Abduction

by Simon Pare

  The woman walked towards the man. With one hand she brushed aside the revolver pointing at her. She poked the old man hard in the chest with her index finger.

  “You can’t do this, you madman… You can’t do this… You can’t…”

  Even as he retreated, the old man spat out furiously, “Now you understand! It hurts, eh? I shouted like you at the time: those nutters couldn’t have done something like that – they couldn’t have done that! But they did it… They did it!”

  He spat on the floor – probably to stop himself crying.

  “They did it… So now it’s my turn to be mad! You will pay for everyone in Algeria…”

  Aziz now spoke, his tone shrill, although he tried to strengthen it by coughing.

  “What is your deal exactly?”

  Meriem started. Knitting her brows, it looked as if she was about to protest. The kidnapper gave a knowing wink before bending down to pick up the old pistol and throwing it to her husband.

  “Finally a serious conversation. You kill your wife, then you kill me and, with a bit of luck, you free your daughter.”

  “How can I be sure that you’ll tell me where she is?”

  “You don’t really have a choice. Hurry up, you’ve only got 25 minutes left. After that, everyone, without exception, will be dead.”

  “I want something more concrete than just idle talk. Your price is high,” Aziz retorted, forcing himself to talk as if he were in a business negotiation, “and you don’t offer any guarantees about the rest of the contract.”

  The man Meriem had called the devil let out a snigger.

  “Some keys – would that be acceptable?”

  “Keys?”

  “The keys to her prison, for example.”

  The man rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a bunch of keys.

  Aziz didn’t reach out for them.

  “First you have to swear to me on the soul of your dead daughter that those keys really do unlock my daughter’s prison.”

  The man scowled. He thought hard for a few seconds, fiddling with the bunch of keys. Then, shrugging his shoulders, he threw the keys into the open drawer. He took two other keys out of his pocket, one small, one big, the two tied together with a piece of string.

  “Fine. I swear on my daughter’s soul that these keys really do unlock your daughter’s prison.”

  “What if you’re still lying?”

  “Don’t ever say that word again when I swear by my daughter, please, otherwise I’ll kill you here and now, one after the other.”

  Aziz searched for his wife’s eyes, but her head was hanging and she refused him any sight of her face. The old man became impatient.

  “I’m not going to wait for the coming of the Messiah with you. Are you ready to kill your wife now?”

  “First give me the keys. What’s more, for all this (he gestured towards the old pistol and then his wife) to mean anything, I have to be certain that the cell is accessible in under two minutes – on foot of course – and that the survivor will have a good chance of freeing Shehera. Can you guarantee that?”

  The old man sucked on the inside of his cheek before blurting out, “It can be done…if you’re quick.”

  “Will you swear on…”

  “On my daughter’s soul I swear. Here are the keys. Are you satisfied?”

  The kidnapper’s eyes now exhibited an almost childish excitement.

  “Well, let’s get it over and done with! Your wife has gone all pale; she can’t stand waiting at the abattoir door any longer. And I’m in a hurry to meet up with my family again.”

  Meriem had sat down again. Keeping her eyes obstinately lowered, she had put both hands on her lap after straightening her dress. Apart from one of her legs vibrating, she betrayed none of her emotions.

  Aziz cocked the pistol. He was amazed that he was so calm. Were their lives destined to be shattered in such ignominious fashion? Was there nothing to be done to avoid this unimaginable gunshot?

  Her breathing shallow, Meriem held her arms across her chest, hunching over as if trying to reduce the area of flesh exposed to death. The old man’s eyes lit up with eagerness.

  “Still hesitating, son?” he whispered in slight disappointment. “Abraham hesitated too, but when he had to do it, he did it!”

  “You take me for Abraham? And yourself for God?”

  Aziz’s tone was one of amused astonishment.

  “But I’m not Abraham,” he murmured to himself. “You can both piss off, you and your Abraham!”

  He looked longingly at his wife, who had pulled her head down into her shoulders and was waiting for the deathblow. Her raincoat was open; the dress suited her particularly well and Aziz regretted not having complimented his wife on it.

