129
T
HE TIGER GROWLED.
It startled Nicholai at first, because he was in a densely populated city, not a remote jungle. Then he recalled that Bay Vien kept a private zoo on his large villa on the fringe of Cholon. Nicholai froze for a moment, then edged along the high stone wall of Bay Vien’s urban fortress.
He had spent the twilight hours hiding in the darkened corners of the Quan Am pagoda on Lao Tu Street in the heart of Cholon. The few pilgrims who came in at dusk to worship the Amithaba Buddha bowed and chanted their Namu Amida Butsu and took no notice of him. When the sun went down and the district was lit only with lamps, Nicholai risked going out. But he stuck to the narrow back streets and avoided the vicinity of Le Grand Monde and Le Parc à Buffles.
He had no way of knowing yet who had tried to kill or kidnap him. It could have been Bao Dai, or Diamond, or Haverford. The attack came ten minutes after Haverford put him in place at the Sporting Bar and then left. Not wasting any time, the ever-efficient Ellis Haverford.
Still, he couldn’t be sure.
Perhaps it was the Sûreté or Deuxième Bureau. It might even have been the Viet Minh, if they had decided that he had betrayed them after all.
Nicholai waited until dark, and then made his way toward Bay Vien’s palatial estate. What if it was Bay Vien who decided to have me killed, Nicholai wondered? Then his guards would doubtless have orders to shoot me on sight.
So best to approach him, shall we say, carefully?
At an outdoor kitchen, he swiped a warm piece of charcoal and put it in his pocket. Now, crouched beside the wall of Bay Vien’s villa, he took out the charcoal, used it to blacken his face and hands, then tossed it into the bushes.
A double strand of barbed wire fringed the eight-foot-high wall, and shards of glass — mostly from Coca-Cola bottles, Nicholai noticed — had been mortared into the top of the stone. A bulky watchtower stood to the side of the iron gate that guarded the main entrance, and searchlights swung back and forth like a prison yard.
There is no choice, Nicholai thought, but to go over the wall.
It was a shame to sacrifice the tailored jacket, but Nicholai shucked it off, waiting for the searchlight to complete its arc, and then tossed it onto the wire. Then he jumped, grabbed on to the jacket, which the barbs now held in place, and swung himself onto the top. He lay there, balanced precariously, until the spotlight finished its next swoop, and then he dropped.
Something moved beneath him.
Nicholai suppressed a shout as the boa constrictor slithered out from under him, its powerful muscles rippling against his ribs. The snake was a good thirteen feet long, shiny in the moonlight. It turned its head, regarded Nicholai for a moment, and then flicked its tongue out to determine if this creature might make a meal.
“No,” Nicholai murmured.
The snake moved off, far more slowly than Nicholai would have preferred. A sensei would have called the snake an omen, a Chinese
sifu
would have told him to emulate the snake — one of the five model animals of Shaolin kung-fu.
So Nicholai became serpentine as he slithered across the clipped, manicured lawn, the grass, wet with evening dew, soaking his shirt. He kept low to the ground, freezing and pressing his face into the grass when the spotlight swung his way.
Then he saw the tiger.
It was in a cage, perhaps fifty feet off to his left.
It growled a deep, threatening growl, and Nicholai felt a rush of primal fear — an atavistic relic, he thought, from our species’ days in the trees. The tiger’s eyes were beautiful to behold, enchanting in the true sense of the word, and Nicholai felt himself being pulled into the creature’s orbit.
Is that how it happens? he asked himself. Just before your death, are you frozen to the sacrificial altar by sheer awe? Do you realize the magnificence of the world just before you leave it?
He met the tiger’s glare.
Two predators, he thought, who meet in the night.
Then he recalled the old Chinese adage:
When tigers fight, one is killed, and the other is mortally wounded.
Good to keep in mind.
Nodding to the caged tiger, Nicholai resumed his slow crawl.
He stopped a hundred feet from the house and observed the guards patrolling the perimeter. There were four of them, walking interlocking routes around the house. Armed with American rifles, they stepped softly and didn’t speak as they passed each other. Just a brief nod to indicate that everything was in order.
The good thing about guards, Nicholai thought, is that they point you toward your target. Each one of them straightened slightly and held his rifle at the ready when he passed outside a certain window on the villa’s second floor. A light shone through the curtain. The window itself was open, although barred with an iron grille.
