The Mona Lisa trembled with laughter, and a wave of tenderness for him washed over the cold sands of my heart. Have some of this, I said, plucking a dose of the remedy from my pocket. How the hell did it get there? Hadn’t I flushed it all away? How did it just keep magically reappearing in my pockets? A small, plastic-wrapped white musket ball of powder. You’ll feel better, I said. Or you’ll feel nothing, which, in your situation, is the same thing.
He stared at the white powder for a while, hesitating, before he finally nodded. The remedy was as versatile as a character actor. It could be rubbed onto the skin or the gums, fired into the veins, or vacuumed through the nose. I poured four white stripes of the powder onto a box of crackers from his cart. Then I rolled a tube from a ten-franc note and held it for him so he could inhale the first line. Then the second. Wow, I said. Then the third. When he snorted the fourth, I said, You’re a natural.
What? He looked up, sniffing. You want some?
For a guy who doesn’t drink, you sucked that right up.
What do the Americans say? Oh, yes. It’s good shit. I can barely feel a thing.
My stash of the remedy exhausted, I settled for a hashish cigarette, of which the Mona Lisa also partook. How did a nice boy like you end up doing this? I said through the smoke commingling from our lungs, a question that made him laugh again.
Ask my brother, he said. The one whose place you stole.
It’s not like he left a note saying he owned his network.
True. Saïd’s crazy, just like you. Or just crazy in his own way.
So where is he? In an asylum?
Afghanistan. Afghanistan! I hadn’t even heard of it before he decided to go. He got it in his head that he wanted to fight the Soviets. What does that have to do with us? Who cares about communism? You know what he said? It’s not about communism. It’s about Islam. The Soviets are killing our brothers. Brothers? I said. Fellow Muslims, he said. This is why he’s crazy. He didn’t care about Islam when we were growing up. He didn’t care about Islam even three years ago. He was just like me and you, stealing things, selling drugs. Having fun! The least he could do was give me his network, but you know what he said? I don’t want to encourage you.
How did you feel about that? I said.
I wanted to punch him in the face.
As someone whom many people wanted to punch in the face, or in both faces, I could sympathize with Saïd. Oh, that damned emotion again! Crazy Saïd. But what else should we call someone unfortunate enough as to believe in God? Or was it Allah? Or Muhammad? I knew as much about Islam as I did about Arabs. But Islam was a religion like Catholicism was a religion, and all religions were built on quicksand. They needed people who needed to believe in something. I was one of those people, until I was forced to believe in nothing, which, come to think of it, is also what religion is about.
Maybe you should forgive him, I said.
Forgive him?
Just like I forgive you, I said, my intonation priestly.
You forgive me? He twitched. For what?
I, who was not easily shocked, was shocked. Torturing me, I said, sputtering. Forcing me to play Russian roulette! Did you forget?
He laughed and laughed. If laughter was the best medicine, then I must be a pretty good proctologist. You should have seen your face, he said. Hilarious! Then he stopped laughing and said, I don’t need your forgiveness.
You don’t need to ask for forgiveness for me to forgive you, I said.
I don’t want your forgiveness! he shouted. Fuck you and your forgiveness!
You don’t have to want my forgiveness. I am just giving it to you.
The Mona Lisa appeared confused, as did my ghosts, who were standing behind him. They expected an act of medieval revenge, which was actually not so medieval, given how often our oh-so-civilized colonizers had carried out centuries-old policies of punishment and torture on us until, I don’t know, a few years ago, just as we self-righteously gutted our enemies while beating our breasts with patriotic pride. But if I had surprised the Mona Lisa and my ghosts, I had also surprised myself, which is always either the best or the worst kind of surprise. I had not intended to forgive him, even if I had not been sure what I would do. I had just wanted to see him, man-to-man, face-to-face, crotch-to-crotch, to find out. The reason I can forgive you, I said, my voice soaring on the winds of my own self-importance, is because what you did to me, I have done to others. I am no better than you and possibly far, far worse.
