This is the Night They Come For You, page 15
The answer was clear to those who chose – unlike me – to see what was truly happening. I told myself Algeria was too young a country for its government not to feel the need to protect itself against the enemy within. But I know now that wasn’t the reality of the situation. I was a pawn of le pouvoir: the controlling force that determined every fundamental issue. I was a cog in the wheel of repression.
How much of this my sole employee, the former owner’s assistant, Riad Nedjar, appreciated I can only guess. We’ve never spoken openly of it. But he’s always understood more than he’s given credit for. I have little doubt he knew what was going on behind the scenes. But he was grateful to me for keeping him on and for teaching him English in my spare time. And the customers, though they liked me, loved Riad. He was invaluable to me. The shop would never have been as successful without him.
I believed I’d put my past decisively behind me, but I discovered that wasn’t so easily done. A French tourist who’d worked at Tativille came into the shop one day and claimed to recognize me, though I genuinely didn’t recognize her. It was through her that Harriet’s brother Stephen Gray tracked me down in 1975, appearing out of nowhere to ask questions about Harriet – and Zarbi, who’d been mentioned to him by Viviane Labbé. I stonewalled as best I could, peddled the Amsterdam story as the probable truth of what had happened to her and detailed Riad to give him a friendly warning off. Riad didn’t need much persuading. He was genuinely concerned for Stephen’s safety. So was I. If I’d reported his visit to Zarbi, there’s no telling what might have happened to him. But I said nothing and I hoped, when he left, that I’d never hear from him again.
1978 was a big year for me. Suzette came into my life. Having a daughter altered my sense of my place in the world. It made me determined that Le Chélifère would still be operating successfully when she was old enough to consider working there herself and eventually taking it over from me. And then President Boumediene died – a rare cancer, it was said, though there were rumours of poisoning, as there were bound to be in the hothouse of Algerian politics. Whatever accounted for his death, I was glad he was gone, because I thought it likely Zarbi would be sidelined by the new regime. Then he’d be off my back. The future suddenly looked inviting.
It didn’t turn out like that, though. Zarbi actually wanted more from me to help him impress President Bendjedid’s underlings – people he didn’t know and who didn’t owe him any favours. But I didn’t have more to give. Zarbi was unimpressed. He implied he’d call in his loan to me, which previously he’d said would never happen. I needed to give him something. But I didn’t have anything.
Arezki Tidjani, a history lecturer at the university and a regular customer over the years, came to my rescue when he asked me a few questions about Sonatrach, where he knew Monique and I had both worked. Tidjani revealed he was working on a history of the Algerian oil industry, starting from the first French strikes in the Sahara back in the fifties. ‘You’d be surprised by some of the things I’ve found out,’ he said. It was just a throwaway remark. Maybe he was trying to impress me. That’s certainly what Monique thought. But I passed it on to Zarbi. And he stopped pressurizing me for a while.
About a month later, Tidjani was killed in a car accident when he drove off a cliff on the corniche road between Algiers and Oran. His death chilled me to the bone. It surely couldn’t be coincidental I’d reported his oil industry research to Zarbi. ‘No one gets killed for writing about Sonatrach,’ Monique airily assured me. She’d long known I worked as an informant for Zarbi. Growing up in Algeria had taught her that many accommodations had to be made with le pouvoir. She regarded the arrangement as a regrettable necessity and not something I should reproach myself for. ‘We all have to take our chances.’
Monique’s insouciance on the issue ate away at me over time. I’d idealized her when we first met. Now I realized she was entirely pragmatic about such things, even if they might have led in this case to someone being killed. But who was I fooling? This was Algeria. And these were the rules of the game. As she’d said, ‘We all have to take our chances.’
