“Why must Madame Nhu loathe the twist,” she said, pouting. “I do love it so.”
“If you’ve got the urge to twist, a GI combo jams every Tuesday at the Brink Hotel.”
“I insist you take me to the brink right now.”
“It’s not Tuesday. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
She giggled. “I didn’t mean the hotel.”
The thought of being out in the world with the assistant to a Communist boss on the International Control Commission made my heart skip. Being in bed with her sent it racing.
“Why are you here, Nadja Kowalska?” I asked as she rolled off to lie beside me.
“With you, illegally naked?”
“In Saigon.”
Nadja slid her hand between my thighs, smiling at my reaction. “Ah, well. I would have preferred a posting in the West, but anything that got me out of Poland qualified as irresistible. In a way, Saigon is perfect. To prove myself as a journalist, this is the place. If I could latch onto a magazine or wire service, that would be splendid.”
“Your government would let you do that?”
“I wasn’t planning to ask for permission,” she said as she stroked me.
“You’d defect?”
“I prefer to think of it as slipping away and not looking back.”
“Your parents wouldn’t get in trouble?”
“My reputation for irreverence is well established. And I made sure Papa had nothing to do with my getting assigned to the ICC here.”
“You’d be okay with not seeing your folks again?”
“My father loves me too much, my mother not at all. She and I have never gotten along. His affection for me drove her mad with jealousy. I couldn’t bear the way she punished him with her scorn. When I left for university papa wept. My dear mamusia did a crossword puzzle. I never lived with them again, which pleased her immensely.”
I turned her over, curled around her lovely rump to nuzzle her ear and cop a feel.
“At least you’ll never have to worry about the craziest law Madame Nhu and His Holiness ever dreamt up.”
“What law is that?” she said, hoarse with passion, her pale flesh trembling.
“Banning falsies.”
She gasped, either at the ludicrous idea or my fondling her. “You can’t be serious.”
“Luckily they’ve been talked out of it.”
“What a pity. The police would have adored enforcing it.”
She opened herself to me and her breath kept catching as I touched her. “I’ve heard a story about a brothel in Saigon,” she said, “where the women are suspended from the ceiling . . . in seated postures . . . and lowered onto their clients until they’re . . . joined. The ladies are . . . spun. I’d give quite a lot to—”
The room phone rang. Somehow she managed to answer it. Robeson had tracked me down. Had I heard the news?
“What news?”
“The report of General Nguyen Van Lang’s death.”
Vietnamese radio, Blue had told him, was announcing the valiant general’s heroic death fighting off a Viet Cong ambush in the marshes west of the city. He had died instantly, struck in the chest, a large-bore hole now blown in him where the crystal spike had protruded.
Chapter Nineteen
I arrived at CID a half hour late the next morning.
“Robeson call for you,” Missy Blue said as I walked in. “Better go there.”
“Where is there?”
She handed me an address for the Special Technical and Economic Mission. I recognized it as the late Major Furth’s duty post. “Hurry,” she said.
I rushed over. On the building’s second floor a plywood door hung off its hinges. A pissed-off major stood staring at overturned office equipment and the row of emptied filing cabinets that lined the far wall. He kept running a hand back and forth across his crew cut. The name plate on his khaki blouse said KLETT.
I identified myself as CID and said, “No guard on the place?”
“An ARVN corporal and private were on last night. No sign of either one this morning. Gone AWOL, their captain says. So much for round-the-clock protection from our hosts.”
“Anybody see the break-in?” I asked, as Robeson approached us from the far end of the room.
Major Klett shoved his hands into his back pockets. “A couple of shopkeepers across the street who live above their businesses.”
“Did they recognize the burglars as locals?”
“Didn’t sound like the neighborhood layabouts, no.” Klett nodded at the shambles. “Bastards didn’t take much of anything saleable. Left the typewriters, the adding machines. They sure trashed everything, though. That, over there, they ransacked real good.”
He pointed to a steel desk, its crappy lock busted open.
“I called my boss when I saw that,” he said. “And he called you.”
“It’s Major Furth’s,” Robeson explained.
The desk was gutted, its contents spilled on the floor. Labeled file folders lay empty. Robeson asked about Furth’s work.
“Jim chaperoned a USAID program called CIP.”
“CIP?” I said. “Cows, Insecticide, and Pigs?”
“Commodity Import Program. It’s like the aid we laid on Europe after the war.”
“The Marshall Plan,” Robeson said.
“Pretty much, yeah. Day-to-day Major Furth signed off on new import licenses the South Vietnamese government issues to businessmen and processed the paperwork on the procured goods. He also handled the paper on USAID’s civilian giveaways.”
“He was the CIP watchdog?”
Klett shook his head. “More like a rubber stamp. Whatever they asked for, we gave them. When the embassy started making noises that they were planning to bring Diem around by shutting down American aid for commodity imports, our overseers asked Jim to take stock. Work up a report.”
“Was their thinking the requests Furth was getting weren’t legit? They want him to check for suspicious activity?”
