of ghosts hummed, Get it over with, but I ignored them and him. I said, I’m not going to do to you what you did to me. As I spoke, I gazed at the Mona Lisa the same way, I am sure, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre looked at the world, with intense sympathy for the millions who thronged to see her. If I looked at someone long enough, if I listened to him long enough, I could slip his face onto one of mine and observe the world through his eyes. The goal, when I was a spy, was to reap information, which cadres above me used to undermine the cause of my subject. When I was an interrogator, questioning prisoners who did know that I was secretly on their side, my purpose differed. If I could get my subject to speak, perhaps I could save him from the torturers. If I could get my subject to stop resisting, then I could save him from himself.
Are you just going to sit there looking at me? he muttered. Say something.
Instead I silently offered him more water and cigarettes, two of the building blocks of life. We drank a little water and we smoked a lot, which is the right proportion, before he said, You think you’re so smart, don’t you? Like some kind of Tintin? A do-gooder? Well, I don’t give a fuck about Tintin. He was just another colonizer.
Had he just insulted Tintin, boy reporter, amateur detective, intrepid hero? As a fan ever since I was a lycéen, I was offended. But I contained my offense and spoke of the more serious issue: I am not a colonizer! I am colonized, just like you.
Were you for the French or against the French?
The Boss believed that I was for the French, so, caught as always in the devices of my own making, I said, For the French.
He laughed again. Of course. Your father was a Frenchman.
I hate my father, I said, and it felt good to say this one true sentence, as clean as a bone.
The Mona Lisa studied me the way a student examines a calculus textbook, with great reluctance and some distaste. You should never hate your father, he said at last. Even if he is an asshole. We come from the wombs of our mothers and the assholes of our fathers.
He had started to talk, which is what every real interrogator who is not simply a torturer wants from his subject. Hungry? I said.
His hunger won out over his pride, and he nodded. Digging into his grocery cart, I uncovered clues to his existence: Orangina, a jar of Nutella, paper napkins, grated carrots, a carton of eggs, and a bag of factory-made croissants, which struck me as sad or criminal or both in this land. There were also soft, aging bananas, and I peeled one and handed it to him. But his hands, having been stomped on by the Ronin and Le Cao Boi, could not grasp the banana, so I held it for him. He ate slowly. One bite, two bites, then on the third, and with the banana half gone, a half-digested memory rose from my bottomless depths, one that I had not chewed on in years, perhaps decades, of my mother feeding me a banana for breakfast as I read, sitting on a stool with a book on my lap while the banana hovered by my cheek, held by her hand. My mother, who could not read except very slowly and out loud—this mother never once doubted that I should learn to read and to read all the time. You were born to read, she told me more than once. And so I read, and read, and read, and up until now, I had not admitted to myself what my mother had told me the one time I asked where those books came from—my father’s personal library.
Finished with the creamy white flesh, the Mona Lisa leaned back, leaving me with the banana’s leopard hide, yellow and spotted with black dots. I flung the slippery hide into a far corner, where I would make Biggie clean it up later. Do they grow bananas in Algeria? I asked. Keep the subject talking, make him feel comfortable, conversation being the best and most enduring form of seduction.
The Mona Lisa grunted and said, I don’t know. I’ve only been to Algeria a couple of times, when I was young and my parents thought I should know something about it.
Having been born there, I said.
I wasn’t born there! I was born here. I’m French . . . officially.
And unofficially?
In Algeria, they call me French. But here, sometimes people say I’m Algerian. Sometimes they say I’m Arab. When I’m really lucky, I’m a dirty Arab.
Hello, you dirty Arab. I’m the Crazy Bastard.
He smiled with benevolence. Actually, you’re Le Chinois.
Oh, yeah? You’re— I stopped. I was ashamed of not having known any Algerians or Arabs or Muslims or North Africans before coming to Paris. I’m sorry, I said with utter sincerity. But I don’t know any racial slurs for you.
None? That’s a first. Okay . . . try bougnoule.
What?
Com
e on. Bougnoule! Don’t be shy.
Bougnoule!
Perfect!
A glow of success lit my insides, a warmth as comforting as that induced by a highly refined whiskey, vodka, brandy, or cognac. My French was getting better!
Now say sale bougnoule, but with more force. Put a little spit in it.
Sale bougnoule!
Even better! You sound just like a Frenchman. Or Frenchwoman. Or even a French child. Just don’t ever call me an arabe de service. I’ll kill you.
The Committed Page 24
