The Mysteries of Algiers

Title

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

About the Author

Copyright

Necessary and inexcusable, that is how murder appeared to them. Mediocre minds, confronted by this terrible problem, can take refuge by ignoring one or other of the terms of the dilemma. They are content, in the name of formal principles, to find all direct violence inexcusable and then to sanction that diffuse form of violence which takes place on the scale of world history …

Mercier was pretending to read Camus. He found the pretence very hard and, every now and again, it was forgotten and he found himself engaged with the actual text. An essay could be written about pretending to read serious books. Perhaps Camus should write it? Perhaps Mercier should write to Camus about it?

A man who thinks that he is going to Fort Tiberias will find it difficult to concentrate on such stuff. Mercier had arrived off the plane from Paris on Friday at midday. He had stood blinking on the overheating tarmac and marvelled at the sharpness of everything – the air-control tower hacked out in hard-edged white against the brilliant blue sky, the stunning yellow hills in the distance and the fierce profiles of the Arab porters. Then a young woman had emerged from the shadows of baggage control and hustled him through it. He had hardly had time to assure himself that she was his appointed contact from the Section de la Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-éspionnage before she had hurried him into the car and set off, driving at top speed towards the city. Since she was both pretty and intelligent-looking, Mercier had tried to engage her in conversation. It did not go well.

‘Since Indochina I have mostly worked on diplomatic security. This sort of work is all going to be strange to me and this will be my first assignment in Algeria.’

‘I know, but you were specifically asked for.’

Since she seemed disposed to say nothing more, he tried again.

‘I have often thought that an educated man’s first impressions of a place are likely to be filtered and shaped by what he has read. For instance, as I look through the window now I am not sure whether I am looking at the real road into Algiers, or Gide’s road to Algiers.’

‘That sucker of African cocks!’

She laughed. It really ought to have been an ugly laugh, but Mercier had to admit that it was not. She gave Mercier a swift glance.

‘I should not take Gide as a guide to our country. Let me warn you, if you are that way inclined, it is better to go to Tangiers. Here, it has been known for the
FLN
to use the Arab boys as decoys, and you are liable to end up smiling the Kabyle smile. Besides, I bet you don’t find that in Gide …’

The car had had to move out into the middle of the road to avoid a column of Arabs with their hands on their heads who were being shepherded by steel-helmeted troops on to an army lorry.

‘But if you have never read Gide –’

‘Let me concentrate on my driving.’

Mercier was reduced to studying the car’s documentation, and from this at least he learned that his driver’s name was Chantal de Serkissian. She put him off at the
SDECE
building in the rue de Sarras. She was about to drive off, but he clung to the car door.

‘Mademoiselle, I assure you, I am not “that way inclined”. Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night? Perhaps, since you know the town, you could suggest the place?’

She refused but countered with an invitation to a beach party the following day. Then he went in to see his briefing officer.

Castiglione was forty-six kilometres outside Algiers and Mercier had had to hire a car to get himself there. The beach was covered with lean brown bodies like a fauvist design for a ballet and he had found her only with difficulty. There was no opportunity for serious conversation. He had been roped into a game of football with the young men, while the girls watched and sang songs, disposed upon the beach like so many sirens. A lifeguard and two paras with sub-machineguns watched over it all. Languid girls and muscle-flexing young men, they were all posing and telling lies with their bodies. Mercier, pale and grey, felt uncomfortable, open to their examination. In the evening, they wandered about as a gang on the boulevard. There wasn’t much to see, just the Monument aux Morts and the aquarium. Outside the aquarium there was a poster advertising the forthcoming screening of Cocteau’s
Orphée
at the Bardo cinema in Algiers.

‘I must see that film again. Maria Casarès is a friend of mine. I have only met Cocteau once but –’

Chantal leant wearily against the wall of the aquarium.

‘Another bumboy. Cocteau’s attempt to raise trick photography to an art form has been applauded by all those who … who … Oh damn! I have forgotten how the rest goes.’

Chantal was reciting with her eyes shut.

‘That is a quotation?’ Mercier had asked.

‘Not one of your Paris intellectuals. Captain Roussel said it, but I can’t remember the rest of what he said.’

‘This is Captain Roussel of the Fifth Compagnie Portée de la Légion?’

‘Yes, him.’

‘But I know him. He is one of the few people out here that I was hoping to get in touch with.’

Philippe and Mercier had worked on the survey of the Plain of Jars, been involved in counter-insurgency operations in the Bay of Tonkin area and had fought together at Dien Bien Phu, actually shoulder to shoulder. But they had parted company after Indochina when Mercier had been seconded out to the
SDECE
in Paris.

Chantal opened her eyes. She was all animation and surprise.

‘What a chance! We know Captain Roussel too! Daddy is giving a big dinner party tomorrow – a formal dress affair. Philippe will be there. Why don’t you come too? I love hearing veterans going over their wars.’

Yet it seemed to Mercier that there was something studied in her animation, and something plotted and predatory, too, in the way in which she now took his arm.

