‘Exactly.’
It was a lot to take in. ‘Why would Carabas go AWOL and try and take out a Chinese battalion?’ I asked. Again it felt like we were drifting from the point.
King threw up his arms in despair, ‘Maybe because he’d lost it by then, turned against the hand that fed him… maybe he was doing it on purpose, trying to create global havoc; and by god he nearly succeeded. Only Carabas was crazy enough to do something like that. Then more ears started turning up at the Embassy… lotsa them and we knew for sure he was still alive.’
‘Ears?’
‘He sent commie ears to the Embassy in Bangkok, and other things. You gotta understand this guy was the golden boy - made Colonel quicker than anyone in the Corps. They had him pinned for big things and when he fell it wasn’t just a fall from grace, it was an abomination… Lucifer cast down from heaven. Your dad and Maybury said they seen it comin’, the madness. By the time he got to Laos it was too late. But the kids murdering their parents and following him? That all happened when he got to Laos.’
‘What?’ I said, registering the sweat gathering on my palms.
‘Carabas used to light a fire outside a village and wait. Then the kids came to him and he sent them back different. That same night they slit their parents throats and followed him into the jungle and were never seen again. A bit like the end of the Pied Piper, remember? After he’s finished cleaning up the rats, he leads the children away into the mountain never to be seen again.’
I had that choking feeling I’d experienced in Bangkok, jungle vines silently wrapping themselves around me. Only now I knew why – I was the hunted. I shivered as if someone had walked over my grave. ‘So after his butchery for the Americans, he moved on to innocent children? Jesus Gerald, it’s too sick to imagine.’
‘Carabas convinced his disciples what was up in the cave on Black Dragon Mountain was their destiny… the wellspring of their beliefs if they could ever get to the bones.’
‘Bones?’
‘Yeah, the remains of their first father, the Jai-Dam - the black-heart freak who started the cult. See, round about 550b.c – and you’ll have to forgive me for the accelerated learning I’m putting you through – there was someone like that, someone who took the children away. He was exactly the same age as Buddha, only with a different agenda.’
‘Like what?’
King sniffed and swatted away the question, ‘no one knows much, but they say they buried him alive in Black Dragon Mountain.’
‘That’s the triangle-shaped mountain on their tattoos?’ I said, ‘It’s on the map I have.’
I shook my head in disbelief. ‘Sounds like something from the Bible or Tintin on a bad acid trip.’
He looked at me darkly, tilting his Sang Thip shot in agreement, ‘Revelations maybe, the second coming of the two-headed beast rising from the sea.’
His wife’s voice splintered our unholy communion with hysterical urgency. King flinched. ‘I gotta go. If you’ve listened to a single word you’ll do the same.’
Questions were racing around my mind in a blur, ‘Gerald wait, you said Carabas ended up crucified to a tree, so who murdered my grandmother?’
He was on his feet, ‘He’s dead alright. As to who’s behind the killings now? I don’t know.’
‘But the cult must still be active if they’re opening people’s stomachs?’
‘No shit, Sherlock, which is precisely why you’re getting on the first plane out of here.’ His wife screamed at him again and he clapped a hand on my shoulder, ‘Aren’t you?’
I sat quiet.
‘Please yourself kid, there aint no shame in running.’
‘That doesn’t strike me as Marine spirit.’
‘You wanted answers I’ve given you them.’
‘I’m going to Laos Gerald, I’ve got to.’
His eyes opened wide and he shook his head, ‘Then you’re as crazy as Jacques. He could have survived if he’d left it alone and not taken the last job. You go to Laos and you may as well burn your return ticket, cos you won’t be needing it. If they knew you was with Maybury, they’ll know you’re with me.’
I took King by the shoulders and held him in a vice. ‘I want to know what Dad’s last mission was, and you’re going to tell me.’
‘Jesus on a cross, you don’t give up! To kill Carabas, to take him off the map once and for all before it got out to the Chinese he was still alive.’
‘But you said he was crucified to a tree?’ Suddenly I felt as if I couldn’t trust him any longer. ‘When was that?’
