Gorgeous East (43 page)

4.

T
he Australians—five or six of them, it was hard to tell, one or another kept falling down—had somehow managed to get very drunk on the watered-down whiskey they served at the Casbah Bar in the Hotel Palais-Maroc. They had been drinking all day, celebrating the fact that the NGO they worked for was closing up shop in Laayoune and sending them back to Sydney in the morning, and they were singing Australian songs off-key at the top of their lungs—much to the annoyance of Legionnaire Szbeszdogy, sitting at the opposite end of the bar with Capitaine Pinard and Caporal-chef Solas. Szbeszdogy’s finely tuned musical ear was wounded by this racket; the boozy, Australian singing gave him a pain deep in his gut.

“These Australians are driving me insane,” he hissed. “One more song and I’m going to start a fight. So help me I’ll smash the next one who opens his mouth with this bottle of Kro!”

“Control yourself, Legionnaire,” Pinard said, amused. “You’re on duty.”

“Why can’t they just shut up?”

“Because this is what they do.”

“What—sing horribly?”

“They travel the world, drink excessively, and regret Australia. Apparently, it’s the kind of place you miss only when you’re away from it.”

“Ah.” Szbeszdogy nodded, understanding. “Like Hungary.”

“Like most places. What about Brazil, Solas?”

They turned to Solas, but he refused to join the conversation. He hadn’t spoken a word all night, and would only respond to a direct order and only with a grunt. His nose, formerly straight and aquiline, now swollen with an ugly purple bruise, showed a bump in the middle and hooked to the right. His murderous hatred for Pinard, and by association Szbeszdogy, and perhaps the Legion itself, drifted off his otherwise smooth café au lait skin like a powerful body odor.

The Australians kept up their raucous singing and drinking, and a few minutes later one of them ran out of the bar and vomited in a potted palm in the lobby, another one fell on his face, yet another slid unconscious to the floor, and the two or three remaining, feeling bereft, ordered more whiskey.

“You want to know why I picked you for this recon duty tonight, Solas?” Pinard said.

Solas didn’t say anything.

“First, you’re the deadliest bastard we’ve got. Your comrades of the 4e ER are blunt instruments compared to you. They’re hammers, especially that bull-headed Russian and that Haitian idiot, but you, my friend, you’re a straight razor. Thin, concealable, deadly”—Pinard chuckled, pleased with his metaphorical power. “Second, I want to give you a chance to kill me. I’m quite serious.”

Solas looked up. “Permission to speak freely, Capitaine,” he said, his voice a low growl.

“Granted.”

“I will kill you. You are already a dead man. But at a time and place of my choosing. You don’t mark Solas like this”—he gestured to his nose—“and live.”

“You’re nose is much improved if you ask me,” Pinard said affably. “Makes you look less like a girl.”

“How about we settle this outside immediately,” Solas growled. “I propose knives. I will cut your throat.”

Pinard reached under his shirt and pulled out the .22 caliber Walther and pressed it discreetly against Solas’s kidney. The Walther was now fixed with a short, stubby silencer of the latest design. It could be fired right here and the shot would go unheard by the Australians halfway down the bar, now singing a pornographic version of “Waltzing Matilda.”

“Understand something,” Pinard said, keeping his voice pleasant. “Your chance to kill me is only tonight, in the darkness, and only when my back is turned. But then you’ve got to kill Szbeszdogy too and you’ve got to beat it out of Laayoune without getting caught. Think you can do it?”

Solas didn’t say anything. Pinard pressed the gun harder into the Brazilian’s kidney.

“If you don’t kill me tonight, I’ll kill you, Solas, I swear it. Tomorrow, the next day. Doesn’t matter, you will be dead.”

“You can try,” the Brazilian said through his teeth.

“I will have an easy time of it too,” Pinard continued in the same affable tone. “I’m an officer now, and what’s another miserable Legionnaire more or less to the Legion? Tens of thousands have died for nothing, marched directly into the mouth of the guns, cannon fodder. And you,
espèce de merde
, you’re worth less than the least of them.”

Solas made a gesture meaning talk all you want, we’ll see.

“You know something”—Pinard released the little gun’s safety catch—“I think I’ll shoot you now. Szbeszdogy and I will be out the door before the Australians realize you’re dead.”

Heat from Solas’s fingertips melted the ice in his glass.

