by Adam Hall
‘True,’ Pepperidge said. ‘She won’t like it. Where are you?’
‘At Chen’s.’ I gave him the number.
‘What sort of condition?’
‘I wasn’t anywhere near.’
Should have been. Jesus Christ, a simple letter drop and bang and he was dead.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Pepperidge was saying, ‘at Chen’s. I’ll vouch for him personally. But you’ll have to be careful from now on. Kishnar won’t be called off.’
‘Nothing’s changed, except that I’m now clandestine.’ Wouldn’t be going to the Thai Embassy or the Red Orchid or anywhere else above ground, wouldn’t be meeting anyone, my only exposure the need for transport, a plain van, a risk that had to be taken.
‘Can I do anything for you?’ Pepperidge asked.
‘No. You can turn in now.’
‘Pissing down, here.’ He was trying to make light of the Veneker thing for my sake, but he’d be taking it hard: I knew a first-class man when I saw one and Veneker had measured up - bright, brief, reliable and concerned.
‘How long had you known him?’
‘Who?’
‘Veneker.’
‘Oh.’ Couple of beats. ‘Did a job with him once. He wouldn’t have wanted to die in bed.’ Another pause. ‘Don’t worry, old boy.’
‘I’d give anything.’
‘I understand.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You still haven’t come across a Colonel Cho out there?’
‘No. That’s C-H-0?’
‘Yes. I’ve been doing some work on him, but it’s not easy at this distance. It’d be an idea for you to ask Johnny Chen. He might know about him. I’ll talk to him myself, if you like.’
‘He’s not here.’
‘When you see him, then. Cho could be very important.’
‘All right.’
‘What we need to find,’ Pepperidge said, ‘is her exposed flank. I mean Shoda’s. And Cho might tell us.’
Katie had said much the same thing: I suppose what you need most is to know her Achilles’ heel.
‘It’d show me the way in,’ I told him. ‘And if I don’t find it soon I think we’ve had it.’
There were two dangers but I didn’t spell it out for him. Shoda’s fury would now be intensified and she’d make my death an ambition - the very powerful were like that: any show of opposition came as a personal affront and they couldn’t rest until it was destroyed. The second danger was that I was now in a rage of my own and ready to take uncalculated risks to get at her because I didn’t like being stalked through the bloody streets and forced into a foxhole and I didn’t like the way they’d wiped out Veneker, a man who’d saved my life with his own.
And there was the voodoo factor and I didn’t know how long I could stand up to it because at the Red Orchid last night I’d felt a degree of vulnerability I’d never known before and it had worried me in the background of my mind - I’d almost accepted the foregone conclusion that Kishnar would make his kill, inevitably, and all I’d been doing was running around the place like a rat in a trap, working out the escape mechanisms I couldn’t have hoped to trigger once he was inside the building. It had been unnerving and it was still on my mind, the sense of oncoming doom. ‘Say again?’ Pepperidge. ‘If we don’t find a way in, I think we’ve had it.’
‘Any specific reason? I mean apart from Kishnar.’
‘I just think I’m outnumbered. Outgunned.’
‘I’m sure you do.’ A different tone, sharper. ‘And I’m sure you’re not. Take any mission and there’s a time when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. It gets dark in there - I’ve been down it a good few times. You need to rest up for a bit, that’s all, restore the nerves. If it’s any help, old boy, I’m working hard at this end and I’m in constant signals with people in London and the field.’ The sharp tone had faded, taking on a hint of false comfort. But what else could the poor bastard do but try to rally the ferret he was running?’
‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘that’s a help. It’s all I’ve got.’
‘Jolly good show. Keep in touch.’
She pulled the gun out of the drawer and checked the safety catch with the movements of a trained marksman and I wondered whether she’d picked it up in the refugee camps or from Johnny Chen. She went to the door and down the open-slatted wooden steps and stopped on the landing halfway down and waited, watching the iron door in the side of the wharf.
