Gorgeous East

by null

  “Get out,” Smith said to them and they gathered their threadbare robes and exited.

  Colonel de Noyer stepped inside and bolted the door and there they were, the three of them—the Legionnaires and the enemy himself, the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam. Smith looked down at him. The Gateway looked back up, flesh quivering, eyes rolling in fear, lips working but no sound coming out, his small erection instantly shriveled. Almost immediately there came a pounding on the door leading to the interior of the bungalow.

  “Your pals better not come in here,” Smith said in English. “Better let them know it now, you son of a bitch!”

  Al Bab pretended he didn’t understand. Sweat rolled from his forehead onto the pale paunch of his belly.

  “Don’t give me that me-no-sabe bullshit,” Smith said. “I’ve seen your fucking Cap’n Crunch!” And he lifted the barrel from the pressure point and delivered a rattling blow to the Gateway’s forehead.

  “Ouch!” Al Bab cried. “Goddamn it! That hurt!”

  Smith raised the rifle for another blow, but the Gateway shouted a few quick words in Hassaniya and the pounding ceased immediately. Only the play of shadows seen beneath the crack of the door indicated anything moved out there. It was liked being locked in a house in the jungle with wild animals prowling outside.

  “Your plan won’t work, whatever it is,” Al Bab said. He spoke American English with a flat, annoying accent that Smith instantly identified as Californian.

  “We’ll see about that, asshole,” Smith growled.

  “I don’t think you’ve thought it through—”

  “Shut up!”

  Smith tossed the FAMAS to the colonel, grabbed Al Bab by his greasy black hair, and dragged him across the room to a long, heavy table against the wall. On this stood the Gateway’s public address system; a microphone and receiver and the tangle of many wires. Also a couple of Dell laptop computers, an ink jet printer, a mess of papers, unopened mail delivered to an address in Marrakesh, a box of 9mm ammunition and a long, sharp-looking knife. The piles of books scattered here and there in English, French, and Arabic included admiring studies of Islamic culture published by Harvard University Press, an Arabic-English-Berber dictionary, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and several works on apiary culture and global warming. On the wall to one side hung a framed photo of Che Guevara shaking hands with Gabriel García Márquez and a diploma from Brown University whose florid calligraphy listed Ralph T. Wade III as the recipient of a Bachelor of Arts degree awarded in 1997, which made him exactly Smith’s age.

  And stacked on a shelf above it all, a dozen unopened boxes of Cap’n Crunch.

  “You like your cereal crunchy-sweet, don’t you, you little shit?” Smith said as he tied the blubbery, naked man to the table leg, hands and feet as hard as he could, using the printer cable.

  Al Bab responded with a painful grunting.

  “Shut up!” Smith said. “Not a sound!” And he stumbled back to the futon, feeling dizzy and weak. Not enough food, too much adrenaline. He put his head in his hands and tried to think himself around this situation, but could only think he could use a plate of French toast, a pile of breakfast links, and a beer. When he looked up again, he saw that Phillipe had folded himself into the far corner, enveloped once again in the personal fog of his madness. No advice would be forthcoming from him, not for the near future. After a while, Smith got up and took the gun from the colonel’s lap and brought it to bear once more on their new captive.

  “O.K., Ralph,” Smith said, through his teeth. “Confess!”

  “How do you know my name?” Al Bab said, surprised. “Are you CIA?”

  Smith jabbed the FAMAS toward the prophet’s Brown diploma on the wall. “You’re such a fucking idiot!”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ralph said.

  “What’s up with the Cap’n Crunch?”

  The mysterious prophet known as the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam and also, apparently, as Ralph T. Wade III, shrugged to the extent his bonds would allow:

  “Tastes good? Reminds me of home? Listen, you think you could loosen these a little? My hands are falling asleep?” He had that annoying California tic, a kind of Valley Girl mannerism that turned statements into questions, that left the end of sentences floating belly-up like a fish in polluted water.

  “Where do you get Cap’n Crunch out here in the desert, anyway?” Smith persisted. “The local Safeway?”

  “Big care package from my mom a couple of times a year,” Ralph said, trying to work his fingers and not succeeding. “We go over to Marrakesh to pick them up.”

  “What are these mountains called?”

