Gorgeous East

by null

  The whiny, self-indulgent triple threat was no more. The Legion had replaced him with a more capable understudy. The name on his name tag, Velcro and removable to preserve l’anonymat—Legionnaire Caspar P. Milquetoast—confirmed this astonishing substitution. Here was a newly hardened individual, able to bunk on the ground in any weather and rise at dawn to march a hundred clicks without breakfast. Trained in knife fighting and in the use of explosives. A fair shot with the FAMAS 5.56 assault rifle that he could—as Colonel de Noyer had promised—disassemble, clean, and reassemble in under two minutes, blindfolded. Trained in Savac, France’s answer to the martial arts, which taught, among other things, how to kill a man in a dozen unconventional ways—bare hands, broken sticks, a rolled-up newspaper, piano wire, a rock, a ballpoint pen, a stale baguette. Prepared for any expediency in the service of France.

  3.

  Freshly minted Legionnaires were sent to one of the regiments stationed in Metropolitan France or the overseas departments for specialized training. They might end up in the 1er REC, the Legion’s armored cavalry division in Orange; in the 1er REG, the combat engineers in Laudun; or be sent off for survival training with the 3e REI in the thick jungles of French Guyana. Or they might request assignment to la Musique Principale, though this required a special evaluation for musical ability by a committee composed of regimental musicians, both Legionnaires and officers, serving with the marching band.

  In the weeks following the kepi ceremony, Smith filed all the necessary paperwork in triplicate for a posting to the Musique Principale with a preference indicated for the Chorale du Légion, then headed off on his first weekend pass to Marseilles with Iian. The copains boozed from one end of the town to the other, started fights, got kicked out of bars, had awkward condom-protected sex with prostitutes—requisite hijinks for the Legionnaire on leave. New assignments usually took months to come down through the Legion bureaucracy, allowing time for several such binges. But to his surprise, Smith received his orders back in barracks in Aubagne, Sunday night.

  They were not the ones he had been expecting.

  The TGV blasted up through the green breast of France with Smith aboard the next morning, racing at speeds approaching three hundred kilometers per hour over placid rivers and through poplar-lined fields. A beautiful day dawned, the hillsides of the Rhône already flushed with wildflowers. It was the beginning of another spring, the first since Jessica’s death. Still suffering from his binge in Marseilles, Smith dozed fitfully, drank six cups of coffee, two bottles of water, peed it all out, sweated a rank alcoholic sweat. A couple of hours later, the grimy outskirts of the capital appeared through the scarred windows of the train and he peered out at congested industrial banlieus, warehouses, dingy storefronts, the utilitarian backsides of apartment blocks busy with piping and ductwork—all bathed in bright, forgiving sunlight. The meandering Seine sparkled green in the sun. North African vendors in the warren of streets below pushed bloody carts from which butchered lamb flanks dangled on hooks. Billboards splashed with the two-story-tall image of a buxom young woman in a skimpy bathing suit advertised an unknown product—Cosmoluxe. A detergent, a hair spray, a bikini wax? Smith couldn’t say.

  He caught a taxi from the gare de Austerlitz to the fort and found Colonel Phillipe de Noyer, duffels packed and stacked in the foyer, noodling as ever on his baby grand. The rest of his once splendid quarters had been taken down to bare walls. The books and classical busts were gone; the paintings and buttoned-leather covering, all gone. Only the piano remained.

  “Legionnaire Milquetoast reporting as ordered.” Smith saluted and stood back, rigidly at attention.

  “Beautiful weather,” the colonel murmured. He didn’t remove his eyes from a spot in the air somewhere above Smith’s head, a thousand miles away.

  “Oui, mon colonel.”

  “Milquetoast—this is your nom de guerre.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are something of an ironist, eh, Legionnaire?”

  “I’m a tenor, sir.” Still stiffly at attention, Smith felt his stomach muscles begin to ache.

  “At ease.”

  “Thank you, mon colonel.” Smith relaxed.

  Phillipe stopped playing and lowered the lid over the keys. A moment of silence followed as if out of respect for a friend who had died.

  “That’s probably the last note I’ll ever play,” he said, half to himself.

  “Sir?”

