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
1.
K asim Vatran’s house stood at the top of a narrow pedestrian street off Istiklal Caddesi in the Beyoglu District of Istanbul, not far from the old monastery of the Whirling Dervishes. The cable cars of the Eski Tramway hung suspended above the dark mouth of the funicular tunnel just a few blocks away. Heartbreaking afternoon light shone now on the Lower Galata, on the blue-green waters of the Golden Horn, crowded with shipping.
The house, painted gray and pale green with dark green shutters over the sharply arched windows, was one of the few remaining Ottoman-era buildings in this increasingly developed neighborhood. A traditional onion dome crowned the square tower that ran up the front, but Vatran (Yale Architecture; AIA, Frank Lloyd Wright Notable Design Winner; First Place, Prix Viollet-le-Duc) had brutally deconstructed the once elegant facade. He had ripped out the third floor, tower and all, to install a spare, postmodern interior behind a wall of tinted plate glass, its smooth, greenish surface interrupted with a complicated arrangement of stainless-steel pins and cables, like a set of braces on otherwise perfect teeth.
Smith hid in the shadows across the street as sunlight crept up house by house until it shone directly on Vatran’s monstrosity, glinting off the cables and pins and illuminating
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
1.
K asim Vatran’s house stood at the top of a narrow pedestrian street off Istiklal Caddesi in the Beyoglu District of Istanbul, not far from the old monastery of the Whirling Dervishes. The cable cars of the Eski Tramway hung suspended above the dark mouth of the funicular tunnel just a few blocks away. Heartbreaking afternoon light shone now on the Lower Galata, on the blue-green waters of the Golden Horn, crowded with shipping.
The house, painted gray and pale green with dark green shutters over the sharply arched windows, was one of the few remaining Ottoman-era buildings in this increasingly developed neighborhood. A traditional onion dome crowned the square tower that ran up the front, but Vatran (Yale Architecture; AIA, Frank Lloyd Wright Notable Design Winner; First Place, Prix Viollet-le-Duc) had brutally deconstructed the once elegant facade. He had ripped out the third floor, tower and all, to install a spare, postmodern interior behind a wall of tinted plate glass, its smooth, greenish surface interrupted with a complicated arrangement of stainless-steel pins and cables, like a set of braces on otherwise perfect teeth.
Smith hid in the shadows across the street as sunlight crept up house by house until it shone directly on Vatran’s monstrosity, glinting off the cables and pins and illuminating
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