The beeper had sounded a minute ago and she was quick to react but not flustered. I watched her from the top of the steps and the minutes went by and Chu-Chu turned and came up again and put the gun away and looked at me and made a figure on the top of the desk with her hand, three fingers and thumb down and a finger sticking out in front, an animal walking along.
‘Dog?’ I said.
She walked her hand close to the jade paperweight and lifted her thumb, dog, yes, peeing. The alarm was triggered by an infra-red ray and angled too low, or of course it could be Kishnar down there or any one of the surveillance team, but I’d have to watch thoughts like that because I’d taken infinite care to get here clean and there was no way they could find me.
They found you at the Red Orchid.
Because I’d been walking in and out of the place, that was why - I hadn’t been clandestine.
‘Dog,’ I nodded to the girl, but she didn’t repeat it.
She spent the morning cooking some food and washing the bare wooden floor while I rested on the divan between phone-calls, drifting into alpha and working a few things out. One of them worried me: I didn’t know how long it would be before Shoda found out I was still alive. The Toyota had been totally burned out when I’d left the hotel an hour later, going over the wall at the other side where it was dark, though the surveillance team had broken up and moved away by then, assuming I was dead. Veneker might have been carrying papers but they could have been under a cover name; in any case they were now probably ash. The metal figures of the number plate would have been decipherable and the police would have run them through their computer and gone to the Hertz office. I’d used my cover name and address, and that would have sent them to the hotel. But A bitter smell had come into the air and I opened my eyes. Chu-Chu was sitting at the small rickety table by the lamp with the dragon shade; the ruby Chen had given her was on it, glowing in the light like a drop of blood. She was gazing at it, her eyes lost in its colour as she inhaled the tendril of smoke rising from the tin ashtray in front of her, where she’d lit a slug of opium.
I closed my eyes again. At the hotel, then, the police would have checked the register and Al would have said yes, a Martin Jordan was staying there, but he hadn’t seen him since a few minutes before the explosion had sounded. He would have said this because the instant I’d realised what had happened I’d kept strictly out of sight. So I would be down as a suspected victim, but they’d also go on checking, trying to find out where the man named Veneker was, and why he’d registered and left a bag behind the desk and disappeared.
But had Veneker used his own name when he’d registered? Pepperidge might know. I didn’t have enough data to give me a fix on the deadline - the time when Shoda would find out I was still alive. But it would be some days at least before they could identify Veneker’s body through the dental records — if any existed in Singapore.
Gimme a kiss, honey.
Some days. Perhaps that was all I would need.
In the afternoon there were some phone-calls and I made notes for Chen. Three of them were from people who didn’t leave their names, or use his.
We didn’t make it. The strip was waterlogged after the rain and we put down in Chiang Mai. You better tell them aver there -you know? - we’ll try again in a few days.
Two calls in Chinese, the Hokkein dialect, which I didn’t understand. Then another American-accented Asian.
The price is right, but they want guarantees. Can we make them? Get back to me as soon as you can - Blue Zero.
In the evening I phoned C
hen in Laos, using the number he’d given me. A woman answered in a tongue I didn’t understand, but I kept on repeating his name and she got him for me.
‘How’s it going?’
‘I’ve got some messages for you. Do you want them now?”
‘Sure.’
I read from the notes. ‘The rest I didn’t understand. There were four.’
‘Okay, What else?’
‘Nothing by phone. The alarm sounded about midday, but Chu-Chu said it must have been a dog.’
‘That thing’s too low. I’ll fix it when I get back.’
‘Is this girl safe with a gun?’
‘What’s she doing?’
‘She went to the stairs with it, when the alarm beeper sounded -‘
‘Oh, sure, yeah. She’s trained.’
‘All right. She’s also using opium.’
‘So what else is new?’
‘Different viewpoints.’
‘She doesn’t have long, Jordan. She’s been on coke for two years. Thing is to show her some kindness while she has the time left, okay? That’s why I took her in.’
