Street of Thieves

“That’s the first time I’ve seen someone reading a Série Noire in a café in Tangier.”

The voice came from behind me and spoke French. I turned around, a bald man in his early fifties was smiling at me.

“That’s a funny coincidence, I collect thrillers,” he added.

For a second I thought he wanted to pick me up or buy the book I was holding, The Prone Gunman, but no, he just wanted to know where I’d found it. I hesitated before answering, for a number of reasons. We chatted for five minutes; I enjoyed talking about my favorite authors, Pronzini, McBain, Manchette, Izzo, it was nice to forget the images of the outstretched body and the overturned tables at the Café Argan. The guy was flabbergasted to discover that a young Moroccan could know these books.

“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.