Deluge
The hurricane has passed on, leaving behind sullen clouds and a
bowl-shaped city three-quarters full of water. The sun is low,
and Denis Delacroix has a stop to make before he points his
borrowed bass boat to what passes for safety in New Orleans. He
is motoring towards the plain brick three-story building that
contains his livelihood.
The jewelry store is not large, but it belongs to him, and he
refuses to surrender years of labor to the vicissitudes of
nature. When the television showed Katrina bearing down on the
city, he removed a few of his more expensive pieces, but left the
rest, convinced that he would ride out this storm as he had the
others. Earlier that afternoon, the mayor admitted that the city
wouldn't have power for at least a month. Denis is sure that if
he left his store alone for that long, it would not matter how
strong his safe was. Looting broke out as soon as the rain
slackened, and so far the police have shown remarkable reluctance
to correct the behavior with a whiff of lead. Denis regards this
display of weakness with contempt; in his native France, the
gendarmes would have strung the first group of looters they
caught from the nearest light pole, and that would have been the
end of that.
The parish streets are covered in a good three meters of water,
and Denis has been forced to pass dozens of people stranded on
roofs and in attics that call to him for help. The boat could
hold at most three people, and Denis is worried about what he
will do if he discovers one of New Orleans' infamously large
Catholic families stuck on a crumbling roof.
Gunfire crackles somewhere to the east. A police helicopter
passing overhead swings in a wide circle before darting off in
response. Denis ducks his head instinctively and strokes the
handgun holstered under his shirt, grateful that he had never
disposed of the old service weapon. He shivers against the heat,
the choppy rumble of the helicopter and the brutal snap of
gunshots putting him in mind of a hot, dusty place five thousand
miles to the east. Not for the first time that day, Denis hopes
that the ancient cartridges in his pistol's magazine are still
good.
Navigation is difficult with most landmarks underwater, but Denis
knows the city that adopted him three decades before well enough
to find his way. It is nearly seven when Denis finally spots the
familiar shape of his destination jutting up from the filthy
brown water. The flood had risen high enough to overflow the
sandbags set up to protect the building, and water licks at the
bottom of the second floor. Denis heaves a sigh of relief that
his store has not been destroyed. There is a garage attached to
the back of the structure, and Denis plans to tie his boat to the
railing that runs along the top. He wants to be in and out in
under ten minutes. There is no way that he will be able to save
everything, but he is going to stuff his backpack with as many
precious stones as he can carry. Night is coming, and there are
only a few days before the new moon. There will be little light
to guide him after dark, and few police to scatter the gathering
predators.
Denis tosses a rope around the creaky railing and secures his
craft. The water level is more than a meter below the top of the
garage, and Denis has to stretch to grasp the wrought iron. With
a heave of the thick muscles in his shoulders and back, Denis
pulls his heavy body over the top and drops to the other side,
ignoring the pops and creaks of his protesting joints. He falls
to a crouch before pausing to stretch, reaching skyward and
closing his eyes. When he opens them again, the three men already
on the roof are close enough to touch.
Denis grabs for his pistol, but the heavy flashlight one of the
men is carrying connects with his jaw first, sending him to the
ground. Darkness falls, and the fading sound of the distant
helicopter combines with the heat and the pain to strip away the
years, and he is again in a tiny
village, miles south of Algiers, on the edge of the desert, in a
blast furnace of bitter dry air that stings his eyes. Denis
stands alone against a mud-brick wall. Four other paratroopers
sit at a nearby table, playing cards and smoking
Gauloises. Two more keep watch out front, and the last
is dabbing at the fresh bloodstains on his brownish camouflage
shirt with water from a canteen. The Arab, that the Lieutenant
and Sergeant-chef had taken out the back door and into a small
courtyard, is screaming. Denis wants to cover his ears, or start
sobbing, or throw away his rifle and run into the desert to die
of thirst and sun. But he does none of these things, because the
men of his new squad are playing cards and smoking and talking
now, as though twenty meters away, a man was not having the tip
of a knife shoved under his fingernails. Denis has only been in
Algeria for a month, and the newspapers in Marseilles had
mentioned nothing of this.
The screams die away into a low moan, and the Sergeant-chef comes
back into the cramped room. He picks a discarded rag from the
floor and wipes his knife clean. Henri asks if the Arab talked
and the Sergeant smirks. "They all talk," the Sergeant says,
"they all talk eventually." A single shot comes from behind the
house. Denis jumps, and the rest of his squad laugh at him. The
Lieutenant steps through the doorway, holstering his pistol and
scowling. He tells his men to get ready to leave, and three
minutes later, they are back in their truck. As they drive away
from the village, Denis can still hear the Arab
screaming, only now it isn't the Arab, but a
skinny boy of no more than seventeen. He is screaming because he
has a full decimeter of good French steel shoved into his gut
– steel that Denis has carried strapped to his calf for
twice as long as the boy has been alive. Denis pulls the knife
out and thrusts again, only higher this time. The high-pitched,
wordless wail stops.
