Abduction (32 page)

“A drive? In the middle of the night? It's after three in the morning! How stupid is that? And why isn't he answering his phone?”

While trying to calm her mother down, Meriem cast an inquisitorial glance at me. Her exhausted face creased with worry; she obviously knew that her husband was lying to her.

“Why didn't you let us know beforehand? Things are bad enough without whims like this. Have you had any news about Shehera? Has he rung?”

She tapped on her mother's arm as if she were calming a small child, studying me unkindly all the while. I felt myself turn pale as I explained that neither Mathieu nor I had thought it worth waking them.

“Mathieu would never have gone off without telling me!” Latifa protested. “Especially as late as this! What are you hiding from us, Aziz?”

Then, her voice going up in pitch: “Something's happened to him, hasn't it? Did he take his heart tablets at least?”

“I…”

My telephone rang. We glanced at each other, suddenly silent, once again reduced to our condition of boundlessly terrified beings.

“Answer it,” Meriem whispered in a voice I didn't recognise.

She sucked her lips against her teeth. I felt like begging her not to clench them so hard, for I could see her teeth's imprint on the flesh of her lips. As I took the accursed device out of my pocket, I mused that the devil no longer had to have recourse to the services of messenger demons, as he did in ancient legends. A simple, bottom-of-the-range mobile was more efficient.

“It's me – Mathieu.”

“Who? I thought…”

“It's really me (my interlocutor was talking in a low voice). Be quiet and listen: nothing has changed for the time being. But we need some proof for… For you too, by the way. I mean: you need an alibi. Pass me Latifa.”

I obeyed automatically; my brain span in search of a rational explanation and then just crashed like an ordinary computer overwhelmed by a programme. My mother-in-law's physical transformation was miraculous. Behind the withering of old age, I caught a glimpse of the pretty young girl she must have been whenever a smile lit up her face.

“Is that you, Mathieu? I was so scared…”

She gave a little nervous laugh.

“You love me? I know you love me… But why are you telling me at three in the morning? Come on, come home quick. You know it's dangerous for a Frenchman to be out and about in Algiers in the middle of the night…”

A furrow between her eyes like an exclamation mark joined the smile that still had not left her lips.

“You're so odd, Mathieu… You don't feel well? Don't hang about on your way home, OK? We need you here… No, no news about the little one… Your heart isn't hurting you? OK, I won't worry… But you've never told me you loved me over the phone before… All right, all right, don't get impatient, I'll pass you Aziz… But why are you saying you love me again?”

The exclamation mark on her brow was now a gash. I sensed that my mother-in-law was trying hard to ignore the alarm signals sent by her intuition. Ashen-faced, her smile transformed into a snarl, she turned to her daughter to beg her for support. But her daughter was staring obstinately at me. The old woman stood there with her arms hanging by her sides, shrivelling up before my eyes with the shock of her discovery: it was no longer
one
but
two
fears that had sunk their claws into her, and neither her heart nor her head knew which to combat first.

“Is that you, Aziz?”

“Yes.”

“There's no one listening?”

I raised my bleary eyes to the two women.

“No.”

“The kidnapper rang me just after you left… To make up for the change of plan, he demanded that… it all takes place in front of him… Well, on the estate… at about six or seven in the morning, so…”

“Yes?”

“When there are people around… Otherwise he'll dump Shehera's body outside your block of flats.”

Caught in Meriem's suspicious gaze, I found nothing to say apart from a fake-sounding
Oh?
accompanied by a feeling like I was vomiting inside.

“Our chap intends to have some fun. He says I fully deserve my fate; I shouldn't have saved people who didn't deserve to be… See, he admits it… without admitting it. He swore that he's hiding so close by that he could count the hairs on our arses if it took his fancy.”

He broke off, overwhelmed by dejection rendered all the more terrible by the obscenity of these last words.

“He'll tell me the objective in the next hour or two. In the meantime I've got to stay in my car… There's definitely a method to this bastard's thinking – if you can call it thinking!”

