The Corsican

by William Heffernan

  “You have something important to do tomorrow. That’s what you should be thinking about now. The future of our group depends on it. And I expect you to do it well.”

  Jean allowed his hand to drop from his father’s shoulder. He stood there for a moment, staring at his back, then turned and walked slowly out of the room.

  It was a small, seedy bar in the red-light district of Vientiane. The bar was owned by a Laotian, who paid tribute to the Sartene milieu, but the bar was never frequented by the Corsicans who worked for Sartene.

  Even in the early-morning hours the Laotian whores scattered along the bar eyed each prospective customer as he entered. The smoke from dozens of cigarettes was thick and hung near the ceiling like wispy clouds, reflecting the colored lights that flashed from the Wurlitzer jukebox that occupied one corner of the room.

  Francesco Canterina and the two men from Saigon sat in a rear booth, the front of which was covered by a beaded curtain. The men were Corsicans. Carbone’s men. They had been in the city for five days, hidden in a cheap hotel near the bar, awaiting word from Francesco.

  One of the Corsicans had the thick body and flat face of a peasant. He was young, in his late twenties, but he was already losing his hair, and it made him seem older. The second man was small and wiry, and his face seemed to come to a sharp edge along the line of his nose, giving his head the shape of a hatchet. They spoke quietly in Corsican, the hatchet-faced man glancing repeatedly toward the entrance of the bar.

  “You sure he doesn’t suspect anything?” the large man said.

  Francesco smiled coldly at him. “Nothing. If he did, I’d be floating down the Mekong right now, food for the crocodiles. He’s an old man, past his time, like I told you. All he wants to do now is play with his grandson. Meanwhile our milieu suffers. It’ll be a kindness to him to put him out of his misery.”

  “And his son will be taken care of too?” the smaller man asked. “I’ve heard about him, and I don’t want him looking me up later.”

  “That I do myself,” Francesco said. Bently flashed through his mind. He hadn’t anticipated his presence. It would require some diversion, something unexpected.

  The large man rubbed his massive chin, which already showed the dark stubble of his returning beard. “I’m not sure of the airport,” he said. “It’s very open.”

  “He and Auguste Pavlovi will go there to meet Auguste’s brother, Benito. His plane is due in at four-thirty in the afternoon, and Buonaparte always goes to meet him. They’re very close, these three old men. The Mua bodyguards will stay in the car. Buonaparte doesn’t like to attract attention by taking them inside with him. It’s the one place he’s most vulnerable. And the time is right. By that time his son will be dead.” Francesco shrugged, confirming the logic of what he had said.

  “What about these other two?” the smaller man asked.

  “They’re like him. They’re old and their minds have gone soft.”

  “Will they have guns?” The smaller man was still pressing.

  “Of course,” Francesco snapped. “Listen, I didn’t tell you I wanted you to take three old nuns. They’ll have pistols, that’s all. The Mua guards will have heavy weapons, but they’ll be in the car. You take them inside.” He snapped his fingers three times. “Just like that. You’re making it sound like I’m asking you to fight some fucking army, instead of three old men.”

  “Look,” the big man said. “Carbone told us no mistakes. We’re just being careful.”

  Francesco looked at each man in turn. Carbone, the ass, couldn’t have picked two more likely assassins. Two hard young Corsicans, dressed in rumpled cord suits. Sartene and the others would recognize them immediately for what they were. “You won’t have to worry about anything,” he said. “There’s a lounge in the airport. You’ll both be sitting there, reading newspapers. They’ll have to walk right past you, but I don’t even want you to look at them. Keep your faces covered with the papers.”

  The large man threw his hands up in a gesture of disbelief. “How are we supposed to see them?”

  “You won’t have to, until just before you shoot.” He grinned at his own cleverness. “There’s a Mua who works at my house in Vientiane. He’ll come rushing up, calling Sartene by name, just as they reach you. Then you drop the papers and they’re right in front of you.”