‘I dunno, early 70s I guess.’
‘But Dad didn’t go back to Laos until ’74.’
He looked at me a long time. ‘CIA had to be sure… after his death there were there were rumours Carabas was still out there. All’s I know is Jacques went in alone with no-one to back him up.’ There tears in his eyes as brushed my hands away and hugged me in his fragile arms. Finally, he ushered me to the door, walked me into the empty night. ‘Forget the key, kid, forget the past, just try and get home. I’m begging you.’
Hanoi was asleep, just the wind unsettling old tiles on its rooftops. I turned back to face him but he’d already disappeared. I found a cyclo driver and prodded him to wake him up, all the way back casting suspicious glances over my shoulder, but the streets were dead. When we arrived at the hotel the night porter tapped me on the shoulder as I walked through the lobby, he was so still I’d walked right past him.
He pointed to the nearby couch, ‘Lady she asleep, she wait for you. I ask her to go or you want her stay? Good looking broad.’ He said as if he’d watched too many Jimmy Cagney films.
She was sleeping softly, her body curled up like a cat. I went over and brushed the hair from her freckled face. Her eyes opened lazily and she smiled at me. ‘I didn’t fancy the smell of the market.’ she said,
‘Dead dogs? That the only reason you came?’
‘What do you think?’
I took her by the hand to my room on the top floor. As I turned the key, far below I could hear the midnight train beginning its eighteen-hour path to Hue in the south. By the time I’d finished smoking a cigarette on the rooftop Giselle was asleep in my bed. I looked at her with the rapt attention of a child surveying his first bicycle; a thing of beauty and infinite possibility. Out of respect I kept my clothes on and snuggled next to her. That night I dreamt of dragons and children that filed patiently across paddy fields into a mountain. All of them led by the Black Buddha.
- 22 -
It’s weird but despite the paranoid urgings of Gerald King I was almost sorry to be leaving Hanoi. It felt unthreatening and unlike Bangkok where I’d lost someone irreplaceable, I was leaving Hanoi with something new; she lay asleep beside me, her legs fighting for space in the rickety, propellored aeroplane.
We were flying through clouds on the border of Laos. What I’d just read in the guide book, that the pilots of Lao Airlines operated without radar, didn’t make me feel any better. Apparently they knew the high jungle peaks and crags in their sleep; when it was misty and they were flying low, they looked for a gap in the clouds to land. Only the odd plane misjudged the mist. Giselle had the right idea catching some sleep.
We were bound for Vientiane, Laos, the place on the matches I’d found in Paris. Lonely Planet said it was a peaceful country steeped in old French villas and colonial history; with swanky bistros, orange-robed monks at every turn and more festivals than you could throw a pole of sticky rice at. There were boutique hotels galore and foreign investment was on the up with fashion magazine editors using it for ‘intrepid chic’ pieces. It sounded lovely and in other circumstances I might have gotten off my arse to write about the place for a newspaper back home. I still had the matches I’d found on the rooftop in Paris: ‘Ravens Bar, Vientiane’. Perhaps that would be my first stop once
I found my bearings. However blindly I was moving, it seemed I was getting closer. I hoped it wasn’t a trap – after all the matches seemed to have been left on Nan’s rooftop for my benefit. Or had they?
I looked out the window, occasionally the mist would part and prehistoric jungle and black-fanged karst glared up at me. Hard to imagine fighting a war in this terrain. I’d Googled the Ravens; a band of plain-clothes American pilots who worked covertly with the Royal Lao Air Force, wore cowboy hats, grew beards, smoked weed and spent a lot of the time pissed behind the controls of their planes. Probably a good idea when they were being shot at and flying without lights across the night jungle. The Ravens dropped aid to refugees, gave co-ordinates to U.S fighter planes bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail and flew opium to Saigon from the Golden Triangle to fund the CIA-sponsored war. What a bloody contradiction.
A Lao Airlines stewardess brought me an orange juice and croissant in a box and asked if it was my first time to Laos. Her face was softer than the Vietnamese, a bit less intense.
