THE SOUND OF A FLUTE WOKE HIM.
At first Nicholai thought it was a bird singing, but then he heard the deliberate repetition of a particular phrase and realized that he was listening to someone play a lusheng.
But there was birdsong in the background.
Birdsong and clean fresh air, and then he knew that he was no longer in the city, or in the tight, fume-choked back of an army truck, but somewhere in the countryside, perhaps even in the wilderness.
He turned toward the slight breeze he felt on the back of his head, but movement was still painful and difficult, and it took him over a minute to roll over and feel the cool air dry the sweat on his face.
His leg throbbed in protest of the motion.
A voice snapped an order in a language that Nicholai did not understand, and then he heard footsteps quickly shuffling across a wooden floor.
He didn’t know where he was, but then it seemed like a long time since he had known. The last thing that he clearly remembered was his fight with the formidable bajiquan practitioner and his rescue by Yu and the monk. He remembered waking up briefly in the back of what must have been a truck – because its rattling forced him to suppress a scream of pain before he blacked out again. He recalled being given a shot of what was probably morphine, and the deep, painless slumber that followed, and he had a vague memory of being lifted out of the truck and placed in another, soft worried voices, and a nightmare in which he heard concerned whispers and hushed discussions about amputating his leg.
Now he reached down in alarm and felt with intense relief that both limbs were still attached to his body. But his left leg was hot and swollen, and now he recalled the fevers and the shaking, his head being lifted to receive sips of bitter tea, and the horrible pain as the truck bounced over rough roads as it first climbed and then descended hills.
Indeed, Nicholai saw that he was in the hills now. Outside the window he saw a lush forest of firs, pines, camphor, and nanmu trees in a series of rolling ridges below him. The landscape seemed impossibly green, after the white and silver of Beijing, and the blackness of the journey to this place, wherever it was.
Maybe I’m dead, Nicholai speculated without alarm. Perhaps this is chin t’u, the paradise promised by the amida Buddha. But the “pure land” was not for killers, and he had killed Yuri Voroshenin with a single leopard strike to the heart.
At first he thought this might have been part of his morphine-induced dreams – crazy, twisted images of Solange, Haverford, shengs and dans and sharp wires and men dressed all in black. But then he realized that the memory of killing Voroshenin was just that – a recollection of an actual event, and he felt some satisfaction at completing his mission, even though the Americans had betrayed him.
Nicholai blamed himself as much as them.
I should have seen it earlier, he thought as he lay in what he now realized was a hammock. I should have known that Haverford never intended to honor his part of the deal.
Even this small mental exertion exhausted him and he sank deeper into the hammock, feeling only now that his clothes were soaked with sweat. His leg hurt and his body still ached from the beating he had absorbed in the Temple of the Green Truth.
Then Nicholai heard footsteps and felt the palm of a hand on his forehead. The hand lingered for just a moment and then he heard a voice he recognized as the monk’s say, “The fever has broken. Good. For a while we thought we were still going to lose you.”
“So I am alive.”
“But shouldn’t be,” the monk answered. “By all rights, you should be in bardo, awaiting rebirth.”
“Perhaps I am.”
“Perhaps we all are,” the monk said. “Who knows? My name is Xue Xin.”
“Michel Guibert.”
“If you wish,” Xue Xin said, a trace of amusement in his voice. “We need to turn you back over now, and change your clothes. It will hurt.”
Nicholai felt two pairs of firm hands on his shoulder and then they turned him onto his back. A jolt of pain shot up from his leg to the top of his head and he swallowed a grunt of pain.
Xue Xin looked down on him, and Nicholai recognized the man from the bridge to the Jade Isle, the alley outside the opera, and the Temple of the Green Truth. His close-cropped hair was jet black, but what seized Nicholai’s attention were his eyes – they looked through you, albeit not unkindly.
If Xue Xin was eaten up with sympathy, it didn’t show on his face. “You will have tea.”
“No, thank you.”
“You will have tea,” Xue Xin said.
The “tea,” Nicholai decided, tasted like wet grass, but Xue Xin insisted that the brew of herbs was healing his infection.
“If you want to live, drink,” Xue Xin shrugged. “If you don’t, don’t.”
Nicholai drank.
Colonel Yu was relieved to see the American agent looking better.
At first they thought he was going to die. He’d lost a great deal of blood from the bullet wound and had taken a severe beating as well. The internal damage from the bajiquan blows alone would have killed a man with less ki, and the leg quickly became infected.
Nor did they have the leisure to give him adequate medical care. They’d had to get the American out of Beijing, and quickly. Yu’s own PLA staff carried him to a waiting army truck that quickly drove out to the Ring Road, where they transferred the unconscious man to a military convoy headed south. An army medic dug the bullet out of his leg in the moving truck. Then they managed to hook up a blood transfusion and started to administer morphine for the pain.
It might have been easier to let him die, Yu thought – dispose of the body and simply shrug at the mystery that swept across official Beijing like the north wind.
The government was rattled, to say the least.
The Russian commissioner Voroshenin was dead – officially from a heart attack suffered while watching the opera, but no one in the intelligence or military communities believed that, not along with the “coincidental” murder of Kang Sheng, found with a wire thrust through his eyeball and into his brain.
The American plot had worked perfectly.
Moscow and Beijing were busy blaming each other, Mao dug a hole and pulled it closed over himself- especially with his dog Kang no longer there to protect him. General Liu remained the calm and stable figure, ready to step in to end the chaos.
The only problem, Yu thought now as he looked at Nicholai, was the “disappearance” of a French citizen, Michel Guibert.
He had been seen going to the opera. Voroshenin’s guards, quickly summoned home to Moscow, had reportedly claimed that Guibert was sitting beside Voroshenin in his private box at the time of his death but got up suddenly and left.
Then disappeared.
Was he dead?
Was he involved in Voroshenin’s death?
In Kang’s?
Beijing and Moscow buzzed with rumors. Some had it that Guibert had killed Voroshenin, others that it was his assistant Leotov, who had also disappeared shortly after his boss’s death.
The Russians claimed that Guibert was a Chinese agent, the Chinese countered that he was Russian. Each accused the other of hiding him at the same time that each accused the other of killing him to stop him from talking. To quote the Chairman himself, “All is chaos under the heavens and the situation is excellent.”
“Guibert” opened his eyes.
“Where are we?” Nicholai asked.
“You don’t need to know,” Yu answered.
The air, while cool, was still warm for winter, and the nanmu tree Nicholai could see through the window didn’t grow up north. The brief dialogue he had overheard as the attendants came in and out was unintelligible to him, not Han Chinese at all, so he guessed that it was some southern tribal dialect.
“Sichuan or Yunnan,” he said.
“Yunnan,” admitted Yu. “In the Wuliang hills.”
“Why?”
“Beijing was unhealthy for you.”
Nicholai remembered his manners. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“Gratitude is misplaced,” Yu answered. “I was doing my duty, Mr. Hel.”
“HOW LONG HAVE you known my real identity?” he asked Yu.
“Since before you entered Beijing,” Yu answered. He recited Nicholai’s history to him – his birth in Shanghai, his removal to Japan, his killing of Kishikawa, his torture and imprisonment by the Americans.
The Chinese seemed to know it all. Nicholai could only hope that they did not realize the depth of his connection to the late Yuri Voroshenin.
“Am I a prisoner?” Nicholai asked.
“I would prefer to call you a guest.”
“Can the guest get up and leave?”
“The question is academic in any case,” Yu answered. “The reality is that you cannot get up, much less walk. And, even if you could, you have no place to go. They are hunting for you everywhere, Mr. Hel. This might be the only place in the world where you are safe.”
A sadly accurate summation of the reality, Nicholai thought, since the moment I killed Kishikawa-sama. The locations and circumstances change, but the fact does not.
I am a prisoner.
He heard Kishikawa’s voice. If you have no options, then it is honorable to accept your imprisonment, although you might consider seppuku. But you have options.
What are they?
Nikko, you must find them yourself. Examine the go-kang. When you are trapped and can find no escape route, you must create one.
Again, please, how?
It is your kang, Nikko. No one else can play it for you.
“You wanted Voroshenin dead,” Nicholai said, probing.
“Obviously.”
“To create a rift with the Soviets.”
Yu nodded.
“And you rescued me from the American ambush because…”
“How often would we get a chance to obtain an American agent so motivated to cooperate?” Yu asked. “I’m sure you can tell us names, places, methods of operations. After all, you agreed to be rescued.”
Hel had understood the monk’s warning and signaled in turn that he understood, the act of a drowning man reaching out for the rope. Surely he knew it would come with a price.
Nicholai said, “I will tell you nothing.”
“The Americans betrayed you,” Yu answered. “Why would you hesitate to betray them in turn?”
“Their dishonor is their own,” Nicholai responded. “Mine would be mine.”
“How Japanese.”
“I accept the compliment,” Nicholai said. He tried to sit up, but the effort was painful and enervating. “I will not become an informer, but I will force the Americans to honor the arrangement they made with me.”
“And how will you do that?” Yu asked, amused at this wounded man who could barely support his own weight.
Yet there was something in Hel’s eyes that made Yu believe him.
“WHERE IS HE?” Singleton demanded.
“I don’t know,” admitted Haverford.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Alive?”
“Again…”
Diamond didn’t bother to conceal his smirk. Singleton frowned at him and then turned his attention back to Haverford. “You don’t know much.”
“I’m trying to find out.”
“Try harder.”
Haverford thought briefly of defending himself. Voroshenin was dead, apparently at Hel’s hands, and the Chinese and Russians were snapping at each other’s throats. And while Hel had possibly escaped, he hadn’t been found – not by Moscow or Beijing anyway -because there had been no blowback at all. Apparently no one had connected Voroshenin’s assassination to the Company.
“I want him found,” Singleton said. “Do you understand?”
“I do,” Diamond said, stressing the first-person pronoun and sounding like a sycophantic schoolboy.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Haverford asked.
“Hel’s gone over to the other side, and you know it,” Diamond said. “And I’m not so sure you’re not happy about it.”
“That’s a goddamn lie.”
“You calling me a liar?” Diamond jumped up from his chair.
Haverford stood up. “A liar, a torturer -”
They started for each other.
“This is not your sixth-grade schoolyard. Sit down, both of you.” Singleton waited until both men took their chairs.
My straight line and my circle, Singleton thought. We shall see which one wins. It is a basic law of Go and of life – the side that wins is the side that deserves to win.
Haverford thought of resigning on the spot. He could probably find a job in academia, or in one of the new “think tanks” – there’s a concept – now sprouting like mushrooms in the damp intellectual soil of the greater Washington metropolitan area. The place had, after all, once been a swamp.
But there was unfinished business, so he clamped his jaw tight and listened.
“Assume Hel is out there,” Singleton said. “Lure him in.”
“How?”
“You’re clever young men,” Singleton answered. “You’ll think of something.”
The meeting was concluded.
THINK LIKE NICHOLAI HEL, Haverford told himself as he left the building for his hotel in Dupont Circle. No easy task, he admitted, as it was probably true that no one else in the world thought like Nicholai Hel.
Well, try anyway.
He ran his thoughts through Nicholai’s options.
Would Hel…
Could Hel…
Yes, he decided.
Both.
“I’M GOING TO DELIVER the weapons,” Nicholai said.
It was a bold, even risky move. A breakout maneuver on the go-kang that had small chance of success and could only place him in great danger. Still, when one is surrounded there are few choices other than to surrender, die, or break out.
“Please don’t be ridiculous,” Yu answered. “Your cover as an arms merchant was just that, a cover. Not a reality.”
“I saw the rocket launchers,” Nicholai said. “They looked quite real.”
“Props,” Yu answered, “for your little opera. The play is over, Mr. Hel.”
“And yet here you are in Yunnan,” Nicholai answered, “for weeks now, near the Vietnamese border. Perhaps that is mere coincidence, or perhaps you are overly solicitous of my recuperation, but more likely it’s because you intend to take the rocket launchers across the border into Vietnam.”
“Even if that were true,” Yu said, “it hardly concerns you.”
“Let me tell you why it does,” Nicholai said. “I have demonstrated skills that might be very useful. I’m fluent in French, have an established cover as an arms merchant, and I’m a kweilo, which would give me certain advantages in the French colonies. So much for my utility, here is my offer: I will deliver the weapons to the Viet Minh and retain the payment as my recompense for services rendered. Once the weapons have been safely delivered, you will provide me with a new identity and documentation. Then we are quit of each other.”
It seemed the perfect solution, Nicholai thought. The Americans, through the gift of the rocket launchers, would unintentionally honor their deal with him, and it would have the added effect of harming their interests.
“You think a lot of your value, Mr. Hel.”
“It is simply an objective evaluation.”
Yu stared at him. “If you reemerge anywhere in Indochina, the Americans will find you.”
“Just so.”
Yu agreed to consider his offer.
The Americans will find me, Nicholai thought when Yu left the room. No, we will find each other, and I will hold Haverford accountable for his treachery.
And then I will find Solange.
DIAMOND PORED over the Hel file.
Goddamnit, he thought. How could Hel have escaped the trap in the Beijing temple and that Chinese kung-fu son of a bitch who was supposed to have been so good? Yeah, so goddamn good that he let Hel put a bullet in his head and kill the rest of his men as well.
Two swings at Hel, he thought, two misses. First he dispatches the two would-be killers in Tokyo, then the massacre in Beijing.
Three strikes and you’re out, Diamond told himself.
The next try has to connect.
But you have to find Hel before you can kill him.
“Lure him,” Singleton had said.
Easy for the old fart to say, a little harder to do. Lure him with what? What bait can you set that would bring Hel in?
Diamond went back to studying the file that Singleton had forced Haverford to turn over. Start at the beginning, he told himself.
Start in Tokyo.
Find the bait that will bring that arrogant half-Jap bastard waltzing in.
NICHOLAI’S ROOM WAS pleasant.
Large, airy, made entirely of poles, it sat on stilts, the space below housing chickens and a pig. Nicholai learned that it sat on the edge of a remote Buddhist monastery in the hills of Wulian, high above the Lekang River, and that the nearby villagers were Puman people, an ethnic minority that spoke a Dai dialect but little Han Chinese. He could see the people through the window – the men wore black turbans, the women colorful headscarves with pieces of silver sewn into them.
It was all so different from drab Beijing.
As a further comfort, Yu had acquired all of Guibert’s clothing and personal effects and had them brought to Yunnan. Nicholai particularly appreciated the razor and small travel mirror, and one morning asked for a bowl of hot water so he could shave.
His image in the mirror was a bit of a shock. His skin was pale, his face drawn, the beard gave him the look of a prison camp survivor. Shaving made him look and feel better, but he realized that he would have to start eating regularly to regain his health.
“I want to get up,” he said.
The young monk who had brought the water looked nervous. “Xue Xin says not for five more days.”
“Is Xue Xin here at the moment?”
The young monk comically looked around the room. “No.”
“Then help me get up, please.”
“I will go ask -”
“If you go ask,” Nicholai said, “I will try to get up on my own while you are gone, and probably fall and die as a result. What would Xue Xin say to you then?”
“He would hit me with a stick.”
“So.”
The monk helped him out of the bed. Nicholai tentatively put some weight on the wounded leg. The pain was ferocious, and it started to buckle beneath him, but the monk steadied him and they walked across the room.
Then back again.
After three trips, Nicholai was exhausted and the monk helped him back into the bed.
The next morning he walked outside.
Painful and slow at first, his walk from the village to the monastery became part of a thrice-daily routine as he rebuilt his physical and mental stamina. Making his unsteady way along the narrow, stone-laid paths, he focused on details – unraveling individual birdsong from the cacophony of a score of species, identifying types of monkeys from their incessant chatter and warning screeches, distinguishing plants and vines from among thousands in the verdant forest.
The jungle was reclaiming the monastery.
Its vines cracked the old stones, swallowed columns and stiles, crept over flagstone pavilions like a patient, persistent tide of Go stones on a board. Yet statues of Buddha peeped through the vegetation, his eyes content with the knowledge that all things change and all physical matter inevitably decays.
The discipline of the walk was good for Nicholai’s mind, and every day the pain lessened and his strength returned until he could walk with strength and confidence. His spirit recovered as well, and soon he began to think about the future.
He almost tripped over the monk.
Xue Xin was on his hands and knees with a small blade, carefully trimming vines away from a stone path that led to a modest stupa. The monk wore a simple brown robe tied at the waist with a belt that had faded almost to white.
He looked up and asked, “Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Xue Xin slowly got to his feet and bowed. Nicholai bowed deeply in return.
“You don’t bow like a Frenchman,” Xue Xin said.
“I was raised in China,” Nicholai answered. “Later in Japan.”
Xue Xin laughed. “That explains it. The Japanese, they like to bow.”
“Yes, they do,” Nicholai agreed.
“Would you like to help?” Xue Xin asked.
“Forgive me,” Nicholai said, “but it seems an impossible task.”
“Not at all. Every day I clean each day’s growth away.”
“But it grows back,” Nicholai said. “Then you just have to do it again the next day.”
“Exactly.”
So Nicholai took to helping Xue Xin with the repetitive task of trying to keep the path clear. They met every morning and worked for hours, then stopped and took tea when the afternoon rain slashed down. Nicholai learned that Xue Xin was an honored guest at the monastery.
“They put up with me,” Xue Xin said. “I work. And you?”
“I don’t know if I am a guest here or a prisoner,” Nicholai answered truthfully, although he left it at that.
“As in life itself.” Xue Xin chuckled. “Are we its guest, or its prisoner?”
“As life dictates, I suppose.”
“Not at all,” Xue Xin answered.
“What do you mean?”
“It has stopped raining,” Xue Xin observed in response. They went back to work on the path.
The next day Xue Xin observed, “You attack the vines as if they are your enemy.”
“Are they not?”
“No, they are your allies,” Xue Xin answered. “Without them, you would not have a useful task to perform.”
“I would then have another useful task,” Nicholai answered, annoyed.
“With another set of ally-enemies,” Xue Xin said. “It is always the same, my Eastern-Western friend. But, by all means, if it makes you feel better, attack, attack.”
That night, lying in his kang, lonely and missing Solange, Nicholai had a crisis of the mind and soul. Raised as he was, he was familiar with basic Buddhist philosophy – only the unfamiliar would call it a religion, or the Buddha a god – that all suffering comes from attachment, that we are prisoners of our longings and desires that keep us bound to the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. He knew the Buddhist belief that these longings make us take negative actions – sins, if you must – that create and accumulate bad karma that must be ameliorated through the lifetimes, and that only enlightenment can free us from this trap.
He got up, took his flashlight, and made his way to Xue Xin’s cell. The monk was in full lotus position, meditating.
“You wish to trim vines by moonlight?” Xue Xin asked. “Very well, but do it without me, please.”
“I want my freedom.”
“Then trim vines.”
“That is glib,” Nicholai answered. “I expect more from you than Zen riddles.”
“You are suffering?”
Nicholai nodded.
Xue Xin opened his eyes, exhaled a long breath as if to reluctantly end his meditation, and then said, “Sit down. You cannot find enlightenment, you can only be open to it finding you. That’s satori.”
“And why you chose it as a code word,” Nicholai said. “Back in Beijing.”
“You needed to see things as they really were,” Xue Xin answered. “Until then, there was no helping you.”
“If you cannot find satori, how-”
“It might come in a drop of rain,” Xue Xin continued, ignoring the question, “a note from a faraway flute, the fall of a leaf. Of course, you have to be ready for it or it will pass unnoticed. But if you are ready, and your eyes are open, you will see it and suddenly understand everything. Then you will know who you are and what you must do.”
“Satori.”
“Satori,” Xue Xin repeated. Then he added, “If our thoughts imprison us, it stands to reason that they can also set us free.”
Yu came to see him the next morning.
The Chinese had accepted his offer.
THE NORMAL ROUTE of arms shipments from China to Vietnam, Yu explained, was through Lang Son, across the border, and directly into the north of Vietnam, where the Viet Minh had secure sanctuaries in the mountainous jungles.
But they were not going to take that route.
The rocket launchers were needed in the south, not the north.
“That is information that our enemies would pay dearly to obtain,” Yu said.
Indeed it is, Nicholai thought. Since its last disastrous effort in the south, the Viet Minh had confined their activities to the north. But now it appeared that, if armed with the new weaponry, they were planning to launch a new southern front.
The northern Viet Minh were dominated by the Soviets, the southern were more independent or allied with China. A successful southern offensive would shuffle the geopolitical deck in Asia.
Yu was playing a deep game.
Given the fact that the weapons had to go to the southern Viet Minh units, there was only one possible route, down the Lekang River into Laos.
It would be no easy feat, he explained. The Lekang ran through deep gorges with boiling rapids and sharp rocks that could pierce the hulls of boats like eggshells. The river was not easily navigable until south of the town of Luang Prabang, deep into Laos.
Luang Prabang itself would present problems. They would have to switch boats there for the rest of the journey, and the area was rife with spies and French special forces.
And then there was the Binh Xuyen.
“What’s the Binh Xuyen?” Nicholai asked.
“Pirates,” Yu answered.
“Pirates?” Nicholai asked. It seemed a tad anachronistic.
Originally river pirates from the vast Rung Sat marshes south of Saigon, the Binh Xuyen, now opium merchants, virtually controlled that city. Their leader, a former convict named Bay Vien, supported the Viet Minh, but had changed sides and was now a close ally of the puppet emperor Bao Dai and his French masters. As a reward, Bay Vien controlled drugs, gambling, and prostitution in Saigon, and used the resulting vast wealth to acquire modern arms and equipment.
“That’s Saigon,” Nicholai said. “What does Bay Vien have to do with Laos?”
“It’s where the opium comes from,” Yu answered.
The Viet Minh used to buy raw opium in the mountains east of Luang Prabang and sell it to buy weapons, but through bribery, intimidation, and assassinations, the Binh Xuyen had virtually taken control of the Laotian opium trade.
Luang Prabang swarmed with Binh Xuyen. Yu went on, “A Viet Minh agent will meet you there and escort you into Vietnam.”
Nicholai noted the shift to the second-person singular and mentioned it.
“This is why we require your services,” Yu said. “My superiors have decided that they cannot take the risk of my getting captured in French territory.”
He told Nicholai how he would be contacted in Luang Pra-bang and later in Saigon, and then resumed his briefing.
In Laos, the Lekang changed its name to the Mekong as it flowed through Cambodia into the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. The delta would be a challenge – not only would they have to evade the patrols of the French army and the Foreign Legion, but they would have to make their way through a network of blockhouses and forts.
Worse still, the Mekong Delta was patrolled by well-armed militias allied to the French occupiers.
“Where do I deliver the weapons?” Nicholai asked.
“We don’t know.”
“That would make it difficult.”
Yu explained, “In Saigon you will be told where to rendezvous with a Viet Minh agent code-named Ai Quoc, to whom we will deliver the weapons. Quoc is one of the most wanted men in the country, in hiding even now. He’s survived a score of assassination attempts and the French have a huge reward on him. You won’t be told his location until the last possible moment.”
Nicholai mentally reviewed the obstacles – the river, the Binh Xuyen, the French, their Vietnamese militias, and then locating the elusive Ai Quoc.
“So basically,” he said, “this is a suicide mission.”
“It does have that aspect,” Yu answered. “If you want to change your mind, now is the time.”
“I don’t.”
“Very well.”
“We have an arrangement, then?” Nicholai asked.
Yu shook his hand.
Nicholai found Xue Xin at his usual task of trimming vines.
“I came to say goodbye,” Nicholai said.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure,” Nicholai answered, then decided that he owed a better answer. “To find my satori.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then I will keep my eyes open,” Nicholai answered.
“We will meet again,” Xue Xin said. “In this life or another.”
Nicholai felt an emotion welling up inside him, something he had not felt since the death of General Kishikawa. “I cannot tell you how much you have meant to me.”
“You don’t need to,” Xue Xin said. “I know.”
Nicholai knelt and bowed, touching his forehead to the ground. “Thank you. You are my teacher.”
“And you mine,” Xue Xin said.
Then the monk knelt back down and resumed his work, serene in the knowledge that Nicholai Hel had determined his destiny.
We will meet again, he thought.
YU HAD LEFT the crates of weaponry in the care of a local battalion commander.
Colonel Ki’s belly hung out over his belt, an indication that life was good for a commander in the remote hills of Yunnan. He treated Yu and Nicholai to a very good lunch of fish, vegetables, and mounds of rice, served by an orderly who virtually salivated as he presented each dish.
“I’ll take command of a squad of your soldiers,” Yu said to Colonel Ki, “and we’ll need some of the local Puman as porters.”
“To Lang Son?”
“To the river,” Yu answered. “We will take them from there.”
“Perhaps,” Ki said, “you have misunderstood what ‘Lekang’ really means in Chinese.”
“It means Unruly Waters,” Nicholai answered.
“Unruly to say the least,” Ki commented with the expression of mild sympathy that one gives to an acquaintance who has just embarrassingly revealed that he is terminally ill. But there was money to be made. “For a nominal fee, I can provide boats.”
“I have already arranged for the boats.”
Ki inwardly cursed the rivermen who had sold their services without gaining his permission or giving him his cut, and worried how such a transaction could occur without his knowledge. “An escort, then? You are four days’ march from the river, and despite the party’s heroic efforts, there are still bandits in these mountains.”
“Bandits?”
“Bad people,” Ki said, shaking his head. “Very bad people.”
The porters shouldered the heavy crates on bamboo poles down the steep mountain trail, slippery with mud from the recent rains. The short legs and long trunks of these Puman tribesmen gave them an advantage that Nicholai did not possess as each step jarred his already sore knees and ankles. While the climb up from the last valley had been grueling, the descent down into the next was simply painful, and Nicholai thought that the route more than lived up to its sobriquet, “the Dragon’s Tail.”
They’d been on it for three days now, with another day yet to go before they reached the river and the boats.
The soldiers that Yu commandeered went out ahead and along the flanks. Some had Chinese “burp guns” slung over their shoulders, others carried captured American Mi rifles. At each pause in the day, and at their camps for the night, Yu gathered the soldiers and conducted study sessions on Marxist theory and Maoist thought.
Communism, Nicholai thought. It promises to make everyone equally rich and instead makes everyone equally poor.
During a break in the march one day, Nicholai took out a pack of cigarettes, shook out two, and offered one to Yu.
“French,” Yu observed. “They are very good, I think.”
“Take one,” Nicholai said. “You’re allowed the occasional bourgeois indulgence.”
A man needs a whiff of sin now and then, Nicholai thought, or he becomes something not quite a man. Yu took the proffered cigarette with an expression of delicious guilt. Nicholai lit it for him and Yu took a long drag. “It is very good. Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
Yu took two more short, disciplined puffs, carefully snuffed the cigarette out on the ground, put the butt in his shirt pocket, and buttoned it.
Nicholai thought of Solange, and missed her.
“Is there a girl at home?” he asked Yu.
“As a revolutionary,” Yu answered, “I have no time for bourgeois concepts such as romantic love.”
“So there is.”
Yu allowed himself a shy smile. “She is also a revolutionary. But perhaps someday, when the revolution has been established… You?”
“Yes. A French girl.”
“And you think about her.”
“Yes.”
After three years in prison, Nicholai thought he had come to terms with loneliness. Its return to his internal life was a mixed blessing. But, yes, he thought about Solange.
Too often and not often enough.
He took the next painful step down the mountain.
They stopped for the night at a Daoist monastery built on a small knoll along the side of the trail. The view was magnificent, the food somewhat less so, composed as it was of congee with small bits of vegetables and fish. But Nicholai ate ravenously and then stood on the periphery of a rectangular stone pavilion and watched the monks perform their kung-fu kata, which he recognized as the classic southern hung-gar form of “Tiger and Crane.”
Beautiful and doubtless deadly, he thought, although not as efficient as hoda korosu. But that was the main distinction between Chinese and Japanese martial arts – the former used many elaborate and circular moves while the latter emphasized one quick, direct, fatal strike.
Nicholai contemplated which was superior and decided that it was the Chinese for beauty, the Japanese for killing.
On the far side of the pavilion, Yu inflicted Communist doctrine on his students. One of the victims, a thick country lad named Liang, stared wistfully off into the bamboo thickets, doubtless wishing that he could find sanctuary there. But Liang was something of a special pet of Yu’s and so good-naturedly sat through the lecture as if genuinely interested. Yu had great, if misplaced, hopes for him.
One more day on the Dragon’s Tail, Nicholai thought. They would reach the river late the next afternoon and load their cargo onto the waiting boats. It would be a nice change to be on the water and off the arduous trail.
He walked back to the chamber that had been assigned to him. It was a small room with a single kang, the classic Chinese raised bed, which was draped with thin mosquito netting. Someone had already come in, lit a lantern, and left a thermos of hot water and an old porcelain cup with which to make tea.
But Nicholai craved rest more than the stimulation of the strong southern green tea, so he stripped off his clothes, climbed into the kang, and stretched out. He closed his eyes and told his mind to allow him five hours of sleep. He wanted to wake up well before dawn to make sure that the caravan got an early start.
