‘Funny place to come back to.’ I said without thinking,
‘Ah well, sometimes it’s good to face old demons.’
I figured him about the same age as Maybury, but unlike the latter he looked well on it. When he smiled at me I wasn’t convinced, perhaps there was a sense of the fugitive in his green eyes. I saw it in his wife too. Maybe my imagination was taking the reins. ‘Hanoi’s a beautiful city, much nicer than Bangkok.’ I said, trying to avoid another faux pas.
‘I hate that fuckin’ place. There’s still a lot of vets there trying to drink away their livers. Tried it for a while… guess I got sad telling the same old stories.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be going back there in a hurry either.’ I said.
‘So what is it you do?’
‘I’m a writer. I write travel articles, books you name it. I go where they send me, for anyone who’s silly enough to employ me.’
King laughed through a lop-sided grin. ‘So you’re a kind of a mercenary then! Your old man would have loved that, the writing I mean. He was into literature; Zola, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Baudelaire… Jesus, he was freakin’ way too bright to be a soldier, never could get my melon round that one. But something tells me you’re not here to write about the Water Puppets, right?’
Crunch time - circumnavigate or come clean? ‘I’m trying to write a book on my dad, it’s not going to be very easy as you and Mr Maybury are the only people I’ve manged to contact.’
‘And I guess you didn’t make too much headway with Lucan huh?’
‘He seems to think people are watching him.’
‘You came all the way to Asia to find out about your old man, huh?’
‘More or less.’
‘That’s laudable… got a little adventure in your blood. Well you’ve come at a good time, the monsoon has just passed and it’s a very beautiful season to be in Hanoi.’
I looked out of the window and started to sag; I couldn’t be bothered with affecting the bright-eyed traveller routine, I wasn’t interested in the lake or time of year. Gerald King was considerate enough to notice the change in my personal weather. ‘You’re not here to make friends and talk about the city. Shut up King.’ He said tapping himself on the forehead.
I nodded and looked outside, ‘If it doesn’t upset you talking about the past, that would be good.’
He pinched his greasy nose and smiled, I noticed his third finger was amputated at the joint, ‘Like I said, Al, sometimes you have to face the demons.’
‘I have a feeling I let a few out for Lucan.’
He swatted away my concern. ‘Shit, it’s been… well I guess it’s rocking on for four decades now since the war so we should be able to talk about these things. What do you want to know?’
‘Anything you can think of. What was his rank when you met him, and where was that?’
‘Your dad was Special Forces at least when he worked for us. First week he was in Da Nang working for the Americans, he told me he went out on some jungle ops and some pretty weird shit went down in a village up in the hills; people were slaughtered, innocents. I know it fucked him up a bit and when he got back to base he kinda kept quiet about it. There was a lot of troops there at the base. One guy they called the Shark - that was his buddy name - people said he was an animal. He’d done about three tours and it had got to him. He didn’t want to go back to the States, he was crazy for killing and I guess that was all he was good for now.
‘His hair was shaved in a mohican, he had this squad of killers around him that used to go into the jungle for weeks, sort of a special aggressive assault unit… most of ‘em had fragged so many people they’d forgot who they were… Shark used to stay out of the sunlight to keep his night vision strong. The guys around him were untouchable too, like a tribe, no one fucked with ‘em. They had extra pay and special treatment. As far as the big boys were concerned, they was golden kids gone wrong… never got reprimanded when they brought scalps back with them, so long as they were contributing to the bodycount - and believe me they were.’
I was beginning to wonder where he was wandering, how my dad connected with these people? I hoped to hell he wasn’t a part of this.
‘Your dad’s sittin’ in the canteen drinkin’ that shit French like to drink in the afternoon.’
‘Pastis?’ I ventured.
