The Mysteries of Algiers Read online

  As I speak there is a lot of reaching for cigarettes and a lot of chair-scraping. I have taken pains to be known as a dull, plodding speaker. Colonel Joinville picks up the sand rose and begins to meditate on its prismatic surfaces.

  I press on. Clearly opportunities have been missed and there have been some disturbing failures in recent counter-insurgency operations. The possibility of a double agent, even at the highest level within our ranks, cannot be categorically dismissed. A review will be necessary. It will be time-consuming. I have no clear recommendations. I merely remind those present of already existing security procedures. I would, of course, welcome comments or detailed questions from other members of the Security Panel or from our distinguished visitors.

  ‘I do not like long drawn-out security reviews and, in this case, I do not think one will be necessary,’ says Joinville without looking up from the sand rose which revolves in his hands. ‘Chantal, you have something to say I believe?’

  Everyone sits up. Chantal has one of those voices which carry from one end of the Galeries Lafayette to the other.

  ‘I too share Captain Roussel’s unease and like him I have been going over the archives here and in Algiers, in the hope of discovering the source of the leaks that we all know are taking place. It is indeed a slow process of elimination and narrowing down. In my researches I found that again and again I was being let down by our intelligence records. I was not the first to have found this to be the case. I have formulated slowly, reluctantly and very tentatively the notion that it might not be that the defects of the filing system constituted an obstacle to the solution of the problem … rather they were a pointer to the answer to the problem.’

  Listening to her, I feel a little queasy. Is it possible that when I thought that I was playing with her, she was playing with me?

  She continues -

  ‘I have to say that I can draw no conclusions from all this. What I would recommend is that a fresh eye undertakes an overall investigation of the intelligence archives at Fort Tiberias. It is certainly possible that Captain Roussel and I are too close to the material for us to be able to resolve several puzzling features that I have noticed in them. I think it would also be helpful if all those involved in the collation of intelligence archives prepared reports on their work for …’

  The bitch! The bitch! She has not actually said it, but everyone understands perfectly what it is she has not actually said. On the one hand, I think surely I can talk myself out of this. On the other hand, I think that Chantal has started a process which is slow but whose conclusion is inevitable. Events at the Security Panel move too slowly. It is time to give them a push. Action is always the answer.

  ‘My colonel, I have an answer for all this.’

  Joinville looks up surprised from his contemplation of the sand rose. I let him see my Tokarev. Then I fire it. At this short range the shot sends him and the chair flying backwards. The sand rose shatters. Next, I shoot the big-shot tradesman Potier, simply because he is sitting next to me and I am in a panic that he will try to pull my gun away from me. After that it is impossible to be sure what I or anyone else is doing. People are diving for cover. I think my third shot, aimed at Chantal, went over her back. People are screaming. Someone else in the room, Rocroy possibly, has a gun and a shot ricochets off the ceiling. The siren on the courtyard wall has gone off and there is shouting outside too. The door swings open. There is only one trooper there. The other must have gone for help. I take the remaining one easily before he can get his rifle up to fire.

  I start running down the corridor. Once round the corner I find Captain Desineux and six legionnaires coming in the opposite direction.

  ‘Captain Desineux, those civilians … there is an FLN suicide squad in the room … the colonel’s been shot. Have a guard put on the corridor. And I want men on the roof. And others on the wall opposite watching the windows.’

  He finds it hard to take in, but he nods and I run on. Out in the courtyard, I see that I am not going to make it through the main gate. It is firmly bolted and a guard is already on alert there. I might try bluffing my way out through the gate, but I can’t see that it will work. I should like at least to return to the archive room and wreak some final damage there, but paper burns disappointingly slowly. Whether I leave here in a jeep or a coffin, I should like to have done as much damage as possible. So where now? What now? Think. Think.

