Molly leaned back and studied the thoughtfulness behind his eyes. “That’s true of most of the world, Peter. The people who control it see to that. It gives them someone to dominate.”
Peter rubbed his chin with his thumb and index finger. “You sound like a man I knew as a child. He believed that every man, every family, was its own country, and he rejected all others that were imposed on him.”
“He sounds like a very wise man.”
“I learned a great deal from him as a child.”
“Not as an adult?”
“I’m afraid I missed that opportunity.”
The waitress, a young Vietnamese dressed in a black vest and pants, came to their table. She bowed quickly and offered a seemingly shy “Chao, dai uy” to Peter, then turned and offered a silent bow to Molly. “You want order now?” she asked in English.
Peter smiled, nodded, and spoke to her in Vietnamese, praising her English.
“Toi hic tieng Anh,” she said, giggling—I am studying English. “But not so good yet,” she added in English.
“Much better than most Americans speak your language,” Peter said.
Molly noted the gentle tone of Peter’s voice, the genuineness of his interest. It reminded her of Buonaparte, the way he dealt with those who served him.
For appetizers they ordered a dish of tom kho, dried shrimp, and ca thu, dried fish, each garnished with ot, crimson hot peppers, that required an ample amount of wine. As a main course Peter chose thit kho nuoc dua, pork in coconut milk, served on a bed of herb-flavored rice. Molly ordered cha gio, paper-thin rice-flour dough wrapped around onions, mushrooms, beaten egg, bean threads and meat, then deep-fried and dipped in a spicy nuoc nam sauce before eating.
After a dessert of French cheese and durians, a foul-smelling but delicious fruit, they ordered brandy and a strong Vietnamese tea.
“That was a delicious meal, Molly,” Peter said. “Every bit as good as your own kitchen.”
“How did you enjoy the durians?” she asked. “The people of the region believe they have the ability to restore sexual vigor.”
He laughed softly. “Is that why you recommended them?”
“Purely informational, Peter.”
He leaned forward, watching her eyes again. “Every time I see you, I seem to find something different,” he said. “How many masks does Molly Bloom wear?”
Her eyes remained steady, serious. “It’s as your friend said, Peter. No one here is what he appears to be. You should remember that with whomever you deal.”
“I shall,” Peter said. “Starting with you.”
It was ten o’clock when Francesco made his way along the dank narrow tunnel to the carved-out chamber that Lin used as a command post. He was tired and sweating when he dropped into the canvas folding chair across the table from where Lin sat.
“How long have you been here now? In Southeast Asia,” Lin asked.
“Since ’46, my dear Cao,” Francesco said, mopping his face and neck with a handkerchief.
“Twenty years and still you haven’t gotten used to the climate. How sad for you.”
Francesco’s eyes flashed across the desk with a mixture of amusement and dislike. “It would help if I didn’t have to come through a tunnel practically on my hands and knees,” he said.
“The tunnels are high enough. You could almost stand, my friend,” Lin said.
“Yes, that would amuse you, wouldn’t it? It would also amuse the little pets you keep tied in those holes in the ceiling.”
“Are you afraid of little snakes?” Lin asked.
“Only when they bite me before I can bite them,” he said.
Hand to mouth, Lin began to laugh softly. “You must admit it’s a wonderful defense system. Especially against those wonderfully tall Americans.”
“Corsicans are tall too,” Francesco said.
“Yes, aren’t they?” Lin’s eyes hardened, but only for a moment. “But you’re a valuable Corsican.”
“You asked to see me,” Francesco said, impatient now with Lin’s gamesmanship. “I assume it’s about the heroin. It will be here at the end of the month. Delivery direct into Tan Son Nhut.”
“That is good. But it is not why I asked you to meet me.” Lin leaned forward, forearms on the table, eyes hard again. “Why are you following Captain Bently? You did follow us after we left the Street of Flowers.”
Francesco smiled, but only with his mouth. “Ahh, I should have known you would discover me.”