Denis gets to his knees, and struggles against the familiar
nausea of a concussion. He takes stock and discovers that his
pistol is gone, and so is his wallet. He quickly searches the
boy's still warm body, but finds nothing more than a tiny, cheap,
chrome-plated automatic in one pocket of his baggy jeans. On his
feet now, Denis' rapid heartbeats seemingly come from a great
hollow drum, and his hands are sticky with blood. There is no one
else on the garage roof. Denis looks first at his boat, and then
up into the building. He knows where the other looters are. Their
friend did not die quietly, and they will come to investigate.
A battered steel door leads from the garage roof into the second
floor, but Denis learned his military tradecraft in a hard
school, and knows better than to use it. A fire escape runs down
the west face of the shop, but he will have to walk along a ledge
for a few meters to get to it. Denis doesn't hesitate. The
concrete is wet and slick, but he keeps his balance and does not
fall into the sluggish black water below. Ten meters behind him a
door bangs open, but Denis' feet are already on the first rusted
metal step, and he goes up, up a
brick staircase in an Arab ghetto in Algiers. The sun is straight
overhead, and sweat trickles down his collar.
The Lieutenant is above on the landing, and Henri is to his rear.
The sniper in the house fires again, and the paratroopers around
front return the favor. Bullets ricochet away from the bricks
with sudden, sharp cracks. The Lieutenant looks down at Denis and
Denis nods in affirmation. The young officer takes a deep breath
and slams his shoulder against the locked door, but it stubbornly
refuses to give way. One more blow opens it with a groan of
splintering wood. There is another rifle shot and the Lieutenant
falls forward like a puppet with cut strings. Denis holds the
muzzle of his MAT-49 around the corner and hoses down
the room without exposing his body. Henri darts past Denis and
through the door. Denis shoves another magazine into his
submachine gun before following.
Inside, there is a man on the floor weakly writhing in a
spreading pool of blood, a Mauser with an open bolt by
one outstretched hand. Henri is pointing his rifle at a woman
kneeling next to the dying man. Henri says something to the
woman, but Denis' ears are still ringing and so he never knows
what his friend said. The Arab woman slowly looks up, clenching
something tight in one fist. Henri shouts again, but the woman
opens her hand and a grenade falls out onto the floor. Denis
grabs the back of Henri's shirt and lunges for the door. There is
a dull thump, and he feels a wave of pressure from the grenade
wash over him. He falls square on his back with Henri's added
weight. Denis thrashes free and rolls over, but the woman is
already dead, her face torn away. Henri is dead too, his body
absorbing the steel fragments meant for both of them. The
Lieutenant's pistol is on the floor, and Denis uses it to shoot
each Arab one more time. Afterwards, he sticks the gun in his
belt and rejoins the rest of his company in the street. It is
only when one of them tells Denis that he is bleeding that Denis
notices the pain. He sits down in the shade of an abandoned house
and takes off his shirt. His skin is gashed, and there is
something small and hard in the wound. Denis uses the point of a
knife to dig a chunk of Henri's eyeglasses out of his
shoulder.
The door at the top of the fire escape is hanging open on broken
hinges. Denis steps into a dank humid space, dimly lit by the
setting sun. He takes a second to work the slide of the dead
boy's pistol, ensuring that there is a cartridge chambered,
before moving deeper into the structure. He is in a backroom of
the lawyer's office that occupies the floor above his store.
Denis removes his shoes, and with the thick carpet muffling his
footfalls, moves down the hall to the building's central
staircase. His face has finally begun to hurt, a dull throbbing
ache that radiates out from his right cheekbone. The pain clears
his head a little, and Denis takes a deep breath and tries to
convince himself that he is sixty-three years old, an American
citizen, and not twenty, young, tall, strong, and slipping through the pitch-black streets
of Algiers at the head of a pied-noir death squad.
DeGaulle has betrayed the colons and the army, and has abandoned
what has been part of Metropolitan France for one hundred and
thirty years to the rebels. Denis has not spent the last two
years up to his elbows in blood in the middle of a godforsaken
desert just to tuck his tail and get quietly on a transport home.
There are scores to settle first, and it was not hard to find
others that felt the same as he. They have two stops to make that
night, and the first one is easy. Denis has barely settled into
an alley across the street from the chosen house when a man comes
out into the cooling evening to smoke a cigarette. The flash of
light from a match momentarily illuminates his face, and Denis
recognizes him from the picture in his file. With a quick
chopping motion, Denis sends the man he knows only as Jacques
circling around back. In less than a minute, the Arab is laying
in the street, throat gaping open, and Jacques is back in the
alley, smoking the man's cigarette.
