Gorgeous East (18 page)

Smith winced at this.

“. . . and I can hardly understand the professor. He speaks so fast and gets real excited, jumping around like a monkey when he talks about symbolism this and symbolism that and I don’t know what-all. Shit, you know, I’ve been at it for months and I’m still not sure what symbolism is. Do you know?”

“Well—” Smith began.

“I mean I guess he’s talking about Mallarmé and Verlaine,” she continued, oblivious. “And Rimbaud—who is cool, don’t get me wrong,
poète maudit
and all that bullshit, like a rock star . . .”

After a while, Smith stopped listening. She had no apparent need for anything from him beyond the occasional assenting grunt. They were sitting on the terrace of a mediocre and expensive bistro on the rue d’Aubigne, a row of severely cropped topiary trees in big pots shielding them more or less from the heavy flow of traffic along the boulevard Moreland. They ate
ris de veau et frites
—veal sweetbreads and fries—the special of the day, and split a large green salad. Blaire ordered a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse, which didn’t go with the food at all, then to make up for this mistake, a bottle of red. She seemed intent on getting drunk. Smith wasn’t in the mood, but allowed himself to be drawn in by her enthusiasm. The afternoon wore on; soon it was dusk and the streetlights flickered for ten minutes, then illuminated themselves, glowing faintly purple along the quais, above the darkening river.

The drunker Blaire got, the more she talked about everything and nothing, her talk, so full of tangents and backtracking and non sequiturs, often making no sense at all. As it got dark, she popped a small white pill into her mouth—

“Speed.” She held out a small tin pillbox. “Want some?”

Smith declined. She made even less sense after this: fast, rambling monologues about nothing followed by rants about people he didn’t know. He was dead tired now, beyond exhausted, hadn’t slept more than an hour in the last forty-eight, desperately needed to find a place to crash and said so, several times.

“All right, buddy, tell you what—” Blaire said at last. “Since you don’t have a bunch of cash right now, I’ll rent you the place by the week until you can get a job. That’s, like, roughly sixty-five euros per week. So give me the sixty-five now”—she held out her hand, small and pawlike, the palms rough with eczema—“and you’ve got ’til next Tuesday to come up with the next sixty-five. Deal?”

Smith hesitated; she seemed crazy to him, slightly unhinged, but what choice did he have? He shook her hand—an unpleasant, damp, scaly sensation—and reached into his pocket and counted out his last sixty-three euros. “I’ll have to owe you the two,” he said. “Just until I can get these traveler’s checks cashed tomorrow.”

“Fine,” she said, frowning down at the money. “But don’t try and stiff me.” And she hopped up and went into the bistro and came out with another bottle of wine.

3.

A
t ten o’clock, Smith found himself dead sober and suffering from a splitting headache at a table in the corner of a rough sort of bar called Aux Rouge Gorge, on a steep street in Buttes-Montmartre. A large, rusty red ax blade hanging from chains out front served as the bar’s only advertisement. A dozen motorcycles parked along the curb bore the insignia of the French equivalent of an American biker gang: a Club Moto based in the gritty banlieu of Marly-le-Roi, known as les Barbares. At the bar inside, the French bikers, tough-looking brutes in battle-scarred leathers, stood drinking white wine from dainty glasses.

What’s wrong with this picture? Smith thought, and might have been amused by the spectacle had he not been so tired. He had been lobbying for a visit to his new apartment for hours now; Blaire, determined to spend all Smith’s rent money on booze, refused to head home until it was all gone or until last call, whichever came first. Now, she went up to the bar and returned with two glasses and a bottle of horrible, cheap champagne—Château d’Isigny, 2005.

“No more,” Smith said, waving his hands, alarmed. “After this, we go!”

“Yeah, yeah, suck my ass,” Blaire leered drunkenly, pouring two glasses. “Come on, this is fun! Aren’t you having fun?”

“It’s real fun,” Smith lied. “But I’m extremely tired. Otherwise it would be more fun than I could stand.”

“You’re a bastard,” Blaire pointed the bottle at him. “You know that?” Then: “Sometimes I think I should just go on back to Atlanta and get a job selling commercial real estate. That’s what my mom does. She sells commercial real estate.”

Smith sighed.

“Like, what’s wrong with you, buddy?” Blaire said, narrowing her eyes. “Are you depressed or something?”

