Gorgeous East

by null

“Yes.”

  “So go back there and you’ll find her again. Simple enough, heh?”

  Smith grinned. Out of the mouths of drunks! Somehow, this thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  6.

  The yellow scrap of paper, now nearly a year old, lay tucked under a heap of newer scraps on the bulletin board in the basement of the American Methodist Church on the quai des Celestins.

  Smith found it the next morning after fifteen minutes digging through the various papery layers—the ride-shares to Barcelona, the telemarketing jobs that required knowledge of French and German, the group apartments looking for student co-locs who wouldn’t mind sleeping in shifts on the couch. He recognized the spidery handwriting the moment he saw it and seized the yellow scrap off the board, sending other bits of ancient paper like snowy flakes sailing to the floor. Written there was a cell phone number (Smith immediately tried calling—disconnected); the quartier, which he already knew; and the street, which he did not, but which he quickly found in the pages of his Guide Bleu pocket map: a tiny blind alley, one of Paris’s smallest capillaries, called—ironically, it seemed to him—the passage du Plaisir.

  Smith hastened to the métro and took it back to Menilmontant, and quickly found the passage in question, settling in to wait in a deep doorway across from where it debouched into the rue Duris. He waited as the day waned. He did not smoke a cigarette or read a newspaper; he waited in the shadows of the doorway silently, hardly breathing, entirely focused on his prey. The blue shadows of a premature twilight engulfed the narrow passage, which only received direct sun once a day around noon and only for five minutes. A few people came and went—a couple of loud schoolkids cutting class to get high, the postman with his bulging leather bag and natty Yves St. Laurent-designed uniform, an old woman carrying a cat off to the vet in a mesh cat-carrying bag, the cat mewing with alarm all the way around the corner. No one saw, or wanted to see, the mysterious man in uniform waiting there in the doorway.

  Then, nearly seven hours after Smith took up his vigil, he heard a crazy laugh from around the corner of the rue Duris, and snatches of a too familiar conversation in a drawly southern voice—

  “O.K., like symbolism, what the fuck is it? I mean . . .”

  Moments later, non-Blaire appeared, wearing the same cable-knit sweater and sweatpants ensemble she’d been wearing when they met a year ago. The same fake Hermès scarf, now dirty and tattered, hung knotted around her shoulder—it seemed she hadn’t changed her clothes or her subject matter in all that time. Struggling along under the weight of a huge backpack, a crusty punk backpacker kid, maybe seventeen, and scrawny-looking, his matted dreadlocks tied with a scrunchy bulging like ganglia off the back of his head. Crudely sewn to the left arm of the backpacker’s military fatigue jacket, an upside-down patch bearing the Bear Flag of the California Republic. Smith stepped out of the shadows, blocking their path down the passage, an unexpectedly martial apparition on this nondescript impasse.

  “Blaire!” Smith called.

  The young woman gasped. “What the fuck?”

  “Remember me?”

  “Huh?” Non-Blaire blinked up at him uncomprehendingly. “What are you, a Képi Blanc? Why would I know one of you motherfuckers?”

  “You don’t remember,” Smith said. “You don’t remember a thing.”

  “Like I said.” Non-Blaire bristled. “I don’t fucking know people like you. Military asshole!”

  Smith almost laughed, then didn’t, figuring it would spoil the effect. She didn’t retain any memory of the disastrous night that had sent him to the Fort de Nogent and into the rough embrace of the Legion. Of course he probably looked like a different person in his smart uniform, with his hair shorn and thirty pounds slimmer—but he knew even if he looked exactly the same, she still wouldn’t remember him. He might be anyone. Just another face she’d slid past in the murky twilight on her way down.

  The California backpacker shifted his eyes from Smith to non-Blaire, didn’t like what he saw, and began to edge slowly back toward the rue Duris. The sounds of city traffic could not be heard from the gloomy trottoir of the passage du Plaisir. It seemed they were alone in the vast city.

  “Hey, you—wait!” Smith commanded. His newfound authority—or the authority implied by the uniform—was such that the California backpacker stopped. “Did you pay her any money?”

  “What’s it to you, dude?”

