Naked in Saigon (27 page)

“Are you going to kill him?” she said.

“The guy’s in pain. I either kill him or call an ambulance.”

“He was going to kill us.”

“That’s right, he was.”

“What are we going to do?”

“They are going to come after us,” he said. “They’ll look in every city in the whole world for us after this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“You wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for me.”

“It was fate.” He started towards the warehouse determined to finish what they had started, then stopped.

“We can just leave him,” she said.

“If we leave him he will make it his life’s work to find us. If he’s dead, I don’t know, maybe they’ll never know it was us.”

“Then you’ll have to kill the other guy as well.”

Reyes shook his head. “I thought I could do this,” he said.

“Don’t do it, Reyes.”

He walked into the warehouse. He could get Walt and some of his friends to come by later and clean up. They’d cleaned up bigger messes than this in Saigon.

The big guy was already turning grey. Angel was still sobbing on the floor, his hands across his ruined face. He wasn’t going to be so pretty anymore.

He aimed the automatic at his head. There were a lot of things going through his mind right then and none of them were coherent. The sweat ran into his eyes. What was he going to do?

Chapter 44

MAGDALENA

If anyone ever tells you they know the difference between right and wrong then ask them what Reyes should have done that afternoon in the warehouse. If they come up with an answer too easily then perhaps they’ve never really known evil, in themselves or in someone else.

I waited outside for the gunshots, then realized I would not hear them. The Glock had a silencer. Finally he came out and went to the water’s edge and threw the pistol as far as he could. I watched it splash into the Saigon River. He walked back and took my hand. “Let’s go,” he said.

I kept thinking about what Connor had said before he left that last time:
Everyone has to believe in something.
I had asked myself what I believed in over and over ever since he left, and finally the answer came to me.
I believed in Reyes and me.

Chapter 45

When I came downstairs Reyes already had a taxi waiting in the forecourt of the Caravelle. He threw my suitcase in the boot. “Airport,” he said to the driver.

“When will I see you again?” I said.

“I don’t know, I have to fix things with Walt.”

“What about Connor?”

“Leave it to me. The Embassy has a lot of experience getting dead Americans home.”

“But our apartment...”

“Listen, right now all you can do is get away and hide. Remember the island?”

“I remember.”

“I’ll make some calls. Get yourself to Dar-es-Salaam. I’ll have a charter plane waiting for you. You remember Jean-Luc?”

I nodded.

“Wait for me there.”

“What will you do?”

“Just do it. They’ll be looking for me, not for you.” He pushed me into the cab. He kissed me through the window. Some Marines wolf whistled at us from the other side of the street.

“You’ll come back?” I said.

“I promise, and next time I’m never leaving you again.” He hammered on the roof with his fist and the cab pulled out into the square and headed down Tu Do.

Chapter 46 

Shofa was delighted to see me again. Even before I had unpacked my bags he brought me tea and rice and fish while his children stood in the doorway grinning at me. He wanted me to have dinner with him and his family that night and I knew it would be impolite to refuse, so I went to their hut and sat on a bamboo mat beside them while they pushed plates of crab and grilled stingray at me. His little girl remembered me and kept pinching my arm and then running off giggling while her father smiled indulgently and her mother scolded.

I took my leave as early as I could and went to sit by the shore and let the water lap around my hips and my ankles. I watched the moon rise over the sea and the shock finally hit me. I shook uncontrollably as the adrenalin flooded out of me.

I looked at my wrists. Even in the moonlight I could see the burn marks from the ropes where they had tied me to the chair in the godown. I had expected I would die there.

I started shaking and I couldn’t stop. It felt like it went on for hours. It happened countless times in the next few weeks. I was coming undone.

I still had on my wedding ring, but when I thought about Connor I felt too numb to cry. Then one day walking along the beach it hit me and I fell to the sand and brought my knees up to my chest and howled. Shofa came running, he thought I had been bitten by a jellyfish, he carried me back to my hut and his wife sat with me for a whole day and night shooing away anyone who tried to come inside and fanning me with a palm leaf.

It would be another month before I had an undisturbed night’s sleep.

At night in the absolute quiet I could still hear the traffic on the Tu Do. There was a thunderstorm late one night and when I saw the lightning shimmer across the horizon I thought it was B-52s carpet-bombing the coast of Africa. I had only been in Saigon a few weeks but I thought the ghosts of that that city would never leave me.

I didn’t worry that Reyes would never come back, not at first. I supposed that whatever it was he had to do in Saigon would take at least two days, perhaps three, and then he would come and find me. But as the days turned into a week and the week passed to a month, a profound depression fell over me.

Jean-Luc flew in and out of the island on a new seaplane now, tying up at the jetty half a mile along the beach. Whenever he arrived with the newspapers I asked him if he had heard from Reyes but I received only a Gallic shrug. But could he find out for me?

“They ring me,” he said in French. “I don’t ring them.”

I went down to the beach one morning and spelled out ‘SOS’ in giant letters in the sand. Shofa’s children watched me, wide-eyed, thinking I had gone crazy. Perhaps I had.

At night, listening to the roll of the waves on the shoreline, I imagined a hundred possible endings for our story. I imagined that Reyes had not shot Angel after all and that Salvatore’s men had got to Saigon before he had time to escape; I imagined that he lingered too long getting rid of the bodies and that Salvatore had somehow linked him to the missing heroin and his missing son-in-law anyway; I imagined he had gone to Vientiane to see Connor’s body safely home and the Corsicans had tracked him there. I had one other idea, even more bitter--that he had decided to go off alone so that if Salvatore’s men found him, they did not find me as well.

On those tormented nights the moon seemed to pulse like a heart and I imagined a different world, one in which certain souls are drawn inexorably towards each other, like the tide on the beach. In the gentle ebb and flow of the waves I heard a whisper of something that Reyes was pleased to call fate, something that pursued every one of us in its different way to a million times a million beaches somewhere between the sea and the moon.

As I sat there I thought of Reyes’ eyes when he’d first picked me out among all the beautiful girls that afternoon in old Havana. My dream of him seemed as close now as the moon, as if I could reach out and touch it. But perhaps that was just an illusion, a madness of gravity and light.

But I had something to believe in now, and I would not give it up. I believed in our happy ending and I believed he would come. If something, somewhere, was to make sense, then he had to come.

And then one morning almost six weeks after I had arrived, I heard the drumming of aircraft engines and I squinted up at the sky. A shadow passed across the sun. I saw a seaplane skim across the water and then motor towards the dock. I ran breathless along the beach and saw him step out on the jetty. He was wearing a white shirt and cotton pants, as if he was on his honeymoon.

I shouted and waved but he could not hear me.

I would have to wait a few minutes longer for our reunion. But I had waited this long, so I guessed a few more minutes wouldn’t kill me.

I’dalmost died so many times. But this time I figured I’d survive. I wondered if Papi was watching me somewhere; maybe now he could let go. He’d seen me fight; now he could watch me fly.

THE END

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