The Corsican Read online

  Sartene stopped almost as if composing himself. No one spoke. “If there are problems with Carbone they’ll be of his making.” He waited again, looking at each of them. “Now, I know something about the man who is the leader of these heathen poppy growers to the north. He’s called Touby Lyfoung and he’s something of a fool. I’m told he’s very impressed with authority and for many years now has tried to get the colonial government to give him some military title he can hang around his neck. We’ll arrange for this through the Americans. They can have the French make him general of the poppies for all I care. But only if he deals with us and no one else.”

  Sartene turned to his son. “You handle this opium business for me,” he said. “But I want you to work closely with Auguste.” He wagged a finger. “He’ll teach you patience. Anyway, it’s time you had more responsibility.”

  Jean’s face exploded with pleasure, and for a moment Sartene questioned his choice. He disliked displays of emotion in business matters, believing it was something that gave advantage to a potential adversary.

  He turned to Francesco. His face was impassive, even though Sartene knew he was seething over the decision to give the opium business to Jean.

  “You’ll continue to handle our other business matters for now,” he said, offering Francesco some hope for the future, as well as issuing a warning to his son.

  “Benito,” he said, turning to face him, “I’ll need you to help me arrange things in case there are”—he made a circular gesture with his hand, searching for the proper word—“difficulties with Carbone. I also want you to go to Saigon and meet with this American. Ask him to come to see me to work out the necessary arrangements. And tell him to bring someone in higher authority. Tell him I don’t want to make an arrangement and have someone higher up change it the next day. He’ll understand. He knows I’ve dealt with his government before.”

  He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, fingers steepled in front of his face. “If there’s any disagreement we should discuss it now,” he said. When no one spoke he separated his hands, then brought them back together. “Is there anything else?” Again there was silence. “Good,” Sartene said, ending the meeting. “Jean,” he said, looking at his son, “tell Pierre to come and see me. Francesco, I want you to stay here a moment.”

  As the others left the room, Sartene came around the desk and placed his hand on Francesco’s shoulder. His eyes were penetrating and he looked directly into Francesco’s, knowing he would see the man’s true feelings there.

  “I don’t want you to misunderstand my reasons in this matter,” he said. “I need you to do what you’re doing now. And I also need you to do something else.”

  There was a glint of suspicion, perhaps even resentment, in Francesco’s eyes. But that was to be expected.

  “I want you to have someone keep a close watch on Carbone,” Sartene said. “And I want you to do it the same way I would. You shouldn’t discuss this with the others. Only with me. But it’s even more important than the other arrangements we’ll be making.” Sartene inclined his head as though they were sharing some secret between them. “Someday you’ll be leading men the same way I am now,” he said. “Then you’ll understand the need to divide authority. Right now I only ask that you trust my judgment and know that we’ll all profit equally from this thing.”

  Francesco shrugged. “I just think I could do this better than Jean,” he said.

  There was no resistance in his words, only opinion. Sartene nodded, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “He has to learn too,” Sartene said, sliding his hand around Francesco and walking him to the door. As Francesco opened the door, he patted his back. “Like Jean, you too must learn patience,” he said.

  When he returned to his desk, Sartene sat heavily in his chair and allowed his mind to question the wisdom of his decision. This thing would mean trouble with Carbone, he had no doubt of that. So far his business interests had produced little bloodshed. But this time it would be different. In the short time since he had arrived in Vientiane he had made himself stronger than Carbone, both in manpower and in the businesses that excluded opium. Now he would move into opium as well, and it would leave Carbone with so diminished a status that he would either have to resist or risk losing many of the people in his organization. It would leave him little choice, of that Sartene was certain.

  The matter of his son also bothered him. He had hoped that Jean would learn to think with the mind of a rapier, not a bludgeon, but such was not the case. At first he had considered sending him to work with the Guerini brothers in Marseille, but had decided against it. Perhaps he had been wrong. He only knew now that he wished his son were more like Francesco, and that too bothered and annoyed him.

  Slowly he withdrew from his pocket a set of keys that was attached to a gold chain that hung from his belt. Selecting one key, he opened the middle drawer of his desk and withdrew a rectangular gold medallion. On the face of the medallion was a shield. Across the top of the shield the word Corse was engraved into the metal; below, the profile of a man with a bandanna tied across his forehead. Atop the shield there was an eagle perched with its wings spread.

  Staring at the medallion now, he wondered if one day he would be able to pass it on to his son. A man can only do his best, he told himself, He can’t control the accident of nature.

  Almost on cue, the door to the office opened and Jean stuck his head in.

  “Papa. Pierre is taking his nap,” he said.

  Sartene grunted in acknowledgment. “Tell him when he wakes up,” he said.

  Jean paused for a moment. “Papa,” he finally said. “Thank you for your trust in me.”

  Sartene nodded abruptly, then looked hard into his son’s eyes. “Don’t fail me in that trust,” he said.

