The Corsican (10 page)

“Papa,” she said. “You forgot your book.”

Sartene turned and took the book from her. “We'll finish our story tomorrow, Pierre,” he said, repeating himself. He raised his eyebrows and inclined his head toward Madeleine by way of apology.

Chapter 5

Sartene had first met Antonio Carbone during his first week in Southeast Asia. It had been a courtesy visit to the massive house on the outskirts of Saigon that Carbone had decorated like the palace of some gauche little prince.

Sartene had always despised ostentatious displays of wealth and power, believing it invited curiosity where none was needed. But he had expected little else from Carbone, based on what he had heard of him during the man's days in Corsica and Marseille.

They were contemporaries, but had never met. Carbone had come to Saigon in 1943, after his brother, Paul, a leader in the
milieu
during the 1930s and 1940s, and a collaborator with the Nazi SS, had died. His brother's successor, François Spirito, had bankrolled his move to the east, and for Sartene, the fact that Antonio had not succeeded his brother spoke enough in itself about the man.

When Carbone had received him in a large study, overflowing with Louis XIV furnishings, Sartene had realized that the two brothers could easily have been twins. They had the same round fleshy face, the deep-set eyes beneath heavy brows, and the thin mouth that seemed to turn up at the edges as though trying to hide some great and humorous secret. Only this Carbone was fat, a fat that came from overindulgence in all things. From what Sartene had already learned, the man even indulged himself with the prostitutes who worked in his bars and nightclubs.

During that first meeting, Carbone had ensconced himself in a gilded, carved chair that sat like a throne behind his equally gilded desk. He had extended both hands in a gesture of welcome as Sartene had entered, but had not risen, simply indicating a chair instead.

“So you come here to earn your bread,” Carbone had begun.

“The war has been hard on Europe,” Sartene had said. “I hoped the opportunities here would be better.”

Sartene's words had been spoken softly, almost humbly. He had found during his life that there was a great advantage to playing the innocent before a man like this. He would learn later that he had been deceived, but until then it was better to offer no sense of threat.

Carbone had toyed with his wide flowered necktie for a moment, then had reached out for the gold medallion on his desk. It was Sartene's, given at the door of Carbone's home as a means of introduction.

“You have done well for yourself, my friend,” he had said. “Of course, I had heard you were coming to my region from friends in Marseille. I understand you are friendly with the Guerini brothers. Very noble men. Tell me, do they give you financial support to earn your bread here?”

Sartene had remained impassive. Carbone would have known of any financial arrangements through Spirito. The remark had been intended as a condescension.

“No,” Sartene had said. “I'm afraid I don't have the advantage of a benefactor. As I said, things are not good in Europe now.”

“Do you come to me for financial help, then?” Carbone had asked.

Sartene had shaken his head. “I found a bit of good fortune toward the war's end,” he had said. “It will be enough to help me earn my bread in a modest way. I'm here as a courtesy to you and to express my hope that if matters of mutual advantage come my way, we might do business together.”

Carbone had extended his hands in a benevolent gesture. “I am always willing to help a fellow Corsican,” he had said. “Especially if it profits me as well. Will you stay here in Saigon?” His eyes had narrowed slightly as he asked the question.

Sartene had shaken his head again. “I am going on to Vientiane. There's more opportunity there to work without great competition, and at present my plans are small by your standards.”

Carbone had smiled and nodded his approval. He was unaware that Sartene had already purchased business properties in Saigon and would undoubtedly remain ignorant of it for a long time. Too long for his own good, Sartene had thought.

Carbone had heaved his heavy body from the chair and walked around the desk, still holding the medallion in his hand. Sartene had also risen, and as Carbone had reached him he had taken Sartene's elbow and begun guiding him toward the door.

“I want you to know, Don Sartene, that you can always come to me if you need my help. We're alone here among these yellow heathens, and if we don't help each other they'll swallow us up like so many crumbs on a table. But fortunately for us they're a stupid people, easily taken advantage of. They work and die for pennies.”