Nicholai’s proximity sense woke him before his internal alarm did.
The two men smelled of cheap Chinese tobacco. Their heavy steps made clear that they were bandits and not professional assassins – they tried to walk quietly but were clumsy and obvious. Amateurs assume that to step slowly is to step softly, while professionals know that the opposite is true and are both quick and light.
Willing himself to remain still, Nicholai measured the slow heavy footsteps of the lead bandit as they creaked on the wooden floor. If they were going to use guns they would have done it already, but they apparently didn’t want to make noise and spring the main attack prematurely, before they had eliminated the leadership. So it would be a sword, a knife or an axe, maybe a garrote, but more likely an edged weapon that could slice through the mosquito netting, sparing the extra second to open it.
So there would be time for hoda korosu.
He edged his hand along the kang, felt for the teacup, and slid it beside him under the thin sheet. Silently he crushed the cup in his hand until he felt blood running from his palm, and then pinched the sharp shard of glass between his thumb and forefinger.
Then he waited.
The footsteps stopped and Nicholai felt the bandit pause as he lifted his arm to strike.
Nicholai swung the shard in a horizontal backhand that sliced the bandit’s throat. The knife arm came down in a limp, useless arc and then the bandit, his left arm futilely clutching his throat, pitched forward onto the kang.
The second bandit made the fatal error of backing up and reaching for the pistol at his belt as Nicholai launched off the kang, grabbed the heavy metal thermos, and swung it like a club. The man’s skull fractured with a sickening crack. Nicholai bent over his body, took the pistol, and stepped outside.
Red muzzle flashes tore the black silk fabric of the night.
Yu, clad only in trousers, stood with a pistol in his hand, trying to form the startled men into some kind of order.
Nicholai heard the zip-zip of gunfire and felt the little pockets of air concuss as the bullets flew past him. He had experienced bombings, beatings, and hand-to-hand combat, but this was his first firefight and he found it chaotic. The bandits had chosen a good time to strike, the hours of deepest sleep before dawn, and the fight had the surreal quality of a waking dream.
The bullets were real, however, and Nicholai heard the hollow thunk of a round strike the soldier beside him. The boy reached down to the hole in his stomach and looked at Nicholai with an expression of hurt surprise, as if to ask if this were really happening, then howled with pain. Nicholai eased him to the ground as gently as he could. The boy would die and there was nothing he could do.
He could only try to save the cargo.
Nicholai exchanged his pistol for the soldier’s rifle and moved out.
Yu was already rallying the men he had left toward the crates stacked in the monastery’s central pavilion. A few of the sentries guarding the crates had already fled, two others lay slumped dead at their posts, while three crouched behind the boxes and returned the shots that were coming from the bamboo thicket on the far side of the pavilion. But they were under heavy fire and it was obvious that they couldn’t hold out for long.
Yu started across the pavilion for the pile of crates but Nicholai held him back. It was brave but useless to join the three soldiers in their isolated post. We would just become additional targets, Nicholai thought, a few more sacrificed stones in a soon-to-be eliminated position on the board. Better to create a new position and give the bandits something new to think about.
So Nicholai squatted behind a stone bench set at the edge of the pavilion. He waited until he saw a muzzle flash come from the bamboo and fired at it, then heard a man scream in pain. Yu did the same with the same result.
The shooting from the bamboo stopped as the bandits considered how to handle the new situation.
Nicholai used the pause to belly-crawl across that side of the pavilion to a bench on the perpendicular side. It would be better, he thought, if the bandits formed a tactic to deal with a situation that had already changed.
Go is a fluid game.
It was quiet for a moment longer and then a spray of bullets hit the stone bench that Nicholai had vacated. Yu pressed himself flat on the stones and survived the blast, but the bullets kept him down as a group of a dozen or more bandits sprang out of the bamboo and rushed the crates.
Nicholai, on the flank of the attack, easily picked the lead bandit off with his first shot but missed the second one and had to fire again. He dropped the next man, but the bandits in the bamboo adjusted quickly and turned their guns on him. Nicholai flattened out and the bullets passed over him.
Then he pushed himself up on his hands and the balls of his feet, took a deep breath, and vaulted over the bench.
Lit only by muzzle flashes, the scene before him played like cinema in a bad old theater with a creaky projector. Nicholai saw flickers of the melee at the crates – a bayonet thrust, a pistol fired at close range, a wounded man’s mouth agape. He plunged in, firing his rifle until the clip was empty. Then he used it like an ancient Chinese weapon – a sharp blade on one end, a blunt object on the other. He swung and thrust, ducked and dodged, beyond thought in the realm of instinct that came from constant training.
But the bandits were simply too many. The most skillful Go player will lose his few isolated white stones against a tide of black ones.
It was inevitable.
Die with honor.
Hai, Kishikawa-sama.
The cherry blossoms of Kajikawa floated in front of his eyes as he recalled his walk, so long ago, with the general. Kishikawa had focused on the beautiful blossoms to prepare himself for his death.
Then through the flashes of light Nicholai saw a row of brown-robed monks, bamboo staffs in their hands, advance onto the pavilion.
The fight became a whirling blur of bamboo, a tai-fung, but the rain pellets were wood striking flesh and bone, and then it was over, like a sudden squall. The surviving bandits fled back into the forest.
Without the precious cargo.
But six soldiers and one monk lay dead, and others were wounded.
Nicholai squatted beside the body of one of the bandits. Yu held up a lantern and they examined the dead man’s face. It took a moment, but then Nicholai recognized him… the orderly who had served lunch for Colonel Ki.
You have been careless and stupid, Nicholai told himself. “Michel Guibert” did not see the obvious ploy. Whereas Nicholai Hel would have. He resolved to retain a piece of his authentic self regardless of any situational guise.
The monks mopped up blood under lantern light.
Nicholai found the abbot, bowed deeply, and apologized for fouling the monastery with violence.
“You did not,” the abbot responded. “They did.”
“Still, I was the cause of it.”
“And so I will ask that you leave at first light and never return.”
Nicholai bowed again. “May I risk a possibly impertinent question?” When the abbot nodded, Nicholai asked, “I thought that you were pacifists. Why -”
“Buddhists are pacifists,” the abbot answered. “We are Daoists. We eschew violence except when necessary. But it is the mission of our order to offer hospitality. So we were forced to choose between two competing values – our desire not to harm our fellow creatures and our vow of sanctuary to our guests. In this case, we chose the latter.”
“You fight well.”
“When one chooses to fight,” the abbot replied, “it is one’s responsibility to fight well.”
Nicholai found Yu in his chamber, angrily stuffing his small gear into his haversack.
“They were your own men,” Nicholai said.
“I know that.”
His face already showed a loss of innocence. Nicholai felt some sympathy, but it did not prevent him from pressing the necessary question. “How am I supposed to trust you now?”
Yu led him out of the monastery to a wide spot on the trail, where a soldier was bound around the chest to the trunk of a tree.
It was Liang. Blood ran down his nose and a purple welt swelled under his eye. He had been beaten.
“He was one of the sentries,” Yu said disgustedly. “The one who survived. He claims he fell asleep, but I suspect that he deliberately let the bandits pass. Either way he is guilty. The monks would not let me execute him at the monastery so I brought him here.”
“You should not execute him at all.”
“At the very least, he failed in his duty.”
“So did we,” Nicholai said. “We should have been better prepared.”
“He caused the deaths of comrades,” Yu insisted.
“Again, as did we,” Nicholai argued. “Men aren’t perfect.”
“The new man must be,” Yu responded. “Perfect, at least, in his duty.”
Nicholai looked at Liang, who trembled with cold and fear. While we debate philosophy, Nicholai thought. It’s cruel. He tried again. “Perhaps he was performing his duty to Ki.”
“His duty is to the people.”
“He is the people, Yu.”
In response, Yu pulled his pistol from its holster and held the barrel to Liang’s head. His hand trembled as the boy cried and begged for his life.
Yu pulled the trigger.
“And that is how you know,” he said, “that you can trust me.”
DIAMOND FOUND HER in Vientiane, in the square outside the Patousay.
The monument, even with its Laotian spires, reminded him a little of an arc de triomphe. Indeed, Solange thought so too.
“It reminds me a little of home,” she said. “In Montpellier we have something similar.”
“What are you doing in Laos?” Diamond asked.
“Looking for work, monsieur,” she answered. “What are you doing in Laos?”
“Looking for you.”
“Ah, well. Your task, at least, is finished.”
“Yours too, maybe,” Diamond said. He was instantly jealous of Nicholai Hel. The thought that the arrogant bastard had slept with this gorgeous creature was infuriating.
“How so?” she asked.
“We might have something for you,” he said.
“ ‘We’?” she inquired, her tone slightly sarcastic and tantalizing at the same time. “You mean ‘we Americans’?”
“Yes.”
“I usually deal with Monsieur Haverford,” she said.
She pronounced it “Averfor,” which Diamond found stimulating beyond belief. “He’s on another assignment. He sent me. I’m Mr. Gold.”
Her smile was sensuous, ironic, and infuriating. “Really?”
“No.”
They walked out of the park onto Lane Xang.
“What do you have in mind, Monsieur Gold?” she asked.
Diamond told her, then added, “I think you’ll like it. It could be very lucrative, and Saigon is a lot like France, isn’t it?”
“In some aspects, yes.”
“So your answer?”
“Pourquoi pas?”
“What does that mean?”
She trained the full force of her green eyes on him and smiled. “Why not?”
“Good,” Diamond said, his throat tight. “Good. Uhh, do you need a taxi? Where are you staying?”
“At the Manoly,” she answered. “I can walk, thank you.”
“I could walk with you.”
She stopped walking and looked at him. “What are you asking now, Monsieur Gold?”
“I think you know,” Diamond answered, summoning up his nerve with the thought that the woman was, after all, a glorified whore. “I mean, you said you were looking for work.”
She laughed. “But not that desperately.”
They quickly made the necessary arrangements for her trip to Saigon and he walked away hating her.
But the whore will serve her purpose, he thought. The file said that Hel had fallen in love with her and intended to return to her. Good – if the son of a bitch is alive, he’ll come find her in Saigon.
And I have connections in Saigon.
Solange made sure that the disgusting American wasn’t following her, and then returned to her hotel and had a mint tea in the quiet of the shady garden.
Saigon, she thought.
Very well, Saigon.
Nicholai had yet to surface and she had to face the probability that he never would. Men die and men disappear, and a woman must take care of herself. The abhorrent “Gold” was right that Saigon was a congenial city, French in many ways.
THEY REACHED THE RIVER LATE THAT AFTERNOON.
Nicholai had to admit it was something of a shock.
Early in winter, he had expected the Lekang to be at its lowest flow. Still, beyond the long eddy where the waiting rafts were beached on the pebbled shore, the river ran fast, full, and angry.
The roar of water running shallowly over rock was impressive, even intimidating, but there was no time for trepidation. Nicholai worried that Ki might take another shot here where they would be pinned down without cover on the narrow strip of beach. He was glad to see that Yu had posted two of his “true believers” to cover the trail.
“We need to get loaded,” he said to Yu.
Yu shouted some orders and his soldiers helped the porters carry the crates onto the rafts, where the boatmen lashed them down. The head boatman, a squat middle-aged Tibetan with a cigarette in his mouth, approached Nicholai.
“Are you Guibert?” he asked in American-accented English that Nicholai knew too well from his years in his cell, listening to the American guards converse in what passed for their native tongue.
“That’s me.”
“I lost two men just getting down here.”
“They’ll be reborn well.”
The boatman shrugged his indifference at the concept of reincarnation. This life was plenty to deal with at the moment. “I’m Tasser.”
He didn’t offer his hand.
“Michel Guibert.”
“I know that. Did you bring the money?”
“Yes.”
“Give.”
“Half now,” Nicholai said, “half when we get to Luang Prabang.”
Tasser scoffed and looked at the roaring river. “Give me the whole megillah now. In case we don’t make it to Luang.”
“It’s your job to see that we do make it,” Nicholai said. He counted out half the money and handed a wad of bills to Tasser. “By the way, where did you learn your English?”
Tasser pressed the fingers of his right hand together and made a swooping arc. “American flyboys. They’d crash their crates into the mountains and I’d get what was left of them down. War had gone a couple of more years, I’d be sitting pretty.”
“Could we speak in Chinese instead?”
“I don’t pollute my mouth with that foreign tongue,” Tasser said in Chinese. He switched back to English. “You got any decent smokes?”
“Gauloises.”
“Frenchie shit? No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I will,” Tasser said. “So what’s in the crates?”
“None of your business.”
Tasser laughed, then crumpled up one of the bills and tossed it into the water. “You gotta grease the river gods,” he explained. But one of his men scrambled downstream, retrieved the bill, and brought it back to Tasser.
Nicholai raised an eyebrow.
“They’re gods,” Tasser said. “What are they gonna do with cash?”
Nicholai walked away and found Yu nervously peering back up the trail. He took out a cigarette and handed it to the colonel.
“Back at the monastery,” Yu said, “you didn’t fight like a man motivated just by profit.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Do not fool yourself,” Yu said. “You believe in a cause, even if you don’t yet know what it is.”
“I believe in my own freedom.”
“Individual freedom is bourgeois illusion,” Yu answered. “You should give it up.”
“I won’t, if you don’t mind.”
“Just get the weapons to their destination,” Yu said.
“You have my word.”
They shook hands.
Nicholai walked back to the rafts. “Let’s get going!” he yelled, and the boatmen pushed off.
The river quickly swept them away.
The river slowed and flattened.
For a distance that Nicholai judged to be a couple of miles, the water ran fast but evenly, and he had a chance to peruse the rafts and their crews.
The rafts were about fifteen feet wide and made of buoyant logs tightly lashed together, although with enough give to allow some flexibility. They had hardly any draft and seemed to roll easily over the shallows. Long oars were laid on the sides, although the crew didn’t need them in this current. A canopy had been stretched over poles at the aft, with a charcoal stove just in front. The crates were stacked in the middle of the raft and tightly lashed to boltholes that had been drilled in the sides.
The crewmen, four to each raft, were all Tibetan, with squat bodies, full faces, and skins darkened by the sun. They sat cross-legged at the sides, near the oars, and enjoyed the respite given by this relatively benign stretch of river.
“I never pictured Tibet as having much of a river trade,” Nicholai said to Tasser.
“You got that right.”
“How did you learn to do this?”
“Crazy Brits,” Tasser answered. “They’re always going up or down something. Up mountains, down rivers. As long as it’s crazy and dangerous. Before the war, a bunch of wiseguys from Oxford wanted to be the first to go down the Lekang. They needed a ‘river sherpa.’ I was a kid, needed the moola, and thought, ‘What the hell.’ ”
“Did they make it down?”
“Most of ’em.”
“All the way to Luang Prabang?”
“I dunno,” Tasser said.
“What do you mean?” Nicholai asked.
Tasser looked at him and smiled. “I’ve never been down this stretch of the river.”
Nicholai felt the water quicken beneath him and looked downriver, where a cloud of mist suddenly appeared.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Tasser took a map from his pocket and spread it out. Nicholai looked over his shoulder and the map appeared to be more of a picture, a cartoon, really, of the river, with drawings of tall peaks and midstream boulders. Tasser considered for a moment, and then hollered over the increasing rush of water, “That would be the Dragon’s Throat!”
“The Dragon’s Tail?”
“The Dragon’s Throat!” Tasser shouted, pointing at his Adam’s apple. He looked at the “map” again and asked, “What the hell does ‘Level 5’ mean, ya think?”
A few seconds later, he answered his own question.
“Holy shit!”
The first fall was only twenty feet but it crashed onto a broad shelf of rock that would certainly smash the rafts to pieces.
Nicholai felt the bow pitch forward, grabbed on to a line, and held on. There was nothing else to do.
Then they went over the edge.
They landed with a heavy impact and Nicholai was sure that he would feel the raft break up beneath him; the logs bounced and rolled but held together and the current swept them over the rock into a chute where the water was whirling in a violent circle just upstream of a second waterfall.
“Get to the oars!” Tasser yelled, and his men abandoned the relative safety of the line and scampered to man the oars.
Nicholai could see why. The circular current was pulling the raft sideways, and if it went into the falls broadside it would surely capsize as it went over. They had to right it so it entered the next fall bow first.
But the raft was spinning like a leaf in the wind.
“Where are the lifejackets?” Nicholai hollered to Tasser.
“The what?” Tasser hollered back.
The current spat them out, but sideways – the starboard side facing the waterfall – and Nicholai saw a large backcurrent, a small wall of water coming toward them.
“Look out!” he yelled.
The backcurrent lifted the raft and pitched one of the aft oarsmen off the starboard side. Nicholai, one hand on the line, crawled back and tried to pull him out of the water, but Tasser yelled, “The oar! Get the oar, goddamnit!”
Nicholai grabbed the oar just before it slipped into the water.
The crewman was pulled back into the circular current and Nicholai saw him try to stay above water as the current spun him around and around like some malevolent funhouse ride.
“Pull!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai sat down and pulled on the oar, straining every muscle and sinew to try to pull the raft around. They were almost straight when the bow went over the edge. This fall was not as high. They landed in a deep pool and the raft bobbed once before it was pulled into the next chute of water.
The flume raced to a narrow fall between two towers of rock. The raft scraped the edge of the rock to the left, bounced off, and then slid over the low fall onto a shallow stretch that rushed over rocks that banged against the bottom.
Downriver he saw a large column of what looked like smoke.
It wasn’t smoke, though. Nicholai knew that could only be mist from a large volume of water crashing over a very high waterfall.
“Pull to the side!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai looked to his right, where Tasser was pointing toward a long eddy. But the current was pulling them away, and they had little time or space to make it over into the eddy, and the crews were already exhausted.
He lifted his oar from the water as the crew on the port side pulled. When the raft was pointed starboard, both sides would row as hard as they could, for their lives. He took a few deep gulps of air and then, at Tasser’s order, started to stroke.
It was only a small bump, but it was enough. Nicholai had pulled himself up on the end of his stroke, and the bump hit before he could settle back down and lifted him up and off the side of the raft.
The first thing he felt was the shock of the cold water as he went under. He pulled himself to the surface, then felt the mental shock of knowing that he was in the river and inexorably headed for the waterfall.
He had been in bad situations before, while exploring narrow passages in caves during his happy years with friends in Japan. Then, the chambers had closed in and seemed to offer no way out. Or he’d been trapped by underground streams, the water hissing below him in the pitch black, and he’d enjoyed the danger, so now he forced his mind to dismiss the terror and focus on survival.
The first thing to do was get turned around, so he struggled successfully to get feet-first into the current. He didn’t know what waited at the bottom of the fall, but it was certainly better to encounter it with his feet instead of his head, smashing his legs, perhaps, instead of his neck or skull. He knew that he was dead anyway if the fall landed shallowly on rock, but honor demanded that he do his best.
Then he pressed his arms tightly to his sides and closed his legs to create as compact a vessel of himself as he could, so his limbs wouldn’t create levers that might tip him sideways and roll him, akimbo, over the falls.
He held his neck and head up out of the water until the last possible moment, then took a deep breath (his last? he wondered) and went over the edge.
The fall was long and violent, the water battering him to try to knock him out of his posture, but he held firm, waiting for the “landing” that would shatter his body, maim him, or offer the next challenge.
Then he felt the stillness of a pool and realized that he’d survived the fall.
He looked back up and realized that he’d plunged at least forty feet. Treading water to catch his breath, he looked downstream and saw, on the right edge, both rafts pulled up on the shore.
They were in bad shape.
The canopy of the first raft was stoved in, and several oars were broken. The second raft looked little better, its bow jagged like a broken tooth. But both had made it through the Dragon’s Throat and, miraculously, the crates sat in the middle like cows lying down in the face of bad weather.
One of the crew standing on the edge saw him and started to point and yell as Nicholai, exhausted, swam for the shore, where he just lay on the rough stones, unable to move.
“Thought you were a goner,” Tasser said, standing over him.
“So did I.”
“Glad you made it.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, you have the rest of my dough.”
On that sentimental note, he pulled Nicholai to his feet.
They spent the next three days resting, repairing the damaged rafts and oars, and perusing the rough map of the next stretch of the river.
“This so-called map is useless,” Nicholai said.
So Tasser and Nicholai walked downstream, climbed a steep cliff on the right bank, and confirmed their worst fear: an enormous fall, higher than the one that nearly killed them, loomed just downstream.
“We can’t run that,” Nicholai said.
“Nope.”
They would have to go around it. With only nine men, a portage would be long and arduous, but they had no choice. So they went back and began the long task of disassembling the rafts and hewing poles with which to heft the crates. This took two more days – making an unplanned delay of five days – so dwindling supplies became a concern. With no villages in the wilderness of the Lekang River gorges in which to buy food, they would have to cut rations, a serious problem with the increase in labor that the portage would extract.
But no one complained about these hardships, when weighed against the terror of another run down worse rapids. The men worked steadily, and in two days they were ready to set out.
For three days they worked in relay teams, hefting, pulling, dragging, and pushing the rafts’ logs up the slope beside the massive waterfall, then lowering them down using ropes wrapped around trees as counterweights. Then, while two of the crewmen reassembled the rafts, the other six men carried the heavy crates with their lethal cargo over the same route.
To the extent that one can enjoy grueling physical labor, Nicholai did so. The battle against the physics of hauling heavy material up and down a mountain and the struggle against the limitations of his own body and spirit seemed simple and clean as opposed to the more underhanded conflicts of his mission.
No deception was involved in this, just the direct application of muscle and sweat, determination and brains. Nicholai found it to be a cleansing process – even the sharp edge of hunger that came on the second day seemed only to sharpen his senses and purge the malaise that he only now realized had set in after leaving Solange.
And the Tibetan crewmen were a marvel of cheerfulness and stamina. Having begun their working lives as sherpas, lugging heavy baggage on the slopes of the Himalayas, they were not daunted by this task and seemed to find the complexities of maneuvering the loads to be a pleasant intellectual as well as physical challenge. They loved to solve the problems of weight and counterweight using complicated arrangements of ropes and knots that fascinated Nicholai.
He resolved that, if he survived this mission, he would spend more time in the mountains and master the techniques of technical climbing.
At night the Tibetans would build a fire, brew strong pots of tea from the dwindling supply, and make soup that got thinner each night. Still it was a good time, resting sore muscles and listening to the tales of ghosts and spirits, sage holy men and brave warriors that the crewmen would tell while Tasser translated into colloquial American English.
Then Nicholai would sleep the sleep of the dead, waking only just before dawn, when the day’s good and hard work would begin again. He was almost disappointed when, after three days, the portage was accomplished, the rafts reassembled, and the journey downriver could begin again.
The river was gentler below these falls. Jagged rocks and shallows, with the occasional rapids, still caused problems, but in only two days, Tasser checked the cartoon-map and happily announced, “We’re out of goddamn China.”
They were in the French colony of Laos, and the river changed its name from the Lekang to the Mekong.
In an almost mystical way, the river itself seemed to recognize the change. It broadened, slowed, and darkened with the collected silt brought all the way down from the Himalayan foothills.
“Like us,” Tasser observed. “Brown and down from Tibet.”
The mountains that flanked the river became greener, verdant with jungle vegetation, and here and there a bamboo village, its houses on stilts against the seasonal floods, appeared suddenly around a bend of the twisting river.
They put in at one of these villages to buy food, and Nicholai realized that Tasser knew a little more than he let on.
“I don’t know what you got in those goddamn crates,” Tasser said, “and I don’t want to know. But if you’re taking them where I think you’re taking them, keep your lips zipped. These are Hmong people, and they don’t much like Commies. So don’t give them any of that “Comrade” shit, or they might take one of them curvy knives and lop off your head. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Another thing,” Tasser warned as he piloted the raft onto a sandy spot along the right side of the river. “Turn a blind eye to what you see here.”
He pointed across the river. “That’s Siam over there. Land of the Thais. Also land of the poppy. This here is prime opium-growing country, and the river downstream from here is a highway for dope. The Hmong grow it, so do the Thais. It’s how they feed their kids.”
“I understand.”
“You’d better,” Tasser said. “We smile, we buy our groceries, we get back on the water pronto.”
Nicholai stayed on the raft while Tasser took two men and went to buy supplies. Naked Hmong children happily dove off a rickety bamboo pier into the water. The women, in their unique black caps, sat nearby, kept a watchful eye, and sneaked shy glances at the tall European sitting on the raft. Nicholai heard dogs barking in the village and the ubiquitous bleating of goats and cackling of chickens.
Barely half an hour later Tasser returned with mesh nets full of bananas and other fruits, greens, rice, and smoked fish. Nicholai felt ashamed of his suspicions as Tasser gave the order to shove off and the raft swirled back into the gentle current. Then the captain handed Nicholai a bottle of clear liquid.
“Take a belt,” Tasser said.
Nicholai took a swallow and felt like his stomach, lungs, and brain were on fire. “Good God, man, what is it?”
“Lao-lao,” Tasser answered. “Hmong moonshine.”
Nicholai helped one of the crew build a fire in the charcoal stove and soon they had a delicious meal of rice, fish, and bananas. Then he took his turn at an oar, and when relieved sat on the edge and enjoyed the beautiful, verdant countryside, the green mountains and limestone cliffs.
Two days later they came into Luang Prabang.
NICHOLAI CUT an odd figure checking in to the small guesthouse.
His clothes were torn and mud-stained, his hair long and disheveled, his face brown as a nut and weatherworn. He ignored the desk clerk’s stare with an aristocratic insouciance and asked for the best room available, preferably with a view of the river.
“Does Monsieur have luggage?”
“Monsieur does not.”
“Will it be arriving from the airport, perhaps?”
“Probably not,” Nicholai said. He produced a handful of bills from his pants pocket and laid them on the counter.
“Passport?”
Nicholai handed over the passport indentifying him as Michel Guibert. It was a calculated risk, one that might send teletypes singing in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, but Nicholai doubted it. Luang Prabang was a backwater even in Indochina, and there were probably no alarm bells here to be rung. Still, French intelligence would no doubt have a presence here, but Nicholai was counting on that.
The clerk copied down the passport information and handed it back to Nicholai with a key. “Room 203 has a charming view of the river. Would Monsieur like a razor sent up?”
“Yes, please,” Nicholai answered. “And coffee, croissant, and the most recent newspaper available, if you will.”
The clerk nodded with satisfaction.
Clean and shaven, Nicholai sat on his small balcony and enjoyed the excellent croissant.
The pastry seemed at odds with the intense heat that was building in the late morning, but nevertheless tasted good along with the cup of strong espresso. It was all very French – even as the file of saffron-robed young monks walked by on their way back from the ritual morning alms solicitations.
A main thoroughfare of the old Laotian royal capital, Khem Kong Road ran along the riverbank and was lined with shops, restaurants, and French cafés. A blend of odors – steamed fish and crepes – spoke redolently of the town’s mixed culture. Ancient Buddhist temples stood beside elegant French colonial manor houses, the red-tiled roofs of which would not have been out of place along the Mediterranean Sea instead of the banks of the Mekong. Beautiful emerald green mountains rose across the brown, muddy river. It was a scene of great tranquility, in sharp contrast to the shipment of lethal weapons waiting on the rafts just a few hundred yards upriver.
Nicholai took another bite of the croissant and read his newspaper, a week-old copy of the Journal d’Extrême-Orient. He hadn’t seen the news in several months, but was not surprised to see that little had changed. Negotiations to end the Korean conflict dragged on, the Viet Minh had defeated the French at a battle near Hoa Binh in the north, a Cambodian nationalist demanded that French forces leave the country, then was forced to flee and was branded both a Communist and an agent of the CIA by the editorialist. In Saigon, the puppet emperor Bao Dai welcomed a delegation from the French film industry and -
He almost missed it at first, in the dull list naming the delegation: Françoise Ariend, Michel Cournoyer, Anise Maurent…
Solange Picard.
Solange was not in Tokyo but in Saigon. As a member of a French film delegation. Interesting.
Saigon, he thought.
How interesting, how coincidental.
Haverford must think me a fool.
Nicholai walked up the street to a clothier.
The heat of afternoon was on – the air was moist with the promise of rain. The dry season in Southeast Asia would soon be over, the monsoons would be coming on. With the temperature at least a hundred degrees and humid, Nicholai’s shirt was soaked with sweat by the time he went into the shop. He bought three cotton shirts, two pairs of linen trousers, a white linen suit, a pair of oxford shoes, and a panama hat and had them sent back to his hotel. Then he found another shop and bought a decent suitcase. Now he could simply pack, walk away from the suicide mission to take the weapons into the south of Vietnam, and go to Saigon into the trap that the Americans were setting with Solange as bait.
He could see the go-kang, and the stones moving, and he saw his way through.
But he couldn’t and knew that he couldn’t.
He had given his word to Yu, and he had to go and make contact with the Viet Minh agent.
NICHOLAI SAT in the back of a pedicab as it wound its way down Sisavangvong Road.
