Gorgeous East (52 page)

“I see.” Pinard nodded, suppressing an urge toward hilarity. But Szbeszdogy, lacking Pinard’s naturally restrained temperament, broke out laughing.

“This is not a joke,” Sergeant Ladjal insisted, wagging his head sourly. “Please understand we do not come to you with nothing. Our pockets are full, so to speak—we have something to trade. Some very valuable information.”

Szbeszdogy stopped laughing.

“Yes?” Pinard said.

“The Marabout hive, their citadel is well known to us”—Muhammed Ladjal gestured at the distant peaks, now covered in snow—“not far from here, in the Guelta range.”

The word
citadel
conjured for Szbeszdogy visions out of
The Arabian Nights
: crenelated towers, moats, invisible castles inhabited by djinns and ogres and an enchanted princess or two. You would need an army of knights to assault such a place. Pinard, who had never read any tales of djinns, ogres, or princesses, thought only of stone walls, barbed wire, and gun embrasures. In either case, a formidable obstacle.

“On a plateau between two peaks,” the Moroccan continued. “Lightly held. Not a job for a brigade, not even a company. Ten men, perhaps twelve. A patrol. The element of surprise.”

Pinard drew the sergeant to his feet and kissed him on both cheeks.

13.

A
n absolute stillness hung over the mountain redoubt of the Marabouts. Smith snapped awake in the predawn darkness, immediately aware of the absence of sound. He opened the interior door a crack. The large room beyond stood deserted. Phillipe took the Gateway’s severed head by the hair and without saying a word to each other they walked through the bungalow, also deserted, down the long corridor and out the front door unmolested. No one stopped them because there was no one to do so. Even the bees were gone, their massive hive silent.

“They cleared out,” Smith said, not believing the empty village, the hovels denuded of every last scrap. “You really think they’re gone?”

“Oh, yes.” Phillipe smiled through broken teeth. “They’re gone.”

“Why . . . ? Did they . . . ? Where . . . ?”

Dazed, Smith couldn’t frame the right questions. But Phillipe seemed temporarily revitalized. Killing Al Bab had sent a jolt of energy through him. Perhaps he had consumed, like a hero out of ancient myth, some of the life force of his vanquished enemy through the blade of his sword.

“Marabout fighters surprised me while you were asleep,” Phillipe said. “They had their guns on me, they were about to shoot. I merely showed them this—” He offered Ralph’s severed head to the pale inspection of dawn. “And they got a good long look and went away quietly. An hour later I heard them all moving out, a kind of sad creaking as they took off their belongings that was the sound of the archimposter’s schemes falling apart piece by piece. This happened yesterday. You’ve been sleeping for twenty hours. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Thanks,” Smith mumbled.

“The Marabouts believe Al Bab is immortal,” Phillipe continued. “Always dying, always resurrected. This head represents just one of the forms of their prophet. Killing him only released his soul to inhabit a higher form. We were the instruments of that release, you and I, Milquetoast. Perhaps the Marabouts think we’re a couple of angels and, like their bees, sent by heaven. In any case, I imagine they’re relieved. New belief systems are generally very demanding. Now they can go back to the relative luxury of the refugee camps. Free logs of UN cheese and so on.”

Smith and Phillipe wandered slowly through the darkened town, the former stumbling a little, freedom an unfamiliar taste in his mouth; the latter swinging Al Bab’s severed head jauntily by the hair, like a lantern. Halfway down the slope a man in a dirty denim jumpsuit, camouflage grease smeared across his hawkish features, stepped out of the shadows. In his hands a gleaming chrome Kalashnikov, its stock inlaid in silver with the Moroccan star.

“Where did you get that ridiculous weapon, Pinard?” Phillipe said.

“Colonel de Noyer?” Pinard cried, squinting into the gloom.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Pinard could hardly conceal his dismay at the sight of this walking skeleton, otherwise known as Phillipe de Noyer—remembering the elegant officer, accomplished pianist, and Satie fanatic, second in command of la Musique Principale. The treasured husband of the woman he loved. To this vigorous, talented person the present emaciated toothless apparition bore no resemblance. For his part Smith, astonished, couldn’t help gaping at Pinard. One thought kept running through his head: He had cried out from the darkness of captivity—
à moi la Légion!
—and, damn, if the bastards hadn’t come for him.

“You remember Legionnaire Milquetoast,” Phillipe said, gesturing to Smith. “Smith, my former adjutant, Sous-lieutenant Pinard—”

“That’s capitaine,” Pinard corrected. “Field commission.”

“Congratulations.” The colonel nodded. “Well done.”

“
Mon capitaine.
” Smith saluted. Pinard eyed him coolly.

“So you made it this far, Milquetoast,” he said.

“I did, sir,” Smith said. But meanwhile, he thought, cocksucker, I never wanted to see your ugly face again! Between the two of them there was, and would ever be, the kind of natural antipathy that goes beyond personality and upbringing, that is rooted somewhere deep in the blood.

Pinard offered Colonel de Noyer a foul-tasting Moroccan cigarette from a requisitioned pack; as an afterthought he offered one to Smith. The men lit up and smoked for a long minute without speaking. It seemed they were standing on the parade ground at Aubagne in full dress, not exposed on a frozen mountaintop in the expectant moments before dawn, targets for snipers, an ambush.

“By the way, Milquetoast,” the colonel said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke into the brightening sky. “I’m recommending you for the Croix de Guerre. You could have escaped without me, you didn’t.
Eh bien, bravo!
” Then to Pinard, “Should anything unfortunate happen to me, please make a note of this commendation.”

