Gorgeous East

by null

  “Correcte, mon general.”

  “Alors?”

  “The Marabouts operate out of unknown bases hidden somewhere in the Gueltas. We would need an entire division to assault those mountains, not to mention—”

  “Pinard, you are an ass!” the general roared. “Another excuse out of your mouth and you’re court-martialed!” Then, calming himself: “Messieurs—has the Deuxième Bureau established the identities of the missing heads?”

  The interrogators exchanged a veiled glance.

  “There is some new information,” the first interrogator offered carefully after a moment.

  The third interrogator, who hadn’t uttered a word in hours of questioning, coughed gently at this—a sound that spoke volumes.

  “Pinard!” General le Breton roared again. “I’ll see you in my office at 08:00 tomorrow. Tu peux disposer!”

  “Je peut disposer à vos ordres, mon general!” Pinard drew himself up and saluted the loudspeaker. Feeling foolish for this, he exited and found Legionnaire Szbeszdogy slumped dismally on the hard bench across the corridor. The Hungarian was reading an ancient issue of Pif Gadget, its childish colors faded and yellow, extracted from the dusty heap of old newspapers and magazines on the floor. Many Legionnaires had lingered there for many years, their fate in the hands of the gestapo; each had added something to this disorderly pile. Sbeszdogy looked up from the cartoon antics of Pif and Hercule with a grimace of pain. The flying metal at the guelb had broken two ribs and badly bruised a lung. Only in the last couple of days had he been able to summon sufficient breath to resume practice on his French horn.

  “How did it go in there?” he said in a low voice.

  “The gestapo loves a scapegoat,” Pinard said. “And you’re next.”

  “I’m ready.” Szbeszdogy nodded. This was false bravado. “Listen, I’ve written something, a piece of music in memory of Caporal Keh. I want you to take a look—”

  He pulled a crumpled sheaf of papers scrawled over with musical notations from somewhere and held it out. Pinard only shook his head and put on his kepi and went out into the rain to have a mournful smoke alone.

  The Hungarian watched him go, thinking, Je suis enculé. He dropped Pif Gadget back onto the pile and picked up another magazine, but with a shudder of disgust flung this one aside.

  It was Képi Blanc, the Legion’s equivalent of Stars and Stripes, full of cheerfully fake news and PR nuggets dreamed up by advertising consultants hired by the top brass. Its chipper articles, copiously illustrated, did not mention the abusive discipline and brutal assaults perpetrated by one comrade upon another; the stealing so bad, every item of value in the noncommissioned barracks had to be kept locked in a safe. It said nothing about the drunkenness and drug abuse and stupidity; nothing about the madness of le cafard, a kind of fatal boredom caused by the isolation of remote posts and the endless repetition of tasks both pointless and painful; nothing about the sheer sketch of it all, about the Legion deployed with antiquated weaponry, undersupplied and outmanned as they were now in Afghanistan, as they’d been in Bosnia and Desert Storm and on every battlefield from Algeria to Tonkin since 1830. And nothing, not a word, about the whores.

  3.

  Soldiers have always gone to whores, there is no keeping them away. Each of the regiments of the Foreign Legion is supplied with its own brothel—which is actually two brothels in one, often housed on the same premises, with some of the whores reserved exclusively for officers and others for enlisted men. The French take an enlightened, scientific approach to venereal matters. Official Legion whores are inspected for STDs twice monthly, given frequent AIDs tests and free medical care and condoms, vacation days and birthday parties, all paid for courtesy of the French Republic.

  The Legion is hidebound by tradition; it is one of the most hidebound armies in the world. The campaign history of each regiment has always dictated the ethnicity of the whores in their regimental brothels: The 2e REP, for example, though based out of Calvi in Corsica, served through Indochina, was mortared to pieces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and prefers Asian girls. There had been in use for the last time in history at that terrible battle one of the Legion’s notorious Bordels Mobiles de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels), staffed by Vietnamese whores who also acted as battlefield nurses during the desperate last days, as the French strongholds fell one by one to the Communists. Afterwards, the unfortunate whores, captured and sent off to re-education camps, denounced their former vocation and joined the people’s struggle against Western imperialist aggression. This denunciation didn’t stick. The official 2e REP pimp, traditionally the regiment’s ranking adjudant-chef, now makes two trips a year at Legion expense to Vietnam, where his patronage is eagerly sought. He recruits there and in Thailand and Cambodia, offers travel expenses and a relocation bonus.

