Where did I get the idea of becoming a cop, they wanted to know. They’d always heard me cuss out the police — They’ve got it in for Moroccans, but they let the white offenders slide — so why this change of heart? Should I tell them about my instinct, my almost infallible ability to see who was cool and who was up to no good, who was a crook and who wasn’t? Sure, try to explain that to your parents, who are Berbers from the Rif Mountains. My father had bad memories of the police back home. “They speak Arabic to us, they insult us, they take our money. The authorities sic them on us to fill their own pockets. Vultures.”
Sometimes I’d follow some guy down the street, because he seemed to fit the description of a murderer. Even with my friends, I asked myself who was running a racket and who was on the up-and-up. It bothered me that I couldn’t share this with anyone. I felt like a traitor.
“Mother,” I said, “this choice brings me peace.”
That would have to be enough for them.
And it did bring me peace. The training went by quickly, although I never told my parents how irrationally the other recruits grumbled about “my people,” the Moroccans, the Mocros, the Muslims.
One part of our training happened at the academy, the other part came from the popular reality show Detection Requested. All the trainees watched it, and the next day it was all they could talk about.
What it boiled down to was that all Moroccans were the same, except me. I was different. One of my fellow trainees put it this way: “You fit in everywhere. You could be a suspect or a cop.”
After I graduated and got my first assignment, I was shy, I kept things superficial, and the result was that my new colleagues didn’t trust me.
They couldn’t get rid of me, though: I was good. Maybe too good. So they transferred me. Something about excessive force, something about complaints from bystanders. I was just a little too assertive.
Sometimes it’s pointless to resist the inevitable, because you know nothing’s going to change.
There wasn’t much for me at the Meer en Vaart station. Those first weeks, I missed not only the bustle of the city center, the anonymity, but most of all the old connections. The way we knew each other, the in-jokes, the speed with which things happened. We were a team. At my new assignment, I was left to my own devices.
Before too long, my desk was piled high with case files. My predecessor — who had retired — was old-school, which meant that few of his records had been digitized. The whole station was still stuck in the 1980s. The only real crime was bureaucracy.
By the end of my first month, Ali — one of the old-timers — had taken me under his wing. He was my big brother, and he took pity on the new kid. “Go here after your shift,” he said, handing me a slip of paper with an address that turned out to be a blue-collar sailing club on the Sloterplas. The building was hidden behind trees, bushes, and a fence. When I turned up, Ali was already there, on his second beer. He’d exchanged his work face for a carefree joviality. He hugged me. “I’m a Turk,” he explained. “We hug.”
If he was looking for an after-hours drinking buddy, he’d picked the wrong guy. I don’t drink. I ordered a mineral water. I really shouldn’t drink, it’s just asking for trouble, especially since I do things I’d be better off avoiding. Which is why I was in New-West now and not still in the heart of the city.
Ali cautioned me not to take the suspicion that dominated our workplace personally. The station had been going through an identity crisis for some years, caused by the treatment it received from headquarters. The station felt it wasn’t being taken seriously, and that was the reason for the pain I could feel whenever I walked through the door. The city center had forgotten us, despite the recent increase in criminal activity. Organized crime ran illegal casinos, refugees streamed into our forgotten neighborhoods, once-proud buildings were degenerating into tenements, some areas were under the control of street gangs. “Let’s say the problems of us brown people are a lower priority than the problems of the white people in the Grachtengordel.”
Only when there’d been a gang murder did they come out our way to have a look.
“Then all at once we’re New York, Los Angeles. The media show up, the social services stand around and nod thoughtfully. Put on their cool act. Shove us off to the side.”
Of course, HQ had to put in an appearance when something high-profile happened. The rest of the time, they stayed nice and cozy in the Canal District.
“The canal ring’s like an albatross around our neck,” said Ali. “There’s the world inside the ring — with all its glamour and wealth and success — and then there’s the world outside the ring, with our six hundred creeps on the most-wanted list, our jihadis in training, our gambling dens, our money launderers, our meth labs, our tough guys and welfare cheats. They don’t give a shit. Worse than that, arkada, they like it like this. They figure they can never get rid of evil altogether, but what they can do is give it a place to live. So here we are in Evil’s Preserve. Marhaba!”
Now, in the distance, children were taking sailing lessons on the calm surface of the lake. The Sloterplas dominated the neighborhood. Wild horses couldn’t drag me out onto the water.
“My kids are almost old enough for that,” said Ali. “Pretty soon now, they’ll start whining, ‘Papa, I want to sail!’” He dreamed aloud of a boat of his own and brought his glass of beer to his lips. He could drink here without anyone watching him. “Social control, man,” he said conspiratorially, and took another slug, and then another.
I knew this sort of drinking, the behavior of a man who didn’t have the luxury of spreading his consumption out across the day, so he had to suck down as much as he could when he had the chance. If he was going to drink, it had to be here and now.
“Everything’s got to be normal here. If you can’t fit in, don’t try to live here — go downtown. Every crime that happens here is explainable. But what happened to Nadia? That wasn’t normal. They’re all talking about it, even in the mosque. But it won’t last long. People forget. They want things to go back to normal.”
Ali was the only one of us who lived near the station. He grew up here. He lived in Old-Sloten, close to the lake. He could be home in a jiffy; you could get from anywhere to anywhere else in this neighborhood in a jiffy.
“Still, Old-Sloten’s different,” he said, “not like this. Here, nobody knows anyone else. That’s the way things are now. They don’t call us Old-Sloten for nothing. We’re old. Even the newcomers. We make them old. I love that. I’m a traditional man. A man who appreciates the old ways.”
He ordered another beer. I’d already seen him put away three of them tonight, and he might have had more before I got there. Alcohol made Ali a better man. I envied him that. My parents caught me drunk once. They basically freaked out. I had “adopted the habits of the infidels.” As far as they were concerned, I was already on my way to hell. I kind of enjoyed their reaction. Better drunk and in hell than sober among the hypocrites.
Ali confided in me that the Meer en Vaart cops would try to get rid of me as soon as possible. “Then they’ll be happy. So don’t be bitter if you have to move on. It’s got nothing to do with you personally.”