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Janvier: Pépé le Moko is still at large.
Meunier: Algiers isn't Pigalle.
Janvier: In Pigalle, he'd have been behind bars long ago.
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Meunier: The Casbah is like a labyrinth. I'll show you. You can say Pépé's gone underground. From the air, the district known as the Casbah looks like a teeming anthill, a vast staircase where terraces descend stepwise to the sea. Between these steps are dark, winding streets like so many pitfalls. They intersect, overlap, twist in and out, to form a jumble of mazes. Some are narrow, others vaulted. Wherever you look, stairways climb steeply like ladders, or descend into dark, putrid chasms and slimy porticos, dank and lice-infested. Dark, overcrowded cafés. Silent, empty streets with odd names. A population of 40,000 in an area meant for 10,000. From all over the world. Many, descended from the barbarians, are honest traditionalists, but a mystery to us. Kabyles. Chinese. Gypsies. Stateless. Slavs. Maltese. Negroes. Sicilians. Spaniards. And girls of all nations, shapes and sizes. The tall. The fat. The short. The ageless. The shapeless. Chasms of fat no one would dare approach. The houses have inner courtyards, which are like ceilingless cells that echo like wells and interconnect by means of terraces above. They're the exclusive domain of native women. But Europeans are tolerated. They form a city apart, which, step by step, stretches down to the sea. Colorful, dynamic, multifaceted, boisterous, there's not one Casbah, but hundreds. Thousands. And this teeming maze is what Pépé calls home.
Fernand Charpin
Extended Reading
