Black Buddha
Page 5
He got up to go and I felt like shaking him, the scabby old pervert. Who was he to wave carrots in front of me, intruding into our lives opening Pandora’s box?
‘Alain, you’re a fine looking boy and your your Mom tells me you’re a decent writer too. Reckon old Pop woulda been proud of you. Now, you look me up when you get to Bangkok, we’ll have time to talk then and maybe go pussy hounding.’
So the sermon was over, broken tale that it was. The intensity seemed to have cooled and once more the room felt like home. He placed his shades back on and rested his gaze on the picture on the piano. ‘Sure was nice of you to listen to an old man’s sorry tales. Guess that’s all I got now. I build myself up with memories of yesterday’s heroics but truth is I piss my bed if I hear a police chopper flying over my apartment.’
He pumped my hand and headed for the front door. ‘Guess I better be on my way,’ he said, averting his eyes from the yellow glow of a table lamp. ‘I’m flying out tomorrow afternoon and it’s a bitch long flight, even in ‘Business’. You promise you’ll call me when you get to boom-boom town?’
‘I will.’
‘When you fixing to come?’
‘Two weeks time, or as soon as I can get a flight.’
‘Well, you’ve got a friend out there. I want to know when you arrive so I can keep an eye on you, you hear?’
He fished around for a business card. I noticed his wallet stuffed with crisp fifty pound notes. Stuffed. He handed me his laminated card, black with gold lettering: FIREBIRD EXPORT & IMPORT/ SAM A.CASBARON. There were numbers and addresses in Saigon and Bangkok. The light in the porch was off. I could barely see his face now.
‘Alain, Asia can be a pretty fucked up place so watch your back. You need any help you call me - pays to know people and I know people.’
Yeah, more thong-wearing perverts. I shook his hand again and watched him trudge though the leaves till he became a rectangular shape silhouetted by a street lamp. He shied away from it, an old man with too many scars, a firebrand who’d lost his glow. Then he was gone.
- 3 -
The C130 groaned as it banked from the South China Sea toward the port of Da Nang. Jacques strapped himself in for landing, thinking as they hit the warm tarmac of the vengeful heat that would soon deplete him and the woman he’d said goodbye to a week earlier in Paris… the smell of her Pears soap.
He shared the aircraft with a bunch of grunts fresh from R & R in Saigon. They sat apprehensively, boys plucked from Indiana cornfields, hard-faced black kids from New York tenements. A few of them were still drunk, barely zippered up from their visits to the pussy parlours. A boy with ‘DUKE’ stencilled on his helmet sat nervously chewing gum, almost too young to shave, a few spidery wisps of hair around his upper lip. ‘Don’t hear no dink gunshot, all’s quiet on the western front.’ He said.
Another marine laughed, a young boy with old man’s eyes, ‘Only sound I hear Johnson, is the stinging end of your clap-ridden pecker!’
Duke gave him the finger and looked over at the Frenchman, took in the crow’s feet around his flint-grey eyes and deep set tan; too old, too calm to be a cherry. ‘You been here a while man, this aint your first visit right?’
Jacques nodded, smiled and returned to the woman in his mind’s eye. In a white hotel room in Versailles he’d pledged his return, made plans with her for a new start. Once this mission was over, and he assured her the Americans would defeat the North Vietnamese and Vietcong in less than a year, he’d be back and they could think about starting a family. Ofcourse he was lying and he knew it, it would take longer than that, but it was a necessary deceit; he might lose her without it - her baby clock was ticking. You can argue with paymasters, even negotiate your way from the muzzle of a pistol at your temple, thought Jacques, but never stand in the way of a woman and her biological compulsion to mother a child. Besides, he wanted to raise a son or daughter. Children washed the slate clean, erased your misdeeds… gave you a chance to be the best you could be.
The Orient. He’d escaped it once, why return? The opium houses, the delicate hands of the parlour girls lighting the paste and placing the flute of the pipe to his lips… the Orient, it was in his blood, an invisible mistress who twisted like a silk dragon around the corridors of his psyche.