  “Frankly, I didn’t think you’d make it, mon enfant.” The colonel looked up absently.

  “Neither did I, sir.”

  “But here you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “You certainly stink like a Legionnaire—a combination of body sweat, Basta, and Kronenbourg. I take it you’ve been on the obligatory spree to Marseilles?”

  Smith permitted himself a smile. The colonel grew serious.

  “Have you requested your regiment?”

  “Musique Principale, mon colonel. Chorale du Légion.”

  “Good. But there’s no need to stand for the selection committee. You’re coming with me.”

  “Where to, sir?”

  “An obscure place called the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara. It has no legislature, no borders, its very existence is under dispute. And make no mistake, even though we will be flying the blue flag of the United Nations, we are going to war. The Legion is going to war.”

  A cold feeling churned at the bottom of Smith’s stomach. “I didn’t know there was a war.”

  “There’s always a war if you look hard enough, Milquetoast, especially in Africa. This one’s been going on nearly four decades between the Moroccans and the Saharouis—they’re the indigenous people of Western Sahara—just simmering along with a handful of casualties on both sides each year and monitored by the benignly incompetent UN mission to the region, known as MINURSO. But a third party, a kind of insurgency, has thrust itself into this stale conflict and now the death toll has exploded. They call themselves the Holy Marabout Army of the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam. Ridiculous, I know, but they themselves are not ridiculous. They are murderous fanatics, without remorse or human feeling, the enemies of civilization itself. France is contributing three hundred troops to MINURSO to help keep the peace, which means she is sending the Legion to fight on her behalf. I have asked for seventy-five combat volunteers from my Corps of Musicians, half of these from the Chorale. Desert air is good for the lungs and sound travels a long way out there—we will not be idle, I assure you. We will practice toward winning the gold medal in Moscow next year. In any case, I will certainly not go to war without a top tenor at my disposal!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “To save time I decided to volunteer you on your behalf. But I should warn you things might get difficult. Do you have a copain?”

  “I do, sir,” Smith said. “Legionnaire P.C. Smith.”

  “Inform him he has also volunteered for Africa.”

  An uncomfortable silence, in which Phillipe tapped gently on the piano lid, as if he expected someone to tap back from inside. He looked up, meeting Smith’s eyes, and Smith was startled by what he saw there: a kind of chaos at the center of his gaze, a storm about to burst.

  “Do you believe in God, Milquetoast?”

  “No, sir,” Smith said.

  “Pity. You’ll need Him where we’re going. Tu peux disposer, Legionnaire! Dismissed.”

  4.

  Paris city traffic—a bewildering variety of unknown small cars, Peugeot taxis, three-wheel scooters, motorcycles, and the vast green-and-white accordion buses of the intra-urban lines—stood at a dead stop in the avenue Gambetta. Waves of high-pitched beeping rolled through the stalled vehicles at regular intervals like breakers over a pier, but no one was going anywhere for a while: Someone had run over a young woman walking a little white dog in the pedestrian crossing at the rue des Amandiers. End of April now, almost May, but the sky showed a leaden gray over the quartier Menilmontant and over the endles
s alleys of crypts and funerary obelisks behind the high walls of the Père-Lachaise. It might be dawn or dusk, winter, fall, or spring. Hard to tell with the concrete chill of Paris still clinging to the sidewalks, to the intercises between the old stones of the buildings.

  Smith watched the blue lights of the ambulances flashing off the storefronts, heard the mournful yip of the little dog. The accident had happened a mere ten meters from where he sat beneath the awning on the terrace of the café Tlemcen. He’d been there for a couple of hours, malingering over a single cup of espresso and a thimble-sized glass of Armagnac, watching the métro exit across the way, and trying to keep an eye on pedestrians coming along the avenue Gambetta and the boulevard de Ménilmontant and entering the rue Duris, the rue Novograd, or the rue des Amandiers, all at the same time, all visible from his well-situated table at the Tlemcen—itself located at the end of a sharp block jutting like the prow of a battleship into the Place Auguste Métivier. But somehow, Smith managed to miss the accident.

