Gorgeous East

by null

  The Legion had been Pinard’s family for more than fifteen years now. He’d been more or less content with military life until—the thought astonished him!—last week. Until meeting Louise de Noyer at the Colline des Oiseaux. And Pinard felt the peculiar squeezing in his heart again and he knew now without a doubt that he was no longer unhappy in the way he had been unhappy before; this new unhappiness lighter, leavened by longing but more painful. He was in love. Suddenly he was sick of military life, sick of the Legion. A family? No, a collection of foulmouthed brutes, drunkards, drug addicts, fools, sadists, murderers. Pinard felt himself choking, short of breath as he’d been at the Colline the other day. Stop! This was not possible! And yet the thought that he loved Louise de Noyer filled him with warmth, filled the dusty equatorial twilight of his soul with new light and hope—though hope was the devil to a Legionnaire, who learns to abandon it during the first weeks of basic training.

  Agleam, suffering, Pinard turned away from the window, from the darkened souk and all the potential complications below, and lay down on his hard bunk in the gloom, his solitary universe expanded to include one other person.

  12

  PINARD IN LOVE

  1.

  Pinard took a taxi out to the dingy little beach called Rass Malek, which lies about halfway down from Cap Juby along the Playa Laayoune. The ocean rolled against the shore, subdued today, a calm, tepid pond. Frothy yellow scum and fish heads floated in the surf, refuse from the vast commercial factory fishing ships, great black, blocky things riding the horizon. Closer at hand, on a desolate island in the bay, a castle built by a Scotsman two hundred years ago crumbled into the dirty water. The Scotsman had come down from Aberdeen to trade in slaves and ivory—the wealth of Africa for scissors and hand mirrors and wooly bolts of tartan fabric—and died there of a fever, missing the simple cottage of his youth in Scotland and regretting everything: his cupidity, his murderous adventures at an end.

  Pinard picked his way through the dunes, lizards scuttling out of his way in the sand, and walked along the beach for ten minutes. He was barefoot, wearing a faded T-shirt and a pair of fatigue shorts, one of the threadbare bath towels from the hotel tossed over his shoulder, a half-drunk bottle of mineral water in his hand. Two Saharoui men, their striped djellahs flapping in a sudden breeze, stood down the beach arguing about something and gesturing angrily at the ocean. The sound of their voices carried, but not their words. Pinard was immediately suspicious of their presence all the way out here. The beaches along the Playa, even the best ones, were never visited by Saharouis from the city. Then he saw her, lying on a thick, colorful blanket reading a magazine, not far from the old Spanish bathing cabanas, half sunk in sand. She wore a stunning white bikini, her fashionable wrap tossed to one side, and might have been on the beach at Cannes or Cap d’Antibes, except in those places she would be topless. As a concession to Islam the white bikini top hugged her perfect breasts. She looked up at Pinard through her big black sunglasses as he approached.

  “We meet again,” Pinard said and immediately felt stupid for having said it.

  “Yes, here you are,” Louise said—the same enviable calm, the lack of fear or surprise she had shown that day at the Colline des Oiseaux.

  “Would you mind if”—Pinard hesitated—“that is, may I join you? It’s a bit lonely on this beach.”

  “You need to be content in yourself,” Louise said, a faint smile on her lips. “Otherwise you will go crazy in a place like Laayoune.”

  “Usually I’m very busy with my business,” Pinard said. “Only today . . .” He stood there, waiting.

  At last, Louise offered a kind of regal sweep of the arm as if to say she owned the beach and was letting him have a little square of it, but only temporarily. Pinard carefully laid out his thin towel beside her blanket, not too close, and threw himself down. He didn’t take off his T-shirt, suddenly embarrassed by the variety of tattoos—prison, Legion, and otherwise—decorating his torso.

  Louise didn’t say anything, continuing to turn the pages of her magazine, an out-of-date Paris Match with Johnny Hallyday on the cover, as usual. Then she closed it firmly and looked up at him.

