Naked in Saigon (9 page)

Chapter 14 

MAGDALENA

I had bought my ticket from the Pan-Am office; this time tomorrow I would be on my way back to New York. I had no plans after that; it was my final bluff, the one call that might make Connor change his mind. If he stayed in Saigon they would kill him, I was sure of that. What would I do back in New York? Go back to work, I supposed, and wait for the call informing me my husband had disappeared.

If he came home with me, we could start again, I could be a good wife and a good mother, as I had always planned to be. I would forget about Reyes and keep a promise to myself never to see him again.

I wasn’t sure which outcome I dreaded the most.

I sat on the edge of the bed fretting. It was a quarter of an hour before the midnight curfew and he still wasn’t home. It was as late as he had ever been. Perhaps I’d left it too late to call my bluff.

Finally, there was a muffled knock on the door. I leaped to my feet. “Who is it?”

No answer.

I hesitated, thinking about Angel standing out there in the corridor with his goons. I didn’t think he would come back, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. I heard another faint knock and I made up my mind and threw open the door.

Connor had been leaning on the door, and as I opened it he fell into the room and lay sprawled in the entrance. I only recognized him from his clothes; his face was a bloody pulp.
Dios mio
. I took a deep breath to brace myself and knelt down beside him. He was conscious but only just. Every time he breathed, a bloody froth bubbled around his mouth and nose. His eyes were swollen shut.

There was so much blood at first I thought he’d been shot.

“Connor? Connor, can you hear me?”

He grunted and twisted in pain. He reached for me and I gasped in shock. What had they done to his hands? I forced myself to stay calm. “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get help.”

I wondered how he had gotten up to our room and why they didn’t stop him down at the desk. Perhaps they were too scared.

I picked up the telephone and called downstairs and told them to get a doctor.

Then I fetched a wet cloth from the bathroom and tried to clean him up as best I could. He had rolled onto his back and lay on the carpet, spreadeagled. He groaned every time I touched him. He had lost at least two teeth on his lower jaw and some of the others were loose. His nose was bent out of shape and I guessed his jaw might be broken, because he couldn’t talk. But the worst of it was the fingers of his right hand, they were a mangled and pulpy mess. Angel’s boys had been thorough and pitiless.

I wondered if he had been there when they had done this.
May you rot in hell
, I thought.

I heard the lift doors open and saw the duty manager run down the hall. He gasped and took a step back when he saw Connor. “Doctor come,” he said.

I put my arms around my husband for comfort and held him in my arms until he got there. I couldn’t think of anything else I could do.

It reminded me of other hospitals, other waiting rooms, that smell of antiseptic, the grim, white walls. I’d sat in a corridor just like this one that night in Miami, the night Papi and I escaped from Cuba. They were lonely places when there was no one to hold your hand, no one to share your grief and the fear.

I just wished Reyes were here.

The doctor emerged from the emergency room and gave me a grim smile. He was French, he had a thin beard and he was probably not much older than me. “He is badly injure,” he said, in broken English, ‘but he will be okay. He has break to cheek, to nose. Some concuss. No fracture to skull. Worse is the hand. All finger break. I give him something for pain.”

“Will he be able to use his hand again?”

A Gallic shrug. “I hope so. We tell better a few day.”

“Can I see him?”

“Yes, but not long. Okay?”

“Okay, thank you.”

Connor’s face and right hand were swathed in bandages. Someone had smashed his fingers with a blunt instrument, or so the doctor told me at the hotel. It was obvious to me why they had tortured him that way; it was to keep him away from the typewriter.

His eyes had swollen shut so I could not tell if he was awake in the darkened room. His face was so misshapen with bruising that he was unrecognizable. I could hear him breathing from the other side of the room.

I sat down in the chair beside the bed. I put my hand on his arm. He stirred. “Connor.”

He tried to say something but his mouth was too swollen, and anyway, the drugs had done their work.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said.

In moments he was snoring.

I sat there for a long time in the darkness, listening to his breathing, feeling hollow inside. What had Reyes said to me once? He said that it was fate that had brought us together. I didn’t know what fate was, or if there was such a thing, but it seemed that no matter what I did the road always led me back here, to the two men who had changed my life.

I thought about finding Reyes and asking him what he thought I should do, but by then it was almost dawn. And as the sun came up over Saigon, I decided my place was with Connor, it was the right thing now, no matter what.

Chapter 15 

It was days before he could tell me what happened.

He didn’t remember much; he had been talking to a contact he had made inside the Air Force base at Tan Son Nhut, they’d arranged to meet in a bar in Le Loi. As he was leaving two men approached him, dragged him off the street and then something hit him hard on the back of the head and he blacked out. The rest was a blur. He woke up later in an alley beside one of the clubs. He didn’t remember the beating, only the agony of waking to a smashed right hand.

“You didn’t see their faces?”

“I didn’t see anything,” he said, his voice still no more than a mumble. There was still a lot of swelling in his face and jaw and it was hard for him to talk. His face was a patchwork of black and yellow bruising and one eye was still shut. “It was dark and it all happened so fast.”

“How did you get home?” I asked him.

He didn’t know. He must have walked. He figured this was just a warning, if they had wanted to kill him they would have.

“I warned you, Connor, I told you they were serious about this.”

“Yeah, honey. You warned me.”

I stroked his hair. It was still crusty with old blood.

“I remember now, one of them said he’d make sure I couldn’t write any more books.”

“You’ll write again, it will just take time.”

“I was so close, honey.”

“I know, they could have killed you.”

“No, I mean the story.”

“
Dios mio, cariño
. To hell with the story!”

“You don’t understand. You know what I found out? Colonel Ky - Vice President of fucking Vietnam and head of the Air Force - he’s flying in refined heroin from Laos. There’s Chinese chemists making China White right there in the jungle, and Ky uses Air Force planes to fly it to Saigon.”

“Shhh,” I murmured. I could barely make any sense of what he was saying and I could see how hard it was for him to talk.

But even with only one good eye open, I could make out the familiar gleam. “Salvatore has been financing it. After Ky and President Thieu get their cut he exports it into the States. He even uses the fucking Army postal service.”

He nudged me with his arm for my reaction, like I should think this was worth getting himself half killed for.

“Let it be now,” I said.

How could he even be thinking about this right now? Why wouldn’t he let it drop?

“Forget about it, okay? When you get out of hospital I’m taking you back to New York.”

“So I run away, is that it?”

“As fast as your feet can take you.”

“I’ve never run away from anything in my life.”

“Well now’s a good time to start.”

“But I’m so close!”

“And if you get any closer than you are, next time they’ll take the baseball bat to your head instead of your fingers.” I couldn’t believe he still cared about any of this after what they’d done to him. “As soon as we can get you out of here, we’ll go home, okay?”

He lay quiet for a while staring at the strip light in the ceiling.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.