Black Buddha
Page 30
Kristen had on an Aran jumper. She looked scared and small, and for a moment the terrible thought occurred to me they might not ever get married and it would all be my fault. ‘Yes, I think we should pay someone, Alain. Please, you sort things out.’
James sat beneath the mosquito net he’d erected, silently smoking a cheroot. Behind the muslin gauze he looked indistinct, ageless. ‘No-one will take us there at night, they’re scared of the bandits in Kasi. And you can’t get to Luang Prabang without crossing the mountain at Kasi, it’s the only road.’
‘What are you saying James?’ asked Kristen, her voice rising in panic,
‘Yeah, wot you saying know-all?’ said Stretch.
James looked back at him with contempt, ‘I’m saying, we’re stuck here one more night.’
I went to the bathroom, locked the door and wound the map around the key, which I then inserted into the cigar container - they just about fit. After this I took some of Kristen’s moisturizer, lubricated the tube and placed it up my backside.
The room was quiet as I turned the bathroom light off and lay on a small patch of Stretch’s bed. The Swedes dressed the wound again for him with Savlon and bandages, we plied him full of Nurofen and Valium and he was out for the count within minutes.
A candle burned by the window, I’d left it open a touch so I could hear the sound of passing cars. The Swedes were shortly asleep, little Kristen tremoring. I knew James was still awake under his mosquito net, just the two of us in silent opposition across the room. Then after a minute as I was almost asleep he said, ‘Sweet dreams, Alain.’
- 27 -
Before it happened I was dreaming deeply, one of those visions so real you can almost reach out and touch the landscape around you. To my side was my Father, the two of us hacking away at jungle foliage with machetes. He looked just as he did in the portrait I took from Nan’s, determined and calm, definitely someone to have in your corner. The jungle was screaming with bats as we slashed at the creeper vines snaking around our waist, through thickets of bamboo and rattan, uphill toward a light in a cave. And there was something confident about the pace of our exertions, as if we were in time to one another. From a strangler fig tree choking in vines hung the upside-down corpses of King and Maybury, their mouths grotesquely stuffed with pulsing fireflies. As we passed them their eyes sprang open, they raised their hands and pointed up the hill. I could hear ‘Break On Through’ in the tops of the branches, Morrison’s voice leaking out of the banyan trunks. Dad stopped and looked at me,
Don’t be scared Son, I’m with you on this one.
Where are we going?
You’ll see soon enough, I think you’re in for some rough treatment, but I’ll watch your back.
I don’t think I’m cut out for this. I’m scared of something in that cave.
Consider yourself lucky you don’t have walk these woods every night of your life.
How the hell did I get mixed up in this Dad?
Then I felt the prick of an insect’s abdomen in my arm. I tried to sit up and brush away the ache but I couldn’t; someone was holding me down. I twisted my head to the side to get a look, the first wave of the injection propelling through my bloodstream. I could feel my heart thrashing against my chest trying to break free, for a moment I thought it might break through the ribcage it was pumping so violently. Then the rush overwhelmed me, the hands holding my arms loosening their grip as I lost resistance and slumped backwards. I was floating above them, above my own body in the guesthouse. It looked small and rumpled on the sheets.
The Swedes lay horribly entwined, their throats glistening in a crack of moonlight. The warmth in my veins was bubbling. I couldn’t move a muscle as I hovered above my slaughtered friends. Then, slow as a feather falling softly to the earth my spirit returned to its mortal prison. James was gone. And Stretch? My eyes filled as I saw him lying at the side of the bed, his hand raised limply folding over the mattress like the flowers in Nana’s flat, as if he was trying to reach me. ‘Wombat,’ I murmured, then my head fell limp as I shut my eyes and took a ride on the heroin ferris once more; slipping in and out of the two dimensions as if it was perfectly natural.
Back in the dream I dropped my machete and fell defeated to the stinking ooze of the jungle floor. Dad stopped ahead of me and looked at the queer black smoke twisting from the cave, the light now obscured. Then I felt the strength in his arms lift me up, take my weight on his shoulders and we were heading right for it… he was humming Brell’s ‘Amsterdam’. ‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to go in there.’
