Satori - Don Winslow [103]
Leave it to later, he told himself. You have something else to do now.
He splashed some water on his face to wipe off the sweat and the slightly dizzying effect of the pastis, then went downstairs and out onto the street.
Rue Catinat was amber in the late dusk as the streetlights came on. Nicholai took a moment to orient himself. On one end of the boulevard was the harbor, on the other end the distinctive twin spires of the Cathedral de Notre Dame.
A five-block walk took him to a shop called International Philately. The man behind the counter was a turbaned Sikh. The three shelves of the glass counter held frames of postage stamps, most of them rare, many of them expensive.
“How may I help you, sir?”
“I was hoping,” Nicholai said, using the code that Yu had given him to contact the Viet Minh, “that you might have a 1914 ‘Mythen’?”
“Blue or green, sir?”
“Green.”
“Green” meant that he was under no immediate danger and that it was safe to proceed.
“I will need to check in the back, please.”
“Thank you.”
The man was gone for less than a minute and returned with a thin glassine envelope. He carefully opened it and showed Nicholai the block of stamps. Nicholai held it up to the desk lamp for inspection and said, “Yes, I’ll have them.”
“Five hundred and forty piastres, please.”
Nicholai paid him.
The Sikh returned the stamps to the glassine envelope, sealed it, and then slipped it into a larger, padded envelope that he handed to Nicholai. Nicholai put the envelope into his jacket pocket and left. He stopped at a newspaper kiosk, bought that day’s edition of the Journal d’Extrême-Orient and a packet of Cigarettes Nationales, then went farther down the street, found a table at a café called La Pagode, and ordered a beer.
He opened his paper, read for a moment until the beer — wonderfully cold — arrived. Then he took out the envelope and, using the paper to shield his hands from view, opened it and read what was written on the inside flap of the larger envelope:
One o’clock tomorrow, go to Sarreau’s Pharmacie. Buy two packets of enterovioform, then walk to the Neptuna Swimming Pool and wait.
Vietnamese women, stunningly elegant wrapped in silk, strolled slowly by, shy but fully aware of their effect. Then there were the métis — the mixed heritage of Asia and Europe — impossibly beautiful with their golden complexions and almond eyes, which in their glint seemed to say that East and West can definitely meet and that it is indeed possible to have the best of both worlds. And the occasional colon woman with blonde hair like Solange.
Nicholai felt a tinge of guilt along with the physical stirring.
But if the coming of night signaled a certain sexual excitement, it also meant danger, and the Vietnamese police and French army patrols also came out, a prosaic reminder that this beautiful city was also a city at war. The restaurants on the boulevard sported anti-grenade screens, and the eyes of the police showed not the usual boredom of merely walking the beat but an alertness to genuine threat. The Binh Xuyen rode up and down the street in their green Jeeps, a few with machine guns mounted on the back.
Nicholai finished his beer, left a few piastres, and headed out.
107
BERNARD DE LHANDES FOUND the Saigon chief of SDECE in his office.
Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage. Only the French bureaucracy, De Lhandes thought, could come up with that title.
Sans prélude, De Lhandes took the bottle of cassis from the desktop, helped himself to a glass, and folded his thin frame into a chair. The air around the desk was thick with smoke, and Colonel Raynal’s ashtray was already overflowing.
Raynal was a fat man with dark, heavy rings under his eyes. De Lhandes thought that both conditions came from his spending countless hours behind his desk, smoking cigarettes and eating bad food as he went