French Kiss, page 22
“Save it for court.” Chun sneered. If he was surprised that Seve knew the name of his mistress on the other side of the world, he had hidden it well. “That is, if you can prove anything.”
“In court,” Seve said, “all I’ll have to do is produce Ki Shen Song, because I’m going to link her to your drug trafficking. We found six ounces of cocaine—pure, righteous stuff—in her possession. She’ll do the hard time with you, Loong. How do you like that?”
“You shit!” Chun shouted. “My sister has nothing to do with it!”
“She’s a beautiful woman,” Seve said. “Do you know what prison does to beauty, Loong? It melts it like wax. It corrodes it like acid.” He was concentrating hard. This was the first time that he had gotten a reaction out of the Dragon, and because it was a nerve that ran deep, he was determined to use it for as long as Chun would let him.
“What are you telling me?”
“Yeah,” Seve said. “I’ve got Ki Shen Song here at the precinct.” He laughed without humor. “But how could that be? She’s in Hong Kong, right?”
“You had no right to invade my sister’s privacy,” Chun said heatedly.
“You’re not expecting me to believe you have feelings,” Seve said, “are you? Not after you killed three cops.”
“They came after me,” Chun complained, his tone already changing. “A man in my position must have bodyguards. Those cops were fools. They just broke in, guns drawn. What did you expect? My men were doing their job, protecting me.”
“No, definitely not feelings,” Seve pressed doggedly on. “Not after you maimed a sixteen-year-old girl just to get at me.”
“You’ll never be able to prove Ki has anything to do with my business,” Loong said, just as if he was not at all concerned.
“See you in court, Loong,” Seve said, crushing his paper cup into a bolted-down wastebasket.
Before he could call for the door to be unlocked, Chun said, “Stay away from Ki. You’ll pay dearly for bringing her into this.”
“Is that a threat?” Seve said, rapping on the steel door. “Because if it is, pal, you just bought yourself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”
Seve left Chun in there to stew for a while. He went into the next room, where Diana had been observing through a two-way mirror.
“That was some bluff, boss,” she said. “It was so close to the edge, I could feel my stomach turn over.” She followed him to a scarred metal table where something resembling coffee was kept hot. “We don’t have anything on the sister. All I saw when I followed her into the dance club’s ladies’ room was her snorting a couple of rows. There wasn’t enough coke left for even a nuisance bust.”
“What are you worried about? It worked.” Seve took a paper cup from a pile beside the hot plate. “Jesus, did you see him jump! That’s a first for that bastard.” He poured himself more coffee. “I’m going back in there and finish the job I started on him.” He saw the look in her eyes and said, “What?”
“What about Chun’s lawyer? He should have been here for this. If he were, he never would have allowed you to—“
“Fuck Chun’s lawyer, and fuck Chun three times over. When he murdered my men, when he did that to the girl, he showed his contempt for the law, he said adiós to the human race. Any emotion you expend on Loong will be wasted.”
“Yeah?” Diana’s eyes were fiery. “Well, what about all the emotion you’re expending on him. You shouldn’t be in there with him now. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, boss.”
“Can it,” Seve said tightly. “Why aren’t you up in New Canaan, goosing our friend Detective Blocker?”
“I’ve already been on the phone to him.” She threw him a look that, had he not been so preoccupied, would have made him wince. “The stuff will be coming in over the FAX wire within the hour.”
“Good. I’ll be interested to see if the autopsy findings are consistent with the picture of the war fan you showed me. That book of yours could be the key.”
“You’d better wrap this up,” Diana said. “You’ve got the last session of your DEA InterNat-Link course in an hour.”
Back inside the cubicle with Peter Loong Chun, Seve said, “I just took a peek at your sister, Loong. She don’t look too good.”
“Bastard.” Chun ground his teeth. “What is it you want?”
