Gorgeous East (23 page)

Smith, to his credit, resisted the powerful impulse to run. It helped to imagine the awful stringencies of Legion life as just another acting job, an extreme example of the Method in action. How hard could it be to play an idiot who gets himself stuck in the French Foreign Legion? Remember Laurel and Hardy in
Sons of the Desert
? The role wasn’t difficult, merely required superhuman endurance, absolute discipline, a prophylactic dose of gallows humor, unquestioning obedience to sadistic authority, and a working knowledge of the French language.

2.

I
n the end, only two of the volunteers Smith had moved cobbles with that first day at the Fort de Nogent remained: a Nigerian named Mboku and the wiry Scottish kid, Iian McDairmuid (nom de guerre, John Smith), who was tougher than he looked. Over the months, Smith and Iian had become
copains
, a semi-official relationship in the Legion. A
copain
was more than a friend, less than a brother. Survival was impossible without a
copain
to watch your back and shine your shoes and polish your buckles and straighten your kit on days when you were broken down with exhaustion and in too much pain to finish these necessary tasks. Your
copain
would give you a little extra food from his own rations and lie on your behalf to the caporal-chef if necessary; you would do the same for him tomorrow.

Smith and Iian survived together. They managed to complete basic training in eight months without major injury, fits of terminal despair, or suicide attempts. Though Iian developed acid reflux and a persistent cough, and Smith broke two toes and lost forty-five pounds of the one hundred and eighty on his frame at enlistment and was now distilled to muscle, sinew, bone. The two of them graduated from
rouge
to
bleu
, suffered beatings together (what you got was often meted out to your
copain
as well), fought the Greek mafia side by side. One stumbling behind the other, they endured the required two-hundred-kilometer march through the Pyrénées in knee-deep snow without provisions or water to the abandoned village of Camurac.

This was their final exam.

On a blustery March day, Smith and Iian were at last presented with their white kepis in a theatrical ceremony on the parade ground at Aubagne, beneath the gaze of four bronze Legionnaires supporting the bronze terrestrial globe—the Monument aux Morts—raised to honor the Legion dead of nearly two centuries. A hundred gold-fringed, gold-wreathed battle flags glittered in the clear, cold afternoon. Wind nattered the leafless plane trees; the shadows of their branches made complicated patterns on the brown grass. Three generals and a cabinet minister stood in the grandstands, hands over their hearts; la Musique Principale played “Le Boudin,”

“La Marseillaise.” Disdainful journalists from provincial papers snapped photographs; colorful Legion ceremonies always made good photo ops, despite the knee-jerk anti-Legion politics of the editorial page. As Smith inclined his head to receive the famous white hat, he felt a half-forgotten emotion swelling in his breast, something he hadn’t felt in years: pride.

The whiny, self-indulgent triple threat was no more. The Legion had replaced him with a more capable understudy. The name on his name tag, Velcro and removable to preserve
l’anonymat
—Legionnaire Caspar P. Milquetoast—confirmed this astonishing substitution. Here was a newly hardened individual, able to bunk on the ground in any weather and rise at dawn to march a hundred clicks without breakfast. Trained in knife fighting and in the use of explosives. A fair shot with the FAMAS 5.56 assault rifle that he could—as Colonel de Noyer had promised—disassemble, clean, and reassemble in under two minutes, blindfolded. Trained in Savac, France’s answer to the martial arts, which taught, among other things, how to kill a man in a dozen unconventional ways—bare hands, broken sticks, a rolled-up newspaper, piano wire, a rock, a ballpoint pen, a stale baguette. Prepared for any expediency in the service of France.

3.

F
reshly minted Legionnaires were sent to one of the regiments stationed in Metropolitan France or the overseas departments for specialized training. They might end up in the 1er REC, the Legion’s armored cavalry division in Orange; in the 1er REG, the combat engineers in Laudun; or be sent off for survival training with the 3e REI in the thick jungles of French Guyana. Or they might request assignment to la Musique Principale, though this required a special evaluation for musical ability by a committee composed of regimental musicians, both Legionnaires and officers, serving with the marching band.

