Opium (4 page)

“I am not the only one who is nostalgic,” Ky said. “I think better days are coming.”

“Has there been a change of heart?'

“I told them, Rocco. You can have opium or you can have communists. What is it you want?'

“So the Americans have lost their virginity in Asia?'

Ky nodded. “I have been trying to explain this to them for three years. You want information on the Viet Minh, you need spies. You want spies, you need money. If Eisenhower won't give you any more money, then you need the opium.”

They heard the siren from the Post Office. It was noon, and soon all of Saigon would shut down until mid-afternoon. The streets flooded with people; pretty Vietnamese secretaries and shop assistants cycling gracefully home down the leafy tunnel of the Tu Do in their
ao dai
- flowing white silk trousers and long flowered robes, slit to the waist - their palm leaf hats tied with bright coloured ribbons;
siclo
drivers pedalling towards the river with Vietnamese businessmen in western suits balanced under the canopies in front of them; hawkers on their way back from the market, flat bamboo springing on their shoulders, piled with cabbages and bananas.

Two men in crew cuts and orange and green Hawaiian shirts came out of the hotel lobby and were immediately surrounded by children peddling cigarettes and garlands of flowers.

“Americans,” Bonaventure said, with a slow smile. “I don't know whether to love them or hate them.”

“So here's the good news,” Ky said. “It's going to be business as usual very soon. You'll be able to bring as much opium into Saigon as you want. You split the proceeds with us. You can't land your planes in Saigon, our blushing American bride wants to turn the other way while you stick it in.”

“What's the plan then?'

“You still use the landing strips up at Pleiku, but now there will be ARVN trucks waiting for you on the ground. We will bring the opium into Saigon under military escort.”

Bonaventure grinned. “Excellent.”

“If someone can keep the Pathet Lao out of the north for a few more seasons, we will all make our fortunes.”

“What about competition? Bonaventure said.

“As a good capitalist I'm all for it, but as a shareholder in Air Laos it offends me. You will be our exclusive supplier.”

Bonaventure raised his cognac in toast. “To a mutually profitable partnership,” he said.

Ky returned the toast. “To opium.”

Chapter 5

Vientiane

B
ONAVENTURE employed five servants, a cook, a houseboy, two
boyesses
, and a gardener. By nightfall only the cook and the houseboy remained in the house, and after dinner Noelle told them they would not be required for the rest of the evening.

Just before nine o'clock she stood on the balcony and listened for the sing-song chatter of voices from the servant's quarters to fade away. By quarter past nine all the lights were out and she was satisfied they were all asleep. She went back inside.

Before she went down the stairs, she briefly re-examined her reflection in the gilt mirror in her bedroom. Her hair was braided in a
baguette
, but one errant curl had worked loose, and teased her cheek. She brushed it back impatiently. No make-up, well a little mascara and a touch of gloss on her nails, her restraint a concession to her education by the French nuns at the Les Oiseaux. Not too provocative, she decided.

But alluring enough.

The night was humid and still, and the white calico dress clung damply to her body. In all the wrong places, she thought, and her cheeks felt suddenly hot. There was hollow tingling in her belly and her pulse was racing.

She picked up her perfume and dabbed at her wrists, her elbows, her throat. They said it was the heat and the pulse that activated the scent. One of the girls at the Convent used to put a little on the skin inside her thighs. Tramp.

Why the change of heart, Noelle? I won't always be twenty two years old. You can be sensible and sour when you're as old as your father. I'm tired of being a good girl.

She ran down the stairs, closed the screen door as gently as she could, saw the silhouette of a car parked on the other side of the road.

“Baptiste?'

Baptiste jumped out and held the door for her. “I thought you had changed your mind.”

“I had to wait until the servants were asleep. Where are we going?'

“Into the night.”

She whispered a quick prayer to the Virgin. It might be the last time they spoke. After tonight they would have nothing left in common.

Saigon

Cholon was Saigon's ugly twin. The city stank of mud and petrol and sewage.

Rocco Bonaventure wrinkled his nose and held his breath. He would never understand why a man like Chen Giai Han did not remove himself to a better quarter of the city.

Cholon was one of those cities that slept by day and worked by night and as the sun dropped low over the rooftops it began to come alive. Hawkers set up at the roadside, fanning the little charcoal fires under their portable kitchens; fortune tellers with grey goatee beards squatted against the walls and laid out their yellowing tarot cards while dentists and barbers set to work under kerosene lanterns slung from the branches of the tamarind trees that lined the streets.

The
chiu chao
ran Chinatown. They came from Swatow, dominated commerce like the Jews, ran the underworld like the Sicilians; and the man Rocco Bonaventure had come to see, Chen Giai Han - better known as Sammy Chen - ran them all.

They passed the Qan Am pagoda; Bonaventure ordered the
siclo
driver to stop outside the Trung Mai hotel, a sad and decaying four storey tenement with an evil-smelling
bac si
on one side and a restaurant on the other. The restaurant was very popular. The house speciality was boiled dog.

The foyer of the Trung Mai was gloomy. The wooden floor was partly covered by a tattered Chinese rug, the exposed boards around it polished to a dull sheen by bare feet. Male guests in black pyjamas lounged in the variety of furniture in the lobby. Two taxi girls, slouching by the desk, studied him with the practised weariness of a
tai tai
examining fish at a market stall.

“Excusez moi. Il faut que je voie Monsieur Chen,”
Bonaventure said to the desk clerk.