The plane taxied to the side of the LZ. A clerk was filling in a clipboard ensuring the neatly stacked silver coffins beside him were correctly dispatched to their respective barracks Stateside. Beside the coffins were black body bags with yellow tags attached; under the midday sun they’d already begun to putrefy.
A sergeant in a jeep rolled up and saluted Jacques. He tipped his beret at the po-faced soldier and climbed aboard. ‘Colonel Deschamps?’ asked the sergeant, ‘Colonel Carabas is waiting for you in the briefing room. Can I take your bag to your quarters?’
His back was straight as a ruler as he took the sack and placed it in the boot of the jeep. They rode toward a squat grey barracks near the waterside, palm trees tall as houses swayed in the noon sea-breeze, the tips scorched by the sun.
The Sergeant smoked a roll-up as he drove, small angry sparks thrown into the air by the oncoming wind. ‘Colonel tells me you was in Dien Bien Phu, sure good to have you around. Need all the help we can get to roust these yellow fuckers.’
‘How much contact have you had?’ asked Jacques.
The sergeant grimaced, ‘Not much as I thought we’d get, old Vic Charles sits up in the hill pulling off rounds every couple a’ hours or so but by the time we get there, he’s gone… could be three of them, could be the whole of the 807th Battalion for all we know.’
Jacques laughed weakly.
‘I say something funny?’ asked the sergeant.
‘They never change, we’re fighting old men in young boy’s bodies.’
The sergeant led him into the barracks, no longer keen on talking. The corridor was cooler, an overhead fan rattled on its moorings where a screw had come loose, it made a whoop-whoop drone like the rotors of a Huey.
A voice broke his thoughts. ‘Colonel Deschamps?’ It had little warmth, more like a radio announcement. He turned and looked up two inches to meet the other’s gaze. ‘I’m Mason Carabas.’
A big man in green fatigues, his shirtsleeves rolled back up his forearms so the veins stuck out like ridges on butcher’s hams. He pulled off his hat to reveal an impressively bald head. It reminded Jacques of burnished mahogany, his profile like that of a Mexican deathmask, aquiline nose and strong chin.
‘Good afternoon, Colonel.’ Said Jacques, saluting.
Carabas motioned to a passing lieutenant to carry the Frenchman’s sack. ‘You can drop the formalities, Deschamps. We’ll give you some time to clean up, take a shower and then I’d like to meet in an hour. Okay?’
‘You don’t waste any time,’ smiled the Frenchman.
The Colonel took him in, his head slightly angled on a muscular neck, a light in his eyes like sunshine caught in brown glass. Then Carabas broke a wide grin and was gone without a word, moving with considerable grace for a man of his size.
Jacques thanked the young man for carrying his bag. The name on his uniform read ‘Curtis’, his uniform as spotlessly clean as his unwrinkled face. He had the blue eyes, blonde hair and freckled complexion of an all American athlete.
‘You’ve been busy in the hills since you arrived?’
The youth looked back at him, hesitated for a moment then scanned behind him before he spoke, ‘You’re French, am I right, Colonel?’ Jacques nodded. ‘Well I guess you’ve fought these little guys before so you know what they’re like.’
The Frenchman smiled, ‘So what are they like Curtis?’
In a dormitory across the corridor two marines were having a pillow-fight and listening to the American radio station that broadcast from Saigon, Arthur Lee and Love swimming around the room.
Jacques set her picture on the writing desk. Penelope had smoky blonde hair, a high forehead and sad, deep blue eyes like a subject in a Modigliani he’d once seen in the Louvre. Strange how meeting a woman in a coffee shop three years ago in Les Halles could change a man’s outlook on life in just a matter of hours. He’d known within minutes of speaking to her outside Notre Dame that they’d be together; the sensuous curve of her full lips, the arching grace of her neck, the careless arrangement of her hair, and that English accent - sexy and proper all at the same time. But the first thing he noticed had been her inkwash drawing of the Rose Window; he’d immediately offered to buy it when it was finished.
