CHAPTER 14
The Paris flics and the National Police and agents of the Sûreté were everywhere the day after while an army of workers struggled to cleanse the thousand faces of the Ski Mask Jihadi from the city. The paint was not easy to remove, the workers had a terrible job of it, and all the while Allah the All-Seeing glowered down upon them. The police held numerous suspects, but since most of them were small Arab boys scribing small crude emulations, they had to let them go with fines and stern warnings to their parents.
The Caliphate confined itself to protest at the mass arrests of Arab children and clumsy humor at the expense of the French authorities. The French news media and the satiric comedians had a high old time with what was a huge and expensive jest, but excellent material for humor. A popular political puppet show presented the President of France, wearing the green coveralls of the sanitation workers, fuming and cursing as he fruitlessly tried to clean the walls of the Élysée Palace with a mop and a pail while a Rai version of the Marseillaise played and urchins jeered and saluted him with upraised index fingers.
As six o’clock the next day approached, I was in the large plaza before the Hôtel de Ville, the headquarters of the city government; a palace that looked as if it had been put together over the past few centuries by architects chosen according to the whims of the political winds—towers, disjointed roofs, cupolas, the whole monstrosity overcrowded with statues of Heroes of the Republic in favor at one time or another. Scores of workers on scaffolding were still cleaning paint off its usually pristinely clean façade.
There was a huge video screen at the end of the plaza nearest the right bank of the Seine where a modest crowd was watching a basketball game, and a carousel at the other end which bordered on a main avenue over which rose a department store with another large video screen hawking goods to be found within. The central police station was visible beyond the Seine, and the plaza was surrounded by flics. A hundred or so people idled about the square, and streams of commuters bustled across it to the avenue beyond, and to the Metro station at the northwest corner, near which I stood, in preparation to make my hasty retreat.
There was a large ornate clock on the façade of the Hôtel de Ville, and as it began to chime six o’clock, four large green faces exploded onto the face of the building, liberally splattering the workers and their scaffolding. The basketball game continued to be visible behind the face of the Ski Mask Jihadi, likewise on offer on the electronic hoarding of the department store, and another one on the central police station itself.
The lines of flics around the plaza stood there dumbfounded as people dashed to the Metro entrance behind them and into the crush of a panicked crowd emerging splattered with green paint, then they moved in to clear the square, quite unnecessarily, since everyone in it, once the momentary shock had worn off, fled it in all directions.
This time, I could hear and almost smell fear, and the crowds of people were venting their outrage at the incompetent flics who had been powerless to prevent this second apparition, many of them pointing at the central police station and shouting their contempt.
When the crush of the paint-spattered fleeing the Metro had died down, I took the Metro back to the Place Clichy, a scene of pandemonium and paint, much as before, though this time scores of riot police were already moving in to break up any violence and the reek of tear gas lingered in the air.
The television coverage had changed. There was the same footage of monuments, department stores, hotels, churches, and billboards, electronic and otherwise emblazoned, with the face of the Ski Mask Jihadi, but the tone of the commentary had turned fearful and angry, much of it turned against the police and the civil authorities.
If these attacks had been made by vicious terrorists instead of clowns, the city could now be a smoking ruin, more than one commentator pointed out, with the police equally powerless to prevent it.
The next morning not Paris but the President of the Republic himself declared a state of siege. Army troops were called in to patrol the Green Zones and the main public areas. The sale of graffiti bombs was banned and the police went around the shops confiscating them. Backpacks, suitcases, and even pocketbooks over a certain size were banned from the Metro. Arab boys by the hundreds were rounded up and this time held overnight. The Garde Républicain, cavalry police in antique costumes otherwise deployed only for ceremonial occasions, were out on the streets on horseback.
Soldiers, police, firemen, sanitation workers, were conscripted to search nooks, crannies, trashcans, everywhere, for graffiti-bombs, and several Deputies, the Mayor, and minor celebrities appeared on television lending a hand, and when graffiti-bombs were found, two hundred of them or so, they were displayed for the cameras as if they were nuclear weapons.
The spectacle of a government proven unable to do anything being forced to make a show of doing something was ludicrous, but the footage of soldiers guarding the parks, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Pantheon, the grand hotels and department stores, flics arresting children, the Green Zones patrolled by armored personnel carriers, leeched the situation of all amusement, and turned it ominous.
The Caliphate expressed its outrage at the French government’s racist assumption that the graffiti attacks were the work of French Arabs, who had nothing to gain and were now suffering great injustice because of them, and suggested it must be the work of agents provocateur; right-wing racist infidel fascists, Zionists, the CIA.
There were orderly protests of solidarity with the French Muslims outside the French embassy in London, a somewhat larger and less civil one by Turkish Germans in Berlin which the German police broke up with tear gas and water cannon. The French embassy in Ankara was stoned and splattered with green paint, and the army was called into Istanbul to quell several chaotic riots. And there were well-organized mass demonstrations all over the Caliphate and a declaration of “solidarity with the oppressed Muslims of Europe” issued by the Caliph himself.
