French Kiss, page 53
“But the result, Monsieur Vosges, was akin to genocide. You unleashed Pol Pot. How many Cambodians were senselessly slaughtered because of you?”
Milhaud shuddered, and Morphée put her arms around him. “Every night,” he said, “I dream of them… of death. How could I have known how it would turn out? How could I have seen that Saloth Sar would have been transformed into a walking, living nightmare?”
“History,” Chris said, “would have shown you the way, if only you had bothered to look. Greed rules mankind, not theory. The lust for power and money overrides the teachings of even the best-intentioned philosopher.”
“But I taught only the path to freedom,” Milhaud said miserably. “I cannot yet fathom what happened.”
Chris wondered if all such philosophers down through history had been so thoroughly deluded. “You said before that it is because of you that Terry is dead. Did you order him murdered?”
“If I had,” Milhaud asked, “would you be able to forgive me?”
“Did you?”
“No. His death was an accident.”
“And what about the murders of Dominic Guarda, Al DeCordia? What about the attempt on my life?”
Milhaud stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
In the dim light it was difficult to be certain of his expression. “Monsieur Mabuse—Trangh—executed Dominic and DeCordia in the same way he murdered Terry. He decapitated them. Then, in New York, he came after me, and almost did the same to the woman who was with me.”
“What is going on? I never authorized—“
“But you were working with Terry on the drug pipeline.”
“Working with him? Why, no. We were, as you might call it, friendly rivals in the same business. Until, that is, I was contacted by Monsieur LoGrazie’s group.”
“Your employers?”
“Yes. At first I was convinced that they were Mafia. Then, because of a listening device I secreted in Monsieur LoGrazie’s residence, I became aware that they were CIA masquerading as Mafia.”
“CIA? Involved in a heroin pipeline?”
“Oh, yes. You are surprised? Well, they have been involved in drug smuggling ever since the war in Vietnam. I made a deal with two of their representatives who I rendezvoused with in Angkor Wat in 1969. One of the men was called the Magician. The other was your brother, Terry.”
“Oh, Christ.” Chris closed his eyes, suddenly dizzy. “No.”
“But, my boy, I thought you would have known. You were his only brother, after all.”
“I never knew… anything.” The enormity of those words came crashing in on him. He felt tired, and so sad he wanted to cry. He took a deep breath, marshaling with a tremendous effort his thoughts. “You said you made a deal with the Magician and Terry, so I assume they bought your pipeline.”
Milhaud nodded.
“What did they give you in return? Money?” Even as he asked the question, he was aware that part of him wanted to hide, desperate not to know.
“Oh, something far more valuable than money,” Milhaud said. “After all, the pipeline was a source of never-ending money. There was only one reason I would have given it up. For a chance to assassinate Sihanouk. But when it was botched, I settled for arms. They provided me with a constant flow of weapons even my money could not get for me.”
Chris was feeling sick to his stomach. “And these arms went straight to Pol Pot.”
“To the Khmer Rouge, yes. As I said, my primary objective at that time was to assassinate Sihanouk. When that became unviable because of his ties into Peking, I settled for his ouster.”
“What did the CIA want with a heroin pipeline?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You didn’t want to think about it, you mean.”
“Possibly,” Milhaud admitted. “But it hardly matters. They would never have told me.”
“But later, when Terry and Mun were running the pipeline, surely you knew to whom the heroin was being distributed.” It was of the utmost importance for Chris to understand this. Now it seemed, after all his hopes and speculations, after his faith in Terry’s motives, he was to be proven wrong. Terry had become a drug smuggler, it was that simple. That truth seemed too horrible to contemplate.
“That was the one odd thing,” Milhaud said. “I never did find out who was buying the heroin. I can tell you that it was none of the usual sources.”
“I still don’t understand,” Chris said. “If Mr. LoGrazie is CIA and he wanted you to take control of Terry’s pipeline… According to what you’ve told me, that pipeline was already the property of the CIA.”
