Hour of the Assassins

by Andrew Kaplan

  C.J. put her arm around his waist in the chill sea breeze outside the restaurant, clinging to him as if for warmth, while the Mexican parking lot attendant went to get her car. The Mexican brought the car, a silver Mercedes 450 SL hardtop, around to where they were standing. As they got in, two thoughts occurred to Caine: that the mistress business was still damn lucrative and that the Mercedes was the Chevy of West Los Angeles.

  C.J. drove swiftly, surely, up the Pacific Coast Highway to the beach house. As she drove, she repeatedly glanced at Caine out of the corner of her eye. Although his face was shadowed, his green eyes seemed luminous in the reflected light of the dashboard dials. He caught her looking at him and they smiled, accomplices in the gentle urging of the California night.

  “What did you discuss with Karl?” she asked.

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business? What do you do, anyway?”

  “I’m a PR man.”

  “What are you selling?”

  “Hot air mostly,” he replied and when she giggled, added, “Myself. That’s what we all sell, isn’t it?”

  She looked at him sharply in response to the implied put-down.

  “You think we’re all so decadent, don’t you? I think you have a touch of the Puritan in you. That wonderful self-righteousness of the solid citizen who goes to church on Sunday and then sneaks into the massage parlor on Monday,” she said, contemptuously tossing back her hair.

  “Perhaps you’re right. I’ve been away a long time,” Caine admitted.

  “Then don’t sit there making judgments about me. As Ivan Karamazov said, ‘If God is dead, everything is permitted.’”

  Caine looked at her curiously. Her erudition surprised him. She was beginning to interest him, much more than he would have ever admitted.

  “How did you get hooked on Dostoevsky?” he asked.

  “I majored in English Lit. at Berkeley. I’m really a very intellectual hooker,” she said with a wry smile.

  “We’re all hookers, one way or another.”

  C.J. glanced at him with frank interest, green pinpoints of light from the dashboard reflected in her eyes. Then she smiled, as though he had passed some kind of test. The car slowed as they approached the beach house.

  She turned into the driveway and they went into the house. Wasserman had gone. He had taken the dossier with him, and Caine quickly scanned the living room but found nothing to indicate that Wasserman had ever been there as C.J. put an album on the stereo. The man is as slippery as an eel, he thought C.J. lit the fire and poured them snifters of Grand Marnier.

  They sat before the fire and gently touched glasses, the brandy a molten orange gold in their hands. Her hair caught the firelight and tumbled down her cheeks like glowing streams of lava. For a brief moment they kissed, suddenly aware of each other, like two hyperbolas become tangent at a single point before being swept away in opposite directions for all eternity. She reached out and ran her fingers through his sandy hair, something she had been wanting to do all evening.

  “What does C.J. stand for, anyway?” he asked.

  “C for Carole, as in Lombard; J for Joan, as in Crawford. My mother was a fan,” she shrugged.

  “I’m glad my mother didn’t feel the same way. Her favorite star was Lassie,” he said, and she laughed.

  Gold flecks of firelight flickered in her eyes. They gazed at each other with a strange sense of discovery.

  “What do you want to do?” she said, her voice a drowsy whisper.

  “You know what I want to do,” he said, and smiled.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she said with a throaty laugh and, taking his hand, led him into the bedroom.

  CHAPTER 3

  The French have a word for it. They call it the post-coital tristesse. It’s a kind of vague sadness that comes sometimes when the act of love is over. Maybe because the reality of sex doesn’t always measure up to the expectation. Maybe that was it, Caine mused as he lay next to C.J. in the darkness.

  During his training in Virginia, his instructor had warned them that an agent was never more vulnerable than right after sex. Perhaps because the time after sex was a time for truth, Caine thought, remembering Lim.

  “Tell me the truth, Tan Caine. Who are you really?” Lim had asked him that first time, her voice barely audible over the rain on the bamboo slats.

  “Just a soldier,” Caine replied, wondering if she was asking out of a woman’s curiosity or whether she was really Pathet Lao.