The cab dropped him off at the edge of an old Luang Prabang institution, the “Night Market,” an open-air bazaar with hundreds of small stands selling balls of sweet sticky rice, bits of fried fish, steaming cups of tea, and a few dozen delicacies that Nicholai didn’t recognize. Other stands offered delicate parasols, brightly colored paper lanterns, cotton shirts, trousers, sandals, candles, and little statues of Buddha.
The rich smells, sights, and sounds were a heady contrast to the austerity of the long river journey. The merchants loudly proclaimed the virtues of their wares or haggled with buyers, the acrid smell of charcoal fires competed with the aromas of sizzling chili sauces in open woks, and, even under lantern light in the dark alleys, the various merchandise combined to make a riotous panoply.
Nicholai easily edged his way through the crowd. At least a head taller than most of the shoppers, he was nevertheless inconspicuous. The Laotians were used to the French colonials and Nicholai looked and acted like one.
He came to a stand selling live birds. The birds were pretty and much too small to eat. Choosing a bird with electric blue and green feathers, he untied it and the bird flew into the night, albeit without the Buddhist prayer that freed birds were usually meant to convey.
Nicholai strolled farther into the market, drank a hot green tea, made a few small purchases, and then tried some fried fish in hot chili oil and coriander. He’d not quite finished it when a man sidled up and quietly said in French, “Follow me.”
They left the market through a narrow alley and Nicholai’s nerves tingled in this potential trap. But it was not unlike working through a tight chamber in a cave, and he calmed his mind and let his senses guard for danger.
They emerged from the alley into a tight dirt street. Nicholai smelled the distinct aroma of opium as he followed the man into a ramshackle building. It was dark inside, the front room lit only by the glow of the pipes. The smokers, sitting or lying around the walls, lost in their opium dreams, didn’t even look up, but Nicholai’s proximity sense alerted him.
The third opium smoker along the wall, in the stained black shirt, was there to kill him, if need be. Nicholai grasped the small ivory letter opener with the carved elephant handle he’d bought at the Night Market.
“Wangbadan,” Nicholai said in Cantonese.
Son of a bitch.
He saw the flicker of recognition in the alleged Viet Minh’s eyes before the man quickly recovered and asked in French, “What?”
The ivory blade flashed out of Nicholai’s sleeve and pressed against the neck of the supposed Viet Minh agent. He said in Cantonese, “If that man moves, I’ll kill you.”
The agent understood. He looked at the “opium smoker” and slowly shook his head. Then he said to Nicholai, “I didn’t see you buy that.”
“That’s right,” Nicholai said. “Where is the man that I was supposed to meet?”
“I am the man you -”
Nicholai pressed the point against his carotid artery. “I won’t ask again.”
“Dead.”
Nicholai felt more than saw the gun come out from under the “opium smoker’s” black shirt and he flicked the letter opener. The blade went straight into the gunman’s throat and he slumped to the floor.
The other Binh Xuyen took the chance and launched a knee strike at Nicholai’s solar plexus. He turned to deflect the blow, then crossed his hands, grabbed the man’s head, and jerked in both directions. The neck snapped and the man went limp in his hands.
Nicholai let him drop just as three men with machine pistols burst through the back door.
“I’m impressed, Monsieur Guibert.”
The boss of the Binh Xuyen gang was physically unimpressive.
Short and slight, with a receding line of nevertheless jet black hair, his left eye went off at an odd forty-five-degree angle, and it looked like the orbital bone around it had been smashed. He wore a plain khaki linen shirt, light khaki trousers, and sandals over white socks.
Now he contemplated Nicholai for a moment and asked, “Would you prefer to speak in French or Chinese?”
“As you wish,” Nicholai said in French.
“Do you know who I am?” the man asked in Cantonese.
“I imagine,” Nicholai answered, “that you’re with the Binh Xuyen.”
“I am not with the Binh Xuyen,” the small man said. “I am the Binh Xuyen.”
“Bay Vien.”
Bay nodded. “You should be flattered by my personal attention. I usually delegate these errands, but I was in town on business anyway, so… You appear to have killed two of my men, Monsieur Guibert.”
Nicholai knew that this was not the time to attempt a retreat. To back off would be to die. “Generally speaking, I do kill people who try to kill me first.”
“They disobeyed instructions, then,” Bay said. “I had hoped to accomplish this without violence. Simply have you sell your wares to what you thought were Viet Minh, pay you your money, and let you go on your way. But now…”
Bay shook his head with what appeared to be regret. “Please understand it’s only business.”
Nicholai knew that this development had rearranged the stones on the go-kang. His promise to Colonel Yu to deliver the weapons to the Viet Minh now seemed impossible to redeem, and his own death wouldn’t change the outcome.
He could almost hear Otake-sama’s gentle counsel. When the immediate situation is untenable, Nikfro, what do you play for?
Time, Otake-sama.
Play for the long game.
“Yes, poor business,” Nicholai answered.
“How so?”
“Fifty rocket launchers will make the Binh Xuyen very powerful,” Nicholai said. “So what would a hundred make you? Or two hundred?”
Bay Vien scoffed, “You can’t get that many.”
“Not if I’m dead,” Nicholai agreed.
He could virtually see Bay Vien thinking, as well he might. The Binh Xuyen would eventually have to fight the militias, other gangs, and perhaps the Viet Minh. They might even have to go up against their current ally Bao Dai and his regular Vietnamese troops in the future. These weapons could decide the outcome of a battle fought in the streets of Saigon.
And Bay Vien’s thinking, Nicholai contemplated, will determine if I live or die.
ELLIS HAVERFORD ALWAYS LIKED Saigon.
In the guise of an employee at the United States Information Service, he had been in and out of the city quite often over the years, and considered it a second home. To him it was the ideal blend of the best of Paris and the best of Asia-the food, the architecture, the wine, the fashion, the women -all without the gray winters and accompanying existential angst that often plagued the city on the Seine. Saigon was a sophisticated town with an easy tolerance for vice-its casinos were honest and well-run, its brothels cheerful, hospitable, and famed for the staggering variety of their courtesans.
And he liked the city’s bars. Saigon was a great town for booze and boozy conversations. The escalating war brought reporters from all over the world, always good for a laugh and a little inside information, always available for late-night card games and early-morning Bloody Marys.
Besides, Haverford liked the Vietnamese. He loved their kind demeanor, respected their long struggle for independence, admired how they had adopted the best of Western culture and adapted the worst.
Still, he hoped to spend as little time as possible there, praying that the “cold warriors” back in Washington would not step into the shoes of the French. He had fought in Vietnam before, and he didn’t want to fight there ever again.
Now he waited for Nicholai Hel, hoping that he would arrive with the spring rains.
NICHOLAI TOOK a separate pedicab down to the river, got off a half mile from where the rafts were docked, and walked the rest of the way.
Tasser shone a bright lamp on him as he approached.
“That you, Mike?”
“And if it wasn’t?” Nicholai stepped onto the raft. “A truck will be pulling up anytime now. We’ll transfer the cargo.”
“Not a minute too soon for me,” Tasser said. “These fucking Hmong give me the heebie-jeebies.”
“What will you do now?”
“Back to the high mountains,” Tasser answered. “See if any more crazy Brits, Yanks, or Frogs want to climb to the top of the world. Look for me in the photos – I’ll be the guy they don’t name.”
A pair of headlights came down the road. Tasser’s men offloaded the cargo onto the shore. Nicholai shook Tasser’s hand. “Thank you for everything. It’s been a genuine pleasure.”
“Same here.”
Tasser gathered his crew and disappeared into the darkness.
Nicholai walked toward the truck.
Bay Vien sat in the front passenger seat.
THE TRUCK ROLLED OUT of town in the morning, Nicholai in the front seat beside Bay Vien.
“Where are we going?” Nicholai asked.
Bay pointed east, across the river, up toward the mountains.
“Why?”
“You ask too many questions,” Bay answered, sucking on a cigarette. He was irritable, unused to the early hour and the jostling of the truck. Besides, the Binh Xuyen boss wasn’t thrilled that Nicholai insisted on coming along with the weapons instead of just meeting him in Saigon.
“Until I get my money,” Nicholai had said, “I stay with my merchandise.”
“I don’t pay,” Bay answered, “until your merchandise is safely delivered.”
“So I guess you’re stuck with me.”
Now Nicholai lit a cigarette of his own and sat back, enjoying the relative cool of the early morning and the streaking red shafts of daylight coming over the hills. Young boys were already herding buffalo down to the river for a drink and a bath, and women were collecting buckets of the muddy water to bring back to their village.
They waited twenty minutes for the ferry to return from the other side of the river, then the heavy truck carefully drove onto the floating platform. Thick ropes on the ferry ran through large eyebolts and then out to the harnesses of elephants, one on each side. A young Lao mahout kicked his elephant in the flank and the two animals started across the river, pulling the ferry along with them.
The ferry came to a shuddering halt on the opposite bank. Two large sheets of corrugated tin were thrown down for traction, and the truck rumbled up the slope and onto a dirt road that cut up through the forest.
They climbed for five hours, slowly making their way up the switchbacks into the mountains, where limestone cliffs punctuated the otherwise green hills. Fields of dry mountain rice broke up the jungle, while other scorched patches told of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture. Men, women, and children – most of them wearing loose-fitting black jerseys, baggy black trousers, and black turbans – were out on the burned fields, hoeing away the debris and getting the rich red soil ready for planting. Small, shaggy ponies grazed the edges of the burned fields.
“Who lives here?” Nicholai asked, risking conversation.
More awake, Bay was a little more gregarious. “The Meo. They came down from Sichuan two thousand years ago.”
Nicholai saw the rice fields, and small patches of potatoes and other vegetables. Then, as they climbed higher, he noticed a different crop.
Poppies.
“The Meo are also florists?” Nicholai asked dryly.
Bay chuckled. “The Viet Minh used to control the opium crop, now we do. I guess it’s caused some resentment.”
An hour later the road leveled onto a valley and then a broad plateau that led into a town – mostly wooden shacks and a few shops clustered around a few brick-and-tile buildings and an enormous colonial structure that looked as if it had been some kind of administrative center.
“The old French governor’s palace,” Bay said.
“Where are we?” Nicholai asked.
“Xieng Khouang,” Bay answered. “It’s about the only town up here. The French built it back in the 1880s, then the Japs took it. When they got chased out, the Pathet Lao had it for a while, until the Meo helped the French take it back.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Money,” Bay answered. “Why does anyone do anything?”
They drove through town without stopping. A mile outside of town they came to a large airstrip that had recently been bulldozed out of the terrain. An American-made DC-3 with French military markings sat on the strip, guarded by French paratroopers. Other soldiers, along with Meo men, loaded crates from trucks and carts into the cargo hold.
“This you didn’t see,” Bay warned.
He got out of the truck. Nicholai slid out behind him and followed him across the dirt landing strip to where a paratroop captain stood, supervising the loading. The captain saw Bay Vien, walked toward him, held him by the shoulders, and kissed him on both cheeks.
Then he noticed Nicholai. “Captain Antoine Signavi.”
“Michel Guibert.”
They shook hands.
Signavi stood just a shade shorter than Nicholai. He wore crisp camouflage gear, jump boots, and the vermilion beret of a paratrooper. “I have some beer on ice. About the best I can do up here.”
He led them just off the airstrip to a canvas canopy with a portable table and three stools. An orderly reached into an ice chest, came out with three bottles of Tiger beer, opened them, and set them on the table.
Signavi held up his bottle. “Santé.”
“Santé,” Nicholai echoed.
“Three more weeks,” Signavi said, “and this runway will be a river of mud. Unusable. The road up here too. Very difficult. I’ll be glad to be back in Saigon.”
He removed his beret, exposing a thick head of black hair.
“I have some cargo,” Bay said, “to put on this flight. It’s okay?”
“Sure,” Signavi answered. “We’re light this trip.”
“And two additional passengers?”
“You and you?” Signavi asked.
Bay nodded.
Signavi looked hesitant.
“In my area of business,” Nicholai said, “discretion is of the utmost importance. I see nothing and I say less.”
“I’ll vouch for him,” Bay said.
“You can understand,” Signavi said, “that this is all… sensitive. We’re fighting a war, someone has to pay for it, and the Reds in Paris are unwilling to do it. So one holds one’s nose and does what is necessary.” He jutted his chin toward the opium being loaded onto the plane.
Nicholai shrugged. “Who am I to judge?”
“Indeed,” Signavi said, his nuanced tone leaving no doubt that while he was going to tolerate this gunrunner for practical purposes, he nevertheless found it distasteful.
Nicholai wasn’t willing to allow the implied insult to pass. He asked, “Signavi, is that a Corsican name?”
“Guilty,” Signavi said. “Napoleon and I, we both sought our futures in the French army. We take off first thing in the morning. I’ll arrange beds for tonight. I hope you will both join me for dinner.”
Nicholai never ceased to marvel at the French ability to dine well under any circumstances. Here, at a secret airstrip in the middle of the Laotian highlands, emerged a lunch of vichyssoise, cold roasted guinea fowl, and a very acceptable salad made from local greens, all washed down with a decent white wine.
Dining accomplished, Signavi led them to a large barracks tent surrounded by concertina wire.
His proximity sense woke him.
He lay still and listened to the sharp click-click as the wirecutters snipped the fence, then to the sound of a man crawling.
Bay Vien was sound asleep on his bed by the tent wall.
Nicholai dove just as the blade slashed through the tent. He knocked Bay off the bed onto the floor, then got up and went through the tent door.
The would-be assassin was already running back toward the fence.
A klaxon sounded and a searchlight swept the ground. Nicholai heard Alsatian dogs bark and then one burst across the stockade ground after the man. The man leapt for the fence and became entangled in the concertina wire. He twisted in the wire, a grotesque acrobatic act, as the machine-gun bullets hit him.
Signavi, clad in satin pajamas, a pistol in his hand, ran out, and a moment later Bay Vien came out of the tent and looked at the corpse hanging from the fence.
“Viet Minh,” Bay said. He turned to Nicholai. “You saved my life, Guibert.”
“Just looking out after my interests,” Nicholai answered. He walked back into the tent and lay back down.
Bay came in. “I’m in your debt,” he said.
“Forget it.”
“I won’t,” Bay said. “It’s a matter of honor.”
Nicholai understood.
COLONEL YU KNOCKED on the door of Liu’s office and received permission to enter.
Liu looked up from the stack of papers on his desk. “Yes?”
“The Viet Minh agent who was supposed to meet Hel was killed.”
“Ah.”
“So Hel didn’t make the rendezvous.”
“Obviously.”
“There’s a report,” Yu said, “unverified, that he went with the Binh Xuyen.”
“Stay on top of it,” Liu ordered.
Yu left the room deeply troubled. If Hel was with the Binh Xuyen, he was either a prisoner or had willingly betrayed him.
THE PLANE FOLLOWED the Mekong south.
Nicholai watched out the window as the broad brown river flowed out of the mountains down into the plains of Cambodia, then broke into multiple tributaries as it entered the delta in southern Vietnam.
Looking down at the endless stretch of green rice paddies, cross-stitched with irrigation canals and dotted with innumerable villages, Nicholai knew that he had made the right decision to deal with Bay Vien.
Blockhouses and guard towers rose every two or three kilometers above the paddies, and Nicholai could spot military convoys patrolling the main roads. Not only was the Foreign Legion thick on the ground, but also the well-armed militias whose arms the French purchased from the proceeds of the opium in the plane’s cargo hold.
The French army bought the opium from the Meo, purchasing their loyalty as well. Then the army sold the crop to the Binh Xuyen, who monopolized the opium traffic in Saigon. The French used the profits to pay the militias and mountain tribes to fight a guerrilla war in the countryside, while the Binh Xuyen held Saigon for them.
We would never have made it through all this, Nicholai thought, with the shipment of arms.
It was the right thing to do.
He had a dull headache that throbbed with the pulse of the engines and was exacerbated by the engine fumes. The propellers were noisy and the plane rattled and bumped, and he was glad when he saw the sprawling metropolis of greater Saigon appear below.
But the plane banked southeast, away from the city and down the coast, and Nicholai saw what looked like a military base.
“Vung Tau!” Signavi shouted over the noise. “ ‘Cap St.-Jacques’!”
The plane made a rapid descent and landed on the military airstrip. Trucks were waiting, and Binh Xuyen troopers in green paramilitary uniforms hopped out and quickly loaded the crates of opium and rocket launchers.
“I’m off to a bath and a decent drink,” Signavi said. He shook Nicholai’s hand. “Perhaps I’ll see you in Saigon?”
“I would enjoy that.”
“Good. See you there.”
A black limousine pulled up. Two troopers armed with machine pistols got out and escorted Bay and Nicholai into the back of the car and it quickly drove off the airstrip.
“Where is the cargo going?” Nicholai asked.
“The opium, to our processing plant in Cholon,” Bay answered. “The weapons, somewhere safe.”
“Until I’ve been paid,” Nicholai said, “the rocket launchers are still my property, and as such, I have a right to know where they are.”
Bay nodded. “Fair enough. They’re going to the Rung Sat – ‘the Swamp of the Assassins.’ ”
“Colorful.”
“It’s the base of the Binh Xuyen,” Bay said, smiling. “Remember, we started as ‘river pirates.’ Your property will be quite safe there.”
“When do I get paid?” Nicholai asked.
“Do you have an account in Saigon?”
“I prefer cash.”
“As you wish,” Bay said. “It’s nothing to me. I’ll arrange for payment tomorrow. Meet me at my casino, Le Grand Monde.”
“What do I have as security?”
Bay turned and glared at him. “My word.”
SAIGON WAS beautiful.
Nicholai thought the city’s sobriquet as “the Pearl of the Orient” was perfectly justified as he rode in a blue Renault taxi down the Rue Catinat.
The broad boulevard – lined with plane trees, studded with sidewalk cafés, bars, restaurants, expensive shops, and exclusive hotels – seemed a perfect blend of French and Asian culture, as if someone had chosen the best of both and placed them in happy harmony, side by side.
Vietnamese police, in their distinctive white uniforms, stoically struggled to manage the swirling Citroën and Renault autos, cyclo-pousses, Vespa scooters, and swarms of bicycles that competed for the right-of-way in a chaos that was a true mixture of the French and Asian styles of driving. Honking horns, jingling bells, and shouts of good-natured abuse in French, Vietnamese, and Chinese contributed to an urban cacophony.
Child street vendors darted and dodged through the traffic to sell newspapers, bottles of orange soda, or cigarettes to customers momentarily stuck in a jam, or sitting at a café table, or just walking down the busy sidewalks.
The women were magnificent, Nicholai thought – slim, tiny Vietnamese in tight silk ao dais stopped to window shop, while the elegant French colons, dressed in fashion only a year removed from Paris runways, strode in their slow, long-legged gait to the unabashed, admiring stares of the café denizens.
The cab pulled up to the Continental Hotel, a broad white colonial building in the Beaux-Arts style, with its arched windows and pedimented doors. It was the apero hour, that time in the late afternoon when the privileged classes sought refuge from the heat and the day’s work, and all the smarter types gathered on the Continental’s broad café terrace that flanked the boulevard. Just across Catinat from the USIS office, the Continental was a convenient place to have a drink, exchange information and intelligence (to such an extent that the café was nicknamed “Radio Catinat”), or perhaps to find a companion to share a table now or a bed later.
Ellis Haverford looked through the anti-grenade netting to observe the new arrival as Nicholai unfolded himself from the backseat of the small car. He was dressed like a classic Southeast Asian colon, in the clothes that he had bought in Luang Prabang. Vietnamese bellboys in short white jackets and black trousers ran out to take his luggage and take it into the lobby.
I’m glad to see you, Nicholai, Haverford thought.
He had been reasonably sure that Hel would come to Saigon, but it was good to know he was right.
Nicholai walked past a rather surprising bronze statue of Napoleon to the reception desk.
“Monsieur Guibert?” The métis clerk smiled. He had received a call from Bay Vien himself and was appropriately obsequious. “Welcome to the Continental. It is our pleasure to have you.”
“Thank you.”
“Your room is ready,” the clerk said. “And Monsieur Mancini invites you to have a drink with him, if it is convenient for you. In the bar? Six o’clock?”
“Please relay my honored acceptance,” Nicholai said. Signavi had apparently wasted no time informing his Corsican colleagues of his arrival in the city.
Mathieu Mancini had come to Saigon after World War I, married a wealthy Vietnamese woman, and bought the Continental. Reputed to be the head of L’Union Corse, the Corsican mafia, in Saigon he was a confidant of Bao Dai’s.
And a friend to Bay Vien.
A bellhop took Nicholai to his room on the fourth and top floor. It was large and high-ceilinged, with whitewashed walls and simple but elegant wooden furniture. French doors opened onto a small, private balcony behind iron grillwork. A ceiling fan circulated the humid air, providing some relief.
Nicholai tipped the bellboy and then was glad for some privacy and solitude. He called room service for an iced beer, drew a steaming hot bath, and luxuriated in it for half an hour.
It was good to be in a city again and experience some luxury and sophistication that he hadn’t known since Shanghai. The contrast between the near-scalding water and the cold beer was a sharp delight, and Nicholai allowed himself to give in to the realm of the senses for a few minutes.
Then he evaluated the Go board.
He had advanced his position. I’m safely out of China, he thought, have funds – or will have tomorrow – and am in Saigon with Bay Vien as a patron and protector.
Good and good.
And Solange is likely somewhere in the city.
Better.
But my position is nevertheless precarious.
Haverford is sitting in the bar across the street, apparently unconcerned with being discovered. He knows I’m alive and where I am. Beijing and Moscow will soon know, if they don’t already, and might well send people to kill or kidnap me. Of the two, the Chinese are the greater threat as the Russians will have a problem getting agents into Saigon.
The “Guibert” cover has a short life. I need a new identity, and quickly, if I’m ever to get out of Saigon. And before I leave, I have things to accomplish.
But all that is several moves off, he reminded himself. The next part of the game is to see what Mancini wants.
The Corsican greeted him warmly.
“Monsieur Guibert,” Mancini said. He kissed Nicholai on both cheeks, patted him on the shoulders, and continued, “Welcome, welcome.”
Mancini smelled of cologne and tobacco.
“Thank you, Monsieur Mancini.”
“Call me Mathieu, please.”
“I’m Michel.”
The Continental’s owner was short but looked immensely powerful, barrel-chested with the big, sloping shoulders of a former boxer. A few strands of silver glistened at the temples of thick black hair that was slicked straight back. His off-white cotton suit and monogrammed white shirt were beautifully cut, and he saw that Nicholai noticed.
“I’ll introduce you to my tailor,” Mancini said. “Vietnamese guy at the ‘Botany’ shop, just down Catinat.”
“I would appreciate that.”
“You’re new to Saigon?”
“First time here.”
“You’re in for a treat,” Mancini said. “It’s a beautiful city, beautiful. So many pleasures on offer.”
And which, Nicholai wondered, are you going to offer me?
“Pastaga?” Mancini asked, using Marseille slang for pastis. He searched Nicholai’s eyes for any blink of incomprehension.
“I could do with a pastis,” Nicholai answered. Solange had covered the word with him many times and familiarized him with the thick yellow liqueur, a close cousin of absinthe.
“Ah, you’re from the south,” Mancini said.
“Montpellier,” Nicholai said, deciding to end the honeymoon. “But you knew that already.”
“I know everything, young man,” Mancini said amiably. “Come on, then. I won’t insult you with the crap we serve the colons. The real stuff is out here.”
As he led Nicholai out of the bar into a private garden, Mancini said, “Me, I’m from Corsica originally. But you already knew that. Did you also know that Corsicans make the best assassins in the world?”
“Is that right?” Nicholai answered. He wondered what the ninja might have to say about it.
“Take it as a fact.”
And a warning, Nicholai thought.
They walked into a narrow strip of garden where several older men sat around two white wrought-iron tables. The men all wore white short-sleeved shirts and either white or light khaki loose-fitting trousers. A couple of them sported broad-brimmed hats for protection against the sun.
Nicholai knew that he was looking at L’Union Corse.
Mancini took off his jacket, draped it on the back of a chair, sat down, and gestured for Nicholai to do likewise.
“This is my newest guest,” Mancini said as Nicholai took a chair. “Michel Guibert.”
He introduced each of the five men – Antonucci, Guarini, Ribieri, Sarti, Luciani – each of whom offered a hand with a gruff nod. Mancini filled Nicholai’s glass with pastis. The men looked on as Nicholai took the carafe of water set on the table and poured some in to dilute his drink. Then he raised the glass, said, “Salut,” and sipped. His familiarity with the pastaga seemed to relax the group, who sat back in the chairs, drank, and took the sun.
“So,” Mancini said, “what brings you to Saigon?”
“Business,” Nicholai answered.
“How is your father?” asked Antonucci.
Antonucci looked to be in his early fifties, and was as skinny as Mancini was stout. But the deeply tanned forearms under his rolled-up sleeves looked like iron, and despite his casual but expensive clothes, the man looked like he could be a day laborer.
“He’s well,” Nicholai responded. “You know him?”
“We’ve done business,” Antonucci said. “In the past.”
“Well,” Nicholai said, raising his glass, “here’s to the future.”
They drank a round. Then Antonucci raised his glass toward Mancini and said, “To my new neighbor.”
Mancini explained to Nicholai. “After years of trying, I just managed to acquire the Majestic Hotel, next door to Antonucci’s nightclub.”
“Your nightclub?” Nicholai asked.
“La Croix du Sud,” Antonucci said, then added pointedly, “In the Corsican quarter, on the harbor. Where all the imports and exports come and go.”
“You’d like his club,” Mancini said to Nicholai. “One of those pleasures we talked about.”
“Come tonight,” Antonucci said.
“Tonight?” Nicholai asked.
Antonucci leaned across the table and looked Nicholai full in the face. “Tonight.”
A little while later, Mancini and Antonucci went out the back gate and strolled across the broad Opera Square. On the other side, the Saigon Opera House loomed in all its French colonial glory. The other Corsicans had drifted home. It was that hour, “the hour of the pipe,” and these longtime residents of Saigon had acquired many local habits.
“What do you think?” Mancini asked.
“Smart young man,” Antonucci said, pausing for a moment to relight his cigar. “Maybe we can make some money with him.”
They walked across the square, quiet now in the torpid hour before the cool of evening would bring out young lovers, old strollers, people looking for relaxation and those searching for excitement.
In his lifetime Antonucci had seen many things. He had started life as a shoeless shepherd, but soon decided that a life of barefoot labor and drudgery was not for him. So he hopped a freighter to Indochina, jumped ship in Saigon, and within two years turned the gaggle of girls he pimped into a prosperous brothel. He used those proceeds to buy the Croix du Sud, the Southern Cross, which turned a profit of its own but really served to launder the money he made with Mancini smuggling heroin and gold into Marseille.
They bought the heroin directly from the French army. Bay Vien bought the bulk of it, but La Corse purchased the surplus. The profits were enormous, even after the hefty cut that went to Bao Dai. They used the money to buy yet more clubs, restaurants, and hotels. Mancini had the Continental and now the Majestic, Luciani owned the Palace. It wouldn’t be long before the Corsicans had a monopoly on Saigon’s hosting business. Their children, or at least their grandchildren, would be restaurateurs and hoteliers instead of dope and currency smugglers.
It was a good life, and he had survived the French, then the Japanese, briefly the British (who were fools anyway), and then the French again. Now the French, desperate for allies, turned a blind eye to the heroin, and the Corsicans had forged a working relationship with the Binh Xuyen and Bao Dai.
All this could end if the Communists won and took over the country, but still Antonucci thought he could work out an accommodation with them. Asia was Asia, and life would go on as usual. Communist or no, men would still want women and money.
Corsica had been conquered by everybody – Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Normans, French, Germans – and the Corsicans were used to working out a way of living with all of them. It was a national trait, an innate talent.
But now the Americans were edging out the French, and that was a different story. Les amerloques, the “crazy Americans,” were impractical, puritanical, and moralistic. They would seek to dump Bao Dai and put in their own man, sweep the carpet clean.
And now this young Guibert had turned up and the rumor was that he had sold a shipment of stolen American arms to Bay Vien. “We should find out more about this Guibert. Use the Belgian dwarf, I can’t think of his name…”
“De Lhandes,” Mancini said. “Odd little fellow. But he seems to sniff out everything.”
“Useful.”
“Very useful.”
Guibert might be just what he claims to be, the heir to his family’s gunrunning business. But then again, perhaps he is an agent of French intelligence. The Deuxième Bureau, SDECE, or perhaps the Sûreté. Or does he serve the Americans, as so much of the world seems to do these days? Maybe he is simply a young man on the make. In which case we can make some money together.
“I already did,” Mancini answered. “Even before he arrived. The dwarf says that he appears to be who he says he is. Bay Vien’s people say the same thing. I had his room searched while we were having pastaga.”
We shall see, Antonucci thought. He looked at Mancini and uttered the ancient words. “Per tu amicu.”
“Per tu amicu,” Mancini ritually responded.
For your friendship.
HIS ROOM HAD BEEN tossed.
