The Centurions (60 page)

The drawing-room light shone out on to the staircase, illuminating the blue-patterned tiles. Christiane's voice called out:

“Is that you, Yves?”

“Yes, I've brought a friend of mine with me. I've told him about Amar and he'd like to meet him.”

Amar was sitting in an arm-chair thumbing through an art book which he held in his chubby hands. A glass of whisky stood on a table by his side.

He looked up, smiled at Marindelle and rose to his feet.

“Nice to see you again, Captain.”

All of a sudden he noticed that the two officers were in battle order; their caps, which they had not taken off, made their faces leaner than ever; each had a revolver and a knife hanging from his webbing belt.

“I'm glad to find you're still here, Si Millial,” said Marindelle. “For a moment I was afraid you might have changed your address.”

Amar glanced at the window . . . then at the door. The window had a grille on it; by the door stood the major with his hand on his holster.

He had been caught in the hide-out which he believed to be invulnerable. His lucky star, his
baraka
, had let him down again. But his nimble mind had been trained by long years of clandestine living to react properly to the most unexpected situations.

“It remains to be proved, Captain, that I'm Si Millial”—he glanced at his wrist-watch—“I must remind you that it's now half past twelve and the law forbids you to make a search at this time of night. However, out of regard for Christiane, I am willing to prove my identity.”

He sat down again, but Glatigny noticed he kept glancing at the telephone. He locked the drawing-room door from the inside and came and stood by the receiver.

“Yves, I find your manners intolerable, and your friend's too,” Christiane exclaimed. “I thought you were too intelligent to be jealous. Si Millial . . .”

She had no time to correct herself and went scarlet in the face.

Si Millial rose to his feet, stretched out his stubby little arms and in a calm, almost amused voice declared:

“I've made two mistakes, gentlemen. I've confided in a woman and I've slept in a bed. Let me telephone my lawyer, Maître Boumendjel, then you can bring in the policemen who are with you.”

He moved towards the telephone, but Glatigny intercepted him.

“Those aren't policemen at the door, sir, they're paratroopers; you're not being detained, you're a prisoner of war and you are not entitled to a lawyer.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Interrogate you,” said Marindelle, “until no more bombs go off in Algiers, until the strike has failed, until the last terrorist in your network has been wiped out.”

Christiane kept glancing alternately at Marindelle and Si Millial.

“Amar, these men are mad. You told me you belonged to a political party, but surely you, a man of peace, an enemy of violence, have never had anything to do with bombs?”

“My right hand, my dear Christiane, does not know what my left is doing. I make war as best I can. If I were in the position of the French, I wouldn't need bombs, but I've no other means at my disposal. What difference do you see in the pilot who drops cans of napalm on a
mechta
from the safety of his aircraft and a terrorist who places a bomb in the Coq Hardi? The terrorist requires far more courage. You're a woman and too tenderhearted; you are open-minded but without conviction, and besides . . . you're not one of us.

“Gentlemen, I'm at your disposal.”

Marindelle summoned one of the paratroopers who came and handcuffed Si Millial. He stretched out his hands and turned to Glatigny.

“I didn't know you handcuffed prisoners of war?”

“Yes, when they're not in uniform.”

Marindelle was the last to leave. He collected a suitcase with a few clothes and a briefcase stuffed with documents from Si Millial's room. He put the key down on the chest of drawers, then marched out without a word. Christiane made no attempt to hold him back. Yet she had been pregnant for the last week.

 • • • 

Glatigny and Marindelle brought their prisoner back to the dilapidated old palace which served as their regimental head-quarters. They made him sit down on a camp-bed in a corner of Glatigny's office.

The major then settled down in front of his small square table. He unscrewed the cap of his fountain-pen and took out a clean sheet of paper. He felt ill at ease and could not decide how to begin the interrogation.

“Your name?” he asked.

