Khalil Read online

  “So what?” said the brother in front.

  “Well, the news could give us some info about the security arrangements being deployed around Saint-Denis.”

  “And what exactly is your problem?”

  “I’ve been tasked with delivering you safe and sound, without a hitch,” Ali reminded him, raising his voice a little in irritation at his passenger’s hostility and contempt.

  “You haven’t been tasked with delivering us. You’re paid to do it. As for ‘safe and sound,’ that’s not up to you. There’s someone above, watching over us. Understand?”

  Ali didn’t reply.

  “Do you understand?” the brother demanded furiously. “You don’t touch the CD, you don’t touch anything, and you keep your precautions to yourself.”

  “You don’t have to yell,” Ali protested. “I’m not deaf.”

  “Deaf or blind, I don’t give a damn. Shut up and drive.”

  Ali pulled his neck into his shoulders and didn’t speak another word.

  Driss stared at the nape in front of him, then he nodded his head and let the matter drop.

  The other passenger, who up to that point had shown no reaction, continued to ignore us. Who was he? Where had he come from? You couldn’t tell by looking at him. A mass of flesh and bones enwrapped in explosives—that’s all he was, nothing more. The kind of fanatic you could leave in a corner and come back for a year later, certain to find him in the same place.

  My gaze shuttled from one to the other. Their opaqueness flabbergasted me. We were going to sacrifice ourselves together, and they didn’t pay the slightest attention to Driss and me. It was like we were only extras, not even bit players. What gave them the right to look down on us? Their determination? I was determined too. More than ever, in spite of the awful questions that crossed my mind from time to time. “Doubt is essential,” Imam Sadek declared. “It’s the titanic battle between the angel and the demon inside us, the test of strength par excellence, the one that puts our backs to the wall. Except that it’s up to us to choose either the angel or the demon. Faith is the accomplishment of our innermost convictions. The outcome of the struggle leads to our real vocation, which is either to belong to God or to turn our backs on Him and face damnation.”

  In my case, the interior struggle had been terrible. The demon attached itself to my being like a sucker. I weighed the pros and cons day and night, wherever I went. I was a walking arena; my head vibrated with shouts, and my thumb pointed sometimes to the ground, sometimes to the sky. The demon was ferocious and turbulent and never loosened his grip. Countless times, I was on the point of going back home to my kebabs, my café, the girls I loved to pester as they were leaving the high school, the friends who preferred the hit songs of summer to incendiary sermons, and my DVDs. But the Lord was stronger than a thousand demon armies. A mere hint of wakefulness had been enough to dislodge the Evil One squatting on my spirit. You’ll never be a full-fledged Belgian, Lyès had promised me. You won’t have a car with a driver. And if by some miracle you wind up wearing a suit and tie, the way other people look at you will remind you where you come from. Whatever you do, however you succeed, in a laboratory or on a soccer pitch, all you have to do is give some pansy a headbutt and down you’ll come from your cloud, you won’t be an idol anymore, you’ll go back to being the raghead you always were. That’s the way things have always been. And they’ll be that way forever.

  There was no question of my ending up like Moka. I figured I’d wallowed in the mud for too long before I became aware that my status as a citizen had been snatched away, and now I had the privilege of being a charity case; my destiny, I realized, depended on me and not on the puppeteers who were trying to make me believe that my soul was nothing but an air vent, that I was made of rags and twine, and that one day I’d wind up in a closet with the mops and brooms.

  Now that I’d come to this last off-ramp, I was focused on my purpose: I had chosen under oath to serve God, and to avenge myself on those who had reduced me to a thing.

  On that Friday, November 13, 2015, I was going to accomplish both ends at once.

  2

  Ali dropped the two brothers off not far from the Stade de France, in the midst of hordes of fans arriving from every direction, their faces painted, their team scarves around their necks, some of them carrying kids on their shoulders. Here and there, excited groups of hard-core supporters wearing horned helmets thrust out their chests and bellowed raucous songs. Others, already drunk on fervor and beer, strutted around waving streamers and tricolored flags. There were many women in the crowd, as ridiculous as the men, their cheeks seared with lipstick, their skimpy blue jerseys outrageously emphasizing the contours of their breasts. Buses in an endless single file continually discharged their passengers onto the esplanades, under the watchful eyes of an impressive security force.

  Many police cars were patrolling the area—but that didn’t prevent our two passengers from calmly plunging into the sea of humanity.

  They didn’t even say goodbye to us, the two brothers. Nor did they seem to have heard Driss say to them, “See you soon.”

  They were barely out of sight when Ali ejected the CD and switched on the radio.

  “Put the Quran back on,” Driss ordered him.

  “There’s surely some news that could be useful to us,” Ali insisted.

  “Put the Quran back on, please. And drop us off at point number three.”

  “Point number two, you mean?”

  “Point number three. Khalil doesn’t know the area. I have to show him the station. Afterward I’ll walk back to point number two.”

  “That’s not what’s indicated on my route map,” the driver remarked.

