by Mike Bond
No matter our experience and awareness we were foot soldiers in a vast war whose deepest secrets were unknown to us; we lived and died following our determination to make a better world, but sometimes achieving just the opposite.
How much did Thierry really know? How far above him was the enemy, if there was one? What dangers did he, or his family, face if he tried to unmask it?
—
OUR NEW HOME was lovely and sun-bright and had no bugs or hidden cameras that I could find. With a wide kitchen, living room and dining rooms facing the Place two stories below, a bedroom facing the interior court ... If you’re going to die soon, why not spend the money? Plus it had a real shower, not just a hose in a tub.
We dropped our stuff, made love in the shower, and downed some baguette, Camembert and Fleurie. Our kitchen had lots of good things to cook with, the refrigerator hummed diligently, the traffic sounded distant through the double panes, and the sun set in crimson splendor over the slate rooftops to the west.
—
“HOW I GOT THIS?” We were in bed and Anne twisted sideways to point to the lightning tattoo down her left biceps. “I had a boyfriend in high school ...” She pulled back. “You really want to hear this?”
I nestled against her lovely tits. “I love hearing everything about you.”
“This boyfriend, he told me when he came inside me it was like a lightning bolt up his spine right into his brain ...”
“He was right. That’s exactly what it’s like.”
“Then he dumped me and I was so miserable and my best friend told me I was the ugliest girl in our class, so I was really unhappy. Then I said to myself Get over it, nothing bad’s happened to you. And to remind myself what a great fuck I was I went out and got this tattoo.”
I put my hand between her thighs. “I like this one too.”
She rolled so I could kiss it. A white orchid just above her glorious black hair. “I like both of them,” I said.
She said nothing and I had a sudden fear she didn’t care. “What was he like, your husband?”
“Éric?” she lay back, swallowed. “He was loving. Strong, gentle ... funny as Hell. God he could make us laugh.” She sniffed. “But you could trust him. To the end of time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
She slid down against me, tickled my chin with a lock of her hair. “He was a lot like you.”
I lay with her head on my shoulder, thinking of the joy and sorrow of it all. And if you try to duck the sorrow you lose the joy.
How wonderful life can be, how intense, profound, multidimensional, exciting, exhilarating, terrifying and moody – which makes the thought of losing it horrendous. When every sweet moment is done it’s gone forever, a delusional memory.
I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want Anne to die. But we would very soon, unless we got Mustafa.
—
THEY CAME in the middle of the night clattering and banging the doors and smashed mine open. Yanked me up and twisted the cuffs off the metal ring on the floor, shoved my face against the wall kicking me behind the knees so I fell and they dragged me up again. I’d been lying in a sombrous pain and tried to wake up but couldn’t tell what was nightmare and what real.
When they shoved and punched me down the corridor and out onto the slippery yard I realized it was the execution ground, and the slipperiness was blood. They tied my knees and ankles together as I tried to kick them but they whacked me on the head with a rifle butt till I began to pass out from the pain.
A cold wind made me shiver, or maybe it was just the knowledge of what was about to happen. They tied my cuffed hands to the rope around my ankles so I couldn’t stand, my knees in old sticky blood, new warm blood running down my temple from where the rifle butt had hit.
Overhead the stars were sharp as broken glass. Despite the darkness I could see three other guys kneeling like me. One looked at me, his white eyes wide with fear, his mouth agape. There was an empty space beside me and I wondered who it was for. A bright white light seared on, blanking out the stars. A shape rustled past, a metal bar banging my shoulder. I feared they were going to beat us, then realized that would be better than what was really going to happen.
They shoved someone down beside me and I could see blood running down the side of his mouth, realized it was Mack. “Hey, buddy,” I mumbled. “This is it.”
A huge pain exploded the side of my head smashing it down against my shoulder. “No talk!” a voice hissed. A voice I recognized: Mustafa.