  The two Corsicans exchanged glances. The larger one nodded appreciatively.

  “He’s really gotten that careless?” the smaller man asked.

  Francesco raised his eyebrows in a what-can-you-expect gesture.

  “I’m not really surprised,” the smaller man said. “Power makes men overconfident. Don Carbone does the same thing. Sometimes I think he’s also getting too old for this kind of life.”

  Francesco laughed. “It happens to us all,” he said. “Let’s have another drink. We’ll drink to youth, and to tomorrow.” He extended his hand through the beaded curtain and snapped his fingers for the waiter. He would buy each of these men a whore tonight, he decided. He wanted them to be content. Especially the one who thought Carbone was getting old.

  Chapter 15

  Jean Sartene swung the small observation plane in a wide arc prior to landing at Phong Savan. With each turn he and Bently studied the forest below, looking for any sign that a hostile force might be lying in wait. The jungle was still, a hundred different shades of green reflecting the early-morning light. The plane passed over the village of Lat Houang with its scattering of hootches, children playing in the dusty soil, old men squatting in the shade, buffalo standing idle, some already hitched to wooden-wheeled carts.

  There was no one working the steep hillsides where the poppies were grown. The plants that remained from the previous crop where now scorched and brown and almost hidden by new growth waiting to be replaced by the new plantings that would be sown in late March, only weeks before the rainy season began. Looking out the window, Bently remembered the first planting he had witnessed, the primitive slash-and-bum agriculture common to all of Southeast Asia.

  It had been a hot, dusty morning, just as it was now. The men, women and children of the village had gathered at the bottom of a wide, steep hill. For weeks, men of the village had been cutting the forest growth that covered the hill with single-bitted axes. The fallen trees and soft vegetation were now dry and brittle. Slowly the men of the village climbed the hill. At the top they lit torches, then turned and raced wildly down the hill, dragging the torches behind them. Flames shot hundreds of feet into the air, literally chasing them down the hillside, and within hours the billowing smoke rose two miles above the fields.

  Later, when the fires ended, the field was covered with a thick layer of nourishing ash that sealed all moisture beneath the burned surface. Now when the hillside cooled the planting could begin, the scattering, by hand, of tiny poppy seeds. Three months later the greenish plant would stand three or four feet high, with a main tubular stem and six to twelve shoots, each holding a brightly colored. flower. For a week the color on the hillside would be awesome, beautiful beyond description, then gradually the petals would drop to the ground, exposing a green seedpod, the size and shape of a bird’s egg.

  This was what the planters would await, moving through the fields then with curved knives, making shallow parallel incisions across the surface of each pod to allow the milky white sap to seep out. Then returning, when the sap had congealed, turned into a brownish-black, to scrape off the new opium with flat, dull knives. He had seen all of it, year after year now, up to the point the pungent, jellylike opium was gathered in bundles for shipment to the recently built morphine-processing plants outside Vientiane and Saigon. He had not gone to these plants, where the opium was cooked in water and lime fertilizer to extract the morphine, then molded into chalky white bricks, ready then to be shipped again.

  He wondered why, why he had not. That part of it was the reality of it all, he decided. This was only agriculture.

  The plane made its final approach to the ramshackle
runway, at the end of which Touby and a small group of Meo warriors waited:

  “We’re here,” Bently said over his shoulder, stirring Francesco Canterina from the sleep he had enjoyed throughout the flight.

  Francesco yawned and looked out at the dirt runway that raced toward them. “I should have gone to bed early last night,” he said.

  “You say that every morning,” Jean said. “And every night your prick keeps you awake.”

  The plane bumped along the runway, the metal shuddering, then skidded slightly to port as it came to an abrupt halt.

  “What time did you go to bed?” Bently asked.

  “They only taught me how to take off and fly this thing,” Jean said. “They forgot about landing.”

