The Mysteries of Algiers (3 page)

During all this our voices have got lower and lower, conscious of al-Hadi’s baleful eyes trained on our dispute. Disturbed, I turn away from the lieutenant and put my hand on the field telephone. Al-Hadi cries out, ‘If you put me through that again, I’ll tell all.’

‘That is what we want, isn’t it, lieutenant?’

My eyes are back on the lieutenant now. He doesn’t like me. He does not respect me even. Well, I am used to it. Al-Hadi has switched to Arabic and is jabbering away. The lieutenant seems to understand no Arabic. The voltage is pushed up a little way and then stops, for the corporal has poked his head around the door. He is careful not to see our detainee.

‘Captain, there is a lady …’

‘A woman, corporal. A woman. We don’t interrogate ladies.’

‘No, I mean … to see you. She insists that she has a right to be down here. She has a pass, but it’s not a military one and I told her that she –’

‘I assure you, captain, I am all woman.’

‘Lieutenant, get Mademoiselle de Serkissian out of here.’

Schwab is already at the foot of the stair, blocking her way. Chantal waves her
SDECE
pass and tries to peer over Schwab’s shoulder to see what is going on.

Al-Hadi switches back to French.

‘Help! Madame, help me! Tell them what you see down here. They are killing me … Tell the newspapers.’

I lean over the prisoner and suggest that he shouts a little louder. Chantal has no ears for the prisoner. She has been engaged in a polite struggle with my lieutenant, trying to push past him, but it is not possible to sustain a polite struggle for any length of time. They smile sheepishly at one another and Chantal allows herself to be conducted upstairs. If I leave them alone for long enough she will be suggesting that Schwab should look in on her some evening to see her stamp collection. Poor fool, the proposal will not mean what he will think it means. I am not in fact displeased at this new interruption of our interrogation and I absently pat al-Hadi on the head.

‘Take a rest. I’m impressed.’

Then I go upstairs to simulate the displeasure I do not feel. She and Schwab are talking animatedly in the corridor. The stamp collection for sure. Telling Schwab to take a break, I take Chantal by the arm and steer her outside.

‘This is my investigation and it stays that way.’

Out in the sunlight of the parade ground she puts on her broad brimmed floppy hat and sunglasses. She looks like a masked cavalier.

‘Your interrogation procedures,’ she sighs. ‘They are all so sordid.’

‘Sordid is how you see it. The enemy doesn’t think that torture is sordid. “The fires of torture lit by our imperialist oppressors are the fires that purify our revolution.” ’

‘Shit on their purified revolution. It’s sordid.’

‘Oh well, interrogation’s not my job usually. I’m only in on this one because it was Mercier who got killed.’

‘Oh, I know, but all that translation and filing, that’s so dreary too!’ Her lip curls in mock petulance. ‘Anyway, Mercier was my friend too … even if I didn’t like him very much.’

‘Your message?’

‘Message …? Oh yes, the message! The security review meeting has been brought forward a week, so it’s the day after tomorrow and it will take place here, not at Laghouat. There will be several unscheduled guests sitting in and a new item on the agenda.’ She fishes in her handbag and produces a brown envelope. ‘It’s all in here, except that while you will probably recognize our military guest, the civilians – there are three of them – will only reveal their true identities in the meeting. Anyway, the colonel expects you to sort out clearances and find accommodation for these three pseudonymous gentlemen.’

‘We are holding the meeting in the fort for reasons of unusual security, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about item one on the agenda?’

‘It’s item two now. First we have to listen to whatever the paras and these civilian gents may have for us.’

‘But, Chantal, item two raises the possibility of a high-ranking traitor within Fort Tiberias itself! That’s not going to impress our security-conscious guests. And it is even possible that the traitor, if there is one, may be sitting in on the discussion of item one, whatever it may be.’

