Sammy swooned, ‘Police as well? Jesus, what you got yourself into kid? Your Mom’s sick with worry.’
‘I can’t tell you now it’d take too long. You know you said you knew people? Well we need a few of them now.’
‘Sure I know people, but I don’t have no connections in Laos. You chose a bad place to get unstuck in… Ok, listen, like I said go the Three Elephants after dark tomorrow night and wait for me, I’ll be there for seven pm, okay? Keep yourself hidden to the back of the restaurant. As I recall it’s toward the end of the peninsula, but if it’s not there any more call me again on this number and we’ll improvise.’
Suddenly, hearing his voice, I wanted to leave, the jigsaw no longer mattered. ‘Can you get me out of here?’
He laughed, ‘I could break you out of a whore house with your hands tied and your mouth in a gimp mask - you just leave it to me.’
We’d see about that. Seven? It seemed an eternity away, but it was the only hope I had. ‘Sammy,’ I said, before putting the phone down, ‘I don’t have a passport, can you get me get over the border?’
‘Just worry about keeping your ass down till tomorrow night. I don’t want to lose you again. What are your present co-ordinates so I can find you if you don’t make the rendezvous…’
But it was too late, I’d already hung up.
I sat by the window smoking Nathan’s roll ups, watching the moon paint shadows and silver lines on the river. In the distance to the left I could see a bamboo bridge strung in fairy lights, it was unfeasibly pretty. I felt as if I’d been caged up for days, despite the hospitality of my host. I needed to get out, my time in the hole had had a greater effect on me than I first realized. I tried to remember who might have seen me as I sat on the riverbank waiting for my things to dry, yet other than the monks, washerwomen, a few farangs and the midget money exchanger, there was no-one. Surely somebody had to be here in their own right; not as bit players in the grand scheme? Then it occurred to me how friendly the little man had been, how I asked him to bring me here, and I cursed myself for being so slow-witted.
As I chained one roll up after the other I wondered who was this ‘special’ friend the Police had been sent on behalf of - who had that kind of power to make the local force do their bidding? I’d seen UN Landcruisers rattling around the town from the window; that had to be in my favour at least? If it all went wrong and Sammy Casbaron didn’t materialize, I could try and find them, explain my predicament. Not that the UN are entirely dependable in moments of peril, but beggars couldn’t be-
And what if Sammy did turn up, what was I expecting of an old man? That we’d just leave and I’d pretend none of this ever happened, that I hadn’t inadvertently left a trail of carnage behind me that began with my friend and would probably end with the stubborn Moore and even Sammy himself? Maybe Nathan’s curious cat had it coming to him if he was unable to resist his own professional vanity, but Sammy was just a screwed up old veteran as damaged as Gerald King and Lucan Maybury. He didn’t deserve to die.
I thought of the old man with the wizened face and goatee beard I’d met at the roadside on Highway 13: “come to the Dala Market,” he’d told me, “I know you”.
I went to the kitchen, found some ice, put it in a sock and wrapped it around my ankle. Before I left I fished out a baseball cap from Nathan’s bedroom, cocked my head out of the front door and skulked into the shadows to take a look around Luang Prabang.
The moon fell upon the temple roofs turning them the colour of pewter, the naga dragons outside their doors oddly animated in the half-light, as if they were watching me. I suppose the monks were all inside, through the cracks of the temple doors I could see the flicker of candles and hear the low murmur of prayer. I walked around a bend that brought me level with the Mekong River, its expanse of mud brown water flowing south from Tibet so far away in the north. In the main street, Sisavangvong, there was a long strip of illumined French houses and chic looking shopfronts selling jewellery and handicrafts. Apart from a few cafes with travellers outside, and tuk-tuk drivers at the wheels of waiting cabs, the place seemed pretty quiet. I kept to the deep shadows as I searched for the Three Elephants Restaurant, my ankle throbbing like a bastard. I had to do it now, by cover of night; I couldn’t risk doing a recce in broad daylight.
