by null
Smith, curled into a tight fetal ball, shivered violently in his sleep just before dawn. The colonel hung motionless, chained to a ring on the other side—he was awake, of course, he was always awake. He watched silently as the girl crept in from the outer dark, clutching a pointed object in her hand. He couldn’t raise his voice, couldn’t bring any words out of the fog. She squatted down and poked at Smith’s bare ass cheek with the object—a sharp, thorny stick.
“Ow!” Smith jerked upright, chains clanking, joints frozen, blinking sleep out of his eyes. “It’s you,” he mumbled in English. “What the fuck do you want?”
The girl shrugged, not understanding. She didn’t speak English or French or Spanish. They’d always communicated in a hash of rudimentary sign language and pidgin Hassaniya. She went veiled, like everyone else in the village, male and female, old and young (the Marabouts had taken Islamic notions of modesty to their furthest extreme), and it was impossible to know what she was thinking, or her age, exactly. Maybe twelve or thirteen, maybe twenty. She widened her dark eyes and made a gesture—palm under chin, fingers fluttering: sing.
“Too early!” Smith waved her off. “Still night out there!”
She wanted a private serenade. She came in every couple of days, bringing scavenged food; the week before a minuscule, if genuine, morsel of roast goat. Smith sang to her sweetly sotto voce for an hour to pay for that excellent meal.
The girl poked him again with the pointy stick. Sing!
“You want me to sing?” Smith said angrily. “Breakfast first!” He pointed to his mouth.
I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. The girl managed to convey this notion in a complicated charade.
“No food, no sing!” Smith huffed. “I’m a professional. A biscuit or my mouth stays closed!”
And he pressed his lips together and would not open them no matter how much the girl poked. At last she scuttled out, waving her stick, making it clear that he was a diva, infidel trash, who ought to be tortured and skinned alive—or words to that effect.
“Mon pauvre Milquetoast,” Phillipe croaked when the girl was gone, his voice sounding dry and cracked and a thousand years old. “You are a performing seal. You sing for a herring. Exactly like a seal I saw once at the Cirque Medrano, in Paris when I was a kid. That seal could balance a ball on the end of his nose. Can you do such a thing?”
“Go to hell, Phillipe,” Smith said. But the injunction wasn’t necessary. The colonel was already there.
2.
You can learn a lot about someone naked and chained and forced to live at very close quarters, in this case a ragged enclosure of stone and dirt, no more than ten-by-ten, located in a secret Marabout village dug into the side of an unknown mountain. And Smith had learned that Phillipe de Noyer was absolutely crazy and getting crazier every day.
The man never slept, never closed his eyes for more than a blink. This chronic insomnia might be a product of his craziness or the craziness caused by his lack of sleep, Smith couldn’t say which. Certainly, the harsh conditions of captivity had made things worse. Phillipe now carried on loud, crazy arguments with the shadows or whispered words of unbearable intimacy to his absent wife, Louise. Or raved incoherently, often repeating the phrase armée, tête d’armée over and over again. And he hummed endlessly and off key, various things by Satie, chiefly Mémoires d’un amnésique, but also the notorious Musique d’ameublement, an irritating and atonal fragment composed by the maestro to be played exactly when people weren’t listening. These manic phases were inevitably followed by an abrupt collapse. After hours of whispering and arguing and humming, Phillipe’s eyes rolled back in his head and his head wobbled weirdly from side to side and he fell into a silence so deep it lasted for days; mental implosions, perhaps neurological in nature, and terrible to witness. For Smith it was like watching a proud old building, already half destroyed by fire, slowly fold in on itself.
