Opium (16 page)

Water dripped steadily from the eaves onto the banana leaves.

It was too hot to be pregnant. She felt the size of a whale. Tiny beads of perspiration glistened on her face, inched along her spine, itched in her hair. She went out onto the veranda, but it was no cooler there. The air was like steam.

After their marriage, Bonaventure had bought Noelle and Baptiste a villa on the western edge of the town, on the banks of the Mekong. It was pale blue stucco with a red tiled roof, and polished teak floors. The courtyard was shaded with
pipal
and mango trees. And they had servants; a cookboy, two
boyesses
, a gardener.

Noelle thought her life would be different, but it wasn't. She felt lonelier than she had before.

She heard someone walk in and she turned around. Baptiste. It isn't fair, she thought when she saw him. When he came back from Phong Savan he was almost dead, his face a battered mess, and the doctors thought he was going to lose his leg as well as his eye. Now eight months later he's as handsome as ever, and I'm fat and ugly.

The eye patch was an affectation, of course, pure vanity. Incredible he hadn't thought to blind himself in one eye before, really. It suited him, damn him. And now he parades in front of me in his royal blue shirt and white suit, looking like a silk pirate and wants my blessing for his lies. When had he changed? When had she?

“Where are you going, Baptiste?'

“I have to meet Rocco.”

“Rocco,” she repeated, her voice flat.

He looked guilty, like a little boy. “A man has to have some pleasures.”

“And having dinner with your wife is not one of them.”

“I'll be home later. I need a drink.”

He would not meet her eyes. She knew what it was he wanted, something he no longer seemed to want from her. “You look at me these days, I see a cloud pass over your face.”

“Noelle, please ...”

“It's your child in here. I can't help it if I am all bloated up.”

He pulled out his Gitanes, a nervous habit. He was tapping his foot on the floor, anxious to be away from her. For the love of God, how had it all gone wrong so quickly?

“You don't make love to me no more, Baptiste.”

“The baby ...”

“Just because I have your child in my belly, doesn't mean I'm made of glass! I still love you.” She felt the hot tears in her eyes and she stopped herself. She did not want to look weak in front of him. “Do I disgust you so much?'

“Of course not.”

“Then I'll ask you just once, Baptiste. Please stay here and have dinner with me tonight.”

“I won't be long, chèrie. But I have to see Rocco. We'll have dinner when I get home.”

“When you're so drunk you can't stand up, and you have the stink of some taxi girl on you?'

“I don't know why I ever married you,” he said, and walked to the door.

Noelle was on her feet. “Because you wanted my father's business!'

Noelle picked up a ceramic elephant her father had bought for her in Saigon. It hit the wall inches from Baptiste's head. Noelle heard the
boyesses
, who had been listening on the other side of the door, shriek and run for the kitchen.

Baptiste turned, one hand on the door, his eyes bright points. “Don't ever do that again,” he growled.

“I won't. I promise. Next time it's a knife, and I won't miss.”

***

She heard the Packard roar out of the courtyard, headed downtown. When she was sure he was gone she threw herself onto her bed and wept. What a fool she had been. Baptiste had not changed; he was exactly the same as he had always been. She had made the elementary schoolgirl mistake of falling in love with an illusion.

Her father had tried to warn her.

She hated Laos, she hated the baby inside her, she hated her father for being right; and most of all, she hated her husband.

***

Amicu's
was a garishly lit room, scattered with school desks that served as tables. Journalists in crumpled shirts, American pilots with too much gold jewellery, and members of the town's Corsican
milieu
in white tropical suits, lounged in wicker chairs. There was a small bar in the corner where the nightclub's owner, Madame Lola - no one imagined for a moment that this was her real name - propped herself on a stool every night in a sequined cocktail dress, and got herself blousy drunk. The selection of music was limited, scratchy Edith Piaf and Charles Chevalier 78's played on an ancient phonogram. After the first bottle of pastis Lola would regale the room with stories of her life, which seemed to consist of bedding a succession of French generals all over Indochina.

But neither Madame Lola nor Edith Piaf were the reason Amicu's attracted such a large crowd of Westerners every evening. It was simply that there were few other places to go. There were only two other establishments in Vientiane that stayed open until the early hours of the morning; one was the White Rose, the other was a place called the Vieng Ratray, which was Lao for “Pleasant Retreat'. It was owned by General Rattakone, and filled with dowdy Bangkok hostesses and stank like an Indonesian urinal. It was more commonly known by the nickname the city's foreign community had given it: the Green Latrine.

Amicu's had won a certain renown for its House Special, which meant oral sex in a curtained cubicle in the rear of the club. For two dollars, plus a complimentary drink, a man could surrender to the expert attentions of one of the taxi girls Madame Lola kept on the premises. It was said that each of the girls had been coached in her arcane art by Madame Lola herself, but no one had yet been drunk enough or desperate enough to test the theory.

Among the American CAT pilots the bar was known as the Suck and Soda.

Rocco Bonaventure was playing
vingt et-un
with Gilbert Gondet and another of his pilots, Marius Nicoli. When he saw Baptiste‚ he collected his winnings from the centre of the table, picked up his glass of cognac and walked over to join him at the bar.

“Baptiste. How was your trip?'

“Milk run,” Baptiste said. A milk run: an hour flying back into the teeth of the monsoon, convinced he was going to die. But there was no point trying to explain to him about dead reckoning and survey maps that were inaccurate up to twelve degrees and faulty drift gauges.

