Gorgeous East (35 page)

“Al Bab will decide.” The girl shrugged. “You will live or you will die. Like everyone.”

Smith sighed. Even the kids up here were existentialists.

Then the girl did something astonishing: She untied her veil, a coarse piece of black cloth, and let it hang loose to one side of her face; the intimacy of this act was enough to get them both killed. She was older than he had guessed, maybe eighteen or nineteen. She had a thin, sharp face—high cheekbones, narrow chin marked with tribal tattoos. Parallel blue lines ran down from the bottom of her lower lip to the bottom of her chin, and a blue tear that wasn’t a tear but the bee hieroglyph of the Marabouts was tattooed on her cheek an inch below her left eye.

Smith hadn’t seen an uncovered female face in months and suddenly found her outrageously beautiful and felt an embarrassing little jolt that he tried to conceal, pressing his thighs together and tucking his male member between them as best he could.

“My name is Alia,” the girl whispered. “And I will pray to God Al Bab doesn’t kill you. You sing too well to lose your head. And your hair is the color of the sun.” She reached up and ran her fingers through the matted blond pelt atop Smith’s head, now more than recovered from its last Legion
boule à zéro
. “They say Al Bab is a prophet, that he is the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, or perhaps even the Hidden Imam Himself. But I do not think any of this is true. I think he is a violent, dishonest man and not who he says he is . . .” She paused. “Am I pretty?”

“You are,” Smith said.

“Like the women in Milan?”

“Exactly like them,” Smith said.

Alia nodded, solemnly. Then she removed her fingers from Smith’s hair, refixed her veil, and went out into the growing brightness.

4.

A
religious procession climbed the zigzag trail up the ravine from the desert at noon. First came the hooded mullahs bearing blue flags emblazoned with the bee hieroglyph, a dozen of them mounted on camels richly caparisoned in studded leather, saddle bells tinkling, the animals braying loudly from time to time, lifting long ropy necks to the sky. In single file behind them trotted twenty or so undernourished young men, new disciples recruited in the Tindouf refugee camps, their dark eyes hollow from days of fasting. A thick haze steamed off the inaccessible massif of the Galtat Zemmur, it’s highest pinnacle awash in a thick bank of clouds. The procession, emerging from this haze as if out of the mists of history, possessed a grave medieval splendor: camels braying, starving penitents, the blue robes of the holy men, the bold flags snapping in the wind.

Marabout villagers lined the route, watching the procession rise toward the giant hive on the plateau. Smith found a place at the back of the crowd, slouching as insolently as he possibly could while naked and shivering and in chains, which wasn’t very insolently at all. Phillipe squatted on the ground, digging with broken fingernails in the dead, crumbly soil. He’d been wrapped in his fog all morning, ambling along, pale eyes fixed on the ground, looking for a grub to eat, for a worm, an overlooked root, a wild onion, anything. The two captives were allowed to wander the village during the day, pitiful figures, reduced to the level of animals; dogs clad only in their own skins, squatting to take doggie craps—a single dry turd—on the stony ground. Their nakedness, the chains they wore, and the complete isolation of the place rendered escape impossible.

The disciples reached the plateau and the crowd surged up after them. Smith helped the doddering Phillipe to his feet.

“
Allons-y, mon colonel
,” he said gently. “We don’t want to miss the fun. The bastards are at it again.”

He drew Phillipe along, past the lean-tos and shanties made from rough mountain stone and UN pressboard and blue UN tarps, until they stood with everyone else in the presence of the hive, which emitted a loud, electric humming. This monstrous construction, set against the western escarpment on a level pan of limestone, resembled an oversized pizza oven or a giant breast. Its rough surface of hard-packed earth glittered with many thousands of bees. A man-sized opening at ground level led to the humid recesses of the interior. A thick, sticky substance oozed across the threshold.

“I saw one of those six years ago at the Awsard camp,” Phillipe said, suddenly himself again. “I was the first from the outside to see such a thing. Except for poor old Milhauz, of course.”

“
C’est bien vous, mon colonel?
” Smith said, surprised—though he shouldn’t be: Episodes of complete sanity came over the man without warning, sweeping down from Phillipe’s upper brain across the burning prairies of his medulla oblongata like a fast-moving thunderstorm. It was as if he merely resumed aloud a conversation already in progress in some drafty corner of his mind.