When he had opened the door he had seen Francesco sitting in a chair in the hall. Sartene had brought Francesco with him so Carbone would know there were hard, young Corsicans beneath him, just in case he was cleverer than he appeared and decided to react harshly.

“And who is this?” Carbone had said, raising his eyebrows.

“Francesco Canterina,” Sartene had said. “One of our countrymen who has come with me to earn his bread.”

Carbone had looked at Sartene closely. “And how many of you are there?” he had asked.

“Only myself and my son and three others,” Sartene had said. Not too many, but still enough, he had known.

“It's good,” Carbone had said, still wary. “A man should have countrymen around him he can trust.”

Carbone had taken Sartene's hand, returning the medallion with it as they shook farewell. He had waved his hand in an expansive gesture. “If you're going to stay in Saigon a few days, go to any of my restaurants, any of my bars, and you'll be my guest,” he had said.

“You're very kind,” Sartene had said. “Everything that I've heard about you is true.”

When they had left Carbone's house, they had walked silently for several minutes.

“Is he as much a donkey as he seems?” Francesco had finally asked.

Sartene had nodded. “But donkeys have a nasty kick,” he had said. “We'll let this one slumber in its stall for now. Later, when he wakes up, he'll find his farm has been sold while he was asleep.”

Over the next few months Carbone had made various inquiries about Sartene's activities and had found little with which to concern himself. Sartene, in fact, had done little in those months. He had purchased a small bar in Vientiane, arranged some modest currency transactions with contacts in Hong Kong and established an insignificant protection network with some small Laotian gambling dens. All of it had been the work of a smalltime operation, exactly as Sartene had intended it to appear. When Carbone's interest had waned, however, Sartene's activities had increased. Within a year these interests had grown to an extent that rivaled Carbone's, and six months later had surpassed them.

During that later six-month period the donkey had awakened and some subtle but definite resistance to Sartene's smuggling and currency operations had developed. What followed had been a minor conflict, in which several of Carbone's Vietnamese employees had simply vanished from the face of the earth. Carbone had been upset, but not enough to risk a major confrontation. His main business, opium, had not been threatened, and until it was he could afford to live with the fact that he had been duped. But from that moment on he had watched Sartene closely.

Even though he had no respect for the man, Sartene did have respect for Carbone's large force of manpower, which could not be discounted. His own force had grown as well. Laotians who had fought the Japanese during the war—men who would instinctively hate Carbone, who had been treated well by the Japanese because of his brother's ties with the Nazis. Carbone also was strong with Viet Nam officialdom, which flagrantly peddled its influence. Sartene too had developed strong political alliances, in both Viet Nam and Laos, and he knew the Vietnamese would not welcome war between the two Corsicans, simply because it would reduce their graft by half. He knew too that a war would have been treated harshly and that such resistance would have caused difficulties for both groups. Now, with the support of the Americans, it would not. Still, it was a situation Sartene had tried to avoid. Conflicts like that only provided danger to those close to you, and he had always felt there was enough danger in the world without courting more, except when it could not be avoided. He had not foreseen that such a time would come, but it had.

As a young man in Corsica there had been other things Sartene had not foreseen. He had been sickly as a boy and had been left thin, lanky, and pale by the time he had reached adolescence. He had grown up in the small village of Calvi, which sat on the northwestern coast with the massive bulk of Mount Cinto rising nearly nine thousand feet to the east. Because of his sickly early years he did not lead the life of a normal Corsican child, and his father, a traveling wine merchant, always returned home, true to his middle-class standing in the village, carrying books to occupy the boy's time. Since there was little money for school and little energy for play during those formative years, the boy, whose name then was Bonaventure Marcosi, lived much of his life in the pages of histories and French novels, so much so that his peers in the village made jokes about his virility.