‘Understood.’
I could smell cooking. Housekeeper, concubine, gun-handler, drug addict and soon to die. Chu-Chu, fourteen.
‘Signing off,’ I told Chen.
‘Sure. Take care.’
The phone rang again in twenty minutes and I went for the note pad.
This is Katie. Do you know where Martin Jordan is? If he contacts you, let me know, mil you? I’m worried about him. Look after yourself too. Bye.
To avoid it seeming like a coincidence I didn’t do anything for an hour, not because I didn’t trust her but because this was a safe-house and I didn’t want her involved: I didn’t want her to get in too deep, where the waters were dangerous. Then I took the parrot cage off its hook and took it into the bathroom and shut the door and came back and phoned her.
‘Martin?
‘Yes.’
I heard her let out a breath. ‘You sound all right.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Where are you?’ Then she said, ‘Sorry. As long as you’re all right.’
‘Yes. How are you?’
Her fair hair swinging as her shoulders came forward; the fan turning slowly under the ceiling; cushions all over the floor; the taste of zabaglione.
‘I’m all right too,’ she said. ‘And I’ve been working hard for you. Is it safe to talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, well listen, darling, there’s a man you ought to see if you possibly can, although I’m told it’s difficult. But he could be terribly important to you. His name is Colonel Cho.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Martin?’
‘Listening.’
‘I thought you’d gone.’
‘I was thinking. The spelling is C-H-O?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he in Singapore?’
‘No. I don’t exactly know where he is, but Johnny Chen does. So will you phone him, and talk about it?”
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Well that’s - all. God, I wish I could see you, darling.’
‘Soon.’
‘Yes. Please.’
Later I shared the food that Chu-Chu put on the table, rubbing my stomach to tell her it was good, and pointing to things and naming them for her, as if she had time left to learn a new language. Then, when she lit another slug of opium, I found a couple of wooden slats from where the crates were stored, and got some string and made a rough cross, propping it against the wall while she watched me. I bent over the little tin ashtray and made a gesture of inhaling, then went and lay down with the cross above my head, doing it three or four times and pointing to Chu-Chu, knowing she’d seen enough of Western customs to know what a cross meant.
She got it at last, and just nodded, knowing that too; then her eyes opened wide and she pointed at me, saying something quickly, a question, and its meaning came to me - she was asking me if I meant that I were going to the under a wooden cross; and the atmosphere in the room, the vibrations, the malevolent scent of the opium and the eyes of this doomed child that had already seen too much of life brought a sudden tremor and tightened my scalp, and I picked up the cross and broke the string and threw the bloody thing into the corner.
CHAPTER 18
MOON DROP
Dropping through the dark. ‘He’s half crazy,’ Chen had said. ‘Have you met him?’
We were talking about Colonel Cho.
Pepperidge: He could be very important. What we need to find is her exposed flank. I mean Shoda’s. And Cho might tell us.
‘I haven’t met him,’ Johnny Chen told me, ‘no.’ He’d got back late on Tuesday night. ‘Nobody ever meets that guy. He’s holed up in a burnt-out rebel radio station in the jungle in Laos and, like I say, he’s half-crazy. There were two guys who tried to get near the place earlier this year, and the dogs got them. He has killer-dogs around.’
Let’s have a snort!
Dropping through the dark.
Chen was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and one thin leg drawn up, his arm hooked across his knee; he looked tired, drained, the fine lines in his face deepened by the light and shadow, his almond eyes strained, looking beyond their focus, seeing, I thought, his dead friend.
‘So I’d forget it,’ he said, and swung his head to watch Chu-Chu, a spark of light coming into his eyes now. She was kneeling in front of a garishly-costumed Xieng doll that he’d brought back for her; she seemed to be greeting it, formally, according to some kind of custom, giving it hardly perceptible bows, her hands - not much bigger than the doll’s - placed together, steepled.