Carefully and professionally, Nicholai observed, but tossed nevertheless. Before leaving the room he had plucked a hair from his head and placed it across two drawers on his bureau, and now the hair was gone.
It didn’t matter – they would find nothing they weren’t supposed to find.
Had Mancini ordered it? Probably, although it could have been the French, who had a veritable alphabet soup of police and intelligence services in Saigon, none of whom were known to be overly respectful of privacy.
And the Corsican mob expects my presence at La Croix du Sud tonight. For what purpose? To be grilled, seduced, observed, threatened, perhaps assassinated? Again, it didn’t matter -to complete his assignment he would have to do business in Saigon, and the Corsicans had made it very clear that he couldn’t do business in Saigon without doing business with them.
Leave it to later, he told himself. You have something else to do now.
He splashed some water on his face to wipe off the sweat and the slightly dizzying effect of the pastis, then went downstairs and out onto the street.
Rue Catinat was amber in the late dusk as the streetlights came on. Nicholai took a moment to orient himself. On one end of the boulevard was the harbor, on the other end the distinctive twin spires of the Cathedral de Notre Dame.
A five-block walk took him to a shop called International Philately. The man behind the counter was a turbaned Sikh. The three shelves of the glass counter held frames of postage stamps, most of them rare, many of them expensive.
“How may I help you, sir?”
“I was hoping,” Nicholai said, using the code that Yu had given him to contact the Viet Minh, “that you might have a 1914 ‘Mythen’?”
“Blue or green, sir?”
“Green.”
“Green” meant that he was under no immediate danger and that it was safe to proceed.
“I will need to check in the back, please.”
“Thank you.”
The man was gone for less than a minute and returned with a thin glassine envelope. He carefully opened it and showed Nicholai the block of stamps. Nicholai held it up to the desk lamp for inspection and said, “Yes, I’ll have them.”
“Five hundred and forty piastres, please.”
Nicholai paid him.
The Sikh returned the stamps to the glassine envelope, sealed it, and then slipped it into a larger, padded envelope that he handed to Nicholai. Nicholai put the envelope into his jacket pocket and left. He stopped at a newspaper kiosk, bought that day’s edition of the Journal d’Extrême-Orient and a packet of Cigarettes Nationales, then went farther down the street, found a table at a café called La Pagode, and ordered a beer.
He opened his paper, read for a moment until the beer – wonderfully cold – arrived. Then he took out the envelope and, using the paper to shield his hands from view, opened it and read what was written on the inside flap of the larger envelope:
One o’clock tomorrow, go to Sarreau’s Pharmacie. Buy two packets of enterovioform, then walk to the Neptuna Swimming Pool and wait.
Vietnamese women, stunningly elegant wrapped in silk, strolled slowly by, shy but fully aware of their effect. Then there were the métis – the mixed heritage of Asia and Europe – impossibly beautiful with their golden complexions and almond eyes, which in their glint seemed to say that East and West can definitely meet and that it is indeed possible to have the best of both worlds. And the occasional colon woman with blonde hair like Solange.
Nicholai felt a tinge of guilt along with the physical stirring.
But if the coming of night signaled a certain sexual excitement, it also meant danger, and the Vietnamese police and French army patrols also came out, a prosaic reminder that this beautiful city was also a city at war. The restaurants on the boulevard sported anti-grenade screens, and the eyes of the police showed not the usual boredom of merely walking the beat but an alertness to genuine threat. The Binh Xuyen rode up and down the street in their green Jeeps, a few with machine guns mounted on the back.
Nicholai finished his beer, left a few piastres, and headed out.
BERNARD DE LHANDES FOUND the Saigon chief of SDECE in his office.
Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage. Only the French bureaucracy, De Lhandes thought, could come up with that title.
Sans prélude, De Lhandes took the bottle of cassis from the desktop, helped himself to a glass, and folded his thin frame into a chair. The air around the desk was thick with smoke, and Colonel Raynal’s ashtray was already overflowing.
Raynal was a fat man with dark, heavy rings under his eyes. De Lhandes thought that both conditions came from his spending countless hours behind his desk, smoking cigarettes and eating bad food as he went over the stacks of reports that came through every day. If you were charged with keeping up with all the espionage in Saigon, you were charged with a lot.
“There’s a new player in town,” De Lhandes said. The Corsicans had asked him to find out what he could about this Guibert, and De Lhandes was in the business of buying and selling information. If he could do both at the same time, all the better.
Raynal sighed. There were already too many old players in town, a new one was the last thing he needed. “And who would that be?”
“Something called a ‘Michel Guibert,’ “De Lhandes said. “He turned up at the Continental.”
Raynal resisted the bait. “Probably just some businessman.”
“Probably,” De Lhandes agreed as he helped himself to another drink and one of Raynal’s cigarettes. “But he joined the Corsicans for their afternoon pastis.”
Raynal sighed again. A true Parisian, he despised Corsicans as a matter of social duty, and resented that his job forced him to at least tolerate, if not actively cooperate with, them here in Saigon. “What do they want with this… Guibert, was it?”
“It was,” De Lhandes said. “And who knows?”
Who does know, De Lhandes pondered, what L’Union Corse is ever up to? It has its greasy fingers into every pie. He slumped a little more into the chair and contemplated the slow circulation of the ceiling fan.
Raynal had a fondness for the Belgian dwarf, and he was useful. A few piastres here and there, a few chips at the casinos, a girl tossed in occasionally, it was little enough. And Raynal needed assets just now, especially the sort that warned him of newcomers.
“Operation X” – could we have come up with a less creative name? – was running smoothly and nothing must be allowed to interfere with that, he thought. If “X” failed, we could very well lose the war, with it Indochina, and with that any vestiges of a French Empire.
Personally he didn’t give a damn -he would much rather be drinking at a civilized boîte in Montparnasse, but professionally it mattered to him a great deal. His job was to defeat the Viet Minh insurgency in the south, and if that meant distasteful operations like the certainly distasteful “X,” then c’est la guerre.
And De Lhandes brought old news. Signavi had already called to report that this Guibert had apparently sold weapons to Bay Vien and had witnessed X’s operation in Laos. Raynal had questioned Signavi’s judgment in allowing Guibert to actually fly in with the opium shipment, but Signavi answered that Bay Vien had given him little choice.
“De Lhandes?”
“Yes?”
“Would you mind going around and having a drink or something with this Guibert?” Raynal asked. “Sound him out?”
“If you’d like, Patrice.”
“Please.”
“Of course.”
Raynal opened a desk drawer, pulled out a used envelope, and slid it across the desk. “For your expenses.”
De Lhandes took the money.
XUE XIN CLIPPED a vine away from the stone and looked up to see a novice monk approaching.
“What is it?” he asked, unhappy to be interrupted.
“I have a message for you.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I am instructed to tell you,” the boy said, looking puzzled, “that ‘the Go stones are pearls.’ ”
“Thank you.”
The boy stood there.
“You may go,” Xue Xin said.
He returned to his work and smiled.
Nicholai Hel was in Saigon.
DIAMOND RECEIVED THE CABLE and went straight to Singleton’s office. He cooled his heels in the waiting room for a good forty minutes until the receptionist told him he could go in.
The old man didn’t look up from the briefing book that he was reading. “Yes?”
“Hel is in Saigon.”
Now Singleton looked up. “Really?”
The boss was in one of his moods, in which every response came in the form of a single-word interrogative. Diamond continued, “Sir, he seems to have arrived on a French military flight with a shipment of weapons, rumored to be rocket launchers.”
That information made Singleton somewhat more expansive. “Where did the flight originate?”
“X.K.”
“Would that be an initialization of ‘Xieng Khouang’?”
“Yes, sir.”
Singleton thought for a moment. “Well, that’s not good.”
“No, it isn’t.”
It was especially not good, Diamond thought, as he hadn’t received this information from Haverford but from Signavi, who had phoned him shortly after Hel left Cap St.-Jacques. The Frenchman had asked him to find out everything he could about this Michel Guibert. Signavi was worried about Guibert’s alleged prior relationship with the Viet Minh, especially with the agent Ai Quoc. Signavi’s Vietnamese special forces troops had been hunting Ai Quoc for months, to no avail.
“Who is in possession of the weapons now?” Singleton asked.
“The BX,” Diamond answered. Seeing Singleton’s annoyed look he added, “The Binh Xuyen.”
“Hel is creative.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Do you have a better word in mind?”
“No, sir.”
Singleton sat back and thought. This Hel person is really quite remarkable, he decided.
Remarkable, unpredictable, and dangerous.
“Take care of it,” Singleton said.
“What should I tell Haverford?”
Singleton pondered Hel’s remarkable escape from Beijing. “Why tell him anything?”
He went back to reading the briefing book.
Diamond stood there for a couple of seconds before figuring out that he’d been dismissed. Feeling the receptionist’s contemptuous look on his back, he hurried out of the office and into the elevator, discovered that he was in a sweat, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
Then he realized that it was all working out. Hel would finally be terminated and…
But what if Hel talked to Haverford about what he had seen in Laos.
And what if Singleton ever found out that…
He left the office and booked himself on a military flight to Saigon.
The supposedly brilliant Hel had walked right into his trap.
CITIES, NICHOLAI PONDERED as he walked along Boulevard Bonard, are like women of a certain age.
The evening masks the signs of aging, smoothes over lines, shades decay, replicates the golden glow of young years. So it was in Saigon, which at night became a lady in a basic black dress, with diamonds around her neck.
Haverford was doubtless a fine intelligence agent, but he made a damn poor street operative, and his clumsy efforts to follow Nicholai were almost comical. Nicholai quickly grew bored of the game, however, and literally turned on him near the clock tower outside the central marketplace.
He looked to be alone, but Nicholai scanned the crowd for signs of other agents. It would be almost impossible to tell, he had to admit. They could be mixed among any of the shoppers or merchants in the busy pavilion. But he looked for the overly watchful, the purposefully disinterested, or anyone who made even glancing eye contact with Haverford.
Nicholai eased into the crowd, circled, and came up behind him.
“Don’t turn around,” Nicholai said. “And walk.”
“Easy,” Haverford said. But he kept walking. Nevertheless, he took the offensive. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried about you.”
“After setting me up to be killed? I’m touched.”
“I don’t know what happened in Beijing,” Haverford said. “We had an extraction team in place and then you just went off the radar.”
“You had an assassination team in place.”
“What are you talking about?” Haverford asked as they walked past stands selling everything from cold soup to silk parasols. “If something went wrong in Beijing, it had nothing to do with us.”
But Haverford had to wonder. Was it possible that stupid bastard Diamond had co-opted the extraction team in an attempt to terminate Hel? What are you thinking? he asked himself. Of course it’s possible. And now Hel blames you.
Nicholai herded him out onto the street. Boulevard de la Somme was busy with evening traffic. If Haverford was going to try anything, it would have been in the market. “You can turn around.”
Haverford, a look of hurt innocence in his eyes, turned to face him. “You have this all wrong. I don’t know what happened back there. Maybe Chinese intelligence made you, somebody flipped, I don’t know. How did you get -”
“You owe me money,” Nicholai said, “a new passport, and certain addresses in the United States. I’ll forgive the monetary debt, but -”
There it is, Haverford thought. Hel had done just what I figured he’d do. Amazing – and characteristic. “Nicholai, did you bring those weapons into -”
“I will require the passport and the addresses.”
“Of course,” Haverford said, “There’s no problem with that. The sooner the better, in fact. You have to go underground, Nick. The whole world is looking for you.”
Nicholai suspected that by “underground” Haverford meant “under the ground,” but in either case had little choice but to go along. “How soon can you get me the addresses and the papers?”
“Tomorrow,” Haverford answered. “Or the next day, at the latest. I’ll set up a meeting point -”
“I’ll tell you when and where,” Nicholai said. Then he asked, “Where is Solange?”
“I don’t know. Why -”
“Don’t lie to me, I don’t like it,” Nicholai snapped. “You brought her here, knowing I would come.”
“You have it all wrong, Nicholai.”
“Yes, I had Beijing all wrong, too, didn’t I?”
He saw a cyclo-pousse coming down the street, flagged it down, and moved Haverford out to the curb. “Get in.”
“I don’t -”
“Get in.”
Haverford got in.
When he turned back around, Hel had disappeared.
YU RECEIVED THE MESSAGE from Saigon.
Hel had made contact.
You are an interesting man, Nicholai Hel, he thought.
HAVERFORD SAT in the back of the cyclo-pousse and contemplated the state of Nicholai Hel’s mind.
Had he come to Saigon for Solange?
Or for other reasons?
And, if so, what were they?
As for Solange, how – and why – had she come to Saigon, and what was she doing? He recalled Singleton’s orders back in Washington. You’re clever young men. Lure him in.
Well, it looks like we both did.
NICHOLAI FELT AT EASE in Cholon.
The Chinese quarter of the city, it reminded him of a damper, poorer Shanghai in the old days. The little stands and small shops were the same, the neon signs the same, the smells of cooking over charcoal, the incense wafting from temples, the shouts, the laughter, the crowding – it all reminded him that the Chinese were great wanderers, pilgrims who took their culture with them and replicated their old cities in the new.
He walked along Lao Tu Street, the main thoroughfare, and felt right at home. Cholon was reputed to be dangerous at night, particularly for a kweilo, but Nicholai had never felt threatened even in the worst slums of Shanghai and he didn’t feel in jeopardy here, even as he turned off the street and walked up narrow alleys into a neighborhood of four-story tenements.
Again, they all looked the same – rectangular wooden structures with tiny balconies from which laundry was hung. Men in sleeveless T-shirts leaned against the railings, smoking cigarettes, women inside yelled domestic questions in an attempt to engage their husbands in at least some form of conversation.
On the street itself, young toughs in brightly colored shirts and tight slacks gathered on the corners watching for opportunities, but didn’t see one in the tall colon who walked as if he knew where he was going and what he was doing. And he greeted them in Chinese as he walked past. They left him alone.
Nicholai found the address he was looking for.
The tiny lobby reeked of stale opium smoke.
Nicholai walked up the creaking, slanting staircase to the second floor. The hallway was narrow and slanted, as if it was tired and wanted to lie down. A door opened and a woman, clad in the tight red silk dress of a prostitute, looked at him for a moment, then continued down the hall.
Nicholai knocked on the door of Room 211.
No one answered. He knocked twice more, then opened the unlocked door.
Leotov sat dozing in a rattan chair by the small window. The room was sweltering and tight, and Leotov’s bare chest was shiny with sweat. He wore a pair of khaki trousers and sandals, his face was sallow, and he hadn’t shaved for several days.
The opium pipe was in his lap.
He opened his eyes and saw Nicholai. His eyes were yellow and runny, but wide in the dreamlike state of the opium addict.
“Where the hell have you been?” he muttered in Russian. “I thought you were probably dead.”
“There were moments when we shared that opinion.”
“I’ve been here for weeks,” Leotov said bitterly, clearly blaming his opium habit on Nicholai’s lack of promptness.
“I was detained,” Nicholai answered. “I didn’t count on being so seriously wounded. It delayed me by weeks. Nevertheless, I apologize – it is good of you to have waited.”
Leotov slowly pulled himself up from the chair and shuffled around the room, as if looking for something but unable to remember what or where it was. “You don’t know what it’s been like,” he whined, “being on the run, having to hide in this hovel, never knowing when… I took recourse in the local vice.”
Nicholai could virtually smell the fear and paranoia coming off him. “I see that.”
“Superior bastard,” Leotov spat. “You and him, both superior bastards.”
The “him,” Nicholai supposed, referred to the late Yuri Voroshenin. But he was already bored with Leotov. “Do you have them?”
“I have them,” Leotov said.
As arranged in their encounter in Beijing, Leotov had taken Voroshenin’s passport and personal papers, including his deposit book at the Banque de l’Indochine in Saigon, where the Russian had not only an account but a safety deposit box.
“So?”
“I’m looking, aren’t I?”
He shoved aside some clothes on the floor and came up with a small leather portfolio that he held up in triumph. “Here you go. Here’s your precious papers. Bastards, the both of you.”
Nicholai took the portfolio and flipped through it. Voroshenin’s passport, several bankbooks, scribbled notes.
“Where’s my money?”
Nicholai took bills from his pocket and handed them to Leotov.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Leotov demanded.
“Our arrangement,” Nicholai reminded him, “was one-third now, the rest when I successfully gain access to the safety deposit box.”
The documents looked authentic, but there was no telling until they were put to use.
“When will that be?” Leotov asked.
“Tomorrow. I’ll meet you somewhere.”
“I can barely get organized to make it out of this room.”
“You get out to buy opium, don’t you?” Nicholai asked.
“A boy comes.” Leotov chuckled. “Room service.”
I should kill him, Nicholai thought. That would be the smart thing to do, and perhaps the kind thing as well. An opium addict is a loose cannon, a mentally incontinent creature who will open his mouth and tell anything to anyone.
He doubted that Leotov could, in fact, make it across the river to collect the rest of his fee for delivering Voroshenin’s documents, but a deal was a deal. “I can wire you funds here if you prefer. A neighborhood bank.”
“If I prefer,” Leotov mumbled, “if I prefer. Where is that damn boy? Do you happen to have the time? I seem to have misplaced my watch.”
Nicholai knew the watch had been “misplaced” at the pawnshop, or simply taken by the opium delivery boy or any other resident of the flophouse while Leotov was in an opium dream. He looked at his watch and answered, “Eight-thirty.”
“Where is that boy?” Leotov asked. “Doesn’t he know I need… I need that money to get out of this shithole, find a safe place, not looking over my shoulder every second…”
“I recommend Costa Rica,” Nicholai said.
Leotov wasn’t listening. He sank back into his chair and stared out the window. Nicholai took the bills clutched in his hand and stuffed them into his trouser pocket, giving him at least a chance of retaining them.
Then Nicholai took his leave.
He walked past the boy coming up the stairs.
THE FRENCH SAXOPHONE PLAYER licked her lips, glanced at Nicholai, and then wrapped them around her mouthpiece and blew.
Nicholai, seated at a front-row table at La Croix du Sud, couldn’t miss the unsubtle gesture, smiled back, and sipped his brandy and soda, the club specialty. The all-female band – twelve Frenchwomen in high-cut sequined gowns – were quite good at the Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey swing tunes.
Then Nicholai saw a gnomelike man, a dwarf with long hair, a red beard, and an enormously corpulent stomach, waddle his way toward the table on short, bowed legs. Sweat poured down his fat cheeks, and he looked like nothing more than a small, hirsute locomotive about to derail.
“No hunting there,” he said amiably as he sat down and jutted his chin toward the band. “That’s Antonucci’s private reserve.”
“All twelve?”
“He’s a virile little man.”
The saxophone player eyed him again.
“She’s just being friendly,” Nicholai said.
“She’ll get a beating if she gets any friendlier,” De Lhandes answered. “If you want a woman -”
“I don’t.”
The dwarf offered his hand. “Bernard De Lhandes, formerly of Brussels, now consigned to this gustatory backwater, where the charm of the women is in direct inverse ratio to the banality of the cuisine. By the salty tears of Saint Timothy, how a refined gourmand is expected to inflict a death from gluttony upon himself in this place I’ll never know. Although I try, I try.”
“Michel Guibert.” Nicholai lifted his glass. “Santé.”
“Santé.”
“Comment ça va?”
“As well as can be expected,” the gnome huffed, “considering that I just dined – if one wishes to call it ‘dining’ – at Le Givral, and all I can say is that whoever conspired to commit the aioli sauce must have been born somewhere in the less enlightened regions of Sicily – presumably in some village whose benighted inhabitants are congenitally deprived of both taste buds and olfactory perception – as the balance, or rather the lack thereof, of the garlic and olive oil smacked of sheer barbarism.”
Nicholai laughed, which encouraged De Lhandes to continue his diatribe.
“The fact that I nevertheless managed to consume the entire boiled fish and a leg of lamb,” De Lhandes said, “the mediocrity of which would have brought tears of boredom to the eyes of a perpetual shut-in, is a testament to both my tolerance and my gluttony, the latter of which qualities I possess in far greater measure than the former.”
De Lhandes was pleasant company. A stringer for several wire services, he was based in Saigon to cover “the damn war.” Over drinks, he filled Nicholai in on the status quo bellum.
The Viet Minh were strong in the north, and that was where most of the fighting was. They were weak in the south, especially in the Mekong Delta area, but still capable of staging guerrilla assaults in the countryside and terror attacks – bombs, grenades, that sort of thing – in Saigon. The legendary guerrilla leader, Ai Quoc, had gone into hiding, but the rumor was that he was planning a new offensive in the delta.
On the political side, Bao Dai was a French puppet, far more interested in graft, gambling, and high-priced call girls than in attempting to actually govern, much less win independence from France. If you believed the rumors – and De Lhandes believed them – he used the huge subsidies that the Americans paid him to buy real estate in France. He was also partnered with Bay Vien and the Union Corse, getting a profitable cut from the opium that the former sold in Vietnam and the latter shipped to France and then the United States in the form of heroin.
In exchange, the two criminal organizations helped him keep order in Saigon, including Cholon, the Chinese quarter on the other side of the Saigon River.
“Home ground of the Binh Xuyen,” De Lhandes said, “but the best food, casinos, and brothels.”
“And beyond that?”
“The Rung Sat,” De Lhandes replied. “ ‘The Swamp of the Assassins.’ There you never go, mon pote. Or if you do, you never come back.”
The conversation lapsed as they sat back and enjoyed the rather sexy orchestra. They weren’t alone in that. At the bar, a large and raucous group of what appeared to be off-duty French soldiers looked on in appreciation, grateful to see European women. At other tables sat men who looked like they might be journalists or government workers. Or spies, Nicholai thought, like De Lhandes.
The “stringer” was subtle, for a European. He had gently tried to sound Nicholai out, find out what he was doing, and Nicholai had given him little or nothing, beyond the fact that he was looking for “business opportunities.”
Now De Lhandes said, “Drugs, guns, women, and money.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said you were looking for business opportunities,” De Lhandes said. “The best opportunities in Saigon are in running opium, arms, whores, or currency.”
He looked for Nicholai’s reaction.
There was none.
The music ended and the band took a break. A waiter came over to Nicholai and said, “Monsieur Antonucci would like to see you in the back.”
Nicholai got up from his chair.
So did De Lhandes.
The waiter shook his head.
“Him,” he said, jutting his chin at Nicholai. “Not you.”
De Lhandes shrugged, and then said, “I’m going out for a night in Cholon, if you care to join me. I can be found at L’Arc-en-Ciel. Any cabbie will know it.”
“I don’t know.”
De Lhandes said, “We’ll make a night of it. A few drinks, maybe some gambling at Le Grand Monde. My pal Haverford is meeting me. Good man – he says he’s some sort of diplomat but of course he’s a spy.”
“It sounds like fun,” Nicholai said, “but I -”
“Oh, come along,” De Lhandes said. “Rumor is that Bao Dai himself will be there. Not a bad connection for a man hoping to set himself up in business here.”
“I’ll try,” Nicholai said.
He followed the waiter to the back room.
NICHOLAI SAT DOWN across the desk from Antonucci.
“You like my place?” the Corsican asked.
“It’s quite good, yes,” Nicholai answered.
The small backroom office was surprisingly cluttered. Somehow Nicholai had expected a neater, more businesslike atmosphere. The desk was a shambles of documents, letters, old newspapers, and overflowing ashtrays. A lamp, its shade stained with dead bugs, hung over the desk.
One of Antonucci’s thugs – a tall, thick man – leaned against the wall, the bulge in his jacket doubtless intentional. Antonucci relit his cigar, rolling it carefully around the flame of his lighter. Satisfied with the even burn, he turned his attention back to Nicholai and said, “You’re a young man. Ambitious.”
“Is that a problem?”
Antonucci shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
He waited for a response, but Nicholai knew that any response to such a wide opening gambit could only be a mistake. So he sipped his brandy and waited for Antonucci to move the next stone.
“Ambition is good in a young man,” Antonucci said, “if he is mature enough to know that with ambition should come respect.”
“Youth thinks it invents the world,” Nicholai said. “Maturity respects the world that it finds. I didn’t come to Saigon to change it or to disrespect its traditions, Monsieur Antonucci.”
“I am glad to hear that,” Antonucci said. “Tradition is that no one conducts certain kinds of trade in Saigon without paying respect to certain other people.”
So, Nicholai thought, the Union Corse already knows about my deal with the Binh Xuyen. Did Bay Vien inform them, or was it their fellow Corsican Signavi? Nicholai would place his money on the latter. “If certain men traditionally control, for example, the armaments trade – ‘men of respect,’ shall we call them – then that is one tradition that a young man would certainly wish to honor.”
“You are wise beyond your years.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Nicholai said, “what is the percentage on tradition here?”
“I am told that it depends,” Antonucci said, “on the particular cargo that is going in and out. But, say, three percent is traditional. So I hear, anyway.”
“Three?” Nicholai raised an eyebrow.
“Three.”
Nicholai raised his glass. “To tradition, then.”
“To tradition,” Antonucci said. “Per tu amicu.”
Nicholai downed his brandy and stood up. “I’ve taken too much of your time. Thank you for seeing me and providing me with your wise counsel.”
Antonucci nodded.
After Nicholai left, Antonucci told his thug, “Tell Yvette I wish to see her on the next break.”
Fifteen minutes later the saxophone player came into the office.
“You make eyes at strangers?” Antonucci asked her.
“No! I was just trying to be hospitable to the customers!”
He slid his belt from its loops and doubled it over.
SO, NICHOLAI THOUGHT as he walked out to find a cab, L’Union Corse wants its cut.
Why not? The cost of doing business.
He got into the back of the blue Renault, which took him down Gallieni Boulevard, across the Dakow Bridge, and back into Cholon.
The cab pulled up on Trun Hung Dao Street by a two-story art deco building with a gaudy mauve-and-green façade. Nicholai went into L’Arc-en-Ciel, through the long grenade-screened terrace into the restaurant, and upstairs to the nightclub. The bar was packed with attractive Chinese prostitutes in skintight cheong-sams who struggled to chat up customers over the loud Filipino orchestra’s dismemberment of Artie Shaw hits.
De Lhandes was at the bar.
“What are you drinking?” he asked Nicholai.
“What should I be drinking?”
“Well, they have Tiger and Kadling beer,” De Lhandes answered, “cold, but they make a mean gin fizz.”
“I’ll have one of those, then,” Nicholai said, taking some piastres from his pocket. “May I?”
“You’re a gentleman.”
Nicholai ordered and paid for two gin fizzes, then, in Chinese, politely declined the invitation of a working girl who tried to perch herself on his lap and offered carnal delights previously unheard of in the mundane world.
“You are a man of iron will,” De Lhandes observed. “A veritable fortress of restraint.”
“I will admit it is tempting.”
“Give in.”
“Not tonight.”
De Lhandes gave him a long evaluative look, then asked, “Or are you a man in love?”
Nicholai shrugged.
“Ahhh,” De Lhandes said, “not only a man of iron will and restraint, a man of fidelity. I am impressed and inspired.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“But I will doubtless yield to the temptations of the flesh,” De Lhandes said, “later tonight. If, that is, I have the cash to do so. It is a mournful state of affairs when the considerable girth of one’s masculine member is adversely affected by the regrettable slimness of one’s money clip. Alas, the unique nature of the rest of my physiognomy generally precludes amorous arrangements of a less commercial nature. Women find me a charming companion at the table but less desirable for the walk into the boudoir. Suffice it to say, I am therefore limited as to the menus from which I can select. That being the sad case, my sexual future depends on fickle affections of the little wheel at Le Grand Monde – Saigon’s finest temple to the gods of chance – in my unceasing attempt to make one vice pay for the other.”
“And do you?”
“Rarely,” De Lhandes said sadly. “If experience is the best teacher I am an exceedingly poor student. How was your chat with Antonucci?”
“Fine,” Nicholai answered. “He just wanted to warn me off the saxophone player.”
They both knew it was an evasion.
“He’s L’Union Corse, you know,” De Lhandes said, watching for Nicholai’s reaction.
“What is that?”
“Don’t play me for a fool, mon pote,” De Lhandes said, “and I’ll return the favor.”
“Tell me, then, do I have in you a friend, or a police informant?”
“I can’t be both?”
They laughed, and Nicholai ordered another round of drinks.
“You seem to know what’s going on,” he said.
“It’s my business.”
“I’m looking for a group of French film actresses,” Nicholai said.
“Who isn’t?”
“They arrived last week,” Nicholai said. “You wouldn’t know which hotel they’re at, would you?”
“Would I know?” De Lhandes asked. “I’ve parked myself across the street like a dog, hoping for a glimpse. The Eden Roc.”
Nicholai wanted to set his drink down and go directly to the hotel. She was so close. But he curbed his impulse and disciplined himself to take care of business. First things first, he told himself, then you can go and find her.
“Do you have an interest?” De Lhandes asked.
“Same as yours.”
“Not the same,” De Lhandes observed. “You have a chance, my friend. By the golden pubes of the village virgin, you have a chance.”
They finished their drinks and crossed the street to Le Grand Monde.
