Okay, so I’m not beginning to see how this is going to come together.
“The crates containing the money and the gold had been in the warehouse all right, but they’d already been taken out before you got there.”
“And of course, you don’t know how the real crates got out of the warehouse or where they went.”
“Oh, yes,” the general smiled. “I know exactly how they got out, and even to a point, where they went.”
Eddie said nothing. He waited, tilting his head back and closing his eyes.
“They were all in the load you flew to U-Tapao the day before. They were the crates labeled as embassy archives.”
Eddie opened his eyes. He should have seen it coming, but he hadn’t.
“Only two people knew that,” the general continued in the same crisp tone. “A CIA guy named Sterling, and Harry Austin. Even the ambassador didn’t know. Sterling was afraid that the South Vietnamese would stop them if anybody knew he was moving the money.”
The general’s left hand went off on a little expedition of its own, made a fist, and knocked twice against the dining table.
“You used two planes. Remember? Sterling was in the first, and you and your squad were with Austin in the second. Sterling only took a few crates on his plane so he could make secure storage arrangements in Thailand. Austin had most of the money in the plane you were on.”
Then something came back to Eddie, distantly. “Sterling never made it to U-Tapao, did he?”
The general sat looking at Eddie, as placid as a Buddhist monk.
“His plane went down in the Gulf of Thailand,” Eddie said. “There were no survivors.”
“That’s exactly right. Then when Harry Austin landed at U-Tapao and found out Sterling’s plane had crashed, he just arranged for Air America to store the crates you were carrying and didn’t tell anyone what was in them.”
“Son of a bitch,” Eddie muttered.
He briefly glanced away, letting everything settle; then he looked back at the general.
“That’s why Captain Austin chose to stay in Thailand after the evacuation instead of rotating back to the States with the rest of us, wasn’t it? Because he knew where the money was, and nobody else did.”
The nod of the general’s head was barely visible.
“How did he get it out of U-Tapao?”
The general shifted in his chair, pursing his lips.
“It wasn’t hard. He commandeered a big truck, got some guys to load up the crates, waved some pieces of paper, and drove out the gate.”
“You mean Captain Austin just loaded up a truck and drove away? With ten tons of money?”
“That was about it. The evacuation from Saigon had turned the base into chaos. Nobody gave a rat’s ass about paperwork.”
The general took a cigar from his inside jacket pocket. A cutter and some matches lay on the table and he busied himself clipping and lighting the cigar without looking at Eddie.
“I want you to find that money for me, Eddie. None of it was ever accounted for. None of it. Austin still had most of it hidden somewhere when he died. We’re sure of it.”
“Now I understand why you’re willing to pay me the hundred grand.”
“No, Eddie, I doubt you do.”
The general consulted the ash that was forming at the tip of his cigar.
“I paid you $100,000 purely to ensure that you’d come to Bangkok. I wanted to make certain you understood that I’m an honorable man who meets his commitments.”
The general let a small silence fall, clearly intending for it to feel significant to Eddie.
“If you can find out where Austin hid the money, you’ll receive the full one million dollar bonus we spoke of in San Francisco. All of it.”
Eddie took a deep breath and considered that in silence while the general puffed contentedly at his cigar.
“You’re telling me that Harry Austin just loaded up a truck and drove away with all the gold and currency from the Bank of Vietnam?”
It was an unnecessary question, if it was a question at all, and the general didn’t bother to answer.
“You’re telling me he stole the entire contents of the Bank of Vietnam, and now you want me to find it for you.”
The general drew on his cigar, inhaling a tiny portion of the smoke, and then he exhaled slowly and deliberately.
“Harry Austin didn’t steal anything,” he said.
“Oh, they just gave all that money to him?”
The general didn’t bother to respond.
“If you say he didn’t steal it, what would you call it?”
“It was abandoned property. I think ‘salvaged’ is probably the correct term.”
“Give me a break,” Eddie snorted. “Austin stole it.”
