Abduction (24 page)

Tahar, to whom Mathieu had listened attentively during their ‘work' on him, had reached the stage of whining punctuated by barks, panting and wheezing – signs of atrocious pain, which, apart from a miracle, still wouldn't break him if his behaviour during the previous sessions was anything to go by. He must gradually be losing control of his sphincters; by now, he had probably, if not defecated, then at least urinated on himself.

Towards eleven o'clock the Alsatian came in to have a look at Mathieu's report.

“You're losing your touch, sergeant! This is bullshit – there's nothing concrete in here!” he said after flicking through the two-page summary of Tahar's supposed confidences. “That son of a bitch has been having you on. Apparently our mate lives in a little village surrounded by mountains, his mother loves her only son, and the head of the Koranic school was terribly strict… Well I never! Are you taking the piss, sergeant? Think there's a shortage of mountain villages in Algeria, do you?”

However, all of a sudden, the officer's anger subsided. Dropping the sheets of paper on the desk, he pulled a strange face.

“An Arab came by this morning and swore to the sentry that he was pretty sure he could identify our prisoner. Rumours spread fast around here and he thinks he knows who our captive is. Come with me – this could be our lucky day, who knows?”

In the room adjoining the interrogation room, which was nicknamed the ‘golden cage', Mathieu caught sight of a white-faced young man, and it was clear from his frantically bobbing Adam's apple that he was in a state of extreme agitation. The paleness of his features was accentuated by frizzy hair of the brightest ginger that Mathieu had ever seen. A soldier whispered in his ear, “Living proof that the Vikings squeezed a few cuddles out of the local women…” Mathieu thought bad-temperedly: T
here weren't any Vikings in Algeria, you stupid prick – those were Vandals!

“Bring me a hood for the witness!” the officer ordered.

“There aren't any, sir! We left them at headquarters.”

“Well, fix one up quick,” he spewed.

A few minutes later a soldier came back with a cement bag he'd just emptied of its contents. He cut two rough parallel holes in it with scissors and a third one for the mouth a little lower down.

“Come on, walk ahead of me,” the lieutenant ordered the man whose head had been covered with the dusty bag. “Don't speak to the prisoner, say the bare minimum, and preferably answer yes or no when I ask you a question. If you've got any comments, wait until we're out of the
fell
's sight. I don't want any stories or tricks, is that clear? You don't need an interpreter, right?”

“No…” the redhead said, suddenly doubling over with coughing.

“Are you OK in there?” the Alsatian enquired almost kindly, patting the civilian on the back, but the muscles standing out on his neck showed how tense the soldier was.

“It's nothing, it's nothing, major,” the other man continued, “just some cement dust.”

The lieutenant smiled at his ‘promotion', delighted by the witness's servility. Ill at ease but curious, Mathieu followed the procession formed by the officer, the witness and two privates as reinforcements in case anything unforeseen happened.

“Yes, that's him,” the Alsatian said in response to the man in the makeshift hood's questioning gesture. “But you said you knew him?”

The man said nothing. He walked towards the naked prisoner trussed up on the plank. Mathieu hadn't been wrong: the near-unconscious rebel stank of shit and urine. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as he remembered a military intelligence officer's motto that had made him laugh the first time: “The shit of the prisoners we interrogate is like the smell of fresh bread to a baker – proof of a job well done. Can you imagine a baker feeling sick at the smell of his own bread?”

“Hey, hands off, you peasant!”

The witness had put his hand on the prisoner's chin and was trying to wake him up. When the man didn't obey, the furious lieutenant punched the witness in the back. The rebel opened his blurred eyes, uttering some indistinct ‘
Yemma yemmas'
. Drops of blood were trickling from his penis and there were some fresh purple belt marks on his chest. The team had worked long and hard on him by the look of it.

The man had taken off his bag and was screaming something at the prone man.

