Black Diamond - Martin Walker [80]
The three of them shook hands, and the brigadier picked up the whiskey bottle by its neck and shepherded them out, collecting J-J on the way. By the time Bruno looked around for Savani, he was gone. Bruno touched his shirt pocket. Savani’s card was there.
“Would Savani be the kind of guy we might want to investigate one day?” asked Bruno, wondering just how discreetly he should put it as they sped toward Bordeaux in the brigadier’s car.
“What’s to investigate? Savani is part of the establishment,” said the brigadier, turning from the front seat to address Bruno and J-J. “Paul is a prominent businessman with a construction company and property interests in Marseilles and Corsica and hotels on the Côte d’Azur. You’ll probably see him elected to the Assemblée Nationale someday. That’s not to say that he hasn’t got cousins who’re involved in shady business. But not Paul. He figured out long ago that there’s more money to be made legitimately. His current big project is an industrial park he’s building in Vietnam with a lot of support from the French government. Naturally he’s been reviving his family’s old contacts there. Not everyone in Vietnam was a Communist. Governments come and go. Families and clans go on forever. Like the Binh Xuyen.”
Bruno had learned from his hurried reading that the Binh Xuyen pirates ran the river trade to Saigon, which meant they controlled the opium trade. They expanded from that lucrative base into casinos, property and politics. They fought for the French against the Communist Viet Minh in return for a free hand for their business activities in Saigon. Savani’s father and Hercule had arranged that. In the final years of French rule, the Binh Xuyen had the world’s most profitable casino, the Grand Monde, and the world’s biggest brothel, the Hall of Mirrors, twelve hundred girls. Their leader, General Bay Vinh, ran the army. Another of the Binh Xuyen leaders became director-general of police. France was broke at the time, and Binh Xuyen’s opium trade financed French intelligence.
When the war ended in 1954, Vietnam was partitioned between the Communist-run North and the supposedly independent South. The French backed their local puppet emperor, Bao Dai, but the Americans wanted a republic ruled by a pro-American strong man, Ngo Dinh Diem. With French backing, the Binh Xuyen launched a coup against Diem. It failed, and the Binh Xuyen leaders had to flee to France in a hurry, along with the emperor and his courtiers. Hercule and Savani arranged it.
“So the people we’re going to see are a bunch of refugee drug smugglers living under the protection of the secret service?” asked Bruno.
“No,” said the brigadier. “Maybe it was like that fifty years ago, but not now. We are meeting some of the leaders of a loyal and French-born community of Vietnamese origin, made up of hardworking businesspeople who have recently been subject to violent criminal attack.”
“There are over a hundred and fifty thousand Vietnamese living here. Where did they all come from?”
“There were waves of refugees,” the brigadier replied. “When Diem was assassinated in the military coup in 1963, a lot of his people fled. Then when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, another wave got out. Then there were the boat people, and since the Binh Xuyen had the best-established community organization in France, they became more influential. I’m not saying they were all entirely law-abiding, but like Savani they learned it was better to make money the legitimate way.”
“I’ve heard this lecture before,” J-J said gloomily. “You’re going to tell us it’s like the American Mafia. The old gangsters built Las Vegas, and then sent their sons to Harvard Law School, and the sons made a lot more turning it into a legitimate tourist playground. Crime as just another step on the ladder of social mobility.”
“But that’s the way it’s always been,” said the brigadier. “It’s not just Las Vegas. Remember