  Bently pushed the flimsy square door with his shoulder and stepped out into the dust storm produced by the single engine of the plane. Through the dusty haze he could see Touby Lyfoung making his way toward him, his hand holding the rim of his pith helmet low over his eyes. The last time I’ll see you too, colonel, he thought. Next month, Pierre, South Dakota; a new office overlooking the Missouri River; even a new president of the United States. He smiled to himself, wondering what Dwight David Eisenhower would think when he found out his new intelligence agency was in the dope business. If he ever did find out about it.

  They gathered under the wing of the aircraft as the dust settled. Touby was still wearing his medals. He had flown back from Vientiane a few hours before they had left Sartene’s airstrip to prepare for the day’s work, and Bently wondered if he had decided not to remove the medals so he could better influence the men they would recruit for the new maquis. Everything in Southeast Asia was played out like a comic opera. But that was true in most of the world. You only noticed it more here, because the contrasts were so much more striking.

  During the trip in the beat-up Japanese staff car Jean seemed more animated. Perhaps the poor landing and the joking about it had livened his spirits. During the flight he had seemed morose; he had hardly spoken. His father had not seen them off with his usual last-minute instructions and good wishes, and Bently wondered if the two had fought the night before. But now Jean seemed fine. He was confident and ready to do what had been asked of him, a far cry from the man who had first visited the Meo hills six years before. Behind them, seated next to Touby, Francesco was equally calm. Truly a hard man, Bently decided. Ready to go and lop off a few heads in the same way someone else would go to market to buy a freshly killed chicken. How much different was it, he wondered, than his own father marching off to his office to foreclose on some fledgling business? Maybe the only difference was that it was neater. You didn’t get blood on your shoes.

  Within an hour of their arrival in Lat Houang, Francesco was off with a contingent of Meo to spread his deadly message to the outlying villages. It would not take long, six hours at most, and then they would be airborne again, headed south, away from a primitive, innocent people who were the first link in a chain that often ended thousands of miles away in small dirty rooms where people filled their veins with milky fluid.

  As Jean spoke to the men of the village, gathered together now to hear of the new maquis that would protect that vital link, Bently studied the dull, flat, undernourished faces. Accidents of fate, he told himself. Born to a life in a brutal jungle, sitting on top of a mountain, instead of in some dull suburb of an American city. Most of them, he knew, had never seen a city, not even Vientiane. Few had traveled more than twenty miles, unless they had been chosen to be part of the opium caravans that moved through the jungles after each harvest. Only a few would be chosen, Jean was telling them. The lucky ones, he told himself. Like the kids who had followed him into battle during the war, and who now owned small, exclusive pieces of land in places they had never heard of before. But there would be chances later for a few more. Bently studied the faces of the men, knowing immediately those who would be considered. Their eyes were eager. The others simply stood patiently, waiting for the talk to end, waiting to get back to whatever it was they would do that day to scratch out another twenty-four hours of existence. They didn’t look like warriors, or even farmers. They looked like kids, small squat kids, who should be off learning to play baseball, or reading comic books in a local drugstore. Tiny people, with a life expectancy that seldom went beyond fifty in these godforsaken mountains.

  Jean was outlining the training, the equipment they would be given, the important part they would play among all the tribes of the Meo. Sweet Jesus, Bently thought. Jean would have made one helluva recruitment officer back in the States, convincing young kids that they could have a chance to get their asses shot off, if only they proved themselves worthy.

  Duty, honor, country. And a free wheelchair in the veterans hospital of your choice. It was time to go home. Now, before the next war started. Colonel Lyfoung will decide who will be chosen. He would leave the next war to those who wanted to fight it. There were always people who wanted to fight wars. And there were always people caught in the middle who had no choice. He looked through the faces of the assembled Ly clansmen again. Always people who never knew about the bank accounts in Hong Kong and Switzerland that make wars worth fighting.

  They sat in the shade of Touby’s oversized hootch and watched the fat little colonel move about among his men, assuring those who expressed interest that they would be considered for this new opportunity. The clincher Jean had delivered was that those chosen for the maquis would pay only a token opium tax of three piasters each year. Bently smiled, thinking of the cleverness of the offer.

