Play the Red Queen

by Juris Jurjevics

  Rue Catinat remained very French. Unlike other parts of the city, the sidewalks were intact, not pitted or cracked, and paved with small rectangular tiles. We moved gratefully into the shade of the tamarind trees that lined our route from the foot of the river toward the cathedral and the old Sûreté headquarters, now VBI, where my sometime colleague Captain Ting was assigned.

  I wanted to stop at Aspar printers to ask the Portuguese proprietor if he might be able to run off some cards.

  “Business cards?” he said. “Calling cards?”

  “Larger—the size of, oh, a playing card.”

  “We can produce invitations, announcements, note cards. No engraving, I am afraid.”

  “This wouldn’t need engraving.” I took out my wallet and handed him the death card I’d found in the jeep. He went pale.

  “We . . . ah . . . cannot do anything illustrative. No four-color graphics.”

  Nadja peered at the ghoulish figure, obviously curious. “This appears to be only three colors.”

  “Monsieur, madame,” he said, sweat beading at his hairline. “It is most illegal to own so much as an unregistered mimeograph machine. Our printing press, she is closely monitored.” His brow furrowed. “To manufacture cards such as this is absolutely forbidden.”

  “Full decks of gaming cards, sure. But this would be only the one. A novelty.”

  The man held the death card by one corner like it was gonna burn his hand. “I can make no such piece for you.”

  Nadja said, “By chance, do you recognize the printer? Or perhaps the artist?”

  “This is done on a letterpress, but I don’t recognize the workmanship or the artist, no.” He was clearly eager to hand it back.

  Nadja tried a flirty smile. “Do you know of a printer who might be persuaded to do a job like this?”

  “No, madame. No one would defy the president’s morality decrees or wish to bring unwanted awareness in such times as these.”

  I thanked him and slipped the card back into my breast pocket. No doubt her cards had been run off in a printing shop deep in the Chinese district of Cholon where Diem’s morality laws were meaningless. A shop I’d never be able to find.

  We continued up Catinat. Every shop window displayed the obligatory photo of “beloved” President Diem. None of Nhu—yet. The kerchiefs around our necks were already dry. We ducked into the Thai Thach gourmet shop to drink in the air-conditioning and the rich aromas of imported French mustards and cheeses. We bought cold sodas in bottles and downed them quickly. Nadja held the sweaty glass to her cheek and told me about street vendors in Warsaw who wheeled a kind of mobile carbonation cart invented by Communist engineers.

  “You get two choices,” she said. “With raspberry juice or without. But you don’t get your own individual glass. The cart comes with glass cups permanently attached by strings. After you’ve had your drink, the cup gets a quick rinse and it’s ready for the next customer. We call the soda gruźliczanka. Tuberculosis water.”

  We snuck a kiss before reentering the stifling heat and crossed the wide median, making our way through the rows of motorbikes parked under its trees. A half-dozen blankets lay spread on the far sidewalk: a mini black market in canned goods and sodas. A crippled vendor displayed a few paltry loose pencils and cigarettes, but she also had V8 juice, hard to find in Saigon, asking about eight cents a can. I bought a few for Robeson and accepted the precious plastic bag she put them in.

  A beggar sitting cross-legged on the shady sidewalk moaned as he exposed legs covered with sores and extended what was left of his hand. I dropped some coins in the leprous paw, hoping he’d get out of there before the white mice found him sullying the fashionable street.

  “C’mon,” I said. Nadja nodded, hand to her mouth.

  Near the corner Tran Thi Banh squatted beside her two young children. She was a regular, an ARVN wife living in the street, worried her husband would never find her again if she left Saigon. Her own possessions sat in a nearby doorway: a cooking pot, a ceramic brazier, two spoons, a few clothes for her and the kids. I bought both packs of Camels she had on offer for eleven cents apiece. They went into the plastic bag with the cans.

  I could feel the heat penetrating the soles of my shoes even as kids passed us barefoot, heading to their napping places. My brains were steaming by the time we reached 213 Catinat, which housed the Indian and Filipino embassies as well as the august dental office of Dr. Nguyen Van Tho. I didn’t like dentists, I told Nadja, but definitely endorsed Tho over the sidewalk docs who pulled teeth curbside for pennies.

