UNKNOWABLE (Murder on the Mekong, Book 2)

by Rivers, Hart;

  Grand battles then he had won in his imagination. And now, he was flush with victory upon winning another—only this one was real, and of the heart.

  Katherine had agreed to meet with him after a great deal of persuasion. They had not parted well at the Dalat Palace Hotel. It dampened his sense of accomplishment with the takeover of the heroin operation in Southeast Asia, which only went to show how vulnerable he was to her influence, and that was not a good thing. Particularly in matters of Intelligence and the trajectory for future ambitions: his dark ops branch of the CIA could now enjoy lucrative financing while never again having to ask for any kind of Congressional funding. That meant no oversight. He was free to be creative, expanding the new “persuasion school” he had in mind to further secure the US’s Big Pirate status on the international stage. Words like terrorism and torture were so inelegant; persuasion was a much better way to put it.

  After all, he had persuaded Katherine to join him with the intent to reconcile, and he would further persuade her with trips to Antibes, Cannes, dinner in Mougins. Certainly no terror or torture involved with that, which brought him to wonder, what could have Paulu so busy that he was not answering his calls? No doubt he was enjoying himself too much in a remote fortress that was no longer just a nebulous dot within a big circle on a map. Clearly Paulu could not remain too long in such a critical position, and part of the catnip he had to offer Katherine was to dispense with Paulu even sooner than initially planned. He would make it a point to reinforce those intentions to further woo the affections she had so coldly withdrawn before abruptly leaving the Dalat. She had done so without knowing her doctor friends were being held at Paulu’s; also without her knowledge, he had instructed that they not be harmed, at least not until he decided what should be done with them.

  He could use the doctors as an additional enticement for Katherine to remain with him. He did not want her going back to lick her wounds where he’d had her followed. He had other means of persuasion, if necessary, but for now he preferred a softer, more romantic approach.

  Phillip glanced at his watch, just as a knock sounded at the door. Perfect. He had already told his bodyguards to expect the deliveries, and here they were, precisely on time.

  “Enter,” he instructed, and in rolled a cart of iced champagne, sumptuous deserts, cheeses, all of her favorite things. Behind the queer-looking older Frenchman, deferentially pushing the cart with his head bowed, came another cart filled with flowers, this one pushed by a younger man who had a pronounced limp and sadly disfigured face, with part of an earlobe missing. He quietly shut the door behind him.

  Except for their uncomely looks, the service was impeccable, like everything at the Chateau. The food laid out in an exquisite presentation by the old man. The flowers artfully arranged throughout the extensive suite that claimed the entire upper floor. But it was the additional secret bedroom at the very top of the tower, gained by a charming staircase within the suite, that was fit for a clandestine rendezvous with the woman he would have for his queen.

  “Monsieur,” the disfigured florist called down from the secret bedroom, “will this meet with your expectations, or do you wish me to bring more? Rose petals, perhaps?”

  Feeling the unusual flutter of anxiety as the time for Katherine to arrive drew closer, Phillip instructed the older man to pour him a flute of the champagne and bring another bottle in an hour. He dismissed him, and then took the short flight of stairs to where the florist awaited his decision.

  “I am expecting my guest shortly.” The champagne danced on his tongue and Phillip imagined imparting a sip from his mouth to hers. Yes, there was a final touch he was missing. The florist had a good eye. “How quickly could you have enough fresh rose petals delivered to completely cover the bed?”

  Click.

  The soft sound of the secret bedroom door shutting behind him had Phillip whirling around, wondering if Katherine had arrived early and was catching him acting like a star-struck schoolboy in the body of a middle-aged fool desperate to impress her; desperate not to lose her and the remembrance of what it felt like to be young.

  The old man no longer looked quite so old, or so French.

  Phillip whirled back around. The younger man had peeled off half his disfigured face.

  As his champagne hit the floor, Phillip shouted, “Guards! Guards!”

  The deferential purveyor of food and drink moved with mind-stunning speed and quite precisely stabbed Phillip with three stone fingers just below his breastbone.

  Phillip dropped to his knees. His face hit the floor. He writhed there, unable to think beyond his desperation to get some air into his lungs, unable to blink as he watched JD strip off the rest of his prosthetic disguise, revealing a brutal slash of stiches down his cheek.

  “I’m afraid the boys are no longer around to answer your call,” JD informed him. “They can be found later, mostly in one piece, in the laundry room. The flight of the company you’re expecting has been delayed. Until then, it will just be the three of us.”

  JD and whoever he had drafted as an accomplice sat casually at the foot of the bed, watching him gasp like a dying fish until he could finally start to breathe again.

  “What do you want of me, JD?” He struggled not to sound desperate and took hope that JD did want something beyond vengeance for letting The Pale Man do what he would with him, which was clearly evident, at least some of it, and…Oh.

  Oh, this was not good. Paulu was not answering his calls. JD was here. The question was, with whom?

  “What do I want of you?” JD repeated, the stony glint in his eyes not boding well. “The better question is, what does my brother Zhang want of you now that you’ve stolen the lion’s share of his poppy fields, attempted to install a tyrant after murdering his second-in-command, and terrorized his people?”

