Abduction (7 page)

“As for you, you ass, don't you have an ounce of modesty, showing yourself in public in your pyjamas with a woman within the confines of God's house? Get out of here before I call the faithful!”

“Come on,” I said simply, “let's go home.”

We walked away in silence, infinitely sad, leaving the cleric to his imprecations. We were only a few yards from our building when Meriem murmured, “Your feet are covered in blood.”

Her voice was so gentle, so like how it
used
to be, that a breath of gratitude for the council workers' negligence filled my lungs.

“It's nothing… just the stones from the building work.”

We started with the police. Meriem wanted to come to the police station with me, but I insisted she wait for me in the car. A duty policeman blocked my path. I announced that I wanted to withdraw a complaint. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth and his cap pushed back, the man joked, “Good idea! At last someone sensible, who doesn't come and heap us with every misfortune that has afflicted him since birth!”

I grimaced.

“One can get carried away sometimes. Then, after a good night's sleep…”

Inside, the man at the desk asked me to wait, muttering that there was no panic and that he had an urgent report to fill in for his boss. I waited a good twenty minutes for the officer to return. People came in and sat down tamely next to me on the bench. A man and his son were arguing fiercely about the burglary they had suffered the night before. The father accused the son of not having checked the padlocks on the grocer's shop; the son defended himself by claiming that it was the father who had done the checks. The two individuals looked strikingly like each other: the same thick, short-sighted glasses, paunchy and bald apart from a tuft around the edge. I mused bitterly: “How about your respective harpies? Are their arses as big as yours?” Their argument was welcome: I focused on the two of them chatting away to try and calm my shaking. Sensing my gaze on him, the father greeted me, then commented, with friendly concern, “You ought to wrap up warm. Your teeth are chattering.”

“I don't know where my mind was this morning.”

“Nothing serious, I hope?”

I saw in his eyes that he thought that he was due the story of my trials since he had entertained me with his own. The officer's return created a diversion. I stood up, dizzy to the point of collapse. I wiped my moist hands on my jacket, silently cursing myself: “Hey, yellow-belly, now's not the time to have a heart attack!”The policeman was putting on the arrogant airs of someone who's just been torn off a strip by a superior and is bent on taking it out on everyone under him.

“Officer…”

He gave a groan and continued to pay no attention to me. I had prepared a little speech with Meriem that we felt was more or less convincing. I had polished it while I was waiting. And then just as my hand gripped the desk, I suddenly felt like throwing myself at the guy's feet, yelling that a murderer and rapist had abducted my daughter and calling on every last cop in the world to help me bring my child back safe and sound. Otherwise my wife would die of sorrow and, without my little girl and my wife, I was fit for the asylum…

A telephone rang. It took me a couple of seconds to realise that it was my own. I got it out of my pocket under the policeman's irritated gaze. The screen read ‘Caller unknown'. I knew straightaway that it was
him
.

“Where are you? Have you finished at the police station?”

The voice was more guttural than the day before. I shuddered with horror.

“I…”

A few scattered neurones did actually send the order to my tongue to articulate the words “
I'm still at the police station…”
But nothing happened. I stood there dumb, caught between two opposing urges to obey and to disobey the man who was planning to wreck my life. The officer leaned forward to pick up a few snatches of our conversation.

“Listen to me,” the stranger continued, “I'm going to kill your daughter right now, but not before I've fucked her. You hear me? And I'll give everyone here a turn… It won't be a vagina she's got – it'll be a pipeline! And I won't mention her arsehole. So stop trying to be clever and answer me now!”

My tongue forgot all rebellion, as if it had been whipped. Gathering the little will I had left to offer the irked policeman a contrite smile, I stammered, “Everything's fine, don't worry… Really… But I can't talk to you right now. I'm with them… Call me back in ten minutes… But please don't do anything…”

I hung up. I must have been white as a sheet. I prayed that my hands wouldn't shake.

