The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  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 piednoir 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.’

  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.

  Chapter Three

  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 …