Gorgeous East

by null

  “What kind of information?” Pinard said, the back of his neck prickling. “Is it illegal? Because there I might be able to give you some good advice.”

  “I’ve already said too much,” she said. “Here’s something else for you to think about. . . .”

  And she leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

  3.

  The narrow balcony outside Louise de Noyer’s room at the Palais-Maroc looked out upon the Friday Mosque, white and crenelated as a wedding cake, across the hot, empty Place el-Hedime. By a trick of perspective, you could lie in the double bed in front of the half-shuttered window and it seemed you were hanging directly over the mosque itself. The clear, hard light of the desert amplified vision as a coliseum amplifies sound and you felt that the solemn men in their djellahs and fezzes and the equally solemn veiled women draped head to toe in black, drawn along by the nasal intonations of the muezzin over the loudspeaker from the minaret, were not a hundred meters away, but directly below. If you threw a shoe out the window, no doubt you would hit one of those devout Muslims on the head.

  Now Louise de Noyer, standing with her back to the half-open shutters, reached around in that awkward elbow way and unhooked the straps of her white bikini top—they had just been to the beach again—and let it fall to the floor. Then she stepped out of her bottoms and stood naked in a hard pillar of brilliant light. Pinard lay on the bed watching her, speechless.

  “How do you like my little striptease?” she said in a low, enticing voice.

  Pinard, grinning like an idiot, couldn’t say anything. They’d been making love for three days now, they hadn’t stopped. Only for an occasional small bite to eat and one trip to the beach.

  “Do it for me now,” she said, her hands on her breasts. “Just a little. Please.”

  Pinard hesitated, embarrassed by this request, one of her little kinks. “Why don’t you come over here and help me out?”

  But Louise shook her head. “I want to see how hard you can get yourself. Please . . .”

  He complied, reluctantly at first, then with some enthusiasm, and when he was ready, she knee-walked onto the bed and settled herself on top of him. This time, he lasted until she cried out and fell across him, gasping; then he seized her fiercely by the hips and let himself go. A few minutes later, he turned her face to the sheets; and again after an hour, face-to-face, as dusk came in vermillion streaks and green flashes out of the east and the men emptied out of the Friday mosque below, followed after a while by the women from their separate doorway.

  Louise lay still beside him, her hand flat on his chest covering his Legion tattoo, and they dozed, awakening to the utter darkness of a desert city at night.

  “This is when I’d like a cigarette,” she said. “But I’ve given up smoking. Anyway, it’s a cliché.”

  Pinard, savoring his happiness, didn’t say anything. The sound of a toilet flushing came to them through the plaster walls.

  “Louise,” he began, hoarse with emotion. “I’ve wanted you since . . . what I mean to say is I think . . .” He tried to keep his voice steady, but couldn’t. She put three fingers over his mouth.

  “No,” she said sharply. “Do not fall in love with me. Don’t even use the word. Everyone falls in love with me, every man I meet, and they don’t know who I am, they just see someone they want to fuck then they think it’s more than that. So please don’t. I’m—”

  “Married.” Pinard finished her thought.

  “How did you know?”

  Pinard shrugged. “Anyone could guess. You’re beautiful. How could a beautiful woman like you not be married?”

  “Not only married,” Louise said. “I love my husband. I’m sorry. I do.”

  “Then why this?” Pinard said, genuinely perplexed.

  She laughed softly. “You talk like a schoolboy. People sleep with people they are attracted to, but don’t love. It happens all the time, especially in France.”

  “So you don’t love me?” Pinard said, feeling, despite himself, a lump in his throat.

  “No, my friend,” Louise said sadly. “I love my husband. And there you have the tragedy of the situation.”

  She pushed off the bed and walked over to the window and opened the shutters and stood against the greater darkness, exposed to the cold night air, her skin gleaming faintly, staring out at the empty square below, at the darkened mosque.

