Abduction (23 page)

“All right, so they're all curly on top, but don't go telling me you thought they were sheep for Eid? Kids make a different sound when you kill them! Is that what liberating Algeria is all about?”

Mathieu thought he glimpsed a flash of sorrow – or was it disdain? – in the Arab's eyes, but the light from the bulb hanging from the ceiling was too dim for him to be sure. He was gripped by anger nonetheless, as if the man had insulted him by daring to feel emotions to which a murderer like him was not entitled.

“Why are you staring at me like that, you lump of shite?”

He wasn't supposed to succumb to rage and his superior would definitely not appreciate the result, but the perverse blow rang out anyway. Despite the chirping of the cicadas, Mathieu heard the tiny cracking of cartilage. The
fell
made a sound like a muffled yelp and his nose immediately started to bleed. Mathieu repeated his question in a less confident tone of voice.

“So what does it really feel like deep down, eh, to murder so many people?”

The man, whose nostrils and lips were slowly becoming covered in blood and snot, screwed up his eyes, which were clouded with tears.

“You would know… euh…”

“What are you mumbling about, you bastard?”

“You…”

His voice had turned whiny, probably because of his fractured nasal septum. He needed a gulp of air before he managed to speak, with bitter mockery: “You torture,
so
(he had stressed the word) you know…
brother
…”

“Fucking… I'm not your brother!”

The Frenchman had raised his fist. The handcuffed man's face tensed in expectation of the punch.

But, probably to the great surprise of them both, the punch did not come.

The next morning Mathieu left the room and came back with a bucket of water and a sponge. Face closed and eyes avoiding the prisoner's, he set about washing away the scabs crusting his mouth and nose.

“Thanks,” the prisoner said once the job was finished.

“It's not for your sake,” the guard objected sourly, “it's for my superior's. He doesn't want us roughing your face up. You've got to look presentable.”

With a resigned sigh, the rebel said, a little quieter this time, “Thanks anyway.”

The soldier threw the sponge angrily into the water. “I don't need your thanks. Remember I'm the one who smacked your face in, you son of a bitch.”Then, grabbing the bucket, he headed towards the cell door.

“Why do you want to die,” he asked him without looking round, as though the question and the possible reply were of no importance. “You're shit-scared and yet you still want to die… Do you want to die for your country, Algeria? Want to go down in patriotic folklore, be called a freedom fighter or some bullshit?”

The prisoner sniggered faintly, then said to himself, “How easy that would be – to die for Algeria. I'd be a hero and everyone would mourn me… and…”

A gasp cut him off.

“So why do you want to die?”

Caught off-guard by his guard's neutral tone of voice, the prisoner answered with the same indifference. “Because… because I don't deserve to live anymore.”

“Why don't you deserve to live anymore?”

The man remained silent and Mathieu thought that he wouldn't open his mouth again, like in a ‘real' interrogation. He was turning the door handle when the man whispered, “One day, when you've become human again, you too will try anything you can to die…”

He coughed and Mathieu, filled with inexplicable anxiety, listened out for the rest of the husky words.

“…Until then, make the most of your luck. You'll see – it's unbearable when you find out you're worthless.”

M
athieu still hadn't said anything when the telephone on the kitchen table rang. Aziz and he looked at each other, paralysed.

“That's your phone. Take the call,” the old man ordered. “He might get angry if you hang about.”

Aziz cautiously picked up his mobile. His hands were shaking.

“It's a message. Just a message.”

Aziz's ashen face had fallen as the disappointment hit home.

“What does it say?”

The Algerian pushed a few buttons, then his eyebrows arched in surprise.

“Nothing. It's incomprehensible.”

His voice rang false. His complexion had gone even pastier. He flicked the lid of the phone shut.

“Show me, Aziz.”

Mathieu was too quick for his son-in-law and assertively grabbed the phone. He blinked at the tiny screen.

“Did he write the text?”

