The Recruiter
Khaleed has spent the last few weeks loitering around Amsterdam looking for just the right boy. First, he visited the kebab shop on Mercatorplein. Then the benches by the northern part of the Rembrandt park, where the teenagers gather to smoke and skate. Once, he even hung around the mosque after Friday prayers, though the emerging mass of thawb-wearing older men were immediately discouraging. It is a Monday afternoon in late October before he finally lays eyes on a promising mark. He is sitting outside a Bos en Lommer coffee shop, chosen for its proximity to a pizza parlor. Here, beanie-clad delivery teenagers linger outside all day, breathing into their hands and awaiting pickups. One in particular catches his eye.
Khaleed pulls his hood over his head then beckons the boy over.
“You a delivery boy?” asks Khaleed.
“Yes,” says the boy. Brown curls eat into his eyes, the last bit of baby fat clinging onto the beginnings of a jawbone. Up close, the boy appears to be fifteen, sixteen at most. There’s an unspoken rule in Khaleed’s line of work—no children, no force. Even crooks have a creed. And while there’s no pattern to his process, Khaleed has developed a keen sense for the ones that are the most malleable, the least suspicious.
“Make good money?” asks Khaleed.
The boy shrugs. Khaleed doesn’t need an answer. He knows how little the teenagers earn, shouldering bulky thermal backpacks and biking through traffic.
“What’s your name?” asks Khaleed.
“Ikram.”
“You want some shisha, Ikram? Come, come, sit down, I don’t bite,” says Khaleed, waving him into the seat next to him. The boy sits, his arms and legs crumpling at awkward angles, a body still getting used to itself. He takes a long drag on the pipe Khaleed hands him, then exhales much too quickly.
Khaleed is careful not to return to the coffee shop immediately, not even the day after. But on Wednesday he is there again, sitting in the same spot, smiling and offering Ikram more shisha. A few days later, Khaleed throws in a spliff for good measure. They smoke it outside, the awning of the establishment cocooning them from the light misting rain. Wet and warm mingle in the air. The neighborhood is a mix of double-income Dutch couples and second-generation Moroccan families and there is a steady stream of foot traffic. Both man and boy are content to people-watch. Slowly, Ikram begins to pass on delivery orders, the gentle zzt-zzzt of his cell phone the only reminder of his responsibilities. They talk about nothing in particular at first, but Khaleed weaves one conversational thread into another so artfully that Ikram soon feels at ease. To an onlooker, their relationship seemed reminiscent of one a bored adult with little prospects might strike up with a younger cousin. These dynamics, though somewhat contrived by Khaleed, are not entirely of his making.
“Your father, he makes good money?” asks Khaleed.
Ikram snorts, then looks away. He slides his hands into his jacket pockets and kicks at nothing on the ground.
“Why? What does he do?” asks Khaleed.
“Do? He doesn’t do anything,” says Ikram, “He sits at home and watches Al Arabiya all day. He won’t even watch the baby. Just the TV.”
Almost instinctively, the two favor straattaal when they speak, a sort of choppy Dutch street language with bits of Arabic and Surinamese thrown in for good measure. It is an unconscious linguistic rebellion in a nation that prides itself on homogeneous order. Every once in awhile, Ikram lapses into pure Arabic. He is less sullen and more expressive in the language of his ancestors. Khaleed can tell without asking that Ikram is Berber from his French-sounding j’s and the way certain words roll in the back of his throat.
***
Recruiting, Khaleed tells his grandmother, when she asks what he does for a living. And sometimes it feels like nothing more than that. Some of the boys make it easy. The sullen ones especially, or the ones with family problems so bad that the mafia is a life upgrade. But there’s something about this one, about Ikram, that nags at Khaleed.
Like Khaleed, Ikram’s family comes from Rif, a mountainous region in the north of Morocco. His parents came to the Netherlands in the 70s, utilizing the temporary guest worker permits handed out by the Dutch government. Lifelines to the promised land. In the end, most never left—after all, what was there to return to? Khaleed is familiar with Ikram’s story, it is the one he counts on. The ones with the absent parents are the easiest to sway, grateful for the attention. The desperate ones, those remind Khaleed too much of himself.
Khaleed barely remembers his mother, only the way her hair smothered his face when she picked him up, silky and lush despite being hidden under a hijab all day. His father is a colder, more amorphous memory: the whiteness of his prayer robe, the hardness of his grip as he pushes Khaleed’s nose down to meet the prayer mat.
