by Simon Pare
Before stepping over the threshold, I clasped my wife in my arms. I smiled inwardly, but my face muscles refused to obey me. I caressed Meriem’s cheeks, incapable of finding any other way of expressing the flood of love coursing through me.
“Wait,” she said when we reached the top of the stairs. She rushed into the flat and came back out less than a minute later carrying a plastic bag.
“It’s to give Shehera some first aid,” she whispered, showing me the medical kit we used to treat the bumps and scratches of everyday life. “We could do with a surgeon instead,” I thought without daring to say it out loud.
We waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes. The driver, roughly on time for once, waved to us to get in. When we declined, he shouted that it was worth him putting himself out for people who lazed about rather than working.
I saw Meriem’s eyes become blurred when a beaming neighbour drew up beside us in his car.
“I bet your old banger’s finally given up the ghost. I’m going into the centre of Algiers. I can drop you off, if that’s any help.”
I turned down our helpful neighbour’s offer, explaining that we were waiting for a friend. As soon as he had driven off, I turned to Meriem. The tear she had been holding back for some time was running down her nose. I let her deal with her tear; I had enough trouble stopping myself crying out for help as ‘everyday’ life carried on around us.
The kidnapper’s phone call was, in a sense, welcome.
“Go to Block 4, Entrance C, the one that…”
“…is directly opposite us. That’s where it is?” I exclaimed in amazement.
“Yes,” he assured me, with gaiety in his voice. “Wait for my instructions in the entrance hall. No tricks – I’m watching you through binoculars.”
“Is my daughter with you?”
“You’ll find out when you get there. In the meantime, get out your mobiles and smash them. Be careful; don’t forget I’ve got my eye on you. Hey, what are you waiting for to obey me?”
“How are we going to keep in touch?”
“I’ll find a way. Obey me this minute or I’ll order my – how should I call him? – my colleague to take care of your daughter!”
“Is Shehera with you, yes or no?”
“Shit! Are you going to obey me, you cockroach spawn!”
We did as he said, certain that we were committing a terrible mistake that was as awfully inevitable as the condemned man’s march towards the rope that will hang him. We contemplated the plastic and electronic debris at our feet. I spotted a kid who was playing with a ball on the other side of the street looking aghast at us. Meriem murmured, “I’m scared, oh I’m so scared…”
It took us a few seconds to make it to the entrance hall of Block 4, which was every bit as seedy-looking as ours with its peeling paint, vandalised letterboxes and broken-down lift. A sentence that I’d read somewhere came to my mind: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
“What now?”
“Look by your feet.”
Lying openly on the floor was a sheet of paper folded in two. An elderly man came in just at that moment. Wrapped up in a coat, his head covered by a forage cap, he called out a loud “Hello!” before noticing the piece of paper himself. He bent down to examine it. A sudden intuition made me protest: “That sheet’s mine – I just dropped it.”
The newcomer pulled an ironic face at us and made a vague gesture that said “Well, take it then, if it’s so precious!”
I picked up the sheet as the man, still racked with coughing, reached the stairs. I read, “Count to 200 and go up to the top floor, right-hand door.”The writing was perfectly legible. A postscript had been added at the bottom of the page: “200 is two times 100, so count to 100 twice!”
I swallowed uncomfortably. It was the first ‘physical’ contact with the man who had kidnapped our daughter. Meriem began to count out loud, probably as a way of controlling the terror that threatened to relieve us of all capacity for thought. Paradoxically, the seemingly schoolboy humour of the postscript chilled me more than the message itself.
“…199, 200. Shall we go?”
We climbed, slowly at first, then almost at a run. The building was a perfect replica of our own. We passed an old lady in a traditional white haik. She tried to strike up a conversation, but we put a quick stop to her lengthy greetings. One floor higher up, two boys were arguing. The elder asked us where we were going, but received no answer.
