Gorgeous East

by null

  Smith clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, and tried to put his finger on something he’d forgotten, something he needed very much to remember. Then he had it: He’d been dreaming, but more than a dream. Rather, a kind of hyper-real, color-saturated memory experienced as one. He’d been having a lot of these lately—the inevitable mental byproducts of his drab captivity.

  In Smith’s dream-memory, an undulating countryside, the smell of a new car. His father’s carefully maintained 1979 Mercury Montego, its seats covered with rich Corinthian leather, this phrase echoing down the years from a popular television commercial of the era.

  And there he was, a kid again, riding in the backseat, his sister Jane swatting at him maliciously with a Wonder Woman pencil. They were headed west on 80, out across the prairies, fields of corn and wheat and sorghum extending in vivid greens to the horizon on either side, the long glittering ribbon of highway ahead. They were on their way to Muscatine to do some shopping. Or to Omaha for their obligatory biannual family visit to Great-aunt Lucy—though his mother’s happy, singing presence in the front seat nestled in the crook of his father’s arm suggested the former. Or maybe they were just out for a Saturday drive across the luxurious blaze of an Iowa spring. Bored, young Smith extracted something from the pocket of his pocket T—a small card printed with stickers—and he began to peel them off and stick them to the Montego’s back window. First a cartoon pirate, his crooked nose and mustache cartoonishly exaggerated. Then a couple of cartoon kids in sailor outfits and a cartoon dog in a sailor shirt. Finally, a funny-looking cartoon man with a bulbous nose wearing a cartoon captain’s hat and a blue naval uniform. Now, from the darkness of his captivity at the far ends of the earth, Smith watched his younger self stick and unstick and restick those cartoon character stickers to the window of his father’s Montego and their names suddenly came back to him: Petey the Sea Dog. Jean La Foote . . .

  “Cap’n Crunch!” he cried aloud, sitting bolt upright in his chains.

  “Non, non,” the colonel muttered from the gloom. “I am Colonel de Noyer.”

  “Not you, Phillipe! Listen, I think . . .”

  But the colonel had already slipped back into his miasma. Smith clanked in his chains impatiently. Those stickers had come out of a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal, the preferred breakfast food of Smith’s youth, purchased by his mother at the Piggly Wiggly on North Grant in Montezuma, nearly thirty years ago. He remembered pulling the stickers out of the bottom of the box against his mother’s specific orders not to extract the prize until the box was done, his small hand covered with guilty yellow cereal crumbs. He remembered munching the cereal later that morning, hunched over a TV tray while watching Land of the Lost in which Marsha, Will, and Holly, whilst on a routine expedition, were swept into an underworld full of slithering bipedal lizards, in much the same way that Smith had now landed himself in his current pickle.

  The box glimpsed on the table of Al Bab’s inner sanctum was definitely the same stuff, a box of mouthwatering Cap’n Crunch!

  Smith grinned to himself, absolutely certain of the identity of that red-and-blue box. Like those other great commercial icons, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, Mrs. Butterworth, and that Quaker Guy from Cream of Wheat, Cap’n Crunch—altered only slightly from a graphic standpoint over the years—abided. Having digested this fact, Smith now asked himself a couple of pertinent questions: Where could this sugary-sweet utterly American breakfast cereal be obtained in the arid waste of the Western Sahara? Surely there wasn’t a Piggly Wiggly located anywhere in a radius of, say, ten thousand miles! And what sort of person would eat such a cereal, even if it could be found?

  Smith’s mouth watered at the thought of his own lost childhood breakfast of Cap’n Crunch, awash in milk, yellow sugary nuggets floating in his Cap’n Crunch bowl (purchased with eight box tops and a postal money order for $2.99), lit by the overhead fluorescent light of the old kitchen back home in their house on Blue Bird Lane in Montezuma, before his sister’s death, before his father’s fatal depression, his mother bustling about in the background always humming a Gershwin tune. But this happy memory called up mysteries that could not be answered. As he drifted back to sleep moments later, the purple flash of heat lightning illuminated the distant peaks of the Galtat Zemmur. Thunder, answering, echoed out across the desert.

  11

  BIRD OF PARADISE

  1.