  Aziz’s heart melted with pain. He thought, with the ridiculous hope that she might hear him: “Sweetheart, how could you think for one moment that I would put my life above yours?”

  Meriem raised her head, surprised at the silence that reigned in the room. For a second, Aziz allowed himself a smile at her, before pulling himself together.

  He held out the gun to the slumped woman.

  “Here you are, Meriem… It was my job to defend you… Come on, get up… Take the gun and the keys… Shoot quickly, don’t think… Don’t laze around like that… Stand up and turn towards me. Aim at my forehead. Afterwards, ask him for the place and run there to free our daughter…”

  He took Meriem by the shoulders, manhandling her roughly.

  “Hurry up. You haven’t got much time left…”

  The woman tottered on her feet and she had to catch hold of her husband’s arm. She threw a horrified glance at the weapon that had been placed decisively in her hand. She beseeched him silently. Aziz shook his head, still wearing the same smile that chilled one part of her soul and warmed another.

  “Meriem, you have honoured me by living with me and by giving me a child. That’s sufficient for my life not to have been a failure.”

  The old man said sarcastically, “Maybe I ought to apologise for being here, but the clock is ticking, lovebirds.”

  Frightened and angry, Aziz yelled, “Shoot, for God’s sake, shoot. Otherwise, our daughter will be hanged. You can’t let that happen. Mathieu would have died for nothing, and your mother too!”

  She levelled her arm at him. But the trembling of her lips showed that she hadn’t yet made her mind up to shoot. A tear welled up in her eye, then a second. She wagged her head in a gesture of helplessness.

  Aziz started cursing her – and night the colour of pitch invaded his heart.

  “I can’t,” she whimpered. “You’re my husband…”

  “Are you going to shoot or not, you slut? Shoot, you idiot, you bitch! Do you want our daughter to die?”

  A furrow appeared on Meriem’s forehead. He noticed a small crease of anger between her eyebrows, so he heaped even more insults on her.

  “You whore… you dirty louse…”

  He heard a first click, then a second.

  She had fired. And he wasn’t dead.

  With feverish eyes, she pulled the trigger again. The same sinister click. He read utter shame in her eyes: I’ve killed my husband and yet he’s still here staring at me!

  Their host’s laughter rang out thunderously.

  “The old peashooter is jammed…That bloody Mathieu! A damned nuisance even from beyond the grave!”

  Meriem muttered, “Oh, jeering at us, are you…”

  She dropped the useless gun. She was breathing spasmodically, as if she’d just surfaced after a long time underwater.

  “You devil! I kill my husband and you burst out laughing…”

  She bent down over the table, her back hiding her hands. She leaped forward with a grunt.

  The knife plunged into the madman’s chest while he was still shaking with laughter. Even under the impact, the man didn’t lose his balance. Grabbing Meriem by the hair, he twisted her neck round and, with no hesitation, shot her in her expose
d temple at pointblank range.

  The sound was strangely quiet, little more than the pop of a cork from a champagne bottle. Meriem fell to her knees in a strange position as if she were praying to her murderer. Then the body slid over to one side.

  “Ah…”

  Aziz pushed the man over backwards with one violent kick.

  “Ah…” he growled, his whole being reduced to this single sound.

  He was holding his wife in his arms. Blood was running down her temple onto her chest, splashing on the husband’s hands and raincoat. Without any hesitation, for his wife’s precious life was for one more tiny moment beating within her, Aziz kissed the spots of bright red liquid.

  Meriem’s face had taken on the obscene rubbery look of a sleeping drunkard, a twisted grin deforming her features. The husband ran his hand over her lips to wipe away the grimace.

  “You don’t look your best, sweetheart.”

  Then the sob came, the first of a ghastly horde – which he stifled, exasperated by the futility of his own grief.

  “You’re dead, and the last words I spoke to you were insults. I am the lowest of the low, Meriem. It should have been me instead of you. I didn’t manage to protect my family.”

