The Tale of the Lazy Dog

by Alan Williams

  He blinked at the sunlight from the door. The man was short and bald with pebble-glasses and fluffy white hair round his ears; he looked and sounded like an English tradesman, slightly run to seed in a rumpled off-white suit and open-necked shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry —’ Murray began.

  ‘Napper,’ the man said: ‘Hamish Napper. Drink?’

  ‘Thanks — a beer.’ Murray climbed on to a stool beside him and was still trying to place him when, in a most untypical English gesture, the man shook hands. It was then that Murray remembered him. An awful evening just over a year ago in the garden of the British Embassy, his nerves shot to shreds, ill with no sleep and too much drink, the two of them propped up under a frangipani tree, arguing wildly about the war, Murray claiming recent experience, blind with rage and whisky, the old man gibbering with the wisdom of age and hindsight. He had been in Indo-China for more than twenty years, and now held some ill-defined post with the Political Section. It was said that he had once played football against Ho Chi Minh during the visit of the British Mission to Hanoi in 1954 — nine men a side, and Great Britain had lost, since no one had dared tackle the President for fear of upsetting the negotiations.

  Murray had remembered him again because of his hands. For it was on account of the symptoms they betrayed that Napper’s career had hung in the balance. Now, in the half-darkness of the bar, the man’s touch was peculiarly repulsive: a moist swollen hand, with the cushions between the joints soft and puffed up like marshmallows.

  ‘So you’re still here?’ said Murray. ‘They didn’t give you the push?’

  Napper gave a little throaty chuckle and shook his head. ‘Must have chattered a lot that night. We were both a bit under the weather, I think. Yes, I’m still here — though I’ve had to give up a few of the old habits. Weaned back on to the bottle, so to speak.’ He pushed his empty glass across at the girl. ‘Takes a bit of time though — and real hell for the first few weeks. The docs got me down to only two pipes a day, but the swelling in my hands and feet still hasn’t gone down.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘End of the year. I’ll be at the statutory retiring age, y’see. I must say this, they’ve been damned decent about it at the Embassy — even joke about it, saying they can’t start sending old junkies back to the U.K. Bad for the Service.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Full pension — bungalow near Godalming — bit o’ fishing. Might even write my memoirs. I’ve got a few tales up here,’ he added, tapping his bald pate, ‘that would make a bit o’ hair in Whitehall stand on end. Trouble is, I don’t think I could do it.’

  ‘The Official Secrets Act, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, bugger the Act. It’s just that when I sit down and try to write it, I can’t remember anything.’ He smiled into his cloudy drink. ‘What are you doing in Laos?’ he added suddenly.

  Murray shrugged: ‘R-and-R. Rest and Recuperation, shall we say?’

  ‘I-and-I, I call it. Intercourse and Intoxication.’ Napper chuckled, sipping his Pernod. ‘On to any good stories?’

  ‘No. Should I be?’ Murray was wary now, remembering that behind that jaunty, short-sighted, rather sad little face was a mind that had once held a position of some delicacy and importance on behalf of Her Majesty in this corner of the world. He said casually: ‘Is there anything I should know? Any coups brewing?’

  Napper shook his head. ‘They’ve actually banned the coup, you know that? Le coup d’état est inter dit au Laos. It’s an official Government decree.’

  ‘It’s a lovely country.’

  ‘The best,’ said Hamish Napper. ‘You get to love it — softens everyone, even the Russians. Everyone except these bloody Americans! Interfering buggers. First they had the casino closed because it was on the second floor of the girls’ lycée. And it wasn’t even as if there were any classes going on — it only opened in the evenings. And now you know what they’re trying to do? Get the Government to ban pot. Just think of it! About the only staple product this poor bloody country’s got, and they want to stamp it out, all because the families of these damned American military people are frightened their teenage brats — teeny-bops, I think they call them — are going to start getting hooked. And you know how many military attachés the American Embassy’s got in Laos at the moment? Eighty-five! Eighty-five military bleeding attachés!’ he cried, beside himself with rage. ‘And we and the Russians have only got two between us — officially. God rot the lot,’ he muttered, gulping the rest of his Pernod.