Which is what I continued to do, uneasily though it sat with my conscience. Stephen Gray returned twice more over the following years, using a supposed interest in Roman archaeology as the reason. He was accompanied on the second occasion by his wife, which gave me some cause to hope marriage would blunt his determination to discover the truth about Harriet. He learned nothing from me, though he never stopped trying to unpick the story I kept on telling: Harriet had vanished inexplicably from my life in Paris in 1965 and that was all I knew for certain. I didn’t breathe a word to Zarbi about his visits. The one thing I was determined to do for Harriet, having failed her so comprehensively when she was alive, was to protect her brother to the best of my ability.
My own life, for all its compromises, would probably have continued on a largely uneventful course but for the chaos Algeria began to descend into in the late eighties. Bendjedid, it turned out, was unable to impose himself on the country as Boumediene had. I’ve always felt, looking back, that the rot began to set in with the construction of the Martyrs’ Memorial. Vastly expensive and massively tasteless, this towering chunk of grandiosity incorporated, as well as an Islamic-style crypt, a glitzy shopping centre, complete with nightclub: a standing insult to Islamists, who dubbed it Hubal – the name of an idol destroyed by the Prophet in Mecca. And soon enough Hubal was more than the memorial. It was everything Algeria had become and they abhorred.
Then the price of oil started to fall, sapping the state’s finances. Inflation, food shortages and unemployment eroded support for the FLN. Protests multiplied. Ordinary people had had enough of being governed by self-serving veterans of the independence struggle. Their frustration exploded in the famous mass demonstrations that began on 4 October 1988. I felt at the time that the chanting of sexual jibes against Bendjedid and other members of the government was the provocation le pouvoir wasn’t willing to tolerate. Resentment was one thing, ridicule quite another. The army came on to the streets, fired on the demonstrators and killed several hundred.
There was no way back from there. As Riad said to me when it was all over, ‘The FLN have turned into le gouvernement général.’ The massacre was something the French might easily have carried out. But this was Algerians killing Algerians. And there was destined to be more of it. Much more of it. Until, seemingly, there was no end to it.
I can’t bring myself to recount in any detail the grisly sequence of events that followed: the electoral victories of the Islamist FIS; the dread harboured by those – like me – who suspected an Islamist government would be many times worse than the bunch of crooks and incompetents we had at the head of our affairs; the removal of Bendjedid by the military décideurs; the declaration of a state of emergency to avert a triumph by the FIS at the polls; the assassination during a televised address of the new president, Boudiaf – some people’s last frail hope for stability – just five months into his term; and the creeping appreciation by the summer of 1992 that a ferocious struggle for mastery was the course the country was set on.
From then on violence began to escalate on all sides. And there were more sides than just the government and the FIS. There was the GIA, set on the forcible Islamization of Algeria. There were militias with scores to settle. There were gangsters who saw the chance to carve out territory for themselves. If you ran into a roadblock, you had no idea who’d actually be manning it. All you knew was that they might kill you for no obvious reason. The violence attained an identity of its own. Boudiaf’s assassination turned out to be more than the start of it. It was also a demonstration of the terrifying nature of it. The bodyguard who’d shot him was either a closet Islamist or a tool of le pouvoir eliminating one of its own for reasons of its own. But no one knew which. No one could be sure of anything. Qui tue? was the universally asked question. Who was doing the killing? And why?
For me and people like me, that wasn’t the most important question, though. Journalists, academics, intellectuals, foreigners and women in western dress became the target. An English bookseller, his French wife and their teenage daughter had to be on the list as well. That was clear. And the police, who were also targeted – along with their families – couldn’t give us any protection. After the novelist Tahar Djaout, whose books we stocked at Le Chélifère, was gunned down as he left his apartment one morning, it was impossible to ignore the danger we were in. What were we to do? Eventually, Monique and I took the decision that she and Suzette would move to Marseille, where so many of the pieds noirs had taken refuge.
I stayed on initially because I wasn’t willing to abandon Le Chélifère. We’d worked hard to make a success of it and I thought it could be nursed through this desperate time, which surely couldn’t last long.
