The Centurions (63 page)

The telephone rang. It was Boisfeuras again.

“This time,” he said, “it's certain. He's a short little fellow, narrow face, he has a scar on his jaw, the little finger of his left hand is deformed; thirty years old at the most.”

“That's him all right.”

“While you're about it, ask him about a certain Khadder the Vertebra. And don't forget: the bombs are due to go off tomorrow morning, just when all the clients who haven't been able to shop at their usual retailers' are pouring into the food departments of the Prisunic and Monoprix. You must make him tell you in which shops they've been planted and for what time they've been set. As soon as we have the information, I'll send along four bomb disposal squads; they're already standing by.”

Esclavier put down the receiver.

“Arouche, some squads are standing by to dispose of the bombs; out with it now, and be quick about it. After that we'll talk about a certain Khadder the Vertebra.”

Arouche had risen to his feet and was twisting his hands to prevent himself from shouting out his hatred in the paratrooper's face.

“Have you finished squirming about?” the captain asked him drily. “I'm in a hurry.”

Arouche sneered:

“A girl waiting for you?”

“Exactly, a woman.”

“While Algeria is going up in flames, that's all you can think about—fornicating like a pig. But tomorrow, the whole of Algiers is going up, and maybe your girl-friend with it.”

Esclavier had to make an effort to master his anger and not strike the little dentist in the face.

“The bombs?”

“No. I'm the only one who knows. You may as well go off and join her now. Your bomb disposal squads can spend all night searching the shops of Algiers, they won't find a thing. You can kill me, torture me, I'll die with pleasure in your hands, because tomorrow . . .”

“I could easily make you talk . . .”

The clock struck ten, emitting a faint tinkling sound like an old music box.

“. . . But I shan't make you, Doctor Arouche; it's against all my principles. You have your reasons for fighting, I have mine, but that has nothing to do with bombs which go off and kill women and children.

“Once you have talked, I'll hand you over to the police; you can then settle matters with them, but you can call your lawyer beforehand and I'll see to it personally that nothing irregular occurs.”

“No.”

Arouche ran his fingers over his scar in the hope that it would revive the hatred that gave him his strength. He remembered the punch in the face which had sent him flying and the subsequent kick that had broken his jaw.

It was on his return from Paris. Back there, there had been a few girls in his life but he had never been able to keep them for long; for there came a day when he could not help calling them whores—in many cases they were whores, but they didn't like being reminded of the fact.

In Paris he used to see a lot of the French students from Algeria, who treated him more or less as one of themselves. He had changed his Moslem name of Ahmad to Pierre; were not his ancestors Christians at the time of Saint Augustine?

Algerines together, they formed a united front against the
Frangaouis
, whose lack of virility they derided—this enabled them to forget their own idleness.

On his return to Algiers Arouche had moved into a European quarter of the town; he had found his old Paris friends again but did not realize their relationship was now on a different footing.

One evening, after a professional dinner, he had gone out with them to a night-club; he had then—not without encouragement—made a rather too obvious pass at the sister of one of his friends. The friend had promptly flown off the handle:

“What the hell does this nigger think he's doing? He's forgetting himself!”

He had then been beaten up in public and thrown out. Ever since that day hatred had replaced every other sentiment in his heart.

He knew he would not talk. He could see that the paratrooper, in spite of his lean, handsome face, was a weakling, full of contradictions, a phrase-spinning type.

Let him go on spinning phrases to his heart's content! In the meantime the minutes were ticking by. The captain would never find the bombs which were cunningly concealed in packing-cases containing tinned food and had already been planted in the shops thanks to the co-operation of a delivery boy. They were timed to go off at half past nine.

Esclavier weighed his words carefully, racking his brains to find some argument based on reason and humanity which might appeal to this motionless, unshakable body sitting in the white-upholstered arm-chair.

In spite of himself, all he could produce were his father's threadbare theories on non-violence. His words sounded false, his phrases trailed away into the void, for they found no echo.