“Are you going mad, Milquetoast?” Phillipe frowned at him. “Who else would it be?”

“No one, sir.”

“I was talking about the bees. They’re an East African species, native to the scrub country of southern Sudan. Very aggressive with a very painful sting, great builders of dirt hives, as you see there. They’re scavengers, they feed off
merde
and carrion like flies, and produce no honey at all, only that red waxy stuff, which isn’t really a wax and has no value to industry. The Marabouts have a Web site, you know. We traced it to a server in Morocco that later disappeared without a trace.”

“Everyone’s got a Web site,” Smith said glumly.

“The content was very informative. Their spiritual leader, the archimposter who calls himself Al Bab, lays out the Marabout agenda quite candidly and there are excellent graphics and links to related sites. His plans for conquest extend far beyond the borders of Western Sahara. Like all dangerous fanatics, he seeks to re-create the world in his own image by plunging it into an ocean of blood. Laughable perhaps—but expressed with religious fervor and absolute conviction, half
Mein Kampf
, half Koran. Did you know the bee hieroglyph has been found scribbled on walls in Paris, in London? Mark my words, Milquetoast, soon they will invade Manhattan!”

“They can try,” Smith said. “But they won’t find parking.”

The Marabout mullahs dismounted their camels, rolled out prayer carpets, and arranged themselves facing the eastern horizon. A rustic bagpipe began to bleat, then stopped and the twenty disciples fell to their knees. Veiled women stepped out of the crowd into the windy silence and helped remove twenty scratchy goat-hair shirts and soon the disciples, reduced to blue loincloths, were nearly as cold and naked as Smith and the colonel, though they seemed impervious to physical suffering, focused on the mysterious initiation to come. Another bleat from the bagpipe and more women emerged, these bearing horsehair whisks and white plastic buckets heaped with yellow or pink powder. Gusts of wind billowed colorful puffs of the powder into the morning air as the bucket women began dusting the disciples from head to toe. The disciples got dusted with one color or the other, two or three a mixture of both. The bucket women paid close attention to the crotch area; perky responses from beneath the loincloths in this region sent knowing giggles rippling through the crowd.

“Cover up every available centimeter of skin and anything, even the arching of an eyebrow, becomes erotic stimulus,” Phillipe observed, his voice low in Smith’s ear. “Really, it’s an excellent reproductive strategy.”

Smith didn’t say anything. Long minutes passed. A bee landed on his forearm; he shook it away, chains clanking. A cloud of pink powder, taken by the wind, blew into their eyes. Phillipe turned his head away and sneezed.

“Pronounced medicinal odor,” he said.

“Like antibacterial foot powder,” Smith agreed.

“Strange to find such an odor among a tribe of technologically innocent Saharouian Berbers. Some age-old mixture of camel dung and piss and a bush that only blossoms at midnight—that sort of thing, absolutely. But this, this”—he searched for the word—“chemical is clearly the product of a modern industrial process. Have you understood its purpose yet?”

Smith thought for a long minute. Lack of food and constant cold had made his brain sluggish. They’d witnessed three or four of these terrible Marabout initiations in their months of captivity, all with equivocal results: Some died, some lived, as if by the magical whim of the bees. Other than that, he couldn’t say.

“They’re breeding a race of warriors here, Milquetoast,” the colonel continued. “This is how the Marabouts rid themselves of those weaker types unfit for military service. Meanwhile, we in the West natter on about tolerance and gender equality and sleep the sleep of reason in our comfortable beds. Watch the colors—one will immediately provoke the insects; the other just as quickly sedate them.”

The first recruit, completely dusted in pink, lowered himself to all fours and crawled into the waxy mouth of the giant hive. At this, the bees began an aggressive humming, like a generator flipped to high voltage. The crowd of villagers carefully backed away, clearing a space all around the thick mud walls. About ten seconds later a low, painful grunting echoed from inside. The grunting grew louder, then exploded into horrible, high-pitched screams and something, a monster wearing a writhing, stinging human-shaped covering of bees, burst from the hive and ran screaming toward the edge of the cliff, bees covering eyes, mouth, nose; bees at last choking the painful screams to a desperate gargle. The cliff here dropped off about sixty feet to a ledge covered with sharp rocks. Without breaking stride this unhappy individual flung himself off into empty air, the bees sailing up like bits of confetti as he dropped. Some things seen cannot be unseen. The image of the screaming bee-man jumping off the cliff would burn in Smith’s imagination forever. But the Marabout villagers seemed unmoved by his horrendous spectacle. Going around with faces covered all the time must have a curious effect on people, Smith thought: The covering of faces, like the wearing of masks, seemed to distance them from normal human empathy. Did they feel regret, remorse, shame? How could anyone be certain? Human emotions conveyed by facial expressions perfected over tens of thousands of years of evolution were, because of their veils, unknowable.