She smiles uncertainly, then shrugs. Chantal, like me, works on intelligence records, but her main area of responsibility is tracking deserters. When harkis go on the run, these Muslim troops tend to take themselves and their weapons straight to the nearest
FLN
battalion. Of course, it is Military Intelligence’s job to work out which
FLN
group, if any, the deserting harkis have gone over to. When I take men out on operations in the Jebel and if we are lucky enough to flush out any of the fellagha, then most of them get killed in the fighting. Even those who are taken alive have a way of dying an hour or two later. However someone is always detailed to cut off the heads of our ‘bag’ and, somehow or other, these heads are got back to base. It is Chantal’s job to compare these heads with photographs of enlisted men in army records.

Down in the cellar once more, Schwab hands me my roster of questions. It is a matter of the slow unfolding of revelations. It may be that tomorrow or the day after we shall have the truth. But today and for the moment all I am looking for is a convenient lie.

What is she doing? Her dress is off. I have unzipped it for her, but Chantal is taking her time. She said that she was just going to remove her ear-rings. There are muffled thumps and bangs in the other room. Then the door swings open and my doubts are answered.

‘Hands on your head, Philippe.’

My gun is in her hands. I know it is loaded. I do as she suggests.

‘Stand right where you are.’ And she sidles round me to reach the bed.

‘You can turn round now – but slowly, with your hands on your head.’

She has settled herself back comfortably against the pillows. Though she still holds the gun with both hands, it shakes a little. The gun is a Tokarev T33, a Russian pistol, heavier than the
MAS
35s carried by my fellow officers, but in most respects a superior weapon. I bought it from a sailor on my way out of Indochina.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking, Philippe. No, you don’t have to talk. I have been looking at your books through there.’

(I don’t have many books. I don’t believe in them and I don’t read for pleasure. I have never owned more than a dozen books in my life. What I have out there are three dictionaries (French, Arabic and Vietnamese), Marx’s
Capital,
and
Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts, The Thoughts of Chairman
Mao
, Ho Chi Minh’s
Selected Works
and Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks
– oh yes and Peltier’s
Psychology of Persuasion.)

‘You are the logical traitor. I mean, logically you must be the traitor in our midst. All this “know the mind of the enemy” routine is a bluff. You are the enemy within.’ Chantal is flushed and triumphant. ‘And I have been going over your dossier. There are far too many bungles and missed catches in it. You are my man. Now bring your hands down slowly and get your trousers off, but slowly.’

Again I do as she suggests.

‘What are you going to do with me?’

‘Now your jacket off. Slowly.’

I seem to have some trouble getting the jacket off, but now as my arms are at last free of the sleeves, I hurl it over Chantal’s head and leap after it on to the bed. I am over her and trying to get the gun. Rather than surrender it to me, she drops it over on to the floor. There is a wild scrabble as we both tumble after it. I outreach her. Chantal is breathless and giggling, but she sobers up when she sees that I have the gun. I am pretty fierce now that I have it. All the time we make love, I hold it pointed to her skull. It is a strain on the arms but worth it.

‘That was great. We must try that one again.’

‘It probably wouldn’t work a second time.’

A lake of sweat and other fluids has formed on the sagging mattress and Chantal and I lie close together in it like the well-greased parts of a weapon in machine oil.

‘I knew you kept your gun in one of the drawers – and I remembered what some thriller writer I read once said: “When in doubt what to do next, have someone with a gun in his hand come through the door.” ’

Chantal is by no means wholly committed to me. She likes to flirt and play around a lot. We have only been to bed about half a dozen times. She probably wouldn’t have given me a chance first time round, if on the occasion of our first meeting I had not asked her what her favourite flower was. It was the white gardenia. Then, when she came round to see me, she found the bedroom door open, and the entire bed covered in white gardenias. We made awkward love, rolling over and over on their crushed stalks. The second time it was her surprise. She brought a stock whip which she had borrowed from one of her farm managers. Afterwards the ceiling was covered with fleck marks which were hard to explain to visitors, and neither of us went swimming for a week. That was all in Algiers. Now that she had joined me at Fort Tiberias, she has talked about forming a ‘humping club’.

I have lumberingly explained that this sector of the Sahara is not as free from watchful eyes as it looks. There are Piper Cub spotter planes all day long cruising around, looking for
FLN
infiltrators from Tunisia trying to come in south of the Morice Line. And there are the harkis, the bedu, and maybe a few successful
A
L
N
infiltrators. Doing it privately on the back of a camel was not going to be easy …

‘Oh, forget it. My little joke.’