But crazy or not, Phillipe had a point. Smith was a kind of performing seal. His career-topping performance during the last moments of the siege of Block house 9 had saved their lives: Marabout fighters closing in that disastrous afternoon stopped short of the kill and lowered their rifles at the opening lines of Berlin’s “Let’s face the Music and Dance.” They settled themselves comfortably in the dirt and listened to Smith sing number after number for nearly two hours, like cobras mesmerized before the snake charmer’s pipes. When Smith stopped singing at last from sheer exhaustion, he and Phillipe were seized, stripped, blindfolded, bound with heavy chains, and hustled into the Gueltas to await an unknown fate. Smith attributed this surprising stay of execution to his theatrical training, but there was more to it: It could be said they owed their lives to Broadway itself, to the fabulous, receding echo of all those fabulous shows, all those gone good times. To the great American songbook, to Cole Porter and George Gershwin, to Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Harburg and Lane. To Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, and Jerome Kern. To every romantic melody ever played as men and women swayed into each other on the worn parquet of bygone ballrooms, comfortably drunk on bourbon old-fashioneds and the possibility of love.
Now, in captivity, Smith was forced to sing Broadway standards for the assembled population once or twice a day. He stood on a granite slab halfway up the slope where the acoustics were good, his clear tenor ringing out across the stony chasms, echoing against the steep sides of surrounding cliffs. But scratch a savage, find a critic: Marabout villagers had too quickly developed the sophisticated tastes of jaded New York theatergoers. They would jeer, throw stones, and withhold food if they didn’t like a particular number—or if Smith’s performance lacked duende—and they were getting increasingly hard to please.
Trial and error and a relentless performance schedule had given Smith the measure of his audience: Cole Porter and George Gershwin had always been his favorites—he used to perform a medley of both, a kind of musical point-counterpoint, popular during his stint at a Brooklyn piano bar back when he and Jessica lived in Park Slope. But there didn’t seem to be enough room for Porter and Gershwin side by side in the Marabout’s insurgent hearts. They preferred Gershwin’s more strident style; they also liked Irving Berlin. Cole Porter’s witty melodies drew only a lukewarm response and they were left cold by Harold Arlen—this a blow to Smith, who preferred the elegant Arlen to Porter and even Berlin. Fortunately, contemporary musicals, which Smith generally detested, held no appeal for the Marabouts. Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber—Cats, Phantom, and Les Misérables, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, Rent—were quickly weeded from his mountainside repertoire.
Smith found he drew his most favorable response from the big, brassy Broadway scores of the forties and fifties, though here again the Marabout villagers expressed definite preferences: They liked Pal Joey, The Pajama Game, Finian’s Rainbow, and Brigadoon; didn’t like Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel, Oklahoma!, or Hello, Dolly! Fiddler on the Roof drove them to rage and throwing stones. Smith chalked this violent reaction up to the Jewish-Muslim divide, rather than any problem with the score. They were crazy about Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and Adler and Ross’s Damn Yankees and went gaga over Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, which worked well for Smith because he also loved Guys and Dolls, thought that it might be the greatest piece of musical theater of all time, and once had a great run as Skye Masterson at the Center Stage of Central Florida in Orlando.
From that show, the villagers preferred “Luck Be a Lady”—Smith’s personal favorite—“Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat!” and the eponymous number, always a showstopper. After singing these three tunes back to back with particular duende before lunch one day, the villagers threw bits of warm bread and chunks of fresh sheep’s cheese, which Smith immediately gobbled down. He considered this impromptu bread and cheese feast one of the great artistic triumphs of his career, second only to his LORT A run in My Fair Lady at the Guthrie—though that now seemed like an episode from the life of another Smith
in a different lifetime, in Minneapolis, in the snow, on the other side of the world.
3.
The girl returned the next morning bearing a small water gourd filled with coffee and a ragged scrap of flat bread that had been dipped in last night’s grease. Smith ate half the bread, drank half the coffee and offered the colonel the rest—but sunk into one of his eyes-wide-open catatonic states, Phillipe couldn’t be roused, even by food and drink. Then, Smith cleared his throat and sang a favorite from Brigadoon in a quiet falsetto. He sang directly to the girl, as tenderly as he could make it. As if he loved her, as if his heart were breaking under the burden of his love for her. The girl’s dark eyes shone in exaltation as she squatted there, watching him, listening.
“Can’t we two go walking together out beyond the valley of trees . . .”
