The club was called Le Bambou. Fitting it out took every centime Philippe had, but in its first six weeks it did not do well. It was seldom more than half full, and acquired a forlorn, neglected atmosphere which discouraged new clients.
All the prostitutes in the area, from the streetwalkers who posed half-naked in doorways brazenly tinkling their keys, to the footsore, young waitresses in the cheap restaurants who might occasionally accept a customer’s invitation to a party for two, were controlled by a Marseilles pimp known as Bastien. This thickset individual, whose thatch of coarse, curly black hair smelt of violet oil, visited Le Bambou soon after it opened.
‘Very nice.’ He pursed his lips, setting down his whisky-soda and looking around the empty room. ‘Exotic, a little different – I like it. This oriental style is the coming thing, I’m told. Don’t worry, my friend, be patient. Soon your club will be packed every night.’
‘We need some glamour about the place.’ Philippe refilled Bastien’s glass with an eagerness that was almost contemptuous. Despite his homily to Ayeshah on the danger of an emotional approach to business, he had taken an instant dislike to this squat satrap of vice who had to be placated before the club could employ hostesses.
‘Naturally.’ Bastien’s thick fingers closed around the neck of the siphon. He shot a small quantity of soda into the whisky and half-emptied his glass in a single gulp. He looked around again, as if evaluating the club for the first time. ‘You’ve got a lot of potential here. I predict a great success for you. Why don’t we say five thousand francs? I’ll send one of the boys round on Friday.’
‘Absolutely impossible,’ Philippe spoke fast, half-swallowing the words. ‘We don’t take that much in a week. I can’t do it.’
The Marseillais swallowed the rest of his drink and slipped awkwardly off the high bamboo bar stool to stand up. ‘Too bad.’ He reached for his black felt hat. ‘Perhaps business will improve, anyway – give me a call, huh?’
He left, rolling like a sailor as he walked, and the two youths who had waited by the doorway followed him.
Philippe unconcernedly accepted a loan from his brothers to keep him in business, while Ayeshah became ferociously determined to make the establishment a success.
‘Do you think I’m going to stay in that disgusting apartment with your grandmother one minute longer than I have to? She hates me, she never stops criticizing me and I can’t stand being pawed by those smelly children with their snotty noses and sticky fingers. We’ve got to get out of there, Philippe, or I shall go mad.’
In the daytime, Ayeshah slept late and lounged in the window alcove of their room, smoking cigarettes and staring discontentedly out into the street. She watched the straggling crowd of students, like a tide that washed up and down the pavement twice a day, as they went to and from their classes at the Sorbonne. Every day she was amused by the small groups of tourists, conspicuous with their cameras and foreign clothes, turning their city maps upside down to try to find their way back to the Boulevard St-Michel through the maze of ancient alleys.
‘Why don’t we offer free entry to students?’ she suggested to Philippe. ‘That way at least the club will fill up and look alive.’
‘Huh. Students haven’t got any money to spend. They’ll be nothing but trouble.’
‘Well, let’s try a discount for tourists then?’
‘How shall we advertise – put up a poster at the airport?’
‘Don’t be sarcastic, Philippe, it’s a good idea. Come on, let me try. Nothing’s worse than this – we’re losing more and more money every week.’
He grudgingly agreed to her plan and Ayeshah visited the small printworks where the restaurant menus were done. She ordered one thousand cards and some small posters. Then she systematically visited every hotel on the Left Bank, from the historic to the anonymous, and persuaded them to allow her to put a card in every room. After that, she boldly followed the students into the university annexe and pinned posters on every notice-board. A tiny figure with shining black hair in a ponytail, wearing an overlarge man’s sweater and tight, black matador pants, she looked so much like one of the students that no one challenged her.
At once a trickle of hesitant young people came to the club and Ayeshah abandoned her characteristic haughty manner and served them slavishly, allowing couples to sit the whole evening over two Coca-Colas and taking to heart their advice about the kind of music the club should play. Within ten days the word had spread through the Left Bank, and on the second Friday after the posters had gone up the club was crammed with kids.