Eddie’s concerns didn’t appear to worry the general, but when he spoke again, Eddie noticed that the words came more quickly than they had before.
“Let me walk you through this. Let’s just say you’re in Saigon in April of 1975. The city is falling apart right in front of you. Panicked mobs control the streets; overloaded Jolly Greens are pounding out of LZs all over town, even snatching people off rooftops; the communists are shelling Tan Son Nhut; and their ground troops are less than five miles from where you stand. Let’s also say you control the security arrangements for all the Bank of Vietnam’s cash reserves and have the means to get them out of the country immediately. What would you do?”
“I’d send them somewhere like I was supposed to. I wouldn’t take them. The money belonged to the Vietnamese government. “
“The Vietnamese government?” The general drew on his cigar again. “Which Vietnamese government would that have been, exactly?”
“The South Vietnamese government, of course.”
“But South Vietnam effectively ceased to exist before you ever touched the money.”
Eddie could see without much difficulty where all this was going.
“Then I’d have just gotten the money out like I was supposed to,” he said, “and let the State Department or someone else straighten it all out.”
“You’d have turned the South Vietnamese money over to the United States government?”
The general raised an eyebrow thoughtfully.
“And if you had, what do you suppose they would have done with it? Maybe give it back to the Vietnamese, who were now of course the North Vietnamese?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then what would they would’ve done with it?”
“Probably just kept it.”
The general nodded a few more times, almost as if he was thinking everything through for the first time himself.
“Did that money belong to the United States government?
“No.”
“But you concede they would have just kept it anyway, although they plainly had no right to it.”
Eddie didn’t say anything.
The general nodded a couple of times anyway, exactly as if Eddie had spoken and he was in collegial agreement with whatever he had said. Then he rose and started toward the terrace.
Passing behind Eddie, he stopped and leaned over until his lips were right next to Eddie’s ear. Eddie could smell the flakes of heavy tobacco clinging to them.
“Then why the fuck would you give it to them?” he hissed.
The general straightened up, took another puff on his cigar, and strolled outside. Eddie could hear the crowd from the racetrack roaring as the door to the terrace swung open and then, when it closed again, the roar was gone.
Fourteen
EDDIE called the Post as soon as he got back to the hotel, but Bar Phillips wasn’t there and no one seemed to know when he might be.
That didn’t surprise Eddie, not from what he remembered about Bar, so he just left a message. The rest of the afternoon Eddie and Winnebago lay around the pool at the Oriental, dozing away their jet lag in the sun and letting the pool boys bring them brightly-colored drinks with tiny purple and white orchid
s floating in them.
Eddie spent the time wondering what to do about the general’s pitch. Winnebago shrugged off the whole thing as none of his concern and invested his afternoon in chain smoking Camels and ogling three busty Scandinavian tourists in string bikinis who were ogling the pool boys. The pool boys kept the drinks coming and ogled each other.
Shortly after nine that night, Eddie’s message having drawn no response, they headed out from the Oriental to take another shot at finding Bar Phillips. Sprinting across New Road through a break in the traffic, they walked up Silom toward the center of town. Although it had been dark for almost three hours, heat and humidity still smothered the city. Eddie could feel the night all over him, a heavy liquid thing that pressed against his body from every direction at once. Pools of moisture formed in his hair and sweat was dripping down his neck before they had walked more than a couple of blocks.
The street around them pulsed with life. It was all sound and smell: sizzling cooking fires on street vendor carts; drifting clouds of bus exhaust; pirated CDs pounding from loudspeakers; and the mingling odors of hundreds of slowly shuffling bodies.