“That was… that was my mother. You know what mothers are like…”

I gave a little cough to regain my composure. The monster's words were still ringing in my head.

“So… I want to cancel a complaint (
I'm going to kill her right now
)… My wife was here yesterday (
fucked… You hear me?
) to report that my daughter hadn't come home. In fact, my daughter (
I'll give everyone here a turn)
was at her aunt's, but she hadn't told us…”

“You think it's our job to sort out problems with your children's upbringing?”

The officer looked me up and down with the stony and slightly threatening haughtiness Algerian policeman adopt when they intend to remind you that you are in enemy territory in a police station and, as such, are potentially guilty of any crime they might care to accuse you of. The subliminal message emitted by this den, painted ‘administrative green', is extremely clear: you who enter here, do not imagine that we are here to serve you; should you persist in this delusion, remember that only a dozen steps separate the grotty normality of our offices from the sordid jails in the cellar below!

As a teenager in Constantine, I had been introduced to this cast-iron truth after making a salacious jibe about a traffic policeman. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed one of his colleagues on duty a few yards away. The two cops had handcuffed me and led me down into the basement, where the offended man had pulled out an erect penis and threatened to sodomize me unless I made up by giving him a blowjob. I think he would have raped me if my screams hadn't put the wind up his colleague. The policeman then tucked his dick away and proceeded to beat me with his truncheon. That evening my father was summoned and informed by the officer on watch that I was liable to imprisonment for having insulted a policeman in the discharge of his duties. However, he added, if my father promised to punish me severely for my misdemeanours, the police would forget all about it. My poor old man thanked them profusely and gave me a second volley of blows at home. Naturally, I didn't dare tell him about the rape I had almost suffered. Furthermore, having first choked on his indignation, he might actually have given me my third thrashing of the day and called me a queer incapable of defending his honour…

A servile chuckle escaped me at this memory.

“My wife panics easily. You know, with everything that's going on. It's in a woman's nature to be more anxious than a rabbit. As for my daughter, don't you worry, I… (I brandished an imaginary stick) as she deserved. I hope we didn't bother you too much with these stupid matters.”

The man made a strangled sound that could just as well have been a life-saving
yes
or a fatal
no
. I felt a pain in my belly:
This twat doesn't believe you… Try something else, quick! Your daughter… your daughter!

I mustered all my remaining strength to assume the attitude of a citizen worried about the detrimental consequences for the police of a blunder he has made.

“It would really cap it off if you've already started investigations just because of some silly woman! Might we have to pay a fine?”

My heart was beating so fast that my thoughts suddenly became confused. To regain my footing, I sucked in the sickly, contaminated air of the police station hard. I tried another smile but just stopped myself in time, as this last masquerade threatened to turn into a fiasco.

The cop was busy trying to extract a scrap of food that was stuck in his teeth with his tongue and didn't bother reacting to my tone of complicity. He was probably wondering which mental drawer to file me away in. I reckoned from the face he pulled that he'd opted for the category ‘standard bootlicker who blubs at the thought of losing some dosh'. Grabbing a register, he asked me for my name and telephone number before scribbling ‘Cancelled' opposite some writing I couldn't decipher. Then he went back to reading some of the documents lying around on his desk.

I ran back to the car. Meriem opened the door for me. She had been crying.

“What took you so long?”

Her hair was totally dishevelled. Grief and worry had made her ugly overnight. My throat tight, I had a kind of dark, hare-brained revelation of the boundless love I felt for this woman: “It doesn't matter whether you're beautiful or ugly, Meriem, it'll take a whole lot more than that for me to tire of your love-bites!”

Inside that sorrow-laden car, I wanted to confess this epiphany to her – that it was vital that together we form a wall of steel against the disaster that was threatening to engulf our family. But immediately the words had formed in my mind, they seemed ridiculous and with an aching heart, I stifled the urge.

She was twisting her handkerchief around her fingers.

“He… He rang me again. He said he'd kill her if… What are we going to do, Aziz?”

