Ryderbeit was in good form. He offered his empty flask to the helicopter pilot, laughed and apologised; then offered to pay Wedgwood for the bourbon, but the American refused, with big helpless gestures. Jackie sat all the while quietly in a chair against the wall, with no more emotion than a look of boredom, and perhaps faint disgust. Murray tried once to catch her eye, but failed, and thought it better not to try again. The pilot then led the way, in single file, to the helicopter — a slim steel skeleton with a glass bubble for a face. There was still no sign of the Thais. Poor bastards, he thought. What it was to be privileged!
Later, as they whirled up through the cloud with a strange tranquillity after the poor dead C 46, he found that Jackie had taken hold of his arm. No one else noticed. Ryderbeit and Jones were slumped in deep sleep, and the pilot was intent on his instruments.
She said, ‘Thank you for what you did. It was very gallant.’ Then added: ‘I caused you a lot of trouble, didn’t I?’
‘No, it doesn’t matter. It was nothing serious.’
‘They hurt you, didn’t they?’
‘Not badly.’ He nodded at Ryderbeit’s slouching puffed face. ‘I hurt him too.’
She squeezed his arm: ‘He’s mad. And dangerous. They should not permit him to stay in this country. He has no principles, he is just a killer. He talks about the Foreign Legion, but he knows nothing about the Legion. Only about the worst of them, the scum of the earth — Germans and people from the east of Europe who cannot remember anything except how to kill. I despise those people. I hate them.’
Although she spoke quietly and close to his ear, the passion in her voice had an intensity that cut above the clattering roar around them. Murray kept glancing at Ryderbeit, wondering if he heard — even with his mongrel white African French. But Ryderbeit slept on —dreaming of what horrors? Murray wondered.
She kissed him, softly, bumping against him with the motion of the helicopter. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured again. ‘I should have stayed.’
‘There was nothing you could do.’
‘But there were two of them — that Negro as well. I should have stayed.’
‘No. No.’ It seemed a pointless argument: she hadn’t stayed, and there was nothing more to be said.
Then she surprised him: ‘What were you all talking about after I left you?’
He pulled away from her, studying her solemn unsmiling face. ‘Talking about?’ he repeated.
‘You were there so long — you must have been discussing something.’
‘Just patching ourselves up. I didn’t feel too good.’ He tried to smile, but something must have showed.
‘You look worried,’ she said. ‘Something is wrong.’
‘Nothing.’
‘You talked about something and it’s worrying you.’
‘Merde! We didn’t talk about anything. We’d had a fight, that’s all. A fight over you.’
She clutched him, with sudden violence, and kissed him again, her teeth touching his through her soft cold lips. He tried to swallow, his throat dry and tight. He wished to God he hadn’t had that brandy. She held on to him, in the gently vibrating machine, and would not let go. There was a quiet frenzy about her now, a hint of hysteria. He tried to pull away and she murmured, in a quick whisper: ‘Don’t go, don’t leave me!’
He didn’t move; he couldn’t move; if he had wanted to leave her, the only place to go was a few thousand feet down into the jungle. It occurred to him that she might have conceived some wild unreasoning passion for him. He began to grow wary. He preferred to make the running in these matters. Girls who took the first step were usually bad news — especially one who was unhappily married to an American agent.
She was still clinging to him, rocking next to him in her hammock-seat while Ryderbeit and No-Entry slept on. It was nearly five o’clock. It wouldn’t be long now till they landed at Luang Prabang; and he wondered, with some apprehension, whether there would be further transport down to Vientiane that night. There was only one place to stay in the Royal Capital, a tourist hotel built by the French, and he had visions of the night ahead. Another quart of whisky scrounged from the local Americans; three men and a girl; trouble. And Maxwell Conquest was going to want to know what had happened to her.
Then another theory occurred to him, something even less comforting. Was it possible that her husband had sent her here — sent her on this rice-drop to watch him, cajole and spy on him? That these clutching hands and quiet passion were all an artifice of the Central Intelligence Agency? That Maxwell Conquest had somehow learnt something, and was anxious to find out more?