  Chapter Seven

  Along the corridor to the laundry, halfway along the corridor I stop, look and see if anyone is coming either way. Then I slide against one of the walls and put my feet on the opposite one and push and wriggle. The corridor is four foot wide. With my back against one wall and my feet against the other I am levering myself up the passage towards the ceiling. There’s a space up there, eight feet up on the left-hand wall, I noticed some time ago – had no idea what use it would be. This ledge is narrow and goes up to the ceiling. I suppose that it was created by irregular boxing in of the laundry pipes. It is two foot wide, four foot long and about three foot high. It is not going to be comfortable. Indeed it resembles the detention cells we use for other ranks. I am going to spend the night here. While legionnaires tramp below I have time to think. It is all I have.

  Now what the hell do I do? I listen to the legionnaires passing below me. Their snippets of conversation do not help. They have not been told much of anything really. They don’t know what has happened to the colonel or to me. We have not been seen. The gates of the fort are closed. All leave is cancelled. Most of the reconnaissance patrols have been cancelled too.

  I stretch out on the ledge and think. It is my curse that I always think several things at once. So I think how am I ever going to come off this ledge and get out of here. But I also go over the events at the security meeting and I think about Chantal. There are never less than two chains of thought running simultaneously.

  In the last three days I have tortured a man and then murdered him. I have killed three others. The colonel I sort of respected and liked and murdered. But murder is not murder when it is committed by an agent of the people. It is an execution. I have also systematically betrayed the woman I was sleeping with. But I consider myself superior to a woman like Chantal. I can appreciate her and her values. In a way I admire them I suppose, but I am also opposed to them.

  Many a schoolboy would see nothing wrong in Chantal’s oath to carry the values of D’Artagnan on into the twentieth century – quite the contrary. But this requires a little thought. What are D’Artagnan’s values? He is a royalist. Chantal is a royalist. In Chantal’s eyes there has been no legitimate government in France since 21 October 1791. D’Artagnan is an old-fashioned Catholic. Chantal is an old-fashioned Catholic. He is a traditionalist. Chantal is a traditionalist. They are both fervent patriots. D’Artagnan believed in taking justice into his own hands, for did he not supervise the execution of Milady de Winter? Chantal and her friends see nothing wrong in that too. The sword, the axe and the horse are their symbols. Their blood and their faith have given them the right to rule over the Arabs.

  In the dark shadow world of Chantal and D’Artagnan, we stand on the edge of a forest which seems to stretch into infinity and we are filled with unassuageable yearnings. Deep in the forest we dimly glimpse the candlelit windows of a chapel. Smoke from a peasant’s cottage straggles across the face of the moon. There is the premonitory sound of a huntsman’s horn, and then another and another, and we see the horsemen flickering between the trees on the fringes of the forest, cavaliers in scarlet capes fringed with gold. Steel helmets glint gold under the torchlight, silver under the moonshine. The white banner with the golden lilies of France has been unfurled. The oriflamme has been presented to the virginal bride who stands before the altar in the forest chapel. What are we yearning for? Sacred mysteries? Or old simplicities?

  So Chantal, toiling over badly cyclostyled records in a jerry-built office block in dusty Algiers, dreams of a marriage of the blood and the soil. But for myself, I am f
or the sullen peasants who watch these cavaliers ride by. When surly Jacques stands his ground and refuses to doff his cap to the fine huntsmen, I am shoulder to shoulder with Jacques.

  To get out of here, I might move to the edge of the ledge. Then, when one of the troopers comes down the corridor, I might drop on him, overpower him without a sound, drag him into the laundry room, put on his uniform. Then with the képi pulled deep over my face, I would march across the parade square and talk my way through the gate. That’s ludicrous. It is not so very easy to overpower a professional soldier without a sound and why should a trooper have his képi on at such an unmilitary angle and why on earth would he be going out for a walk in the desert? Everyone in the fort knows me. The gates are closed and I am not going to get through them that way.

  I have no time for Mercier either and all that liberal values and slowly-slowly stuff. That cow de Beauvoir in her comfortable armchair in Paris going on and on about the cancer of torture in French Algeria … I don’t even respect that stuff in the way I do what the true enemy stands for. Objectively what liberals do is shore up the oppressing power, commit little kindnesses which only delay the necessary revolution, the salutary bloodletting. They are panders smearing cosmetics on the face of Moloch. Of course if one thinks about the Algerian tragedy objectively, there are two sides to it. I can see the other side’s case. Marxists are trained to think objectively. But seeing two sides is not the same as impotent dithering. I believe in action. Action to secure the rights of the oppressed!

