Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  WHAT THE PRESS SAYS ABOUT JAKE NEEDHAM

  “THE BIG MANGO is as good as it gets.” -- The Bangkok Post

  “No clichés. No BS. Thrillers written with a wry sense of irony in the mean-streets, fast-car, tough-talk tradition of Elmore Leonard. Needham has found acclaim as one of the best-selling English-language writers in Asia.”-- The Edge (Singapore)

  “Mr. Needham seems to know rather more than one ought about these things.” -- The Wall Street Journal Asia

  “Needham is Michael Connelly with steamed rice.” -- The Bangkok Post

  “Needham is Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction.” -- The Straits Times (Singapore)

  “Jake Needham has a knack for bringing intricate plots to life. His stories blur the line between fact and fiction and have a ‘ripped from the headlines’ feel. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.” - CNNgo

  “THE BIG MANGO is a witty, inventive, and most of all thrilling thriller; a heady, bloody, luxurious, sordid fictional romp.”-- The Nation (Thailand)

  THE BIG MANGO

  A novel

  by

  Jake Needham

  Smashwords edition published by

  Half Penny Ltd.

  Hong Kong

  THE BIG MANGO, copyright © 2011 by Jake Raymond Needham

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or it was not purchased specifically for your use, please purchase a copy for yourself. Thank you for respecting the work of the author and the publisher.

  Excerpt from LAUNDRY MAN, © 2011 by Jake Raymond Needham

  Smashwords ISBN: 978-616-7611-06-8

  English-language print publication history

  First edition: Asia Books Co Ltd, Bangkok, 1999, ISBN 974-8237-36-2

  Second edition: Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2002, ISBN 962-86319-4-2

  Third edition: Marshall Cavendish International, Singapore, 2010, ISBN 978-981-4276-60-3

  All e-book editions published by Half Penny Ltd, Hong Kong

  Smashwords Edition October 2012

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Bonus Preview of LAUNDRY MAN

  The Jake Needham Library

  What the Press Says About Jake Needham

  Meet Jake Needham

  For Aey, James, and Charles.

  But then, everything is for them.

  “I would be glad to know which is worst: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-de-fen, to be dissected, to be chained to an oar in a galley; and, in short, to experience all the miseries through which every one of us hath passed … or to remain here doing nothing?”

  “This,” said Candide, “is a grand question.”

  Voltaire

  Candide, 1759

  Prologue

  ON April 21, 1975, sometime late in the afternoon, Nguyen Van Thieu abruptly resigned as president of the Republic of South Vietnam and abandoned to the North Vietnamese what little was left of his weary and wasted country.

  Just before dawn the following morning, a C-118 belonging to the South Vietnamese Air Force rolled almost unnoticed down a darkened runway at Tan Son Nhut. The plane was heavy, crammed with boxes and crates that had been trucked to the airfield from the Presidential Palace during the night. Gaining altitude and turning its back on the approaching dawn, the big plane crawled slowly into the moist early morning darkness and lumbered away.

  Four nights later, on April 25, an aging DC-6 provided by the American Ambassador flew Thieu and nine of his confederates quietly out of Vietnam. Each of them was carrying a document personally signed by President Gerald Ford authorizing their entry into the United States.

  By daybreak on April 26, the rumors were racing through Saigon. Thieu and his cronies had fled, the whispers went, but they had not gone empty-handed. The vaults of the Bank of Vietnam were bare. Thieu had secretly spirited all the bank’s reserves out of the country before he left.

  It made a good story, but it wasn’t true.

  The C-118 that departed Tan Son Nhut in the early morning darkness of April 22 carried only a few of Thieu’s personal possessions and some government archives he hoped might win him sympathetic treatment from future historians. The Bank of Vietnam’s gold and foreign currency reserves were still there in South Vietnam.

  The rumors did have one thing right, however. The reserves were no longer in the vaults of the Bank of Vietnam. They were in the basement of a nondescript warehouse on Phan Binh Street, a narrow, shell-cratered road just north of the American Embassy. The currency and gold were there and not in the bank’s vaults because the CIA had launched an operation to get them out of the country before they fell into the hands of the North Vietnamese.

  Several weeks earlier, a United States marine captain trusted by the CIA’s Saigon station chief had been given the task of secretly preparing the reserves of the Bank of Vietnam for shipment to safety, and he had done his job well. That was no surprise to the station chief. He knew the officer to be a reliable man, a bit of an oddball perhaps, but well educated, intelligent, and resourceful. It was even said by some that he wrote poetry, but the station chief had never read any of it himself and he had never asked the captain if that were true.

  That the man did have an intellectual bent, however, was readily apparent from the code name he selected for the undertaking. He called it Operation Voltaire. No one ever asked him why.

