I began gathering together our things which would be useful corroborative evidence if we were brought before some officer but one of the men cocked his rifle and aimed it at my head. Another soldier picked up the sketchpad. At least we’d have that, I thought. Niki tried to say our car was down the hill, but a soldier shut her up with a brutal shove and a rasping shout of “uskoot” – “be quiet” in Arabic. Only the rifle barrel pointing at my head stopped me from intervening physically. We began walking along the path the soldiers had used, parallel to the road and some two hundred yards above it.
I was holding Niki’s hand, this time not for cover but to try to cheer her up. Her fears had been realised. And why should she, this small, sweet Japanese-Canadian woman find herself so deep in such typically Israeli shit. Me, OK, I had all the reasons in the world, but why her? I was flooded with compassion, and perhaps love too, and I tried to convey it to her through the palms of our hands. When I sensed that it was working, I also put my arm around her, but this was too much for the soldiers, and one of them stuck the barrel of his rifle between us and separated us.
Another man was reporting something over his radio. We kept on walking, and every now and again one of them turned around, crouched and aimed his weapon in the direction we had come from. They had probably heard something that I hadn’t. Perhaps it was Udi’s footsteps, I thought and hoped.
After about ten minutes we reached a dirt road, and saw the lights of a vehicle approaching. It was a military pickup truck, and we were loaded onto it at gunpoint. Any hope of Udi helping us to end the affair there in the field was now dead.
7.
A Sunken Nipple and a Tiny Tattoo
ONCE AGAIN I was to be interrogated, and once again Niki was my only hope. But there was a difference: this time, I was also her only hope.
“Please let her go,” I begged when we got to the base. “We’re just a couple on holiday, and if we strayed into a forbidden area, I’m sorry but keep me here and let her go. It was my idea, a silly idea, to have a picnic up there.”
The soldiers didn’t seem to be paying any attention to what I was saying. When an officer showed up and told them to take Niki one way and me another, I repeated my plea to have her released. As they separated us at the entrance to their headquarters, she looked scared, scared to death almost. How wrong everything had gone! Between us, in the mission, in life. My feelings for Niki at that moment were so powerful that I went down on my knees to plead with them to free her. A rifle barrel was jabbed into my back and she vanished with her captors down the corridor.
The officer in charge of the patrol, an older man, was not a professional interrogator, and the place was not an investigation facility but rather a small base for the forces guarding the secluded airport, or so I deduced – I had no way of knowing it for sure. I didn’t even know if it was within his authority to question us, or if this was merely a stage on the way to the Mukhabarat. He was, if I remembered the Algerian army insignia properly, a major. On the shoulders of his rather shabby uniform he wore gilt flowers on a green and white background with two yellow stripes, and his cap bore the Algerian emblem of a crescent and star over crossed swords and a wreath of leaves. He had apparently decided to enjoy to the hilt all the pleasure that the situation could give him. His dismal office had suddenly become an important investigation point, despite the blotches of mould on the walls. The damp had even encroached onto the photographs hanging there of President Bouteflika whom I recognized from the intelligence file, and his predecessor Boumediene, whose greatly enlarged picture I’d seen at the airport.
My wrists were tied together with bootlaces, as were my ankles – clearly the base wasn’t equipped with handcuffs. I was seated on a chair a short distance from the officer’s wretched desk, and in one corner two soldiers stood guard with Famas F-1 assault rifles at the ready. It was the first time I’d seen these French-made firearms which resembled the Israeli Tavor with their heavy-looking stocks and short barrels. One of the men, sloppily dressed, was holding a leg of his weapon’s open bipod with one hand and had the index finger of the other on the trigger, and I thought that a hasty move on his part could put an end to my life. The officer’s handgun was on the desk but, unlike the untidy soldier, he didn’t seem frightened of me.
He scrutinized my passport and, after asking me where we were staying, he called the Sofitel and obtained confirmation that we were guests at the hotel. He spoke French to me, until it became clear that my French was worse than his English, after which he used a mixture of the two languages in a thick Arabic-French accent.
“You have de luxe hotel, dit moi pourqoi you make love on ze montagne where is interdit to be in ze nuit?” he asked, and luckily I still remembered some high school French.
“We did not know it was forbidden,” I replied. “There is no fence or anything else there.”
The officer, who was a hefty man of about fifty, with broad rounded shoulders and the thick arms of a farmer, rose slowly, walked around the desk, and slapped me with his roughened palm. The blow had little energy behind it and didn’t hurt much as I managed to stiffen my jaw and neck muscles before it landed.
“You no answer ze question. Répondez vous!” he ordered, evidently enjoying this new role.
“We saw the spot during the day, while touring around Mont Plaisant. When it started to get dark, and we realized we had missed the sunset, we decided to have our picnic where I would have some scenery to paint in the twilight. So we stopped the car and climbed some of the way up the hillside.”
Even to me, this prearranged response sounded a bit stupid. But the officer mulled it over for a while, and apparently didn’t think my explanation totally unreasonable. He asked about the car, I told him where I’d rented it, and he called the company to confirm. Then he sent a patrol to check if it was where I said we’d left it.