  The DLEM—Détachement de la Légion Étrangère de Mayotte, stationed in remote Dzaudzi in the Comoros—favors Malagasy whores for obvious reasons of convenience. The whores of the 13e DBLE brothel, once located in Djibouti, are all large-breasted black Amazons from the Horn of Africa.

  But the 1e RE, mustered for the conquest of Algeria in 1831, headquartered for a hundred years at Sidi Bel Abbès and now based in Aubagne, is considered the mother regiment of the Legion. The whores of the 1e RE brothel still come from the Kaybile tribe of the Algerian Berbers and are considered by Legionnaires who have much experience in such matters to make the best whores in the world. When stationed at Aubagne, Sous-lieutenant Pinard frequented a Kaybile whore nicknamed La Mogador after the long-ago Algerian battle in which the Legion seized a heavily fortified Moroccan citadel with more than 60 percent casualties, higher than the rate at the notoriously lethal Charge of the Light Brigade. There was always a whore nicknamed La Mogador in the 1e RE brothel, as a kind of ironic comment on that outrageous toll; La Mogador of the 1e RE has become a recurring character, like the temptress Angélique in those trashy books by Serge Golon.

  Kaybile whores have smooth, toffee-colored skin and large, soulful dark eyes and are generally slim, with breasts like plums, and are very flexible. But it is no mere physical attribute that makes them so appreciated. They seem to have the ability, almost magical, to make themselves fall in love with their Legionnaire clients and to make the Legionnaires believe this affection is genuine—if only for an hour at a time. Thus, the paying Legionnaire is able to indulge himself in the fantasy that he is spending his combat pay on a date with a particularly energetic girlfriend, and not for an hour with a whore who will move on to the next man when the clock runs down.

  Reality sometimes reinforces this fragile illusion: every so often, one of the Kaybile whores actually ends up marrying a Legionnaire, for whom she makes—it is said—an excellent wife. Others return to their homes in the Atlas Mountains after twenty years’ hard service. With the money made on their backs in Aubagne they manage to buy olive orchards and farms and innocent young husbands and a high-status position in the affairs of Kaybileland, which has experienced a dramatic shift in values over the course of the last generation or so. The ancient patriarchal traditions of the Kaybiles are wearing away. The tribe has become a matriarchy.

  4.

  Pinard stumbled back to his quarters after the interrogation, dropped to his cot, and lay still for a couple of hours, enveloped in a blank darkness like sleep, but unvisited by dreams. He awoke at dusk, feeling uneasy and anxious, and knew what he needed to calm his nerves and knowing made him disgusted with himself, but there it was, and he put through the necessary phone call and jumped into the shower.

  Stepping out of the mildewed stall a few minutes later, Pinard caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and was momentarily startled by what he saw: Who was this ugly, cruel-looking individual? The unfamiliar face, hawkish and blunt as the face of one of his distant Abenaki ancestors, didn’t look like the face of someone who found joy in the sound of the oboe. The skin of his arms, legs, and torso, slightly olive in tone, was covered with many crude and garish il
lustrations, some done back at the juvenile detention facility in Canada, others by professional tattooists—ridiculous to call them artists—in grimy military towns all over metropolitan France. The barrel-chested physique, toned but stocky, seemed ungainly, out of balance, thick up top, thin at the bottom, and resting on rickety legs bowed like the legs of a sailor too long at sea. The male organ dangled there in its thicket of hair, a dark vicious stump. Pinard turned away with a shudder. He didn’t understand himself completely and didn’t care to. His life had been hard, there wasn’t much more to say than that. He was not by nature given to self-examination, avoided looking in mirrors and had learned to shave himself in the shower by touch alone, for the simple reason he was often, as tonight, startled by the man he saw looking back.

