Naked in Saigon (21 page)

“Fuck,” Reyes said.

A white sliver of bone had pierced his skin, just above the ankle, which was twisted at an odd angle away from his body. There was some blood but not a lot.

“I think it caught on something when we rolled down the slope,” Connor said, grunting with pain. “I heard it crack.”

Reyes knelt down beside him. This didn’t look good.

Connor was white but he wasn’t in too much pain, not yet. That would come. Reyes took out his knife and cut off his boot and sock before the swelling made it impossible. He checked his circulation by squeezing the toenail and felt for a pulse.

He didn’t have any morphine; if he could get him to the village, the Hmong had plenty of opium though. In the meantime he gave him a stick to bite on. “This could get bad,” he warned him.

For once Tou stopped smiling.

“What is it with you, Connor? You always been this accident prone?”

“Never even broke a fingernail before this trip.”

He turned back to Tou. “If you go to the village for help, can you get back before night?”

He shook his head. “We have to take him with us,” he said.

Connor had turned white and was covered in cold, greasy sweat. He was going into shock. Reyes fashioned a makeshift splint out of bamboo, tied it on with strips cut from his shirt. It would have to make do.

“Just try to keep still,” he said. “There’s no easy way to do this.”

Tou hacked down two stands of bamboo with his machete and cut them into poles about the same length. Then he made webbing out of vines and they lifted Connor onto it. He screamed, but there was no time for refinement, he knew they had to hurry. He doubted if even Tou could find his way in the dark and the night set quickly here.

They set off again. Connor was just a wiry guy but he was heavier than he looked. They could carry him easily enough along the flat parts of the trail but when they went downhill it was impossible to keep their balance.

They knew they’d have to abandon the makeshift stretcher. Connor tried to stand on his good leg but then he gasped and went down again, panting with pain. His fingers clutched at Reyes’ arm like he was trying to squeeze the bone out of it. “Fuck, it hurts too much,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Well I’m not leaving you here, not now we’ve come this far.”

“You’re a madman. Get away from me.”

Reyes knelt beside him and put his arm over his shoulder.

“God damn you, Garcia, leave me be!”

Connor gritted his teeth but there was a high-pitched keening noise coming from him.

“You’ve got to help me or we’ll all be stuck here,” Reyes said. He and Tou lifted him upright, supporting him under each arm. Connor bent his knee to keep his injured ankle off the ground. The smaller Tou almost buckled at the knees, now Reyes had almost all the weight.

Connor groaned with pain and almost passed out.

“For Christ’s sake, stay with us,” Reyes said.

When they got to the bottom of the valley, they laid him down and rested for a few minutes before trying again.

“Only way is to drag him,” Tou said.

“Okay,” Reyes said.

Inch by inch they pulled him up the slope. Connor’s leg bounced on the hard ground and this time he passed out. Now it was like dragging a bag of cement up a flight of stairs.

They stopped halfway to rest again. They had lost the trail and it was almost dark but they knew they were close because they could hear the village dogs howling. They could see the first stars through the canopy of the trees.

“Let’s keep going,” Reyes said.

He had reached that point of exhaustion where he was ready to give up. Somehow Tou kept him going. “Nearly there, boss,” he kept grinning over and over. “Nearly there!”

Suddenly they emerged from the jungle into a clearing and shadows came rushing out of the gloom to help them. Half a dozen Hmong picked Connor up and carried him into one of the huts. Reyes just lay there, next to Tou, too tired to move another yard. He reached out and grabbed the boy’s hand. ‘Tou, you are a fucking hero, you know that?”

“You too, boss,” Tou said and they both started laughing hysterically in the darkness.

He was back; he had done it. He thought it was all over.

He should have known better than to even dream it.

Chapter 34 

They laid him on a bamboo mat on the floor. In the dim light of the oil lamp he looked like a cadaver. The headman’s son prepared an opium pipe, tamping the sticky black opium into the bowl and lighting it for him. Connor’s hands were shaking from the pain. He inhaled as deeply as he good, and after he had finished the first pipe, Reyes could see the tension go out of him.

“I guess this is what it’s meant for,” he said.

“A few more pipes should keep you going through the night,” Reyes said. “In the morning you’ll be back in Vientiane. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“You still have my camera?”

“Your camera?”

Reyes had forgotten all about it. He looked over his shoulder and there was Tou, grinning and holding up Connor’s knapsack and pointing to the camera.