Then I realized I’d walked the wrong way; I was heading into town rather back down the peninsula. I scurried down a sidestreet burgeoning with palms and yet another temple; this one clad in emerald tiles that caught the moonshine and threw it back like scales on a mermaid’s tale. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. The Lexus, black and gleaming, sat on the side of the street right next to me. Fortunately the lights were off and there was no one in it. I made an abrupt about turn and threaded my way through the darkness, heading deeper down the peninsula. But I never found the Three Elephants. Time to use the Internet; it was probably on Trip Advisor.
They say the royal family was ousted from Laos in ’75, that the King was too stubborn to leave his palace despite warnings of the communist invasion. When it finally came, the people of Laos were too placid to stand up for him and he was taken along with his wife and son to re-education caves near Vietnam in a place called Viengsai. It was there he allegedly went mad and died. Looking through the wrought iron gates down the long gravel driveway to the palace beyond, I remembered Gerald King talking about Dad and the royals. As I stared at it, the Mekong rolling by at its rear, I had a sensation of the past touching the present and it sent a tingle down my spine. Jacques had been here; I didn’t know if he stole the key and map, stumbled upon it, or was given it, but he had been in the palace all the same. And as Mum said, he’d come back to sort something out. I looked into the dark windows trying to imagine which room he’d been in and why.
As I slunk back the way I’d come, my limp turning into a laboured hop, I thought again about Colonel Mason Carabas, softly turning in an afternoon breeze as the rope chafed his neck and the sunlight blew holes in his flayed corpse.
I let myself in, went to the upstairs room I’d slept in that afternoon, drew the mosquito net around me and tried to sleep. I reminded myself I was lucky having a place to hide. Writing this, it strikes me the human spirit is capable of unbounded generosity and greed in the same breath. It wasn’t the prospect of treasure Nathan was interested in, but something far more precious than even paternal responsibility; his reputation. In terms of knowledge, we were no different; I was stumbling through Asia like a lab rat hunting for an exit, he was just in another corridor of the labyrinth. If I’d begun with high morals of indignation and a burning sense of injustice for my friend, I was now reduced to a simpering mess of fear.
I lay scratching my mosquito bites for a few minutes then remembered to go to the bathroom and reinsert the charger up my backside for another night. I lay back down on the bed and then against all reason, fell asleep.
- 33 -
Bangkok was buzzing around him like a humid ant factory, the concourse swarming with porters and drunken soldiers returning from R and R. But he was finally leaving. He bought a paper and sat in the shade outside the terminal for a cigarette. It was too hot to read, the concrete city seemed to soak up all the heat and throw it right back at him. He had an hour to kill before boarding, an hour to reflect on a decision that was to change his life; hopefully for the better. The manicured lawns and velvet-green corridors of the royal palace seemed a world away, as did his work as a soldier. He had a new role to learn, he was going to be a Father, an infinitely more difficult prospect than dealing with grunts and mad butchers. As he recalled his final contact with his CIA contact, a nearby marine began an argument with an aged tuk-tuk driver.
‘A Father? Congratulations Deschamps, that’s wonderful news!’ Knowles said, sweating down the phone, ‘Will you be gone long?’
‘Haven’t we been through this? I’m not coming back. I trained eight hundred useless civilia
ns into perfectly respectable soldiers. We’ve had a few successes against the Pathet Lao, but they’ll still win… you know that by now.’
There was a long pause, surely Knowles must have expected his response. ‘So that’s really it, you’re leaving for good?’ he said curtly,
‘The king will be disappointed. I hear he speaks very highly of you.’
‘He’s a good man, but I think you should advise him to move out of the palace… their days are numbered.’
The afternoon light drew long shadows across the base of Long Cheung. Outside the portacabin window, his friends prepared a table of food they’d had flown in from The Mixay restaurant in Vientiane. “Goodbye Jacques” was written on a banner strung between two poles of bamboo. He’d pretended not to notice their preparations.
‘I hear he’s still alive,’ Knowles said slyly,
‘I’m not interested in him, I never was.’