“And what is it, erm… do you think?”

“The objective? I don't know. He repeated several times that everyone has to pay.”

My father-in-law let out a strange chuckle.

“I'll soon find out what lies beyond the rainbow.”

“What?”

He adopted a more sententious tone of voice.

“
It's a nice day to die…”

The mobile resonated with the beginnings of a timid laugh that was so unexpectedly light-hearted that I felt a sob throbbing inside my chest.

A question almost slipped out of my mouth:
What's up with you, you old cretin? Been drinking?
His breathing died away, rattled by another couple of bursts of that disconcerting laughter.

“Even so, Aziz, I'm still shuddering with fright at the thought of…”

He ended with a quick side-step: “…of cleansing my soul after all the crimes I've committed, huh, isn't that what I'm supposed to say?”

I heard a slow exhalation, a kind of
Pffeuh!
followed by a barely audible “My God, I'm talking such bollocks!” Then nothing more, apart from the sound of my own blood pounding in my temples.

I choked back a swelling of pity.
Of course you're scared witless, Mathieu, you're not some heroic Indian chief. You're just a fallen Frenchman – and a failed Algerian to boot. And to cap it all, you ran into me, a man with all the balls of a rabbit!

I kept the phone pressed to my ear for a couple of needless seconds, then put it away with a lingering look out of the gaping window – which supposedly led to my daughter's prison – and then at Meriem. The woman who had long ago taken possession of my soul looked as if she wanted to annihilate me with a single question:
Had I really done
everything
a father is duty bound to do to save the flesh of his flesh?

I had failed from start to finish. I had killed a man for nothing, Mathieu had pipped me at the post by electing to die in my stead, and my daughter was still a lunatic's plaything.

It was a perfect trap: if we alerted the police, the girl was lost; if we didn't, the result would be the same. With one small difference: in the first scenario, the killer
alone
decided on her passing; in the second, it was
we
who decided on the timing of Shehera's execution.

When I was younger, I had been unlucky enough to witness a man commit suicide by throwing himself off the suspension bridge in Constantine. The man had bumped into me by accident just before he climbed up the bridge and had been polite enough to turn round and apologise. It took several seconds for him to hit the bottom of the canyon. Throughout his entire fall, he let out a bloodcurdling scream. For several nights afterwards I kept waking up with a start, imagining the terror of the man as he saw the ground approaching at breakneck speed. For him, that fear had come to a swift end. I had no such luck. Ever since Shehera's kidnapping, I felt myself falling at an ever more breathtaking velocity down the sides of a canyon infinitely deeper than the one in Constantine.

I suddenly realised that the bulge of the pistol in my pocket was far too visible. I evaded Meriem's accusing gaze. Once again I wondered whether I had been wrong to lie to her. The mere thought of the words I might use to tell the truth caused my tongue to sag down against the bottom of my mouth.

When he lowers his eyes, Meriem thinks with bitter surprise that she would have laid down her life for this man who ‘stole her soul', as the old cassette they played over and over again in Aziz's car in the early days of their relationship proclaimed so prettily. The song swore that “
I won't stop loving you until the Good Lord starts to grow old
.” The tune had been playing by chance on the radio the first time they made love in the car. Over the years the little ditty had become a sort of anthem celebrating this event.

How long should you love? the wife ponders, stirring the broth of grief that is poisoning her heart and mind.
Before
, this gently blasphemous chorus had had a joyous meaning without any ambiguity.

God had all at once grown old and that had made our daughter's death possible. Shall I continue to cherish this dillydallying husband, who buzzes around, goes out and comes back in like a fly, but doesn't bring our little girl home in his arms?

The broken woman supporting another grief-stricken woman guesses – knows – that she is being unfair. She senses that the love she still feels for this man is beginning to be contaminated by something resembling, yes, contempt; a
real
father has a duty to protect his family, whereas this one has got bogged down in lamentations with his doddering old father-in-law…

You imbecile
, a voice rebuffs her,
it isn't your husband's fault if a maniac has kidnapped your daughter. For God's sake, don't act like some silly little Arab goose who's always blaming someone for her misfortunes!

