That Devil's Madness

by Dominique Wilson

  #

  From the gap between the curtains of her room Nicolette could see the sky start to lighten. Earlier, she’d waited until she’d heard Steven’s soft snores, then sneaked back into her room – she didn’t want Madame Lesage to know she’d been in his bed. But she couldn’t go back to sleep, couldn’t stop thinking. Part of her couldn’t wait to see Steven again. She wondered how he’d act towards her, especially in front of the other journalists. Would he make it obvious their relationship had changed? Or would it be better not to? But then, knowing Steven, he’d probably make a whole lot of jokes about last night – innuendoes and wisecracks. No, he wasn’t a kid; he’d know to keep things quiet. She wondered for a moment how they’d work their relationship – would they team up on other jobs? Each go their separate way then meet up again when they could? She’d never had a long distance relationship before…

  But what if Steven didn’t want a relationship? What if he saw this as just a one-night stand, a quick screw? No. He was older, more mature. That was young men’s behaviour – those that had just discovered sex and wanted to taste all the flavours, as it were. Men of Steven’s age were better than that. But what if he already had a wife? A mistress? A girlfriend? She knew nothing of his personal life. He wasn’t wearing a ring, but lots of married men wore no ring.

  She felt like such an idiot. She didn’t want to face him today; she just wasn’t up to it. No, definitely not. He’d probably made plans to meet up with DJ anyway. She’d stay in bed until she was sure he was gone, then try to ring her mother again. Some of her friends as well. It would be the middle of the night back home, but it was Christmas Day, after all. Surely even the press had Christmas Day off. Then, after her phone calls, she might go out to see what was open – probably everything, seeing this was now a Muslim country. She’d buy herself some magazines and a few treats, and spend a quiet day spoiling herself in her room. Forget last night ever happened. Just as long as nothing happened with Boumedienne – it would be just her luck to have him die on Christmas Day. But then, it would also mean she could take her photos and go home, and never have to see Steven again…

  #

  Ding dong merrily on high, In heav’n the bells are ringing! Ding Dong verily the sky—

  She could hear him coming down the corridor, singing at the top of his voice. She’d dozed off and from the light behind her curtains, it was now broad daylight. Go away, Steven.

  Ding dong verily the sky— He rapped on her door and walked in, not waiting for her response. ‘Merry Christmas kiddo. What are you doing still in bed? Come on, get dressed. We’re going to the Genève – DJ’s room. Christmas lunch.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Yes you are; everyone’ll be there. Come on, get dressed. I’ll be back in five.’

  ‘No. I said I’m not going. You go.’

  Steven looked at her for a moment, then his expression grew serious. He sat on the edge of her bed.

  ‘Look, if this is about last night, forget it. You were down and wanted some company – I can understand that, but I’m not one for relationships. So don’t make a big deal out of it. Water under the bridge and all that. Now why don’t you get dressed and come have a bit of fun. Christmas and all that.’

  Was that how he saw it? No big deal? Water under the bridge? It was all too soon – she didn’t know what to think. But she was supposed to toughen up, wasn’t she? That’s what she’d told herself. Maybe that’s how they all behaved – maybe one-night stands were the norm when you didn’t know where you’d be from one day to the next. Fine. She could pretend last night never happened. Whether she liked it or not, she still had to work with him. She took a deep breath, raised her chin and looked him in the eye.

  ‘What made you think it meant anything to me? You’re not that great, you know.’

  He laughed. ‘Good girl. See you in five. And happy Christmas, kiddo.’

  ‘Happy Christmas, Steven.’

  She felt like crying.

  21

  Just like her first day in Algiers, DJ’s room was packed. This time the atmosphere was more festive. The hand basin was filled with bottles as before, and someone had brought a piece of a pine tree branch and put it in a large jar filled with sand. It stood by the windowsill, decorated with ribbons and what seemed like cheap, strangely shaped baubles but which were – when Nicolette looked closer – inexpensive glass earrings found in most bazaars. On top of this branch, someone had added a star cut from gold cardboard.

