Abduction (20 page)

The second decisive words he spoke to Aziz were these:
Then I met Tahar.

And he fell silent again, not knowing how to continue, despite his son-in-law's obvious impatience. How was he supposed to confess that, a few days before meeting Tahar, he had been involved in some ‘work' on a particularly tough
fell
who had been captured in a remote
douar
in the Constantine area after being denounced. Rumours from informers suggested that preparations were underway for a meeting of resistance leaders in the east of Algeria, and the local DOP staff hoped that the prisoner would eventually reveal the date and the place. Overexcited at this prospect, the chiefs of staff in Algiers had ordered them to extract the precious information from the man as fast as possible, since it would naturally only be of any use if the meeting had not already taken place. The forty-year-old man, a certain Hassan, had been tortured at length. His face swollen, his body reduced to one large bleeding wound, shitting himself with fear every time the soldiers fetched him from his cell, he hadn't give a single scrap of useful information, persisting in playing the fool and swearing by Allah and His Prophet that he loved France and the three colours on its flag and that, if the lieutenant so wished, he would be delighted to spit on the FLN and its leaders, including Amirouche and his stooges, as many times as they wanted him to.

“We can't even find out if he's a big fish, some kind of political commissar,” complained a colleague, chain-smoking to drive away the smell of shit. “If we can't find out, then he must be one!” the lieutenant had decided.

Mathieu had water-boarded the prisoner himself, before sending electricity through the rebel. The glans of his penis, black from electric burns, had been almost completely severed. Several times the Arab had passed out. Once they thought he was dead and the lieutenant panicked, having received clear orders not to kill him without having first extracted the information the top brass in Algiers were waiting for. The team in charge of dealing with him had hardly ever seen anyone resist for so long and their uneasy admiration for the
fell
was tinged with rage as time ticked remorselessly away.

“He's going to die without talking, the bastard. And we'll get shat on from so fucking high we'll be up to our eyeballs in it. They'll accuse us of being a bunch of useless wets!” the intelligence officer had groaned, summing up the general feeling of frustration. It was Mathieu who had come up with the miracle solution. He had asked if the man was married; the colleague who updated the files on the people they arrested had confirmed that, according to his sources, his wife had been killed in a coach accident three years previously. It wouldn't be possible, he remarked with a rueful expression, to use the
fatma
as a means of pressurising the man into giving in. “How about children? The bloke must have some. All wogs have kids, they love it…” Mathieu insisted. His colleague had shrugged and conceded that he didn't have a clue; the suspect's house had been empty when the soldiers searched it. As he nibbled away at a bar of chocolate as usual, the lieutenant gave Mathieu a strange look. “You've got something in mind, haven't you…”

A faint voice in his mind called out:
No, Mathieu, leave children out of this, leave them out of this shit – it's too despicable even for someone like you. Think of your mother – she loved you so much when you were a boy!
“Tough luck, schmuck!” Mathieu had retorted in his mind, “my bitch of a mother didn't love me and the feeling was mutual.”

Then as if in thrall to his own ignominy, he explained that if the prisoner had any kids, they must have been taken in by their uncles and aunts. All they had to do was to pay a visit to their relatives, round up all the kids and threaten them with the worst kind of torture if they didn't immediately point out which of them was Hassan's son or daughter. “At least one of them will crack, I promise you. It's as old as time: force someone to choose between their own children and their nieces and nephews, and they'll always choose their children!” he concluded with great solemnity.

Everything happened exactly as Mathieu had predicted. The panic-stricken parents handed over the
fell
's son almost straight away, a small eight-year-old boy half-dead with fear, who stammered amid much sobbing that he had lost both his father and his mother and then, as soon as he caught sight of the man naked and trussed up on the table, ran towards him whimpering in Arabic, “Daddy, Daddy, what did they do to you?”