  He coughed. The small, pointed stones of sorrow would not come out. And they announced their intention to grow and become even sharper.

  “You’re lucky, son.”

  “What?” Aziz grumbled, awaking from a thousand-year absence.

  “You’re lucky to be surrounded by people who love you so much.”

  The husband jumped (and part of him, to the great scorn of the rest of his soul, took the opportunity to gripe: She loves me? But she shot at me!)

  “Aren’t you dead yet, you rat?”

  “It’s not going to be long, I don’t think. I don’t know what the knife hit, maybe a lung, maybe my heart, but it’ll be suffocation or a heart attack. Even if the blade only went halfway in, it still hurts like hell. Your wife was a brave woman, boy.”

  The murderer was sprawled out on the floor with his back leaning against the wall with the black curtain. He was still holding the revolver that had pierced Meriem’s temple. Surrounded by a scarlet halo, the kitchen knife was sticking out of the man’s chest like some strange, evil plant.

  “About to kill me?” Aziz enquired indifferently.

  “No, no, son. I need an heir, I’ve already told you that. In this business between us, pain is a relay race. We’re on the same team and you’re the next runner. I’ve just passed you the baton.”

  “Give me the address then. You swore by your daughter.”

  A gasp ran through the man. A frothy liquid, like red-stained sick, appeared at the corners of his mouth.

  “Of course I’ll keep my word.”

  A smile joined the bubbles springing from his mouth.

  “The City of Joy, Block 4C.”

  The father creased his brow before turning red: “But that’s here!”

  The wounded man’s sardonic pout didn’t fade. Laying Meriem’s head on the floor, Aziz rushed out into the corridor, opening the doors to every room, from bathroom to bedroom, one after another.

  Foaming with rage, he came back into the living room.

  “You lied, you lied, you swine! Where is she? I’m going to… I’m going to…”

  He shook the wounded man by the shoulders. Between two hoarse coughs, the old man managed a snigger.

  “You’re going to…you’re going to kill me before I can speak. Look at the knife. Life is flowing out of me like a washbasin, you stupid little shit! Stop and listen… First of all, I didn’t lie to you, and secondly we’re going to do each other a favour. For the last time…”

  Aziz let go of the kidnapper’s shoulders. The latter handed him the revolver that had put a hole in Meriem’s temple.

  “Here is proof of my good faith. Answer a question first, just one, before I specify where in the building the cell is. Hurry up, because the guy must be losing patience. He’s the cowardly, irascible type who’s a bit keen on young flesh; you know the kind. With the rebels, he raped a whole load of kidnapped women. That was before he was granted an amnesty, but I’m not so sure that his dick has changed much since. So, do you agree?”

  Incapable of uttering a single word, the father nodded. He seized the weapon he was offered and thrust it into his pocket. He resisted the desire to tidy his wife’s hair: her curls were hanging in her eyes, giving a neglected look to a woman who was the personification of elegance. A pool of blood was spreading over the floor around the body.

  “What’s it like being surrounded by people who love you so much? I mean: Mathieu, your wife, all of them ready to give their lives, maybe not for you, but at least for Shehera?”

  “Well…”

  The horde of sobs once again came knocking at the top of his throat. Once again, Aziz decided to ignore them, while surprising himself by how diligently he could answer his wife’s murderer.

  “I could have died at any time in my life for Meriem and Shehera – and my life would still have been complete.”

  He whispered ‘complete’ with a feeling that the innumerable mountains of sadness that he would have to scale one by one for the rest of his days were already rearing up inside him.

  The waxy-cheeked old man observed him greedily. The bloody foam had now formed a crude beard around his chin. In a rasping voice, he articulated with difficulty, “I wasn’t so lucky. My wife and daughter had only just begun to love me. They weren’t given any time to cherish me more than that. But unfortunately for me, I had all the time in the world to love them. The longer I lived, the more I loved my vanished ones. That ever-growing love, which churned my entrails, was worse that any disease; it was a cancer of the soul that no morphine could soothe.”

  Aziz sighed with a shrug.

