by null
“What’s that?” Pinard felt his ears burning suddenly.
“Her exquisite body,” the emir said, smiling broadly. “For me to use as I please.”
The tent got very small all at once, and Pinard felt a kind of hot pressure in his guts. Without thinking, he lunged across the carpet and caught one of the teenage emir’s golden earrings and pulled down hard. The earring came off with a wet, ripping sound and the emir cried out in pain, but the sound of his voice was almost immediately stifled by Pinard’s hands around his throat. Pinard squeezed hard and kept squeezing; the emir’s eyes bulged, his tongue came lolling out, his face went purple.
“Stop!” It was Szbeszdogy’s voice. “If you kill him, we’ll never get out of this warren alive!”
Pinard let go, his hands trembling. The emir fell back, half strangled but still breathing.
“Give me the Walther,” Pinard growled.
The Brazilian drew the gun, but did not immediately hand it over. Instead, he held it level with Pinard’s heart. Their eyes met.
“Quite right,” Pinard said calmly. “This is your chance, Solas. Kill me now and this officious little bastard will reward you with a fortune and you can spend the rest of your life here in the souk. Go ahead.”
The Brazilian hesitated for two terrible seconds. Then he grinned and tossed over the gun. “From one man of honor to another,” he said.
“Welcome to the fight,” Pinard said, and he pressed the Walther’s silenced end against the emir’s forehead. “Where is she?”
The emir rolled his eyes in fear. The whites were flecked with pink where a couple of blood vessels had burst.
7.
Louise de Noyer lay on a low Turkish couch in a blue-tiled room in the emir’s harem complex in her blue French underwear, attached by an iron collar and chain to a ring in the wall, as two more harem women, their clothes cast aside, applied perfumed pomade to her glossy blue-black hair. This exotic scene, reminiscent of Gérôme’s Bain, was interrupted violently when the door to the room slammed open and the three Legionnaires entered, dragging the young emir along with them.
The harem women screamed and went scrambling for their clothes. The corridor outside was already filled with the dark shapes of the emir’s myrmidons, and the harem complex—indeed, the entire souk—came alive with shouting and the urgent tromping of many feet.
“You’re going to ruin everything!” Louise shouted at Pinard from her place on the couch. “Let the emir go!”
“I let him go, they cut our throats!” Pinard said.
“You don’t understand! He’s going to help me find my husband!”
“I understand too well,” Pinard said. “Slut!”
The word came too quickly to his lips, but this wasn’t the place for a lover’s quarrel: Pinard shoved the Walther into the back of the emir’s head and swung him around by the scruff of his pink polo shirt until he faced the door. Two big-boned Mauritanian eunuchs blocked the threshold: These bulky, emasculated henchmen carried the traditional symbol of their vocation—a heavy, curved scimitar, straight out of The Arabian Nights.
“Tell your dogs to piss off,” Pinard growled.
The emir spoke in rapid Hassaniya, fear rattling his voice. The eunuchs—purchased in a slave market in Nouakchott the old-fashioned way, with a rawhide pouch full of silver coins and a couple of goats—backed off down the corridor.
“Let’s get out of here,” Pinard said. “Now!”
Solas seized Lousie de Noyer’s chain and yanked hard and the chain came out of the wall in a shower of plaster and tile.
“Pardon me, madame,” Solas said. “But you’re coming with us!”
“No!” Louise pulled back against the chain. “I won’t!”
“How you want me to handle this, mon capitaine?” Solas said.
“With prejudice, Legionnaire!”
“I don’t want to smash your pretty face,” Solas said grimly. “But if I have to, I’m going to enjoy it!”
Louise gasped in disbelief. “Liar!” she shouted at Pinard. “You’re not a bank robber at all! The Legion sent you!”
“The French Foreign Legion?” The emir went pale.
“You’ve heard of us,” Pinard said.
“You have no right to be here!” the emir cried, outraged. “This is a clear violation of national sovereignty!”
“It’s not a question of national sovereignty at all,” Szbeszdogy countered. “Western Sahara is a non-self-governing territory.”