  “If I tell you, will you untie me a little?”

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll crack your skull—” Smith wielded the FAMAS again.

  “The Gueltas,” Ralph said hurriedly. “Officially SADR, but the SADR doesn’t really exist, does it? This territory belongs to me now.” He couldn’t resist a self-satisfied smirk at this.

  “How far is Marrakesh from here?”

  “About seven or eight hundred miles. Rough country. We go by camel train to the border and take ATVs from there.”

  “Long way for a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.”

  “It’s not all I eat, you know,” Ralph said sullenly. “You probably still eat some junk from your childhood? Barbecued chips? Pop Tarts maybe? Moon-pies? Ding-Dongs? What about Little Debbie?”

  “They’d tear Little Debbie to pieces in the Foreign Legion,” Smith growled—and it hit him at the mention of all this junk food that he was starving. So hungry he’d almost forgotten how to eat.

  Presently, he grabbed a box of Cap’n Crunch off the shelf and found a bowl and a spoon and a paper carton of Parmalat. The first yellow sweet taste of the stuff did indeed remind him of home—brought back winter mornings in Montezuma with his sister and his parents at the kitchen table before school in the morning, before everything went sour and everyone died. All gone, a whole world gone. And it struck him how strange it was to be sitting here at the top of a mountain in the middle of the desert munching away at a bowl of Cap’n Crunch in the presence of a monster who had, without remorse, brought violent death to thousands. But he had learned by now not to marvel at the appalling strangeness of life. It was the other things—getting up, going to work, watching television, traffic lights, bank accounts, real estate, the rule of law. Normalcy. That was the surreal part.

  8.

  The flap tied open revealed two Moroccan soldiers standing at attention in full battle dress, Kalashnikovs at the ready. Six more stood guard around the tent, relieved every three hours by fresh troops. The rest of the demibrigade went about their business in the camp in the slanting yellow light of late afternoon. Some squatted over the latrine trench, chatting amiably among themselves as they did their business, their bobbing heads just visible over the nearest dune. Others smoked in front of the tents, or got busy making the evening meal out of packets of dehydrated soup and freeze-dried vegetables, peeling back the tinfoil coverings of RCIRs.

  Just beyond the dune, at the northern edge of camp, an endless field of stones spread evenly to the horizon. Some stood so closely jammed together there wasn’t more than a few centimeters of space between them. The stony plain reminded Szbeszdogy of the old Jewish cemetery in Budapest where he used to go to smoke pot back when he was an unruly and bewildered youth—so thickly planted with grave markers as to present a solid wall to the observer from the sidewalk along Nagy Street. Beyond the stones, in the blue, rose the line of snowy peaks Pinard now identified with certainty as the Algerian Gueltas.

  The Legionnaires of Mission: SCORPIO, handcuffed back to back, to one another, and to the tent poles, stared longingly out the tent flap at the prospect of distant mountains. They hadn’t been given anything more than a cup of weak tea in two days; had only been allowed to use the latrine trench once in that time, which was against Geneva Convention regulations governing prisoner access to toilets. T
hey faced years of such maltreatment, incarcerated in some deep, underground dungeon in Marrakesh or Fez, the pawns of international politics. No help would come from the Legion; General le Breton had been clear about that. As far as France was concerned, Mission: SCORPIO didn’t exist. Officially, they were rogue Legionnaires, acting without orders on their own behalf.

  “How is it you always find yourself in such situations, Pinard?” Solas said bitterly.

  “He’s just lucky,” Vladimirovitch said.

  “That’s enough,” Pinard said, but this time his voice lacked conviction.

  “First there’s that crazy story about Block house Nine,” the Brazilian went on sourly. “Everyone in the Legion heard about that disaster. Who was it you lost there? Ah, yes, the Mongolian jerk-off artist from the 2e REP. Then we get trapped in the souk and have to blow our way out and voilà, we end up at the mercy of the Moroccans. And now here we are again!”

  “Shut your face, Solas,” Szbeszdogy said wearily. “It’s not Pinard to blame, but the Legion. Who else would send six men to do the job of a battalion?”

  “The question is not who?” Pinard muttered. “But why?”

