Gorgeous East
Authors: null
GORGEOUS
EAST
ALSO BY ROBERT GIRARDI
Madeleine’s Ghost
The Pirate’s Daughter
Vaporetto 13
A Vaudeville of Devils:
7 Moral Tales
The Wrong Doyle
GORGEOUS
EAST
ROBERT GIRARDI
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GORGEOUS EAST. Copyright © 2009 by Robert Girardi. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
“Let’s Face the Music and Dance” by Irving Berlin
© Copyright 1935, 1936 by Irving Berlin.
© Copyright renewed. International copyright secured.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
[http://www.stmartins.com] www.stmartins.com
Book design by Kathryn Parise
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Girardi, Robert.
Gorgeous East / Robert Girardi.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-56586-2
1. Soldiers of fortune—Fiction. 2. Brotherhoods—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.I694 G67 2009
813'.54—dc22
2009016756
First Edition: October 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my creatures: Charlotte, Ben, Samantha
CONTENTS
2. Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam
9. Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries
15. The Smell of Strong Cheese
Once did she hold the gorgeous east in fee;
And was the safeguard of the west . . .
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great, is pass’d away.
—William Wordsworth
All civilizations have their sufferers. In every country in Europe, and without doubt in America also, live men for whom life is a penance. Some of them have been stricken down by misfortunes or by unforeseen happenings, and the sight of the places where they have been unhappy has become unbearable for them. Others have suffered by their own mistakes or they have committed some act for which their consciences reprove them; they know that they can reconstruct themselves only by escaping from their pasts. For all those beings, for all those whom Dostoevski calls the “Insulted and the Injured,” the Foreign Legion offers a refuge.
—André Maurois
AUTHOR’S NOTE
T
he French Foreign Legion, the famous mercenary corps founded during the reign of King Louis Philippe in 1831, endures to this day as a last resort for any man stupid or desperate enough to join its ranks. Though an anachronism, a relic of nineteenth-century warfare, the Legion is a living relic: Legionnaires served in the first Gulf War and in Bosnia, and are now deployed in Afghanistan.
Legion headquarters, once located at Sidi Bel Abbès in French Algeria, were removed following Algerian independence in 1961 to Aubagne, Bouches-du-Rhône, in southwestern France. Only foreigners (that is, non-French citizens) age eighteen to forty are accepted as volunteers there, at the Fort de Nogent near Paris—open around the clock, 365 days a year—and at several other recruiting stations throughout France. Officers are selected from among the top graduates of the French Military Academy at Saint-Cyr. Legion commissions are eagerly sought. No ambitious young officer can resist the chance to mold soldiers out of such unpromising human clay as the Legion provides—traditionally, the worst of the worst, criminals and runaway husbands, alcoholics, sociopaths. But to these lost men the Legion still offers a unique privilege called
l’anonymat
: a new identity and an assumed name affixed to their uniforms via Velcro tags that may be discreetly removed in the presence of television cameras, journalists, or police detectives. This is, in effect, a chance to start broken lives over again.
The political situation in the Western Sahara, fictionalized in these pages, is roughly as I describe it. Though there exists at this writing no such thing as a Marabout Insurgency, it is not beyond the realm of the possible. Meanwhile, the war between the kingdom of Morocco and Polisario—the armed faction of the Saharoui Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), a phantom state also known as the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara—drags on. Now entering its fourth decade, it remains one of the least known conflicts in the world, perhaps because phosphate deposits and fishing rights are not as pertinent to the global economy as oil. The UN Mission to Western Sahara (MINURSO) has been involved in negotiations to end the conflict since the 1970s, but—to no one’s surprise—its efforts have proved ineffectual. Hundreds of thousands of Saharoui refugees are still housed in hardscrabble camps in the Algerian desert, not far from the town of Tindouf.