Gorgeous East (24 page)

“
Eh bien
,” he heard someone behind him say, “at least they don’t have far to go. The Père-Lachaise is just there!” And someone else laughed, cruelly, at this.

Smith got up and walked the neighborhood again, stalking the same streets he’d been stalking for days, but still couldn’t recognize any of the buildings. It was hopeless. He’d never find the right address, all of it a blank facade in his memory, exactly like the blank facades looming up all around. At last, rush hour came—
l’heure de pointe
—and he gave up and made his way down the avenue de la République against the flow of pedestrian traffic—experiencing the distinct pleasure of having people avert their eyes and step out of his way. He wore his
tenue de ville
: the khaki shirt ironed into thirteen precise creases; the khaki pants so stiffly starched you could bounce a coin off the knee; the eye-catching shaggy red epaulets and blue sash; the desert-rated combat boots—les Rangers—polished to an impossible Legion sheen; the seven-pointed bomb insignia glinting from his collar; the white kepi perched on his head at a jaunty angle, now shielded from the rain with a clear plastic cover.

All of it marking Smith out as one of them. A Legionnaire, one of the world’s violent. One of the wolves.

5.

T
he Bar des Bluets, a hole-in-the-wall Legion hangout off a steep street in the Buttes-Montmartre, smelled of vomit, cigarettes, and cheap beer—exactly like the basement fraternity parties Smith had attended back at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

The patron was an ex-Legionnaire, a battered old drunk named Claude with a glass eye, the missing orb lost fighting the Fellagha during the Algerian War in the 1950s. In Claude’s day the Legion was still based out of Sidi Bel Abbès, a town the Legion built for itself in the pleasant, hilly countryside north of Oran, in what was then French Algeria. When France abandoned that colony as a result of the war, the Legion relocated every scrap, every brick, electrical outlet, and pane of glass, every memorial tablet, toilet, and statue—including the massive Monument aux Morts—to Aubagne. A large, water-stained panoramic photo of Claude’s old regiment—the 1er REP posed in full dress, battle flags flying in 1956—hung in a broken frame behind the bar. Spindly palm trees swayed in the background of the photo. Farther off, the slopes of forbidding Algerian mountains, the peaks touched with snow. Later, Claude’s regiment was disbanded—its men disgraced and scattered, its officers thrown into prison—for the role it played in the failed Legion-backed coup d’état that had sought to keep Algeria French. This historical photograph and an explicit beaver-shot centerfold out of a grim Spanish porno magazine nailed to the door of the water closet made up the totality of the Bluets’s decor.

Smith found his
copain
, Iian McDairmuid—Legionnaire Smith—leaning on one elbow at the bar, staring up at the centerfold, twenty empty bottles of Kro lined up like a company on parade before him along the zinc countertop. He was very drunk, eyes wandering in his head like stray asteroids around a sodden moon. His white kepi was gone, his uniform soiled, its elaborately pressed tunic vomit stained and wrinkled, lacking blue sash and one precious epaulet.

“You drink too much, kid,” Smith said, sitting on a stool next to him. “Look at your uniform. Two months’ pay, right there.”

It was true. The Legion provided each
engagé volontaire
with four complete uniforms—
tenue de ville
,
tenue de sortie
,
tenue de combat
, and
tenue de soir
—any piece of which was ridiculously expensive to replace. The shaggy red epaulets alone would cost Iian 170 euros each; the sacred white kepi, more than 500 euros.

“Fock you, lad,” Iian muttered. “I told you I was a fock’n dipso. What’s i’ to ye?”

“How about a cup of coffee? I’ll buy you one.”

“I shit in your cup of coffee. Buy me another Kro.”

“No.”

“Buy me a Kro or I’ll cut you fock’n throat.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Smith said. “The problem with you is your liver. Every time you drink, you turn into an idiot, then you puke. You’ve got the liver of a girl. Your liver is the size of a fucking Milk Dud. You know how big that is?”

Iian shook his head and Smith made a very small circle with his thumb and forefinger.

“Like this.” He grinned. “About the same size as your dick.”

“Go t’hell!” Iian growled, belligerence in his voice.

“You’re in Paris,” Smith continued, enjoying his newfound role as the voice of reason. “Go to the opera, the Louvre. See a show, see the Arc de Triomphe. All you do is sit in this shithole all day staring at that poster with those wobbly eyes of yours—”

“One of the nicest snatches I ever seen, fockface,” Iian interrupted. “An’ fock you!”