They turned onto a broken-up sidewalk and edged their way through the narrow space between the vendors crowding both sides of it. Ranks of carts faced each other like two tiny freight trains stuck on parallel sidings, each loaded down with fake Rolexes, homemade copies of DVDs, plastic Louis Vuitton luggage, T-shirts, belts, socks, and stuffed animals. There was food, too: sliced fruit, rice wrapped in banana leaves, grilled chicken on wooden sticks, and other things that neither Eddie nor Winnebago recognized. Some neon tubing dangling from a T-shirt vendor’s cart caught Eddie’s attention and he traced the patterns it threw against the mirrored surfaces of a sleek office tower. Nearby a street vendor swirled a huge wok filled with roasting chestnuts over a charcoal fire built right on the sidewalk. It might be almost the twenty-first century for everyone else, Eddie thought, but Bangkok didn’t seem entirely sold on the concept.
Eddie and Winnebago were swimming in a sea of people: street-hardened touts, school children in blue uniforms, sweating tourists, office workers in suits, saggy-faced drunks, chubby Chinese housewives, and farangs with embarrassed grins and half-naked teenage girls hanging from their arms. It was a loud, smelly, sweaty mess, but no one pushed or shoved and the crowd bubbled and throbbed with an internal rhythm that was both graceful and amicable.
There was something about it all that cast a kind of spell over Eddie. The sounds, the odors, and the heat all combined to brew up a kind of magic potion, one that left him feeling a little drunk, nearly overwhelmed, and staggering in a swirl of possibilities. Somehow, in a way he didn’t really understand, it all came together to make him feel strangely innocent and young again. It even, he had to honestly admit, gave him something like half a hard-on. But then everyone got wised up in Bangkok eventually, he figured, even when they were half hard; and he doubted that anyone stayed young there for very long.
“Where are we going, Eddie?”
“The Pong.” Eddie pointed through the crowd up Silom Road. “It’s just up there, I think.”
The Pong was what the American soldiers on R&R in Bangkok during the sixties and seventies had christened Soi Patpong, undoubtedly the most famous street in Bangkok. Patpong had been little more than a narrow, bumpy alley that ran for a couple of hundred yards between Silom and Suriwong Road until somebody opened a tiny bar there and hired a few Thai girls to go-go dance to American rock and roll. Within weeks, there were thirty other bars just like it and the street was wall-to-wall with lithe, beautiful young girls. None of them were very good dancers, but they were all gorgeous and wore very small bikinis and very high-heeled shoes, so nobody cared much.
In the eighties and nineties, however, it had all been downhill for the Pong. The American military went home and left nothing behind but a motley band of sad and bedraggled misfits: burned-out Peace Corps types, drunken old Air America pilots, glue sniffers, thinner addicts, leftover hippies trying to score cheap dope, and hordes of German and Scandinavian tourists in baggy shorts, leather sandals and nylon socks. The Pong had a slightly wistful air about it now, Eddie thought; a sense of time having passed too quickly, and for too small a purpose.
“Is this a joke or something, Eddie?”
Eddie glanced over his shoulder. Winnebago had stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant and was reading some menu pages that had been photocopied and stuck to the inside of the front window.
“Do they really eat this stuff? Fried chicken knuckles? Chicken feet salad? Fish sauce? What the fuck is fish sauce? You squeeze the fish and the shit that comes out of it is sauce? You think maybe that’s fish sauce?”
Winnebago read on.
“Oh, man, I don’t believe it. Sliced bull’s penis?”
“The Chinese believe it’s good for your virility.”
“It didn’t do much for the poor, fucking bull’s, did it?” Winnebago muttered.
***
THE man watching Eddie and Winnebago was caught out in the open when they walked away from the restaurant’s window more quickly than he expected. He scrambled back into the crowd, suddenly conspicuous, and then watched from the shadows as Eddie grabbed Winnebago’s elbow and pointed up Silom. It looked as if Eddie was pointing a long way up, so the man doubted it had anything to do with him, but then Winnebago nodded vigorously and they began walking straight toward him.
He looked around quickly for some place to disappear. This part of Silom Road was a canyon of darkened office towers, none offering much promise to a man seeking to blend unnoticed into the background, so he took a chance. He stepped off the sidewalk and, while pretending to search for a taxi, examined his prospects further up the road.
