132
T
HE ROOM IN THE BROTHEL
was small but adequate.
Whores, after all, Nicholai thought, end up in a whorehouse.
Nicholai’s room was down the end of a long, narrow hallway. It contained a four-poster bed, and the walls and ceiling were made of mirrored glass.
“Our guests are narcissists,” Momma explained, for she ran this establishment as well as Le Parc. Her silence had been handsomely purchased and guaranteed with the promise of agonizing exfoliation should she as much as whisper of Nicholai’s presence. “They like to admire the beauty of their own ecstasy, and from a variety of angles.”
Nicholai found the constant inescapable self-reflection somewhat unsettling. Everywhere he looked he saw a slightly distorted view of himself. Nor could he leave — he was imprisoned in the bedroom and the attached (mirrored) bathroom, with its tub, sink, and bidet. His meals would be brought in to him, and fresh air was out of the question.
“As for your other needs,” Momma warbled lasciviously, “I have thought of everything.”
“I have no other needs,” Nicholai said.
“You will.”
She shut the door behind her.
133
H
AVERFORD GAMBLED
a few piastres at the roulette table, lost, grew bored, and decided to make a night of it at Le Parc.
He walked out onto the street to hail a taxi and thought about Nicholai Hel.
The dramatic shootout on the street had made all the papers, which printed that the attempted assassination and possible kidnapping of the respected French entrepreneur Michel Guibert had been an act of terror committed by the Viet Minh. The businessman had survived the initial attack but was now nowhere to be found, and French officials were very concerned that he was in the hands of the Communist terrorists.
Haverford knew it was Diamond.
Now Hel was either dead or enduring interrogation in a tiger cage. Or perhaps he was alive and had gone into hiding. If so, he had pulled the earth up over him, because Haverford had all his sources out trying to locate Hel (or alternatively his corpse), and they had turned up nothing.
Nor had Hel tried to contact him, which meant that Nicholai no longer trusted him, perhaps that he thought the Americans were responsible for the murder attempt. Growing fond of an asset was always a mistake, but Haverford had come to like, or at least appreciate, Nicholai Hel.
The blade flashed out of the darkness.
One more second and it would have slashed his throat to the neck bone, but Haverford saw it and leaned just out of the way. The backslash was already coming at him. He blocked it with his wrist, felt the blade bite in, and yelled in pain and anger.
The Marines had taught him well.
He grabbed the knife hand, turned, and flipped the attacker over his shoulder, onto the sidewalk. The man landed hard on his back and Haverford stomped hard on his throat. Then he pulled his pistol from the inside of his jacket.
One of the other robbers backed off, but the second kept coming and Haverford shot him square in the chest.
By this time, the Binh Xuyen guards had come running out of Le Parc à Buffles.
“Bandits,” one of them said.
“You think so?” Haverford asked. He was breathing heavily, blood was running down his sleeve, the adrenaline was already dropping and he knew he would soon feel the pain. He looked at the cut and said, “I’ll need to get some stitches.”
One of the attackers was dead, the other had run away, and the Binh Xuyen were already taking their bamboo batons to the knife wielder.
“Alive,” Haverford snapped. “I want him alive.”
“Bandits,” bullshit.
No robber in his right mind would try to take a wallet outside Le Parc; only a madman would try to rob one of Bay Vien’s customers.
The guards dragged the man away.
134
A
NTONUCCI WATCHED
his girls play.
The club was busy for a Thursday night, full of hard-drinking French paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires, and Antonucci kept a careful eye lest they decide to brawl in his establishment. So far the soldiers were behaving themselves, and probably would continue to do so, fearful of being banned from the joint and losing the right to stare at the pretty musicians. Later they would doubtless head to a brothel to douse the flame his girls had set alight, and others would profit.
So be it, Antonucci thought, it’s a sin to traffic in flesh.
He struck a match and rolled the end of his cigar around the flame.
Cubans, the good stuff.
He glanced at his watch. The whoremongering American should be answering for his sins by now. They had sent three of the best, with instructions to make it look like a robbery. Bay Vien wouldn’t like it, but to hell with him too. Sooner or later they would have to deal with that Cholon street rat as well.
And he’ll be much harder to kill than the American, Haverford.