‘Why did you come on this trip?’ he asked her.
‘I wanted to.’
‘But why?’
‘I had nothing to do, I was bored.’
He could feel her breath, warm and clear of whisky, stirring against his cheek; and he remembered her standing in the reception that first evening, her tall body in the sheath of deep-blue silk; and he hoped there would be no plane that night out of Luang Prabang.
PART 5: THE NIGHT OF SISERA
CHAPTER 1
Murray locked the door on the inside and put the key on the table by the bed. The fan from the ceiling swung with a faint clanking sound; the air was cool and the hotel quiet. It was almost dark.
He turned and looked at her. She was still standing with her back to him in front of the window, looking out across the sharp black banana leaves. The window was open and in the stillness insects went on pinging against the wire mesh. He moved across to her without switching on the light. Her face was a shadow under the black hair, her body firm and mysterious as he took hold of her arms just below the shoulders, feeling her quiver through the coarse combat-tunic. He had known how it would be the moment they began the bus ride from the airport, round the hill in the centre of the town with the little pagoda at the top, glinting in the dying sun like a golden dagger.
There had been no plane on to Vientiane — nothing until noon next day. The hotel was a shabby concrete building with a live bear in a cage in the garden and two French pilots drinking Pernod in the bar. The only other guest was a thin grey Dutchman who was in Luang Prabang compiling a dictionary of local dialects and roamed about the lobby, grumbling about there being no plug for his electric shaver. There was also no free whisky, but after a thrifty dinner Ryderbeit had got into conversation with the pilots, who bought him and Jones a bottle of rusty wine. Murray and Jackie evaded them with care, and managed an early unobtrusive escape upstairs.
He kissed her now on the neck and she said, ‘Is the door locked?’
‘It’s locked,’ he whispered, without moving his lips. ‘They’ll be downstairs drinking for hours, if I know Ryderbeit.’
She nodded: ‘French pilots — in an empty hotel — drinking bad French wine. Don’t you think it’s sad?’
‘Why should it be? They chose the job — they weren’t conscripted.’
‘Undress me,’ she said, without moving.
He started on the five olive-green buttons and the tunic dropped to the floor. Her body was very dark against the white bra, which he snapped off, feeling her shiver all over now.
Smooth lean shoulders and rounded belly with the neat diagonal fold of the navel, which is the symbol of French surgery. Breasts plump and stiff-nippled as he gripped them and squeezed her to him, turning her round, feeling himself harden against her, ripping skilfully at the zip of her trousers, peeling them off her buttocks and down her long legs, thinking wildly, It’s too good, too soon — the girl’s crazy, I’m crazy — lying with her now on the bed, kissing the triangle of dark deep-scented hair, feeling her writhe and arch her spine, while the insects pinged and the fan swung with its slow clanking swish.
He made love to her in rhythm with the fan, until the sound was lost in her sighing and moaning, and a final long cry that carried into the night of Luang Prabang, in the jungle-heart of Laos. He lay limp and giddy, growing slowly conscious of the burning of her fingernails in
his back and shoulders, remembering stories that Charles Pol had told him of these girls from French Algeria who would sit in the pavement cafes and laugh at some Moslem lying lynched at their feet. Beautiful black feet.
‘Why did they call you “pieds-noir”?’ he asked.
She whispered something he didn’t catch, still holding him to her, gripping him with her thighs, trying not to let him escape out of her; and when he did, she gave another small agonised cry and her nails bit into him again, painfully this time. ‘Pieds-noirs,’ she murmured: ‘It was the name the Bedouins gave the first settlers who came to Algeria because of the black shoes they wore.’
They lay on top of the sheet listening to a breeze stirring the banana leaves outside the window. ‘I wonder if the bear will wake us,’ she said suddenly: ‘Wake us with his growling?’
‘It’ll be more likely Ryderbeit growling.’
‘He should be in a cage. He’s a terrible man — un affreux.’
Murray smiled. Les Affreux, the Terrible Ones, had been the nickname given to the white mercenaries in the Congo. ‘He isn’t quite as terrible as he makes out,’ he said. ‘He plays the comedy a lot of the time.’
