Gorgeous East (19 page)

“Blaire, please—” he began, but she began to laugh, an hysterical shrieking sound. She wasn’t just drunk and flying on speed, Smith realized. At that moment she was as crazy as a loon.

“That’s not my name, asshole! Fucking Blaire? Do I look like a Blaire? That’s hilarious!”

“O.K.,” Smith said, desperately trying to stay calm. “What’s your name then?”

But she didn’t answer. Instead, she put her hands under her breasts. “Do you like my tits?” she said. “I’ve got great tits.”

“Umm, actually, you do,” Smith said. “But I’m really, really tired . . .”

“Oh, I fucking get it!” the woman who was not Blaire spat. “You’re a fucking faggot! You’re a gay fucking faggot, is that it?”

Smith didn’t say anything.

“Let me tell you something! I don’t want a faggot living in my flat. I don’t want to come home one day and find you, like, fucking some other gay faggot up the ass. So get the fuck out of here! Now!
Faggot!
”

“Just hold on one goddamned minute,” Smith said, getting angry. “I’ve already paid you sixty-three euros—”

“
Get out!
” non-Blaire screamed and took a step forward and swiped at him with one withered paw.

“I’m staying here tonight, Blaire,” he began.

“My name’s not Blaire,
asshole!
” And she jumped around him with surprising agility and knocked the casement open with the palm of her hand. The glass pane shattered from this reckless blow, and fell in gleaming shards, hitting the pavement below with a faint musical note.

“
Help!
” she called out the window, her hand bloody. “
Au secours! Viol! Viol!
” She paused and turned to Smith, grinning crazily, and made a bloody streak with the wounded hand on her forehead. “Know what that word means, asshole?
Viol
?” Then she turned back to the window. “Rape!
Viol!
Rape!
Infâme, il me viole, le salot!
”

“Oh, God!” Smith groaned aloud. “Stop! Cut it out!”

But all he could think was no, not again! and a moment later, he heard a dull thumping coming from an adjacent apartment and imagined that the police would be there soon. He had no desire to see the inside of a French prison cell, even for the amount of time it took to explain the situation, which very well might be several days. In a panic, he shoved his feet into his boots, grabbed up his duffel, kicked the apartment door open, and scrambled down six flights of narrow stairs, bouncing off the railings, nearly tumbling through an open bull’s-eye window into the air shaft, but made it at last out to the narrow, nameless street. And he didn’t stop running until he had reached a wide, brightly lit thoroughfare—the avenue Gambetta, as it turned out—with the high walls of the Père-Lachaise rising on his left. Though he couldn’t say exactly how he’d gotten there or from which direction he’d come.

A marble breath filtered through the great iron cemetery gates, from between the jumbled alleys of tombs. The night air, cool in Smith’s face, did little to quell the outraged thumping of his heart. He waited for a few pointless minutes at a bus stop and thought he could still hear, like the tolling of a distant bell, like the call of guilt itself, the faint sound of non-Blaire’s voice shouting “Rape!
Viol!
” carried from afar, all the way from Istanbul, on the disquieting wind.

5.

T
he huge digital clock in the empty central concourse of the gare de l’Est read 2:05 A.M. It seemed much later than that. Smith trailed slowly past the closed magazine stands, the shuttered ticket windows, looking for a convenient spot to sleep. At last, he found a wide, shadowy doorway just off the columned arcade on the rue d’Alsace side of the station. It wasn’t until he’d set his duffel down and prepared to settle himself in the threshold for the remainder of the night that he realized he’d left his jean jacket behind in non-Blaire’s apartment. Tucked in the inside pocket of that jacket was an envelope containing the last of his cash and his passport.

A kind of deadness seized Smith’s soul at this realization.

