by Abdel Sellou
“So Abdel, that’s how you come to see us, alone? Are you suicidal or just crazy?”
“I’m not alone, see?”
Jean-Michel takes out his BB gun and all of the peons disappear, all except for the girl, who’s now curious. We left Moktar in his underwear, shaking with fear and cold in the middle of the Droits de l’Homme esplanade. I’ve described how people calmly changed platforms when a fight broke out in the metro. There at the Palais de Chaillot, they backed up the same way, barely surprised by the show. The girlfriend followed us. We never saw Moktar again.
I’d just gotten out of prison. I was legal, I was responsible, in the eyes of the law, for everything I did. For the first time in my life, there was no more judge, no counselor, no teacher, no parents. No more adults reaching out their hands to try to guide me and filling my ears with their good advice. If I had wanted to be the new Abdel after my stay at Fleury-Mérogis, I would have had no problem finding someone to help me. I’d just have had to ask. Belkacem and Amina didn’t turn their backs on me: when they came to see me in the visitation room, just before I got out, they gave me a hard talking to, just like parents should when their son screws up. I waited for their speech to fizzle out . . . I was still oblivious.
My heroes always came out on top. Terminator got hit, but he kept standing. Nobody could beat Rambo. James Bond dodged bullets. Charles Bronson barely cringed when he was hit. It’s not that I identified with them: I just saw life like a cartoon. You fall off a cliff, you’re flat as a pancake, you get back up. Death doesn’t exist. Worst-case scenario, a bump pops up on your forehead and stars circle your head. You bounce back fast from everything, and then you make the same mistakes all over again.
I didn’t do anything differently. I reclaimed my turf at Trocadéro. I didn’t notice that the cops were keeping an eye on me, and once again, I never saw them coming. Are we going back? Okay, let’s go.
17
France is a marvelous country. It could have given up, considered me a lost cause to myself and everyone else and let me sink into delinquency. Instead it decided to give me a second chance to behave like an honest young man. I took it. In appearances, at least. France is a hypocritical country. As long as you’re discreet, it lets every kind of fraud, rip-off, and traffic slide. France is accomplice to all of its worst citizens. I took advantage of that, shamelessly.
A few months before the end of my sentence, an educational counselor got interested in my case. He came to see me, all friendly, and offer me a way out that didn’t include theft and assault: a profession. Where school failed, Justice and its special emissaries thought they could succeed.
“Mr. Sellou, we’re going to find you an internship. Starting next month, you’ll leave Fleury-Mérogis and go be transferred to a semi-free center in Corbeil-Essonnes. You’ll need to go to your place of work every day and go back to sleep at the house every evening, except for weekends, when you can go back home to your family. We will evaluate your situation several times throughout the course of your internship and then decide what happens next.”
Amen. What the counselor wanted, I could pretend to want, too. But in reality, I didn’t see myself sticking to any protocol for one second. You’d have to be pretty naïve, really, to think that a kid who never obeyed his parents, or his teachers, or the cops could suddenly think that obedience was the key to his salvation! What arguments did anyone provide to make me believe that, anyway? None! That said, this white dude in his suit and tie was right to save his spit . . . I listened closely to his little speech. I heard the word “free.” There were four letters before that, S-E-M-I? Those I forgot right away. I also heard that I’d be sleeping where I wanted on the weekend. That meant I’d leave Corbeil-Essonnes Friday morning and not come back until Monday evening. Four days in the wild . . . I signed up right there and then.
Three weeks after the internship starts—in electrical work, just like Papa!—the counselor calls me in.
“Mr. Sellou, is there a problem with your training?”
“Uh, no . . . I don’t know.”
“Well, I’m told you haven’t been in four days.”
I figure it out immediately. I never went to see how to handle cables, switches, and circuit breakers. I sent a friend instead. Same height, same build: he looks like me, and I never look like myself in photos. It works like a charm until the friend skips the training . . . he might have at least told me! I’m gonna have to set him straight. In the meantime, I owe the counselor an explanation. I try to get around the issue.
“Actually, I didn’t really like the ambience, you know . . . When you start hearing racist jokes . . .”
“Well then, what do you plan on doing? If you stop attending your internship, I won’t be able to keep you in the semi-free program. You’ll have to go back to Fleury-Mérogis.”
Ooh . . . this whitey thinks he can scare me! He doesn’t know that the bedding is softer at Fleury than in Corbeil! I swallow my pride, try to look contrite and beg him.
“Give me one week to find another internship. Please, sir . . .”
“One week, not a day more.”
Hey, hey! He thinks he’s a tough guy on top of it!
“One week, I promise.”
What bothers me about Corbeil is that that there’s no TV in the rooms. We get back at nine o’clock at the latest, sign the register in front of the uniformed guard with an expression that’s so alert, you’d think we were in Saint-Tropez . . . The next day, the doors open at dawn to let the brave get back to the grind on time. In between, there’s nothing to do. Nothing, not a thing.
