Black Diamond - Martin Walker [78]
“Okay, maybe I was misinformed,” Pons said with a shrug. “I suppose you’re pissed off with him because he’s stealing your lady friend.”
Bruno took a deep breath. “Were you born such a miserable old bastard, Pons, or do you practice this stuff every day?”
“Hey, no offense,” said Pons, his meaty face suddenly creasing into a grin as if it were all a joke between friends. “Plenty more where she came from for a rugby star like you. And one thing about the ladies, what it is that they’ve got, it doesn’t wear out.”
Bruno turned away in disgust. Pons caught his arm. “I didn’t mean anything by it. So what if he is a ladies’ man, that damned son of mine? He gets it from me. And it’s about all I see of me in the jerk.”
Bruno ignored him and turned to the baron. “I’ve had enough.”
“The baron understands me,” Pons insisted. “I was just telling him about a maison de passe I know in Bergerac, very discreet, very well run. I’ve known the madam since she was working herself. She’s always got some fresh young things on offer who are eager to please. The younger the flesh the better, I always say. We ought to organize a party, make a night of it. My treat, Bruno. What do you say?”
Bruno squeezed back into the crowd behind him to make room and grabbed Pons’s belt buckle. He pulled just enough to make a gap and poured his glass of wine down into the man’s crotch.
“I say you ought to cool down,” he said, pushing the empty glass down behind Pons’s belt and squirming away through the crowd. He was steaming with the effort of suppressing his anger but knowing that phrase “stealing your lady friend” would stick in his brain. There could be a kernel of truth to it, an unpleasant little voice whined in his head. She was seeing a lot of him, and he was luring her onto his council list. And he was handsome. And rich. Bruno slammed a mental door shut on the nasty seed that Pons had planted, knowing it would open again, probably in the small hours of the morning.
19
“There you are,” said the brigadier, grabbing his arm. “Here, you look as though you need a drink.” As if by magic in this crowded room full of mourners, he conjured a clean glass from the windowsill beside him, poured a large scotch from a bottle at his side and handed it to Bruno.
“Here’s someone I want you to meet,” he said, putting his arm around the shoulders of a short and very expensively dressed man in his fifties with a tiny mouth in the shape of a perfect cupid’s bow and a strong smell of cologne. He was wearing a tie of woven black silk, and his hair had the cut and sheen of an expensive weekly barber. “Meet Paul Savani, son of the legendary Capitaine Savani, and a good friend of the man we buried today.”
“I’m just about to read your father’s book on Vietnam,” Bruno said, shaking hands. “Hercule left a note in there saying bits of it came from some confidential Deuxième Bureau report your father wrote.”
“It’s no great work of literature, that’s for sure,” said Savani in a strong Corsican accent. “Hercule thought highly of you, so any friend of his …” He pulled out a slim leather wallet, removed a business card and slipped it into Bruno’s shirt pocket. “My private number’s on there.”
“Paul has a lot of friends in strange places, and you never know when they might come in handy,” said the brigadier. “He wants to help you find Hercule’s murderer.”
“We know it’s the Fujian Dragons,” Savani went on. “We just don’t know exactly who.”
“What dragons?” Bruno asked, not sure he’d heard correctly through the noise of the crowd.
Savani explained that the Fujian Dragons were a Chinese triad, an old one. It had started as a sect of Buddhist monks fighting the Manchus in the seventeenth century, trying to restore the Ming dynasty. Now the triad’s focus was organized crime, specializing in smuggling and illegal immigration.
“But your father’s expertise was Vietnam. Isn’t that different?”
“Fujian and Binh Xuyen, they both started out as river pirates. There’s a centuries-old