  “My husband is a wonderful man. He actually saved my life, stopped me from committing suicide. That’s how we met—he grabbed my arm as I was about to drown myself in the sea. Don’t ask why I was about to do such a stupid thing—I was young and depressed—Phillipe understood that. After he pulled me out he took me to his hotel room and made love to me that very night, and that saved my life more than anything. He’s also very talented—a musician, the piano, you know, nearly concert quality. And this is going to surprise you, I mean for someone with my political convictions, he’s”—she paused—“in the military. Worse than that, actually. The Foreign Legion.”

  “But they’re notorious!” Pinard exclaimed. “Vicious brutes! Murderers!”

  “You’re right,” Louise agreed. “I hate the Legion for its violence, for how they abuse the volunteers, how they turn young men into the worst kind of killers. And for what they’ve done in the past to the Arabs and the Africans, the Vietnamese, the Mexicans, even the French—remember what happened to the Communards of 1870? Forty thousand shot in the streets and buried beneath the cobblestones of Paris. Legionnaires did that, Legionnaires following orders! I hate them because they are an army of mercenaries, the tool of neo-imperialist oppression. But they do have a wonderful military band, one of the most famous in the world, called la Musique Principale. My husband is in charge of that. And he’s not one of the enlisted men, you understand, he’s an officer, a graduate of Saint-Cyr. Only the top officers in any graduating class may choose the Legion. They consider it a great honor. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” Pinard said. He could barely keep the smile off his face.

  “But you’re right. When you add it all up, music or no music, that’s just what they are, a bunch of assassins who murder for pay on the orders of the French government. I made a terrible officer’s wife. I refused to attend social functions, I never went down to Aubagne for any of their stupid ceremonies—not for Camerone Day, for Christmas, or le Quatorze. I demanded that Phillipe request a posting near Paris, which wasn’t at all good for his career—he ought to be a general by now. He indulged me in all these things without complaint because he loved me, and because he was so strong, he didn’t care what anyone thought of him. I don’t know, maybe because of my father, I’ve always been attracted to strong men, like Phillipe.”

  Pinard grunted irritably at this. Suddenly he hated Phillipe de Noyer more than he had ever hated anyone. Images of that crazy bastard playing his piano all night long came into his head unbidden. Playing that damnable Satie when he could be lying in bed, fucking his beautiful wife. The bastard.

  “Please, don’t get upset with me,” Louise said, sensing his anger.

  “I’m trying not to,” Pinard said.

  “I want to talk about him. Do you mind so much?”

  “Talk,” Pinard said, though he didn’t want to hear another word. “Go ahead.”

  “He has a disease,” Louise continued, after a moment, her voice trembling. “He’s dying. It’s in the blood, I mean inherited, in the genes, but sometimes it doesn’t develop, it stays dormant, or it develops later in life, which it did in his case. We used to make love all the time, every day, and it was wonderful and we talked about having children. But his métier took him all over the world, often to dangerous places, and we never seemed to have the time. About five years ago, he went to Algeria as an inspector for the UN, to report on conditions in the Saharoui refugee camps. Something terrible happened out there in the desert that he wouldn’t talk about and this disease, apparently, can be triggered by a traumatic event. When he came back, suddenly, he
was sick. But it was a very strange sickness, a kind of incurable insomnia. He just couldn’t sleep anymore. I mean he couldn’t sleep at all, not even for a few minutes. He took a leave of absence and went to doctors in Paris, in Germany, in London, and they prescribed sleeping pills, meditation, magic potions, acupuncture; they did CAT scans, brain tests, everything. But still, he couldn’t sleep. Finally a doctor at le Clinique du Sommeil in Lucerne tested his DNA and figured out Phillipe had a rare hereditary condition that attacks the sleep centers of the brain.”

  Pinard remained quiet, listening.