  “All men are soldiers now,” she said. “Is that why you are fighting?”

  “No,” reaching for a cigarette. In the brief match flare her dark eyes searched his face, as though some answer might be written there.

  “Then why do men make war?”

  “Because the women are watching,” he replied. And then she had giggled, “Make love, not war. Isn’t that what you Americans say?”

  Well, he was no good at making love anymore either, Caine decided. C.J. certainly wouldn’t disagree with that. They lay together in the soft California night, catching their breath and after a long silence she finally brought it out.

  “You’re a lousy lover, you know that,” she said bitterly.

  “Does it really matter?”

  “Christ, that’s a new one,” she snapped. “You’re the first guy I ever slept with who didn’t want to know how good he was. You don’t really care, do you? You just jerked off inside me, you bastard,” bitterness eroding her anger.

  “No, I guess I don’t care very much. Is that what you felt?” Don’t think about it, he told himself. This is the vulnerable time and you don’t want to feel anything, just get it off so you can get some sleep.

  “I felt that you wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, like an unpleasant duty.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I must be regressing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing really. It’s just that when you’re young the object of sex is relief, not pleasure.” Something in his tired voice plucked at her.

  She leaned over him, her long blond hair tickling his face and said softly, “Boy, she really must have been something.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who did this to you,” she replied. “But don’t take it out on the rest of us. We’ve all been through the mill. You don’t know what I went through with my old man. You think you’ve had it bad. Well you don’t know what bad is.”

  “You’re right,” Caine said and then he lit a cigarette because there was no way to stop it now and sleep wouldn’t come till morning. He rested his head on his arm and watched the smoke curl into the darkness.

  The CIA, like most large corporations, does the bulk of its recruiting on college campuses. The Company, as it is called by the people who work there, looks for two types of recruits among the students it interviews: those with technical degrees in engineering, accounting, computer science, etc., to do “white” work at Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and those with language skills and graduate majors in international-related studies to be enrolled in the Career Training Program. The CTP is a one-year course designed to prepare an agent in “black” work, which may involve hazardous assignments overseas.

  John Caine had his first interview on a sunny spring morning at the Career Placement Center at UCLA, where he was completing his M.B.A. with a major in international finance. The recruiter was a shrewd, gregarious man in his early sixties with a ready smile and wit. Caine remembered with a wry smile that he had told the interviewer he was considering the CTP because he loved foreign travel and, besides, it sounded like fun. God, was I ever that young, he wondered. Shortly thereafter he sent in his application and medical history, similar to most job applications, except that it was much longer and more detailed, even requiring him to list every address he had ever stayed at for the past fifteen years. He then sat for a long three-part examination. The first part of the exam was a standard intelligence/knowledge test s
imilar to the entrance exam for grad school. The second part was one of those psychological tests designed to determine which you would rather be: a lighthouse keeper or an insurance salesman. The last section was a test of the applicant’s abilities in language acquisition. He was timed to see how quickly he learned an invented language. Since Caine claimed proficiency in German and Spanish, he was also given translation exercises.

  When he passed the exam, a security check lasting nearly seven months was run on him. After he had been cleared by the Agency and the FBI, Caine was flown to Washington and interviewed again. A month later he received a verbal offer to join the CTP at a Civil Service Grade 9, which paid about eleven hundred dollars a month.

  Twenty-nine months later Caine was on a jet to Laos.

  He lay next to C.J., his bare arm touching hers, a world away, staring into darkness and listening to the occasional sounds of night traffic along the coast highway. From somewhere came the sound of a late newscast, muffled and indistinct—something about a kidnapping. Insomnia must be the major disease of the twentieth century, he thought. C.J. stirred restlessly beside him. After a long silence she snuggled against his shoulder and whispered,

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Yes,” he said, and smiled.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you before. It’s never really good the first time. Oh, hell, it’s lonely lying here by myself. Put your arm around me,” she said in a little girl voice.