  He’d heard the desperate shriek of tires, the horrified shouts of the passersby and swung toward the intersection moments afterwards to see the young woman lying there, already struck down—descendu—her white coat matting with blood. He jumped up to help, got a leg over the railing—he’d learned CPR and lifesaving skills, among other things, in the Legion—then stopped himself. Legionnaires were not welcome in Paris, in any situation. Parisians of every type from taxi drivers to cabinet ministers despised them as dangerous drunks, brawlers, murderers, rapists, fascists, militarists—all of which they were, to an extent. Anyway, the young woman was dead. Smith could see that now, from the way she lay, nearly bent in half, on the hard pavement. So he settled back into the cane-bottomed café chair and watched as a crowd gathered, as a doctor arrived from somewhere, as the ambulances pulled up, driving slowly along the sidewalk, as the paramedics finally zipped the young woman into a body bag and it began to rain, the rain washing her blood into the gutter.

  “Eh bien,” he heard someone behind him say, “at least they don’t have far to go. The Père-Lachaise is just there!” And someone else laughed, cruelly, at this.

  Smith got up and walked the neighborhood again, stalking the same streets he’d been stalking for days, but still couldn’t recognize any of the buildings. It was hopeless. He’d never find the right address, all of it a blank facade in his memory, exactly like the blank facades looming up all around. At last, rush hour came—l’heure de pointe—and he gave up and made his way down the avenue de la République against the flow of pedestrian traffic—experiencing the distinct pleasure of having people avert their eyes and step out of his way. He wore his tenue de ville: the khaki shirt ironed into thirteen precise creases; the khaki pants so stiffly starched you could bounce a coin off the knee; the eye-catching shaggy red epaulets and blue sash; the desert-rated combat boots—les Rangers—polished to an impossible Legion sheen; the seven-pointed bomb insignia glinting from his collar; the white kepi perched on his head at a jaunty angle, now shielded from the rain with a clear plastic cover.

  All of it marking Smith out as one of them. A Legionnaire, one of the world’s violent. One of the wolves.

  5.

  The Bar des Bluets, a hole-in-the-wall Legion hangout off a steep street in the Buttes-Montmartre, smelled of vomit, cigarettes, and cheap beer—exactly like the basement fraternity parties Smith had attended back at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

  The patron was an ex-Legionnaire, a battered old drunk named Claude with a glass eye, the missing orb lost fighting the Fellagha during the Algerian War in the 1950s. In Claude’s day the Legion was still based out of Sidi Bel Abbès, a town the Legion built for itself in the pleasant, hilly countryside north of Oran, in what was then French Algeria. When France abandoned that colony as a result of the war, the Legion relocated every scrap, every brick, electrical outlet, and pane of glass, every memorial tablet, toilet, and statue—including the massive Monument aux Morts—to Aubagne. A large, water-stained panoramic photo of Claude’s old regiment—the 1er REP posed in full dress, battle flags flying in 1956—hung in a broken frame behind the bar. Spindly palm trees swayed in the background of the photo. Farther off, the slopes of forbidding Algerian mountains, the peaks touched with snow. Later, Claude’s regiment was disbanded—its men disgraced and scattered, its officers thrown into prison—for the role it played in the failed Legion-backed coup d’état that had sought to keep Algeria French. This historical photograph and an explicit beaver-shot centerfold out of a grim Spanish porno magazine nailed to the door of the water closet made up the totality of the Bluets’s decor.

  Smith found his copain, Iian McDairmuid—Legionnaire Smith—leaning on one elbow at the bar, staring up at the centerfold, twenty empty bottles of Kro lined up like a company on parade before him along the zinc countertop. He was very drunk, eyes wandering in his head like stray asteroids around a sodden moon. His white kepi was gone, his uniform soiled, its elaborately pressed tunic vomit stained and wrinkled, lacking blue sash and one precious epaulet.

  “You drink too much, kid,” Smith said, sitting on a stool next to him. “Look at your uniform. Two months’ pay, right there.”

  It was true. The Legion provided each engagé volontaire with four complete uniforms—tenue de ville, tenue de sortie, tenue de combat, and tenue de soir—any piece of which was ridiculously expensive to replace. The shaggy red epaulets alone would cost Iian 170 euros each; the sacred white kepi, more than 500 euros.