The casino was in a courtyard protected by a high stucco wall topped with strands of barbed wire. Outside, Binh Xuyen troopers patrolled on foot and in Jeeps with mounted machine guns. Guards at the entry gate stopped and gave them cursory searches for weapons or explosives.
“Saigon these days,” De Lhandes observed, his arms raised to shoulder height to allow the guard to pat him down. The guard nodded De Lhandes in, then searched Nicholai and passed him through. That accomplished, they went through broad doors into the enormous white building.
High-ceilinged and lit by chandeliers, the casino was a decent attempt at its progenitors on the Riviera and in Monaco. The thirty-odd gaming tables were covered in rich green felt, the furnishings, mock fin de siècle, were clean and well kept up.
The crowd, save for being predominantly Asians, could have been from the south of France, dressed expensively in the latest styles. The working girls, and there were many, were suitably muted in their nevertheless seductive attire, and the wives, girlfriends, and mistresses of the well-heeled men gracefully ignored their presence. White-jacketed Chinese croupiers worked quickly and efficiently, while larger men, obviously security, stood in the corners keeping watchful eyes.
The large room was filled with excited chatter, shouts of victory and curses of loss, the clatter of dice, the clack of chips, and the spinning of roulette wheels. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovered like protective coverage over the triumphs and disappointments.
Haverford sat at a roulette table. Giving Nicholai only the slightest glance, he pushed some chips onto the table and watched the wheel spin.
He won.
Bay Vien, resplendent in a sharkskin suit and a beautiful Chinese woman on his arm, stood and watched the action.
“Who’s that?” Nicholai asked.
“Bay Vien,” De Lhandes answered. “Boss of the Binh Xuyen. He and Bao Dai own the joint. Would you like to meet him?”
“Not especially,” Nicholai said.
“You will, sooner or later,” De Lhandes said, “if you’re going to do any business in Saigon.”
“Right now,” Nicholai said, “the only business I’m going to do in Saigon is at the roulette table.”
They went to the cashier’s window and purchased chips, then walked back to the table where De Lhandes promptly lost on his first try.
“By the hirsute sack of Saint Anthony!” De Lhandes cursed. “By the inexhaustible appetites of the daughters of the Dordogne! By the unspeakable perversions of the sisters of-”
“Not going well?” Nicholai inquired.
“I am condemned to a chastity born of penury,” De Lhandes answered.
Nicholai stepped up to the layout and watched the game. It seemed quite simple – players made bets based on the ball landing on a number from one to thirty-six. They had to choose to make difficult “inside” wagers on a specific number or a cluster of numbers, or more likely yet less remunerative “outside” bets on the even odds of the ball landing on red or black. The combinations of types of wagers seemed infinite, but a child observing the game could readily discern that the odds were always in favor of the house.
“I hope you have better luck than me,” Haverford said. He looked a little glum, a dwindling stack of chips on the table in front of him. He offered his hand. “I’m Ellis Haverford, by the way.”
“Un bon ami,” De Lhandes said. “A genial pal, for an American.”
“Michel Guibert,” Nicholai said, then added, “And what do you do in Saigon, Mr. Haverford?”
“Ellis,” Haverford answered. “I’m with the United States Information Service.”
“Do you dispense information,” Nicholai asked, “or acquire it?”
“First the latter and then the former,” Haverford said, enjoying the game. “And you? What brings you to Saigon?”
“The weather.”
Haverford laughed. “The ferocious heat or the stultifying humidity?”
“First the latter and then the former.”
“Are you going to try your luck?” Haverford asked.
“At…”
“The roulette wheel.”
“I might take a spin,” Nicholai said.
He started conservatively, placing a modest two-piastre “outside” bet on black, and won. Leaving his winnings on the layout, he added chips and placed three more bets on black, won, and then shifted to red.
The croupier spun the wheel, the ball rattled around and landed on 27.
Red.
Two more reds and a single shift back to black later, Nicholai had acquired a tidy stack of chips. A small crowd, driven by the herd instinct of gamblers toward a “run,” had gathered around the table. One of them was Bay Vien himself, who stood at the far end and regarded Nicholai with a look of slightly jaded curiosity.
Nicholai merely glanced back at him, but wondered when, and if, he would make good on his promise of payment.
Nicholai moved his chips onto the square marked 10. “Straight up,” he said to the croupier.
“That’s a thousand dollars, man,” Haverford said.
“Mon pote, the odds are-”
“Thirty-seven to one,” Nicholai said. “I’m aware.”
It seemed obvious.
Several people hastily placed bets on black; a few of the braver ones put money on a split between 9 and 10. The doubters among them laid chips on red.
“Rien ne va plus,” the croupier said, ending the betting as he spun the wheel.
The ball landed on 10.
“How did you know?” Haverford asked.
“Extraordinary,” De Lhandes muttered, “by the pope’s wrinkled scrotum…”
Nicholai shifted the pile of his winnings in a square layout on four numbers, 17, 18, 20, and 21.
“Pick them up, by the puckered anal cavity of-”
“Don’t be foolish, Michel.”
Nicholai looked across the table at Bay, who merely smiled, seemingly unbothered that Guibert was beating the house. Then again, Nicholai thought, he is unbothered.
“Corner,” Nicholai said. If the ball landed on any one of the four numbers, he would win.
Bets were quickly laid down for and against him.
“Rien ne va plus.”
The ball landed on 18.
“Cash out.”
“Pick them up.”
“A feast, I tell you, even in this colonial purgatory… and by the pubic hairs of the Mona Lisa, the women you could have tonight, piles of them…”
Nicholai pushed the chips back onto 10.
“… tits and asses like Cezanne’s hay bales, and -”
Bay looked at Nicholai and nodded, as if to say, Be my guest.
“-such a variety, a five-star Michelin sexual buffet, by the boiling hot spunk of -”
Nicholai looked back at Bay. “Straight up.”
“That’s madness,” De Lhandes said.
Haverford just shook his head. The gamblers around the layout scrambled to place counterwagers.
“Rien ne va plus.”
The wheel spun. The ball clattered, rattled, and bounced. Nicholai wasn’t watching the ball, however – he had his eyes trained on Bay, who met his stare with the same fixed smile. Nicholai heard the wheel slow and stop, and heard the crowd collectively gasp as the croupier announced, “Dix.”
Ten.
Nicholai didn’t move to pick up his chips or change his bet.
“Michel, you won,” he heard De Lhandes say. “Don’t be a fool, my new friend. That’s a lot of money.”
“Encore,” Nicholai said. “Straight up.”
“Mon pote, you are throwing your money away!”
“A fortune!”
Nicholai glanced over at Bay, who shrugged.
The croupier closed the betting.
The ball rolled.
Bounced…
Landed on 12…
And bounced onto…
Ten.
Bay turned away from the table, put his arm around his woman, and walked toward the bar.
Nicholai picked up his chips, worth a little more than $100,000.
Bay had paid in full for the rocket launchers.
The casino was abuzz with the newcomer’s amazing run.
Nicholai walked over to the bar and bought a round of drinks.
“Well played,” De Lhandes said.
“Indeed,” Haverford added dryly.
“By the blue veins on Jane Russell’s sainted breasts,” De Lhandes enthused, “that was spectacular! For a moment I thought that the admittedly fat-clogged arteries of my overburdened heart – which more resemble pâté de foie gras than actual blood-bearing vessels – were about to burst! Thor’s throbbing member, man, you terrified me! But I am happy, happy – no, overjoyed – for your exemplary good fortune. Santé!”
“Santé,” Nicholai said.
“No one beats this casino,” De Lhandes said.
Unless, Nicholai thought, the casino owner owes you a large sum of illicit money and found a clever and entertaining way to pay you.
The roulette wheel was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.
A commotion and a fresh buzz was happening around the entrance to the casino. The security guards made their way toward the noise outside. Through the main door, Nicholai could see a convoy of large, shiny black sedans pull up. Captain Signavi emerged, then a squad of Binh Xuyen troopers, machine pistols in hand, piled out of the lead car as other troopers hastily formed a cordon from the cars to the door.
“Could it be?” De Lhandes asked with some sarcasm in his voice. “A royal visit?”
The third car pulled up, troopers opened the back door, and a middle-aged Vietnamese man in a white dinner jacket emerged from the car as the guards, their heads on swivels, looked anxiously around.
“It’s Bao Dai,” Haverford explained to Nicholai. “The Playboy Emperor.”
He waved his fingers, miming a puppeteer.
Bao Dai turned and reached his arm back into the car, clearly to fetch another passenger in the backseat.
“I hope it’s his latest mistress,” De Lhandes said. “The rumor is she’s fantastic”
Nicholai watched as the woman eased gracefully out of the car.
She was fantastic.
Solange.
SHE WORE A BLACK GOWN with fashionably deep décolletage, and her blonde hair was swept up and off her long neck, with just one tendril carefully disarranged to flow down to her shoulder.
Solange took Bao Dai’s offered arm and allowed him to escort her through the cordon of guards, each of whom labored unsuccessfully not to stare at the tall, elegant Frenchwoman who was the emperor’s latest love.
“I heard she’s a ‘film actress,’ “De Lhandes said. “At least that’s what she calls herself.”
“I’d like to be in that movie,” Haverford said.
Nicholai disciplined himself not to slap his stupid face, but could not prevent the flush he felt burning his own cheeks. When it receded, he let his eyes meet Haverford’s, but if the American was ashamed, he didn’t show it.
“I had nothing to do with it,” he whispered to Nicholai.
If you didn’t, Nicholai wondered, who did?
“It’s good to be the emperor,” De Lhandes observed as Bao Dai and Solange came into the casino.
Nicholai watched as Bao Dai introduced Solange to various important men, watched as she held her hand out to be kissed, as she smiled, made small witticisms, and dazzled. She seemed very much at home in this society, a bit too comfortable for Nicholai’s tastes, and he was annoyed with himself that he felt so…
Face it, he told himself, the word is “jealous.”
He wanted to walk over and kill Bao Dai with a single strike.
The way the man pawed her, stroked her bare arm, signaling his ownership of her to all in the room. It was disgusting, and he was angry with her for allowing it.
Hypocrite, he accused himself.
You are a whore as much as her, you both sell yourselves, you are both playing roles. If she plays hers well, so do you, “Michel Guibert.”
“I don’t suppose we’ll be introduced,” De Lhandes said.
Haverford smiled. “We’re not high enough on the pecking order for that.”
De Lhandes sighed. “So I can only lust from afar.”
“Bad for you, good for Le Parc à Buffles,” Haverford said. The casino’s courtesans were well beyond De Lhandes’s limited means, but Le Parc offered a menu for all budgets.
Then she saw him.
Tall, she looked over her companion’s shoulder and spotted Nicholai. Only the most discerning observer could have noticed the small tremor of recognition before her green eyes moved on to a brief glance at Haverford, but Nicholai saw it.
He walked over to them.
Bay Vien looked surprised at the intrusion.
Nicholai glanced at Bao Dai but addressed his words to Solange. “Michel Guibert, formerly of Montpellier and Hong Kong. Enchanté, mademoiselle.”
“Enchantée, monsieur,” Solange said, her eyes warning him away before she turned her look to Bao Dai.
The emperor noticed the colon’s rude approach to his mistress but easily hid his annoyance. “Welcome to Vietnam, Monsieur Guibert. What brings you to Saigon?”
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” Nicholai said. “I’m starting a business – a manufactury.”
“Superb,” Bao Dai said. “And what will you manufacture?”
“I was thinking of marionettes,” Nicholai said, looking straight at Bao Dai. “You know… puppets.”
It was a deliberate insult and everyone who heard it knew it. But Bao Dai merely smiled and asked, “What sort of puppets?”
“French, I think,” Nicholai said. “Or do you think American?”
“I didn’t think the Americans were known for such things,” Solange said.
“Yes, their ventriloquists use them. They call them, let me think” – Nicholai looked directly at Bao Dai – “yes, ‘dummies.’ It’s quite clever, actually. The dummy appears to be talking but, of course, it’s really the ventriloquist. But if you didn’t know better, you’d swear that -”
“Yes, I think we understand the concept, monsieur,” Solange said, turning slightly to signal Bao Dai that she wished to move on.
“Well, best of luck in your business, Monsieur Guibert,” Bao Dai said. “If there is anything that we can do to facilitate your endeavor, I hope you will not hesitate to let us know. We always like to encourage entrepreneurs.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Nicholai said. “Even as far away as Laos, they speak highly of your cooperative nature.”
Bao Dai’s eyelids closed for just a moment and then opened again. When they did, Nicholai saw that his eyes were black with repressed rage. “Do you gamble, Monsieur Guibert?”
“A bit, Your Excellency.”
“He just beat the house for a tidy little fortune,” Bay Vien said.
“Indeed?” Bao Dai said, raising his eyebrows. “Perhaps, then, you would like to join me in a private game?”
“I’d be honored.”
“I prefer games that match player against player.”
“As do I.”
“Good,” Bao Dai said. “Actually, I’ve become very fond of the American game of poker.”
Solange kept the frozen smile on her face, but Nicholai could tell that she was livid. She stared at him with a look that said Just go away.
He smiled at her.
“It will be high stakes,” Bao Dai said, hoping to embarrass him.
Nicholai looked at Solange and answered, “I like high stakes.”
“No limits, actually,” Bao Dai added.
“Better.”
“I’ll get a table together,” Bay said, “in the private room.”
“Will you be joining us?” Nicholai asked Solange.
Word of the newcomer’s insult of Bao Dai and the impending poker game quickly spread through the house.
Bay Vien passed by Nicholai and muttered, “This game won’t be fixed, you know.”
“I trust you to see that it isn’t.”
He walked over to the bar.
“Christ, man,” De Lhandes hissed, “are you out of your mind? Insulting the emperor. He’ll have your throat cut. But by the love my mother would have laded upon me had she not been so horrified at what emerged from her womb, you have balls, Guibert. Clanging, great, magnificent balls.”
“What are you doing?” Haverford asked.
“Playing poker,” Nicholai answered. “What are you doing?”
“Playing poker, I guess,” Haverford answered. He walked off to find Bay Vien.
Bay was a popular man. A few moments later, Bao Dai pulled him aside. “I want him broken. Every last piastre to his name.”
And De Lhandes said to anyone who would listen, “By the glossy belly of Buddha, would you not love to be in that room?”
SIX MEN SAT at the round table. Nicholai, Bao Dai, Bay Vien, Haverford, Signavi, and the dealer.
Bay Vien announced the rules – the casino would deal, but a buck would rotate from player to player to determine the order of betting and set the game. That “dealer” could choose between one of two games, seven-card stud or five-card draw, the latter with jacks or better to open. There would be no silliness such as wild cards, and jokers were cut from the deck. Importantly, there were no limits on raises or stakes.
Nicholai sat with a squat glass of single-malt scotch straight up and looked at Solange, who stood over Bao Dai’s shoulder like some kind of good-luck fetish. It was demeaning, he thought, demeaning and cheap and far beneath her.
Unless, he thought, she is playing a role that the Americans have cast her in. Just as you are playing a part in their melodrama. But what is her role?
Bao Dai neatly stacked his chips into several piles. Haverford sat to Nicholai’s left, Bay to his right.
They cut cards for first deal. Bay won and chose five-card draw.
Nicholai picked up his hand.
Two hours later, the room was full of stale smoke and fresh tension. Haverford was all but out, as was Bay Vien. Signavi had a modest stack of chips in front of him, but Nicholai and Bao Dai were the big winners and headed for a showdown.
Nicholai found the game itself tedious beyond description, as he had for three long years in prison listening to the American guards play endless rounds of the childish game. Poker lacked nuance and creativity and was painfully puerile when compared to Go. It was a simple matter of risk analysis and money management, and basic mathematics dictated that five players over the course of a certain number of deals would basically receive the same hands. In that sense it was remotely similar to Go, as it involved decisions as to when to be aggressive and when to yield.
Nevertheless, he found the one-on-one battle against Bao Dai compelling. He was surprised at how badly he wanted to take the emperor’s money and beat him in front of Solange.
Speaking of a lack of nuance, he thought.
He picked up his cards to see that the deal had given him a pair of queens and a pair of tens. It was enough to stay in the betting for the draw, and he threw his chips in as Bao Dai raised the betting.
He got his card, the ten of clubs.
Bao Dai opened and Nicholai saw him and raised him.
Haverford tossed his cards on the table. “Not my night.”
Signavi looked hard at Nicholai, whose face was placid and unreadable. He grunted in disdain and pushed his chips in.
Bao Dai smiled across the table. “You’re bluffing.”
“All right.”
The emperor called and raised.
Nicholai and Signavi both saw the bet.
Bao Dai laid his cards out – a red flush.
“Full house,” Nicholai said, and swept up the chips.
Signavi swore in disgust.
Bao Dai only smiled, but Nicholai observed the slight flush of anger and frustration on his cheeks. He glanced up to Solange, who quickly turned away, walked to the bar, and fetched Bao Dai a fresh whiskey.
Nicholai looked at his own stack of chips. He had over two thousand piastres’ worth – about $120,000.
Bay Vien had the buck, ordered a fresh pack, and called for seven-card stud. The dealer shuffled and Bay Vien cut.
Nicholai looked at his two down cards.
It wasn’t promising – a four and five of clubs.
His first up card was a jack of hearts.
Bao Dai showed a queen of diamonds, and bet.
Nicholai stayed in.
The next round brought him the eight of clubs and Bao Dai the queen of spades. The emperor looked up, smiled at him, and raised by three hundred piastres. Nicholai tossed in the chips to see his next card.
A jack of diamonds.
“Pair of jacks showing,” the dealer said.
Haverford folded.
Bao Dai drew a deuce. Still the high hand showing, he bet another five hundred piastres, and Nicholai stayed in to get the six of clubs.
The emperor drew the queen of clubs.
“Three of a kind showing. Queen high.”
Solange’s eyes looked almost sorrowful. Bao Dai bet another five hundred, sat back, and looked at Nicholai. “Do you still prefer games that match player against player?”
Nicholai wasn’t sure if he was matched against a player, or against a player and the house, but he answered, “Yes, my preferences don’t seem to have changed.”
“So…”
Bay Vien folded.
Signavi also threw in his cards. “It’s not my night, I see.” He got up, went to the bar, and poured himself a Pernod.
“So it comes down to you and me,” Bao Dai said to Nicholai.
“As it was meant to be,” Nicholai said. Insolently, he looked directly at Solange, who turned her face away.
“The lady is tired, I think,” Bao Dai said. “Shall we make this the last hand?”
“Fine with me,” Haverford said. Bay and Signavi quickly assented.
Bao Dai raised an eyebrow at Nicholai.
“As long as there’s a winner and a loser,” Nicholai said.
“I think I can assure you of that.”
I wonder if you can, Nicholai thought, recalling that the emperor’s ally and business partner had ordered the fresh deck, owned the casino and the dealer. I’ve made a fortune tonight, and still have enough left to purchase a fresh start in life.
The emperor has three of a kind showing. Judging from his aggressive betting, he has another card down. I have only one chance to beat even his up cards – I have to draw a seven of clubs. The odds are overwhelmingly against me.
Bao Dai reached up and brushed the top of Solange’s hand.
Nicholai pushed his chips in.
The deal came.
Bao Dai reached for his down card.
Nicholai said, “Let’s neither of us look.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let’s neither of us look, Your Excellency,” Nicholai suggested as he pushed all his chips toward the center. “And let’s do make this the last hand.”
“That’s insane,” Haverford said.
Solange’s green eyes flashed like emeralds.
“He could already have four queens under there and know it,” Haverford hissed.
Nicholai was aware of that. He looked at Bay to see if he could discern whether the fix was in.
He couldn’t.
Bao Dai took a deep breath and then pushed his chips in.
“I see you,” he said. Then he looked to Bay and asked, “Is my credit good here?”
“Of course,” Bay said jokingly, but his face looked strained, as if he hoped that the emperor wasn’t going to do what he feared.
But he was.
“I see you,” Bao Dai repeated, “and I raise you two thousand piastres.”
“I don’t have it.”
“I know,” Bao Dai said pleasantly. “I warned you this was no limits. The sad fact is, you had no business being in this game. I played you like a… puppet.”
Bay looked disgusted. Signavi found a reason to look down at the table as Haverford saw something fascinating on the floor. They were all embarrassed for Bao Dai. He had humiliated himself as a man.
But Solange looked straight at Bao Dai, and her expression was one of contempt. It was ephemeral, it quickly shifted to a mask of indifference, but Nicholai saw it, and it was victory enough.
“Good night, then,” Nicholai said, and started to get up.
“Your credit is good here,” Bay said to him, glaring at Bao Dai.
“To the limit of two thousand piastres?” Nicholai asked.
“Exactly.”
Is Bay’s offer sincere, or is the deck stacked and he’s setting me up for an even bigger fall? I saved you from a bullet, Nicholai thought, looking at him. Would you set me up now?
Nicholai sat back down.
He looked at Solange, who looked back at him.
“I call your bet,” Nicholai said.
Bao Dai turned his down cards and showed his hand.
His first card was the queen of hearts.
Four of a kind.
He looked at Nicholai and his leer said, I told you that you had no place here. My hand, my pot, my woman.
Nicholai turned his remaining down card.
The seven of clubs.
“MY GOD, YOU’RE RICH,” De Lhandes observed.
It was true – Nicholai had taken enough money from Bao Dai to set himself up for life.
To his credit, the puppet emperor had taken his losses with a suave grace. Small wonder, Nicholai thought, he could easily replace the money with the funds he took from the Americans and his percentage of the gambling, prostitution, and drug business.
Still, it took courage to face down the powerful Bao Dai, and Michel Guibert’s name was on hundreds of tongues in Cholon before Nicholai even left the casino.
“I will arrange security for you,” Bay offered.
All that money, the crime lord thought. While the Cholon criminals were usually afraid to defy the Binh Xuyen by committing robbery on its turf, this amount of money could provoke a rash action. Someone might be willing to risk his life and the lives of his family for such a fortune.
“That won’t be necessary,” Nicholai answered.
“I suggest,” Bay said, “that you allow me to put your chips in the safe. I will arrange an armed escort to the bank for you in the morning.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Nicholai said. “And I accept.”
Haverford approached Nicholai and whispered, “That was stupid and dangerous.”
“I agree.”
“Tomorrow at the Sporting Bar. Five o’clock.”
“Very well.”
There was a bustle in the main room as Bao Dai prepared to leave. The emperor looked back at Nicholai, waved his hand, and waited for his guard to form.
Solange looked over his shoulder at Nicholai.
“Where shall we go now?” De Lhandes asked.
“To the Parc à Buffles,” Nicholai said, loudly enough for Solange to hear.
She turned away.
Momma, the brothel’s madam – alerted to this Guibert’s new wealth – was waiting for him.
“Monsieur Guibert, bienvenue,” she warbled, her chins quivering with the effort. “Felicitations on your triumph! Your pleasure is my pleasure.”
“Thank you.” My pleasure is your profit, he thought, but never mind.
“But this establishment is not for a man of your distinction,” Momma said, “you must accompany me to the back, which is reserved for our special guests.”
Nicholai could almost feel De Lhandes’s envy. “I assume my friends will be equally welcome, madame.”
“Of course,” Momma said, broadening her smile to encompass De Lhandes. “Any friends of Monsieur’s…”
They followed her out through a courtyard, past armed Binh Xuyen guards who kept an eye on a long line of soldiers waiting patiently for the less exclusive services. The brothel was a model of assimilation and Nicholai observed the diverse nature of French forces in Vietnam – paratroopers from the Métropole, Foreign Legion troopers from all over Europe, lanky Senegalese soldiers, and squat Vietnamese.
Momma led them into a separate building, ornately decorated in colonial fin de siècle. Nicholai found it grotesque and tasteless when compared to the spare elegance of Japanese geisha houses.
The House of Mirrors was an establishment so exclusive that only the very rich knew of its existence or could afford the quality of its services. Like the finest of French restaurants, if you had to ask the price, you had no place there.
Momma rang a small handbell and quickly a platoon of girls formed behind her in rank and file, a choice for every taste and predilection. Most of the women were Asians in tight, brightly colored cheong-sams or white satin ao dais, but a few European women wearing peignoirs stood literally head and shoulders above them. One had blonde shoulder-length hair and heavy breasts, barely concealed under the filmy nightgown.
The madam noticed that Nicholai’s eyes rested on her.
“That is Marie,” she whispered. “Belgian – like the French… but dirtier.”
Nicholai selected a Chinese woman instead. Her black, flowered cheong-sam was buttoned to her neck, her black hair pulled into a tight bun.
“Ling Ling will please you,” Momma said.
“I have no doubt,” Nicholai answered. “And please put my friend’s selections on my bill.”
“You are a good friend.”
“I am a man reborn,” De Lhandes said, scanning the line of women with the eye of a starving gourmand examining the menu at a four-star Parisian restaurant. He was in a torture of indecision, torn between a zaftig Slav from Belgrade and a Japanese who looked as if she’d been chiseled from alabaster. “One doesn’t wish to be perceived as a glutton, Michel, but…”
“I don’t mind spending Bao Dai’s money,” Nicholai answered. “Have both.”
“By the priapism of a pope, Michel!”
Ling Ling – although Nicholai knew that “Pretty Pretty” was obviously not her name – took Nicholai by the hand and led him to her chamber. He didn’t violate her privacy by asking her for her real name. The pseudonym was a small way of keeping what little she had left of herself for herself.
“Should I undress or would you prefer to undress me?” she asked.
“You can undress,” Nicholai answered. He was not deluded about the nature of this relationship. He didn’t wish the pretense of romance or seduction. This was a simple business transaction.
She unbuttoned her cheong-sam and hung it up in the small closet. Nicholai undressed, she hung up his clothes as well, and she then took him in her hand and went to her knees in a gesture of foreplay that Nicholai knew was a subtle health inspection. Satisfied, she pulled him down onto the bed. Nicholai was pleased that her body was thin and spare, what the Chinese describe as a “lean horse,” more a Zen garden than the lush, generous hothouse that was Solange.
Is she in bed with Bao Dai now? he wondered. Is she pulling the puppet’s strings, making him dance to her charms?
Nicholai was surprised at this flash of sexual jealousy. It was so… Western. Unpragmatic and foolish. He turned his attention back to the very lovely naked woman on the bed, looking at him expectantly.
“Let down your hair, please,” he said.
She reached behind her head and pulled out a cloisonné pin. Her black hair fell shimmering around her shoulders. Relieved that they could converse in Chinese, she was frank about ascertaining his other preferences.
“Would you like to begin with the Middle Way,” she asked, “then perhaps finish by Fetching the Fire from the Far Side of the Mountain?”
“Neither, actually,” Nicholai said.
“You do not find me attractive?”
“I find you very attractive,” Nicholai said. “But it is so delightful to hear your beautiful Chinese that I would find it most pleasurable to spend our time in conversation.”
She looked at him curiously, but chattered away. He made polite listening sounds and the occasional brief contribution to the conversation, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
Your rudeness to Bao Dai was stupid, he told himself, your anger at Solange unfair. Deliberately making an enemy of the country’s ruler was just courting danger, and as for your attitude toward Solange – did you want to drive her into another man’s arms?
You’ll be lucky if she ever wants to see you again.
He waited in the foyer for De Lhandes to return from his buffet. In a little while, the dwarf came rocking down the hallway on rubbery legs.
“Damn generous of you, Michel,” De Lhandes said, “to a fault, if I might say so, but if the indulgence of even recently made friends is a vice of yours, then I say hurrah for vice in all its variegated forms and twisted permutations, speaking of which -”
“You’re an information broker?” Nicholai interrupted.
“Yes,” De Lhandes said. “Do you have information you wish brokered?”
“I wish to obtain some.”
“And a generous discount for you, my friend,” De Lhandes said. “About whom, may I ask, which indeed I may, should, and must, in fact, if I am to be of service to you.”
On the taxi ride back to Saigon, Nicholai told De Lhandes what he needed.
“Your luck holds,” De Lhandes responded. “By my happily exhausted but cruelly abused male member, your luck holds.”
Let’s hope so, Nicholai thought.
SOLANGE PRETENDED that she was lying on the beach at Frontignan and Bao Dai was a small wave that kept washing over her.
The wave – finally – broke.
She waited for a politely appropriate spell of postcoital intimacy and mutual praise, then rolled over for a cigarette.
“He seemed quite interested in you,” Bao Dai said, getting up for a smoke of his own and a glass of scotch. “A drink?”
“Thank you, no. Who did?”
Bao Dai smiled indulgently. “Please, my darling, trust me when I say that I’ve had more than my fill of games tonight. We both know that I’m referring to your handsome fellow countryman.”
“That Guibert?”
“That Guibert.”
Solange got out of bed, slipped into a white silk robe, and cinched the belt around her waist. Then she sat on the Louis XIV loveseat and looked over at him. “Men do find me attractive. Am I meant to apologize for that?”
“Only if the attraction is mutual,” Bao Dai answered. “Was it?”
Solange shrugged. “You said yourself that he is a handsome man. The world is full of them. I suppose you could have me blinded…”
“You’re being glib.”