“Culture,” Smith concluded. “A little culture might not be bad for you. Actually, it might help.”

“When I hear the word
culture
, I go for my gun!” Iian shouted, outraged. “Y’ bourgeois faggit!”

He lurched forward and took a swing—a vicious left hook with force behind it—but Smith, expecting this explosion, ducked away and the blow glanced off his left shoulder. The kid spun off his stool, unbalanced by momentum, and landed facedown on the unwashed floor. He was so drunk he couldn’t get up. He lay in the muck of puke, spilled beer, and Paris grime, cursing loudly. The only other customers, two paratroopers from the 2e REP at the far end of the bar, their hands all over the Senegalese prostitute sitting between them, paid no attention to this fracas. Claude,
le patron
, his remaining eye fixed on a Formula 1 race on the television over the bar—Schumacher leading the pack as usual—didn’t bother to turn around.

You could be your worst self in the Legion, an obnoxious drunk, an unvarnished bastard, a liar, a con man, and still count on the unwavering support of your
copain
. The fragile niceties of civilian discourse, its false smiles, phony solicitude, and calls for intervention had no currency here. Smith helped Iian back up on to his stool and bought him a shot of cheap cognac and the kid knocked it back, his hand shaking.

“Yu’ve heard aboot the heads,” he said at last, calming down.

Smith looked at him blankly. “What heads?”

“Another UN team site wiped out last week in the Non-fock’n Territory of West Fock-all. Some place culled Om Dunka, or sumthin’ wherever the hell that is. Been all over the French tele. Makes the second massacre now. Number two. And that’s where we’re going, laddie, in case yu hadn’t heard. Right into the shyte. Th’ cocksuckers over there chop off everyone’s noggin, just t’—you know—put the terror to the blue helmets. Funny thing, they only leave th’ heads behind. What yu suppose they do wi’ all the bodies?”

“How should I know?” Smith said.

“You’ll go see me dad?” the kid said, after a moment, his voice trembling slightly. “If I don’t get back. He’s not a bad un, good man, really. Tried to do right by me, t’ keep me off th’ booze and drugs—I jus wasn’t havin’ any.”

“Sure,” Smith said, keeping the smile from his face with difficulty. “When you planning on checking out?”

“Fock you,” Iian said. Then, after a glum moment: “Did y’ find her?”

Smith shook his head. A pause. Then Smith ordered a Kro for himself and another for the kid, who drank it thirstily, as if he hadn’t had a beer in a month.

“How many days now?” Iian said.

“Three.”

“Going to piss what’s left of your leave, looking for some miserable bitch?”

“Yes,” Smith said.

“Follow y’ own perspcription, man! The fock’n Opera, the fock’n Tour Eiffel. All that tourist shyte!”

“Don’t do as I say,” Smith said. “Do as I do.”

The kid scratched his jaw for a moment. He swayed dangerously to one side, then to the other, like a kite in the wind, gears in his mind working audibly. Then, the pilot light flared up and the alcohol fumes behind his eyes caught fire.

“You remember where you first met her?”

“Yes.”

“So go back there and you’ll find her again. Simple enough, heh?”

Smith grinned. Out of the mouths of drunks! Somehow, this thought hadn’t occurred to him.

6.

T
he yellow scrap of paper, now nearly a year old, lay tucked under a heap of newer scraps on the bulletin board in the basement of the American Methodist Church on the quai des Celestins.

Smith found it the next morning after fifteen minutes digging through the various papery layers—the ride-shares to Barcelona, the telemarketing jobs that required knowledge of French and German, the group apartments looking for student co-locs who wouldn’t mind sleeping in shifts on the couch. He recognized the spidery handwriting the moment he saw it and seized the yellow scrap off the board, sending other bits of ancient paper like snowy flakes sailing to the floor. Written there was a cell phone number (Smith immediately tried calling—disconnected); the quartier, which he already knew; and the street, which he did not, but which he quickly found in the pages of his
Guide Bleu
pocket map: a tiny blind alley, one of Paris’s smallest capillaries, called—ironically, it seemed to him—the passage du Plaisir.

