thought, to show her there are no hard feelings. She’s sensitive, gets her feelings hurt so easily. Thin-skinned, that one.
He saw Mancini come through the door and search for him with his eyes. Then the boss of L’Union Corse found him and shook his head.
So subtle a gesture only an old friend would have known what it meant.
Antonucci knew, and it made him angry.
The attempt on the American had failed.
135
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.
136
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,
“What do I have to do?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” Haverford said. “Just tell me something.”
“What?”
“Who paid you?” Haverford asked.
“The Corsicans,” the man rasped.
“Who?” Haverford asked again, because this was a surprise.
“La Corse,” the man said.
137
“I HAVE PUT MY LIFE in your hands,” Nicholai said as he set De Lhandes down.
He knew it was gross and offensive to have lifted the dwarf off his feet that way, but there was no choice.
“By the chancred twat of a Marseille whore…”
“Many people,” Nicholai said, “would pay a good price to learn my whereabouts.”
“That is true,” De Lhandes sputtered, still angry at the rough handling. “Why have you, then, put your life in my hands?”
“I need a useful ally that I can trust,” Nicholai answered.
“I agree that I am useful,” De Lhandes replied, “extraordinarily so, in fact. But why do you think you can trust me?”
Nicholai knew that everything depended on his answer, so he thought carefully before he spoke. Finally he said, “You and I are the same.”
De Lhandes looked up at the tall, broad-shouldered, handsome man, and Nicholai saw his spine stiffen. “I hardly think so.”
“Then think further,” Nicholai replied. Having started this, he couldn’t go back. Both his life and De Lhandes’s were on the line, because the dwarf would leave here an ally or not at all. Nicholai would have to either befriend him or kill him. “Look beyond the obvious differences and you will see that we are both outsiders.”
Nicholai saw this catch De Lhandes’s imagination, so he continued, “I am a Westerner raised in the East, and in the West you are…”
He knew he had to choose his words carefully, but then De Lhandes finished the thought for him. “A small, ugly man in a world of large, beautiful people.”
“We are both forever on the outside looking in,” Nicholai said. “So we can either stand on the periphery of their world, always looking in, or we can create our own.”
“Create our own world?” De Lhandes scoffed.
But Nicholai could see that he was intrigued. “Of course, if you’re happy with the one you currently have, if you are content with the odd turn with a high-class whore, or the occasional fine meal tossed to you like a bone to a dog, very well. But I’m talking about becoming rich, the sort of wealth that allows you to live a dignified life with, how shall I put it, quality.”
“How?” De Lhandes asked.
“It’s risky.”
“What have I to lose?”
Nothing, Nicholai thought. But I have everything to lose, including my life. If I let you walk away from here and am mistaken in you, then I am a dead man. But it’s too late for second thoughts now. He said, “I need you to do something.”
He gave Voroshenin’s papers to De Lhandes and asked him to contact Solange.
138
BERNARD DE LHANDES LEFT the brothel and hailed a
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
