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
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
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