“That’s the least of your worries.”

“That’s my Pulitzer,” he said.

He heard the village girls pounding rice outside. Tou grinned and bobbed his head and said he was going outside and Reyes wished him luck.

“Where’s he going?” Connor said.

“That’s how they do their courting,” Reyes said. “The young boys talk to the girls while they’re pounding the rice. If the pounding stops you know he got lucky.”

“You really slept with Marilyn Monroe?”

“Sure I did. Nixon, too. Nixon was better, Marilyn just lay there, but Nixon likes screwing people.”

Connor laughed at that. “I’m never sure with you what’s the truth and what’s the lie. You like to keep people guessing, don’t you?”

“Because the truth is so banal. I just hang around the fringes of the great and mighty and do little jobs for people. That’s me, Connor, a fringe player.”

“Like I said, that could be truth or you have just snowed me again.”

“It makes me an unreliable source so be sure you don’t quote me on anything.”

“One thing I know...you really love her...don’t you?”

“Who?”

The opium was really starting to have an effect. Connor’s eyes closed and he mumbled something Reyes couldn’t hear. Reyes patted his shoulder. “You should never ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to,” he said.

They had given him a little raised platform off the ground to sleep on. He lay down and listened to Tou’s girl giggling as she pounded the rice. He must be doing all right. He closed his eyes, replaying the last forty-eight hours in his head, marvelling at his own luck. A lot of times now he thought he’d pushed fate too far and somehow he always walked away smiling. He guessed he would use up all his lives one day and he wondered if he would have any warning or would it just be a magic bullet?

He listened to the pigs rooting and snuffling in their sleep underneath the hut. He realised the pounding had stopped. Tou’s smile must have won her over. Good for him. He listened to the silence of the jungle, breathing in the sticky sweet smell of the opium.

He thought about Magdalena. He always did about this time every night. After seven years it had become a habit.

Connor woke sometime in the night. “Are you there, Reyes?”

“What’s up, Connor?”

“It’s hurting again, bad.”

Reyes sat up, lit the oil lamp next to his bed and squatted down beside him. He prepared another opium pipe for him, helped him hold it to his lips. He bent over to take a better look at his ankle. His foot was swollen to twice its size and the toes felt cold. The circulation wasn’t getting through. He wondered if he’d lose his foot. A one-armed one-legged journalist. There weren’t many of those.

The opium kept going out so he had to keep lighting it for him. He couldn’t do it himself with that mangled hand.

“Some fix, huh?”

“I’ve been in worse. We got lucky this time.”

“How is getting captured by the Pathet Lao and strafed by your own Air Force lucky?”

“I look at it this way, Connor. It’s like walking past a sleeping lion. You get past once - well, that’s lucky. You do it again, and that’s just about a miracle. You go up and drag on his tail and call him a lazy sunnavabitch and he eats you, that’s not unlucky, that’s just plain dumb.”

“You trying to tell me something, Reyes?”

“I think you got the idea.”

“I was just doing my job. Someone has to tell people what’s going over here.”

“You really think it matters? You tell people what’s happening, but if someone in the government says it’s not? There’s not a damn thing they can do about it. People wander about in the dark all their lives because they don’t care or they can’t change anything even if they do.”

“You wait, Reyes. Nixon and his cronies won’t get away with this forever. America has to know...how it’s being betrayed...by its own government.”

He closed his eyes. That was the trouble with the Connors of this world: he’d rather save the world than save his marriage. Reyes thought he was asleep, but he was still mumbling, about Nixon, about heroin, about Vietnam. He guessed it was pointless to wish him sweet dreams.

Six hundred miles away in Saigon, Angel paid a late night visit to the Gia Long palace.

He thought it looked like one of the casinos in Vegas, except it didn’t have a Chinese theme. There were high ceilings with massive chandeliers and his Italian leather shoes echoed on the marble floors. He was shown into the office of one of Thieu’s personal assistants, a white-uniformed Vietnamese Special Forces major called Nhu. He sat behind an enormous black lacquer desk, which was mostly bare except for an onyx ashtray and a tortoiseshell cigarette box.

Nhu wore tight-fitting black trousers and a short-sleeved shirt of pale yellow silk. Angel thought he looked like a male dancer.

And where are all the fucking chairs?

“Your friend Mister Garcia is in Laos,” Nhu said without looking up from the letter he was writing.