  A girl had come into the bar, strolling towards them. She was European, tall and very dark, dressed in trousers and a leopard-spotted combat jacket. Hamish Napper looked round and greeted her in faultless French, his good humour rapidly recovered. He introduced Murray: ‘This is Jackie. Mrs Jacqueline Conquest,’ he added, with rather less enthusiasm. She and Murray shook hands. She had a round, pretty face, calm and unsmiling.

  ‘What will you have?’ Napper asked her in French.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ she said, her eyes straying round the dark corners of the bar. ‘I have to meet someone.’

  Napper’s pebble glasses gleamed slyly; the French language had sharpened his manner, giving him an almost predatory cunning. ‘So it’s someone else, is it?’

  The girl gave the nearest thing to a smile and hunched her shoulders: ‘Tu penses!’ She turned to Murray: ‘Bon soir, Monsieur Wilde. Salut ’Amish!’

  They watched her leave, stepping gracefully over the drain and out of sight. ‘Who is she?’ Murray said, calling the bar-girl’s attention to their glasses.

  ‘Jackie? French girl, married to a shit. American chap called Maxwell Conquest — ridiculous bloody name! — seconded up here from Saigon. I don’t think they’re happy. She spends half her time wandering round in a dream. She wasn’t looking for anyone in here — she just didn’t have anywhere else to go. She wouldn’t be seen drinking in here with us — her hubby wouldn’t like it. Hubby’s a good clean all-American boy who has three showers a day and never takes a drink unless the ice has been made from chlorinated water. Bastard.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Spook. CIA. Spends most of his time closeted with Colonel Buchbinder’s boys in the American compound, hatching plots against the Lao politicians. He’s supposed to be my opposite number. We don’t get on.’

  ‘And you do the same thing — hatch plots?’

  ‘Me? Bah!’ He chuckled again — just a little too easily this time, Murray thought. ‘Usual odds and sods — they wouldn’t put an old crock like me on to anything important.’ He finished his drink and struggled off his stool. ‘Still, must be toddling along now. H.M.G. calls!’ He pulled out a fistful of large tissuey hundred-Kip notes — delicate pink and mauve like the old French franc notes, with the chateaux and cardinals replaced by pagodas and dancing girls — and before Murray could stop him, had thrust them across at the bar-girl. ‘On me, old man. See you before you leave.’ He gave a little wave as he went, moving in a kind of crab-footed shuffle, punctuated every few steps by a quick hop.

  Murray felt he should have been amused by the man; yet he wasn’t. Vientiane could never be described as a first-grade diplomatic posting, but while Britain remained a co-signatory of the Geneva Agreement on Laos, it still mattered; and Murray was beginning to wonder whether even the British Foreign Office would continue to tolerate an ageing, heavy-drinking, garrulous ex-opium-addict, unless he was of some real worth. For Hamish Napper was still employed — and had probably been so for more than two decades — in what is loosely called ‘political intelligence’, which can be a sensitive area of work, especially in South-East Asia. Yet instead of putting him out to pasture long ago, they were allowing him to reach full retiring age at the end of the year. And the year, Murray reflected, as he started up the stone steps to his room on the first floor, still had several months to run. He hoped he was not going to regret Mr Hamish Napper.

  CHAPTER 2

  Murray walked the
few hundred yards down to the river where the reception was being held at the Lang Xan Royal Palace Restaurant. The sun had gone down and an astonishingly large amount of traffic had appeared, roaring in both directions down the pitted main street: a ceaseless gleam of chromium, with headlamps on high-beam — Chevrolets, Citroëns, VWs, dozens of little Japanese models driven ferociously in the middle of the road. Murray, hesitating under the awning of the Bar des Amis, remembered wondering, on his last visit to Laos, at this phenomenon of Vientiane. For where did all these cars come from, and where did they go? The road south, following the Mekong down to Savannakhet, was passable in the dry season only by large buses or vehicles with four-wheel drive; while the old Route Nationale Treize up to the Royal Capital of Luang Prabang had long been cut by the Pathet Lao forces and was open for only thirty kilometres. There were no other roads out of Vientiane — only the laborious and infrequent ferry that plied across the river to Thailand.