Si Millial appeared indifferent, almost amused, as he sat there with his manacled hands in front of him. This was not his first interrogation, nor the first time he had had handcuffs round his wrists. Like an earnest pupil, he replied:

“Amar Si Millial, but also Ben Larba, Abderhamane . . . I've used at least a dozen names in the last five years. But thousands of Algerians also know me by the name of ‘Big Brother.'”

Glatigny put down his pen. He suddenly remembered the Vietminh political commissar who had interrogated him for the first time in the tunnel which served as an air-raid shelter. He had had the same reactions as him: the fountain-pen, the sheet of paper . . .

“Are your handcuffs bothering you, Si Millial?”

“A little.”

Glatigny went over and unfastened the steel bracelets which he then tossed into a corner of the room.

“As you can imagine, Si Millial, we don't find this sort of work particularly pleasant. We would much rather be fighting you on equal terms up in the mountains; but you've forced us to wage this sort of war.”

“I agree, Major, your conception of military honour must be a bit of a disadvantage in this sort of . . . work, as you call it. Why don't you hand me over to the police?”

Once again Glatigny was reminded of the Vietminh, who had also been sarcastic about military honour, as displayed by colonial officers.

“Stick to the rules of the game, Major. Send for my lawyer, and the police inspector of this area and his constables, to draw up a warrant for my arrest, for we're not in a state of emergency. Then your conscience will be at rest and you will have observed your code of military honour.”

“No,” Marindelle burst out. “Our
bourgeois
conception of honour, we left behind us in Indo-China in Camp One. We're now out to win, and we're in much too much of a hurry to saddle ourselves with such ridiculous conventions. Our diffidence, our indecision, our pangs of conscience are the best weapons you could use against us; but they won't work any longer.”

A long silence ensued; the lamps began to dim, faded away to a few red filaments, and then went out completely. Marindelle spoke up again in a more confident tone:

“Si Millial, we want to know who's responsible for the general strike. We've got to have his name.”

“My honour as a soldier prevents me from replying. In our army I've got the rank of colonel.”

A rectangle of dark blue sky appeared through a shattered pane in the window. A Jeep drove off outside. The signallers repairing the power plant could be heard cursing the “useless bloody contraption.”

The rasping voice of Boisfeuras came to their ears:

“Well, have you got it going? Bring in some lamps.”

The harsh light of the hurricane lamp that Boisfeuras was carrying drew closer, casting flickering shadows on the walls; presently, enclosed in this circle of light, they settled by the side of the bed, so close together that they were almost touching.

“Well, Marindelle,” Boisfeuras observed, “I see you found the bird in his nest. This is Si Millial, isn't it? Why haven't you tied him up? With all these light failures, he could make a break for it. Have you searched him? What about his luggage?”

Marindelle showed him the briefcase and the suitcase on the table.

“Get up, Si Millial,” said Boisfeuras. “Come on, on your feet! Take off your jacket, your tie and belt and shoes. Bucelier, take all this stuff away and put it in my office. Don't forget the briefcase or the suitcase.”

Si Millial now looked ridiculous, as he stood there in the shaft of light holding his trousers up with both hands.

“The address of the letter-box? Come on, be quick about it!”

“I'm a colonel, I'm entitled to my rights.”

“Out in Malaya, Si Millial, I once picked up a Japanese and stripped him down to his under-pants. He also told me he was a general. I had it inscribed on his tomb: ‘General Tokoto Mahuri, War Criminal.'

“Well, are you going to come clean?”

Si Millial was disconcerted by this forthright, brutal treatment; until then he had held all the cards; but Boisfeuras brought him back to the harsh reality of his position: that of a terrorist without any safeguard.

“Are you going to come clean or not?”

He tried to parry the blow by bluffing:

“Everyone knows I've been arrested by now. My letter-box is blown.”

“No one knows yet.”

“What about the woman?” Boisfeuras suddenly asked, turning to Marindelle. “Did you bring her with you?”

“She won't talk,” said Marindelle.

“I'll take your word for it; after all, you know her better than I do. We've got to act quickly, we've only twenty-four hours left. Your letter-box, Si Millial?”