Later, after his mother died, his father moved back to Morocco. From then it was just Khaleed and his jida, his maternal grandmother, with the occasional phone call and Western Union checks tying him to his father. They heard rumors of his father’s remarriage, but when the checks stopped coming, Khaleed knew for sure it was up to him. He dropped out of school and began working—first as a delivery boy then inevitably, for the mafia. It wasn’t a bad life, though sometimes Khaleed wondered if he liked his life because it was a good one or because he lacked the imagination to want something better.
***
“Do you want to come with me tomorrow night? I’m meeting some friends at the Club Noir,” asks Khaleed, a month after their first meeting. He is rolling a cigarette, his fingers massaging the loose tobacco into a tightly-wound crepe. A filter. A swipe of the tongue. Then with a single twirl he is done. He hands it off to Ikram.
“I have to work,” says Ikram, taking the cigarette. He has to flick the lighter a few times for the faltering flame to catch, “I need the money.”
“Tell you what, I actually need a boy to help me tomorrow. I can pay you, more than you make now,” Khaleed doesn’t look at Ikram as he says this.
This is his first test.
“Ok,” says Ikram, without asking about the nature of the proffered job.
“Ok,” says Khaleed. They agree to meet in the Rembrandtplein at 11PM the next night. After the boy leaves, Khaleed fishes for his cellphone and scrolls to his last dialed. He balances the phone between his ear and shoulder as he takes a brand new pack of Camels from his jacket pocket. He never wastes his Camels on the marks.
“I have found someone,” Khaleed says into the phone. He listens as he lights his cigarette. “Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow, insha’allah.”
***
The next morning Khaleed wakes up in a cold sweat. He has been dreaming of the shed again. The sticky, dampness of the floor. The cloying musk of the wet, freshly-cut cow ribs that drip blood from the rafters. The soundtrack is always his own whimpering. Dragged, beaten to a pulp in his father’s 10×10 meat shed. The halal butcher’s son, an unrepentant sinner.
Khaleed lies for a minute, situating himself in the present. He rubs his face. Scratches his balls. The light is beginning to splinter in through the blinds. He gropes for the cellphone keeping him company in bed and shoots Ikram a text.
Hoi jongen
Hoi
You’re coming tonight, yes?
Yes
Khaleed gets dressed. Outside, the cold air is bracing as he tilts his head and cups a lighter to the cigarette. He tries not to look at the image of tarred kidneys as he returns the pack to his pants pocket. Instead, he savors his first hit, closing his eyes and imagining the smoke filling his lungs like soft waves crashing in a cave.
From where he stands, Khaleed can see a corner toko, a Turkish bakery, and the turret of a nearby mosque. In this neighborhood, every store sign blends impossibly long Dutch words with the gentle curve of Arabic vowels. Rent is cheap here, where the buildings are nondescript and government-built, a hasty bandaid to the city’s influx of new immigrants. The architecture utilitarian, a far cry from the brownstone canal houses of the city center. Nobody puts pictures of this neighborhood on postcards to mail to friends. Khaleed stubs out his cigarette and crosses the tram tracks, headed for the bakery.
Inside, he nods at the owner, a square-jawed man with thick wrists. He is ungainly for a baker, too big for this tiny bakery that smells like day-old dough and fried sweets. The fluorescent lighting only accentuates the worn quality of the store, with its blue-tiled walls and peeling countertops. For art, someone with aspirations beyond baking has plastered the walls with laminated paintings; Khaleed is particularly fond of a close-up depicting a serene Dutch milkmaid pouring milk into a basin. He wonders if the baker himself has chosen the decor or if there lurks some mystery wife in the nether regions of the bakery, kneading dough, and dreaming of fine art.
Khaleed stands in front of the case for so long that the baker, who takes his time serving other customers and sipping his tea, walks over and strikes up a conversation.
“Can I help you, meneer?” says the baker.
“No, no, I find it hard to choose one, you know.”
“Why not take a selection then?” says the baker.
This isn’t their first interaction. Khaleed’s sweet tooth sees him frequent the bakery daily, sometimes stopping for a coffee of the dark, black variety. Occasionally he does business here, and he has noticed the baker eyeing his companions, the sometimes rough-looking men who enter in pairs and sit down to talk without ordering anything. Khaleed takes a perverse pleasure in the baker’s discontent.
