“You thinking she did him before she did him?”
“Or when he was . . . most distracted.”
“Man oh man. That’s so cold it’s hot.”
“Then she goes and showers, washes off all the blood. Puts on her clean ao dai. Quietly slips away.”
“Premeditated as hell,” Robeson said. “Y’all see a picture card anywhere, Sarge?” He started going through the night table closest to the door.
I rifled the blank stationery on the small writing desk. Punctilious service and social eminence, read the hotel’s ad card. Favored by discriminating travelers. And beautiful killers. No playing card. Nothing in the center drawer of the wooden secretary either. I pinched a hotel envelope, slipped in as much of the glass flute as I could retrieve from the bathroom sink, folded it lengthwise and slid it gently into my shirt pocket.
Ting pretended not to notice that I was removing evidence. His department had a fancy crime lab thanks to generous US advisors, yet he clearly wanted me to have her prints, maybe to confirm her identity if either of us ever bagged her. Or . . . maybe he needed me to preserve the prints because officially nothing was going to be left of the scene: no photos, no evidence of what had happened. Witnesses would be warned off. The police captain’s immediate concern would be concealing the circumstances of the general’s demise, not finding the Red Queen.
Senior plainclothes dicks like Captain Ting of the new Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation were repackaged old-school Sûreté detectives trained by the French, coached and equipped for years by Michigan State University’s policing experts, presently mentored by CIA operatives. Plainclothes VBI detectives weren’t any less corrupt than their white mice colleagues, just better paid and more sophisticated in their extortions. Some, like Ting, showed some class, even a little reluctance. Meaning they might apologize if they ever had to squeeze your nuts or erase evidence.
“What branch of the army did the general belong to?” I said.
“General Nguyễn Văn Lang’s post is at headquarter,” Ting replied.
“What did he do at headquarter?”
“Work with Directorate of Supply. And at Ngân Hàng Quốc Gia also.”
“What the fuck is that, Captain?”
“National Bank, Viet Nam.”
The red scarf was cut away on Ting’s orders. With great difficulty two policemen cocooned the body in two ponchos and lifted the general onto a litter. Messy work. The cops were smeared. Half the hotel must have heard by now; no matter how much Ting’s bosses might wish or pretend, no way would all this stay secret.
“Unseemly business,” Ting said, repeating a favorite expression he’d borrowed from a British war flick we’d seen together at the small Shell Theatre beneath the apartment building the oil company maintained for its employees. Ting added his customary, “Bad thing, very bad thing,” his face somber. “General Lang have wife, many childrens.” He warbled something showy in French that sounded like a poodle gargling.
I cocked an eyebrow at Robeson. “What’s he sayin’?”
“Il me semble parfois que mon sang coule à flots/Ainsi qu’une fontaine aux rythmiques sanglots . . . Fait pour donner á boire á ces cruelles filles,” Robeson repeated. “My blood gushes like a fountain and is given to whores to drink.”
I whistled. Ting allowed himself a sheepish grin. “Baudelaire,” he said, a frog poet I knew he liked.
“‘Tutti frutti, oh rooti,’” I said. “Beau de Little Richard.”
The grin vanished. “Assez vu,” Ting announced. “Enough seen,” Robeson whispered.
Captain Ting stepped into the hall to check on his men’s progress. I followed. Ting’s detectives had already questioned the room-service waiter, the doormen, clerks, and floor maids. Aside from the waiter who had delivered champagne, no one had seen the Red Queen or the general after they closeted themselves in his suite. The general’s aide had talked the night manager into letting him sack out in the room of a Dutch journalist away on assignment. No one remembered seeing the heartbreakingly innocent young woman leave the hotel. Certainly no one had copped to helping her escape.
“Any chance she’s still here,” I said to Ting, “hidden in a room of her own?”
“Hotel not big,” he said and flicked his hand. “She gone.”
Robeson joined us. “No one saw her split, Dai uy? A boss fox like that?”
“Maybe she quỉ,” Ting suggested. “Evil spirit.”