Baptiste hoped he might get his cognac and escape to a corner before Madame Lola spotted him, but he was not quick enough. She came right over and smothered him in an enormous embrace leaving a smear of lipstick on his cheek. He was overpowered by the taint of cheap scent and sweat and alcohol. “I could make you so happy, Baptiste,” she growled.

He tried to pull away.

“Free drinks for a month if you come in the back room with me.”

Bonaventure was laughing. Perhaps he put the old cow up to this, Baptiste thought.

“I'm a good fuck,” she whispered, 'you can ask anybody.”

“I'm tired, Lola.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I fucked three generals at Dien Bien Phu? The first two were killed by shrapnel, but the third one I fucked to death myself!' She cackled and tried to kiss him again.

This time Baptiste managed to twist away. He pulled Bonaventure towards a table in the gloomiest corner of the room.

“Elle est un cul de vache!
' Baptiste muttered under his breath.

Bonaventure said nothing. He put one boot on one of the school desks and grinned. “You only play hard to get because your father in law is here, Baptiste.”

“I'd rather cut it off.”

Bonaventure raised an eyebrow.

“So tell me more about the trip,” Bonaventure said. “You were gone nearly three days. I was starting to worry.”

“About me?'

“About my opium.”

“I was stranded near Sam Thong for two days by the monsoon. Another half an hour and there was no way I could have landed her. I would be a dead man right now.”

Bonaventure shrugged this off as an incidental. “But you made the drop on the Vietnam side?'

Baptiste nodded. “Your opium's safe.”

Bonaventure patted his hand, and signalled the little Lao bartender for two more cognacs.

“I met Jean-Marie Pepin,” Baptiste said.

“I thought he had gone back to Bangkok or somewhere.”

“Francisci brought him back. He says he's buying another Cessna.”

Bonaventure looked as if he was about to spit. “Buying another plane?'

“Jean-Mar' must have had two or three hundred kilos in the back of his plane.”

“Francisci! His father was a peasant. They say his mother was a mountain goat.” He drained his cognac and slammed the empty glass on the table.

It seemed their heavyweight protection would not be enough after all. Baptiste had been landing his shipments in drop zones in the Vietnamese Central Highlands that were heavily guarded by Vietnamese air force commandos. Francisci had been frozen out.

But the bastard had persevered and Baptiste had learned that Francisci had dumped twenty nine watertight tin crates, wrapped in a buoyant life belt, to a waiting Vietnamese fishing boat in the Gulf of Siam. Inside each of the crates was twenty kilos of raw opium. There were greater margins of risk and overhead. But from that one successful drop Francisci had made over fifty thousand dollars.

“They're starting to eat into our profits,” Baptiste said.

“What do you think I should do, Baptiste?'

He tried to conceal his surprise. It was the first time Bonaventure had ever included him in his decision making. “Can the Vietnamese help us?' he said, remembering what Bonaventure had done to him a few years before.

“Francisci's too careful. He never lands inside Vietnam at all these days.”

“Perhaps the Americans ...?'

Bonaventure looked up. “Talk of the Devil and one of his closest friends appears,” he muttered.

Baptiste looked around. It was Gerry Gates, the American he had seen with Petrovski that day at Phong Savan. Officially he was in Laos under the auspices of something called the Program Evaluation Office but Baptiste just assumed he was some sort of spy. The country was full of them.

After the debacle with Kong Le, Eisenhower had taken the view that if Laos fell to the Pathet Lao, all of Indochina would follow. He called it the Domino Theory.

After taking Phong Savan the communists had swept southwards towards Vientiane. Baptiste and Bonaventure, together with the rest of the Corsican community, had been ready to flee across the border to Thailand. But it was Kennedy, the newly elected US President, who decided that enough dominoes had fallen. He put the US Marines at Okinawa on high alert while five hundred Marines at Udorn, just across the Thai border, climbed into helicopters ready to ship out and defend the Lao capital.

The crisis had been averted but ever since the Americans had been pouring into the country. Baptiste didn't like them but he liked that they had saved the opium business.

After Kong Le took Phong Savan in 1961, he had joined forces with the Pathet Lao and they now held the Plain of Jars. Without the airfields the opium trade would have been finished, but then the Americans, God bless them, had carved airfields in the surrounding mountains in order to make rice and ammunition drops to the Hmong, the tribesmen they had enlisted to fight a proxy war for them against the communists.

Air Laos was back in the air.

“Gerry!' Bonaventure raised a hand and beckoned the American to their table.

Gates ambled over. He was an unremarkable man, Baptiste thought, except for his eyes; it was the thing he still remembered best about him from that day at Phong Savan. They took in everything; the eyes of a man walking point in the jungle.

“Come and sit down,” Bonaventure said to him in English. “What are you drinking.”

“Cognac and soda thanks, Rocco.”

“Have you met my son-in-law, Baptiste Crocé?'

“Face is familiar.” They shook hands. Gates grip was strong and dry. Yes, he remembers me now, Baptiste decided.

“Monsieur Gates is with the American Embassy,” Bonaventure was saying. “Gerry, tell me again, what is it you are doing in Laos?'

“I'm here advising the Meo on agriculture,” Gates said.

Bonaventure threw back his head and roared. “Ah, you people are wonderful! What a sense of humour!'

“I'm glad you think so, Rocco,” Gates said.

“We were just discussing the difficulties of the opium business.”

“I have nothing to say on that subject, gentleman.”

“But it is very important for you,” Bonaventure pressed.

“Not in the least. Because the United States government chooses to look the other way while you people conduct your affairs does not mean the United States government approves.”

“It is just that I have small problem, regarding one of my competitors. No, 'competitor' is too grand a word. I shall not dignify him this way. He is a tick on the rump of a buffalo.”