“You haven’t been honest with us, have you, Lek?” Eddie’s voice was still soft, but it had taken on an unmistakable edge.
Lek returned Eddie’s gaze without flinching. “I think you had better tell me exactly what you mean.”
Across the river, a motorcycle engine coughed to life. The unseen rider played with the throttle and the engine’s roar rose and fell in a wave that washed back and forth over them. The wave crested, broke, and rolled away. They all sipped their coffee and listened to the sound until it faded in the distance.
When Eddie nodded at him, Bar reached into his shirt pocket, took out a small red booklet, and flipped it onto the table. It hit on one corner, teetered there briefly as if trying to decide how much to show of itself, and then flopped over on its back.
They could all see it was a passport, the gold stamping clearly visible even in the dim half-light seeping from the nearby buildings. On the cover was a wreath with a large five-pointed star and beams of light radiating from it. Above the wreath were the words SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM. Below it, in smaller letters, it said PASSPORT—DIPLOMATIC.
Lek glanced at the passport without expression and looked away quickly. “How did you get it out of my bag?”
Winnebago started to say something, but Eddie waved him into silence.
“I can’t force you to tell us anything, Lek.” Eddie said. “It’s up to you.”
Lek shifted in her chair, pulling her legs up and tucking them under her. As she smoothed her skirt and adjusted her tiny feet so that her body rested comfortably against them, Eddie thought briefly of the possibilities he had once imagined. Lek remained silent, staring at the river.
Eventually Bar’s impatience got the better of him. “You were never married to Austin, were you?” he asked her.
She shook her head slowly. “No.”
Bar’s face clouded and he started to say something else, but Eddie held up his hand.
“Did you ever meet him?” Eddie asked.
“I’m good, Eddie,” Lek laughed, “but not that good. We were together a few times.”
Eddie leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He thought he might finally be getting on top of things and he started to feel good about it, almost downright confident he was on the right track.
“Why did McBride tell us you were Austin’s wife?” he asked Lek.
This time when Lek laughed it was so sudden that it startled Eddie and he almost lost the delicate balance he had assumed on the back legs of his chair.
Winnebago flung up his hands. “Would somebody tell me what the fuck is going on here?”
Eddie let that pass, but he slowly lowered his chair until it was flat on the ground, and then slouched down, affecting an indifferent posture.
“McBride’s not DEA, is he?” Eddie watched Lek carefully. “He’s CIA.”
Bar shook his head vigorously and waved both his hands in little jerking motions. “No way, man. I’ve known Chuck for years. He’s DEA.”
Eddie gave Bar a look like the one the kid in the nursery rhyme must have gotten right after he told his mother he had traded their cow for a bag of magic beans.
“That’s right, isn’t it, Lek?” Eddie shifted his eyes back to her. “McBride’s a spook.”
“How did you know?” she asked him.
“I took a wild shot that accidentally hit something.”
Lek nodded as if that was exactly what she had already decided herself.
“Oh, man,” Bar muttered and consulted the pattern of wrinkles on the back of his left hand, studying them like they were the key to some kind of a code.
“So who the hell are you, lady?” Eddie asked. “You’re CIA, too, aren’t you? McBride is using you to keep an eye on us.”
“No.” A trace of a smile danced across Lek’ face. “You couldn’t be more wrong about that.”
Lek almost seemed to be enjoying his interrogation, Eddie suddenly noticed, and that unsettled him. His self-confidence eased off a bit, hid behind one ear, and developed a twitch.
“Then why did McBride throw us together?” he asked.
“He thinks I was married to Harry. He told you exactly what he knows.”
“You convinced a CIA field agent that you were married to Harry Austin and he never even bothered to check it out?”
“Of course he checked. Everything was in perfect order: my employment history, our marriage records, everything.”
Eddie adjusted his indifferent look, turning up the volume a little. But now he knew for sure that he was either losing control of the situation or, far more likely, had never had any control in the first place. Maybe Lek was American. Maybe she was Vietnamese. Maybe she was one and working for the other. Maybe she was both and working for neither. How the hell was he supposed to know unless she wanted to tell him? His self-confidence turned tail and fled, not even pausing to kiss him goodnight.
“I’m sick of guessing games, Lek,” Eddie said, folding his arms and shifting in his chair. “Just spell it out. Who are you and what do you want from me?”
Lek’s eyes became flat as mud. “I am the special deputy to the general secretary of the Hai Ba Trung.”
She looked sideways at Bar and then back at Eddie, holding his eyes with hers.
“In English, you call it the Vietnamese Intelligence Service.”
Twenty-Eight
SOMEWHERE across the river a radio played a Thai love song. The melancholy voice of a young girl, heartbroken and mournful, spread over the black water like river fog.
The air was unnaturally still. The world was wrapped in a thick, breathless darkness and no one moved for a long time. Eventually Bar raised his right arm very slowly until his hand was just above his head. Four young, bow-tied attendants like those at the front gate appeared out of the shadows and two of them took up positions at each end of the deck. Their movements were languid, like boys walking under water.
Lek laughed under her breath. “Don’t you think this is a little melodramatic?”