Les amerloques,
Antonucci contemplated as he inhaled the rich smoke, such amateurs at intrigue, so ham-handed, so obvious. It takes centuries to produce a conspiratorial culture, generations of familial connection. America, with its youthful naiveté and mongrel bloodlines, is a blunt tool that no steel can sharpen.
America in Asia? A deaf man at the symphony.
So now Haverford lies in the street, the French police will give their apologies along with their indifferent Gallic shrugs, and “Operation X” will go forward. The opium will flow through the French military instead of the Viet Minh, be shipped to labs in Marseille to be turned into heroin, and will find its way to the streets of New York. We will make our money and life will go on.
For some.
He allowed himself a lingering look at the long legs of the saxophone player. Lucky she can sit in her chair, that one. She’ll think three times before making eyes at a handsome stranger again.
And what happened to Guibert? Antonucci wondered. The newspaper story about the Viet Minh was an obvious French fiction. The rumor was that Guibert had made free and easy with Bao Dai’s new mistress, compounding the error of embarrassing him at the gaming table and taking his money. Yes, Bao Dai ordered Guibert killed to get his balls back, and then his boys botched it. He should have come to us.
Antonucci turned his attention back to the saxophone player, Yvette. Maybe I’ll throw her a fuck tonight, he thought, to show her there are no hard feelings. She’s sensitive, gets her feelings hurt so easily. Thin-skinned, that one.
He saw Mancini come through the door and search for him with his eyes. Then the boss of L’Union Corse found him and shook his head.
So subtle a gesture only an old friend would have known what it meant.
Antonucci knew, and it made him angry.
The attempt on the American had failed.
135
I
T HAD BEEN
a good payday for De Lhandes.
So good that he bypassed Le Parc and went straight to the House of Mirrors, where he paid a good portion of his earnings for a Sri Lankan girl of such exquisite skill and beauty that it made him favorably reconsider the possibility of a benevolent deity. He finished dressing, kissed the girl on the cheek, left a generous tip on the night table, and headed out. It was not too late for the pho soup at La Bodega.
But that is me, he thought wistfully as he closed the door behind him. The aspirations of a gourmet with the wallet of a crust-munching peasant.
A large hand clasped itself over his mouth and he felt strong arms lift him and then he was in a room.
“Just be quiet for once,” he heard Guibert say.
136
H
AVERFORD SQUATTED
beside the surviving attacker, put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it for him. “You speak French?”
The terrified man nodded.
“Good,” Haverford said. “Look, here’s the thing,
mon ami,
I can pull you out of the shit you’re in — I have no hard feelings, I know it was only business, yes? Or I can just walk away let these Binh Xuyen boys have you. It’s your choice.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” Haverford said. “Just tell me something.”
“What?”
“Who paid you?” Haverford asked.
“The Corsicans,” the man rasped.
“Who?” Haverford asked again, because this was a surprise.
“La Corse,” the man said.
137
“I
HAVE PUT MY LIFE
in your hands,” Nicholai said as he set De Lhandes down.
He knew it was gross and offensive to have lifted the dwarf off his feet that way, but there was no choice.
“By the chancred twat of a Marseille whore …”
“Many people,” Nicholai said, “would pay a good price to learn my whereabouts.”
“That is true,” De Lhandes sputtered, still angry at the rough handling. “Why have you, then, put your life in my hands?”
“I need a useful ally that I can trust,” Nicholai answered.
“I agree that I am useful,” De Lhandes replied, “extraordinarily so, in fact. But why do you think you can trust me?”
Nicholai knew that everything depended on his answer, so he thought carefully before he spoke. Finally he said, “You and I are the same.”
De Lhandes looked up at the tall, broad-shouldered, handsome man, and Nicholai saw his spine stiffen. “I hardly think so.”
“Then think further,” Nicholai replied. Having started this, he couldn’t go back. Both his life and De Lhandes’s were on the line, because the dwarf would leave here an ally or not at all. Nicholai would have to either befriend him or kill him. “Look beyond the obvious differences and you will see that we are both outsiders.”
Nicholai saw this catch De Lhandes’s imagination, so he continued, “I am a Westerner raised in the East, and in the West you are …”
He knew he had to choose his words carefully, but then De Lhandes finished the thought for him. “A small, ugly man in a world of large, beautiful people.”
“We are both forever on the outside looking in,” Nicholai said. “So we can either stand on the periphery of their world, always looking in, or we can create our own.”
“Create our own world?” De Lhandes scoffed.