When he was fifteen his father died, leaving his mother and sister without support, and young Marcosi took a job on the docks, unloading fishing boats when they returned with the day's catch. To everyone's surprise, including his own, the work seemed to agree with him, and the fishermen joked that the smell of dead fish had returned him to health. In fact it had. By the time he was eighteen he had gained twenty pounds and had begun to spend his Sundays hiking in the mountains with other young men his age.

Now his life seemed set before him. Hard work; someday a marriage and children and continued life along the beautiful rugged shores and in the mountains of his homeland. It was what most had, and he saw no reason why it should not suit him as well. In the evenings there would still be his books and the life he lived within his mind. He had learned from his books that a man should content himself with the boundaries of his prospects, that to do otherwise led to misfortune. He had also learned that a man must live up to his responsibilities. And his were to his mother and his sister. His mother was a simple, strong peasant woman with the bulk of a small ox. His sister, Carmela, was entirely different, however, a delicate beautiful creature, who caused the eyes of young men to risk too long a look as she moved past. She was his closest friend, partly because of his inability to play with other boys as a child, but mostly because of her devotion to him. At night she would sit for hours and listen to everything he had learned from his books that day.

Carmela was sixteen, two years younger than he, on the day she was killed. He had found her body near the edge of the town. She had fought the men who had raped her and had been beaten for her efforts. They had left her there with her skirt still pulled up over her face, the underpants they had ripped from her body still stuffed into her mouth. She had choked on the cloth and they had just let her die. But she had also identified them in dying. Next to the body he had found a French army insignia, ripped from the collar of one of the men, and in the dirt around her were the footprints of at least five.

Two days earlier a squad of five soldiers had camped outside the town. They were the advance unit of an army force that would engage in one of the regular sweeps of Mount Cinto is another vain effort to locate a group of Corsican bandits.

On the evening after his sister's funeral, Marcosi gave his mother all but a few francs of the money he had saved and told her she would leave that night for his uncle's home in the village of L'lle-Rousse, ten miles to the north. At first his mother objected, knowing what he would do. But one look into those dark, piercing eyes told her she was no longer dealing with a child, and it also told her she would not see him again for many years.

The Frenchmen slept in three tents, snoring deeply from the large amount of wine they had drunk the night before, the sound obscuring the young man's movements as he went from one tent to the other shortly before dawn. It was simple and quick for the first four, a hand over the mouth and a quick slash of the throat severing the jugular vein. In the last tent was the sergeant. Marcosi had gone to that tent first, but when he saw the insignia missing from the sergeant's tunic he had decided to save him for last.

He had knocked the sergeant unconscious as he slept, then tied his hands and feet, spread-eagled, to the four stakes of the tent. When the man regained consciousness he lit the kerosene lantern in the tent. He wanted to see this man, but even more, he wanted the sergeant to see what would happen to him.

Slowly he opened the sergeant's trousers as the man screamed for mercy. Marcosi did not speak. His eyes told the sergeant the reason. He pulled the man's genitals from his trousers as his body bucked violently, fighting to escape. The knife moved in three quick motions and the blood spurted from the severed arteries as he placed the prize on the man's chest. Now he worked even more quickly. The blade of the knife slipped under the socket of one eye and with a quick twist of the wrist the eye popped forward and dangled on a cord against the sergeant's cheek. Within seconds the other eye followed. Marcosi pulled the gray egg-shaped testicles from the severed scrotum and placed one in each empty socket. The sergeant's screams were deafening, turning into a muffled gagging sound as Marcosi forced the severed penis down his throat with the blade of his knife. The sergeant choked to death on his own member before he could lose consciousness from a loss of blood. The man suffered and died just as his sister had.

Marcosi sat staring at the dead man for several minutes, then tore open his tunic and, with his knife, carved a message on his chest, knowing it would be found by the French army unit that would discover the bodies. It was a simple message.
In memory of Carmela Marcosi. Murdered at the hands of French pigs
.