The Mysteries of Algiers (2 page)

Al-Hadi was believed to carry information from Fort Tiberias to the
FLN
command cell in Algiers. Whenever Mercier thought of his forthcoming assignment to Fort Tiberias, a heavy ball of sick fear began to gather in his stomach. Mercier knew what danger was. The difference between him and Philippe was that Mercier thought about what he was doing, and that he did not think that the end of winning the war in Algeria justified the use of any and every means, no matter how foul. Algeria should be policed with honour and compassion. If, and only if, it could not be held thus, then it should be relinquished. Fort Tiberias’s reputation as an interrogation centre was exceeded only by that of the Zeralda Barracks outside Algiers (and this itself may have been because fewer of those questioned at Fort Tiberias survived to complain about their experiences).

The small boy under the table, pretending to be a dog, had fixed his teeth into Mercier’s trousers. Mercier shook him off impatiently. What was honour? The Arabs regarded their women as the vessels of their honour. Reputation among women, that was the only thing that counted among the men. Secret vessels of honour, the folds of their white gondourahs clenched between their teeth, gold ornaments clinking with every step, the women who walked on their roofs by night and called to one another across the narrow streets. He tried to imagine Chantal or the girl sitting opposite him resigning themselves to becoming shrouded vessels of honour. The hoarse mocking laughter, the shrill ululations of triumph … No, it was impossible. Then in an effort not to think about Chantal, he looked down at his book.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland when we are about to lose it. Those whose self-torments are too great are those whom their homeland rejects. I have no desire to be brutal …

This time a sports car pulling up outside the café pulled him away from his book. A young man and his girl got out and, with their beach robes draped negligently over their shoulders, entered the bar. Yacht club people. It was a timely distraction, for as his eyes followed them to the counter, Mercier realized that while he had been reading and alternately brooding, a row had broken out between al-Hadi and the proprietor. Al-Hadi was shouting in Arabic. The proprietor obviously had no idea at all what it meant. Neither did Mercier. Then al-Hadi was showering money on the counter, many coins and quite a few notes – more than the price of a few drinks. Al-Hadi appeared to lose patience and, stooping low to retrieve the brown-paper parcel from the floor, he thrust it into the baffled proprietor’s arms. Then he gathered his long white robes around him like an affronted woman and flounced out of the café.

There was no need for Mercier to follow. There would be another tail waiting round the corner, waiting to see where al-Hadi’s trail led them next. Mercier waited for a couple of minutes. Then he put the book down, apologized to the pretty girl for moving the table out a little, and started towards the proprietor. The flash was so brilliant, he could not see the proprietor. His feet were somewhere not on the floor. Something seemed to be flooding his ears. He closed his eyes to think more clearly. When he opened them again, he saw without surprise that he was covered in blood and dust was drifting down to settle on the blood. He wondered if the blood was his. Probably not, he thought, that girl beside me has lost both her legs. It’s probably her blood. He closed his eyes again and waited for the sirens.

This was the third rock ’n’ roll session. Al-Hadi was stripped and bound with leather straps to the wooden plank, which we had tipped at an angle of 45 degrees. As for the two leads of the field telephone, one went up his nostril and the other we had fixed to the tip of his penis with Scotch tape. Crocodile clips would have been better, but we didn’t have any. The current surged up again, and al-Hadi rocked and rolled. The eyes dilated and bulged as if the skull was going to spit his eyeballs out at us. We took the current back down, and I ran over my notes. Mercier’s last moments must have been pretty much as I had them reconstructed on my clipboard, though there is no certainty in such things. A story created under close questioning, and in which pain has been used, not mindlessly, but as a technique for investigating the truth – it will achieve results, but they are not necessarily entirely reliable.

Anyway, we are not especially interested in Mercier’s last moments. According to Colonel Joinville, the first thing we want from al-Hadi is what or who was his source of information here, deep in the Sahara, information so valuable that the
FLN
command cell in Algiers needed and could risk al-Hadi’s irregular but frequent runs to the coast. Second, who could have tipped him off that there was a tail on him that day? Third, how did al-Hadi know that the middle man in the chain of shadows was not some low-grade trainee or gendarme in plain clothes, but Mercier, the man who had been due to take over security here? Mercier was in on the shadowing operation only to familiarize himself with al-Hadi’s appearance. Half an hour or an hour on the job – that should have been all, but within half an hour of sighting al-Hadi he was dead.