“No, I don’t think this is a little melodramatic,” Eddie said.
“Are you going to interrogate me now?” Lek seemed to be amused by the prospect. “Are these little boys going to torture me if I don’t tell you what you want to know?”
“The pictures you said were in the safety deposit box…” Eddie broke off, wishing he didn’t sound so tired, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. “What was the point of sending them to us?”
“I had nothing to do with the pictures and I don’t know who sent them to you. The ones I showed you were in Harry’s safety deposit box just as I told you they were. I imagine yours came from the same person who sent them to him.”
“I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Believe what you want.”
“And I suppose you had nothing to do with those thugs waiting for us outside the Stardust either?”
“Not really.”
Eddie thought he caught a tone in Lek’s voice that had not been there before; something that sounded like frustration, even embarrassment. He stayed silent until she explained it, as he knew she would.
“When we were at the Oriental, I used my mobile phone to check while I was in your bathroom.” Lek seemed to consider briefly how much she should tell Eddie. “Yes, those men were ours, but I didn’t arrange for them to be there.”
“Who did?”
“My superiors are very thorough men. They use many different tools for their work. I am only one.”
“What about the general? Is he one of those tools?”
“Yes, but I have nothing to do with that either. Someone else is running him.”
“Why did they kill Harry Austin?” Eddie made a little fist and rapped it against the table. “Maybe that time the tool just slipped?”
Lek looked away and said nothing.
“How did you get on to Austin, Lek?”
“The usual way. We worked hard and bit by bit we put it together.” Lek gave a
little shrug. “Eventually we found out that Harry had devised the original security plan for moving the money. We’re not sure yet how he did it, but we know he got it out of the country somehow on his own before Saigon fell. After that, he just kept it.”
Eddie realized that Lek was looking at him now with something on her face that seemed almost like sadness, but he couldn’t see her eyes in the dark so all he could make out was the outline of it. Why was she looking at him like that, he wondered? He didn’t know and he didn’t ask.
From out on the river there came the low thrump thrump of a boat engine leaping to life. Lek turned for a moment toward the sound and her motion caused her white blouse to twist and snatch up what light there was drifting in the dimness and draw it into the fabric. For a moment, the sudden flare of luminescence made Eddie almost giddy. He could see nothing but her skin against her blouse, rich honey against the radiance of the light.
“Do you really think that Austin kept the money hidden all these years?” Bar asked. He could see he was interrupting Eddie’s thoughts, although he wasn’t exactly certain what those thoughts were, but he was too impatient to sit quietly.
“We know he did,” Lek said. “Most of it at least. We just don’t know where.”
“So they traced Austin to Bangkok and sent you here to reel him in, huh?”
“More or less. Yes.”
“That was pretty cold, wasn’t it? Romancing a lonely old guy so you could steal his money? Did you have to tell him you loved him?”
“Steal his money?” Her eyes flashed with anger. “I cannot steal something that he stole from my country in the first place.”
Eddie watched Lek’s face closely. It was a lovely face, he still thought, but suddenly she also looked to him like a woman capable of great cruelty.
“That’s a bunch of shit,” Bar growled. “You were yanking a poor old guy’s pud just to find out where the money was. If you’d found it, you’d have killed him and taken it.”
“I am Vietnamese. Harry Austin took something that is ours, something that he had no right to take. Returning it to my country justified whatever means were required.”
“Oh, I see,” Bar snorted, “and you people took…what? South Vietnam? An entire country that you had no right to?”
“The Vietnamese are one people,” Lek shot back. “We had the right to bring our nation together again.”
“Knock it off, both of you,” Eddie snapped. “You sound like the Larry King Show.”
He pushed himself back in his chair and folded his arms. “Okay, let’s cut the crap, Lek. What’s the deal you’ve got for us?”
“Why do you think I have a deal for you?”
“Everyone else seems to have one. Why should you be any different?”
Lek dropped her hands into her lap. Her face went blank and her voice turned toneless. “I won’t haggle with you. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has authorized me to pay you up to $5,000,000 if you can find where Harry Austin hid the money he took from us. So that is my offer. $5,000,000.”
At least the price was moving in the right direction, Eddie thought.
“All you have to do is find the money and tell me where it is,” Lek finished. “After that, we will do everything else.”
“I’ll bet. Then I suppose you’ll just send me the $5,000,000. The check is in the mail? Something like that?”
“We would be prepared to offer you reasonable guarantees if you insist.”
“I can hardly wait to find out what those might be,” Eddie chuckled. “Maybe the same kinds of guarantees Captain Austin got, you think?”
When Lek said nothing, Eddie stood up and walked to the edge of the deck. The Chao Phraya looked like a painted river in the darkness. He leaned on the rail, his back to the table, and breathed in the Bangkok night.
After a while he turned back and said, “I’m too tired to think anymore tonight.”
“So what now?” Lek asked, glancing at the boys blocking both ends of the deck.
“Nothing,” Eddie told her. “The three of us are leaving, but you’re staying. These guys will turn you loose tomorrow at noon and you can do whatever you want. I figure we’re at least entitled to a little head start.”