  “You’re going to sit there in your T-shirt? You’ll get an ugly tan that way.”

  “Oh, yes.” Pinard slowly rolled his T-shirt up and over his head, revealing the tattoos and ropy muscles like a proscenium curtain rising for the show.

  “Very interesting decorations,” Lousie said. “How did you get so many?”

  “Oh, you know”—Pinard shrugged—“over the years . . .” His voice trailed into silence.

  “So you’re lonely in Laayoune?” Louise said, watching him carefully.

  Pinard slid his eyes in her direction, trying not to see the way her hip bone jutted out so sharply; how her pelvis sloped neatly to its ultimate destination somewhere in the depths of her white bikini bottom.

  “Not really,” Pinard managed. His throat felt dry. “I’m normally very busy. I’m here with a marketing team.” He felt ridiculous saying this. “I work for Club Med, you know.”

  “You don’t seem like the Club Med type to me.”

  “There’s a type?”

  “Of course. There’s a type for everything—” Then, interrupting herself: “Where did you get that one?” She pointed to the crude, fading tattoo decorating Pinard’s left pectoral, approximating the location of his heart. It showed a skull with an exploding artillery shell clamped in its jaws like one of General le Breton’s Venezuelan cigars; beneath this, the motto: Honneur et fidélité—valeur et discipline. Honor, Loyalty, Courage, Discipline. He’d gotten that one his first year in the Legion.

  “I did my national service in the Armée de Terre,” Pinard lied. “One night, we were in Toulouse, we got drunk and”—he shrugged—“I woke up with this.”

  “Why not a naked woman?”

  Pinard shrugged. There were, in fact, no naked women on his flesh. Knives, skulls, bombs, one winged devil, but no naked women.

  “You’re blind drunk enough to disfigure yourself and not remember in the morning, and yet in the tattoo parlor, you come up with the four cardinal military virtues?” she said, frowning. “Drôle de type. Perhaps your subconscious mind runs to fascism.”

  “It’s just a tattoo,” Pinard said, a little hurt.

  “Of course,” Louise said. “That explains everything.”

  Pinard looked over and saw she was teasing him. He blushed, embarrassed. The two Arabs who had been arguing had stopped arguing and now stood staring at them from some distance off.

  “So you’re really going to build a Club Med?” Louise said. “Here on the Playa Laayoune?”

  “Actually right out there,” Pinard said, gesturing to the Scotsman’s castle out in the bay, its broken turrets silhouetted against the sky. He was inventing freely now. “We’re going to rehabilitate that place, have speedboats, water taxis going back and forth. A restaurant right here on the beach. A casino. It’s really going to be spectacular.”

  Louise de Noyer laughed. “Mais c’est ridicule!” she said. “That horrible ruin looks like the Château d’If!”

  “I don’t know that place.”

  “From The Count of Monte Cristo.”

  “ Ah, oui! Bien sûr . . .” But Pinard had never read that famous book, had in fact never heard of it, and didn’t know what she was talking about. Now Louise raised her dark glasses to her hair, and Pinard was confronted for the second time with her indigo-blue eyes. Looking into them, he felt himself crumbling like the walls of Block house 9 under rocket fire.

  “You’re not fooling anyone,” Louise de Noyer said, her voice low and serious. “You’re clearly not a businessman. Any more than I’m a tourist.”

  “All right,” Pinard said, sweating. “I’m not a businessman. But what are you doing here?”

  “You answer first,” Louise said.

  Pinard’s mind raced for an answer that would not be the truth but would have enough of the flavor of tru
th to keep her interested, and he remembered the minister’s suspicions and knew what he was going to say.

  “This is my secret,” he said, looking out to sea. “You can’t tell anyone. You must swear. If you do, I can’t answer for the consequences.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Louise said, sounding utterly sincere. “I swear. Go ahead.”

  “My friends and I”—he paused dramatically—“we stole some money. In France.”

  “Ooh la-la!” Louise said, impressed. “Fascinating!”