“I said only that it had been bought by the CIA in 1969. I don’t know what happened in the interim. Perhaps the Magician and Terry sought to take it private; certainly they had a falling out of epic proportions, over what I cannot say.”
“So the CIA hired you to get the pipeline back.”
“Yes, in Operation White Tiger, though initially I was not aware of who they were. And the key—what they were truly desperate to acquire—was the Prey Dauw. With that talisman they can control all of the poppy production in the Golden Triangle.”
“How would they have learned about the Forest of Swords?”
“The Magician. That was the name your brother gave Virgil.”
Chris was watching the avenue for any sign of the black BMW. “The Magician wants all of us dead. Do you know why?”
Milhaud stirred. “It doesn’t matter. Now we are all set upon this path. We have no choice but to follow it to the end.”
“That’s not true. It has been my experience,” Chris said, impaling Milhaud with his gaze, “that people who claim they have no choice lack the courage to make it. If it will be painful for you to change, think of this: perhaps you are the one to help Soutane become whole again. You spoke before of penance. Wouldn’t that be penance enough? Wouldn’t that be sufficient to heal you?”
Milhaud tore his eyes away from Chris’s. “We are wasting time,” he said harshly. He turned to Morphée, pushed her farther back into the shadows. “Stay here,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t move until we come back for you.” Then he was running across the street. Despite the warnings inside his head, Chris went after him. “We must get the Prey Dauw.” Milhaud unlocked the front door of the building. The garage area was pitch black, and he deliberately kept the light off. Their footsteps echoed eerily off the walls.
Upstairs, the rambling apartment was dark. Milhaud locked the door behind them. Here and there, pale wraithlike patches of light dappled the floorboards and carpets.
Milhaud cautiously led them on a circuitous route down hallways and around heavy furniture. He turned on no lights as he went, and Chris was obliged to keep close enough to touch him in order not to lose his way or bump into anything.
At the doorway to each room Milhaud paused as if sniffing like a dog to catch an intruder’s scent. With each step they took it seemed to Chris as if the tension was increasing exponentially. He had begun to sweat, to peer into the darkest corners where he could not possibly see anyone lurking, as if his intuition would provide him with warning. Until, like a child afraid of the dark, he began to see movement, coiled and sinister, within every ill-defined shape and partial outline.
At last they came to Milhaud’s study. It was accessible through open, double sliding doors. The two of them stood in the doorway, Chris trying to discern shapes in the dark, Milhaud concentrating intently without looking at anything at all.
They moved quickly into the room. Milhaud went immediately to his desk. While he did so, Chris stood at the windows that looked out onto the Seine and, across its expanse, the École Militaire and the Pare du Champ de Mars.
Bamboo shades covered the windows completely. Nevertheless, narrow strips of dim light seeped through. Chris moved closer, until his face was against the bamboo slats. In this position he was able to look down through the gaps at the Avenue New York.
He saw the black BMW double-parked. He could see exhaust curling; its motor was running.
Chris turned away, saw Milhaud with a gun in his hand. He was about to speak, but Milhaud waved him to silence. Milhaud pointed to a door in the room, opened it, and went through. Chris slipped in after him.
They were inside a storage closet. “The black BMW that followed you from Angkor Vat is downstairs,” Chris whispered into the cramped space.
“I’m not surprised,” Milhaud said in his ear. “Someone is in the apartment. They have come as I said they would to steal the Forest of Swords.”
That interested Chris. He recalled that Milhaud had locked the door, but he had heard no sound as of a breaking lock. That meant whoever was in the apartment had gained entrance with a key.
He reached out, opening the closet door a fraction further so that their view of the office was of a more generous slice. It took in part of the open doorway, the area of Milhaud’s desk, as well as a section of floor-to-ceiling bookcase.
He was about to ask Milhaud who might have a key to his front door when he became aware of a shadow filling the open doorway. Next to him he felt Milhaud tense, and could see him moving the pistol into position.