But Nicholai could see that he was intrigued. “Of course, if you’re happy with the one you currently have, if you are content with the odd turn with a high-class whore, or the occasional fine meal tossed to you like a bone to a dog, very well. But I’m talking about becoming rich, the sort of wealth that allows you to live a dignified life with, how shall I put it, quality.”
“How?” De Lhandes asked.
“It’s risky.”
“What have I to lose?”
Nothing, Nicholai thought. But I have everything to lose, including my life. If I let you walk away from here and am mistaken in you, then I am a dead man. But it’s too late for second thoughts now. He said, “I need you to do something.”
He gave Voroshenin’s papers to De Lhandes and asked him to contact Solange.
138
B
ERNARD
D
E
L
HANDES LEFT
the brothel and hailed a
cyclo-pousse
to take him back to the city.
By the bloated buttocks of a bishop, it was a difficult choice.
Guibert’s whereabouts would be worth a Sri Lankan girl, perhaps even a woman from the Seychelles, renowned for their abilities and sexual secrets, and a dinner, with wine, at Le Perroquet. His mouth watered at the memory of the wine list that the sommelier had let him peruse that once.
Magnificent.
Of course, one would have to be alive to enjoy it, and from the look on Guibert’s face, that seemed far less than a certainty. All of Saigon was jabbering about his escape from the assassins and how he had left several dead on the street.
This was not a man to betray.
Still, he thought, if you broker this particular piece of information, you needn’t worry about his revenge. The question, really, is who to approach, and that really depends on who had made the futile attempt.
Oh, the rumors abounded.
Some had it that Bao Dai himself had ordered the assassination in retribution for Guibert’s win at the gaming table; better yet, others said that Guibert had succeeded in breaching the long white thighs of the emperor’s mistress and the attack was Bao Dai’s attempt to remove the horns from his head.
By the absent arms of the Venus de Milo, it would have been worth dying to sample the charms of La Solange.
He returned his thoughts to business. If he were to sell Gui-bert’s location, to whom would it be? Anyone would pay good money, knowing that they could resell the information to the highest bidder. But why should I sell wholesale, when retail would be so much more lucrative? In that sense, Guibert was right. Why should I settle for the crumbs off the table?
He sat back and thought it over.
The
cyclo-pousse
puttered across the bridge back into Saigon.
139
A
NTONUCCI WATCHED
the blonde woman sit on the stool and hook her stockings to her garter belt.
It almost made him hard again.
But he was sated.
The girl had indeed played a good saxophone, then he had bent her over the desk and had his way with her, and now she knew who was boss and didn’t feel neglected. Waiting for her to finish dressing and leave, he locked up the office and went out the back way.
Antonucci didn’t hear the man.
He did feel the pistol, pressed hard against his back.
“How are the kidneys, old man?” the voice asked in French with a heavily American accent. “You still piss okay? How would they feel if I pulled this trigger?”
“You don’t know who you’re playing with,
minet
,” Antonucci growled. “I eat punks like you for lunch.”
The pistol butt came down hard on his back and doubled him over. Then the man pushed him hard into the wall, spun him around, and stuck the pistol barrel in his face.
“Why?” Haverford asked.
“Why what?”
“Why the hit on me?” Haverford pressed. “Was it your idea or did someone come to you?”
Antonucci spat on the ground. “You’re a dead man.”
“Maybe,” Haverford said. “But not before you.”
He pulled the hammer back.
Antonucci looked into his eyes and saw that he meant it. Who cared, anyway, what
les amerloques
did to each other? An oath of secrecy to another Corsican? He would die for that. To these people, forget it. And he took some pleasure in answering, “One of your own people.”
Haverford knew the answer before he asked the question. “Which one of my own people?”
“He used the name Gold.”
Diamond, thought Haverford, is a congenital dolt. “And what did ‘Gold’ tell you?”
“He said you were going to interfere with our business.”
“Your dope business.”
“Of course.”
Antonucci enjoyed the look of consternation on the American’s face. He laughed and said, “Don’t you get it,
mimi?
Your man Gold has a piece. Every kilo of heroin that goes into New York, he gets his taste.”
Haverford felt a cold rage come over him.
“The Guibert contract,” he said. “Cancel it. Stop it.”
“Too late.”
“What do you mean?”
Antonucci lifted his hand and wiggled it in a waving motion. “The Cobra,” he said, “is already loose.”