Black Diamond

so there’s a feud. And the Chinese are attacking the Vietnamese here in France, which means they’re attacking the Binh Xuyen, with whom we have an old alliance. We help our friends. It’s tradition.”
    “One of the reasons why the Viets are seeing us this evening is that Paul here smoothed the way,” the brigadier said.
    “It would have happened anyway,” Savani said. He took a thin cigarillo from his breast pocket and began to light it, ignoring the DÉFENSE DE FUMER signs all over the
mairie
. Without a word, the brigadier leaned across to unlatch the window and threw it open. Savani spoke again. “Your old army friend Tran is well respected, and right now the Viets need all the help they can get. They called me last week, when all this trouble began. So I called the brigadier.”
    Bruno studied the two men. Every time he met the brigadier, he had a sense of some looming secret government of France, operating behind the façade of politicians and media. It troubled him.
    “Paul also helped broker the truce last year between the gangs in Marseilles,” the brigadier said. “You know about that?”
    “Only what I read in an old
Paris Match
while waiting at the dentist,” said Bruno, looking sideways at Savani. “They said it was a war over drugs.”
    “
Paris Match
had it mostly right, even though they kept Paul’s name out of it,” said the brigadier. “They had twenty killings in less than a month. Chinese against Viets, Viets against Corsicans, Corsicans against Chinese. But it wasn’t just about drugs; it was about who got to control the port. Paul brought the leaders together and helped broker a deal. We’re going to do the same thing here.”
    “Does that mean you’ll be joining us in Bordeaux?” Bruno asked Savani.
    “Not this time. And I have to get back to Ajaccio.”
    “Paul kindly flew me down from Paris in his plane,” thebrigadier said. “It’s at Bergerac, and he’ll take it on to Corsica tonight. And now I think we’d better head for Bordeaux.”
    The three of them shook hands, and the brigadier picked up the whiskey bottle by its neck and shepherded them out, collecting J-J on the way. By the time Bruno looked around for Savani, he was gone. Bruno touched his shirt pocket. Savani’s card was there.
    “Would Savani be the kind of guy we might want to investigate one day?” asked Bruno, wondering just how discreetly he should put it as they sped toward Bordeaux in the brigadier’s car.
    “What’s to investigate? Savani is part of the establishment,” said the brigadier, turning from the front seat to address Bruno and J-J. “Paul is a prominent businessman with a construction company and property interests in Marseilles and Corsica and hotels on the Côte d’Azur. You’ll probably see him elected to the Assemblée Nationale someday. That’s not to say that he hasn’t got cousins who’re involved in shady business. But not Paul. He figured out long ago that there’s more money to be made legitimately. His current big project is an industrial park he’s building in Vietnam with a lot of support from the French government. Naturally he’s been reviving his family’s old contacts there. Not everyone in Vietnam was a Communist. Governments come and go. Families and clans go on forever. Like the Binh Xuyen.”
    Bruno had learned from his hurried reading that the Binh Xuyen pirates ran the river trade to Saigon, which meant they controlled the opium trade. They expanded from that lucrative base into casinos, property and politics. They fought for the French against the Communist Viet Minh in return for a free hand for their business activities in Saigon. Savani’s father and Hercule had arranged that. In the final years ofFrench rule, the Binh Xuyen had the world’s most profitable casino, the Grand Monde, and the world’s biggest brothel, the Hall of Mirrors, twelve hundred girls. Their leader, General Bay Vinh, ran the army. Another of the Binh Xuyen leaders became director-general of police. France was broke at the time, and Binh Xuyen’s opium trade financed French intelligence.
    When the war ended in 1954, Vietnam was partitioned between the Communist-run North and the supposedly independent South. The French backed their local puppet emperor, Bao Dai, but the Americans wanted a republic ruled by a pro-American strong man, Ngo Dinh Diem. With French backing, the Binh Xuyen launched a coup against Diem. It failed, and the Binh Xuyen leaders had to flee