Maxim Jakubowski - Paris Noir

Akhmed, who seldom deigned to look Bruce directly in the eye, did so now, and he did so out of frank incredulity. For the money.

And now another unexpected sensation shimmied up Bruce’s spine like a fun-loving singe after a banane flambée au rhum: Sold for money. Not ideology. Money. OK. Got it. But in the here and now what it means is that all this terrific sex we’ve been having tonight, and for any number of nights over the past four months, means nothing to this guy. I’m hurt, Bruce said sarcastically, but to himself. Mordacity as a defence mechanism. The root is to bite, but the one bitten is oneself. Because, quite irrationally, be was hurt. A little bit, anyway. But beneath that he liked it. Les Délcieux d’Amour dans Les Nuits de Paris , indeed. He liked it.

And what would you do with the money, he asked.

Akhmed shrugged. Same thing I do with all my money.

Which is?

I send it home to my mother.

All of your money?

All of my money.

Admirable. A Confucian would call that filial piety.

Whatever a Confucian is, Akhmed glowered, is not me.

Mostly a lost value, in my society anyway, Bruce concluded lamely.

Akhmed’s silent expression reflected only a sour disinterest.

Bruce snuggled up and traced Akhmed’s lower rib with a forefinger. And you don’t send the least tithing cent to your local mosque? he asked playfully.

The side of Akhmed’s hand clipped Bruce above the ear, catching his head between it and Akhmed’s chest, the musculature of which Akhmed had the reflexive foresight to tense, thus inducing a temporary tinnitus in both of Bruce’s ears.

Cocksucker, Bruce said reflexively, though he said it in French. He didn’t mean it that way, in the way that Akhmed thought he meant it. Bruce meant to say mangeur de bite! merely as an exclamatory remark, an expostulation of marvel over the abrupt change in the course of events. But Akhmed thought Bruce was calling Akhmed an eater of dick which, even in ordinary circumstances, would have represented a breach of protocol – another word the French may have invented, which thought caused Bruce to giggle incontinently.

Under the circumstances, Akhmed beat the shit out of Bruce. Beat him well and thoroughly, all the while saying to himself, Akhmed, you are a fool. It’s his western way. He’s an idiot. He has no idea who you are. All you’re doing is thrashing your meal ticket. And cross-rationalising: he insulted me. I pitch but I don’t catch. I’ve had it with this suceur , all he does is insult me. When he wakes up, maybe he will have learned his lesson.

Indeed, Bruce lost consciousness long before Akhmed finished with him. So that Bruce took no pleasure when, at the end, having set aside everything of Bruce’s that could possibly have any value, including his clothes, Akhmed fucked him again. Fucked him hard. Fucked him so hard that it was all that Akhmed could do to refrain from finishing the job, i.e., killing the fuckee. For he hated himself at the last moment of pleasure, because it was pleasure, and for that pleasure, he hated himself.

Finally, pretty worn out, he rolled Bruce’s senseless and pasty white old man’s bag of bones, some of them broken, off the bed onto the floor, doubled the dive-hotel pillow between his back and the wall, and smoked himself a cigarette. His hands were trembling. Strictly adrenalin, but he saw it as a weakness for which he blamed the old man and gave him a kick.

But, after only a few drags, Akhmed became too introspective to relax. What he had done, what had happened, was complex. The rigidity of the discipline he applied to his prostitution, to his money, to the whole of his circumstances, as altogether illegal as they were altogether modest, here in this thousand-year-old city of extreme decadence, of lights everywhere and of people from all over the world, a city which allowed him to live in a way that he could never live almost anywhere else… did not apply so easily to the emotions coursing through him. He felt himself a one-man colonial uprising. He would never feel himself up to the stature of a warrior of God. Yet God must have something to do with it, else why do fools such as this Bruce cross his path? He’d never had a French client who wanted to ask him about his mother. Never had a French customer who cared what he did with his money or his time away from work. Nobody had even so much as asked him what part of Morocco he was from; to them, it seemed to him, Morocco was a sort of child’s alphabet block lost among similar blocks, indistinguishable, one from the other, in a pile called ‘Africa’.

Meanwhile, the very freedom against which he and others like him railed was the very freedom which enabled him to pursue the almighty euro according to his lights. To wit: his mother had thought for years that Akhmed was teaching Berber as a second language at L’Ecole de Science Polytechnique, a position modest enough, but secure and respectable, which enabled her to live in a paid-for house.

At least, that’s what he let her let him think that she thought.

With a grunt of frustration he stubbed out his cigarette on one of Bruce’s exposed butt cheeks and threw the end at the bidet. The tang of burnt flesh suffused the room with unexpected vigour. A memory fleeted across Akhmed’s mind, and he frowned. He looked down on the unconscious Bruce with the scowl of an annoyed and very handsome Easter Island deity. The American’s hands were small, like his eyes and his dick. His paunch, despite a gym membership, was pronounced. Akhmed half-consciously compared the flatness of his own abdomen by touch. I could kill this guy. He looked at Bruce. Maybe I already have.

He didn’t bother to check.

Outside in the hall, which was really just a landing not one metre wide, a man and a woman trudged up the staircase, breathing hard between snatches of conversation. Footfalls passed by the door and the couple worked their way up to the next étage. The couple’s desultory remarks diminished. A door opened and then closed. Silence returned to the hotel. Out of the little window adjacent to the bed, several floors down via an airshaft, along the narrow alley to its mouth, a feeble klaxon marked the slow progress of a police Peugeot threading through traffic on the boulevard Clichy. On the way to some place else.

No, Akhmed thought. I cannot blame this man for my life.

He took a bird bath at the sink and soaped his split knuckles. It felt good. Then he gathered Bruce’s effects and decamped.

That felt good, too. Akhmed had pulled off a bigger job than normal, and felt like thereby he’d improved on his circumstances. Which he had. Bruce’s wallet, cellphone, watch, the opal ring, the credit cards, but especially the passport, brought Akhmed some thirty-five hundred euros.

He took the money and went home to his mother for a while.

It felt good, when he considered how this largesse had come about; which, soon enough, was never.

It took six weeks for the bruises to revert through purple, blue and yellow to the natural sallowness of Bruce’s skin, better than two months for the two broken ribs to heal and for his piss to stop going pink except every once in a while, and even longer for the lousy French dentist to grind the posts and take the mould and design and build and fit and finally install a bridge for the two lower front teeth that had been knocked out. The guy didn’t even wear latex gloves, for chrissakes, while he had his hands in Bruce’s mouth, and he reeked of cigarettes. What the hell, Bruce wryly reflected, maybe it had become his destiny to have to pay for any kind of dirty behaviour, getting old isn’t for sissies, and the dentist had to take his hands out so Bruce could laugh without choking on mirth.