Abduction (40 page)

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?”

“Yes,” said Aziz, his eyes bulging as his interlocutor pointed the pistol first at him and then, suddenly, at his wife. He was terrorised and incredulous at once, because the old man's gesticulating was so over the top that it seemed as if he wanted to make them laugh.

“So which one of you shall I take out first?”

He exaggerated his grimace of indecision.

“I scare you, eh? You don't know what I'm up to? You're saying to yourselves: he doesn't have a hair on his head – is that what drove him mad? Is he kidding, with his absurd story about killing one, two or three of the people in this room?”

“Stop the CD of the Koran, please! I can't understand a thing with all this noise,” Meriem suddenly begged, putting her hands over her ears.

“Sorry, I need the noise. Firstly, because my neighbours are the nosy kind. And then because it doesn't do any harm, a little Koran here and there; it appeases the soul, it's better than Prozac and we really should listen to a bit before leaving for the other world. Who knows what awaits us there? There's no question about it: a nice chant adds a certain solemnity to any event. One other advantage – and no trifling one – of playing surahs over and over is that no one dares ask you to turn the volume down. Your neighbours tend to think that if someone listens to the Koran all day long he must be friends with hard-core Islamists and therefore likely to give them some serious bother if they annoy him. In a nutshell: holy scripture as a deterrent weapon! Do you really want some different music? Some rai? Oum Kalsoum? I've got them in my collection, you only have to choose.”

With her hair covering her eyes, Meriem kept her hands on her temples in a strange pose like an obstinate child shouting
I'm not playing!

“…On the other hand, if you promise me you'll stay calm, I'll turn it off. OK?”

Silence fell on them like a cold shower. Aziz felt an urge to rub his eyes, but didn't. The old man placed the knife and then Mathieu's gun on the coffee table within reach of the couple. A faint smile played on his lips when he saw them exchange astonished glances. Casually opening a chest of drawers, he took out a revolver that was smaller than the Frenchman's weapon.

“I'd never thought you'd get your hands on a pistol by yourselves. I intended to give you mine. This one's brand new; it's all shiny. I keep it polished, as you can see.”

He clicked his tongue against his palate.

“My plan is very simple. There is a gun in front of you. One of you will grab hold of it and shoot the other. The survivor will then kill me. Before he shoots, I promise to tell him where the girl is. He will then have a tiny but real chance of saving her.”

“Really, that can't be what you want!”

The mother had reached out with both hands towards the elderly gentleman in a prayer-like gesture.

“You were probably a loving father. You can't really want a child and her parents to die!”

The man took a step back, his eyes sparkling with anger when Meriem touched him.

“Don't come near me, you slut! How would you know if I was a loving father? I cut off three of your daughter's fingers – don't forget that before you try the weeping harlot act to soften me up.”

“But…” she attempted, “see some sense… What you're demanding… is horrible…”

“Sense? Another word and I'll kill you both before hanging your beloved tadpole.”

The kidnapper was spluttering with rage. He clenched his fists, took a deep breath and suddenly resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened. Only a swollen vein on his forehead showed how extremely tense he was.

“You have a choice between two options. One of them is radical: you all die – father, mother, daughter – and I survive. The second is, by comparison, more moderate: there are two deaths, for sure, one of you two and me. In this case, your daughter has some chance of survival, either with her father or with her mother. This option has two advantages. First of all, it puts your love for each other to the test; secondly, it's fairer because I, the cause of all your troubles, disappear forever.”

He ran his tongue over his bottom lip.

“There is a flaw in the second option, you'll say: trust. If you choose the second option, I categorically commit myself to tell you where your daughter is being held and maybe even how to overpower her guard. The bloke's a real moron.”

The old man sniggered.

“Just imagine – he uses his real phone number to talk to me!”

His expression changed to that of a second-hand car salesman vaunting the qualities of an old banger to a customer.

“Go for the moderate option, it's the best offer I can make you. Non-negotiable, sir and madam!”

A covetous grin twisted his lips.

“Yes, I know. I've seen too many weird films in my life, the kind where a mother is forced to choose between her two children. So, which of you will make up your mind first?”

Meriem's face had remained frozen in an intensely questioning expression. Aziz's face looked stupid.

“Do you think you've got divine power over us?” muttered Aziz, more in astonishment than anger.

“Yes,” exclaimed the old man in a sudden spurt of resentment, “I do have that power over you.”

“By what you're saying, you want to spare two out of the three members of my family?”

The kidnapper eyed Aziz distrustfully, obviously wondering whether he was addressing him in the crafty manner one uses with dangerous lunatics.

“I need an heir, my boy,” he finally whispered with a tired look.

“An heir?”

The man walked towards the black curtain and pulled it back in one movement. Surrounded by a black wooden frame was a photograph: a pretty young woman in a traditional, embroidered dress was holding hands with a little girl of three at the most. Both of them were smiling faintly at the lens. The black-and-white picture had been so magnified that the outlines of the faces had become blurred, as if they had been drawn with a silver charcoal pencil.

“My life stopped then. I loved them. I was the happiest…”

A spasm choked him.

