The Tale of the Lazy Dog

by Alan Williams

  The banker was now getting to grips with his plate of deep-fried prawns. Murray took a drink of white wine and said: ‘And how did you get to know Charles Pol?’

  Finlayson sat chewing thoughtfully. ‘My business takes me down to Cambodia from time to time,’ he said at last. ‘I ran into him first at the Cercle Français in Phnom Penh.’

  ‘What exactly does he do in Cambodia?’

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’

  ‘He was evasive, shall we say?’

  Finlayson shook his head glumly. ‘He’s a cagey devil. To tell the truth I’ve never fathomed the French. They’re all for wine, women, good food, the intellectual life — then you scratch the surface and what d’you find? Cloven hoof and hairy heel, that’s what. Anyway, I’ve never been able to trust a man with a beard.’

  ‘He trusts you.’

  Finlayson’s eyes bulged across the table, solemn and slightly puzzled. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He was the one who put me on to you. I don’t know how much he’s told you, but he wouldn’t have even mentioned your name if he hadn’t had a good deal of confidence in you.’

  Finlayson paused, his fork in mid-air. ‘Yes, I must admit, in one way and another Charles and I’ve got to know each other pretty well. White men sticking together, you might say — especially when it comes to doing business with these Asians. They can be damned slippery sometimes.’

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t trust him?’

  ‘No further than I could throw him — and that wouldn’t be far!’ He allowed himself a faint smile. ‘But you can’t always work on your own — trust yourself and no one else. Can you?’ He thrust his face forward, his brown-stained moustache twitching as though to communicate some message of special significance. ‘I have to confess,’ he added, ‘I’ve done a couple of deals with old Pol. When it comes to business we’re as thick as thieves.’ Again the hint of a smile played across his gloomy features.

  ‘And he told you everything?’

  ‘He told me what he said you’d told him. The bare bones, I’d call it.’

  ‘And how much was that?’

  ‘You want me to go through it?’

  ‘Please.’ Murray finished his prawns and drank his wine, listening to Finlayson’s low monotone repeating almost word for word the tale Murray had heard from the young American all those weeks back in the Bangkok clip-joint. When it was over he smiled and called for a second bottle of wine. ‘So what’s your opinion — professionally? Do you believe it?’

  Finlayson stroked his moustache and gazed across at the bar where a noisy group of Americans had burst in and were ordering Jim Beam bourbon on the rocks. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘it’s a very plausible theory.’

  ‘But is it true? Could they really have had that amount at one time in one place?’ Murray was leaning forward now, his eyes trying to hold Finlayson’s across the dim candlelight. ‘Is it possible?’

  ‘Oh certainly. Of course, I don’t deal with Vietnam as such. Most of my work’s tied up here in Laos with foreign aid. But I do get a peek at some of the gold figures. And they’re pretty staggering. As you know, since the gold crisis in fifty-seven most of the big trading’s shifted from up here down to Saigon. It’s now one of the biggest gold markets in the world — the Chinese Reds are buying it up through the London Gold Pool. And by international law all gold buying must be transacted in dollars — U.S. of course. And if some of the figures I’ve seen are correct, it amounts to a very fair sum.’

  ‘How much of it is hot money?’

  ‘A lot of it’s warm, shall we say.’

  ‘And all in dollars?’

  ‘Indeed. Who wants to deal in a load of old Vietnamese piastres when there are greenbacks around?’

  ‘So what happens to these greenbacks?’

  ‘They try to get them out of the country. A flush-out, they call it. It’s done about every six to eight months. They fly the stuff out to some safe place, usually the Philippines, then ship it back to the old U.S.A.’

  He was interrupted by one of the Americans at the bar, who had caught sight of him and now came lurching over: ‘Hi George! How’s the kip keeping?’

  ‘Quite satisfactory, thanks.’ He made no effort to introduce Murray. ‘And how’s the flying?’