Bay Vien was home, in his bedroom.
With infinite patience — and gratitude toward his Japanese masters who had taught him that virtue — Nicholai made a slow, crawling circle around the entire villa, searching for a weakness.
He found it in the back, by the kitchen.
A white-jacketed cook sat on a stool outside the open door. Head down, elbows on his thighs, he smoked a cigarette.
Crawling a bit closer, Nicholai could smell the distinct odor of
nuoc mom,
the Vietnamese fish soup that was a staple of the peasant diet. Nicholai put all his concentration into his sense of hearing and listened. The cook was having a desultory conversation with someone inside. Luckily, he spoke in Chinese, and Nicholai learned that the boy inside was an underling, a servant, his name was Cho, and that the soup was almost ready so Cho shouldn’t disappear to take a nap someplace if he wanted to keep his nuts where they were.
Nicholai waited and timed the guards’ orbits until he learned that there was a thirty-second gap at the kitchen door.
Nicholai closed his eyes and ordered his mind to allow him five minutes of rest. Aware that he was fatigued from the battle on the street and his flight to Cholon, he knew that he had to marshal his energies — the next burst would have to be quick and certain.
When he woke up, the cook had finished his smoke and was back in the kitchen.
Nicholai pulled himself up on his forearms and waited for the next guard to come. The sentry came by the kitchen door and then —
— stopped, as the cook came out and handed him what appeared to be a chunk of fish. The guard slung his rifle over his shoulder, thanked the cook, and stood and ate.
Damn the man, Nicholai thought.
He dropped back down and waited.
The guard ate quickly, but it threw the rotation off, and it took another half hour before the guards’ circuits were back in order. Then Nicholai waited for a sentry to pass by the kitchen, sprang up, and rushed for the door.
The cook, stirring his soup, was unaware, and Nicholai hit him with a fist to the back of the neck, then caught him before he could fall forward on the stove, dragged him into a corner, and then gently set him down.
It would have been easier to kill him, but the man was an innocent, and Nicholai knew that Bay Vien would not easily forgive the killing of one of his people.
Nicholai stood behind the door that opened into the house and shouted, in Chinese, “Cho, you lazy, useless thing! The soup is ready!”
The young waiter scurried through the door, straight into Nicholai’s
shuto
strike, and dropped in a heap.
Nicholai pressed himself against the wall until the next sentry passed outside, then found a slightly longer waiter’s jacket on a hook in the pantry, put the waiter’s round black cap on his head, put two bowls of the soup on a tray, and headed upstairs.
The guard at the bottom of the stairway nodded brusquely, then blinked when he noticed the waiter’s strange height.
It was too late.
Nicholai’s leopard paw strike, the fingers folded but not closed into a fist. His second knuckles struck the guard straight in the nose — hard enough to drive the bone into the brain but not forceful enough to kill. Nicholai caught him in one arm and guided him to the floor so the gun wouldn’t clatter. Unburdening him of the.45, he slipped the pistol inside his sleeve and walked up the stairs.
His proximity sense told him there was another guard outside Bay Vien’s door.
Indeed, the guard heard his footsteps and called, “Cho?”
“I have Master’s dinner.”
“About time.”
As Nicholai feared, the door was at the end of the hallway, which would give the guard ample time to discern that it wasn’t Cho. Cursing his large Western frame, he tucked his chin into his chest, hoping to buy a crucial moment.
Looking back up, Nicholai took the spoon off the tray and threw it like a ninja star just as the guard was raising his pistol. The spinning spoon caught the guard in the eye and drove his head back.
His shot fired high.
Nicholai sprang forward, grabbed his gun wrist, and pushed it up. As soon as he felt the guard pull back down, he went with his flow and pulled with him, sweeping the arm in a full circle backward until he heard the shoulder pop. Then he reversed the flow, swept the guard’s foot, took him to the ground, and struck him in the throat.
He stepped over the prone guard, pulled his pistol, and kicked the unlocked door open.
130
B
AY SAT UP IN BED,
a pistol of his own pointed straight at Nicholai’s chest. A beautiful Asian woman pulled the sheet over herself.
“My friends generally just ring the doorbell,” Bay said.
“I didn’t know if I was still your friend.”
“You know,” Bay said, “with one shout from me, my guards will come and they will throw you to my tiger.”
“But you won’t be alive to see it.”
