Gorgeous East (31 page)

“Forgot about a child’s head?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Tell me, where do they come from, these headless children?”

“The Marabouts are not an army in the modern sense,” Pinard said, remembering the
Commentaries
of Caesar he’d read at Saint-Cyr. “They’re a nation under arms, like the barbarian invasions of ancient times. They campaign with their wives, their children, even their grandmothers—”

“We are not interested in strategic opinions or historical analysis,” the second interrogator interrupted harshly. “Confine yourself to what actually happened.”

“Make no mistake,” the first interrogator added. “You stand before your judges.”

The wound in Pinard’s thigh was now beginning to throb.

“And please don’t mention these supposedly dismembered children to anyone,” the first interrogator added. “Think what the press would do with such a story. This is classified.
Comprends?
”

“
Oui, monsieur.
”

“Continue.”

The battle for the remaining Peugeot dissolved in Pinard’s memory into the flash and blur of tracer bullets, eruptions of bloody sand, the dim shapes of screaming Marabouts. Fighting back to back, firing their weapons in tightly controlled bursts, Sous-lieutenant Pinard and Legionnaire Szbeszdogy gained the meager shelter of a pile of flaming rubble a meter or so away from the second truck. There, just as Pinard blew off the last of his 5.56, a Marabout round ricocheted off a rock and struck him in the thigh. Another grazed his ear and left temple, releasing a blinding gush of blood and, wounded and nearly blind, he made what peace he could with the merciless deity every soldier must face in the end: the God of Battles.

“You find yourself praying,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. “Even if you believe in nothing at all.”

“Surely even an atheist has belief after a fashion,” the first interrogator suggested, a Jesuitical smirk on his face. “He believes in science perhaps.”

“
Ni l’un, ni l’autre.
” Pinard shook his head.

“
Passons, passons.
” The second interrogator made an impatient gesture. “This is not the place for amateur theological discussions.”

Pinard continued.

As a dozen of the enemy closed in, Caporal Keh came careening down into the
guelb
from his hiding place above, rocket launcher at his shoulder, an inchoate Mongolian war cry on his lips. He fired his second and last boudin into the melee; the concussive
whump
gave Pinard and Szbeszdogy just enough cover to scramble into the cab of the idling Peugeot. Pinard threw himself behind the wheel and jammed the truck into gear and accelerated, fully intending to swing back around to rescue the embattled Mongolian. But burning debris now illuminated Keh’s fate: His head, eyes still blinking as if in surprise, suddenly rolled from his shoulders and the headless corpse toppled into the sand. He had been cut down with a single blow from a Marabout scimitar. Such was the end of the valiant Hehu Keh, Legionnaire, ex-private of Mongolian People’s Army, masturbator, lover of barmaids, the deepest bass voice in the Legion. Marabout bullets crashed against the armored flank of the departing truck, a kind of valedictory drumroll to speed Keh’s departing soul off to the Mongolian Valhalla. One of these sent a sharp piece of metal slamming into Szbeszdogy’s ribs and he fell back, screaming in pain.

“There was nothing we could have done,” Sous-lieutenant Pinard continued, keeping his voice steady with effort. “I’ve thought it over and over a hundred times and I still say there was no way to save Keh. We had no ammunition left and I couldn’t see because of the blood in my eyes. Anyway, there wasn’t enough time, we were taking heavy fire. The truck was pointed toward the horizon and I hit the accelerator. Before I could turn the wheel, it was too late, they’d got to him”—a lump rose in his throat—“Messieurs, I would like to recommend Caporal Keh for the Medaille Militaire. If you permit me, for the record: Caporal Keh acted with fierce courage, beyond the call of duty, with no regard for self—”

But Pinard’s speech was interrupted at this point by a voice from above: “No use wasting a medal on a dead man, is there, Pinard?”

The sous-lieutenant looked up, bewildered. The voice, familiar, pompous, issued from a camouflaged speaker box in the ceiling. Up there also, the tiny lens of an electronic eye. He had been listened to, watched the whole time.

The voice belonged to General Victor le Breton, second in command of the 1e RE, a big, obnoxious man, dangerously obese and very vain, who had his unique, showy white uniforms custom-tailored at the Yves St. Laurent atelier in Paris. In full dress, a hundred golden medals pinned across his chest, he resembled an ornate, gilded ship scudding before the wind.