  A lone flamingo stood asleep, one leg up, at the center of the artificial lagoon in the middle of the abandoned Colline des Oiseaux—the bird sanctuary—in Laayoune, capital of the Moroccan-held portion of the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara. Bright green algae floated on the dark surface. The early morning sky, a peerless blue and free of clouds, burned above with incipient heat. Soon, the heat would descend, making Laayoune’s vast, new concrete plazas—the Place Mechouar, the Place du 27 Fevrier 1967, peopled now with a few hesitant peddlers, the sellers of feathers and dates, the purveyors of used bicycle tires and other nameless scraps—as hot and lifeless as the surface of Mercury.

  The park’s acacia trees and tamarisks and tall, spindly palms rustled in a warm breeze from the South Atlantic visible twenty kilometers off from the tops of the high dunes at the edge of town.

  2.

  E variste Pinard followed the woman along the bare avenue du Colline from a safe distance, perhaps fifty meters back. He’d been promoted to capitaine for the duration of Mission: SCORPIO, the Foreign Legion’s covert operation in Western Sahara, of which he was officer in charge. All the woman had to do was glance over her shoulder and she would see Capitaine Pinard skulking along back there, an eyesore in his tourist’s tropical shirt and too-short yellow shorts: no place to hide, no concealing shade, not a tree, not a bush softening this dry stretch of road. But she seemed hardly aware of her surroundings, wrapped in her thoughts as she was in the improvised hejab thrown casually over her glossy, dark hair, and she did not turn around. Now she crossed the sandy verge to a gap in the fence and simply stepped inside the closed bird sanctuary.

  Pinard hesitated for a long minute. A camel, tied by its bridle into the bed of an old, battered Citroën Mehari parked across the street, eyed him lazily with dark, mysterious eyes. The woman mounted the concrete steps, strewn with sun-withered palm leaves, and disappeared from sight around a bend. Pinard took a deep breath—he’d come too far to turn back now—hurried across the verge, and followed.

  The wire and wood aviaries were mostly empty now, the exotic birds stolen for food or sale to exotic bird smugglers—though a few survivors remained, perched on the highest branches of the artificial trees in their dilapidated enclosures. Coming past the cages along the narrow palm-lined alleys, Pinard saw the bright flash of African green parrots, heard the chirp-chirrup-chirp of Harbert’s Finch, and the bawdy honk of flamingos. A Malian peahen, its gaudy tail feathers extended, swept along an intersecting walkway, stately as a potentate. Pinard stopped to let it pass. The place had the air of an insane asylum following some great disaster: The attendants had fled, leaving the crazies behind to fend for themselves.

  He found the woman a few minutes later by the concrete shores of the artificial lagoon. The lone sleeping flamingo had just been joined by two others and these three stood side by side, resplendently pink, legs up, necks crooked into question marks, already asleep. Pinard thought he probably shouldn’t speak to the woman, but it seemed pointless not to. What, after all, could be more innocuous than a French national, a businessman (his cover story), greeting another French national met by chance in an odd corner of the world?

  “Eh! Bonjour!” he called, coming toward her, withered palm fronds crunching under his feet. “Excuse me for bothering you, but you look French.”

  He stopped a safe distance away and kept his hands in his pockets to show he meant no harm.

  She studied him through large dark glasses that concealed her eyes, reportedly a unique shade of deep indigo blue. He didn’t know for sure, hadn’t b
een this close to her before. She was modestly dressed—a loose-fitting long-sleeved blouse and white capri pants, her improvised hejab actually an expensive Hermès scarf covered with clock faces and sundials—but none of this could hide her wonderful litheness, the curve of her breasts beneath the cotton fabric of the blouse, the deep ivory pallor of her skin. Below the outer epidermal layer, there seemed to be another skin, aglow, luminescent. She was like a movie star incognito or the porcelain figurine of Columbine from the Commedia dell’arte Pinard had once seen in the Collection de Sèvres back in Paris—improbably delicate yet artfully sturdy, perfectly made—though what he’d been doing in such a place, a museum devoted to china figurines, he couldn’t recall now.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Pinard said again. “It’s just that I thought you looked French . . .”

