Gorgeous East (28 page)

No one moved. The two British Pakistanis, childhood friends from East London drafted into the Pakistani army during the course of an unfortunately timed vacation to their paternal homeland, shifted uneasily in their rope-soled combat sandals.

“What’s the bloody Frog tryin’ to say?” one of them whispered. “An’ why’s he speaking German?”

“Bollocks if I know,” the other one said. “If them Marabouts is runnin’ about choppin’ ’eads, I say we mutiny and run like hell back to Dahkla.”

“I’m for you,” murmured the Catalan, who understood English. “If the bloody officer don’t like it, we shoot him first.”

The Dyaks, squatting in the sand oblivious, twittered happily like a flock of small brown birds. Suddenly, they climbed back into their truck for a mid-morning nap. Pinard didn’t bother to go after them. No one spoke Dyak and the Dyaks pretended not to understand anything else. In any case, UN troops couldn’t actually be ordered to do something they didn’t feel like doing. They could only be requested very firmly to volunteer. If they refused to volunteer, a charge of noncooperation could be brought, but only after weeks of paperwork submitted in several languages and long legal briefs filed with JAG lawyers in Brussels. Such was the state of discipline in UN MINURSO, currently under the command of the controversial Dutch pacifist general Kurt van Snetters.

“
J’appelle les volontaires!
” Pinard shouted angrily. “A patrol. For reconnaissance.
Immediatement!
”

The Dyaks could be heard twittering dismissively from inside the truck. The British Pakistanis backed away, shaking their heads. The Turks and the Brazilians and the Latvian hoped Pinard would decide to turn around and head back across the dunes as fast as possible. A deep sigh, which was the mutinous Catalan expelling breath, rose into the superheated air.

Only Legionnaires Hehu Keh and Szbeszdogy took up their FAMAS assault rifles and stepped forward.

2.

I
t’s a female did that,” Caporal Keh said, not bothering to keep his voice down anymore. An unpeopled silence hung heavily over the smashed and crumbling battlements of the block house.

Pinard agreed. “Just the kind of thing a woman would do. Cut off a man’s
bite
and shove it in his mouth.”

“Them Marabout bitches fight alongside the men,” Keh said. “Just for the pleasure of mutilating enemy corpses afterwards.”

“Like the War Women of the Apaches.” Szbeszdogy nodded. He had just finished reading a Hungarian translation of Evan S. Connell’s
Son of the Morning Star
.

Pinard, Keh, and Legionnaire Szbeszdogy crouched in the narrow band of shade directly below the severed head almost certainly shoved into its shell-hole niche in the wall by the same band of Marabout insurgents who had attacked the UN team site at Om Durga a couple of months back. That time they struck just after midnight, killing everything alive, even the company dog and two egg-laying chickens. The proof here was the mysterious hieroglyph carved into the powdery bricks, the graphic symbol of the Marabout insurgency, their swastika, their hammer and sickle: an eye shape, crossed with three parallel slash marks meant to represent—though the significance remained uncertain—a bee, stinger attached.

“Someone take it down,” Pinard ordered vaguely, at last. He looked away. The dead mouth, stuffed full of the ultimate indignity, leered at him with a rigor mortis grin.

Szbeszdogy suddenly leaned over and vomited up the few crumbs of UN protein crackers left in his stomach.

“What did you do in the 1e RE?” Keh said, amused.

“Musique Principale,” Szbeszdogy admitted, wiping his face.

“Another musician!” Caporal Keh offered a derisive snort. “
Regardez comment c’est fait, les musiciens!
” And he reached up and grabbed down the head by jabbing two fat fingers in the empty eye sockets, wrapped it in a shred of camouflage meshing, and tied the meshing to his belt, the head bouncing against his thigh like a soccer ball.

“Back in Mongolia, it was my job to gut the sheep and crack their skulls.” He smiled at the memory. “My mother made an excellent stew with the brains and glands. How much difference, I ask you, is there between a sheep and a man?”

“Quite a bit, actually,” Szbeszdogy deadpanned. “For one thing there’s the wool.”

“For another thing, Mongolians prefer to fuck sheep,” Pinard said. “When they’re not jerking off.
C’est correcte, Caporal?
”

The Mongolian didn’t find this amusing. He had been caught last year naked and drunk out of his mind on the eve of Camerone Day—the Legion’s most sacred celebration—masturbating frantically in the middle of the parade ground at the 2e REP’s headquarters in Calvi and had become the laughingstock of the regiment. It was for this he’d sought reassignment to MINURSO.

