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something to say. Japrisot wasn’t the most voluble person he’d ever met, even though his English was excellent.
    “Thirty-one years. Before that the Prévôtales in Algeria.”
    “Prévôtales? Provost Corp? Military Police?”
    “Yes, Le Légion étrangère, what you call the Foreign Legion.”
    “Bad times,” commented Holliday.
    “Very bad,” said Japrisot. He shrugged. “Better for me than others however,” he murmured.
    “How so?”
    Japrisot’s heavy shoulders lifted again.
    “I wasn’t at Dien Bien Phu.”
    “There is that,” Holliday said and nodded. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu had been the last encounter of the war in Indochina for the French and a ghastly preview of the coming war in Vietnam for the United States. More than a thousand soldiers died during the prolonged battle and several thousand more were taken prisoner, never to be heard from again.
    Japrisot stared out the window and smoked. Across the quay the Vieux Port was a forest of masts. Once the central port of the city, the Vieux Port was now reserved for pleasure craft and the local fishing fleet. On the far side of the narrow harbor a line of pale yellow seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings rose in a solid wall. At the far end of the harbor was a narrow plaza where the daily fish market was staged, and rising away from it was la Canebière, a broad triumphant avenue that led up the steep hill the old city was built on, leading to the basilica on the summit. The only thing Holliday remembered about Marseille was that King Alexander Karageorgevich I of Serbia had been assassinated there in 1934, the first political murder ever caught on film.
    “All I know about Marseille is The French Connection ,” offered Rafi.
    “Popeye-goddamn-bloody-Doyle,” muttered Japrisot, stubbing out his cigarette in a big enameled Cinzano ashtray in the middle of the table. “He put a curse on this place. Connard!”
    “Things aren’t as bad as the movie made out?” Holliday asked.
    “They are actually much worse,” said Japrisot. “Sometimes I think the film made it that way with all the publicity it was given. Still, the tourists come and ask if they can see where the heroin is made. Merde! It gives the place a reputation, yes? Not a good one. We have Disney cruise ships and you hear them talking, Gene Hackman this, Gene Hackman that.”
    “They don’t smuggle drugs here?” Rafi asked.
    “Of course they smuggle drugs here. They smuggle everything here,” answered Japrisot. “Morphine, pornography, girls, Africans, toothpaste, cigarettes. Cigarettes. A great many cigarettes. Le Milieu smuggles anything to make a profit. Last year it was false teeth from the Ukraine.”
    “Le Milieu?” Holliday asked.
    “Marseille’s version of the Mafia, the underworld,” explained Japrisot. “They started off mostly as stevedores, controlling the waterfront in the late forties and early fifties, then moved from there. After the war they got into drugs in a big way.”
    “Is our guy Valador one of this Milieu?” Rafi asked.
    Japrisot let out a snorting laugh, smoke rushing out of his nostrils like an animated bull in a cartoon.
    “Little Felix!?” Japrisot said. “Felix Valador barely knows his mother’s name, let alone anyone in Le Milieu. He’s strictly small-time. Sometimes he brings a few hundred cartons of cigarettes in for the Corsicans, sometimes knockoff Rolexes from a Hong Kong freighter. Connecting with La Santa is a big step up for him, believe me. We got lucky, my friends—of that, I have no doubt.”
    A boat came through the narrow entrance to the Vieux Port. It was an old- fashioned harbor trawler, perhaps forty-two feet long, the high deckhouse set far back toward the stern. Once upon a time she’d been painted blue and white; now she was just dirty, rusty tear tracks running down from her ironwork, dark stains everywhere from bilge runoff, her brightwork dull under a layer of grease. Her license number was painted in