‘How long can you wait?’ she asked, flicking the hair from her forehead.
‘About an hour, I have to go to Marseille. How much do you charge?’
She noted his close-cropped hair, the lantern set of his jaw and the way the hardness in his eyes softened as he looked at her. ‘I don’t want money for my art, just admiration at the altar of genius,’ she said with a grin.
‘Do you take coffee as payment?’
‘It would have to be good coffee.’
She gathered her easel and fold chair. Without asking he took them from her and carried them as they crossed the bridge to the Left Bank. Her clothes, he noticed, were a little threadbare, Bohemian even, with a lilac scarf around her neck. Her limbs were athletic and golden in the overcast light, as if she had been born outdoors like a child of Artemis. She made him feel giddy and sad at the same time.
‘Are all soldiers this bold?’ she asked coquettishly,
‘Only those bound for African heat for the next three months,’ he smiled. She returned the smile a little too late, he registered the turning of her eyes from blue to flat grey, it seemed she’d lost interest. He motioned to a brazzerie next to an old bookshop. They went inside and took a table.
‘What are you doing out there? In Africa?’
‘Escorting De Gaulle to Mogador.’ He looked out of the window wishing he didn’t have to watch the time.
‘Another stolen colony of yours?’ she said with the steely dogma of a student idealist.
‘Unless I’m mistaken you English are pretty good at that yourselves.’
‘Are you a soldier?’
He lifted his shirtsleeve higher to reveal a tattooed bicep, ‘Legion Etranger.’ he said, ‘Sort of.’
She was looking at the book he was carrying with him. ‘Since when does a soldier read Camus?’
‘Are you going to psychoanalyse me or are we going to drink coffee?’
She rested her chin on the cradle of her palm, stirring the creamy froth in her coffee with a free finger and inserting it in her mouth. It seemed they hadn’t taken their eyes off each other for a full minute.
‘”Sort of”, what does that mean?’
‘It means,’ he said looking around him and lowering his voice. ‘That I’m a mercenary who hates the heat and spent his best years in the Legion wearing a silly hat. We don’t belong to the regular French Army.’
Her face creased into a laugh, the sunburn around her eyes gathering into delicate bird’s feet.
‘When are you going?’
‘Half an hour, Gare Du Nord.’
‘You’re going to be late.’
There was never enough time. In the last ten years he’d swept through an exotic female buffet from the Bay of Bengal to Marrakech with barely time for little more than a cursory relationship among any of them. But something about this girl made him nervous. ‘Can I see you again?’ he asked with a dry throat.
‘When are you back?’ she asked, not wanting to seem too interested,
‘Three months.’
‘Mr De Gaulle is away a long time.’
Jacques looked away distantly. ‘Where can I find you?’
‘I should be around… painting the sights, starving and deluding myself I’m going to be a famous artist one day.’
‘There are quite a few sights in Paris, can you be more specific?’
‘I’ll meet you in three months and one day by the vernicular ride leading to Montmartre. It will be summer.’
He felt something burst inside his chest. What if she didn’t turn up, forgot about him? She looked at him intently and pulled her wavy hair from her high forehead as if to see him more clearly. ‘I think I can remember that,’ said Jacques, ‘my mother lives there.’ He got up to leave, ‘What do I call you?’
She fished in her pocket for some money and he held up a hand in protest. ‘Maybe one day you’ll give me the Rose Window sketch,’ he said.
‘Maybe.’ She smiled.
He paid, left her and walked out into the vivid afternoon light, the sky a swathe of black clouds filtering shafts of sunlight. It was only when he arrived by taxi at the Gare Du Nord that he found the painting scrolled tight in his jacket, a little message written hurriedly on the back: ‘My name’s Penelope. Be good until the vernicular, soldier.’
But that had been three years ago, now he was cast adrift, a mercenary for hire. There were no loyalties now, no one watching his back. Somehow the Orient had claimed him again, and this time it didn’t want to let him leave. Jacques shifted the camp bed to the side of the room and did some exercises, a hundred press ups and three sets of fifty sit ups. Outside, the young recruits were lining up on the parade ground in their fresh uniforms. After he could no longer move his arms he lay down on the bed and pondered the recent proposition that had led him here… the meeting.
