Gorgeous East

by null

  “As you suggest, Monsieur Deschafeaux, time to discuss practical matters. The Marabouts are the enemies of Morocco, as they are the enemies of civilized people everywhere. Religious lunatics, mystics who, from what we can tell, worship bees more than God, and are not good Muslims. Can we agree on this?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good.” The minister nodded. “We have common ground, then. The presence of a Marabout hive in the Saharoui souk came as much of a surprise to us in the Ministry of Police as it did to you and your”—he smiled faintly—“business associates. Might I ask, by the way, where you innocent businessmen found those marvelous grenades?”

  Pinard opened his mouth to deny the existence of any such grenades, but the minister interrupted, “Louise de Noyer has told us every detail of what happened the other night. In other words, your denials are stupidly useless.”

  Pinard closed his mouth. Just hearing her name spoken aloud caused the breath to leave his lungs, a painful clenching of his heart. He longed for the day when this pain would cease, but it never would.

  “You are an obstinate man,” the minister continued. “Obstinacy is a necessary trait in—in business. Mais soyez raisonnable, obstinacy has its limits.” He rose and came around the desk and unlocked Pinard’s restraints, then sat back down again.

  Pinard’s hands, cuffed for nearly forty-eight hours, felt dead. He gritted his teeth as the blood returned to them with the prickly sensation of stinging nettles.

  “In my capacity as Minister of Police,” the minister said, “I am in the position to share information that might be of interest to the Foreign Legion. This information concerns the whereabouts of two Legionnaires, one an officer, who are at this moment prisoners of the Marabouts. Would you be interested in hearing this information, Monsieur Deschafeaux?”

  Pinard, flexing his dead fingers, paused before he answered. “The concerns of the Foreign Legion have always been the concerns of France,” he said carefully, “and as I am a citizen of France, yes, I would be very interested in such information.”

  “Ah, very good!” the minister said, and he rubbed his hands together like a shopkeeper, a dry papery sound. “Now we may revisit the one hundred thousand euros you mentioned earlier—a sum far too low for information leading to the delivery of two innocent men from the mouth of Satan.”

  10.

  The negotiations continued until first light.

  At last, the amount of the bribe was decided upon, including a second, smaller but significant amount to ensure the cooperation of the Moroccan army at the Berm. The minister agreed and the two men shook hands. There was no shame in this exchange; it was merely baksheesh, one of the time-honored traditions of settling difficult matters in the East. Some might call it corruption but this would be imposing alien cultural traditions on such a reasonable transaction.

  Of course, Pinard was cheating on the deal and risking his freedom and the freedom of his men as surety. He had managed to convince the minister to accept payment only after the liberation of Colonel de Noyer from the Marabouts—a tidy bit of subterfuge—and had no authorization to pay any money to anyone. He would figure out the rest as they went along, muddle through somehow. This was the Legion way, and it was also the French way: they have always been a nation of débrouillards, an untranslatable word meaning, more or less, that every Frenchman has inherited a natural ability to make do with the meager resources at hand.

  Unlike the rule of law, the workings of baksheesh are efficent, prompt. There is no paperwork to fill out, nothing to sign, no witnesses. Eight minutes following the end of negotiations, just after dawn, Pinard and the men of Mission: SCORPIO were released and ushered down the freshly cured cement front steps of the Prefecture de Police into the Oued Bou district, its white facades still retaining the blue shadows of the westering night.

  13

  À MOI LA LÉGION!

  1.

  Alia held out her arm, usually mocha-toned and sinewy-smooth, now a dull purplish color and swollen and covered all over with large angry-looking bee stings.

  “Look what they did to me!” she cried. “I go to the water tank this morning with my jugs and they swarm and bite, these accursed bees!” Angry tears sprung to her eyes. She stamped her foot on the bare earth: “I want to smash them all!”