Next he sang a couple of numbers from Finian’s Rainbow and finished with “My Funny Valentine” from Pal Joey.
Recital over, Smith dropped chin to chest, a mock-thespian bow. “I thank you,” he murmured to the imagined applause. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart. . . .”
The girl squatted back on her heels and studied him for a long time, eyes unreadable. Smith felt self-conscious beneath this scrutiny, more pointed than her poking stick. It might be possible for someone who has gone around naked all their lives to grow accustomed to wearing clothes, but the reverse did not hold true. No matter how hard he tried to forget his nakedness, he couldn’t. He’d been swaddled within moments of birth, habitually wore pajamas, and except for brief periods in the shower or in bed with a woman, had remained clothed ever since.
At last, the girl put a finger over her lips to indicate secrecy and glanced over her shoulder to make sure no spies were lurking along the path outside.
“I have news,” she whispered in passable French. “Al Bab is coming and you will soon be judged. They must not hear me tell you such a thing. They will feed me to the horrible bees if they hear.”
Smith gaped at her. She could speak French! Then he felt a coldness in his gut that was more than just dismay over her weeks of dissimulation. The Man himself! Mystical Imam of the Marabouts! Their Jesus, their Buddha, their Joseph Smith!
“Al Bab, lui-même?”
“Oui, il vient.” The girl nodded. “Demain soir.”
“You speak French well. Why did you trick me?”
“Al Bab forbids us to speak French. He allows us only to speak Hassaniya, which he says is a holy language, the language of the prophet, peace be upon him. But the kind nurses from Médecins Sans Frontières taught me French at the camp at Tindouf, which is in Algeria. Remember, many people speak French in Algeria.”
“Are we in Algeria now?”
The girl shook her head. “We are in the mountains of the Galtat Zemmur. It is not Morocco, it is not Algeria. It is the land of the Saharoui Berbers.”
“You mean Western Sahara. The SADR?”
“Call it what you want, je m’en fiche! I hate it here. I wish to go somewhere else, entirely. To Milan perhaps.”
“Milan, Italy?”
The girl nodded. “The women in Milan wear beautiful clothes and are very happy without so many terrible bees. I have carefully hidden a magazine of fashion from Milan given to me by one of the kind nurses at Tindouf. There are pictures of many beautiful women with many beautiful clothes. Do you know such a magazine?”
“Yes.” Smith grinned. “But I don’t subscribe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
“It is a fine magazine.”
“Yes.”
“The beautiful women in the magazine go with their face uncovered,” she continued. “Here that would mean death by so many stones, here—”
“Do you know what’s going to happen to us?” Smith interrupted.
“Al Bab will decide.” The girl shrugged. “You will live or you will die. Like everyone.”
Smith sighed. Even the kids up here were existentialists.
Then the girl did something astonishing: She untied her veil, a coarse piece of black cloth, and let it hang loose to one side of her face; the intimacy of this act was enough to get them both killed. She was older than he had guessed, maybe eighteen or nineteen. She had a thin, sharp face—high cheekbones, narrow chin marked with tribal tattoos. Parallel blue lines ran down from the bottom of her lower lip to the bottom of her chin, and a blue tear that wasn’t a tear but the bee hieroglyph of the Marabouts was tattooed on her cheek an inch below her left eye.
Smith hadn’t seen an uncovered female face in months and suddenly found her outrageously beautiful and felt an embarrassing little jolt that he tried to conceal, pressing his thighs together and tucking his male member between them as best he could.
“My name is Alia,” the girl whispered. “And I will pray to God Al Bab doesn’t kill you. You sing too well to lose your head. And your hair is the color of the sun.” She reached up and ran her fingers through the matted blond pelt atop Smith’s head, now more than recovered from its last Legion boule à zéro. “They say Al Bab is a prophet, that he is the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, or perhaps even the Hidden Imam Himself. But I do not think any of this is true. I think he is a violent, dishonest man and not who he says he is . . .” She paused. “Am I pretty?”
“You are,” Smith said.
“Like the women in Milan?”