The figure stood for a moment, as if surveying a familiar environment. Then it crossed silently to Milhaud’s desk and, leaning over, snapped on the etched-glass lamp on one corner.
By its light Chris recognized Trangh. Milhaud relaxed, and the gun lowered. He shifted position, about to stand up and perhaps emerge from the closet, when Trangh moved to the bookcase and, laying his hands flat against its surface, moved a portion of it away.
It was a hidden door, and as soon as it was open, Chris felt a new kind of tension filling Milhaud. Trangh was leaning into the interior of the open space, and now he emerged with an odd-looking triple-bladed sword.
“Merde!” Milhaud breathed. “He is taking the Forest of Swords!”
Thinking of the black BMW downstairs, Chris whispered, “Maybe he saw the car in the street and has come to move the sword in order to protect it.”
“It was perfectly safe where it was,” Milhaud said. “Christ, what a fool I’ve been. He has betrayed me.” Chris saw the gun come up, aiming at the back of Trangh’s head.
At the same instant it seemed, so many tiny pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Now Chris knew why no one had been observing the apartment. No one had to because Trangh was their eyes and ears.
Trangh was working for Milhaud, the someone high up in the pipeline, but now it was clear he was secretly working for someone else. Who? Whoever had sent Trangh to kill Chris, whoever had set Milhaud up to be shot tonight, whoever was in the black BMW. Milhaud’s employers?
Then Chris had it. “He’s working for Marcus Gable!”
Milhaud turned his head for an instant. “Who?”
“Virgil.”
“Yes! The Magician. It must be!” Milhaud sighted down the gun barrel. “He’ll die for this!” His finger tightened on the trigger.
Chris, staring at Trangh rewrapping the Forest of Swords in chamois, was brought wholly back to their confrontation in the stable in Tourrette. He remembered what Seve had said. Trangh had murdered Terry, Dominic Guarda, and Al DeCordia. And in trying to murder Chris, he had maimed Alix.
And yet, when he had had another chance to kill Chris, he had not. Instead he had accepted Chris’s bargain of Soutane’s life for the dagger Terry had wanted to keep. Why?
Chris did not know, but he recognized in Trangh a mystery that he perhaps needed to solve in order to understand who and what he had become. Because it was clear to him that he was no longer the Christopher Haye who had stood in court defending a man who had then all but confessed his guilt to him. The Christopher Haye who had felt betrayed by the law he had sworn to uphold, helpless to enact a justice he knew had been mocked.
For a time he had been convinced that he had been slowly absorbing as if by osmosis his dead brother Terry’s identity. That would have been simple enough to understand, and would have made a neat literary point. But ever since that night in the stable, he knew the truth was far more complex, as life was far more complex than any work of fiction could be.
He saw the muzzle of Milhaud’s pistol aimed at Trangh, and in his mind rose the boyhood image of the stag in his rifle sights. It pawed through the snow, the steam rushing from its nostrils as its warm breath met the frigid winter air. He felt Terry’s finger over his, making him squeeze the trigger against his will.
He saw that Trangh was like that stag, knew that if he allowed Trangh to die, he would never know, he would never come to understand what he had become. And somehow Terry would be gone from him forever without his ever being able to say goodbye.
This quest had begun to determine who had killed Terry and why, but it had become something far greater in scope and importance. It had become for Chris a personal journey toward a home he had never suspected he had, let alone believed that he would ever find.
Milhaud’s finger was tightening on the trigger, and Chris twisted the gun out of his hand.
Ma Varada had said to Mun, “You will not die,” and she was right. Mun, having used his powerful friends and considerable funds in Bangkok, walked off the jumbo jet onto French soil. It was Paris, not Nice, because Paris was where Ma Varada said the Magician was.
Paris or Vence, it did not matter to Mun. France no longer felt like home. His mind, his spirit were consumed with Sagaing. It had only been with an immense effort that he had been able to pull himself away from the city of prayer.