  ‘Up and down, like always. We lost another last week — C 46, had an engine go and went smack into a mountain. One helluva life, at four hundred bucks a week, and you finish getting burned up on a stinking mountain in Laos! Well, see you around, George.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ Finlayson murmured. ‘Air U.S.A. pilots,’ he said to Murray when they were gone. ‘It’s a CIA outfit. Quite a joke really — the only charter airline in the world that carries no passengers, but will fly anywhere and drop anything.’ He took a deep drink of wine, while Murray sat studying the crouched backs of the pilots along the bar, thinking hard but saying nothing.

  ‘What about this American sergeant chap?’ Finlayson asked. ‘How much have you discussed with him?’

  ‘Nothing — directly. He’s an M.P. for a start, and he doesn’t want to spend three years in the stockade, plus a dishonourable discharge. All he said was he might be able to get me on to the airfield to have a look round — might even arrange for me to wear an M.P.’s uniform. But that’s not your side of the business.’ He leant forward again across the table. ‘Let me ask you something personal, George.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Have you ever done anything illegal in your life?’

  Finlayson’s pale eyes bulged back at him. ‘Illegal, old boy? Perish the thought!’

  Murray smiled: ‘What about the Lao National Lottery last year? The first and only one of its kind in the world — the only one that never paid any prizes?’ He peered at him closely over his glass, but the large melancholy face across the table was giving nothing away. ‘I suppose Charles Pol told you about that?’

  ‘Isn’t it common knowledge? You advised the Lao Ministry of Finance — told them it was a good way to raise a little extra revenue — then took a small cut of the profits?’

  Finlayson nodded slowly, gazing into his wine. ‘Fair’s fair,’ he said. ‘It was rather underhand, I grant you. But I still don’t think Pol should have let on.’

  Murray smiled: ‘You may not have done anything very illegal in the past — but that’s all going to change, if we go through with this. Understand?’

  ‘Understood.’

  The pilots at the bar were beginning to sound drunk, throwing dice and shouting. Murray envied them. Four hundred dollars a week, with the spice of danger thrown in, and no moral obligations.

  Finlayson said quietly: ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Find out the time, date and place of the next flush-out. Can you do that?’

  ‘I’ll keep my ear to the ground. One sometimes picks up a clue here and there.’

  ‘It’s got to be more than a clue, George. If you’re going to be cut in, it’s got to be all or nothing. What about the previous flush-outs?’

  ‘Oh, one heard about them, but usually only after they’d happened. I remember, because they’re always given the codenames of weapons. The last one was Happy Hound, the ones before, Mighty Mouse and Bullpup. Like children with important toys, don’t you think?’

  ‘Find out the name and time and place of the next one, George.’ Murray sat very still, waiting for the banker’s reaction, while the Americans at the bar argued over a bet.

  Finlayson spent some time wiping his mouth with his napkin, then twirling his wine glass in the candlelight. ‘If I may be so judiciously indiscreet,’ he said at last, ‘I must have some guarantee as to your own integrity. I mean to say, if something goes wrong —’

  Murray nodded: ‘So something goes wrong?’

  ‘I mean to say, old boy, what are your actual plans to date in this matter? I know Pol’s behind it, probably putting up the cash and so on. But what are your plans?’

  ‘I need two pilots,’ said Murray. ‘The best two
pilots in South-East Asia, with a lot of nerve and not too many scruples. I want two pilots who can get a medium-sized transport plane — Caribou or C 123 — off the ground in a hurry, in darkness and flying several hundred miles at treetop level without radar or a radio compass, and can land it under the same conditions — blind.’

  ‘And what about you?’ Finlayson did not sound worried, just healthily suspicious.

  ‘Me?’ Murray grinned and finished his wine. ‘I’m just the ideas man — a displaced intellectual. If it all falls through, don’t worry about me. I won’t blackmail you to the IMF. I’ll just write it up afterwards — as fiction. It ought to make a good yarn. But for the moment I’m the only one of us — as an accredited journalist — who can walk in on Air U.S.A. and ask to go on a rice-drop; who can wander on to an airfield with no special permit; cross frontiers without too many tricky questions being asked; get thrown out of unauthorized areas without arousing too much suspicion. All right?’