“Exactly like them,” Smith said.
Alia nodded, solemnly. Then she removed her fingers from Smith’s hair, refixed her veil, and went out into the growing brightness.
4.
A religious procession climbed the zigzag trail up the ravine from the desert at noon. First came the hooded mullahs bearing blue flags emblazoned with the bee hieroglyph, a dozen of them mounted on camels richly caparisoned in studded leather, saddle bells tinkling, the animals braying loudly from time to time, lifting long ropy necks to the sky. In single file behind them trotted twenty or so undernourished young men, new disciples recruited in the Tindouf refugee camps, their dark eyes hollow from days of fasting. A thick haze steamed off the inaccessible massif of the Galtat Zemmur, it’s highest pinnacle awash in a thick bank of clouds. The procession, emerging from this haze as if out of the mists of history, possessed a grave medieval splendor: camels braying, starving penitents, the blue robes of the holy men, the bold flags snapping in the wind.
Marabout villagers lined the route, watching the procession rise toward the giant hive on the plateau. Smith found a place at the back of the crowd, slouching as insolently as he possibly could while naked and shivering and in chains, which wasn’t very insolently at all. Phillipe squatted on the ground, digging with broken fingernails in the dead, crumbly soil. He’d been wrapped in his fog all morning, ambling along, pale eyes fixed on the ground, looking for a grub to eat, for a worm, an overlooked root, a wild onion, anything. The two captives were allowed to wander the village during the day, pitiful figures, reduced to the level of animals; dogs clad only in their own skins, squatting to take doggie craps—a single dry turd—on the stony ground. Their nakedness, the chains they wore, and the complete isolation of the place rendered escape impossible.
The disciples reached the plateau and the crowd surged up after them. Smith helped the doddering Phillipe to his feet.
“Allons-y, mon colonel,” he said gently. “We don’t want to miss the fun. The bastards are at it again.”
He drew Phillipe along, past the lean-tos and shanties made from rough mountain stone and UN pressboard and blue UN tarps, until they stood with everyone else in the presence of the hive, which emitted a loud, electric humming. This monstrous construction, set against the western escarpment on a level pan of limestone, resembled an oversized pizza oven or a giant breast. Its rough surface of hard-packed earth glittered with many thousands of bees. A man-sized opening at ground level led to the humid recesses of the interior. A thick, sticky substance oozed across the threshold.
“I saw one of those six years ago at the Aw
sard camp,” Phillipe said, suddenly himself again. “I was the first from the outside to see such a thing. Except for poor old Milhauz, of course.”
“C’est bien vous, mon colonel?” Smith said, surprised—though he shouldn’t be: Episodes of complete sanity came over the man without warning, sweeping down from Phillipe’s upper brain across the burning prairies of his medulla oblongata like a fast-moving thunderstorm. It was as if he merely resumed aloud a conversation already in progress in some drafty corner of his mind.
“Are you going mad, Milquetoast?” Phillipe frowned at him. “Who else would it be?”
“No one, sir.”
“I was talking about the bees. They’re an East African species, native to the scrub country of southern Sudan. Very aggressive with a very painful sting, great builders of dirt hives, as you see there. They’re scavengers, they feed off merde and carrion like flies, and produce no honey at all, only that red waxy stuff, which isn’t really a wax and has no value to industry. The Marabouts have a Web site, you know. We traced it to a server in Morocco that later disappeared without a trace.”
“Everyone’s got a Web site,” Smith said glumly.
“The content was very informative. Their spiritual leader, the archimposter who calls himself Al Bab, lays out the Marabout agenda quite candidly and there are excellent graphics and links to related sites. His plans for conquest extend far beyond the borders of Western Sahara. Like all dangerous fanatics, he seeks to re-create the world in his own image by plunging it into an ocean of blood. Laughable perhaps—but expressed with religious fervor and absolute conviction, half Mein Kampf, half Koran. Did you know the bee hieroglyph has been found scribbled on walls in Paris, in London? Mark my words, Milquetoast, soon they will invade Manhattan!”