“What else should I be,” she asked, “when you’re being silly? I’m with you, darling, not with him. I’m a little hurt – I thought you noticed.”
He walked over and put his arms around her neck.
She hated his touch.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps it’s that he took so much from me tonight. I was worried that maybe he took you as well.”
“Oh, now you are being silly,” she answered, turning her neck to kiss his fingers. “Vous me faites briller.”
Later he went into his private study, picked up the phone, and ordered, “Kill him.”
NICHOLAI LAY ON HIS BACK on his bed and forced Solange out of his mind.
Focusing instead on creating a mental go-kang, he reviewed the state of play as it stood at the moment.
My position, he decided, is strong but ephemerally so. I have sufficient funds to launch and sustain my next moves, but what should those moves be? The possession of Voroshenin’s papers is promising but the promises must be fulfilled – a tricky prospect.
Nor can I rely on Haverford’s promise of a new passport. It could just as easily be a setup for another termination attempt, and in any case would still leave a trail that the CIA could follow. Then there are the papers I am due from the Viet Minh, but do I want them and the Chinese to also have a way to track me?
In either case, I would still be in my perpetual peripatetic prison.
But let them both think I need their passports.
Or that we do.
Solange had been so difficult to read. She would have made a superb Go player – maybe she will, he thought, if she decides to come with me and we manage it. But she had looked indifferent, icy, and angry in turn – furious, in fact, when I took the money from Bao Dai.
Was it an act? The theatrical skills of a first-class courtesan on display, or is she really with Bao Dai and through with me? Certainly she gave me not the slightest sign otherwise, but then again, given the situation, she had to be circumspect. Or was I the one exposed to the “theatrical skills of a first-class courtesan”?
His doubts surprisingly painful, he moved on to scan the position of the white stones that still surrounded him.
They were many and they were in motion.
Start with Haverford and the Americans. Despite his protestations to the contrary, it is still most likely that he intended me to be killed in Beijing and was surprised and dismayed that I survived. Now that I’ve openly surfaced in Saigon we’re both pretending, at least, to be friends and allies.
But will the Americans make another attempt?
If so, which Americans? It is most likely that Diamond was responsible for the attempt back in the rock garden in Tokyo (which seemed like another lifetime). Would he now make another attempt in Saigon, with or without Haverford’s assent?
Then there are the French, doubtless edgy at the thought of a stranger getting near their opium-smuggling operation. They will be suspicious, perhaps lethally so, and if the army isn’t moved to act, the civil authorities might be, considering that a mess will soon land on their desks as soon as it is discovered in Moscow and Beijing that Michel Guibert is alive in Saigon.
And what about L’Union Corse? The opium trade is the wellspring of their wealth, from which they draw to purchase their hotels, clubs, and restaurants. While they appear to be cooperative, soliciting as is their nature their “cut of the action,” “Corsican” is virtually synonymous with “treacherous.”
On the topic of treachery, he thought, can you really trust Bay Vien, a man who has switched sides before and doubtless will again? Will his albeit temporary alliance with Bao Dai cause him to betray you as well?
And, if so, to whom? Bao Dai is the obvious choice, but it is well to keep in mind that Bay, after all, is Chinese, although many generations removed from the homeland. But Cholon is Chinese, surely swarming with Beijing-controlled operatives, even if Bay himself isn’t one of them.
Beijing will certainly be coming for me.
As will Moscow. Even if Leotov has not already lost his nerve and contacted them, they will soon find out – if they haven’t already – that Voroshenin’s killer is in Saigon. The KGB certainly can’t be seen to let that go unavenged. They will be coming. If not here, then somewhere else, and they will be relentless.
“Michel Guibert” needs to disappear, and quickly.
Hopefully, he thought, Solange Picard will disappear with him.
But it all depends on what happens tomorrow.
With delicious irony, my future depends on Yuri Voroshenin.
He put the imaginary board away and went to sleep.
MICHEL GUIBERT WAS the talk of Rue Catinat.
Even the waiters at breakfast treated him with an increased deference, and Nicholai saw the staff and other guests subtly point to him and whisper.
He found his new status amusing.
So did De Lhandes. He arrived in the dining room looking remarkably fresh from the previous night’s excesses, sat down at Nicholai’s table, and sniffed disapprovingly at the fare.
“But, my friend,” he huffed, “this is shit, especially for a man of your taste and wealth. These Corsicans wouldn’t know cuisine if it crept up their anal cavities and warbled Piaf tunes. Look, they can even make a debacle of breakfast. Would you like a real croissant?”
“I suppose.”
“Come on then.”
De Lhandes led him outside and down to the corner of Rue Catinat and Le Loi to a place called La Pagode, where the outdoor café stubbornly refused to adorn itself with anti-grenade netting.
“The owners act as if there is no war,” De Lhandes said. “They consider putting up such vulgarities as the edge of a slippery slope. This, my nouveau riche friend, is how quality is preserved.”
Over café au lait, croissant – which were, Nicholai had to admit, delicious – and apricot preserves, De Lhandes slipped him an envelope. “Exactly what you requested.”
“And what do I -”
De Lhandes waved a small, dismissive hand. “On the house, my friend.”
“I can’t -”
“You can and shall,” De Lhandes said curtly. “Am I not allowed to return a gift in my own way, with what means I have at hand, by the ancient bells of St. Germain? I would have cited Notre Dame, but you’ll understand that I’m a bit sensitive about the Quasimodo association.”
“Thank you,” Nicholai said.
“You’re welcome.”
Nicholai was impressed that De Lhandes never asked why he wanted the contents of the envelope or what he intended to do with them.
It has been a long time, he thought, since I’ve had a friend.
Later that morning, Bay Vien personally picked Nicholai up to deposit his winnings in the bank. They rode in his personal car, armored, and escorted by machine-gun-wielding guards.
“You are a difficult friend,” Bay said on the drive.
“How so?”
“You embarrassed the emperor,” Bay said. “In his city, in front of his woman.”
My woman, Nicholai thought. But he said, “You helped me.”
“Everyone saw how you looked at her,” Bay said. “For that alone, not to mention the money, he could kill you.”
“More likely he would ask you to do it.”
“True.”
“And would you?”
Bay said, “I’d feel badly about it – you’re a good guy, for a colon, and you have balls. But don’t kid yourself, Michel – guys like you come and go, I will have to live with Bao Dai for a long time. So if he asks me to get rid of you…”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence.
“I would understand,” Nicholai said.
“Leave Saigon,” Bay said. “Get your money and get out. Tomorrow. Today if you can.”
“I have business here.”
“The rocket launchers?” Bay asked. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten your offer to procure more of them. But do it from Laos. You don’t need to be in Saigon.”
“I have other business here.”
“What kind of business?”
“My business,” Nicholai said.
“Please tell me you are not going after this woman,” Bay said. “I have a dozen blonde Frenchwomen -”
“As I said,” Nicholai snapped. “It’s my business.”
Bay regarded him for a long moment. “Do it quickly, xiao. Do it quickly and get the hell out, before I have to do something that I really don’t want to do.”
They arrived at the Banque de l’Indochine. The Binh Xuyen guards escorted Nicholai and his cash inside.
HE MET WITH THE BANKER, a colon in his mid-fifties, in a private office.
“I wish access to my safety deposit box, please,” Nicholai said.
Laval had heard of this Guibert. All of Saigon had. He said, “I’m sorry, monsieur, but I wasn’t aware that you had a safety deposit box with us.”
“I do,” Nicholai answered. “In the name of Yuri Voroshenin.”
He slid Voroshenin’s passport across the desk. Laval glanced at it and then looked back at Nicholai. “I am informed that Monsieur Voroshenin recently passed away.”
“As you can see,” Nicholai said, “you were apparently misinformed.”
“This is most irregular.”
“Monsieur Laval,” said Nicholai, “the Banque de l’Indochine is most irregular.”
Laval looked insulted. He sat back in his chair and then ran his long fingers across his high forehead. “Do you have any additional identification that might authenticate your identity, monsieur… whoever you are?”
Nicholai nodded, removed an envelope from his jacket pocket, and handed it to Laval. The banker took it, opened it, turned ghostly pale, and sputtered, “This is outrageous.”
“I agree,” Nicholai said. “I imagine Madame Laval would agree as well.”
“How did you get these?” Laval asked, stunned by the photographs of him in bed with a young Cambodian girl.
“Does it matter?”
“This is hardly the act of a gentleman.”
“Again, we are in perfect harmony. Those copies are for you to keep, I have others safely stored away. However, if this is not adequate identification” – he slid a stack of piastre notes across the desk – “perhaps these pictures might suffice.”
Laval hesitated. Then he took the stack of bills and stuffed them and the photos inside his jacket pocket.
He grudgingly led him to the vault and handed him the key.
Nicholai opened the steel box.
Bankbooks for accounts in Switzerland and the United States. In addition to the accounts were stocks and securities – a bit ironic for a Communist, Nicholai thought. He knew nothing of such things, but could hope that Voroshenin did, and had invested the Ivanov fortune wisely. Then there were codes to other safety deposit boxes. In Zurich, Bonn, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires.
Of course, Nicholai couldn’t know what they contained, but there was already enough money to fund what he wanted to do and for he and Solange to live in reasonable comfort and safety.
And, on the subject of safety, Nicholai was delighted to find what he had hoped to find, and what a man of Voroshenin’s profession would surely store in a secure place -
Passports.
One French, another German. With unintentionally exquisite irony, one was Costa Rican – the same nationality that the Americans had promised him. And, speaking of the Americans, Voroshenin had even provided himself with an American passport.
One “Michael Pine,” resident of Park Avenue in New York City.
Nicholai took the contents of the box, put them in his briefcase, and walked out of the vault.
Laval was waiting for him.
“Now I wish to open an account, please,” Nicholai said, handing him the American passport, “in this name.”
The account was opened. Nicholai kept enough for immediate expenses, deposited the rest, and instructed Laval to wire it to their branch in Marseille.
Laval obediently did so.
Nicholai wished him a pleasant day and left.
THE MEN SAT in Antonucci’s office.
Mancini, Antonucci, Guarini, Ribieri, Sarti, Luciani – the whole leadership of L’Union Corse sat around the table and listened to what Captain Signavi’s guest, the amerloque who called himself “Mr. Gold,” had to say.
“The so-called Michel Guibert,” Diamond said, “is an asset of an American anti-narcotic unit sent to infiltrate the Indochina- Marseille-New York heroin connection.”
The men were silent for a minute.
Finally, Mancini said, “This is what comes of doing business with outsiders.”
“He seemed like a respectful young man,” Antonucci responded. He took a cigar from its humidor and carefully lit it, not showing his fury at having been deceived by the young Guibert.
“It’s the times,” Guarini offered consolingly.
“There’s more,” Diamond said. “His handler is an American working in Saigon under USIS cover.”
“Haverford,” Mancini said. “I knew it.”
More silence ensued, more sipping of espresso, more slow, deliberate smoking. Then Mancini said, “The Haverford thing has to look like something else. A robbery… use some of the local boys.”
“What about Guibert?” Antonucci asked.
Signavi interjected, “He’s something different. He can handle himself.”
The men took this in.
Antonucci said, “I’ll give it to the Cobra.”
A DOUR, OVERWEIGHT FRENCHMAN was waiting for Nicholai in the lobby of the Continental. He slowly unfolded himself from his chair and approached Nicholai as he waited for the clerk to retrieve his room key.
“Monsieur Guibert?”
“Yes?”
The man’s suit hung off him like laundry. Dark circles under his eyes gave an impression of even greater colonial lassitude.
“Patrice Raynal,” he said. “SDECE. I would like a word.”
“The bar?” Nicholai suggested.
“Perhaps your room?” Raynal suggested. “For your privacy?”
They repaired to Nicholai’s room, where Raynal refused the offered drink, lowered himself into a chair, and got right down to business. “I don’t like you, Guibert.”
“Ah,” Nicholai responded. “Most people wait a day or two until they decide to dislike me.”
“They have not had the advantages,” Raynal said, “of receiving hostile wires from Moscow and Beijing demanding your immediate arrest and extradition, nor equally strident inquiries from Norodom Palace inquiring about the identity of a Frenchman who insulted the emperor and made improper advances toward his escort. Nor have they received the reports that you sold a cargo of extremely lethal and probably stolen weapons to the Binh Xuyen and that you took an extremely ill-advised airplane ride to Cap St.-Jacques.”
“The Binh Xuyen are your allies,” Nicholai said pleasantly.
Raynal’s voice was tired. “You see, publicly they’re not. The French government does not consort with pirates and dope smugglers. And just this morning, Guibert, before I even had a chance to spike my coffee with a fortifying jolt of cognac, I received word that a certain, admittedly minor Soviet functionary, formerly of the Beijing delegation, was dead in a Cholon flophouse, an apparent suicide but, jaded cynic that I am, I can’t help but wonder if your presence in the same city is merely coincidental. You do seem to have a habit of being in the vicinity of dead Russians.”
Leotov dead? Nicholai wondered, keeping any sign of it off his face. An overdose or the Russians, or the Chinese? “I suppose I have that in common with any number of, say, Germans.”
“Witty,” Raynal said. “I dislike you more every minute.”
“So are you arresting me?” Nicholai asked, tired of the jousting. Obviously, extradition to either of the Communist capitals would be the end of the game.
“No,” Raynal said. “We don’t take our orders from Moscow or Beijing. Not even from Washington, yet. But your business in Saigon is concluded. You managed to make a nice little lagniappe at the casino last night. Leave, Guibert, as soon as possible.”
“Bay Vien told me the same thing.”
“He was correct,” Raynal said. “I really don’t care what happens to you, I just don’t want it happening in my little garden. Not to put too fine a point on it, get out. Va t’en.”
He pushed himself up from the chair, looking even more wrinkled than he did when he arrived.
“One more thing?” he said as he walked to the door. “Leave His Excellency’s woman alone.”
Nicholai stepped over to the note that was set on his table. If Raynal had noticed it, he hadn’t let on.
He opened the envelope.
Ciné Catinat? À deux heures?
Unsigned, but in her hand.
He looked at his watch.
He had just enough time to make his rendezvous at Sarreau’s and then go meet Solange.
NICHOLAI WALKED up to the counter at Sarreau’s and asked for two packets of enterovioform.
“You are sick to your stomach?” the clerk asked.
“Otherwise I would not have asked.”
He paid for the pills and then went back onto Rue Catinat and walked down toward the Neptuna Swimming Pool.
The Vietnamese who had followed him from the hotel was still on his tail.
Whoever he works for – the Viet Minh or the French – should be informed of his ineptitude, Nicholai thought. Unless the point is to be discovered, in which case he should be promoted.
Nicholai strolled to the pool.
It was a blistering hot day and the pool was crowded. Children splashed and annoyed the serious swimmers attempting to do disciplined laps in the marked lanes. Nicholai lingered under a plane tree at the edge of the little park, lit a cigarette, and watched.
His tail made a show of “disappearing” into the crowd.
So many games, Nicholai thought, to market the instruments of death.
He waited for fifteen minutes, grew bored and irritated, and decided that enough was enough. As he was walking away from the Neptuna, a Vietnamese fell in at his side. The man was especially short, and clad in khaki shirt, shorts, and rubber sandals.
“You brought the police,” the man said.
“They brought themselves,” Nicholai answered.
“I could lose him easily,” the man scoffed. “But you…”
“I apologize for my stature.”
“Buy cigarettes.”
“It’s a bit late to stunt my growth.”
“Buy cigarettes.” The man jutted his chin at a tobacco shop and then he melted into the crowd.
Nicholai walked over to the tobacconist’s. The owner, an old man, handed him the pack. An address was scrawled on the back.
“Take a cyclo-pousse,” the old man snapped.
Nicholai went back out on the street to hail one of the bicycle-powered rickshaws. The first one in a long queue hurried to pick him up, Nicholai gave him the address, and the driver pedaled out into the swirling Saigon traffic.
Nicholai noticed the police tail get into the next in line, but the driver argued with him, with much yelling and hand-waving. By the time the police tail found a driver who would take him, Nicholai’s rickshaw had disappeared into the current.
The route led across the Dakow Bridge, over the Saigon River into Cholon, and Nicholai recalled the sad joke that there is a Chinese quarter in every city in the world except Shanghai.
This one was no different. Three-story tenement buildings painted in vivid greens, blues, and reds, their tiny railed balconies decorated with drying laundry, leaned over the narrow streets as if they might imminently collapse onto them. Every other block seemed to have a small Buddhist temple or a shrine to a lesser Chinese god.
The driver navigated the vehicle through the clogged, noisy streets and pulled up alongside what appeared to be a tailor’s shop, then refused the payment that Nicholai offered as he got out.
Nicholai went into the shop and was immediately hustled through a door into a back room. His proximity sense was on high alert, but discerned no danger. Apparently, the Viet Minh had not brought him there to kill him. Was it possible that they didn’t know about his transfer of the weapons to the Binh Xuyen?
The man who had met him near the pool was already there. He did not give a name, but said brusquely, “You did not make the rendezvous in Luang Prabang.”
“No,” Nicholai answered, “you did not make the rendezvous in Luang Prabang.”
“Our man was murdered shortly before.”
“I can hardly be held responsible for his negligence,” Nicholai answered.
“You have no feeling.”
“See that you remember it.”
The agent frowned at the distasteful necessity of dealing with this mercenary creature. “Where are the weapons?”
So, Nicholai thought, either they do not know or they are not certain. He needed time and space to complete his maneuvers on the board, just a little space to move the stones into position. “Where is my money?”
“When we get the weapons,” the Viet Minh agent answered. “Where are they?”
“In a safe place,” Nicholai answered.
“We have heard rumors…”
So the Viet Minh had heard about his airplane ride with the Binh Xuyen and the French into Saigon. Yet his making contact through the stamp shop had confused them. Otherwise they would have tried to kill me immediately, he thought. “You shouldn’t listen to rumors. It’s a morally debilitating habit.”
“You are playing a dangerous game,” the agent said. “If you have sold the weapons to the Binh Xuyen, you will answer for it.”
“I answer only to myself,” Nicholai responded. “In addition to the money, I believe there is also the matter of a new passport?”
The agent said, “You will get your money when we get the weapons and your new papers when the weapons reach their destination.”
“That would be to this Ai Quoc person?”
The agent didn’t answer.
Which is answer enough, Nicholai thought. He knew he had to take the offensive. “You will give me the money and the papers when I deliver the weapons to you.”
“That is inconceivable.”
“Nonsense,” Nicholai responded, “as I just conceived of it. You might think it improbable, inconvenient, perhaps impossible, but inconceivable? No.”
“I will pass along your request,” the agent said stiffly.
“It is not a request,” Nicholai said. “It is a nonnegotiable demand.”
Nicholai knew that he was acting far too Western – confrontational and direct – but he didn’t have the time for elaborate Asian courtesy. And he needed them to believe that the papers were crucial to him.
“Do not contact me again,” Nicholai pressed. “I will contact you within two days to tell you where and when we can make the transfer. If you do not have the money, the deal is off. If you do not have the papers, the deal is off. Do we understand each other?”
“I understand you far too well.”
“Good,” Nicholai said. “Now I have an appointment.”
He took a cyclo-pousse back into the city and had it drop him off near the Ciné Catinat.
SHE WAS SILVER in the reflected light of the screen.
Solange sat two rows in front of him, arranged her long legs in the narrow aisle, lit a cigarette, and looked up at the screen.
Simone Signoret starring in Casque d’or.
The film was a Belle Epoque crime story that held little interest for Nicholai, and he was glad when, after twenty minutes, Solange got up and left the theater. He waited a few seconds and then followed her out onto Rue Catinat. She walked quickly, with long strides, and didn’t look behind her until she came to the Eden Roc Hotel, where she checked her image in the glass doorway and saw his reflection.
Nicholai waited until she went in, then followed her into the small lobby, where he saw the Vietnamese desk clerk smile in recognition and hand Solange her room key. So he knew that this was her official address, although he suspected that she spent most of her nights at the palace.
She went into the elevator and Nicholai stood off and watched the brass arrow above the doors indicate that she went to the second floor. He went over to the small shop, purchased a Journal, and perused the headlines before he allowed himself to walk over to the stairway door to make sure that neither the desk clerk nor the concierge were watching, then went in and took the stairs up to the second floor.
He walked the corridor and found that the door to room 231 was ajar. He stood outside for just a moment, allowing his senses to confirm that the perfume was hers.
He went in and shut the door behind him.
Solange stood in the small living room.
“That was foolish,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “Foolish and jejune.”
“What was?”
“Your behavior last night.”
She’s beautiful, Nicholai thought. Her golden hair, a casque d’or indeed, soft in the muted afternoon light, one hip cocked in anger, her muscled leg set off by the high heels. She turned away from him, pried the bamboo window shades open with her fingers, and looked out onto the street.
“What did you want me to do?” Solange asked. “Starve? Live on the street?”
“I make no judgments.”
“How worldly of you,” she mocked. “How tolerant you are.”
Nicholai knew that this verbal slap was deserved. He asked, “Did Haverford send you here?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “A different one. He called himself ‘Mr. Gold’… he arranged for me to meet Bao Dai. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if you were alive, or dead…”
Diamond, Nicholai thought, is as unimaginative as he is brutal. He has all the subtlety of a bull. And yet bulls can be very dangerous when they turn, hook, and gore.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“It isn’t,” she said. “They sent me here to lure you, didn’t they? Even if we get out, they can use me to track you. You should leave me, Nicholai. Walk away now and never come back.”
“No.”
She looked back again toward the window, and Nicholai realized that she was afraid she’d been followed from the cinema. “I need to get back before the film is over.”
“To learn how it ends?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve seen it three times. The first two times, I cried.”
“And this time?”
“I will probably cry again.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her. Her lips were soft and warm.
Nicholai brushed the hair away from her neck, kissed her there, and was rewarded with a moan. Encouraged, he unzipped her dress and ran his hand down the warm skin of her back.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” she murmured. “This is crazy.”
But she shrugged the dress off her shoulders and let it slide down her hips. Then she unsnapped her bra and pressed her breasts against him. “You feel so good.”
Nicholai picked her up and carried her into the bedroom.
Setting her on the bed, he peeled the dress down her legs, revealing her black garter and stockings.
Solange opened her legs, nudged her panties to the side, and said, “Quickly.”
He unzipped his trousers and fell on top of her. Entered her with one thrust and found her wet and ready. She grabbed his buttocks and pulled him in deeper.
“Come in me.”
“What about you?”
“Just come in me. Hard. Please.”
She took control of their lovemaking, pulling him into her until she felt him swell and then climax, crying out.
Nicholai lay on the bed, watching her get dressed, elegant even in her postcoital deshabille. She sat on the edge of the bed as she rolled the stockings back up her legs.
“Breakfast tomorrow?” he asked. “I found a place, La Pagode, that serves quite good croissants.”
“A date?” she asked wryly.
“We can sit at separate tables,” Nicholai said. “Or will the emperor miss you?”
“He’ll be busy with affairs of state,” she answered. “Trying to decide if he’s run by the French or the Americans.”
“And what will he decide?”
“He won’t,” she said, standing up and pulling the dress up over her hips. She frowned, as if she thought her hips were a bit too broad. “The Americans will decide for him. They will decide for everyone.”
“Not for us.”
“No?” She smiled as a mother might smile at a small boy’s heroic fantasy.
“No,” he answered.
She leaned down and kissed him. “And what will we decide?”
“To be together.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
He had money now, enough money for them to live happily in a safe place somewhere. He told her all about Voroshenin, the connection to his mother and his family’s fortune, about the safety deposit box, the bank accounts, the passports.
“We could go anywhere,” he said. “France perhaps.”
“I would like that, yes.”
“Maybe to the Basque country,” he said. “Did you know that I speak Basque?”
She laughed. “That is very odd, Nicholai.”
“I learned it in prison.”
“Of course you did,” she said. “Yes, the Basque country is very pretty. We could buy a château, we could live quietly…”
Her face turned more serious than he had ever seen it. “I love you.”
“I love you.”
She broke from his embrace, went into the living room, found her purse, and took out a lipstick. Coming back into the bedroom, she sat in front of the mirror and redid her lips. “You smeared them.”
“I’m glad.”
She checked her image in the mirror, then, satisfied, stood up. Nicholai got up, then held her tight. She accepted the embrace, then broke it and held him at arm’s length. “I have to get back.”
“The film,” Nicholai said. “How does it end?”
Her laugh was enchanting.
The heroine watches them kill her lover, she told him.
NICHOLAI WAS EMBARRASSED about sneaking back down the stairway, but he understood Solange’s concern – Bao Dai would not make a complacent cuckold and he would take it out on her, not him.
He walked down the street to the Sporting Bar.
Haverford was already there, sipping on a cold beer. A small paper shopping bag was set on the empty chair beside him.
Nicholai sat down at the next table and both men looked out onto the street.
“You’re the talk of the town,” Haverford said.
“So I hear.”
“Bad idea for a man in your position,” Haverford said. “As a general rule, by the way, and understanding that you’re relatively new at this sort of thing, a ‘secret agent’ should try to avoid celebrity.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.” He turned to look directly into Haverford’s eyes. “Diamond brought Solange here.”
Haverford didn’t know. Surprise – and perhaps anger – showed in his eyes.
“He’s tracking you down,” Haverford said.
“Because…”
“You went off the radar, Nicholai,” Haverford said. “Because you know things that would be extremely -”
“I wasn’t intended to survive the Temple of the Green Truth, was I?” Nicholai asked. “Diamond arranged for me to be killed there.”
Nicholai would have thought it impossible, but Haverford actually looked ashamed. “It wasn’t me, Nicholai.”
“But the Chinese rescued me. Why?”
“You tell me,” Haverford answered. “You brought the weapons down here, didn’t you? You came to Saigon before you even knew that Solange was -”
“But you were here,” Nicholai said. “You knew.”
“I surmised,” Haverford corrected. “I didn’t know if you were alive or dead -”
“Odd, you’re the second person to say that to me today.”
“-but I did my best to enter the very interesting mind of Nicholai Hel,” Haverford said. “I sat at the go-kang and played your side. This was your only move, Nicholai.”
Haverford touched the bag sitting on the empty chair. “It’s in the bag, so to speak,” he said. “A Costa Rican passport under the name of Francisco Duarte, and the home addresses of your intended victims. Go now, go quickly, forget about Solange -”
“You’re full of advice today.”
“My parting gift,” Haverford said, standing up.
“What about Diamond?”
“I’ll take care of him,” Haverford said. “I have to fight a little intra-office battle, but I’ll win. You have your freedom, Nicholai. Enjoy it. Sayonara, Hel-san.”
He walked away down the street.
Nicholai picked up the bag and looked inside. As promised, there was the passport and, more important, the home addresses of the men who had tortured him in Tokyo, including Diamond, in what seemed like a lifetime ago.
He ordered a beer and enjoyed it in the oppressive heat. The temperature was in triple digits and it was as humid as a shower. The air was heavy, and the monsoon would break any day now. He hoped not to see it, that he and Solange would be on a flight out by then. Perhaps to some sunny, dry place.
It was tempting to think that they could go back to Japan. His deck of new identities might allow it, but he knew that the country had sadly changed and would never again be what it was. Japan was Americanized now, and he didn’t wish to experience it.
Besides, there was a little matter to settle – three of them, actually -in America itself before he could decide on a place to settle. But Solange would want someplace to be while he was away.
Maybe France, maybe somewhere in the Basque country.
After all, he thought, I speak the language.
Nicholai finished his drink, paid the tab, and walked back out onto the street. He had gone only a couple of blocks when he heard the car come up behind him.
The Renault motor sputtered as the car slowed down to match his pace. Nicholai didn’t glance back – he knew they were coming for him and it wouldn’t help to signal them that he was aware. A quick glance into a shop window told him that it was a blue Renault with a driver and two passengers.
Nicholai kept walking. Would they really attempt to snatch him here? In the late afternoon on Rue Catinat? And would it be a beating, an assassination, or a kidnapping? He brought the Paris Match up to his chest, out of their view, and, flexing his forearms, rolled it into a tight cylinder.
Then he saw the two men coming toward him.
One of them made a crucial mistake – he let his own eyes meet Nicholai’s. Then his eyes shifted focus, over Nicholai’s shoulders, and Nicholai knew that the men in the Renault were now on the sidewalk behind him.
So either it’s going to be knives – if it’s an assassination – or it’s a kidnapping, because the car was still keeping pace instead of just letting the men out and roaring off. Nicholai didn’t wait to find out.
He took care of the men behind him first. Swinging the rolled-up magazine as if he was digging an oar into the water, he struck the first assailant in the crotch, then pivoted and swung the magazine like a cricket bat and struck the second man in the neck. Both went down – the first in agony, the second unconscious before he hit the sidewalk.
Nicholai went into a deep squatting horse-stance and thrust the magazine back over his shoulder, striking the next man in the eye, dislodging the orb from its socket. The fourth man reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. Nicholai dropped the magazine, trapped the man’s hand on top of his own shoulder, and then spun, breaking the arm and spinning him to the ground.
