by Don Winslow
Solange opened her legs, nudged her panties to the side, and said, “Quickly.”
He unzipped his trousers and fell on top of her. Entered her with one thrust and found her wet and ready. She grabbed his buttocks and pulled him in deeper.
“Come in me.”
“What about you?”
“Just come in me. Hard. Please.”
She took control of their lovemaking, pulling him into her until she felt him swell and then climax, crying out.
Nicholai lay on the bed, watching her get dressed, elegant even in her postcoital deshabille. She sat on the edge of the bed as she rolled the stockings back up her legs.
“Breakfast tomorrow?” he asked. “I found a place, La Pagode, that serves quite good croissants.”
“A date?” she asked wryly.
“We can sit at separate tables,” Nicholai said. “Or will the emperor miss you?”
“He’ll be busy with affairs of state,” she answered. “Trying to decide if he’s run by the French or the Americans.”
“And what will he decide?”
“He won’t,” she said, standing up and pulling the dress up over her hips. She frowned, as if she thought her hips were a bit too broad. “The Americans will decide for him. They will decide for everyone.”
“Not for us.”
“No?” She smiled as a mother might smile at a small boy’s heroic fantasy.
“No,” he answered.
She leaned down and kissed him. “And what will we decide?”
“To be together.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
He had money now, enough money for them to live happily in a safe place somewhere. He told her all about Voroshenin, the connection to his mother and his family’s fortune, about the safety deposit box, the bank accounts, the passports.
“We could go anywhere,” he said. “France perhaps.”
“I would like that, yes.”
“Maybe to the Basque country,” he said. “Did you know that I speak Basque?”
She laughed. “That is very odd, Nicholai.”
“I learned it in prison.”
“Of course you did,” she said. “Yes, the Basque country is very pretty. We could buy a château, we could live quietly …”
Her face turned more serious than he had ever seen it. “I love you.”
“I love you.”
She broke from his embrace, went into the living room, found her purse, and took out a lipstick. Coming back into the bedroom, she sat in front of the mirror and redid her lips. “You smeared them.”
“I’m glad.”
She checked her image in the mirror, then, satisfied, stood up. Nicholai got up, then held her tight. She accepted the embrace, then broke it and held him at arm’s length. “I have to get back.”
“The film,” Nicholai said. “How does it end?”
Her laugh was enchanting.
The heroine watches them kill her lover, she told him.
128
NICHOLAI WAS EMBARRASSED about sneaking back down the stairway, but he understood Solange’s concern — Bao Dai would not make a complacent cuckold and he would take it out on her, not him.
He walked down the street to the Sporting Bar.
Haverford was already there, sipping on a cold beer. A small paper shopping bag was set on the empty chair beside him.
Nicholai sat down at the next table and both men looked out onto the street.
“You’re the talk of the town,” Haverford said.
“So I hear.”
“Bad idea for a man in your position,” Haverford said. “As a general rule, by the way, and understanding that you’re relatively new at this sort of thing, a ‘secret agent’ should try to avoid celebrity.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.” He turned to look directly into Haverford’s eyes. “Diamond brought Solange here.”
Haverford didn’t know. Surprise — and perhaps anger — showed in his eyes.
“He’s tracking you down,” Haverford said.
“Because …”
“You went off the radar, Nicholai,” Haverford said. “Because you know things that would be extremely —”
“I wasn’t intended to survive the Temple of the Green Truth, was I?” Nicholai asked. “Diamond arranged for me to be killed there.”
Nicholai would have thought it impossible, but Haverford actually looked ashamed. “It wasn’t me, Nicholai.”
“But the Chinese rescued me. Why?”
“You tell me,” Haverford answered. “You brought the weapons down here, didn’t you? You came to Saigon before you even knew that Solange was —”
“But you were here,” Nicholai said. “You knew.”
“I surmised,” Haverford corrected. “I didn’t know if you were alive or dead —”
“Odd, you’re the second person to say that to me today.”
