“Your mission is more important than your little ego problems. The alibi you have is the one that was chosen for you. You have to abide by it, period. Some of our brothers are servers in bars or security guards in nightclubs. In the eyes of the Lord, they’re no less pure than an imam in his minbar. So please don’t be more of a royalist than the king. You’re part of a project; the rest isn’t your affair. From now on, this is where you live. It’s a nice, quiet part of town. All you have to do is keep a low profile. Of course, until further notice, you’ll keep your job at the Turk’s, except you won’t have to play night watchman in that store of his anymore. If all goes well, we’ll go back to work in two or three months. We have a lot on our plate. And next time, your munitions will be checked before you’re sent to the front. I trust you’re still game.”
“More than ever,” I told him, without a second’s hesitation.
10
My boss didn’t protest when I announced my decision to resign from the night-watchman part of my employment. He was even happy to scale down my salary proportionately. In the end, we got along well, he and I. Every now and then, we’d have a bite to eat in his office and make small talk. Sometimes he’d leave the keys to the store with me and go off for a spin in his top-of-the-line SUV. He was crazy about that car, I believe; he spent most of his time polishing it from top to bottom, perfuming it and tracking down the least speck of dust on its dashboard and leather seats. Suleiman loved to park his sparkling chariot in front of the store to impress the locals as well as anyone who happened to be passing by.
I felt sad for him.
There’s no more vulgar intoxication than what comes from illusory glitter, no more ridiculous sin than ostentation.
My boss’s escapades didn’t prevent me from attending to my tasks. I kept the delivery register up to date, with cash payments recorded to the last penny; I took orders, over the phone and in person; I negotiated with customers as if I were running my own business. In the beginning, the Turk would verify the day’s takings, tapping and retapping on his calculator. Then he stopped. He’d cast a quick glance at the cash tickets, just for form’s sake. From time to time, his son, a twenty-two-year-old goldbrick, would come in and poke around the cash register; I’d get rid of him—forcibly, if necessary.
In the evenings, I’d find my roommate at home. Hédi wasn’t very talkative, but when he felt obliged to speak, he’d say sensible things. According to Ramdan, the Tunisian was weighed down with diplomas. His traceability stopped there. His personal history, the ideological path he’d taken, his function within our group—all that was classified information. One night, while we were watching a television documentary on the advent of Nazism in Germany, he started to dispute the official version, swearing that Adolf Hitler hadn’t committed suicide and that he’d died in southern Argentina thirty-five years after the war. I could not possibly have cared less about the führer’s fate, but I willingly went along with my new comrade’s theories. He knew a lot about the underside of Western politics, international skullduggery, geostrategic issues, the conflagration in the Middle East, the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi, and the new global order that was reconsidering the national borders inherited from colonialism in order to subjugate second-class peoples and seize their wealth. He could talk for two consecutive hours without catching his breath, and then, suddenly, he’d fall silent for entire days. Sometimes I had the impression that I was living with a poltergeist. Hédi constantly had his nose in a book and set his reading aside only to say his prayers. Five times a day, and he never missed one. He had an app on his iPhone with the muezzin’s call. At the first click, Hédi was standing on his prayer rug, facing east. He chose the longest verses and remained prostrate for several minutes on end. I found him excessive, as rigid as a broadsword in matters of religion, but easy to live with. We shared the domestic duties. He took care of the housekeeping, I handled the cooking. I was a bit more addicted to the TV than he was, and the sole condition he requested was that I would lower the volume when he was reading.
One morning, however, just when I’d decided he was a saint, I caught him putting a box of condoms in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. My indignation seemed to surprise him: “I’m only satisfying a natural human need.”
“You don’t have the right.”
“Yes, I do have the right. So do you. We’ve been chosen to make the supreme sacrifice. Why should we leave a widow and orphans behind us? There’s a fatwa that authorizes us to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.”
“Are you talking about a temporary marriage, a so-called pleasure marriage?”
“The pleasure marriage is a shameful distortion of Islamic dogma, a cheap Shiite dodge that consists in making extraconjugal fornication lawful, which Sharia law categorically condemns. Such maneuvers have nothing to do with the exception the law allows for warriors like you and me. Of course, there are those who abstain. But they’re not held in greater esteem than those who heed the legitimate call of instinct.”
For my part, I preferred to abstain.
When Hédi came home from an “encounter,” I’d try to get him to tell me about it, just as a way of engaging him in conversation, because I couldn’t bear his silence. He’d limit himself to smiling and leave me wanting more.
* * *
—
The authorities arrested Imam Sadek at his home, with a view toward deporting him to Morocco. The radio and television spoke of nothing else. Experts, top reporters, human rights activists, and political stars streamed in and out of the broadcast studios; some guests were in favor of extradition, others against it. For its part, the Moroccan government in Rabat protested; it refused to burden itself with a naturalized Belgian “fanatic” whom the Sherifian regime had stripped of his nationality.
I followed what the imam’s lawyer had to say on the radio. During the program, I could hear loud noises and insults in the background.