  “I don’t really give a shit,” Smith said. “But if you did, you just got ripped off. There’s no room for anyone else in her tiny miserable-ass pad—and believe me it isn’t a place you’re going to want to stay longer than five minutes.”

  The California backpacker thought about this for a long minute. “I gave her a hundred euros,” he said in a flat voice. “And, like, some weed.”

  “Give it back to him!” Smith turned to non-Blaire. “Now!”

  “Fuck you!” non-Blaire spit out. “He’s my new co-loc! That’s rent money! And who are you, like the fucking housing cops?”

  “Do what I say or I’ll call them now,” Smith said. “And not the housing cops. I mean the gendarmes who might be interested to hear your student visa ran out two years ago!”

  Shaking with rage or fear or both, non-Blaire reached up under her dingy cable-knit sweater and pulled out a belly-pouch (the placement of which gave her an unflattering pregnant look, when in reality she was quite thin) and Smith suddenly remembered her body, her breasts, which she’d exposed to him that terrible night. She pulled a handful of crumpled bills out of the pouch with a trembling hand and thrust them at the California backpacker. He took the money and counted it quickly, smoothing the colorful bills between his palms.

  “What the fuck!” he said at last. “There’s only thirty left! Where’s the rest of my money?”

  “We ate lunch, remember,” non-Blaire said. “We drank wine!”

  “You said you’d pay for that!” the kid insisted. “You said you’d put it on your card!”

  “Like I have a fucking card!” non-Blaire said.

  “See what I mean?” Smith said.

  “And where’s my weed?” the California backpacker said, increasingly irate. “Give me back my fucking weed!”

  “The weed,” Smith said to non-Blaire, holding out his hand.

  Cursing, non-Blaire reached again into her belly-pack and pulled out a transparent blue plastic Baggie printed with Chinese characters and stuffed with a dried-up green material, heavy on stalks and stems that looked more like dried oregano than marijuana, but was in fact a potent blend from the Orient called Bangkok Bag, very popular with backpackers. Smith ripped open the Baggie and shook it out on the sidewalk and the marijuana went fluttering to the gutter in the chill Paris wind. The California backpacker stood there, a stunned expression on his face.

  “That was totally uncool!” he groaned. “What a fucking asshole!”

  “Get out of here, you little jerk,” Smith growled, curling his hands into fists, and the kid moved off toward the rue Duris, shouting “Fascist asshole!” at the top of his lungs, and was gone. Then, Smith turned his full attention to non-Blaire. She stood slumped against the grimy wall of the passage—an injunction, DÉFENSE D’AFFICHER, stenciled on the crumbling plaster behind her head—looking like she didn’t care what happened next.

  “How did y’all know that?” she said, her voice careful not to betray any emotion. “About my student visa and all?”

  7.

  The flat, heaped with trash, empty bottles, old newspapers, moldy food, shoes, dirty laundry, looked even worse than Smith remembered. Pages torn out of L’Officiel had been duct-taped over the window non-Blaire broke on the occasion of his last visit. The place had a peculiar stink—oddly, not entirely unpleasant, Smith thought—like the den of a small, dangerous animal. A raccoon, perhaps.

  “What are you going to do to me?” non-Blaire whispered, and she sank down to the stained futon behind the pasteboard partition and drew her legs up to her chin. The posture was
defensive, but Smith knew he could do whatever he wanted to her and she wouldn’t necessarily ask him to stop. He could turn her over and tear off her jeans and take her from behind like that—and the thought gave him an erotic jolt that did him no credit. But he wasn’t that kind of person anymore; he was a better person, a Legionnaire who lived by a code of honor, earned through enormous suffering. What he’d done to Jessica in Istanbul had been an anomaly in his life. This is what he now chose to believe.

  He turned away from non-Blaire and kicked around in the rubble on the other side of the partition until he found what he’d expected to find, exactly where he’d left it, spread on the floor like a bedroll: his old jean jacket. He seized it up, felt the pockets and extracted an envelope containing 115 U.S. dollars in traveler’s checks—the last remnant of his funds from the ill-fated trip to Turkey—and the precious blue booklet, its pages stamped with entry visas for Turkey and France and the countries in between: Affixed to the inside flap, the photograph of a callow, self-centered young man taken four years ago, embossed with the official seal of the United States.