  Two American members of the CIA’s Saigon station packed a total of almost 20,000 pounds of currency, mostly American dollars, as well as a small amount of gold bullion into wooden crates. Some embassy employees, locals who had no idea what was in the crates, then trucked them to the warehouse on Phan Binh Street. The captain organized a small detachment of marines to guard the building and settled back to wait for orders to fly the crates to safety outside of Vietnam.

  Those orders never came.

  As the noose around Saigon tightened, the CIA pressed what was left of the South Vietnamese government to approve the implementation of Operation Voltaire and allow them to ship the Bank of Vietnam’s reserves to Switzerland, but the frightened men abandoned by Thieu dithered. They clung to their daydreams like drowning men to driftwood.

  Maybe the North would accept a negotiated settlement, they hoped against all reason. If it did, then letting the Americans fly the Bank of Vietnam’s gold and foreign currency out of the country would suddenly look like a very bad idea. After the North Vietnamese took over, they would certainly tag anyone who had been rash enough to endorse such a plan as a traitor, a label that would undoubtedly prove fatal.

&
nbsp; Then April 30, 1975, came, and it didn’t matter anymore.

  North Vietnamese artillery pounded the city remorselessly, Saigon began to burn, and the population spiraled into an ugly panic. The State Department ordered all remaining Americans in Saigon evacuated, but it took a cordon of American marines on the walls of the embassy compound, bayonets fixed to their M-16s and thump guns popping canisters of tear gas into an angry mob of Vietnamese, to make it possible.

  By the time the last helicopter load of Americans lifted off the roof of the gutted embassy building and clattered through the dense smoke to the aircraft carriers waiting in the South China Sea, the crates of currency and gold stored in the warehouse on Phan Binh Street had become nothing but 20,000 pounds of excess baggage. Operation Voltaire was forgotten.

  As the years passed, the few people who had known about Operation Voltaire retired or died and the more informed speculation about what happened to the Bank of Vietnam’s reserves disappeared along with them. Within a little more than a decade, the colorful story of a vast hoard of gold and currency abandoned by the fleeing Americans in the flames of Saigon was reduced to a footnote in the rich annals of Washington folklore. Only half-believed at most, and even then only by a few, the tale was filed away with Deep Throat and the grassy knoll and largely forgotten.

  Then, in 1995, reconciliation became the flavor of the day. Vietnam and the United States resumed diplomatic relations, reopened their embassies, and exchanged diplomatic personnel.

  The newly appointed second secretary at the American Embassy in Hanoi, a position frequently reserved for a senior intelligence officer, was a man who had begun his career, not coincidentally, with a brief tour in Saigon in 1975. That posting had been minor, he had been listed on the embassy personnel roster as nothing more than a junior cultural attach, but the second secretary was one of the few people still in public life who knew for certain that the story of tons of money and gold left behind in the ruins of Saigon was not folklore. And he had not forgotten.

  As far as the second secretary knew, no trace of that 20,000 pounds of currency and gold had ever surfaced anywhere, so the first time he found an excuse to travel from Hanoi down to Saigon—now known as Ho Chi Minh City in what he thought a particularly graceless brutalization of history—he naturally took a stroll around to Phan Binh Street.

  The warehouse was gone.

  The second secretary glanced at the empty space where it had once stood; he took in the mounds of broken concrete and the rusting rebars that were all that remained; and he walked on without stopping.

  As nearly as the second secretary could calculate with any certainty, the ten tons of gold and currency in that warehouse in April 1975 would now be worth at least $400,000,000. Since plainly the money was no longer where it had been left, the second secretary thought he might ask around, diplomatically of course, to find out what the North Vietnamese had done with it after they rolled into Saigon.

  Imagine his surprise when he discovered that the North Vietnamese hadn’t done anything with it.

  Because they didn’t have it either.

  One

  FOURTEEN months as a marine corps grunt in Vietnam had left Eddie Dare with at least one staunch conviction: he had been born for better things than crawling around in the mud with a bunch of stoned assholes. Still, when he reflected on the subject now—which was something he tried very hard not to do—he was forced to admit that practicing law in San Francisco had an awful lot of the very same qualities.

  Eddie opened the Chronicle sports section with a sigh, propped it against a stainless steel napkin holder, and went back to his breakfast.

  The Buena Vista Cafe was way down at the end of Hyde Street, right on the bay where the cable cars from Union Square turned around, and a stool at the counter there was Eddie’s favorite place to begin a day. Three fried eggs, crispy bacon, that thick-cut patty sausage that you nearly couldn’t find anymore, hash browns swimming in catsup, and two slices of sourdough toast soaked with enough butter to cause little rivulets to form and run down his fingers every time he lifted a slice. Eddie knew eating breakfast like that wasn’t fashionable anymore, but he figured he probably wasn’t fashionable anymore either, so to hell with it.