After a further three flights of stairs, we reached the top floor. There were two flats opposite each other. Between them, a staircase leading to the laundry room had been blocked off with a metal door. “This is it. Oh my God…”
A chant from the Koran was coming from the right-hand door. Aziz recognised the reader of a sacred text, a very famous Egyptian called Abdou Samed. The volume of the cantillation was turned up almost to full volume. The passageway between the two flats was relatively clean and the tenants had even made a point of arranging a few potted flowering plants.
Was it possible that Shehera was being held in this unremarkable flat, suffering violence and mutilation whilst all around ‘normal’ people went about their ‘normal’ business?
Aziz felt himself torn between two options, the first suggesting that the place was Too – what would you call it? – inoffensive, that’s it! for horrible events to take place there, and the other murmuring Remember the young conscript in the bus who had his throat cut; neither the trees nor the wind speed, nothing changed! Remember when you murdered the informer: did the scenery rebel? Did a comet appear in the sky?
And the ‘reasonable’ voice flung back: Come on, man. Your daughter might already be dead, even as a wonderful aroma of coriander soup tickles your nostrils!
Ever since his daughter had been kidnapped, Aziz had been prey to all kinds of fears, each viler than the other. The one that immobilised him now in front of this door surprised him by the form it took: a diffuse cramp like the effects of an electric shock spreading through his body – kidneys, stomach, testicles, anus, brain, not to mention his damn legs, from which all motor muscle memory seemed to have disappeared.
His wife stepped forward unhesitatingly. With keen admiration, he mused that mothers are stronger than fathers; that’s why humanity has survived. She knocked. Once. A second time, harder, because of the racket of the chanting.
The door was flung open. In the doorway, a thin, very old man fixed them with a kindly stare. Aziz recoiled as he recognised the man wrapped in his coat who had let him pick up the sheet of paper.
“Sorry… We got the wrong flat.”
“No, you didn’t get the wrong one. Please come in,” before adding to the stunned couple, “Don’t you recognise my voice? It’s true that the telephone distorts one’s voice. Even I don’t recognise myself when I hear myself on the answer phone.”
He forced himself to cough a couple of times – and it was by this slightly rough cough that Aziz recognised him.
“I caught a cold,” the man explained uncritically. “Can you place me now? I allowed myself a little trick on you just now.”
They followed him into the flat, still dumbfounded.
“Sit down,” he offered in a slightly more authoritarian voice. “Coffee? I’ve prepared some for you; it’s still hot.”
The voice of the teller of the Koran filled the entire room. Meriem almost shouted, “You’re the…”
“Your little Shehera’s new ‘uncle’? Yes, otherwise we wouldn’t be gathered here in this grotty flat in a grotty neighbourhood in a grotty city, would we?”
The bald-headed man with almost non-existent eyebrows suddenly extinguished his pretence of a smile.
“So you don’t understand why I’m asking you to take a seat? If you don’t want me to get vulgar, lady, put your plastic bag down so I can check what you’ve brought with you.”
The enthralled couple did as they were told and perched on the edge of a couch facing the television. With the sound turned off, it w
as showing a report about the President of the Republic’s activities. As he examined the contents of the bag, the old man remarked, “He’s got everything perfectly worked out, that dear President of ours. Chief only of himself yesterday, chief of us all today until death carries him off to tamper with some other elections somewhere in hell! Do you like our little master?” he asked as he set down two cups of coffee on the low table. “Now, if he’d had a daughter…” he continued, with the same cheerful grin on his face.
He sniggered.
“He wouldn’t have called her Sheherazade, though! The guy’s too smart, even if his life resembles the Arabian Nights; I mean the caliph of caliphs with lots of courtiers competing to lick his boots… Anyway, the bloke isn’t married and doesn’t have a daughter, so the matter is closed!”
When he served the coffee, his shirtsleeve rode up slightly to reveal white hairs, some of whose roots had an ochre tinge.
Mathieu had described the man who threatened Tahar as a flaming redhead.
So ghosts did exist. The man opposite them was indeed the same father whose soul had exploded during the Algerian war and who was bent on taking revenge by burning them, half a century later, as an offering to his grief!