I scoured the classifieds. A chain of pizza restaurants was looking for delivery boys. I’d already stolen enough motor scooters to master the art of driving and I’d run through the streets of Paris enough to know each neighborhood like the back of my hand. I got the job. For a few days, I loaded the calzones on top of the moped, I rang doorbells, furious when nobody would buzz me in, mixed up door codes, rescued my double cheeses from crooks that refused to pay, offered margheritas to the homeless guy on the corner. I managed to get a glowing report that I handed to the education counselor with an angelic smile.
“Bravo, Mr. Sellou. I encourage you to keep trying.”
“No problem. I’ve even decided to move on to more serious things.”
He’s amazed.
“What do you mean, Mr. Sellou?”
“Well . . . I mean that I have ambition. That I won’t keep delivering all my life. I’ve already started helping out the manager.”
“Well, good luck. From the bottom of my heart, good luck.”
He doesn’t think I’ll go very far.
18
I played the model employee to earn confidence from management. They showed me how the chain operated, from the order stage all the way to the client’s door and on to calculation of the day’s receipts, every night, before closing. I moved up fast in the store that hired me. I watched closely and remembered every weakness in their system: despite appearances and the so-called lesson learned in prison, Lil’ Abdel hadn’t changed. He was just looking for a new way to do business.
After getting caught again at Trocadéro, I understood that I’d have to move to another business. Paris had changed since the mid-eighties and my beginnings in the watch and camera trade. Security had beefed up so tourists could take better, safer advantage of their visits, and the police, even if it had taken them a while, quickly caught on to crooks like me. And it was getting tense between traffickers, who were always wanting more. Drugs were now the best way to make a lot of money. The network created every kind of greed, and guns started showing up. We weren’t yet seeing guys walking around with Kalashnikovs like dogs in the projects—that’s the norm these days—but gangs were forming little by little and they were looking for any way possible to make an impression on the others. You had to defend your territory. The North Africans didn’t really mix so easily with the blacks anymore. The rise of the INF in Algeria scared the French.
Newspapers reported their barbaric acts. People started looking down on us and treating us almost like savages. I really did need to find a new orientation, fast.
At Corbeil-Essonnes, I meet a druggie in the semi-free program, like me. He stole a Citroën AX to go to work. Every morning, for two or three weeks, he drops me off just outside of Paris. Then he disappears with the car. I have to take the RER again. I find myself in the place of the honest, hardworking folks who watched me sleep, spread out on the seat, just two years ago.
In his store in the Latin quarter, Jean-Marc—the manager—doesn’t know what to do anymore. His delivery boys come back often on foot with their pockets empty. They swear they were mugged in a building entrance. More like they sold the moped, often in exchange for hash, kept the money, and shared the pizzas with their friends. But how could you prove it? Jean-Marc’s no fool, but he has no way to take action. You can’t fire a delivery guy because he was mugged. You don’t file a complaint against him just because you don’t believe him. Jean-Marc sighs deeply and asks headquarters to send him new mopeds ASAP. I don’t join in on the pathetic business with the rest of the team, I don’t say anything, but it can’t keep going on like this. I’m coming up with a new plan and these little small-time thieves are preventing me from putting it into action. I talk to the manager.
“Jean-Marc, your guys there, they’re making a fool out of you.”
“I know Abdel, but my hands are tied!”
“Listen, it’s really very simple. It’s ten o’clock. Call them, one by one, and tell them you don’t need them today. Same for tomorrow and the next day. And in three days, you send them a pink slip for unjustified absence, or something like that.”
“Okay, but who’s going to make the deliveries in the meantime?”
“I’ll find you some people.”
If police are sometimes incapable of stopping crooks, it’s because they don’t use the same methods. They don’t anticipate the crime, they don’t see the hit coming, they’re not on a level playing field. Personally, I’m equipped to deal with these guys. Obviously: I’m one of them! They grew up in La Chapelle, Saint-Denis, Villiers-le-Bel, Mantes-la-Jolie, wherever. We all went to the same school. It’s called life in the projects.
I knew how to clean house. Just like magic, those delivery boys don’t claim getting mugged anymore; the receipts come back intact every evening. They’re delivered by Yacine, Brahim, and a few other future accomplices. They’re already playing along; they behave themselves for a few weeks. They know they can trust me to improve things soon. In the meantime, they stuff themselves with pizzas and they’re already happy!
There was a TV series I loved when I was a kid: The A-Team. In the pizzeria scam, I’m Face, the good-looking one who does everything right, and Hannibal, the one who ends every episode with the famous phrase: “I love it when a plan comes together.” I start replacing Jean-Marc on his days off. And when upper management gives him another store, I take his place, with everyone’s congratulations. The coast is clear.
In 1991, all the accounting is still done on paper, by hand. In my little pizzeria, we use what we call masters, which are stubbed books of numbered pages that come in double. You slide in a sheet of carbon paper and that way you get a copy of the order. One copy is a receipt for the client, and the other goes back to the main office, which then knows what’s been sold and therefore how much a store is supposed to have made.
My plan is very simple: to sell undeclared pizzas. When a client calls to place an order for two or three pies, you just have to ask if he wants a receipt. When it’s a small family or two or three students, we don’t even ask. When it’s a delivery to a company, we systematically provide a receipt. That night, I slip carbon copies of the receipts and their corresponding invoices into the envelope headed for the main office. The rest is for us.