Deep down, Meriem agrees, but at the mention of her daughter's disappearance and the glacial desert she will have to face for the rest of her life, she clings to this resentment for her companion in life.

Dad, why did you have to die so young?
she thinks in a rage. She observes her mother with suppressed anger. A strange jealousy grips her heart: her mother is no longer grieving only for her kidnapped granddaughter, but also for her… her… Meriem can't bring herself to speak the usurper's name in her mind.

And yet she used to like him, this ‘uncle' who spent all his evenings at their house when her father was still alive! Spoiling her silly, bringing her countless toys at first, then books, telling her interminable and wonderful stories about his native Brittany.

She had never understood the origins of the friendship that bound her father so strongly to this Frenchman who'd appeared from nowhere and of whom she knew only that he had ‘helped the Revolution' and that he wouldn't allow himself, despite the nostalgia gnawing away at him, to go back to France. He had always managed to find work not far from them. That wasn't very hard with his job as a post office counter clerk. There were post offices in even the remotest parts of the country! Every time Tahar was posted somewhere, Mathieu managed to follow him, sometimes needing a year or two before he obtained a transfer. Not really understanding the reasons for these constant changes, his superiors at the post office grudgingly satisfied what they viewed as a
gaouri
's whims and finally buckled in the face of their strange compatriot's obstinacy.

Mathieu had Algerian identity papers, but he didn't seem to hold his adoptive country in great esteem. Meriem had often caught him grumbling about these Arab layabouts who spent their time complaining about the entire world while they shamelessly frittered away the fabulous riches that nature had bestowed on them. Meriem was shocked to hear these criticisms verging on racism coming from the mouth of a European, but she was forced to acknowledge that all he was doing was repeating, sometimes word for word, the diatribes of her own widely admired father.

They were living at the time in a small town in the east of the country, where her father exercised the post of headmaster. When she mentioned the rumours about his heroism, the former
mujahid
curled his lips in disgust: “What do those meatheads know about courage and the evil of war? The only thing they're interested in is whether I'll agree to be their candidate for mayor to cover up for their dodgy real estate schemes and their swindling with
my heroism
!” He had always refused to tell her about the deeds that had earned him his reputation as a rebel, once objecting scathingly when she pressed him: “Everyone always lies when they talk about the war. So don't ever force me to lie to you!”

Dad, you would have known how to bring back our little girl… Whereas this useless twit doesn't even know how to look after the monkeys entrusted to him!

She takes her mother by the arm and pulls her into Shehera's bedroom.

“Have a rest, Mum. Mathieu will be home soon.”

“You think so? I know him like the back of my hand, my Mathieu. His voice was odd, as if he were afraid…”

After tucking her mother in like a child, Meriem goes back into the living room. All she can see of Aziz is an exhausted profile so ravaged by despair that it makes her heart melt with both grief and anger. She puts both hands on her man's shoulders, finding nothing to say to him. He grasps them. He too remains silent. He is afraid of starting to speak, afraid that he won't be able to stop.

The ringtone kills off the sigh rising in Meriem's lungs. It is her mobile that is tinkling with those ghastly cheerful musical chimes her daughter installed for her because she thought the old ringtone was too bland.

“So then, has he confessed everything to you, your nice little husband?”

She feels a shooting pain. She raises her hand to her breast, but manages to stammer: “What was he meant to confess?”

“Oh, always keeping secrets! That's no good… You should tell the woman of your life everything! Tut, tut, that's not the behaviour of a faithful husband…”

“Which secrets do you mean?”

The man doesn't answer right away. Meriem feels a new pang biting into a different corner of her heart. What if the kidnapper hangs up? Without giving any news of her daughter? Plunging them once more into the horror of ignorance?