The Mysteries of Algiers (17 page)

‘This is yours, comrade Captain?’

‘Yes. That is – I stole it. I –’

‘Is it for your own use? What do you want this stuff for?’

Before I can answer, Nounourse booms, ‘Comrade Captain. By article five of the Tribune of the Federation for National Liberation, the following crimes against morality when discovered to have been committed by Party members or by soldiers serving in the Army of National Liberation are punishable by death – pederasty, the consumption of alcohol and the use of drugs. This article specifically was reaffirmed at the Summit of the Wilayas at Sounnam in 1956.’

‘All right, but wait till I –’

‘There can be no extenuating circumstances.’

The man in front of me has started to juggle with the sachets of morphine. I wonder why he is doing this, until I deduce from the direction of his eyes that he is trying to distract me from something. I twist my head to the left, but it is too late to prevent the descent of the hands of Nounourse and the wrapping of the cord around my neck.

‘Do you like stamps, Captain?’

Chantal looked incongruously provocative as she leaned over the table and I presumed that ‘stamps’ was code for something else. That proved not to be the case.

‘Postage stamps, I mean. Have you ever collected stamps?’

I shook my head and wondered as I did so, why Maurice at the head of the table was looking so apprehensive, but she went on excitedly, ‘I have a magnificent stamp collection. Come upstairs and let me show you my stamp collection.’

What should I say about those wretched stamps? They were nicely set out on loose leaves of cartridge paper and written up in a copperplate hand. Chantal turned the pages – stodgy French dignitaries in miniature and uninspired allegories of France and her provinces were flipped over. Chantal paused for a moment over a mint set showing military scenes – vignettes of ‘the grandeur and servitude of military life’. For example, the one franc stamp showed Napoleon’s bear-skinned Imperial Guard trudging through the snow, while behind and to the right of them, youths in uniform gave the Sieg Heil salute. Each stamp had an heraldic label attached to it – a complex monogram dominated by a sword and a great V and crowned by a steel helmet. I leaned over to read the writing on the stamps, ‘La Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme’, and as I did so Chantal rested her hand on my shoulder.

‘Fieldpost stamps from the Russian Front. Uncle Melikian was with the French Legion when von Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad. He vanished after that. But come and look at this album –’

She sat cross-legged on the floor. Her long gown accommodated this unsuitable posture with extreme strain. I joined her there and, together on the floor, we looked at her collection of German stamps. I did not know Chantal then, and at that time this eminently innocent half-hour had the quality of a nightmare, where at any moment something just as strange, but much nastier might happen.

‘A different style, you see.’

Race horses, opera houses, airships – what was I supposed to be looking at or for? Chantal watched my face anxiously and then as if she were engaged in trying to prompt, began to speak very slowly.

‘There are no stamps like this any more … Quite a different style from today’s stamps … It is a world we have lost … Look!’ (A close-cropped youth sounding a herald’s trumpet.) ‘That boy has no doubts … And that stamp there!’ (A modern building in Breslau in a series commemorating the games there in 1938.) ‘The sweep of that line shows no doubts either … And that one.’ (In the same set, an old building in Breslau.) ‘Do you see? It is different and yet similar. Then, before the war, they built in a European tradition. Europe was not a colony of America … Isn’t he lovely?’ (A horse, the winner of the Vienna Cup in 1943.) ‘Isn’t he magnificent? We have had thoroughbred horses since the days of Charlemagne and his chivalry, now why not thoroughbred people? … See!’ (Siegfried kneels over a steel-corseted Valkyrie.) ‘Like Wagner himself, this stamp shows us that it is possible to be strong yet beautiful.’

I found it uncomfortable on the floor and stood up. Chantal fished about for her cigarette holder and then her cigarettes. I found her the ashtray.

‘In France now, our France of the dirty rats, Mendès-France, Blum, Mitterrand, since the war, it is fashionable to mock “Strength through Joy”. But, Captain – I’m sorry, Philippe – Philippe, do you think we shall find joy in those incomprehensible Left Bank films, the drugs and cocktails from America, the Negro music, and the lies put out by the
RTF
? Philippe, believe me, I speak from my own experience. It is possible even for a woman to know the joy that comes from strength – and the strength from joy.’

