Gorgeous East (51 page)

“You’re an optimist, all right. Your glass is half full of bullshit!”

On and on, he went. The picture of the world Ralph drew was an exact negative version of the one Smith saw. A dark mirror image of the things Smith had been taught were good and true from childhood, which were actually, according to Ralph, false and bad. Ralph had grown up in his father’s house overawed by the idea of the moon walk and his father’s role in it; Professor Jihad made him face the bitter truth hiding behind this lie: The moon walk was just another massive crime. An oppressive act of colonialist trespass perpetrated upon the pristine, ash-gray dust of the moon.

After a while, Smith wanted to put a gag in the prophet’s mouth, could have, but didn’t. The outrage he felt at Ralph’s words was keeping him tense and awake.

“Enough about the fucking moon walk,” Smith interrupted at one point, nearly shouting. “That’s obfuscation! Let me hear about your tribe of fucking bee-loving murderers! Why?”

Ralph acquiesced. And seemed to enjoy talking about what he saw as his life’s great work, sprouted from a seedling planted in Jihad’s seminar fifteen years ago. The great man had urged all his disciples to become practicing revolutionaries, to reject progressive liberalism as a false doctrine and to live like those hippie saints who had been his comrades in the Weather Underground. Urged them to throw bombs of their own making at “the Bad America, beneath the western sky.” Ralph chanted this last bit, smiling. “Not his exact words, actually a tune by Gun Club, remember them? But you get the idea.”

Professor Jihad’s quirky brand of New Age Islam—hopped-up with the odd dose or two of old-fashioned Puritanism and wired together with strands of New Age pseudoscience—was one such bomb: Its strict behavioral codes, its emphasis on the enforced modesty of women and on the necessity of violence to achieve holy ends were the very antithesis to the corrupting ideals of personal liberty and pursuit of happiness enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Ralph’s chance to act out Jihad’s startling, contradictory ideologies came after he left Brown, and matriculated as a graduate student at the New School in Manhattan.

“I met a bunch of other righteous dudes at the New School,” Ralph said. “A few of them Jihad’s kids. We got together and pooled the resources of our trust funds to form an arts-based activist organization with cells in Green-point, Brooklyn; Madison, Wisconsin; and Berkeley. Our mission statement at that time was a little vague. We were trying to subvert the consumerist-fake-Christian-pornified-Western-bullshit U.S.-despotic-regime-nation through agitprop street theater, free seminars on how bad everything was, and performance art. One year we recruited at Burning Man and got matching funds from the NEA!

“We did have a few successes in those days—remember that art student who blew up mailboxes in the shape of a smiley face all over the Midwest? One of us! Remember John Walker Lindh? A fellow traveler! But 9/11 really put the lie to all that artsy crap and showed us the true way. Street theater and blowing up mailboxes was nothing compared to the Twin Towers coming down in a massive toxic cloud of burning investment bankers! If only we’d thought of that first! What a brilliant stroke! So we decided to trade in the soft stuff for something new and massive. We would out-terror the terrorists and use the excellent tools of modern culture—science, advertising, marketing—to achieve our political goals, which aimed at the destruction of the very things they were a product of. Then the fucking Patriot Act came along and things got a little oppressive for us. Suddenly, the FBI was reading our e-mails, tapping our phones. So we dissolved our homegrown cells and formed an NGO and decided to focus our resources overseas.

“One of our international studies guys came up with the Western Sahara, a country without a government, always teetering on the edge of anarchy. Great place to grow a terrorist organization from scratch like sea monkeys in a jar! We quietly moved into the refugee camps out here, first Awsard, then the others. We started slowly, learning the language, devising an ideology, a brand-new religion, blending folk stories and myth and the Koran and just some totally made-up shit and then preaching it to the people with absolute sincerity. It’s a fact that desperate people will believe anything that promises them a way out—”

“Tell me about the bees,” Smith interrupted again.

“The bees are excellent, don’t you think?” Ralph grinned. “Our consultant at Ogilvie in New York gets the credit for that one. Every great belief system needs a visual symbol, he said, something that can be scratched into the dirt with a few quick strokes. Bees because they sting, you know, because they hurt and no one forgets a bee sting, and because raising bees is good for the environment. We’re very green, you know. And because bees produce honey, which is an excellent protein that indigenous people can eat to survive.”