“That’s the price one pays for incompetence,” Lin said. “Now why?”
“Because Peter Bently is not Peter Bently. His name is Pierre Sartene. He is Buonaparte Sartene’s grandson. And that makes him very dangerous to me. I intend to kill him, Cao.”
“No, you won’t, Francesco. He is being cultivated, and he is going to be very useful to me. If you’re right, and this nonsense about his being Sartene’s grandson is true, he is going to be even more useful than I hoped. Now tell me how you developed this fairy tale.”
“It’s no fairy tale, my dear Cao.” Francesco sneered. “Like you, I have friends who have access to information. When you told me his name I became concerned. I contacted my friends and saw what they call his personnel file. His supposed father, Matthew Bently, was an OSS officer who served here. I knew the man. He worked with us in Vientiane. He had no wife. No son. But when I saw Pierre, I knew. I have not seen him since he was twelve. But still I knew. Buonaparte sent him away. I always thought to friends in Corsica or France. But now I know he sent him with Bently. There’s no question. And there’s no question I have to kill him. If I don’t, he will kill me.”
“Why should he kill you, of all people?”
“Don’t be stupid, Cao. You know I killed his father. He’s Corsican. He won’t rest until he kills me.”
Lin placed a cigarette in a carved bone cigarette holder and lit it. “Don’t be a fool. Peter Bently is no more Corsican than I am. He’s a spoiled American who’s more concerned about his sex life than anything else. And what if he does find out? What is he going to do, chase you to Hanoi?”
“He’s not bound by the agreement with Buonaparte. And blood is blood. You don’t know about these things.”
Lin jumped up behind the desk. “Don’t presume to tell me what I don’t know. What I know is that you won’t touch him until I’m finished with him. He’s an intelligence officer, one of those fools who are supposed to find me. And I have arranged to know what he is doing. Not only does that protect me, but it also gives me a chance to learn things valuable to us.”
“Like his work with the man Morris, who worked with that other American fool, Constantini?”
“That too,” Lin said. “And anything else he may talk about. And believe me, he will talk. So you won’t touch him. Not until I’m finished with him.”
“That I don’t promise,” Francesco said.
“Then promise yourself this. Whatever you do to him, I will have done to you.”
Francesco glared across the chamber. He was being asked to risk his life, to let the Sartenes satisfy their vendetta. It was something he would never agree to. He forced a smile. “As you wish, Cao,” he said.
Chapter 33
The last light of day hung over the city, a mixture of muted, changing colors that seemed to linger in the sky just beyond the old colonial rooftops, as though unwilling to surrender to the night. The side streets were empty now, most people taking time for an evening meal, moments with their families, or in the case of the Americans; another long lonely night in a Saigon bar.
The day had been brutally hot, and now, for the first time, the temperature had dropped below a hundred. The empty, heat-soaked streets appeared to breathe a sigh of relief that was almost audible. Or so it seemed to Peter as he walked them, trying to offer some exercise to legs that had been stuffed behind a desk all day. Even in the lingering heat the effort was worthwhile.
Three weeks had passed—strange weeks for Peter, a mixture of lethargy a
nd excitement in combination such as he had never known. The work side had been dreary, marked by only one success, an NVA major, furnished by his grandfather’s Mua tribesmen, and met with an excitement bordering on the ridiculous from Wallace. But the colonel had recovered quickly, and had demanded progress on the Cao investigation. That, in itself, also approached the absurd. Reports came in several times a week identifying Cao as everything from a waiter in a Plantation Road restaurant to an outcast monk living near the Saigon docks. Peter had gradually become convinced that Cao was either several VC agents using a common code name, or an imaginary figure created by the Viet Cong to keep his unit running in time-wasting circles.
But it wasn’t only Cao. His private search for Francesco’s drug connections had gone nowhere either. The time he had spent in the seedier drug-related bars had produced nothing.
