The Rivals

There are two kinds of Frenchmen in Algeria, and no two men were ever more ironically type-cast than Pierre Lagaillarde and Pierre Popie. Both from well-to-do families, they grew up as next-door neighbors amid the rose gardens and orange groves of Blida, a small town nestled at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. 32 miles from Algiers.

Slim, swaggering and handsome, Lagaillarde liked to race hot-rods on the twisting mountain roads above the Chiffa gorge, was soon known locally as a casse-tout, or hellraiser. He believed that Algeria belonged to its French colonizers, distrusted Arabs, and eagerly embraced every right-wing idea from anti-Communism to antiSemitism. Popie was small, shy and intellectual, and his credo read: "I am an Algerian. I believe that Europeans can live in close friendship with the Moslems even if Algeria becomes independent."

On the Barricades. Events threw them against each other, and Lagaillarde always won. At Algiers University, where both studied law, he captured the presidency of the European Students Union from Popie. Lagaillarde was elected a Deputy to the National Assembly, served as a paratrooper in charge of "interrogating" Moslem suspects, emerged as the top man among the European activists. He personally led the January 1960 uprising in Algiers, fought a pitched battle with the police and raised the barricades against De Gaulle. Arrested and brought to trial in Paris, Lagaillarde fled to Spain, where, from the safety of Madrid, he now loudly urges the European activists in Algeria to fight to the last man.

Pierre Popie followed a more dangerous course. He became that rarity in Algeria-- a European who openly favored negotiation with the F.L.N. rebels. At the Algiers bar, he brilliantly defended Moslems accused of F.L.N. sympathies. Last month, called to testify at the Paris "barricades" trial, Popie told his friends: "Lagaillarde's lawyers have made him out to be a lily-white, high-minded revolutionary boy scout. I have evidence to show him up for what he is--a torturer and killer operating with immunity and enjoying the protection of certain elements in the French army."

Ear to Ear. His evidence was never given. Two days before he was to leave for Paris, Popie was found dead in his Algiers office: he had been stabbed 14 times, and his throat was slit from ear to ear.

In the old days, this would have been the end of it, for the police files of Algiers are filled with unsolved murders of "liberal" Europeans. But, under De Gaulle, the police no longer look the other way. Detectives carefully checked up on every name listed in Popie's methodical diary. One entry mentioned a paratroop corporal named Claude Peintre. When Peintre was brought in for questioning last week, it was discovered that his fingerprints matched those found in Popie's office after the murder.

Peintre cracked like a dropped mirror, implicating a burly, broken-nosed ex-Foreign Legionnaire as his fellow assassin. They had killed Popie, said Peintre, for $400 each, which had been given them by Paul Agay, 32, an executive of a soap company, who had told them: "That bastard has to be eliminated before he talks." Hauled in by the police, Agay would admit only that he had "received orders from Paris from someone I knew only by his Christian name."

At week's end a police official said: "We are investigating three separate trails. One leads to a right-wing group in Paris, another to a small group of activists in the French army, and the third trail leads straight to Spain." In Spain, Expatriate Pierre Lagaillarde had nothing to say. At long last, his rivalry with Pierre Popie was over.

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