The lieutenant and I are both shivering. This is not a pleasant working environment. The solitary light bulb is protected by a wire grille and its tight meshwork casts odd shadows over the buckets of water and other stuff on the floor. Packing cases are piled high against three of the walls. I have to share this room with the ordnance section. The lieutenant rarely looks at the prisoner or at the mess around us. Instead his gaze drifts upwards to a point on the wall above al-Hadi’s head where Brigitte Bardot and Suzy Delair flash their saucy bottoms at us. Such pin-ups are Scotch-taped all over the fort – in the lockers, on the jeeps, even on some of the guns. I remember, in Indochina, thinking how odd it was that the Viet Minh had no pin-ups. Men and women, their partisans fought shoulder to shoulder – and I guess now that the fellagha hiding up in the mountains, hundreds of miles to the north of Fort Tiberias, have no pin-ups either. It is not the torture but the pin-ups that signify that the Legion is going to lose this war too.

But now another puzzle for Joinville – if al-Hadi knew he was going to be tailed, what suicidal impulse made him bring a bomb out with him on his ramble through the streets of Algiers? He must have known that he would be picked up afterwards – as indeed he was, ten minutes later, after a short chase. There had been five dead in the bar and twelve wounded. Also two gendarmes had to be hospitalized after injuries sustained protecting al-Hadi from the
pied-noir
mob which swiftly gathered around the arrest.

Al-Hadi looks at me. It is such a look! I can imagine the lieutenant thinking to himself, ‘This is the look of complicity that passes between the torturer and the tortured. There is a bond here.’ Perhaps there is such a bond. Al-Hadi understands why I must torture him and I already know why al-Hadi had to kill Mercier.

‘Do not think that I do not know what you are going through,’ I tell our prisoner. ‘I am a man like you and I can tell you. As the current begins to ease up there will be an unpleasant tingling, bearable at first, but soon you will be out of control. You will be grateful for the gag, but I am afraid there is nothing we can do to prevent you damaging your wrists still further on the leather straps. You don’t even know what damage you are doing to your body as one electric explosion after another fills your head. And, when the gag comes out … in the end, you must say exactly what I want you to say. As you can see, I am not in any hurry. So now, we come to your marriage. This woman of yours, this Zora, how often does she come to your bed? Or do you go to hers? Is she circumcised? Does she shave down there? Do you kiss? You know, I have never seen an Arab kiss his woman. If we bring her in, will we have a good time? What do you think, if we bring her in, will we have a good time? You are going to tell us everything. Nothing will be left to our imagination. In any case, as you can see, Schwab has no imagination.’

The interrogation was going slowly. I was deliberately taking it slowly. Schwab, the lieutenant standing beside me, was looking increasingly restive and sulky. I have explained to him that the nature of the Arab mentality is such that if we can get al-Hadi to talk about his wife and his private life, if we can break into the filthy harem of his mind, and get him to talk about it, then he will talk about anything. He will indeed be a broken man.

To Joinville, the commanding officer at Fort Tiberias, I should rather put it that I was engaged in a rare form of person to person anthropology. But I doubt if I shall have to justify the slowness of my procedures to Colonel Joinville. As far as our colonel is concerned, it is not the results achieved by torture that are valuable, but rather the torture itself. Torture is precisely the forcing engine for bringing the benighted races of the world to civilization, part of the melancholy passage from childhood to maturity for the happy-go-lucky blacks and feckless Arabs.

‘Pain,’ Joinville says, ‘is not a penalty. It is part of civilization – indeed it is at its heart. The European peoples have had to suffer in order to attain to reason and obedience. Now it is time for the others to follow in our footsteps. Civilization is not a fun palace. It is indeed a miserable affair. Yet they have asked for it and we must respond to their request.’