“Except your bees don’t make honey at all,” Smith said. “All they do is sting!”

“My bad,” the Gateway admitted. “We picked the wrong species, you can’t be all right all the time. So once we had our bees, we invented a myth to go along with them, some bullshit about a messianic figure called Al Bab—Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Iman, right?—being asleep in a cave for a thousand years, then there’s a swarm of bees sent by Allah to sting him awake, to wake his ass up to get busy saving the world. And man, what a beautiful synergy! We had our initiation rites. Every religion’s got to have an initiation. You know, baptism, circumcision, whatever? Like show me the madman who dreamed up slicing the foreskin off some poor little kid’s dick so he’ll be more pleasing to God! Makes our bees seem like an eminently reasonable alternative.”

“What about cutting off people’s heads?”

“That was my idea,” Ralph said, pride in his voice. “Heads are very primal. Like the Aztecs and that wall of a million skulls Cortés saw when he marched into the Valley of Mexico. And the Dyaks riding around on motor scooters in Borneo a couple of years back slashing off people’s heads like cantaloupes left and right. And shrunken heads in the Amazon, and headhunters in New Guinea, you know, stuff like that. Puts a chill right up your spine. Throw a couple of severed heads into any mix and you’ve got what? Fucking absolute beautiful terror!”

Smith didn’t want to listen anymore. Disgust and horror rose up like bile. “Shut up, you sick fuck!” he shouted. “Just shut up!”

“Face reality, dude,” Ralph said, sounding hurt. “The planet’s overcrowded with people, literally crumbling under the weight of billions of feet, billions of tons of human shit. The human footprint’s got to be smaller. What did Trotsky say? The revolution must be watered with blood!”

“
Non
, Robespierre said that . . .” It was Phillipe’s voice, sounding dry and dusty, as if it came from beyond the tomb.

Smith spun around to see his commanding officer standing there, more or less steady on his feet, lucidity once again shining from his watery blue eyes.

“You will permit me, Milquetoast,” Phillipe said. He took the FAMAS rifle from Smith’s hands and flipped up the stubby bayonet affixed to the stock.

“Do you remember a little man named Hanz Milhauz?” he said to Ralph. His tone, though conversational, calm, contained an explicit threat.

Ralph blinked up at him and began to tremble.

“Ah, I see.” The colonel nodded. “You don’t remember him. But then, you probably never knew his name. You murdered him at the Awsard camp six years ago. You cut off his head and subjected his body to indignities. Does this sound familiar to you?”

“If you kill me now, you won’t”—Ralph’s voice crackled with fear—“won’t get out of here. Think about that?”

“Something very important is missing,” the colonel said, his eyes carefully searching Ralph’s face. “Not even Hitler or Stalin could murder so many innocent people simply for a few stupid, abstract ideas. Hitler genuinely hated Jews. This was not an abstract idea with him. He hated them personally, each and every one. Just as Stalin hated the kulaks because he envied them their beautiful farms and plump, pretty wives. All politics is personal, don’t you agree?”

A tear squeezed out of Ralph’s close-set eyes and rolled down his round cheek.

“I offer you here a last chance to explain yourself,” Phillipe said gently. “Try again, please.”

“I have been explaining,” Ralph said. “You weren’t listening.”

“I heard every word,” Phillipe said. “You weren’t explaining. You were preaching to a fool. And I’m afraid Legionnaire Milquetoast here is a fool, otherwise he wouldn’t be in this predicament. Try again. Speak to me. One man to another.”

Ralph Wade moved his lips desperately, but this time no words came out.

“As I suspected.” The colonel nodded. “You do not have a genuine personal life. You’re not really a human being, only a sack full of foul air. Through some terrible oversight you were born without a soul.
Hélas
, there is only one thing to do with such an abomination—”

Smith lunged, not fast enough. The colonel stabbed down hard with the bayonet and buried it to the stock deep in the stony heart of the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, once known as Ralph T. Wade III, who coughed painfully, a bright mouthful of blood spilling down his bare chest, and died.

Smith began to weep. From exhaustion, from fear. It was dark now. With the morning light the Marabouts outside would get a good look into the room and see their precious Al Bab lying there dead.

“When you meet the devil you must not hesitate, you must kill him,” Phillipe said, sounding perfectly reasonable. “I swore I would claim my revenge for the murder of poor Milhauz and now I have. But to finish the job I must cut off his head.”