‘Yeah, that stuff. Anyway, the day after your Dad’s first sortie into them hills he’s keeping to himself in the corner of the canteen and the Shark comes in with one of his buddies. As usual the room goes quiet as it did when they made an entrance. I mean, these guys were feared by everyone, even the gunny sergeants… they’d crossed the line. Shark goes over to Jacques says he wants him to move, that he’s in his perch by the window. Your dad just ignored him, carried on drinkin’ like no one was there. Shark pulls an ear from his pocket, a child’s ear. He throws it on the table.
‘Jacques gets up, eyeballs him real quiet - the room is so still you can hear a pin drop. The Shark thinks he’s got his spot as your old man lets him sit on down,’
King let out a sigh and shook his head in disbelief, ‘Your Dad beat the crap out of him so bad the guy nearly lost an eye. The other commando just stands there - nobody was gonna stop him until he’d finished. Shark didn’t get in a single punch at Jacques, not a punch! Calm in the eye of a storm, that’s how Lucan described your father.’
King looked at my nose. ‘You look like you’ve taken a few rounds in the ring yourself, what is it with your family?’
My heart beat as the story unravelled, dormant genes within me glowing and flickering to life like embers reignited. ‘Anger management issues,’ I smiled, ‘So what happened after the fight?’
‘Shark went to the Infirmary. ‘Powers That Be’ kinda forgot about it. Your dad was special property too. An advisor to the US.’
‘Was he there for some specific mission?’
It seemed Gerald King wasn’t interested in specifics. ‘Uh-huh. After the Shark incident your dad wasn’t safe… I guess he made himself unpopular with the wrong people. But that’s the first I ever heard about Colonel Deschamps!’
‘You weren’t there though?’ I said,
He shook his head, ‘No but Lucan was, he saw it happen. He told me.’
He was a natural storyteller, he’d taken me right to the canteen, but I wondered how much of his account had been embellished in soldier’s gloss? Outside I could see the afternoon sunlight chasing shadows across frangipani and flame trees. I wondered why Maybury had insisted I come all the way here, so far the memories of Gerald King seemed unlikely to help me in my search for Skip’s killers.
What the hell, I might as well probe as much as I could. ‘By the way, I know it’s probably nothing but since he’s your friend I’ll tell you - Lucan said he’d been set up by someone. He also said there were people asking questions, people who could get in and out of his prison. I don’t know what he meant but I think he was telling the truth.’
He swallowed and looked at his beer bottle, eyes flat, ruddy skin now pale. ‘Who do you want to hear about, your dad or Lucan?’
‘Both.’ I sensed there might be something he wanted to say. I had a feeling I’d have to make another visit before I won his confidence and even then it might be a dead-end. He sniffed, pinched his nose and made to get up. I panicked and stopped the verbal foreplay. ‘Gerald, Lucan was terrified of someone, poor man.’
He looked at me belligerently, the mood had suddenly changed. ‘Lucan’s a crazie, a paranoid,’
‘Maybe so, but he told me to get out of Bangkok while I still could - why would he say that?’ My voice was wavering, I didn’t know if I could hold back my real reason for being there any longer.
‘I dunno, junkie talk, you know the way they like to…’
Then I cut him off. ‘Please, I’ve had en
ough of this. Listen, the real reason I’m here? My best friend was murdered in the Khao San Rd two nights ago. Then they came for me. When I went to see him, Maybury told me to run. Do you know something I should Gerald? Is there a connection I’m missing between him and my dead friend because if there is I’m a mile away from making it?’
His forehead was threaded in beads of sweat. I hoped I hadn’t played my honesty card too early. He looked at me sympathetically, ‘I’m really sorry to hear about your friend, really am, but Lucan’s a junkie, you don’t listen to them right?’
Thick skin or ignorance? I wondered. I’d have one more try. ‘Is it possible the same people who killed my friend have put the frighteners on Maybury?’
King shook his head, our meeting was over and it had been a waste of time. ‘No. It’s all talk. As to your dad, of course I’ll tell you about him if it’s going to help your book, but I don’t know about any fucked up cults in Bangkok.’
