Bleeding in Black and White
By Colin Cotterill
Bleeding in Black and White
Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2015
First Published 2015
eBook Edition published by
Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.
Bangkok Thailand
http://ebooks.dco.co.th
ISBN 978-616-7817-63-7
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author's imagination or else are used only fictitiously. Any resemblance to real characters, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.
Also by Colin Cotterill
Dr. Siri Paiboun series
The Coroner's Lunch (2004)
Thirty-Three Teeth (August 2005)
Disco For the Departed (August 2006
Anarchy and Old Dogs (August 2007)
Curse of the Pogo Stick (August 2008)
The Merry Misogynist (August 2009)
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (August 2010)
Slash and Burn (October 2011)
The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (January 2013)
Six and a Half Deadly Sins (May 2015)
Jimm Juree series
Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011)
Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012)
The Axe Factor (April 2014)
Other publications
Evil in the Land Without (2003)
Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket (2004)
Pool and its Role in Asian Communism (2005)
Cyclelogical (2006)
Ageing Disgracefully (October 2009)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Epilogue
About the Author
1.
Ban Methuot - Vietnam
It was one hell of mess. The wife they’d given him, or what was left of her, was wrapped in tobacco leaves and bamboo matting and stored in a shed out back of the Administrator’s place. The rainy season had set in early so the bridges were out and the road was impassable for the next five months. There was only one way of getting word in and out and that was through the telegraph at Dupré’s. And now here was that same Monsieur Dupré’s pretty young wife lying naked on the missionary’s bed. Reverend Robert ‘Bodge’ Rodgers could see her skinny legs through the doorway. He drained the glass and put it down on the antique table beside the Holy Book. As if things weren’t bad enough already, that was the last of the bourbon.
Probably the Viet Minh should have counted up there at the top of his worries but he’d somehow managed to push them on to the back burner. When the possibility of being butchered in your bed hangs over you every night and there isn’t a thing you can do about it, you tend to blank a lot out -pretend it isn’t there.
Beneath the din of the relentless pounding of rain on the slate roof, he heard another sleepy groan from his bed. He could see those skinny legs cycle in slow motion on the silk sheets. He shook his head. How had he gotten himself into such a hell-fired, Satan-sponsored, God-forbidden mess? It took him several uncoordinated attempts with a delicate brass trumpet to kill the flame in the table oil lamp. The only illumination in the house now came from one last pale light on the bedroom wall. Its glass cover had been smashed to smithereens during the tragedy, so the flame danced in the warm drafts.
Bodge stood on drunken legs that didn’t feel at all like his own and let himself sway for a while. The dizziness cleared some but he still walked into the table, the footstool and the wall desk before he found the bedroom doorway. He looked at Monique’s tightly luscious curves shuddering in the lamplight. Even in sleep she flirted. Every mound and valley of her told him to get himself over there beside her. A year ago he wouldn’t have needed asking twice. But things had changed over the last six months. He’d changed. His priorities and loyalties were tangled. He wasn’t sure what he believed in any more.
He held on to the door frame with his left hand to keep himself up and reached behind him with his right to the sliding lid of the French bureau. It came down without effort the way expensive, finely crafted furniture was supposed to. Even the click of the secret compartment was no more than a lizard’s tut. The German revolver was heavy and warm and had enough power to blow Monique’s sweet head all the way back to Marseilles.
He took a few unsteady paces to the edge of the bed and filled his lungs with air and classy perfume. It was time to show her exactly how he felt.
2.
January 1952 - Three months earlier
“Time, Bodge?”
“Gee, Lou. You haven’t asked me for an hour. I thought you’d croaked over there.
“I just want the time. If I needed sarcasm, I’d specifically say, ‘Give me some sarcasm, Bodge’.”
Bodge pulled back the cuff of his laundered shirt. He wore a reinforced John Bull he’d won from a squaddy in an arm wrestle at an English pub. It was camouflage green and dented, but he wouldn’t ever think of replacing it. It was his link to life. “Two.”
“Two? Damn. I was sure it was four.” Lou yawned again and rasped air through his lips. He held an Italian government report by its corner and swung it like a pendulum. “Why do you suppose it’s always rectangular?”
“What’s that?”
“Paper.”