  Just then, from the ominous pink bungalow up the slope, seemingly in response to the girl’s blasphemous exclamation, came the first syllables of the rantings of Al Bab, also known as the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam and Munificent Signpost of Heaven. It was the beginning of one of the Birkenstock-wearing theocrat’s lengthy harangues—some sort of religious indoctrination, Smith supposed—delivered via public address system at top volume three or four times a day. Everyone in the village was obliged to stop what they were doing, squat down in the dirt, and listen. Now, Al Bab’s shrill intonations and harsh consonants rang off the surrounding mountain peaks like a hammer against steel.

  “Oh, God,” Smith groaned. “Son of a bitch’s at it again.”

  “You don’t care about my pain, ’ti Blanc.” Alia pouted. ’Ti Blanc was what she called him now, literally, Little White Boy. “You care about only the food I can give for you.”

  Smith focused on the girl with effort. The verdict had been handed down from the holy crew in the bungalow the day before: The Marabout insurgency had no need for music. They were going to sever his head from his body and feed the resulting headless carcass to the bees. His head would be tossed onto a pile with other heads or maybe impaled on a stake. The same fate awaited Colonel de Noyer, hanging in his chains, emaciated, sleepless, saintly in his silent endurance across the room. Phillipe hadn’t spoken in a couple of days; occasionally, he’d blink or wheeze. His hair, now falling out in patches, revealed a shrunken, yellow scalp. For him, death would come as a mercy.

  “Do you not love your poor Alia?” the girl persisted.

  Smith didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, how my life is terrible for me in this terrible place!”

  “Maybe you could leave me alone now,” Smith managed. “I’ve got a whole lifetime of mistakes to pick over before I go.”

  “You have many regrets?”

  Smith nodded grimly. “As many as if I’d lived a thousand years.” It was a line from—he couldn’t remember where—Cole Porter? Gershwin?

  “Weakling!” the girl hissed. “Where is the courage to resist your fate?”

  Smith looked at her, hope suddenly burning like the acid in his empty gut. “How am I supposed to resist, exactly?”

  Alia leaned close, her peeling lips barely an inch from his ear.

  2.

  The moon rose over the highest peak of the Galtat Zemmur just before midnight. Smith waited, his hollow stomach still churning. The moon dimmed slowly and fell with his dwindling hopes. Of course the girl didn’t show—how stupid he’d been to believe her crazy promises! In the silence he could hear the persistent grumble of Al Bab’s generator and the subtle buzzing of the hive. Suddenly, he became aware of Phillipe staring at him through the darkness. The colonel blinked, his pale, sleepless eyes like the eyes of some ancient owl, wise but infinitely melancholy.

  “Is that you, Phillipe?” Smith said.

  “Why do you always ask such a stupid question?”

  “Because mostly you’re not there. Mostly you’ve been replaced by a raving lunatic.”

  “Your tone borders on insubordination, Legionnaire!” The colonel frowned. “Watch yourself.”

  “I’ve had it up to here with the military shit,” Smith said. “How about we just forget it?”

  “You’re insubordinate and a fool. The military shit, as you call it, gives us the courage to endure. It is like those Englishmen, African explorers of the nineteenth century who even in the middle of the jungle, bothered to dress for dinner.”

  “What?” Smith said, not understanding.

  “Structure. Traditions. These things stand between us and the chaos of unbeing.”
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br />   “Whatever,” Smith said glumly. He wasn’t in the mood for philosophizing. “It’s too late anyway. We’re dead men tomorrow morning.”

  “An end to this dirty business!” The colonel lifted a chained arm and let it drop. “We’ve lived long enough, eh, Milquetoast?”

  “Speak for yourself,” Smith said.

  “But not yet, I’m afraid, not yet—to paraphrase Augustine. A bloody piece of work needs doing before the end.”

  “What work?” Smith said, puzzled.

  The colonel folded himself back into himself once again like a large bat folding its rubbery wings and didn’t bother to elaborate.

  3.

  Hours passed.

  Smith felt despair as a sour nausea for which there was no remedy. He would be decapitated at dawn, not long now, and no one alive would give a damn. Try as he might, he couldn’t believe in a personal God and couldn’t pray for his own soul and didn’t believe friends and family would be waiting for him happily on the other side—anyway, what would Jessica say?—and he found himself washed up naked and helpless on the barren shores of his own nihilism and self-contempt. The nourmoom blew through the ragged doorway. Distant peaks gleamed like polished tombstones in the oblique light of a fallen moon.

