Mathias Énard - 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.

They might have killed strangers; they’d almost even killed Judit, who knows. They’d beaten up my favorite bookseller; they had offered me shelter, food, and an education. My room was too little; the commentaries on the Koran, the grammar books, the treatises on rhetoric, the Sayings of the Prophet, his Lives, my shelf of thrillers: these magnificent books were obstructing my view. Where were they, all the members of the Group? At noon, I called Sheikh Nureddin and Bassam on their cellphones from our telephone: no answer. I had the feeling that no one would come back, that this office had served its purpose, that they had left me, the naive one, to get the beatings and deal with the police. That’s why the Sheikh had so easily given me five hundred dirhams. I wasn’t going to see anyone ever again. Not a single one of them. Stay with my books until the cops arrived. No, I was paranoid; impossible. I had read so many thrillers where the narrator realizes he had been used, manipulated by the crooks or the forces of law and order that I saw myself, sole representative of the abandoned Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, waiting calmly for the cops and ending up being tortured in place of the beards.

Sheikh Nureddin’s office wasn’t locked. I told myself I was imagining things on my own, that they would come back momentarily, expose me, and make fun of me till the end of my days.

The bookstore’s cash box was there, on the table, no one had emptied it for weeks, there were about two thousand dirhams in it.

I found other bills in a leather bag, euros and dollars, ten or fifteen thousand dirhams in all, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Otherwise everything was empty, the desk diaries had disappeared, the contacts, the notebooks full of orders, the account books, the activities, the business affairs of Sheikh Nureddin, all gone. Even his personal computer wasn’t there. Just the monitor.

I was all alone in the midst of dozens, hundreds of shrink-wrapped books.

I took a walk around the neighborhood, to see if I might come across a familiar face that belonged to the Group; no one. I went to Bassam’s house, a few feet away from my parents’, I met his mother and asked if she knew where he was; she gave me the kind of look you reserve for contagious beggars, muttered a curse and slammed the door, then reopened it to hand me a dirty old envelope with my name on it — Bassam’s handwriting. I glanced at it, it wasn’t dated today; apparently some old thing he had never mailed, since he hadn’t known where to send it. His mother closed the door again abruptly, with no explanation.

At four o’clock I had a meeting in the Free Zone with Jean-François for the new job; I wanted to change, to make myself as handsome as possible, I felt as if the world were crumbling into pieces. Going back to the Group, I thought I saw two shady looking characters hanging around our premises; cops in civilian clothes, who knows. I checked my email, there was a message from Judit, she wrote that she was finally coming back to Tangier as planned, but alone; she didn’t have enough money to get a new ticket for Barcelona; she’d be there a little before the set date, the day after tomorrow, she said, after having seen Elena off at the airport.