  “Save it. I’m running this.”

  Ali shifted into reverse and backed down the middle of the street, giving us hateful looks through his rearview mirror. Driss flashed him a thumbs-up and then ignored him.

  As best we could, we got through the various traffic jams between the entrance to Saint-Denis and point number three. Ali dumped us off in a deserted side street and drove away fast, clearly relieved. You didn’t have to be a wizard to guess that he was going to return to Brussels directly and without delay. Once he got home, the first thing he’d do would be to clean his car from top to bottom to get rid of the smallest traces of our DNA.

  “You shouldn’t hold it against him,” said Driss, as though reading my thoughts.

  “Did you see how he took off?”

  “War’s a marketplace like other marketplaces, Khalil. Some people get down to work, some run things, some are subcontractors. Ali’s a subcontractor. He doesn’t make war, he does business.”

  He wasn’t telling me anything new. I didn’t care much about what other people were up to. The Lord would judge. Me, I didn’t cheat. Greed, hijinks, glitter—I’d put all that behind me. I was a soldier of the All-Merciful; I belonged to an order of chivalry that had no equal.

  Driss’s words distorted the solemnity of the moment. He had no business being sorry about anyone or anything. No reference to any topic other than our mission was worthy of interest. What did he mean by “get down to work”? Dying for the supreme Cause is a privilege that isn’t granted to just anyone.

  “What made you change our plans at the last minute?” I asked.

  “The operation hasn’t started yet.”

  “There’s no reason for you to escort me to my post. I don’t need anyone to hold my hand.”

  “I only wanted us to spend a last minute together. Does that bother you?”

  “No, but what’s Ali going to think? I can’t manage on my own?”

  “He can think whatever he wants. He doesn’t count.”

  We walked to a square in silence, amid people coming and going, some carrying grocery bags, some with their heads full of worries. The brightly lit shop windows, the neon sig
ns, the flickering televisions, the vehicles gliding over the asphalt—everything around me belonged to a dimension that was no longer mine.

  We sat down on a bench. Driss started smiling into space again. Opposite us, a girl was hailing a taxi, a shopkeeper was trying to entice a potential customer to step inside, a couple was hurrying home. “Is it true that you’re going into foster care?” an old woman asked a young boy. “Chantal told me about it…” It was an evening like any other, except that in a few hours, it would have a place in history and lose all resemblance to former and future evenings.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Driss asked.

  His question surprised me, because I was deep in thought. “How am I looking at you?”

  “You seem sad.”

  “How would you like me to seem?”

  He tapped me on the wrist. “You have no idea how proud of you I am.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  His fingers closed around my hand.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Scared of what?”

  He stroked the tip of his nose and then spoke with a tremor in his throat: “Sometimes I blame myself for dragging you into this.”

  “There’s no reason why you should.”

  “I often wonder whether you didn’t join up with Lyès just to keep from upsetting me.”

  “You’re not wrong.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I would’ve been unhappy if you had shunted me off to the side.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “Not in the slightest. At first, I followed you, you led me on. But eventually I realized that I had done right to follow you. I’d been traveling blind before. I needed a road, and the brothers showed me one.”

  “I’m relieved to know that.”

  “You were wrong to doubt it. I feel important for the first time in my life.”

  The corners of his mouth began to twitch as he said through a sigh, “There’s nothing good for us on this earth.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  Abruptly changing his tone, he asked, “Do you remember Chemla?”

  “I don’t remember anything or anyone. I’ve wiped my slate clean of everything but the present instant. This evening, we are the privileged of the Lord. You can’t measure how much that fact flatters me.”

  Driss nodded. Now his fingers were drumming on his thigh. Less relaxed than he’d been before, he must have been asking himself a lot of hard questions.

  “Who were those two guys?” I asked him.

  “I think they come from the Middle East.”

  “They didn’t even look at us.”

  “Maybe that’s in their culture. In any case, our destiny and theirs are sealed in grace.”

  “Well, when we’re living in Paradise, I hope we don’t have the same address.”

  He laughed his childlike laugh. The same one he had in the old days, when he heard a good joke. He’d always been attractive, but that evening, he was beautiful; his eyes overflowed with angelic sweetness.

  “Come on, forget about them,” he said. “Nice guys or pricks, today they’re the closest of our brothers.” He checked his watch. “The match will be starting soon. The station’s on the far side of that square over there—see it? You can’t miss it. You’ve got your commuter train ticket?”

  “Yes, and no chance I’ll lose it. It’s my one-way trip to Firdaws.”

  He stood up, waited for me to stand up in turn, put his arm around my shoulders, and urged me forward. “Don’t take just any line,” he said. “Choose the one that’s most crowded.”

  “Please. I’m not a baby.”

  He apologized and started walking faster.

  We reached a boulevard and stopped next to a closed kiosk. Now there weren’t many people around us anymore, just a pair of pallid old women who looked as though they’d lost something and a wild-eyed homeless man rotting amid his rags at the foot of a vandalized billboard.