  Out of Tho’s office strolled the unmistakable one-and-a-half-handed figure of CIA’s bad boy, Lucien Conein. Conein looked straight through us, did an about-face, and walked casually back toward the cathedral. I turned and noticed a black Renault parked at the curb. A streak of red marred its shiny front hubcap: the not-so-private sign secret policemen used to identify themselves to one another. Nhu’s undercover cops weren’t even bothering to camouflage their presence. The car started up and rolled slowly in the direction Conein was walking.

  “Who was that?” Nadja said. “And what happened to his hand?”

  “You could say that he’s another legit sort of shady guy.” I explained that Conein liked to tell people he’d lost several fingers in a clandestine op, but in fact he’d lost them to the fan of a stalled automobile he’d been trying to fix on his way to an assignation with his best friend’s wife. At least according to Radio Catinat.

  Nadja and I turned back toward the Majestic. A second car, a Citroёn Black Maria, sat at the curb, its rear hubcap also streaked with a splash of red, the driver smoking. A Westerner and a Vietnamese idled in the shade across the street, sweltering in the stupefying heat. I could see them reflected in store windows as they trailed us along the opposite sidewalk.

  “Damn.”

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Something I forgot I needed to pick up.”

  I took her to Rickard’s gunsmith shop, where I bought a full-speed loader for my .38, which I pocketed, and a box of ammunition that I added to my plastic carryall. I had plenty of extra ammo back at the office, but you never knew when you might need some sooner.

  As an afterthought, I asked Rick if by any chance he had a Vis Radom for sale. He opened a display case and brought the pistol out on a black velvet mat.

  “A Polish gun!” Nadja exclaimed. “You are becoming a little fond of Poland, I think.”

  The piece was beautifully balanced, the pale grips comfortable. The gun felt good in my hand. I could see why the Red Queen favored it.

  “You sell any of these lately, Rick?”

  “Nah, can’t remember the last time anyone picked one up.”

  Like printers, willing gun-sellers would be easy for her to find in Cholon. But not for me.

  I slipped my pistol into the bag just out of sight, finger on the trigger. If needed, I could let the weighted bag drop away and raise the weapon in one motion.

  Our shadows were waiting for us outside Rick’s shop. The Asian man had crossed to our side; the Westerner remained on the opposite pavement. I mentioned them to Nadja, but she seemed unconcerned.

  “Coming from what you call an Iron Curtain country, one is used to being observed,” she explained. I wished I could be that calm; I was still shaky after the zoo.

  I started to steer her toward the Aterbea, a small upstairs bistro near the Caravelle, then thought better of it. A public place with lots of Americans would be safer.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Nadja’s face was flushed and her hand felt clammy. We needed to get inside before she worked herself into heatstroke. I urged her past the Caravelle’s Sikh doorman in red uniform and turban. The Caravelle was Saigon’s newest and biggest hotel, where the Australian and New Zealand embassies had their premises. At seventeen bucks a night, it was also the priciest, n
ot that the guys at the bar in Jerome’s were paying for their housing or booze. The serious papers and magazines took good care of their newsmen. Jerome’s was the watering hole for all the big-shot journalists who’d come to hike through scrub and jungle or sit through the daily bullshit military briefings at the Rex Hotel, popularly called the “Five O’Clock Follies.”

  “Champs Elysées restaurant if you’re hungry?” I said. “Or Jerome’s Bar?”

  “I have no appetite in this heat. Jerome’s.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Light-headed. Trembly.”

  I ordered us cold Cokes in frosted glass steins and checked the room to see if our tails had followed us upstairs. Didn’t seem like it, though they could have switched off with another team. Jerome’s was full of familiar TV faces in town to cover the coming coup, complaining loudly about the long wait for the action to begin.