“Who else do you think it could be?”

Mathieu handed the phone back to his son-in-law. His tic had returned and was more febrile than ever. He pushed the unruly eyelid down hard.

“Have you done anything for his guy, Aziz?”

The grief-stricken father appeared to hesitate before protesting.

“No, of course not. What do you think he'd ask me to do for him?”

“That's for you to tell me.”

“Go to hell! Firstly, I don't owe you any explanations. And secondly, I haven't done anything for him, all right? Where did you get that idea? Did he ask you to do something perhaps?”

“Why me?”

They looked each other up and down for a few seconds, resentfully mingling their silent lies. Mathieu was just opening his mouth when Latifa appeared, terrified.

“The phone rang, didn't it?”

She stared at her son-in-law as if she held him responsible in advance for any coming disaster.

“Yes,” her husband replied in his son-in-law's stead, “but it was a wrong number.”

The old man stood up and put his arms very tenderly around his wife's shoulders.

“Go on, I'll be with you in a few minutes.”

She groaned.

“Oh, this is all so awful, Mathieu.”

“Yes,” he replied simply, struggling not to cry.

He whispered a couple of words in his wife's ear before closing the door behind her. He poured himself a glass of water while Aziz tapped away on the buttons of his mobile, probably setting it to vibrate.

The man who had once been a soldier sat down on his chair again. With the exhausted acquiescence of his companion in misfortune, he resumed the pathetic process of dissimulation from which he hoped at least some truth would emerge.

Otherwise, all he had to do was to kill his son-in-law. Pointless – but did he have a choice? – other than to earn a little more time for Shehera, a few bubbles of oxygen before she drowned.

It was that night, the night when he broke Tahar's nose – although he didn't know his first name yet – that his ‘conversion' began.

Even now, as he sat opposite Shehera's father beating about the bush, dreading having to announce to him that he has probably found out who the kidnapper is, he can think of no other word than the ridiculous ‘conversion'.

He hadn't fallen suddenly to his knees with imploring words to a new God. No, he hadn't needed to address any novel prayers to some brand new avatar of Yahwe or Allah, like the slippery formulas whispered by a child's toy.

Yet overnight Mathieu had become incapable of torturing.

Later, when he rediscovered a little of his irony to fight off his despair at having betrayed his country, he distinguished two stages in this transmutation, which he described – to himself, of course, for he didn't breathe a word of this to anyone else – using the Sunday school images of his childhood.

Instead of the Angel Gabriel, he received a visit from a weak-bladdered little boy who warned him, just by his screams, that he would soon be carrying a shame that would grow endlessly inside him like some ravenous embryo he would never be able to get rid of.

As for the bearer of these ‘good tidings', it was no longer a bearded Jesus dying on the cross to save the human rabble but Tahar, tortured in a stinking room belonging to the DOP, a criminal among criminals who was trying, despite his terror, to kill himself in atonement for sins greater than his own life.

Mathieu became utterly disgusted with himself in the space of twenty-four hours. Years later, as he emerged noisily from a cheap restaurant, he found an amusing explanation for this complete turnaround. He'd been very hungry that day and the dish the waiter had brought him looked absolutely perfect in every respect: appearance, aroma, quantity… Anyway, he was getting ready to stuff his face when a tiny bit of snot dripped off the waiter's nose and immediately sank into the delicious sauce that filled his plate. This was all it took for the meal to become instantly vile to Mathieu and impossible to swallow without throwing up.

That summed up his life in his own caricature of it until that fateful morning. At some stage in his childhood, some damned angel that was dying of boredom on the plains of paradise had squirted a long flow of snot into the pot where what should have been a fairly honourable future had been simmering for the little Breton lad. The contrast between the absolute innocence of the one and the limitless guilt of the other – the child and the
fell
– had, to his misfortune, allowed him to smell the ‘revolting dish' he'd become. Since then, Mathieu, the wringer of bodies who had been indifferent to such considerations up to this point, could no longer stand himself. Worse:
he disgusted himself
.