I was wrong on both counts. The violence only grew worse, claiming more victims every day. The Islamists who gave me the evil eye in the street were obviously going to strike at some point. I stopped going to the shop and left Riad to cope with the pitiful trickle of customers. Then, at Riad’s urging, I stopped leaving the apartment altogether. ‘They will kill you if they see your face,’ he warned me. ‘It has come to that, my friend.’
So, having left it too late to arrange a safe departure from the country, I became a recluse, staring at the walls of the apartment and at the bleak reality of my situation. I contacted Zarbi in the hope he’d be able to help me, but he said he had his own safety and that of his wife to worry about: there was nothing he could do for me. But he urged me to stick it out. ‘There will come a better time, Nigel.’
There seemed scant prospect of that. And just when I thought the situation couldn’t in all seriousness get any worse, my past came back to haunt me.
One day Riad showed up at the apartment accompanied by a plain clothes police officer. For a crazy second, I thought Riad had in some way betrayed me. But it wasn’t that. The police officer – Taleb was his name – wanted information about Stephen Gray, who I was horrified to hear had been arrested drunk on an overnight train from Annaba. More horrifyingly still, Stephen had accused Zarbi and Laloul of carrying out an assassination in Paris in 1965 and had said I could vouch for him.
What Stephen can have been thinking of I couldn’t imagine. Making such an accusation to the police bordered on the suicidal, though I got the impression he’d struck lucky with Taleb: he seemed to be that rarity in those days, an honest detective. As to what had prompted Stephen to travel to Algeria at such a dangerous time, my fear was that he’d found out the truth about what had happened to Harriet and wanted to confront me with it.
All I could do in the circumstances was deny all knowledge of him – and of Zarbi and Laloul. I suggested Stephen Gray might be one of our postal customers and had named me because there was literally no one else he could name in Algiers. Taleb looked unconvinced. He said he’d be back if he needed to ask me any more questions.
Several days passed without word from Taleb. It looked as if I was off the hook. But I was worried about what would happen to Stephen. So was Riad. As far as he was concerned, ‘Stephen is mad to have said such things.’ And he was right. Yet what could we do to help him without antagonizing Zarbi and Laloul?
Riad did at least have a contact at Police HQ, so he was able to make some discreet enquiries and we learned Stephen had been deported from the country at the DRS’s direction a couple of days after his arrest. I didn’t doubt this was Zarbi’s doing and I was relieved he hadn’t dealt with the problem in some more drastic way.
I hoped that was the end of the matter. But no. When Riad next came to deliver supplies to me, he also brought disturbing news. Zarbi had visited the shop and instructed him to pass a message to me. A car would collect me from outside the apartment building at eight the following morning and take me to meet him.
It sounded like a trap to me. But Zarbi had apparently anticipated my reaction. ‘Tell Nigel this,’ he had said to Riad. ‘If I wanted to kill him, I wouldn’t do it myself. I’d contract the job out to Napoli.’ Napoli was a notorious Algiers gangster, real name Yacine, nicknamed Napoli because he’d supposedly expressed a desire to earn enough money to retire to Naples. ‘All we’re going to do tomorrow is talk.’
I wasn’t reassured. On the other hand, I had no choice but to obey. And so I was loitering in the street doorway of the apartment block next morning when a black Range Rover drew up and a shaven-headed heavy in reflective sunglasses told me to climb in.
Our destination was a pull-in overlooking the sea out on the Cherchell road. If I’d been driving, I’d have been scared stiff of encountering a roadblock round every bend, with potentially fatal consequences. We encountered two, but were waved through both with a cursory exchange of nods and single-fingered salutes. Those manning the roadblocks wore military uniforms of some description, but I couldn’t have said with any certainty what their affiliation was. We were OK, though. We weren’t to be messed with.
