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.
No matter the time, however, for it took him the better part of three months to gather up a new passport and replacement credit cards – forget the keys to the French couple’s apartment, which for some reason Akhmed had stolen too, even though he had no idea where Bruce lived. You think you can pay two bucks for a lousy key in Paris, like you can in the States? Forget it, mon vieux. It turns out that a French key, some of the designs of which are hundreds of years old, can easily cost a hundred euros. Some have to be hand-forged, for chrissakes. Losing your keys in Paris is a very big deal, very expensive. Dealing with a Parisian locksmith is very much like dealing with a hairdresser: they’re artists!
But that inconvenience, too, passed, and in the course of these things Bruce learned a lot about the French language, the French people, Paris, bureaucracy, and keys. He learned that a kidney is un rein. He learned that there are as many French words for keys as there are Eskimo words for ice. He already knew that a civil servant is called a fonctionnaire, but he discovered that, whereas such a beast is held in almost universal contempt, the true example of it is a proud creature, able to perform miracles on a whim. Not only that, but many of them are queer, they have parties and disposable income and houses in the country and, moreover, some of them know Paris like, surprise surprise, like Bruce knows lower Manhattan, inside and out.
In other words, by the time four or five months had passed, a whole new world had opened up. And before Bruce knew it, it was nearly time for him to go back to New York.
He had learned a lot in his stay in Paris. He retained a certain satisfaction. He had begun to run with a tonier crowd, too, much like the various crowds he’d occasionally run with in New York, which consisted for the most part of boursiers, for example, men who worked in the stock exchange; and bankers, other government officials, real estate agents, and so forth. Professionals.
But what he hadn’t learned always lingered in the back of his mind. The polite doings of his new friends could be amusing. They enjoyed a cocktail and could talk – boy, could they talk. They knew wine and France and food. They knew contemporary culture, they knew a great deal about America, they knew a great deal about the long, complicated history of France.
Bruce noticed that his new friends smoothly, adroitly, and almost certainly avoided topics like Vietnam, Algiers, Congo, the Middle East, and the hegemony of American consumerism. Finally, one night, one man among them who, though not uncivilised, nurtured some obvious antipathy towards him, drank enough to express loudly and clearly and in so many words that the reason nobody talked to Bruce about certain topics was that Americans don’t know fuck-all about the rest of the world, and for the very simplest of reasons, which is that Americans don’t care fuck-all about the rest of the world, because they only care about themselves, and, pay attention, forty per cent of American high-school students can’t find their own fucking country on a fucking globe.
Bruce took umbrage. He suddenly found himself in the very uncomfortable position of defending not only himself, but his patrimony. Which was ridiculous. Why was it ridiculous? Because, in fact, as his arguments unravelled, his antagonist – hesitant at first, for he didn’t want to make a scene, but, sensing that Bruce’s entire political acts consisted of little more than know-nothing bluster – proved himself devastatingly correct. Bruce didn’t know anything about the rest of the world. He supposed he’d allowed himself to lose track of the names of the President of Israel, for example, not to mention that of the leader of the Palestinians, forget Syria, even though the titular head of Syria had been there his entire adult life, and never mind the name of a single other so-called foreign leader. Bruce kept his head to the extent that he managed not to blurt out that he’d stopped voting ages ago, mainly so he would never be called for jury duty, but the fact of it stuck in the forefront of his mind and stayed there, hindering his wit to the extent that he could name no more than two out of three personalities prominent upon the political landscape of France itself, not even a woman conspicuous among French leaders friendly to the idiotic foreign policies of the United States, despite the great cost to her domestic popularity.
Finally, as much as the average French fairy with a drink in his hand appreciates a good political debate, the atmosphere at the party began to sag under the imbalance of the argument. Cela suffit, Alain. Alors, the man’s friends began to say to him, back off, let’s have a drink. And yeah, Bruce found himself saying, in English, I didn’t come here to talk about politics, I came here to get laid.