“What are you going to do if I try to leave tonight?” Lek seemed balanced between amusement and surprise. “Kill me?”
“No,” Eddie shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“But he might,” Bar suggested in a helpful voice, pointing to the tallest of the four boys.
The boy was standing just to Lek’s right holding a black revolver with polished wood grips. He had both hands wrapped around the gun and, although the muzzle was pointed up, the expression on his face left no doubt that he could bring the weapon into action quickly.
Lek glanced at the boy. “Does that mean you’re refusing my offer?” she asked.
Her tone was so stilted that Eddie found himself wondering for a moment if their conversation was being recorded. He looked back out at the water again and realized that was ridiculous. Their conversation was rolling past and disappearing into the darkness just like the river.
“No, it doesn’t mean that,” Eddie replied in a soft voice. “Not yet, at least.”
He watched a large log drift by on the current. As it passed, it spun slowly through a full circle and then abruptly it sank out of sight in the inky water. Eddie waited for it to bob back to the surface, but it didn’t. He hoped that wasn’t an omen.
No one said anything else. Bar and Winnebago stood up and, together with Eddie, they walked away. Lek picked up the passport Bar had left on the table and flipped open its red cover. Neither her picture nor her name was where it should have been. She was gazing at blank pages.
“Where did you get it?” she called after Eddie, laughing a little in spite of herself.
“Like Bar said,” Eddie called back. “He has friends around here.”
When they reached the corner of the building, Eddie stopped and looked back at Lek although he had promised himself that he wouldn’t. She had extraordinary features—strong, yet still delicate—and the way her long, upper lip was pushed out and drawn taut made him think for a moment of a petulant child who had been caught doing something naughty.
“You are a very clever bastard, Eddie Dare,” she said as he watched her.
“Think so?”
“But there’s one thing I really do wonder.”
“What’s that?”
“If in the end, you will be clever enough.”
It was a good question, Eddie thought to himself. A hell of a good question actually.
Eddie knew he would find out the answer soon enough anyway so he wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about it right then. Instead, he grinned, cut Lek the biggest wink he could, and wiggled his eyebrows. It was a gesture so silly he laughed out loud when he did it.
Then Eddie turned back toward where the taxi was still waiting for them somewhere off in the darkness and walked away. He didn’t look around again.
***
THEY didn’t have to drive too far, only a mile or so to a wharf further up the river next to a darkened Buddhist temple. Bar paid off the taxi and Eddie and Winnebago followed him to the edge of the river and down a ramp of creaking planks that had been bleached by the sun to the color of paper. A half dozen or more shallow-bottomed longboats, their hulls striped in brilliant reds, greens and blues, bumped against a wall of old tires, the boatmen stretched out asleep inside.
There was a pay phone on a post at one corner of the wharf. Eddie stopped and looked at it.
“Think this thing works?” he asked Bar.
“Probably not. Use my mobile.”
“I’m going to leave a message for McBride at the embassy. They can probably tell if the call comes from your phone and I’d rather he doesn’t know we’re together.”
“What difference would that make?” Bar asked.
“McBride thinks I’m on my own and he isn’t taking me very serio
usly. He probably figures I’m stumbling around somewhere with Winnebago and haven’t got a clue what to do.”
“Yeah,” Winnebago mumbled as he reached for his Camels, “imagine him thinking a thing like that.”
Eddie lifted the receiver and smiled when he heard the hum of a dial tone. “Where’s a good place for me to meet McBride tomorrow?” he asked Bar.
“Why do you want to see McBride after the kiss-off he gave you at the embassy?”
“We need help, Bar. The CIA must be interested in that money just like everybody else is. Maybe McBride will toss in with us if I tell him what I know.”
“But you don’t know anything,” Winnebago pointed out, exhaling smoke and adding his dead match to the other garbage floating in the river.
“I’ll make something up.”
Bar eyed Eddie. “What kind of a place do you have in mind? Public or private?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just as long as it’s somewhere McBride will have a hard time tailing me after I leave. You know he’ll try.”
Eddie and Winnebago watched Bar while he sorted through the possibilities. The boatmen, all wide awake now, sat quietly in their boats and watched the three farangs watch each other. Finally, Bar told Eddie what instructions to leave for Chuck McBride and gave him some coins and the night number for the embassy. Then he spoke quietly in Thai to the boatmen while Eddie was on the phone.
After Eddie hung up, Bar pointed toward one of the boats, a new-looking one with a long band of red and green striped canvas over a metal frame that formed a canopy from bow to stern. They all climbed down into the narrow shell and made themselves as comfortable as possible on its hard, wooden seats. The boatman fired up the massive automobile engine in the stern, racked the throttle a few times—for good luck, Eddie hoped—then powered away from the pier and made for the middle of the wide, oily river. After ten minutes, the boat slowed and began a gently arcing turn into a narrow canal that flowed east, away from the river.
“This is the Saensaeb Canal,” Bar screamed into Eddie’s ear loud enough to be heard over the roar of the big engine. Then he pulled a handkerchief out of the back pocket of his trousers. “Everyone calls it the sewer run. If you’ve got anything to use, I’d suggest you cover your face.”
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