Naked in Saigon (2 page)

He went back to his apartment and sat down hard on the floor. He started to shake.
Shock
, he thought,
I’m in shock
. He slid onto the floor and lay on his side and closed his eyes.

The last thing he saw before he passed out was the battered leather briefcase. He wondered what the hell was in it that had made that sergeant look so scared.

Chapter 2

It was dark when he came to. He couldn’t have been out for long--he could still hear the ambulance bells on the Tu Do. He realized his hands were burned, he guessed from dragging the smouldering piece of lintel off one of the girls.

He got up at the second attempt and staggered to the bathroom, looked at himself in his shaving mirror. Jesus Christ. His face was blackened form the blast and there was dried blood crusted to both his ears. He had a gash in his scalp and his hair was matted with blood, one half of his face was black with it. His shirt was ripped, his pants too, they had practically been torn off his body by the force of the blast. He was half naked. No wonder people had been staring at him.

He had to get himself to the hospital, get his scalp stitched.

When he came out of the bathroom he saw the briefcase lying on the floor, he tried to open it but it was locked. Well, not the first time he’d sprung a lock. He got a screwdriver from his kit and jimmied it open.

He rocked back on his haunches and swore softly under his breath. Inside were seven one-kilogram bags of Double UO Globe brand refined heroin, pure China White.

He shut the case and tried to think this through. He had not lived a sheltered life by anyone’s standards but this was totally unexpected. He put the case under his bed, put on fresh clothes, washed the blood off his face best he could with his burned hands and went out to find a doctor.

Chapter 3

Reyes and Walter Winstone - Walt - went back a long way. Reyes had run guns for him in Cuba. Walt was his contact in Miami when he was running messages for the Kennedy administration after the missile crisis. When Walt had shown up in Saigon he had tried to recruit Reyes for the Agency again, but he’d told him he was officially retired. They still saw each other for drinks at the Continental once or twice a week, and Walt never gave up trying.

Walt did not look like a spook. He wore loud Hawaiian shirts and outsized Bermuda shorts, even at night. His thinning fair hair straggled over his collar, and he affected a long salt and pepper beard. He even smoked a pipe.

“Holy shit, look at you,” he said when he saw Reyes. “You look like you got hit by a truck, man. The fuck happened to your hands?”

They were swathed in bandages. “Doctor says I have second-degree burns. He put eleven stitches in this,” Reyes added, pointing to his scalp.

Twenty-four hours since the grenade had exploded inside his bar; two more Marines had since died in hospital, bringing the final tally to six. Three of the bar girls had died, too, but they wouldn’t appear in the official figures. Two more had no hope of ever working again.

But the war wasn’t going to stop for one bomb. No one here on the terrace of the Continental Palace was going to send back their cocktails and go home because of a loose grenade on the Tu Do. Already the roof was filling up with embassy people like Walt and other desktop warriors from the Military Assistance Command. A few preening Vietnamese with American or government connections were dotted among the crowd. Walt had got there early to make sure of a corner table facing the old Opera House, which these days served as the National Assembly building.

The plaza was jammed with army trucks and Honda motorcycles and it sounded like every one of them were revving their engines and pounding their horns. Reyes sat down and took a deep breath. ‘Ah, breathe in that tropical air. Petrol fumes and the smell of burning bars.”

“Man, when I heard about it, I thought you’d cashed in.”

“Only the good die young, Walt.”

“Well then you got nothing to worry about.” He leaned forward, examined the trackwork of stitches above Reyes’ temple. “Another scar to impress the ladies with, you rugged son of a bitch.”

“There’s a dozen young boys not nearly so damned lucky. Half of them are in the morgue. Two of the girls are going to be cripples the rest of their lives.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Remember that
bolerista
in Havana, Inocencia Martinez, used to sing at the Left Bank? Happened to her, lost both her legs when a rebel left a bomb in the foyer. She ended up taking her own life in the end. She was only in her thirties.”

The beers arrived. Reyes downed half of his in one swallow. When he put down his glass he caught Walt staring at his hands, they were still shaking.

“Nowhere’s safe in ‘Nam,”” Walt said.