Nothing happened with Giselle back in Hanoi. Despite inviting herself to my room, she seemed nervous and withdrawn at the prospect of being in such an intimate situation. Without undressing she was quickly asleep in my bed. Nothing turns out the way we picture it. Before she dropped off, I told her I was going to Laos the next day; she nodded without surprise and told me she was coming too.
‘What about your job? Are you done here?’ I’d asked. She was asleep before she could answer. Then at the airport, something a little weird; she was laughing at my old passport photo. To be fair, it is pretty funny. I look like a delinquent from a fifties youth movie, hair quiffed, expression desperately somewhere between James Dean and a mannequin from a Freemans catalogue. When I asked if I could see hers she balked, told me she didn’t want me to see it and pushed it to the bottom of her handbag.
Now she was asleep, I didn’t see the harm in having a sneaky look. I carefully snaked my hand down between her legs where it was stashed and tried to fish it out. I couldn’t, it was wedged. As my hand drew back it rubbed on her thigh by accident and she bolted up in her narrow seat.
‘Hey! What are you doing!?’ Her face was flushed with surprise.
I drew back from her. ‘I was going to take the piss out of your photo….’
She relaxed and put her hand on mine, ‘You gave me a jump.’
‘Come on, it can’t be that bad.’
She frowned, ‘Look, it’s a high school picture, I’ve got a brace and these horrible bangs, so I definitely don’t want to show you... anyway, it reminds me of a bad time looking at that photo.’
‘So, the ugly duckling grew into a swan. Come on, let’s see!’
She shook her head. ‘I’m serious - it embarrasses the hell out of me. Besides, you might not like me if I showed you.’
I left it at that. Strange to think women are almost as vain as men.
Evidently the pilot found a hole in the mist and the plane started to descend. Looking down, I saw us leaving the mountains behind and heading over wet rice fields glittering green in the morning light. Minutes later we were headed over shanty suburbs and dusty brown roads; then without warning we touched down and the diminutive air stewardess fell out of her chair.
‘Lady and gentlemen,’ she said straightening up, ‘Welcome to Laos International Airport.’
The sun beat against the spangled blue walls of the airport building; pretty impressive for a third world nation. The guide book had Laos pegged ahead of Mongolia in the poverty stakes, and I wondered where the money for swanky airports came from?
‘China,’ said Giselle flatly. ‘They’re buying up the country up lock, stock and barrel in return for pillaging its natural resources.’
‘Like what?’
‘Teak trees, mahogany, hydro-electric power from the Mekong. And they’re thinking of building a high speed train through Laos direct from Beijing, it’ll rip the guts out of it.’
Nice imagery. Skip had said much the same to me back in London. Like it or not it was time to welcome our Chinese brothers; we’d be seeing a lot more of them over the next few years. Outside Wattay Airport a few tuk-tuk drivers listlessly swatted at flies, old cars blew by in a wheeze and a horizon of low-slung buildings did little to impress. We caught a tuk-tuk and it occurred to me I didn’t know where we were going, I just told the driver to take us to the centre.
‘Centre, where?’ he asked, confused.
‘Vientiane?’
‘Nam Phou fountain.’ said Giselle.
‘You seem to know where you’re going.’ I said.
She smiled as the light came through a slit in the tuk-tuk canopy and played upon her blue irises. ‘This place is pretty topical right now, everyone comes to Vientiane and Luang Prabang to shop and eat French food, or goes to Vang Vieng to smoke weed and be a pain in the ass.’
‘Seems like I chose the right person to come with, you know your stuff.’
‘According to friends of mine it’s changed a bit since I came here last. There didn’t used to be much here at all apart from whorehouses.’
Parked on the roadsides were the tired remains of old Citroens and Mercedes; some of them must have been at least fifty years old. We’d left the suburbs behind, the streets here were prettier, temples at every turn with frangipani trees in full flower, and groups of tangerine robed monks who walked silent and graceful down the shaded boulevards. The streets were threaded with travelers sitting outside cafes and bakeries. With its crumbling French villas and peaceful vibe I liked the look of it.