“Is that right?” Robeson looked somber. He was church-raised but took supernatural doings real serious. He used to say his late granny had conversations with the dead while they lay in rest at the family funeral parlor.
Ting glanced around to make sure none of his men were near enough to see him pull out a handkerchief and extract a circular silvery medallion.
“What the fuck is that?” I said.
Ting grunted. “Found on body. You take.”
He dropped the medallion back in the handkerchief and handed it to me. Robeson opened the cloth to get a closer look. Within the medallion’s outer ring a hollow triangle framed an engraved lotus plant with a sword in the foreground, its blade raised. Sitting underneath the medallion was a familiar playing card: the death figure in an ao dai, red skull for a face and gold star in the upper corner.
“La carte de vengeance de la Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
Robeson translated: “He says it’s the revenge card of the beautiful dame—”
“—without mercy. I get it, I get it.”
Something was scrawled in Vietnamese across the card’s face. We hadn’t seen that before.
“What’s this mean?” Robeson said to Ting, pointing to the writing: Trừ gian.
“Say, ‘exterminate traitor.’” Using his manicured pinky nail, Ting pointed to a tiny hole in the card and the bloody pin on the back of the medallion. “She pin card to General with needle.”
“Pin where?” I said.
Ting brought his index finger up to his face. “Through cover of eye.” He leaned in. “No say I say.”
Pinned to his eyelid and pushed right into the eyeball.
“You careful, yes? Dangereuse,” Ting whispered in French. He repeated it in Vietnamese: “Tồi tệ.” Ting turned and strolled down the corridor to check on the men wrestling the stretcher down the rear stairs.
“Well, that’s a first,” Robeson said, “Ting inviting us to investigate where we’ve got no jurisdiction.”
I rewrapped Ting’s evidence. “And coming that close to the general’s corpse. Meaning he’s more scared of his superiors than of hungry ghosts.”
A South Vietnamese general stabbed to death in Saigon would have Ting’s bosses gnawing on his bones and demanding the impossible, even as they tried to cover it up. So he needed our help. He couldn’t openly investigate a murder they wanted buried, the very fact of it erased. Yet they’d also insist he solve it, having ordered him to destroy evidence, silence witnesses, and make their compromised general vanish along with the true circumstances of his death.
Miss Blue recognized the medallion immediately as a badge of the Cao Dai religious sect’s private army. She mimicked its central position on their tan berets by holding it up against her beautiful head of hair. I didn’t tell her it had recently been tacked through a dead man’s eye.
“What exactly is Cao Dai?” Robeson said.
“Special religion,” Blue said. “Big temple in Tây Ninh City.”
“And it has an army?”
She shook her head. “Years ago, yes. Big army. Battalion of mens and womens both.”
“I hope the Baptists don’t get wind of this,” her boyfriend joked.
“Diệm finish Cao Đài army,” Missy Blue said. “Army no more. Cao Đài soldier no more.”
I removed the envelope from my pocket, carefully lifted the bloody thumbprint from the largest piece
of glass, and taped it to a white card. I wrapped the flute fragments in a page of Stars and Stripes, then placed them, the calling card, the medallion, and the tape with the thumbprint in the ammo box padded with cardboard. Not much of an evidence collection: three red scarves, two shell casings and three other vengeance cards. I snapped the fasteners closed.
“What’s buggin’ you?” Robeson asked.
“Just mulling the lady’s handiwork at the Continental. I wonder if getting close to her victims is something she’s done before. Remember that wallet photo of the girl with Major Furth? What if that was her? What if it’s not the astrologer who picks them out? What if she’s already met her ambush victims?”
“Major Furth got to his feet as she was approaching the café.”
I nodded. “Maybe because he was waiting for her.”
“Christ almighty. So they don’t just pick the location and the time, they find an officer who’s looking for female company, and set him up on a date with Lady Death?”
I needed someone to do a little discreet snooping. I couldn’t trust Crouch, so I called over the captain’s clerk, Corporal Magid, and told him to check into the first two dead officers’ personal lives, to see if they’d taken up with a respectable young lady of university age in the weeks before they died.