In our training centers, everyone was on high alert.
Fraternal Solidarity’s headquarters hadn’t been subjected to any raid or search, but the personnel had been greatly reduced; the remaining staff included only women, cooks, and a few unimpeachable volunteer workers.
Lyès, our emir, had charged Ramdan with taking command during the interim and vanished.
Ramdan was the kind of opportunist who if entrusted with the care of a puppy would immediately start trying to bring the whole kennel into line. He actually considered himself our true commander. He controlled the logistics and randomly summoned people to come to the mosque at impossible hours to fritter away their time. When it came to discretion, he would have set an old handicapped dog running, alarmed by his constant boasting, his immediate attempts to turn every discussion into a recitation of his feats of arms. He wanted to have us believe that he was the sheikh’s closest collaborator. He was, of course, lying. Ramdan was nothing more than a hardworking flunky who didn’t know how to hold his tongue. It was through him that I got the answer to my question about how the emir and the sheikh knew what had happened in that RER station in Paris. “Well, that’s just it,” he replied. “Nothing happened, even though something was supposed to happen.”
Ramdan told me that on the night of November 13, he, the sheikh, Lyès, Imam Sadek, and his son-in-law were in Charleroi at his brother-in-law’s, a real estate promoter who was responsible for having found me my new abode. The six of them met for a sumptuous dinner that nobody touched. The news channels were broadcasting loops showing the panic that the attacks had set off in the Paris region.
“We were very worried,” Ramdan said. “The massacre programmed for inside the Stade de France hadn’t taken place. Lyès didn’t understand why our ‘special messengers’ ”—he’d made air quotes with his fingers—“had set their bombs off outside the stadium. The operation there looked like a failure. Imam Sadek asked us to redo our ablutions and pray for you. You were our last h
ope. The TV stations were passing from the Bataclan to the sidewalk cafés in the vicinity of place de la République and then coming back to the unsuccessful attacks in Saint-Denis, but there were no reports of a major incident on the RER line. By two in the morning, still nothing. In Lyès’s opinion, one of two things had happened: either you’d lost your nerve, or the police had arrested you. In either case, we were in danger. The sheikh ordered us to disperse immediately, and we all went our various ways.”
“I called Ali the driver.”
“Come on, use of the phone is forbidden, you know that. Ali wouldn’t have been able to reach us or call you back…The first days after the attacks were a total blackout for us. I’d stayed with the sheikh in Charleroi, in a safe house. Since you were giving no sign of life, we were convinced you’d been arrested, and we figured the services were grilling you in secret, trying to get you to give us up. We only found out you were back in Brussels when the bomb maker told us about your visit to him. The info he gave us made us understand why nothing had happened in the RER train, and we could see that you deserved no blame. I admit we were all very relieved, but we had to find you right away. I was charged with looking for you, and in the end, I found you. And that’s the whole story.”
“You thought—you all thought—I had defected?”
“In the beginning, yes.”
“Do I seem as though I could be such a coward?”
“Don’t be offended, Khalil. In situations like that, we always have to anticipate the worst-case scenario. If we didn’t, how could we take the drastic measures that are needed? But here you are, back among us, as determined as ever. I can assure you that the sheikh is doubly proud of you. First for your courage, and then for keeping your cool when you were left on your own.”
He embraced me and planted a kiss on my forehead, a sign of respect usually reserved for the leaders of the movement.
I finally felt purged of the poison that had been corroding my guts and my mind. However, although my unaccomplished mission in Paris was categorized as an unfortunate error filed away with no follow-up, my doubts concerning the pedagogical bomb vest persisted. I admitted that my suicide belt might have been a specimen for apprentice bomb makers to study, but how to explain that the explosive charge had been quite real?
* * *
—
In the end, Imam Sadek was deported to Morocco.
“The jackals of the Atlas Mountains are going to eat him alive as soon as he gets off the plane,” Hédi predicted.
“We’ll avenge him,” Ramdan promised.
* * *
—
I was drinking coffee in a small café not far from the store. Some trifecta addicts were chatting here and there. A young bimbo was smoking in the street and conversing with a black man as tall as a mast. At the bar, two pensioners weren’t managing to agree on the past performances of a horse. The bartender advised them to bet on a mare named Jumper. Behind him, his spouse rinsed glasses with a sullen look on her face.
A plasma screen was showing a feature about a circus. You could see a collapsing tent, some starved-looking beasts in their cages, and a clown complaining about working conditions while the group of acrobats around him nodded approvingly. The image vanished suddenly and was replaced by a TV news studio. The news anchor was making an urgent announcement.
“Turn it up,” a customer barked.
The bartender fingered the remote control.
The anchor yielded to a correspondent on location. The latter, microphone in hand, turned toward the statue of Manneken Pis, which a security cordon had under tight surveillance; police vans were everywhere. Armed cops were trying to keep the curious at a distance.
