Opium by Colin Falconer Read Free Book Online Page A

Saigon prison. “All right then, I believe you. So help me get him out.”
    “Get him out?'
    “You have friends in the Vietnamese government. You have told me about it. Use your influence, papa. Do it for me.”
    He sighed. “You don't know what you're asking. Such a thing will not be easy.”
    “You must be able to do something.”
    He put his arms around her. “Is he really so important to you?' he whispered.
    She placed her hands on top of his. “Please, papa.”
    He thought about this for a long time. “Noelle. I have told you before, I think you have chosen poorly. This man will break your heart.” When Noelle did not reply, he added: “But it is your life. I will see what I can do. Next week I go to Saigon. I will make enquiries. I cannot promise anything.”
    “Thank you, papa,” Noelle whispered. She got up and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.
    “See, it is settled. Now come and have an apéritif with your papa.”
    “Not now, I am too upset. I just want to be alone.”
    “You will be down for dinner?'
    “I don't think so.” She went out, closing the door gently behind her.
    Bonaventure stared after her. Baptiste Crocé you must have the tongue of the devil to bewitch my daughter this way! But it hasn't done you any good, has it? I wonder what a few years in a Vietnamese prison will do for your good looks and your charm?
     
     
    Saigon
     
    A week later Rocco Bonaventure was once again enjoying a vermouth cassis on the terrace of the Continental Hotel with Lieutenant Colonel Tran van Ky. A woven bamboo canopy protected them from the torrential monsoon.
    The drains were overflowing in the Tu Do and the tyres of the Renault and Peugeot taxis ploughed furrows through the water. “What happened to that pilot I told you about?' Bonaventure asked him over the din of the rain. “What was his name? Baptiste?'
    “His case has not yet come before the courts. But opium smuggling is a very serious offence in Vietnam.”
    “How long will he get?'
    Ky raised the cognac to his lips and considered. “How long would you like?'
    “The maximum,” Bonaventure said, and then the conversation moved on to other things.
     
     

Chapter 9
     
    Hong Kong
    October, 1960
     
    T HE blue and white globe of Pan Am Airlines glittered in the late afternoon sun as the Boeing 707 swooped down towards Kai Tak airport. The rumble of the Rolls Royce engines shook the grimy cocklofts and airless workshops in Mongkok just two hundred feet below, where immigrant Chinese hunched over their benches assembling cheap transistors and artificial flowers.
    Sammy Chen looked out of the porthole window and imagined himself down there. He had been born in Dao Yung in the Swatow province of China. His father had made a living as a street hawker, his mother as a charwoman. He wondered if anyone else in the cabin had experienced the same crushing poverty. Dao Yung was over forty years ago but he could still remember the open sewers and the sticky rice with nothing to flavour it except a few roots and some pieces of cabbage.
    It was the triad that saved him from that life. His half-brother ran errands for the Fei Leung, and when he was fourteen he had encouraged Sammy to join him. They had both worked as look-see boys at an opium den.
    When Sammy's family emigrated to Vietnam in 1938 the first thing he had done was identify himself to the local hong of the Fei Leung. He had a quick brain and he rose quickly though the ranks. For the last five years he had been the 486 , which was what they called the chief of the Fei Leung in Cholon, His personal wealth was now close to half a million dollars.
    None of Sammy Chen's fellow travellers would have identified him as a man of means. His black western-style suit was shiny from wear, and the white open-necked shirt he wore could be bought for a handful of coins in any street market in any city in Asia.
    Sammy Chen considered any form of ostentation dangerous. It was better to blend in, look like