“It's the only photo I have of them. I've had dozens of copies made because I'm so scared of losing it. I hadn't thought of taking photos of the rest of my family at the time. My father, my mother, my brother… You always think you've got time for those things.”

“Why are you talking about an heir?”

The man seemed surprised at the interruption.

“For years, I tried to make myself heard in Algeria. People couldn't have massacred an entire village without ever repenting. My compatriots had snatched independence for the country and there was no longer any need to spit on the victims of Melouza. My little girl, my wife – what had they done to deserve being cut up like cattle at the butcher's? People sniggered and told me to my face that it was a village of traitors that had sold out to France, that one could only piss on the memory of renegades like them. My daughter a traitor, a renegade, at her age?

Aziz sensed an immense, devastating fury spreading gradually through the old man. It had probably never left him since the massacre. Pity as bitter as bile blended in with the hatred that Aziz felt for this creature.

“Once I was kidnapped by military security. I spent a week being beaten in a cellar. According to them I was a disruptive element. Talking about Melouza and Béni Ilemane was regarded as siding with Algeria's enemies. Can you imagine? I just wanted some recognition that my daughter and my wife had been wrongly killed. I was even prepared to forget about my poor mother and my brother, and to admit that that my father, the village constable, might have been punished for his alleged links to the French military…”

He gave a muffled scream. “But my poor Sheherazade had nothing to do with the French army services or with some so-called general arsehole allied to some political leader prick! We are precocious in Algeria when it comes to treachery, but she was only three years old, my little girl.”

A nervous twitch ran through his body.

“My heir will be one of you. I'm going to die soon anyway. In three months or six months. Testicular cancer that's spread to anything it can get its teeth into!”

“Heir to what?”

“To my pain, of course! I need someone who will suffer as much as I have suffered and who will speak everywhere and forever about the cause of his misery: Melouza. Infinite pain is an effective prod to the memory!”

The little man pulled the curtain back into place. The slight genuflection he made did not escape the couple. He wiped his lips, then his brow, with a large handkerchief.

“We never feel someone else's pain; we only feel our own. For many years I contemplated the best way to perpetuate the memory of this atrocity. The Algerians didn't want to talk about it anymore. At best, they advised you to shut up, their argument being that there had been so many unjust deaths during and after the war that they weren't going to favour some people over others. The disease struck and I began to fear that I'd be six feet under before I found someone to take over from me… And then I found the answer… Or rather the answer found me!”

His face lit up with pride. All his limbs were trembling.

“For years and years I looked for Tahar, the only man I was sure had taken part in the massacre. That son of a bitch didn't half move around a lot. The first time, I wasn't brave enough. It was in the centre of Constantine. He was walking calmly along the pavement, completely unsuspecting. I was driving a car – I wanted to run him over. At the last moment I couldn't do it. I was scared I'd get arrested; there were witnesses, I'd have been tried and maybe sentenced to death. A policeman asked me for my papers because I'd caused a traffic jam. I explained that I'd had some engine trouble and that I'd be more careful next time. I wasn't worthy of my daughter's misery, nor my wife's, that day. I wept with shame, then I consoled myself with the thought that Tahar's death, on its own, would not offset my family's. For half a century I have lived with this intolerable contradiction: dying of desire to take revenge, yet lacking the balls to go through with it!”

“Why only my father? He wasn't the guiltiest; he was just a simple soldier then. There were loads of officers above him who'd given the orders, people who were colonels and majors, who became ministers, deputies and who knows what else after independence? Why didn't you go after his superiors?”

The man scratched the top of his nose in bemusement.

“You're right. Human beings are stupid. Unfortunately for your father, his was the mug I'd seen. The others – the colonels, the political commissars – were abstract to me. You may consider that unjust, but isn't most of our business on earth about suffering and creating injustice?”

A sly glint flashed across his pupils.

“Do you know that you almost found yourself in your daughter's position? I told you I'd been looking for you all for years before I gave up. I'm sure that it was the inconsolable hatred that gave me this cancer of the bollocks. About two years ago a sort of miracle occurred. I had gone to a town in the Aurès for business purposes. You know the kind of place: just one tarmacked road, a seedy hotel, a single restaurant as dirty and sordid as the inhabitants. It was only the day before I left after a four-day stay that I realised that the street my hotel was in was named after your father. Your father! The half-rusted plaque proclaimed in no uncertain terms that Tahar, a hero of the Revolution, had been dead for over a decade having earned the eternal gratitude of the Algerian people! Chance, my girl, is the universe's only true comedy director, with a real flair for taking the piss out of us! I couldn't stand such a coincidence. I banged my head against the wall in rage – your father had managed to slip cosily into his grave before receiving his rightful punishment! I was already sapped by my illness. I had a heart attack; they took me to the hospital where the doctors thought I was a goner. I almost died without having avenged my family. I was hospitalised for a month, and it was in a hospital bed, full of tubes and on a drip, that I swore to myself that I would devote the remainder of my life to finding Tahar's family. They would pay for him, and that was that. Hatred helped me to recover, they repaired my heart somehow, I bribed whoever I had to for a visa and to have my cancer treated abroad. I had to hang on for a year or two more, enough time to finally claim my dues.”