His hand was shaking. I looked at him a moment and he avoided my gaze, ‘Who said anything about cults?’ I asked, the air thick and close about us, begging to be cut with a knife.
He rubbed his nose compulsively, eyes flicking from his wife to the ceiling, then outside the shop. He was nervous of something. ‘Gotta make a run out of town to pick up some supplies so I better get on my way. You around for a couple of days?’ he said looking back at his wife, that fugitive expression settling back on his face.
‘You know about this don’t you?’ I said, louder than I’d intended. One of the Nordic girls looked over from her computer screen.
He sighed, rose from his chair and turned to face me. ‘You ever hear the story about Theseus and the Minotaur, the hunted and the hunter? Cos you sure as hell aint the Minotaur kid.’
- 14 -
A light blue mist played off the rice paddies as he cycled toward the plantation, the sun would be up soon. A guard sat at the gate half asleep, he nodded to Jacques as he pedalled up the dust track toward the shuttered villa. Beyond the dragonfruit flushed in dew, Jacques saw his friend dressed immaculately in white flannels, a crimson scarf wrapped about his neck.
‘Monsoon’s coming, it’s cold this time of morning, mon ami.’ said Leclos rubbing his hands.
It wasn’t until the Citroen DS was rumbling along the highway to the town of Hoi An that Leclos asked why they were making this journey at all.
‘If I tell you it could put you in danger old friend, so just take me there and have me back before the end of the morning.’
‘You look scared.’
The sky was pregnant with late monsoon clouds promising rain. In the fields water buffalo and farmers were dragging themselves out for another day. By the time grey had given way to the blue of morning, Leclos was encamped in a noodle house while Jacques searched the morning market for the man he’d known years before.
The Frenchman to sat on a peasant stool close to the floor, incense sticks were burning, roll upon roll of silk stacked in columns around them. On a piece of paper Jacques sketched a face. As the sun rose, the Vietnamese worked around his client with scissors and needle, weaving and cutting, glueing and preening. Finally they chose the clothes, simple peasant garb. Jacques took them and rubbed the material on the ground, balling it up in his hands and crushing it, ‘It mustn’t look new Thuc, that’d give the game away.’ With a bow and the exchange of a few piasters, Jacques was gone, the package under his arm.
Lunchtime: outside the enlisted Men’s Club, the barber from Da Nang pottered around his never ending supply of business; skinny youths with flat-top haircuts and fresh military tattoos on their arms. Many of them were brown now, sunburned by two-day line patrols. As Jacques walked back toward his quarters a voice beckoned from the shade of a doorway. ‘I called on you this morning but you’d already gone.’ said Carabas.
‘I went to Da Nang for some breakfast.’
He laughed, ‘Tired of grits and bacon already, huh?’
‘Something like that, there’s an old patisserie there I used to like.’
Half of the Colonel’s enormous head was bathed in shadow, as if light and dark forces were fighting for possession of him. ‘I need to talk to you, outside the compound? I’ll get a jeep, meet you out front in five minutes.’
When Jacques returned to his room, his possessions looked as if they should already be packed. He hadn’t expected to be leaving so soon, but whether he liked it or not he was finished, washed out. The French called it cafard - war sickness. First came torpor, depression and even suicide. He hadn’t even had a chance to try his feeble plan and all at once the morning endeavour in Hoi An seemed to him a bit pathetic.
In his room he glanced at the picture of Penelope on the desk and her sketch of the Rose Window pinned to the wall. What were they going to do, a pacifist mercenary and starving artist? It was so hopeless it made him laugh. As he packed his bag ready to leave the barracks, changed his sodden shirt and took another from the armoire, he noticed something shrivelled on his pillow. He picked up the petrified ear and threw it out of the window. So, the Shark was out already?
Carabas and Jacques drove by the fishing port; brightly-coloured squid boats in red and blue, trawlermen washing themselves in the afternoon sun, their teeth white as ivory. Carabas and Deschamps stopped outside a bar called the Gin Palace. There were tables out front and a group of shoeshine boys.