“Is that you,
mon general
?”

“No, it’s the voice of God!” the general answered.

The Deuxième Bureau interrogators, Jesuits that they were, seemed displeased by this blasphemy.

“You are familiar with article seven, section two of the Legion Code?”

Pinard hung his head. “Of course.”

“Repeat the pertinent injunction for me.”

“ ‘I will never abandon my dead or wounded,’ ” Pinard said in a flat voice, recalling the pledge they’d made to the pile of heads back at the blockhouse. That one at least had been honored.

“Where are the earthly remains of Caporal Hehu Keh at this moment?”

“We searched for his body, sir,” Pinard said desperately. “We couldn’t find anything. There was a sandstorm. It was the season of many such storms. We couldn’t even find the Berm in that mess. We set out for the block house in the teeth of the storm two weeks later to retrieve the heads with the wind howling around us like the devil—we had to abort that mission. It took us two more weeks to get the heads back to Dahkla. As for finding what was left of Keh . . .” His voice trailed off.

“And what about the two missing men?” the general boomed down at him. “You returned to France with twenty-one heads. There remain a twenty-second and a twenty-third head. Am I not correct, Pinard?”

“
Correcte, mon general.
”

“
Alors?
”

“The Marabouts operate out of unknown bases hidden somewhere in the Gueltas. We would need an entire division to assault those mountains, not to mention—”

“Pinard, you are an ass!” the general roared. “Another excuse out of your mouth and you’re court-martialed!” Then, calming himself: “Messieurs—has the Deuxième Bureau established the identities of the missing heads?”

The interrogators exchanged a veiled glance.

“There is some new information,” the first interrogator offered carefully after a moment.

The third interrogator, who hadn’t uttered a word in hours of questioning, coughed gently at this—a sound that spoke volumes.

“Pinard!” General le Breton roared again. “I’ll see you in my office at 08:00 tomorrow.
Tu peux disposer!
”

“
Je peut disposer à vos ordres, mon general!
” Pinard drew himself up and saluted the loudspeaker. Feeling foolish for this, he exited and found Legionnaire Szbeszdogy slumped dismally on the hard bench across the corridor. The Hungarian was reading an ancient issue of
Pif Gadget
, its childish colors faded and yellow, extracted from the dusty heap of old newspapers and magazines on the floor. Many Legionnaires had lingered there for many years, their fate in the hands of the gestapo; each had added something to this disorderly pile. Sbeszdogy looked up from the cartoon antics of Pif and Hercule with a grimace of pain. The flying metal at the
guelb
had broken two ribs and badly bruised a lung. Only in the last couple of days had he been able to summon sufficient breath to resume practice on his French horn.

“How did it go in there?” he said in a low voice.

“The gestapo loves a scapegoat,” Pinard said. “And you’re next.”

“I’m ready.” Szbeszdogy nodded. This was false bravado. “Listen, I’ve written something, a piece of music in memory of Caporal Keh. I want you to take a look—”

He pulled a crumpled sheaf of papers scrawled over with musical notations from somewhere and held it out. Pinard only shook his head and put on his kepi and went out into the rain to have a mournful smoke alone.

The Hungarian watched him go, thinking,
Je suis enculé.
He dropped
Pif Gadget
back onto the pile and picked up another magazine, but with a shudder of disgust flung this one aside.

It was
Képi Blanc,
the Legion’s equivalent of
Stars and Stripes,
full of cheerfully fake news and PR nuggets dreamed up by advertising consultants hired by the top brass. Its chipper articles, copiously illustrated, did not mention the abusive discipline and brutal assaults perpetrated by one comrade upon another; the stealing so bad, every item of value in the noncommissioned barracks had to be kept locked in a safe. It said nothing about the drunkenness and drug abuse and stupidity; nothing about the madness of
le cafard
, a kind of fatal boredom caused by the isolation of remote posts and the endless repetition of tasks both pointless and painful; nothing about the sheer sketch of it all, about the Legion deployed with antiquated weaponry, undersupplied and outmanned as they were now in Afghanistan, as they’d been in Bosnia and Desert Storm and on every battlefield from Algeria to Tonkin since 1830. And nothing, not a word, about the whores.

