Gorgeous East (8 page)

Phillipe dropped down quietly, lifted the Kalashnikov from the guard without waking him, and began to walk, not furtively like an escaped hostage, but head up and brisk, as one might walk along the Champs-Élysées on a Saturday afternoon. He kept walking toward the west, stopping only when he reached the perimeter wire and open desert spreading beyond. The Algerian town of Tindouf lay about fifty kilometers to the south-southwest of where he stood.

He turned back and hunted through the neighborhood until he found something he could use: a 175cc Husqvarna dirt bike, half hidden under a plastic tarp, its camouflaged tank nearly full of gas and stenciled with the markings of the Pakistani army. Phillipe slung the Kalashnikov over his shoulder and rolled the bike out toward the desert. There, on the rim of the emptiness, watched only by a curious lizard, he kick-started the little engine and puttered over the dunes and down a trail that fed directly into the Tindouf road.

No one followed, no shots echoed after him through the desert air. Ahead, only blue sky and yellow sand.

10.

T
hat night, in Tindouf, Phillipe told his story to the Algerian authorities. The next morning, five hundred Algerian soldiers, Phillipe with them, rolled into the camp, fully armed, only to find the hennaed one and his Marabouts had vanished.

No one in the camps would admit any exact knowledge of what had happened to the Pakistanis. There had been some kind of a fight in the UN compound, someone said. You could hear the echo of gunfire, see the flames and the black smoke rising up. All they knew was that the Pakistanis, who had recently raped some of their women, hadn’t again emerged from their barbed-wire enclosure and cinder block buildings. No one knew anything about an earthen hive full of bees or an uprising of Marabouts. Meanwhile, inside the depot, the only trace of Al Bab and his cohorts was the pile of Pakistani heads and the remains of the hive, which had been doused with gasoline and burned into a shapeless black pile. The scorched carcasses of many bees crunched like spent cartridges underfoot.

Phillipe searched for hours, but couldn’t find the hovel where he’d been kept a prisoner, and so wasn’t able to locate Milhauz’s head, which he had promised to repatriate. This inability haunted him on the plane all the way back to Dahkla, where throughout the course of the long debriefing with MINURSO command, he saw in his mind’s eye the gaping mouth and sad eyes of the unfortunate economist.

11.

A
week later, after a slapdash medical examination at the Legion hospital in Aubagne and several debriefings with representatives of various branches of the French government, including the Sûreté and the Deuxième Bureau at the Fort de Nogent, in Paris, Phillipe found himself on recuperative leave wandering the rooms of his beautiful house in Neuilly.

An August evening, high summer, heat coming in through the open windows. Paris was empty except for the tourists, the better cafés deserted, everyone, even the taxi drivers and the waiters, at the beach or in the mountains. Louise had probably gone down to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the unfashionable but pleasant seaside town where they had recently bought a small vacation cottage. Phillipe hadn’t tried to contact her since his return to France, though she was easily reachable via cell phone. He tried now, dialing her number twice, but hung up both times without leaving a message.

He dragged himself up to the large bathroom on the second floor, with its elegant gold-framed mirrors and Napoléonic-era alabaster eagle-foot tub. He had often made love to Louise in that tub, but this thought—he couldn’t explain it to himself!—now injected a darkness into the core of his being. He disrobed, dropping his uniform in a crumpled heap on the tile floor and studied himself naked in one of the long mirrors. He had changed. He was not the same man he’d been just a month before. His body, formerly muscular and pink, looked emaciated, slightly yellowish, and showed the scars and bruises of rough treatment. More remarkably, his hair had gone stark white during the course of the single night he’d suffered the captivity of the Marabouts. The little patch of white that had been called Flame of the Pentecost by his first wife had now ignited his entire scalp. But his face looked oddly smooth, younger perhaps, as if unusual suffering had worn away the wrinkles and lines, given him the smooth complexion of the marble statues of the saints in Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois.

That night, lying clenched and rigid in the big bed, Phillipe couldn’t sleep.

It had been this way since Awsard. He hadn’t slept more than an hour or two a night in the last couple of weeks, sometimes as little as fifteen minutes out of every twenty-four hours, although he couldn’t really say he felt tired. His brain seemed in the grips of a kind of frantic electricity that was not entirely unpleasant. A letter had come for him the week before, mailed to Legion headquarters in Aubagne, now passed on to agents of the Dieuxème Bureau for chemical analysis. The envelope, covered with colorful Moroccan stamps, had been mailed from the disputed city of Laayoune in the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara; a single sheet of flimsy blue paper lay within, scrawled over with terrible, ungrammatical French in a spidery, childish hand:

We let you live, you who is our bloody Ishamael. You one have survive alone to tell all, to warn all of the coming slaughter of the evil smelling nonbelievers. Al Bab, he called Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, he an Hidden servant of the Hidden Imam, who will clean and sweep the earth so a beautiful and fragrant feet of the Hidden One might trod upon it without fear of corruption or dirt, without stepping in the offal of dogs and women. He has Peace Be Upon Him! come down from the mountain’s cave where he been to sleep for a thousand years. Tiny angels, resembling bees, sting him awake and now he speaks this warning to the whole world, beneath the mighty sign of the bee! All unbelievers in Western Sahara will have their heads cut, unless they return to their own lands or to hell like the excrement-eating dogs they are. But yea, we shall pursue them even there! I beat them with my shoe! I beat them all with the heel of my shoe! The Holy Army of Marabouts is raging and raging, their hands turn against all. Heed my many warnings of Al Bab! Who am also called He Who Leans at the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, and Exceptional Righteousness. Who am called Sharp-Edged Weapon of God, who am called . . .

And so on, page after page.