  But then nothing in Laos, Murray reflected, was quite as one expected. Visiting wits on sabbatical from the State Department dubbed it ‘Laos-Chaos’. A war had convulsed its jungles and mountains for a decade; had on at least two occasions sent shockwaves through the Chancelleries of the Free World; had caused the 7th Fleet to be alerted and hasty conferences convened between Moscow, London and Washington.

  Yet here, in the eye of the hurricane, the Communist Pathet Lao still maintained an official headquarters in the centre of town — a well-appointed French mansion hung with bougainvillea and the portraits of Mao and Ho, and boasting a beautifully-tended vegetable garden that faced the Morning Market where raw opium and cannabis resin were on sale alongside dyed silks and fresh fish and ballpoint pens. Murray Wilde, grown cynical and tired of the silliness and cunning and brutal charm of this continent, had once written of Laos, ‘The war that never happened in a country that never was’. It was as near the truth as he ever hoped to get.

  He had reached the river swelling through the soft twilight, with the din of traffic drowned by the sustained screaming of cicadas in the high grass by the water. The Lang Xan Royal Palace Restaurant stood in its own grounds, behind a gate supported by stone elephants and a driveway crowded with a fleet of Government and Corps Diplomatique limousines. The place had been originally conceived, on the departure of the French, by some visionary Lao princeling who had planned it as a vast tourist hotel in preparation for the day when Vientiane played host to the Olympic Aquatics on the Mekong. But the princeling was swept aside by a coup, the money ran out, and the tourists and the Olympics never came. All that was built of the Lang Xan Palace was the restaurant, bar and ballroom: a curious blend of stunted Corbusier and Cecil Beaton — shards of glass and rusted steel entwined with wrought-iron arabesques and gilded egrets perched on the steep half-completed pagoda roof rising from the river like some surrealist ski-jump.

  The entrance was jammed with cyclo-pousse drivers, curled up in their passenger seats, smoking or asleep. An officer of the Royal Lao Army collected Murray’s card and showed him across an unswept cement floor to the folding doors into the ballroom. The Ambassador and his wife greeted him with rigid smiles, welcoming him aboard the bandwagon of international diplomacy. For while the Cold War might be fought out across the world with propaganda, trade embargos, troop movements, threats and blackmail, here in Laos, under a pair of triple-tiered chandeliers — not all of whose bulbs worked — the conflict was joined over stiff drinks, the bitter ideological platitudes dissolved in preposterous offstage buffoonery. Murray had heard many stories of these diplomatic gatherings in Laos, which rarely ended without some incident. An impeccable Indian member of the Control Commission had once slapped a Pole’s face after an argument about seats on the ICC plane to Hanoi; and after one particularly boisterous do at the Danish Legation a distinguished member of the British Embassy had spent the night on the Chinese Communist chargé-d’affaires’ sofa.

  There were about fifty people in the room, half of them in uniform, standing in neat groups according to nationality and rank. Murray calculated that they must be only on their second round of drinks, served tirelessly by tiny men in white mess-jackets and embroidered slippers. It would take at least another hour before international protocol began to collapse. He was on nodding acquaintance with perhaps half a dozen faces; but for the first time in many days he at last felt no need to hurry. The man he had come to meet would make himself known to him in good time.

  He helped himself to a drink and began to circulate. The Indians were there in a tight circle — surprisingly large, Sandhurst-built men in white-laundered uniforms, talking solemnly over whiskies and soda. In another corner were the Poles, conspicuous this time for their ungainliness: squat pale men with wide nostrils and slack mouths, their dove-grey uniforms with shelves of épaulettes and silver eagles hanging awkwardly on them, as though fashioned for a more gallant generation.

