Gorgeous East (2 page)

Fatal familial insomnia, or FFI, a hereditary condition caused by the same type of mysterious infectious proteins (prions) responsible for mad cow disease, is rare but well documented by medical research.

My efforts at verisimilitude end here. This volume is a work of fiction, offered as an entertainment; certain details of life in the Legion and elsewhere have been manipulated for dramatic effect. The characters described in the following pages are not meant to resemble anyone now living or once living, now dead.

GORGEOUS

EAST

1

SARABANDE FOR

A SUICIDE

1.

P
hillipe watched the pale young woman coming down the Grand Degré from the abbey, slowly, past the knickknack shops and the kiosks selling holy water, in the midst of a crowd of tourists in the rain. She gleamed like an apparition against the gray afternoon light. It was late July but wet and cold, as is often the case along this stretch of the Breton coast. A perennial gloom emanated from the abbey’s dark, medieval stones; low-lying clouds obscured the pinnacle of its famous spire.

The tourists were Americans, big and ruddy and loud and badly dressed in their usual array of sports paraphernalia and baseball caps—one of the package groups off the buses parked in an endless line along the causeway to the mainland. The pale young woman, clearly French, didn’t belong with them, wasn’t a part of their group, but seemed in the grip of a lethargy that prevented her from breaking away. Perhaps she had allowed herself to be drawn along at their shuffling pace rather then fight through the crush to the Gothic gates, to the causeway and the car park and the salt meadows and the tidal flats beyond, to France, a misty blue outline in the near distance. The Americans looked warm in their thick sweatshirts emblazoned with colorful logos. On their feet massive, elaborate sneaker boots—some with bulbous protrusions and lights that flashed with every step. The young woman wore only a thin cocktail dress made of a black, silky material, the sort of thing better suited to an intimate party in Paris, an evening at Soixante-Sept, or any of the other fashionable nightclubs in the Marais. The complicated straps of her sandals glittered with faux jewels; her toenails were painted gold.

The guide in charge of the American tour group raised his umbrella and began to speak, gesturing at the overhanging story of a half-timbered house from the fifteenth century. In the next moment other tour guides up and down the street raised similar umbrellas at similar houses and began to speak in their own languages, and an international cacophony echoed off the ancient, dripping facades. Phillipe heard snatches of German, Spanish, Japanese, Greek.

Meanwhile, the Americans had advanced a bit and now shuffled in place just across the railing from where Phillipe sat beneath the striped awning on the terrace of Aux Trois Ancres, sipping a cognac and going over his notes. He was writing a monograph on Erik Satie, the avant-garde composer—one of the most eccentric and whimsical figures of those bright decades lying across 1900 that the French call la Belle Époque—which he intended to submit to
Revue du Musique Français.
But Phillipe had been writing this particular monograph for a couple of years; writing was only a hobby for him, one of many. And now he rose out of his seat beneath the awning and let his notebook fall unheeded to the wet ground.

The young woman stood there, shivering in the rain, behind the broad backs of a couple of middle-aged American ladies. To call her beautiful missed the point. She possessed a kind of flickering quality, like a flame seen through a rice-paper screen. Her pale skin, nearly white, as if she lived entirely by moonlight or bathed exclusively in milk, seemed illuminated from inside. She was probably in her early twenties, and clearly Parisian—her dress and glittery sandals, her glossy black hair cropped short, all in the latest style—but this veneer of sophistication could not conceal the obvious from Phillipe: Here was someone in a great deal of trouble.

Now, the young woman’s blue eyes, close to the color of Phillipe’s own, though far more vivid—a kind of indigo blue—flashed toward him. Their gaze met for a second or two; she didn’t seem to register his presence. Then, she turned away, and the tour group shuffled on, and somehow Phillipe knew she intended to commit suicide. More, he knew how she intended to do it: She was going to follow the Americans to their buses along the causeway, climb over the rocks and onto the mudflats with the tide rushing in, and simply give herself up to the relentless surge. She might be dashed against the breakwater, or washed out to sea, to England across La Manche. Either way, it wouldn’t matter much to her, though she probably hoped they wouldn’t find her body afterwards.

Phillipe gasped, certain of the annihilation he had seen in the depths of her eyes. But he also recognized this death wish as a kind of fatal caprice, a passing psychological squall. Two or three days from now, he knew, if she survived, thoughts of suicide would be gone from her. She might not even remember this desperate afternoon so far from familiar Parisian boulevards, with the rain coming down and the lumbering tourists and the gargoyled silhouette of the Mont-Saint-Michel acting as a suitably dramatic backdrop for her death. He watched her move off toward it now, the fatal tides already rolling in. She was through the l’Avancée gate, through the Porte du Roi, the Americans bearing her away like a crowd of gaudily dressed pallbearers—and yet he hesitated. How could he know what he knew? Was this some kind of macabre fantasy on his part? No! He had seen it! And he knew he didn’t have much time.