“There was a kid I paid to watch the door. I knew him for three years, took medicine and food to his family. When the grenade went off he’d disappeared, haven’t seen him since.”

“You can’t trust any of these damn gooks, they’d sell their own mothers.”

“Only if their mothers were American, Walt.”

“Well I’m glad you walked away from it, my friend. What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have grenade insurance.”

Walt smiled. “I hear the premiums are prohibitive.”

“I have money in the bank. Do I put it back into fixing up the
Nevada
? Because, you know, I don’t think we’re going to be here much longer.”

Walt’s expression changed; in a moment he had slipped on his Agency face. “What makes you say that, my friend?”

Reyes nodded across the street, a crew-cut serviceman was standing just off the street talking to a Vietnamese kid in a white vest. He handed over a few piasters and the kid gave him a small plastic packet. He put it in his pocket and walked away.

“Because half the army is stoned.”

“Actually the figure is closer to twelve percent than fifty,” Walt muttered.

“That means one in ten of your boys are doped out. I don’t figure that makes for a well-oiled fighting machine. It’s refined number four heroin, Walt. Two years ago you never saw this shit on the street. Now every mama-san from here to Hue is a dealer. Where the hell is this stuff coming from?”

“Salvatore.”

“He’s here, in Asia?”

“He paid us a visit last year.”

“I thought he got his supply from the Corsicans.”

“He’s had a few problems with the Marseille connection.” Walt leaned in with his elbows on the table, lowered his voice a little. “You know all that opium we used to help them ship out of the Triangle? Well someone had the bright idea of bringing all these whizz bang Chinese chemists from Hong Kong and setting them up in laboratories right fucking there in the jungle. Now instead of hundreds of leaking bags of black jelly you just have a few bundles of powder, plastic wrapped like little white bricks, easier to load, easier to transport. Who needs to take the stuff back to the States? You got half of America right here, you sell it to them. And if they make it home after their tour, even better, you got yourself a brand new customer in Detroit and Miami and Philadelphia and the Bronx. Beautiful. Some business plan, huh? They even package the stuff like soap powder. They call it ‘Double UO Globe,” got a little red stamp with a tiger on it.”

“How are they bringing it in?”

“The fucking Vietnamese air force flies it straight in from Laos. It’s easy. No worrying about customs, they just unload it and ship it. The Corsicans are still over there, they’ve done a sweetheart deal with the government, people are making so much money it’s coming out their fucking ears.”

“And you guys are letting them do it?”

“The President of Vietnam has a big stake in this. I mean, everybody’s getting a cut and he’s a friendly government. What do you do? You know how it is, you played this game a hundred times before.”

“Christ, Walt.”

“We can’t stop ‘em doing this; it’s called venture capitalism. We’re here to defend against the evils of communism.”

“You don’t believe in this shit anymore either, do you?”

“I stopped believing in
anything
a long time ago. Now it’s all about the pension. Don’t tell me you still believe in love, faith and honour?”

Reyes finished his beer. “I’d like to think there’s still some things I believe in.”

“Yeah? So what are they?”

Reyes shrugged. “When I find out, I’ll let you know,” he said finally and finished his beer.

It was dark when he got back from the Continental. Reyes pushed open the green louvered windows and sat out on the balcony, his feet on the wrought iron balcony, the briefcase balanced on his lap. There were flashes along the skyline, the USAF carpet-bombing the jungle as they did every night. The rumble sounded like distant thunder. The city was breathless hot.

Tet, the Chinese New Year, had come and gone. He had decorated the apartment with sprigs of plum tree blossom but these had mostly withered and died. It was time to throw them out.

He stared at the briefcase. There were some brown spots of dried blood on the leather and he scraped them off with a fingernail. Finally he opened the lid. How much was this worth? He supposed he could retire in style on what he had right here. But would money fix his life right now? He doubted it.

Anyway, it was irrelevant because he didn’t have a buyer for this junk and he wouldn’t have sold it to them even if he did. He supposed he was a man whose morals had been at best questionable during his life, but he had a few principles and he knew them well enough to know that this windfall was useless to him. He wasn’t about to sell it and he wasn’t about to give it back to its rightful owner, if that was the right word.

So what was he going to do?

Chapter 
4