  “When did your father come up with this new tax incentive?” he asked.

  Jean continued to stare straight ahead. “He didn’t,” he said. “It was something I thought up when I was talking to them. Most of them didn’t look too enthusiastic.”

  Bently shook his head. “Jean, my lad, you should come back to the States with me and open a used-car lot.”

  “I just might do that. Sooner than you think.” He was still staring out into the corner of the village. Touby had taken refuge under a chum-ngay tree, its long, slender pink pods dangling overhead, still not ripe enough to be harvested and cooked as a wild asparagus.

  Bently didn’t respond immediately, allowing his eyes to wander around the squalid village. Off to his left a group of women were turning and basting a wild pig that would soon be served to the men. On his last visit Touby had offered the prized flesh of monkey and porcupine. The porcupine had been tolerable, the flesh sweet and gamy. The monkey had been another matter. They had sat in a circle outside Touby’s hootch. Before each guest a monkey had been buried in the ground up to its neck. The monkeys had chattered wildly, twisting their heads around, looking for some escape. The chattering ended when the guests cleaved into their skulls with machetes and began picking at the still-warm brains.

  “Thank Christ they’re serving pig today,” Bently said.

  Jean nodded, remembering some of his more exotic meals among the Meo, the flying bats and raw cockroaches. “Aren’t you curious about my interest in your country?” he asked; looking toward Bently for the first time.

  “I figure if you want to talk about it, you will. Does it have anything to do with why your father didn’t see us off this morning?”

  “Now I know why, your army made an intelligence officer out of you,” Jean said. “I talked to him last night about taking Pierre away for his education.”

  “You said ‘taking,’ not sending him away,” Bently said.

  Jean nodded. “I don’t want to be away from him. I don’t want to lose my son for all those years, the way my father had to lose his.”

  Bently let out a low whistle. “That must’ve been some conversation.”

  “I never saw him that angry with me,” Jean said. He looked back into the village for several moments, then turned his body to face Bently. “Tell me, Matt, is it wrong to want what’s good for Pierre?”

  “You’re asking the wrong man, buddy. I never had a kid, never felt wha
t you’re feeling now.”

  Jean waited as if deciding whether to continue. “You told me once how you tried to escape your father,” he said at length. “First when you went away to university, then later to the army.”

  There was a pleading in Jean’s eyes, and Bently didn’t know precisely how to respond to it. He liked the man, liked the hidden gentleness that recently had begun to show through the brutal exterior. “That’s different,” he said. “What are we really talking about? Taking Pierre away to school, or you getting away from your father?”

  “Maybe I’m talking about all of us getting away.” He concentrated on Touby and the villagers again. It was almost as though he had wanted to say “getting away from him,” but couldn’t. “I suggested that he come with us, if we did go, but I knew he couldn’t agree to that. If he had agreed I think I would have been disappointed. Dammit, it’s not that he doesn’t want what’s good for us, it’s just that there’s never a chance to prove anything by yourself …” He seemed to have trouble finding the words. “For yourself,” he finally added.

  “You’ve done pretty well the past few years,” Bently said. “I know. I’ve watched you.”

  Jean nodded, almost solemnly. “To some extent, yes.” He faced Bently, his eyes imploring again. “But he’s always been there. To correct the mistakes, to set things right again. A man needs a chance to fail too, doesn’t he? Maybe I’ll never have that chance now. But damn, I want it for Pierre. I want him to love his grandfather, to know him. He can learn a lot from my father. Good things. Things that will make him strong. But I want him to be independent too. I want him to have a will as strong as my father’s, so he can make his own decisions, in his own way. And maybe I want that for myself too, even if it’s just for a short time.”

  Bently felt the beating, bone-killing heat of the day. It had intensified, almost as if hell were pushing through the ground in this insane part of the globe. It must be what Jean was feeling, he thought, only it’s coming from within him. “So you’ll do it?” he asked.