  Somehow, at last, he slept. The dreams of imprisoned men are vivid enough (those bright colors missing from the bare walls of prison cells produced instead by the subconscious mind); the dreams of condemned men on the eve of execution explode will psychedelic intensity. Now, Smith’s dreams were full of outrageous colors and loud slamming noises like the sound of a body falling to earth from a great height over and over again. There he was, an amoeba preserved on a glass slide, every intimate flaw magnified as if seen through the lens of a microscope, and he felt the weight of a scrutiny that was coldly scientific and relentless, and in his sleep uttered a loud, fearful cry:

  “No!”

  A hand over his mouth pulled him from this nightmare.

  “Mais, taisez-vous!” It was Alia’s voice. “You must not make so much as the smallest noise!”

  Smith squinted up at her, his eyes adjusting. She carried a dark bundle under her arm. From one end of the bundle protruded a short, stubby barrel Smith instantly recognized—the good old FAMAS 5.56 assault rifle, standard issue to the Legion, no doubt a souvenir of the killing ground at Blockhouse 9. Smith’s hands reached for the gun, but were restrained by his chains, which rattled alarmingly in the stillness.

  “Clumsy idiot!” the girl hissed.

  She withdrew a key from somewhere and unlocked the large, primitive iron padlocks that bound Smith’s ankles and wrists, catching the links so they fell quietly. Smith stood up, giddy, relieved of the weight of the chains for the first time in nearly four months. He rubbed his neck, he probed the sores on his wrists. He felt like Christ resurrected. He thought he knew the jubilation of slaves given their freedom after many years.

  “Wonderful,” he gasped. “Thank you.”

  Alia unrolled the dark bundle—a hooded djellah, stinking of body odor, that Smith shook gratefully over his head. Clothes! Then she handed him the rifle. He turned it over lovingly in his hands, released the safety mechanism. The clip held the standard combat load of twenty-five rounds. He slotted a round into the chamber and at this slight mechanical sound, Phillipe looked up, instantly aware.

  “Unlock my chains,” he croaked.

  Smith hesitated.

  “I forbid it!” Alia shook her head. “I don’t have clothes or a weapon for that crazy old man. He will get us killed!”

  “Listen to me, Milquetoast,” Phillipe said. “You eat, you shit, you sleep, you fornicate. You are born an animal and you die an animal, that is unless you do something in between to raise yourself above this condition. I had hoped that in the Legion you would find the personal honor you never possessed.” He coughed, a dry reedy sound. “I was wrong. You remain selfish and a coward. Now you are planning to escape this hell alone, without your commanding officer.”

  Smith bowed his head. The colonel, in his emaciated and weakened state, would be nothing but a liability. How could you scramble over steep rocks and cross immense deserts with a man unable to walk at any pace faster than a shuffle?”

  “Article seven of the Code of the Legion,” Phillipe said, his voice suddenly stern, commanding. “Repeat it.”

  Smith remained silent.

  “We must go now,” Alia said, tugging anxiously at the sleeve of Smith’s new garment. “You will take me to Milan, so that I might wear beautiful dresses and jewels, like you promised.”

  “I’ve given you a direct order, Legionnaire!”

  “I am a volunteer serving France with honor and fidelity unto death,” Smith said begrudgingly. “Devoted to my commanding officers, courage and loyalty are my virtues—”

  “Enough,” Phillipe interrupted. “Unlock my chains.”

  Smith looked from the colonel’s calm pale eyes to the girl’s anxious dark ones and back again.

  “Phillipe, I’m sorry . . . ,” he began, but his voice trailed off. What was the point of attempting to excuse himself from yet another crime?

  4.