He would not have come back but for the Magician. He watched Ma Varada as they went through Immigration and Customs. She was wearing a high-fashion linen and silk suit, a knock-off of an Ungaro she had made for her in Bangkok. She had her hair cut short, in a very modern style. She wore snakeskin high-heel shoes from Charles Jourdan, a pair of iridescent green bracelets on her left wrist, and carried a snakeskin bag. Although it was well past midnight, she looked as fresh as when she had stepped onto the plane in Bangkok. It was impossible to believe that she was the same person Mun had saved from the punishment of General Kiu.
“Don’t bother with a taxi,” she said when they had cleared customs. “I had a friend bring my car to the airport lot.”
It was a Citroën with a modified engine. She drove very hard and very fast. At this hour, traffic was almost nonexistent. Several times, Mun was obliged to hold onto the passenger handle as she whipped around the curves of the Périphérique. Ahead of them lay Paris, a soft and willing lady wrapped in sequins of light.
They entered the city via Porte de la Muette, heading east on the Avenue Henri Martin. They were in the Sixteenth arrondissement, a mainly residential area that, lately, had become quite chic.
Ma Varada turned right on the Rue Scheffer. They had to come around in order to gain access to the tiny Square Petrarque. A vehicle bar prevented her from driving into the private street. She pulled the Citroën into the curb at the side of a corner three-story house with a rather severe Neoclassic facade which was made of thick slabs of white stone. A small but ornate wrought-iron balcony dominated the second story, and a pair of imposing oval windows flanked like all-seeing eyes the maw of the front door, which was set rather deeply into the stonework. In the streetlights, the facade rose out of the shadows like a beacon or a reef. Mun wondered which one it would turn out to be.
As they got out, Mun could see that, were it not for some new apartment blocks, the upper levels would overlook the Place de Trocadéro and the stark, rather fascistic Palais. Once, of course, they had. They were three blocks from the Passy cemetery where heroes of the wars had found their eternal rest.
“The Magician is here,” Ma Varada said.
Mun was tired and in pain. He knew this was not the time to force a confrontation with the Magician. His wound was healing quickly, which Ma Varada attributed to the blind man of Sagaing’s elixir, but he was far from being recovered. There had been considerable tissue and muscle damage, and only time could complete the process of rehabilitation.
Mun also knew that time was one thing he did not have. Not when it came to the Magician. He had to be stopped now, before he gained possession of the Prey Dauw. Before he could command all the opium warlords. Before he took complete control of the Shan. His power was already considerable on the Shan Plateau.
He had somehow co-opted Admiral Jumbo, and it was conceivable that, despite persuasive orations to the contrary, he had done the same to General Kiu. Now Mun knew that the Magician and Terry had had the same plan: to unite all the warlords. But what each meant to do with that enormous power was so different.
Kiu or Jumbo, one or the other of the warlords had killed Mogok, and had tried to kill him and Ma Varada. Which one? Mun did not know. Only the Magician knew.
Abruptly, Mun laughed. It had occurred to him that it did not really matter who had tried to kill them. In the end it was the Magician who was pulling the strings.
Mun, looking up at the building, wished that Terry was here. He whispered a short prayer, then said, “All right. Let’s go.”
But Ma Varada pushed at his chest, went up the stone stairs alone. She stood on the landing, in full view of the video camera mounted on the stone and mortar ledge three feet above her head. With her back to him she rang the bell. In a moment she put her hand on the door handle and opened it inward.
“I don’t want to see her,” Milhaud said. “When she learns the truth, she will despise me and, knowing that, I will not be able to go on. Now, at least, I am insulated from her hatred; I can fool myself into believing that it does not exist.”
Chris put down the phone and, misunderstanding the source of Milhaud’s fear, said, “You’re not giving her enough credit.” He saw that Milhaud looked as terrified as Soutane had sounded when he had called her at the hotel.
“Chris, where have you been! I’ve been nearly frantic with worry!” She had almost shouted in her anxiety.
“To Porte de Choisy,” he said. “While you and Seve were off having a tête-à-tête, I made a startling discovery.”