  The waitress eased over with a fresh pot of coffee. Blond and athletic looking with a slight dusting of suntan, she looked like the runners in Golden Gate Park who could only find the time to put in miles on weekends. As she refilled Eddie’s chunky ceramic mug, she tossed out her most dazzling smile, but Eddie was tough to dazzle before his caffeine kicked in.

  “Anything else, handsome?”

  “No thanks, Suzie. Got to get to the office.”

  “Hey, new client, maybe? My tips going to get better?”

  Suzie had been flirting mildly with Eddie ever since she started working days at the BV instead of nights. Eddie noticed she had made a point of telling him she changed shifts because she was sick of the yuppies and tourists who piled into the place every night to slurp Irish coffee and check out the action; that she liked more mature, more stable men, guys who had lived a little. Eddie didn’t take long to get the idea, but it didn’t really excite him all that much once he did. Suzie was okay, but Eddie was already up to his ass in okay. Okay was the story of his life.

  Christ, is that what it’s going to say on my tombstone? he thought to himself. Here lies Eddie Dare. He was okay.

  “Did that woman ever call? The one I gave your number to?”

  “I don’t do divorces, Suzie.”

  “Well, you know, I figured with all the experience you’ve had yourself…”

  Eddie winced. Okay, honey, so I’ve been married a couple of times. So what?

  “This woman looked like she had pretty good money.”

  “I just don’t do divorce work, Suzie.”

  Suzie rubbed at a spot on the counter that was invisible, at least to Eddie, then she tossed the towel away and sloshed coffee around in the pot.

  “So, you still working on that case for the dog?” she finally asked, mostly just to keep the conversation going.

  “It’s not a case for a dog, Suzie. It’s a case that happens to involve a dog.”

  “I thought it was two dogs.”

  “Okay, two dogs.”

  Eddie had represented Eric Ratmoski on and off for five years. Breaking and entering a few times; extortion, of course; a couple of assault charges; a concealed weapons beef; and an interstate gambling conviction. All that was pretty much business as usual for Eric, but now he had plunged headlong into the porno business. That by itself probably wouldn’t have bothered Eddie so much, but Eric’s recent fixation with German Shepherds was pretty far over the line.

  Two dogs that Eric said he particularly loved—and Eric’s choice of words there was something Eddie wasn’t about to reflect on too closely—had been taken away and locked up at the San Francisco Animal Shelter. Eric had been onto Eddie every day to get them back and Eddie had been trying. He hadn’t managed it yet, and he figured that if he had to sit through one more meeting with the vice squad and listen to all those doggie fuck jokes again, he was going to puke. Probably he should tell Eric to get himself another lawyer. Maybe one who liked dogs.

  “I don’t know, Eddie,” Suzie mused. “Seems to me that talking to people about divorces isn’t any worse than watching movies of dogs humping.”

  Eddie was still trying to figure out what to say to that when a customer down the counter waved his coffee cup for a refill and Suzie wandered off. Eddie jumped at his chance. He used the last crust of his sourdough toast to sop up a stray bit of egg, dropped a twenty on the counter with a wave to Suzie, and headed outside to grab a cable car back over Russian Hill to his office.

  People who lived in San Francisco claimed that only tourists rode cable cars, and generally it was true. A real San Franciscan normally couldn’t manage to wedge his way onto one even if he wanted to. The flip-flops and camcorders and kids wearing T-shirts with stupid slogans gave no quarte
r; but it was still pretty early in the day for little hooligans to be out and about their business of ruining the city and Eddie usually had no difficulty getting on a car back over the hill after breakfast.

  It had been several years now since he had moved up to the better end of Grant just west of Market. He had the second floor of a small, vaguely Victorian building with a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor and something on the third floor called Pacific Century Import Company that apparently opened only occasionally and generally very late at night. That was odd, even for San Francisco, but Eddie had made a point of not asking too many questions. That was not odd for San Francisco.

  Eddie had started out as an uptown guy in a flashy, bronzed-glass office tower, then worked his way down to a one-man office over a Chinese restaurant. Most people usually tried to get that the other way around, he knew, and he would have preferred that approach himself, but you had to play the cards you were dealt and he figured he had done the best he could with his.

  His first stop after he left Wren & Simon, the big downtown firm where he had started right out of law school, had been two dingy rooms over a grocery store in Chinatown. After Eddie took a few days in the silence of his new office to contemplate the stark fact that he didn’t have any clients, not one, he hit upon a marketing strategy that was designed to get him some as quickly as possible.

  The idea was straightforward enough. Mostly he hung around the criminal courts at the Hall of Justice, wore a good suit, and radiated a willingness to work cheap. It turned out to be a remarkably effective plan because Eddie had one important thing going for him: he was pretty fast on his feet. That gave him a useful edge over the other lawyers who cruised the courthouse in search of a living, most of whom in Eddie’s eyes were only a step or two from swapping lives with their clients anyway.