Chapter Eighteen
Robeson and Blue were back on again, so I was solo for the evening and called Nadja to invite her up to the bar on the Majestic’s rooftop terrace. Neither of us had remembered to eat, so we were quickly and happily drunk.
She needed the buzz, she said, to subdue the headache she’d gotten that morning trying to sort out all the in-country American agencies for her boss.
“I can’t imagine why you were confused,” I said, and explained that the Vietnam Task Force was replacing the Vietnam Working Group, which had fused with the Southeast Asia Task Force. “Meanwhile MAAG-V is phasing out and the brand-new MAC-V is phasing in. MAAG supplied and subsidized the French, MAC-V will aid and advise the South Vietnamese.”
She covered her ears. “It should be set to music, made into a patter song.” Nadja took a long, deep drag on her cigarette. “It’s all horribly knotty,” she said, smoke punctuating her words.
“Naughty?”
“No, knotty. Knotty.” She mimicked tying a bow. “You’re as bad as the Russians, with their directorates and groups and departments, changing names ad nauseam. The Vietnamese have taken to imitating you, creating new agencies for MAC-V to advise just to keep your noses out of their affairs.”
“You think they’re making up departments for us to advise that don’t actually do anything?”
“Very nearly. Their job is to agree with you and say, ‘Yes, yes. You numba one!’ And collect your largesse.”
“We duck and dodge our superiors too, come to that. Have to. There’s a dozen contrary US generals and admirals in-country and nowhere near enough soldiers and sailors to make all those brass heads happy, moving us around like poker chips.”
Our top military honchos and the new ambassador were like ants riding down the Saigon River on a turd, each of them convinced he was the commodore.
“Viet Nam is just a piece of it,” I said. “We’ve got arms cached in trouble spots on several continents, along with military-assistance missions, prepping for Communist revolutions.”
“Yes,” she said. “People’s wars.” She raised her glass. “The old imperialism is done for. Dollar imperialism and Red imperialism are the coming thing.”
“And us? You and me? Where are we in all that?”
“Unnoticed, I hope.”
“Why’s your boss interested in our alphabet soup anyway?”
“He didn’t say. He’s flying to Hanoi tonight and asked me what I knew.”
“Hanoi, as in North Viet Nam?”
“It’s nothing special,” she said, pleased by my surprise. “He flies up at least once a month on the Commission’s ancient Boeing Stratoliner. Always at night. There aren’t as many fighter aircraft aloft after dark, you see.”
“What’s he go to Hanoi for?”
“To make the diplomatic rounds. He’s trying to back-channel a settlement of this darling bush war of yours. He’s young and dashing and wants ever so much to help craft a ceasefire and get awarded the Order of Lenin along with a Nobel Peace Prize.”
“How’s that going?”
“He’s making progress, he says. He insists the North Vietnamese are genuinely interested in avoiding all-out civil war.”
“You ever go along?” I said. “To Hanoi?”
“Only once. It’s fairly gloomy. They’re not having a good year. There’s a major drought and assistance has been slow coming because Moscow and Peking are squabbling. Besides, I am a cowardly flier, and that plane is a fright, decades old . . . Mind you, it’s not as bad as a Soviet death ship. At least it has four working engines. Still, I am not particularly anxious to explore another Marxist society. Too many Russians hanging around Hanoi, glowering at the Communist Chinese advisors whilst playing out their intramural rivalries. Comrades those comrades are not.”
“You’re gonna find yourself hanging around a salt mine talking like that.”
Nadja arched her eyebrows. “They will do what they will do, and always badly. Back in Poland every job has eight workers doing it. All eight desperately bored and depressed because there’s not enough work to share and no pleasure in it. There’s nothing to purchase with your earnings either, other than wodka. Gray is the prevailing hue, and everybody’s always chuntering.
“In any case,” she went on, “the Stratoliner’s got thirty seats, most of them empty. If you’d like a lost weekend, I’m sure I could arrange it.” The vixen in Nadja appeared as she broke into a smile.
