He checked his watch. It was time to join J-J and the brigadier for the drive to Bordeaux. Swiftly he changed from his uniform into the civilian clothes he had brought in his shoulder bag. The blue trousers and blue shirt stayed. It meant only removing his tie, cap and jacket and donning a casual black windbreaker jacket. But that left no room for the books, so he scoured the kitchen for a plastic bag, locked the house and left. When he got back to the mairie he spotted an anonymous black car with two radio aerials and a grim-faced driver. It had to be the brigadier’s car.
“I know who you are, monsieur,” the driver said. “You can leave your bags with me. I’ll put them in the back.”
“I’ll need to work on the books in the plastic bag while we drive,” Bruno said.
The driver nodded and looked at his watch as Bruno went inside the mairie and took a glass of wine from the table at the door. The crowd seemed even bigger than it had been when he left it. He saw J-J looming above the sea of heads and edged across to say he was ready to go.
“The brigadier was looking for you,” J-J said. “Someone he wanted you to meet. He’s over by the big window.”
Bruno struggled through the crowd again, holding his glass of wine above his head to prevent it from being jostled, and found himself squeezed against the burly shape of Pons the sawmill owner who was talking business with the baron.
“There you are, Bruno,” said the baron. “I think I preferred our private send-off for Hercule to this zoo.”
“You know the mairie, Bruno,” said Pons in his brusque way. “How long will it take me to get a construction permit to turn my sawmill into residences?”
“A very long time,” said Bruno. “This mayor won’t be helpful while you’re running against him. And because you’re running against him he could well lose and be replaced by your son. From what I’ve seen of him, your son is not likely to be very helpful.”
“But what if I apply to build green housing?” Pons said. “What if I were to make it an ecological project, with solar panels, geothermal heating, full insulation, carbon neutral-all the fashionable bells and whistles.”
“Then you’d probably get your permit,” Bruno replied, “along with a corruption scandal in the press that will say you have a deal that could make you rich, and he’s your heir. At that point, the rest of the council would turn very hostile very fast. There’s already some grumbling in town about the tax breaks you’re getting for opening a new sawmill in St. Felix after you closed ours.”
“That’s exactly what I told him. What would make it work would be the subsidies we could get for a project like that,” said the baron. “But the moment you apply for public funds, there’d be trouble. That’s why I told Pons that he should sell the land to me.”
“Even then you could have trouble,” Bruno said. “Industrial land that’s going to be rezoned for housing needs an environmental damage survey. Those cost a lot, and a cleanup can cost even more. And no mayor could get around that regulation, even if he wanted to.”
“You wait till the elections, Bruno,” grunted Pons. “Then you’ll see what mayors can and can’t do.”
“Since you raise the topic, why in hell are you running when you know you’ll just take votes from the mayor and probably make your son the winner?” the baron asked.
“What makes you say that? I’m going to win, not my damned son and not that wimp Mangin, who spends all his time trying to appease the Reds and the Greens and doesn’t really know which side he’s on.”
“You haven’t got a chance, but you’ll take a few hundred votes from the mayor,” the baron said. “Anyone would have to say objectively that you’re trying to put your son’s Red-Green coalition into power.”
“ Va te faire enculer, Baron. I’ve got a lot of support and I’m going to win this thing and if people like you come to their senses, I’ll win by a landslide. Anyway, I thought you’d become a friend of my son, Bruno. I hear you’ve been getting free dinners at that fancy restaurant,” Pons said with a sneer.
Bruno’s mouth fell open in disbelief, but his jaw clenched. If there had been room to move his arm, Bruno would have been tempted to punch the sneer off Pons’s face, but the baron’s hand was on his arm.
“You’re out of line,” the baron snapped at Pons. “I was there. Your son wanted to pick up the check, but Bruno insisted on paying.”
“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 Deuxieme 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 feud, but sometimes they cooperate. It’s a bit like France and Germany, or France and England-hundreds of years as enemies, then allies. Vietnam and China are old enemies, but Binh Xuyen and the Dragons were never very obedient to government. They always had their own deals.”
“So the trouble we’re seeing is not some Chinese-Viet ethnic conflict but something between criminal gangs?” Bruno asked. He had trouble thinking of Vinh as any kind of criminal, far less a gang member. “And why would they want to kill Hercule?”
“Hercule was killed because he was a symbol. He was an important friend to the Vietnamese. And then he’s French, a top man in intelligence. They wanted to intimidate, to show how far their arm could stretch. And when you say ‘gangs’ you can miss the point. These are old organizations, more like clans. Membership has to do with family and heritage. Sometimes you don’t have a choice.”
Bruno got the impression Savani was talking about himself. He looked quizzically at the brigadier.
“Family traditions work in different ways,” the brigadier said, trying to refill Bruno’s glass. But he put his hand over it, knowing he’d had enough. “The Savanis have always been helpful to the French state. Or at least, there has always been one wing of the family that played that role.”