  “I’ll leave you here, Khalil. It’s time for me to proceed to my post.”

  “You’re right. Everything has to take place as planned.”

  Driss took me in his arms. “I’m so, so proud of you, Khalil.”

  I held him close, inhaled his smell. We stayed like that for several long seconds. When he stepped back, his eyes were damp and blurred. There was a profound sadness in his smile.

  “Well, shall we say goodbye for now?”

  “Goodbye for now, Driss.”

  “Take care of yourself,” he joked, with a lump in his throat.

  “Right, I will.”

  Screwing up his courage, he leaned close to my ear and said, “I bet I score more kills than you.”

  “Betting is haram in Islam, Driss.”

  “Okay, but martyrdom absolves all haram.”

  He hugged me to him hard one last time, hurried away, and disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  Driss and I had been prepared for our mission over the course of the previous five weeks. Every evening after prayer, the sheikh, our coordinator, came to see us at Lyès’s place to make sure that we were really up to the job. Before leaving us, he’d grab us by the shoulders, probe our deepest thoughts, and remind us that God requires of his subjects only what they are capable of undertaking. “Your mission is crucial. If you don’t feel ready, there is no shame in withdrawing. No one will hold it against you. Martyrdom is a conviction, not a constraint. Other brothers will be overjoyed to take your place.”

  Driss would reassure him in his clearest voice: “We’re not going to let anyone do in our place what God expects us to do ourselves, Sheikh.” The imam nodded without taking his eyes off me. “Khalil is shy,” Driss said, “but once he commits himself, a bulldozer wouldn’t stop him. We grew up together, and we’ll die together.”

  “And together you will be in the baraka of the Lord,” the imam concluded, pressing us against him.

  The next day, the sheikh would come again and put us to the same test. It was an obsession with him. He wanted to verify that we were “solvent bombs,” worthy of credit, and to ascertain whether Lyès, who claimed to know his guys inside out, was not mistaken about his arsenal at a moment when the situation required authentic weapons of mass destruction.

  The sheikh came back the next night and every night after that, not wanting to leave anything to chance.

  That afternoon, he’d been there again, draped in a robe befitting a revered imam, with Lyès on his right and the other imam, the venerable Sadek, on his left. “In a few hours,” he had declared, “the whole world will be glued to its television screens. Heads of state will take turns expressing their indignation, but it is you who will be heard all over the earth. No ambiguity will weaken our message. We are going to prove to these infidels, once again, that we are capable of striking anyone, anywhere.”

  * * *

  —

  At the time and place indicated, a car had passed and picked us up, Driss and me. Two other passengers were already on board. Their presence had puzzled us; Lyès hadn’t taken us into his confidence as far as they were concerned. He’d just let it be understood that there would be some explosions inside the Stade de France, that Driss’s mission would be to target the crowd exiting the stadium, and that I would go into action inside the RER station after the match.

  The explosions scheduled to take place inside the stadium would be set off, therefore, by our two unknown companions.

  I hadn’t known that we were going to travel together.

  Driss climbed into the car first and slid over on the backseat to give me room.

  “No need for introductions at the moment,” said Ali, the driver. “You’ll take care of that l
ater, in the eternal gardens.”

  Right from the start, I had disliked the two strangers. They didn’t even deign to glance at us. Their arrogance and coldness were repellent. Out of the corner of his eye, Driss encouraged me to put up with them in silence. The two brothers must have been concentrating too hard on their mission to bother with acting friendly.

  “You got a smoke?”

  The homeless man I’d noticed earlier pulled me out of my thoughts. He was leaning over me, tottering and filthy, holding two dingy fingers to his lips to indicate his lack of nicotine.

  “I don’t have a sou, and I haven’t eaten since yesterday. Do you have a coin, maybe, or a restaurant ticket?”

  “Beat it,” I growled at him.

  “Sure, sure, hey! I wasn’t asking for the moon.”

  “Go back to your rags, I tell you.”

  He must have seen something in my look that dissuaded him from insisting.

  He returned to his spot and contented himself with checking me out from a distance, grimacing.

  * * *

  —

  I spent an hour circling the nearby blocks, being careful not to get too far from the RER station. I took my bearings at each corner and retraced my steps to make sure I wasn’t getting lost.

  The cafés and bars were packed. The match had just started. Fans fidgeted on their seats or simply stood with their noses as close to the screen as possible, holding their beer mugs aloft like trophies. The uproar they made spread out around them in frenzied waves.

  * * *

  —

  The detonation sounded far away. Barely audible. I hurried over to the nearest bistro to see whether the operation had been launched yet. The customers inside were lively and excited, the hubbub good-natured. At the bar, the bartender and his servers were commenting on the match, their eyes riveted to the screen above their heads. In the stadium, the stands teemed with enthusiastic fans; songs responded to catcalls; and I was forced to conclude that the detonation I’d heard hadn’t involved anything bigger than a gas cylinder—unless it had just been a figment of my imagination.