  Now he splashed himself with a cheap Italian cologne called Basta, very popular with Legionnaires, though its odor, supposedly musky, called to mind a natural gas leak, and he took his tenue de sortie out of its dry-cleaning bag and put it on. This was the Legion’s walking-out uniform, differing from tenue de ville in its pale khaki color and absence of shaggy red epaulets, and in the presence of braided lanyard rope encircling the left shoulder. Thus attired, Pinard marched the length of the parade ground to the caserne, humming one of the difficult sections of Albinoni’s Two Oboe Concerti. There he drank two quick glasses of red wine at the bar and went across the hall to the little store, where he impulsively dropped an unnecessarily large portion of his pay on a very small bottle of Chanel No. 5, a pair of hoop earrings strung with onyx beads, and a copy of the latest Paris Match.

  The 1e RE officers’ brothel was located on the rue Montaigne, a side street in a quiet bourgeois neighborhood about four kilometers from base in a large house that had once belonged to the mayor of Aubagne. To make up for his foolish expenditures, Pinard decided to walk out there, bypassing the line of exorbitant taxis waiting at the main gates to take Legionnaires into the dives and clip joints of Marseilles, an hour away. Those few Legionnaires fortunate enough to have steady local girlfriends were now groping in the bushes of a little park up the street, its lamps purposefully broken with well-placed stones.

  The night wind felt cool on Pinard’s face as he walked. A light rain fell. Birds chirped restlessly from nests hidden beneath the boughs, tight against the trunks of the pines. It was the hour of late dinner. Military life is essentially lonely. Walking along the quiet streets of well-kept homes, families gathered inside around their cassoulets, carafes of wine gleaming on well-appointed tables, Pinard felt this loneliness acutely. He quickened his pace to a fast march, trying not to mistake the clusters of seedpods hanging from the branches of the horse chestnuts for severed heads, trying not to see the blast of the sun on the Sahara in the flare of passing headlights, and worrying out the Albioni concerti, whistling loudly now, to keep his mind off such terrible things.

  The brothel’s street wall, topped with razor wire artfully entwined in a tall hedge, concealed a well-kept garden and the wide veranda on which the whores sat on summer nights in transparent dresses sipping Cynar—a bitter-tasting apéritif made from artichokes that was supposed to be an aphrodisiac but wasn’t. In the wide entrance hallway stood an age-darkened pier glass and a hat stand hung with a dozen kepis, both blue and white, the former allowed only to Legionnaires above the rank of caporal-chef. Madame Grasson—the tall, dignified Frenchwoman who looked after the whores—took Pinard’s kepi with a graceful gesture and knelt to unlace his Rangers, which were then exchanged for carpet slippers. He mounted the stairs one step at a time like a man ascending the gallows, to the tiny room where La Mogador waited naked on the bed, reading last week’s Paris Match. (This issue, like so many others, featured a long story on Johnny Hallyday, the aged and inexplicably popular French rocker. On the cover an image of the man at the beach with his latest starlet girlfriend—his absurd bouffant gone gray, his pecs sagging, his skin leathered by too many summers on the Côte d’Azur.)

  “Evariste, mon amour!” La Mogador cried as Pinard came into the room. “Oh, vien t’ens, chéri. Embrasse moi!”

  Pinard couldn’t help smiling at the enthusiastic reception—her act was perfect, artfully done—and she flung herself into his arms and kissed him on the lips, which he didn’t like much, not from a whore, and he gave her the perfume and the earrings and the new Paris Match. She made all the expected enthusiastic noises over these little gifts and seemed genuinely happy to see him, but he knew this was all part of the comedy they were playing. Even their conversation—to pass the awkward minutes as Pinard removed his uniform carefully, folding everything according to regulation over a clothes chair put there for that purpose—seemed like a scene from a play about a whore with a heart of gold.

  “I ached for you here,” she whispered, putting a hand over her heart. “And here, even when I was with the others”—lowering her hand between her thighs—“night after night I dreamed of you!”

  Pinard grunted irritably at this foolishness.