Finally, blessedly, Khaleed singles out a borek, the fattest one, with spinach-cheese filling oozing out of its phyllo sides. He points to it and the thick-wristed baker clamps it with tongs, trapping it within a thin wax sleeve. Khaleed pats his pockets, his hand emerging with an assortment of bank notes, the smallest of which is a twenty. He hands it over, the baker makes change, and Khaleed leaves a five euro tip on a seventy cent pastry. And so the equilibrium of their relationship is maintained.
He bites into pastry. In his pocket, a light buzz stops him in his tracks.
Are you well?
I’m good
I’ve been praying for you, child
Khaleed smiles and shakes his head. His grandmother. He taps his thumb on his phone screen a few times, mulling over his plans for the day. He thinks about the last time he visited her, how papery thin her skin had felt when he’d kissed her. Cheeks sagging in the way wax pools around the base of a candle. Brittle bones. Bird-like hands chopping onions for tagine. I’m coming over now, he texts back.
Turning around, Khaleed catches the baker’ s eye and points to more things behind the glass case, adding an assortment of pastries and even a Turkish pizza.
“For my jida,” explains Khaleed. The baker nods and relinquishes his frown, the crook of his smile finally extending to his eyes.
***
Khaleed’s grandmother lives in Almere. Here the sky is frighteningly open, white-wisped blue skies meeting green fields as if to accentuate the flatness of the land. Khaleed pushes open the unlocked door of his grandmother’s council home and calls out. Inside, it is a time capsule of his childhood: mismatched tapestries, lace tablecloths, figurines of characters from Arabic folklore tales. In the kitchen he finds his grandmother cooking, a copy of Het Parool on the table opened to a half-spread photo of Ajax midfielder Hakim Ziyech.
“Finding a new husband, jida?” says Khaleed tauntingly, stooping to kiss her. She has always been small but the years have burdened her with a pronounced stoop, so she appears almost childlike. But she is a fighter, his grandmother, although two bouts of cancer have taken their toll. Khaleed sits down, suddenly filled with the dense, bottomless emotion that comes with confronting aging in the ones we love.
`
“Our boy, he did so well, eh?” says his grandmother, smacking the newspaper.
“Yes, yes, he did,” Khaleed agrees, even though he did not watch the game.
***
At the Rembrandtplein that night, Khaleed finds Ikram skulking amidst the bronze statues that guard the square, his human presence betrayed only by the red-gold glint of the cigarette dangling from his lips. Amsterdam on a Friday night buzzes all around them: bikes, cars, and trams in a choreography of near misses. Bars and cafes expel belligerent occupants in every direction. As the pair approach Club Noir, Khaleed notices Ikram noticing a group of girls in tiny sequin dresses shivering in line. The boy is nervous, keeping his hands sequestered in his pockets. It’s a cold night, with a kind of biting wetness that chills to the bone. Ikram’s hoodie, though pulled tight over his head, is ill-equipped for the weather. Khaleed makes a mental note to buy the boy a proper parka.
Khaleed leads the way up to the bouncer, a buff Antilles man with a shiny, bald head. Without breaking stride, Khaleed nods and the bouncer pulls open the club door for them. Even as they pace past the girls in line, Khaleed is aware that he is now the object of their attention. He is not classically handsome, at least not in the rakish way of most of his peers, though there is an enigmatic attractiveness to him. This has nothing to do with his face. His cheeks are a little too gaunt and a dark-blue weariness is permanently stamped under his eyes. Instead, it is the totality of his very presence that captivates, the sum of how he carries his parts. His is not the swagger of the other Moroccan men, nor the carefree stride of the Dutch. What the girls are admiring are the confident movements of his limbs, clinical and yet—fluid all at once.
Inside the club, a Krantje Pappie song is thumping, the one the radio has been playing on repeat all summer. The smoke machines have already been hard at work and the dance floor is a mass of mist and gyrating silhouettes. Khaleed is greeted by the occupants of no less than six other VIP tables before they reach their table. Tonight he is dressed in a tight-fitting silk shirt and a large belt buckle. A thick gold chain hangs from his neck. More notably, he has a gun tucked into his pants, hidden by his thick jacket. Tonight, his piece is just for show.
As they join the table, some men rise to shake Khaleed’s hand and move to make room in the booth. They smile briefly to acknowledge Ikram and then—the air clouds with cigarette smoke, curses fly, and a round of drinks are poured. The table radiates a palpably masculine energy. Khaleed knows most of the men, who are predominantly Moroccan or Antilles, maybe a few from Suriname. But there are a smattering of white men too, hard-looking, with dark hair and pale-skin. They are not Dutch and drink only Żubrówka, though everyone else is pounding Hennessy on ice, including Ikram. The boy is more than a little tipsy by the time a blonde girl in a crop top and leopard print pants sidles up to him.
