Black Buddha

by Richard Waters

  - 35 -

  He lay back on the bed, watching her at work, sunlight spilled through the window onto the canvas, illuminating the colours of her creation. Alain sat on the carpet playing with a toy gun, his unformed face replicated in Penny’s oil rendition. Jacques listened to the sound of seagulls fishing on the river, there were houseboats moored up against the banks and the town was full of American and Japanese tourists. Three years, almost four since he’d last seen Carabas and taken his final breath of Asia. He felt finally complete, happy. Sartre could go fuck himself; there was no need for existential angst when you had your own little tribe, when you appreciated the good fortune of being with those you loved.

  The English papers weren’t too concerned with the war, perhaps because they had nothing invested in it. Maybe they realised it had all been a sham, that the hammer and sickle would never be that dangerous after all. The kids around the Richmond neighbourhood were wearing flares, high heels and glitter face-paint; all those years spent in foreign deserts and nameless jungles, it seemed he’d missed the best part of his youth.

  ‘It’s coming along nicely,’ he said to her back, watching the way the light played on the muscles in her naked shoulders as she lifted the brush and applied the strokes of paint. His wife didn’t answer him,

  ‘Penny?’

  She looked at their boy, playing on the carpet, then back to him. ‘We got some more in the post today, I don’t know what-‘

  ‘Bills?’ He frowned at the ceiling and went to the cupboard to put some clothes on. He needed some space.

  That afternoon he took his son down the river for a walk. He bought a paper and sat the two of them on a bench under a broad oak tree. The glowing green leaves seemed to go on forever, the branches almost touching the ground. Alain sat on his lap watching a stream of ducks paddle by. He was a happy little boy, he reminded Jacques of himself at that age, fierce eyes and a mop of blonde hair. He even had a dimple in his chin and a small birthmark in exactly the same spot on his neck. He hoped his son’s life would be more straightforward than his, that he wouldn’t find himself at the age of thirty-nine, wondering where he’d gone wrong. He remembered the weekend he told the family, his Father didn’t talk to him for a week after that. Eventually they’d respected his decision to join the Legion Etranger, but that wasn’t to say they understood it. His grandparents and cousins gathered at the Gare Du Nord to wish him farewell, his mother sniffed and wiped her eyes as he leant out of the train to Marseille. He’d missed her most of all.

  Jacques hugged Alain, stood him on his knees and looked into his eyes. His little boy looked back at him then turned to see where the ducks had gone. ‘Why do you sound different to Mummy, Daddy?’ he chirruped,

  ‘Because I’m from another country, a place called France.’

  Alain sneezed, his face framed in summer light. ‘Is that why you argue a lot?’

  Jacques brushed the hair from his face. ‘Are you warm enough, little man?’

  He thought about his inability to make things work here, and by that he meant financial things, for everything else was perfect. He had no choice but to go back. The first call had come a month earlier in June. Jacques had taken another construction job to supplement his two nights a week as a doorman in a jazz club in Hammersmith. His last job had been a disaster; he’d worked on a building site with a bunch of Irish immigrants. They seemed nice enough, outsiders like himself. At lunch they’d sit on the roof of the unfinished building and stare across the London skyline, sometimes they even swapped sandwiches. The foreman was a cockney, a man called Beasley, the chairman’s son and a natural thug. No one questioned him. Beasley had a particular dislike for an old soak called Mick. His nose was broken in three places and he had the soft eyes of a bloodhound. When Mick, at least fifteen years their senior, took time out to catch his breath, the foreman was upon him in seconds.

  One day it was too much for Mick’s pride and he chose to answer him back. Jacques paused at his sandwich as the foreman threatened the Irishman with dismissal. Without warning, Beasley hit him hard across the mouth with the back of his hand. The Irishman fell over, and when he looked up his hand was cupped with blood. He shouldn’t have interfered, should have carried on eating his sandwich. Instead Jacques stood up, placed his lunch back in its box and hit the foreman at the back of the neck just below the bottom of his head. He fell unconscious to the cement floor. The other men sat dazed as Jacques lifted him onto his shoulders and walked to the side of the building. When Beasley awoke, he was dangling by his ankles ten storeys above the district of Holborn. He didn’t bring him back to terra firma until his pants were sodden and he was crying like a baby. He walked back to his lunchbox, said goodbye to the other men and left. Foolish, the firm had owed him a week’s work and he hadn’t been paid a penny.

  Neville the ferryman appeared by the riverbank in his blue boat, wearing a tattered seaman’s jumper. ‘Does the young man want to come on the good ship Eternal?’ he called, a woodbine hanging from his mouth.

  ‘Do you want to go across the river, son?’

