Black Diamond

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 Deuxième 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’ youcan 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 Napoléon,” 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,