Satori

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.

139

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.”

140

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.

141

“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