The Corsican by William Heffernan Page A

appear. When Carbone’s interest had waned, however, Sartene’s activities had increased. Within a year these interests had grown to an extent that rivaled Carbone’s, and six months later had surpassed them.
    During that later six-month period the donkey had awakened and some subtle but definite resistance to Sartene’s smuggling and currency operations had developed. What followed had been a minor conflict, in which several of Carbone’s Vietnamese employees had simply vanished from the face of the earth. Carbone had been upset, but not enough to risk a major confrontation. His main business, opium, had not been threatened, and until it was he could afford to live with the fact that he had been duped. But from that moment on he had watched Sartene closely.
    Even though he had no respect for the man, Sartene did have respect for Carbone’s large force of manpower, which could not be discounted. His own force had grown as well. Laotians who had fought the Japanese during the war—men who would instinctively hate Carbone, who had been treated well by the Japanese because of his brother’s ties with the Nazis. Carbone also was strong with Viet Nam officialdom, which flagrantly peddled its influence. Sartene too had developed strong political alliances, in both Viet Nam and Laos, and he knew the Vietnamese would not welcome war between the two Corsicans, simply because it would reduce their graft by half. He knew too that a war would have been treated harshly and that such resistance would have caused difficulties for both groups. Now, with the support of the Americans, it would not. Still, it was a situation Sartene had tried to avoid. Conflicts like that only provided danger to those close to you, and he had always felt there was enough danger in the world without courting more, except when it could not be avoided. He had not foreseen that such a time would come, but it had.
    As a young man in Corsica there had been other things Sartene had not foreseen. He had been sickly as a boy and had been left thin, lanky, and pale by the time he had reached adolescence. He had grown up in the small village of Calvi, which sat on the northwestern coast with the massive bulk of Mount Cinto rising nearly nine thousand feet to the east. Because of his sickly early years he did not lead the life of a normal Corsican child, and his father, a traveling wine merchant, always returned home, true to his middle-class standing in the village, carrying books to occupy the boy’s time. Since there was little money for school and little energy for play during those formative years, the boy, whose name then was Bonaventure Marcosi, lived much of his life in the pages of histories and French novels, so much so that his peers in the village made jokes about his virility.
    When he was fifteen his father died, leaving his mother and sister without support, and young Marcosi took a job on the docks, unloading fishing boats when they returned with the day’s catch. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, the work seemed to agree with him, and the fishermen joked that the smell of dead fish had returned him to health. In fact it had. By the time he was eighteen he had gained twenty pounds and had begun to spend his Sundays hiking in the mountains with other young men his age.
    Now his life seemed set before him. Hard work; someday a marriage and children and continued life along the beautiful rugged shores and in the mountains of his homeland. It was what most had, and he saw no reason why it should not suit him as well. In the evenings there would still be his books and the life he lived within his mind. He had learned from his books that a man should content himself with the boundaries of his prospects, that to do otherwise led to misfortune. He had also learned that a man must live up to his responsibilities. And his were to his mother and his sister. His mother was a simple, strong peasant woman with the bulk