  I swigged my drink and licked my parched lips. Nadja sipped slowly from her stein, then took out a cigarette and lit up. She didn’t like hypodermics, she said, and preferred to smoke her heroin. Easy to do in Saigon, where the smack was cheap and unusually pure. More important, it didn’t give off an odor as it burned. You could smoke heroin in public, even in the spiffy, high-class saloon where we’d parked ourselves, and nobody would notice unless you fell off your barstool.

  Nadja slid her fingers up my chest and extracted the card from my shirt pocket. Her glass stein went up again for another long sip, her eyelids dipping for a moment. She applied the icy glass to her forehead.

  “Is this the calling card of the ‘Lady Death’ I’ve been hearing about?”

  I nodded. “We call her the Red Queen.” Helping myself to her funny cigarette, I took a long drag and handed it back, holding my breath.

  “I see why you might. Perhaps your job is a little bit exciting after all,” she said, her smile full of mischief. I shrugged, my lungs and cheeks full of her magic smoke. My heart rate slowed. For a moment, images of the nightmare morgue stopped flashing in my brain.

  “Am I going to read about you in the papers when you catch her?”

  Better than reading about her catching up with me, I thought. The smoke escaped from me in a smooth rush.

  Coyly, she said, “What a story I’ll have to sell then: ‘My wild nights of love with the sheriff who snared the Viet Cong’s infamous girl assassin.’”

  She held my chilled glass stein to one flushed cheek, her own against the other, and closed her eyes. She looked blissful. I asked for a glass of ice water, dunked her kerchief, wrung it out and draped it back around her neck.

  “Mmm, that feels—”

  I smiled and brushed stray strands from her moist face. The heat and the dope had made her loopy.

  She swayed and I grabbed her by the elbows. Sweat glistened on her upper lip and the pale skin above the low scoop neck of her dress. She smelled of talcum and whatever women sweated that made men woozy.

  Nadja put down the steins, took another long drag and looked like she’d inhaled light. She was beautiful stoned and I told her so, which launched a complicated discussion of whether she was beautiful in my eyes because I was “trollied” too, or because she was? Or . . . The thread of possibilities slipped away.

  I hoped Nadja might return to earth once she got some food inside her, but she barely grazed on the appetizers. Her eyes were like saucers. The bartender sold me a pair of sunglasses that somebody had forgotten and I stuck them on her cute nose.

  “I shouldn’t have taken you out in this heat. We should go. Bathroom first?”

  “No need. All those drinks and I swear I don’t need the loo.”

  I made her drink more Coke and helped her to the lift. If our watchers were in the lobby, they’d be expecting us to emerge from the elevator, so we got off on the first floor and took the stairs. The two men were seated on an upholstered silk couch, facing the elevator bank with their backs to the staircase. I slid Nadja into an armchair and took a seat at the small writing desk just behind the couch. Nadja began snoring. I had to work hard not to laugh. The sound was so aged for someone so young and beautiful.

  I lit a cigarette and blew smoke over their heads. They didn’t notice. I stubbed out the cigarette and asked the white guy for a light. He barely glanced up. Just patted his shirt pocket for his lighter, a snazzy little silver deal. He froze when he turned to find me at his shoulder, my hand in the bag on the writing desk, gun pointed at him.

  “Thanks, pal,” I said, as I bent toward the flame.

  He signaled his Asian partner and made to rise. Nadja blinked herself awake and upright. She beamed at the Western dude like he was family. The Vietnamese guy leapt up, startled at being caught out. The senior man quieted him with a look and they left like normal citizens. Nadja followed me to the door, where we watched them cross Lam Son Plaza and walk past the National Assembly to their waiting Black Maria.

  “At least they weren’t armed,” she said, not having seen the bulges above their ankles. “Who were they?”

  “The Asian looked Vietnamese. The other one could have been anything.”

  “Guess his nationality,” Nadja said. She sounded worried, or was it just the opium?

  “Aussie, American, badly dressed Frenchman? Doesn’t matter. They’re all from the same place,” I said. “Spookland.”

  “But what nationality did he look like to you?”

  I took her hand. “Trouble, honey. They all just look like trouble.”

