Satori - Don Winslow [104]
“There’s a new player in town,” De Lhandes said. The Corsicans had asked him to find out what he could about this Guibert, and De Lhandes was in the business of buying and selling information. If he could do both at the same time, all the better.
Raynal sighed. There were already too many old players in town, a new one was the last thing he needed. “And who would that be?”
“Something called a ‘Michel Guibert,’ “De Lhandes said. “He turned up at the Continental.”
Raynal resisted the bait. “Probably just some businessman.”
“Probably,” De Lhandes agreed as he helped himself to another drink and one of Raynal’s cigarettes. “But he joined the Corsicans for their afternoon pastis.”
Raynal sighed again. A true Parisian, he despised Corsicans as a matter of social duty, and resented that his job forced him to at least tolerate, if not actively cooperate with, them here in Saigon. “What do they want with this … Guibert, was it?”
“It was,” De Lhandes said. “And who knows?”
Who does know, De Lhandes pondered, what L’Union Corse is ever up to? It has its greasy fingers into every pie. He slumped a little more into the chair and contemplated the slow circulation of the ceiling fan.
Raynal had a fondness for the Belgian dwarf, and he was useful. A few piastres here and there, a few chips at the casinos, a girl tossed in occasionally, it was little enough. And Raynal needed assets just now, especially the sort that warned him of newcomers.
“Operation X” — could we have come up with a less creative name? — was running smoothly and nothing must be allowed to interfere with that, he thought. If “X” failed, we could very well lose the war, with it Indochina, and with that any vestiges of a French Empire.
Personally he didn’t give a damn —he would much rather be drinking at a civilized boîte in Montparnasse, but professionally it mattered to him a great deal. His job was to defeat the Viet Minh insurgency in the south, and if that meant distasteful operations like the certainly distasteful “X,” then c’est la guerre.
And De Lhandes brought old news. Signavi had already called to report that this Guibert had apparently sold weapons to Bay Vien and had witnessed X’s operation in Laos. Raynal had questioned Signavi’s judgment in allowing Guibert to actually fly in with the opium shipment, but Signavi answered that Bay Vien had given him little choice.
“De Lhandes?”
“Yes?”
“Would you mind going around and having a drink or something with this Guibert?” Raynal asked. “Sound him out?”
“If you’d like, Patrice.”
“Please.”
“Of course.”
Raynal opened a desk drawer, pulled out a used envelope, and slid it across the desk. “For your expenses.”
De Lhandes took the money.
108
XUE XIN CLIPPED a vine away from the stone and looked up to see a novice monk approaching.
“What is it?” he asked, unhappy to be interrupted.
“I have a message for you.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I am instructed to tell you,” the boy said, looking puzzled, “that ‘the Go stones are pearls.’ ”
“Thank you.”
The boy stood there.
“You may go,” Xue Xin said.
He returned to his work and smiled.
Nicholai Hel was in Saigon.
109
DIAMOND RECEIVED THE CABLE and went straight to Singleton’s office. He cooled his heels in the waiting room for a good forty minutes until the receptionist told him he could go in.
The old man didn’t look up from the briefing book that he was reading. “Yes?”
“Hel is in Saigon.”
Now Singleton looked up. “Really?”
The boss was in one of his moods, in which every response came in the form of a single-word interrogative. Diamond continued, “Sir, he seems to have arrived on a French military flight with a shipment of weapons, rumored to be rocket launchers.”
That information made Singleton somewhat more expansive. “Where did the flight originate?”
“X.K.”
“Would that be an initialization of ‘Xieng Khouang’?”
“Yes, sir.”
Singleton thought for a moment. “Well, that’s not good.