The Marines had taught him well.
He grabbed the knife hand, turned, and flipped the attacker over his shoulder, onto the sidewalk. The man landed hard on his back and Haverford stomped hard on his throat. Then he pulled his pistol from the inside of his jacket.
One of the other robbers backed off, but the second kept coming and Haverford shot him square in the chest.
By this time, the Binh Xuyen guards had come running out of Le Parc à Buffles.
“Bandits,” one of them said.
“You think so?” Haverford asked. He was breathing heavily, blood was running down his sleeve, the adrenaline was already dropping and he knew he would soon feel the pain. He looked at the cut and said, “I’ll need to get some stitches.”
One of the attackers was dead, the other had run away, and the Binh Xuyen were already taking their bamboo batons to the knife wielder.
“Alive,” Haverford snapped. “I want him alive.”
“Bandits,” bullshit.
No robber in his right mind would try to take a wallet outside Le Parc; only a madman would try to rob one of Bay Vien’s customers.
The guards dragged the man away.
134
ANTONUCCI WATCHED his girls play.
The club was busy for a Thursday night, full of hard-drinking French paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires, and Antonucci kept a careful eye lest they decide to brawl in his establishment. So far the soldiers were behaving themselves, and probably would continue to do so, fearful of being banned from the joint and losing the right to stare at the pretty musicians. Later they would doubtless head to a brothel to douse the flame his girls had set alight, and others would profit.
So be it, Antonucci thought, it’s a sin to traffic in flesh.
He struck a match and rolled the end of his cigar around the flame.
Cubans, the good stuff.
He glanced at his watch. The whoremongering American should be answering for his sins by now. They had sent three of the best, with instructions to make it look like a robbery. Bay Vien wouldn’t like it, but to hell with him too. Sooner or later they would have to deal with that Cholon street rat as well.
And he’ll be much harder to kill than the American, Haverford.
Les amerloques, Antonucci contemplated as he inhaled the rich smoke, such amateurs at intrigue, so ham-handed, so obvious. It takes centuries to produce a conspiratorial culture, generations of familial connection. America, with its youthful naiveté and mongrel bloodlines, is a blunt tool that no steel can sharpen.
America in Asia? A deaf man at the symphony.
So now Haverford lies in the street, the French police will give their apologies along with their indifferent Gallic shrugs, and “Operation X” will go forward. The opium will flow through the French military instead of the Viet Minh, be shipped to labs in Marseille to be turned into heroin, and will find its way to the streets of New York. We will make our money and life will go on.
For some.
He allowed himself a lingering look at the long legs of the saxophone player. Lucky she can sit in her chair, that one. She’ll think three times before making eyes at a handsome stranger again.
And what happened to Guibert? Antonucci wondered. The newspaper story about the Viet Minh was an obvious French fiction. The rumor was that Guibert had made free and easy with Bao Dai’s new mistress, compounding the error of embarrassing him at the gaming table and taking his money. Yes, Bao Dai ordered Guibert killed to get his balls back, and then his boys botched it. He should have come to us.
Antonucci turned his attention back to the saxophone player, Yvette. Maybe I’ll throw her a fuck tonight, he 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, mon ami, I can pull you out of the shit you’re in – I have no hard feelings, I know it was only business, yes? Or I can just walk away let these Binh Xuyen boys have you. It’s your choice.”
“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.”