The sand, blown by the simoom into little furrows, looked as white as snow in the hot glare. Flecks of feldspar glittered pinkly in the drifts. The tops of the Peugeots could be seen as a thin black line over the dunes in the heat-haze. No one seemed to be manning the Brownings, their main source of covering fire.

The Legionnaires malingered there in the narrow shade beneath the wall a moment longer.

“Could be booby-trapped,” Szbeszdogy offered presently. “Or an ambush.”

“Possible.” Pinard shrugged. Though they hadn’t taken fire advancing to the walls of the fort.

“Stop!” Caporal Keh said, nearly shouting. “Do we talk or do we go in?”

Pinard unclipped a grenade from his belt and lobbed it over the rubble blocking the main gate. The blast shuddered the old wall; a cloud of brick dust, dirt, and small stones blossomed into the air. The Legionnaires hurdled themselves through the falling cloud, over the rubble and into the blockhouse yard, firing their weapons. Three full clips of 5.56 exploded simultaneously. Severed heads went spinning wildly in a rain of bullets like grotesque bowling balls. Piles of shattered debris littered the yard. Smashed furniture, plastic bits of laptops, books with every page torn to shreds, scraps of choral sheet music. The entire contents of the enlisted barracks and officers’ quarters, even the wooden slabs from the latrine pulled out and rendered into bits. This total destruction seemed the result of a dark animal urge. A bear with a dog in its teeth, shaking until everything has been shaken apart. Gory patches of splatter in the sand indicated the places where the Legionnaires of the garrison had been decapitated. Scratched here and there gleefully in the bloody muck, the bee hieroglyph.

Pinard moved through the mess cautiously at first, FAMAS held ready. But the fort was completely deserted. There could not be a more deserted place.

“
Ces sales chiens de Marabouts!
” the Mongolian growled. “I knew these men. True, most of them were assholes—”

“But they didn’t deserve to die like this,” Szbeszdogy said, kicking a head out of the way. “Butchered like pigs.”

“Maybe not,” the Mongolian agreed.

Working through the debris a couple of minutes later, Pinard found three more heads. He conquered his squeamishness this time and, following the Mongolian’s example, took hold of the heads by the empty eye sockets. It was the easiest way. The hair shaved in the
boule à zéro
style favored by the Legion offered no purchase; the ears and nose had been lopped off by the Marabouts, mouths stuffed with withered genitalia. He thus assembled eight heads in a gruesome pile. Thirteen more were discovered by Caporal Keh laid out grotesquely, like cabbages, in a couple of rows in the dirt behind the latrines.

Pinard studied this macabre display, horror and rage boiling inside him. The completeness of the massacre brought to mind other notorious Legion slaughters—the debacle at Camerone; the rout and murder of the Forestier expedition in the Hoggar in the 1880s. But more immediately the many atrocities perpetrated by the infamous el-Krim during the Moroccan wars. El-Krim’s special trick, the flaying alive of captured Legionnaires, was done in such a way that they lingered, skinless, for days. Though some he buried up to the neck in sand and covered their heads with honey, leaving ants and dung beetles to finish the work.

The head of Phillipe de Noyer, Block house 9’s commandant, Pinard’s superior and a mentor to many in the 1e RE, no doubt lay somewhere in the surrounding mess. But it would be now impossible to identify the colonel’s mutilated, sun-blackened head from all the other mutilated, sun-blackened heads by facial characteristics. Forensic specialists in Aubagne would have to rely on DNA samples, dental records. Of course the bodies were nowhere to be found, another sign the Marabouts had been at work. They’d left no corpses at Om Durga either, only disembodied heads.

“I know what they do with the bodies!” Szbeszdogy cried. “They eat them! They’re a bunch of fucking cannibals!”

“
Du calme!
” Pinard said sternly. “
C’est du merde, ça, Szbeszdogy!
Psy-ops lies!”

“Ask me, a Legionnaire makes a pretty indigestible meal—” Caporal Keh began, then he paused: An unmistakable rumbling echoed across the desert like distant thunder.

“What’s that?”

“What?”

“Listen—”

They raced up to the parapet to see the telltale plumes of diesel exhaust in the distance. The Peugeot LVRAs, hurriedly reloaded with all guns, ammunition, and equipment, were moving off. Pinard watched helplessly through his Éperviers as the trucks pulled out of formation and lurched in a westerly direction over the last dunes at the rim of the horizon.

“
Putains! Lâches!
” Szbeszdogy shouted. “Come back!”