3.

S
oldiers have always gone to whores, there is no keeping them away. Each of the regiments of the Foreign Legion is supplied with its own brothel—which is actually two brothels in one, often housed on the same premises, with some of the whores reserved exclusively for officers and others for enlisted men. The French take an enlightened, scientific approach to venereal matters. Official Legion whores are inspected for STDs twice monthly, given frequent AIDs tests and free medical care and condoms, vacation days and birthday parties, all paid for courtesy of the French Republic.

The Legion is hidebound by tradition; it is one of the most hidebound armies in the world. The campaign history of each regiment has always dictated the ethnicity of the whores in their regimental brothels: The 2e REP, for example, though based out of Calvi in Corsica, served through Indochina, was mortared to pieces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and prefers Asian girls. There had been in use for the last time in history at that terrible battle one of the Legion’s notorious
Bordels Mobiles de Campagne
(Mobile Field Brothels), staffed by Vietnamese whores who also acted as battlefield nurses during the desperate last days, as the French strongholds fell one by one to the Communists. Afterwards, the unfortunate whores, captured and sent off to re-education camps, denounced their former vocation and joined the people’s struggle against Western imperialist aggression. This denunciation didn’t stick. The official 2e REP pimp, traditionally the regiment’s ranking adjudant-chef, now makes two trips a year at Legion expense to Vietnam, where his patronage is eagerly sought. He recruits there and in Thailand and Cambodia, offers travel expenses and a relocation bonus.

The DLEM—Détachement de la Légion Étrangère de Mayotte, stationed in remote Dzaudzi in the Comoros—favors Malagasy whores for obvious reasons of convenience. The whores of the 13e DBLE brothel, once located in Djibouti, are all large-breasted black Amazons from the Horn of Africa.

But the 1e RE, mustered for the conquest of Algeria in 1831, headquartered for a hundred years at Sidi Bel Abbès and now based in Aubagne, is considered the mother regiment of the Legion. The whores of the 1e RE brothel still come from the Kaybile tribe of the Algerian Berbers and are considered by Legionnaires who have much experience in such matters to make the best whores in the world. When stationed at Aubagne, Sous-lieutenant Pinard frequented a Kaybile whore nicknamed La Mogador after the long-ago Algerian battle in which the Legion seized a heavily fortified Moroccan citadel with more than 60 percent casualties, higher than the rate at the notoriously lethal Charge of the Light Brigade. There was always a whore nicknamed La Mogador in the 1e RE brothel, as a kind of ironic comment on that outrageous toll; La Mogador of the 1e RE has become a recurring character, like the temptress Angélique in those trashy books by Serge Golon.

Kaybile whores have smooth, toffee-colored skin and large, soulful dark eyes and are generally slim, with breasts like plums, and are very flexible. But it is no mere physical attribute that makes them so appreciated. They seem to have the ability, almost magical, to make themselves fall in love with their Legionnaire clients and to make the Legionnaires believe this affection is genuine—if only for an hour at a time. Thus, the paying Legionnaire is able to indulge himself in the fantasy that he is spending his combat pay on a date with a particularly energetic girlfriend, and not for an hour with a whore who will move on to the next man when the clock runs down.

Reality sometimes reinforces this fragile illusion: every so often, one of the Kaybile whores actually ends up marrying a Legionnaire, for whom she makes—it is said—an excellent wife. Others return to their homes in the Atlas Mountains after twenty years’ hard service. With the money made on their backs in Aubagne they manage to buy olive orchards and farms and innocent young husbands and a high-status position in the affairs of Kaybileland, which has experienced a dramatic shift in values over the course of the last generation or so. The ancient patriarchal traditions of the Kaybiles are wearing away. The tribe has become a matriarchy.

4.

P
inard stumbled back to his quarters after the interrogation, dropped to his cot, and lay still for a couple of hours, enveloped in a blank darkness like sleep, but unvisited by dreams. He awoke at dusk, feeling uneasy and anxious, and knew what he needed to calm his nerves and knowing made him disgusted with himself, but there it was, and he put through the necessary phone call and jumped into the shower.