  As the three of them puttered across the Thames, Neville’s sheepdog beside his boy, Jacques looked at the day’s copy of The Times. Vietnam was falling back into the hands of its rightful owners, the peace marches had finally worked and America was pulling out. He wondered what had happened to King Savang Vatthana; in the few years since his departure he’d quickly forgotten about Laos, his soldier’s life, even the bad times with Carabas. It was as if they’d burrowed back down in the earth of his memory. You didn’t need recollections like that when you had a family. But the key, he still had it stored with his mother in Paris, and no, the antichrist, second comer of the Blackhearts, whoever he was, had never sought it out.

  The breeze blew up from the side of the boat, Neville stared across the river as if navigating an old schooner and little Alain clutched the sheepdog and put his nose to the wind. As he looked at his son’s beautiful face he thought about the morning phone call and it filled his stomach with nerves. Across the fabric of time the voice had sounded older, more sure of itself, ‘Jacques? How are you, it’s Knowles… remember me?’

  Ofcourse he did.

  ‘Hello, to what do I owe the honour?’ he said dryly.

  Knowles laughed, ‘So, how are things?’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  In the background he thought he could hear the rumble of a fan, the chirrup of oriental voices. ‘It wasn’t difficult. How are you finding civilian life?’ said Knowles as if he already knew the answer,

  ‘It has its high points.’ answered Jacques.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Like not being shot at on a Sunday morning. What are your people still doing out there?’

  ‘It aint over till the fat lady sings, baby.’

  ‘Excuse me but I’m busy with my son, what do you want?’ he said stiffly. Knowles coughed into his fist twelve thousand miles away. ‘One last job, one more piece of magic from the Legion.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Jacques, his knuckles yellowing around the phone.

  ‘Sorry I called, just thought this should be your mission, I mean, you always hated him... But hey, we can give it to someone else.’ he said blithely,

  ‘Hated who?’ said Jacques, but the line was already dead.

  As he walked back through the dappled sunlight, Alain upon his shoulders, Jacques decided he’d go back if the call came again, one last pay cheque. And only if it was big enough to set them up for the next few years so he could get his shit together. Penny had dinner ready for them in the garden, a spread of sandwiches. The sleeves of her summer dress were frayed at the edges, but in the late sunlight her hair and perfect skin looked radiant as snow in a honey light… like the landscape paintings in the palace of Luang Prabang.

  He kissed her on the cheek and went to the bottom of the garden to w
ork on the summerhouse. ‘Do you think you’ll ever finish it?’ she said playfully. He grinned back at her and threw Alain in the air and caught the giggling toddler. She called after them, ‘Oh by the way, you had a call from an American… he left a number.’

  Knowles is serious… two calls in a day.

  He tried not to look interested. ‘Thanks, I’ll look at it later.’

  Alain toyed with his plastic hammer; Jacques kept it beside his own in the toolbox, ‘Are we building a house for me Daddy?’

  ‘No, it’s for your mother to put me in when she finds me annoying.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to live in the house with us?’ he said, his face breaking into a frown. Jacques picked him up and span him around till they were both dizzy,

  ‘I’m always going to live with you.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  That night as his wife and child sat drawing in the front room, Deschamps took the phone from the hall into the kitchen and shut the door. The lights on the other side of the river were switched on, people were outside the pubs drinking in the mild air. He cursed his indecision and picked up the phone.

  ‘Knowles speaking… it’s four in the morning, who is this?’

  Jacques looked through the crack in the door; the flat was cold, they needed carpets. ‘Deschamps, I got your message.’

  Knowles was smiling at the other end, he was sure of it. ‘I knew you’d call, you always were elusive to start with.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Need you to go back in… there’s been a complication.’

  Maybe it was the shock of speaking to him again, but Jacques felt the hairs on his arms rise up as if there was an ill wind blowing through the room. ‘What do you mean complication?’

  ‘Some of our boys have… Jacques I need you to locate him and terminate his contract.’

  ‘Carabas is alive?’

  ‘He’s too dangerous now. He led a Hmong charge on some Chinks platoon stationed on the Chinese border in Luang Nam Tha. We thought he was dead so we officially denied it. We can handle Charlie for a bit longer but if the Chinese put their war machine against us this could tip us all into World War Three. You getting the panic in my voice or do I need to start pleading?’

  Knowles really did sound scared, as if the ten-feet thick walls of the Embassy were not enough to shield him from his darkest fears. ‘I want you to find him and put him out of his godforsaken misery. And you should know, he got some of your friends.’

  ‘What… who?’ said Jacques, remembering outside the airport as Carabas had stood watching him.

  ‘Jones. They found him outside a village with his chest ripped apart. Nearly got Gerald King too, you remember him?’

