Abduction (42 page)

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.

“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.

He stood up, defeated. The kidnapper had lied to him. His daughter was probably already dead. A dark shroud replaced the daylight. He opened his eyes wide, at the same time emptying his chest: in front of him, less than ten yards away, yawned the void.

The void, with its promise of permanent peace, stripped of remorse.

Still clutching the pistol, he took a step towards deliverance.

See, it isn't hard,
chuntered a corner of his brain.

The telephone rang. He didn't recognise the ringtone. He shuddered and looked around him before realising that the device was stowed in his pocket. He flicked it open. Displayed on the screen were two letters, initials perhaps.

“Is it you?” enquired a voice when he pushed the call button. “Do we do as planned? First, though, I'm going to have a bit of fun…”

The voice let out a coarse guffaw.

“It's halal because it's war booty…And I'll get rid of the body at the dump tonight. No one will be any the wiser. Hey, old man, have you lost your tongue or something? Hang on… It is you? Where are you?”

The line went dead. A few seconds later, the same ringtone went off again. Once more, Aziz took the call in a daze.

“What the hell's going on? I can hear your ringtone… You're out on the terrace, right? You're not the old man, eh? How did you make it up here? Hey, butt-face, I'm talking to you!”

The inside door of the laundry room had opened. From behind the wire mesh of the second door, an unshaven man in his early thirties armed with a sawn-off shotgun was shouting at him.

“What's that in your hand? Answer me or I'll blow your balls off!”

“Nothing – just a telephone.”

“Are you taking the mickey? I'm talking about the other hand. It's the old man's gun, isn't it?”

The accomplice pointed his gun at him.

“What old man?”

Just then, a voice called out from inside.

“Is that you, Dad? Dad, he wants to kill me!”

The fellow turned round and yelled, “Shut up, tart! I'd have been better off fucking you, with a rag in your gob!”

The thug went down in two movements, initially sprawling down the side of the wire mesh door with the first shot to the stomach, then onto his back after the second bullet, fired point-blank into the mouth that had insulted the girl. A spurt of blood and some pieces of flesh soiled the father's fist, but he didn't even notice.

“Help, Dad!”

He thought that the key would refuse to open the wire mesh door. It didn't. The oxygen that his lungs were forcing themselves to gulp down had congealed to a thick substance.

Stepping over the body, Aziz saw nothing of the first room, apart from a camp bed and a chair. The air smelled foul, musty with mould and excrement. The door to the second room was open.

His daughter let out a high-pitched whine. He caught her just as the stack of tins collapsed. He almost passed out; he didn't remember his child's body being so heavy. The teenager choked on her tears. As nothing else came to mind, Aziz whispered, “Daddy's here, Daddy's here…”

“He wanted to… then kill me… there's an old man as well… he's cruel… he's going to come… Kill them, Dad, kill them…”

He hugged her tightly to him with her feet a good foot off the ground, lifting her up to leave some slack in the rope encircling her neck. Shehera's arms were tied behind her back, but he spotted the bloody bandage wrapped around her left hand.

“Try not to move – I'll take the rope off first.”

His daughter carried on sobbing, haemorrhaging fat tears, and he had no tourniquet to stem them. Despite the surrounding stench, he smelt Shehera's heartrending child's scent through her sweater and he struggled to stop himself weeping too. “She hasn't got a lisp anymore, my princess! As soon as possible, I'll take her to the zoo to see Lucette. Will she remember Lucette, though?” he forced himself to think, horrified by the absurdity of the dykes his mind was erecting against the infinite sorrow that threatened to swamp him. Moving his foot forward to shift his daughter's weight onto his right arm, the father began, with his left hand, to loosen the knot in the rope. A new fit of panic gripped him at the sound of breathing. The revolver was lying on the floor and he was defenceless! It took him one more breath to realise that it was his own breathing.