“Me? Oh, not too much.” Seve bent over him. “I just want it all. Every rucking inch of the pipeline. As the godfather of Chinatown, you’ve got it all up here.” He tapped Loong’s temple. “You give it to me, and I’ll see that the coke we found in your sister’s place disappears. Poof! Like that. I can do it, Loong, ’cause I’m your angel.”
Chun looked up at Seve. “Then maybe I’m already damned.”
Seve frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Godfather of Chinatown?” Chun was shaking his head. “I do not have that power. I am merely a caretaker. A gardener, as it were, lovingly sowing like Johnny Appleseed the white powdered poppies as they are shipped into my safekeeping. And for this, as you would expect, I am paid a salary. A handsome one, to be sure, but a salary just the same.”
Seve was totally unprepared for this. “But all our information—“
“Was supplied by my network,” Chun said. “I believe the government calls it disinformation. It was useful for a time to have you believe in a fairy tale. But now, as you see, I have been revealed as, how would you say?, the Wizard of Oz. A charlatan, of sorts.” He looked at Seve. What was in his eyes? “So, now you have me, and you have spent so very many months pursuing me. To what end? You were pursuing a phantom. As we wanted. Now you are further from the truth than when you began, because I am ignorant of the information you desire. I have no idea where the pipeline begins or who actually runs it.”
“Bullshit! You’re in Hong Kong four times a year. Who do you meet there, errand boys?”
“Essentially, yes. Oh, these men are quite a bit higher up than that. But they are cutouts, nonetheless. They are pristine from a security point of view, and so am I. Do you still want their names? I’ll give them to you.”
Seve felt the anger hot behind his eyes. He wanted to lash out, to grab hold of that smirking face and rip it to shreds. But he did nothing.
Instead, he said, “I have one question to ask you, and you’d better think long and hard before you answer because your sister’s future depends on it.” Bending over, Seve gripped the arms of Chun’s chair. Face-to-face, unblinking. “If you don’t run Chinatown, who does?”
He could see something small and desperate writhing behind Chun’s eyes. “If I tell you, I’m a dead man.”
“Hey, if you don’t tell me, your sister is history, pal.” He put his lips next to Loong’s ear. “You’ve never been inside. You don’t know what it’s like. Especially for a woman with your sister’s looks. She’ll last—what?—six months. After that, even you won’t recognize her. The women inside are animals, Mack trucks on two legs. They’ll take your sister, squeeze her until she’s dry. You’re calling the shots. Now you condemn her, Loong.”
Seve backed away, saw the tremor in Chun’s temple. “All right,” Loong said at last. “But you’ll have to spring me for this.”
“No fucking way, pal.”
“It’s that or nothing,” Chun said. “Where we’re going, we’ve got to go together.”
“Wherever you and I can go, I can take a police team.”
“Think so? Your quarry will be gone before you’ve left the precinct.”
“What are you saying?”
“You think no one on the outside knows what happens in here?” Chun said. “Figure it out for yourself.”
And Seve, feeling uneasy for the first time since he started the interrogation, suspected that Chun wasn’t lying.
Milhaud, in the arms of Morphée, dreamed aloud of his wife. Morphée, a Vietnamese woman of exceptional beauty, was used to this post-amour tristesse from her client. Young on the outside, inside she was, perhaps, older than he.
Milhaud’s wife had been dead for some years, but he had scarcely forgotten what she had done to him or, rather, what they had done to one another.
In those days the name of Milhaud had not yet been invented. He had lived his life nearer to Asia, enmeshed in controversial politics, closer to revolution.
But now, times had changed radically. Asia was a place simply of business, controversial politics was passe, revolution was a part of history. With the internationalization of world economies, even the once great leaders had ceased to dream.
Long before the others, Milhaud had seen the failure of his—and their—policies. The death of his wife had been the last straw, the last link in a previous and outdated life (he and his daughter had had no contact for some time). And so he had ceased to exist. Six months later Milhaud had appeared in Paris with the proper credentials, and had been quickly snapped up by Le Giron, the Society to Return to the Fold.