  “Your deal?”

  “You saw the frame behind the curtain. Promise me that once a year you will publish the photo in the newspaper, in the ‘Birthdays’ section. Until your death.”

  “I don’t know either your daughter’s or your wife’s birthday.”

  “It’s simple: it’ll be the anniversary of Melouza. Now take an oath that you will respect your promise and I’ll tell you where your daughter is.”

  “I swear.”

  “…On the soul of… the deceased woman.”

  “…On the soul of my wife…”

  The wounded man gave a grimace of satisfaction while pointing to the ceiling with his index finger.

  “So… where did you hide my daughter?”

  “Look where my finger’s pointing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I had a laundry put in up there. I made sure I bought it at the same time as the flat. You have two keys on you: one of them opens the door to the staircase leading up to the roof, the other is for the laundry room. You’ve got a chance of making it.”

  Aziz stood up at once, but the man was clinging to his trousers.

  “Hey, you’ve got one last chore to see to – to help me depart this planet.”

  “Fuck off!” Aziz barked, breaking free from the old man’s grip. “You can die by yourself!”

  “No, I’m too… soft to stand hours of agony,” the wounded man protested, stretching out his arm to grab hold of Aziz’s leg again. “And also I might feel like yelling out of the window or, better still, phoning my accomplice to warn him of your arrival. I wouldn’t hesitate for a second; you’ve seen for yourself that I sometimes keep my promises. Ah, there goes the phone. I bet that rogue of mine’s getting impatient… Please, if you’ve killed someone already, it’s not that hard! So, push the knife in up to the hilt and then it’s bye-bye to the Algerian war, bye-bye to this dump called Earth! With a bit of luck, God will be a sport and acknowledge the validity of my actions. If so, I will see my family again in paradise; if not, I will find myself in the company of Satan and I’ll ruin his eternal life with my story.”

  A snigger shook his shoulders as if he’d heard a good joke.<
br />
  “The funniest thing about all of this is that I spent my entire adolescence dreaming of just one thing: that Algeria would one day be free and independent. Seems like we got far more than we bargained for with our new masters!”

  Laughing made him vomit up more blood. Shehera’s father contemplated with an air of bewilderment the incomprehensible creature imploring him with a whore’s simpering airs to put an end to his ordeal. Without further thought, he shoved the old man over backwards and, as one might crush an insect, put his shoe on the knife before pushing down on it with all his strength. The dying man urged him on with his eyes until the death rattle came.

  Then, grabbing the mobile that had started vibrating again, Aziz dashed for the front door.

  The larger key opened the metal door. He tiptoed up the twenty or so steps. A second door, wooden this time ,blocked off the access to the terrace. He wiggled the large key in the lock, then the small one, to no avail. A rush of despair deprived him of his mental faculties until he thought of touching the handle: the door swung open without further effort.

  Wiping away the sweat streaming into his eyes, he had a look outside through the half-open door.

  The crook who had somehow or other sold the utility room to the kidnapper had done things properly. Not satisfied with extending the laundry with an extra room, he had also added a little garden of sorts, made up of a host of potted flowers. To top things off, the building was surrounded by a wooden palisade so that the whole arrangement rather called to mind a suburban house that had been whisked away to the top of a block of flats.

  Aziz eyed the weapon that the kidnapper had given him; his hand was shaking and he had the impression that the revolver was still hot from the gunshot that had killed his wife. He checked for a second time that the safety catch was off. The gun’s range must be very short judging by the ridiculous noise made by the bullet that had killed Meriem. He decided to only shoot at his target point-blank.

  Crouching down, he crossed the space between him and the palisade. Straddling the fence on the blind side, he kept tight to the wall until he reached the door. The laundry room door also had an extra locked metal covering, but this one was made of wire mesh. The sole shutter was closed. Aziz put his ear up to the wire mesh. There was not a sound coming from inside the laundry room. He rubbed his ear with his coat sleeve and held it to the metal again. A distant rumbling gave him renewed hope, before he realised that it was the beating of his own heart.