“What's he jabbering on about? Is the fucker speaking in Arabic or Kabyle?” the lieutenant roared. “Get the interpreter in here right now. And keep him away from the prisoner!”

The ‘witness' was shouting angrily and from time to time his voice broke down into splutters. His cheeks were grey with cement, which his tears turned black in places. The two privates stepped in between the two men, while Mathieu, overwhelmed by the newcomer's grief, rushed outside to fetch the
harki
who usually served as their interpreter.

“He's telling the prisoner that he's seen his face now and one day he'll kill him; one way or another he'll pay for the others. He swears this by…”

The back-up soldier, a middle-aged man in fatigues wearing a traditional
chèche
rather than an army helmet, was fiddling with one end of his moustache to hide his emotion. This chap was no softie. He regularly attended suspects' interrogations as an interpreter and wasn't averse to lending a hand if permitted. Even though the lieutenant didn't respect him (a
harki
was, according to him, disloyal by nature as he had betrayed once and was therefore likely to betray again), he appreciated his clear translations and his willing explanations that helped to disentangle the customs of the region.

“Sir, he also says that his father and mother, his brother, his wife and his three-year-old girl were all killed by this bloke and his
fellagha
accomplices. He says his father was the village constable… He says they had their throats slit like… burned like… This guy's face, he'll never… He says… he'll never forget it… He says that… his daughter was called… I can't understand everything he's saying, sir…”

“So,” the Alsatian growled, “he didn't know our
fell
at all before he saw him here?”

In the face of the lieutenant's anger, the interpreter stammered, as if he'd been caught out: “Well… I don't think so, sir…”

“So he was just having us on with that pack of lies that he knows something about this bloke here? What are you waiting for? Ask him.”

The disconcerted
harki
nibbled at his lower lip, as if he were caught in the crossfire between his superior's rage, whose consequences were unpredictable, and this other, near-sacred rage of a human being deprived in one fell swoop of both his families, the family that had seen him being born and the other he had founded himself.

“Hey, I'm talking to you, you lousy interpreter! Are you going to translate?”

“He's talking about his daughter again… She was three years old, she was called…”

He pronounced the first name, commenting to himself emotionally, “It's a beautiful name.”

“What's all this crap about a name? I can't understand what you're muttering…”

The interpreter repeated the dead girl's name, making sure he articulated it more carefully, like a schoolboy. Chilled by the strange scene taking place before his eyes, Mathieu rubbed his temple nervously. He recognised in his unsettled stomach the signs of the nauseating pity that sometimes overcame him by surprise, like an enemy waiting in ambush, when he was tormenting a suspect, so that he had to slink pathetically out of the interrogation room at the first excuse. He would have liked to have been brave enough to step forward, in a selfish, protective reaction, and put his arms around the shoulders of the man who was raging and lamenting the loss of his two families. Maybe – the idea seemed obscene at first because this man was an Arab, and then not so obscene after all – maybe if he shared the man's mourning for his family, he might mourn his own family that he had loved so little, to the point of cutting his mother to the quick and falling out with his father for good… For the first time in a long while he felt an intense pain in his chest and a nostalgia for the world before he went into the army, before the torture and its base works, before this system of military obedience that was so handy for escaping individual infamy.

“Come on, you idiot, I couldn't care less what the girl's name is! Ask this arsehole,” the head of the unit screamed, “why he's come and stuck his oar in if he hasn't got any information for us!”

In his rage, the lieutenant had forgotten that the visitor could speak French. No longer able to keep quiet, Mathieu whispered as neutrally as he could: “Sir, the witness isn't a witness. He's made up a story just so he could get close enough to identify one of his family's murderers.”

The officer's small, blue eyes looked daggers at him, as if to say: “
What's this got to do with you?”
before, wide with frustration, they turned to the so-called informer.