Szbeszdogy watched them both, increasingly alarmed.

“But before I kill you, I offer another way, a counterproposal. Are you listening?” A little jab with the gun. “If we emerge from tonight’s adventure alive, which we might not, let’s be honest, you will come to me and you will acknowledge that I did what I did to your nose for the sake of the mission. And you will recant your threat to kill me forever.”

“That’s fucking stupid,” the Brazilian said, his voice hoarse. “So I tell you I’m not going to kill you now. What’s to stop me from killing you later?”

“Your honor as a Legionnaire,” Pinard said. “I’ve read your dossier. You had no honor when you joined the Legion—you were a punk, a favela murderer—but you have it now, because the Legion has given it to you. So I will accept your word as a Legionnaire and a man of honor.” And he laid the Walther carefully on the bar next to Solas’s drink. “Use this on me if you want. Frankly, I don’t care much one way or the other. But remember, if you don’t kill me tonight, you will come to me tomorrow and tell me the vendetta is forgotten. Or I will definitely kill you. I swear it.”

The Brazilian stared down at the gun. “If you think I won’t—”

“Shut up, you idiots,” Szbeszdogy interrupted. “Look!”

Pinard looked. Just then, a figure wearing a Saharoui djellah, hood up, crossed the lobby toward the front doors. Another hooded figure, stooped, ancient, waited outside in the penumbra of reflected light at the edge of the darkened world.

5.

T
he two djellahed figures hurried along, shadows against the encompassing shadows of Laayoune, illuminated in silhouette by the headlights of a passing delivery van. Then they turned a corner into the run-down neighborhood abutting the Saharoui souk, on the eastern end, and there was no more traffic and no streetlights, and they moved ahead silently through the black. The trick, as always, was to follow close enough, but not too close. A puddle of urine reflected faintly from the gutter. Heavy storm clouds, full of an ocean darkness, piled high above the city.

Pinard couldn’t see a damned thing. Just when he thought he caught a glimpse of them, they disappeared into the gloom. But Solas’s cat-green eyes could see in the dark; they actually glowed with a kind of strange tropical luminescence.

“This is nothing,” he said. “When I was a kid, in the favelas, I could see every turn, every alley, and the nights were blacker than this. One night the federal police chased a bunch of us down with machetes, because they didn’t want to waste any bullets. Bullets cost money. They hacked to death ten or fifteen kids and left the pieces lying around like rotten meat. Just to teach a lesson to the gangs. But me,” he grunted, “I got away because I can see in the dark. Later, I chopped one of those lousy cops that did it to us, and while he lay there bleeding to death I pissed on him, and shoved a broken bottle up his ass!”

“He’s not a man at all,” Pinard said to Szbeszdogy, “but some kind of supernatural Brazilian tiger.”

They passed along the barbed-wire trench that enclosed the souk on three sides. For a brief moment, the desert moon shone through the clouds and the effect was startling, a bulb switching on. Behind them, the spotlights of the Moroccan machine gun towers trailed like fingers across the Gate of Dusk and the Gate of Dawn. Solas, leading the way, motioned for them to keep back. Here the trench ended and they came face-to-face with the improvised walls of the souk—a series of barricaded houses and cement and cinder block reinforcements topped with broken bottles and iron spikes.

“Shh,” Solas whispered. “They’ve stopped, they’re not far.”

Pinard couldn’t see anything, but he took the Brazilian’s word for it. The Legionnaires pressed themselves against the rough surface of a cement barricade. The yelping of a dog somewhere out in the night sounded for a moment like a child crying for help. Then, from out of the shadows, came the barely audible sound of knocking, a code: one, two. One, two. One. And the soft creak of a door opening, a faint line of yellow light and a few inaudible words. The hooded figures folded into this light, the door closed, and all was blackness again.

“Now what?” Szbeszdogy said.

“We do the same.”

“There was a password,” Solas said. “Did you hear it?”

“
Merde
,” Pinard said. “I couldn’t hear a thing.”

“Ah.” The Brazilian chuckled softly. “But I could.”

“You’ve definitely got the eyes and ears of an animal,” Szbeszdogy said, grudging admiration in his voice. “
Mais rassurez-vous
, I mean that in the best way possible.”

