Street of Thieves (9 page)

“It's one of my passions,” I explained. “I learned French reading them.”

Jean-François had been living in Tangier for a few months; he was the branch head of a French business in the Free Zone. He liked the city: if in addition there were a bookseller able to provide him with old detective novels, he'd be overjoyed.

I gave him the address of the bookseller, explaining that I wasn't sure if he was open, but if he was, he'd find what he was looking for. He thanked me, then asked me if I knew how to use a computer. I replied of course.

“And can you type fast?”

“Of course.”

“With how many fingers, two?”

“More like four.”

He said Listen, I might have something to offer you. My business works for French publishing houses. We're digitizing some of their catalogues. We're always looking for students who know French well and like books.

Yesterday the attack, the day before yesterday Judit, and today a job in the Free Zone. I thought of the first sentences of Mahfouz's
Chatter on the Nile
: “It was April, the month of dust and lies.” The idea of being able to take a break from the Propagation for Koranic Thought was more than tempting. I explained to Jean-François that I worked in a religious bookstore, but that I had some free time. He seemed impressed.

“How old are you?”

“Almost twenty,” I replied.

“You look older.”

“It's the gray hair.”

In recent months I'd had some graying at my temples. At the same time, if I did actually look older, he wouldn't have asked me the question; there must have been something childlike in my face still, contradicted by my appearance and the traces of gray.

“Come see me at the office on Monday between four and five, we'll talk.”

He gave me the address and left the café. I looked at
The Prone Gunman
in front of me. Thrillers were powerful things. I wondered how one would translate into French. God knows more than we? God alone knows Fate?

I didn't know that I had only four months left here; I didn't know that I would soon leave for Spain, but I could glimpse the hand of Fate, the power of the interconnectedness of invisible causal series called Fate. Going back to the Group, at nightfall, the world seemed as if it was on fire; Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Greece, all of Europe, everything was burning; everything looked like those images of Marrakesh that the TV was broadcasting over and over, a decimated café, overturned chairs, corpses. And in the middle of all that, the astonishing irony of a lover of thrillers who was offering me work without even knowing me, just because he had seen I was reading Manchette. And Meryem. And Judit. And Bassam, with his cudgel. And the worst, which is always yet to come.

Monday noon, there was no one at the Group, and by now I was almost sure they had something to do with the Marrakesh attack.
Make fun of me, say I was particularly naive, but imagine for a second that your next door neighbors, your boss, and your best friend were found complicit in a terrorist act; you wouldn't believe it at first; you'd look around you, raise your arms as a sign of powerlessness, shake your head no, no, I know those people, they're not involved. In my head there was a world between beating up neighborhood drunks and organizing, seven hundred kilometers away, the death of sixteen people in a café. Why Marrakesh? To safeguard their positions in Tangier? To strike the most touristic city in Morocco? Where had they found the explosives? Had Bassam known about it, for weeks possibly? An action like that isn't put together overnight, I thought. And I thought Bassam was too open, too direct to hide such a big thing from me for long. He must have learned about it the night he had spoken to me.

They might have killed strangers; they'd almost even killed Judit, who knows. They'd beaten up my favorite bookseller; they had offered me shelter, food, and an education. My room was too little; the commentaries on the Koran, the grammar books, the treatises on rhetoric, the Sayings of the Prophet, his Lives, my shelf of thrillers: these magnificent books were obstructing my view. Where were they, all the members of the Group? At noon, I called Sheikh Nureddin and Bassam on their cellphones from our telephone: no answer. I had the feeling that no one would come back, that this office had served its purpose, that they had left me, the naive one, to get the beatings and deal with the police. That's why the Sheikh had so easily given me five hundred dirhams. I wasn't going to see anyone ever again. Not a single one of them. Stay with my books until the cops arrived. No, I was paranoid; impossible. I had read so many thrillers where the narrator realizes he had been used, manipulated by the crooks or the forces of law and order that I saw myself, sole representative of the abandoned Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, waiting calmly for the cops and ending up being tortured in place of the beards.

Sheikh Nureddin's office wasn't locked. I told myself I was imagining things on my own, that they would come back momentarily, expose me, and make fun of me till the end of my days.