“Dance?” she says. She is standing in between Khaleed and Ikram, so close that Khaleed can smell her, a heady mix of vanilla and sweat. Ikram looks to him for guidance and in response, Khaleed merely sucks on his cigarette. The girl does not seem perturbed by the table of men, who are watching Ikram watch the girl.
“Ok,” says Ikram, and allows her to lead him onto the dancefloor. Back at the table, a large man leans toward Khaleed, his belly threatening to punch through the buttons of his shirt.
“I should call you my Pied Piper!” says the fat man, clapping Khaleed on the back so hard it makes the Hennessy in his glass slosh over the edges. Khaleed laughs, a too-big and too-hearty laugh.
Collateral damage, that’s how Khaleed’s boss, the fat man, refers to these boys. The youngest of whom do the dirtiest of jobs. Expendable, mostly because of their youth. Has this fat, rich man ever stopped to consider the value of a human life? Khaleed sips on his Hennessy and watches the boy on the dancefloor, noticing the delicate way Ikram has planted his hands on the blonde girl’s hips. Swaying, swaying, swaying to the beat.
***
In the months leading up to spring, Khaleed takes it upon himself to conduct an education of sorts, instructing Ikram in all manner of subjects: the need to wear a rubber, where to buy a discounted iPhone, what to say to girls, and how to decipher the dynamics of the mafia. There’s a subtlety to this last subject matter, for although the boy is not religious, Khaleed can sense that Ikram is imbued by an underlying sense of morality. Still, the mafia too have their own code, and Khaleed leans hard into this. He pays Ikram, ostensibly to be his bodyguard-lookout-errand runner. The secrecy of what they do is always implied, even if Khaleed never actually discloses the nature of his job. But it is Ikram’s peers, the younger mafia boys, who impress Ikram the most. Boys with flashy clothes, electric scooters and enough money to dictate the autonomy of their own lives. The mafia, they say without saying, is the only way to equalize one’s standing within society.
Two months pass this way, and then, Khaleed gets the call. That afternoon, he texts Ikram to meet him.
“We’re going out of the city today,” says Khaleed.
“Where to?” says Ikram.
“It’s a surprise, jongen,” says Khaleed.
Khaleed drives. Ikram’s knock-off Hilfiger cologne clogs up the car but Khaleed doesn’t comment upon it. It wasn’t too long ago that he too was a young boy with a fresh-faced girlfriend. Young love, he thinks, glancing sideways at the boy. Ikram’s jawline has sharpened and his haircut—smooth, faded sides cresting into an effortless flop that skirts his eyes—makes him look much older than he did a few months ago.
They take the A10 south and are on the highway for about 10 minutes before Khaleed caves and cracks open the window. He reaches for the pack of Camels in the center console. Offering Ikram one, he then mouths another out of the box for himself. Ikram lights both.
“Where are we going?” asks Ikram.
Khaleed keeps one hand on the wheel while reaching the other back. He rummages in the back seat for a few seconds, finally pulling a package free. He drops this in the boy’s lap.
“A present,” says Khaleed.
The boy looks down at this lap. The outline of the gun is obvious through the opaque plastic.
“Go on, open it,” says Khaleed, keeping his eyes on the road. He exits off the highway. First right, then left. Out the window goes his cigarette butt. They are beyond city limits now, in a part of town neither has occasion to visit. Manicured lawns that back into private canals. Standalone brick homes. Peugeots and Aston Martins. Khaleed parks on a main street, across from a public park. Here there are metallic sculptures, tennis courts, and a children’s playground with intact swings. They are less than 15 miles away from their own neighborhood, and yet—a world away from what feels familiar.
Ikram disposes of his cigarette out the car window, then unwraps the package with great care, extricating the gun and cradling it in his palms. It’s probably the way he has seen the police do it in movies. Or the bad guys. Khaleed can feel the adrenaline radiating from the boy.
“Aren’t you hot? Take off your jacket.”
Ikram is still looking at the gun, turning it left and right, gazing at it almost reverently. Khaleed can feel his indecision: should he set the gun down to take his jacket off? Is it loaded?
“It’s not loaded,” says Khaleed. His mouth is dry. He is, he realizes, uncommonly nervous, almost as if the situation is reversed.
“I need a favor,” Khaleed finally brings himself to say.
“What?”