  “I’m never any good the first time, either. Nerves, I guess,” putting his arm around her.

  “Your bracelet is scratching me. What is it anyway? I’ve never seen one like it,” she said, running her fingers along the dull metal ring around his wrist.

  “It’s from Asia,” he yawned.

  “Were you in Asia?”

  “Weren’t we all?”

  “You’re like a politician,” she laughed. “You have a way of answering questions without saying anything. What kind of a bracelet is it?”

  “It’s a Meo bracelet,” he replied, remembering Dao. “It’s supposed to protect you against evil tlan spirits.”

  “You don’t really believe in spirits, do you?” she asked, amused.

  Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could blame it all on the tlan the way the Meo did? he thought. What do we Westerners know about spirits anyway? Just the Bible. They knew about it all right. The spirit of man will sustain his infirmity. But a wounded spirit, who can bear? But then, no one with a white skin knew much about Asia.

  “In a way,” he said.

  “What’s a Meo?” she asked in a sleepy voice. “It sounds like a cat.”

  “They’re a mountain tribe in Indochina,” he said. That had been his first mistake. He remembered Dao correcting him the first time they met at Airstrip 256. As they ducked under the air blast from the helicopter blades and ran to the edge of the clearing, Caine had shouted something about being glad to be with the Meo force at last. The chopper pulled heavily into the sky with an incredible clatter as Dao remarked pedantically:

  “We are not Meo. Meo means ‘barbarians’ and is a name the Chinese gave to us thousands of years ago. We call ourselves Hmong, which means ‘free men.’”

  “I’ll remember,” Caine said, shouldering his pack. Thorns tore at his fatigues as he stumbled through the dense undergrowth, following Dao’s wiry body tirelessly scrambling up the trail. He quickened his pace as Dao’s blue air force jumpsuit almost disappeared into the dense jungle shade. Cunningham was right, Caine thought. It’s going to be tricky. He’d met Cunningham, a hard hawk-nosed Yankee, ten minutes after he had landed at Long Tieng Air Base, CIA headquarters in Laos, The fan in Cunningham’s tiny office barely stirred the air, stifling in the dense noon heat Cunningham handed Caine a lukewarm Coke, sizing him up in a brief speculative glance. He took in Caine’s muscled shoulders, sandy hair, bright green eyes, and almost too-handsome features. He looked like what you like to think an American looks like.

  “Relax,” he said. “You’ve got twenty minutes till your chopper takes off. You’ll rendezvous with General Dao at Strip two fifty-six in the Annam border sector. I suppose Washington briefed you.”

  “They told me you’d be my control,” Caine replied.

  “Sure. I’ll have about as much authority over you as you’ll have over Dao, which is to say, zilch. Officially your assignment is to advise Dao. He’s got about three thousand tribesmen attached to the Royal Lao Army and paid by us. They operate in Sector Five against twenty thousand Pathet Lao guerrillas and one, maybe two, NVA regiments in the area.”

  “Then I’d advise him to surrender,” Caine snapped. “What’s my real assignment?”

  Cunningham smiled briefly with approval, gulped down his Coke, and let out a loud belch.

  “To keep the roof from caving in. Dao may not be much, but he’s the only thing keeping Charley from moving down into the Plain of Jars. It’s going to be damn tricky, Caine. The Meo are brutal and superstitious. If you offend a tlan spirit, they might kill you five minutes after you walk into camp. And Dao has his own ambitions. We’re using each other right now, but don’t put any bets down on this marriage. Come on, I’ll walk you to the chopper.”

  They walked out to the chopper, eyes squinting against the intense glare of the tarmac. As Caine slung his pack and M-16 aboard, Cunningham shouted: “You’ll be on your own, Caine, so watch your back. And one more thing”—his voice almost lost in the scream of the rotor—“whatever you do, don’t let them take you alive.”

