Naked in Saigon (5 page)

“I’m afraid I’m busy.”

“Too bad.” He sauntered to the door. “Tell your prick of a husband what I said. He pokes around in my business, you’re going to be a widow.”

He passed the room service waiter on the way out; he was standing with his back against the wall in the corridor, terrified. Angel took the croissant off the tray and stuffed it in his mouth. He gave her a half wave and left, his bodyguards shuffling behind him.

Chapter 8 

It was late when Connor got home. I was in bed with the lights out, but I was wide awake, listening to the muted roar of traffic in the square, the thump of music from the bars on the Tu Do. He undressed and slipped into bed beside me, kissed my shoulder and then rolled away, thinking I was asleep.

“Where have you been?”

“Hi, honey. I didn’t know you were awake.” He rolled back. “Are you okay?”

“I’m lonely.”

A theatrical sigh. “I told you that you shouldn’t come. This isn’t a holiday, I’m working.”

“It’s nearly midnight.”

“The people I have to talk to don’t keep regular hours.”

I switched on the bedside lamp. “If I find out you’ve been fucking a bar girl, I’ll kill you.”

“Jesus,” he muttered, staring at the ceiling.

“Well I don’t know what you’ve been doing.
Dios mio
, you reek of booze and cigarettes.”

“I think I’m onto something big.”

I thought about what Angel had said. I hoped not.

“I mean it. You want to hear what I’ve got?”

I didn’t really, but what choice did I have?

“What is the largest restaurant and nightclub chain in the world?”

“Is this some sort of game, Connor? I don’t get it.”

“The largest catering business in the whole goddamn world is the US military. You ever thought about that? Do you understand the potential that leaves for graft?”

“I thought you were here to cover the war.”

“The war is a sideshow. The real story is the money, it always is.” He leaned on one elbow. “Yeah, I’ve been at the bars tonight; I was talking to an Air Force staff sergeant who wants to blow the cover off the biggest scam in Asia. There’s people making huge money out of this war, unbelievable money.”

“Doing what?”

“Selling Air Force service contracts.” Connor’s eyes shone with that special kind of fever he caught whenever he stumbled onto a story. “See, there’s only a small part of the Air Force that flies missions, a handful of hotshot pilots. But the Air Force is like an iceberg--what you see is the very smallest part. Most USAF guys never leave their base, their job is to make sure the top guns and their ground crew get fed and don’t get bored between missions. To do that, they have to decide which refrigerators to order, which liquor brands to stock in the mess. They’re in charge of buying everything from slot machines to potato chips. In dollars this adds up to huge numbers. My guy says there are four staff sergeants out at Tan Son Nhut taking massive kickbacks on everything from bourbon to Cheerios.”

I didn’t like this, it sounded like the sort of operation Angel would run, the sort of investigation that could get him killed.

“Be careful, Connor.”

“Fuck them all, this has to be exposed. You wouldn’t believe the names I heard mentioned today, the same people whose names kept coming up when I was researching my other books. Winstone, Salvatore, Garcia, it’s like an honour roll from the Bay of Pigs.”

I didn’t react when he said his name. I knew he was in Saigon, I had known for a long time, even before Connor had told me he wanted to come here. The truth of it was, Reyes was the reason I had insisted on coming with him.

It made no sense to still feel like this. He was the past now, even if the flame did still burn a little. I was married now.

But when I closed my eyes I could still feel his hands on me.

“I had a visitor today,” I said.

“Here?”

“Barged their way in just before breakfast.”

“What visitor?”

“A man called Angel Macheda. This guy Salvatore you just mentioned? He’s married to his daughter.”

“What the fuck was he doing here?”

“He was looking for you.”

“For me?”

“I don’t know what Angel is doing in Saigon, but if he’s here, it means the Salvatore family have business here and they don’t like anyone poking around in their little schemes, Connor. You need to take a step back.”

“They don’t scare me.”

“That’s because you don’t know them.”

Connor grabbed her. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me,” I said. The irony seemed lost on him. He was peerless as an investigative journalist, but the one subject he was clueless about was his own wife. It hit me for the first that he didn’t know much about me because he didn’t want to know, not until now, anyway.

“This is all to do with Havana.”

“I know all those people you talked about, Connor.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because the thing I loved about you was that you weren’t part of that world. It was what I wanted to get away from. I shouldn’t have married a journalist, should I?”

“You want to bring me up to speed?”

“Not really.”

