Opium (12 page)

“Sure. But I don't know him.”

They had laid Baptiste on the floor of the shed, his head lolling on a rice sack. They treated his leg wound as best they could, packed a combine dressing over the wound, held it in place with a thick swathe of crêpe bandage. They propped it up on an old orange crate.

“Shot out some calf muscle,” Gates said. “Lost a lot of blood.”

Baptiste started to come round. He gagged. Gates reacted first, stepped forward, and kicked him over onto his side. Baptiste retched painfully, clutching at his ribs. He uttered a string of obscenities and Petrovski and Gates laughed.

***

His mouth tasted foul, his head pulsed with pain. Everything hurt. He looked around. He must be in Bonaventure's storage shed, the place stank of grease and opium and urine. A Cessna, plundered for spare parts, skeletal and rusted, took up most of the space. Wooden crates were stacked along the walls.

Two men stood over him. One was a crew-cut American, looking like he'd just stepped off a golf course. He looked bored. He was smoking a cigarette and leaning on one of the hangar doors. The other was a bearded nightmare in an orange and green Hawaiian shirt.

Baptiste tried to focus on the grey-haired man in the bandana. “Petrovski?' He slurred the name, his tongue felt twice its size. He tried again. “Petrovski?'

“Perhaps,” the nightmare said, in French.

Jesus God, Baptiste thought. I can't breathe. He brought up his left arm to splint his ribs and rolled onto his left side. “Baptiste Crocé ' He held out his hand.

The man who might be Petrovski ignored it. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?'

There was the sound of small arms fire from the town, followed by the crash of mortars. Petrovski and Gates looked at each other, their faces taut with strain.

“Monsieur Bonaventure wants his opium,” he said.

“Did he send you here to get it?' Petrovski asked him. “He must be paying you plenty. You know what happened to your comrade yesterday?'

“He liked it here and decided to stay?'

“He circled the airfield before he landed, just like you did this morning. Only he didn't have your reactions and the Pathet Lao blew him out of the sky.”

“Communists?'

“They're on Kong Le's side, at least for now,” Gates said. “It's only the Meo that are holding them off. The Lao soldiers just cut and run.”

Baptiste forced himself painfully into a sitting position, resting his weight against the side of the shed. “Where's the opium?'

“Where's Gilbert and Marius?'

“Rocco's regular pilots wouldn't do it. So he hired me.”

“You were the only one crazy enough to do it,
hein
?'

“Where's the opium?' Baptiste repeated.

“Forget it,
ami
. You can't walk, never mind fly an airplane. We'll put you on the Dakota, you can fly out with us.”

Baptiste tried to get up, but the hangar seemed to spin around him. He clutched at Petrovski's leg, waited till the dizziness had passed.

He tried again, putting his weight on his good leg. Sweat ran down his face in beads. He found his balance and let go his hold on Petrovski's jacket. “I want Rocco's opium.”

A mortar round landed in the middle of the airfield and a spray of dirt bounced on the wings of the Dakota parked outside on the grass next to the Beechcraft.

“I haven't got time to argue with this bastard all day,” Gates said. “We're leaving. If you want to come with us, get your ass on the Dakota.”

The two Americans walked out.

Baptiste took the revolver from the pocket of his flight jacket and levelled it at Petrovski. Rocco wants his opium. He's paid for it, and he doesn't like to pay for something he doesn't get. You don't want to disappoint him, do you?'

Petrovski looked at Gates and shrugged his shoulders. “There's no talking sense to some people, is there?'

***

Petrovski drove back to the Snow Leopard Inn in an olive drab jeep that was coated with ochre dust. Baptiste dragged himself back into the Beechcraft's cabin. There were holes peppered through the fuselage and the starboard wing, but the hydraulics appeared to be intact and neither engine had sustained any damage. He sat at the controls to wait for Petrovksi to come back.

Another mortar round landed on the airstrip, throwing up a drifting spray of dirt. Black plumes of smoke rose behind the coconut palms at the northern edge of the airfield, and the sound of small arms fire got louder.

His leg was bleeding again.

Fuck you, Rocco. I'll get your opium.

And then it will be your turn to bleed.

Do you want to chase clouds forever
?

Vientiane

The airport at Wattay had no Immigration or Customs controls, was no more than a cleared pasture. There was a handful of sheds at the eastern end of the strip, that Air Laos used for hangars and warehouses. In the monsoon it was a cloying swamp, in the dry season the airfield was a dust bowl.

Bonaventure had his driver park his Mercedes in the shade of a
pipal
tree next at the edge of the field. It was hot inside the car, and Bonaventure sat with his legs stretched out of the open door. Noelle sat beside him, fanning herself gently with the morning's copy of
Lao Presse
.

Neither of them spoke for a very long time. Out on the airfield a flock of vultures were picking over the carcass of a buffalo.

It was Bonaventure who broke the silence first. “I cannot believe you did this,” he hissed.

“Don't preach to me, papa. Not after what you and your gangsters did to him.”

“He deserved it. So did you. You behaved like a whore. I should have had him dumped in the Saigon river.”

“If you did, I would have killed myself.” She fanned herself even more furiously. “Or perhaps I would have killed you.”

You see, Bonaventure thought to himself. It was the peasant blood again. His mother's fault. In the name of the holy Virgin, why was he ever cursed with such a daughter?

“He's getting your opium for you. I thought you would be pleased.”