As his son tried to kiss him, the father, his face blank, looked away and muttered something. The intelligence officer made a sign to the
harki
who served them as interpreter and on occasions as a zealous helper during interrogations. “He's angry. He's telling him that he's not his father and ordering him to get away from him,” said the auxiliary soldier, “but I think the prisoner really is this little bastard's father!”

“We've got the
fell
faggot now!” the lieutenant smiled triumphantly. “Tie the kid up next to his father. We'll give him some volts straight off – there's no time to fuss about! We'll see if this guy loves his son more than his bosses in the FLN.”

Mathieu thinks of Shehera being tortured by her kidnapper. He is no better than the madman who has kidnapped the teenage girl. He has known that ever since that day when, at his suggestion, a child was tortured to extract secrets from his father that the end of war a few years later would render so horribly meaningless. As soon as the electrodes were placed on his ears, the child urinated on the floor below him in terror; and the father started to shake. His eyes, swollen from the blows he'd received, stared incredulously at the soldier about to crank up the magneto. At the little prisoner's first scream, the
fell
struggled violently as if he thought he could break his bonds, but his lips stayed tightly shut. When the second came, the man shut his eyes as the child choked and spluttered out a growling noise, which the
harki
said meant something like “Daddy, help me… hurts, it hurts, they're hurting me…”

He caved in at the kid's third high-pitched yelp. Then, in one breath, without looking at his son, the cause of his weakness, he gave the names, the place and the date of the meeting. The lieutenant was so happy he gave Mathieu a slap on the back. “Well, well, you really got us out of a hole there! I owe you one, my friend. The colonel'll come as if he was fucking his wife for the very first time. We've killed two birds with one stone – getting the tip-off and recruiting an influential rebel. This
fell
has become a traitor to his FLN mates, so he and his son don't have a choice anymore; they're going to have to work for us now. If he doesn't agree, we'll do the
son
trick again. By the way, go and see the cook in a moment and bring back something nice for the kid; the lad's earned it, after all! Before that, wipe his face and get him some clean clothes. And don't forget: no one's
to know about this
…”

The lieutenant had a knowing look on his face. Still tied up, the kid followed the soldiers' movements with his eyes. His face was stained with tears and snot; drops of blood were forming on one of his ears. Mathieu saw from his terrified look that he expected to be murdered at any moment.

It was then that the man who was to be Aziz's father-in-law heard, very distinctly, the soft, fluty voice of the boy who loved Robert Surcouf and Jean Bart beating on the walls of his skull.
You can give him all the sweets you want, you're still going to hell, Mathieu. You've tortured a kid… but you're going to fry all alone like a rancid sausage.
The voice was weeping uncontrollably and repeating over and over again:
I haven't said anything up till now, but you've gone too far… I don't want to go to hell with you, I haven't committed any atrocities, I'm not guilty of anything, I don't want…

Never before had it criticised him for torturing people and belonging – without so much as a grumble – to an army that carried out large-scale operations in which they combed and bombed villages under suspicion, napalmed fields and forests, displaced the population and worse still. It criticised him – incessantly, it's true – for his lack of ambition and the sickening sordidness of his life. Mathieu knew he was despicable, but he couldn't work out why he had become like this and especially why he had grown accustomed to it so easily. However, to his amazement, that hadn't stopped him from drinking, fucking, joking and even – albeit infrequently – trekking heroically around the
jebel
when his superiors ordered him to.

At the end of the day, he had decided, he didn't owe anyone any explanations since he despised
himself
. What's more, all that stuff about heaven and hell bored him to tears. He thought he'd sorted out the ‘problem' by deciding that he was both the one who vomited and the vomit itself: when he found a part of himself unbearable, he would quite literally
expel
it by drinking continuously until every nook and cranny of his stomach rebelled. Without a hint of irony, he deduced from this that his failing organism would one day have nothing more to regurgitate and that the unfathomable metaphysical mystery of his potential guilt would thus be resolved, like some conjuring trick, by the prosaic capitulation of his liver to a good old cirrhosis.