When his Alsatian unit commander saw the prisoner's broken nose, he tore a strip off him. Mathieu got out of it somewhat by stating that he had had a long and extremely informative conversation with the rebel.

“Your method works, sir. People tell their torturers all kinds of things when they start mollycoddling them!”

His superior's blotchy jowls had twitched. The officer loosened the collar of his shirt by running a finger around his neck. He must have shaved a bit too close, Mathieu noticed, because there were some raw patches on the skin on his throat.

“What did he tell you?”

“Nothing particularly useful for the moment. Some vague stories about his childhood, the Koranic school he went to, his mother – that sort of thing. But give me one more night and I'll winkle some information about his
katiba
out of him…”

“Why would he grass on his mates? Does he fancy you that much, sergeant?”

Mathieu had shrugged his shoulders, as if to say slyly: “
I couldn't give a damn – you're the boss! There's a real chance of extracting the information the colonel's been longing for and it'll be your fault if we fail…”
The suspicious Alsatian had come round to his subordinate's suggestion, but only reluctantly.

“Type me up a complete report of everything he told you last night, especially any details that could help us locate his home
douar
. If that helps us track down one of his relatives, who knows, maybe there'll be some way of putting pressure on the bloke. We've got copies of the survivors' statements. They all claim they don't know who attacked them. Have a look through the papers again, just to check we haven't missed anything important by mistake. The rest of the team and I'll work hard on the guy and if we haven't made any progress by this evening, you can take over for another night. Hey, don't go falling in love with him though!” the Alsatian said in an attempt at a ribald joke. “There are more than enough women in Constantine or Sétif, not to mention all the
fatmas
around, if you're into that kind of creature.”

“Witty one, sir!” Mathieu hissed as he turned on his heel, his stomach churning with fear at the decision he had just taken in the depths of his soul. A minute earlier it would have seemed not only insane, but also contrary to any moral sense he had left.

“One last thing!” the officer shouted. “Make him understand that our patience has just about run out. If he persists, explain to him that soon, as if by chance, he'll try and escape and, obedient soldiers that we are, we will be forced, as the law provides, to shoot him dead after the customary warnings! The colonel gave us a week to get as much out of this
zouave
as we can, and we've wasted five days already.”

He guffawed, but his eyes, which had an unfamiliar glitter of distrust in them, did not join in with his mirth.

“Oh and by the way, you're going to be on ‘fire' duty. Some time since you last did it, eh? You've already broken your mate's nose so you might as well finish the job.”

Mathieu saluted without bothering to point out the contradiction in threatening with death a man whose sole wish was to die.

The morning passed in a kind of terror that he had never experienced before. While he laboured over a report describing an imaginary conversation, he could hear Tahar's screams through the breezeblock walls. In this army post in the open countryside, there was no record player to cover the prisoners' howls of pain.

He sighed, bursting with anger at himself. The gods were real gamblers: they weren't satisfied with his self-contempt; now he was turning all queer, no longer able to stand the screams that had until now formed the background noise to life in the DOP! He was tormented for much of the morning by the urge to have a stiff drink, but he resisted it, unwilling to face his superior's bad mood.

Mathieu recognised every note of what was known as the ‘scale' of screams. The most harrowing screams weren't necessarily caused by the most extreme pain. On the contrary; suspects yelled more at the beginning of their interrogation, when they not only still had the strength but were expressing above all their terror at the suffering to come. He could recall a prisoner who had squealed like a pig having its throat slit when he received the first blows and kicks, but who a few days later could only wail imperceptibly when they held a soldering iron to the soles of his feet. A good interrogator had to have a keen ear to pick up quickly the
kind
of pain that his suspect could endure before talking. That particular
fell
, who'd spilled the beans after having both feet burnt with a soldering iron, had withstood the field magneto turned up to maximum voltage without flinching.