“I protest in the strongest terms! I shall inform MINURSO of this violation—”
Pinard, losing patience, backhanded the kid hard across the mouth. “Shut up or I’ll crush your Game Boy!” he growled. “Petit con!”
“Brute!” Louise shouted. “Leave him alone!”
Pinard couldn’t look at her. Anyway, there wasn’t time now. They moved quickly out into the corridor and hustled along through several twists and turns until they found themselves in a courtyard open to the sky. Pinard glanced up and saw stars and wondered if he would live to see the dawn. They pushed through a wooden gate studded with iron nails and stumbled out into the labyrinthine alleys of the souk, now moving at a fast run through the darkness: Solas with his catlike eyes out in front, dragging Louise by her chain, then the emir and Pinard, with Szbeszdogy bringing up the rear.
“You’re so stupid,” the emir managed, panting. “You’re all dead men . . .”
“Then so are you,” Pinard said grimly. “Count on it.”
The sound of voices and shouting followed them on a parallel course from a few streets over. Then they seemed to move beyond their pursuers and there was no one ahead of them, no one behind. They came to a narrow turning; here a sound like the humming of a large electric motor echoed against the mud-brick walls. Solas hesitated, slowed, the cat hairs on the back of his neck tingling.
“That’s not so good,” he murmured.
“Keep going,” Pinard urged. “Forward!” This had always been the Legion way. Over the top and straight at the impregnable bastion; the definition of that indefinable military quality peculiar to the French, through a thousand years of victory and defeat, but mostly defeat: élan!
They debouched at full speed into a shabby square dominated by a structure like a giant breast or a pizza oven—its packed earthen surface glittering strangely. This glitter was the smoky light of burning camel dung flickering off the wings of an uncountable multitude of bees; the electric motor sound was their insidious buzzing. Hooded figures appeared out of the gloom on either side of the hive. They wore blue djellahs the exact color of Madame de Noyer’s stylish underwear, their faces veiled. Pinard smacked the emir hard in the back of the head with the Walther.
“Miserable little shit!” he shouted. “You said you had no dealings with the Marabouts!”
“But it’s true!” the emir sobbed. “They consider me unclean. They will not even speak to me. They have invaded my souk and taken half of it for themselves and will not leave!”
“Tell those freaks to get out of our way or I blow your head off!”
The emir complied tearfully. One of the Marabouts brought up a Kalashnikov and fired two quick, sloppy bursts in response. Bullets sprayed all around, chewing into the dirt. No one was hit and Pinard and the emir scrambled back into the darkness of the alley.
“What will you do now, imbecile?” Louise said, her chain still firmly grasped in the Brazilian’s fist. “I told you to leave me where I was!”
“Too late,” Pinard said.
“It’s never too late for negotiation! Compromise—”
To a Legionnaire, the word was an insult.
“Yes, yes!” the emir bobbed his head. “Shall we go back to my tent and sit down and discuss matters in a business fashion?”
“Hard to fight Kalashnikovs with a pistol, mon capitaine,” the Brazilian interjected.
“La ferme, Solas!” Pinard barked.
“Stop, look at these”—Szbeszdogy lifted his baggy, colorful tourist shirt and unzip
ped the stomach pack he wore there and withdrew two black metallic objects, shaped like avocados, their cast surface bisected by a thick metal seam. Complicated pins protruded from the smaller end.
“Bombs?” Louise sounded frightened.
“Very beautiful bombs.” Szbeszdogy laughed.
They were concussion grenades, packed with C4 pilfered from the secret Legion arms cache in the desert.
“Stefan, you’re a genius—” Pinard began, but now the emir saw his opportunity. He jerked out of Pinard’s grasp and made a break for the little square.
“Allah, il Allah!” he shouted, as if expecting to find sanctuary with the hooded fanatics standing guard by their monstrous hive. A crack rang out, the single report of an assault rifle, and the emir pitched forward, pierced by a bullet, which exiting blew off the back of his skull.
Louise screamed and covered her face.
“Prepare yourself to run as fast as you can,” Pinard commanded. “But for God’s sake, stay calm!”