“This,” Smith said aloud to himself, “is the end of Smith,” and he felt the panic twisting in his gut. But the thought of his own negation gave him a little surge of energy. He would retrace his steps, he would find non-Blaire’s apartment, reason with her. . . . Then he realized this option did not exist: Other than its putative proximity to the Père-Lachaise, Smith remembered nothing about the place, not the building or the street, which had been nondescript in the extreme. Not a single distinguishing detail. He could wander the labyrinthine quartier up there for a week and still not find non-Blaire’s filthy studio. He didn’t know her last name; he didn’t even know her real first name, which might or might not be Blaire. Here he was, crouched in a dusty corner of the gare de l’Est, just after 2:00 A.M., with absolutely nothing left, not a single sou—worse, without a passport. It was a place that very much resembled despair. Smith trembled there for a while, numb and afraid, and tried to think himself out of the situation, but it was like trying to think himself off a deflating raft surrounded by sharks in the middle of the ocean. Whether you went down with the raft or threw yourself to the sharks didn’t matter much in the end. And now, suddenly, he began to feel the pull of a sinister undertow, a swift current drawing him toward the vast shaggy continent of madness looming in darkness and surrounded by perilous reefs just ahead.

Smith peered at this dreadful silhouette for a long, terrible moment, felt the black winds on his face, felt himself slipping closer, closer, ashiver with it. But just as he was about to let go, give in to the current, his attention was drawn to a large rectangular billboard, illuminated by a bank of yellow lights, suspended above the arcade, just across the way. This billboard and these yellow lights were very much things of this world, the yellow lights recalling a scene from earlier in the evening—three Foreign Legionnaires fighting back to back and singing joyfully in the yellow light of the café. And the image on the billboard was exactly appropriate to this mental picture: It showed a square-jawed Legionnaire, white kepi gleaming, visions of faraway deserts in his eyes, a row of medals glittering on his chest.

LÉGION ÉTRANGÈRE, the caption read. FORT DE NOGENT—OUVERT LES 24 HEURES.

Below this, an old-fashioned-looking bomb with a seven-pointed flame blossoming from its fuse, and a motto that Smith knew enough Latin to decipher: LEGIO PATRIA NOSTRA. The Legion Is Our Country.

“I guess it’s better than going nuts,” Smith said aloud again, his voice echoing hollow in the high, empty hall. And he picked himself up and shouldered his duffel and marched down the central concourse and out into the cobbled
place
at the front of the station. Here he found a taxi stand, a lone Peugeot 504 waiting. The driver sat with the dome light on, reading a copy of
Paris Turf
, the frilly sound of old-time café music—the French call it
les flons-flons de l’accordéon
—playing softly on his radio. Smith rapped on the window on the passenger side and opened the door. The driver folded his racing sheet carefully and looked up. He was a sad-eyed, middle-aged Frenchman, his hair nearly white. He wore a black beret—a hat, though not forbidden by law, as rare in Paris these days as a fez in Istanbul—and a shabby corduroy jacket sprinkled with cigarette ash.

“
Excusez-moi
,” Smith said. “
Parlez Anglais?
English?”

The driver shrugged. “Little,” he said.

Smith drew a breath. “Fort de Nogent,” he said. “
Légion Étrangère.
”

“
Mais vous êtes fou!
” the driver said. He tapped his head with a finger. “Crazy! Go home!”

“You know where it is?” Smith persisted. “Fort de Nogent?”

The driver nodded reluctantly. “
Oui. C’est loin.
Far.”

“Thing is, I have no money.” Smith opened his hands to show they were empty. “
Rien.
”

The driver stared in disbelief, then reached across and slammed the door. “
Fiche-moi la paix!
” he shouted angrily and turned back to his racing sheet.

Smith unstrapped the Rolex from his wrist and rapped it against the glass. His father had won it shooting craps in the army in 1951, carried it through the Korean War, timed the contractions leading up to the birth of Smith and his sister, using its precise red second hand, the lateness of the mail trucks from Des Moines, the hours leading up to and following his daughter’s funeral, and his own faltering pulse in the moments before the unknown seizure that struck him down. Smith fought back sentimental tears as he pressed its time-yellowed face to the glass—but this was a sacrifice he knew he had to make, an offering to the gods for a new life.

“Rolex!” he called, rapping the glass again. “
Pour vous.
Fort de Nogent . . .”

The taxi driver looked at the watch, considering. A moment later, he unlocked the door.

6.

T
hey bumped over rutted streets in the darkness, skirting the Arab and North African quarters at the fringes of the great city. Then the gleaming lanes of the Périphérique and lonely suburban boulevards lined with tall, narrow houses tightly shuttered against this uncertain hour. At last, they came to the massive, mold-spotted walls of an endless fortification. The accordion music played on. The cab was stifling, but Smith didn’t open a window. The driver said nothing at all, not a word. I’m leaving everything behind, Smith thought, and felt that now too familiar feeling of vertigo, of the world slipping away from beneath his feet.

