by null
5.
Back in Aubagne after completing his sentence, restored to the austere, monotonous, and brutal life of the Legion, reduced to eating Legion slop and drinking mediocre wine from the Legion’s vineyards and sleeping with whores in the Legion’s brothel, Smith’s regret became acute, like a sharp pain stabbing him in the heart. Why had he done this to himself? And he wrote letter after letter to Louise, telling her he still loved her, begging forgiveness, pleading for a face-to-face meeting to explain himself more clearly to her—though their conversation would have to be brief and could only take place at the visitor’s center on the base in Aubagne, since, because of his desertion, he’d lost leave privileges for at least a year.
Smith wrote twenty-seven letters in total. Some of them more than thirty pages long, with copies mailed to each of her several addresses—to the town house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement in Paris, to the château de Noyer in Brittany, to the little beach house she’d bought with Phillipe at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the Pyrénées Atlantique. He never received a single response, though a few of the envelopes mailed to the town house in Paris came back scrawled over with NOT AT THIS ADDRESS!! in what was certainly Louise’s own handwriting. Eventually, Smith stopped writing. He consoled himself with the thought that their relationship would have ended badly sooner or later, probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a few months. Because a man, no matter how handsome or talented or good or deserving of happiness, simply cannot live off a woman for long.
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Author’s Note
1. Sarabande for a Suicide
2. Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam
3. Rapunzel
4. The Ugly American Cowboy
5. The End of Smith
6. Punishment
7. Massacre at Block house 9
8. The Lost Patrol
9. Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries
10. Cap’n Crunch
11. Bird of Paradise
12. Pinard in Love
13. À Moi la Légion!
14. Bridge of the Requiter
15. The Smell of Strong Cheese