  “This disease is a type of CDJ—think of mad cow, scrapies. It’s what they call an autosomnial dominant disease and is spread by horrible little particles called prions, which are abnormal proteins that inhabit the brain and blood—I quote here from the medical texts that I have read and reread many times—and it is characterized by severe untreatable insomnia and cognitive disorders. In other words it is a species of madness, complete with hallucinations, manias, paranoias, everything. In some rare cases it is passed down through families—fatal familial insomnia, FFI they call it—and in this form it is like a curse, borne through the generations. The condition goes back hundred of years with the de Noyers—there are diaries, medical records, court documents, military reports. Phillipe’s grandfather was killed at the Battle of the Somme in the First World War, he charged the German guns with a toilet plunger in his hand—they gave him the Medaille Militaire, they had no idea he was sick in his head. Others in his family went like that, jumping off cliffs on a whim, or attacking policemen with bricks—one of them even tried to assassinate Léon Blum, the famous socialist. But first, all of them, all of them, quite suddenly stopped sleeping.”

  She paused, her voice choking with emotion, her eyes filling with tears.

  Pinard sagged back into the pillow, a bit stunned by this information: It certainly explained a lot about the colonel’s odd nocturnal behavior; and the way he appeared to haunt his own life, the ghost of a former self. Louise wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand and continued.

  “As it turns out, there is another terrible side effect to this terrible disease. You see, the sleep centers of the brain are quite near those parts that control sexual functioning. So when my husband stopped being able to sleep, he stopped being able to make love to me. This is why I . . . I like to see you hard, first. I’m paranoid, but just to make sure, you understand? Toward the end, Phillipe would get hard only a little, then die inside of me. And he tried over and over again, he got very desperate and finally, it didn’t work at all. This was horrible, crushing to me as a woman. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Pinard said. He could barely speak.

  “He offered me a divorce that I refused because I love him. But I am a very physical woman, very sexual and I can’t”—she paused—“I’m weak, maybe, but I can’t endure not experiencing physical pleasure, and so I’ve pursued many affairs, I can’t help myself. Phillipe ignored my behavior for a while, he is a very understanding man, then he couldn’t take it anymore and volunteered to go again with the UN to Western Sahara—to die, I think—and there, here—he disappeared. His superiors told me about an attack on a UN outpost in the Sebhket Zemmur, he was probably taken by the Marabouts, they said. But there’s been no ransom demand, no trace of him. In any case, the French government refuses to pay ransoms—this is official policy—and the Legion will certainly pay nothing, so I have come to look for him and to pay myself. I’ve been to the Saharoui souk, I spoke to the emir, and he has agreed to help me. I’m waiting now for more information. I have been waiting weeks for a word. This is why I’m in Laayoune. I shall ransom him back, my Phillipe, so he may die in my arms. This is the last comfort I can offer him. So do you blame me”—she came away from the window, and Pinard saw the tears streaming down her face—“if I forget my sadness for a little while with you, with your—”

  She stopped herself and bit her lip, watching him. He was ready again. He would never get enough of her, enough of her body, he knew now, not in this life. Best take it while he could. He gestured imperiously, and she came over meek and willing, head bowed, and knelt on the bed beside him, and he pushed her down.

  4.

  The Australians—five or six of them, it was hard to tell, one or another kept falling down—had somehow managed to get very drunk on the watered-down whiskey they served at the Casbah Bar in the Hotel Palais-Maroc. They had been drinking all day, celebrating the fact that the NGO they worked for was closing up shop in Laayoune and sending them back to Sydney in the morning, and they were singing Australian songs off-key at the top of their lungs—much to the annoyance of Legionnaire Szbeszdogy, sitting at the opposite end of the bar with Capitaine Pinard and Caporal-chef Solas. Szbeszdogy’s finely tuned musical ear was wounded by this racket; the boozy, Australian singing gave him a pain deep in his gut.

  “These Australians are driving me insane,” he hissed. “One more song and I’m going to start a fight. So help me I’ll smash the next one who opens his mouth with this bottle of Kro!”

  “Control yourself, Legionnaire,” Pinard said, amused. “You’re on duty.”

  “Why can’t they just shut up?”

  “Because this is what they do.”

  “What—sing horribly?”

  “They travel the world, drink excessively, and regret Australia. Apparently, it’s the kind of place you miss only when you’re away from it.”

  “Ah.” Szbeszdogy nodded, understanding. “Like Hungary.”

  “Like most places. What about Brazil, Solas?”