A Hanoi holiday. I shot her a look.
“No, no.” She giggled at my expression and actually snorted. “You misunderstood. I’m not inviting you to Hanoi. The Stratoliner stops off next door in Cambodia and Laos to pick up and drop off diplomats. You would love Vientiane City. Much wilder than Saigon, a rogues’ gallery of Russian spies, French and Corsican mafiosi, Pathet Lao agents and Red Chinese operatives, all mixing it up with Laotian royalists. We could deplane there, or Phnom Penh if you prefer, and have some time to ourselves away from this place. We’d fly back on its return leg. What say you, Ellsworth Miser?”
I had spent a week in Vientiane at Lulu’s brothel, and at the Green Lantern where I’d tried Lao opium for the first time. A wild town. One streetlight, countless dives. Opium was their only money crop. Bales of it lay in the street. I spent the next week in Phnom Penh getting high on soups spiced with the Cambodians’ favorite herb—marijuana. Lieutenant Seftas loved to escort official visitors there and encourage unsuspecting cheeseheads from Wisconsin to get blasted on bowls of somlah machoo.
“You’re on,” I kidded her, “and then when your boss negotiates a settlement we can give Hanoi a try.”
A weekend with Nadja could really broaden my horizons, though I doubted my captain or the major would see it that way. How long could I keep them from finding out about us?
“You know,” she slurred, as we each downed another shot of wodka, “I set out this morning to be knotty—I mean naughty.” The way she looked at me as she said it, I no longer cared who found out about us. “But Madame Nhu’s blue laws make it strangely difficult to be naughty. Underwire bras—disallowed. Extravagant hairdos—illegal. Sentimental love songs—forbidden. And here I am lusting after a good weepy ballad.”
“You think you got it bad? Brothels ain’t legal,” I said. “No more strip tease. Not even a beauty contest. Can’t go to the track to bet the ponies. The Dragon Lady has nixed boxing matches and cockfights. You can’t even buy a deck of cards for a game of solitaire, much less play games of chance at a casino. Here we are in Asia and opium dens are outlawed.”
The things that offended the
holier-than-thou First Lady were as endless as the absurd decrees President Diem issued at her behest.
Nadja licked her lips. “So what is there for sincere sinners to do by way of debauchery?”
“Less and less, I tell ya. No more blue movies or risqué magazines. No contraceptives either.”
“Fine thing. Soldiers without contraceptives or pornography,” she said. “Men without women. What is war coming to?”
“Necking in public, verboten. General Harkins’s orders: soldiers rotating home can’t so much as kiss their girlfriends goodbye.”
“Well then, we’ll just have to stay in.”
I helped her down to her new room on four, where she abandoned her clothes a piece at a time. I followed, gathering them up. She passed out as soon as her naked flesh hit the sheets. I lowered the gauzy mosquito net and slipped in next to her in my clothes. A mosquito already under the net settled on her beautiful arm, ready to gorge. If it tipped its ass up to slip its syringe beak into her, I’d know it was a malaria carrier, and have to smack it hard enough to wake her. But if it lay flat while inserting its tiny hair needle—standard behavior of the non-malaria variety—I could let it be and let her sleep. Buddha would decide if the mosquito lived or died, if Nadja was going to awaken or sleep on. The mosquito raised its ass. Malaria.
But Nadja was snoring so sweetly, I took pity on her and pinched it off, smearing my thumb and index finger with a little of her blood. She awoke anyway, scratching the site.
“You like my room?” she said.
I wasn’t sure if she was talking in her sleep. “Yes. And you’re far better looking than the last occupant.”
I eased back down beside her and kissed her eyes.
“You’d be cooler if you shed some clothing,” she said, and worked at my belt while I stared at her pink nipples, set off against her white bosom. “I need skin,” she said, suddenly energized, though her eyes were still closed. She pulled my belt and holster away, held back her flaming hair and lightly ran her tongue along my thighs. I groaned. Straddling me, she wove back and forth like a tipsy cobra.
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