I didn’t like disturbing the silence, their thoughts.
‘It’s necessary,’ as quietly as I could, ‘for me to see him.’
In a moment Chen swung his head in my direction. ‘Then you’re half-crazy too.’
‘How was your trip?’
‘My trip? Okay, I guess.’ He seemed to be coming back to some kind of present. ‘She look after you?’
‘Yes, very well. She’s an accomplished lady.’
‘Cooks good. Thai Suki. I taught her that. She give you Thai Suki?
‘Yes.’ I didn’t know what it was called.
He lit a black cigarette, squinting through the smoke. ‘She likes you. Said you think you’re going to die, is that right, made some kind of a crucifix?’
‘I was just doing some mime for her. Trying to tell her she’s going to die if she keeps on with that stuff.’
‘She knows that.’ He shrugged. ‘We all know where death is, out here. It’s all in the same place, in the poppy fields. Why’s it so goddamned necessary for you to see this goon?’
‘I’ve been told he might have some information I need.’
‘You have any connection? Some kind of introduction?’
‘No.’
He blew out a stream of smoke with a whistling sound. ‘Jesus, have you ever seen the front end of a war-trained Doberman that never gets anything to eat?’
‘There are ways of handling dogs.’
‘Oh, sure. You shoot their ass off and the next thing you know is your own’s gone up in smoke. Cho is real mean, but you don’t seem to be getting the message.’
Dropping through the dark, the lines hissing.
‘What else do you know about him, Johnny?’
‘Not much.’ He was watching the child again. ‘You look cute, sweetheart. Cute.’
She looked up, knowing the word sweetheart. It wasn’t quite a smile that came into her eyes, but a lessening of melancholy, the most, I knew now, that she’d ever be able to give him.
‘He was chief of intelligence’ - to me now - ‘of an insurgent group affiliated with Shoda’s organisation., He was clever, but he wanted to handle things his way, and she didn’t like that. She had him arrested and slated for execution, but he got away with it somehow, with a head wound you’d never believe.’
A current of air drew the smoke beneath the dragon lamp and upwards through the shade, quickening as it reached the heat of the bulb, making me think of ectoplasm, of ghosts, hers, mine, his.
‘Who’s with him there?’ I asked Chen in a moment.
‘At the radio station? He’s on his own. Been there a couple of years, maybe more, I doubt anyone really knows - he’s become a kind of legend, I guess. But if you want cold facts, the cold facts are that he doesn’t like anyone going near him, which is why, understandably, he’s holed up in a remote place like that in the jungle, thirty or forty kilometres from the nearest village, which is a narcotics centre anyway, buried out of sight. I’ve made a few runs in there; otherwise I wouldn’t have picked anything up on the guy. Ask me to guess, I’d say there’s damn few people in the whole of Indo-China who know about him, just the villagers and fliers like me who go there.’
‘Does Shoda know where he is?’
‘I doubt that too. She’d have the place dive-bombed if she did. ‘Well’ - he tilted his emaciated hand, rotating it in the French manner - ‘maybe that’s not true. He can’t do her any harm, for Christ’s sake, the way he is now. That’s how he knew about the place himself — he ordered it dive-bombed for his group, to wipe out some rival operations.’
‘Does he use the transmitter?’
‘There’d be nothing left of it, and nobody’s ever picked up his signals, or they’d have said.’ He plucked some tobacco from his lip, studying it. ‘Who the hell told you he has any kind of information for anybody?’
‘I got it on the grapevine.’
He shrugged. ‘D’you trust it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, okay. But, I mean, if you want to go see the guy, I guess it’s as good a death as any. But what am I saying? You’d have to shoot every goddamned dog first, to get yourself your own bullet. There’s better ways.
In the poppy-fields.
‘Would you drop me there, Johnny?”
Impatiently, ‘He watches the track, see. There’s a track from the village, where they ran the stuff to build the station with. You can still get a vehicle through, but weren’t you listening? You try -‘