Caporal Keh raised his FAMAS and got off a quick burst at the retreating trucks, before Pinard ordered him to desist.

“Don’t waste ammunition!”

“
Nous sommes fini!
” Szbeszdogy groaned and slumped down against the parapet.

Unfortunately for them, the Hungarian was right: They had come three hundred kilometers and four days across the desert from Dahkla and through the Berm at passage fourteen, sector twenty-one. A massive sandstorm from the direction of the Saharoui refugee camps at Tindouf on day three had cost them eighteen hours. There is nothing to do during a sandstorm like that but hunker down and wait, the sky going purple-brown, the hot air thick as soup with flying particles, nearly impossible to breath without a respirator. It was the season of storms, another one might blow up at any time. Being left out here in le Vide—the Empty—was like being left in the middle of the ocean on a flimsy raft with no water, no food, no radio, no compass. All this gone with the trucks.

“Maybe they thought from the gunfire we were under attack,” the Mongolian said quietly. “Maybe they saw something. Maybe—” But he was interrupted by the sound of the Hungarian’s unmanly tears.

“Don’t be a fucking woman, Szbeszdogy!” The Mongolian looked down, contempt in his voice. “Keep it up and I’ll bend you over and give it to you good!”

Szbeszdogy didn’t answer, his sobs echoing in the stillness.

“Take care of the poor bastard,” Sous-lieutenant Pinard ordered, his voice thick. He felt like weeping himself. “I’m going down to look for the last couple of heads.”

But as he descended to the exercise yard the melancholy strains of Schumann’s
Three Romances for Oboe and Violin
echoed in his head. It was the piece he’d been practicing before leaving Aubagne. He had vague notions of trying out for one of the lesser-known European orchestras some day, when he left the Legion behind and was made—as was the right of every honorably discharged Legionnaire—a citizen of the French Republic.

“
J’aurais dû rester avec mon hautbois . . .
,” he whispered to himself ruefully. Should have stuck with his oboe.

3.

E
variste Pinard was 100 percent French Canadian—in other words slightly more than a quarter Indian, in his case Abenaki—born in Ours Bleu, a mill town two hours northwest of Quebec City. He ran away from home at fourteen after smashing his third stepfather over the head with a bottle of hard cider during a drunken argument and soon found his way to the stews of Montreal. There he lived on the streets for a couple of years, then became a runner for a Jamaican drug gang selling dangerously pure heroin to Anglophone private school kids. This line of work was lucrative but risky: A couple of his clients died from overdoses; a couple more got themselves hopelessly addicted, and fell into prostitution and other vices, ruining their lives before they had begun. Pinard, caught by the Mounties at last, spent two and a half years in a detention center for incorrigible juveniles, a terrible place all the way out in the Canadian Rockies, overlooking a frozen lake. That lake, the cold mountain sky, the despair of incarceration, the savage punishments, were carved into his memory in the same way the crude tattoos inflicted upon him there with safety pins and shoe polish were scrawled across his flesh—indelibly, impervious even to the wearing away of the years.

Later, Pinard migrated to France, worked as a stevedore on the docks in La Rochelle; as a bouncer for a live sex show in Paris; thugged a bit—in other words, beat up helpless deadbeats for a Russian mafia loan shark—the only work done during those hungry years he didn’t care to remember. Then he sold crystal meth and ecstasy in rave clubs in Nice for a Serbian cartel and was caught again, this time by the Sûreté Nationale. At twenty-three, he was forced by a judge wearing a funny hat to make a difficult decision: prison and eventual deportation or enlistment in the Foreign Legion.

To his own surprise, Pinard had taken well to the Legion’s rigorous discipline, borne up under its famously random brutality, been thrilled by the idea that, enduring, one might rise from the ranks, redeem oneself from past mistakes through service and suffering. In return, the Legion had given him the gift of a dual vocation: war and the oboe. He had risen very quickly by Legion standards. Promotions from jeune Legionnaire to Legionnaire premiere classe, to caporal, to caporal-chef, to sergent, to sergent-chef came in the first twelve years. Then he was selected—one of three enlisted men out of the entire Legion—for officer training at Saint-Cyr, a difficult academic course that he completed successfully, but very nearly didn’t, and only after many long all-nighters and much mental anguish. But in the end, Pinard’s struggles exchanged resignation for hope. He had, beyond all expectations, risen to that upper world where men made polite dinner table conversation with other men’s wives, where one rented apartments overlooking the sea, bought furniture. He was an officer.