He slid between us, raised a huge glinting thing to the light. A cleaver, thick with blood. He spun and swung it past my ear. It made a whistling sound, a metal hiss. I tried not to flinch.
“Tonight is goodbye,” Mustafa said, a kindly almost-curious voice. “You will confess to your infidel murders or I will kill him.” He slapped the cleaver sideways down on Mack’s head, knocking him backwards. “You will confess,” he repeated. “Or I will kill him.”
Mack gave a sigh of pain or disgust, I couldn’t tell. I imagined the blade flashing down, cutting off his head, it rolling across the ground. Mine too.
Even in this moment of death I cared more for Mack’s life than my own.
“Cameras!” Mustafa chortled. “Action!”
The red light in the camera flashed on. “We will start with this false Muslim,” he said, striding to the man on the right, beyond Mack. “Who is the true descendant of the Prophet?” he asked in a mild, curious voice, as if wanting to know. The ancient hatred between Shia and Sunni over the lineage from the prophet Mohammed, equivalent to how many angels can fit on the tip of a pin, and which has since caused so many millions of deaths.
The man said something I couldn’t understand. Mustafa gestured toward the camera. Two flunkies lifted the tripod and moved it in front of the man, who had raised his face to the now-hidden stars and was mumbling something with trembling lips.
It was beyond horrible, this. If there were a God how could this God allow it? Fear clenched my heart; I couldn’t breathe. Knew I was next. Or Mack.
The cleaver whistled down and with a soggy clunk bit into the man’s neck. It stuck on the spine; the man’s head fell forward, half disconnected. Mustafa yanked it free, dragging the man sideways, raised it and swung down, thunking into the spine in a different place. Pain exploded in my head – the rifle butt again. “Look down!” snarled the man behind me.
From the side of my eyes I could see Mustafa wrenching the cleaver free and swinging it down again, and the head rolled free in a wide-spreading pool of blood that gurgled across the earth between our knees, hot and stinky, bringing out the odor of the older half-dried blood beneath.
“So!” Mustafa stood over me. “That was instructive, no?” He tipped up my chin with the bloody tip of the cleaver. “What did you learn?”
“That you are a coward,” I wanted to say but didn’t, knowing it would just make him draw my suffering out longer. “Go ahead,” I choked. “Get it over with.”
“Yes,” he nodded. “Get it over with.” He raised the cleaver high, halted, turned to the camera and said something about getting a different angle.
I took a breath.
“I love you, man,” Mack said.
“I love you too,” I answered, the only time I’d ever told a man I loved him other than my father. Then I saw Pa’s face, his diligent hedonistic smile, his laughter at the world. “They will burn in Hell forever,” Pa chuckled, “if only there were one.”
I raised my head, determined to look death in the eye. The cleaver glinted as it flashed down, twisted between me and Mack and thudded into the ground.
“Oh, I am bad,” Mustafa panted. “Can’t even aim this weapon straight.” He shuffled sideways to Mack, raised it again. “Confess,” he said softly, bending down to peer into Mack’s eyes. “Confess to your infidel sins, before the camera, and p
erhaps I will not kill him.”
“You piece of pig shit,” Mack said, braver than I.
“Oh my,” Mustafa sighed, a patient teacher with a recalcitrant pupil. “Now I have to kill you.” Again the raised cleaver glinted in the camera light, flashed down between us. “Ah, I am truly bad. Cannot kill a kaffir, you think?” He turned and waved at the camera, “Stop!” His empty eyes swung back to mine. “Perhaps tomorrow? Perhaps I do better tomorrow?”
I sat up, the bedsprings yowling. There was someone in the darkness beside me. “Who?”
Anne eased against me and my heartbeat slowed, my breathing softened, and I was at home again.
—
FROM THAT NIGHT Anne and I became a single unit focused on our prey. We still reported to Thierry, confided in Tomàs, kept Harris semi-informed, stayed in touch with Claudine and the kids, and tried to work 24 hours a day. But night and day we focused on Mustafa, Mack and Gisèle, the Tower, and the backpack nuclear bomb. And this new enemy, the insider who was trying to defeat every move we made.