In the weeks following the kepi ceremony, Smith filed all the necessary paperwork in triplicate for a posting to the Musique Principale with a preference indicated for the Chorale du Légion, then headed off on his first weekend pass to Marseilles with Iian. The
copains
boozed from one end of the town to the other, started fights, got kicked out of bars, had awkward condom-protected sex with prostitutes—requisite hijinks for the Legionnaire on leave. New assignments usually took months to come down through the Legion bureaucracy, allowing time for several such binges. But to his surprise, Smith received his orders back in barracks in Aubagne, Sunday night.

They were not the ones he had been expecting.

The TGV blasted up through the green breast of France with Smith aboard the next morning, racing at speeds approaching three hundred kilometers per hour over placid rivers and through poplar-lined fields. A beautiful day dawned, the hillsides of the Rhône already flushed with wildflowers. It was the beginning of another spring, the first since Jessica’s death. Still suffering from his binge in Marseilles, Smith dozed fitfully, drank six cups of coffee, two bottles of water, peed it all out, sweated a rank alcoholic sweat. A couple of hours later, the grimy outskirts of the capital appeared through the scarred windows of the train and he peered out at congested industrial
banlieus
, warehouses, dingy storefronts, the utilitarian backsides of apartment blocks busy with piping and ductwork—all bathed in bright, forgiving sunlight. The meandering Seine sparkled green in the sun. North African vendors in the warren of streets below pushed bloody carts from which butchered lamb flanks dangled on hooks. Billboards splashed with the two-story-tall image of a buxom young woman in a skimpy bathing suit advertised an unknown product—Cosmoluxe. A detergent, a hair spray, a bikini wax? Smith couldn’t say.

He caught a taxi from the gare de Austerlitz to the fort and found Colonel Phillipe de Noyer, duffels packed and stacked in the foyer, noodling as ever on his baby grand. The rest of his once splendid quarters had been taken down to bare walls. The books and classical busts were gone; the paintings and buttoned-leather covering, all gone. Only the piano remained.

“Legionnaire Milquetoast reporting as ordered.” Smith saluted and stood back, rigidly at attention.

“Beautiful weather,” the colonel murmured. He didn’t remove his eyes from a spot in the air somewhere above Smith’s head, a thousand miles away.

“
Oui, mon colonel
.”

“Milquetoast—this is your nom de guerre.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are something of an ironist, eh, Legionnaire?”

“I’m a tenor, sir.” Still stiffly at attention, Smith felt his stomach muscles begin to ache.

“At ease.”

“Thank you,
mon colonel
.” Smith relaxed.

Phillipe stopped playing and lowered the lid over the keys. A moment of silence followed as if out of respect for a friend who had died.

“That’s probably the last note I’ll ever play,” he said, half to himself.

“Sir?”

“Frankly, I didn’t think you’d make it,
mon enfant
.” The colonel looked up absently.

“Neither did I, sir.”

“But here you are.”

“Yes.”

“You certainly stink like a Legionnaire—a combination of body sweat, Basta, and Kronenbourg. I take it you’ve been on the obligatory spree to Marseilles?”

Smith permitted himself a smile. The colonel grew serious.

“Have you requested your regiment?”

“
Musique Principale, mon colonel. Chorale du Légion
.”

“Good. But there’s no need to stand for the selection committee. You’re coming with me.”

“Where to, sir?”

“An obscure place called the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara. It has no legislature, no borders, its very existence is under dispute. And make no mistake, even though we will be flying the blue flag of the United Nations, we are going to war. The Legion is going to war.”

A cold feeling churned at the bottom of Smith’s stomach. “I didn’t know there was a war.”