Then he ran.
He sprinted onto a side street that went off to the right from Catinat. The car followed him, bullets zipping as the driver attempted to steer through traffic and shoot at the same time. Pedestrians screamed, fell to the ground, and ducked into doorways, trying to get out of harm’s way as bullets flew and Nicholai pushed through the crowd.
Racing ahead of him, the car crashed onto the sidewalk in front of him.
The driver steadied his pistol on the bottom of the open window and lined up his shot. Nicholai dove to the ground and then rolled until he came up under the driver’s door. The shooter shifted the gun back and forth, trying to relocate his target.
Nicholai reached up, grabbed the shooter’s wrist and yanked it down, breaking the arm at the elbow, then pushed up, slamming the pistol butt into the man’s face. Then he sprang up, grabbed the stunned man by the hair, and slammed his face down onto the window ledge. He opened the door, pulled the man out onto the sidewalk, and got in himself.
A second car roared up the street.
A man leaned out the passenger window, blasting a Thompson.
Nicholai flattened out on the seats as the bullets shattered the windshield and sprayed glass all over him. Grabbing the pistol in one hand, he reached out with the other, opened the passenger door, and fell out onto the sidewalk. With the riddled car as a screen, he belly-crawled along the street, then looked up to see a startled messenger on a motor scooter stopped in front of him.
“Sorry,” Nicholai said as he lunged and knocked the man off the scooter.
He hopped on and raced off.
The driver saw him and came after him.
Nicholai leaned as low as he could over the scooter’s handlebars as the bullets zipped over his head. Police klaxons howled over the shouts and cries of bystanders as he weaved in and out of traffic, the pursuing car hot behind him.
He needed to create some space.
His mind flashed to the Go board, where two ways of creating space existed. The traditional and expected move was to place a stone far from the opponent, which in this case would mean accelerating the scooter to try to gain some ground.
The other was to eliminate the opponent’s nearest stone.
Nicholai slowed down to let the car catch up a little and then cranked the handlebars, turned, and charged the car. Firing the pistol with one hand and twisting the throttle with the other, he rode straight at the startled driver like a kamikaze pilot determined to sell his life at high price.
The shooter got off one more burst before he dived out the door. The driver ducked behind the wheel.
At the last second, Nicholai swerved, missed the car by an inch, and drove out into the swirl of traffic on Rue Catinat. Melting into the chaos of rush hour, he made it down to the harbor, across the bridge, and into Cholon.
THE 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.
BAY 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.
THE 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.
THE 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.
HAVERFORD 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.
ANTONUCCI 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.
IT 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.
HAVERFORD 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.
“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.
BERNARD DE LHANDES 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.
ANTONUCCI 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.”
SOLANGE SAT on a stool in front of the mirror and carefully applied her eyeliner.
Bao Dai liked it a little thicker than she preferred – the emperor went for that smoky, cinema look.
Fair enough, she didn’t care.
But in the light of morning she wondered how much longer would he find her intriguing, attractive? What would happen when she had no new tricks to show him and he grew bored with the old ones? The same thing, she knew, that always happened. He would start to find fault, correct her grammar, criticize small things about the way that she dressed, and then he would say he was only teasing. He would stop laughing at her quips, grow impatient with the time she took to get ready, his eye would wander to the next new thing.
C’est l’amour.
She didn’t really care for Saigon. Too humid, and the air was always thick with intrigue. It was a hothouse, and she found it all rather suffocating. Sometimes it occurred to her to go back to France – not to Montpellier, with its memories, but to Paris or maybe Lyon. The Puppet Prince kept talking about a trip to Paris. Perhaps she could keep him on the hook until they were there, and then let him grow bored with her and leave her.
With a stipend, of course.
Is Nicholai Hel really dead?
The thought struck like a punch to the stomach. Her hand quivered and she had to hold her right wrist with her left hand to steady the pencil.
But is he really dead and is it my fault? Was our indiscretion discovered, did the emperor find out that his crown had horns and order Nicholai killed out of jealousy? No, she thought, if Bao Dai had done that he couldn’t have resisted telling me, or at least hinting at it. And his ardor in the bedroom has certainly not diminished.
Solange was familiar with the behavior of men who suspected they’d been cuckolded. They were sullen and ridiculous – wanting sex but not wanting to dip their pens in a contaminated inkwell. They alternately sulked and strutted, and then either went away or came into bed, depending on how she manipulated them, of course. But Bao Dai had been his usual cheerful, unabashedly lustful self.
Tonight she would go with him again, out to dinner somewhere and then doubtless to Le Grand Monde for more gambling. Just as doubtless to bed, where she had better devise some new treat to keep him interested.
That is unless he has found out, and then he could just as well beat me, or take me somewhere to be killed.
If Nicholai isn’t dead, where is he?
She was thinking this when there was a soft knock on the door. The maid, finally bringing the hand cloth she had requested an hour ago.
“Come in!” she yelled from the bathroom.
In the mirror she saw the bearded dwarf, De Lhandes.
“ARREST HER,” Diamond said again.
“For what?” Bao Dai asked.
“If for nothing else,” Diamond insisted, “disrespecting you.”
“That is a shame,” Bao Dai agreed, “but hardly a crime.”
The argument in Bao Dai’s private office in the palace had gone on for quite some time and the emperor was starting to tire of it. He did not like this American. Well, he did not like any Americans, but they were now paying the bills, would soon displace the French, so he was obliged to listen. This “Gold” seemed to have a personal grudge against Solange and Guibert. As to the former it was difficult to feel animosity, as to the latter it was virtually unavoidable.
“She knows where he is,” Diamond pressed. “Give me some men, let me take her and get the truth out of her.”
“And what if she won’t tell you?” Bao Dai asked.
“She will.”
Despite his better instinct, Bao Dai had to acknowledge that the idea had some appeal. The woman had, after all, cuckolded him, and he felt it keenly. Worse, his humiliation would soon be the topic for dirty whispers and salacious chuckles all over Saigon. So the thought of Solange under the tender care of the Tiger was not without its pleasures.
There were more practical reasons for seeking her help in locating “Guibert.” The flow of opium brought with it a river of gold. When added to the healthy inducements that the Americans were now paying, it all amounted to vast wealth. But the amerloques might stop paying if it became public that he was profiting from the heroin that flooded their streets.
His position in the palace was tenuous. The French might seek to replace him; if not, the Americans. Then there was his ally and partner in crime, Bay Vien, who was helping him route money out of the country through L’Union Corse. Already he had massive bank accounts in Switzerland and landholdings in France, Spain, and Morocco, against the time that the Europeans threw him out or, more likely, the Viet Minh won the war.
But his security would be threatened if Operation X were exposed, and it was certainly possible that Solange was in league with Guibert to do just that.
“Pick her up,” he said.
Diamond smiled. “Right away, Your Excellency.”
“But hurt her as little as possible,” Bao Dai said, more to soothe his own conscience than from any hope that this brutal man would calibrate his efforts.
“We’ll leave no scars,” Diamond assured him. “And her end will look like suicide. An overdose, perhaps. She wouldn’t be the first French actress to -”
“I don’t want to know,” Bao Dai said.
GETTING INSIDE the House of Mirrors unseen was as nothing, even in the daylight of morning.
Exhausted from the night’s exertions, whores sleep in the morning, soundly and sweetly, and the guards around the brothel were equally somnolent in the rising heat. Moisture masks sound as surely as dryness enhances it, and in the wet morning the Cobra was able to slip through the lax security.
It took time and patience, but what didn’t?
The prey’s room was at the end of the hallway. The Cobra already knew this but didn’t need to know, because the faint odor was discernible even behind the closed door. A Westerner simply smells different from an Asian, and there were no other Europeans in the brothel in the early morning.
The Cobra paused in the hallway and listened.
The prey was asleep, so this would be easy.
There were no inside locks on whorehouse doors, in case security needed to get in quickly to aid a beleaguered girl. This would be a simple matter of quietly opening the door, dispatching the deceased in his sleep, and leaving out the window.
The Cobra moved forward and pulled the knife.
HIS PROXIMITY SENSE alerted him.
Nicholai was meditating, trying to recover the long-lost tranquil state of his boyhood, when he became aware of the footfalls in the hallway.
So soft as to be almost undetectable.
The light gait of a tiny Asian courtesan? he wondered. Had Momma sent someone, despite his wishes to the contrary? He lay still and listened, allowed his proximity sense to focus on the target. As he did so, the steps stopped.
Perfect silence.
But Nicholai knew.
It wasn’t a whore, but a predator.
Nicholai slid off the bed to the side opposite the door. He flattened himself on the wooden floor and waited. The slightest trace of a scent came from the hallway.
But the door never opened.
The hunter had sensed the prey’s awareness and backed off, and Nicholai realized that this was no ordinary hunter.
THE COBRA COILED in the bushes outside the window.
The prey had been flushed, and if it fled, would come this way.
But the prey didn’t come.
The Cobra waited for a while, then sneaked away.
“YOU WISHED TO SEE ME, monsieur?” Momma asked.
“I wish to see Bay Vien,” Nicholai answered.
“He is hardly your butler,” Momma said, a tad annoyed, “and besides, he has asked me to see to your every need.”
“Very well,” Nicholai answered. “I need to leave. I have been discovered here.”
“Impossible!” Momma thundered, deeply offended. “No one in my establishment would breathe a word, I assure you!”
More likely it was De Lhandes, Nicholai thought, and I played the wrong stone and misjudged his character. I will deal with him another time, but for now this place has been compromised and I have to find another. “Madame, I must depart.”
“It is not safe for you out there!”
“It is not safe for me in here,” Nicholai said. “Did you send a girl to me a little while ago?”
“No, monsieur, you said -”
“Quite so,” Nicholai answered. “Did you send anyone?”
“No.”
“Well, someone came,” Nicholai said, “with the intent, I believe, of killing me.”
Whoever had come was a professional, Nicholai knew, who realized that he had been discovered and then laid a trap outside the window. He could sense him out there, and later, when Nicholai sensed that he had withdrawn, he had looked out the window to see that the bushes were bent down and the slightest trace of footprints were still extant.
There was something else lingering… something that his proximity sense warned him of…
Momma drew in a breath of apparent shock. “I am devastated, monsieur! Devastated! Désolée!”
“Apologies are unnecessary, madame,” Nicholai answered, “but I need to leave right away.”
“I will telephone -”
“By the frothing jism of Jove, let me pass, sir!”
Nicholai heard De Lhandes’s indignant voice echo down the hallway.
“I will have him -”
“Let him through,” Nicholai said.
A few moments later, an even more than usually tousled De Lhandes came into his room.
“I thought you betrayed me,” Nicholai said.
“I thought about it, believe me,” De Lhandes answered.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I’m not entirely certain,” De Lhandes responded, “and were I you – a tantalizing concept now that I think on it – I wouldn’t advance that query too much further less it impel me to change my mind – a great flaw of mind, by the way, this dithering to and fro – and market you like a hung hog in a boucherie. But what made you suspect that I had played the Judas?”
Nicholai told him about what he had sensed in the hallway.
De Lhandes frowned. “The Cobra.”
“While I usually find your non sequiturs charming -”
“There is a rumor,” De Lhandes said, “more of a legend, really, although the distinction between those two qualities is vague at best when one considers -”
“For God’s sake, man.”
”- of someone they call ‘the Cobra,’ “De Lhandes said. “Supposed to be absolutely deadly with a blade, and… this is not good news, I’m afraid… it is whispered in certain circles that the Corsicans are, collectively, the Cobra’s chief employer.”
“L’Union Corse.”
“Just so, by the cursed blood of Bonaparte, may it boil in hell,” De Lhandes said.
So it’s the Corsicans, Nicholai thought. Their first attempt turned into a bloody burlesque, so they decided to hire their best talent for the next attempt.
But why?
Realizing that this wasn’t the time to ponder that question, he asked, “Did you see her?”
“She said she will come to you.”
“And the papers?”
“Safely stored, Michel.”
DIAMOND LEFT THE HOTEL frustrated and angry.
The blonde bitch that had cuckolded the emperor wasn’t in her room.
He put men out on the Saigon streets.
Himself, he went to lead the search for Nicholai Hel.
BAY VIEN WALKED into Nicholai’s room at the brothel and said, “You have to leave now.”
“Not until I hear from her.”
“The Sûreté are coming,” Bay argued. “Don’t just think of yourself. You’re endangering everyone in this house. We’ll keep looking for her, we’ll bring her to you.”
It’s true, Nicholai thought. He had no right to do that. “Where are we going?”
Bay told him.
“What about Solange?” Nicholai asked. “She thinks I will be here.”
“I’ll get word to her,” De Lhandes offered.
“And my men will bring her to you,” Bay said.
Appropriately, Nicholai thought, to my hiding place – the Swamp of the Assassins.
THE RUNG SAT LAY southeast of Saigon, east of the mouth of the Soirap River where it drained into the South China Sea. A wilderness of swamps, mangrove forests, bamboo, and countless little tributaries formed an impenetrable maze to all who didn’t know it well.
The Binh Xuyen knew it well.
This was their birthplace and sanctuary, where their old pirate raids had originated and returned, the place from which their famed assassins emerged to slip into the city, kill, and then slip back again.
Nicholai lay in the bottom of the skiff as it came downriver then turned east on a small channel in the dense swamp. The terrain was surprisingly varied – now a flat, sun-drenched stretch of low vegetation and algae, then a dark, dense stand of mangroves, then a wall of bamboo. This pattern repeated itself for an hour, and then the boat slowed onto narrower channels, pressed hard by the mangroves that loomed beside and above and at times shut out the sky, casting the boat into a diurnal darkness.
A man could get lost in here, Nicholai thought.
Get lost and never find his way out.
Finally the skiff pulled up alongside a houseboat anchored against a line of mangroves. The boat was squat and wide, with open decks fore and aft and a cabin in the center. Binh Xuyen troopers, machine pistols slung over their shoulders, stood on guard. Bay Vien emerged from the aft cabin door and stood on the deck as Nicholai stood up.
“You are nothing but trouble, Michel,” he said, helping him onto the boat.
“Is she here yet?” Nicholai asked.
“No,” Bay said impatiently.
He led Nicholai into the cabin, which had a small kitchen with a gas cooker, a table, and a couple of chairs. A narrow set of stairs led down into the hull where there was a small hold and sleeping quarters.
“You’ll be safe here,” Bay said, “until we can get you on a ship out.”
That was the plan – hide him and Solange here in the swamp until the next night, then take them by boat to a freighter coming out of the Saigon docks.
“Have you heard from her?” Nicholai asked.
“You’re monotonous,” Bay said.
“Answer my question.”
“No,” Bay Vien said.
“I’m going back to look for her.”
“In the first place,” Bay said, “no one will take you back; in the second place, you can’t get back on your own; in the third place, even if you did, you would only be killed. Her karma is her karma now.”
Nicholai knew that he was right.
“You want tea?” Bay asked.
He shook his head, lit a cigarette instead, and sat down in the bamboo chair at the small table.
“Relax,” Bay said.
“You relax.”
“A man in love,” Bay said, shaking his head. He jutted his chin toward the hatchway. “Go get some sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
“I said go get some sleep.”
Nicholai went down the hatchway into the hold.
The crates were there.
Crates of rocket launchers.
Bay nodded. “I’ll go back to Saigon and see what’s happening. Besides, there are pursers to bribe.”
“I’ll pay it.”
“Yes, you will.” He called for the skiff and left.
Nicholai went down into the hold, lay down on one of the beds, and tried to rest.
His promise to Yu was almost fulfilled, he had money and papers.
Now there was only one thing left to do.
Get Solange to safety.
DE LHANDES WADDLED down the aisle of the cinema.
Michel had said that Solange loved the films. The screen was dim, some film noir, he thought, of the type that he couldn’t bear. De Lhandes preferred comedies or period pieces, with low bodices and heaving bosoms.
Then a daylight scene brightened the screen and he saw her in the third row. He slipped into a seat behind her. She was staring up at the screen and weeping as she dabbed a tissue to her eyes.
“Mademoiselle,” De Lhandes whispered. “Michel is waiting for you. Go out the back. There are men to take you to him.”
He saw her neck stiffen with doubt.
“You have no reason to trust me,” he said. “Only that I am an admirer of beauty and, like all cynics, a disappointed romantic. And I am his friend. Go now, Mademoiselle Solange, before it is too late.”
He waited as she decided what to do.
Then she got up, slid down the aisle, and walked out the back door of the theater.
GUIBERT WASN’T at the House of Mirrors.
Nor at Le Parc, nor the Continental, nor Le Grand Monde. He wasn’t on Rue Catinat, the Central Market.
He was gone.
Diamond cruised the streets. If he couldn’t find Hel, he’d find someone who would tell him where he could.
HAVER FORD WALKED the narrow alleys of Cholon.
If the Corsicans had sent another killer, it meant that Nicholai was still alive, and he figured that Hel would most likely run to a neighborhood where he spoke the language and knew the customs.
But no one had seen a tall kweilo who fit Hel’s description, or at least no one was talking.
BERNARD DE LHANDES was looking for a decent meal, reading the sidewalk boards that listed the evening’s fixed-price menus when the men jumped out of the car, grabbed him, and shoved him onto the floor of the backseat.
“Where is your friend?” Diamond asked.
“I-I-I don’t know.”
“Tell me before I hurt you very badly.”
But De Lhandes did make them hurt him very badly. He made them bruise organs and break bones but, in the end, he couldn’t stand the pain.
“Forgive me, Michel,” he wept. “By the sacred blood of Saint Joan, forgive me.”
He told them what they wanted to know.
“THE RUNG SAT?” Signavi questioned.
“That’s what the little bastard said,” Diamond answered. “Believe me, he was telling the truth.”
The French paratrooper found the information troubling. “The Rung Sat is Binh Xuyen country.”
Diamond didn’t want to hear it. He’d already gotten the word that La Corse had botched the hit on Haverford, and that the smart-mouthed son of a bitch now knew about his connection to Operation X and the heroin trade. And now Hel had made it out of Saigon, into the so-called Swamp of the Assassins, which could only mean that he was under the protection of Bay Vien.
“I don’t care if he’s in the pope’s living room!” Diamond yelled. “You have troops, send them!”
Signavi shook his head. Americans were so clumsy – they would always use an axe when a stiletto would do. “The Cobra will track him down. We don’t want to get in the way.”
“Yeah? Is the Cobra as good as the guys you sent to kill Haverford?” Diamond asked. “Listen to me – if ‘Guibert’ gets away he takes Operation X with him. It’s over! We’re finished! You think Bao Dai is going to sit around and watch all his money go down the chute?”
He could see Signavi wavering and pressed, “We know that the woman is on her way to Guibert. Send a team, get it done.”
Signavi nodded.
JOHN SINGLETON SAT and contemplated the Go board.
He had acquired an appreciation for the game during his days in China, but could find no one in Washington who could give him a decent match, so he preferred to be alone and play both sides.
It was a good mental exercise, disciplining him to see a situation from all perspectives.
Now he looked at the go-kang and pondered the whole Nicholai Hel scenario. He reviewed it from all angles, considering Hel’s origins, his killing of Kang Sheng as well as Voroshenin, the arms connection to Liu, Haverford’s Beijing network of spies, Hel’s escape from China into Laos, his liaison with the Binh Xuyen.
He changed his perspective to consider the situation in Vietnam – the intense Viet Minh activity in the north, the relative quiescence in the south since the last failed Communist offensive, the fact that the very dangerous Ai Quoc had been in hiding, that Hel had delivered the weapons to Bay Vien instead of to Ai Quoc, the fact that Haverford had served in Vietnam during the war…
Then there was Diamond, the allegedly secret Operation X, his connection to the Corsican heroin trade, and his visceral hatred for, and fear of, Nicholai Hel…
Now both his agents were on the ground in Saigon, and it would be fascinating to see which of them emerged victorious. He found it amusing that each stone on the go-kang thought that it determined its own moves and never saw the hand that moved them toward their fates.
This Hel, on the other hand…
He did seem to move himself.
NICHOLAI HEARD her footsteps on the hatchway steps.
“Solange?”
“Nicholai.”
Her perfume was intoxicating.
Nicholai rolled out of the bed and came to her.
“Thank God,” she said. “I was so afraid…”
Solange pressed herself tight against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, trapped the knife against her back, and whispered, “Per tu amicu.”
She stiffened, ever so slightly, and he knew.
And felt his heart break.
“It’s you,” he whispered into her hair. “You’re the Cobra.”
Then he let her go and took a step back. The light in the cabin was dim, but he could see in her eyes that it was true. Lying in the bed, waiting for her, he had seen it, and realized that he should have known sooner.
The Cobra is deadly with a blade.
La Corse had recruited her all the way back in Montpellier to kill the German colonel. They had taught her to use a knife and she slashed his throat. They took her to their base in Marseille and used her for other missions.
She kept her association with La Corse, but started to freelance, both her sexuality and her other skills. That night in Tokyo, after the attack in the garden, she came in with a knife in her hand and murder in her eyes.
Were you going to use that?
If I had to.
And you knew how, didn’t you, he thought.
She might have killed him during their romantic rendezvous at the hotel, but she knew that she was under observation and would be a suspect. But, the next day, De Lhandes had told her about the House of Mirrors and she had come, as the Cobra, to kill him. His proximity sense had told him it was someone he had encountered before, but now he truly realized it.
Life as it really is.
Satori.
“Is it Picard,” he asked, “or Picardi?”
“Picardi,” she said.
The Corsicans are the best assassins.
“The story you told me,” Nicholai asked, “how much of it was true?”
“Most of it,” she replied. “The hurtful parts, if it’s any consolation.”
It wasn’t.
“How many men have you killed?” Nicholai asked.
“More than you, perhaps,” she said. The knife slid out from behind her back. She held it low at her waist, slightly back, out of his reach. “I make money as I can – as a courtesan, as a killer. Tell me the difference.”
“In the latter case, people die.”
“You are hardly in a position to look down at me from a position of moral superiority, mon cher,” Solange answered.
So very true, he thought.
So very true.
“You must have amassed quite a fortune,” he said.
“I save it,” she acknowledged. “The lives of both my professions are quite short. Beauty and swiftness fade quickly when they fade. I will need to retire young, I’m afraid.”
Nicholai doubted that her beauty would ever fade. Not in his eyes, at least. Nor for her eyes, those amazing, beautiful green eyes. He saw her shift her right hip ever so slightly forward. The muscles in her calf tightened.
“La Corse hired you to kill me,” he said.
“I told you to walk away from me and not come back.”
“Was that my unforgivable sin?” he asked. “Loving you?”
“It’s the one thing a whore cannot abide.”
The tendons in her right wrist tensed.
It was subtle, but he saw it.
Could he stop the lightning lunge he knew was coming? Perhaps, perhaps not. If he did block it, could he counter with hoda korosu and kill the Cobra?
Again – perhaps, perhaps not.
Nicholai stepped back. “Then kill me.”
Her eyes flickered with doubt and suspicion. He understood it – her past gave her no reason to trust a man. He said, “I would live for you and kill for you, so dying for you…”
She shook her head, her golden hair shimmering in the lamplight.
“Please, Solange,” he said, “free me from my prison.”
Just as I freed Kishikawa-sama.
He closed his eyes, both to assure her and to summon his tranquility, and breathed deeply. This life was as a dream and when the dream ended there would be another and then another in an endless cycle until he realized perfect enlightenment.
Satori.
He heard her foot turn on the wooden deck, the preparatory move for the thrust, and readied himself for death.
She burst forward.
Into his arms.
“I can’t,” she cried. “God help me, je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime.”
“Je t’aime aussi.”
Over her sobs, they heard footsteps crash heavily onto the deck.
THERE WERE EIGHT OF THEM and they were coming for the guns.
The black-clad troopers from Signavi’s Vietnamese special forces piled onto the deck and came down the hatchway.
Solange whirled out of Nicholai’s arms, spun again, and slashed the first trooper’s throat. She yanked his body clear and then stabbed the second one in the stomach. The third went to shoot his pistol, but she slashed downward, severing his wrist tendons, and the pistol clattered down the stairs. The shocked trooper grabbed his dangling wrist and stared at her. She used the moment to plunge the knife into his throat. Another trooper vaulted the railing over him and went for her.
Nicholai hit him in midair, their momentum sending them crashing into the bulkhead. Grabbing him by the shirt, he threw him, scooped up the pistol, shot him, and pulled Solange aside just before a burst of machine-gun fire came down the stairs. The bullets bounced crazily around the hold as he shoved her into the bulkhead and shielded her as he reached back with his gun hand and fired up the hatchway.
He could hear the survivors regrouping on the deck, and then heard the metallic rattle and saw the grenade bounce down the hatchway. Pushing Solange down, he dove, grabbed the grenade, and tossed it back up.
The sharp crack of the explosion preceded the screams of gutted men.
Then it was quiet.
“Stay here,” he ordered.
She shook her head. “Claustrophobia. I don’t care for closed spaces. Ever since Marseille, they frighten me. Badly.”
“Stay here anyway.”
He went up onto the deck and saw the dead men. A flat-bottomed swamp boat bobbed alongside. Hearing footsteps behind him, he whirled and saw Solange, the knife caked with dark, congealing blood still in her hand.
“I told you to -”
“You don’t tell me what to do,” she said, picking up one of the machine pistols from a dead trooper and slinging it over her shoulder. “Now or in the Basque country.”
She stopped as they heard boat motors and the slaps of hulls on the water.
They were coming and coming fast.
“Stay low at least,” he said.
Then he scrambled down the hatchway.
Nicholai cracked open a crate, took one of the rocket launchers, found the solvent, and quickly wiped the weapon clean of the protective grease.
Even from the hold, he could hear the motors getting closer.
He found a tripod, took it and the launcher in either hand, and hurried back up the hatchway.
“Mon dieu,” Solange said, “and what do you intend to do with that?”
“Screw the tripod into the barrel,” he said. “S’il te plaît.”
He trotted back down to the hold, found the ammunition, and came back up with two of the rockets. “Eight-pound highexplosive antitank rockets with a velocity of 340 feet per second, capable of penetrating eleven inches of armor plating at an effective range of a hundred yards. Or so I’m told.”
“Men.”
Now he could make out the running lights of the first boat, and troopers standing in the bow. The boat looked loaded with men.
Nicholai shoved the rocket down the back of the tube, then lay down, adjusted the tripod, and sighted in. Waiting until the boat came inside the hundred-yard range, he took a deep breath and pulled the trigger on the exhale.
The rocket shot out, whooshed through the night air, and plunged into the water behind the speeding boat.
Solange flipped the machine pistol onto full automatic.
Nicholai sat up, reloaded, and settled back in again. He adjusted the sight, waited, and fired.
The boat exploded in scarlet flame.
Men on fire shrieked and leaped into the water.
Solange winced.
The next boat was coming hard.
Nicholai went for more ammunition, came back, and sighted in. The boat was so close he could hardly miss now.
So close he could make out the face of Bay Vien.
BAY’S MEN LOADED the crates onto the swamp boat as he examined the carnage on and below the deck.
“You killed these eight men?” he asked.
Nicholai nodded.
“The two of you?”
Nicholai nodded again.
“Mmmph.”
“How did they find us here?” Nicholai asked.
“De Lhandes gave in, under torture.”
“Is he dead?”
“He’ll recover,” Bay answered.
“That’s good,” Nicholai answered. He didn’t begrudge his friend the betrayal under torture. Bay shouted for his men to hurry.
“We don’t have much time,” he explained. “They’ll be coming with more men. Getting you on the freighter is out now. Police and soldiers are checking every boat. They’re all over the harbor. Maybe we can get her on board, but not you.”
“I won’t leave without him,” Solange said.
“Where are we going?” Nicholai asked.
“Up the river,” Bay said, “into the delta. Deliver the guns to the Viet Minh and then find a way to get you out of the country. It might take some time.”
“We have time,” Nicholai said.
But he wasn’t entirely sure.
“ROCKET LAUNCHERS?” Diamond asked.
Signavi confirmed that rockets had sunk two boatloads of his men and sent them plunging into the Swamp of the Assassins.
God damn Nicholai Hel to a fiery death of his own, Diamond thought.
And God damn that traitor Haverford, who had to have had a hand in this.
“Do you know where he might be headed?” Signavi asked.
“He’s taking them to the Viet Minh,” Diamond said. “Guibert is a Chinese agent.”
“You told me he was an American narcotics agent.”
“Grow up,” Diamond said. “I lied.”
Either way the man had to be found and killed. Signavi took command of the military operation to sweep the delta and find Guibert and the weapons. A shipment of those weapons to the Viet Minh could change the course of the war.
“I’m going with you,” Diamond said.
He hated battles, but this was his best chance to kill Nicholai Hel.
HAVERFORD LOOKED at De Lhandes in the hospital bed.
“Who did this to you?” he asked.
“One of yours,” De Lhandes murmured through the painkilling drugs. “That’s why I asked to see you. I’m hoping you’re better than that.”
