Gorgeous East

by null

  The Brazilian stared down at the gun. “If you think I won’t—”

  “Shut up, you idiots,” Szbeszdogy interrupted. “Look!”

  Pinard looked. Just then, a figure wearing a Saharoui djellah, hood up, crossed the lobby toward the front doors. Another hooded figure, stooped, ancient, waited outside in the penumbra of reflected light at the edge of the darkened world.

  5.

  The two djellahed figures hurried along, shadows against the encompassing shadows of Laayoune, illuminated in silhouette by the headlights of a passing delivery van. Then they turned a corner into the run-down neighborhood abutting the Saharoui souk, on the eastern end, and there was no more traffic and no streetlights, and they moved ahead silently through the black. The trick, as always, was to follow close enough, but not too close. A puddle of urine reflected faintly from the gutter. Heavy storm clouds, full of an ocean darkness, piled high above the city.

  Pinard couldn’t see a damned thing. Just when he thought he caught a glimpse of them, they disappeared into the gloom. But Solas’s cat-green eyes could see in the dark; they actually glowed with a kind of strange tropical luminescence.

  “This is nothing,” he said. “When I was a kid, in the favelas, I could see every turn, every alley, and the nights were blacker than this. One night the federal police chased a bunch of us down with machetes, because they didn’t want to waste any bullets. Bullets cost money. They hacked to death ten or fifteen kids and left the pieces lying around like rotten meat. Just to teach a lesson to the gangs. But me,” he grunted, “I got away because I can see in the dark. Later, I chopped one of those lousy cops that did it to us, and while he lay there bleeding to death I pissed on him, and shoved a broken bottle up his ass!”

  “He’s not a man at all,” Pinard said to Szbeszdogy, “but some kind of supernatural Brazilian tiger.”

  They passed along the barbed-wire trench that enclosed the souk on three sides. For a brief moment, the desert moon shone through the clouds and the effect was startling, a bulb switching on. Behind them, the spotlights of the Moroccan machine gun towers trailed like fingers across the Gate of Dusk and the Gate of Dawn. Solas, leading the way, motioned for them to keep back. Here the trench ended and they came face-to-face with the improvised walls of the souk—a series of barricaded houses and cement and cinder block reinforcements topped with broken bottles and iron spikes.

  “Shh,” Solas whispered. “They’ve stopped, they’re not far.”

  Pinard couldn’t see anything, but he took the Brazilian’s word for it. The Legionnaires pressed themselves against the rough surface of a cement barricade. The yelping of a dog somewhere out in the night sounded for a moment like a child crying for help. Then, from out of the shadows, came the barely audible sound of knocking, a code: one, two. One, two. One. And the soft creak of a door opening, a faint line of yellow light and a few inaudible words. The hooded figures folded into this light, the door closed, and all was blackness again.

  “Now what?” Szbeszdogy said.

  “We do the same.”

  “There was a password,” Solas said. “Did you hear it?”

  “Merde,” Pinard said. “I couldn’t hear a thing.”

  “Ah.” The Brazilian chuckled softly. “But I could.”

  “You’ve definitely got the eyes and ears of an animal,” Szbeszdogy said, grudging admiration in his voice. “Mais rassurez-vous, I mean that in the best way possible.”

  They crossed a gully and came to a wooden construction, heavy beams dried out and petrified by years of exposure to the sun. It didn’t look like a door at all, but part of the sturdy system of barricades separating the souk from the rest of Laayoune. Solas stepped up and knocked out the code along one of the beams. A pause, then three of the beams creaked open an inch on concealed hinges, revealing a faint sliver of light.

  “Polisario,” Solas said. “¡Libertad para todos!”

  “¿Quién es?” came a faint growl from the other side.

  “We are those who know the password,” Solas replied in Spanish. “Now let us in before the Moroccans take a shot at us.”

  Pinard was surprised to hear Spanish spoken, then he wasn’t. Many of the urban Saharouis preserve that language from the days of Spanish colonial rule. There were still Saharoui immigrant ghettos in Seville and Cádiz, a last remnant of the diaspora of the 1950s and ’60s.