  “Your brother?” Phillip repeated, his vision swinging toward the assailant who had risen from the bed and was advancing towards him again. “But…no. Impossible.”

  “It’s an arrangement you are quite familiar with yourself. Or were.”

  Before he could move or speak, Zhang grabbed Phillip’s right hand and, in a blinding flash of pain, snapped his little finger nearly clean off. It dangled to the side.

  Phillip felt his bowels constrict as Zhang lifted him off the ground, shook him till his teeth chattered, and flung him across the room. His entire body hit the wall, and he slithered to the floor, somehow still conscious, and completely aware he was shitting all over himself while Zhang and JD towered over him.

  “You are an arrogant man,” said Zhang, who wasn’t at all who he was supposed to be, not according to Intelligence, nor had JD corrected his assumptions. “You are arrogant and deluded with power. Save any threats you might be thinking will save you. You cannot find us if we do not want you to. But, as you can see, we can easily find you whenever we want. As for now, you have nine more fingers to snap before we start with things more long-term disabling and much more painful.”

  “That’s enough, Zhang.” JD reached down as if offering his hand and Phillip shook his head, tears streaming down his face while he tried not to imagine pain exponentially worse than what he was already suffering. “And that is the level of my trust for you now, Phillip. You have deeply, deeply disappointed me. I cannot believe at one time I wished you were my father—you’ve turned out to be an even bigger bastard than him. I do not approve, but I can almost understand your terrible management of the situation with my brother. You never knew him. You’re not attached, and it was all part of your game, how you operate, the strategies you live to construct. But how could you betray me after all these years?”

  Phillip thought of lying, but he wanted this to be over, and JD would get the truth somehow, even if it took nine more broken fingers, followed by every bone in his body.

  “I was covetous,” he admitted. “I wanted the woman you took from me, and I wanted the power. I wanted to create, manipulate, and then win the game.”

 
JD snorted in disgust. “You’re nothing but a piece of the game yourself, you delusional cretin, not the master of it.”

  “Yes,” Zhang echoed, “and it is a game that will be moving past you soon enough. You’re too blind to see that your misguided war in Southeast Asia is already lost.”

  “As Kate will be lost to you if you do not facilitate the safety of Doctors Kelly and Moskowitz upon their return to Nha Trang,” JD informed him. “Which I will personally arrange. And should you not ensure their continued good health for as long as I am alive—and, Phillip, I do intend to outlive you—then the consequences will be severe. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes. Yes. What else?”

  Their terms were swift, calculated, and shrewdly negotiated. Though Phillip had to admit that, under the circumstances, they were fair. Even with a healthy dose of blackmail as part of the checks and balances, at least he was getting out alive, and there would be time now to consider his counter moves.

  “And should you ever decide to break our agreement or show any act of aggression toward my new Poppy King,” Zhang concluded, “just remember that running will get you nowhere because I will chase you, and I will take you down.”

  Phillip’s relief was enormous as Zhang left the room. JD lingered behind.

  “I would have a private word with you, Phillip.” He pulled a rose from one of the floral arrangements and plucked several petals, tossed them on the bed. “Did you love her? My mother, did you?”

  “I…” The strike of the question came as unexpectedly as Zhang’s blow to his sternum. “I was very young, JD. We both were. And we were married to other people for the wrong reasons that seemed right at the time.”

  “Your handkerchief was in the book she left me. I still have it. I stole it from her room because my father wanted everything of hers destroyed after she died. I’ve wondered if he had something to cover up, if he was responsible somehow and just made it look like she did it herself. I still don’t know, but one day I will find out. As for the other question that I’ve had, since even before Maman died…”

  The sensation in Phillip’s chest lowered, swirling down into the pit of his stomach. Swallowing against the acid inching its way up his throat, he made himself ask, “What other question?”

  “Why did he hate me so much?” JD touched his right earlobe and, in a déjà vu moment, like magic he produced a gold coin. He flipped it. The coin landed squarely in Phillip’s lap. Turning on his heel, JD just said, “I think I know the answer to that.”

  Chapter 44

  Peace Mission Hospital

  Nha Trang, RVN

  The mighty Mekong, one of the twelve great rivers of the world, snakes through China’s Yunnan Province, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam for 2700 miles before emptying into the South China Sea…

  A lot of water under that bridge was all Gregg could think as he laid down his pen and pushed aside the letter he kept trying to write to his folks back home. He thought if he could do justice to the description of what had increasingly become his world, they might understand, at least a little, the distance that had come to divide them, that went beyond actual miles.

  Funny how the water didn’t look all that different on the California coast than it did in this part of Vietnam. He could hear the distant waves of the sea, a breathtaking turquoise instead of a Mekong muddy brown. The lap of waves mingled with the soft play of the fountain fronting the mission’s veranda. In so little time, so much had changed since his last visit here to see Shirley, particularly when it came to his feelings and assumptions about life, love, and the people he thought he knew.

  JD had made good on his promise. Izzy was completing his recovery on extended medical leave in a private room at the mission, with Margie en route from Hawaii to Nha Trang to lend her healing touch.

