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
XUE XIN 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
DIAMOND 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
CITIES, NICHOLAI 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.
111
YU RECEIVED THE MESSAGE from Saigon.
Hel had made contact.
You are an interesting man, Nicholai Hel, he thought.
112
HAVERFORD 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
NICHOLAI 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
THE FRENCH 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.”
br /> 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.