Satori (27 page)

We shall see, Antonucci thought. He looked at Mancini and uttered the ancient words.
“Per tu amicu.”

“Per tu amicu,”
Mancini ritually responded.

For your friendship.

106

H
IS ROOM HAD BEEN
tossed.

Carefully and professionally, Nicholai observed, but tossed nevertheless. Before leaving the room he had plucked a hair from his head and placed it across two drawers on his bureau, and now the hair was gone.

It didn’t matter — they would find nothing they weren’t supposed to find.

Had Mancini ordered it? Probably, although it could have been the French, who had a veritable alphabet soup of police and intelligence services in Saigon, none of whom were known to be overly respectful of privacy.

And the Corsican mob expects my presence at La Croix du Sud tonight. For what purpose? To be grilled, seduced, observed, threatened, perhaps assassinated? Again, it didn’t matter —to complete his assignment he would have to do business in Saigon, and the Corsicans had made it very clear that he couldn’t do business in Saigon without doing business with them.

Leave it to later, he told himself. You have something else to do now.

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’Extrême-Orient
and a packet of Cigarettes Nationales, then went farther down the street, found a table at a café 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
métis
— 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

B
ERNARD
D
E
L
HANDES FOUND
the Saigon chief of SDECE in his office.

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

Sans prélude,
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
boîte
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.

108

X
UE
X
IN CLIPPED
a vine away from the stone and looked up to see a novice monk approaching.

“What is it?” he asked, unhappy to be interrupted.

“I have a message for you.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I am instructed to tell you,” the boy said, looking puzzled, “that ‘the Go stones are pearls.’ ”

“Thank you.”

The boy stood there.

“You may go,” Xue Xin said.

He returned to his work and smiled.

Nicholai Hel was in Saigon.

109

D
IAMOND RECEIVED THE CABLE
and went straight to Singleton’s office. He cooled his heels in the waiting room for a good forty minutes until the receptionist told him he could go in.

The old man didn’t look up from the briefing book that he was reading. “Yes?”

“Hel is in Saigon.”

Now Singleton looked up. “Really?”

The boss was in one of his moods, in which every response came in the form of a single-word interrogative. Diamond continued, “Sir, he seems to have arrived on a French military flight with a shipment of weapons, rumored to be rocket launchers.”

That information made Singleton somewhat more expansive. “Where did the flight originate?”

“X.K.”

“Would that be an initialization of ‘Xieng Khouang’?”

“Yes, sir.”

Singleton thought for a moment. “Well, that’s not good.”

“No, it isn’t.”

It was especially not good, Diamond thought, as he hadn’t received this information from Haverford but from Signavi, who had phoned him shortly after Hel left Cap St.-Jacques. The Frenchman had asked him to find out everything he could about this Michel Guibert. Signavi was worried about Guibert’s alleged prior relationship with the Viet Minh, especially with the agent Ai Quoc. Signavi’s Vietnamese special forces troops had been hunting Ai Quoc for months, to no avail.

“Who is in possession of the weapons now?” Singleton asked.

“The BX,” Diamond answered. Seeing Singleton’s annoyed look he added, “The Binh Xuyen.”

“Hel is creative.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“Do you have a better word in mind?”

“No, sir.”

Singleton sat back and thought. This Hel person is really quite remarkable, he decided.

Remarkable, unpredictable, and dangerous.

“Take care of it,” Singleton said.

“What should I tell Haverford?”

Singleton pondered Hel’s remarkable escape from Beijing. “Why tell him anything?”

He went back to reading the briefing book.

Diamond stood there for a couple of seconds before figuring out that he’d been dismissed. Feeling the receptionist’s contemptuous look on his back, he hurried out of the office and into the elevator, discovered that he was in a sweat, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

Then he realized that it was all working out. Hel would finally be terminated and …

But what if Hel talked to Haverford about what he had seen in Laos.

And what if Singleton ever found out that …

He left the office and booked himself on a military flight to Saigon.

The supposedly brilliant Hel had walked right into his trap.

110

C
ITIES,
N
ICHOLAI PONDERED
as he walked along Boulevard Bonard, are like women of a certain age.

The evening masks the signs of aging, smoothes over lines, shades decay, replicates the golden glow of young years. So it was in Saigon, which at night became a lady in a basic black dress, with diamonds around her neck.

Haverford was doubtless a fine intelligence agent, but he made a damn poor street operative, and his clumsy efforts to follow Nicholai were almost comical. Nicholai quickly grew bored of the game, however, and literally turned on him near the clock tower outside the central marketplace.

He looked to be alone, but Nicholai scanned the crowd for signs of other agents. It would be almost impossible to tell, he had to admit. They could be mixed among any of the shoppers or merchants in the busy pavilion. But he looked for the overly watchful, the purposefully disinterested, or anyone who made even glancing eye contact with Haverford.

Nicholai eased into the crowd, circled, and came up behind him.

“Don’t turn around,” Nicholai said. “And walk.”

“Easy,” Haverford said. But he kept walking. Nevertheless, he took the offensive. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried about you.”

“After setting me up to be killed? I’m touched.”

“I don’t know what happened in Beijing,” Haverford said. “We had an extraction team in place and then you just went off the radar.”

“You had an
assassination
team in place.”

“What are you talking about?” Haverford asked as they walked past stands selling everything from cold soup to silk parasols. “If something went wrong in Beijing, it had nothing to do with us.”

But Haverford had to wonder. Was it possible that stupid bastard Diamond had co-opted the extraction team in an attempt to terminate Hel? What are you thinking? he asked himself. Of course it’s possible. And now Hel blames you.

Nicholai herded him out onto the street. Boulevard de la Somme was busy with evening traffic. If Haverford was going to try anything, it would have been in the market. “You can turn around.”

Haverford, a look of hurt innocence in his eyes, turned to face him. “You have this all wrong. I don’t know what happened back there. Maybe Chinese intelligence made you, somebody flipped, I don’t know. How did you get —”

“You owe me money,” Nicholai said, “a new passport, and certain addresses in the United States. I’ll forgive the monetary debt, but —”

There it is, Haverford thought. Hel had done just what I figured he’d do. Amazing — and characteristic. “Nicholai, did you bring those weapons into —”

“I will require the passport and the addresses.”

“Of course,” Haverford said, “There’s no problem with that. The sooner the better, in fact. You have to go underground, Nick. The whole world is looking for you.”

Nicholai suspected that by “underground” Haverford meant “under the ground,” but in either case had little choice but to go along. “How soon can you get me the addresses and the papers?”

“Tomorrow,” Haverford answered. “Or the next day, at the latest. I’ll set up a meeting point —”

“I’ll tell you when and where,” Nicholai said. Then he asked, “Where is Solange?”

“I don’t know. Why —”

“Don’t lie to me, I don’t like it,” Nicholai snapped. “You brought her here, knowing I would come.”

“You have it all wrong, Nicholai.”

“Yes, I had Beijing all wrong, too, didn’t I?”

He saw a
cyclo-pousse
coming down the street, flagged it down, and moved Haverford out to the curb. “Get in.”

“I don’t —”

“Get in.”

Haverford got in.

When he turned back around, Hel had disappeared.