He studied the stranger’s face again – an ordinary face, no sooner seen than forgotten, a few wrinkles, a smoker’s neglected teeth; nothing that indicated that the man had suffered exceptional sorrow and that he was preparing to pay fate back in its own coin. To bring his breathing under control Aziz forced himself to take a furtive look at the décor around him, which was just as bland as the occupant of the flat: unshowy furniture, a cheap carpet, doilies on top of the television set and on the table. Closed doors at the end of the corridor. His gaze swung back to the living room: on the far wall from the window, a rod held up a black curtain that covered a large part of the wall. A chair had been set down facing the strange curtain.
“Why?”
“Why is our President so smart?”
“Why have you made us responsible for your misfortune? You’re well aware that we are innocent of what happened to you fifty years ago.”
The man shrugged, seemingly finding the question stupid.
“Do you know this surah? It is about God’s bounty. God is obliged to keep repeating that He is good, otherwise no one would believe Him seeing what goes on in the world! I’ve turned the volume up for two reasons: so that no one hears us should, let’s say, our conversation get a bit heated; and secondly so that you absorb the implacable irony of our Creator. I would like…”
“I couldn’t care less about your mad meanderings. Just give me back my daughter.”
Meriem’s voice had dwindled to a trickle, but it didn’t quaver. Your cheeks are ashen, my sweetheart. You should put on a bit of rouge once this is all over. This outrageous observation had crossed Aziz’s mind like a highwayman. To his amazement, he pondered that the hormones released by his fear were gradually unsettling his thoughts.
The thin man made a show of reprobation, wagging his finger at the mother.
“In my day, people didn’t use to interrupt their elders when they broached important subjects.”
“Give me back my daughter,” Meriem repeated, raising her voice. Her lips were blue, and the hand she had rested on her knees was shaking like a small animal. The rest of her body had stiffened with a considerable effort of will.
Ignoring the mother’s interjections, the kidnapper continued his mockery of a sermon.
“My dear friends, I would like to remind you that there is only one day that counts – and that’s the day you die. In a sense, it is the happiest day of all the ones our birth condemns us to suffer. You will agree with me on that: no more cares, no more grief to rend our guts, no more hopes that are as cruel as they are futile. It’s such heartbreak to come into the world and such a relief to disappear forever from this damn universe. Life is like leaving behind a repulsive turd that the merciful void will clear away forever.”
Aziz felt certain that the man was declaiming a carefully prepared text. An itch was tickling the back of his throat. He was scared of coughing; maybe his body would react by unleashing a terrible scream that would transform the nightmare Meriem and he were living into reality. For it could not be possible that this skinny old shortie with the look of a peaceful grocer was the sadist who had coldly chopped off his daughter’s fingers…
“I can tell you that two of us, maybe three, will know the happiest day of their lives today.”
He sipped his coffee, watching for his visitors’ reaction.
“Naturally, I’m not talking about the accomplice who’s guarding your daughter. He’s an amnestied Islamist terrorist, an unscrupulous brute who’ll do anything I order him to. He’s got quite a number of slightly twisted libidinous instincts, but he tries to curb them…well, as long as I’m around to control him. And so he should; I pay him enough money to obey me. He’s scared of me too; the idiot thinks I’m a top dog in the GIA or some other bunch of nutters like that. I persuaded him that you were anti-God and that you deserved the most severe punishment. He’s spent time with the rebels himself and he is still fascinated by cruel leaders who are afraid of nothing. So as long as I shower him with money and verses that absolve him of each and every filthy crime he commits for me…”
He plunged his lips into the cup again.
“I think this coffee’s delicious, don’t you? Just so things are clear, I need to add that I count myself among the blessed who will no longer be alive (he glanced at his watch, pretending to calculate)… in half an hour, three-quarters of an hour’s time if we chat for too long. Oh and while we’re on the subject, hand over anything that might, let’s say, cause harm to any of us in any, erm… unforeseen manner. I’m sure you’re hiding at least a knife, maybe a hammer or an axe?”