But his mind was not so easily able to shed his past life. A ceaseless machine, his brain continually dredged up incidents, somber, shadowy, unpleasant, that haunted him during the hours of pleasure or sleep.
Morphée, who knew how to please him in every physical and psychological way, was nevertheless at a loss to stem the flow of effluvia from his past life. After sex, while he lay, half asleep, entwined within her moist thighs, he spoke softly, his words a dark river of misdeeds, small evils, and secret pain. She held his head, kissed his sweat-soaked forehead as she would if he had a fever, recognizing a stream-of-consciousness anger that, growing like a malignant, living thing had, over time, wrecked a family, destroyed several lives.
How many men had Milhaud’s wife slept with; how many times had she deliberately let him find her in the act? It was impossible for Morphée to count or to measure the pain Milhaud’s wife had caused him. Why, she had often wondered, had they remained together for so long? Once, Milhaud had given her a glimpse of the reason: she had been charismatic, drawing influential people of both sexes to her as inexorably as a flame attracts moths. Therefore, she had been invaluable to him.
It was not surprising that Milhaud occupied her thoughts, for, in her own way, Morphée loved Milhaud, seeing in him the greatness that his wife apparently had not.
Morphée, when she was very young and in Asia, had been used by men. She had quickly seen that if that was to be her lot in life (in truth, she could not conceive of any other), at least she could take her quid pro quo.
She had never before been involved with a client, never before had wanted to be, and she found it somewhat terrifying, not to say risky. On the other hand, it was also exhilarating. She loved everything about him, even his pain, because that, too, was part of him, part of what made him what he was.
Within an hour Milhaud ceased to speak, the dark river of words coming at last to an end. Then he slept in the arms of Morphée, while she digested this latest erotic incident where Milhaud’s wife had cleverly seduced the mistress of the minister of finance in order to learn the minister’s secrets and, in so doing, coerce his support for Milhaud’s work in Indochina.
When Morphée fantasized, she dreamed only of Milhaud, finding that she would be happy to be just with him, leading, as she had never before, a normal life.
Milhaud awoke from his sleep within the precincts of Les Portes du Jade as he always did, refreshed. Les Portes du Jade, the house of pleasure, was an eighteenth-century white-stone mansion built around a walled garden thick with roses, violets, and columbine. There was a verdigris fountain in the shape of a mermaid coupling with a dolphin. A single filigreed iron bench was set beneath a chestnut tree.
It was on the Left Bank, three blocks from the Sorbonne, just off the Boulevard Saint Michel. The voluptuous greenery of the Luxembourg Gardens could be seen from many of its apartment windows.
This is what Milhaud looked at while he was dressing. Behind him, he could hear Morphée stirring on the bed.
“Tell me something,” he said as he knotted his tie. “What do you think of, dear Morphée, while I sleep?”
“I dream of time,” she said.
Milhaud turned to look at her. “Really? I wonder what that is like?”
She smiled her enigmatic smile, what drew him to her over and over. “You would have to be a slave in order to understand. You would have to understand what it is like to have nothing of your own, to be subjugated. I am Asian, so I know what that is like, to have nothing, to see even your own land milked by foreigners.
“But I am also a woman. I am set in a sliver of time like a porcelain ballerina, to be taken out and admired, then put back on a shelf.
“You would have to understand what it is like to be intimate with someone, to accede to their every demand, to kiss them to sleep when they cry like a baby, and then be ignored by them when you pass them in the street or in a restaurant.”
She regarded him out of smoky eyes. “For a boxed toy such as I am, the dream of time is the only one worth having.”
He came and sat on the edge of the bed in order to touch her. “Is that what you think you are?” He needed to do that every time before he left, to prove to himself that she was real and not a figment of his imagination.
“I know just what I am,” Morphée said. “A slave of desire.”
“Perhaps,” Milhaud said, “that power is what makes you so desirable.”
She laughed. “I am hardly that.”
“But to create fantasies is to exert the ultimate power.”