  “Je suis française,” the woman admitted. But she didn’t offer anything more—didn’t seem surprised that here, in the middle of nowhere, a Frenchman had appeared—and turned her attention back to the flamingos in the lagoon.

  “You know this park is closed . . .” Pinard managed after a long awkward moment. “It’s probably not safe to go walking around alone.”

  “Do you work here?” the woman said, the slightest trace of irony in her voice. “You are perhaps an ornithologist?” She spoke in the elegant, refined French they used to call l’accent du seizième, after that posh arrondissement in Paris where all the most exclusive girls’ boarding schools had once been located.

  “Not me.” Pinard shook his head. “I’m a tourist”—then he caught himself—“and a businessman. Actually I’m here for both business and pleasure. Today, I’m doing a little sightseeing.”

  The woman nodded, appearing to accept this explanation, though really, there were no sightseers in Laayoune. No Westerners in the city who did not have an ulterior motive or an NGO. They were attached to UN MINURSO, or Médecins Sans Frontières, or they smuggled contraband—drugs, people, the hides and horns of endangered animals—out of Africa via the lawless Saharoui souk to dealers in China. No one came to see the sights because, despite all the efforts of the Moroccan government and all the new construction during nearly thirty years of occupation, there weren’t any sights to see.

  “I wanted to visit the birds,” the woman said. A full minute had passed since Pinard’s last words. “I was told this was one of the finest bird sanctuaries in Africa.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Pinard said. “In the days of the Spanish.”

  “They said even though the park was closed now, the birds were well cared for”—the woman paused, her lip trembling slightly. “But it’s just not true. These birds are suffering. In times of strife it is the innocents who suffer, especially the animals. No one thinks of them.”

  “I suppose not . . .” Pinard’s voice trailed off.

  Standing this close to her was disconcerting. He felt an unfamiliar squeezing sensation in the vicinity of his heart. Her lips, he found himself thinking, such beautiful lips—and a forbidden image swam up unbidden from the depths of his libido like a dark fish: There she was, kneeling before him splendidly naked, her bare flesh shining in the gloom of a shuttered room, those same lips parting eagerly to take him into her mouth. A sudden dizziness sent his head spinning; he faltered, stumbled back a step or two.

  “Are you all right, monsieur?” the woman asked, alarmed.

  “A touch of malaria,” Pinard lied. “Souvenir of a long history of doing business in Africa.”

  “Maybe you should sit down”—she gestured to a crumbling concrete bench, half concealed beneath the cascading branches of a tamarisk. “Should I get a doctor?”

  “Non, merci,” Pinard said. “I’m fine, look”—and he hopped around on one foot and made a lewd honking noise in imitation of the flamingos, to show he was fine. The woman smiled at this clowning and lifted her dark glasses as if to get a better look at him and Pinard held his breath: Her eyes were indeed a curious shade, halfway between blue and indigo, a unique purple, like the color of the stuff that comes drop by drop from the murex shell, the original purple, the purple of dreams.

  “Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  She turned on the heels of her flats and hurried up the stairs to another long alley bordered by empty and decaying cages and Pinard followed eagerly, and would have followed her anywhere, even into a deadly ambush, even if he knew what was coming. At the far end of the alley stood one of the largest cages still occupied. From the top of the plaster tree in this cage, a bird of paradise, feathers bedraggled, looked down on its disintegrating world with a mournful eye.

  “You see?” the woman said. “That poor animal is clearly depressed.”

  “Well, it’s a bird”—Pinard fumbled for words—“hard to tell . . . the emotional state of a bird . . .”

  “You’re not looking,” the woman said sharply. “Look closely.”

  Pinard looked again at the bird, the bird looked down at him. Its breast feathers glistened ruby red and iridescent green in the morning light, its tail feathers a deep, funereal black. Pinard couldn’t shake the sensation that the bird seemed to know something he didn’t; that this creature purporting to be a bird was also more than a bird. Just then, it seemed to be saying: You and me both, brother! But Pinard pushed this thought aside as ridiculous.

  “You see? Its wings have been clipped!” the woman said, outraged. “It can’t fly away. And if it could, where would it go? Here we are so far from its natural habitat.”