After a few days we had to sleep. By two a.m. we’d been at work since seven the previous morning. We’d tumble on the bed and make love, then, sweaty and drained, fall asleep in each other’s arms.
We’d fed Mustafa’s real pix into the system and were getting complementary hits from other camera locations. The same ugly, evil Mustafa trudging a sidewalk, elbows and feet wide, half-hiding his scorn, slipping into a bank with a plastic portfolio under his arm, standing in the Porte de Clichy Métro at the crossing of the Pontoise and Courtilles lines, watching the young women in their flimsy miniskirts walk past.
Shoot First
“WE HAVE A HIT!” Thierry on the phone sounded casual, almost happy.
“What kind of hit?” It was after midnight and Anne and I were so exhausted we’d given up and were headed to bed.
“Where is she?”
“I’ll get her.” I went into the bathroom where she was brushing her teeth. “It’s Thierry.” I put the phone on speaker. “He has a hit.”
“Oogle,” she responded, took the toothbrush from her mouth and spat into the sink, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “A hit?”
Thierry waited a second, building suspense. “Mustafa’s cell.”
“O Mon Dieu,” she snapped. “Not possible!”
“16:23 today he walks into the post office at 38 Boulevard de Strasbourg. We just now got the link. They got him first with the outside camera and then a close-up inside. He pulls out a phone, and receivers in the post office catch the call. To Abdelasalaam Al-Fatah, Moroccan, 28, unemployed, an S-List guy, address in St. Denis, goes to the Salafist Al Rawda Mosque in Stains.”
“That got closed,” Anne said, “for preaching terrorism.”
“It’s open again. He’s been in and out of jail since age fifteen, multiple burglaries, suspect in several rapes, lots more stuff.”
“And he’s out?”
“He couldn’t be judged on rape, the judge said, because in the Muslim culture rape is not a crime.”
I scanned the dark rooftops, the sky. It was like hunting where everything you kill gets stolen from you, till you starve.
“The phone?” Anne said.
“A prepaid throwaway ... No history, just that one call.”
“Bought when?” I said, trying to wake up and think.
“Last Tuesday, a camera shop at Orly. Cash.”
“Since then?”
“Nothing till this call at 16:23. That was eight hours ago. We’re listening for anything new. He’s disabled the GPS, we can’t locate him.”
“If we do,” Anne said, “we take him in?”
“That’s, of course, the eternal question.”
“Have you put anyone on the St. Denis place?” Anne said. “This Abdelasalaam?”
“That’s part of the eternal question. If we locate him, do we grab him, work him over? Or do we watch, see where he takes us?”
“That’s where I’m headed now,” I said. “A quick look.”
“We’ve got guys to do that,” Thierry said. “Arabs.”
“You can show your guys a thousand pictures of Mustafa,” I said. “But I’m the one who knows him. I know his smell. His aura. How he walks and what his face does when he looks at people. If he shows up there, we decide what to do – bring him in fast, or follow him.”
“If we follow him,” Anne spat more toothpaste into the sink, “we might lose him.”
“So back to this Abdelasalaam,” Thierry countered. “We watch who he is, his connections ...”
“Or we send him south?” Anne persisted.
“Under the new rules,” Thierry mumbled, “we now need Ministerial approval for sending guys to Casa.”
Casa is of course Casablanca, near where Moroccan Sécurité has a nice little place for intimate discussions. Out in the desert, far from the roving eye, its only neighbors some sandblasted, forgotten Roman ruins.
“No need for Casa,” I said. “I’ll take this guy down to Fontainebleau Forest and he’ll tell us all we need to know.”
Thierry said nothing, then, “ATS has some good pix of him, I’ve sent them to you. As you’ll see, he’s tall and skinny with bad teeth and a pockmarked face.”
“I think we should bring him in,” Anne said.
