Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (19 page)

There were no fences around the workers’ compound but it was separated from the rest of the facility as if by measureless oceans of space.

Each shift went to work under the leadership of a blue security type, and a couple of security people were always visible at the perimeter of the compound.

“Stay out of there,” Red told me. “Motherfuckers will cut your throat for a pack of Luckies.”

“Have much trouble with them?” I said.

“Naw. Security keeps them under control. Plus there’s all of us. Long as you don’t go in there alone at night, they can’t do you much harm.”

“Doesn’t look like a step on the executive ladder,” I said.

Red laughed. “Shit no,” he said. “It’s goddamned slave labor, what it amounts to. They buy stuff at the commissary on credit. It gets deducted from their wages and each month they’re farther behind.”

“I owe my soul to the company store,” I said.

“Sure. And they bitch, they get turned in as illegal aliens.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “if they do get turned in and they start discussing this situation with somebody from the Justice Department …”

“Course,” Red said. “But these assholes don’t know that. They figure all of us round-eyes are on one side and they’re on the other. They don’t even speak English, you know.”

It was evening. Hawk walked into the compound and squatted on his haunches beside one of the cook fires and began talking to one of the Vietnamese.

“Get him out of there,” Red said. “I’m telling you it’s dangerous in there. Even for him.”

“He’ll be all right,” I said.

“It’s against the rules, too,” Red said.

“No fraternization?”

“Hell no,” Red said. “Bastards start talking to people they may find out they’re being fucked.”

Hawk strolled back.

“What’d they say?” Red said.

“Said they’re bored,” Hawk said.

“You speak the language?”

“Some, and some French, some pidgin,” Hawk said. “I spent time there.”

“With the Frenchies,” Red said.

“Uh huh.”

“I hear the women were something,” Red said.

“Even better than Doreen,” Hawk said.

At lunch at the end of our first week, I said to Plante, “Where do these guys go from here?”

“The forces? They go on permanent station at Transpan installations around the globe.”

“Security?”

“Security, training, and demonstration,” Plante said.

“How ’bout that mansion over in the corner by the river,” Hawk said.

“Executive house,” Plante said. “Mr. Costigan and his son stay there when they are in the area.”

“Costigan owns all this?” I said.

“This and much more,” Plante said.

“He there now?”

“His son,” Plante said. “Why?”

“Saw all the security over there,” I said. “Kind of like to get a look at Costigan. Man’s a legend.”

Plante nodded. “In an age of collectivism,” he said, “Jerry Costigan is the most powerful sole proprietor in the world.”

“That anything like Soul Brother,” Hawk said.

Plante shook his head without smiling. “It’s no joke,” he said. “Mr. Costigan has never yielded an inch. He is an individual swimming strong in a sea of conformity.”

Hawk nodded and drank some lemonade. I said solemnly, “Man’s a legend.”

“When the government came in here and told us we had to let them unionize the work force Mr. Costigan said no, and meant it,” Plante said. “We locked the bastards out and imported workers from the foreign labor pool. Workers, by the way, grateful for the chance. They need discipline.
They’re not used to American hustle and stick-to-it. But with guidance they do the job without a lot of pus-gut shop stewards grieving everything you try to do.”

One of the men attendants cleared away dishes and poured coffee.

“Mr. Costigan’s way is clean. There’s no bloat in his operation. He doesn’t subcontract. He doesn’t depend on anyone. He’s stood by the things that got us where we are. Everywhere collectivism, committeeism, collaborationism is oozing over us. Trying to creep in at every fissure. Foreign goods, foreign ideas, decision by committee, by regulatory agency, by boards and unions and …” Plante guzzled some coffee. “… damned community action groups and class action groups and affirmative action groups. Want us to be run by a bunch of fat-ass pansies from Harvard.”

Hawk leaned forward, his face open and interested, his hands folded quietly on the edge of the table. Now and then he nodded. If he wanted to, Hawk could look interested in the
Playboy
philosophy.

“But Mr. Costigan.” Plante gulped more coffee. A mess steward filled his cup. Plante shook his head rapturously. “Mr. Costigan, he won’t budge. He does it his way. With his own workers, his own forces. He owns it all and he runs it all.”