Both Ayeshah and Philippe retreated behind the bar to help the frenzied barman serve drinks. Philippe grumbled savagely as he ripped the caps off Coca-Cola bottles as fast as he could.
‘Your crazy ideas. Why don’t you think before rushing out to offer cheap drinks all over town? None of these people will ever come back. All they’ll do is tell everyone else that the club’s overcrowded and it takes an hour to get served.’
‘At least we’ll make some money tonight,’ she spat back with defiance, then turned with a gesture of mock helplessness to serve a young Italian.
‘Money! Five centimes profit on each drink – you call that money?’
Ayeshah decided to ignore him. It was a long, hot, gruelling night and when it was over Philippe had to admit that it had been profitable. By the end of the week he grudgingly acknowledged that the students, although they seemed to drink nothing but Coke, at least filled the club with pretty young girls with whirling petticoats and nodding pony tails, and were enough of a spectacle to amuse the tourists, who had more money to spend. In addition, some of the students were wealthy, especially the foreign ones whose families mistakenly regarded the Sorbonne as some kind of finishing school.
‘But we can’t survive on this kind of business,’ he warned her. ‘Where will the students be in vacation-time? And how many tourists are there in Paris in the dead of winter, eh?’
‘So – we make a bit of money this way, we pay Bastien, he lets us have some girls and we go for the big money. Simple.’
Philippe scowled and Ayeshah dropped the subject. She appreciated now that her lover was neither a good businessman nor the kind of personality who could fill a nightclub simply with people who enjoyed the ambience around him. Sour complaints were his substitute for enterprise, and opium his response to failure. He had always simply used whatever club he owned as a convenient base for his drug-dealing, but in Paris Philippe had no contacts except his family. He could always find opium for his personal needs; he went more and more often to a foetid top-floor room near the Gare du Nord where a dozen elderly orientals prepared pipes in the traditional way, but most of the drug business was firmly controlled from Marseilles and small operators lived dangerously.
Furthermore, as she grew accustomed to the city that was now her home, Ayeshah realized that Philippe would never achieve the easy access to high society he had enjoyed in Singapore. The film premières, the jet-set clubs, the glittering balls, the boxes at Longchamp or at the opera were only something to read about in Paris Match.
‘What do you expect?’ he demanded when she wistfully remembered cocktails at Raffles Hotel. ‘When Singapore was just a fishing village with a handful of pirates across the bay, Paris was the greatest city in the world. It’s easy to get to the top in a small town that’s still growing, much more difficult in a city that’s two thousand years old. Of course we’re nothing but small fish in a big pond in Paris. It was your idea to come here, don’t forget.’
‘I want money, and I want a social position,’ she said, her jaw tight with aggression. ‘And I don’t care how I get them. There must be a way.’
‘Maybe I want to fly to the moon,’ he replied, putting on his jacket and preparing to go out. ‘There must be a way to do that too.’
Once more he began to leave the day-to-day running of the establishment to her, but now he realized that she was becoming his enemy. Ayeshah’s energy was directed to mastering
Paris for her own, undeclared, ambitions and she no longer took the trouble to weave the elaborate dream of eroticism with which she had previously enslaved him. The balance of power in their relationship had shifted. She refused him in bed and, instead of forcing her to submit, Philippe shrugged off his defeat and compensated by keeping a tight grip on the bank accounts, limiting her ultimate control of the club.
Ayeshah countered by cheating him. She rigged the till, watered the drinks and falsified delivery notes. Within six months, she had extracted enough money to pay Bastien’s premium for several months, and she went to the pimp behind Philippe’s back and frankly explained the situation.