I prudently chose to observe the final day of the action on television in my apartment. The authorities had not been so dim as not to note that the previous graffiti assaults had occurred at 6 o’clock nor were the news channels, and as they had the day before when nothing had happened, their cameras were positioned for live coverage of the choice locations. There was little traffic on the streets save police and army vehicles, people leery of having their cars splattered with paint.
Most businesses had closed early to allow their employees to make it home before the fateful hour, but while television cameras showed streets unnaturally uncrowded at this rush hour, they also showed crowds of people whose curiosity had overcome their fear of being caught in a melee or being arrested gathered in main squares, before monuments and government buildings, beneath the Eiffel Tower, along the quais, many of them equipped with tarpaulins, plastic raincoats, and umbrellas.
They and the television viewers were not to be disappointed. At the stroke of six by the Hôtel de Ville clock, the hundreds of remaining graffiti bombs detonated. This time the Hôtel de Ville was spared, likewise the Élysée Palace, the central police station, the Eiffel Tower, but the Arc de Triomphe, Trocadero, the Ritz, the old Opera and the Opera Bastille, and hundreds of lesser targets were freshly anointed with the visage of the Ski Mask Jihadi.
Despite all worldly efforts to the contrary, Allah the All-Knowing was still watching.
* * * *
During the next few days the state of siege became a state of frenzy. Working hours remained shortened to avoid six o’clock, now by government order, and businesses began to complain of lost revenue. Everyone was searched by soldiers at the entrances to Metro stations within the Green Zones. The search for graffiti-bombs continued though no more were found. The troops in the Green Zones took to random searches. Mosques were raided by the police. The flics roughed up young Arabs and arrested scores of them for “disturbing the peace,” namely their own.
The Caliphate issued stern protests, similar words were forthcoming from Muslim countries outside its borders, there were Muslim protests in Britain, Germany, and Turkey, and chastising speeches in the United Nations.
As the graffiti was cleaned away and not renewed, as nothing further was heard from the Ski Mask Jihadi while the state of siege continued, French opinion itself began to turn against the authorities. The people of Paris, certainly the beurs, but soon enough the general populace, wanted nothing more than for the city to return to normal, and the only thing that seemed to be preventing it was the authorities themselves.
Obdurately refusing to admit defeat even when it was staring them in the face, the French authorities held their ground for another week. The Imam of the Grand Mosque, no radical jihadi, intervened with a fatwa commanding a general strike by the Faithful until the state of siege was lifted and the army removed from the Green Zones, not just in Paris, but all over France, and mullah after mullah expressed his agreement.
Since so many necessary but low-paid, arduous, and lowly regarded jobs were performed by the beurs, life in Paris and the rest of the country went from bad to worse, and since by now everyone wanted to put an end to it, trade unions began to join in the strike, and seeing the handwriting on the walls but no further Jihadi graffiti, the government finally relented, lifting the state of siege with the declaration that thanks to its diligent efforts the invisible enemy had been defeated.
Had we been defeated? This was the subject of contention in meetings of the caids in the St. Denis storeroom, in the cafes and restaurants where small groups of us idled away the time while Paris returned to something like normal.
There were many futile meetings of the caids at the storeroom, at which I was reduced to repeating the same thing in an attempt to keep their spirits up and my position as Caid of caids secure, namely that we had achieved a great victory when the trade unions joined in a strike originally called for by a fatwa from a Muslim Imam to lift a state of siege falling most heavily on French Arabs.
Kasim-Pierre made it morosely plain that he did not agree, but held his tongue at these meetings, glowering at me contemptuously, watching the confidence of the caids in the leadership of Osama the Gun slowly ebbing away.
Finally, when he judged their trust in me had sufficiently soured, when I had repeated this declaration of victory once too often and it was greeted with open derisive snorts and grunts, he made his move.
“If this was such a famous fucking victory, then why hasn’t the Caliphate at least congratulated us for it?” he demanded of me. “Why don’t they even try to take credit for a so-called victory that we supposedly won for Islam?”
I had no response to that. I had asked much the same question of Ali and he had had no answer either.
“I’ll tell you why! Because the Caliphate didn’t want the state of siege ended!”
Although I still sat on a crate at the center of the semi-circle of caids, Kasim-Pierre had made himself the focus with that. Even I found myself hanging on what he would say next.
“The Caliphate wanted the state of siege, or why would they have sent us the graffiti-bombs in the first place, and if they wanted it, why would they want it ended?”
“And why would they have wanted it in the first place?” Tarik demanded.
“So they could declare an oil boycott of France until it was lifted.”
“Your dream, Kasim-Pierre,” I said, trying to regain some authority. “The Caliphate never promised to do any such thing.”
“Why would they want to do that?” demanded Saddam.
“To show their power!” Kasim-Pierre declared.
“But the Imam’s fatwa showed our power when it got the state of siege lifted,” I reminded him.
“It showed the power of the unions,” Kasim-Pierre replied scornfully. “If they had not joined in out of their own selfish interest, the strike would have failed. They don’t give a shit about us.”
“But we proved to France that we were needed, that the economy would fall apart without us,” I insisted. “Isn’t that what you said we wanted to do in the first place?”