  They came out of Laayoune more like prisoners on a work detail than Legionnaires on a search-and-rescue mission. They were given Moroccan air force jumpsuits of coarse denim with nothing to distinguish rank or regiment, and placed in the custody of a demibrigade of the Moroccan army commanded by a fox-faced major named Abduljemal Rabani, said to be a distant cousin of the king’s. They were not allowed to carry weapons and went unarmed except for the concealed blade a Legionnaire always carries. Though for Szbeszdogy, this weapon of last resort took the form of no weapon at all, only a narrow file for picking handcuffs tucked into the lining of his pants; in Solas’s case, two razors and a garotting wire hidden in the hollow heel of his boot.

  From Laayoune, the demibrigade struck out across the desert in a south-easterly direction, always keeping the snow-capped Gueltas to the right, their narrow peaks just visible above the horizon. Fifty rank-and-file Moroccan soldiers and the personnel of Mission: SCORPIO were crammed into the backs of two Bulgarian-made Grushinka AT troop transport trucks, baking hot and airless, without windows or ventilation. A stock 1982 Jeep Cherokee 4 × 4, originally Detroit red, now Marrakesh green, possessing air-conditioning and optional cassette player, carried Major Rabani, his second in command, and the two Moroccan non-coms in frosty comfort.

  The major refused to reveal the exact location of the fashula—the hive—a word that had lately come to signify any Marabout camp—where intelligence indicated Colonel de Noyer was being held. Specific information, he told Pinard curtly, was secret property of the Moroccan government. He wore silver-lensed aviator glasses, his hair slicked back. He looked like a movie star, a swarthy matinee idol of the silent era. He pursed his mouth daintily when he spoke, as if sucking on something sour:

  “I will absolutely not allow questioning, not of myself or my troops on this or any other matter,” he said on the evening of their first day out. “We will get there when we get there, but we will get there. . . .” Waving airily toward the horizon, across the desert where there were no roads, where it was like navigating at sea.

  The major’s coyness bothered Pinard, but he did indeed seem to know where he was going, consulting laminated field maps, figuring vectors and longitudes with an old-fashioned slide rule and protractor. Pinard had no real reason to be suspicious. His Legionnaires were being well treated, supplied with food, water, and cigarettes. The Moroccan troops seemed friendly enough. And yet . . .

  They progressed across the desert in slow zigzags, in exasperating fits and starts. The entire demibrigade, officers and men, stopped five times a day, an hour at a time, for obligatory prayers to Mecca. The major established the direction of this super-holy city using his orienteering compass, rolled out a small square of carpet, and settled himself down face forward in the sand. His men, pious or not, followed his example.

  Pinard, Szb
eszdogy, and the assassins from the 4e RE watched disdainfully from the shadows of truck or tent through these hours of enforced idleness, smoking foul Moroccan army-issue cigarettes and talking in low voices as fifty Moroccan foreheads touched the hot sand and fifty corresponding Moroccan rumps bumped heavenward.

  “Ridiculous spectacle,” Solas muttered. It was now the third day out from Laayoune, just before noon, and the Moroccans had commenced their prayers once again in the 120° heat. Visible off to the east-northeast as a bluish brown line, indistinguishable from the horizon, the infamous Berm.

  “Someone give me my FAMAS,” Vladimirovitch said. “I’ll rip them a second asshole.”

  “What do they do if they’re in the middle of having sex?” Dessalines wondered. “Do they stop and pray?”

  “They move the boy their fucking toward Mecca and keep at it,” Vladimirovitch said, and everyone laughed.

  “At least they believe in something.” Szbeszdogy tossed his weedy cigarette into the sand. “Which is more than I can say for you filthy bastards.”

  “Oh, I believe in something,” Solas said grimly. “I believe in my FAMAS, my razor blade, and my own right arm.”

  “I don’t care what anyone believes,” Capitaine Pinard interjected. “So long as you men shut up and don’t cause any trouble. Every day we spend kicking around this miserable desert . . .” He didn’t finish this thought. “We need to get there soon if there’s going to be anything left of the colonel. Understood?”

  A reluctant mumble of assent followed his statement, echoed by the pious murmur of Moroccans mouthing their prayers in even rows in the blazing sun.