  I might drop lightly down, steal into the laundry room, wrap a sheet round myself, pretend I was an Arab … ludicrous, ludicrous. All these flights, deaths and concealments, this desperate pass that I am in, it seems so extraordinary that I could ever have reached it. It was not of my seeking. It was in the beginning a matter of cautious contacts made with people who knew people who knew FLN section heads, of anonymous meetings and then small testing assignments. There has been no dramatic moment, only a slow escalation of the risks involved, until this morning when I prepared to go to the security committee and I thought that nothing would happen, but at the same time I thought that I should take my gun to the committee.

  I could wait up here until I saw the chance of taking a hostage. It would have to be Chantal. Then I could talk them into surrendering a jeep and opening the gates to me. That is of course totally preposterous. A film director can risk having a preposterous scene like that in his production, but I cannot risk the implausible, because in my case if things don’t work out I die. If Chantal with my pistol to her head says, ‘No, I’m not moving’ (and she is a woman of courage), what would I do then? Blow her brains out, or say, ‘Oh well forget it.’ Even if I did manage to propel her along in front of me, their marksmen would almost certainly take the risk of killing her to get at me. They just cannot let me escape. And how if we got a jeep am I going to drive holding a pistol to Chantal’s head? Well, I could force her to drive, I suppose. But the jeep is going to be spotted from the air pretty fast.

  There’s all that Camus crap. If I was a hero in one of those existentialist novels, I would be thinking now about blowing my brains out. Dinner-table stuff for the intellectuals. Not for me. People just go on about how they are thinking of committing suicide to make themselves seem interesting. It doesn’t to me. Willy-wet-legs. Suicide is one of the curious indulgences of the bourgeois.

  I should have tried to get out earlier. Talked the gates open before anyone had quite realized what was happening. Damn, damn, damn. If only it was yesterday and I knew then what I know now.

  Maybe, if I did try to make a run for it, they would make it easy for me to get away? In the hope of seeing where I led them? Well I certainly wouldn’t count on that. Besides, I don’t want to lead them to my comrades.

  Cautiously and quietly I keep shifting my position on the ledge. I am uncomfortably aware of my body. It is I suppose the last time that I shall contemplate my body whole, all my fingernails there, all my teeth, still perfect hearing for a few more minutes or hours. I am still in my right mind and still potent. I notice that my hands are clutched over my balls as if in self-protection. It is a little bizarre, but perhaps I should masturbate now? It will surely be my last orgasm. No, my bladder is full and, though the rest of my body is hot and stiff, my penis is limp and cold. Fear takes away desire, makes a man impotent. Now I can consider Chantal without the coloration of sexual desire. Look at her objectively, and I wonder how anyone so beautiful can be committed to a cause that is so evil? It is hard to get away from the notion that a beautiful face is the outward expression of a beautiful soul, a healthy body the appropriate sheath for a healthy mind. It is hard to get away from that idea, but I should. In any moment in history the oppressing class has most of the beautiful women. I wonder what Chantal thinks of me now? Strange for a professional hunter, now to be the hunted. I really ought to know all the tricks. But the right one for the present moment does not occur to me.

  I might get down from here. Go along to the barrack room of third platoon. Address the men. Appeal to the old Spanish Civil War lags. Organize a mutiny and a mass desertion. Claim that we are acting to support de Gaulle and the civil authority against a projected colonels’ putsch in Algiers. My men will follow me anywhere. Bunk. They won’t. They hardly know me. I have hardly interested myself in their welfare. I leave all that to the NCOS. They don’t particularly like me. I am the officer that busies himself with all that dirty work down in cell 2. It is hard for me to contemplate with detachment what my men would do to the officer who has been betraying their comrades to the FLN.