To my surprise, Laloul was waiting for me as well as Zarbi. They were reclining on the rear seat of a silver grey limousine, surveying the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean in the shade of a small grove of Aleppo pines. It was a beautiful autumn morning. The air, which I breathed in deeply as I walked across to join them, was clear and warm, scented by the pines. But for its human inhabitants and their killing frenzy, I reflected, Algeria would be paradise.
The driver climbed out of the car as I climbed into the passenger seat. I’d already been searched, absurd though the idea was that I’d try to bring a gun with me, even supposing I had a gun or knew how to use one. As the driver’s departure confirmed, I represented no physical threat to Wassim Zarbi and Nadir Laloul. I never had. The sharing of that knowledge between us reinforced their superiority. I was in their power. I had been since Paris. For nearly thirty years, they’d had me under their thumbs, even though, for long periods of self-delusion, I’d persuaded myself it wasn’t so. But there, that morning, as I looked round at them – older and fatter but more dominating than ever – I realized all pretence on the issue was futile. I was their creature, no better than some pet macaque whose neck they could wring as and when he ceased to amuse or be of service to them.
‘Like old times, hey, Nigel?’ said Zarbi with a smile. ‘Just the three of us.’
‘Why am I here, Wassim?’ I asked, unsure if I really wanted an answer to my question.
‘We need to come to an understanding,’ said Laloul, removing a toothpick from his mouth as he spoke. ‘Wassim has told me of the visit from Stephen Gray.’
‘He’s gone now. I’m sure you made it clear to him he’d be crazy to come back.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Zarbi. ‘But maybe he is crazy. A brother seeking justice for a dead sister. You cannot always reason with such a man.’
‘Yet you let him go.’
‘The British make a lot of noise when their citizens get into trouble. We would have had the embassy on the case. And we do not want some London newspaper leading a campaign to rescue Stephen Gray, innocent tourist, from the snakepit of Algeria, do we?’
Laloul chuckled. ‘You should offer to write an editorial for them, Wassim. You have it off just so.’
‘We let you send Monique and Suzette to Marseille, Nigel,’ said Zarbi. ‘And this is how you reward us.’
‘I had no idea Gray was coming to Algeria.’
‘I questioned him before we put him on a plane to Paris. He has learned a great deal about what happened there with you and us and Guy Tournier … and Harriet. You should have warned us.’
‘I don’t know what he’s learned.’
‘Too much. And what he hasn’t learned he has guessed. He knows what we did. To Tournier and to Harriet. He can’t prove it, of course. He could only do that with your help.’
‘I’m not going to help him.’
‘No. You are not. Because you are not going to leave Algeria.’
‘I have no plans to leave.’
‘You must be the only foreigner who doesn’t. But we need to make it clear to you, Nigel. You are one foreigner who isn’t leaving. You have a bookshop to run, after all.’
‘How is business?’ asked Laloul with an undertow of sarcasm.
Before I could think of a response, Zarbi said, ‘You have your passport with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Give it to me.’
Refusal wasn’t an option. I took out my passport and glanced for a moment at the gilded lion and unicorn coat of arms, then handed it to Zarbi. ‘When will I get it back?’
‘When things quieten down and it is safe for Monique and Suzette to return to Algiers. A family should be together. And your family belongs here.’
‘You really think things will quieten down?’
‘Eventually.’
‘Can we rely on you, Nigel?’ asked Laloul. It was clear from his tone that he doubted it.
‘Yes,’ I said, stubbornly and self-servingly. ‘You can.’
‘We’re not sure that’s true. Remember Tidjani?’
‘Of course I remember him.’
‘You waited three days before telling us about his research plans.’
It was a strange and disturbing remark by Laloul, because it was true: I had waited several days to tell Zarbi Tidjani was delving into the history of the Algerian hydrocarbons industry. I didn’t want to get him into trouble, though in the end I realized I’d get myself into trouble if they found out I knew and had said nothing. But …
‘And how do we know you waited three days?’ Laloul continued. ‘Because your wife only waited two.’