I was scanning the streets for the Ravens Bar as the driver brought us to a halt and pointed to a stone fountain in the middle of a pedestrianized roundabout. ‘Nam Phou.’ he said blithely. ‘Hey, Mister,’ he whispered, as if Giselle wasn’t there, ‘you want smoke something?’
‘Nope.’
‘Dope?’
‘I said “no”.’
‘How about lady. You want lady?’
‘No thanks, I have one here.’
‘Ladyboy?’
Jesus, were there any more variables? Before he got on to transvestite animals I paid him five dollars and climbed out with our bags. Why is it, I wondered, that taxi drivers are the most bloody awful ambassadors for any country you visit?
There were French and Italian restaurants huddled around the fountain square and a cluster of silk merchants and massage spas. A café called The Scandinavian Bakery had an awning and tables and chairs outside. The heat was unbelievable, the humidity sapping at my sense of vigilance and robbing my bones of any spirit.
‘This is the centre?’ I asked the driver in disbelief.
‘Dead centre of town mister.’
‘You’re not kidding.’
Maybe everyone was inside hiding. But for the occasional flash of an orange monk, the city seemed asleep. We rented a room with wooden floors and pale blue walls off Setthathirat Street, the main street shaded in tamarind trees and temples. The guesthouse owner was half awake on a mattress in reception, watching a Thai channel on TV. Behind his head was a poster displaying all the communist members of the Laos politburo.
‘Welcome to the Sayakorn Guest House, you come good time, That Luang festival.’ he said lazily with a wai.
‘Thank you.’ I said,
‘Khop chai lai lai.’ said Giselle.
‘What’s that mean?’ I asked.
‘Thank you.’
We took a shower - separately, Giselle emerging fresh and newborn in a crimson silk skirt with her hair braided, her neck strung with turquoise jewels in a black vest. She looked dazzling. We walked by the Mekong River past vendors hawking chicken on spits. ‘The fat chickens are from Thailand,’ said Giselle pointing to it over the river, ‘the thin free range ones are from Laos. No additives here, not like the shit they pump into birds b
ack home.’
‘Sums them up doesn’t it.’ I said sourly, noticing a child throwing darts at a board decked in balloons. Beyond him was the slow expanse of the Mekong, rolling slowly by in the afternoon haze.
‘Who?’
‘The Thais.’ Then I remembered her parentage, ‘I’m sorry, that’s a bit racist of me.’
‘What’s your problem with them,’ she said looking at me quizzically.
‘Nothing, I’m sorry, that was thoughtless.’
‘No come on, you started so you should finish what you were going to say.’
I shrugged, ‘I just have a problem trusting them that’s all. That and the fact they give themselves to Western men like free sweets in a candy store.’
Giselle arched her eyebrows, her cheeks flushing, then her eyes seemed to burn a darker colour. Here we go, I thought.
‘Well given that I’m half Thai maybe you should only believe half of what comes out of my mouth?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.’
She hadn’t even gotten started, ‘And by the way, when a girl gives herself to prostitution it’s an act of selflessness for her family. The karmic wheel has pushed her to the point she has to support her family in whatever way she can. She mentally disengages from it, the act I mean. She tolerates the smell of the dairified, sickly farang, his fat belly, his pallid spiritual emptiness, and she thinks of her family, every time he puts it in her. She thinks of the numbers… she counts them with every stroke.’
‘Well that’s one way of looking at it.’ I said sarcastically, whilst trying to veil my surprise. I wouldn’t like to be the subject of her clinical invective. Clearly, she was more Thai than American in her way of looking at things. I wondered what her view of us was… me.
We walked in silence through clouds of grilled meat and steaming Mekong fish wrapped in banana leaves, our mood barely lightened by the happiness of the revellers around us. There were beer girls everywhere hawking their brands; Tiger, Beer Lao, Singha… they all looked delicious, the moisture on the bottles’ dark brown necks as the light swam through the glass. Giselle caught my eye and grabbed my arm pulling me off up the riverbank.
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