Bay frowned. “I suppose from the clatter that you spilled my soup.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You are a bother, Michel.”
He elbowed the woman next to him. “Get some clothes on, darling, and get out. I need to have a private talk with my rude guest.” The woman leaned out of the bed, grabbed a silk robe from the floor, and put it on. Bay told her, “Go down and tell the cook that we need more soup. The cook is still alive, Michel?”
“Yes.”
“Go.”
The woman eased past Nicholai and then he heard her trot down the hallway.
“The pistol is getting heavy,” Bay complained. “Shall we each put ours down? We’re not going to shoot each other, are we?”
“I hope not.” Nicholai slowly lowered his gun.
Bay did the same. “You look ridiculous in that jacket.”
“I feel ridiculous.”
“Do you mind if I get dressed?”
“I’d prefer it, actually.”
Bay got out of bed and went into the attached bathroom, emerging a moment later in a black silk robe decorated with a red-and-green embroidered dragon. He tied the knot around his waist and walked past Nicholai as he said, “Let’s go to the dining room.”
He stepped over the dazed guard who lay on the floor, still rubbing his throat.
“Useless crap eater,” Bay said. “I should feed you to Beauty.”
“Your tiger?” Nicholai asked.
“Lovely, isn’t she?”
Nicholai followed him downstairs.
131
T
HE SOUP WAS
delicious.
Served by a cowed Cho and a rather resentful chef (“I told him if he spit in your bowl, I’d cut his balls off,” Bay reassured Nicholai), it arrived on the teak dining room table hot and steaming.
Bay skillfully wended his chopsticks to pick out the delicate pieces of fish. “Sleeping with the emperor’s woman,” he said, shaking his head. “Not good.”
She’s not his woman, Nicholai thought. She’s mine.
“Fifty-seven French whores at my brothel,” Bay said, “but you have to have
that
one.”
“Does Bao Dai know?”
“I don’t know if he knows,” Bay answered.
“I
know. He asked me to keep an eye on her. I didn’t tell him, if that’s what you want to know.”
“Who tried to kill me?”
Bay shrugged. “Wasn’t me.”
“Bao Dai didn’t order it?”
“Maybe he did,” Bay answered, “just not through me. I guess he’s angry that I didn’t stack the deck against you. Maybe he doesn’t trust me anymore.”
“I need to ask a favor,” Nicholai said.
Bay shrugged and ate his soup. Finally setting his chopsticks down, he picked up the bowl and slurped down the broth. Then he said, “You break into my home, beat up my staff, scare my evening’s companion half to death, point a gun at me and threaten to use it, and then you ask for my help? This after you take my most important partner’s money, screw his woman, and then commit mayhem and murder in the streets of Saigon? And
that
after you apparently killed some Russian and have half the world baying for your blood? You have balls of steel, Michel. I should just throw you to Beauty and let her break her teeth on you.”
“But you won’t,” Nicholai said.
“What do you want?”
My life, Nicholai thought. More than that, my honor.
“Sell me my weapons back,” he said. “I am prepared to offer you a small profit for your trouble.”
“Are you prepared to die as well?”
“Yes.”
Bay gazed at him for a long moment. “I believe you. But, tell me, if I sell you back the weapons, what do you intend to do with them?”
“Deliver them to the original client.”
Bay looked surprised. “The Viet Minh. Why?”
“I gave my word.”
“That’s why
you
should do it,” Bay said. “Why should I?”
Nicholai answered, “Whatever else you are, or aren’t, you are a man of honor and you owe me your life.”
“The Viet Minh are the enemy.”
“Today,” Nicholai agreed. “Four years ago they were your allies. Four years from now, who knows? Bao Dai is going to come after you eventually, and if he doesn’t, the Americans will. Besides, the Viet Minh are going to win.”
“You think so.”
“So do you,” Nicholai answered. “But that is all speculation. The only real question is, will you honor your debt?”
“Have I mentioned that you’re a difficult friend?”
“Yes.”
“I owe you my life,” Bay said. “But this is it. We’re even.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll get you out of town,” Bay said. “Until we can get you on a ship or something.”
Nicholai shook his head. “I need to go back into Saigon.”
“Are you nuts?” Bay asked. “Half of Saigon is looking to kill you, the other half is looking to sell you to the people looking to kill you.”
“I have to get word to someone.”
Bay frowned. “Is it the woman?”
Nicholai didn’t answer.