He told Haverford about giving up “Michel” and Solange’s whereabouts, then fell back into unconsciousness.
Haverford left the hospital in a cold white rage.
He went back to his office, checked out a service.45, and went hunting for Diamond.
THEY MADE IT safely up the river, navigating without running lights past naval patrols, hiding in channels, mangrove swamps, and stands of bamboo. Then they took a tiny tributary, little more than a stream, north through the swamp until they came out on the Dengnai River south of Saigon. Safely crossing the stream, they landed near a small village, where the people helped them transfer the cargo to a canvas-covered truck.
“What’s the name of this place?” Nicholai asked.
“Binh Xuyen.” Bay Vien chuckled. “We’re pretty safe here.”
They took some tea and rice with pickled vegetables, then got into the truck and drove the roadway inland, then left the truck and the main road and set off on foot. Daylight found them carrying the crates along dikes built above the rice paddies, steaming now in the cloying humidity that came just before the monsoon season.
Nicholai and Solange, dressed unconvincingly in the black shirt and trousers and conical hats of Vietnamese farmers, walked in the center of the small column – just enough Binh Xuyen to carry the load, a handful of armed guards, with Bay Vien in the lead. It was treacherous country, flat and open, observable by French aerial surveillance, vulnerable to the watchtowers and blockhouses that punctuated the landscape.
It was too risky, so they decided to abandon the dikes for the low rice paddies. Trudging through sometimes waist-high water was exhausting, progress was excruciatingly slow, and they had to stop and flatten themselves in the water every time they heard an airplane engine.
At this pace, Nicholai thought, they would never make it to the rendezvous with the Viet Minh. Solange, although stoic and uncomplaining, was clearly played out. Her calves and ankles were cut from blade grass, and her eyes showed a dunning fatigue.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“Splendid,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed a stroll in the country.”
She pushed ahead of him.
Just before midday, Bay walked back to them.
“It’s too dangerous,” he said. “We have to stop for the day.”
Nicholai agreed, but asked, “Where?”
“There’s a bled just a kilometer or so from here,” Bay answered. “The villagers owe their allegiance to me.”
Nicholai knew exactly what that meant – if the people of the tiny hamlet betrayed them, the Binh Xuyen would come back and kill them all. It saddened him but he understood. Collective responsibility was an Asian tradition.
When they made it to the bled, Nicholai and Solange lay on the floor of a dark hut and tried to get a little sleep. There wasn’t much time to rest – they would move out again as soon as it was dark and hope to make some progress before the moon rose.
Solange fell asleep, but Nicholai lay awake, listening to the sound of airplanes circling above them. The tension in the village was palpable, especially when in the late afternoon he heard whispers that a Foreign Legion patrol was just a half kilometer away.
The village collectively held its breath.
Nicholai laid his hand on the warm metal of the machine pistol and waited. He wasn’t going to be captured – he had seen all he wanted of the interrogation room and the cell. If they took him, they would take him as a corpse.
Then he decided that was selfish. If it looks as if we’re going to be discovered, I will hand her the Ivanov bankbooks, then hold a gun on her and let them think we took her as a hostage. Then I will find a way to kill myself on the way to the prison. That resolved, Nicholai watched through the bottom slats as a Legion officer stood on the edge of the village and questioned its elder.
The man shrugged his shoulders and waved his finger in an arc, indicating that the foreigners could be anywhere, in any one of the dozens of villages nestled among the rice paddies. The young lieutenant looked at him skeptically.
Nicholai noticed that his finger had tightened on the trigger.
The lieutenant stared at the old man for a second, the old man stared back, and then the lieutenant ordered his men to move on. Nicholai lay back and looked at Solange sleeping. He drifted off himself, and when he woke up it was dusk. A few minutes later Bay came in, followed by a woman with bowls of rice and steamed fish. Solange woke up and they ate, then got ready to resume the march.
They walked the dikes now, shielded by the neat rows of mulberry trees. Staying in tight formation, they literally walked in each other’s footsteps and made reasonably good time until the moon rose and lit them. Then they stretched apart and moved by twos and threes, the scouts going ahead and whistling signals that it was safe for the next group to move.
The local militias were out, walking the dikes themselves, going from village to village. Several times, its patrols came within eyesight, and Nicholai’s party flattened themselves to the ground and belly-crawled, if they moved at all.
It was a deadly game of hide-and-seek in the moonlight, a match of stealth and wits. To Nicholai’s surprise, Solange was very good at it – she moved with a quicksilver grace and silence, and he laughed at himself when he remembered that she was not only Solange but the Cobra.
She is more experienced at this, he thought, than I am.
The night seemed to go forever, but they made about ten miles before the sky started to turn to the stony gray of predawn and they came to a long line of mulberries a half mile from a small hamlet.
Bay signaled them to lie and wait.
A few minutes later, Nicholai heard the single sharp whistle to come ahead and he quick-stepped in a slouch along the dike until he reached the relative safety of the tree line. There was a small clearing among the trees and there he saw Xue Xin.
“IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU again,” Nicholai said.
“And you,” Xue Xin answered.
He looked so different now, in the light khaki jacket of a Viet Minh officer with a holstered pistol on his hip.
“You knew we’d meet again,” said Nicholai.
“I always knew it,” Xue Xin said. “I knew your true nature.”
More than I did, Nicholai thought.
His name wasn’t Xue Xin, of course, but Ai Quoc.
Nicholai saw it clearly now.
Quoc had controlled the operation and had counted on Nicholai to honor his deal with Colonel Yu.
“I knew,” Quoc continued, “that you would realize the truth and see things for what they are.”
“And now I want a life,” Nicholai said.
Quoc looked past him to see Solange and smiled. “We will do our best to get you out. It might require some patience on your part.”
“I have become the personification of patience.”
“Why do I have my doubts?”
“It must be your monklike wisdom,” Nicholai answered. “All that clipping of vines and deep breathing.”
The sky was turning a coral pink.
Quoc said, “We should be going.”
Nicholai walked up to Bay Vien. “Where are you going now?”
“Back to Saigon,” Bay answered, “to curse your name to the heavens for stealing my weapons and getting away with it.”
“Will they believe you?”
“Yes, or they’ll pretend to,” Bay said, “for a while longer, anyway. Then…”
He left it unfinished. It was obvious – no one knew the future, no man could say what his karma held in store for him.
“Goodbye,” Nicholai said. “I hope we see each other again in better times.”
“We will,” Bay answered.
Bay gathered his men and headed out.
“We need to go,” Quoc said. His soldiers, thirty-odd veterans, started to heft the crates on bamboo poles and were already walking north.
Quoc began to limp after them.
The airplane came out of the east.
WING GUNS BLAZING, strafing the tree line, it came in low and out of the sun.
Three Viet Minh went down like toy soldiers knocked off a shelf.
The shells splintered trees, spraying shards of wood like shrapnel.
Nicholai tackled Solange and lay on top of her. The ground shook under them from the vibrations of the low-flying plane.
“Go now!” Quoc yelled as the plane rose to come around for another strafing run.
Nicholai got to his feet and pulled Solange up behind him and, hand in hand, they ran for the next rice paddy, racing to get over the exposed dike before the plane completed its turn. Its wings shone in the rising sun as it banked, came back, and dove, a hawk on the hunt.
They made it over the dike, but two more Viet Minh behind them weren’t as lucky and were picked off easily. Nicholai and Solange slid down the slope into the muck of the rice paddy and plunged under the surface.
Holding her hand as he held his breath, Nicholai tried to listen for the now muted popping of the guns and the sound of the plane’s engines as it climbed again. When he heard a higher-pitched whine he pushed up, and together he and Solange sloshed across the rice paddy.
Looking around, Nicholai saw that Quoc had survived the last attack and was waving them toward a copse of trees on the far side of the paddy. Ahead of them, the men carrying one of the crates made it over the top of the dike and disappeared from sight. Another Viet Minh lay down on his back on the dike and started to fire his machine gun up at the plane, which was now coming in behind them.
Solange jerked him down, and again they held their breath and felt the rounds zip into the water around them. When they came back up, the plane was climbing in front of them. It waggled its wings and kept flying away, apparently out of ammunition or low on fuel.
Nicholai and Solange made it across the paddy, over the dike, and into the copse of trees, where the Viet Minh were regrouping. Wounded porters fell out as other men took their place. Loads were shifted, weapons exchanged. A soldier who was apparently a medic gave rudimentary aid with the scant supplies at hand. Other men were beyond help, and lay dead or dying.
Nicholai found a rifle and picked it up. Solange draped the sling of a burp gun around her neck. They walked to the far edge of the trees. In front of them stretched a long rectangle of tall sword grass bordered on the right and left by paddy dikes. Beyond the grass rose another stand of trees.
“We’ll be safe once we get there,” Quoc said, pointing to the trees.
“Why is that?” Nicholai asked.
“We disappear.”
Nicholai had no patience for Zen metaphysics. If Quoc, whether he was really a monk or not, thought they were going to meditate themselves into thin air, Nicholai wanted a more mundane plan. The plane had flown off, but the pilot had certainly radioed their position to the patrols that were thick on the ground.
It wouldn’t be long before troops arrived, and they would run out of neither bullets nor fuel. The French troops and native militia that had been crisscrossing the countryside would converge in a neat, organized pattern and surround them. The sheltering trees would become a death trap, unless Quoc had an actual plan for escape.
“Our motherland will swallow us,” Quoc said.
Poetic, Nicholai thought, but hardly practical.
Of course his mind went to a different metaphor, the go-kang, and he saw it all too clearly. Their little pool of black stones would soon stretch into a thin line and progress toward Quoc’s apparently magic trees, there to group into a pool again. The white stones – and there were many more of them – were even now gathering around them.
Go players had a term for such an isolated, surrounded group.
Dead stones.
And, Nicholai recognized, the flat go-kang surface had become an anachronism. The ancients never anticipated modern airpower, which literally added another dimension to the game. They couldn’t have imagined stones floating above the board, delivering death and destruction below.
Nor, he had to admit, was Go a model for battle. The go-kang was serene, quiet, perfect in its organization and form. The modern battlefield was chaotic, noisy, hellish in the anarchy of its blood, carnage, and agony.
Modernity, he thought, has destroyed so much.
He forced his mind back to the reality on the ground. Trap or no, the copse on the far side of the grass was a better position than the one they now occupied, its size created a larger defensive perimeter from which to make a last stand. He made it to be a little less than a half mile away, so it should take only minutes to reach.
But the sword grass would be a painful impediment, although doubtless narrow foot and game trails had been cut through the chest-high blades. The burden of the weapons, especially now that there were fewer porters, would slow them down further.
Perhaps…
No, Quoc would never think of abandoning the weapons, and when Nicholai looked at it honestly, neither would he.
They had come at too high a cost.
The quiet behind told him that the Viet Minh were ready to move out.
He turned and saw that they would leave their dead comrades. Everything useful had been removed from their bodies.
“It comes at a high cost, your freedom,” Nicholai said.
“For every enemy we kill,” Quoc answered, “they will kill ten of us. And in the end, it won’t matter.”
“Save, perhaps, to the ten.”
“The individual is nothing when compared to the whole,” Quoc answered.
Nicholai stared at him.
Seeing his true nature.
And, perhaps, a bit of his own.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
“You will come to see.”
“I hope not,” Nicholai said. “I hope never.”
If each individual became only part of the machine, at the end of the day there would be only the machine. The inexorable, impersonal, grinding machinery of the modern. He turned away from Quoc, took Solange by the arm, and walked her away, out of hearing.
“I was thinking,” he said, “about the first meal we’ll have when we get to wherever we’re going.”
“Oh yes?” she said. “And what were you thinking?”
“You made a dish back in Tokyo…”
“I made a number of dishes back in Tokyo,” Solange said, her wide mouth opening into a smile.
Nothing can dim the light in those green eyes, he thought. “The coq au vin, perhaps.”
“Simple French country cooking.”
“Simplicity sounds wonderful,” Nicholai said. “With what wine, then?”
She speculated on a number of choices, narrowing it down to a handful and then finding it impossible to choose. Then they discussed which vegetables they would have as side dishes, how they should be prepared, and then which dessert would be best, a tarte tatin or perhaps a marquise au chocolat.
“Should we invite De Lhandes?” Nicholai asked.
“Yes, of course,” Solange answered, “but he must leave straight after coffee so we can make love.”
“Out he goes, then.”
She kissed him, long and lovingly.
THEY WERE ONLY fifty yards into the sword grass when the shooting started.
Turning to his left, Nicholai saw the line of Legionnaires come onto the dike, and to the far right of the troops he thought he saw a soldier with a vermilion beret directing their fire.
Signavi.
Nicholai lifted his rifle to his shoulder and returned fire, shooting to his left but moving ahead. The copse of trees was their only faint hope and they had to keep moving, for getting bogged down in the grass was certain death.
Quoc saw it and ordered a dozen men to form a screening line to their left to try to slow up the French advance and buy enough time to get the weapons into the trees. The porters were amazingly disciplined, not pausing to shoot, or drop to the ground, or even duck. They just kept shouldering their loads and moving ahead at a slow trot.
Signavi saw what they were doing, directed fire on them, and several of the porters dropped. The others strained to carry the weight, and a couple of Viet Minh lowered their rifles and took their places on the bamboo poles.
Two Legionnaires fell as the screening line came into action, and Nicholai saw Signavi direct a squad to his left, toward the copse, to cut off the Viet Minh. If the French got into the trees first, it was over.
He shouted to Solange, “Can you run?”
She nodded.
They took off, the saw grass slicing their faces and chests as they ran toward the copse, angling off to the left to block the French. Several Viet Minh joined them, and they ran through the grass as bullets zipped around their heads. One man dropped, and then another, and then it was as if they had disturbed an angry nest of hornets and the air buzzed around them.
But most of them made it to a tiny rise above a ripple of ground, and from there they could lay down fire on the flanking Legionnaires, forcing them to stop, drop to the ground, and engage in a firefight.
Behind him, the porters moved toward the trees.
Nicholai looked back to the dike and saw Signavi talk into a radio attached to the backpack of one of his soldiers.
No, Nicholai thought, please no.
He raised his rifle, sighted in, took a deep breath, and fired. The bullet hit Signavi in the high spine, and he clutched at his back and then fell.
But it was too late.
Only a minute later, Nicholai heard the plane engine, and then he saw it, but this time it didn’t drop low to strafe, but stayed high until it was directly above the rectangle of grass, and then it dropped its load.
Napalm.
The grass caught fire immediately, and a wall of flame rolled toward them.
Men ignited like torches and spun madly around, shrieking. Others seemed to simply melt.
Nicholai took Solange’s hand and ran.
The wave of flame rolled behind them like a fiery red tsunami from a nightmare. Nicholai felt it scorch his back and singe his hair as the intense heat seemed to suck the air from his lungs.
He pushed Solange into the trees.
Quoc was thirty yards ahead of them, waving them forward.
But leaves above him were inexplicably dropping. Leaves don’t fall in the springtime, Nicholai thought weirdly, then he saw that bullets were clipping them off the branches and at the far end of the copse he saw Vietnamese militia coming toward them.
We are dead stones, he thought.
The flames were fast coming up behind, the French rapidly working their way to the left, and the militia was in front and on the right. If we run to the front, right or left, Nicholai saw, we will only run straight into the guns. If we stay here, we will burn.
Surviving was not an option.
They had only a choice of death.
Quoc waved violently. “Here! Here!”
Nicholai looked more closely and saw a Viet Minh crouch at Quoc’s feet and then -
– disappear.
Into the earth.
Tunnels, he thought.
Our motherland will swallow us.
Sure enough, when he reached the middle of the copse, Nicholai saw small square openings. The Viet Minh were taking the rocket launchers out of the crates and handing them down the tunnel entrances.
“Come on,” Quoc said, pointing to the little square hole at his feet.
It was narrow.
Solange could squeeze through it, maybe Nicholai could.
“You first,” he said.
She balked. “I told you – I’m claustrophobic. I can’t.”
“You have to.”
He helped Solange get down into the square hole and watched as she wiggled her shoulder and made her way down. Then he looked forward to the far end of the copse. He could make out individual soldiers. They were advancing too quickly for the Viet Minh to get the rest of the weapons down the tunnel. Even if they did, they wouldn’t have time to cover up the entrances again, or escape in what could only be a vast and complicated maze of tunnels.
They would be trapped and caught.
Solange with them.
Quoc misapprehended his hesitation. “You are also afraid of tight spaces?”
Nicholai smiled, thinking of his blissful days exploring caves with his Japanese friends. “No.”
He pointed toward the advancing troops. “We need more time.”
“Yes.”
“Take care of her,” Nicholai said. “She isn’t one of your ‘ten.’ ”
“You have my word.”
Quoc quickly chose five of his best men and Nicholai went with them toward the edge of the copse. The gunfire increased, branches dropped on them, men fell. When they got to the edge of the trees, one of the Viet Minh bent over and opened a square of earth.
Then they lay down and started to fire across the open ground.
Nicholai felt a body fall beside him, then he was face-to-face with the blazing green eyes of angry Solange. “I said I wasn’t leaving without you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t ever do that again.”
She laid the stock of the machine pistol against her cheek and started shooting.
Diamond flattened himself onto the ground and peered through the grass at the copse of trees.
Nicholai Hel was trapped between the approaching flames and the rifles.
He hoped Hel chose the fire.
A harsh roar came up as the fire hit the trees.
Nicholai turned and saw them go, the flames climbing up the trunks and then igniting in the leafy branches with a hideous whoosh.
A Viet Minh ran from the center of the trees and signaled.
The weapons were in the tunnels.
“Time to disappear,” Nicholai said.
They crawled back to the tunnel entrance.
Solange balked, but Nicholai helped her and she squeezed down. When she was clear, Nicholai lowered himself into the hole, his wide shoulders snug against the entrance. It was a very tight fit, and for a few seconds he thought he might not make it at all. But his caving experience had taught him how to narrow his shoulders, and he felt Solange tug at his legs, and then he slid down the entrance shaft.
Four Viet Minh came behind them, and the last one pulled the tunnel entrance shut behind him. Another one gave his life to replace the camouflage on top.
Nicholai found himself in a small oval chamber that opened to a narrow horizontal shaft, just high enough to crawl into on all fours. Lanterns, apparently run off a generator, were hung every twenty feet, and although the light was dim they could see to move. He eased Solange into the next tunnel and crawled behind her.
A minute later, Nicholai heard the flames erupt above them.
It would have been a bad death.
“Are you all right?” he asked Solange.
“I hate this.”
“I know.”
He paused, then followed Solange into the next chamber.
This one was larger, high enough to stand up in. Three horizontal shafts came off it in different directions. They rested for a moment, then one of the Viet Minh led them into another shaft, reached behind him, and ripped a plug from a cable, plunging the tunnels behind them into darkness.
Diamond cursed when the tunnel went black.
He had found the hastily camouflaged entrance and led several of the Vietnamese down the shaft into the first chamber. They crawled until they came to the chamber with the three shafts, then split up. Diamond took one of the men with him and was sure that he had the right tunnel as he could see recent scrape marks in the dirt below and could swear he heard the sound of movement, like rodents, ahead of him.
He was on the track and then darkness hit.
Fighting off a momentary panic, he felt for the flashlight on his belt, turned it on, and shone it in front of him. The light in his left hand, his.45 in his right, he crawled forward.
They crawled until they came to what seemed to be a dead end. But another shaft ran sharply to the right, and they took it, and then repeated this process of seeming dead ends until this maze zigzagged at least three hundred yards and Nicholai roughly reckoned that they must be literally out of the woods. They came to a chamber that had a vertical shaft and they descended a wooden ladder another twenty feet down to a much larger chamber.
“Your home for the next couple of days,” Quoc said.
It was an underground barracks of sorts. Wooden-framed bunk beds lined the walls, rudely constructed wooden chairs were placed about, some medical supplies, bottles of water, and canned foods were neatly stacked and organized. There was even a small shelf of books, and relatively fresh air was being pumped from a narrow ventilator shaft.
“It’s quite good,” Nicholai said, “but I prefer the Continental.”
“I’m sure Mancini would be pleased to welcome you,” Quoc answered. “Shall I call for a reservation?”
“That’s all right.”
“Or the Beijing Hotel?”
“I’m growing fonder of this establishment by the second,” Nicholai said, “assuming, of course, that the price is reasonable.”
“Your bill has already been taken care of,” Quoc said.
“It’s a small city down here,” Nicholai said. “How far does this complex go?”
“Now?” Quoc said, “Almost all the way to the outreaches of Saigon. Eventually, all the way to the suburbs.”
“And then you pop out of the ground with rocket launchers and take the city,” Nicholai said.
“When the time is right,” Quoc said, “hopefully before the Americans blunder in. You will stay down here for a few days, then we will get you out, I think through Cambodia, if that suits you.”
“That will be fine,” Solange said.
She took a bottle of water, sipped from it, and handed it to Nicholai.
“We will leave you alone,” Ai Quoc said.
He and his men left the chamber to see to the rocket launchers.
Diamond crawled to a dead end and realized that he must have chosen one of the false tunnels. They were clever, these Communist rats. He started to back out, then paused and felt a small waft of air. He shone the flashlight to his right, saw the concealed shaft, and headed into it.
Soon he came to another dead end.
Damn these bastards to hell, he thought.
Then he saw the next shaft.
He was halfway through the maze of zigzags when he heard a dull throb above him.
Nicholai looked up.
So did Solange.
They stared at the ceiling as if they actually thought that they could see what they were hearing.
A low-pitched hum and then a whining sound, and then the bombs hit.
The bombers came in directly over the tunnel complex and laid their ordnance in a spread pattern over a rectangle of a thousand square yards.
The chamber shook.
Dirt fell from the ceiling.
It all held for a moment and then there was a horrific bass thud and the bunk beds came down, and the neat stacks of supplies, and the walls quivered and more dirt came down and then the lights went out.
Nicholai heard Solange moan, “Mon dieu, mon dieu.”
He reached for her hand, found it, and pulled her forward, his mind reconstructing the chamber and locating the shaft. He found it with his hand, reached up for the rungs, and pulled her behind him.
“We have to get up!” he yelled, and then he felt her find her feet and they climbed up the ladder to the next chamber. They had to get up and out quickly or they would be buried alive.
A slow, suffocating death in the dark.
“Nicholai…”
“We’re all right,” he said. “We’re all right. Stay with me.”
He pulled her up into the next chamber. It was pitch dark now, a tight cloying blackness as he forced himself to remember the layout. It was difficult in the noise of the explosions above them, the falling dirt, the concussive force of the blasts.
You have been here many times before, he told himself, in many caves, in tighter spots than this, so think. He found the tunnel entrance first with his mind and then with his hands. Then he took off his shirt, tied one sleeve to his belt and the other to Solange’s.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going to be fine.”
He led them into the entrance and they started back.
Diamond spat the dirt out of his mouth and rubbed it from his eyes.
God damn the Frogs, he thought. Didn’t they know he was down here? Or did they know and didn’t care?
“Come on,” he said to the soldier behind him.
There was no answer.
The man was dead.
He plunged ahead.
The tunnel was fast coming in around them as Nicholai pulled Solange along. They came to one false wall after another, but Nicholai had the route firmly in his head and he crawled quickly, encouraging Solange all the way.
“Almost there.”
“That’s good.”
“Oh, that’s very good.”
Diamond heard voices.
Speaking French.
He stopped, lay flat, and held the pistol out in front of him.
Nicholai’s proximity sense warned him.
Someone was around the sharp right angle in front of them.
He stopped.
“What-”
“Ssshh.”
A bomb blast rattled the walls. Dirt slid, narrowing the tunnel. His ears ringing, Nicholai couldn’t hear. He slid forward on his stomach, and then a muzzle flash lit the tunnel and he saw Diamond.
Diamond crawled forward, shooting in front of him.
Nicholai reached his right hand as far as it would go, clutched at the air, and grabbed Diamond’s wrist. “Solange, your knife!”
Diamond ripped his arm backward and freed his hand.
He lowered the pistol again, toward Nicholai’s face.
Nicholai felt the powder blast burn his cheek.
He reached again in the dark, lunging out with a punch. “Your knife!”
Solange coiled as much as she could in the narrowing confine of the tunnel. She pushed out with her long legs and squeezed past Nicholai, her knife in front of her.
Diamond pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flash blinded Nicholai. He crawled past Solange, and heard Diamond crawling away. He started to go after him, but then he heard Solange moan.
Diamond would have to wait.
He stopped and turned to Solange.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
But then he felt the warm stickiness of her blood.
She was bleeding badly from the side. He couldn’t see in the stygian darkness but he could feel.
So could she. “Please don’t let me die down here.”
“I won’t let you die anywhere,” he said.
Another blast rocked the tunnel. Dirt fell into their faces, their eyes, their noses, their mouths. He felt for her face, brushed the dirt away, then turned onto his back and started to pull himself along the tunnel shaft, pulling her behind him.
It was excruciatingly slow and he knew she was losing blood fast. The tunnel was collapsing, they were half buried, and he could only feel his way along, turn his head, and try to smell the way to open air.
He had to do it. He couldn’t let her die.
After an eternity he turned, saw a faint beam of sunlight, and sensed a fleeting breath of fresh air. He pulled until they reached the bottom of the tunnel entrance.
“We’re there,” he gasped.
Now he clawed his way up the shaft with one hand and pulled her with the other. He climbed and fell four times before his hand gripped the surface with enough purchase to pull her weight up behind him.
He collapsed on the surface and pulled her into his arms.
“We’re here, my love,” he said. “We made it.”
But Solange was still.
Limp and lifeless in his arms. He wiped a strand of her golden hair from her green eyes, and closed them.
Then the next bomb hit.
HE AWOKE in a bed.
Clean, crisp sheets tight around his legs.
Haverford looked down at him.
“Good morning.”
“Where…”
“You’re in a Saigon hospital,” Haverford said. “A Foreign Legion patrol found you staggering around out in the delta. You were severely concussed, had some second-degree burns, shrapnel wounds, and three broken ribs.”
“Solange?”
“I’m sorry,” Haverford said.
Then Nicholai remembered.
A deep sorrow came over him.
“Why aren’t I in a cell?” he asked, looking around the room. It was impossibly white and clean.
“Ah,” Haverford said. “Your name is René Dazin. You’re a French merchant that the Viet Minh kidnapped. You were very lucky that the bombing raid happened to set you free, my friend, the same bombing raid that killed Michel Guibert.”
“Who made up that story?”
“I did, of course,” Haverford said. “But you might want to get out of the country as soon as you can walk.”
“Which should be when?”
“Might be another month or so,” Haverford answered. “I have a clean passport for you. You recuperate, then you disappear.”
Nicholai nodded, and even that small move made his head throb. But he was heartened that Haverford thought he needed the passport, even though he had Voroshenin’s multiple identities safely stashed with De Lhandes. The American agent, Nicholai thought, will believe he has me on a leash, and he will be wrong. Then he asked, “Diamond?”
“He made it out,” Haverford said. “Rats usually do.”
“Good,” Nicholai answered, relieved that Diamond hadn’t been killed by an impersonal bomb. He would visit Diamond personally and hold him to account. Not only for himself, but for Solange.
Haverford leaned closer and whispered, “Ai Quoc made it too. So did the weapons.”
“You were working with him all the time,” Nicholai said. He saw it now, all of it. Haverford had played a very deep game of Go, and played it well.
“Since we fought the Japanese together,” Haverford answered. “It’s a triple for me – the Soviets and the Chinese at knifepoint, Mao weakened, and a chance for Quoc to take Saigon and end this war before we can get into it.”
“Do your bosses know?”
“I think so,” Haverford answered. “My boss respects victory. I get promoted, Diamond gets put out to graze. Who knows, maybe you and I will get together again sometime for tea.”
“I’d like that.”
“Me too, chum,” Haverford said. “Sayonora, Hel-san.
“Sayonara, Haverford-san.”
Nicholai lay back and looked out the window at the pretty garden in the courtyard outside. Slashes of silver rain started to fall, the beginning of the wet season.
The beginning of a lot of things.
He had a new identity, the means to effect his revenge, access to the Ivanov fortune, not to mention the money he won from Bao Dai. After settling matters with Diamond and his cohorts, he could start a new life.
If indeed, he thought, there is such a thing as a new life without Solange.
There is, he thought, there must be, because you are alive and that is your karma. And it is your karma also that you are free now, truly free.
But to do what? he asked himself. How do you use your freedom? You are a killer, a warrior, a samurai – no, not a samurai, for you are not attached to any master. You are a ronin, a wanderer, an individual. So what does the ronin do now? How do you spend this life that has been restored to you?
You begin by killing Diamond, he decided, and then you go on to rid the world of as many Diamonds as you can. The men who kill the innocent – who torture, intimidate, brutalize and terrorize in the name of some “cause” that they believe in more than their own humanity.
He heard Kishikawa’s voice.
Hai, Nikko-san, it is a good way to spend a life.
He looked out the window and saw the hard rain shear a leaf from a branch. The leaf fluttered to the ground, shimmering gold and green in the rain.
Satori.