He spent the rest of that cursed day looking after the child, taking him first to the shower and then to the sickbay, clothing him from head to toe and later stuffing him with the best things he could dig up in the canteen. But the kid obviously couldn't understand this change in treatment, and a shiver of fear ran through him every time Mathieu came too close. From time to time, he moaned in Arabic: “My ears hurt… I want to see my father!”

When evening came and he had got rid of the kid by putting him back in sickbay, Mathieu had fallen back on his tried-and-tested method of getting completely plastered. He woke up the next morning with a migraine the size of Algeria but afflicted nonetheless by a new itch more unforgiving than the worst parasite:
shame
.

Only once that day had he tried to defend himself.
Come on, you're exaggerating. I'm only torturing to get information; I'd never abuse anyone just for kicks. You know, I've never helped rip off a rebel's ear, for example, to earn a round of pastis from a beaming barman! I'm a soldier; I'm fighting for my country and the free world…

He heard his answer – and there was mocking pity in the retort from the scoundrel crouching somewhere deep inside his brain:
And that's your excuse for the kid?

It was as if the entire moral circuit that he thought no longer existed inside him had suddenly been activated again, its needle stuck at maximum voltage, the tortured boy flicking a wall switch with a potential accomplice in the little sniffling Breton boy fighting not to spend eternity in hell. No matter how often Mathieu sniggered and repeated to himself, “Listen up, you three fucking policemen in my life – father, mother and You, you incomprehensible clown spying on me from up there in Your clouds! When I interrogate someone, I'm like a septic tank: I stink to high heaven, I disgust anyone who approaches me. But who'd dare claim that a septic tank isn't useful?” that which he had almost instantly baptised the
moral magneto
had not loosened its grip.

Hunched on the kitchen chair, Mathieu coughs. Half a century later, that damned shame is still alive and well, polluting his nightmares, clinging to what is left of his soul like incurable ringworm. He has never told anyone any of this in detail, not even the person he has loved – and loves – more than anything in the world: Latifa. No love could survive the proximity to such filth. So it is out of the question that Aziz here, whose sole attribute is to be Latifa's daughter's husband, should hear it from his lips.

Time is short, so all he says to the father of his granddaughter is:
We carried out a large-scale operation after a tip-off.

However, the informer had been wrong on two counts. Firstly, about the basics: there was no meeting of high-ranking FLN officials, but rather a movement by six platoons of rebel troops preparing to carry out a huge wave of reprisals, ordered by local FLN chiefs and completely out of proportion to earlier operations, against villages in a region suspected of supporting a rival movement called the Algerian National Movement, the MNA. And, secondly, about the date: the event – the massacre – had taken place two days before the date the prisoner had given.

The old soldier sighs; he is, as they say in this country, eaten away by sadness and regret. He shifts on his chair before relieving his aching stomach with a discreet fart.

Mathieu looks at his watch – how fast time flies, as fast as the kidnapper's knife on the girl's fingers! – and whispers a silent entreaty: “Li'l Robert, my failed privateer who used to have so much tenderness to spare, if you're going to stir up the muck in my heart some more, please help me to speak about Tahar in front of this Algerian bastard…”

He brings his hands together and rubs his phalanges, all the while praying intensely: “… Without betraying my friend, please, without betraying him.”

G
od must be hooked on luck, for Mathieu had only come across ‘his' rebel by accident around the side of an earthen bank several hours' march north of the huge peak. The exhausted patrol had given up the hunt and he was merely looking for a sheltered spot, firstly to relieve himself and then to take off his boots and rest his aching feet a bit.

That day the new captain had decided that every available soldier, including the DOP staff and the pen-pushers, had to take part in the hunt. “We've got to take advantage of what's happened in the villages in the Béni Ilemane area and then, I can assure you, the battle with those FLN criminals will be as good as won. Or at least the one we're fighting to win over public opinion back home and around the world, which has been a fiasco until now. Those sand niggers have done us a real favour this time, gentlemen!”