Almost immediately he spotted a 7-Eleven. It was just a few doors past the next cross street and its façade glistened so whitely among the dim gray buildings lining Silom that it almost hurt his eyes.
The man lowered his head, stepped back onto the sidewalk, and made for the 7-Eleven at what he hoped was an inconspicuous pace. Once there, he slipped inside and pretended to browse the shelves while he kept an eye on the street through the big window at the front. Sure enough, as he lingered over a display of flashlight batteries, he saw Eddie and Winnebago walk past.
He edged carefully back outside to see where they were going. Before they had covered another fifty yards, he had worked it out.
***
POPEYE’S Fried Chicken appeared to Eddie out of the Bangkok night like a hallucination. It was outlined with tubes of neon—red, blue and yellow streaks of color—and the light from the spotless dining room flooded out onto the Silom sidewalk through a glittering curtain of glass. Several dozen people, mostly farangs, sat scattered among its fifty or more red, plastic-topped tables benignly watched over by a six-foot effigy of the man himself, yellow corncob pipe clinched in his teeth and a sailor cap cocked rakishly on his head.
After they spotted Popeye’s, Eddie and Winnebago quickly hit a half dozen of the bigger go-go bars in Patpong. Eddie put some cash around among the waitresses and bartenders and accompanied it with a promise of more for anyone who sent Bar Phillips to meet them at Popeye’s within the next hour. Crossing back over Silom, they grabbed a table and loaded it down with food.
“This is a hell of a lot more like it,” Winnebago said, biting into a greasy drumstick. “I’m still so fucked up from the flight I could eat a horse.”
“That can be arranged, I imagine,” Eddie said.
Winnebago gave Eddie a dead-eyed stare and changed the subject. “What are you going to do if you find this newspaper guy?”
“Ask him what he knows about Captain Austin. Bar’s probably met every Westerner in Bangkok at one time or another. Maybe he can tell us what the captain was doing here. At least that would give us a place to start.”
“So you’re going to do it? To look for the money for this general guy?”
“I don’t know.” Eddie poked a french fr
y into a smear of catsup. “I figure we’re here and he’s paying for it. It couldn’t hurt to ask around a little.”
“You’re actually going to tell a newspaper reporter about all this shit?
Eddie tilted his head toward Winnebago and raised his eyebrows.
“I didn’t think you were completely stupid,” Winnebago said. He tossed a chicken bone onto a paper plate and grabbed a fresh piece. “Then what are you going to tell him?”
“I’m just going to say that Harry Austin’s family hired me to find out what really happened to him. I think that ought to fly.”
“Is this reporter some big buddy of yours?”
“No, not really. I met him when I was down here on a case once for the Bank of America. He wrote a magazine piece about some dentists from San Diego who ripped off the bank and spent the money building a porno movie studio in Bangkok. It was great human interest stuff.”
Winnebago gave Eddie another long look, but he ignored it and went on.
“Anyway, he’s a smart guy, tough and mean as hell, and as far as I know he’s fairly honest. At least for a reporter.”
“If he’s not a buddy, why would he go to any trouble to help you find out about Austin?”
“I doubt it’ll be any trouble. Bar can probably tell us what Austin was doing and who he hung out with right off the top of his head.”
“And if he can’t?”
“I’ll offer him $10,000 to find out.”
Winnebago chewed pensively at the bone of his third drumstick while he examined a man standing out on the sidewalk who appeared to be eyeing the crowd inside Popeye’s. If it was Bar Phillips, he figured they were in real trouble. The guy looked to Winnebago like some geezer from a Tallahassee retirement home who had fled to Bangkok to draw his final breaths in mostly imagined debauchery. He must have been at least sixty, and wore a black shirt and pants, white belt and shoes, and a bicycle helmet with a skull and cross-bones stenciled on the front. Maybe he wasn’t really sixty, it occurred to Winnebago. Maybe he was closer to thirty and Bangkok just did that kind of thing to you.
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