The man nodded and hawked over his shoulder. For a moment Bonaventure thought he had spat on the floor, but then he heard the ring as the bolus landed in a brass spittoon somewhere under the desk.

He went through a curtain that led to a small anteroom behind him. Bonaventure heard a brief exchange in
chiu chao
dialect, and then a Chinese woman in flowered silk pyjamas came out and peered at him through her thick black-rimmed spectacles.

“Comment t'appelez vous?'

“Je m'appelle Bonaventure, Rocco Bonaventure. Il faut absolument que je voie Monsieur Chen. C'est très important.”

The woman considered a moment, then indicated that he should follow her. A doorway under the stairs led to the rear of the hotel; coloured plastic strips hanging from the frame to deter the flies. Bonaventure followed her through.

The back room was airless and hot. Bonaventure was invited to sit on one of the hard-backed chairs, and then the woman shuffled off again, shouting at someone in her own dialect.

A single dull bulb hung from the ceiling. He looked around. An old grandmother in black pyjamas sat on a bamboo cot, staring at him, while a child crawled on the floor at her feet. Two middle aged men in white vests and brown trousers played
mah-jong
at a card table, while another, older man lay on a cot in the corner of the room, smoking opium.

Bonaventure watched him heat a ball of the black, jelly-like drug over the flame of a lamp, then knead the hot opium into the convex bowl of his pipe. The smoke was sweet and rich. There was no other smell quite like it, Bonaventure thought. Personally it made him want to retch.

The old man reversed the bowl of the pipe over the lamp flame and the little bead of opium bubbled as he inhaled. His eyes were glassy, fixed on another, better world.

“Monsieur Bonaventure!' The squat, bespectacled man in the doorway pronounced it:
Bon Van Chao
. Sammy Chen wore a crumpled, western style suit over a white open-necked shirt, stained with the day's sweat. He had brown sandals on his feet. “You do me great honour to visit.”

Bonaventure stood up. “The honour is all mine, Sammy.”

Sammy gave him a soft, sweaty handshake and then pulled up a chair next to Bonaventure and sat down. He clapped his hands and the old woman hurried off.

Sammy launched into a long enquiry after Bonaventure's health and the well-being of his family. While they talked the old woman re-appeared holding a tray with a teapot and two handleless porcelain cups. The tea was pale and bitter and scalding hot.

Finally, Sammy Chen got down to business. “So why you come to Cholon, okay?'

“I had a discussion today with Colonel Ky,” Bonaventure said. “It seems the Americans now think President Diem has been a little too harsh in his domestic policies.”

Sammy rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “Need opium money.”

Bonaventure nodded. “Well it's opium or the communists, and no one wants the communists taking over.”'

“Double lucky for us then. If you can supply I can sell
beaucoup
here in Saigon. Perhaps I can sell Hong Kong also.”

This was what Bonaventure had hoped to hear. He already flew much of his opium to Bangkok where Rivelini smuggled it to his uncle's heroin laboratories in Marseille. But the market there was saturated. But if Sammy could offer him a new and expanding market he could buy up all the opium the hill tribes could produce, and encourage them to grow more. The potential profits were limitless.

“Look at him,” Sammy said, nodding towards the old man on the bed. He had drifted off into a reverie, eyes half open, his body utterly still. “Does no harm. Is okay when you are old man.”

The baby crawled across the floor and hoisted himself to his feet, clinging to Chen's trousers. His hands left dirty fingermarks but Chen did not scold him. They rarely raised their voices to their children, Bonaventure had noticed.

“Number two son,” Sammy said, and he picked him up and sat him on his knee. “Very good have many children. Children are the future. Take care of us in wrinkle time, clean our bones when we are dead, make prayers for us so we are honoured in heaven.”

Bonaventure thought about Noelle. I don't see her cleaning my bones and keeping them in a jar, he thought.

“Man should have many sons,” Chen said.

Bonaventure did not venture a comment.

Chen bounced the child on his knee. “Daughter is good. Son is better.” He put the child back on the floor and the conversation returned to business. But as they discussed price and quantities Bonaventure found his mind wandering. He kept thinking about what Sammy had said about sons and daughters, and he wondered what Noelle was doing right now.

Vientiane

The ruins of the ancient
wat
appeared in the splash of the headlights. They picked out the demons and heroes of the Ramayana as they clambered along the eaves, clawing at the invading creepers of the jungle. When Baptiste switched off the beam they returned to the jungle shadows. He lit a paraffin lantern and they climbed out. He came around the car and she felt his hand on her shoulder. “You know this place?' he whispered.

“I came here once with my father, years ago. He told me it was abandoned last century.”

“Do you know why?'

“Bad
phi
perhaps?'

The Lao believed that spirits called
phi
governed the material world. They lived in everything - in mountains, in rivers, in animals, in people, even in the sky. Rainbows were the sky spirits bending to drink, thunder and lightning was the sound they made when they were angry. A great deal of a Lao's time was spent consoling and cajoling these spirits with sacrifices of rice and elaborate rituals. But it was a daily task that could not be ignored, for a provoked
phi
could sprain ankles or break limbs, even bring sickness and tragedy.

Their footsteps echoed on the stone flags of the courtyard as Baptiste led her into the ruins. The swinging yellow light of the lantern illuminated the dragons that snaked along the curlicues of the roof, the stone lions standing guard at the doorways, the serpents on the balustrades. Two putty coloured lizards froze in the light of the lamp. Noelle thought they, too, were stone until they scampered away into the darkness.