Phillipe tossed a few bills down on the table, more than what he owed, and, leaving his notebook on the ground, dashed after the young woman, pushing pedestrians out of the way, crashing down through the causeway gate. She was already on the other side. He caught sight of her glossy black head, moving along about twenty meters up the causeway. She passed the first bus, then the second, and Phillipe’s pace flagged slightly—could he be wrong about this after all?—then she sidestepped into the gap between the third and fourth bus and disappeared. He dodged around a clutch of Danes lined up to board a bus painted with a huge Danish flag that would take them back to Copenhagen, and came out on the narrow strip between the buses and the breakwater just as the young woman climbed down over the rocks exactly as he had imagined she would. In the distance, a white wall, advancing.

Phillipe leaped over the rocks without thinking about the possible consequences and slogged out as fast as he could, but he didn’t seem to be making any progress. The wet, gummy sands of the flats sucked at his handmade leather boots; each step weighed a kilo. The young woman, barefoot and much lighter, glided across the surface, head down, oblivious to the doom rushing to meet her at a rate of about one meter every second—the speed, as Victor Hugo once observed, watching the rising tide from the battlements above, of a horse at fast gallop. Phillipe fought against the sand, lost one boot and kicked off the other, and somehow reached her no more than five seconds before the wall of water hit. He grasped her shoulder and swung her around and their eyes met for the second time that day. This time, she registered his presence as an outrage. She came back to herself with a shudder, and she came back angry.

“
Non!
” the young woman screamed. “
Le salot!
Bastard! Don’t touch me! Let me go!”

“Not this time!” Phillipe shouted over the roar of the waves, then the water smashed down over them, hard. They were thrown back onto the sand, submerged and picked up and whirled along together in the current, like the damned lovers Paolo and Francesca in the hot wind of Dante’s
Inferno
. Phillipe kept a hold on the young woman’s shoulder, got an arm around her waist, and pushed off the bottom to surface for a breath of air. As the current lessened, he swam with one arm, pulling her along toward the causeway and the buses, their steely sides gleaming ahead like the gates of heaven.

The Foreign Legion emphasizes an utterly rigorous regime of physical fitness, even for its officers, musicians, and cooks; fortunately for Phillipe, the ability to swim a hundred meters in full combat gear was a mandatory part of basic training. Phillipe reached the causeway, was dashed against a sharp protrusion, cutting a gouge in his cheek; then he grabbed on to a rock and managed to pull both himself and the young woman to safety. He dragged her around the buses into the road as she coughed and choked out the sea-water she had attempted to swallow. The swift-running tides had torn the thin dress from her pale skin and she was naked except for a pair of midnight blue panties. Phillipe bent her over and pounded on her back with the flat of his hand as tourists stood around gaping. The Americans seemed shocked, not by the violence, of course, but by the nakedness. A few Japanese snapped pictures with expensive digital cameras.

“Is she all right?” one of the Americans asked in English.

“What the hell’s going on?” another one asked.

“Maybe someone should go get the police, whattya call them—the ghendarms. . . .”

The young woman crouched there, arms clutched about her nakedness, shivering violently, blue lips drawn over her white teeth.

“Your shirt!” Phillipe shouted in English at a tall man wearing a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. “Can’t you see she’s freezing?”

“Here ya go, buddy,” the tall man said, and he drew off his sweatshirt and tossed it to Phillipe. “Keep it.”

The young woman still fought against him, but weakly now. He managed to get the huge sweatshirt over her head—it reached nearly to her knees—and Phillipe pulled her up and marched her back up the causeway toward the grim edifice of the Mont, looming like the prison it had been for a century or so of its thousand-year history, the prison it was again today for one shivering, stunned young woman. The prison of this life.

2.

T
hey sat by the fire in the empty parlor of Phillipe’s hotel drinking Calvados, the potent stuff warming their insides. The young woman—her name was Louise, this much Phillipe had managed to get out of her—now wore one of his expensive silk shirts and flannel pajama bottoms borrowed from the concierge’s son, printed with cartoon figures from the Asterix comic books: There was Asterix, the pint-sized Gallic warrior in winged helmet, bottle of magic potion in hand; there the obnoxious bard Cacofonix playing his lyre; there Obelix hoisting a menhir, his little white dog at his side.

Louise, eyes lowered, studied her cartoon pajama pants with some intensity. The white dog, bone in its mouth, appeared to be headed for her inner thigh. She hadn’t uttered more than a word or two since she’d been pulled from the sea. Phillipe had ordered a
bifteck en sauce au poivre vert
for her from the concierge, and when it came she ate hungrily, plate on lap, without comment.

When she was done, she wiped her mouth on the sleeve of Phillipe’s shirt and studied him, a frank hostility in her eyes. No doubt he represented everything she’d been taught to despise: from the severe military cut of his hair to the conservative, tailor-made civilian clothes he wore, to his steady, serious demeanor. He was at least twenty years older than her and not exactly handsome. But he had the sinewy thinness that comes from rigorous field training, from an intimate familiarity with the Manual of Arms—coupled with an aristocratic demeanor that women found attractive. More, he had a kind of self-possession unavailable to ordinary men. There is a perfection to be achieved in matching oneself exactly to one’s capacities; here was someone who was always quite successfully himself. A startling lock of pure white his ex-wife Celeste had derisively called the Flame of the Pentecost shone from the center of his dark scalp.