  I fired four shots at the security meeting. It is an eight-round magazine. Of course if it comes to it, I might have to blow my brains out. But there are a lot of other people’s brains I’d like to blow out first. If I do shoot myself, there will be nothing grand about it. I don’t want to be on the end of a rock ’n’ roll session in cell 2. And it is crucial that what I know about the command structure of the FLN should not pass into the hands of the enemy. Death then would be necessary to preserve the revolution’s secrets. Indeed it is objectively necessary that I get out of here and get what I know to the comrades in Algiers. First, the stuff about barricades week; FLN bomb squads can make good use of that. Second, the date of Operation Sunshade and details about its preliminaries. So far I have not even managed to get to my masters the information that Sunshade (code for the testing of the first French H-bomb in the desert) will take place at the beginning of next year. That is why the tribes are being cleared around Reganne. Third, Tughril in Algiers must be told how I have been blown and persuaded to do something about Chantal.

  Could the FLN organize a rescue operation to get me out? Not on. They don’t know what is going on and I have no way of contacting them.

  I detest and adore the woman, that body, those hips like a cavalry officer’s and that mind like a sewer. Simultaneously angel and pig, she rises before my vision as the flying pig: She is committed to Action Française of course. Daddy’s estates are in hock to the Jews and the Masons. De Gaulle is a crypto-communist preparing to sell us out. In her bedroom in Algiers she has a lithograph of Marshal Pétain standing on a storm-tossed hillside. The military cape on his shoulders and the tricolor above him billow in the wind of history. Chantal said that we should couple beneath him to get his blessings on our union. In her next breath, she said Pétain was the only man to have offered France a chance of moral regeneration in this century.

  And now that Pétain is dead? Order, discipline, purity, Chantal and her friends estimate that the old values can be restored, but a few heads will have to be broken first. The old values, the simple values, as little words who can quarrel with them? Chantal worships health, strength and beauty. We all worship them, don’t we? Chantal will never sleep with a man who wears a surgical truss. A man who wears a surgical truss, though he may have many admirable qualities and go on to do great things in life, will never sleep with Chantal. Neither will a Jew, an Arab nor any of tho
se made joylessly ugly by poverty and disease. Reflecting back on yesterday afternoon, I see now that she must have known already who I was and that at the same time she made love to the soldier’s healthy body she was sizing up the atheist Marxist for his coffin. The business with the gun was a test and warning, a life-or-death tease. I thought I was playing with her. Now that I find that she has been playing with me, I know … What do I know? I don’t know anything.

  Maybe I should hole up here for a couple of days, three even, until they assume I must have got away somehow, so the heat is off. Then make a run for it? That is not on. I can’t stay up here that long. I should be weak from hunger when I finally sprinted out into the desert. Besides I am bursting to pee now. It is fear which fills my bladder and stops me from sleeping. I could really use a sleep. An effect of shock I suppose.

  This constant pressure in my bladder, it was like that at the political education centre Lang Trang. Everything they gave me to drink just went straight through me. Horrible sores developed on my legs. The sores attracted bugs. If I had my hands free I used to try and catch the bugs and eat them. They never allowed me to sleep. Lights shone day and night and my eyelids were peeled back and clipped so that they never closed. They made me beg to be given permission to drink urine. I thought myself particularly lucky if it was my own that I was allowed to drink. A small thing, but in such circumstances a small boon can give great happiness. It was a brief happiness, for the urine was too salty to satisfy thirst. I have described to Rocroy and to Mercier the things I went through at that camp. What I never told them is how I feel about it. I look back on Lang Trang with nostalgia and on my educators with respect. Of course they showed me the truths of Marxism. But it is not just that. The generals and politicians who sent us to Dien Bien Phu in such a hurry, once Dien Bien Phu was lost and that strategy seen to be not so smart, what hurry did they take to get us captives out of the hands of the Viet Minh? They didn’t really care. We were inconvenient bargaining counters in the hands of the enemy. Objectively viewed, my interrogators and teachers at Lang Trang were all cruel men, but they did care intensely about me and, in their rough way, they looked after all of us when we had been abandoned by our own generals.