“I… I… How dare you? You bastard, you think the army's got time to waste on your personal quest for vengeance! I don't give a damn if someone bumped off your father and mother, or how many hairs you've got on your arse. What I expected was information about the rebels, you son of a…”

Crimson-faced by now, the lieutenant advanced towards the young man and threw a punch at him, followed by a kick when the man collapsed to the floor. Slightly put out by having lost his cool in front of the privates, the lieutenant wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

“Consider yourself lucky just to get punched, you little shit, because it might have crossed my mind that you were – who knows? – an informer sent by the
fells
to see if their man had caved in or not! Now get this liar out of here!”

Then, turning to the prisoner as if he was telling him a secret, he said, “So, my lovely little faggot, seen what you've gone and done? Now you've really got it coming. You're not a prisoner of war, just some second-rate murderer who's cost us a lot of time. I'm sick and tired of you, so now the fun's really going to start and if you haven't talked by the time the fun's stopped, well, too bad, I'll make sure I shut you up for good, with or without orders from HQ!”

And, pointing his index finger upwards, he enjoined them to hang the rebel from one of the hooks on the ceiling.

Before dawn the next day, having asked the prisoner if he still wanted to die (and the man, incapable of speaking, nodded almost incredulously at this godsend),Mathieu dressed him and then led him out of the camp in full view. The courtyard was still empty and the stunned sentry asked him where he was going this early with the battered Arab prisoner who had to lean on his shoulder.

“To the wadi,” replied Mathieu, casually readjusting the strap of a haversack containing civilian clothes. “The lieutenant hasn't got enough fuel for his morning coffee. He ordered me to fetch some with a little help from… our old friend here.”

“Fuel, sergeant?”

“Come on, soldier. What do you make a fire with in the countryside?”

“Oh!” said the sentry in embarrassment, finally grasping the allusion to ‘fire' duty. “Erm… Watch out for yourself, sergeant, it's still dark and there's some dangerous cover here.”

The young squaddie's tone was hesitant and perhaps even slightly disapproving.

“Thanks,” Mathieu replied simply, suddenly brimming with affection for the last French soldier in whose eyes he wasn't yet a traitor.

He fought a stupid temptation to explain himself, then just said, “Watch out for yourself too, soldier. Think of your loved ones; there's no point dying too soon.”

A
ziz gazes wide-eyed at the man who is suggesting that he knows his daughter's kidnapper and that all this horror might be somehow connected to the distant past.

He is about to get up and grab the old man by the collar to make him cough up more than the scraps he has revealed until now when his phone starts to vibrate.

Mathieu sees him tense up and reach for his pocket.

“The phone?” he whispers in a very old voice.

Aziz rushes to the bathroom. He shuts the door carefully before opening his mobile phone and at the same time turning on the cold tap.

“Is that you, Aziz?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

Aziz feels the same icy pick driving into his chest. He feels like sinking to his knees and begging; he feels his whole body turning into a mountain that is suddenly about to crumble.

“So have you done my little errand?”

“Errand? Um… yes.”

“You took the photo?”

“Yes.”

“Send it to me now.”

“But I don't have a telephone number…”

The voice burst into a high-pitched laugh – ridiculous, thinks the father in terror.

“Oh yes you do, my boy. Take a look at your screen.”

Aziz holds the telephone up to look at the luminous rectangle. On it, instead of the ‘Caller unknown' message he was expecting to find, are displayed the nine figures of an Algerian telephone number.

“Don't get too excited, my friend. I'll only use this number once. I've already told you: there's no shortage of anonymous chips in this country. Anyway, if you tip the police off in any way, your daughter will go straight to the paradise reserved for murder victims after some, let's say,
special
treatment in this hell on earth of which I am a humble servant.”

“I want to talk to my daughter,” said Aziz.

His throat is so tight that he is afraid the other man didn't hear him.

“Send me that fucking photo first!” the latter snapped back. “And stay where you are!”

“My daughter… my…”

The line went dead and Shehera's father had the very precise sensation that a vein, an artery or some vital organ had burst inside him, like an overstretched elastic band made of flesh.