“—but I did my best to enter the very interesting mind of Nicholai Hel,” Haverford said. “I sat at the go-kang and played your side. This was your only move, Nicholai.”
Haverford touched the bag sitting on the empty chair. “It’s in the bag, so to speak,” he said. “A Costa Rican passport under the name of Francisco Duarte, and the home addresses of your intended victims. Go now, go quickly, forget about Solange —”
“You’re full of advice today.”
“My parting gift,” Haverford said, standing up.
“What about Diamond?”
“I’ll take care of him,” Haverford said. “I have to fight a little intra-office battle, but I’ll win. You have your freedom, Nicholai. Enjoy it. Sayonara, Hel-san.”
He walked away down the street.
Nicholai picked up the bag and looked inside. As promised, there was the passport and, more important, the home addresses of the men who had tortured him in Tokyo, including Diamond, in what seemed like a lifetime ago.
He ordered a beer and enjoyed it in the oppressive heat. The temperature was in triple digits and it was as humid as a shower. The air was heavy, and the monsoon would break any day now. He hoped not to see it, that he and Solange would be on a flight out by then. Perhaps to some sunny, dry place.
It was tempting to think that they could go back to Japan. His deck of new identities might allow it, but he knew that the country had sadly changed and would never again be what it was. Japan was Americanized now, and he didn’t wish to experience it.
Besides, there was a little matter to settle — three of them, actually —in America itself before he could decide on a place to settle. But Solange would want someplace to be while he was away.
Maybe France, maybe somewhere in the Basque country.
After all, he thought, I speak the language.
Nicholai finished his drink, paid the tab, and walked back out onto the street. He had gone only a couple of blocks when he heard the car come up behind him.
The Renault motor sputtered as the car slowed down to match his pace. Nicholai didn’t glance back — he knew they were coming for him and it wouldn’t help to signal them that he was aware. A quick glance into a shop window told him that it was a blue Renault with a driver and two passengers.
Nicholai kept walking. Would they really attempt to snatch him here? In the late afternoon on Rue Catinat? And would it be a beating, an assassination, or a kidnapping? He brought the Paris Match up to his chest, out of their view, and, flexing his forearms, rolled it into a tight cylinder.
Then he saw the two men coming toward him.
One of them made a crucial mistake — he let his own eyes meet Nicholai’s. Then his eyes shifted focus, over Nicholai’s shoulders, and Nicholai knew that the men in the Renault were now on the sidewalk behind him.
So either it’s going to be knives — if it’s an assassination — or it’s a kidnapping, because the car was still keeping pace instead of just letting the men out and roaring off. Nicholai didn’t wait to find out.
He took care of the men behind him first. Swing
ing the rolled-up magazine as if he was digging an oar into the water, he struck the first assailant in the crotch, then pivoted and swung the magazine like a cricket bat and struck the second man in the neck. Both went down — the first in agony, the second unconscious before he hit the sidewalk.
Nicholai went into a deep squatting horse-stance and thrust the magazine back over his shoulder, striking the next man in the eye, dislodging the orb from its socket. The fourth man reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. Nicholai dropped the magazine, trapped the man’s hand on top of his own shoulder, and then spun, breaking the arm and spinning him to the ground.
Then he ran.
He sprinted onto a side street that went off to the right from Catinat. The car followed him, bullets zipping as the driver attempted to steer through traffic and shoot at the same time. Pedestrians screamed, fell to the ground, and ducked into doorways, trying to get out of harm’s way as bullets flew and Nicholai pushed through the crowd.
Racing ahead of him, the car crashed onto the sidewalk in front of him.
The driver steadied his pistol on the bottom of the open window and lined up his shot. Nicholai dove to the ground and then rolled until he came up under the driver’s door. The shooter shifted the gun back and forth, trying to relocate his target.