  A resident French journalist, who had attached himself to Murray, began to explain, in the side-of-the-mouth tones of the well-informed, that since the Czechoslovakian crisis the old Polish delegation had been withdrawn, and replaced mostly by Russians or Russian-born Poles. It was not a detail that Murray paid much attention to at the time. He was looking at a predominant group of Americans in the centre of the room. Among them was the girl he had met that afternoon in the Bar des Amis — Mrs Jacqueline Conquest. He recognised her only at a second glance; the floppy camouflage jacket and trousers were replaced with a sheath of tight-fitting deep blue silk, tracing a profile of long legs, high hips, large fine breasts; her hair scooped up from the nape of the neck, making her face seem more slender, her eyes larger, darker, even across half the length of the room.

  He began to move towards them. He knew at least one of the men in the group — a pleasant gangling young man called Luke Williams who was in charge of the U.S. Information Bureau — and Murray’s present occupation as an author and freelance journalist afforded him the excuse to introduce himself.

  Luke Williams already knew him by reputation, and the build-up he gave him was almost embarrassing. The two other men in the group nodded gravely; but the girl stood by with the same unsmiling calm she had displayed in the bar that afternoon, and something warned Murray that it would be unwise to let on that they had already met. One of the other two was her husband: a slim tight-faced man with a buttoned-down shirt, buttoned-down mouth, and grey arrow-shaped eyes. Murray distrusted him on sight. He noticed that neither he nor his wife were drinking.

  The other man was the new head of USAID in Laos, Colonel Buchbinder — muscular and close-cropped with the handshake of a stevedore and horn-rimmed eyes that never shifted nor blinked as he spoke: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Wilde! Sorry I wasn’t here on your last visit but we’re gonna make up for it this time, I’m sure, giving you plenty of opportunity to see our economic assistance programme in action at all levels of national life, getting things really moving in this country —’

  The girl’s gaze had fixed on a point somewhere above their heads, beyond the shabby damp-blotched walls — a gaze of total boredom.

  ‘Luke here will fit you up with our information kit,’ Colonel Buchbinder went on, ‘every detail of our aid effort right up to date. And for any other details you want to know’ — he swivelled his owl’s stare on the tall smiling boy on his left — ‘Luke’s your man!’

  Luke Williams beamed back at Murray: ‘Anything I can do to be of help, sir. You know my office, opposite the main Embassy compound?’

  Murray thanked him, while Colonel Buchbinder and the Conquests moved off to join their Ambassador. The girl had turned away without a gesture, even a nod. Neither she nor her husband had spoken a word — though Murray was aware all the while of the CIA man’s cold stare, and was glad when he was gone.

  He turned gratefully back to Luke: ‘Listen, there is something you can do for me. I’m only in Laos for a few days — a kind of stopover between assignments — but I’d be very interested’ — he had unconsciously dropped his voice so
that the American had to lower his head to hear — ‘in doing a rice-drop.’

  Luke straightened up, smiling brightly: ‘Sure. No problem. It’s been done, though.’

  ‘Everything’s been done,’ said Murray. ‘I’m interested in some special camera effects, early morning stuff — sunrise on take-off — and as far north as possible. The highest drops you do.’

  The American’s smile had changed to a slow frown. ‘That’s very high, and very north. Nearly nine thousand feet if you want the limit, which is where it begins to get rather close to Chicom territory.’

  ‘So? You fly up there — I want to see it.’

  ‘You never done a rice-drop before?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m asking you.’

  ‘I gather it can be pretty hairy up north. Specially if the weather gets bad. And it’s all the same in those mountains — high or low. We do a pretty simple drop just forty minutes from here, over Xieng Khouang. You’ll get your kicks there if a storm comes up.’

  ‘No good,’ said Murray. ‘I’ve had all the kicks I want in life — I’m getting old now. I want a genuine drop as far north as you can get me cleared for, and taking off as early as possible in the morning.’

  Luke Williams nodded dubiously. ‘I’ll see what I can do. They may insist on a personal liability disclaimer, and that takes time.’

  ‘Why? I’ve signed plenty of them before — in much worse situations than this. Unless, of course, you’re going to tell me that you lose too high a percentage of your rice-drop sorties over north Laos —’

  ‘Oh no, don’t get me wrong, it’s just a formality. You know what civilians are! We’re not dealing with the military up here.’

  ‘I’ll sign whatever you give me,’ Murray said.