Satori - Don Winslow [108]
“No hunting there,” he said amiably as he sat down and jutted his chin toward the band. “That’s Antonucci’s private reserve.”
“All twelve?”
“He’s a virile little man.”
The saxophone player eyed him again.
“She’s just being friendly,” Nicholai said.
“She’ll get a beating if she gets any friendlier,” De Lhandes answered. “If you want a woman —”
“I don’t.”
The dwarf offered his hand. “Bernard De Lhandes, formerly of Brussels, now consigned to this gustatory backwater, where the charm of the women is in direct inverse ratio to the banality of the cuisine. By the salty tears of Saint Timothy, how a refined gourmand is expected to inflict a death from gluttony upon himself in this place I’ll never know. Although I try, I try.”
“Michel Guibert.” Nicholai lifted his glass. “Santé.”
“Santé.”
“Comment ça va?”
“As well as can be expected,” the gnome huffed, “considering that I just dined — if one wishes to call it ‘dining’ — at Le Givral, and all I can say is that whoever conspired to commit the aioli sauce must have been born somewhere in the less enlightened regions of Sicily — presumably in some village whose benighted inhabitants are congenitally deprived of both taste buds and olfactory perception — as the balance, or rather the lack thereof, of the garlic and olive oil smacked of sheer barbarism.”
Nicholai laughed, which encouraged De Lhandes to continue his diatribe.
“The fact that I nevertheless managed to consume the entire boiled fish and a leg of lamb,” De Lhandes said, “the mediocrity of which would have brought tears of boredom to the eyes of a perpetual shut-in, is a testament to both my tolerance and my gluttony, the latter of which qualities I possess in far greater measure than the former.”
De Lhandes was pleasant company. A stringer for several wire services, he was based in Saigon to cover “the damn war.” Over drinks, he filled Nicholai in on the status quo bellum.
The Viet Minh were strong in the north, and that was where most of the fighting was. They were weak in the south, especially in the Mekong Delta area, but still capable of staging guerrilla assaults in the countryside and terror attacks — bombs, grenades, that sort of thing — in Saigon. The legendary guerrilla leader, Ai Quoc, had gone into hiding, but the rumor was that he was planning a new offensive in the delta.
On the political side, Bao Dai was a French puppet, far more interested in graft, gambling, and high-priced call girls than in attempting to actually govern, much less win independence from France. If you believed the rumors — and De Lhandes believed them — he used the huge subsidies that the Americans paid him to buy real estate in France. He was also partnered with Bay Vien and the Union Corse, getting a profitable cut from the opium that the former sold in Vietnam and the latter shipped to France and then the United States in the form of heroin.
In exchange, the two criminal organizations helped him keep order in Saigon, including Cholon, the Chinese quarter on the other side of the Saigon River.
“Home ground of the Binh Xuyen,” De Lhandes said, “but the best food, casinos, and brothels.”
“And beyond that?”
“The Rung Sat,” De Lhandes replied. “ ‘The Swamp of the Assassins.’ There you never go, mon pote. Or if you do, you never come back.”
The conversation lapsed as they sat back and enjoyed the rather sexy orchestra. They weren’t alone in that. At the bar, a large and raucous group of what appeared to be off-duty French soldiers looked on in appreciation, grateful to see European women. At other tables sat men who looked like they might be journalists or government workers. Or spies, Nicholai thought, like De Lhandes.
The “stringer” was subtle, for a European. He had gently tried to sound Nicholai out, find out what he was doing, and Nicholai had given him little or nothing, beyond the fact that he was looking for “business opportunities.”
Now De Lhandes said, “Drugs, guns, women, and money.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said you were looking