Meriem interpreted my silence as a reproach. She averted her eyes towards the windscreen.

“I've been trying to tell myself since this morning that I'm going to be no use to my daughter if I keep crying. I stop crying, I think I've summoned up enough courage, and then… this bastard calls and whispers into my ear that he'll cut Shehera's head off if he feels like it…”

I made no move to console her: I was too scared that my body might disintegrate if our two despairs should touch.

She jumped as if she'd just been bitten by a poisonous animal.

“Oh no… not again… the phone!
Your
phone!”

I read the inevitable ‘Caller unknown' message on the screen before raising it cautiously to my ear. With dark irony, I thought that I would have handled radioactive material the same way.

“Where are you?”

“In the car with my wife.”

“Did you convince the police?”

“Yes… I think so.”

“All right, let's move on to more serious matters. Get out of your car now. If you're driving, pull over.”

I did as he said, asking Meriem to wait for me inside the vehicle. The tension was exhausting me; for a second I felt like an athlete sentenced to run the hundred metres over and over again under pain of death. The memory of a cigarette tickled my tongue. With an intense feeling of nostalgia, I thought, “Ah, a drag of some nice pungent grey tobacco and I'd cope with this better…” It'd been ten years since I'd stubbed out my last fag butt. I promised myself that I would treat myself to a packet of unfiltered cigarettes before the morning was out. A second train of thoughts, just as out of place as the first, had wormed its way into my brain.

The voice, terribly familiar now, brought me back to my surroundings. I tensed my muscles to ward off goose pimples. I also recognised, somewhere in the background of my sensations, an urge to vomit after another fit of panic.

“What I'm about to ask you is strictly between the two of us. Even your wife mustn't suspect anything. There's no one next to you? No cheating – that would have disastrous consequences for you know who!”

“No, there's nobody. My wife's in the car. How is my daughter?”

“Fine. Now, our deal is simple, Aziz: she will be fine
as long as
you obey me. Any pranks and – she croaks! Now, open your ears wide and keep calm. Are you calm?”

The man's inflexion had changed: more excited, with a hint of – how would you say? –
childish
enjoyment. It was this cheerfulness that made me feel with awful certainty that the worst was yet to come.

“I'm calm.”

“Do you have enough imagination, Aziz?”

“What's imagination got to do with it?”

“You'll need some, because you're going to have to kill someone for me.”

“K
ill someone for you? Are you mad?”

There followed a few seconds of silence – enough time for me to bite my lip at my own stupidity: I had mentioned madness to a madman! Something slimy slithered into my mind:
Hey! Don't act so surprised. Everything's been mad since yesterday. Why would what this guy's asking you to do be any less mad?
I raised my eyes to the skies in search of help; the blanket of cloud, impassive as ever, looked like a badly cleaned zinc bar counter.

The voice articulated its words slowly. “‘Mad', eh? You're going to pay a heavy price for that insult. The generous time limit of forty-eight hours I was going to offer you is reduced to twenty-four, meaning by 8 o'clock tomorrow morning.”

“I…”

“Every time you protest, the time limit will be halved. You don't have to obey me, Aziz. But if you don't, your daughter will die in a very unpleasant fashion when time runs out. Unlike many people in this country, I'm honest – I always keep my word.”

The crackpot was deadly serious –
he really did want me to kill someone for him
.

“And who am I supposed to…” I said, taken aback.

Meriem was watching me through the windscreen. Quite obviously, my gestures were not sufficient to keep her still any longer.

“Go to work,” the kidnapper ordered. “I shall call the zoo in the morning to check you're following my instructions. I shall give you the name of the person. I shall also make sure that you have no reason to doubt the seriousness of my demands. I repeat: no one must know about our little agreement. Your safety depends on that too, you nitwit; by tomorrow, God willing, you will be a murderer. Dear Lord, grant long life to those who revere You even at the cost of their own lives… and the lives of unbelievers!”