Read The Mysteries of Algiers for Free Online

Raoul before. Indeed it was clear that Raoul and Chantal had become very well acquainted of late. Raoul liked to pose as wit and flâneur of the boulevards and she seemed to find this pose attractive. Mercier was at the far end of the table, ill at ease to be seated so far from Chantal or myself. (This dinner was on Tuesday night. Mercier was to die on Thursday. I was already pretty sure by Tuesday that Mercier was going to die. Only I still did not know when or how.) Raoul sat opposite me and Chantal next to him.
    As I describe Chantal to the men in the platoon I know for certain that I have them with me and, in my mind’s eye, they enter Maurice’s garden one by one and file behind us at the table and each one leans over the woman’s shoulder to get a better look at her breasts. Now of course I am not going to tell the men what I knew about Mercier, nor what I felt about Chantal and Raoul. I am not going to tell them anything about my thoughts and feelings. Nor will I tell them how halfway through our argument about music in the barracks, I noticed that Raoul’s flies were open and how Chantal’s hand rested tenderly on that place. But I will tell them what was said at my end of the table, and I make sure that they can picture the scene, the cut glass and the candelabra, and I tell them what we ate – moules marinières, casseroled pheasant, oranges in chocolate and salad and cheese – and what we drank – Muscadet, Côtes du Rhône and brandy. And I am careful to point out to the men that of course we did not have to fight for it as they do in the Legion canteen.
    Maurice and his pals will be hunting wild boar and partridge and just possibly lynx. In past years I have taken legionnaires through the area they will be hunting in. My men were on search and sweep exercises against the FLN .
    Maurice and his pals wanted to compare notes. Flushed and jocular, they were keen for me to acknowledge that we are all one brotherhood of men with guns – as if their weedy potting of birds really compared with our man-hunts against the FLN .
    ‘Don’t suppose you have left any for our beaters to flush out?’
    ‘Your fellagha is a wily bird. You can practically walk over one without seeing him.’
    ‘Come on now, Captain. Admit, for all the seriousness of things, there is still an element of sport, of fun even in a manhunt …’
    ‘The trouble with the sort of man-hunts I take my men on is that from minute to minute one can never be sure who is hunting whom,’ I replied.
    It was at this point that Raoul decided to join our conversation.
    ‘It seems to me that there is something, how shall I put it – well it seems to me that the pleasure can be as great for the hunted as the hunter. At the risk of seeming absurd, yes, I will venture to suggest that there is something in being sought after that is pleasurable, and that pleasure has something of sex in it. Yes indeed, but I can see that you do consider this absurd.’
    Maurice certainly looks very grim, but Raoul plunges on regardless.
    ‘Gentlemen, I urge you to consider …’
    (This affected manner of speech is something that Raoul has picked up in his practice as advocate in Algiers.)
    ‘… no, to reflect back on your childhood. Those games of hide and seek in the dark, the panting and feeling for limbs, at times a sense of orgiastic release. And when, in those enchanting games, you were finally discovered was there not a flush of pleasure that was at its roots a thing of sex? For myself, I believe it was.’
    (My platoon finds Raoul rather hard to take. Only Corporal Buchalik is guffawing.)
    But the de Serkissians were becoming used to Raoul and his conversational provocations. Even so, I wondered if Raoul might not have gone too far this time. I hoped that Maurice would tell Raoul to shut up. But Maurice was distracted from immediate response by one of the guards. From our table we had a view of the blackly gleaming sea in the Bay of Algiers. Maurice clearly felt