I’m not sorry, the Mona Lisa said. Hell, I’d do it again, you bastard.
And I would forgive you again, I said.
At one time, which is to say for most of my life, I would have threatened eye-gouging and kneecapping on anyone who called me a bastard. Like God, who should not be called by His name, I should not be called “bastard.” Every time I was called bastard, my face flushed, my heartrate accelerated, my fists clenched, my throat constricted, and the lymph nodes of rage flooded my bloodstream. But I was not upset at this moment. What had happened? I could see me from his point of view. Inhabiting his heart as well as his brain, being the sympathizer par excellence, I knew he spoke my true name, the serial number of my being engraved in every structure of my cell by whatever hand had made me. And yet he was a bastard, too, at least in the moral sense. We sat just a few feet from each other, with me recognizing our common humanity, or, perhaps more likely, inhumanity. And what was the difference? To say that we were all human was merely sentimental, but to say that we were all inhuman was truth. In what era have we humans never been bastards?
You’re a strange bastard, he muttered.
I have to be if I want to forgive the unforgivable.
The Mona Lisa looked confused. That’s impossible.
Revolutions are always about making the impossible possible, I said. And I am a revolutionary who has found his revolution.
You’re an idiot who’s crazy.
That could also be true.
Part Four
Vous
CHAPTER 16
You know what you know.
You know what you do not know.
But what do you not know that you do not know?
And what do you already know that you refuse to know?
These were the principles and questions that Claude, the master, drilled into me, his willing apprentice, for months and years while I was a secret policeman for the Special Branch, stepchild of the Central Intelligence Agency, fostered in accordance with the most advanced, state-of-the-art policing methods of the United States of America, delivered to my country with many strings attached by the unlikely crew cut technocrats of the obscure Michigan State University. We did not know at the time that Michigan State University was the second-best university of a mid-tier state. The only American universities we might have heard of were Harvard and maybe Yale or Stanford, so we chalked up not having heard of Michigan State University to our ignorance. Before coming to the United States as a foreign student, the only thing I even knew about Michigan was that it was a favorite place to spend summers for the young Ernest Hemingway, who, Claude said, would surely have gone to Vietnam during the war years to test his manhood and his writing skills, if he had not already given himself the final test with a shotgun.
Only a real goddamn man can die that way, Claude said when he gifted me a copy of Men without Women on my twenty-fifth birthday, my first birthday present ever, unless you count my birth, which was and always would be the greatest birthday gift ever, given to me by the only person who could give it, my mother. Your first birthday present ever? Claude said, astonished. I told him that I had never even had a birthday party, at least one I could remember, since my people—the Vietnamese ones, not the French—did not celebrate birthdays except for the first and the eightieth. Turning one was significant, given high child mortality rates, and attaining eighty was also a landmark, given the many color
ful ways of dying in a poor, rural, chaotic, and unjust (but still beautiful) land like mine.
Live and let live, said Claude, giving me the present, wrapped in newspaper. This is my favorite Hemingway, he went on as I took a seat in his slightly sweltering apartment in the Eden, the CIA’s Saigon residence of choice. Hemingway was called the greatest writer of the greatest country of the greatest century in human history, Claude said. Ergo the greatest writer of all.
He poured me two fingers of Jack Daniel’s and I was grateful that his fingers were substantially thicker than mine.
Lesser men would just use a pistol with a short barrel, Claude said, raising his glass with the reverence of my father raising his chalice before his congregation. But Papa Hemingway chose a shotgun. Blam!
May we all be so brave in the end, Claude later told all of his students, of whom only I had even heard of Hemingway, and that was only because I had read The Sun Also Rises in Professor Hammer’s class on the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation at Occidental College. I wonder, Claude mused before our befuddled class, if Papa Hemingway knew himself. Truly knew himself. Because your job as interrogators is to know yourself so that you can persuade your subjects to know themselves. I’m speaking of true interrogators, boys. Not torturers. You’re not torturers. Anybody can be a torturer, even though that is also a kind of art, the way pornography can be a kind of art.