“There is a man. He lives there,” Khaleed gestures, and Ikram turns his gaze to follow the finger pointing to a house in the distance. From where they sit, they can make out the stone lions that flank the main gate. An imposing red brick building is visible beyond. “This man, you do not need to know his name. But he is dangerous to us. He is threatening us, our community. And we need to send him a message.”
“What kind of message?” says Ikram. His puffy jacket squawks against the seat as he moves.
Khaleed is silent for a beat. Outside the car, the day is striking its highest note, sending a crescendo of pink and golden hues across the sky. It is beautiful, in the way that chilly, spring afternoons can sometimes be, and yet innocuously bright for the conversation at hand.
“This is a big moment for you, ‘Kram,” says Khaleed. He reaches for the gun and the boy flinches as Khaleed grabs it by the handle. It is a 9mm Hi Point, the kind favored by the youngest members of the mafia, the ones only recently initiated. Khaleed has repurposed it from its previous owner, a 17-year old boy who had no further use for it.
Khaleed lets the gun lie heavy in his hand, weighing his next words.
“We need you to go to his house. Point this at him and pull this part,” Khaleed says, holding the gun as he extends his arm and lightly indicates the trigger. “It’ll fire a blank but he’ll get the message.”
***
Sitting in the car, watching Ikram lift the gun and point it at the owner of the house with the stone lions, Khaleed is very aware that the man does not, in fact, understand. The man is a criminal lawyer and a part-time judge, so outspoken against gang violence that his name has occasion to pass many a mafia leader’s lips. And now he stands, one hand outstretched, speaking calmly to Ikram. As though a scared Moroccan teenager standing on his front lawn and pointing a gun at him is an everyday occurrence. Khaleed can tell this is going to go very wrong. He knew it in his bones the minute the boy stepped out of the car. The way the recent confidence Ikram had gained seeped out of his body with every step the boy took toward the house.
Khaleed knows this will go wrong because he himself loaded the gun. With bullets not blanks. He watches the lawyer, a statuesque Dutch man with a receding blonde hairline, step toward Ikram. Even from a distance the boy’s arm wavers, currents of fear traversing through his body. The boy is not ready for this, but then—Khaleed never needed him to be. He knows this, planned this, down to the details of the suitcase in the trunk of the car. And the flight ticket in his pocket. Even so, just as the man reaches the boy, Khaleed turns his head toward the park and watches a flock of geese take off, startled by the sound of the gunshot.
***
The newspapers never name Ikram—that isn’t how they do things in the Netherlands. The most notable quote comes from the police commissioner, who talks at length about the rise of teenage hitmen in the city. Amsterdam is turning into a narco state, he opines, giving the media the soundbite they are looking for.
Khaleed high-tails it back to Morocco, to the desert mountain town of Rif, where he knows no one and his face blends in amongst the masses. Unfortunately, in his long absence, he finds he has romanticized his homeland. He now cannot stand the stench of raw goat meat wafting from the market. Hates the way every moving person, vehicle, and animal kicks up puffs of red dirt. Dirt that settles into a fine dust, coating everything in sight, so the town appears rusty beyond repair.
Perhaps it is this restlessness that makes him feel lonely. And maybe it is this loneliness that makes him feel like crying. Khaleed distracts himself by watching the clouds fold into each other, a backdrop in motion. Here, the crows punch holes in the sky, screaming about the coming of warmer weather. Khaleed thinks about Ikram. He remembers how much the boy was looking forward to spring. Ikram had big plans for payday, he was taking his girl to Belgium. It will be my first time out of the country, he’d confided to Khaleed, laughing as though the idea was unfathomable, even to himself.
Khaleed watches a street dog drag a piece of splintered branch across the street. The bark is ripped at its seams. But still the dog tussles and tears. Khaleed pulls on the shisha pipe. He has not decided what he will do once his big-bellied boss calls him. He has had his cell phone turned off since he got here weeks ago. There is a certain nagging at his chest that feels unhealthy.
In spite of that, Khaleed knows that, if a moment to turn back had ever existed, the illusion of that choice has long since passed. Life and all its sharp points and twisted edges have swallowed him whole. He watches the last rays of the sun tinge the tips of the juniper trees covering the mountain range just beyond the town. Even sunken beyond view, the sun casts a ferocious orange glow, so the trees appear as if on fire.
• • •
In spite of a career in tech marketing, Ashanya Lingam loves dabbling in fiction. She is particularly interested in telling the stories of immigrants negotiating Western societies, especially around themes of identity, longing, and loss. Though Malaysian-born, she currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner and a dog named Rembrandt.