She flushed. Then she stretched out her hand and pulled me down to my knees on the floor once more. The cigarette was stubbed out. Doubtless the Legion and the officers’ mess had coarsened my emotional reflexes but I was thinking, ‘Is this my opportunity? Is this the moment to which “Come up and see my stamp collection” was leading?’ In fact, no. The affair of the bed of gardenias was to take place a few days later in my flat. But on this first evening, Chantal composed herself to kneel facing the window and I knelt and listened in discomfort while she prayed.

‘Oh God, almighty and eternal, who has established the Empire of the Franks to be the Instrument of Thy Holy Will in this world, fill with Thy celestial light always and everywhere the Sons of France, that they may know what they must do to extend Thy Kingdom.’ The end of the prayer was marked with a clap of the hands and she was up and striding over to her jewellery box on the dresser. She wanted to show me a signet ring – a vast crude thing too large for her fingers. The signet was the complex monogram I had already seen, with its great sword and V.

All the Children of Vercingetorix possess such a ring. In 1948 a few of the surviving veterans of the Légion Française contre le Bolchévisme came together to form what was originally a social club and mutual aid group. But its membership was disappointingly small and gradually the membership was broadened to include all those who looked back with nostalgia to Fortress Europe holding out against the menace of Asiatic Zionist Bolshevism – elderly survivors of the pre-war Came-lots du Roi and Action Française, some Belgian Rexists, disgraced Vichy functionaries and the like. After 1954 and the Philippeville massacre there was a small influx of Algerian
pieds noirs.
Bitter officers returning from defeat in Indochina added fresh blood and expertise to the group. The veterans’ club reconstituted itself as a semi-secret elite dedicated to making a stand against the conspiracy by Jewry’s Bolshevik International and its Anglo-American and Negro allies to overthrow civilization in Africa. The new league was known as the Children of Vercingetorix. The de Serkissians joined of course. The stamps were rubbish, but I had found Chantal at prayer very attractive. A glib intellectual might comment that this was an attraction of opposites, but I doubt if things were so simple.

Alas, it is of course impossible to explain the aesthetics of fascist philately to my captors. They are hardly the types to collect stamps – and, as for neo-Nazism, a common opinion among the Arabs in Algeria now is that Hitler’s chief crime was that he concentrated on the Jews rather than the French. I am reminded of the frustrations I so regularly experienced lecturing on counter-insurgency to those dumb platoons of legionnaires in Fort Tiberias.. I even have great difficulty in explaining to the men in the room why the Children of Vercingetorix pose such a danger to the liberation struggle in Algeria. Over the last year I have sent Tughril many reports on the subject of the Children of Vercingetorix and it is to him I should be talking now – not this gang of amateurs.

Once Nounourse had the garrotte round my neck, he had paused, enabling me to bark out in my best Saint-Cyr parade-ground voice, ‘Stop this nonsense. I am a major in Wilaya Four of the Army of National Liberation. I was given this rank by the Command Council of the Army of Liberation in Tunis. I demand to be heard and tried by officers of my own rank or above. Where is Colonel Tughril? It is he who must decide whether I can best serve the revolution by living or dying.’

Nounourse listened, growled and then tightened the garrotte, so that I should never have managed another sentence. But a young man sitting on my other side, half shaven with steel-rimmed glasses, looks up appealingly at Nounourse.

‘He should at least have the right to make a confession before we kill him.’

‘What is there to confess?’ growls Nounourse. ‘I don’t tolerate addicts, winos or pimps in my cell. Oh, all right then, examine him, doctor, and tell us whether he is an addict or not.’

‘I am not really a doctor, you know – just a student,’ he tells me with a shy smile. He has the sleeve of my shirt up. He clicks his tongue.

‘He is addict all right.’

‘So I kill him,’ growls Nounourse.

‘The confession first,’ says the ‘doctor’ and the others agree.

‘It will be better that way.’