The squad moves on. Electricity to this part of the city is
sporadic at best, so the faint glow of oil lamps spills from a
few open windows. The light does little to penetrate the alleys
and narrow streets that Denis and his men traverse. They meet no
one. Everyone knows that the war is over, but that knowledge has
not changed the dangers of Algiers' nighttime streets. Louis has
lived in Algiers for most of his life, and guides them to their
goal without hesitation. The large house's windows are covered
with heavy curtains so no interior illumination leaks out. There
are men covering the gate leading into the traditional courtyard,
but because the war is over, there is no one on the roof. Denis
and Jacques climbs through an open window next door and creeps
upward. A bare meter separates the neighboring houses' flat
roofs, and both men leap lightly across, disturbing not so much
as a pebble. They start on the top floor and work their way down,
killing as they go, using knives at first, and then pistols when
a woman raises the alarm before Jacques ends her life. At the
first shot, Louis and David pin the guards down from across the
street while Denis and Jacques finish their work. It is over in
less than five minutes. Denis comes out the front door and shoots
the two surviving guards in their backs. Jacques is dead. Their
primary target slept with a Luger under his pillow. If
the hysterical girl in bed with him had not spoiled his aim,
Denis would likely have fallen as well, but in Algiers, such
things are often settled by millimeters. Denis and David follow
Louis back into the night, gone like shadows before Arab
reinforcements begin to arrive.
The next morning, mail arrives at Louis' house. Denis reads a
letter describing how a café bomb in Paris has removed his
sister's leg just above the knee. Over their cigarettes, Louis
and David swear undying vengeance for the slight. Denis nods in
agreement, but that night he slips away and buys passage on a
ship bound for Hong Kong. The tramp steamer is sailing within the
hour, and the last launch out to her is leaving the dock as Denis
arrives. He doesn't hesitate, and dives headfirst into the
brackish, salty water. He swims, but waterlogged clothes and
heavy boots pull him down. For a few panic-stricken seconds,
Denis thinks that they will leave him to drown. Instead the
launch returns, and hands reach to pull him, sodden and drained,
into the bottom of the boat. Shivering, Denis drags himself to
the back of the launch and watches the lights of Algiers fade
away.
This is a different staircase, in a different city, and Denis
stops at the first landing, listening with buzzing old ears for
the movement of men that want to kill him. Voices come from
below, arguing over whether to finish searching for more
valuables or to take the boat and leave. Greed soon triumphs over
good sense, and the beam of a flashlight stabs into the dark
through a window. Denis waits quietly for his prey to come to
him.
The door at the bottom of the stairwell opens, and Denis aims to
the left of the light. The cheap pistol fires three times before
jamming. The flashlight falls to the floor and the bulb breaks.
Seconds later, the door to the garage roof slams open and swings
back and forth in the wind. In the darkness, Denis hears the wet
gasps of a dying man. He clears the chamber of his weapon and
goes down the steps.
The stars have come out, and a thin crescent moon lights the
roof. The last looter is standing with his back to the door,
carrying a duffel bag and staring forlornly at the bass boat
drifting away. Denis shrugs. He has never been very good at
knots. The looter turns when Denis pushes the door out of his
way. He is tall and thin, with short, curly dark hair, and wide
terrified eyes. He raises Denis' service pistol and pulls the
trigger. Nothing happens, and the looter's eyes become even
wider. He frantically jerks the trigger again, and again, with
the same result. Denis smiles; he has seen the same desperation
on the face of more than one Arab trying to work unfamiliar
French hardware. Denis drops his stolen weapon and draws his
stiletto. The looter is still looking for the safety catch when
the tip of Denis' knife licks out, snake-quick and shining in the
moonlight. A third body swells the ranks of the dead.
Denis staggers to the railing and retches until bile burns his
throat. Instinct comes to the fore, and with no small effort, he
heaves the nearest body into the water, and then the next. The
man in the stairwell is dead when Denis reaches him, leaving a
dark trail along the tile when Denis drags him by the back of his
basketball jersey into the open. He goes into the flood as well,
disappearing under the surface without a trace – only to
bob up again and float away in the gentle current.
At last, the building is empty and the garage roof is silent.
Denis sits down and leans his back against the railing. His
wounded face has stopped oozing liquid, but the film of dried
blood cracks when he works his jaw. Blood that doesn't belong to
him covers his hands, arms, and shirt. Denis rests, silently
wishing for a cigarette, until night finishes descending. He
stands up again, knees creaking against the unwonted strain.
Ignoring the full duffel bag at his feet, Denis strips in the
dark, finding new bruises and cuts by feel. He leaves his clothes
in a pile and returns to the edge of the flood. His recently
recovered pistol goes first, in a casual underhand toss, sinking
with a splash a dozen meters out from the garage. Denis hefts his
knife, but only hesitates a moment before casting the weapon
away. He hears it break the water and sees a flash of white
before it too is gone.
Alone and old, Denis Delacroix climbs the railing and drops into
the warm fetid waters covering his city. He lets his body sink,
until his bare feet contact the asphalt meters below, and there
he stays until his lungs burn. Finally he kicks, hard, and takes
a great heaving breath of moist, smoke-tinged air when his head
breaks the surface. After another moment, one reluctant hand dips
after the other, and Denis begins to swim.
by Andrew Hellard
... who is a freelance writer.
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