Glatigny tried to intervene. He was surprised and disturbed by this new side to his character that Boisfeuras was revealing.

“Why not go through his papers and belongings? Perhaps you'll find the address you need among them.”

“Leave this to me; I know how to deal with this sort of business. And Si Millial is by no means a beginner; before starting up on his own he had already worked for several intelligence services, it didn't matter which, provided they were operating against us.”

He sneered:

“But I suppose you're not too keen on what we've now got to do, Glatigny. Afraid of getting your hands dirty, perhaps? This man in our clutches is an unexpected stroke of luck. Perhaps he'll be able to prevent our having to fight in the streets. But it's no good putting him behind glass, in a shop-window. This is Si Millial, the bomb man. Come on, Marindelle!”

The power plant suddenly started up again and the lights came back. They dragged Si Millial off in his stockinged feet, still holding up his trousers with his hands.

In the “schoolroom” stood Min.

“The address of the letter-box?” Boisfeuras asked once again.

Si Millial slowly shook his head and Min took a step towards him.

Marindelle had opened the window and was taking deep breaths of the cool night air. He knew it had to come to this, that this was the ghastly law of the new type of war. But he had to get accustomed to it, to harden himself and shed all those deeply ingrained, out-of-date notions which make for the greatness of Western man but at the same time prevent him from protecting himself.

“
22
, Rue de la Bombe,” Boisfeuras eventually informed him. “Marindelle, take a couple of Jeeps and drive like hell. We've only an hour left before the curfew ends.”

The patio began to overflow with prisoners. Some were in pyjamas under their overcoats and, still half asleep, kept rubbing their eyes. Others with a searchlight trained on them, were lined up against a wall with their hands in the air, expecting to be shot at any moment.

Raspéguy, with a pipe in his mouth, stood leaning over the gallery on the first floor, wondering what he was going to do with this lamentable mob. He longed to escape with his men into the mountains, leave this job to others who were qualified to do it, inhale the damp morning air into his lungs and experience once more the sadness and intense delight of days of victory. Today was only a day of arrests.

“We've got Si Millial, sir,” said Marindelle, as he went past him.

“Who the hell's that?”

“A rebel colonel, maybe the chief one.”

“Good God, where is he?”

“In Boisfeuras's office.”

Raspéguy found Si Millial tied to a bench. Min stood by the side of Boisfeuras's desk, connecting the field telephone up again.

The colonel sat down on the bench next to the prisoner and gave him a light-hearted slap on the thigh.

“So you're Colonel Si Millial, are you?”

Si Millial was beginning to lose heart; he felt as though he was being drawn and quartered so as to reveal his innermost secrets. A breach had been made in his courage and he feared it was bound to grow wider.

He wanted to reply, however, and reassert himself under that label of colonel which was the only thing that was likely to impress these army men. He replied with a certain self-satisfaction.

“Yes, I'm a colonel, because with us there are no generals!”

“A good thing too,” Raspéguy replied. “If only we could do without them! What's your command?”

“Thousands of men, hundreds of thousands, an entire nation which is up in arms against the oppressor.”

“I see, just as I'm at the head of the entire French Army. But try and be a little more specific.”

“I'm the military leader of the Committee of Co-ordination and Execution, our government in other words.”

Raspéguy gave a whistle of admiration. He turned to Boisfeuras, who was making notes in red pencil on Si Millial's papers, and asked:

“What did you get out of him?”

“He's a hard nut; he wouldn't give away a thing. Only an address:
22
Rue de la Bombe. I've sent Marindelle over there.”

Boisfeuras suddenly leapt to his feet in excitement and tapped the papers:

“There's the whole plan of the strike in here, Si Millial's contacts in France, a letter from the Afro-Asiatic Group written on paper with a U.N. heading . . . We caught him just in time!”

Raspéguy looked at Si Millial with renewed interest.

“Well, I must say, you've got some important connexions!”