  ‘Nicolette, you’re back.’ Jean-Paul made his way across the room and hugged her, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘Joyeux Noël. I like the hair.’

  ‘Thanks. Merry Christmas. But you’re back too – how was Egypt?’

  ‘Busy. By the way, congratulations.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘That scoop you guys got – the farmer in Constantine.’

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘Yes we heard. By the way, I found out something about that while I was in Egypt. You might be interested.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait till it quietens down a bit,’ he said, indicating the noisy group standing by the Christmas tree, singing Silent Night in a variety of languages. Someone across the room called Jean-Paul and he excused himself. Steven came up to her and handed her a glass of wine.

  ‘Here,’ he said, searching in the pocket of his jacket and handing her a small packet. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  Nicolette was surprised. She hadn’t expected anything from Steven, especially after this morning. Should she have gotten something for him? For Jean-Paul? No one else seemed to be exchanging presents – but then, they did get here late, so she might have missed it. She handed him her glass and opened the package. Inside were a couple of packets of cigarettes and a simple brass refillable lighter.

  ‘But I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Wrong. You don’t smoke your own cigarettes. You smoke mine, DJ’s, even Amoud’s. So I figured you’d better have your own.’

  Nicolette smiled. ‘Fair enough. Thank you. I’ll treasure the lighter.’

  ‘Hey, don’t go making a big deal of this.’ He smiled and winked at her. ‘Like I said, it’s just time you had your own.’ He handed her back her glass and went to look for DJ.

  ‘So how’re you getting on with him?’

  Nicolette turned to find Mike Davis, the bureau chief, standing behind her. By the look of him, he’d started his celebrations early.

  ‘Steven? Okay, I guess. Can’t work him out.’

  ‘Then don’t try.’

  ‘Have you known him long?’

  ‘Hell yeah – known him since he first started in this business. He was barely out of short pants. Started as a junior assistant to a newsreel team in Indochina. Was there for the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Poor bastard – that nearly finished him before he’d even begun…’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘He’d never seen anything like it. Was just your average Australian country kid. To see ordinary people with the simplest of weapons fight to the death against professional armies, well, you’re pretty impressionable at that age, but still, he was doing ok… But when his girl got killed, I really thought that was the end of him. Thought he’d go back home and become an accountant or something.’

  ‘What was his girlfriend doing in Indochina?’

  ‘Not an Australian girl – a Vietnamese. Pretty, sweet little thing. He was crazy about her… Anyway, after the French finally surrendered, the locals celebrated – no one had thought it possible, you see. So there they were, dancing and singing and cheering in the streets, when some French copper lost control – I dunno, got scared maybe, or just pissed off because they’d lost – anyway, whatever the reason, he fired his gun into the crowd. People panicked. She fell and got trampled to death.’

  ‘That’s horrible!’

  ‘Yeah, it is. Anyway, Morris disappeared from the scene after that, and I figured he’d gone back home. But a couple of years later, there
’s his by-line covering the Mau Mau uprising. Then he’s in Cuba, covering that revolution. Pretty soon, his news stories are in broadsheets worldwide. Always from the side of the underdog. Vietnam, Rwanda, Cuba – anywhere there was a war, a civil conflict, Morris was there.’ He stopped and looked around the room. Drained his glass. ‘But hey, why the hell are we talking about that? It’s Christmas Day, girly, and I need a refill. Happy Christmas.’

  #

  They were sitting on the floor, leaning against DJ’s bed.

  ‘A lot of it comes from Vietnam now,’ Jean-Paul explained to Nicolette, ‘Used to be Czechoslovakia. You could get anything there – a real arms supermarket. And the end user certificates were no problem, no matter how questionable. But then the KGB got in on the act, and that was the end of that. But Vietnam, well, there’s a lot of superfluous stuff left over from the war lying around there. AK-47s are the favourite, and of course hand grenades. Vietnam’s got plenty of those.’