“At first glance, what this seems to have been is a terrorist attack that luckily claimed no victims,” the correspondent said. “A man attempted to stab two police officers. According to eyewitnesses, the individual, who appeared to be in his thirties, cried out ‘Allāhu akbar’ before lunging at the two policemen while brandishing a knife, which obliged the officers to fire. The attacker has been taken to the nearest hospital. According to the police, he’s not mortally wounded.”
“What a dumb shit,” said the bartender. “He attacks cops armed to the teeth by waving around a little knife and yelling. Was that supposed to give him the advantage of surprise?”
“That’ll make one less asshole in the world,” growled one of the pensioners.
I went back to the store.
The next day, the picture of the knife-wielding brother was on the front page of all the newspapers. “Suicide Bomber at Manneken Pis” was the headline in Le Soir. The chief of police confirmed that the attacker, who had succumbed to his wounds in the ambulance, was wearing a fake explosive belt.
* * *
—
At midnight, Ramdan called me. I was asleep.
“I hope I’m not waking you up?”
“Too late, you just did.”
“What time does your store close?”
“At seven p.m.”
“Good. I’m sending someone to pick you up at seven on the dot tomorrow evening.”
“Not Ali, please. There’s a chance I might break his face.”
“He doesn’t have one anymore.”
Something in his voice froze my blood. Later, I’d learn that Ali the driver had never gone home after dropping us off. His car had been found burned to cinders in an empty lot. But no trace of his body.
The next day, at the appointed hour, a taxi came and picked me up on rue Heyvaert. Bruno Lesten, rebaptized Zakaria, was at the wheel. The former nemesis of the fourth grade, the kid who used to terrorize me at school, had become someone else. He’d married a Muslim woman and converted to our religion. Tall, with hair as red as a wood fire, he was one of the first ethnic Belgians to join the Association. He was to be found without fail in the first ranks at the mosque, he always carried a Quran, and he would recite certain surahs by heart, in Arabic. The sheikh held him in very high esteem.
We weren’t close, Bruno and I; we lived together within the brotherhood, but that was all. There was something in his eyes that I found disturbing. When our paths crossed, I felt uneasy. Besides, he only very rarely responded to my overtures, no matter how fawning they might be. I’d never understood why Driss admired him so much. Bruno had neither charisma nor talent; he was sinister and taciturn and seemed to take a malicious pleasure in snubbing people.
“Bruno?”
“Zakaria,” he corrected me.
“I didn’t expect to see you.”
“Me neither,” he said drily.
“When did you come back?”
“Come back from where?”
“Well, from you know where.”
“And what is it I’m supposed to know?”
“You weren’t in Syria?”
His face flushed suddenly. “I’ve never been there.”
“I thought…”
“You deaf or what? I’m telling you, I don’t even know where it is, whatever godforsaken fucking place you’re talking about.”
In truth, he’d been in the very first contingent of those who left to make war on Bashar al-Assad. Unlike his companions in arms, who saturated the internet with their photos and videos of victorious jihadists on the field of battle, some of them brandishing the decapitated heads of their victims, others dragging enemy corpses behind their pickup trucks, Bruno took great care to ensure that his image never appeared anywhere.
“Who told you this nonsense?”
“I thought it was understood.”
“Understood from who? Everyone should concentrate on fixing his own problems. If not, things are going to turn bad. Do I make myself clear?”
“I wasn’t trying to make you mad.”
“You better not. When you have nothing interesting to say, you
keep your trap shut. And if that’s asking too much, we’ll implement the emergency procedure. People who always run their mouths, there’s only one way to make them shut up,” he added threateningly. “String them up by their tongue.”
I didn’t insist.
He put the car in gear and sped away on squealing wheels. If a cat had crossed the roadway, he would have run over it, just to demonstrate how much my indiscretion had irritated him.
“Where are we going?” I asked, so he wouldn’t take my silence for some sort of defection.
“Knokke-Heist.”
“It’s not summertime yet.”
He shot me an incandescently black look.
Bruno appreciated neither humor nor familiarity. This was, no doubt, the reason why I kept my distance where he was concerned. Bruno was a latent threat, with eyes that torpedoed you without warning and a mouth made for biting.
“Can you turn on the heater? It’s freezing in here.”
He didn’t turn on the heat, or the radio either.
We drove to the easternmost portion of the Belgian North Sea coast without exchanging a single word.
Having arrived in Knokke-Heist, we waited behind a service station for further orders. I wanted to go and get us some hot coffee; Bruno wouldn’t allow it. “Everything we need is in the glove compartment,” he said.
There was a soggy, cold sandwich, a bottle of mineral water, and a bag of sour lemon candy, but no coffee.
Bruno checked his watch before tapping a number into his phone.
“We’re on-site,” he announced to the person on the other end. “You’re where?” He looked into his rearview mirror. Two headlight beams pierced the darkness behind us. “All right, good, but don’t drive too fast. It’s so damn misty, it’s hard to see.”
A car passed us. Bruno practically attached himself to its rear end.
Khalil Page 11