  Then La Mogador moved on to a bit of cheerful regimental gossip about one of the girls, who at last retiring to marry a Legionnaire, had then promptly fallen in love with another man, and been dumped by both and was now destitute, reduced to walking the streets. After this behavior, the brothel, of course, wouldn’t take her back. It was one thing to be a whore, quite another to be a faithless one. And she chattered about the weather, about a recent shopping trip to Aix-en-Provence where she bought an expensive scarf on sale, about her brother in Algeria who had decided to go to trade school to become a diesel truck mechanic—and did Pinard think that was a good idea? Finally she asked about Pinard’s months in Western Sahara.

  “Miserable,” Pinard responded. “Hot as hell. Nothing but sand, ants, and scorpions. Not a place you’d ever want to visit. Here’s hoping I never have to go back.”

  “I suppose it wasn’t much of a party,” La Mogador said, frowning.

  “Right about that.”

  “But you’re a hero! They’ll give you a medal, mon amour!”

  “Not me,” Pinard grunted. “You’re thinking about Caporal Keh. He was the hero. Now he’s dead.”

  “How did he—” But she stopped herself, sensing Pinard didn’t want to explore this painful subject, and she dropped to her knees abruptly and pulled down his briefs. “Well, here’s something to welcome you back, chéri. More fun than a medal.”

  As she went to work, Pinard’s mind wandered.

  He looked around the room, at the bright Algerian scarves strewn on the dresser, the magazines stacked on the cowskin-covered stool, the pot of geraniums on the windowsill. He looked at the framed photographs on the table by the bed: her parents and younger brother a couple of years back on the pilgrimage to Mecca. And—brilliant touch!—a shot of himself she’d taken with her digital camera last year, hastily slipped into the kind of snap-together frame from Prix Unique that could be taken apart quickly, the photograph replaced with another of the next client. Still, La Mogador had really managed to make the place comfortable, like a room in a normal house where she lived with a couple of lusty co-locs. Pinard was not by nature a sentimentalist, but for reasons he couldn’t quite say, at the moment he appreciated the illusion. Then he realized he didn’t remember La Mogador’s real name—was it Zahra or Syeda?—and the illusion vanished.

  A few minutes later she lay back on the bed with her legs in the air and Pinard went at her. He didn’t last long—it had been months; the two or three ragged whores available to UN forces in Dahkla were best avoided—and afterwards they lay side by side in silence, passing a cigarette laced with hashish back and forth. Her beautiful tawny brown skin was unblemished except for a small blue tear tattooed at the corner of her left eye. Her breasts were perfect.

  “You can have me again if you want,” she whispered huskily through the pungent smoke. “You can do it as often as you like tonight”—and she reached for him with a lazy smile, already high—“I’ve made room for you, chéri, canceled all my other appointments.�
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  Pinard looked at her, amazed. Could she really love me? he found himself wondering for a crazy moment, then nearly laughed out loud at the thought.

  “And what would it cost me for such an evening?”

  La Mogador looked away, slightly offended. Then she looked back at him, a rueful smile touching her lips.

  “The money’s already been advanced by General le Breton. He told Madame Grasson you were a hero and wanted us to treat you like one, because . . .” She hesitated—then blurted out the first true thing that evening—“But you’re a damned unlucky bastard, aren’t you, pauvre salot!”

  “What do you mean?” Pinard said.

  Then he saw the look in her eyes and knew immediately. And he felt a chill rippling along his spine that was more than the damp breath of wind from the window cracked open to let a few drops of the rain nourish the geraniums.

  5.

  Did you enjoy yourself last night, Pinard?”

  “Pardon, mon general?” Sous-lieutenant Pinard felt the muscles tightening at the back of his neck.

  “Don’t be an idiot.” General le Breton licked his fleshy lips. “I’m talking about your little Kaybile girl.”

  Pinard wanted to punch the fat bastard of a general in the mouth for this crack, an assault that in former days would have meant an on-the-spot court-martial, immediately followed by a firing squad—from initial blow to completely dead in less than five minutes. Even now, such an act would earn him a three-year sentence to the brutal Legion prison camp at Lac d’Islay in the icy Jura mountains. There the Legion sent the worst of the worst (multiple rapists, murderers, the chronically insubordinate, homicidal maniacs), those dangerous sociopaths who all too often managed to penetrate the ranks.

  Pinard resisted the impulse. “She’s not my little Kaybile girl, sir.” He shrugged. “She’s just another whore.”