“No, quite the contrary. The hope was he’d give the program high marks and a glowing review that would convince the embassy of its importance, so the ambassador wouldn’t turn CIP off for too long—and risk driving Diem closer to negotiations with Hanoi. Jim had the idea to do an audit while he was at it. The first ever. He was looking to see if the program could be run more efficiently, make it even more appealing. Soon as he began, though, Jim started complaining it was shameful, a total disgrace.”
“What was a disgrace?” I said.
“The amount of fraud and larceny in CIP. The rampant theft of USAID shipments arriving in port. Lifted straight off the ships even before they dock, rustled from storehouses on the docks, dipped into whenever any of it moves by truck.”
“Tapped at every step.”
Klett nodded. “If it’s in transit, it’s in play. The pilfering’s so bad, Jim said, we’re constantly buying back our own supplies to compensate for the losses.”
“What’s going missing?” I said.
“Whatever the Vietnamese are hot to have. Rice, sugar, concrete, paper, all the luxury goods . . . at least half of every shipment disappears. He mentioned cash recently too.”
“Dollars?”
“No.” Klett blinked. “Local currency. Lots of it.”
Robeson made a quizzical face. “Sir, what exactly was he referring to?”
“I’m sorry. I was engaged elsewhere. I never got a chance to ask for the details.”
“But he kept you abreast of his findings?”
“Only in general terms. But for sure he had found more than the garden variety horseshit that passes for normal in this place.”
Robeson said, “Normal horseshit like GIs buying back our own stolen goods in the street markets at three times the PX price?”
“Not just t
hat. The Viets have a genius for rackets.” Major Klett beckoned us to the window that overlooked the building’s courtyard. “The city’s electrical grid is crap, right?” he said. We nodded.
He pointed to a portable generator running full-out. “Practically the minute we got our own generator up and running,” Klett said, “city officials showed up with our Vietnamese counterparts and insisted we connect it to the building’s meter. Said we had to pay for the electricity we were generating. Threatened to evict us if we didn’t. I balked. But my CO told me to pay.”
“What do you think they’d have done if he’d backed you and you said no?” Robeson asked.
“Complain and whine until they got me and him transferred, swapped out for more compliant advisors. Failing that, they’d make our lives as miserable as possible until our tours were up, then send us off with nasty write-ups about our uncooperative attitudes.” He looked out beyond the buildings. “Jim was starting to see this place as one big scam.”
I said, “How far along was he with his report?”
Klett sucked air between clenched teeth, his face pained. “Close to finished.”
“And this is where he kept it?” I pointed to the rifled desk.
“No, no. Major Furth kept his baby under wraps, locked away in our office safe. Ledgers, notes, the latest working draft. The supporting data too, pages numbered and dated. He was meticulous about security.”
“Where’s the safe where Furth kept the report?” I said.
Klett grimaced and pointed to a heavy French antique in the far corner of the room. The dented front suggested the thieves had attempted to bust it open, without success.
“We’ll need to see the contents,” I said. “We have the clearances.”
“A squad from MAAG headquarters showed up the day after Major Furth was killed. I thought they might be coming to protect us. They demanded I open the safe, cleaned it out, sealed it all up and took it away. All ordered by General Harkins—acting on orders from the Department of Defense.”
Major Klett had the resigned calm of a man about to be engulfed in an unavoidable shitstorm.
“Who else might be privy to what’s in the major’s report?” Robeson asked.
“There’s an American civilian who was helping him interpret the data. He and Jim socialized some. He just up and quit when he heard Jim got killed.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Fred Tuttle, economic counselor lent to Jim by USOM. He was advising three, four days a week. Some weekends too.”
“Where is Mr. Tuttle?”
“Holed up in a hotel, waiting on a flight out.”
“Which one?”
“Hotel Duc. Maybe a block or so from the old bombed-out palace.”
“Corner of Cong Ly and Tran Qui Cap,” I said. “I know the place.”
The major got called away by one of his men and gingerly made his way through the mess. Robeson squatted at Major Furth’s trashed desk, poking underneath the gutted file drawer.
He smirked. “Ya oughta remember Hotel Duc,” he said. “You unburdened yourself of half a month’s pay there—what?—two weeks ago.”
“Do I bust your chops like that?” I bitched.
Robeson stopped rifling through the spilled files. “Jesus.” He passed two empty file folders over his shoulder to me and kept rummaging. The label on one read Victor, Edward; the other, LaValle, Henderson—the first and second of the Red Queen’s American kills. We called over to Major Klett to ask if he knew them. He didn’t but thought they were economic advisors, old colleagues of Jim Furth’s who’d been helping unofficially with his report. “Is it important?”
Me and Robeson exchanged a look. Whoever had tossed the office hadn’t known Furth’s report had already been seized. They’d still be after it, or anyone who might know its contents.
“The rest of your American personnel all accounted for?” I said.
“My people? Yeah. Except the civilian, Tuttle.”
“Sir,” Robeson said, “it might be advisable to arm yourselves.”
“We already have.” He patted his holster.