“It goes back to Napoleon,” Savani explained. It had taken a while, but Bruno began to suspect that he was in the presence of a leading figure in the Union Corse, the oldest network of organized crime in France. “We were cousins with the Bonapartes.”
“I think I’m out of my depth here,” Bruno said.
“It’s very simple,” Savani said. “We Corsicans ran the French empire in Indochina. Hotels and casinos, rubber plantations, the civil service and the colonial police and military. Hercule worked for my father in Vietnam. They were friends. So when Hercule started recruiting barbouzes to go after the OAS killers, he turned to my father, who knew where to recruit even better killers. Most of the real barbouzes were Corsicans.”
“And very grateful we were too,” the brigadier said. “So was de Gaulle, after they saved his life a couple of times.”
“Where do the Fujian Dragons get involved?”
“For their own reasons, the Dragons killed Hercule. He was a good friend to us and the Vietnamese, so there’s a feud. And the Chinese are attacking the Vietnamese here in France, which means they’re attacking the Binh Xuyen, with whom we have an old alliance. We help our friends. It’s tradition.”
“One of the reasons why the Viets are seeing us this evening is that Paul here smoothed the way,” the brigadier said.
“It would have happened anyway,” Savani said. He took a thin cigarillo from his breast pocket and began to light it, ignoring the DEFENSE DE FUMER signs all over the mairie. Without a word, the brigadier leaned across to unlatch the window and threw it open. Savani spoke again. “Your old army friend Tran is well respected, and right now the Viets need all the help they can get. They called me last week, when all this trouble began. So I called the brigadier.”
Bruno studied the two men. Every time he met the brigadier, he had a sense of some looming secret government of France, operating behind the facade of politicians and media. It troubled him.
“Paul also helped broker the truce last year between the gangs in Marseilles,” the brigadier said. “You know about that?”
“Only what I read in an old Paris Match while waiting at the dentist,” said Bruno, looking sideways at Savani. “They said it was a war over drugs.”
“ Paris Match had it mostly right, even though they kept Paul’s name out of it,” said the brigadier. “They had twenty killings in less than a month. Chinese against Viets, Viets against Corsicans, Corsicans against Chinese. But it wasn’t just about drugs; it was about who got to control the port. Paul brought the leaders together and helped broker a deal. We’re going to do the same thing here.”
“Does that mean you’ll be joining us in Bordeaux?” Bruno asked Savani.
“Not this time. And I have to get back to Ajaccio.”
“Paul kindly flew me down from Paris in his plane,” the brigadier said. “It’s at Bergerac, and he’ll take it on to Corsica tonight. And now I think we’d better head for Bordeaux.”
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 Cote d’Azur. You’ll probably see him elected to the Assemblee 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 t
o 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 Balzac, who said that behind every great fortune there lies a great crime. The grandson of yesterday’s crime lord is today a pillar of the state.”
“The state and its custodians may think in those grand terms of decades and generations,” said J-J. “But I’m a policeman on the ground, and the ones I see are the victims of crime today. They’re the ones I’m supposed to protect.”
“That’s why the French state in her genius has always had different arms of the law, operating by subtly different rules,” said the brigadier. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine, and Bruno protects the interests of St. Denis. And France is grateful to us all. What that means today is that we want a truce between the Viets and the Chinese.”
“So we’re not trying to stop organized crime,” said Bruno. “We’re just trying to organize it better.”
“Precisely,” said the brigadier. “We’re never going to stop it, so we have to control it and make it play by our rules as much as we can. You may not like it, but that’s just as much policing as catching bank robbers.”
“Or dressing up as Father Christmas in St. Denis,” said J-J, elbowing Bruno in the ribs.
“I’m glad you reminded me,” said Bruno, handing J-J a copy of Alain’s signed statement. “The man in the red suit and white beard has been out there solving crimes. It’s not bank robbery, but finding out who was cheating the truffle market is important for the Perigord people who pay our wages. Consider it an early present from the Father Christmas of St. Denis.”
20
The twin spires of Bordeaux’s ancient cathedral of St. Andre glowed in their floodlights as the car approached the Pont de Pierre across the wide Garonne River. Bruno called Tran to check that they were still meeting at his restaurant as planned. He closed the phone and directed the driver into the warren of narrow streets that surrounded the Basilica of St. Michael. Halfway to the Porte de la Monnaie the brigadier spotted the multiple aerials of the unmarked police car blocking an alleyway. As their car slowed, two men came from the shadow of the alley and flagged them down. The brigadier opened his window and showed an identity card. At a signal from one of the guards, the unmarked police car quickly reversed to make room for them to pass. The alley was perhaps a hundred yards long and unlit, but the car’s headlamps picked out a small knot of people standing at an open door from which a dim light spilled. The driver headed toward them at a crawl.
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