  “We’re hiding out here in Laayoune while it’s being laundered, converted into usable currency.”

  “So you’re a criminal!”

  “I’m a kind of engineer, actually,” Pinard said. “I dug the hole into the vault. It was a very delicate operation. The process took two months.”

  “C’est du Rififi, ça!”

  Pinard didn’t catch this reference to a well-known French heist film. Cultural references generally escaped him, the end result of a life spent engrossed in military matters.

  “How much did you get?”

  “Enough to make it worthwhile, believe me,” Pinard said, beginning to enjoy this.

  “What will you do with your share?”

  “I’ll go to Brazil,” he said, thinking of Solas.

  “Why Brazil?”

  “The women, of course.” And he flashed what he hoped might be a roguish smile.

  “So, how was it robbing a bank?”

  “It wasn’t exactly a bank.”

  “What was it then?” She was like a schoolgirl, eager to know.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Was it in the newspapers?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And no. Or at least not in a form you would recognize. It was in the newspapers, but only as a kind of unusual anxiety in world markets noted on the business pages. In weather reports of an unquiet wind blowing down the streets of the financial capitals.”

  “You’re a poet, my new friend.”

  Pinard shrugged. “I’ve been called worse things.”

  “Actually, I salute you for your criminal activities. How much difference is there between a bank robber and a revolutionary? Both are dedicated to a redistribution of wealth, both—”

  “Yes, the wealth has been redistributed,” Pinard interrupted, grinning. “To my own pockets.”

  Just then, the two Arabs down the beach began to stride toward them as if they had made up their minds about something, and the necessity for immediate action had impressed itself upon them. Pinard didn’t like the look of this and rose suddenly off his thin towel and reached into the pocket of his shorts and put his hand on the pearl-handled stiletto he always carried, its ebony haft engraved with the Legion’s seven-pointed bomb. He stood there for a long moment, hand on stiletto, watching them coming along. When they got close enough to see his face, they stopped abruptly, turned around, and went back the way they had come.

  “Who are they?” Louise asked.

  “Who knows,” he said. “Interpol, maybe.”

  “For your sake, I hope not.” Then she handed up a bottle of expensive tanning lotion. “I want a little color,” she said. “But I don’t want to burn. Could you please do my back?”

  Pinard took the bottle and squatted on the colorful blanket behind her, and she rolled over and reached around and undid the straps of her bikini top; as they fell to each side, he saw the bare white curve of her breasts and his heart stopped. Trembling, he squeezed the bottle and squirted out a white, slightly transparent puddle into the palm of his hand and the perverse thought struck him that he had never seen anything that more closely resembled ejaculate. And slowly, with the utmost delicacy, he began to work the fragrant stuff into the soft, bare flesh between her shoulder blades.

  2.

  The next ten days were the happiest of Capitaine Evariste Pinard’s life thus far. He couldn’t remember a better time. He was happy and happiness to him, who had never felt it, was like being drunk, but without the unpleasant disorientation of drunkenness and without the hangover in the morning.

  He sent the 4e RE assassins under Szbeszdogy’s command on secret desert maneuvers in the sandy wastes beyond Laayoune and remained alone in the city. He saw Louise nearly every day. They didn’t touch each other, they didn’t kiss more than on the cheek as a greeting, they didn’t make love—but they both knew it was coming, somehow, and the waiting made the prospect that much more enticing. They ate together every night, sat in the bar at the Palais-Maroc eating pistachio nuts and drinking an Algerian wine that wasn’t so bad, and talking about their lives.

  Pinard made up a few absurd stories about the criminal enterprises he supposedly pursued, but mostly he listened to Louise talk about herself. Like most beautiful women, she had been indulged throughout her life and thought anything she had to say inherently interesting, and now Pinard indulged her, and experienced great pleasure doing so.