  We hopped in a taxi and were home five blocks later. As we got out, she whispered that the doorman was taking down the license plate of our cab. Did I think he was one of them too? I brushed back her hair and told her not to worry. Like all Vietnamese, Gai the doorman was always on the prowl for lucky numbers to play and she looked like someone fortune favored.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The envelope with the official seal of the United States had been delivered to the front desk of the Majestic by embassy courier. I brushed away the spots of fresh cockroach droppings that stained the fancy blue envelope. The matching card inside fit exactly, a handwritten dinner invitation to the ambassador’s private residence, signed Emily Lodge.

  Saigon had no television station, and barely a power grid or a telephone system. After three attempts, I gave up trying to get through to the embassy to respondez. I poured Najda into her bed and went back to the office to use the military phone.

  Warrant Officer Rider and Sergeants Moehlenkamp and Francis had arrived from Nha Trang. I told Rider and Francis I’d be with Ambassador Lodge tonight, and assigned them to stake him out starting at 0600 the next morning, in the hopes her advance team might show itself as they clocked the ambassador’s movements for repeated behaviors that would help them plan the Red Queen’s attack.

  “If we position ourselves right following the ambassador, I’m hoping Unit Eight will come to us. Like the Vietnamese say, ‘The water is in the well.’”

  Sergeant Francis shuffled a deck one-handed. “You’ve been in-country too long, Sergeant Miser.”

  “I’ll notify the embassy Marines you’ll be trailing the ambassador. Contact me or Robeson quick if you get suspicious about anybody in his slipstream.”

  I told them he’d almost certainly start his morning swimming laps at the Cerc, and also cautioned them: if they noticed a slight, attractive, demure young Vietnamese woman anywhere in the proximity of Ambassador Lodge, it might be the Red Queen herself.

  I gave Moehlenkamp the Cao Dai military medallion Ting had slipped us, and told him to get up to the sect’s headquarters in Tay Ninh City near the Cambodian border. “You’re looking for anyone who can connect the medallion to a female sharpshooter from the region.”

  After Moehlenkamp left for the airport, I called Captain Ting to get his read on who might have been tailing me. I kept the question vague but he got the idea. He said he hoped we might perh
aps run into one another soon—meaning he’d call to meet up when he knew something.

  I returned to the Majestic, but it was still early, so I went upstairs to the roof where Seftas was already encamped on his usual barstool. “Sef” raised his chin, acknowledging me as he tapped ashes from his cigarette.

  I checked my watch before taking a stool.

  “Hot date with the honeypot?” he asked.

  “Dinner at the ambassador’s residence.”

  “Oooh.” Seftas grimaced. “Dinner with the Man. Tread careful. Don’t get dis-Lodged. He’s racked up quite a body count. You realize you’re dining tonight at the Richardsons’ old place?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Richardson was sandbagged and barely gone from Saigon when Lodge appropriated it for himself. A class-A power move lost on no one.”

  “Yeah: cross the ambassador and get shopped.”

  Seftas scanned the roof. “And with Richardson gone home to DC, there’s no one left to object if Lodge wants to lay out emergency funds to back the coup plotters. Mr. Ambassador’s free to goose the generals, offering fat overseas accounts and bona fide passports with visas along with the absolutely first-class escape routes if things don’t work out when they storm the palace. Well, maybe somebody’s objecting. The Dragon Lady’s been giving newspapers an earful of poison, accusing us of conspiring with the Viet Cong, if you can believe it, to overthrow Diem. In the event of an attempted coup, she says certain Americans—meaning your host, no doubt—stand a good chance of being assassinated themselves. A not-very-subtle threat that he should not be encouraging rebellion.”

  “You buy it that Lodge is backing a coup?” I said.

  “I do. Seems he has a direct go-between with the coup plotters. Name of Lulu.”

  I groaned. “Tell me they’re not using Lulu’s bordello in Vientiane to put their deal together.”

  “Madam Lulu’s Peace Palace.” Seftas snickered. “Secret meetings in a brothel, no one paying any mind to who’s slipping in and out, everybody real discreet.” He shook his head and smiled to himself. “Fucking ballsy if it’s true.”