‘Frankly I’m disappointed you didn’t work well together…’
‘If he didn’t end up killing me, he would have done it to himself.’
The Embassy man bristled. ‘Some men ride the razor’s edge, Jacques, while the rest of us keep close behind the barrier,’
Very smart, a little shame to tempt him back to the matter of Carabas their missing golden boy. ‘I don’t ride razors anymore, I’m going to be a dad remember?’
Everything had a natural ending and this was it, he was leaving Laos before the luck ran dry. The hills and jungle surged up around their secret encampment in a riot of angry vegetation; in the end the tarmacadam, the discarded bottles of Schlitz, the painted stripes on the runway, would all be overgrown and this war forgotten, swallowed by the green expanse. To hell with Carabas, so what if he knew of his trip to the leper colony? No-one would believe him anyway, he was certified mad. Jacques was leaving all of it behind to begin a different life.
‘That’s the end of it. Goodbye.’
‘You never leave Laos Jacques, it leaves you.’
But Deschamps had left. He was about to board a plane that would return him to London; how much proof did Knowles need of his resolve? Penny had found them a house and there were plenty of companies in the capital that would surely benefit from his experience as a security adviser, everything would be fine, he assured himself.
He blinked against the Bangkok sunlight, across the sprawling horizon of temples and slophouses; it seemed they were melting before his eyes.
Then his heart nearly stopped as he saw him.
The titan shoulders were level with the heads of darting Thais, his knife-black eyes thin and inscrutable. His head had turned a chestnut brown, deeper in colour than it had been in Vietnam. Mason Carabas wore a pale safari suit which clung to the sharpness of his body somehow at odds with its wearer, as if he should have been naked, caked in blood and the earth of the jungle. Jacques tormentor stared toward him, his lips curling into a smile.
You never leave Laos Jacques, it leaves you.
The marine slapped the rickshaw driver across the face and at that instant, through the open door, Jacques heard the departure of his flight announced on the tannoy. He tried to look past them as they fumbled in front of his eyeline. Reaching for the pistol secreted in his shoulder bag, Jacques scoped the gridlock of taxis and tuk-tuks, the mountains of baggage and attache cases… but Carabas had disappeared.
- 34 -
Something woke me, less of a noise, more like a presence drifting up the stairway. I smelt its putrescence like flyblown meat, the smell of the dark.
‘Chloe?’ I murmured, then realised her mother had taken her for the night. The moon had disappeared too, there was little light in the room. I fell back on the pillow and tried to drift back to sleep but the stench of the jungle swam straight up my nose like a rotten finger. When I was eight our Persian had kittens in the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. A black tomcat twice as big as her tried to savage the kittens and she bit him in the throat and killed him. My grandad buried the cat behind the summerhouse but refused to tell me where exactly. Over the next few days I saw our cat returning to the same spot time and time again to check the cat wasn’t coming back from Hades. The soil was black and freshly turned, that’s when I knew where it was.
Perversely, I took a gardening trowel and dug it up to see what it looked like. By then the fur around its mouth had hardened and started to separate from the teeth in a scabby grimace. The smell nearly made me puke as I put it back in its grave feeling disgusted at myself for my curiosity. Lying in my bed under the mosquito net, I was reminded of the same smell. Only a hundred times worse.
I heard the noise downstairs in the workshop, the sound of paper being moved, something rough scuffing against the wooden floorboards. I tried to remember if I’d bolted the door; I was sure I had. The smell remained, the scratching sounds continued but no-one came up the stairs. I noticed there was a lock on my door, I rose from the bed holding my breath in the hope I might make my footfalls lighter. When I slid the bolt across to the eyelet, I heard the sound again and wanted to scream. With my swollen ankle and cold turkey side effects I was in no shape for a confrontation… man or reptile.