They crossed a gully and came to a wooden construction, heavy beams dried out and petrified by years of exposure to the sun. It didn’t look like a door at all, but part of the sturdy system of barricades separating the souk from the rest of Laayoune. Solas stepped up and knocked out the code along one of the beams. A pause, then three of the beams creaked open an inch on concealed hinges, revealing a faint sliver of light.

“Polisario,” Solas said. “
¡Libertad para todos!
”

“
¿Quién es?
” came a faint growl from the other side.

“We are those who know the password,” Solas replied in Spanish. “Now let us in before the Moroccans take a shot at us.”

Pinard was surprised to hear Spanish spoken, then he wasn’t. Many of the urban Saharouis preserve that language from the days of Spanish colonial rule. There were still Saharoui immigrant ghettos in Seville and Cádiz, a last remnant of the diaspora of the 1950s and ’60s.

The door creaked open wide enough for the men to step inside, then closed behind them. They found themselves standing in a dark corridor. At the far end an archway opened to a lattice-covered alley faintly illuminated by a smoky, yellow-green light.

“What do you want here?” The voice came from a small boy, about eight years old. He was wearing a dirty soccer T-shirt advertising AC MILAN and a Saharoui kilt. He was barefoot.

Pinard reached into his pocket and withdrew a couple of butterscotch hard candies he’d lifted from a bowl on the front desk of the Palais-Maroc.

“Here, kid,” he said in rudimentary Legion Spanish. “Suck on one of these.”

The boy hesitated, but he took the candies and sat back on a broken crate half hidden in a niche beside the door and began unwrapping them.

“A woman, a man, not five minutes ago,” Pinard said. “Do you know where they went?”

“The woman has gone to see the emir,” the boy said, his mouth already full of candy. “Everyone who enters the souk of the Saharouis who is not a Saharoui must go see the emir. You are going to see him, aren’t you?”

“Naturally,” Pinard said.

The boy told them the way and they headed for the opening at the far end and entered the narrow alley, no wider than four feet across. The smoky light came from primitive lamps, little more than bowls of baked mud upon which sat burning some foul-smelling substance.

“Dried camel dung,” Szbeszdogy said, pinching his nose. “God, what an awful stench!”

“Try not to breathe,” Pinard said.

They followed the narrow alley though a series of twists and turns until they came to a wider street, parts of which were open to the sky. This seemed to be the souk’s main drag. Camels, knees folded, slept on the ground in pens fronting the tumbledown houses. The big animals groaned and huffed in their sleep, dreaming perhaps of the limitless desert. Farther on, an area lit with flickering electric lights off juice illegally diverted from the Laayoune grid.

A group of Saharoui men sat on threadbare carpets beneath the awning of a rude café, drinking sweet tea. Many of them wore piecemeal military outfits—the ragtag castoffs of a variety of North African armies; this was the thrift-store motley that passed for Polisario uniforms. A portable radio, tuned to a Moroccan station from Fez, played whiny Arab music at top volume. Dark eyes followed the Legionnaires as they passed. No one spoke.

“What’s to stop them from cutting our throats?”

Just then, as if in response to Szbeszdogy’s question, one of the Saharouis detached himself from the group at the tea house. He came striding up and blocked their way forward.

“
Qu’est-ce que tu fou ici?
” he demanded in French, pushing a finger in Pinard’s face. But before Pinard could answer, another man followed the first, then another and another until the Legionnaires were surrounded. One of the Saharouis began shouting in his own language and pointing at Solas.

“He is one of those who tortured our cousin in the swimming pool at the Agadir,” the first man said to Pinard. “He must pay for this humiliation. Violence is traded for violence, so it is written. We will take him and you and the other can go on your way.”

“We have come to see the emir,” Pinard said, his voice calm and reasonable. “Do you dare detain guests of the emir in the Saharoui souk?”

Solas’s hand crept toward the Walther, visible as a square bulge beneath the silk of his gaudy shirt.

“Steady,” Szbeszdogy whispered.

“You will observe my friend’s nose,” Pinard continued. “I broke it with my fist. This was his payment for the crime of humiliation against your cousin.”

“Not enough.” The first Saharoui shook his head emphatically. “He must pay with his life. My family has been too greatly dishonored.”

“We might conceivably let him off with a severe maiming,” said the second, scratching his beard. “Perhaps we will only take his manhood. It’s not so bad, we do it very quickly.”