Claude’s use of literary criticism to illustrate interrogation techniques sometimes confused my fellow students, but he came from a rarefied line of red-blooded Americans who were both patriotic and patrician. Like me, he had gone to a boarding school, the super-elite Phillips Exeter Academy of New England. Here he read the classics, rowed crew, and prepped to become a shock trooper of American exceptionalism, which is how Americans delicately refer to “American imperialism,” a phrase that one must never say to Americans, who sincerely believe, as all imperialists do, that they have taken over the world for its own good, as if imperialism were a kind of penicillin (for the natives), with power, profit, and pleasure merely being surprising side effects (for the doctors). Like me, Claude believed in the virtues of art and literature, and did not find it at all contradictory that a person of cultural refinement could also be a warrior. Like the Greeks, he said. The body and what you do with it is an art, too.
So I practiced the art I learned from Claude on the Mona Lisa’s body—and mind—in the warehouse for the next two weeks, as did Bon, the Ronin, and Le Cao Boi, and it gradually became clear that for the Ronin and Le Cao Boi, this interrogation was art for art’s sake. Bon regarded interrogation as exercise, something that may or may not be pleasant but that must be done efficiently and relatively quickly. But the Ronin and Le Cao Boi were not efficient, sauntering in once every day or two to enjoy themselves, in no rush to get to their goal of finding out where the rest of the Mona Lisa’s comrades were hiding so the Boss could liquidate his competition. As for the Boss, he visited just once to inspect the progress. He examined the Mona Lisa’s huddled, naked, bruised body, which appeared to satisfy him, but he was not impressed by the information that I had extracted and recorded into a notebook, such as the hometown of the Mona Lisa’s parents (Sour El-Ghozlane), his academic performance (mediocre), his preferred hobby (building model airplanes), his favorite food (doner kebabs), the fate of one of his uncles (heaved into the Seine by gendarmes along with a few dozen other Algerians, since pigs are pigs no matter their nationality), his political views (somewhere between apathy and anarchism), or his motivations for becoming a gangster. Like me, he had father issues. But I don’t hate my father, the Mona Lisa said. If he beat me and my brothers, it was only because the French beat him first. Or maybe not only. Maybe he really is just an asshole and the French only made it worse. Who knows? One of my other uncles fought against the French in Algeria. The paratroopers took him away and my father—he was just a teenager then—had to go pick up what was left of his brother for burial. That will fuck you up. Then you fuck up your children and your children will fuck up their children and so on.
If you’re so aware of being fucked up, I said, you could try to stop.
Try? I tried. I didn’t do so bad in school. I knew how to put on a tie and go for a job interview. I can speak fluent French. I was born here. But I could hear how their voices over the phone changed or see the look on their faces when they said my name, if I got that far. Moussa. That’s not a French name, they would say, like they gave me the interview just to tell me that to my face. All I had to do was change my name. I’ll admit, I tried on some different names. Gaspard. Maxime. Charles. They didn’t fit. Didn’t feel right. And I thought, I went to your schools, which are my schools. I learned your language, which is my language. I don’t feel Arab at all, except when people call me an Arab. And that’s not enough? Now I have to change my name, which my parents gave me? And I knew this would not be the end. They would never stop. They wouldn’t be happy until I married a woman who looked like them, gave them children who looked more like them than like me, made friends only with them. They wanted my soul. I wasn’t going to give it to them. Either I could be one hundred percent French or I could be just a dirty Arab, so instead I decided to be one hundred percent gangster.
I recorded this dialogue in the notebook, which the Boss skimmed before hurling it into my chest. Why am I paying you for this shit? His favorite television shows and musicians? His ideal woman? What he wants to do with his life? Are you writing his biography? Who gives a fuck?
He paused, glowering at me, and I submissively lowered my eyes as we both waited for the appropriate silence to pass in response to his rhetorical question.