  Dessalines offered a mirthless snort. “Even I know the answer to that one,” he said. “Same reason we joined up in the first place, eh, les gars?”

  The answer, unspoken on all their lips, rang out like a funeral bell. Painted over the old artillery gate at Fort St. Jean in Marseilles was a quote from General Negrier, one of the Legion’s dark heroes: You have joined the Legion in order to die; I am sending you where you can die. You may already congratulate yourselves on no longer being alive.

  The sun disappeared at last and the moon rose, thin as the filament of a lightbulb. The blistering heat of the desert dissipated instantly at dusk, leaving the Legionnaires shivering with cold, so cold no one could sleep, except Vladimirovitch. The big Russian snored placidly, his head slumped against Dessalines’s shoulder, like a stranger on a bus.

  “What if we could get out of these cuffs?” Szbeszdogy whispered at last. “Did anyone think about that?”

  “No,” Dessalines said. Then: “Can we?”

  “So we get out,” Solas said. “And we’re shot to death by our Moroccan allies. Even if they miss, where are we? In the middle of a desert, without water, without food.”

  Pinard lifted his head. Drifting off for a moment, he’d seen wandering the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, a slim, elegant figure whose face would haunt him for the rest of his life. Then, to Szbeszdogy: “Well, Stefan, can you do it?”

  “I’m not Houdini, but I’ve got my little pick tucked away”—the Hungarian indicated the pants seam of his jumpsuit. “Not going to be easy.”

  “They’ll kill us,” Babenco said. “They’ll leave our carcasses to the desert. What can six do against sixty?”

  “Think of Camerone.”

  “They all died at Camerone,” Babenco said.

  “Wrong.” Pinard said. “Three survived.”

  “But which three?” Vladimirovitch sat up, suddenly awake. “That’s the question.”

  “A Moroccan prison might give us a better chance,” Babenco said. “We could tunnel our way out, bribe guards. The possibility of immediate death in this place makes a democracy out of us! I say we vote.”

  “Nothing makes a democracy out of the Legion,” Pinard said. “But go ahead. I’ll listen to opinions, this once.”

  Silence. Each one considered the possibility of escape, calculated the odds, reluctant to speak first. Before they could make up their minds, Pinard cleared his throat.

  “Let me ask you assholes a simple question,” he said. “What are we?”

  “Legionnaires,” Vladimirovitch responded automatically.

  “Exactly,” Pinard said. “And the enemy?”

  “Moroccans,” Babenco said.

  “Correct again,” Pinard said. “And one Legionnaire is worth twenty of those bastards, so I consider them outnumbered, not us.”

  “Very nice!” Solas interjected. “It’s a great comfort to know we’ll die outnumbering the enemy.”

  “Some of us will die,” Pinard said. “Maybe we’ll all die. But won’t we die, in any event, on the last day of our lives? Better to die now as a Legionnaire facing the enemy. Or do you really want to rot for years in some rat-infested Moroccan sewer? So what if we escape, or survive until France buys us back for the price of a couple of used Mirage jets. What’s the best that can happen then? Do you really want to wind up a miserable old bastard at the Legion farm in Puyloubier and die in a hospital with feeding tubes sticking out of your guts and only a gay male nurse to sit by your bedside? I for one am glad I’m not back in Aubagne right now, safely marching up and down the parade ground. I say to hell with all of it! Life is for cowards. Come now, oh death!”

  The men were silent following this little speech, but it was clear they had accepted Pinard’s way, whatever that might be. After a long moment, Szbeszdogy said, softly, “Bravo, Pinard. Vous êtes Valéry!”

  “What? Who’s this Valéry?”

  “A French poet.”

  Pinard suddenly remembered Louise’s comment to the same effect on the beach that first day and the memory caused him pain. “Don’t insult me,” he said harshly. “I’m no poet. I’m the opposite thing.”

  “Ah!” The Hungarian grinned. “Then you’re a man of action! But with you action is in its own way a kind of poetry.”

  “Fuck off, Szbeszdogy. Now, can you get to that pick?”

  “I’ll need my hands. Next time they take us out to the latrine.”

  “Bien,” Pinard said. “We are all in agreement. But understand, consensus is not the same thing as democracy. Well, Solas, any last words?”