He looked at me sadly. ‘You don’t- we don’t have a choice. We were born for this.’
The guesthouse room smelt different now, the scent of collective sleep and cigarettes replaced by cleaning fluids. My vision was wreathed in auras, I couldn’t focus on the shapes moving around me; a female with black hair pulling sheets from the beds and piling them into a suitcase; a thin man, on his naked back the tattoo of two snakes. As he replaced the hypodermic needle in a wooden case and nodded to the men at the door with the bundled bodies, I tried to scream but no sound left my mouth. Then he took form. Perhaps it was he who had administered the coup de grace to Skip; maybe he was the surgeon after all. James collected his rucksack from the side of the bed and left the room looking back at me with a grimace. You bastard, I thought, no wonder you kept your shirt on in the river, you’ve got the Jai-Dam written all over you.
I saw the blur of another, a larger figure watching me from the doorway. He was careful to keep himself in the dark. He seemed more like a statue than a human, so small were his movements, the hard cast of his face.
‘I know you,’ I said sleepily. Finally, I gave in to the weight of my eyelids, drifting unnaturally upstream to the heart of the darkness.
When I woke I was cold and feverish. The other side of the golden hill is strewn with thorns and cold winds that rip about your innards. The Stranglers sang about it, but this wasn’t “textured like sun”. My bones were singing with pain and I was gasping for air trying to reach the surface. I wanted to cry for my friends, in the darkness I could remember Stretch lying at the foot of the bed, his hand reaching out as if he was trying to warn me. I thought about his little girl, who’d never see him again; the Swedes who’d never get married, and I started to sob.
My throat was raw, nothing but hot air issued from my lips. They were caked in something too. I licked them and tasted earth; the dank taste of clay. I felt around me, a wall a few feet to my left, another even closer to my right. Damp and cold… night air, what little there was of it. Above me I felt the rough texture of bound bamboo for a ceiling.
I was buried in the ground.
I tried to remain calm but my body was on its last lap on the carnival ride. It thirsted for another ride, but the theme park had shut for the night, the ferris had stopped and all the punters had gone. I looked at the blue dial on my watch; an hour till dawn. How long had I been buried? And where was I?
I held my breath at the end of each exhalation and inhalation. It worked a little and relaxed my heartbeat, controlled my environment. I was still in my shorts and t-shirt, and needed to go to the toilet but I couldn’t move. The ‘charger’ was hidden, up that most secret of tunnels. Even now they’d be rifling through my things, examining every pocket in my rucksack. It gave me some small satisfaction to know that I still, in a perverse way, had the upper hand. Until they brought out their butcher who in the travels of his knife would no doubt find what he was looking for.
I scrunched into a semi-foetus position for some comfort and waited for the first sounds of dawn. Dad, you got me into this, I thought, still feeling as if there was something more than a tenuous connection between us since the dream, almost feeling him listening close by. Now get me out of it.
- 28 -
Despite the fact the room was spinning and he could see three chimp
-faced men rather than the actual one, Jacques was determined not to throw up and offend the Hmong warlord. In the low-ceilinged hut his minions prepared another pipe, a smell of caramel in the air as the opium bubbled at the touch of flame. Deschamps wiped the sweat from his forehead and remembered the odd course of events since his arrival.
The King of Laos had seemed more concerned with the state of his tomato allotment than the imminent fall of six centuries’ of monarchy. He had a rectangular clumsy face like a block of mahogany, there were sleepy sacks under his eyes and when he smiled it seemed to require every fibre in his satin-clad frame. How apt that a country as languid as this should have a king that seemed to embody its torpor. ‘In Laos,’ he said softly, ‘we believe in peace, so we will say prayers in the temples and banish the bad spirits of war.’
In this land of imagined fiends and river gods it was hard to get the Lao to reason with sense. Hard to make them wake up and smell the war. ‘Your eminence,’ Jacques said patiently, ‘the Communists will come and it will be soon, the Pathet Lao are getting stronger, they have the Vietnamese behind them now.’