“He hasn't got it yet,” Bonaventure said. Perhaps Kong Le's men had already taken care of him. But six hundred kilos of opium! That was a lot to lose.

***

Baptiste taxied the Beechcraft to the end of the runway. Another mortar round landed less than fifty yards away and he felt the aircraft tremble from the aftershock. That was the fourth round to hit the airfield. The airstrip was still serviceable but it wouldn't be for much longer.

Behind him the Dakota rumbled away from the Quonset huts with the last Americans in Phong Savan on board. Petrovski was with them.

Baptiste swung around onto the strip, the three captured Pathet Lao heads grinning at him, rotting black in the sun. He pushed the engines to full throttle and bounced along the runway. Get up, get up you son of a whore he cursed at the plane. The jungle rushed closer. He had no choice but the take off with the wind with so much opium on board. But this would take him close to the communist guns. He eased back on the controls and felt the wheels lift clear of the ground.

He did not hear the rattle of the machine gun fire over the roar of the engines. The Perspex canopy split with holes, and the Beechcraft seemed to lurch in the air. For a moment he was blind, and when he put a hand to his face it was wet with blood.

Chapter 20

I
T WAS almost noon when Rocco Bonaventure heard the distant whine of an aircraft coming from the north. He had all but given up hope. He murmured a quick prayer of thanks; he could not afford to lose another plane.

The Beechcraft was a grey speck in a milky sky. As it swooped towards the coconut palms, he got out of the Mercedes and ran to meet it.

Noelle waited by the car. There was something very wrong, could tell by the beat of the engines even before she saw the trail of oil spewing from the port engine. She crossed herself.

“For the love of God,” Bonaventure shouted. Then Noelle saw it too. There were jagged holes all along the fuselage and the tailplane. Only God and Baptiste Crocé knew what was holding the frame together.

“Please God,” Noelle whispered. I will never do anything bad again. I will not fornicate with him or smoke opium or disobey my father. I'll be a good wife and make babies and keep the rosary from this day on. Just get him down safely.

Baptiste cut the port engine, the remaining engine laboured to keep the plane airborne. The port wing dipped suddenly.

He was not going to make it.

“My plane!' Noelle heard her father shout out in an agony of loss.

Somehow he corrected the descent. The wings wobbled and shook but a few feet from the ground he levelled her out and set her down on the dirt in a perfect three point landing. The Beechcraft bounced to a halt at the end of the runway.

Noelle whispered her thanks to the Virgin. She suddenly realised she had been clutching the crucifix at her throat so tightly it had left a livid imprint in the flesh of her palm.

Baptiste shut down the engines. Eerie silence.

Bonaventure ran back to the Mercedes. “Get over there,” he shouted to his driver.

***

Baptiste had bled all over the cabin.

Noelle cradled him in her arms. He was unconscious. There was a deep laceration on his scalp and a crust of it had hardened on his face, soaking his shirt and trousers, and the force of the jet stream through the shattered Perspex had sprayed blood around the cockpit. There was more blood seeping from a sopping bandage on his lower left leg.

The eyelid on his left eye was split open, and she could see the eyeball underneath, the pupil dilated and misshapen.

Bonaventure was more concerned with what was in the back. “He got the opium,” he said with grudging admiration.

Noelle ignored him. “Look what I've done,” she moaned. She could not believe she had led him to this. She was as crazy and as cold as her father.

“Is he alive?' Bonaventure asked her, curious rather than concerned.

“Barely.”

“Well, let's get him in the car then,” he said. “We'll find him a doctor.”

Chapter 21

B
ONAVENTURE found Baptiste dozing in the garden of the Bungalow, one leg heavily bandaged, resting on a rattan chair. There was a thick pad over his left eye. The rest of his face was still misshapen from the beating he had taken in Cholon and there was a thick swathe of bandaging under his shirt splinting his ribs. He held a cigarette in one hand and a glass of
vermouth cassis
in the other. He looked pale and tired and insufferably smug.

' Crocé.”

He opened his good eye. “Monsieur Bonaventure. What a pleasure.”

Bonaventure grunted. “For you perhaps.” He pulled up a rattan chair and sat down. He took out a silver cigarette case and selected a black Russian cigarette. His doctor had told him they were not good for him, but he allowed himself one on certain occasions, such as when he had unpleasant duties to perform.

“How is the leg?'

“The bullet broke a small bone, but the doctor says it will heal. It is the eye that is the problem.”

“Oh?'

“He says the fragment of Perspex he removed has damaged the cornea and I will probably lose sight in it.”

So you will be one-eyed from now on, Bonaventure thought bitterly. Like my daughter. “Will you be able to fly again?'

“Not without an aeroplane.”

Bonaventure took the point. “I don't know whether to shake your hand or cut your throat.”

“A difficult choice for you, I imagine.”

“My daughter seems to be very fond of you, Monsieur Crocé.”

“She is a poor judge of character.”

“Precisely.” Bonaventure drew on the cigarette and studied the other man. I wonder what he wants? he thought. I can guess. But perhaps I shall be able to accommodate him. He has shown himself to be far more resourceful than I imagined. “You are either very brave or very foolish. I cannot make up my mind which it is.”

“Perhaps both. Such qualities go hand in hand. If a man is a hero or an idiot depends on how things turn out. Anyway, it was Noelle's idea.”

“She says she is going to marry you. Is that her idea also?'

“No. It was mine.”

“Who are you in love with, Monsieur Crocé? My daughter - or my business?'