  They turned to Solas, but he refused to join the conversation. He hadn’t spoken a word all night, and would only respond to a direct order and only with a grunt. His nose, formerly straight and aquiline, now swollen with an ugly purple bruise, showed a bump in the middle and hooked to the right. His murderous hatred for Pinard, and by association Szbeszdogy, and perhaps the Legion itself, drifted off his otherwise smooth café au lait skin like a powerful body odor.

  The Australians kept up their raucous singing and drinking, and a few minutes later one of them ran out of the bar and vomited in a potted palm in the lobby, another one fell on his face, yet another slid unconscious to the floor, and the two or three remaining, feeling bereft, ordered more whiskey.

  “You want to know why I picked you for this recon duty tonight, Solas?” Pinard said.

  Solas didn’t say anything.

  “First, you’re the deadliest bastard we’ve got. Your comrades of the 4e ER are blunt instruments compared to you. They’re hammers, especially that bull-headed Russian and that Haitian idiot, but you, my friend, you’re a straight razor. Thin, concealable, deadly”—Pinard chuckled, pleased with his metaphorical power. “Second, I want to give you a chance to kill me. I’m quite serious.”

  Solas looked up. “Permission to speak freely, Capitaine,” he said, his voice a low growl.

  “Granted.”

  “I will kill you. You are already a dead man. But at a time and place of my choosing. You don’t mark Solas like this”—he gestured to his nose—“and live.”

  “You’re nose is much improved if you ask me,” Pinard said affably. “Makes you look less like a girl.”

  “How about we settle this outside immediately,” Solas growled. “I propose knives. I will cut your throat.”

  Pinard reached under his shirt and pulled out the .22 caliber Walther and pressed it discreetly against Solas’s kidney. The Walther was now fixed with a short, stubby silencer of the latest design. It could be fired right here and the shot would go unheard by the Australians halfway down the bar, now singing a pornographic version of “Waltzing Matilda.”

  “Understand something,” Pinard said, keeping his voice pleasant. “Your chance to kill me is only tonight, in the darkness, and only when my back is turned. But then you’ve got to kill Szbeszdogy too and you’ve got to beat it out of Laayoune without getting caught. Think you can do it?”

  So
las didn’t say anything. Pinard pressed the gun harder into the Brazilian’s kidney.

  “If you don’t kill me tonight, I’ll kill you, Solas, I swear it. Tomorrow, the next day. Doesn’t matter, you will be dead.”

  “You can try,” the Brazilian said through his teeth.

  “I will have an easy time of it too,” Pinard continued in the same affable tone. “I’m an officer now, and what’s another miserable Legionnaire more or less to the Legion? Tens of thousands have died for nothing, marched directly into the mouth of the guns, cannon fodder. And you, espèce de merde, you’re worth less than the least of them.”

  Solas made a gesture meaning talk all you want, we’ll see.

  “You know something”—Pinard released the little gun’s safety catch—“I think I’ll shoot you now. Szbeszdogy and I will be out the door before the Australians realize you’re dead.”

  Heat from Solas’s fingertips melted the ice in his glass.

  Szbeszdogy watched them both, increasingly alarmed.

  “But before I kill you, I offer another way, a counterproposal. Are you listening?” A little jab with the gun. “If we emerge from tonight’s adventure alive, which we might not, let’s be honest, you will come to me and you will acknowledge that I did what I did to your nose for the sake of the mission. And you will recant your threat to kill me forever.”

  “That’s fucking stupid,” the Brazilian said, his voice hoarse. “So I tell you I’m not going to kill you now. What’s to stop me from killing you later?”

  “Your honor as a Legionnaire,” Pinard said. “I’ve read your dossier. You had no honor when you joined the Legion—you were a punk, a favela murderer—but you have it now, because the Legion has given it to you. So I will accept your word as a Legionnaire and a man of honor.” And he laid the Walther carefully on the bar next to Solas’s drink. “Use this on me if you want. Frankly, I don’t care much one way or the other. But remember, if you don’t kill me tonight, you will come to me tomorrow and tell me the vendetta is forgotten. Or I will definitely kill you. I swear it.”