  As the door closed Sartene placed the medallion back in the desk and locked it. He would wait and see, he told himself. He sat back in his chair and drew a deep breath, realizing he was disappointed his grandson was asleep.

  Madeleine sat before the mirror providing ritual strokes to her hair with a long-handled silver brush. In the reflection of the mirror she could see her husband seated on the edge of the bed, drawing heavily on a cigarette. He seemed deep in thought, as he had through most of the evening. When he had come to her after the meeting in the office he had been bursting with pleasure. Then later, for no apparent reason, his mood had changed and he had been pensive, almost nervous. She continued to watch him between glances at her own image to make sure the brush strokes were having the desired effect.

  She was pleased with the way she looked, and she recalled now how she had been frightened six years ago that the birth of her son would change her into the frumpy, sexless mother her own had become. She drew a deep breath, watching her breasts rise and fall beneath the thin beige negligee she was wearing. It had not happened, would not be allowed to, she told herself.

  She watched as Jean stubbed out his cigarette, then, without noticing, lit another. He was like an anxious child tonight, she thought. It must have something to do with their business, and though she wanted to know why he was disturbed, she did not want to know about their business. She had told herself many times it was easier to love them if she did not know what these Sartene men did.

  She stood and walked to the bed and sat next to him, the thin negligee moving against her figure with an inviting sensuality that pleased her as much as it did her husband. She kissed Jean’s shoulder lightly, then rested her head against it.

  “You seem very bound up in things tonight,” she said, in her native French.

  At first there was no response, the only sound coming from the rotating ceiling fan above their bed, a constant buzzing that always reminded her of the sound a moth made when it was trapped against a window struggling to reach the light beyond the pane.

  “I have a lot on my mind,” he said finally.

  She ran one hand inside his pajama top and stroked his chest. “Do you want to talk about it?” she said, knowing he woul
d either decline or speak in such vague generalities it would not matter. He was quiet for a long time, and she surrendered again to the sound of the fan above her head.

  Jean looked around the large bedroom. It was the largest in the old house, one that rightfully belonged to his father, but Sartene had insisted it go to his son and Madeleine. Instead, he had taken a small room across from Pierre’s, saying it was enough for a man who slept alone.

  It was his nature to do those things, Jean thought now. All his life, or at least as much as Jean had witnessed or had been told about, his father had always provided for his family first, his friends second, and then, when he was satisfied all had been cared for, himself. He was like that with everyone within the small, intimate group he held so closely to himself. Beyond that group it was different. His acts of apparent benevolence were done to produce a loyalty necessary to his business. Like the building of that Buddhist shrine at the new house, Jean thought. It was a simple act—“to show I understand and respect their needs,” his father had explained—that would provide payments in loyalty that could not be bought.

  Now his father had given him a great responsibility—a test, really, of his worthiness—but still something that could affect the organization badly if he did not do it well. And there would always be that bastard Francesco, waiting in the background, hoping he would fail.

  “It’s just that my father has asked me to do something that’s very important to our business,” Jean said, as though the long silence since Madeleine’s question had not occurred.

  “And you’re worried?” Her voice was soft, intentionally soothing.

  “I can do it,” he said abruptly.

  She stroked his chest again.

  “I suppose I am,” he said at length. “Not that I can’t do it. Just that so much depends on it. And I want to do it in a way that pleases him, the way he would do it.”

  “You can only do things the way you do them. You can’t be a copy of your father,” she said.

  He nodded his head, more as an acknowledgment of her words than in agreement. “That bastard Francesco can,” he said.

  He was right about that, she knew. Even from a distance, her distance, she was able to see the similarities between Francesco and her father-in-law. They had the same quiet, threatening way about them. Only Francesco’s was more open, more obvious. Buonaparte’s seemed veiled, perhaps because he was older.

  “Francesco still worries you, then?”

  “I don’t trust him,” Jean said, his voice soft but gruff at the same time. “He respects my father, even fears him. But he doesn’t love him the way I do, the way Auguste and Benito do. He only uses him, and if he ever gets strong enough, or if my father is weakened enough, he’ll go against him.”

  She thought about Francesco, the feeling of discomfort she experienced when he was near. There was an animal cunning about him that came through his good looks, perhaps even intensified them in an unpleasant way. She had caught him looking at her on occasion, when no one else could see, and she had suspected what was on his mind. Her father-in-law had the same sense of cunning, but in a less malevolent way, or at least she had never seen the malevolence manifested. But with her he was gentle. No, not gentle. Considerate, really. The only person he was truly gentle with was Pierre.

  “Why don’t you talk to your father about it, about your concerns?” she asked.

  “He’d think it was jealousy. And maybe he’d be right. No. I just have to prove myself to him and make sure Francesco never gets strong enough.” He nodded to himself, as if approving his own decision.