Lou Vistarini sat at a desk facing Bodge’s on the fourth floor of the modest Adams Center in New York City. Down in the lobby was a sign saying this was the Trans-National Insurance Company. That might have fooled one or two mailmen but nobody else on that block of East 23rd. and Third believed it for a second. They just had to look at the intense people turning up there each morning to know something was going on and it had nothing to do with insurance.
“It has some connection with the British Imperial system of measures, if I’m not mistaken,” Bodge answered without looking up from his own report. Lou clawed his black-rimmed glasses half way down his nose and looked over at Robert ‘Bodge’ Leon, his office m
ate. Nice enough guy. Average looking but solid, like he could be the next in line at Mount Rushmore. Built big, six foot five, but getting soft of late like John L Sullivan after he got stuck into the booze. He was smart, really smart; not the type to rile easily, but he tended to take life a little too seriously at times. He was a careful talker — he thought before he spoke and that confused some people into figuring he was a slow thinker. That was Lou’s appraisal at least and he’d sat opposite the man for the past seven years. They drank together once or twice a week, spent birthdays together, even double-dated on the odd occasion. So he was probably in a good position to say.
Lou was a lesser version of Bodge: two sizes smaller in white button-collar shirts, five inches off the leg in standard charcoal gray slacks. But he was from a similar mould. Like most of the males at Trans-Continental they wore crew cuts so sheer on the back and sides there was no hairline. They both had a knack of making neckties look like bitten-through lasso ropes — the kind you’d find on escaped cattle. On their nights out they weren’t unused to hearing,
“I didn’t think you guys was allowed booze.” So there must have been something about the two of them together that reminded people of Mormons.
“Yeah. I know all that,” Lou persisted. “But it’s all random. Some royal guy just sits down one day and makes up all these random numbers just to make schooling impossible: twenty four shillings in a yard, sixteen ounces in a pint. But what was it that made old King What’s-his-Lord decide on rectangles for paper?”
“As opposed to?”
“Squares. There’s no reason on this earth why paper shouldn’t be square.”
Bodge looked up for the first time, but not at Lou. He stared into that reservoir high on the wall that contained all the answers to unnecessary questions. With someone like Lou in your office you needed to dip into it any number of times a day. It occurred to Bodge that Lou had reached that ‘meaning of life’ stage and he felt obliged to help him through it.
“Well, Lou, I guess it has something to do with man’s uncontrollable desire to fold things in half. Every square’s destined to become a rectangle.”
That was Bodge. He wasn’t the type of man who could settle unless he had an answer to every question. That was the quirk that got him into the agency in the first place and what got him into most of the trouble he’d ever had in his life. But these days he was finding very little he could be bothered to put thought into.
He signed his name in the box at the bottom of the report to say he’d read it. There was no box that asked whether he’d given it any thought so he hadn’t bothered to. He took the next paper off the IN tray pile and scanned the heading. ‘Communist Affiliations in the Danish Peerage’. It wouldn’t have been any less inspiring had it been square.
Lou wasn’t about to let up. “Only the first time.”
“Say what?”
“If you fold it a second time, it’s square again, right?”
“I guess.”
“Then if them royals had been a little more inclined to order and neatness, they could very well have made the standard measure a foot by a foot. Just think how packable everything could of been: square books, envelopes, playing cards.”
Bodge was trapped again, lost in another of Lou’s foolish sidetracks. They got him every time. It was what happened when two intelligent men are stuck in an office without inspiration. Neither of them was pushed intellectually. Any ape with a degree could have done the work that passed over their desks. Bodge took up the challenge of square.
“A rectangle is more of a natural shape to man.”
“Oh, yeah? You got rectangular mountains and trees in Tennessee?”
“I didn’t say ‘natural to nature’. I said ‘natural to man’. Think about it. What shape is most congruous to our needs? We’re tall, thin beings.”
“You’re not.”
“Compared to a tortoise I am and tortoises have no need for rectangles. A child grows perpendicularly and you want him to always look out on the world, so what shape are our windows? Rectangular. We have to pass from one room to the next, so what shape do doors have to be to accommodate our bodies? Rectangular. We have an arm on either side of us, so what shape of desk allows us to reach to the left and to the right? What shape of bed best allows us rest? And when I pass on do they roll me into a ball and bury me in a pit? No sir. They bury me in a…”
“Rectangular prism. I get it.”