Morphée followed him with her eyes as he rose, slipped on his jacket. She understood his facility with words. “What would you do if you were with your friends, and passed me in the street? Would you at least smile?” That was the worst moment, the moment of separation. After he was gone, it was all right, she could take care of the ache, dull and throbbing, controlled. But for this moment, this tearing of her reality, she wanted to turn her face away and cry. Instead, she smiled because she knew it was what he loved, what he wanted.
“I would do more. I would stop and kiss you on both cheeks as a long-lost friend.” Milhaud, leaving her, thinking with a quickly beating heart, When she smiles I see Soutane, and when I am with her, I imagine I am near Soutane.
Placing the money carefully on the top of the bureau. “Au revoir, Morphée.”
Chris, sleeping fitfully aboard his Pan Am flight, was dreaming of shadows. He was cycling through the sun-drenched French countryside. Alix was at his side, smiling, matching his pace. Bent over the handlebars, her light, muscular figure was filled with an astounding sexual energy.
Sunlight, moving in and out of the gnarled plane trees that bordered the road, dappled her face, alternately throwing her features into highlight and relief.
She smiled. He saw her even, white teeth just before the shadow overtook her. Chris felt the brush as if from an invisible hand of enormous strength. It shoved him aside so that he wobbled unsteadily for a moment. By the time he had righted himself, Alix was quite a distance ahead.
Chris called to her, but the wind, shrieking past him, bore his words away. He tucked his head into his shoulders, began to race after her, pushing himself so hard that his leg began to hurt. The more it hurt, the more he pushed himself. But the faster he went, the farther away she seemed, until she was nothing more than a speck upon the horizon, gone.
He did not give up, however, merely redoubled his effort, and at last coming upon her, lying with her bike by the side of the road, pinned by a giant fan to the earth dark and damp with her blood.
He awoke with a start as the plane touched down. He blinked, licked his dry lips, and thought of the dream, of the race, of Alix back in the hospital in New York. He knew he was guilty about having left her there, helpless.
He looked out the window at Nice and, beyond, the blue mountains, hazy as from an Impressionist’s brush. Inside the terminal, he found that the airline had lost his luggage. He dutifully filled out forms, anxious only to be out of there; he had brought nothing of real value with him.
He saw Soutane on the lookout for passengers emerging from his flight. This is what she was: Terry’s girlfriend. He tried to reconcile that in his mind. But it seemed impossible for him to comprehend.
She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Time had heightened the exoticism of her mixture of bloods—Khmer and French. She unwrapped her sunglasses as she saw him.
She wore a linen blouse with thick swirls of forest green, cerulean, and mauve, black form-fitting leggings, short boots of the same color. Her long, extraordinarily beautiful legs still looked like those belonging to un petit rat, a young dancer from the Paris Opera Ballet.
Chris stared into the green motes in her brown eyes and uttered her name in a voice filled with an unnamed emotion.
“Soutane.”
“Hello, Chris.”
It was so prosaic, not at all what he had expected of this moment. What should they do, embrace? Merely smile at each other? It was so awkward.
She kissed him on both cheeks. As they walked to her car, she said, “This journey can’t be pleasant, of course, but I’ll try at least to make it less painful.”
Chris wanted to ask her how she would do that, but he let it go. He had not eaten during the flight and had awakened entirely unrested; he felt utterly spent.
“Right now,” he said, squinting into the brilliant sunlight, “I’d just like to take a shower.”
“Of course,” Soutane said. She gestured. “Watch your knees. These sports cars never have any space to speak of.”
It was a honey-colored Alfa Spider with white leather seats. The cloth top was down, and the air, even when she put the car through its paces at top speed, was as soft as a whisper.
Nice was white and orange, climbing the ascending terrain off the azure Mediterranean with the grace of a dancer. This was a place, Chris thought morosely, to come to on your honeymoon or with a lover, not to pick up the body of your dead brother.
“We’ll have you home and in the shower right away,” Soutane said.
“Home? Not my hotel?”