1965. Even at 6pm Saigon had been hot enough to slow-bake a dog in a locked car. Not that there were many, most of them hung caramelized in the market. Saigon: hard frowns and paranoia ricocheting from street to street, Vietcong slipping seamlessly as mercury into the crowds, letting off bicycle bombs by the river, gestating havoc and anxiety. A dark cloud of reckoning was heading toward the bloated colonial capital. Vietnamese women waddled by with baskets of apricots and peaches to sell at market in Cholon. Across the river of bicycles and coolie hats he could see the graceful white ghost of the Hotel Continental. He checked his watch: he was a little early.
The American had suggested they meet for a beer but hadn’t gone into details as to why. A job offer was all he’d say. And Jacques was broke, the Legion behind him, between assignments and Penny waiting for him back in England, another roué washed up on the opium shore. He should have returned to her three weeks ago. Recently, he’d been in the dens three days out of seven and it was a problem, his usually muscled frame now slim, the colour drained from his cheeks. Opium – what it gave it more than took away, a slow and delicate dissipation. Truth was he needed whatever the Yanks were going to offer him. If Jacques could make enough to get home to Penny he’d kick the habit, leave the mercenary life for good and keep his promise to her. He needed to clean out before she saw him like this.
The man he’d come to meet in Saigon was from the Embassy in Bangkok, the Divisional Headquarters for the CIA. As Jacques crossed the square to the Continental a conversation cut his path, ‘… we hit Ho in the north, drop his worst fucking nightmare on him. This is going to be an aerial conflict, the first -’ The Americans were here, crew-cut and muscular, young and polished, not a trace of wine on their polo shirts, not a filigree of class or dignity in their kindergarten souls. It wouldn’t be long before the jungle consumed them as it had done the French.
The Agency man sat in the corner of the terrace bar in a tweed jacket that was making him sweat. Jacques sidestepped the waiters on his way to the table, hoping he looked a little more awake now after his afternoon trip to the house of the dragon.
The Yank stood up, extended a han
d. ‘Colonel Deschamps, my name’s Knowles, pleasure to meet you. What can I get you to drink?’ He had a crunching East Coast accent. On the table sat a dossier.
‘Perrier with a twist of lemon, please. You’ve come from Bangkok?’ asked Jacques, his accent carrying a trace of French lending a gentle demeanour to his broad shoulders and hard-cast face.
‘Yeah, haven’t really gotten myself used to the Orient yet, it’s so damn hot. I’m from New England you see.’
As the jazz quartet in white tuxes began a number his water arrived. In the shade of the courtyard’s frangipani and mango trees, Jacques’ favourite pianist was playing on the grand piano.
The American wiped a film of sweat from his forehead. ‘We’re looking to recruit operatives who know the terrain and the way these people think. Specifically in Laos.’
Jack had been seated no more than a minute before the Agency boy had begun his sales pitch. He had the physiognomy of a snake. ‘Don’t tell me you’re intending to go to Laos?’ The Frenchman raised an eyebrow in jest, ‘Isn’t that out of bounds?’
‘Look- Ho Chi Minh is using Laos to smuggle North Vietnamese troops and munitions to the South. It contravenes the Geneva convention and what was agreed between yourselves and Ho Chi Minh a few years ago. We need to put an end to it quickly, only problem is the US can’t be seen to be there if you get my drift? It’d cause an international shit storm.’ Knowles looked around the room conspiratorially, ‘However, if we were to use advisors, in a strictly advisory sort of way, build up a resistance of natives from Laos we could then claim we were not actually there leading the fight but....’
Jacques cut in. ‘You want to hire me in a ‘strictly advisory’ manner, to train the tribes? There’s over sixty, which one did you have in mind?’
Knowles coughed nervously and lifted the folder from the wrought iron table. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was sliding like a cat from the white walls, onto the lacquered heads of Embassy wives already half-cut beside the bar.