Of course, I also have to justify the use of supplies. Nothing could be simpler. Every morning, when a supplier delivers the dough, the crates of ham and liters of tomato sauce, I give him free coffee. In the meantime, Yacine and Brahim discreetly take whatever we need for our phantom pizzas from the truck. Another proven method: fake orders, all recorded in the master, of course. I pretend that a little joker named Jean-Marie Dupont from Saint-Martin calls to order himself a dozen extra-large pizzas of every combination. Except at that the address he gives, the delivery boy finds a dentist’s office where nobody’s ordered anything. Obviously, no one delivered anything and the pizzas were never made. Except upper management, after receiving my report, files it unknowingly in the losses column.
Two guys come to see me at the store.
“We have a proposition for you: we have an empty store nearby. We buy a pizza oven, a moped, we hire a delivery boy. When you get calls here, you send them to us and we take care of the delivery. We split, fifty-fifty.”
We invested a small fortune in equipment, registered the business with the chamber of commerce, I put a girlfriend at reception, and we were off. We made a bundle of cash very quickly and then, suddenly, it slowed down. So the idea came to me to type the company name into the Minitel. I found out they opened a second store without telling me. I had the keys for the first one. I went one night, took out the oven—a Bakers Pride worth thirty thousand francs—took the mopeds, and resold everything in parts. My partners had nothing on me: we never signed any contract, my name wasn’t anywhere on the documents. They went out of business just after that.
My friends and I, we were pretty happy with ourselves. We didn’t need much. The category of small-time crooks suited us just fine. We weren’t looking to make millions, we didn’t really think we were smarter than anybody else, we had fun playing pranks on people where no one really got hurt. In our little group, nobody drank, nobody took drugs. We didn’t need any useless baggage. Most of all, we knew none of us would ever kill for money and we didn’t want to be in the hardened-criminal category. We were looking for fun in all its forms. We got girlfriends from our clientele. After closing up, we’d head to the college girls’ places for part two. Between us, we had a competition going: who could get the prettiest girl. It was hot in those tiny studio apartments under the roofs of Saint-Germain. Brahim had his technique: he pretended to be clairvoyant and predicted the girls would fail their finals. He was hoping to console them. His strategy didn’t always work. Messengers of bad omens don’t go over well with intellectuals. Personally, I made them laugh. You know what they say about a woman who laughs.
I had a hard time getting up in the morning and thought I must be pretty stupid to keep torturing myself like this. Work is tiring. Whether you do it legally or not, it’s tiring. I was starting to get fed up. I was afraid of ending up just like the honest people I considered total morons. And on top of that, the pizzeria chain was starting to equip each store with a computer. That was the end of trafficking orders. I asked to be let go. I left to go to the unemployment office with my work certificate. Without making the slightest effort, I was going to get an amount close to my official salary for two years. I had no problem taking advantage of the system.
At that point in my life, I really was like Driss, my character in the film Intouchables. Careless, joyful, lazy, vain, explosive. But not really mean.
III
Philippe and Béatrice Pozzo di Borgo
19
Serving hamburgers. Carrying crates from the truck to the warehouse, from the warehouse to the truck. Starting all over again. Filling a tank, giving change, pocketing your tip. When there is one. Guarding an empty parking lot at night. Trying not to fall asleep, at first. Then, sleeping. Observing that the result is the same. Entering bar codes into a computer. Planting flowers in roundabouts. In spring, replacing the pansies with geraniums. Trimming back the lilacs just after they bloom . . . I tried a ton of small jobs for three years. Strangely, I didn’t discover my vocation. I went to the unemployment office when they called me in, the same way I went to see the judge when I was sixteen to eighteen. Appearing docile and o
bedient was the unavoidable condition for getting unemployment checks. From time to time, you had to provide something extra. Proof of your good intentions. Nothing big. So, serving hamburgers . . . Place the slice of meat between the two pieces of bread. Press the mayonnaise distributor. Go light on the mustard. I handed in my apron fast. I awarded myself a family-sized helping of fries, covered the potatoes with a blob of ketchup—they stank like stale grease—and left giving a huge smile to the whole team.
I was supposed to look for a job. I looked very little and did it badly on purpose—that gave me a lot of free time. Day and night, I kept partying with friends who had the same kind of lifestyle . . . random. They worked for four months, the minimum requirement to qualify for unemployment; then they showed up at the unemployment office and got along nicely for a year or two. None of us did anything bad anymore, at least not much. We did sometimes invite ourselves onto a work site at night to goof around with a backhoe, or organize a scooter rodeo in the Bois de Boulogne, but nothing that would disturb the peace. We went to the movies. We snuck in through the exit and left before the credits. Still, I’d almost become a good guy. To prove it, I gave my seat to a pretty mother who was bringing her son to see Robocop 3. The kid was wearing nice leather high-tops, American style, and had big feet for his age. I wanted his shoes. I almost asked him where he got them. It didn’t even occur to me to take them. That got me worried: So, Abdel, you getting old or what? But then I thought, I don’t really need those shoes . . .