  The Brazilian had none and hid his face in the shadows. For the first time in many years, since those terrible days of running from machete-wielding police in the stinking, unpaved favelas of Rio, he was afraid.

  9.

  Marabout fighters appeared at the little square of window overlooking the ravine. Smith sent a couple of 5.56 rounds crashing in their direction and they dropped out of sight. But they weren’t gone: Marabout fighters at the window, against the door, pressed around the bungalow in an ever-tightening noose. So close, Smith imagined he could hear their hearts beating through the cinder block and plaster. One rush would do it—only a question of when that rush would come. They only needed the right moment and a single, carefully placed round. Meanwhile, he held them all at bay with the barrel of his FAMAS jammed for hours at a time into the ear of the Mullah of Mullahs, Al Bab, the Gateway to the etc., Ralph T. Wade III.

  This stalemate persisted for a day and a night and a day, then began to wobble, gently, like a skyscraper in an earthquake.

  Colonel de Noyer still crouched without moving in his corner, sleepless, immobile, lost to reason, unable to find his way back out of the fog—a vague, cloudy landscape his soul inhabited no doubt scored by Satie’s haunting Messe des Pauvres. Maybe Phillipe was finally gone for good this time. Smith craved sleep, needed a backup. Damn you, Phillipe! He screamed, spit in the man’s face, pummelled him. Nothing. Desperate to keep awake, Smith clawed at the flesh of his arms until it bled, sang at the top of his voice, running the verses of a half-dozen great American songbook standards into a crazy, discordant musical collage: “You’ve got me in between the devil and deep blue sea. I’ve got music, I’ve got rhythm, I’ve got my gal, who could ask for anything more? This is the story of a very unfortunate colored man who got ’rested down in old Hong Kong. Now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted, I know but too well what they mean. It was just one of those things, one of those crazy flings. Who could ask for anything more!”

  Meanwhile, Ralph T. Wade III snoozed, snoring comfortably despite the painful nature of his bondage to the computer table. Smith, delirious with exhaustion at last, dropped off for ten minutes around noon on the morning of the third day. Waking up with a gasp, he surprised three Marabout killer
s already in the room, creeping toward him, muffled in their blue djellahs. Perhaps they had wafted under the crack of the door like genies out of a bottle. Panicking, Smith pushed the barrel of his rifle as far into the ear of the Gateway as it would go without splitting the man’s skull.

  “I die, he dies,” Smith shouted. “Make your move!”

  But the Gateway uttered a single word and his minions backed out, closing the door quietly behind them.

  “How long you think you can keep it up, dude?” he said to Smith.

  “Fuck you,” Smith said halfheartedly.

  Ralph shook his head. “You’re not going to make it, my friend.”

  “And you’re a dead asshole.”

  “Kill me now, get it over with?”

  “I will,” Smith muttered. “Don’t rush me.”

  But Smith couldn’t say what he was waiting for exactly. Then it occurred to him, an idea born out of delirium and lack of sleep: He was waiting for the Legion to appear over the crest of the hill like the cavalry in a Western. But how would they know where to find him? He stood up in a kind of daze, switched on the PA system, and took the microphone in his hand.

  “À moi la Légion!” he called into the emptiness of the mountains. “À moi la Légion!”

  Again and again for the next couple of hours. This was the Legionnaire’s famous distress call—to me, the Legion! To me! Four words echoing down the years since the rainy day they mustered for first inspection on the Champs de Mars in 1831—the cry of any outnumbered Legionnaire in any tight spot around the globe for the last one hundred and seventy five years: drunk and alone in a cutthroat saloon in Algiers in 1875 with just a broken knife against fifty pissed-off Spahis; the last survivor of an outgunned garrison cut off in the heart of the Rif in 1902; lost in the weird primordial forests of Madagascar in 1890, or the malarial swamps of Cochin China in 1900. There he was, our Legionnaire, pinned down beneath a murderous barrage at the Somme in 1917 with twenty thousand casualties in a single afternoon; there he was at Bir Hakim in 1942 fighting former comrades gone over to Vichy; at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the wily Viet Minh creeping along hidden trails through the bush, each soldier bearing on his back an artillery shell aimed directly at the Legion’s beating heart.