“That poor kid!” Louise sobbed. Then bitterly: “You murderer! You monster!” As if it had all been Pinard’s fault from the beginning, as if he had purposefully gotten her crazy husband captured and placed this hive in their path and shot the emir with his own gun. But it was true: He had a guilty-looking face.
Pinard looked over at Szbeszdogy.
“Ready?”
“Nom de chien!” Solas swore. “Now!”
Pinard tossed the Walther to the Brazilian and plucked one of the grenades from Szbeszdogy’s hand. He pulled the pin with his teeth, darted out into the open, and hurled it at the hive, bullets raining all around. He threw himself down in the dirt just as the grenade exploded with a roar and the hive blew apart like a giant pumpkin. Smoke and flames blasted into the air; great chunks coated with goopy red wax and dead bees splatted down wetly all over the place. The Marabout guards lay flopped out on the ground, dead or dying, though one managed to fire off his rifle before Solas caught him with a couple of quick pops from the Walther. Then, Pinard grabbed up one of the Kalashnikovs and, followed by the others, dashed across the square and down another narrow alley on the other side, this one ending abruptly at the high exterior wall of the souk.
“Down!” Szbeszdogy called, heaving the second grenade.
The explosion knocked them flat and blew a hole through the mud bricks. When the dust cleared, fresh air from the outside world poured into the foul-smelling souk, air that held the tang of the sea. An electric streetlight winked at them from the near distance. Out there, the wide, empty streets of Laayoune, peaceful, faraway, watched over by the paternal machine gun towers of the Moroccan army. The Legionnaires and the woman, her chain dangling freely now, clambered through the smoking hole and crossed a ditch and tangle of barbed wire into the city. Pinard was the last, dropping back and firing every few meters to make sure no one followed. The time-honored tactic of décrochage, a fighting retreat.
But now Moroccan spotlights were trailing anxiously over the souk. An alarm siren whined in the clean desert air. Yellow flames shot up to the sky: Houses had caught fire in the neighborhood of the exploded hive. As Pinard and the rest came around the massive supports of the nearest machine gun tower, the spotlight above swung down and caught them all in its beam. The Moroccan guards up there, shouting and gesticulating, thought they were under attack. Now, after so many months, so many years of restraint, they let loose wildly with their big guns. The blazing streak of tracer bullets ripped through the darkness, the big 12.7mm rounds smashing emphatically—Thump! Thump! Thump!—into the earthen walls of the souk, into the dry, stony ground.
8.
Head down, hair hanging over her face, Louise de Noyer emerged from the minister’s office still barefoot and wearing her charming blue underwear, a Moroccan police jacket shrugged over her bare shoulders. She didn’t look up as she approached the bench where the six Legionnaires sat handcuffed and immobilized with leg irons—everyone asleep after forty-eight hours of interrogation, hunched against one another, snoring, mouths open. Except for Capitaine Pinard. He sat there, preternaturally alert, awake as an animal in a trap, waiting for her.
Now, here she was, walking free down the long, institutional hallway at 3:00 A.M. No doubt she had told the Moroccans everything she knew.
“Louise!” Pinard called as she passed. “Louise!”
The uncharacteristic tone of supplication in his voice made her pause. She turned to look at him.
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth,” she said. “That you caused the death of that boy.”
“Boy?” Pinard said, coloring. “He was old enough to want to fuck you—”
“You disgust me,” Louise interrupted, turning away.
“Wait!” Pinard called to her, desperate now. “I need to s-say something to you,” he stuttered, though he had never stuttered in his life. “F-forget this stupid m-mess. Something about us, now that it’s too late, I—”
“Stop.” Louise’s face twitched with horror, but Pinard wouldn’t be stopped.
“I love you. You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. Maybe the only person other than my father, and he’s only a vague memory to me. . . .”
A single frigid look silenced him. She didn’t give a damn about him or his father or anything he had been or would be, anything he thought or did or might do. He could save the whole world from destruction, win the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire in the process and it wouldn’t matter one bit to her. She lowered her startling eyes again and turned away from him for the last time. Pinard watched her go, watched her back and legs and ass, her bare feet paddling along the corridor until she was gone. He slumped down again, broken. Thus passes—he thought, though not in these words exactly—my happiness forever.