  The door creaked open wide enough for the men to step inside, then closed behind them. They found themselves standing in a dark corridor. At the far end an archway opened to a lattice-covered alley faintly illuminated by a smoky, yellow-green light.

  “What do you want here?” The voice came from a small boy, about eight years old. He was wearing a dirty soccer T-shirt advertising AC MILAN and a Saharoui kilt. He was barefoot.

  Pinard reached into his pocket and withdrew a couple of butterscotch hard candies he’d lifted from a bowl on the front desk of the Palais-Maroc.

  “Here, kid,” he said in rudimentary Legion Spanish. “Suck on one of these.”

  The boy hesitated, but he took the candies and sat back on a broken crate half hidden in a niche beside the door and began unwrapping them.

  “A woman, a man, not five minutes ago,” Pinard said. “Do you know where they went?”

  “The woman has gone to see the emir,” the boy said, his mouth already full of candy. “Everyone who enters the souk of the Saharouis who is not a Saharoui must go see the emir. You are going to see him, aren’t you?”

  “Naturally,” Pinard said.

  The boy told them the way and they headed for the opening at the far end and entered the narrow alley, no wider than four feet across. The smoky light came from primitive lamps, little more than bowls of baked mud upon which sat burning some foul-smelling substance.

  “Dried camel dung,” Szbeszdogy said, pinching his nose. “God, what an awful stench!”

  “Try not to breathe,” Pinard said.

  They followed the narrow alley though a series of twists and turns until they came to a wider street, parts of which were open to the sky. This seemed to be the souk’s main drag. Camels, knees folded, slept on the ground in pens fronting the tumbledown houses. The big animals groaned and huffed in their sleep, dreaming perhaps of the limitless desert. Farther on, an area lit with flickering electric lights off juice illegally diverted from the Laayoune grid.

  A group of Saharoui men sat on threadbare carpets beneath the awning of a rude café, drinking sweet tea. Many of them wore piecemeal military outfits—the ragtag castoffs of a variety of North African armies; this was the thrift-store motley that passed for Polisario uniforms. A portable radio, tuned to a Moroccan station from Fez, played whiny Arab music at top volume. Dark eyes followed the Legionnaires as they passed. No one spoke.

  “What’s to stop them from cutting our throats?”

  Just then, as if in response to Szbeszdogy’s question, one of the Saharouis detached himself from the group at the tea house. He came striding up and blocked their way forward.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu fou ici?” he demanded in French, pushing a finger in Pinard’s face. But before Pinard could answer, another man followed the first, then another and another until the Legionnaires were surrounded. One of the Saharouis began shouting in his own language and pointing at Solas.

  “He is one of those who tortured our cousin in the swimming pool at the Agadir,” the first man said to Pinard. “He must pay for this humiliation. Violence is traded for violence, so it is written. We will take him and you and the other can go on your way.”

  “We have come to see the emir,” Pinard said, his voice calm and reasonable. “Do you dare detain guests of the emir in the Saharoui souk?”

  Solas’s hand crept toward the Walther, visible as a square bulge beneath the silk of his gaudy shirt.

  “Steady,” Szbeszdogy whispered.

  “You will observe my friend’s nose,” Pinard continued. “I broke it with my fist. This was his payment for the crime of humiliati
on against your cousin.”

  “Not enough.” The first Saharoui shook his head emphatically. “He must pay with his life. My family has been too greatly dishonored.”

  “We might conceivably let him off with a severe maiming,” said the second, scratching his beard. “Perhaps we will only take his manhood. It’s not so bad, we do it very quickly.”

  Solas twisted his mouth into a kind of smile. Threats like these he’d heard all his life, in the favelas of Rio, in the Legion, in the places between. He was calculating now how many he could kill with the gun, how many with his hands, and with the razor blade he kept always concealed in a small pocket inside of his shorts. After that it was sauve-qui-peut.

  “Your cousin is not dead,” Pinard said in the same reasonable tone. “A little roughed up, his clothes probably ruined. For this, my friends apologize. What if I offer you twenty thousand dirhams for the ruined clothes?”