“And now that the state of siege is over, now that we’re out of graffiti bombs and the Ski Mask Jihadi has disappeared, it’s back to business as usual, isn’t it?” said Kasim-Pierre. “We need their lousy jobs as much as they need our labor. It won’t happen again…unless…”
“Unless what?” demanded Saddam.
Kasim-Pierre shrugged in frustration, no doubt sensing that if he didn’t come up with something, whatever he had gained would easily enough slip away.
“Unless…unless we come up with a much stronger action than graffiti bombs! Something that creates such a backlash against the Arabs in France that the Caliphate has to shut down the oil. And when we get that lifted, we’ll show that we’re needed for more than cheap labor, we’ll show our power!”
“What action?” growled Saddam.
“A real jihad!”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning guns and petrol-bombs, not graffiti-bombs!”
“You’re out of your mind! The way things are now, we can’t even get away with a check-cashing agency stick-up.”
“You’re talking about a bloodbath!”
“Our blood, not theirs!
A look came into Kasim-Pierre’s eyes that I had never seen in any man’s eyes before. His gaze became as cold and implacable as that of a reptile and yet a fire seemed to burn behind it as that of a dervish in a holy trance, making him seem both less than human and more. The caids quailed before it and so did I even before he spoke.
“Much as I detest the Great Satan, their Ronald Reagan spoke words of wisdom applied to a situation such as this—if we’re going to have a bloodbath, let’s have it now.”
No one moved, but everyone in the room seemed to fall back in horror.
“A jihad is a jihad,” said Kasim-Pierre. “Islam conquered half the world with the sword. And those jihadis weren’t hiding behind ski masks either.”
“Nor were they facing the tanks and machine guns and helicopter gunships of the French Army,” I quickly pointed out. “Nor were they calling down the wrath of the infidels on innocent Muslims. The Koran may praise willing sacrifice of your own life in the service of Islam, but not the life of unwilling Believers!”
There were sighs and grunts of relief, and that baleful something went out of Kasim-Pierre’s eyes. “The fact is that the graffiti-bomb tactic won at least some sort of victory,” I reminded my caids once more. “The Caliphate supplied them to us once, I don’t see why they wouldn’t give them to us again, and this time perhaps many more, Inshallah.”
I gave them one of Ali’s Gallic shrugs. “As some American or another didn’t quite say, if at first you do succeed, try, try, try again.”
* * * *
When I reported what had happened Ali, he became fearfully agitated. “He’s gone mad, you can’t let this happen, you’ve got to stop it, Osama!” he fairly whimpered. He went to my unused bar and poured himself a huge drink of cognac which he swallowed in two great gulps before speaking again.
“These idiots start an armed insurrection and the French will slaughter them all in a week, they’ll deport every Arab without French citizenship, such as me and you, you fool, if mobs don’t kill us first, if we don’t get thrown in concentration camps, the Europeans were capable of exterminating six million Jews, and the Jews didn’t even provoke it by starting a doomed war against them—”
“Calm down, Ali, the rest of them were terrified of doing it, they don’t even have the weapons to try, and the Caliphate can prevent it just by sending us more graffiti bombs.…”
Ali seemed to get hold of himself, but now it was my turn to become at least nervous. “Which they will, of course…? Won’t they? I must give my men something to do.…”
Ali became so
mething of his old self. “I’ll make damn sure they do. When I report this situation, I’ll make it sound even worse than it is. They’re stockpiling petrol bombs. They’re all stoked on cocaine and methedrene. They’re already recruiting suicide bombers. They’re planning to raid armories.”
“Just leave me out of it!” I told him in no little alarm. “Make it absolutely clear that Osama the Gun is their…their loyal little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike against a flood of blood. Tell them they have to get me those graffiti bombs before I lose control.”
CHAPTER 15
There were no more meetings at the storeroom during the next ten days, and Kasim-Pierre and I avoided each other in the cafes and restaurants where small groups of us met from time to time in the absence of anything else to do but wait on the will of the Caliphate. But word filtered back to me that Kasim-Pierre was attempting to recruit men for his mad armed uprising one by one, and the caids let it be known that if he succeeded in winning over too many of their men, they would be forced to go along, like it or not.
For as Tarik told me, “He who will not lead where his followers demand, ends up walking alone.”
It was clear that the next meeting of the caids would decide the issue. If the graffiti-bombs were not forthcoming, Kasim-Pierre would replace Osama the Gun as Caid of caids and Ronald Reagan’s futile bloodbath would surely begin.
Thus it was with enormous relief that I greeted Ali’s equally relieved news that another shipment was on the way. On the appointed hour of the appointed day, all the caids and nearly a hundred other men gathered in the storeroom, all relieved to one degree or another, save Kasim-Pierre, who stood by the door looking very much alone.
The truck was late in arriving, and much beer and stronger drink was consumed while we waited, which I myself did not imbibe, though under the circumstances I could not refrain from partaking in a judicious amount of the kif.
When the truck finally pulled up, it was a mad and far from sober dash into the street to retrieve the cartons. There were thirty of them, and we hauled them into the storeroom and tore them open in a frenzy.
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