A few minutes later, two swarthy, mustachioed policemen came and took him off to see the minister.
9.
The minister had exchanged the native djellah he wore in his capacity as Minister of Tourism and Social Intercourse for the neat khaki uniform of a colonel of the Moroccan National Police. Vivid red Moroccan pentacles decorated his green collar tabs. His tie, neatly knotted, was also vividly green, meant to represent the true nature of Islam, always growing, eternally alive and like a hardy weed, impossible to eradicate.
Pinard was dragged in by the two policemen and handcuffed to a chair bolted to the cement floor. At a signal from the minister, one of the policemen reached down and ripped open the front of Pinard’s gaudy tourist shirt, its panels bedecked with red and white orchids, revealing the Legion tattoo on his chest, the skull eating the artillery shell and the motto Honneur et fidélité—valeur et discipline.
“How do you explain this garish decoration?” the minister said.
“It’s a tattoo,” Pinard said.
The guard who had ripped his shirt open smashed Pinard across the face with the back of his hand, not hard enough to knock out any teeth, but hard enough to raise a fat lip.
“Insolence is frowned upon by this office,” the minister said dryly. “Your tattoo—the motto of the French Foreign Legion, is it not?”
“No,” Pinard said. “The motto of the Foreign Legion is Legio Patria Nostra.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everyone in France knows that,” Pinard said.
The minister sighed. “How can I help you, Monsieur Deschafeaux, if you do not tell me the truth? Clearly you are lying. You are a Legionnaire.”
“I’m a businessman,” Pinard insisted. “A French businessman. I work for the Club Med organization.” His cover was utterly ridiculous, but Pinard was bound to maintain it to the bitter end. He had his orders: The sacred name of the Legion must be kept out of this foolhardy mission at all costs.
The minister leaned back in his chair. He sat on the other side of a plain metal desk upon which there was absolutely nothing, not a piece of paper, not a pen, not a rubber band.
“You deny being a Legionnaire?”
“Beca
use I’m not a Legionnaire,” Pinard lied.
“Good for you,” the minister said, a faint smile on his lips. “So much the better that you are not a part of that terrible group of murderers and perverts. They have quite a bad reputation here in Morocco, you know, from the period of French colonial misrule. Bloody bandits masquerading as an army, that’s what they were. Despoilers of virgins, killers of children.”
Pinard didn’t rise to the bait.
“My grandfather fought with the great el-Krim against the Legion in the 1920s,” the minister continued. “Have you heard of el-Krim, Monsieur Deschafeaux? He was a great Moroccan patriot and hero.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of him,” Pinard allowed. “In France he’s also known as great. A great and vicious murderer of the Frenchmen who were here irrigating fields and building roads and schools for you bastards to use and that you still use.”
The mustachioed policeman standing behind Pinard raised his hand to strike at this insult, but the minister stopped this violence with a glance.
“There is no such thing as murder in a war to throw off the yoke of colonial oppression,” he said.
“Murder is murder,” Pinard said, “whatever the reason for it. Your precious el-Krim used to bury captured Legionnaires up to the neck, cover their faces with honey, and let the ants devour the rest. Not exactly a humanitarian, you must admit. For this and other brutalities he was eventually brought to justice.”
“French justice,” the minister said.
“Enough history.” Pinard leaned as far forward as his handcuffs would allow. “I have a more modern proposal. Something better discussed in private.”
The minister nodded and the mustachioed policemen left the room.
“Well?”
“What would you say if I offered you one hundred thousand euros to let us go?”
The minister frowned, drumming his fingers on the desk. “In my capacity as Minister of Police for the District of Laayoune”—he waved at a map on the wall showing the so-called Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Morocco with the Moroccan-held areas between the Berm and the sea shaded in green—“I could have you shot for an attempt to corrupt a public official. However, as Minister of Tourism and Social Intercourse, which is more of an honorary appointment, and therefore, shall we say, semiprivate—” He stopped himself, then made a gesture that seemed abruptly dismissive of their conversation up to this point.