“Just very, very tired,” Smith repeated.

“Do you smoke weed?”

“I have,” Smith said, no longer put off by her non sequiturs. “I don’t anymore.”

“Why not?” Blaire demanded aggressively. “Got a problem with it?”

“Not really, it’s just that—”

“So you got any? I’d really dig some. I mean good weed’s, like, really hard to score over here.”

“I just told you I don’t—”

But this statement was interrupted by a commotion at the street door. Raised voices, a bottle shattering, then three men in khaki military uniforms pushed in from the outside: Two of them, wiry and pale, with blond hair and icy blue eyes, looked Swedish; the third, muscular and very dark, probably African, with high, aristocratic cheekbones. They wore absurdly spotless white military caps on their heads and dark blue sashes wrapped around their waists; huge, shaggy red epaulets hung off their shoulders. Their uniforms were pressed and starched and utterly clean—though one of the Swedes, a fresh, congealing gash down the left side of his face, had dripped blood into his shirt collar.

“Fuck’n shit,” Blaire hissed. “
Les Képis Blancs!
”

“Who?” Smith said.

“
Les Képis Blancs
. The White—whatever—Caps, Hats. It’s what they call those dudes, on account of their hats. They come in here all the time to fight the bikers. Y’all watch, any minute now, there’s going to be a serious
bagarre
.”

The three white hats elbowed their way up to the crowded bar and a space seemed to clear around them—though the bikers at the far end pretended not to notice them. The noise level in the room receded like the tide, everyone suddenly talking in subdued tones.

“Maybe we should get out of here,” Smith whispered. Then: “What the hell are these guys—French Special Forces?”

Blaire shook her head drunkenly. “No French allowed,” she said. “They’re, like, foreign mercenaries, paid by the French. Légion Étrangère, they call them.”

Smith thought for a moment, translating slowly in his head. “You mean Foreign Legion? The French Foreign Legion?”

“You got it,” Blaire sneered. “Bunch of assholes.”

“Wow, the Foreign Legion’s still around,” Smith said. “Do they still take anyone, no questions asked?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Blaire said, annoyed. “All I know is we got to get out of here. My student visa ran out about a year ago. If
les flics
ask for my papers . . .”

“
Tamam
.” Smith pushed up from the table. “Let’s go.”

Blaire held up the bottle, still nearly full. “You got to be kidding! Come on, buddy, help me out here . . .”

“I’ve had more than enough,” Smith said, but he sat down again. Blaire drained her glass and moved on to Smith’s. Then she pushed the glasses aside and took the bottle and upended it between her lips.

Smith turned away from this disgusting spectacle to watch the Foreign Legionnaires at the bar, bottles of Kronenbourg in their hands. They possessed an undeniable swagger, a fearlessness that might be part of an elaborate pose, or might be completely real. The Foreign Legion was, he remembered reading somewhere, famously brutal, the toughest army in the world. Every year, recruits were killed during the merciless training process, or committed suicide or deserted if they could. Now he remembered watching an old movie with his mother back in Montezuma when he was a kid—
Beau Geste
with Gary Cooper. His mother singing a snatch of something snappy by Harold Arlen and popping popcorn in the kitchen. Then, rabbit ears adjusted and readjusted to bring the picture in straight on the ancient console TV, they curled up on the couch under a quilt as snow drifted deep across Iowa and the hot glare of the desert shone out from the small black-and-white screen. Smith couldn’t remember anything of the plot, only a column of men marching over endless dunes and the image of Gary Cooper, sternly beautiful, taking aim at a burnoosed Arab with an antiquated rifle. And a single line of dialogue, uttered by a sneeringly cruel man with a pencil-thin mustache: “Fools! Even in death you serve the Legion!”

Blaire put the bottle of champagne down and belched. “I’d fuck that black one anytime,” she slurred, indicating the African Legionnaire. “Look at them pecs. That boy works out!”

The three Legionnaires finished their Kronenbourgs quickly and ordered Ricard, snatching the bottle gruffly out of the bartender’s hands when he brought it over and filling their glasses to the brim with the pernicious yellow liquid.