After a while, a second disciple, this one dusted with yellow powder, crawled into the hive. The villagers settled back to wait. At first, nothing. Then a foot could be seen through the opening, twitching. That was all. After a long time—Smith guessed an hour, hard to know without his dad’s old Rolex—the ordeal passed its natural time limit. Two Marabout guards wearing gloves and bee-proof meshing cautiously approached the hive. They reached in and removed the disciple via his formerly twitching foot. He was already purple and swollen, grotesque black tongue hanging from his mouth. Dead. The few bees still crawling on his flesh were groggy, engorged, and easily brushed aside.

“Different colors and yet they both died,” Smith said. “There goes your theory,
mon colonel.
”

Phillipe squinted up at the nearest peak. “That fool was clearly allergic. Death came from a single sting.”

5.

T
he earthly dwelling place of the mysterious Al Bab, Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, Beloved of God, the Stung One, Supernatural Grand Marabout, Supreme Military Leader, and General of All Generals of the Marabout Uprising, lay tucked behind a rocky protrusion at the top of the village, removed at a safe distance from the giant hive and its buzzing, stinging raiding parties of heavenly messengers. It was a modest, cheery structure built solidly of brick and cinder block, its walls painted flamingo pink, a vibrant color Smith assumed had everything to do with bee-resistant pink powder mixed in with the plaster, and nothing to do with the owner’s fondness for South Florida chic. A small satellite dish sprouted off the gable end; a generator chuffed away, hidden behind a barrier of thornbushes. Yellow lights burned from within. Electric lights. This familiar glow meant much more than the promise of artificial illumination to Smith, who had come to dread the long, icy hours of darkness. It meant
heat
. The death sentence that no doubt awaited him inside might be received without bitterness if he could just sit there in the warmth for a few minutes to hear it pronounced.

Dusk was the hour allotted for private petitions and also the hour of judgments rendered. The Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam received his faithful now as the sun descended. Villagers assembled humbly in the waning light, peasants on their way to an audience with their king. Smith stood under guard at the end of this line of wheedlers, whispering to himself a quotation from Camus: “There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn. There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.’ ”

He raised his eyes to the heavens and watched the stars come up, repeating this mantra under his breath, and seemed able to call the brilliant little pinpricks of light into existence just by the force of these ten words. Then he was standing on the gravel of the forecourt and the door swung open and two Marabout guards dragged him roughly by his chains into the sanctuary. The sensation of heat crept in a kind of half-painful prickling across Smith’s bare skin. Driven to his knees, he was forced to crawl up a narrow hallway of rough, untreated concrete to a room at the back. The first thing he saw of the men waiting for him was their bare feet and brown toes, some decorated with silver rings, protruding from beneath Marabout-blue djellahs and set against the dark red and blue arabesques of thick Berber carpets. A calloused, bare foot forced him down and for several long minutes, Smith lay deliciously warm, nose pressed to the fragrant weave. How he wished he could stay there forever!

Then the foot lifted and a hand yanked him by the hair to his knees. He looked around, blinking, and found himself in a large, plain room, crowded with men, who, being inside the four walls of a holy sanctuary, were allowed to remove their veils. The proliferation of chins, noses, mouths, beards, mustaches—features unseen for so many weeks—unsettled him. At the center of the room, enthroned in a yellow, wingback glider that looked like it might have come from Sears, sat Al Bab. The Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam alone remained veiled. He was a stocky figure, round as Buddha, his hands and the rectangle of skin visible around his eyes hennaed in a complicated web pattern usually reserved for dainty young brides. A large gold bee hieroglyph pendant hung on a chain around his neck; white light from the bare lightbulb in the ceiling danced off this garish piece of bling. He alone also hadn’t removed his shoes—clunky-looking leather orthopedics resembling Birkenstocks—an insult, in Smith’s mind, to the beautiful, soft carpet.