Lavie Tidhar - Osama

When Richard was born his father was in prison. By the time he left school at sixteen, he was already stealing cars like his old man. He did some time for mugging. “I was not there to give him the love and affection he should have got,” his father would later say. When Richard ran into the old man at a shopping mall some years after his first arrest, Robin Reid had a word of advice for his son. Muslims treat you like a human being, he said. And they get better food in prison.

Richard took the name Abdul Raheem after his conversion at the Feltham Young Offenders Institute. A few years after that he disappeared. His mother thought he was in Pakistan. Records obtained later suggest that he was trained in Afghanistan. He resurfaced in Amsterdam, where he worked in a restaurant. From Amsterdam he went to Brussels, and from Brussels to Paris.

December was cold and dark, and the days were short. It was on the seventeenth that Richard bought a round-trip ticket to Miami, flying with American Airlines. He spent his time in Paris around the Gare du Nord, not staying in a hotel; when he arrived at the airport on December twenty-first, he looked rough.

He had no luggage. French security personnel interviewed Reid, but they could not find a reason to hold him. Having missed his flight, he returned the next day and this time successfully boarded the Boeing 767 flight.

It was a Saturday morning. There were a hundred and eighty five passengers on board. There were, as mentioned, explosives, as well as a detonator, in the soles of Richard Reid’s shoes. Once the flight was airborne, and after the in-flight meal (which Richard did not share), the smell of smoke began to waft through the cabin. A stewardess, Hermis Moutardier, discovered him trying to light a match and warned him that smoking was not allowed on board. Reid promised to stop. He picked his teeth with the blackened match instead. He had a window seat, and no-one beside him. Moments later, Moutardier returned, finding Richard bent over in his chair. She thought he was smoking. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘what are you doing?’ He did not reply. When she demanded an answer Reid turned in his seat, exposing the shoe now between his legs, a fuse, and a lit match. Moutardier grabbed him. He pushed her away. She tried to take hold of him again and he pushed her, hard, until she fell across an armrest in the next row of seats. Moutardier ran back down the plane, shouting, ‘Get him! Go!’

When Cristina Jones heard Moutardier, she ran towards the commotion. Reid’s back was turned away. Jones shouted, ‘Stop it!’ and tried to grab him. Reid turned and bit her left hand, his teeth fastening to the flesh below the thumb, not letting go. Jones screamed.

When he released her, Jones put up the tray table in the seat beside him. Passengers passed over bottles of Evian water to pour over Reid. They then used belts, headphone wires and plastic cuffs to tie him up. When, later, the FBI tried to take hold of him, they had to cut Richard out of layers of bonds.

‘I think I ought not apologize for my actions,’ Richard Reid said at his trial. ‘I am at war with your country. I’m at war with them not for personal reasons… So you can judge and I leave you to judge. And I don’t mind. This is all I have to say.’

‘You are not an enemy combatant,’ Judge William Young said. ‘You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist … We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.

‘You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.

‘Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down.’

‘On the Day of Judgment,’ Reid said as he was carried away, ‘you will see in front of your Lord and my Lord and then we will know.’

Joe put down the book and drank his whisky. A single ice-cube tinkled against the glass. The window shutters had gone down, and the plane was in darkness. Like the guy in the book, he had a window seat and no one beside him. Before and behind him, all throughout the plane, people were sleeping, like silkworm larvae in their soft cocoons. He could hear the sounds of their lives, the gentle snores and their bodies turning this way and that, and he wished he too could sleep. The books did not seem particularly conductive for airplane flights. They were full of exploding planes, exploding buildings, exploding trains, exploding people. They read like the lab reports of a morgue, full of facts and figures all concerned with death. He did not understand them. He thought about the words of the judge in the book. The judge said there was no war, or rather he said that the bomber, Reid, wasn’t a soldier: he was a criminal. But it seemed to Joe that, though he didn’t understand it, there was a war being fought in the book. He didn’t know why or what it was about, it was an ideological battle of which he had no conception, but not understanding it did not mean that it did not exist. Perhaps the judge, like himself, did not understand it, could not understand it, and therefore would not accept it for what it was. And yet, it only took one side to declare war.

He sighed and lit a cigarette, having booked a seat at the back of the plane, and when the ash grew long he tapped it into the arm-rest’s small, metallic ashtray. He wished he could look out of the window. It was dark on the plane, and quiet. He had headphones, but they carried only canned music through. Tomorrow he would be in Paris. He was travelling back through time on this flight, the hours falling backwards the further he went; it was like shedding old skin, emerging new again at the same point one started from. Today he would be in Paris. Yesterday, now.

On board the plane there was no time. Here, he existed in a bubble of stalled time, time halted, preserved, the hour of boarding contained within the self-enclosing metal all the while it was in the air. He shook his head. He was being fanciful. It was only the crossing of time zones that did this. Tomorrow he would readjust his watch, and it wouldn’t matter what the time was on the other side of the world. It seldom mattered what happened on the other side of the world.

He finished his cigarette, and his mouth tasted of ash. He finished the whisky, swirling it around his mouth with his tongue, running his tongue against his teeth, and swallowed, and his stomach felt hollow. He pressed the button that turned off the light and sat back, his head resting against the seat. The plane hummed all around him, and he let the sound close on him until he was completely alone, and the rest of on-board humanity had dwindled into a nothingness: an emptiness of sound.

Finding the fat man had not been easy.

He had landed at Orly; taken the train into Paris; checked himself into a small run-down hotel in the foothills of Montmarte. Orly was a concrete busyness. On the jetty as they disembarked a man slipped and fell, hitting his head on the ground. Outside the terminal building there was a statue of a French general: the small brass plaque read: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, Lille 1890-Algiers 1944. “Fighting France calls upon you.”

Sprayed against the concrete base was a faded inscription, partially covered in dried bird droppings. It read, France has no friends, only interests. CDG .

The trains were busy and the seats worn. There were sprayed messages against the sides of the carriages, and burn-holes in the upholstery. Joe’s hotel room was on the third floor, overlooking a narrow, climbing street. Just outside the hotel entrance there was a man with an upturned cardboard box offering passers-by a chance to find the lady, his hands moving incessantly as the three playing cards, face down, changed and shifted places. Joe stared out of the window and smoked. He felt restless, tired, but not able to sleep. The air was hot and muggy, a dirty Parisian summer beginning to angrily emerge from a winter’s sleep.