At dawn I looked out of my window to the mountains, a light mist hung about them and the sky was washed in a papery golden light as if it were made of parchment. Somewhere in a distant temple a gong sounded. Maybe it had been a bad dream and nothing else. My ankle was easing up, my heartbeat relaxed and I felt strangely optimistic. I went to Nathan’s room in the hope it was him who’d made the noises, and that his old Minsk had returned him to safety, but the sheets on his bed were unmade as they’d been the day before. Downstairs, I checked the lock on the door. It was bolted. There was nothing to suggest anyone had been here, the paintings were undisturbed, the air smelt of wood and oil paints, nothing putrid about it whatsoever.
But there was another smell, a manufactured scent of cologne I vaguely remembered. I shooed it away, made myself a coffee, unwinding the dread of the night from my thoughts as easily as shedding a soiled t-shirt. Today was a fresh day, I’d get through this somehow; Sammy would get me out… it’d all be okay.
I sat down in an armchair and took a drink of orange juice. The fever I’d run the night before had passed through my system. But the scent was still there, albeit vaguely, like a dream that hovers over the conscious mind but refuses recollection. I knew it from somewhere… I leafed through a National Geographic, stared at an old Air France poster tacked to the wall, and then it came back to me, the place I’d smelt it before - her coldwater flat the night she died. As I’d lain trembling last night beneath the mosquito net, someone downstairs had been calmly looking around; the same person who’d covered her mouth and taken away her last precious days.
Shaking now, I lit a cigarette and tried to remind myself there’d been times in my life when I’d been an exponent of bravery. The first time they put me in the ring to calibrate what I was made of was against a kid who’d been boxing for six months. My legs felt like jelly, I was so nervous I could barely breathe. After he hit me a few times and my eyes were watering, I realised I either hit back or he’d carry on doing it. I needed this to work, needed an identity, a vessel through which I might express my rage at my father’s abrupt removal from my life. And so I gave the kid all I had; it wasn’t stylish and no one would have pegged me for greatness but I prevailed. After that I became quite good, I didn’t have the natural flair of the black boxers, nor the rhythm with which they danced across the canvas; but I had guts. I tried to focus on this as I left the house in broad sunlight and went to the Dala Market to find the old man called Yin.
I kept to the backstreets behind the temples. There were plenty of travellers about, most of them on bikes with maps stuffed in their pockets. I asked a monk the way to the market. It wasn’t far away he said, by some crossroads beyond the Tourist Office and close to the police station. For
an instant I thought about entering and proclaiming my innocence, that it wasn’t me who had killed the Swedes and the giant from Blackburn. But my instincts knew better, their deaths had not been broadcast in the papers, the bodies had been removed from the crime scene.
I limped across some scrubland to the back of the market, trying to favour my other leg as much as I could but my ankle felt as if someone had tapped the bone with a jackhammer. Women with faces of dried leather sold their goods at its fringes. ‘Main man, main man,’ they crowed, ‘you want buy Hmong pillowcase?’ Mountain women, just like I’d seen at the festival of That Luang.
It was a maze of stalls; second hand clothes, live chickens, herbal remedies, fruit, silverware, tapestry rugs. I looked for Yin at every turn, sheepishly turning around to see I wasn’t being followed. The hours were dripping by till I was to meet Sammy; it was still only midday. No-one in the market had heard of Yin. Outside the entrance I saw the little moneylender, he still had on his check shirt and red necktie. I quickly doubled back before he spotted me, retracing my route.
As I rounded a corner by an aisle of watermelons I heard her voice before I saw her. She was haggling with a vendor over the price of a mango. She looked as beautiful as that first afternoon in Hanoi, her midnight hair falling freely over her back, her legs long and sinewy in a pair of cut-off denims. I watched the cruel curve of her mouth, the unnatural blue of her almond-shaped eyes, and realised I’d been a fool to believe she’d ever been interested in me.
When I looked again Giselle was walking away. My eyes shot to her ankle and there it was, just as I’d known it would be - two inky snakeheads curling about a shark’s tooth mountain. I watched her disappear then hurried to the back of the market, cursing myself for leaving the safety of the house.
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