“There’s always a war if you look hard enough, Milquetoast, especially in Africa. This one’s been going on nearly four decades between the Moroccans and the Saharouis—they’re the indigenous people of Western Sahara—just simmering along with a handful of casualties on both sides each year and monitored by the benignly incompetent UN mission to the region, known as MINURSO. But a third party, a kind of insurgency, has thrust itself into this stale conflict and now the death toll has exploded. They call themselves the Holy Marabout Army of the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam. Ridiculous, I know, but they themselves are not ridiculous. They are murderous fanatics, without remorse or human feeling, the enemies of civilization itself. France is contributing three hundred troops to MINURSO to help keep the peace, which means she is sending the Legion to fight on her behalf. I have asked for seventy-five combat volunteers from my Corps of Musicians, half of these from the Chorale. Desert air is good for the lungs and sound travels a long way out there—we will not be idle, I assure you. We will practice toward winning the gold medal in Moscow next year. In any case, I will certainly not go to war without a top tenor at my disposal!”

“Yes, sir.”

“To save time I decided to volunteer you on your behalf. But I should warn you things might get difficult. Do you have a
copain
?”

“I do, sir,” Smith said. “Legionnaire P.C. Smith.”

“Inform him he has also volunteered for Africa.”

An uncomfortable silence, in which Phillipe tapped gently on the piano lid, as if he expected someone to tap back from inside. He looked up, meeting Smith’s eyes, and Smith was startled by what he saw there: a kind of chaos at the center of his gaze, a storm about to burst.

“Do you believe in God, Milquetoast?”

“No, sir,” Smith said.

“Pity. You’ll need Him where we’re going.
Tu peux disposer, Legionnaire!
Dismissed.”

4.

P
aris city traffic—a bewildering variety of unknown small cars, Peugeot taxis, three-wheel scooters, motorcycles, and the vast green-and-white accordion buses of the intra-urban lines—stood at a dead stop in the avenue Gambetta. Waves of high-pitched beeping rolled through the stalled vehicles at regular intervals like breakers over a pier, but no one was going anywhere for a while: Someone had run over a young woman walking a little white dog in the pedestrian crossing at the rue des Amandiers. End of April now, almost May, but the sky showed a leaden gray over the quartier Menilmontant and over the endless alleys of crypts and funerary obelisks behind the high walls of the Père-Lachaise. It might be dawn or dusk, winter, fall, or spring. Hard to tell with the concrete chill of Paris still clinging to the sidewalks, to the intercises between the old stones of the buildings.

Smith watched the blue lights of the ambulances flashing off the storefronts, heard the mournful yip of the little dog. The accident had happened a mere ten meters from where he sat beneath the awning on the terrace of the café Tlemcen. He’d been there for a couple of hours, malingering over a single cup of espresso and a thimble-sized glass of Armagnac, watching the métro exit across the way, and trying to keep an eye on pedestrians coming along the avenue Gambetta and the boulevard de Ménilmontant and entering the rue Duris, the rue Novograd, or the rue des Amandiers, all at the same time, all visible from his well-situated table at the Tlemcen—itself located at the end of a sharp block jutting like the prow of a battleship into the Place Auguste Métivier. But somehow, Smith managed to miss the accident.

He’d heard the desperate shriek of tires, the horrified shouts of the passersby and swung toward the intersection moments afterwards to see the young woman lying there, already struck down—
descendu
—her white coat matting with blood. He jumped up to help, got a leg over the railing—he’d learned CPR and lifesaving skills, among other things, in the Legion—then stopped himself. Legionnaires were not welcome in Paris, in any situation. Parisians of every type from taxi drivers to cabinet ministers despised them as dangerous drunks, brawlers, murderers, rapists, fascists, militarists—all of which they were, to an extent. Anyway, the young woman was dead. Smith could see that now, from the way she lay, nearly bent in half, on the hard pavement. So he settled back into the cane-bottomed café chair and watched as a crowd gathered, as a doctor arrived from somewhere, as the ambulances pulled up, driving slowly along the sidewalk, as the paramedics finally zipped the young woman into a body bag and it began to rain, the rain washing her blood into the gutter.