He had been to every corner of the sprawling Tan Son Nhut base; had checked every plane arriving from Vientiane under the guise of watching for infiltrating VC. If heroin was there, and if more was coming in, he simply could not find it. And if it was going out, he had no idea how, or who was arranging the shipments. There simply was no “long silver train,” none that he could locate at any rate. And the other comic-book phrase, the “green vulture,” was even more elusive.
He had talked to Morris about it and the newsman had simply shaken his head, insisting it sounded like typical GI lingo, hackneyed and trite enough to be real, but nothing he had ever heard. He had sought an outside source, someone who knew Francesco Canterina, but had found the man was a mystery to all his normal contacts. Peter only hoped that the questions would draw Francesco out.
He tried to push it all from his mind, something he had been attempting daily with greater frequency. Each day seemed to blend into one endless flow of khaki-clad bodies moving in and out of the base, offering nothing, proving nothing, just existing within a framework of endless orders and procedures. God, the military was boring, he realized. He had escaped it all these years by his constant training. But once that training was over, once there was no more that was new to learn, it all became one endless banality that would threaten the patience of the retarded. It was no wonder career military people looked forward to war. At least then there was a purpose to it all. Unless you were stationed with the headquarters paper merchants, as he was now.
His mouth had grown dry, either from the heat or the realization of how bored he was. At least the evenings had been good. Increasingly, over the past weeks, he had found himself waiting for his work day to end so life could begin. What a dreary fact it was. It made him understand the bars of Tu Do Street, the sad young prostitutes in their garish costumes, crudely offering minutes of release in comical pidgin English. Suddenly they were desirable, even to men who would find them otherwise repulsive.
But he had escaped that. The one saving grace of the entire experience. His evenings had been filled with Lin. Or on days when she could not excuse herself from Duc’s home, evenings at the Room of a Thousand Mirrors, and occasional conversations with Molly. He thought of Molly, walking now. Odd, he told himself. Without question the most physically beautiful woman he had ever known. And without question the most disquieting. She was far too interested in him, and the interest seemed professional.
His thoughts turned to his grandfather. The man amazed him, even more so now than as a child. It was as though a network of wires went out from the massive old house, reaching everywhere, then reporting back on all that occurred. Even unimportant things. Yet nothing, no small bit of information, seemed unimportant to the old man. He was like a senile old pack rat. But instead of old newspapers and bits of string, he collected old happenings, scraps of conversation, and Lord knew what else.
This last time their talk had strayed away from anything to do with his grandfather’s business, or his own. Only when he was about to leave did the old man again caution him to move carefully, to reconsider the method of his search for Francesco. Their talk had been just that. Talk. They spoke in more detail of his life in America. His growing up with a lack of interest in team sports—anything involving chasing a ball, as he liked to put it—preferring activities that challenged him alone against an obstacle or a solitary individual. It had seemed to please his grandfather, to be something he could understand. He had also understood the loneliness Peter had felt growing up. Unsure of his place throughout his teenage years. Remembering past places he could not return to, nor speak about to others for fear of discovery.
But it had been like that for his grandfather as well. In that one way, at least, they were alike. He had questioned him more intently about his youth in Corsica, the days in Marseille and later in the resistance. He had not asked about the years in Laos, knowing somehow he should not. The only exception had been questions about his father, more details about his death. And he had regretted those questions almost as soon as they were asked, seeing the strain and the suffering they caused the old man. He had wondered if his life made any sense at all without the life of his grandfather, and the past that it involved. And if that was true, how then could his life, so different, relate to the life of that old man sitting on the banks of the Mekong?
Peter ran his tongue over his lips, realizing his mouth was even drier now. Too much work, all this thinking, he told himself. Ahead, at the corner joining Nguyen Hue Street, an old peasant woman was beginning to gather her merchandise together after another day of street sales. Among the items were small boxes of dried fruit, which he thought might ease his growing thirst.
The old woman looked up at him expectantly as he stopped before her. She was small and thin and had a conical hat pushed back on her head, and as he squatted down to face her, the shape of the hat reminded him of the halos in religious paintings, a golden circle that surrounded her wrinkled, flat-featured head.