Nicholai reached up, grabbed the shooter’s wrist and yanked it down, breaking the arm at the elbow, then pushed up, slamming the pistol butt into the man’s face. Then he sprang up, grabbed the stunned man by the hair, and slammed his face down onto the window ledge. He opened the door, pulled the man out onto the sidewalk, and got in himself.
A second car roared up the street.
A man leaned out the passenger window, blasting a Thompson.
Nicholai flattened out on the seats as the bullets shattered the windshield and sprayed glass all over him. Grabbing the pistol in one hand, he reached out with the other, opened the passenger door, and fell out onto the sidewalk. With the riddled car as a screen, he belly-crawled along the street, then looked up to see a startled messenger on a motor scooter stopped in front of him.
“Sorry,” Nicholai said as he lunged and knocked the man off the scooter.
He hopped on and raced off.
The driver saw him and came after him.
Nicholai leaned as low as he could over the scooter’s handlebars as the bullets zipped over his head. Police klaxons howled over the shouts and cries of bystanders as he weaved in and out of traffic, the pursuing car hot behind him.
He needed to create some space.
His mind flashed to the Go board, where two ways of creating space existed. The traditional and expected move was to place a stone far from the opponent, which in this case would mean accelerating the scooter to try to gain some ground.
The other was to eliminate the opponent’s nearest stone.
Nicholai slowed down to let the car catch up a little and then cranked the handlebars, turned, and charged the car. Firing the pistol with one hand and twisting the throttle with the other, he rode straight at the startled driver like a kamikaze pilot determined to sell his life at high price.
The shooter got off one more burst before he dived out the door. The driver ducked behind the wheel.
At the last second, Nicholai swerved, missed the car by an inch, and drove out into the swirl of traffic on Rue Catinat. Melting into the chaos of rush hour, he made it down to the harbor, across the bridge, and into Cholon.
129
THE TIGER GROWLED.
It startled Nicholai at first, because he was in a densely populated city, not a remote jungle. Then he recalled that Bay Vien kept a private zoo on his large villa on the fringe of Cholon. Nicholai froze for a moment, then edged along the high stone wall of Bay Vien’s urban fortress.
He had spent the twilight hours hiding in the darkened corners of the Quan Am pagoda on Lao Tu Street in the heart of Cholon. The few pilgrims who came in at dusk to worship the Amithaba Buddha bowed and chanted their Namu Amida Butsu and took no notice of him. When the sun went down and the district was lit only with lamps, Nicholai risked going out. But he stuck to the narrow back streets and avoided the vicinity of Le Grand Monde and Le Parc à Buffles.
He had no way of knowing yet who had tried to kill or kidnap him. It could have been Bao Dai, or Diamond, or Haverford. The attack came ten minutes after Haverford put him in place at the Sporting Bar and then left. Not wasting any time, the ever-efficient Ellis Haverford.
Still, he couldn’t be sure.
Perhaps it was the Sûreté or Deuxième Bureau. It might even have been the Viet Minh, if they had decided that he had betrayed them after all.
Nicholai waited until dark, and then made his way toward Bay Vien’s palatial estate. What if it was Bay Vien who decided to have me killed, Nicholai wondered? Then his guards would doubtless have orders to shoot me on sight.
So best to approach him, shall we say, carefully?
At an outdoor kitchen, he swiped a warm piece of charcoal and put it in his pocket. Now, crouched beside the wall of Bay Vien’s villa, he took out the charcoal, used it to blacken his face and hands, then tossed it into the bushes.
A double strand of barbed wire fringed the eight-foot-high wall, and shards of glass — mostly from Coca-Cola bottles, Nicholai noticed — had been mortared into the top of the stone. A bulky watchtower stood to the side of the iron gate that guarded the main entrance, and searchlights swung back and forth like a prison yard.
There is no choice, Nicholai thought, but to go over the wall.
It was a shame to sacrifice the tailored jacket, but Nicholai shucked it off, waiting for the searchlight to complete its arc, and then tossed it onto the wire. Then he jumped, grabbed on to the jacket, which the barbs now held in place, and swung himself onto the top. He lay there, balanced precariously, until the spotlight finished its next swoop, and then he dropped.