  ‘What’s an AK-47?’

  ‘Kalashnikovs – automatic rifles. Russian. Guerrillas love them because they’ve got a metal butt that you can keep folded forward, so they’re a lot smaller than most rifles. Easier to hide. You’d know one if you saw it – they’ve a curved metal bullet-feed half way down. And they’re pretty simple to use, so you don’t have to train anyone.’

  ‘So how’d they get them over here? It’s not like you can go over for a quick shopping trip.’

  ‘They don’t go buying it themselves – there’s a whole network involved. They form companies and—’

  ‘Hang on, “companies”? We’re talking groups of rebels here – freedom fighters, whatever. They own companies?’

  Jean-Paul shook his head. ‘No, they’re at the bottom of the ladder. It’s complex, Nicolette. At the very top, you have governments of all the major nations who manufacture the weapons, then who want to sell their surplus to other countries. They don’t really care who buys them, even if they say they do – it’s all about the money. If there’s a war on somewhere, great. They have a ready market. If there’s no official war, you get your dealers selling stuff off to your smaller groups – civil wars, revolutions, whatever.’

  ‘Like here.’

  ‘Definitely like here. The companies I’m talking about are often just a front to launder money. There’s a whole system set up to ensure no one knows more than he has to – cells.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Small groups to make sure no one knows everyone in the organisation. They used it here during the war of independence. One man picks two others to work under him. They, in turn, each pick two more. No one knows who the other has picked, so no one knows more than three other people at the one time – the one who chose him, and the two he picked.’

  ‘Clever. Kinda like honeycomb in a beehive.’

  ‘Exactly. Of course, when you get right down the bottom of the ladder – down to your rebel groups that go around doing the actual dirty work – well of course they know their own little group, but they’ve no idea who their group leader gets his orders from.’

  Nicolette nodded. She understood now what Steven had meant when he’d said she wasn’t going to find out who was responsible for the arms deal in Constantine in just a day. ‘So get back to the weapons.’

  ‘It’s the smaller countries – or the ones without the necessary resources to manufacture their own weapons – that have to buy ready-mades from the countries that manufacture. Now there’s this law that says that any country that buys arms has to sign a document guaranteeing it won’t pass the weapons on to another country or group, without the permission of the country it bought it from. But you can imagine how often that gets done legally, when there’s huge sums of money involved.’

  He reached behind him for his cigarettes on the bed, and offered one to Nicolette. She showed him the ones Steven had given her.

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yeah, it is… You said earlier that a lot of the stuff nowadays comes from Vietnam?’

  Jean-Paul nodded. ‘You get places like ‘Nam, where the country’s dead broke anyway after the war, and there’s all this stuff lying around – it doesn’t take much figuring to see that someone’s going to be on the ball and start moving the stuff to where there’s a ready market. They’d make a lot of money out of it.’

  ‘So the stuff from places like Vietnam – does that get sold directly to the little guy?’

  ‘No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you – even the little guys are part of a huge network. Look, let’s start at the bottom and work up. You have these revolutionaries who need guns. Now there’s always someone at the head of these groups. This guy negotiates with someone who’s like a go-between. The go-between gets word to the bigger fish – the negotiator – who has contacts with suppliers, who buy off the governments or whoever has access to a supply. Get it?’

  ‘I think so. Listen, I need to get some food into me – this wine’s going to my head.’

  ‘Yeah, I could do with something too. Want me to get you a plate?’

  Nicolette nodded, looking towards the three food trolleys that had been brought up from the hotel kitchens only a short while ago.

  ‘Something gutsy to mop up the wine,’ she said.

  Jean-Paul was soon back carrying three plates. Two were laden with a variety of tagines – rich meaty stews on a bed of steamed couscous, with a couple of kebabs on top for good measure. The third plate held a variety of sweetmeats – m’hencha, almond filled and coiled like serpents; kab-el-ghazel, crimped and crescent-shaped to represent gazelle horns, and semolina cakes filled with dates and lightly flavoured with orange flower water, called bradj.