  The bargaining went on for nearly a half hour. The Legionnaires pooled everything they had in their pockets and promised to pay more to a boy who would show up the next day at the hotel. It was extortion and it made them sick, because, being Legionnaires, they would rather fight than pay. From nearby, from some hidden recess in the crumbling walls of the souk, as the big, gaudy bills were counted out, came the mocking hoot of an owl.

  6.

  The emir of the Saharouis sat playing a Nintendo Game Boy in the middle of a beautiful Zemmour carpet in an opulent tent pitched in an open area at the epicenter of the souk. The tent was spread with more beautiful carpets and hung with chandeliers of lacy, filigree silver. The emir, alone among his people, was permitted to live in a tent, a reminder of the glory days before the Moroccans and their Berm, before the Spanish and the French and the Portuguese, before the Foreign Legion came to Africa, before even the Arab invasions of the seventh century: a time of peace and freedom when the Saharouis had wandered their desert uninhibited, sailing across the dunes which were like the ocean on magnificently caparisoned camels, each man his own sheik.

  The emir, a thin, spindly teenager, looked twelve, but was probably fifteen or sixteen. He wore a pastel pink polo shirt, spotless white trousers, and a crocodile-skin Hermès belt; his narrow brown feet were bare, the healthy toenails buffed and glistening. A pair of heavy gold hoop earrings hung from his long delicate lobes. He seemed utterly engrossed in his Game Boy and oblivious to the charms of his harem, which consisted of three plump, languid women, veiled but dressed in flimsy robes that exposed a good portion of their ample anatomies.

  “I could have you killed for sneaking into my souk!” he said without taking his eyes off the tiny screen. He spoke in a clipped, nasal British-accented English—a product of Harrow, the exclusive boarding school in England, where he spent half the year playing polo and hobnobbing with royals.

  Pinard, Szbeszdogy, and Solas lay prostrate before him, face to carpet, asses in the air, shoes off, like supplicants before an Oriental potentate, which in fact they were.

  “Give me one bloody reason I shouldn’t have you flogged and thrown into a pit full of vipers,” the emir said, thumbs busy working the game.

  “Mercy, Star of the East,” Pinard replied in English. “We have come to ask your help.”

  “First you need to obtain my bloody permission to come and ask my help. Got that?”

  “But how could we obtain your bloody permission, excellent sir?” Szbeszdogy spoke up. “Because here you are, hidden in your marvelous souk, and you do not go out.”

  The emir snapped his Game Boy shut. His face, though young and still softened by baby fat, was already hardened by the unchecked exercise of hereditary power.

  “There are ways,” he said coldly. “You have to know the right people, make inquiries, find a sponsor, that sort of thing. Rather like getting into a Mayfair club.”

  “Might we not now obtain your permission?”

  “I don’t suppose you brought any game chip software?” The emir tapped his Game Boy. “That would be a much appreciated bit of baksheesh.”

  “Unfortunately not, excellency,” Szbeszdogy said.

  “Bollocks!” the emir exclaimed. “I’m getting damned tired of Baby Kill Zone, let me tell you. I’ve breached all the levels, all the babies are dead, absolutely splattered. And Mossad Versus Jihad is downright boring. The damned Jews keep winning no matter what I do—and don’t tell me Jewish domination of the electronic games industry has nothing to do with that outcome!”

  Szbeszdogy and Pinard exchanged a confused glance.

  “Listen, if you promise to send me some new games, and I mean a box full of them, I will overlook the fact that you were caught sneaking around my souk.”

  “Of course,” Pinard said. They were suddenly speaking French. “When we return to France. As many as you like.”

  The emir spit in his hand and wiped it on his pants, Saharoui shorthand for done deal.

  “Alors, qu’est-ce que tu veux?” He yawned. “Be quick. I’m busy.”

  “A Frenchwoman entered the souk about an hour ago,” Pinard said. “We would like to speak to her.”

  “She is quite safe,” the emir said, frowning. “We Saharouis aren’t bloody white slavers, you know. She came here of her own free will and is free to go any time she likes and right now she wants to stay and she doesn’t want to see anybody. Is that all?”

