Devil May Care

that the police couldn’t really penetrate, either because it was too dangerous for the officers or because the denizens of the high-rises, even if they spoke French, would not co-operate. La Courneuve, a district of St Denis with its infamous Cite des 4000, was one. Sarcelles was another: a ghetto with its own violent rules of dog-eat-dog that had little or nothing to do with the laws of the Republic. These places were viewed by most people as the price that France had been made to pay for her imperial misadventures.
    The French abandonment of Indo-China had been humiliating, but had had few repercussions at home beyondthe appearance of a vast number of indistinguishable Vietnamese restaurants. The Algerian war, on the other hand, had saddled the large cities of France, and Paris in particular, with thousands of disgruntled Muslim immigrants. While they were effectively fenced out of the city centres into the high-rise suburbs, Mathis viewed such places as a breeding ground for crime and subversion that would sooner or later explode.
    Yusuf Hashim had been one of many runners in a long supply chain of heroin. The police had found the narcotic on the estate and it was notable for both quality and quantity. This was not the fashionable dabbling of the cocktail set at Le Boeuf sur le Toit and other nightclubs of Mathis’s youth. This was death-by-drugs, peddled on a national scale, and the supply line was expertly run with so many cut-outs that it was impossible to find the source.
    Colleagues in Marseille, working with American detectives, had had some success in closing down shipments to America through what the FBI called the French Connection. What they had further discovered was that, although France was buying more heroin than ever before, the bulk of what came in was being shipped on to London.
    It was almost, the French police told him, as though someone with limitless resources was waging a crusade against Britain.
    Mathis looked at his watch. He had a few minutes to spare so he ordered another coffee and a small cognac. For several days something had been nagging at the edge of his memory, begging to be let in. And now, as he looked through the glass enclosure of his pavement café beneath its scarlet awning, it finally came to him.
    The tongue removed with pliers … He had heard of thispunishment before, and now he remembered where. His brother, an infantry major, had fought with the French forces in Indo-China and had told him of a particular Viet Minh war criminal they had tried to capture and bring to justice. He had supervised the torture of captured French troops, but had also been an enforcer of Communist doctrine against Catholic missionary schools. His speciality had been the punishment – or torture – of children, many of whom had ended up maimed for life after his attentions.
    When Mathis returned to his office, he asked his secretary to search the files for photographs relating to war criminals from the Indo-China war.
    After he had seen Bond at lunch, Mathis had commissioned one of his subordinates to find Julius Gorner’s Paris factory and photograph its proprietor. Several prints came in of a tall, handsome Slavic man with a large, white-gloved hand and an intensely dismissive, arrogant expression. In two pictures he was accompanied by a man in a kepi with Oriental, possibly Vietnamese, features.
    When the secretary returned with a brown cardboard file, it took Mathis only a few minutes to find a match. Side by side he placed the shiny new monochrome print of a man in a kepi standing next to a black Mercedes 300D Cabriolet and a faded eleven-year-old newspaper cutting showing Pham Sinh Quoc, whose Wanted picture had once been on every wall in French Saigon. They were one and the same man.
    Mathis, however, did not immediately lift the telephone or order a car to take him to Gorner’s chemical plant. He tried instead to work out whether the Far East connection might mean more to Gorner than having provided him with a psychopathic aide-de-camp.
    Lighting a Gauloise filtre, he put his feet up on the desk and considered what commercial gain there might be for Gorner in having an entrée to the dangerous triangle of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.
    Nine hours behind Paris, it was nine o’clock on a bright morning in Santa Monica, and Felix Leiter was making a house call to a Spanish-style home on Georgina Avenue. He limped over the grass and up to the front door.
    The grizzled Texan, who had