Black Diamond

cigarette, and
banh bot loc tom
smelling of fish sauce and sugared vinegar.
    “These are my favorites,” Vien said, pushing a plate of sticky rice and baby shrimp toward Bruno. “
Banh ram it
, from my mother’s hometown of Hue.”
    “A lot of this is new to me,” said Bruno. “What’s this
treizième
you mention?”
    “It’s slang for the main triad council, from the
treizième
arrondissement in Paris,” the brigadier explained. “Sometimes they claim a loose authority over all the triad groups; sometimes they deny having any influence. This time they claim this outbreak has nothing to do with them.”
    “The Chinese are fighting among themselves, you know that,” said Vien. “They blame us for these bombings when they’re doing it to themselves.”
    “You trying to tell me that you aren’t defending yourselves?” the brigadier asked.
    “Do we have a choice?” countered Vien. “But defending is one thing. Attacking, using gasoline bombs, that’s something else.”
    Vien smiled and poured the brigadier more whiskey. Bruno glanced at Vinh, who kept his eyes downcast and sat with his chair some distance from the table, as if he were not really part of this.
    Bruno looked around the table, confused. The two Vietnamese that he knew, Vinh and Tran, were law-abiding small businessmen, and yet this discussion seemed predicated onthe assumption that a war was under way between two rival groups of organized crime. Any intervention he made would probably be unwelcome, but so be it. This meeting had only taken place because he’d gotten in touch with Tran, and now it seemed to be another kind of meeting altogether. He cleared his throat.
    “When you talk about defending their turf, I think we might be missing the point,” he said to the brigadier. “You’re probably thinking of the big picture, but I only see the small one, and that’s Vinh here, who has no more to do with organized crime than the man on the moon. He sells
nems
, not drugs. He doesn’t run whores or protection rackets. Believe me, I’d know if he did. The Vinhs work hard, pay their taxes and are respected neighbors. They’re entitled to our protection. Protection by the French police, not by some shadowy organization called the Binh Xuyen.”
    Vinh raised his eyes to Bruno’s and nodded his head very firmly, just once. Bruno looked across at Tran, seeing something of the young soldier he had known in Bosnia. Why on earth was he playing some kind of scene from
The Godfather
, a Mafia boss surrounded by his underlings?
    “Tran, you run a restaurant, and you’re no crook. Can you explain to me what’s going on here?”
    Tran looked nervously at Vien, who was smiling indulgently at Bruno. “Go ahead, Tran, explain it to your friend,” the old man said.
    Tran shrugged. “It’s tradition. We turn to our own for protection. And to be frank, we haven’t had much help from the French authorities over the years.” Tran looked across at Vinh, whose eyes were looking down at the table once more. “When Vinh and his wife were attacked, they turned to the one organization they could count on, the Binh Xuyen. But you’reright about one thing. We aren’t gangsters anymore. Only the very old men remember what the Binh Xuyen used to be back in Saigon under French rule. I haven’t handled a gun since I left the army, not until this week when I felt the need to get one for protection against these Chinese bastards. And where did I have to turn to get one? To the Binh Xuyen. It’s the only organization we’ve got. But it’s not what it was. It can’t defend us. The best it can do is help us defend ourselves, and maybe get to sit at a table with people from Paris and ask just what we get for our taxes.”
    “So who’s running the Burmese heroin into Marseilles, if not the Binh Xuyen?” the brigadier asked.
    “I don’t know anything about Marseilles, just like I don’t know anything about heroin or opium or the old days,” said Tran angrily. “This is Bordeaux and Aquitaine, where we run restaurants and market stalls and teach school and work in banks.”
    “And sometimes help run boatloads of illegal immigrants,” the brigadier said drily.
    “One moment,” came a new voice. For the first time Bao Le spoke, and Bruno was struck by the way the other Vietnamese, even the elderly Vinh, turned attentively, even respectfully, toward him.
    “I wouldn’t wish our French friends to get the impression that the Binh Xuyen is