‘Why are you here soldier?’ The king didn’t seem to understand,
‘To make sure you survive, so you can continue to rule in peace. It’s in the interests of the West.’
‘America you mean. It used to be your people who had their interest here. I liked them actually.’
Jacques smiled wanly, ‘We all have our time.’
The regent moved across the palace room pointing to a piece of moonrock encased in a glass cabinet. Despite his weight there was something effete in his gait. ‘Look, a gift from President Nixon, from the United States.’ He returned to his throne with a sigh. ‘My men have never killed a single man. I think that is something to be proud of, don’t you? Colonel Deschamps, communism comes from a land of ice and stone, it won’t grow here, the climate doesn’t suit it.’
‘I’m afraid that may change.’ said Jacques, ‘and very quickly.’
King Savang Vatthana pondered the mercenary’s worn, handsome face and smiled, ‘Do you like vegetables soldier, I know your countrymen are fond of them?’
Deschamps shrugged and tried to smile, ‘When they’re fresh.’
‘Would you like to see my allotment?’
And so went the first meeting. Jacques was taken on a tour of the Royal Gardens, sloping gently down to the Mekong River. He said goodbye but not before the king had introduced him to his groundsman, Yin, raking leaves on the royal drive. ‘This man is my ears. In future, if you have anything to say, speak to Yin and he will tell me everything. Or speak to me.’
Yin looked back at the king and smiled. With his broad shoulders and unusual green eyes, he didn’t look like a gardener at all. Jacques bowed to them and walked away. On the street he could smell fresh baked bread issuing from the royal bakery. As the drum banged on the temple hill of Mount Phousi far above, he stood to the side to let a trail of monks file by. On a side road Carabas waited in the jeep, the back of his khaki shirt crested in sweat. He swatted a fly on his hard-boiled head while some apprentice monks watched him from behind a column of emerald and gold tiles. Then one of them ran away as if he’d seen a devil.
‘How’d it go?’ asked Carabas.
‘The man still believes in ghosts, but I’ll get through to him eventually.’
‘Nothing wrong with that, Scarecrow. Hop in, there’s somewhere I have to go before we head back to Vientiane.’
Jacques climbed in beside him and gunned the engine. They didn’t say a word as they left Luang Prabang, nor as they crossed the mountains, but Jacques knew well enough by the fall of the sun that they were headed in the wrong direction. At best it would have taken six hours to Vientiane, but now they were headed toward the Ho Chi Minh Trail with no back up. The VC came out at night to move munitions toward Saigon under the cover of darkness, and that spelled payload time for the B52s and their carpet bombs; in short, suicide.
Finally as they crossed another set of mountains, the first star appearing above the red of sunset, Jacques said, ‘You’re going to Nong Khiaw this way, toward Sam Neua… you know that’s enemy territory. You’ll get us both killed.’
Carabas stared deadly ahead and slowed the jeep at the top of a precipitous descent, the road muddy below them. His voice sounded childlike, awestruck as he pointed to a mountain etched black against the crimson sky. Triangular, jagged as a shark’s tooth, something about it seemed eerie and unnatural, even from this distant elevation. ‘Look.’ Rasped Carabas.
‘It’s just a mountain.’
It was deathly still, no crickets yet, the air chill upon their shoulders. ‘No,’ said the Colonel slowly shaking his head with a smile. This is destiny.’ He looked at it with love in his eyes, then without warning black fluid started spilling from his mouth; like tar or molasses. Only this time he let it run free, down his khaki shirt and on to his cream pants.
Jacques felt fear running through him, as if he was in a nightmare so real he would never wake up from it. ‘What the hell is it?’ he asked moving away.
Carabas ignored him, tilting his chin for the other to soak up the view. ‘Now I know it’s real. I dreamed it back in Da Nang when I was having visions.