Carabas pulled up a chair and motioned one over. No sooner seated than the grubby kids were wiping wax on his shoes. Another boy approached the gathering, a little older than the first two, a Mao Tse Tung cap askew on his dirty head. He shouted something to the kid cleaning Carabas’s shoes who scampered away, then set to work where the other had left off, his box beside him.
‘Survival of the fittest, even at his age he knows. Don’t you, you sweet little bastard?’
‘So… you wanted to talk to me.’
Carabas swivelled in his seat, ‘I’m afraid so.’ As the boy buffed his shoes, he looked at an old woman struggling with a yoke strung across her back balancing two baskets of apricots. As one of them fell to the floor he looked back at Jacques. ‘In times of war a man can find colours within himself he never knew existed,’ He spoke without expression or emotion.
Beyond the woman picking up spilled fruit Jacques suddenly noticed the figure of the prostitute he’d spent the night with two weeks earlier… Moi wasn’t it? Through the crowd of fishermen, GIs and bent frames of merchants, she looked directly at him, her face ashen with shock.
‘… I want all these new colours, Deschamps. I won’t rest until I’ve followed that river to the very end, to my destiny. You however, are tired of the killzone, used up, your sharpness blurred. Can you understand the position I’m in regarding yourself?’
‘It’d be easier for both of us if you didn’t speak in riddles.’
‘You and me, we’re not compatible. Chalk and cheese. I guess you being French that makes you the cheese. I do things my way, seems you don’t approve of that.’ Carabas coughed, then more heavily into his fist, hurriedly wiping away the black catarrh with a handkerchief.
He’s ill, thought Jacques, maybe that explains it?
The little boy polishing his shoes kept glancing at a pocket watch in his wooden box, then without warning he took off. The crowd turned in a slow, hypnotic waltz, the prostitute no more than twenty yards away now pointing frantically, pleading, before she too darted off down a sidestreet. Jacques looked down at the box then back at Carabas still pontificating like a Roman senator.
A moment later he was on top of the Colonel, catching him off guard and forcing his bulk beneath a table he swiftly overturned to protect them. As the wooden box exploded, shrapnel flew into the table and past them through open windows, embedding in walls and passers by. When Jacques looked up again, the little boy who’d cleaned his own shoes lay motionless in a carapace of blood and dust.
Carabas brushed himself down, eyes scoping the street. He paid no heed to the dead children before him; instead he broke into a slow smile and nodded to himself. Jacques thought he said, ‘Destiny’.
A light rain blew across the jeep as the base appeared in the distance. Jacques couldn’t believe he’d saved the monster next to him from a death that had been perfectly planned for him. Why? Strangely, Carabas hadn’t spoken for the entire journey. ‘You know,’ he said finally as they made for the entrance, ‘I figured you as something else, a burnout, but now… now I guess I owe you don’t I?’
Jacques brushed the dust from his face. ‘You owe me nothing. I’ll work as planned for you for the agreed time and money but the less we see of each other the better. I think you’re ill. The black fluid from your mouth, what is it?’
Carabas stopped the jeep by the gate and let it idle in neutral, ‘I don’t know. Nothing I can’t handle.’ He swatted it away. ‘Well, I guess Scarecrow and Lizard are headed to Laos after all- I had a call from our employers and they want us there tomorrow.’
He cruised past the sentry. ‘I got a VC village to mop up before we go, kind of a parting gesture to the Battalion. You can come along if you want, or maybe you’d rather save yourself for afternoon tea with the King of Laos? It’s just good honest grunt-work here in the Nam, Scarecrow. We’re soldiers, not diplomats.’
‘Where’s the next hit?’ said Jacques, trying very hard to veil his disgust,
‘Village about fifteen clicks north, place called Lang Co.’
‘I know it. There’s a leper colony on the hill there.’
‘That’s the place. Intel says VC are using the place as an arms dump. Half the fishermen there are probably Charlie.’
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