“In fact, there is nothing about our lives that lends itself to square.”
“You’re right.”
“I know.”
The OSS had recruited Bodge directly from the mud of France as World War II in Europe edged towards its conclusion. He’d made quite a hero out of himself in his first conflict even though his heroism had come about quite by chance. He hadn’t been the type of boy who headed off to battle in the hope of getting medals pinned to his chest. He wasn’t a coward but he wouldn’t have objected to seeing out the war in some office in London.
He’d been a college wrestler so there was a time he’d been in good shape, and he was smart enough, but there was no mistaking the fact that he’d been appointed combat aide to General Osgood merely on his ability to speak French. Much to the disappointment of his parents, the language had been his major at school. It was largely their fault. When he was little he was brought up by a nanny from New Orleans. At least, she was the one who stayed longest. The pidgin they spoke together was a perfect grounding for formal French at school. His well-to-do mother and father saw him as more of an investment than a loved one. They wanted him in politics, or theology, but their only child chose humanities.
All through his teens he’d dreamed of living in Europe. England was his first choice but he already spoke passable English and he decided French would round him out — make him more saleable to international corporations. It hadn’t occurred to him that Europe already had more than its share of unemployed young men and they didn’t really need to import others. But luck was on his side. Hitler invaded France and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and suddenly Bodge had something his government needed: French.
He was almost twenty-one and still six months from graduating when the notice went up on the school careers board. ‘TRAVEL. Learn a Trade and get paid for using your foreign language. UNCLE SAM NEEDS YOU.’ At the recruitment office the cheerful captain with angles ironed into his uniform assured Bodge he could get credits for his degree and complete it as a member of the United States Marine Corps.
So he joined up and two months after putting his pen to paper he found himself on a troop carrier on his way to the country he’d always dreamed of seeing. His two years in the service turned him into a man and tangled him up in a lie he couldn’t get out of. He was glad when demobilization came in '45 and he worked his way home with his Medal of Honor hidden quietly at the bottom of his kit bag.
The war in Europe was won, Bodge was a celebrity and people were asking about him. When the guy in Berlin had first recruited him for the Office of Strategic Services, the subject of paperwork never came up. There was a lot of talk of covert missions to exotic places, parachuting into jungles and sailing down unspoiled rivers, but not a word about paperwork. And that was odd because for seven years, that’s all he’d done.
Of course there was no end of excuses for it. For the early months the world had been at peace for the first time anyone could remember. Once the Pacific was won, there was no immediate call for espionage in foreign countries. Any action that came along was handed out to the guys with broken noses and tattoos. Bodge was a nice, soft guy. His superiors had problems with a giant of a man who apparently never lost his temper. What message would that send to the world? So, agent Leon settled down to writing and translating reports on the American war effort. Then on October 1, 1945 under President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9621, the OSS was disbanded. It was a pity, but Bodge guessed it would allow him to find himself a real job someplace. He still had his dream to do business in Europe.
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The director of the disbanded organization had other things in mind. He wasn’t about to lose this band of handpicked heroes just because there was nowhere for them to work. So, Bodge and 150 other valuable but positionless “agents” were all placed on what was officially termed “speculative hold”. They filed, they went on retreats and seminar courses, they processed unimportant “code green” documents left over from the war and they played a lot of backgammon. They were paid well for their somnolence but like most of them it wasn’t the money Bodge had signed up for. He wanted to serve his country and if there was a little excitement in the bargain he wouldn’t say no.
There was a certain buzz of anticipation when, in 1946, the President established the National Intelligence Authority and the Central Intelligence Group. There was a serious pay rise. All the agents began to work for one or the other organization but as far as Bodge could tell, the same goddamned files were coming over their desks and the same goddamned “you’ll have to be patient” met his polite requests for missions. They were reminded that this was the clerical section and a more stable infrastructure had to be established before they could apply for a transfer to operations. It was round about here that Lou Vistarini and Bodge found themselves in the same office. Bodge handled French, Lou Italian. Neither of them remembered volunteering for the clerical section in the first place. Lou and Bodge complemented each other. Lou was the hare to Bodge’s tortoise, the Costello to his Abbott.
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