  She was definitely left-leaning in her politics, though not as radical as her dossier suggested, no more left-leaning than the average young French woman. She supported the Palestinian Intifada, the end of genocide in Darfur, the liberation of Tibet from China’s iron grip, animal rights, sustainable energy, the right of homosexuals to marry, the eradication of AIDS, the activities of Greenpeace, and stood in solidarity with those ski-masked and dreadlocked young hooligans, the Black Block Anarchists, who disrupted meetings of the G-8 with their agitprop shenanigans, rock-throwing and bus-burning. She knew the singer Vanessa Paradis pretty well—they’d been on a housing rights committee in Paris together. She was well read and musical—Robbe-Grillet, Proust, and Bulgakov were her favorite writers; Camille Saint-Saëns and Erik Satie her favorite composers, though she also liked American hip-hop, Cap Verdean jazz, and Bob Marley. She adored the films of Max Ophuls, Jean-Pierre Melville, Godard, and—despite his archaic patriarchist attitudes—the Westerns of John Ford, so beautifully made they were hard to resist.

  For his part, Pinard let all these cultural references wash over him like a wave. He didn’t catch any of it, except for hip-hop and Bob Marley.

  She did not mention her missing husband, Colonel Phillipe de Noyer, officer in command of the 1e RE Musique Principale of the Foreign Legion—a conservative militaire, an aristocrat twenty years older than herself—as far from someone Pinard would match her with as anyone he could imagine. She said nothing about marrying the man at twenty-four, or about the pampered kind of life she’d led at his remote château in Brittany and in Paris, nothing about their years of marriage. She didn’t wear a wedding ring. And it appeared, from the absence of a telltale band of white skin around her ring finger, that she had never worn one.

  Instead, she talked about her famous half sister, Alphonsine Vilhardouin, the actress—they’d become close only recently. And she talked about her father, the immortal Hector. She’d barely known the man, had only seen him a dozen times in her life, her mother being one of his lesser mistresses—though he had supplied enough money every year for twenty years to send her to an excellent boarding school in Switzerland and then on to a university in the United States.

  Pinard was surprised by this last disclosure. He couldn’t imagine Louise in the United States—the anti-Canada, a loud place full of hamburger-eating fat people who cared only for brutally boring sports and Jesus.

  “L’Amérique, alors, comment s’était?” How was it?

  “A fascinating experience,” Louise said. “I went to a small college in the South called Washington and Lee, which was once only for men. Don’t ask me why I went there, I’m not so sure myself anymore. It’s in the mountains of the state of Virginia, very beautiful, very green and lush, and very different from Europe. Racist and conservative, to be sure, but no more so than the Faubourg St.-Honoré”—referring to a posh street in the posh First Arrondissement of Paris. “Actually, I like the Americans of the South, they say what they think and they are not as stupid as one might think, and the men are quite attractive in a louche
, après-guerre kind of way. But they drink a lot, very heavy stuff, bourbon and whiskey, and are often absurdly drunk, so drunk they vomit and piss themselves.”

  “Myself, I’m a Canadian,” Pinard admitted. “We’re not immune to the pleasures of heavy drinking.”

  It was her turn to be surprised.

  “I thought you were French.”

  “I am—well, Quebecois.”

  “You don’t have that horrible accent.”

  Pinard shrugged. “I’ve spent the last seventeen years in France.”

  “Robbing banks.”

  “Not always,” he said. “I used to sell drugs. But I got out of that.”

  “How many banks have you robbed?” She snuggled up to him, her voice low. “You can tell me everything.”

  “No, I can’t. You’ll be compromised.”

  “Compromise me.”

  “But you haven’t even told me what you’re doing here! In this miserable asshole of the world!”

  Louise looked away. “I don’t know you well enough,” she said. “What if you’re a government spy?”

  “What if you’re a government spy?” Pinard said, and they both laughed at the thought.

  Then, Louise took a sip of her wine and her mood grew serious. She looked away, looked back, her beautiful indigo eyes narrowing, and made a quick decision: “I’m waiting for something,” she confided, her voice a whisper. “Information from the souk. I’ll tell you that much.”