“
Main de Danjou!
” one of them called, bringing himself to attention. The others repeated this obscure toast and the three of them drained off the Ricard in a single swallow. Ricard was strong stuff, Smith knew, more than ninety proof; it must burn like hell going down unadulterated with water. Then, the African Legionnaire turned away from his comrades and put a hand on the nearest biker’s leather-clad shoulder: “
Z’avez une cigarette, la tapette?
”

The biker swung around, fists raised, bristling at what was clearly an insult, but the African Legionnaire took a lightning step back and knocked him down with a quick, sharp blow before he could strike. In the next moment, the brawl broke out in every corner of the bar, like something out of an old-fashioned Western. Chairs went flying, tables upended. Glasses shattered against the wall. One of the Legionnaires bit the neck off an empty bottle of Kronenbourg, and, spitting out glass and blood, slashed at a biker who had drawn a knife.

“
J’appelle la police!
” the bartender shrieked, pulling out a cell phone. “Police!”

A flung bottle missed Smith’s head by inches. In the distance already, the
mee-maw
,
mee-maw
sound of French police sirens approaching. Smith jumped up, shouldered his duffel, and seized Blaire by the arm.

“We’re going!” he said. “Now!”

She wrenched her arm away drunkenly. “Why? This is a trip!”

“Because of your papers—remember your papers?”

Blaire allowed herself to be led around the fracas and out into the street.

There, slumping over the low fender of an old Renault 4CV, she retched up half a bottle of cheap champagne in the gutter. More bikers were pouring into the bar from somewhere, as if they had been waiting in nearby alleys for the fighting to begin. The Legionnaires inside fought back to back now, embattled, vastly outnumbered, their neatly pressed uniforms torn, ruined, spattered with blood, white kepis somehow still perched, spotless, atop their heads. They looked oddly happy in there, Smith thought, watching them through the open door from the safety of the curb. As if to support this conclusion, one of them started to sing—“
Tiens, voilà du boudin, voilà du boudin. Pour les Belges il n’yen a plus! Ce sont des tireurs au cul!
”—and his comrades joined in, a strident martial chorus, and they fought on, arms flailing, fists flying, blood spattering, singing happily in the yellow light of the bar.

4.

B
laire’s apartment wasn’t a one-bedroom at all, but a filthy one-room studio, divided in half by a hip-high pasteboard wall. And it didn’t overlook the white marble obelisks and elaborate aboveground tombs of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, as advertised, but gave out on one side on an air shaft, the thick smell of garbage curling up from the trash bins below; on the other, a grim, nameless street, utterly featureless.

Smith half carried Blaire up the stairs, six narrow, steep flights. Blind drunk and maxed-out on speed, she raved on, blabbering in two languages. Smith could hardly make out a single coherent phrase. He tossed her down on the bed—a stained, bare futon—where she instantly passed out. He took off her shoes and covered her with a sheet, then stepped gingerly around the divider and tried to clear a space for himself to sleep on the floor. The overhead bulb had long since burned out and, there being no lamps to speak of—she’d been using candles, with waxy residue and burned matches all over the place—he worked by streetlight reflected through the casement window. Even in this sepulchral dimness, the complete squalor of his surroundings was clearly apparent: moldy food, wads of toilet paper dark with an unknown substance, a decomposing beta fish floating in an algae-spotted bowl, filthy heaps of clothing; the kind of disorder that could only mirror a disordered mind.

How horrible! Smith thought, scraping a pasty something off the floor with the edge of his shoe. This was the absolute bottom. But he had paid for a week and at least the bottom was a place from which it was not possible to fall. He softened his duffel with a few blows for use as a pillow and laid his jean jacket over a disturbing stain on the floor and lowered himself down. He had barely closed his eyes when Blaire lurched around the divide from the other side. She was totally naked.

“Hey, asshole,” she said. “What do y’all think you’re doing?”

Smith stared. She was far more attractive without her clothes—that bulky cable-knit sweater had concealed nice breasts and compact curves—but she was smudged-looking, as if she hadn’t bathed in some time, and her eyes were spinning mad in her head.

“I’m going to sleep,” Smith mumbled, embarrassed, turning away from her. “So should you.”

“Hey,
hey!
” she spat. “Y’all better fucking do me after all the money I spent on you today! And I mean you better pound my bones good, or I’ll kick your ass right out into the street!”

She stumbled toward him and Smith jumped up, alarmed.