  She continued to stroke his chest quietly, urging him to leave his thoughts. It was so like him. Barging straight ahead forcefully. It was a simple honesty, and she loved that about him. But she also knew it was not the way his father would act. He was right about that.

  He looked at her for the first time. “You know, even talking to you like this. It’s something my father would never approve of, never do himself. He would think it wasn’t the Corsican way.”

  “In our bedroom you don’t have to be Corsican,” she said, smiling.

  She watched him look at her in a new way now, with a sudden understanding that she wanted to be with him. His face became one large smile, making him look so much like the little boy he was at these times. He reached out to her gently.

  “I must look in on Pierre, first,” she said, still smiling.

  She stood and slipped into a robe that matched her nightgown, still watching him. Pierre’s room was next to theirs, across the narrow hall from his grandfather’s. When she reached the door she could see light coming beneath it, and she opened the door quietly, suspecting the child had fallen asleep with his bedside lamp on.

  Standing in the doorway now she saw the true reason. Pierre lay atop his bed, his eyes fixed on his grandfather’s face, as the older man read to him from a book.

  “Papa,” she said in a gentle admonishment. “He’s supposed to be asleep.”

  Both sets of eyes turned toward her, each reflecting a sense of guilt that seemed suddenly comical. Two children caught in the act of disobedience, she thought, trying but failing to withhold a smile.

  Sartene shrugged. “He couldn’t sleep. I thought I would read to him for a bit.”

  “Ahh,” she said, “I see.” She moved toward him and looked down at the book. “And what bedtime story have you chosen? I see,” she said, leaning down and looking into the open pages of the book. “The Battle of Craonne. Of course. That’s the story where Napoleon and Hans Christian Andersen defeat the goose who laid the golden egg, is it not?”

  “Mama, it’s a good story,” Pierre insisted.

  “Yes, I know it is, my darling. But now you must go to sleep.” She emphasized the word “sleep,” casting an amused glance at her father-in-law as she spoke it.

  Sartene shrugged and rose from his chair. “Your mama is right, Pierre,” he said. “We’ll finish the story tomorrow.”

  The child stuck out his lower lip in a pout, as his mother tucked the light sheet about his body and leaned down to kiss his forehead. His grandfather followed suit, winking at him and causing the child to grin.

  Two little conspirators, Madeleine thought. As Sartene started to leave the room, she noticed he had left the book on the nightstand next to the bed. She picked it up and looked at it, shaking her head. All these things about military history that he filled the boy’s head with, she thought. Sometimes it made her wonder if he was entertaining the child or training him for battle.

  “Papa,” she said. “You forgot your book.”

  Sartene turned and took the book from her. “We’ll finish our story tomorrow, Pierre,” he said, repeating himself. He raised his eyebrows and inclined his head toward Madeleine by way of apology.

  Chapter 5

  Sartene had first met Antonio Carbone during his first week in Southeast Asia. It had been a courtesy visit to the massive house on the outskirts of Saigon that Carbone had decorated like the palace of some gauche little prince.

  Sartene had always despised ostentatious displays of wealth and power, believing it invited curiosity where none was needed. But he had expected little else from Carbone, based on what he had heard of him during the man’s days in Corsica and Marseille.

  They were contemporaries, but had never met. Carbone had come to Saigon in 1943, after his brother, Paul, a leader in the milieu during the 1930s and 1940s, and a collaborator with the Nazi SS, had died. His brother’s successor, François Spirito, had bankrolled his move to the east, and for Sartene, the fact that Antonio had not succeeded his brother spoke enough in itself about the man.

  When Carbone had received him in a large study, overflowing with Louis XIV furnishings, Sartene had realized that the two brothers could easily have been twins. They had the same round fleshy face, the deep-set eyes beneath heavy brows, and the thin mouth that seemed to turn up at the edges as though trying to hide some great and humorous secret. Only this Carbone was fat, a fat that
came from overindulgence in all things. From what Sartene had already learned, the man even indulged himself with the prostitutes who worked in his bars and nightclubs.

  During that first meeting, Carbone had ensconced himself in a gilded, carved chair that sat like a throne behind his equally gilded desk. He had extended both hands in a gesture of welcome as Sartene had entered, but had not risen, simply indicating a chair instead.

  “So you come here to earn your bread,” Carbone had begun.

  “The war has been hard on Europe,” Sartene had said. “I hoped the opportunities here would be better.”

  Sartene’s words had been spoken softly, almost humbly. He had found during his life that there was a great advantage to playing the innocent before a man like this. He would learn later that he had been deceived, but until then it was better to offer no sense of threat.

  Carbone had toyed with his wide flowered necktie for a moment, then had reached out for the gold medallion on his desk. It was Sartene’s, given at the door of Carbone’s home as a means of introduction.

  “You have done well for yourself, my friend,” he had said. “Of course, I had heard you were coming to my region from friends in Marseille. I understand you are friendly with the Guerini brothers. Very noble men. Tell me, do they give you financial support to earn your bread here?”