“
Oui, mon colonel.
”

Cold wind swept down from the peaks above, redolent with snow. Phillipe was on his feet and lucid, even garrulous—but the last fires of his life were clearly extinguishing themselves as each second gave way inexorably to the next. He faltered suddenly, and put his hand on Smith’s shoulder to steady himself.

“Are you able to walk, Colonel?” Pinard asked anxiously. “They’re waiting down there, ready to take this place by storm. If I don’t get back soon we’ll be caught in our own firefight!”

“Who’s waiting?”

“Legionnaires Szbeszdogy and Solas.” Pinard grinned. “And a few new volunteers.”

“Good. Shall we go,
mes enfants
?”

Phillipe removed his hand from Smith’s shoulder and took a step forward unaided, then another, and soon they were moving down the slope.

“Glad you showed up, Pinard,” the colonel said. “I didn’t want to carry this ugly relic all the way back to Aubagne.” He raised the head, an expression of terminal horror fixed to its fat cheeks. “Meet the great and terrible Al Bab. Strangely, he was an American. What was that name again, Milquetoast?”

“Ralph T. Wade III,” Smith said, “of Marin County, California.”

“Half the trouble in the world seems to be caused by Americans.” Phillipe shot Smith a critical glance.

Smith didn’t say anything to this, but he thought, what about the other half?

Presently, Phillipe tossed the severed head of the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam to Captain Pinard as casually as someone might toss a soccer ball to a fellow player after a game. A few minutes later, Pinard tossed it to Smith and a few minutes after that it went back to Phillipe again. And carrying this grisly trophy between them, first one, then the other, digging their fingers into the greasy, blood-matted hair, into the sockets of the eyes, they walked together down the trail and came to a narrow switchback that rose and fell sharply down the course of the ravine. The sun rose to the east as they descended. Dawn touched the heights, but not the desert below.

14

BRIDGE OF THE

REQUITER

1.

P
hillipe lay a long time dying in the hospital in Ceuta. The windows of his room, arched in the Arabic fashion and subtly tinted with gold-colored glass like an expensive pair of sunglasses, looked out on the white city, on the fortress of Monte Hoche, on the waters of the Mediterranean, wine dark, touched with whitecaps. The room was air-conditioned and clean. He was still in Africa, that is to say on the African continent, but actually in Spain. Ceuta is Spanish territory, as it has been for five hundred years, one of the last footholds of a vanished empire.

Toward the end of Phillipe’s final struggle with death, an old-fashioned gentleman wearing a pair of pinc-nez spectacles and a velvet suit, his beard neatly trimmed, came to sit by Phillipe’s hospital bed on an odd, rickety-looking stool. The legs of the stool were needle-thin, but carved up and down with demonic little figures like gargoyles on a Gothic cathedral.

These gargoyles grimaced and screamed, their screams making no sound at all, and they spit out a vicious black poison that was their deathless malice, the same terrible stuff that had afflicted the de Noyers down through the generations. The gargoyles would spit this poison into anyone who came near them with an open wound, and had found the de Noyers especially receptive hosts. They had penetrated Phillipe’s ancestor, Thibault, Conte de la Tour Grise in the following manner: This pious and valiant knight had gone on crusade to Egypt with St. Louis in 1277, was shipwrecked off the Egyptian coast, taken prisoner after a desperate fight, and thrown into the dungeons of the caliph of Damietta, no more than a damp hole cut deep into the earth and full of pestilence. In the caliph’s dungeon, Thibault sat down on a filthy, rickety stool just like this one, a sword wound on his thigh. From the contaminated stool, and through Thibault’s wound, the gargoyles entered his blood, chewing their way with their sharp teeth into his very marrow, into the fibery thickets of his most intimate material, where they then laid their poison like maggot eggs.

But the gargoyles could not infect the blood or the marrow or the intimate material of the Velvet Gentleman, who was incorporeal and far beyond such terrors and who could not be touched by anything in this world, and who found the stool quite comfortable. He took Phillipe’s hand.

“You recognize them, of course,” the Velvet Gentleman said gently. “I mean these malefic little demons.”

“Yes.” Phillipe shuddered. “They’re horrible.”

The Velvet Gentleman nodded. “They have been hiding inside your body, inside the bodies of your family, generation after generation, since the days of the sainted king, as a poisonous snake hides in underbrush. Sometimes they lie quiescent, asleep for fifty years, for a hundred years, and do not disturb the host. Other times”—the Velvet Gentleman offered a gesture—“we have your sad case, my dear de Noyer. They have gnawed away great gaping holes in the precious fabric of your brain like moths going at a suit.”

“Where do they come from?”

“Where indeed?” The Velvet Gentleman shrugged. “I could say the East. That’s where such things come from, generally. Plagues, new ideas, new religions. Before that”—he shrugged—“they inhabited a universe that is not our own, that is infinitesimally small, so small that it exists and does not exist at the same time.”

“Your paradoxes hurt my head,” Phillipe said. “I’m very tired . . .”

But the Velvet Gentleman demurred. “We have fought them long and hard together you and I,” he said. “My music played through your fingertips made them quiet, made them slow their ceaseless gnawings, and so you have lived much longer than any of your ancestors. Think of it—six years without sleep! Who can claim to have experienced the same torment and lived! Now, granted, your body has reached its physical limits and you will die. But your death cannot be their victory. They feel your death coming and are getting ready to jump into a new host. We can’t let this happen. They must die too, this time, once and for all when your body dies. Understand?”