The bookstore's cash box was there, on the table, no one had emptied it for weeks, there were about two thousand dirhams in it.

I found other bills in a leather bag, euros and dollars, ten or fifteen thousand dirhams in all, I couldn't believe my eyes.

Otherwise everything was empty, the desk diaries had disappeared, the contacts, the notebooks full of orders, the account books, the activities, the business affairs of Sheikh Nureddin, all gone. Even his personal computer wasn't there. Just the monitor.

I was all alone in the midst of dozens, hundreds of shrink-wrapped books.

I took a walk around the neighborhood, to see if I might come across a familiar face that belonged to the Group; no one. I went to Bassam's house, a few feet away from my parents', I met his mother and asked if she knew where he was; she gave me the kind of look you reserve for contagious beggars, muttered a curse and slammed the door, then reopened it to hand me a dirty old envelope with my name on it—Bassam's handwriting. I glanced at it, it wasn't dated today; apparently some old thing he had never mailed, since he hadn't known where to send it. His mother closed the door again abruptly, with no explanation.

At four o'clock I had a meeting in the Free Zone with Jean-François for the new job; I wanted to change, to make myself as handsome as possible, I felt as if the world were crumbling into pieces. Going back to the Group, I thought I saw two shady looking characters hanging around our premises; cops in civilian clothes, who knows. I checked my email, there was a message from Judit, she wrote that she was finally coming back to Tangier as planned, but alone; she didn't have enough money to get a new ticket for Barcelona; she'd be there a little before the set date, the day after tomorrow, she said, after having seen Elena off at the airport.

This news warmed my heart, even if I was a little wounded that she wasn't doing it to see me again sooner and for longer, but for unfortunate financial reasons.

I made my decision, without waiting for the outcome of the afternoon interview. I gathered together all the cash that there could be in Sheikh Nureddin's office, even the ten-cent pieces. I had almost fifteen or twenty thousand dirhams in bills and coins. More cash than anyone had ever seen, I could have taken a taxi to the suburb of Nador to find Meryem, say I'm taking this young woman away, here's ten thousand dirhams for your trouble, no one would have objected.

It was April, the month of dust and lies.

I gathered my things together, the hundred or so thrillers took up so much space you wouldn't believe, I emptied the boxes we had just gotten from Saudi Arabia to put them in: in all, with the
Kashshaaf, The Stories of the Prophets,
the dictionary, the books I liked, there were three big boxes; even some clothes had gone into each of the boxes; plus I took the Group's laptop, the screen, the keyboard and two or three things I had to keep.

A real house moving, and nowhere to go.

When everything was ready, I left for the Free Zone in a bus; I left all my things at the Group, took only the cash and the laptop, that made me look important, a laptop. I thought Jean-François wouldn't remember me, or else that the secretaries (very dark Moroccans, short skirts, black pantyhose, nice legs, disdain in their looks and voices) wouldn't let me get to their boss, but no, ten minutes after I reached the office I was shaking hands with Jean-François; he addressed me formally with
vous
now, saying, aha, here's Mr. Friend of the
Série Noire,
and all of a sudden the women in black stockings and miniskirts began regarding the young yokel who had just arrived as a human being; the boss disappeared very quickly, I was placed in a tiny room that adjoined the director's office, a Frenchman appeared, handed me a book; there you are, he
said, our business is to make these things into digital files, copy two pages of this on this computer for me. I took the book, put it on a stand, and copied it while the Frenchman looked at his watch, a big shiny timepiece, after two pages I said, okay that's it, he replied, hey not bad, you've got something, let me look it over, my word it's pretty good, wait a second. Jean-François reappeared, the other man called him Mr. Bourrelier, it looks good to me Mr. Bourrelier, he said, no problem, Jean-François looked at me smiling, and said I know a good thing when I see it, you go over the details together, Frédéric.

Frédéric called in the secretary, she took my papers, which she photocopied; Frédéric asked me when I could begin, and I thought a second: if Judit was arriving in Tangier tomorrow I'd want to spend some time with her. Next Monday? That's fine with me, Frédéric replied. You're paid by the page, 2,000 characters, 50 cents. That means about 100 euros for an average book. Then we deduct corrections, at 2 cents each. If you copy out 20 books a month, you get 2,000 euros, more or less, if the work is done well.