“A bag of fruit, Grandmother?” he suggested in Vietnamese. “But just a small bag that I can eat while walking.”
His clear use of the language, properly spoken, appeared to amuse her. He could see it behind her eyes. She turned her head to the side and spit red betel nut juice into the gutter beside her.
The old woman extended the small bag of fruit. “Fifty P,” she said, her voice high and broken with age.
The price was so outrageous Peter was forced to laugh. He looked at the old woman, sternly, noting the small gold cross she wore around her neck.
Peter reached into his pocket and took out the money, pulling it back as she reached for it.
“Will you go to church tonight, Grandmother?” he asked.
The old woman gave him a strange look, then shrugged her shoulders.
“I want you to go to church tonight, Grandmother. And I want you to confess to the priest that you robbed a poor young American.”
He held out the bill to her and she took it, raising it to her mouth to hide her giggling. “One cannot steal from the rich,” she said. “One can only take back what they have already taken from the poor.”
Peter widened his eyes. “Grandmother,” he said, feigning shock. “You talk like a communist. Are you VC, Grandmother?”
The old woman tittered again, hiding her mouth from him.
“You must confess that also,” Peter said. “The Pope, in Rome, he does not approve of communists.”
“The Pope in Rome is rich also,” she said, again giggling over her outrageous sacrilege.
Peter walked on, leaving the old woman behind. He shifted his shotgun-filled briefcase up under his left arm, so he could hold the bag of fruit in his left hand and pick into it with his right. He could hear the old woman’s laughter fading behind him. Another name to add to the list of Cao suspects, he told himself.
He had begun his list of suspects last week, partly to amuse himself, partly to relieve his own frustration with his search for Francesco. He had told Molly that he had placed her chief barman on the list; Lin, that her maid was his primary suspect. Even Morris’ pet hate, a notorious Australian journalist who reported the wa
r from Hanoi and specialized in fictitious American germ-warfare stories.
Peter walked on, telling himself none of it mattered. Every army throughout history had believed its side just, its enemies evil. He thought of his grandfather’s words, used to describe, but not explain, his own life. I never tried to understand what was good and what was evil in the world, he had said. I only tried to understand how the world was, and what I had to do to survive in it.
Peter smiled to himself. Not a very ethical view. Certainly not according to Judeo-Christian standards.
He continued along the sidewalk of this street, which had become his favorite in Saigon. The Street of Flowers. Now nothing but empty stalls, only the fragrance of the cut flowers left behind.
Peter popped a piece of fruit into his mouth and sauntered on. He would not see Lin tonight, and had not yet decided if he would go to the Room of a Thousand Mirrors. Perhaps a quiet meal alone and early sack time. It would be a novelty, certainly, he decided.
Across the street, about twenty-five yards ahead, a casually dressed Vietnamese stepped from a doorway, looking in his direction. He continued up the street at a pace slower than Peter’s. Alerted to the man’s interest, Peter forced his senses to sharpen. There was movement behind as well. He paused at a flower stand, picking up a wilted stem. Directly behind him, thirty yards away, two more Vietnamese kept pace, eyes on him. Across the street from them, a fourth, and twenty yards behind him, a fifth, who might or might not be part of the others.
Peter felt his stomach tighten; his mouth began to turn dry again. Perhaps his imagination was playing games with him, but every instinct in his body told him otherwise. Slowly he shifted the bag of fruit to his right hand and allowed the briefcase to drop down into his left. The 12-gauge over-and-under shotgun was loaded with double-O buck magnum shells that would drop a bear in its tracks at close range. But there were only two shells, and four or five men. He thought of the .25 caliber Colt automatic in his wallet holster, knowing he would have to get to it before they moved. Once they did, if they were good, if they were professionals, there would not be time. He erased all thought of the men’s being amateurs. They had moved in on him without his knowing. They had bracketed him. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he told himself. Out walking in a deserted area alone.
The Corsican Page 38