  “If we could speak with her for a moment,” Pinard persisted. “We are all here in your souk for the same purpose. A bit of coordination might save everyone a lot of trouble.”

  The emir scratched at a few wispy follicles of hair on his chin. For him, at least, the beard of the prophet was a long way off.

  “You’re talking about the Marabouts, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” Pinard admitted. “About the men being held captive by them. We are here to help negotiate their return to France.”

  “What makes you think I have any dealings with those bloody fanatics?” The emir’s voice rose to an outraged squeak. “That’s damned impertinence!”

  “You are the emir of the Saharouis,” Pinard said soothingly. “Could anything occur in your country without you knowing that this thing has occurred? In the souk, in the desert, everywhere, your eyes are like the eyes of God.”

  “You have a very good point,” the emir said, accepting this ripe piece of flattery with obvious pleasure. Then, he clapped his hands and one of the plump harem women heaved herself up and disappeared behind a curtain at the back of the tent. She returned a few minutes later with bowls of honeyed dates and glasses of sweet tea on a shiny brass tray that she set down on the carpet. The men drank the tea and ate the honeyed dates, which looked like shrivelled camel crottes, but which tasted much better than they looked—sweet and gritty, but gritty in a pleasant way.

  “Excellent source of fiber,” the emir said, his mouth full of the sticky dark fruit. “Watch out for the pits . . .” He opened his mouth, exposing on his tongue a moist black object, which he then spit onto the Zemmour carpet for one of the harem women to scoop up. “Now, on to business—”

  But another one of the harem women interrupted, reaching up to wipe at the emir’s mouth with a damp cloth, a maternal gesture the haughty teen found intensely annoying

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said. “As civilized men, you’ll agree business matters are unsuitable for female ears.” Then he unleashed a stream of harsh-sounding invective at the woman in his own language and she stalked off angrily, ornate babouches flopping.

  A tactical error, Pinard thought grimly. The kid was now alone with the hard-bitten Legionnaires of Mission: SCORPIO.

  “Tell me something,” the emir said, leaning forward. “Who are you exactly?”

  “We are French businessmen,” Pinard said.

  “I’m young, but I’m not an idiot. Why don’t you tell me the truth?”

  “But we are businessmen,” Pinard said. “Our business is to find the two men I mentioned. Will you help us?”

  “That depends how much you’re wi
lling to pay for information,” the emir said, a crafty gleam in his eye. Then he wagged a finger. “Think carefully. Do not insult me.”

  Though the air in the tent was stifling, the emir didn’t sweat. Pinard glanced over at Solas. The Brazilian also looked cool as an eel, impervious to the heat. It was a question of metabolism; of natural selection and the influence of weather on body type.

  Pinard, himself dripping with sweat, drew his men together, as if for a financial consultation.

  “I should tell you right now, we’re not authorized to pay anything, not one fucking sou,” he whispered. “So this one’s going to be all bluff, like playing American poker.”

  “More like Russian roulette,” Szbeszdogy said.

  “It is the Legion way.” Pinard shrugged. Then, to Solas: “Is the safety off on the Walther?”

  The Brazilian nodded.

  “All right, ready?”

  Szbeszdogy hesitated. At moments like this, in the lull before the fighting, a curious cacophony filled his ears. It was the sound of all the notes from all the songs he’d never written jangling together before they fell off, one by one, into the great uncreated void.

  “Stefan?”

  “Yes,” the Hungarian said. “Why not?”

  Pinard turned back to the emir. “Thirty-five thousand,” he said, pulling the figure out of the air.

  “I hope to Allah—peace be upon him—you mean pounds sterling!” the emir said, genuinely insulted by the offer.

  “American dollars,” Pinard said, just to confuse the issue.

  “You’re joking with me. I can spend that kind of money in a fortnight in London, just on gin and whores.”

  Pinard was beginning to hate this arrogant little teenager.

  “In any case, the Frenchwoman has offered me five times that amount. And something else, something without price.”