Opium (2 page)

He owned an aviation company carrying freight and passengers - mostly spies and missionaries - around a landlocked and mountainous country. Northern Laos had few roads, and those that existed were just tracks hacked through jungles infested with tigers and poisonous snakes. There were less than a thousand telephones in the whole country. Without Air Laos the country went back to the Stone Age.

But it was not the legitimate but modest proceeds from aviation that kept Rocco Bonaventure in Laos. Honest profit did not pay for the fleet of twin engined Beechcraft or the villa in Bangkok and the bullion on deposit in the
Banque
d”Indochine
. It did not justify the weekly flights to Bangkok during the spring poppy harvests.

So he didn't want communists causing trouble up north. They were bad for the opium business. And in this part of the world, what other business was there?

***

Noelle's appearance at breakfast shook him from his brooding. She looked radiant, damn her. She wore fine gold chains at her wrist and neck in the manner of a high born Lao woman, and a broad silver belt around her waist. Noelle was one of the few western women Bonaventure had ever seen who could adapt eastern clothes and customs and make it appear altogether natural, even flattering. She is beautiful, Bonaventure thought. Too damned beautiful.

I'll have to marry her off soon.

“Papa, what's wrong? You look worried.”

'“Of course I'm worried. Marcel was just telling me what happened last night.”

She smiled sweetly at him and joined him at the table. “And how is Marcel?'

“He has decided to take breakfast in his room.”

“It's rather childish when men sulk, don't you think?'

“He has twisted his knee very badly. He cannot get out of bed!'

She stuck out her bottom lip. “Poor thing. I hope he's better soon.”

Impossible girl! He wished she was still of an age when he could spank her bottom. But then, when had he ever done that? She had been spoiled and that was half her trouble.

She took a slice of papaya with her fork.

He glared at her. “Well?' he said, finally.

Her eyes widened. “Yes, papa?'

“What have you got to say for yourself?'

“About last night? Oh, that was nothing. You shouldn't worry.”

“Nothing? You want me not to think it's just nothing worry when my own daughter behaves like a tramp?'

She put down her fork. “I'm not a tramp, papa,” she said.

“Yes, I know that, I'm sorry.” He was amazed to hear the contrition coming from his lips and not hers. How had she done that? “What do you think Marcel thinks of us?'

'“Marcel is a bore.”

“He says you hit him, and then drove away with some cowboy.”

Noelle giggled, covering her mouth with the back of her hand like a schoolgirl. Infuriating. “I didn't hit him. I pushed him perhaps.”

“And this other gentleman ...”

“He is no gentleman, papa. But it's all right. I was very careful.”

Bonaventure lost his appetite for his breakfast. He lit a cigarette and wondered what to do. He blamed her mother - may God keep her always in His mercy - and the peasant blood in her for this wilful streak.

“This gentleman who is not really a gentleman - do you know who he is?'

“His name is Crocé ‚. He's a pilot."

“Baptiste Crocé !'

“You know him?'

“I know every pilot in Indochina, it's my business to know.” He exhaled a blue-grey stream of cigarette smoke. Crocé ‚! “What on earth possessed you to behave like that?'

“He intrigued me.”

“Intrigued you!'

She poured coffee from the silver pot and drank it black. She dabbed at her mouth with a linen napkin. Her eyes were wide and innocent. “Why, what do you know about him?'

“He is a former Air Force pilot, stayed behind after Dien Bien Phu. He worked for a small freight carrier in Bangkok for a few months, but they sacked him because he was unreliable. Unreliable! That means he drinks. When he came to Laos he wanted to work for me, I told him I didn't have any planes to spare on cowboys. Somehow he got some money together and bought a Cessna with another young man called Jean-Marie Pepin. He has a reputation as a womaniser and a gambler.”

Noelle smiled. “He sounds almost too good to be true.”

“Don't mock me, Noelle.”

She pouted and touched his cheek with her hand. “Papa, you have to trust me. It was just a little fun. I am bored, I have nothing to occupy me. What you want me to do? Sit around and pound rice like the locals?'

“Perhaps you need a husband.”

She smoothed an errant curl from her cheek. “Perhaps. But not Marcel Rivelini. I would rather join a Convent.”

“Something else I have considered.”

She laughed at that.

Oh, you can laugh. Bonaventure thought. But sometimes I think it's the only solution. How else am I going to control you, my adorable little minx?

***

A few hours later Jean-Marie Pepin landed his Cessna at Wattay Airport and taxied to the cluster of sheds at the far end of the field. One of the Air Laos pilots, Louis Jourdain, was tinkering with the engine of his Beechcraft. He waved Jean-Marie over.

“Have you heard what your friend's been up to?' Jourdain shouted.

“How could I? I stayed overnight at Phong Saly.”

Jourdain wiped his hands on a rag. He had been looking forward to this. "Last night he drove your car right straight through the front bar of the Constellation. Smashed out of his mind, of course."

“M
erde alors.”

“That's not the best of it. Guess who was there?'

“De Gaulle?'

“Noelle Bonaventure. And get this - she drove him home.”

Jean-Marie ran his fingers through his blonde curls.
Imbecile
! Idiot! He must have been out of his mind to go into partnership with a man like that. A good pilot but a crazy human being. “Did he fuck her?'

“Not even Baptiste is that crazy.”

“Yes, he is.”