Though the colonel is much admired by the men who serve under him, he is not exactly popular. For one thing he, like me, believes that the French are going to lose this war. An officers’ briefing rarely goes by without him pointing out that there must be a certain nobility in the defence of a cause that is lost.

‘We have enrolled in the ranks of Hector while the
FLN
have taken the side of Achilles. It would take a subtle man to determine who has chosen the better part.’

And again, while Joinville’s ruthlessness is admired, it takes many peculiar forms.

‘We burn their douars, we rape their women, we confiscate their crops, we carry out the necessary exemplary executions and we round up those who are left into what I can only call concentration camps. These wretches suffer for us. God has chosen the Algerian Arab to suffer for the sins of France, but God must hate the French very much to let our Algerians suffer so …’

In any event, it is clear that Joinville would sympathize with my stated intention to break into this man’s head. But I have a different story for everyone.

I had been thinking that Schwab didn’t like the business with the Scotch tape – that he was one of those that didn’t like touching Arabs. Then it occurs to me that he may have compunctions about ‘deep questioning’, and that this series of interrogations may be his first. Such virgins are increasingly rare these days.

‘Pissed off, lieutenant?’

‘You can say that again.’

I steeled myself to give the standard pep talk.

‘Not all army work is pleasant. Very little of it is. Come on – you saw the pictures. That girl will be a freak on two stumps for the rest of her life. Have you heard one word of regret for that from this creature? I’ve seen it before. When the ambulances come the Arabs cheer and their children pelt the stretchers with stones and the women stand on the roofs making their damn
youyou
noises. You cannot stand back and do nothing. That is not on offer. If you are alive today and still alive in two years’ time when your service is up, it will be because somewhere – somewhere and sometime – I don’t know when – one of our men has submitted one of theirs to deep questioning and he has discovered the cache of landmines, one of which would otherwise have blown up you and your jeep. Face it. You can’t ride on the backs of your fellow officers with a fine liberal conscience. Your life here is not a gift. It has to be worked for.’

He looks obstinate.

‘I do not like your way of torture.’

‘This is not torture. Well of course it is, in a loose sense. There is no point in mincing words in the Legion. It is torture in the sense that pain is applied to extract precise points of information. But it is not torture in the sense that the communists practise it. They use horrible methods to break a man’s spirit, to make him into a zombie who will renounce anything, denounce anything. But here we respect a man’s physical and moral integrity. Am I right, lieutenant?’

He looks doubtful. And I am about to try my ‘I would not ask any of my prisoners to undergo anything that I have not myself undergone’ line. In my case it is more or less true. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, I spent ten grim weeks in a special detention camp outside Lang Trang. But he breaks in –

‘All right, it is probably necessary to put a little extra pressure on this man, but it is a dirty business. Could we not get it over with, in his interests and ours? Could we not go a little faster?’

‘Faster?’

‘You keep going over the shitty business over and over again. The bomb factory, the Bar des Ottomans, and so on, and now all this stuff about his childhood and his family, and his work, and who were his neighbours ten years ago and such shit and more detailed shit. It makes my flesh creep to watch him screaming, while you try to piece together his earliest memories of childhood – as it were.’

‘Know the mind of the enemy, lieutenant. Know the mind of the enemy – not just what is in it, but how what is in it got there in the first place, and what the enemy will do with what it is that is in his mind. We must know the mind of the enemy better than the enemy knows it himself. It is the only way that we can win this war.’

‘Well, I can accept that I suppose –’

‘You’d better!’

‘– but we seem so close to a breakthrough on what we really want to know. But then you bring the current down again, and start the questioning and then when you’ve got him confused and he’s about to make a slip, then it’s back on with the current. With respect I am fucked off with it all.’

‘Lieutenant, you are new to interrogation technique, aren’t you?’

He nods stiffly.

‘That is all right with me. I’ve been working with these techniques since ’55. Lesson 1: If you are going to use the magneto, there is no point in shooting up to top voltage from the start and keeping it there. While the voltage is on the poor guy just tries to swallow the gag, and when the switch is off he is too dazed senseless to speak. No, you work through gradations of pressure and fear. It is a matter of finesse. Finesse.’