This is the first time she has come to my room in the fort. We have kept our liaison pretty quiet, for Chantal estimates that we shall have more weight on the security committee if no one realizes that we are involved with one another. It is better if we are perceived to be two independent voices in its deliberations.

I am indeed surprised that she agreed to this afternoon’s assignation, for she has already begun to flirt with other officers at Fort Tiberias, and in the committee meetings we do indeed speak with two independent voices now. In these meetings she is sounding increasingly critical of my plodding methods and poor results. Too many files, too much plod and no one could understand how the files were organized apart from me.

We lie quiet for a while in bed watching the great fan slowly turning on the ceiling and drinking Martini from the bottle. Then Chantal begins to talk about item one – now item two – on tomorrow’s agenda (neither she nor the colonel would say anything at all about the new item one). I lie back and contemplate Chantal talking and speculating. Chantal has what I have always privately classified as fascist good looks – unfairly, doubtless. One sees many American girls like Chantal – strong teeth, strong jaws, big bones, large milk-giving breasts, healthy diet, assurance that comes from family love and a good income.

I try to pull her over on to me again, but she keeps going on about the damned security agenda. It was I who had put the possible existence of a traitor on the agenda and argued forcibly with the colonel that none of the officers, not even the most senior, especially the most senior, could be considered above suspicion. Colonel Joinville’s eccentricity verges on madness – madness to the point that he does not even resent my suggestion that his strange ideas render him suspect. Captain Kolbetranz is one of those rare officers who has risen from the ranks, a refugee from East Germany, he could be a Soviet plant. Captain Delavigne is an intellectual. God knows what goes on in the minds of those who read
Le Monde.
Captain Yvetot is an excessively conventional and conservative officer. He may well be secretly and implacably opposed to the nuclear test about to take place at Reganne and to de Gaulle’s new
force de frappe.
Major Lacan is a ghost of a man. He has left his soul in Dien Bien Phu. It is enough to run through the long list of possible suspects to see why France is going to lose this war.

‘You suspect even me, don’t you?’ says Chantal.

‘No, there are limits even to my suspicious nature.’ But I take care to put the slightest note of hesitation in my reply, for I am careful always to keep her a little off balance. And if she is only having a game with me, it is also true that at this stage I am by no means wholly besotted with her. My natural cast of mind is to have two minds – on anything. I can see that Chantal is a magnificent creature, but at the same instant that I marvel at her body I find it revolts me. The big breasts, the flesh round the hips, superfluous flesh everywhere, the big eyes which out of the context of her carefully made-up face might be mistaken for jelly fish, smells that allure and repel. I have seen so much flesh in other contexts, electrocuted, charred, drowned, dismembered and smelling, that my response to any human body cannot be unambivalent. It must be the same for all of us serving in Algeria.

Temperamentally and politically too there was a great divide between Chantal and myself. It is enough now to remark that Chantal’s politics are the politics of the shoulder-blades. So she herself has described it to me. The shiver that travels up the spine, between the shoulder-blades, and tingles at the nape of her neck and brings tears to her eyes, this shiver is her political master. The manifestations of the political shiver are rare and not announced in advance, but they are crucial. The singing of the ‘Marseillaise’ in a night-club, the Spahis cantering by on full-dress parade, a child, miraculously still alive, dragged from the rubble of an
FLN
bomb outrage, suchlike stuff. My view of politics is more logical.

And there is her class. I am not of her class. Who is? In Algeria, only members of ‘the hundred families’. The de Serkissians own vineyards, olive groves, tobacco plantations, a bauxite mine and a casino. And despite that frivolous champagne and Jaguars look, she is an intellectual and a reader of books. I am not fond of all that. It’s the negation of action. It is after all the intellectuals, the academics and the journalists who are paralysing the military offensive now. The French are going to surrender Algeria after losing a series of debates in a coffee bar. And a lot of men on both sides have got killed, while the intellectuals maundered on. Killed for nothing. I am serious about this.