  “Thankfully, someone’s still feeding it.” Pinard pointed to a bowl of water and a pile of birdseed mounded on the dirty concrete floor of the cage.

  “Ah . . .”

  Now Pinard screwed his courage to the screwing place that was somewhere to the left of his stomach and turned to face her.

  “You don’t know me,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm, reasonable. “My name is Edouard Deschafeaux”—this, the absurd pseudonym bestowed on him by the Legion for the purposes of the mission. He put out his hand awkwardly; the woman shook it, with a kind of mock-solemnity—“I’m in Laayoune on business for a few weeks, perhaps a month—”

  “I thought you said business and pleasure?” she interrupted.

  “Exactly,” Pinard said, beginning to sweat. “Which is why I was wondering if I might offer you a cup of coffee this morning? Maybe some breakfast?” His ears felt very tight against the side of his head, his heart beating wildly. He felt as if he had just accomplished one of the most courageous acts of his life so far, as much of an act of courage as attacking that Marabout column in the desert two months ago.

  The woman laughed, a muted ringing sound, like a sterling-silver plate being dropped into clear water.

  “Merci, non,” she said. “I don’t drink coffee, it stains the teeth. And I’ve already eaten. Another time, perhaps.” She adjusted the Hermès scarf over her glossy hair and mounted the steps.

  “Will I see you again?” Pinard called after her stupidly.

  “Paris c’est tout petit pour ceux qui s’aime,” she said and was gone.

  Pinard didn’t recognize this curious statement as a line from a classic French film, and stood there for a while clutching the wire mesh of the bird of paradise’s cage, trying to puzzle out its exact meaning. He finally decided it was some sort of joke on her part, and the joke was on him. This shouldn’t have happened, he thought regretfully. Why had he made contact with her in such a foolishly personal way? But he didn’t stick around long enough to tell himself the answer and hurried out through the closed park, a cloud of regret and worry hovering over his head. And there was something else, something he couldn’t yet put a name to, that had just started to knock around in the bottom of his heart. He paused, gasping suddenly for air like a drowning man; yes, perhaps he was drowning! As he dragged himself past the few still-tenanted aviaries, the birds inside seemed to recognize this condition. They flapped their mutilated wings and fluttered helplessly to the
roofs of their cages, which, though made of rusty wire mesh and sun-rotted wood, to them was the sky.

  3.

  Capitaine Pinard and Legionnaire P.C. Szbeszdogy, dressed for a business meeting in cheap, ill-fitting Legion-provided suits, briefcases in hand, climbed the wide, modern streets of the Oued Bou district, late for their nine fifteen meeting with the minister.

  “What am I supposed to say?” Szbeszdogy complained, panting. Sweat made dark patches on the coarse fabric of his suit jacket. “I know nothing about business.”

  “Neither do I,” Pinard said glumly.

  “At least you’ve been briefed.”

  “Oh, yes. A couple of hours’ worth. Now I’m a businessman.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” the Hungarian persisted.

  “Say nothing,” Pinard snapped. “Just keep your mouth shut. Start now.”

  They hurried on, racing against the heat and slowed by it. Below lay the new Moroccan hospital, the red-and-green standard of the Moroccan king flying from its squat tower. Farther off, the medina, the new soccer stadium, all white and pink, and the new highrise government offices under construction along the rue el-Jazouli.

  Down there also, like a mud-colored stain on the white city, lay the Saharoui souk—a crammed medieval ghetto surrounded by barbed wire trenches and machine gun towers and watched over by surveillance cameras and at night by the high-intensity spotlights of the Moroccan army. During daylight hours, the two official gates into the souk—the Gate of Dawn and the Gate of Dusk—remained open, though closely guarded by Moroccan troops. These gates closed at sunset with the beginning of curfew, and entry into the souk, officially forbidden, became an adventure: Some said there were tunnels, others secret doors open only for those who knew the password and where to find them, like those magical portals in fairy tales leading to underground realms. True, many people came and went freely after dark, all with illicit business in hand, but this nocturnal access wasn’t without its perils. The undertaking, advertised by Laayoune’s criminal class as routine, nonetheless each year claimed the lives of a few unfortunates making the trip.