By now I am perfectly relaxed. The charade with the cord around my throat has only been staged to impress or to panic me. It has succeeded in neither. I make my report, somewhat edited, for I judge that some of the material is for Colonel Tughril’s ears only. I wind up proposing that firm action be taken against the Children of Vercingetorix. I particularly urge that a squad be detailed to murder Chantal. Because of her position in both that neo-fascist league and in military intelligence, she poses a unique threat to the operations of the
FLN
in Algiers and the Sahara. Whether it is because of the compression of my narrative (which still takes over an hour) or because of my holding back some things which I judge to be for Tughril’s ears only, I don’t know, but the comrades are not happy with my report.

The ‘doctor’ starts. Having first saved me from Nounourse’s noose, he now seems determined to play prosecuting council.

‘So you shot your way out of a military security meeting?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then you shot your way out of Fort Tiberias?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well done,’ but the doctor clicks his tongue.

Then Nounourse booms in my other ear. ‘Did you kill this clever fellow, this … Raoul?’

‘Yes, I think so … Yes – er that is I left him for dead.’

‘You should be sure. Always finish them off.’ And Nounourse takes his hands off the cords to make an interesting wrenching gesture.

‘And Zora, you killed her?’

‘Zora? Oh yes, I killed her.’

Why do I lie? I am far from sure that Raoul was dying when I left al-Hadi’s flat, and, as for Zora, I certainly did not kill her. I remember thanking her for the clothes – an unnecessary piece of politeness – and I left her comforting her frightened infant. Come to that, why didn’t I finish Raoul and Zora off? There is something about an interrogation … I have noticed it before, when I went through the charade of interrogating the fellagha at Fort Tiberias, something that makes the interrogatee want to rush into a panicky lying, pointless lies that will not cover his tracks or convince his captors … But why should I be lying? Perhaps it is that I do not think that my audience deserves the truth?

The inquisition goes on.

The doctor wants to know, ‘And these people, this Eugene and Yvonne Dutoit, you killed them too?’

‘Oh yes, I’m sure that will be in tomorrow’s papers.’

There is a growl of satisfaction from Nounourse, but my difficulties continue. The other two in the room carry on the questioning. They are, I should judge, simple labourers, perhaps not even that, perhaps members of Algiers’s vast legion of unemployed. Maybe they are simply trying to get the story straight in their heads. Nevertheless, they seem to intend some sort of threat with every question.

‘You killed comrade al-Hadi?’

‘Yes. I had no choice. It was necessary to preserve my cover.’

‘And yet you also tell us that within twenty-four hours of this necessary killing, your cover was in fact blown?’

‘Yes.’

‘You agree that that was most unfortunate?’

‘Of course.’

‘Captain, you walked about in the Sahara for a week and you had no food and water?’

‘Oh no, it wasn’t as long as that. Three days, maybe four days. I can’t be sure. I was delirious for part of the time and, towards the end, unconscious.’

‘But you walked about in the desert with this bullet in your leg? You are a very strong man.’

‘Ah no. You don’t understand. That was at the end, when the Arabs picked me up.’

‘Ah yes, that was what you said but, tell me, why did this bedu shoot you in the leg?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was, as Zora said, an accident.’

‘So you believe what this Zora said? You really remember nothing of what happened until you awoke at the flat belonging to al-Hadi? How long were you prisoner of that unusual woman?’

Nounourse says something about al-Hadi’s wife, too fast for me to catch, and the others laugh. But I laugh too in order to express my solidarity with the group. In fact I am intensely irritated. They are getting nowhere with this rubbish. Certainly they are not impressing me.

The ‘doctor’ who is not really a doctor leans towards me.

‘You laugh and yet you are dead man.’

‘We have never seen a dead man laughing before,’ affirms the juggler.

‘You should know,’ continues the ‘doctor’, ‘that garrotting is a slower process than hanging on a drop scaffold. Normally death in a garrotting comes from asphyxiation. Though it is possible that in Nounourse’s hands your neck might snap – if the cords don’t break first. I keep telling Nounourse that he should use piano wire, but he won’t have it. I believe that I am right in saying that even after your neck has snapped, you will retain consciousness for between a minute and a minute and a half. And then everything in your bowels will come bucketing out.’

The ‘doctor’ turns to address the others on the floor.

‘And yet here he is laughing and not bothering to convince us about anything.’

‘I am, damn it. It is you who are not wishing to be convinced.’