Tuareg

It was late afternoon when the captain’s batman found the body.

His shouts, verging on the hysterical, rang through the oasis, prompting the men to drop their shovels and go running over to the small shack, but the sergeant major shoved them all firmly back as they all tried to crowd into the hut.

When he was finally alone with the body, lying now in a flyinfested pool of blood, he sat down on the stool and cursed his bad luck. The son of a bitch could have waited four more days.

He was not at all sorry; nor did he feel the slightest bit of compassion for that son of a bitch, the biggest bastard of them all, lying in front of him, despite the fact that they had shared many years in that hellish place together. He also had been the only one with whom he could ever have a vaguely intelligible conversation with from time to time. Still, he did not doubt that Captain Kaleb-el-Fasi deserved to die, be it there or anywhere else, but he wished to hell that the timing had been better.

Now they would send in a new commandant, who would be neither better nor worse, just different. It would be years before he would know him well enough to take advantage of his weak points and learn to manage him in the same way that he had managed the one that now lay dead in front of him.

He was also worried about the complex process they would have to go through with the investigating commission, because even he did not have the remotest idea who, out of the bunch of murderers that stood some five meters from the door outside, talking excitedly to each other, was guilty this time.

They would all be suspects, including him, he quickly realised, since he would have much the same motives as any of the others: to get rid of the man that had made the lives of anyone under his command unbearable.

He had to find out who the murderer was before anyone turned up and hand it over as a closed case in order to avoid any further trouble.

He closed his eyes and mentally went through the faces of all his men, in search of a suspect, but finished the exercise totally disheartened.

He could dismiss about a dozen of them as possibly innocent. The rest of them, he realised, would all have taken great pleasure in slitting his commandant’s throat.

‘Mulay!’ he screeched.

A broad, very tall, sour-faced man came in immediately and stood there, pale and shaken, almost trembling, in the doorway.

‘At your orders sergeant,’ he stuttered.

‘You were on duty weren’t you?’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

‘And you didn’t see anyone?’

‘I think I must have fallen asleep at some point, sergeant,’ the giant of a man said, almost sobbing. ‘Who would think such a thing could happen in broad daylight…?’

‘Obviously not you. You’ll probably be up before the firing squad for this. Even if you’re not guilty of it, you’re responsible for it.’

The other man gulped and his breathing became laboured as he put his hands out in front of him beseechingly:

‘But it wasn’t me sergeant. Why would I do it? In four days time we were off in search of that caravan.’

‘If you mention that caravan again I’ll personally arrange for you to be shot. I’ll deny ever having spoken to you about it. It’ll be your word against mine.’

‘I understand sergeant,’ Mulay said apologetically. ‘I’ll never mention it again.’

‘I just wanted you to know that I was one of the few people that wanted him alive.’

Sergeant Major Malik-el-Haideri got up, took the dead man’s packet of cigarettes from the table and lit one with his heavy silver lighter that he then slid nonchalantly into his own pocket.

‘I understand,’ he admitted. ‘I understand very well, but you were also on guard and that means that it was your job to shoot at anyone who came near this hut. Bastard! Whoever did this I’ll skin him alive!’

He glanced back at the body, went outside and stopped in the shade of the porch where he scanned all the faces of those present. Everyone was there.

‘Listen to me and listen well!’ he growled. ‘We have to sort this out between us, unless we want a load of officials coming in to make our lives even more unbearable. Mulay was on guard, but I don’t think it was him.’

‘The rest of you, I suppose, were all asleep. Who wasn’t in the hut and why?’

The soldiers looked at each other suspiciously, aware that the situation was pretty serious and that it might lead to an investigating commission being called in. Finally a petty officer spoke up timidly:

‘I don’t remember anyone being missing, sergeant. The heat was unbearable. It would have been very odd if anyone had stayed outside.’

There was a murmur of mutual agreement.

The sergeant meditated for a few moments.

‘Who went to the bathroom?’

Three men put their hands up.

‘I wasn’t even two minutes,’ one of them protested. ‘He saw me and I saw him.’

He turned to look at the third man.

‘And you, who saw you?’

The skinny black man came up from the back.

‘Me. He went over to the dunes and then came straight back. I also saw the other two… I couldn’t sleep and I can tell you for sure, sergeant, that nobody left the hut for longer than three minutes. The only one that wasn’t here was Mulay,’ he paused for a minute and then added casually: ‘And you of course.’

The sergeant major shifted about uncomfortably and for a split second seemed to lose his composure as a cold trickle of sweat ran down his back. He turned to Mulay, who was standing quietly next to the door and gave him a withering look.

‘So if it wasn’t any of you lot and there’s nobody around for at least a one hundred kilometre radius, it looks like you’re going to have to…’ He stopped suddenly, then starting praising the skies jubilantly as a thought suddenly flashed across his mind:

‘The Targui! Well I’ll be damned…! The Targui! Officer!’

‘Yes, sergeant,’

‘What was that you were telling me about something to do with a Targui not wanting you to enter his settlement? Can you remember what he was like?’

The officer shrugged his shoulders doubtfully:

‘All the Tuareg people look the same when they wear that veil, sergeant.’

‘But could it have been the one that stayed here yesterday?’

It was the skeletal black man that answered.

‘It could have been him sergeant. I was also there. He was tall, thin with a blue, sleeveless djelabba over a white one and a small bag or charm made of red leather round his neck.’

The sergeant gestured for him to stop right there as he breathed a huge sigh of relief.

‘It’s him, without a doubt,’ he said. That son of a bitch had the balls to come in here and slit the captain’s throat right under our very noses. Officer! Lock Mulay up! If he escapes I’ll have you

shot. Then radio through to the capital. Ali!’

‘At your orders, sergeant!’ the black man replied.

‘Get all the vehicles ready to go… We’ll need maximum supplies of water, petrol and provisions. We’ll catch that bastard even if he’s hiding in that hellhole out there.’

Half an hour later, the Adoras military posting was buzzing with activity, the likes of which had not been seen since its first opened or at least not since the large caravans from the south had stopped going there.