It is one of the problems of working in intelligence that one’s work gives one little to talk about at dinner parties. The dinner had been disappointing from Mercier’s point of view. Philippe had embraced him on arrival, but was stiffer and more reserved than Mercier remembered. They didn’t refight the Indochina campaign that evening, for there had been another guest at table, a sharp young Algiers lawyer, at least ten years their junior, Raoul somebody. Raoul and Philippe had locked horns over the conduct of the present war – or containment operation as Philippe pompously called it. In the course of the evening, Philippe had given ground and was driven to rely on claims that he was only a simple soldier who obeyed orders. But if Raoul ran rings round Philippe, it still seemed to Mercier that Raoul was the prisoner of his own cleverness.

Mercier enjoyed intellectual debate, but this just seemed like two men playing chicken and trying to force each other to the outside edge of the pavement. Come to that why didn’t the soldier and the right-wing lawyer just clear a space on the table and arm wrestle? In Indochina the soldiers used to make it more exciting by holding upturned knives behind the clenched hands, so that the loser’s hand would slowly but surely be impaled. Surely Chantal was bright enough to have become a little bored with the garrison population of Algiers and what passed for its intelligentsia?

Chantal went over to sit beside her father and demurely rested her head on his shoulder while he praised his daughter’s shooting to the other guests. But after he had retired early to bed, she produced an exotically carved cigarette holder. The dress she was wearing – an extraordinary Schiaparelli creation, low cut and of pink silk – and the way she brandished her cigarettes, made Mercier think of an adventuress. He told her this and she looked pleased. The row between Philippe and Raoul thundered on. Mercier mocked their swagger and their uncompromisingness. He had told Chantal that beneath the formalities of political debate, what they were actually engaged in was a competitive demonstration of brute male strength – a not very subtle way of impressing women, using their inflexible logic as a method of social oppression. He had gone on to quote something from de Beauvoir’s
La Deuxième Sexe
at her.

Chantal had looked impatient and tossed her head.

‘Who on earth is oppressing me? But all this political talk is boring me.’ She clapped her hands and an attendant came running up. ‘Boy! I am going for a swim. Get me my swimming things and have Hamid put the pool lights on.’

Chantal strode off towards the changing cabins, and a little later some of the younger guests followed her into the pool. She took pity on him only as he was leaving.

‘I’m sorry if I seemed rude, but it was so hot and I wanted to swim. I’m sorry about this evening, but, as you will swiftly discover, things are not what they seem. I don’t know if Philippe has told you, but the office will tell you tomorrow. He’s fixed it for you to do a short assignment in Algiers and then for you to come and join him at Fort Tiberias. I have work down there too. Perhaps down there, next week, we can talk about books and things …’ she tailed off vaguely.

So now he was on Philippe’s little assignment, pretending to read Camus, actually shadowing al-Hadi. There were plenty of distractions in the café – a pair of youths noisily exulting over their triumphs at the pinball machine, a repulsive small boy crawling under the tables pretending to be a dog, and a very pretty girl sitting directly opposite him. And there was the clack of dominoes, and the radio blaring out. There had just been a five-minute blast of martial music. Doubtless they were being prepared for another important announcement from Metropolitan France, from General ‘Manifest Destiny’ himself. The view from the windows was of the harbour and of the corniche road towards the casino. Thick brown clouds had been rolling in over the sea since midday and it was very sultry. Mercier’s shirt clung to him like a wet facecloth and he felt the pressure in his head spreading to the muscles at the back of his neck. Every few minutes or so he found himself infuriated with all these distractions and equally frequently he had to pull himself up and remind himself that he was not supposed to be reading the book anyway. He wished that he had brought a less interesting book along with him. Between Camus’s arguments and the diversions of the café, he was constantly distracted from his real business.

Al-Hadi sat at the bar. A brown-paper parcel was parked at the foot of the stool. Al-Hadi had been in the café for almost half an hour now, but as far as Mercier could see, he had made no contact with anyone. Unless perhaps it was the barman who supplied him with Pernod. He had not expected that al-Hadi would turn out to be a drunk. Even if he proved after all not to be a runner for the
FLN
, it was still the case that al-Hadi was not a city Arab, but a Sahrawi and few of the Sahrawis had a developed taste for alcohol.

But perhaps al-Hadi was only pretending to get drunk, just as Mercier was pretending to read Camus and the small boy was pretending to be a dog? And perhaps also the noisy bluster of the two youths at the pinball was designed to conceal their homosexuality? And the barman a police informer? And the pretty girl a transvestite prostitute? For sure, this bar and every bar and every place on earth was full of people pretending to be what they were not. Drunks pretending to be sober, introverts pretending to be extroverts,
petits bourgeois
pretending to be upper class, unhappily married women pretending to be happily married. Algiers, specifically, was a city of frightened people pretending not to be frightened. Disguises and pretence, then, were hardly what distinguished agents from other people. What was extraordinary about Mercier’s trade was that he was supposed to tell lies in order to discover the truth. Why should we all spend our lives telling lies? Mercier was very depressed.