I made a quick calculation: to reach 20 books per month, let's say 200 pages per day, you had to copy out 25 pages in 60 minutes. One page every two minutes, more or less. This Frédéric was an optimist. Or a slave driver, depending.

“Wouldn't it be simpler to scan the books?”

“For some of them, no. For the ones with slightly transparent paper, it's almost impossible, the results are erratic. The OCR doesn't understand anything, and then you have to take the book apart, lay out the page, correct things, it ends up costing more.”

To me he sounded like he was speaking Chinese, but fine, he must have known what he was doing.

“Can I take the work home?”

“Yes, of course. But you have to work here at least five hours a day, for tax reasons.”

“Okay.”

The secretary had me sign a contract, the first one in my life.

“Good, see you Monday. And welcome.”

“Till Monday, yes. And thanks.”

“Thank you.”

I went to say good-bye to Jean-François, he shook my hand, saying, see you next week, then.

And I went back to Tangier. On the way, the sea shone.

Judit was arriving tomorrow. In fifteen days I'd be twenty. The world was a strange mixture of uncertainty and hope.

In the paper, still no news of who was responsible for the attack in Marrakesh.

So it was almost seven o'clock when I got back to the neighborhood; night was falling. I had had time to make a plan. First I wanted to clarify a few things; I felt full of energy. I went back to see the bookseller.

My heart dropped when I reached his shop; the display wasn't out, but the metal shutters were raised. I had a lump in my throat, I gathered all my courage and pushed open the door; after all I had been coming to this place since I was fifteen or sixteen, I wasn't going to let Sheikh Nureddin take it away from me.

The bookseller was sitting behind his desk, he lifted his head; on his face I saw surprise, then hatred, scorn, or pity. I had expected insults; I had imagined myself asking his forgiveness, he would have forgiven me, and we'd have resumed our conversations like before. He remained silent, staring at me, his brow knit; he said nothing; he was contemplating my stupidity, was drowning me in my own cowardliness; I was shrinking, crushed with shame; I couldn't manage to speak, or to take out the envelope with the dirhams that I had naively prepared for him, I muttered a few words, hello, sorry, I choked and turned tail, fled once again, fled faced with myself; I left at a run; there are things that can't be fixed. Actually, nothing can be fixed. As I left the store I imagined he'd run after me saying “Come back, boy, come back,” but of course not, and when I think
about it today it's entirely logical that he had only scorn and no pity for a lost kid who had chosen the cudgel and Sheikh Nureddin. I walked quickly to the Group's premises, my guilt was changing into aggression, I was mentally insulting the poor guy, what came over me, good Lord, to go back there, and two small tears of rage emerged from the corner of my eyes, there was smoke in the night, a thick, whitish smoke mixed with ashes scattered by the wind; a vapor of anger was weighing down the springtime, a burnt smell was invading my throat and it was only when I reached the corner of the street, seeing the crowd and the fire trucks, that I realized that the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought was burning; tall flames leapt from the windows and licked the upper floor of the building; from outside, with their hoses, firemen sprayed water on the openings, mouths with tongues of fire that spat tons of half-consumed paper debris, while a squad of policemen were trying their best to keep the crowd away from the catastrophe. Hundreds of books were going up in the breeze, invading the air as far as Larache or Tarifa; I pictured the blister packs melting, the heat attacking the compact pages of stacked books that ended up catching and transmitting the destruction to their neighbors, I knew my stock well, near that window was the supply of
Heroines, Sexuality,
and all the little manuals, over there were the cubic yards of commentaries on the Koran, and right in the middle, on the synthetic rugs that must have been liquefied, my boxes, the
Série Noire
were flying away too, the Manchettes, the Pronzinis, the McBains, the Izzos and all my nice shirts, my fabulous shoes, my patent leather; the polish must have been burning, the hair gel would fuel all of it and soon, if the firemen didn't manage to get the fire under control, it would be the gas canister in the kitchen and the one in the bathroom that would explode, sending into the air once and for all what remained of Sheikh Nureddin's institution.