The Dictator's Last Night. Yasmina Khadra

enemy.’

2 Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

       5

      When Amira finds me I am lying stretched out on the couch with my turban over my face. She is a solid, brisk woman, almost black, with a thick head of hair and curvaceous bust. She was one of my first bodyguards: a fearless and indefatigable Amazon who has never left my side since she was recruited. There is something arrogant about her but her loyalty is unswerving, and when she was younger I sometimes appointed her to share my bed and table with me.

      She clicks her heels and salutes. Strapped into a commando battledress, she looks bigger than ever.

      ‘Take my blood pressure,’ I order her.

      She unbuckles a side-pack and takes out the monitor.

      My personal physician vanished from Tripoli the day after the air strikes started, so I appointed Amira as my nurse. We have two or three doctors in the headquarters but for reasons of caution I have decided to dispense with their services. They are the same age as the rebels and too unproven to deserve my confidence.

      ‘Your pressure is normal, sir.’

      ‘All right. Now give me an injection.’

      She pulls a small packet of heroin out of her side-pack, pours its contents into a soup spoon, flicks a lighter.

      I close my eyes, my bare arm lying at my side. I hate syringes; I have hated them ever since I was thirteen and a nurse nearly left me disabled by breaking a needle in my backside. The infection that followed kept me in bed for weeks.

      Amira fastens the tourniquet and flicks her finger two or three times on my forearm to find a vein.

      ‘How many syringes have I got left?’

      ‘Half a dozen, sir.’

      ‘And heroin?’

      ‘Three doses.’

      ‘Are you sure no one is going into my stock?’

      ‘The bag never leaves my side, sir. It’s with me when I wake up and when I go to sleep.’

      She tidies the equipment away and waits for my orders. As I remain silent, she starts to undress.

      ‘No, not tonight,’ I stop her, ‘I am not in the mood. Just massage my feet.’

      She buttons up the top of her jacket and begins to unlace my shoes.

      Women.

      I have known hundreds of them.

      Of every background.

      Artists, intellectuals, virgins, maids, wives of compliant apparatchiks and conspirators, I had them one after another.

      The ritual was simple: I placed my hand on the shoulder of my chosen one, my agents brought her to me that evening on a beribboned platter, and my bed unpeeled its silken sheets for our bodies to revel in the intoxication of the flesh.