  Finlayson nodded, signalling for the bill. ‘Let me just ask you one thing, Wilde — if it doesn’t sound impertinent. What did you do before you came out to Asia?’

  ‘Lived off a rich wife.’

  Finlayson nodded again, without comment. The pilots at the bar had made up their quarrel and were bawling for more drinks. As Murray and Finlayson passed them on their way out, the one who had come up to their table turned on his stool and shouted, ‘Cheer-io Gee-orge old chep!’ in a grotesque mimic of the English accent.

  ‘Good night to you all,’ Finlayson answered, with resolute lack of aggression. The rest of them watched with glassy grins — a row of big, well-scrubbed, all-American boys of forty-five who’d seen it all, resting now on their wide wallet-bulging butts, pissed and far from home.

  Christ, thought Murray, as he stepped out into the tepid black night: No wonder they flew into mountains! He wondered if they got danger-money as well.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘Hi there, we’re in luck, sir!’ Luke swung his long legs off the desktop and sat forward with his boyish grin. ‘You’re off the launching pad — got you fixed for a drop tomorrow morning at sunrise. Weather permitting of course.’

  Murray sat down opposite, buttoning his jacket against the icy air-conditioning. The room was of bare weatherboard, with a physical contour map of Laos and North Vietnam covering most of one wall. A framed photograph of the U.S. President watched over both of them with a look of funereal responsibility.

  Luke had managed to get his pipe going at last and it was giving little puffs like a toy steam-engine. ‘You have to check in at the airport, Air U.S.A. Gate Two, at five-thirty tomorrow morning. Take-off’s scheduled for six. It’s a two and a half hour flight north of here, and the weather begins to get bad about mid-morning, so take-off has to be timed so you reach the drop zone around when the sun’s burned off the mountain fog. O.K. with you?’

  ‘Fine. Where is the drop zone?’

  Luke spun round in his chair and jabbed at the top of the map with his pip-stem. ‘It’s a numbered grid reference, but we won’t know what it is till just before take-off. All I can tell you is it’s way up north, not far from the North Vietnamese border. It’ll be rice and cornmeal, in triple-sacking, for the use of anti-Communist cadres among the Meo tribesmen. It’s all here in our leaflet.’ He spun back and thrust a heavy folder across the desk marked KINGDOM OF LAOS — YOUR INFORMATION KIT. ‘And here’s your clearance pass. You hand that to a Captain Gaccia at the Air U.S.A. traffic manager’s office. Anyone’ll tell you where it is when you get inside the gate.’

  ‘Any trouble getting through the gate?’ Murray asked casually.

  Luke shook his head, laughing: ‘No, no, we’re everyone’s friend here in Laos! Dropping rice is the way to win ’em. You know we even drop whole school kits? — blackboards, textbooks, even the funnies with the captions translated into the local dialect. That’s the way to victory — words, not guns!’

  And so say all of us, thought Murray, as he stood up and shook hands across the desk. Luke followed him to the door, stepping with him into the aching afternoon glare. ‘Remember to wear something warm,’ he called: ‘couple of newspapers and an extra undershirt. It can get darned cold up in those planes. And don’t forget your passport — just in case.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Murray waved cheerfully, thinking, Nice helpful Luke, we ought to cut him in, give him something for his trouble. But Luke Williams did it for love — love of liberty and a brave new world where mountain tribes read ‘Peanuts’ and ate rice that fell from heaven.

  Murray walked away to where he had left the hired Willys jeep, parked in the shade of a mouldy phallic-shaped wat, out of sight of the Embassy compound. The canvas flaps were drawn shut on both sides, and he was just climbing in when he saw the girl come round the wall of the temple. She was wearing trousers again, with a dark Chinese tunic buttoned to the throat and a conical straw hat that covered her face in a pool of shadow. She paused by the jeep. ‘Mister Wilde? We met yesterday with Mister Napper, and again at the reception.’

  He stood up, smiling uncertainly. It was the first time he had heard her speak English: correctly, but with a marked French accent, as though defying the infectious drawl of her husband’s tongue. ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I am going just to the American Embassy. Thank you.’