  As for himself, from Nha Trang to…Where? Where did he go from here?

  One of his early lessons in the science and art of psychology was that most humans are engineered to cling to the familiar, even when the familiar becomes destructive or unhealthy, because at least they know what they are dealing with, while the unfamiliar, the inherent risks, are unknown, and therefore best avoided.

  There had been no avoiding being plucked from his USC doctorate graduation and thrust into the army’s frontline psychiatric unit, the 99KO in Nha Trang. The irony was that he had been ripped from the familiar at the whim of Uncle Sam, only to return so changed that he no longer felt he belonged in the good old USA.

  Do you want to go back? was the question that kept circling around and around in his head. A professorship was waiting at UCLA, his dream job; or at least it always had been. But there was a true need for him here at the mission, and he had begun to wonder if he needed being needed here more than realizing an old dream.

  As he surveyed the stretch of green lawn that reached down towards the cream-colored sands of the beach and the big stones along the shore, Gregg thought back to a road trip up the Pacific Coast he had taken a few months after he had gotten discharged. He had hoped it would be some kind of healing journey after exploding his mother’s television and frightening everyone, maybe himself most of all. So from Del Mar he headed north in his little racing-green MG; first stop: surfing with an old friend at Malibu, and trading him the MG for a new VW camper bus. From there he moved on to Montana de Oro with its big dunes and crashing waves and the chest-high, bright-yellow mustard plants all in bloom with the California poppies. He found the best cold-water wetsuit that money could buy at O’Neil’s in Santa Cruz and, oh man, there was nothing like the smell of new neoprene—or the taste of the most amazing salsa at his favorite Mexican restaurant in Monterey.

  Still going north, he found he preferred the strangely lonely, empty waves and beaches of southern Oregon, near Gold Beach where he was the only soul around, sitting on his long board out by the huge rock stacks of Cape Benjamin; and, further north, the big green rollers of Pacific City. Once he’d had his fill of the solitude, he followed Highway 101 until he found the scent of the cedar and Douglas fir beach bonfires, and the fellowship of a tight tribe of surfers at Indian Beach. There, on a sparkling blue sea, eight foot faces beckoned. They told him stories of magical waves on the lost coast of Vancouver Island. A tiny place called Tofino on the very edge of the continent.

  In Tofino more surfers and runaway Vets gladly shared their crazy-strong dope from seeds brought back from Southeast Asia, and it was just so great when they all sang out loud together with tapes of Neil Young and CSNY. Wooden Ships.

  All along the way back down again he would run into other Vets with their own haunted eyes. Sometimes getting stoned or drunk—or both—with them while they shared a camaraderie of silence, of stories untellable, memories too awful to freshen.

  And through it all, hard as he wanted and wished to forget, he couldn’t stop remembering Nha Trang. Remembering this smell, this dampness, the scent of spicy sauce and frying fish and always the underlying mélange of raw sewage and rotting garbage and exhaust. The sound of motorbikes and noise of a language he still could not understand but which had become somehow familiar—while the once familiar, clean smell of the Pacific and coffee and donuts and Coppertone seemed alien, the latest American slang and attitudes sounding too new to his ears. It was as though while he was serving in Nam, time and his whole generation had moved ahead and away from him and he had been stalled and absolutely left behind.

  He found himself wishing he had been wounded in a way that was evident, had lost a hand or a foot even, instead of the kind of achy, depressed, weird wound inside that bled dreams at night and memories during the day. But then, one day, a few weeks before he got the call from JD, he was driving to the beach near Trestles, passed a young guy hobbling along in an old Camo jacket and baggy pants. Long, shaggy hair, dirty beard, a stump where his left leg had been.

  So he pulled over, offered him a lift. Their eyes met and something connected. The guy knew. “Nam,” he said. “Nha Trang,” said Gregg.<
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  They hung out all morning. The guy had some incredible weed—Thai Red he called it. They talked waves, big days at Trestles, Orange Julius, tacos, old surfers they had known, Doc Paskowitz, Dewey, Hobie. No war stories. They thought maybe they remembered each other from back when, before…You know. Yeah, sure they remembered, they laughed.

  They laughed a lot. The first real laughs he’d had since getting back home. Jamie was his name. They agreed to get together the next week and Gregg would bring an extra board if Jamie wanted to learn to kneeboard.

  Jamie flashed him the peace sign and nodded.

  The next week when Gregg got to Trestles, he couldn’t find Jamie. But there were a couple other guys hanging out—a junkie with another broken down Vet.

  Where’s Jamie? Gregg asked.

  Who’s asking?

  A friend. We were going to paddle. I brought him a board.

  A moment of silence passed and, while he listened to the surf hit shore, he could hear the answer in his head even before the guy said it.

  Jamie’s dead, friend. Blew his fucking head off.

  “Gregg? Mind if I join you?”

  It was Shirley, holding out a tall, icy G and T. One for him, one for her.

  “I would love it if you joined me, Shirley.”

  He accepted her offering and expected her to take the chair across from him. Instead his pulse upticked when she made herself right at home next to him on the veranda’s rattan couch. A clink of her glass to his and she asked, “Whatcha thinking about?”