“Not yet. You two, can you be there in an hour? Surveillance only? You’ll have full ATS backup. In case Mustafa does show? Not that I think he will ...”
“We’ll have to use the Peugeot,” I said.
Thierry snickered. “It fits the neighborhood.”
This riled me. “There isn’t a car in Seine St. Denis that can keep up with it.”
“So take good care of it. When you’re done we want it back.”
When we’re done. I thought of Mack and Gisèle, the Tower. Paris.
“Be careful,” Thierry added. “There’s lots of guys with guns in that neighborhood. If you have to, shoot first.”
—
THE STREET was pallid under the arc lights. Dirty façades, drab awnings. Graffiti in Arabic and French, miserable cars toed into the curb, hanging wires, a furtive rat, sticky grunge on your soles. Gutters of trash.
“Nirvana,” Anne said. She was half-slouched in the passenger seat, head barely visible above the door, while I watched the oversized rearview mirror for anything coming the other way.
A few cars patrolled the neighborhood. Abdel’s was a brick four-story building squeezed in between many others of its kind, with a front door that hung open over a broken stoop.
It was a dirty, deadly and deteriorating place like so many in the Lost Territories of France, and just being there infected me with a dim view of the future. Things get worse. That was the rule. Things always get worse.
That’s what it seemed like. That most folks in this hellhole of misery, fanaticism, and fear were just doing what they could to get by and raise their children. When all they probably wanted was to move out. And couldn’t. Or they were faithful, but didn’t believe violence was the answer.
The answer to what? Maybe people like Rachid Raqmi might have one. Or Nisa?
We were four blocks from where Yasmina Noureff had blown herself to bits. Or someone with a trigger had blown her.
02:14 on the Peugeot’s blue dash clock. “I could use a cigarette,” Anne said.
“Not in here.”
“Screw you.”
“And you’re not going to stand outside smoking. And blow our whole scene.”
“Screw you,” she repeated. I’d noticed that two things made her cranky: one, if she hadn’t eaten meat for several hours, or, two, if she wanted a cigarette.
“No damn cigarettes,” I repeated.
Okay, maybe I was cranky too. It had been a long day. We were exhausted and getting on each other’s nerves. I’d been dizzy with
fatigue and dying for sleep when Thierry’d called about Mustafa’s phone and this guy Abdel. Anne had been beyond weariness too, but in ten minutes we were in the Beast and on our way. Now, sitting in its soft seats in the cool darkness of this dilapidated ghetto where absolutely nothing was happening, we couldn’t stop falling asleep, heads nodding and jerking up, grunts and face-rubbings.
“The only way I can stay awake,” I said, “is if we fuck.”
She giggled. “You think I’m nuts? That’d be a DA.”
“DA?”
“Disciplinary Action.”
“You’re making that up.”
She shook her head. “We’re not supposed to fuck on the job.”
“Says who?”
“Thierry, for one.”
I took out my phone and hit the code for his cell. “What are you doing!” she hissed.
“Calling Thierry to ask if it’s okay if we fuck while we’re waiting.”
She slapped my hand nearly destroying my phone. “Don’t you dare.”
“I’m serious. We go in the back seat and do it with you on my lap and I can keep looking up the street and you looking back toward Abdel’s door ... Otherwise I’m going to fall asleep.”
She fumed at this for a few minutes, took out her Glock and cranked it. With a sudden twist she crawled between the front seats into the back, laid the Glock on the rear panel, in a spinning motion unbuttoned, unzipped and pulled down her jeans.
How exciting new love and desire and constant threat of death and the fear of losing friends can turn a fuck into a volcano of desire and release, a revelation, a hardening of the will ... And you come out of it less fatigued, can go on, run another ten miles.
I sat in the back watching toward the front as she came down on top of me facing the rear, her soft fine hair tickling my cheek. As always it was delicious, exciting, beyond delightful. But not for an instant did I lessen my gaze on the street; I intensified it, just as the ferocious pleasure of rising up and down inside her intensified everything.