‘Lucky man to have a sensible woman to manage him, eh? We shall do good business, you and I, don’t worry. And don’t worry about Philippe, either. He won’t give any trouble, I assure you.’ Bastien added the notes she gave him to the fat wad encircled by a rubber band which he kept in his trouser pocket. He was generous to her, sending not only a handful of showy tarts with Italian silk sweaters clinging to their mobile breasts and wings of thick black eyeliner emphasizing their smouldering eyes, but a few groups of businessmen who normally frequented more established clubs in the area.
There followed an unpleasant few weeks in which Le Bambou’s clientele changed; the prices soared, the tourists disappeared, the students complained, the new clients confused the prettier girl students with the whores and there was a fight almost every night. Bastien, who at once took to calling in for a whisky-soda at some point in every evening, loaned the club two young toughs in mohair suits who stood idly by the doorway, ostentatiously picking their teeth with flick-knives, and these disturbances gradually ceased.
Philippe, maddeningly, took the credit for the greater profit which they now made with less effort. ‘You see, ma chère, if you had done as I advised in the first place we would never have had such a struggle. There’s no money in students, you can’t rely on tourists – business people are the ones with the money.’ Ayeshah and Bastien exchanged glances across the corner of the bar.
A waiter rushed to the counter and called for six bottles of the best champagne.
‘You see.’ Philippe took a satisfied pull at his Gitane and blew pungent smoke into the air. ‘Six bottles! That’s the way to spend money.’
Ayeshah slipped off her stool and helped the waiter set up the ice-buckets and distribute the new gilt-rimmed champagne goblets around the table which was occupied by a large group of prosperous-looking middle-aged men. Their host seemed to be the youngest of them, a fresh-faced man of Middle Eastern appearance in expensively tailored clothes which made the best of his well-covered figure.
‘Who is he?’ she asked Bastien, who was personally acquainted with most of their new clientele. ‘He was in here last week with a couple of Arabs; they were drinking champagne as if it was going out of style and the girls told me he gave a good tip.’
Bastien nodded, a solemn expression on his heavy features. ‘Make a note of that face, ma petite. He’ll be the most powerful man in France one day, if you want my opinion. Hussain Shahzdeh. He’s a fixer. You want it, Hussain can arrange it, whatever it is.’
‘I like his style,’ Philippe announced in lordly tones.
‘Everybody likes his style,’ observed Bastien, his shrewd, black eyes watching Ayeshah as she turned away from Philippe with contempt on her beautiful face.
Chapter Fourteen
James hitched his sarong casually around his waist, and tried to keep his limbs still in the posture of exhaustion appropriate to a labourer slumped on the palm-thatched bamboo bus-shelter at the end of his day’s work. His watch was rolled into the folds of the sarong around his waist, and he glanced briefly downwards to check the time. Thirty seconds to go.
The bus appeared in a cloud of red dust, stopping for the small group of working men standing or squatting around the shelter. James heard the far-off thud of the first explosion as he climbed aboard, and saw, from the rear of the vehicle, a dense cloud of black smoke rising from the dockside in the distance. The first explosion was followed by others, and as the bus left the outskirts of the town behind, the smoke was rising high in the evening sky.
He jumped off the bus as it began to climb the escarpment. Below him the town, the river and the Kuala Lumpur road all lay in a broad valley. The hills on each side rose like waves of foaming green, one upon the other, as far as the eye could see. The light faded rapidly, and by the time he arrived at the camp he was finding his way by torchlight through the screeching darkness.
Next morning the fire in the docks was still burning. Twenty-five Japanese had been killed, two cargo ships damaged and the warehouse full of oil and gasoline destroyed. The fire had taken hold of latex and copra on the dockside and was raging out of control while shipping waited offshore.