The captain noticed the imperceptible gesture Arouche made to glance at the clock and his expression of relief when it struck eleven; all he wanted was to gain time.

Esclavier tried another tack.

“Arouche,” he said all of a sudden, and in a dry tone of voice, “I was tortured once myself. I know what it's like, and I know that one talks, for everyone talks in the end . . .”

And, while Arouche kept his eyes on the clock, he embarked on this confession which was so painful to him that the sweat broke out on his forehead and he found himself panting for breath:

“It was in
1943
, Arouche. I was dropping for the third time into the occupied zone; the Germans were waiting for me down below. Before I could even get out of my parachute harness and draw my revolver, I was caught, with a pair of handcuffs round my wrists.”

Arouche glanced at him, with an almost amused expression, then switched his gaze back to the clock.

“It's not so much the beating-up that's hard to bear, Arouche; it's the waiting for it and not knowing what the pain will be like. The Gestapo man was dressed in black; he had a smooth, shiny face and wore steel-rimmed spectacles. He kept looking at his hands pensively, as though they reminded him of some unpleasant memory. It wasn't he who frightened me, but something behind him, a clock like this one here. What frightened me was what was going to happen.

“He asked me who I was and what rank I held; he knew everything about my mission, which was to blow up the power-house of a factory, but what interested him far more was the names of the people I had to warn in case of an accident, the recovery team . . . ‘To some extent or other,' he told me, ‘everyone talks over here; and the proof is that we've got you in our hands. I'll give you half an hour to think it over.'

“After that, Arouche, I kept watching the clock, as you're watching it now, with its chubby Tritons blowing on their trumpets and the minute-hand starting on its course. Would you like a cigarette, Arouche? The German offered me one before leaving me alone in the room.

“The instructions we had been given in London were quite simple: to hold our tongue long enough for the networks to be able to take the necessary security measures. This length of time was never precisely defined.

“So, as I watched the clock, I kept trying to persuade myself that I wouldn't talk, that I would rather be mutilated for life than admit that if anything misfired I was to go to a certain bookshop in the Rue Guynemer at Vannes and ask for the rare edition that Mr. Duval had ordered.

“I pictured the owner of the bookshop as an old white-haired lady who had nothing more to expect out of life . . . whereas I was only twenty years old. How old are you, Arouche?”

Arouche shrugged his shoulders without replying, unable to take his eyes off the clock.

“The German displayed no emotion, neither hatred nor pity, nor even a trace of interest. He actually told me:

“‘I don't think the information you've got will have the slightest effect on the eventual outcome of the war, whichever side wins, but what you'll suffer will mark you for the rest of your life.'

“He came back half an hour later; he sat down at his desk and, like the good, conscientious official that he was, he checked his wrist-watch by the clock.”

Automatically Esclavier pushed back his cuff and likewise checked his wrist-watch by the clock. It was now a quarter to twelve.

“Then the German pressed a bell and three men in civilian clothes came in; one of them was a Frenchman. They dragged me out of the room.”

Esclavier had risen to his feet and was pacing round the Kabyle.

“It's the first blow that hurts. It takes you by surprise, you're not expecting it, you think it won't be possible to stand another. Then, just as you're beginning to persuade yourself that the pain is just bearable, the second blow comes down and shatters your resistance, all the little illusions you've so carefully built up.

“It's then you begin waiting for the third blow, which does not come right away; your wincing, throbbing flesh prays to get it over as quickly as possible until the moment comes when it begins to hope that there won't be a third blow, and that's the very moment it comes.

“And this goes on, Arouche, hour after hour, with men who have got all the time in the world, who stop every now and then for a drink or a snack. You tell yourself: now they're going to leave me in peace for ten minutes, for a quarter of an hour. But suddenly one of them gets up and gives you another wallop, still chewing on a piece of sausage he has just popped into his mouth.