‘You think so? Just because he saved our lives? Ah!’ She made an angry gesture in the dark and sat up. ‘He was saving his own life. You talk about him as though you were friends.’
Murray shrugged: ‘That Negro Jones puts up with him. I don’t suppose they have to fly together. Ryderbeit may be un affreux, but he must have some qualities.’
She leant down and kissed him, wide-mouthed, her tongue rolling luxuriously round inside his mouth. ‘You have qualities,’ she said at last, allowing him to breathe again. ‘Magnificent qualities.’
He pulled her on to him, pressing her breasts hard against him, his hands sliding down her long back, over the soft curve of her buttocks, feeling her warm and wet between the thighs — this strong, dark, beautifully-made pied-noir who belonged to him, in that moment, completely. And he thought, with uneasy satisfaction, I’ve cuckolded the CIA. He wished to God he could hate the CIA — that they had done him some irreparable wrong so that he could hate them as much as he could love this girl. And he realised, with a catch of misgiving, that he could love her very much.
Sometime later he asked her: ‘Do you love your husband?’
‘Don’t talk about him. Please. Not now.’
They slept heavily after that, for several hours, before Murray woke suddenly. There was a confusion of voices outside, muffled and heavy, then a banging on the door. ‘Murray Wilde, you evil bastard!’
He sprang up, putting himself between the girl and the door. A French voice broke in, quiet and rapid; then came a crash on the door, low down as though someone had kicked it. ‘Get out o’ there, you sneaky copulator!’ Ryderbeit yelled, hammering with both fists. ‘You selfish thievin’ bastard!’
One of the French voices began again, ‘Alors mon vieux, vas te coucher.’ And Jones repeated, ‘C’mon Sammy, let’s go to bed.’
Jackie had woken too and whispered, between the hammering, ‘What’s happened?’
Murray stood naked in front of the door and said loudly, ‘Ryderbeit, go to bed, as Jones tells you. Go to bed and shut up, or I’ll set the bear on to you.’
There followed what sounded like a scuffle, then a great howl of anguish: ‘I wanna talk, I wanna drink, I wanna talk t’yer Wilde, you greedy thievin’ copulator! And I’m all ’lone…!’ His voice receded with a shuffle of feet and muttered voices.
Murray went back to the bed. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘he should be in a cage — with the bear.’ He lay down and kissed her on her mouth and cheek and under the ear. ‘He’s just drunk.’
‘He knows I’m in here. How do you think he knows? He looked in my room, I suppose. He’s a pig.’
‘He’s only drunk.’
‘It’s not good, if he talks — if those pilots and the Negro talk — and my husband finds out. There are no secrets in this country.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ he whispered, without conviction. ‘He probably won’t even remember in the morning.’
They lay as they had slept, his arm round her shoulder and hand between her legs. Then, in the dark silence, he felt her sobbing. ‘It is so humiliating! It’s always the same,’ she cried, ‘hiding away, in dirty hotels in this dirty continent, full of dirty drunken misérables!’
He held her tightly, beginning to rock her like a child: ‘Don’t worry, just sleep. Sleep and forget.’
But he could not forget. What had she said, always the same? How many times the same, in how many hotels? — dirty furtive hotels in Vientiane, Bangkok, Saigon? Couldn’t he take her away, rescue her from the whole ugly scene, run like hell with her? What was there to stop him? His job as a writer allowed him almost unlimited freedom of movement, his talents were not exclusive to one organisation. He could run faster and further than Maxwell Conquest.
There was nothing to stop him, except a mythical fifth of one billion U.S. dollars.
CHAPTER 2
They woke early, with the light splintering through the banana leaves outside. The fan had stopped sometime in the night and already they were beginning to sweat. They did not speak at all as they came together again, with a steady synchronised passion that left them drained and happy, sweating freely now, their minds still empty of the hard realities ahead. Ryderbeit and Jones. The plane at noon. Vientiane and the mean-mouthed husband in the CIA.