While waiting for the patrol to come back he asked me about my occupation, why we’d come to Algeria, and what we’d done since arriving. I gave him full answers, and let him see on my digital Nikon the many pictures I’d taken at the mosques and Notre Dame and of the scenery, as well as the landscape sketches I’d made “up there” so that I’d be able to paint them later. The beautiful Niki figured in many of the pictures, and he asked me about her.
This reminded me, with a jolt, that she was nearby in the same situation as I was, and what felt like an electric shock of pain surged through me. I told him the story we had prepared of how we had met, and with each detail my heartache increased.
The officer was a lot less moved than I was by the story, and when I’d finished speaking, he ordered the guards to tie me to the chair and announced that he was going to hear Niki’s version. While the slovenly soldier kept his rifle aimed at me, the other man wound a thick rope around me, pinning my upper body and arms to the back of the chair, my thighs to the seat and my calves to the legs of the chair. I was almost mummified, but my thoughts were about Niki. Why did she have to go through all of this? Even without any connection to the crisis in our relationship, or to my dumb machismo that had caused that crisis, how had I ever agreed to get her involved in this world? After all, when I did so, I had already been under detention and interrogation in Amman, and I was aware that this kind of thing could happen. Why had I allowed her to take these dangers upon herself? Why hadn’t I done what Udi had suggested at the start – that we’d live as a couple and her role would be only to provide cover for me. I had brought her into this with my eyes wide open, succumbing far too easily and conveniently to her samurai codes.
The major spent a long time with Niki, but I couldn’t say exactly how long because there was no clock in the room and I couldn’t look at my watch. It was already very late at night, and I assumed that was why we were being questioned here and not taken to the Mukhabarat. This gave me some hope. If Niki gave him the same story, there was a chance we’d be released. Between these thoughts, I had visions of Udi finding us, entering the camp and freeing us, but I knew t
his was a fantasy. He couldn’t know where we were or carry out a Rambo-type raid like that. For one thing, if it failed then we’d really be suspected and the investigation would become far more serious. All they had to do was to comb our picnic site and find the night vision device and radio gear, and we’d be in for many long years of imprisonment, or worse. Even a routine patrol the next day could happen upon the devices.
The hours went by. I wasn’t wearing my coat, and the cold of the springtime night slowly penetrated my bones. But despite that, and despite all my fears and fantasies, my head drooped and I fell into a light doze, from which I was awoken by loud voices. My hopes that the affair would end with the major’s interrogation were dashed. The door opened, and into the room came the major and a vigorous officer wearing another kind of uniform. He was about my age and height, but he was slim and agile and had a thick moustache. A Mukhabarat man, I guessed.
He took the major’s chair, indicating his seniority, brought it closer, and sat with his knees touching mine and his face right in my face.
“I’ve just had a long talk with your girlfriend,” he said in French, and when I said I’d prefer English he expressed surprise: “Aren’t you bilingual there, in Canada?”
“In Quebec, perhaps. Not in Ontario,” I replied and this seemed to satisfy him.
He continued in heavily accented but passable English: “Your petite amie sounds almost convincing. But we have made the gynaecological examination to her. You do not have the sexual intercourse there, on the mountain. I see no signs of the semen on her.”
The thought of what they’d done to Niki demolished me. Did this mean they had stripped her, forced her thighs open and examined her vagina? Did this vigorous, crude officer facing me do it? Or the older major with those thick fingers? It was unlikely that they had a woman perform the examination properly, or that they had brought a doctor.
“We drank wine, we fell asleep …” I muttered. Would our crisis, which had made me impotent, bring about our downfall?
“In the meantime, everything you say, you and the woman, about your visit in Algeria and also about where you live in Canada has, how you say it, checked out. Luckily for you, it is the working hours there now. We have sent it to our consulate in Toronto, and they have checked and confirmed it.”
I broke into a sweat over the possibility that the Algerians would contact the Toronto authorities and they’d get in touch with Ron Friedlich’s parents. But the moustached intelligence officer’s mind was elsewhere:
“So, even if you did not have the sexual relations tonight, you must know the intimate details about each other.”
What kind of information was he expecting me to give him? What could he verify?
The investigator ordered a soldier to remove the rope binding me to the chair, and while this was being done he said: “She say you were stabbed once, before she meet you, in some kind of knife fight, and you have scars on your shoulder and your derrière. I am going to check that now.”
In a minute the ropes were off me, but my wrists and ankles were still secured by the bootlaces. One of the soldiers was told to open my shirt and bare my shoulder and the intelligence officer took a close look at the old wound.
“That is not made by a knife,” he said.
“Right. It was a broken bottle.”
He told me to stand up and ordered the soldier to pull my trousers down. The first thing that entered my mind was my circumcision. They would see that my foreskin had been removed. That was also what their own Muslim penises looked like but why should Ron Friedlich, a Canadian, be circumcised? I dropped my trousers myself, shivering with cold and with anxiety that my Jewishness would be exposed. I could, of course, say I was circumcised for health reasons, but it would take me a few giant steps back.