  ‘Lasa jiyid mer rehturban,’ Jean-Paul said as he handed her one of the savoury plates and put the one with the sweetmeats between them on the floor.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘A good meal is known by its odour – some North African proverb I picked up. It’s about the only thing I can say.’

  ‘I use to know a heap of them; my grandmother was always coming up with them. The only one I can remember now is a lucky year is that in which the fruits of the earth are without worms.’

  Jean-Paul laughed. ‘Makes sense.’

  Nicolette picked up a kebab and took a bite. ‘You were telling me about the little guy. He doesn’t get to be the negotiator?’

  ‘Never. To be able to negotiate deals and not get caught, you’d have to be someone who can travel around without arousing suspicion. And you’d have to have contacts at the other end too. You’d also have to know the countries you were dealing with pretty well.’

  ‘Fair enough. So let me get this straight. This negotiator – he gets told someone wants some guns. He goes off to whatever country has them, buys the guns, gets them back without arousing suspicion, and sells them down the line to get to the little guy. To do that, he’d need a boat, or a plane.’

  ‘Yeah, he would, if that was how it works, but it’s not. The negotiator never gets his hands dirty – he just organises things. He gets others to do the actual work. He’s there, in the background, but he never does anything that’ll give him away. It’s how he survives.’

  ‘And how do they get it all into the country? There’s border security, customs. You said something about an end user certificate?’

  ‘You only need that if you’re dealing with the major countries, to make it all look legal. So customs are no problem if you’ve got that. For the less official stuff, there’s an awful lot of space, an awful lot of sea and sky. It can be done.’

  ‘Okay. So, getting back to what’s going on here?’

  ‘Word is whoever’s doing the negotiating is in Constantine at the moment. And he’s not Algerian – one of my sources reckons English.’

  ‘So how do we find out about this guy?’

  ‘Very carefully, I’d say. And not “we”. As soon as Boumedienne’s funeral’s over, I’m giving up this racket.’

  ‘But why? This is big. Don’t yo
u want to get to the bottom of it? What are you going to do, anyway?’

  ‘I’ve bought myself a nice little place just outside this little village in Provence. I’m going to grow grapes, make wine…’

  ‘Can’t you do that after we crack this? It’s worth chasing up, Jean-Paul. Certainly more interesting than sitting around waiting for Boumedienne to die.’

  ‘Sorry, Nicolette, but I’ve made up my mind. Boumedienne, and that’s it.’

  ‘What are you two up to?’ Steven asked, picking up the plate of sweetmeats and sitting on the floor between them. ‘You look like you’re planning to take over the world.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Nicolette answered.

  Across the room DJ and a Scottish correspondent broke into a drunken rendition of I’ll be home for Christmas. Mike Davies decided to join them for a minute, but changed his mind and went to refill his glass instead. Steven popped a bradj into his mouth and chewed.

  22

  January 1957 was particularly cold in Constantine. Nicolette, rugged up in a coat with a little fur collar and matching fur hat, walked along beside Louis, playing hopscotch with the pavement squares as they walked.

  ‘Are those boots polished?’ Louis asked, pointing to her feet. Nicolette looked at her boots. She stopped skipping. She knew how strict her grandfather was about clean shoes. Every night he would spread newspaper on the kitchen table, and choose the right coloured polish and the right brushes from a box he kept under the sink. With one brush he would carefully work the polish into the leather of the shoes he had worn that day, then leave the shoes for a while so the polish could penetrate the leather. When he judged enough time had passed, he’d pick up the other brush and shine the shoes. Then he would get a piece of woollen cloth he kept just for that purpose, and buff the shoes even more until they shone like new.

  For the past year or so, since Grandma Therèse had died after being so long in hospital, Grandpa Louis expected Nicolette to polish her own shoes.