Out on the street, Robeson and I put our heads together. The three casualties were looking less and less like random ambush victims.
“These men had regular dealings over this report,” I said. “A fact that seems to have escaped fuckin’ Sergeant Crouch. We better get to the bean counter while he’s still among the living.”
Chapter Twenty
Hotel Duc was all CIA. Their military friends might stay a night or two, but the Duc belonged to the Agency. Two uniformed white mice lolled on the corner next to their green-and-white police jeep, but the CIA knew they offered no protection, so Nungs in black guarded the hotel’s front and back entrances. Tribal mercenaries, Nungs had no credos, no ideology—except fight like hell for whoever was paying.
The hotel had amenities: a good little bar, rec room, restaurant, small theater, its own liquor store, and fully polygraphed mama-sans to clean the fifty rooms and five apartments. Plus a swimming pool and a freestanding pool house where a poker game redistributed wealth nightly. As Robeson had been happy to remind me, I’d dropped a couple of hundred at that table betting a broken straight.
Hotel Duc was home to a hundred agents, and now to one Fred Tuttle. The duty officer wouldn’t so much as speak his room number but had us escorted upstairs by a small graying American who wore a shoulder holster with a shiny .357 so big it made him look like he’d sprouted half a bosom. He took us to a room on the top floor where we banged on the door and announced ourselves. Silence. Our escort spoke up on our behalf and a voice inside demanded we hold our credentials up to the peephole. The door creaked open.
Fred Tuttle was short and balding and looked like the accountant he was, except for the .45 he held unsteadily behind his right leg. Tuttle sat down on the couch and indicated the armchairs across from him. Robeson slid into one. I slouched against the wall, arms akimbo, and made a friendly face, trying to put him at ease.
“How soon you out of here?” I said.
Tuttle dropped the pistol on the cushion beside him. His fingers shook a little as he lit up a Marlboro. “Eleven days and a wakeup.”
“You must be happy to be going home.”
He wiped the sweat from his upper lip. “I’ll be happy when I’m at thirty thousand feet and still breathing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re wise to be cautious.”
He huffed derisively. “Terrified is more like it. There are parties out there who’d like me not to leave the country with what I know.” Tuttle clutched himself as if he was cold, though sweat stained his shirt. “Fuck,” he said. “I hate hiding like this but who wants to be a dead hero? I’m putting as many air miles as I can between here and wherever.”
“Your bosses okay with you quitting?” Robeson said, trying to distract Tuttle from his panic.
“My superiors weren’t happy, no. Leaned on me hard. Couldn’t stop me, legally speaking. I’m in breach of contract is all. I said I can walk and I did. But now I’m no longer eligible for government transport. And civilian flights are booked solid. I’d try going standby but I can’t risk hanging around the airport for hours. So I’m flying commercial on my own dime, taking nothing through customs, walking straight onto the flight.”
Robeson shone his pearly whites on Tuttle. “You and Jim Furth were friends, I understand. Was he involved with any local women? Keep a private apartment where they could meet, that sort of thing?”
“Why are you asking?” he said, instantly suspicious.
“We’re wondering if he might have stashed a draft of his report somewhere outside the office.”
“Jim inventoried everything like trial evidence. Everything dated and coded. Nothing left the premises. It’s all in an ancient safe in the STEM office.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Exc
ept . . .”
“Except what?”
“All the research is gone, along with the report. Confiscated.”
Tuttle paled and curled in on himself where he sat on the couch. You could see his fear reignite. I didn’t want to lose him, and kept talking.
“Was there a new lady in Major Furth’s life?”
“Always. The latest was a real Kewpie doll, way younger than him.”
“You saw her?”
“Once. A sweet shy thing.”
“This new friend, you recall a name? Anything about who she was, where they met?”
“He probably said, but I don’t remember.”
The room was messy, the bed unmade. Soiled dishes sat on a table alongside a near-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker. Tuttle caught me scoping the place.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s, ah . . . a little scungy. I keep the maids out. Change rooms every day. Can’t risk having the housekeepers coming through. They tell me everyone who works here is heavily screened, but . . .”
“You’re afraid of the maids?” Robeson said.
“I’m afraid of whatever Lady Death might turn up as next. Look how she did in General Lang.”
Robeson shot me a look. Tuttle’s CIA hosts were clearly keeping current on the Red Queen.
“Did you know the other two G-5s she killed?”
Tuttle nodded. “Captain Victor and Major LaValle. We heard Ed died in a random VC attack. But LaValle’s family was hard to track down, so his name was withheld. If Jim had known . . .” Tuttle looked like crap, rheumy and pasty.
“Victor and LaValle, what was their connection to Jim’s work?”
“Jim enlisted their help when he started to grasp the extent of the corruption and outright thievery. After they saw what he’d already found, both of them volunteered incriminating information they’d become aware of independently.”
“Did they know what was in the draft report?”
“Much of it, yes. They’d come in after hours when they could to review Jim’s work, add their pieces to the growing puzzle.”
Play the Red Queen Page 13