Get this done by next Saturday, the Boss finally said. Fantasia is that evening and there will be a very special party the night before for BFD and many other VIPs. He enjoyed his visit to Heaven. A lot. He’s already been back a couple of times. If he liked Heaven—
He’s going to love what we’ve lined up for him, the Ronin said with a laugh.
What’s lined up? I asked.
You’ll see. You’re part of the show. We need everyone we can get. Be there at six. Show starts at nine, the Boss said. He gave me an address on the deluxe avenue Hoche, not far from where one of my clients lived, a loquacious lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions. As for this guy, if you can’t finish this job, then I’ll finish it, said the Boss, kicking the Mona Lisa in the ribs. The Mona Lisa screamed theatrically, knowing that if he did not make it look good, the Boss would kick him again, and harder. Then the Boss left with Bon, who said, by way of farewell, When are you coming over for dinner with Loan? I made an excuse, about how this interrogation of the Mona Lisa was taking up all my time, when the truth was that seeing Bon with another woman made me uncomfortable.
Maybe even jealous? my ghosts asked with a collective snicker.
Shut up, I said.
I didn’t say anything, the Mona Lisa mumbled from the floor.
I was alone again in the cell with him, while outside in the warehouse two dwarfs guarded the coffee, which, unlike the hashish, did not whisper. It did not need to speak at all. The truly powerful let others speak for them.
What was your boss talking about? the Mona Lisa mumbled from the floor.
You have a week left, I said, which meant I also had a week left before Bon faced Man, if Man attended Fantasia, which he would, because Fantasia was oxygen for our people. Everyone needed oxygen, no matter his or her age, occupation, or belief. For one night we would put aside our differences, pro- or anticommunism, and unify in our deep love of song, dance, and lowbrow comedy, the lower the better. On the one hand, I could not wait to see Lana. On the other hand, I wanted to indefinitely postpone seeing Bon’s gun in his hand, pointed at the faceless man haunting his dreams. Meanwhile I did not know how to extricate myself from this situation with the Mona Lisa, who had resisted all my entreaties and persuasions. Perhaps I had not exhausted all the tricks that Claude taught
me and those I had invented on my own. Or perhaps I was tired of knowing and did not want to break the Mona Lisa because I did not want to know what he knew. Or perhaps I already knew the most important thing the Mona Lisa knew, this man who had said, more than once, sometimes with resignation and sometimes with defiance, I’d rather die.
I knew that I had lived in Paris for too long and had become too assimilated when I arrived at the address on avenue Hoche at exactly six in the evening on Friday night. Punctuality is not a trait of my fun-loving people, who have a more flexible notion of time than the French. For my people, the elegant edifice that confronted me could be an hour from the Mona Lisa’s apartment or three hours, depending on their mood. The marble-clad lobby with its brass-accented double doors, mirrored walls, and crystal chandelier suggested that any one of this property’s inhabitants was likely worth more than the Mona Lisa’s dwelling and all its tenants combined. I saw myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, and my reflection reminded me that I was now thirty-seven years old by the Western method. By Vietnamese custom, I was thirty-eight, taking into account my nine-month lease of my mother’s womb. And why not take those months into account? I had been warm and fed in the best kind of sensory deprivation tank in the world, versus the worst kind, the aquaria depriving prisoners of all light, sound, and sensation, reducing them to quivering masses of jelly, which Man had made for me in the reeducation camp after having read the CIA handbook on interrogation. I looked vaguely yellow in the mirrored wall, dressed like what I was, a waiter from a cheap restaurant, in uninspiring black slacks and a white long-sleeved shirt that was no longer quite white. The most glamorous parts of me were my Bruno Magli shoes and my hair, slicked back in the manner of the 1930s or 1940s, when every man’s hair was glossy and short, rather than long and unkempt in today’s tasteless fashion. But besides the hair, which remained black, the rest of me was tired and old, the booster rocket of my youth long ago jettisoned on my way to the orbit of middle age. I had most likely lived half my life, which wasn’t too bad, given the endless gallons of whiskey I had loved, the countless cigarettes I had adored, and the dozens of women I had hopefully amused.
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