The driver pulled up at a drawbridge. A white metal barrier and an empty guard box prevented him from crossing. On the other side of a deep, dry moat loomed enormous gates, built to accept twelve-horse gun carriages during the reign of Louis Philippe.

“Fort de Nogent,” the driver said, without turning around. He pointed across the bridge. There, a ceramic sign illuminated with a single yellow light: LÉGION ÉTRANGÈRE. An arrow pointed down.

“O.K.,” Smith said, “
Merci.
Enjoy the watch.” But as he gathered up his duffel and made a move to exit, the driver got out and came around and opened Smith’s door. Smith stepped out and the driver tried to hand back the Rolex.

“
Pas nécessaire
,” the driver said. “You keep.”

“
Non, merci
,” Smith responded firmly. “It’s yours. I insist.”

When the driver understood Smith wouldn’t take back the Rolex, he offered a little bow. Then he drew himself up smartly and saluted.

“
Bon courage, Légionnaire
,” he said. And he got into his cab and with a backhanded wave out the window drove off into the night.

Smith reflexively checked his wrist, but his watch was gone now; he guessed it was going on three in the morning. He crossed the bridge into a warren of low barracks buildings and eventually found himself at a nondescript blue door marked with a tiny brass plaque, no larger than a coat button, in the shape of the seven-pointed bomb insignia of the Legion. He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again, louder. Nothing. It was like knocking at the door of an illegal gambling parlor in Chinatown, or some ultrahip underground sex club. At the third knock, a narrow window slid to one side and Smith found himself staring into a pair of dark, suspicious eyes. The eyes stared back. They were black and hard with a kind of existential hardness, as if the man behind them had never gotten a break, as if he’d been the scapegoat time and again for everyone else’s crimes and had become innured to this terrible and ridiculous fate.

“
Oui?
”

“
Légion Étrangère?
” Smith said.

“
Vous êtes sûr?
” The hard eyes narrowed. “
Vous avez assez réfléchi?
”

“Sorry.” Smith shook his head. “My French is not—”

“English?”

“American,” Smith said. “I’m volunteering.”

7.

T
he eyes belonged to a square-built, tough-looking soldier wearing the blue sash and shaggy red epaulets of a Legionnaire. The Velcro tag on his pocket identified him as Sergent-chef Evariste Pinard. Two rows of hash marks on his sleeves recorded fifteen years’ service; the spidery creep of crude tattoos traced up his throat. Crossed trumpets on his collar tabs identified him as a musician in la Musique Principale, the Legion’s famous military band, but it was diffiucult to imagine this brute playing anything, or even humming a tune. He had the kind of face, scarred, apparently villainous, that made others nervous. Here was a man who looked guilty as hell.

Smith took a deep breath and, suddenly full of misgivings, followed the sergent-chef into a dingy waiting room no one had bothered to sweep in a long time. On the wall a map of France; blue, white, and red pushpins marked the various Legion recruitment centers. Also, a large, water-stained framed print showing a nineteenth-century battle scene: Three Legionnaires in the fancy blue and red and gold uniforms of the era, one carrying a French flag shot full of holes, charged from a ruined farmhouse beneath a burning sky into a massed formation of the enemy. Despite the cheery colors and puffy cotton-candy clouds and banners waving, things seemed to be going very badly for the Legion.

“Camerone,” the sergent-chef offered, following Smith’s gaze, a kind of reluctant pride in his voice. “
Le trente Avril
, 1860.
Un pitoyable douzaine contre l’armée Mexicain!
Maybe twenty men, fighting against one thousand! For days they hold out, no food, no water. Only three left”—he held up three fingers—“they fix bayonets, they charge! You remember Camerone! Every Legionnaire must remember Camerone!”

“What happened to the three men?” Smith said.

But Sergent-chef Pinard only shrugged to indicate that this question was without merit and led Smith to a metal table at the back of the room. They sat across from each other and the sergent-chef took up a blunt pencil and several multipaged forms with carbon paper between each page. No sign of a computer anywhere, not even a typewriter.