“This Angel Macheda, you knew him in Havana?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

I thought about that, wondered how much of the truth our marriage could stand. “He was a family friend.”

“Who else?”

“Reyes Garcia.”

Perhaps it was the way I said his name, he understood straight away. “Okay,” he said.

“There’s a lot of things I’ve never told you about myself, Connor. In a way I hoped you’d find out for yourself. It’s your job.”

“I thought if you wanted me to know, you’d tell me.” His hand slipped beneath the covers, found my thigh. He gingerly moved it up to my hip. “Were you lovers?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

“I cheated on him and he couldn’t forgive me.”

“Did you love him?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Do you still love him?”

I hadn’t expected him to ask me that. “I’m married to you now, Connor,” I said, and in that moment I resolved not to see Reyes again, not even to think about him. I couldn’t stand the pain in Connor’s eyes. “Can we go home?”

“Go back to New York? What the hell for?”

“Because we’re in danger.”

“I’m not going to let these guys intimidate me.”

“Why not?”

“Because once I start doing that, I may as well give up my job. You sure there’s no other reason? Is it because you’re scared? Or because you don’t want to see this Reyes Garcia again?””

“You don’t get it, do you? I don’t know if this story you’re onto is going to hurt the Salvatore family or not, but if it does, you are in real danger here. They’ll only warn you once.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Well you can take them without me,” I said, and rolled away from him and turned off the light.

He reached for me in the dark but I kept my back to him. I’d married him to get away from this world and now he’d dragged me back into it.

I didn’t sleep much at all that night. He was awake, as he always was, just before dawn. I heard him dress and slip out. After he’d gone I tossed and turned but even though my head ached and my eyes were gritty with exhaustion I couldn’t switch off. Around seven I got up and showered and then went down and had three strong coffees on the terrace. I stared at the bootblacks and the beggars in the square and I realized I had made a terrible mistake. If I wanted to get away from the past so badly why had I come to Saigon, when I knew that Reyes was here?

As for Connor, if he wanted to kill himself there was nothing I could do to stop him. The best thing to do would be to go home, before I got in too deep.

Chapter 9

REYES

The arrival of the American war machine had destroyed the time-old rhythms of life in Saigon. In the colonial days all the shops had lowered their steel shutters for a few hours in the heat of the day, but now many of the shops stayed open all day. The tawdry neon-lit bars on Tu Do and Le Loi only ever closed for curfew, keeping the off-duty servicemen plied with rock music, sex and beer round the clock.

Reyes was parked on a stool in a bar called the
Pink Pussy
. The owner, another Agency old boy known to everyone as Mac, still thought the name was hilarious. He had never been a subtle man.

He was ten minutes early for his appointment. He ordered a Tiger beer and waited. From his vantage point at the end of the bar Reyes could look across the street and stare at the blackened shell of the
Nevada
.

A jukebox screamed to Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower.” The place was breathless and dark, filled with off-duty Marines. A few of them were smoking joints with their beers. The bar girls ignored Reyes, they knew who he was and didn’t waste their time. One of them, tottering on three-inch heels and wearing a crazy blonde curly wig, was pulling a drunken Marine towards the curtained off area at the back for
bamilam
.

A man in a camouflage jacket sat down next to him and ordered a beer. There was a white label sewn on his jacket that said
bao chi
- ‘journalist.” He still looked fresh to Reyes, had the pale-skinned and wide-eyed look of a new boy. He sounded Boston-Irish.

“Can I buy you a beer?” he said.

“I like to buy my own,” Reyes said. He didn’t like or trust journalists, had no reason to after the life he had led.

The guy said nothing for a while, just drank his beer. One of the girls tried to sit on his lap and he pushed her away.

“You’re Reyes Garcia, right?” The guy held out his hand. “Connor O’Loughlin.”

So this was Magdalena’s husband. He looked him over, figured she could have done better.

Reyes ignored his hand. “Who do you work for?”

“I freelance.”

“I don’t know what you want with me, Connor O’Loughlin, but I don’t talk to the press and I have no idea why the press would want to talk to me.”

“You don’t work for the government anymore. I thought you might be interested in telling me your side of the story.”

“I never worked for the government and I don’t have a story. You’re wasting your time here.”

He didn’t look disappointed—he must have expected Reyes to brush him off. He ordered two more beers. He slid the bottle along the bar to Reyes. Reyes slid it right back.

“You like what you see happening in Vietnam?” he said. “There’s boys dying out here every day and what for? Just so some people can use the war to get rich.”