Street of Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page B

after all it was Bassam who was right, you had to leave, you had to leave, the harbors burn our hearts. Solitude became a mass of fog, a thick cloud, of Evil or fear; I was slightly nauseous. I began to shiver from cold on my bench and all of a sudden I was hungry, very hungry.
    After devouring a sandwich in two mouthfuls on the way, I went back to my room at the Propagation; everything was deserted, silent, a silence that beat at my eardrums; I fell asleep like a rock.

THE next morning my mouth tasted like an ashtray and my eyes were red, but otherwise I was in pretty good shape. I shelved a few books, breakfasted, read the commentary on the Sura of Joseph in the Kashshaaf as the sun spread over the rugs. At times, the faces from the day before came back to me, the bookseller in tears, the moustache on the parking lot bastard, like an upwelling of sewage that I kept trying to check by concentrating on my reading. I tried to convince myself that what was done was done. What’s done is done. The future is what counts.
    Sheikh Nureddin reappeared in the early afternoon, dressed in civilian clothes, that is in a dark blue, rather elegant suit. He greeted me politely, I might even say warmly. He asked me if I had prepared the books (it was Thursday) and I answered yes. He said perfect. Tonight we have a meeting in town, I’ll be back tomorrow morning. And he went out. No remark, no allusion to the previous day’s punitive excursion.
    Finally I found solitude. I looked at a few Internet sites, sent some Facebook messages to girls I didn’t know, all French, like throwing bottles into the sea. I am a young Moroccan from Tangier, I’m looking for your friendship to share my passion: books.
    I’ll show you ladies how cultivated I am, I thought, hence the note about the books, slightly exaggerated perhaps, but sober and precise. I should add that I chose girls who definitely were pretty,but who wore glasses and who came from cities I knew nothing about, but imagined were cold, boring, and thus propitious for reading. (It goes without saying that I never received a reply; in their defense, I have to admit that if these girls ever glanced at my profile, which I had taken care to make public, they would have seen among my friends not only Bassam’s convict’s face, but also the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought and Al-Jazeera, which, seen from Bourges or Troyes, had very little chance of inspiring tenderness.)
    I napped a little, dreaming about the above-mentioned young women. Then I reread the beginning of Total Chaos, one of my favorite thrillers; I imagined that Tangier suddenly became Marseille, which wasn’t very likely, as I snacked on a bag of chips; night fell gently; the smell of the sea was all around me.
    I lay on the floor without a light until it was dark out.

BASSAM rushed in and almost trampled me.
    â€œWhat are you doing in the dark? Were you sleeping?”
    â€œNot really,” I said.
    He was overexcited, as usual. He kept pacing in circles like a puppy around its mother’s basket.
    â€œWhat’s happened to you now?” I asked. “One more guy to beat up?”
    â€œNo, this time it’s bigger than that.”
    â€œIs it the Prophet’s sword?”
    â€œStop your blasphemies, you degenerate. It’s time for revenge.”
    I thought for a minute that he was joking, but after I turned on the light I could see that his weaselly eyes shone with a strange madness, in the center of his thick peasant’s head.
    â€œWhat kind of shit are you talking about?”
    He fed me some vague paranoid theory according to which only an attack that would shock people’s sensibilities would get things underway by precipitating the West, the population, and the Palace into confrontation. It was all Sheikh Nureddin, with hardly any Bassam. He had a tiny pea in place of a brain.
    â€œYou have a pea instead of a brain,” I said.
    What’s