Meriem and Aziz kept an enthralled eye on every move of the madman holding forth in front of them. He furrowed his brow bad-temperedly.
“It looks like you don’t take me seriously. Well, watch this.”
Picking up his telephone, he pressed a few buttons before showing them the screen of the device.
“Come closer, it’s a small screen. I shall receive an updated message like this every fifteen minutes. Hey, stay calm – don’t get hysterical, it’ll just make things worse!”
The tiny photograph was under-exposed. Scrunching up his eyes as if he were short-sighted, Aziz made out the figure of a teenage girl – his daughter. She had her hands behind her back and was standing on some kind of platform. Her mouth was gagged with a piece of material or some sticky tape. He only spotted the rope around her neck as he was about to look up.
“What the heck is she doing on that crate?” he asked, fearing the answer with all his soul.
His wife, who was still peering at the screen, grabbed his wrist and let out a single, hoarse sound, maybe the word no.
The man shut the lid of his phone.
“Aziz, I think your wife’s sight is better than yours. So I’m going to describe your daughter’s precise position to you. She is standing on a stack of tins the height of a chair. Those tins contain tomato puree. I like my soup nice and red, and these last few years I’ve been worried about a shortage of tomato sauce in the run-up to Ramadan. The pile is obviously unsteady, as you can guess. The girl has her hands tied behind her back and her mouth is gagged. So far, nothing too serious. But your wife has seen the… ‘hitch’.”
The man laughed scornfully. Meriem’s nails had pierced Aziz’s wrist. Some blood welled out of the scratches. The husband passionately wished the scratches might tear his muscles and nerves, and that intense physical pain might prevent his brain from understanding the kidnapper’s reasoning.
“That photo was taken just now. Accounting for the fatigue and cramps that will soon set in, quarter of an hour, twenty minutes would seem to be the maximum time before one unfortunate movement by your daughter will cause those tins to collapse. It doesn’t matter too much for the tomato sauce, but the
crash will immediately tighten the slipknot around your loved one’s neck. She won’t be able to scream in terror because of the gag, although she might be able to twitch her feet for a few seconds – then croak!”
He lit a cigarette and took a long drag on it. He probably didn’t realise that he was jigging around nervously on the spot.
“There is a chance, though, that she won’t suffer too much. Her neck might decide to snap straight away and, in that case, your little frog will cross over from life to death without even noticing it. You saw Saddam Hussein’s hanging on the television. The bastard was so heavy that he almost had his head ripped off, with the result that he died instantaneously. I imagine that right now he’s plotting with the devil and a couple of fallen prophets on the quickest way to annex some emirate in paradise.”
After greedily sucking in a second drag, he threw the cigarette down on the rug and stamped it out. Aziz followed the movements of the foot crushing the cigarette butt. He set out in search of his own brain in order to react to what had just been revealed to them – and couldn’t find it.
“Your daughter’s real problem isn’t death; it’s her fear of moving a hair’s breadth and bringing the tins tumbling down as we sit here chatting. Compared to that, her severed fingers are nothing.”
His hand stretched out towards them.
“Give me your weapons. They’re no use to you. If my partner doesn’t get a phone call ten minutes from now, his orders are to give the tins a big kick. And the girl will be off to join Saddam Hussein, the imbecile friend of every Arab.”
He let out a cawing jeer when he saw the knife (“Ooh, ooh, now that’s scary!”). He studied the husband’s weapon with interest.
“This is a French army peashooter, isn’t it?”
“It belonged to my father-in-law. It’s… it’s loaded.”
“That swine Mathieu,” he hissed through his teeth. “He’s not very kind – he could’ve given you a more modern gun. I would gladly have skinned that man alive, one piece of skin after another, one piece of flesh after another. Then I would have thrown his meat to the dogs with a warning that it wasn’t edible. Oh, I would have enjoyed that, I can tell you! But the trick with the car accident wasn’t badly thought-out. By the way, you said the gun’s loaded?”
