Ryderbeit told him, and he nodded, without any apparent surprise. ‘There was a big raid tonight,’ he added, ‘just east of here. Perhaps you saw it? Their bombing is preposterous. There is nothing here but jungle and a few peasants. Twice a month now they bomb this region and there is never anything. Just one small hamlet. It is of no importance. Nothing in Vietnam is of any importance except the people. As the fish are to water. You have read your Mao?’
‘Some of it,’ said Murray. ‘Textbooks for schoolboy revolutionaries.’
Pol chuckled from his nest of cushions. ‘Ah but he doesn’t write for sophisticates like us, my dear Murray!’
Murray turned to Ryderbeit and said in English: ‘What is all this — a teach-in at the London School of Economics?’
Ryderbeit grinned: ‘Have to take ’em in their stride, soldier. Just talk easy and gentle. They’ve been smokin’.’
‘Speak French, please,’ said Banaji. ‘We have no secrets here.’
‘Very well.’ The Vietnamese was teasing a tiny brown pellet of opium into the bowl of a rubber-tubed pipe, basting it with the flat end of one of the needles. ‘Why are we here, Monsieur Banaji?’ Murray said at last.
‘We must talk business.’
He looked at Pol. ‘On whose terms?’
‘The terms must be mutually agreed,’ said Pol. ‘There should be no problem. My friend Banaji has close contacts with some of the most influential men in this part of South-East Asia. Even with a war on, my dear Murray, basic things do not change so very much.’
Banaji spread out a pair of long chicken claws of hands. ‘The Japanese,’ he murmured, ‘the French, the Americans — it’s all the same thing. Foutus. Le Vietnam est foutu.’
‘You know what we have to offer?’ Murray asked him, and the Vietnamese passed Banaji the pipe, nimbly setting a flame to the bowl while the old Frenchman reached for the nozzle, his lips distending now like an oboe player’s, sucking deeply with a long rasping sound, ending in little crackles of spittle as he rested back on the cushions and let the smoke drift slowly, almost endlessly it seemed, in three streams from his nostrils and a small gap at the edge of his mouth.
It was some time before he answered. ‘You have money for us, I think? A great deal of money. For a certain consideration I am prepared to ask friends of mine to help you dispose of this money. We have many methods and great experience. In Vietnam itself we are limited. There are patrols, the bombing, the Viet Cong and the Americans together — they make business very difficult. But outside Vietnam — in Laos, perhaps…’
Murray looked again at Pol: ‘Have you discussed Cambodia?’
‘Cambodia is impossible,’ said Banaji. ‘It is too well controlled. As Pol here will tell you, Sihanouk has many problems — he plays too many games at once — to risk troubling the Americans more than is necessary.’ He passed the pipe suddenly to Murray. ‘But Laos is altogether another matter.’
Before accepting the pipe, Murray turned again to Pol. ‘How much of the operation have you discussed, Charles?’
‘I have had to be frank, my dear Murray. As Monsieur Banaji says, we have no secrets here.’
‘He’d think me a damned fool if I blurted everything out on our first meeting.’
‘You confided in me. And in Sammy here.’
‘With you, Charles, there was no operation — just a nice fantasy by the walls of Angkor. But with Sammy and his third-degree approach I was hardly left much option. And what does Monsieur Banaji mean by a consideration?’
‘Why not ask him?’
Murray asked him.
‘Thirty million American dollars, Monsieur Wilde.’
Murray lifted the nozzle to his lips, nodding to the Vietnamese who put a light to the opium, and he inhaled carefully, watching the little brown kernel bubbling in the bowl, drawing the sweet smoke down past his lungs into his belly, holding his breath now like a deep-sea diver as he passed the pipe sideways to Ryderbeit who was already crouching forward, both hands eager.
‘Thirty million,’ he said slowly, ‘is a fortune. It is ridiculous.’
Banaji did not move. ‘No more ridiculous than the operation you have proposed, Monsieur Wilde.’
‘I have proposed no operation, Monsieur Banaji. Everything that has happened here has been by arrangement with Charles Pol and Sammy here. I am no party to it.’
‘Without my help you can do nothing, Monsieur Wilde. What use is your own share of this fortune unless you can transport it to a safe place?’
‘Let’s get one thing quite straight,’ Murray said, relaxing a little with the quietening effect of the smoke. ‘Pol has informed you of our proposed operation. This may succeed or it may not. If it does succeed we are to hand over to you thirty million dollars. Is that correct?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Banaji.
‘We pay you in cash on some mountain-top in Laos?’
‘Or an airfield, Monsieur Wilde. It is all understood and arranged. Your own plan — the plan you have devised yourself — has many intelligent qualities. I congratulate you on the details. If I have understood Charles correctly, you are to walk on to Saigon’s airfield dressed as military policemen, and will then take charge of a plane carrying one and a half billion American dollars. You will fly it out of Vietnam and land it on an unfinished barrage just north of Vientiane, where the necessary equipment exists to move the money out and load it into sacks of rice. These will then be transported down to Vientiane’s Wattay Airfield, where they will be loaded aboard a plane belonging to the Air U.S.A. line. Am I right so far?’ Murray nodded. ‘Only the pilots,’ Banaji went on, ‘will not be from Air U.S.A.’
He held up his hand to interrupt Murray: ‘No