“I held out, Arouche, up to the moment they began thumping me over the head with a sock filled with sand; I felt as though my skull was coming apart, that my brain was being bared: a wretched, quivering jelly.

“I gave them the address of the bookshop in the Rue Guynemer; I told them everything I knew. After the war I spent six months on garrison duty not far from Vannes, in the Meucon camp. I never dared go near the Rue Guynemer or ask about the bookshop there. What if the old lady had been a young girl of twenty!

“You know why I didn't hold out, Arouche? For the same reasons that you're going to talk. I didn't have a sufficient motive, nothing but vague ideas and theories: peace among nations, anti-Fascism, high principles and all that sort of nonsense, meanwhile taking care not to catch a cold in the head and to avoid sitting in a draught; I also felt a certain amount of resentment and scorn for my father. But that's not enough to turn a man into a martyr.

“All you've got, Arouche, is hatred, and what a petty little hatred it is! You've never been able to have the sort of girl you wanted—a European girl—isn't that it? I realized that just now. That's not a good enough reason to blow up a whole town and massacre women and children.

“You won't hold out; and you'll know as I do what it feels like to be a coward and to be saddled with that cowardice all your life.

“Come on now: where are the bombs?”

Arouche still kept silent, but Esclavier could now see how fragile the dentist's courage and resolution were. Out in Indo-China he had once known a Viet who had refused to talk. He had had the impression that the man had withdrawn into himself and was sealed off by a trapdoor in some mysterious refuge where he no longer felt, heard or saw a thing.

Arouche did not have such a refuge. The twelve strokes of midnight issued with a gentle tinkling sound from the clock.

“Arouche, the bombs?”

Once again Esclavier felt like a coward because he was incapable of making another man go through what he had been through himself. He would have to ask Bordier and Malfaison to deal with the dentist.

The telephone rang—no doubt Boisfeuras was getting impatient. It was Isabelle, with a sob in her voice:

“Philippe, they've killed grandfather and his three servants, set fire to the farm and destroyed the vines. I want to get out there at once, but because of the curfew . . . Oh, Philippe!”

She burst into tears. After a short silence she went on:

“He was so fond of them! Come and join me as soon as you can. Yes, I'll be waiting at the Bouzareah.”

It was not until dawn that Esclavier reached his mistress's flat. The news of the murder of old Pélissier had made him see red, and what he dreaded most of all he had managed to accomplish all by himself, without having to appeal to his N.C.O.s.

By the time the dentist was carried off on a stretcher, in the early hours of the morning, he had confessed everything; none of the fifteen bombs went off.

But when Philippe tried to make love to Isabelle, he found he was incapable. The young woman had been too involved in his mind with the ghastly hours he had just spent and a little of that horror still clung to her. And since there was no one else he loved or desired, he suddenly discovered the inferno of love in which all those who cannot quench their desire have to live.

Philippe stroked Isabelle's hair and went and lay down on the other bed; he felt he wanted to die.

 • • • 

The general strike broke out on
28
January. During the morning it was almost universal. Following the instructions of Radio Tunis, the inhabitants of the Arab quarters who had laid in enough foodstocks for a week did not set foot outside. The streets were empty, the shops closed.

The Zouaves strutted about the Kasbah in full-dress uniform and distributed sweets to the children whose numbers gradually increased until they swarmed around the soldiers like flies. Other units were busy driving these children off to school in trucks.

A large number of Moslem school-teachers followed them; out of a sense of solidarity or because they were frightened, a few Frenchmen went on strike. They were replaced by soldiers and were meanwhile set to work emptying the garbage cans.

The
10
th Parachute Regiment was entrusted with the task of opening up the shops. Its squads hooked the metal shutters on to the rear of their trucks and tore them down bodily. Some of these shops were looted, but none of the owners came and protested, for the looted shops all belonged to F.L.N. subscription-collectors. Boisfeuras had carefully compiled his list from the documents Arcinade had provided.