Smith hastened to the métro and took it back to Menilmontant, and quickly found the passage in question, settling in to wait in a deep doorway across from where it debouched into the rue Duris. He waited as the day waned. He did not smoke a cigarette or read a newspaper; he waited in the shadows of the doorway silently, hardly breathing, entirely focused on his prey. The blue shadows of a premature twilight engulfed the narrow passage, which only received direct sun once a day around noon and only for five minutes. A few people came and went—a couple of loud schoolkids cutting class to get high, the postman with his bulging leather bag and natty Yves St. Laurent-designed uniform, an old woman carrying a cat off to the vet in a mesh cat-carrying bag, the cat mewing with alarm all the way around the corner. No one saw, or wanted to see, the mysterious man in uniform waiting there in the doorway.

Then, nearly seven hours after Smith took up his vigil, he heard a crazy laugh from around the corner of the rue Duris, and snatches of a too familiar conversation in a drawly southern voice—

“O.K., like symbolism, what the fuck is it? I mean . . .”

Moments later, non-Blaire appeared, wearing the same cable-knit sweater and sweatpants ensemble she’d been wearing when they met a year ago. The same fake Hermès scarf, now dirty and tattered, hung knotted around her shoulder—it seemed she hadn’t changed her clothes or her subject matter in all that time. Struggling along under the weight of a huge backpack, a crusty punk backpacker kid, maybe seventeen, and scrawny-looking, his matted dreadlocks tied with a scrunchy bulging like ganglia off the back of his head. Crudely sewn to the left arm of the backpacker’s military fatigue jacket, an upside-down patch bearing the Bear Flag of the California Republic. Smith stepped out of the shadows, blocking their path down the passage, an unexpectedly martial apparition on this nondescript impasse.

“Blaire!” Smith called.

The young woman gasped. “What the fuck?”

“Remember me?”

“Huh?” Non-Blaire blinked up at him uncomprehendingly. “What are you, a
Képi Blanc
? Why would I know one of you motherfuckers?”

“You don’t remember,” Smith said. “You don’t remember a thing.”

“Like I said.” Non-Blaire bristled. “I don’t fucking know people like you. Military asshole!”

Smith almost laughed, then didn’t, figuring it would spoil the effect. She didn’t retain any memory of the disastrous night that had sent him to the Fort de Nogent and into the rough embrace of the Legion. Of course he probably looked like a different person in his smart uniform, with his hair shorn and thirty pounds slimmer—but he knew even if he looked exactly the same, she still wouldn’t remember him. He might be anyone. Just another face she’d slid past in the murky twilight on her way down.

The California backpacker shifted his eyes from Smith to non-Blaire, didn’t like what he saw, and began to edge slowly back toward the rue Duris. The sounds of city traffic could not be heard from the gloomy
trottoir
of the passage du Plaisir. It seemed they were alone in the vast city.

“Hey, you—wait!” Smith commanded. His newfound authority—or the authority implied by the uniform—was such that the California backpacker stopped. “Did you pay her any money?”

“What’s it to you, dude?”

“I don’t really give a shit,” Smith said. “But if you did, you just got ripped off. There’s no room for anyone else in her tiny miserable-ass pad—and believe me it isn’t a place you’re going to want to stay longer than five minutes.”

The California backpacker thought about this for a long minute. “I gave her a hundred euros,” he said in a flat voice. “And, like, some weed.”

“Give it back to him!” Smith turned to non-Blaire. “Now!”

“Fuck you!” non-Blaire spit out. “He’s my new co-loc! That’s rent money! And who are you, like the fucking housing cops?”

“Do what I say or I’ll call them now,” Smith said. “And not the housing cops. I mean the gendarmes who might be interested to hear your student visa ran out two years ago!”

Shaking with rage or fear or both, non-Blaire reached up under her dingy cable-knit sweater and pulled out a belly-pouch (the placement of which gave her an unflattering pregnant look, when in reality she was quite thin) and Smith suddenly remembered her body, her breasts, which she’d exposed to him that terrible night. She pulled a handful of crumpled bills out of the pouch with a trembling hand and thrust them at the California backpacker. He took the money and counted it quickly, smoothing the colorful bills between his palms.

“What the fuck!” he said at last. “There’s only thirty left! Where’s the rest of my money?”

“We ate lunch, remember,” non-Blaire said. “We drank wine!”

“You said you’d pay for that!” the kid insisted. “You said you’d put it on your card!”

“Like I have a fucking card!” non-Blaire said.