“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.
114
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. “
“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
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,
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.”
