Satori

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’Extreme-Orient and a packet of Cigarettes Nationales, then went farther down the street, found a table at a cafe 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 metis – 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.

107

BERNARD DE LHANDES FOUND the Saigon chief of SDECE in his office.

Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage. Only the French bureaucracy, De Lhandes thought, could come up with that title.

Sans prelude, 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 boite 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.