Phillipe found this letter amusing, mostly for the strident, pseudo-Koranic style and purposefully bad French of the imposter who wrote it. Still, he couldn’t sleep, though not from fear. He would never sleep again, he knew this now, and for him it was an end: the doom that had preyed on his family since the days of Saint Louis had at last found him.

This condition, a creeping kind of violent madness, was the peculiar curse of the males of the de Noyer line. Records documenting its effects went back hundreds of years, the pattern more or less always the same. The afflicted male stops sleeping and after weeks of relentless insomnia begins to hallucinate. He is possessed by freakish manias, hears voices, sees unspeakable visions. These visions drive him to commit terrible crimes—usually murder—or in some cases prompt a spectacular suicide. The history of the curse of the de Noyers—long, tragic, and bloody, but relieved by occasional episodes of low comedy—mirrored the history of modern France.

The dastardly Ravillac, a bastard son of the family, was chained to four horses and pulled limb from limb for the regicide of Henry IV in 1558. In 1620 another one of Phillipe’s ancestors, believing the Bishop of Rennes to be a wild pig, and believing himself to be out hunting in the woods, shot the prelate dead with an arquebus during mass at the cathedral and for this was burned at the stake. A hundred years later, Phillipe’s great-great-great-grandfather, an amateur naturalist and friend of Voltaire’s, tied stones around his neck and jumped into the murky waters of the Vieux Port at Honfleur during the Blessing of the Fleet. He left a note saying he intended to investigate the secret lives of fish and, not to worry, was adequately prepared for a long stay at the bottom of the sea. Another great-grandfather, a famous soldier who had fought at Valmy, sat out the entire fifteen-year run of the Napoléonic Wars because he suddenly conceived the notion that God intended people not to wear clothes and they wouldn’t let him fight naked. And there was Phillipe’s own grandfather, killed charging the German guns at the Somme during the First World War, carrying nothing but a toilet plunger and a scandalously pornographic novel written by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. (These awkward items were changed in army dispatches to an officer’s sword and a copy of the Gospels. Subsequent newspaper editorials made the man a hero of both church and state; he was posthumously awarded the Légion d’honneur and interred in the Panthéon near the tomb of Maréchal Lannes.)

Horrors similar to these, as yet barely visible, were coming toward Phillipe slowly through the ancestral mists. It remained for him now only to choose his particular form of madness; a choice—the last act of his rational mind—in which lay the essential difference between murder and suicide. But Phillipe, summoning all his mental discipline, chose neither. His act of will, existentially perfect, was in keeping with the best traditions of the de Noyers: The ancient motto of the family, engraved on the armorial shield hanging over the family crypt at Saint Marie’s church in Honfleur—
Tantum Transiere Probi
, Only the Righteous Shall Pass—suggested just this kind of heroic denial of an unalterable destiny.

So, instead of murder or suicide, Phillipe chose the two things he loved most, sacred objects to carry along with him as he entered his personal twilight: Satie and the Foreign Legion. Satie, whose music exuded peace and humor, for the peace denied him at night. The Legion for its order, for the beauty of men marching in lockstep to the sound of the kettledrum, the bass oboe, the Chinese chimes—difficult instruments completely unknown to any other marching band. Only this kind of order, both military and musical at once, might withstand the irruption of unreason Phillipe had experienced in the desert. Choice made, fate settled. But Phillipe still couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed at 3:00 A.M.—the high noon of the sleepless—and went downstairs to the piano and played from memory Satie’s
Trois Morceaux
. Playing Satie was nearly as good as sleep. It soothed the raw, torn-away places in his brain, quieted the electric buzzing in his mind’s ear. As he played, he closed his eyes and viewed scenes from the Legion’s last Bastille Day parade in Paris as if watching 3-D slides through one of the precious View-Master
visionneuses
of his childhood.

There they are, the ten thousand, assembled on the Champs-Élysées, la Musique Principale in the lead. Then, the opening notes of “Le Boudin”—the Legion anthem—played on a single cornet, high and clear and sweet. The whole band picks up the tune a moment later and the battalions, moving in unison, begin their march down the famous avenue slow as a funeral cortege at eighty-eight paces per minute, always at the back of the back, behind the Mechanized Artillery and the Armored Cavalry of the Armée de Terre, beneath the streaking blue, white, and red contrails of the Mirage jets of the Maritime Airforce. They are in no apparent hurry to reach the draped grandstand full of foreign dignitaries and generals, politicians and movie stars. But they arrive at last and there, they halt, and the heels of ten thousand boots strike the cobbles in unison with a precise, martial clatter. Silence. Every eye turns toward the central dias beneath the vast tricolor flag. But instead of the President of the Republic in his elegant dark suit, flanked by cabinet ministers and Isabelle Adjani, there sits on a pillow in the place of honor poor Phillipe’s brain, a pink, spongy mass full of tiny holes, its very cells being eaten from the inside out by hideous, invisible little creatures like dust mites, eating away until everything, every last memory has been eaten up, digested, defecated.

Phillipe’s eyes snapped open at this horrible vision, his pajamas soaked in a cold sweat. But he continued to play, he didn’t miss a note. Satie would quiet the creatures, put them to sleep, make them eat his brain more slowly. This was his secret weapon against them. And so, Satie’s plaintive, melancholy
Trois Morceaux
echoed in the empty town house, absorbed by the beautiful carpets, the paintings on the walls, by his wife’s expensive clothes hanging in the closets upstairs. Poor Louise. The thought of her peerless flesh filled Phillipe with revulsion now. He still loved her, but what was love? A concept invented by idealists to palliate certain uncomfortable requirements of human nature for the continuation of the species. And in France, as someone once said—was it La Rochefoucauld?—love was merely the exchange of two whims and the fleeting contact of one skin against another.

Out in the garden a pear tree swayed somberly in the breeze, in time to the music.

3

RAPUNZEL