  “Fock you, lad,” Iian muttered. “I told you I was a fock’n dipso. What’s i’ to ye?”

  “How about a cup of coffee? I’ll buy you one.”

  “I shit in your cup of coffee. Buy me another Kro.”

  “No.”

  “Buy me a Kro or I’ll cut you fock’n throat.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Smith said. “The problem with you is your liver. Every time you drink, you turn into an idiot, then you puke. You’ve got the liver of a girl. Your liver is the size of a fucking Milk Dud. You know how big that is?”

  Iian shook his head and Smith made a very small circle with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Like this.” He grinned. “About the same size as your dick.”

  “Go t’hell!” Iian growled, belligerence in his voice.

  “You’re in Paris,” Smith continued, enjoying his newfound role as the voice of reason. “Go to the opera, the Louvre. See a show, see the Arc de Triomphe. All you do is sit in this shithole all day staring at that poster with those wobbly eyes of yours—”

  “One of the nicest snatches I ever seen, fockface,” Iian interrupted. “An’ fock you!”

  “Culture,” Smith concluded. “A little culture might not be bad for you. Actually, it might help.”

  “When I hear the word culture, I go for my gun!” Iian shouted, outraged. “Y’ bourgeois faggit!”

  He lurched forward and took a swing—a vicious left hook with force behind it—but Smith, expecting this explosion, ducked away and the blow glanced off his left shoulder. The kid spun off his stool, unbalanced by momentum, and landed facedown on the unwashed floor. He was so drunk he couldn’t get up. He lay in the muck of puke, spilled beer, and Paris grime, cursing loudly. The only other customers, two paratroopers from the 2e REP at the far end of the bar, their hands all over the Senegalese prostitute sitting between them, paid no attention to this fracas. Claude, le patron, his remaining eye fixed on a Formula 1 race on the television over the bar—Schumacher leading the pack as usual—didn’t bother to turn around.

  You could be your worst self in the Legion, an obnoxious drunk, an unvarnished bastard, a liar, a con man, and still count on the unwavering support of your copain. The fragile niceties of civilian discourse, its false smiles, phony solicitude, and calls for intervention had no currency here. Smith helped Iian back up on to his stool and bought him a shot of cheap cognac and the kid knocked it back, his hand shaking.

  “Yu’ve heard aboot the heads,” he said at la
st, calming down.

  Smith looked at him blankly. “What heads?”

  “Another UN team site wiped out last week in the Non-fock’n Territory of West Fock-all. Some place culled Om Dunka, or sumthin’ wherever the hell that is. Been all over the French tele. Makes the second massacre now. Number two. And that’s where we’re going, laddie, in case yu hadn’t heard. Right into the shyte. Th’ cocksuckers over there chop off everyone’s noggin, just t’—you know—put the terror to the blue helmets. Funny thing, they only leave th’ heads behind. What yu suppose they do wi’ all the bodies?”

  “How should I know?” Smith said.

  “You’ll go see me dad?” the kid said, after a moment, his voice trembling slightly. “If I don’t get back. He’s not a bad un, good man, really. Tried to do right by me, t’ keep me off th’ booze and drugs—I jus wasn’t havin’ any.”

  “Sure,” Smith said, keeping the smile from his face with difficulty. “When you planning on checking out?”

  “Fock you,” Iian said. Then, after a glum moment: “Did y’ find her?”

  Smith shook his head. A pause. Then Smith ordered a Kro for himself and another for the kid, who drank it thirstily, as if he hadn’t had a beer in a month.

  “How many days now?” Iian said.

  “Three.”

  “Going to piss what’s left of your leave, looking for some miserable bitch?”

  “Yes,” Smith said.

  “Follow y’ own perspcription, man! The fock’n Opera, the fock’n Tour Eiffel. All that tourist shyte!”

  “Don’t do as I say,” Smith said. “Do as I do.”

  The kid scratched his jaw for a moment. He swayed dangerously to one side, then to the other, like a kite in the wind, gears in his mind working audibly. Then, the pilot light flared up and the alcohol fumes behind his eyes caught fire.

  “You remember where you first met her?”