Luckily, the officer didn’t even look at that part of my anatomy. He went behind me and told the soldier to pull down my underpants.
“That is a knife,” he said with authority when he saw the scar. He told the soldier to get me properly dressed again. No one had ever been so grateful as I was then for those fragments of shrapnel that had nicked my flesh.
“OK. Now you must to tell me something about her. Something that only you know.”
I fell back into my chair. Here I was being ordered to tell them information that would mean they must undress Niki and ogle her body. “Of course there are such things. But there’s no reason for me to tell you. The other officer has called Sofitel and confirmed that we were there together.”
“Why are les dames always more clever than les hommes? What you think, this way you are protecting her? I can do with her whatever I wish, and you can do nothing about it. I ask you one simple question. So, answer, please, like she answer.”
“The nipple of her left breast is inverted,” I said, and both officers burst out laughing. The major even saw fit to translate what I’d said for the benefit of the soldiers, who didn’t understand English.
“C’est tout? Perhaps also they cut off le clitoris,” he looked at me mockingly.
If he had shoved his fingers into Niki’s body to look for signs of my semen, perhaps he had also crudely examined that delicate spot. I tried to overcome the nausea that rose inside me and that tasted of the cheese I’d eaten before we were arrested.
“It is not a very rare thing, that the point of the nipple goes inwards,” I said trying to make my voice sound matter of fact, so that this subject wouldn’t obsess them. “And when it comes to the clit …” but I stopped myself before saying something derogatory about what some Muslims do to their women. I needed the sympathy of this disgusting creature, not his antagonism.
“Autre chose, please, something special, that only you know?”
“OK. She has a small tattoo of a sword, right under her navel.”
“Vraiment? I have not gone so high,” he laughed maliciously again.
If only the two of us were alone there. If only my wrists and ankles were not bound. If only I didn’t have a rifle pointed at me. I knew I could shatter this slimy toad’s skull and break every bone in his body.
“I go to look,” he said and left the room. The major, who had noticed how upset I was, told his men to tie me down again, and followed him. He didn’t want to miss the show.
I shuddered while the soldier was tying me to the chair, with rage, with horror at what Niki was going through now, with helplessness. This, I knew, was the lowest point in my life, and the thought that Niki was in an even lower place, made the situation intolerable.
When the door was opened again, the light of early morning poured into the room. My grilling had not taken so many hours, and I hoped that Niki’s hadn’t either. Where had the time gone? Perhaps while I had dozed off and they were waiting for the man from the Mukhabarat.
I thought I was hallucinating. In the light coming through the door, I saw the silhouette of Niki’s slight frame. She was pushed into the room. The major followed her inside. Niki looked exhausted but there was a soft glow on her white face.
“They are letting us go,” she said as she came up to me.
The officer ordered the soldiers to untie me.
“You have ze bonne chance,” he said. “He believe her.”
I took a deep breath to gain control of the emotions stirring in my chest and to keep myself from crying.
When I got onto my feet, Niki put her head on my chest and hugged me. Then she took my arm and placed her hand over mine, in a calming gesture.
The major said a military vehicle would take us to our car.
He took his departure from us with some advice: “Pas plus de piquenique.”
We squeezed into the wide front seat of a Russian truck and, after a few failed attempts to get it started, for which I hardly had the patience, the engine finally responded and we left the base. I hugged Niki close and we didn’t open our mouths until we reached the car.
On the way to the hotel we also sat very close, but remained silent, though Niki’s tears flowed witho
ut stopping, and I breathed with difficulty, unable to contain all the emotions raging within me: the enormous swell of compassion and love for Niki; the hatred for the two Algerian officers; the anger at Udi and the hasty change in operating procedures that had left a pit for us to fall into; the frustration at now being under open scrutiny; fear that we could still be apprehended before we left, and refusal to accept that Dolly’s killer was apparently going to remain alive. But I had not yet given up on that little dream. A new day had dawned, and who knew what to expect? Especially in our strange business.
When we got to our room, Niki hurried to the bathroom, and threw up again. This time, as I held her, she allowed herself to sob and moan. Then she filled the bath with hot water and foam, got undressed and immersed herself, body and head. I sat next to her and when she came up for air I held her hand. Then I saw a glimmer of something that I thought could possibly be a smile.
“You must need a bath too,” she whispered. “Come on in.”
8.
Home Again
DAYLIGHT WAS SEEPING through the curtains when we fell asleep in each other’s arms, taking consolation from each other’s exhausted bodies. I had barely the slightest conception of what Niki had been through and she wasn’t yet ready to speak about it.
The ringing of the phone woke us. I had no idea what time it was. The caller identified himself as an Air Canada representative, and it took a few seconds for me to recognize Udi’s voice. “As you requested,” he said, “your departure has been brought forward and you will be leaving on an Air France flight at seven this evening to Paris and from there to Toronto on Air Canada, after a brief stopover. The tickets will be waiting for you at the airport.”
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 38