  “Aha!” Smith allowed himself a brief moment of triumph.

  “What’s that shit?” non-Blaire said sulkily, looking up.

  “My traveler’s checks,” Smith said. “And my Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card.”

  “What?”

  “My passport.”

  “How did that get here?”

  “You really don’t remember?”

  Non-Blaire shrugged. She didn’t remember a thing. Then, to change the subject: “What do y’all need with a passport, anyway?” She uncurled herself from the fetal position and rose to her knees. “Don’t they make all Képi Blancs citizens of France?”

  “That process takes five years,” Smith said. “I might decide to go home before then.”

  “Home . . . ,” non-Blaire repeated softly, and there was something about her tone that made Smith pay attention. Her eyes were unfixed, wavering a little like Iian’s. She was drunk, yes, but she probably needed psychiatric care, a long stay in the country, the help of someone who loved her. Here she was trapped like a ghost, doomed to walk the streets of a city that was not her own, cadging money and sex off unsuspecting students and backpackers, living off that meager half con and a few occasional dollars from her mother, all the while falling farther and farther into an abyss of her own making with each bleary, hungover dawn. Smith had been there, it was a view he recognized, the walls of your hole looming up.

  “Got any money?” he said.

  Non-Blaire, sniffling, wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “No,” she said. “There’s nothing left. That California kid was my last hope for rent . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then: “Why are you punishing me? Will you at least tell me that?

  “This isn’t punishment,” Smith said. “Here”—he reached into his pocket and withdrew 150 euros in cash left over from his first Legion paycheck and tossed it down to her. Non-Blaire stared at the money, surprised. Then she scooped it up and stuffed it under her sweater.

  “What do I have to do for this?” she said, her manner both cold and suggestive at once.

  “Nothing,” Smith said.

  She nodded. That was O.K. too.

  “What’s your real name?” Smith said.

  “Margaret,” non-Blaire said.

  “Want some advice, Margaret?”

  “No.”

  “Paris is killing you. This place is killing you. Look around”—he gestured to the piles of trash, the broken window—“you live like an animal in a cave. Make up with your mother. Go back to Atlanta, if that’s where you’re really from.”

  And he stuffed the traveler’s checks in his pants and buttoned the passport into the pocket of his tunic and, leaving non-Blaire there on her knees, went down the stairs and into the passage du Plaisir that all too quickly turns into the rue Duris. Later, waiting on the métro platform at Ménilmontant, the blue ozone smell of the third rail and the stink of decomposing rat carcasses and urine hanging in the stale air, Smith found himself smiling. He had recovered more than just a hundred bucks in traveler’s checks and his passport from the detritus-covered floor of non-Blaire’s pitiful flat. He had recovered a small, precious fragment of the personal dignity he’d thought irretrievably gone.

  8.

  The wide, beautiful streets of the First Arrondissement, nearly empty at this late hour and shining wetly in a light rain, looked exactly like a photograph by Brassai. The stern, aristocratic galleries of the Louvre rose from their formal park along the Seine. Smith came up through the Tuileries, his Rangers making no sound along the damp, sandy paths, and turned up the rue du Louvre to the main Paris post office—the only such establishment in Europe open for business 24/7, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. There he bought a padded envelope from a machine in the lobby, addressed it to himself c/o Poste Restante, sealed his passport inside, and dropped it into the dark mouth of the mail slot. They would hold it in general delivery for a year and a day; surely enough time to get to Africa and safely back again.

  After this, Smith decided on a whim to head over to the Left Bank, to one of the crowded dives along the Boul’ Mich. Halfway across the river on the Pont Neuf, he met Iian McDairmuid coming from the other direction. They had not planned to meet here, they had not planned to meet at all tonight, but it is axiomatic that two acquaintances set adrift in a large city are bound to run into each other sooner or later, by some mysterious law of personal gravity.

  “I’ll be flummoxed,” Iian said, though he didn’t sound surprised. “There’s m’ man Johnny!”