  They’d taken Chong alive, Caine thought. That had been his fault. So many things were his fault: Lim, the child—No, he didn’t want to go on any more guilt trips. Emotion is wasted energy, Dao would say. He remembered Dao laughing, sitting around the fire and all of them drunk on the potent com liquor passed around by the spirit doctor, the tu-ua-neng. Chong was playing those strange plaintive sounds on his khene and then all of them were laughing, because Caine had suggested taking a prisoner and getting information.

  “Prisoners,” Dao laughed. “There are no prisoners in this war.”

  Christ, how do you turn it off, he wondered. C.J. lay quietly beside him, her breathing deep and regular. He got up and, still naked, walked into the living room and took some brandy from the bottle left on the coffee table. Then he went out on the balcony and stared out at the pale froth of surf crashing against the deserted beach. Far to the south, he could just make out the lights of the Palos Verdes shore. He drank the brandy with a sudden gasp, shivering in the cool sea breeze.

  We just don’t fit, he thought. Like the kiwi that belongs to the sky yet is born without wings. L.A. is filled with refugees caught at land’s end. The reason the pioneers stopped in California wasn’t because they had found what they were seeking, but because they ran out of land. They simply couldn’t go any farther. Well, what happens when you come to the end of yourself? Do you just stop? he wondered. We lost our cherry in Asia. We thought we were going to defeat the enemy. Nobody told us we were the enemy.

  He was really cold now and he stepped back inside, closing the glass balcony door against the chill and the tireless pounding of the surf. C.J. was sleeping on her side, her long hair tangled on the pillow. He looked down at her and gently stroked her hair away from her face. Her skin tan, almost the same color as Lim’s and her body delicately made, like Lim. But how could you explain C.J. to Lim or Lim to C.J.? Poor C.J., he smiled. Trying so hard to be a liberated lady. And Lim, for whom the concept didn’t even exist. Christ, why don’t you just drop it and get some sleep, he thought.

  He got back into bed and put his arm around C.J. She lay curled away from him, her hair tickling his lips. It would be easy to fall in love with someone as bright and beautiful as C.J., but who could afford it, he thought. We give our heart away for free, but it costs us so much to get it back. Like Lim. Was it really love with Lim, or pity? From the beginning the two emotions had been part of each other. Even that afternoon when she came to his hut, the monsoon rain clattering on the
bamboo roof, the green hills hidden in gray clouds. Caine had been clumsily trying to sew a rip in his pants.

  She stood before him, wearing the black shirt and trousers of the Meo women, a red sash about her slender waist. She wore a black turban and around her neck three heavy silver rings, her dowry. Her skin a light tan, oval eyes dark, and her only really oriental feature was her slightly wide nose. On her feet she wore plastic shower shoes made in Japan. At first he didn’t think of her as being pretty, but later he learned to look at her the way he looked at white women and to see how beautiful she really was. She smiled shyly and said, “I am Lim, lord. My Uncle Chong has given me to you in exchange for the rifle you gave him.”

  Flustered, he dropped his sewing, then picked it up and threw it on his bunk.

  “I don’t understand. Tell your Uncle Chong that he doesn’t owe me anything.”

  “But I belong to you, Tan Caine. I am your woman now.”

  “People don’t belong to people,” he snapped. “Go home to your uncle.”

  “Please,” her voice trembling. “All is yours now,” taking off her silver neck rings and holding them out to him. “I will do everything to please you.”

  “Christ,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “I can’t take you, Lim. I’m a soldier, an American. Surely there’s some other man, one of your own people.”

  “No, there is no one,” she replied morosely. “Since the war there are few men, many women. If you do not take me, no man will. And besides”—pointing to the bracelet Dao had given him—“you are Hmong now. Or is it because you already own a woman? I have heard that Americans may have only one wife. Is it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only one wife?” Lim asked, puzzled. “How can a man live with only one woman?”

  “I don’t know.” Caine laughed. “We’re not very good at it either.”

  She knelt before him and touched her forehead to his hand.

  “I am yours for as long as you want me, Tan Caine. All men have many women and you have none. Please don’t send me away,” she pleaded.