Satori (28 page)

111

Y
U RECEIVED THE MESSAGE
from Saigon.

Hel had made contact.

You are an interesting man, Nicholai Hel, he thought.

112

H
AVERFORD SAT
in the back of the
cyclo-pousse
and contemplated the state of Nicholai Hel’s mind.

Had he come to Saigon for Solange?

Or for other reasons?

And, if so, what were they?

As for Solange, how — and why — had she come to Saigon, and what was she doing? He recalled Singleton’s orders back in Washington.
You’re clever young men. Lure him in.

Well, it looks like we both did.

113

N
ICHOLAI FELT AT EASE
in Cholon.

The Chinese quarter of the city, it reminded him of a damper, poorer Shanghai in the old days. The little stands and small shops were the same, the neon signs the same, the smells of cooking over charcoal, the incense wafting from temples, the shouts, the laughter, the crowding — it all reminded him that the Chinese were great wanderers, pilgrims who took their culture with them and replicated their old cities in the new.

He walked along Lao Tu Street, the main thoroughfare, and felt right at home. Cholon was reputed to be dangerous at night, particularly for a
kweilo
, but Nicholai had never felt threatened even in the worst slums of Shanghai and he didn’t feel in jeopardy here, even as he turned off the street and walked up narrow alleys into a neighborhood of four-story tenements.

Again, they all looked the same — rectangular wooden structures with tiny balconies from which laundry was hung. Men in sleeveless T-shirts leaned against the railings, smoking cigarettes, women inside yelled domestic questions in an attempt to engage their husbands in at least some form of conversation.

On the street itself, young toughs in brightly colored shirts and tight slacks gathered on the corners watching for opportunities, but didn’t see one in the tall
colon
who walked as if he knew where he was going and what he was doing. And he greeted them in Chinese as he walked past. They left him alone.

Nicholai found the address he was looking for.

The tiny lobby reeked of stale opium smoke.

Nicholai walked up the creaking, slanting staircase to the second floor. The hallway was narrow and slanted, as if it was tired and wanted to lie down. A door opened and a woman, clad in the tight red silk dress of a prostitute, looked at him for a moment, then continued down the hall.

Nicholai knocked on the door of Room 211.

No one answered. He knocked twice more, then opened the unlocked door.

Leotov sat dozing in a rattan chair by the small window. The room was sweltering and tight, and Leotov’s bare chest was shiny with sweat. He wore a pair of khaki trousers and sandals, his face was sallow, and he hadn’t shaved for several days.

The opium pipe was in his lap.

He opened his eyes and saw Nicholai. His eyes were yellow and runny, but wide in the dreamlike state of the opium addict.

“Where the hell have you been?” he muttered in Russian. “I thought you were probably dead.”

“There were moments when we shared that opinion.”

“I’ve been here for weeks,” Leotov said bitterly, clearly blaming his opium habit on Nicholai’s lack of promptness.

“I was detained,” Nicholai answered. “I didn’t count on being so seriously wounded. It delayed me by weeks. Nevertheless, I apologize — it is good of you to have waited.”

Leotov slowly pulled himself up from the chair and shuffled around the room, as if looking for something but unable to remember what or where it was. “You don’t know what it’s been like,” he whined, “being on the run, having to hide in this hovel, never knowing when … I took recourse in the local vice.”

Nicholai could virtually smell the fear and paranoia coming off him. “I see that.”

“Superior bastard,” Leotov spat. “You and him, both superior bastards.”

The “him,” Nicholai supposed, referred to the late Yuri Voroshenin. But he was already bored with Leotov. “Do you have them?”

“I have them,” Leotov said.

As arranged in their encounter in Beijing, Leotov had taken Voroshenin’s passport and personal papers, including his deposit book at the Banque de l’Indochine in Saigon, where the Russian had not only an account but a safety deposit box.

“So?”

“I’m looking, aren’t I?”

He shoved aside some clothes on the floor and came up with a small leather portfolio that he held up in triumph. “Here you go. Here’s your precious papers. Bastards, the both of you.”

Nicholai took the portfolio and flipped through it. Voroshenin’s passport, several bankbooks, scribbled notes.

“Where’s my money?”

Nicholai took bills from his pocket and handed them to Leotov.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Leotov demanded.

“Our arrangement,” Nicholai reminded him, “was one-third now, the rest when I successfully gain access to the safety deposit box.”

The documents looked authentic, but there was no telling until they were put to use.

“When will that be?” Leotov asked.

“Tomorrow. I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“I can barely get organized to make it out of this room.”

“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

T
HE
F
RENCH 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. “
Santé
.”

“Santé.
”

“Comment ça va?”

“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
status quo bellum.

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,
mon pote.
Or if you do, you never come back.”

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.”

“It sounds like fun,” Nicholai said, “but I —”

“Oh, come along,” De Lhandes said. “Rumor is that Bao Dai himself will be there. Not a bad connection for a man hoping to set himself up in business here.”

“I’ll try,” Nicholai said.

He followed the waiter to the back room.

115

N
ICHOLAI SAT DOWN
across the desk from Antonucci.

“You like my place?” the Corsican asked.

“It’s quite good, yes,” Nicholai answered.

The small backroom office was surprisingly cluttered. Somehow Nicholai had expected a neater, more businesslike atmosphere. The desk was a shambles of documents, letters, old newspapers, and overflowing ashtrays. A lamp, its shade stained with dead bugs, hung over the desk.

One of Antonucci’s thugs — a tall, thick man — leaned against the wall, the bulge in his jacket doubtless intentional. Antonucci relit his cigar, rolling it carefully around the flame of his lighter. Satisfied with the even burn, he turned his attention back to Nicholai and said, “You’re a young man. Ambitious.”

“Is that a problem?”

Antonucci shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

He waited for a response, but Nicholai knew that any response to such a wide opening gambit could only be a mistake. So he sipped his brandy and waited for Antonucci to move the next stone.

“Ambition is good in a young man,” Antonucci said, “if he is mature enough to know that with ambition should come respect.”

“Youth thinks it invents the world,” Nicholai said. “Maturity respects the world that it finds. I didn’t come to Saigon to change it or to disrespect its traditions, Monsieur Antonucci.”

“I am glad to hear that,” Antonucci said. “Tradition is that no one conducts certain kinds of trade in Saigon without paying respect to certain other people.”

So, Nicholai thought, the Union Corse already knows about my deal with the Binh Xuyen. Did Bay Vien inform them, or was it their fellow Corsican Signavi? Nicholai would place his money on the latter. “If certain men traditionally control, for example, the armaments trade — ‘men of respect,’ shall we call them — then that is one tradition that a young man would certainly wish to honor.”

“You are wise beyond your years.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Nicholai said, “what is the percentage on tradition here?”

“I am told that it depends,” Antonucci said, “on the particular cargo that is going in and out. But, say, three percent is traditional. So I hear, anyway.”

“Three?” Nicholai raised an eyebrow.

“Three.”

Nicholai raised his glass. “To tradition, then.”

“To tradition,” Antonucci said.
“Per tu amicu.”

Nicholai downed his brandy and stood up. “I’ve taken too much of your time. Thank you for seeing me and providing me with your wise counsel.”

Antonucci nodded.

After Nicholai left, Antonucci told his thug, “Tell Yvette I wish to see her on the next break.”

Fifteen minutes later the saxophone player came into the office.

“You make eyes at strangers?” Antonucci asked her.

“No! I was just trying to be hospitable to the customers!”

He slid his belt from its loops and doubled it over.