Smith watched as the colonel began sawing away with the blunt edge of the bayonet, ill suited for such a purpose. It was, after all, a stabbing weapon. They would be clawed apart for this, eviscerated by the blunt fingers of an enraged Marabout mob, their lifeless carcasses fed to those horrible stinging bees. But soon, Smith’s fear gave way to another sensation. He felt the relief of the traveler who at last comes within sight of the friendly porch of his own house after many hard years on the road. And now, overwhelmed by weariness, he lay back on the futon and fell instantly asleep.

12.

I
n the morning, they counted the bodies. Legionnaires Dessalines, Babenco, Vladimirovitch, and twenty-two Moroccans, all laid out side by side, equals in death. A Legion victory but a very costly one—casualty rate, 50 percent. Corpses decompose rapidly in the desert heat; in some cases, gases trapped in the viscera can lead to the most gruesome explosions. Immediate burial is a necessity.

Solas, still toting the large caliber Browning, supervised the burial detail, one long narrow grave for everyone. The surviving twenty-seven Moroccans, now prisoners of the Legion, worked with their entrenching tools for two hours as the sun rose over the desert. When they were done, Sergeant Ladjal and the rest rolled out their mats and prayed for their dead comrades in the first flush of heat.

Pinard ordered the mass grave to be filled without further ceremony, but Szbeszdogy intervened.

“You’ve got to say something, Capitaine,” he insisted. “The Moroccans have their prayers. We need a few words for our dead.”

Pinard agreed reluctantly. He stepped up on the mound of displaced sand and took off his borrowed Moroccan cap. The men, both Moroccans and Legionnaires, squinted up at him.

“I can’t tell you I knew these three all that well,” Pinard said. “Dessalines was a big brute, tough but superstitious as a woman. Babenco—who knows?—the man never said much of anything, but he was from Uruguay, which I understand is a quiet sort of place. And Vladimirovitch, thick-skulled and dumb as an ox. I didn’t like them and they didn’t like me. But none of that matters now. They are at last, officially, heroes. Their names will be inscribed on the black walls of the Legion crypt in Aubagne along with the names of forty thousand others, men from every nation in the world and every profession and all walks of life. Princes, doctors, chimney sweeps, artists, drunks, marshals of France. I don’t know if there’s a god and frankly, I don’t care. But if there is, for these three, it’s the God of Battles. So to this fierce and pugnacious being I say receive the souls of Dessalines, Babenco, Vladimirovitch. They were Legionnaires: They did their duty and are dead. Now bury them.”

Pinard stepped down off the mound and put his cap back on and the Moroccans went to work filling the grave.

“See what I mean?” The Hungarian chuckled. “One would think you’d spent your whole life shut up in a library.”

“Shut up, Szbeszdogy.”

“In all seriousness,” Szbeszdogy said. “You have a kind of natural eloquence. If poetry displeases you, what about politics?”

“Don’t insult me!”

A delegation of the Moroccans, led by Sergeant Ladjal, approached. Solas stood guard warily, 50-caliber rounds ready in the breech.

“A word, your honor,” Sergeant Ladjal said in French. He bowed deeply, nearly bending himself in two at the waist, then squatted in the sand.

“
Alors?
” Pinard said, looming over him.

“What do you plan to do with us?”

Pinard thought about this for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “We’ll take some supplies and a truck and your weapons and you’re free to go back to Laayoune with the rest.”

The sergeant nodded thoughtfully. “It is as I feared,” he said. “I beg you not to do this thing.”

“I don’t understand,” Pinard said, baffled. “You wish to remain our prisoners?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why?”

“The major was a cruel man,” Sergeant Ladjal said. “He was a bad officer and interested only in his own comforts. So it doesn’t bother us that you killed him. But if we return to Morocco with our commanding officer dead and our weapons confiscated, and you and your men escaped, it will go very badly for us. I will certainly be shot for cowardice, as will the two surviving corporals. The other men will be thrown into a terrible prison for a very long time. We are not very good soldiers, but soldiers are only as good as their officers allow them to be. We could become very fine soldiers indeed and you, monsieur, seem like a very fine officer. And so, my men and myself, we would like to volunteer with the Foreign Legion.”