There was no elation. Bill, James, Ibrahim and Lee Kuang Leong had travelled steadily north up the Malayan peninsula for almost three months, planning and carrying out sabotage operations with increasing skill and success, moving on swiftly once each job was completed. Sometimes, when they were lucky enough to steal a boat, they could be dozens of miles away before any damage was done. The Japanese announced larger and larger bounties for the capture of white men, dead or alive, and the Malay police force was almost wholly under their control. The four men were forced to live in temporary camps in the jungle, and so had been weakened by illness and poor food, and in place of the schoolboy enthusiasm of their early days undercover they now shared a sense of living on borrowed time. Their success was also their enemy; each strike against the Japanese put them in greater danger.
Cunningly, Bill had turned their fears into fuel for their endeavour. He had instituted a system of evaluating each operation and planning the next which kept the small group focused on their task and minimized the damage to their morale when things went wrong. The relentless pressure of activity left no fingerhold for terror in their minds.
Automatically, the four men began to consider their next target, the highway linking the east coast with Kuala Lumpur and the west. The road ran through a succession of mountain gorges where it appeared easy to lay explosives and cause a rockfall. Their stock of explosives, however, was so low that they first needed to find more. Their map showed an area close to Kuala Lumpur where there were two or three quarries, and on this unconfirmed promise they planned to steal dynamite.
‘This job will be a real beaut.’ Bill traced the slender belt of the road across the map with the earpiece of his spectacles. ‘Everything the Japs have got is in the east and this is the only way across to the west of the peninsula. If that road is cut the Japs will have their hands tied, and all their troops will be held back there in the east or down here in Singapore. If only we could radio the Communists, between us we could give the Japs a hell of a beating before they got the road clear.’ They had heard that the Chinese Communists had also taken to the jungle, and were gathering strength in several hidden camps in Perak. There were said to be several hundred of them, but with few arms and no radio contact with the outside world.
‘If we could knock out the airfield at the same time, the Japs would be paralysed.’ Ibrahim pointed to the only airstrip on the east coast. ‘If they wanted to send reinforcements they would have to come up from Shonan by train.’
‘Shonan.’ James pronounced the new Japanese appellation with disdain. ‘It won’t be Shonan much longer; another six months and we’ll be talking about Singapore again.’ There was an optimistic silence as Bill folded the map with care. Suddenly, without a word, James got to his feet and ran a few steps down the track leading out of the camp. His acute hearing had detected footsteps. He came back with a Malay girl of about ten years old whom they recognized as the daughter of a village storekeeper who had been supplying them with food, an enchanting little sprite who normally laughed and teased her elders. Now, however, she was silent and lethargic.
‘Where’s your brother?’ Bill asked her. ‘He was supposed to be here this morning
– where is he?’
She looked blankly at them with her upturned brown eyes and said nothing. They offered her some food, but she made no move to take it.
‘Well, she can’t hang about here on her own,’ Bill unfolded his bony legs and stood up. ‘One of you must take her back.’
‘For Pete’s sake, she’s only ten. She’s a child. What does it matter – she can take care of herself.’ James was eager to move on to the next objective.
‘She’s our responsibility, old man. Her parents wouldn’t let her go anywhere unchaperoned. Maybe there’s something wrong. And she could give us away to the Japs. Go on, James, get moving.’
‘You don’t go – better for me,’ suggested Ibrahim, taking the girl’s arm. She gave a shriek and clung to James, shaking with the irrational fright of childhood. So James slowly walked her back to the outskirts of the village, and as they approached the site of the family’s home he halted by a screen of shrubs.
Something was indeed wrong. The light wind that stirred the palm fronds above them carried the scent of smoke and scorching. The ground was black. The timber-built village store had been burned to the ground, and the neat stacks of dried fish, sacks of rice and tinned goods set out in front of it were reduced to smoking heaps. The fire had spread to the houses on either side, which were half-destroyed; the village seemed deserted. At the back of the gutted building James saw piles of sheeting on the ground. The air smelt of the charred goods and of something worse. James had never before smelt burnt human flesh but the obscene aroma, like roast meat but oddly sugary, was unmistakable.
He looked down at the child, who was clinging in panic to his leg, and spoke softly in Malay.
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