They stood together under the shower and in the shafts of sunlight Murray studied her in detail, then began systematically to kiss her whole body from her mouth down to the inside of her thighs, with a deep mute passion this time, while her fingers held his head. As they stepped back into the bedroom, their skin already drying in the heat, he pressed her back across the bed, becoming suddenly greedy and desperate, because this might be the last time: there would never be another forced landing and forced night in a distant hotel behind the lines. She protested at first, feebly murmuring that she must go, it was getting late; then surrendering as totally as before — perhaps sharing his own desperation, because she must have known too, far better even than he, what the chances were — how hopeless they were. Afterwards she wept, quietly, without hysteria or embarrassment; and he could only comfort her with the promise that he would try to help her. (Help her with two hundred million dollars?)
It was crazy, of course. He should run away with her now — today, this week, before she took that plane to Saigon.
She wiped her eyes and stood up to dress. ‘We must go and buy toothbrushes and dentifrice,’ she said, with startling practicality. She looked at him with her large eyes and smiled: ‘I’m sorry, but you taste a little bit of whisky. Only a very little, and I don’t mind. Really I don’t mind. I probably taste too. But we mustn’t be like Ryderbeit. He must taste disgusting this morning!’
They laughed at Ryderbeit’s expense, as they crept down the stairs and out of the empty lobby. The hotel was still asleep. In the main street there were a few Laotian schoolchildren on bicycles, and long-haired beggars sat in the shade of the pagoda roofs, listlessly offering their wooden bowls. Between the pagodas were long flights of steps down to the river where naked children were preparing sampans for fishing.
They found a tiny shop that sold a few Western pharmaceutical goods, alongside the more traditional healing herbs and potions. Jackie also bought a comb, and Murray a razor. Afterwards they climbed a steep shaded path to the top of the hill in the centre of the town, to the little golden-spired pagoda which had a terrace with white stone balustrades and a small ivory buddha set back in a shrine full of strong-smelling flowers. From here they could see the whole town and the great brown Mekong winding deep between the hills, past the Royal Palace, which was like a miniature French chateau with long windows and a lily pond in the garden. Then the tiny airfield with its rows of helicopters and the T 28 fighter-bombers, lined up like bumblebees; while somewhere to the north, beyond the layers of dim blue h
ills, was a muddy little square with a lonely American called Wedgwood and the broken body of a G 46 transport plane. It seemed very remote now, very unreal.
He stopped and looked at her carefully. ‘What will happen, Jacqueline, when we get back to Vientiane?’
‘I will see you perhaps.’
‘It won’t be easy.’
She shrugged. ‘No, of course not. And I go to Saigon next week.’
He took her arm and led her back to the zigzagging steps down into the town. It was breathlessly hot, even in the still shade. Halfway down she turned to him: ‘You don’t want to see me again, do you? You don’t want the complications. Why should you?’ She started off again, walking fast now until she was almost running down the last few terraces of steps. He began to run too and almost collided with her in the steel light of the street. For a moment they walked together, out of breath and in silence. Then she said, without looking at him: ‘We’ll see each other in Saigon, perhaps?’
‘How do you know I’m going back to Saigon?’ he asked sharply.
‘You have to go back — you have your work there.’ She began to walk away again, briskly down the middle of the street. The few pedestrians avoided her, strolling in the margin of shade. Murray followed, but did not try to catch her up. Outside the hotel they were waylaid by a line of little girls who leapt up from their haunches, trying to sell them lengths of embroidered silk. Jackie brushed past them, but Murray was inveigled into a shrieking, giggling argument which he could not comprehend, and missed her as she entered the hotel.
When he got inside, she had already disappeared. There was only Ryderbeit, sitting alone in the restaurant, sipping a glass of milky liquid. He looked up at Murray with eyes like bruised fruit. ‘Hello soldier. How are the tubes?’
Murray sat down reluctantly. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Sick as dogs.’ He grinned through his cracked lips, his smooth greenish complexion sprouting only a fringe of black stubble. ‘And how was the long night with you, Murray boy?’
The Tale of the Lazy Dog Page 11