Something moved beneath him.
Nicholai suppressed a shout as the boa constrictor slithered out from under him, its powerful muscles rippling against his ribs. The snake was a good thirteen feet long, shiny in the moonlight. It turned its head, regarded Nicholai for a moment, and then flicked its tongue out to determine if this creature might make a meal.
“No,” Nicholai murmured.
The snake moved off, far more slowly than Nicholai would have preferred. A sensei would have called the snake an omen, a Chinese sifu would have told him to emulate the snake — one of the five model animals of Shaolin kung-fu.
So Nicholai became serpentine as he slithered across the clipped, manicured lawn, the grass, wet with evening dew, soaking his shirt. He kept low to the ground, freezing and pressing his face into the grass when the spotlight swung his way.
Then he saw the tiger.
It was in a cage, perhaps fifty feet off to his left.
It growled a deep, threatening growl, and Nicholai felt a rush of primal fear — an atavistic relic, he thought, from our species’ days in the trees. The tiger’s eyes were beautiful to behold, enchanting in the true sense of the word, and Nicholai felt himself being pulled into the creature’s orbit.
Is that how it happens? he asked himself. Just before your death, are you frozen to the sacrificial altar by sheer awe? Do you realize the magnificence of the world just before you leave it?
He met the tiger’s glare.
Two predators, he thought, who meet in the night.
Then he recalled the old Chinese adage: When tigers fight, one is killed, and the other is mortally wounded.
Good to keep in mind.
Nodding to the caged tiger, Nicholai resumed his slow crawl.
He stopped a hundred feet from the house and observed the guards patrolling the perimeter. There were four of them, walking interlocking routes around the house. Armed with American rifles, they stepped softly and didn’t speak as they passed each other. Just a brief nod to indicate that everything was in order.
The good thing about guards, Nicholai thought, is that they p
oint you toward your target. Each one of them straightened slightly and held his rifle at the ready when he passed outside a certain window on the villa’s second floor. A light shone through the curtain. The window itself was open, although barred with an iron grille.
Bay Vien was home, in his bedroom.
With infinite patience — and gratitude toward his Japanese masters who had taught him that virtue — Nicholai made a slow, crawling circle around the entire villa, searching for a weakness.
He found it in the back, by the kitchen.
A white-jacketed cook sat on a stool outside the open door. Head down, elbows on his thighs, he smoked a cigarette.
Crawling a bit closer, Nicholai could smell the distinct odor of nuoc mom, the Vietnamese fish soup that was a staple of the peasant diet. Nicholai put all his concentration into his sense of hearing and listened. The cook was having a desultory conversation with someone inside. Luckily, he spoke in Chinese, and Nicholai learned that the boy inside was an underling, a servant, his name was Cho, and that the soup was almost ready so Cho shouldn’t disappear to take a nap someplace if he wanted to keep his nuts where they were.
Nicholai waited and timed the guards’ orbits until he learned that there was a thirty-second gap at the kitchen door.
Nicholai closed his eyes and ordered his mind to allow him five minutes of rest. Aware that he was fatigued from the battle on the street and his flight to Cholon, he knew that he had to marshal his energies — the next burst would have to be quick and certain.
When he woke up, the cook had finished his smoke and was back in the kitchen.
Nicholai pulled himself up on his forearms and waited for the next guard to come. The sentry came by the kitchen door and then —
— stopped, as the cook came out and handed him what appeared to be a chunk of fish. The guard slung his rifle over his shoulder, thanked the cook, and stood and ate.
Damn the man, Nicholai thought.
He dropped back down and waited.
The guard ate quickly, but it threw the rotation off, and it took another half hour before the guards’ circuits were back in order. Then Nicholai waited for a sentry to pass by the kitchen, sprang up, and rushed for the door.