‘Now we can go back to base.’ He said, wiping the paste from his mouth and rubbing it like gold in his fingers. They drove back in alternate shifts. It took eight hours.
So that was Jacques’ first meeting with the eccentric monarch, savang Vatthana, more followed in close succession and always he had the sense he was being measured by the other; the faithful gardener, Yin never far away as he brought tea and eavesdropped, or peered in through an open window with a rake in his hands; always those curious green eyes watching. On one occasion Jacques was left on his own beside an open cabinet crammed with loose jewels. The king pointedly said his wife had more diamonds than they could count, and one of the servants was in the middle of doing just this. Thousands, perhaps scores of thousands of dollars’ worth of unaudited gems winked up at him.
‘I have to attend to something in the elephant stables,’ said the king, ‘Would you mind taking tea on your own for a little while?’
Jacques was sat as always in the royal reception room. As the British-made grandfather clock ticked away and the king continued his absence, Jacques looked around to see if he was being watched. No, so far as he could tell the Staff was in another wing of the palace, the gardeners at work outside. Surely they wouldn’t miss a few diamonds, after all how could you miss what you didn’t know you had? And there were so many… Imagine what they were worth.
Sure he thought about it, and he could have gotten away with it, but the only thing Jacques left the place with that day was an annoying sense of how corpulent and spoilt the Francophile monarchy seemed to be.
‘Yo Jacques, your man Knowles is on the phone from Bangkok… he sounds pissed,’ Back in the Hmong hut an American voice snapped Jacques from his reverie. Through the haze he saw Tyrone Jones step in from the sunlight. He went outside to the plane parked at the edge of the opium fields. They looked beautiful this time of the year, the mountaintop a bloom of white.
‘Deschamps speaking?’
Knowles’ weasly voice crackled down the line. ‘Jacques, you heard anything?’
‘About Carabas? No, nothing. He’s disappeared.’
Bullshit. A Raven pilot had seen him just last week in the Nam Ha jungle near the Nam Tha River, the heads of his captives on stakes beside a great fire; scores of children gathered around him. Jacques wasn’t about to tell Knowles that - he knew what would happen; the bureaucrat would send him after the CIA’s prodigal son.
‘We got another one of his little packages this morning, can you imagine the smell when we opened it? The damned air conditioning in the embassy is broken… it stinks in here.’
‘More ears?’
‘I take it he’s still killing the enemy?’ said Jacques,
‘You kidding, he’d give the butcher of Lyon a run for his money. Look, he’s stopped his requests for munitions, air strikes, money for the Hmong… he’s gone AWOL.’
Jacques’ skin felt as if it was coated in fire ants, ‘You sent him into the jungle Knowles, and that’s where you’ll find him,’ he said curtly.
In the poppy fields Hmong women were removing weeds strangling the precious crop. The same crop the Yanks were secretly processing in Saigon for sale on the market.
‘Wrong,’ snapped Knowles, ‘that’s where you’ll find him. He may be near Xieng Khouang, he may be near Luang Prabang, I don’t know.’
Jacques bristled, ‘I don’t play with mad dogs.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Means I’m not paid to baby-sit special agents with a deathwish – you wanted me to train the Hmong and that’s what I’m doing. The stories going round about him, you must have heard them… the mans a liability.’
‘Like what?’
‘He’s recruiting kids from villages, they say more than a hundred children have left their families to go with him. And worse, some of them have killed their own kin. Was that his mission, to corrupt children?’
‘You think he’s lost the plot?’
‘Since when was it normal to post ears to your paymasters?’
‘Find him…’
‘And do what? I haven’t seen him since we first got here, and that was six months ago.’ Knowles didn’t answer. ‘Well?’ said Jacques, but the line was dead.
Jones appeared with his goofy grin, ‘Let’s wrap it up, y’almost done?’
Jacques looked back at the hut; a Hmong boy was peering at him from the shadows, his Mongolian face the colour of nutmeg. Jacques took another lungful of air, he couldn’t be bothered to bargain any longer, and he couldn’t smoke any more opium - they could have all the guns in the back of the plane.