  “Iian.”

  They stopped for a cigarette and leaned against the balustrade. The Isle St. Louis floated out there on the dark river, the homes of the rich bathed in sumptuous white light. The gargoyled towers of Notre Dame rose above its square on the Île de la Cité at the heart of medieval Paris, now awash in garish colors—pinks, yellows, mauves—and subject to the tinny fanfares of a Son et lumière show.

  “Did y’ find the bitch?” Iian said.

  Smith nodded.

  “Did y’ wring her fock’n neck?”

  “No.”

  “Y’ fuck her, at least?”

  “No.”

  The kid leaned over and spit into the water and watched it fall. “Then why all the trouble?”

  “My passport.” Smith grinned. “I got it back.”

  “Lucky bastard.” Iian whistled. He understood: Desertion was an expediency never far from the mind of any Legionnaire. But to desert properly, you needed to get out of France, and to get out of France, you needed a valid passport, and the Legion confiscated all passports upon enlistment. These valuable documents were returned only after washing out of Basic in the first couple of weeks, or upon honorable completion of the full five-year contract. Colonel de Noyer had waived the passport rule in Smith’s case, compelled by an unquenchable desire for a good top tenor. Now, Smith had the unique option of desertion at any time; he could buy a plane ticket, slip out of the country over the course of a six-hour pass.

  “So yer goin over th’ wall tonight, then?” Iian said bitterly. “Back to the U.S.A.?”

  “No.” Smith shook his head. “Not tonight.”

  “When ye plannin’ on goin’?”

  Smith shrugged. Five years was too big a chunk of his life. He would give the Legion ten more months, maybe a year.

  “One of these days,” he said. “But don’t sweat it. Tomorrow I’m going to Africa. With you.”

  “Tha’s just plain idiotic,” Iian said. “You should get out tonight. A war, th’ colonel says. You wait an’ see, we’re in for some punishment over there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “O, we are!”

  Just then a bateau d’ombre—one of the night tourist boats—passed under the arches of the ancient bridge. Despite its name, lights blazed from the big observation windows. The kitschy wheeze of an accordion rose up along with the low burble of conversation and laughter and t
he smaller sounds of people dining, drinking. Then it passed on, into darkness, up the river. The Legionnaires watched it go. As it faded out of sight, Iian said, “Let’s go get drunk.”

  “Tamam,” Smith said.

  And they crossed the bridge to the Quartier Latin, where they were sure to find cheap wine and something to eat and, because of the uniforms they wore, belligerent debates with left-leaning students they would settle in the end with their fists.

  7

  MASSACRE AT

  BLOCK HOUSE 9

  1.

  None of the larger desert animals roamed the remote, barren corner of the Western Sahara called Sebhket Zemmur. No fenec foxes or gazelles, and certainly none of the flamingos, riotously pink, that could be seen taking off gracefully from the brackish lagoons around Nouadhibou on the coast.

  Neolithic graves have been found in caves in the nearby foothills. On their rough walls human handprints and the images of elks and wooly mammoths and flocks of migratory birds and groups of men hunting them and fighting one another with rocks and spears, all drawn in charcoal and ochre and red-iron stain, the relic of distant eons when the climate of these parts was wet and lush, the landscape a rich marshland watered by many rivers. The elks and mammoths and migratory birds were gone, their bones compressed into oil deposits hundreds of feet down. The ant and the scorpion now ruled the sands and barren salt flats, once teeming and green. But even these tiny, venomous creatures were forced into hibernation most of the year, asleep except for a week or two of frantic copulation every winter when a few drops of dew condensed at dusk on the shadowed, west-facing slopes of the dunes.

  Of the Sebhket Zemmur’s original inhabitants, only the fighting men remained.

  2.

  War came to Smith and Iian McDiarmuid in the dry wasteland of the Sebhket at Block house 9, a four-square desert fort built by the Legion during the vicious French colonial struggles of the 1920s—and once again garrisoned by the Legion, now the willing tool of neo co lo nial UN interventionists. This was just before dawn fifteen days after leaving Paris.