  Murray held his hand to his eyes, squinting down the hot sleepy street, thinking of some excuse to delay her. Lunch was over, cafes closed for the siesta, and it was too early for a respectable drink; only the dark air-conditioned clip-joints down the main street were open, and he did not want to risk a refusal.

  ‘Yesterday I did not realise,’ she said suddenly, ‘that you are the Mister Wilde who taught at Huế University. Faculté des Lettres, je crois?’

  ‘That’s right. Do you know Huế?’

  ‘Bien sûr! Or perhaps I should say I used to know it — before they destroyed it. It was the most beautiful city in the Orient. It was a crime what they did!’ Her voice had risen to an unexpected note of passion, subsiding at once into neutrality: ‘You were there when it happened, weren’t you? It must have been very disagreeable.’

  But Murray said nothing, and there was a heavy pause. He suddenly had no wish to talk more about Huế: it was too painful for preliminary small-talk. For several seconds they stood facing each other in the silent shade of the temple. ‘How long are you staying in Vientiane?’ he said at last, a little desperately, remembering Le Bar des Amis — quiet and cool at this hour, the fans still working by courtesy of the Thai cable across the river.

  ‘My husband’s stationed most of the time in Vietnam. We’ve been here for four months, but we go back next week.’

  ‘You live in Saigon?’

  ‘The Americans give us a house there. It’s not very amusing, but at least it’s better than this village. I hope we’ll be sent some day to Hong Kong.’ She gave a small despairing shrug: ‘Mais on ne sait jamais.’

  ‘Come and have a drink at the hotel. Something to remind you of France,’ he added, with forced enthusiasm; and for the fraction of a second she hesitated.

  ‘No, I must go to the Embassy. Thank you.’

  He watched her longingly out of sight, her body moving elusively under the loose Chinese tunic — wondering how long it had been since he’d had a girl like that? Perhaps never. He had not even asked her where she came from.

  It was stifling inside the jeep and Murray’s hands left wet marks as he unfolded the French roadmap, Croquis Routier de L’Indo-Chine, which he had bought second-hand that morning from a local bookshop. There seemed to be no up-to-date maps of the country: the Americans inhabited a land made up, it seemed, not of towns and villages, but of numbered grid references, drop zones and radio-compass bearings. He had also found one sketchy map of Vientiane — a largely useless document marking only ‘friendly’ embassies, the Post Office and the USIS library. But it did show the road out to the airport — and, even more important, where it joi
ned the long-neglected Route Nationale Treize, now Highway Thirteen, up to Luang Prabang.

  It was for this road that Murray Wilde now headed — first checking the exact time and mileage, writing both down in his notebook. He avoided passing the American Embassy, in case he ran into Luke who would almost certainly want to know where he was going. Instead he made a detour round the deserted Morning Market, past the guards at the Pathet Lao vegetable garden, up the broad dusty avenue towards the Monument des Morts — an impressive imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, plastered with lavish gold-leaf and still unfinished after ten years, straddling a road that had ceased to exist, commemorating the dead of wars that had not yet happened.

  It was impossible to drive through it because of some innovations that had been started inside on a row of golden Buddhas. Murray had to mount the muddy track round the side, driving on past the embassies of Laos. Solid stone residences set back in luxuriant grounds where the French colons had once held court were now peopled by random groups of international squatters. Weary, womenless men, dried up by the heat, their livers in disrepair, their political alignments warped by the daily task of fighting the Laotian telephone service, enraged by the gay corruption of the Lao leaders, and by the maddening problem of countering rumours of battles, both past and impending, with the reality of a largely non-existent army whose few indolent officers spent most of their time smuggling gold and drugs.

  Only the Americans, in their hermetically sealed hygienic compound, with its own plumbing, water-purification plant and closed-circuit television, lived in happy expectation of Laos surviving the twentieth century. They, after all, had something to offer — not only rice and blackboards and comics, but also a dam. The High Dam of Nam Ngum.