Jean-Marie hitched his khaki flight bag over his shoulder and walked to the road. There was a taxi parked under a simpoh tree. It was actually a World War Two jeep. The passenger side door was broken and was held in place with a lady's pink garter. He woke the Lao driver, who was asleep on the front seat, and told him to take him to the Settha Palace.

It was a gentle ride into town, the only obstacles a few water buffalo that had wandered onto the road from the paddies, and a handful of high wheeled oxcarts on their way back from the morning market. The road entered Vientiane along an arcade of flowering trees.

***

The capital of Laos was no more than a sleepy rural town nestled on the flat rice plain of the Mekong. Most of the houses were made of sandalwood, thatch and plaited bamboo, and built on stilts of teak, and surrounded by stands of coconut palms or oar-bladed banana trees. Chickens and black razorback pigs lived under the houses. There were wooden
wats
with upswept eaves everywhere.

The commercial heart was three parallel streets of weathered one storey wooden shops, Indian and Chinese. You could buy saris and gentlemen's suits from the Indians, while the Chinese offered an eclectic range of shops of Roy Rogers t-shirts, dried herbs and tinned pâté de foie
gras
.

“L
a
Baraque
Indienne
,” the driver announced in French. The Bungalow.

The Settha Palace - The Bungalow - had the slightly dilapidated air of an old aunt, gone to seed, surrounded by photographs of her riotous past. If everyone moved out tomorrow Jean-Marie guessed that the gardens would reclaim the villa in weeks. Moss grew on the long, gabled roof, and the
flamboyants
in the courtyard were unchecked.

He went inside. It was just after lunch, and the room boys were curled up like a litter of kittens on a double bed in the hall, under some torn mosquito netting. Four other members of the hotel staff were sitting at the bar. A black telephone was ringing at the other end of the counter. They watched it with detached fascination, like an exhibit in a zoo. None of them moved.

A British journalist was asleep in a rattan chair, looking pale in his tropical whites, a copy of
Lao Presse
open in his lap. His head was thrown back and his mouth gaped open, while a fly circled the cavern of his open mouth.

Jean-Marie found Baptiste in the back garden sitting under a spreading
flamboyant
, apparently asleep, in a little courtyard someone had created with thousands of upended beer bottles. He was wearing a fresh white shirt and white linen trousers, both carefully pressed. He had on a pair of dark glasses and there was a shadow of stubble on his cheeks. Jean-Marie resented Baptiste's ability to look like a Hollywood film star even when he was hungover.

“You idiot,” he said.

Baptist opened one eye. “Jean-Marie, it's you. What time is it?'

“Time you got some brains. How's your head?'

“It aches a little. And look at this.” He pointed to his lip, which was swollen and cracked. “Some
espèce de con
punched me.” He took off the sun-glasses and squinted up at his friend and business partner. “You heard about it, I suppose?'

“Jourdain told me. Where's my car?'

“Your car's all right. Nothing's broken.”

“What about the bar? How are you going to pay for the damage?'

Baptiste replaced the dark glasses. “Don't worry so much. I'll work something out.”

“T
u est con
. Do you know who that girl was?'

“Noelle Bonaventure.”

Jean-Marie threw himself onto a chair beside him. “Yes, Noelle Bonaventure!
Merde!
Her father's
un vrai monsieur
, one of the biggest gangsters in Indochina. You'll get your cut throat playing with those people!'

“I'm not playing Jean-Mar.”

“Then what are you doing?'

“You know what I heard the other day? The Vietnamese are planning to re-open the opium trade. That's going to mean a lot of money to someone. Perhaps it's time we formed a strategic alliance.”

Jean-Marie stared at him, bewildered for a moment, before he quite understood what Baptiste was thinking. “You're out of your mind!'

Baptiste shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps. Can you move a little to the right? You're blocking out the sun.”

Chapter 3

N
OELLE stood at the windows, listening to the rhythm of the night. The chirrup of the cicadas built to a crescendo, then dropped away, then built again. The monsoon was still two months away, but already the humidity was oppressive, and a sultry patina of sweat clung to her skin.

La Vie en Rose
, sounding scratchy and sad on the gramophone: Edith Piaf. Noelle hugged herself and thought about the Corsican in the white linen suit. “Baptiste,” she murmured. Such easy charm. So alive, and so dangerous.

Forget it. Her father would never allow her to see him again.

Rivelini had limped back onto the plane for Bangkok, sulky as a teenager, and the next day her father had flown to Saigon, leaving her alone in the villa. Another endless tropic night, her boredom like a physical ache in her bones. She wanted to go out, she wanted to flirt. If only she were back in France.

She barely remembered it now. They left just after the war, when she was nine years old. All she remembered of Marseille was the smell of fish at the docks, grey rows of stone buildings, and biting cold.

She had spent almost all her life in Asia, with the cycle of monsoons, the alien rituals of
les jaunes
, and the loneliness of luxurious, echoing villas. She had gone to a Convent school in Saigon; there had at least been a few French girls of her own age there. In Vientiane the only French women she knew were married to foreign diplomats. There was nowhere a young European woman could go alone without exciting comment.

The men that her father approved of did not excite her; and those she did like - like Baptiste - he put off limits. She wondered at the quixotic nature of her own character. I love papa, she thought. I'll never be his good little girl but I don't have the courage to be a bad one.

She heard a car horn blaring from the driveway at the front of the house. Who could that be at this time of the night?