“And the forces help him,” I said.

“Absolutely.” There was a faint gloss of sweat on Plante’s upper lip. “Absolutely. Transpan is self-contained. Self-contained. When the collapse comes, we’ll be ready.”

He paused, looked at his watch, and raised his eyebrows. “God, I’m running late,” he said. He stood, rapidly drank a cup of coffee, and hurried out.

The mess steward cleared away his dishes impassively.

Hawk spent a lot of time among the Vietnamese workers. The fact that it was against the rules meant as much to him as the fact that it was dangerous. Which is to say it meant nothing at all. Someday I would figure out exactly what did matter to Hawk. I did. Susan did. He mattered to himself. Beyond that I hadn’t got. And since I’d known him for thirty years it said something about his containment. Or my powers of perception. Or maybe that’s all there was that mattered to him.… On the other hand, how come he spent so much time squatting on his haunches around the Vietnamese cook fires at night.

I asked him one evening in the bar at the Pequod House.

“Forging alliances,” he said.

“And fomenting rebellion?” I said.

“Case we need one,” he said.

I nodded. Doreen rushed past us bearing drinks, frowning slightly.

“It’ll get a lot of them killed,” I said.

Hawk nodded.

“But if we do it right we’ll have our shot at Susan,” I said.

Hawk nodded.

I drank some beer from the bottle.

“What becomes of them,” I said.

Hawk shrugged.

“What is becoming of them now,” I said.

Hawk shrugged again.

I shook my head. “No, let’s look straight at it. I don’t care what happens to them if it gets Susan out.”

Hawk nodded.

Doreen hurried by in the other direction carrying empties on her tray. She wore the same frown of concentration. Hawk watched her.

“You in their place,” Hawk said, still looking at Doreen as she ordered drinks from the service section at the end of the bar, “you rather do what they doing now, or take a shot at fighting your way out.”

The bartender put six long-necked bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon on Doreen’s tray, rang up the bill, put that on the tray, and Doreen charged back past us toward the big round table in the corner. The tip of her tongue showed in the corner of her mouth.

“Okay,” I said. I drank a little more beer, letting the bottle rest against my lower lip and then tilting it slowly down. “We gotta give them a chance, though. If it’s over too quick there won’t be a
chance to get at Susan. We need a real battle. We need some real and extended chaos.”

“Or we need to win,” Hawk said.

I had the beer bottle halfway to my lips. I stopped and slowly put it back down. I looked at Hawk. He grinned and I felt my own face begin to broaden. We looked at each other, the smiles getting wider.

“They can take over the facility,” I said.

“Uh huh.”

“Transpan has the firepower,” I said.

“But the gooks got us,” Hawk said.

“We got the bastards cornered,” I said.

“Okay, boss,” Hawk said. “I sketch out the big picture. You fill in the details. How we going to do it.”

Doreen passed again, a faint sheen of perspiration giving tone to her forehead.

“By God,” I said, “you’re right. She is lovely.”

Hawk gestured toward the bartender for two more beers.

“And getting lovelier,” he said. “But that don’t answer my question.”

“Okay,” I said. “Are they ready to go?”

“Yes,” Hawk said. “Fact I having trouble holding them down.”

“They got a leader?”

“Ky,” Hawk said.

“Can he control them?”

“Yes.”

“Can you control him?”

“For a while.”

“Can I talk with him?” I said.

“Sure.”

“We don’t really have to sweat the forces too much. They may have some personal weapons, switchblades, hideout guns; but the company weapons are in the armory every night.”

“So we secure that,” Hawk said.

“And all we have to sweat is security.”

“And the gooks outnumber security.”

“So if we get them some weapons, and secure the armory …”

“They might win,” Hawk said.

“And you and I will deal with Costigan’s bodyguards,” I said.

“And Costigan.”

I took a five-dollar bill from my pocket and left it on the bar.

“I gotta walk,” I said. “I think better walking.”

“I’ll join you,” Hawk said. “Nothing like an evening stroll on a summer night.”

“In Pequod, Connecticut,” I said, “there’s nothing else.”

“Except Doreen,” Hawk said.

“True,” I said.

Ky looked sort of like a pleasant snake, he was slender and easy in his movements, and his thin face was smooth and without lines. He smiled often, but there was about him a sense of contained deadliness. He wore only a pair of black loose-fitting pants as he squatted beside the fire under the tarp, and as he moved, the skeletal muscles moved languidly, but strong, under his skin. His black hair was long, nearly to his shoulders, and he had a drooping black mustache. Around us there were twenty or thirty Vietnamese men gathered, many of them in shadow at the edge of the firelight, squatting motionless. Ky spoke to Hawk in a clutter of French, Vietnamese, and pidgin. Hawk nodded and answered him in the same.

The summer night was warm, but the fire was kept up. There was a cookpot set at the edge of the ashes. The smell of the workers’ compound was not an American smell. It was a smell of different herbs and different food eaten in a different land. It was a smell of foreignness and difference. I wondered if the rest of the installation smelled that way to them.

“He say they recruited out of refugee camps in Thailand. Say if they make trouble they get shipped back to Vietnam.”

“Tell him that’s not so,” I said.

“Told him that,” Hawk said. “He doesn’t think I know.”

“And he thinks I do?”

“You white.”

“Ahh,” I said.

“Says he knows chocolate soldiers got no power. Wants to hear it from you.”

“What would happen if they did get shipped back to Vietnam?”

“Ky was working with us in counterinsurgency,” Hawk said. “Special task force. Root out the Commie vipers and kill ’em. All of a sudden the Commie vipers in charge, and we fighting each other for a spot in the helicopters. Say the Commie vipers be inclined to kill him with bamboo slivers. Says most of the workers got that kind of problem.”

I nodded. “What color was the guy that signed him up to counterinsurgency?”

Hawk grinned. He spoke to Ky. Ky answered and looked at me and nodded and grinned.

Hawk said, “Some honkie major signed him up. Said it would be to his advantage once us Yanks had rooted them Commie vipers out. Said he could count on us Yanks.”

I nodded. “So much for trusting honkies,” I said.

Hawk relayed it. Ky replied.

“It lose a little in the translation,” Hawk said, “but he say he got the idea.”

“He’s got to trust me and you, or not trust me and you. There’s no way we can assure him that we won’t bolt, and leave him holding the ass end of a tiger. In fact we will.”

Hawk nodded. “Good point,” he said.

He talked some more with Ky. Ky nodded and made a short reply and Hawk spoke some more and Ky still nodded and then sat quietly and looked at me. No one else around us said a word. Nobody moved. All of them smoked cigarettes.

“I told him what we’re up to,” Hawk said. “I told him that we had some influence with the feds. I told him that we wanted them to tear this place up as a diversion so we could get at Susan.”

“What did he say?”

“He say the Vietnamese equivalent of un huh.”

I looked around the bright circle that the fire made, at the semi-shadowed faces of these distant foreign men. Uprooted for decades, used in the service of other people’s goals. One of the things I noticed was that the way they sat shielded us from the sight of the Transpan security types.

“Here’s what I think,” I said, talking directly to Ky. Every few sentences I paused and Hawk translated for me. “I think that you are probably illegal
aliens and run the risk of being deported if you get caught, as you are likely to if you leave here. But I think the deportation, if it happens, will be back to the refugee camp. I don’t think there’s any danger of getting deported to Vietnam.” I was getting very cramped squatting on my haunches. “We will speak to Ives about you, and he will assure us that you won’t be deported, and he might mean it or he might not. And if he does mean it, he might be able to deliver, or he might not.”

I waited while Hawk spoke.

“But,” I said, “what I would almost guarantee, is that when Transpan no longer needs you, you’re going to get worse than we’re offering.”

When Hawk spoke again, Ky nodded and looked at me steadily. Then he spoke.

“He wants to know what about you,” Hawk said.

“I’m going to try and get Susan away, and if I succeed I’ll split,” I said. “Hawk too.” I was looking directly back at Ky. “You’ll be on your own.”

Hawk spoke it to him, Ky nodded some more. And was quiet, looking at me, smoking his cigarette in slow deep drags, holding the smoke in his lungs a long time before he exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he spoke.

“He wants to know how come you going to all this trouble. Whyn’t you just call up the immigration people and report a bunch of illegal aliens.”