  ‘Ofcourse I remember him, but why Jones? Or King for that matter? What would he possibly want with them, I mean they never met him?’

  Again Jacques had the feeling Knowles was keeping something back from him. Penny called from the other room.

  ‘He wanted to find you - I think he still wants to. It’s personal for him.’ Amid the calm of his kitchen, the Thames running softly by his back garden, Jacques felt his blood rushing about his insides. In the horizon of his memory the sky had turned crimson, a ragged platoon of young men were bending over a steaming corpse and dipping their hands in its blood.

  ‘You still there?’ said Knowles, the line now scratchy.

  ‘Jacques?’ called Penny, from the other room.

  ‘Yes, in a second!’ he shouted, his hand over the receiver. ‘You want me to go back to Laos because you say he’s after me?’

  ‘I’m saying we’ll pay you thirty thousand dollars to clean up his shit, now you want the job or not?’ he snapped.

  Jacques could hear Penny’s footfalls coming across the hall to the kitchen. Across the threadbare carpet, past the neatly stacked column of white envelopes growing ever bigger. He heard Alain laugh and it cut straight through him… he deserved more, a life of not worrying, of hearing his parents counting beans.

  Jacques had to go back. ‘When?’ He asked grimly.

  ‘Immediately, as soon as you can get out here.’

  ‘How many men have you sent?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ said Knowles defensively,

  ‘How many have you sent in to find him who haven’t come back? I’m hanging up in two seconds unless I get an honest answer.’

  ‘Three,’ he answered quickly, ‘Three. You’re our last resort.’

  ‘I’ll be in Bangkok the day after tomorrow. And the price is more than double thirty thousand. Expect a call.’ Deschamps put down the phone without saying goodbye.

  Outside, the twilight changed to a honeyed Laotian light, the birdsong replaced by the steady thrum of crickets and the pub drinkers over the river now in a heap of smouldering bodies, hissing under a monsoon rain. Toward them, on a boat lit by a lantern, stood his nemesis cowled in a poncho… In his mind, Jacques was already back there.

  - 36 -

  I heard laughter outside the Gallery as I watched the clock and prepared to meet Sammy Casbaron, wrapping my ankle with ice for the last time to try and bring the swelling down. At least it wasn’t broken. The evening peninsula was swarming with tribespeople dressed in black and blue ethnic garb – Hmong I supposed. They seemed to have materialized from thin air. Maybe it was another festival. Something about their simple tan faces gave me hope, perhaps I had a chance to finally escape this citadel of jungle. In their hands were pots of incense and smouldering palm fronds. I wondered what they were celebrating tonight, another offering to appease the spirits? There’d been no more knocks at the door; perhaps the police had given up looking for me.

  It was six o’clock, the sky a mellow ruby, the air a heady bouquet of woodsmoke from the slash and burn farmers in the mountains. Nathan hadn’t returned; all afternoon I’d waited watching the door, torn between my flight from this place and a responsibility to go and look for him. But I knew I wouldn’t go back, that I lacked the mental resolve or physical capability. I hoped Sammy Casbaron was as smart as I thought he was, maybe he knew someone who’d take me seriously back in Bangkok, someone I could tell the whole story to. I never wanted to go anywhere near that jungle again, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to blow the lid on the place. Sometimes the best results are achieved by remote. Truth be told, fear wore me like a close-fitting suit, I just wanted to go home.

  As the procession swept by the door I crept outside and made my way across the street. As I crossed the grounds of an oxblood coloured temple, a young monk bowed to me and scurried off to join his brethren. I was early, my watch read a quarter to seven. I cursed the lingering sunset as if it were a pestilence; for the first time in my travels I needed the dark.

  Opposite the Three Elephants – I’d found it on Google - I crouched in the long grass on the banks of the Mekong and waited, trusting the mantra that military men are never late. A few farangs were eating an early dinner inside the wooden interior decked with candles and booths. I couldn’t just go in and sit at a table, besides which I didn’t have any money. So here would have to do, being bitten alive by mosquitoes while my stomach grumbled. The sound of drums echoed down the dusty street, in the distance I saw a procession walking toward me, this time a trail of monks.

  I slid further down into the grass, till I was level with the road. As they passed, the area around us was lit by the warm orange of their candles, shadows bouncing off the stucco facades of villas. I heard a car in the opposite direction, but couldn’t yet see it.

  And then he appeared with his bowlegged gait, my charred old saviour. He had on a khaki suit and ski shades; he looked like a seasoned white hunter in a sci-fi film as he peered through the window of the Three Elephants and walked inside. I waited for the last of the monks to pass and made a dash for it. Sammy was sat in the dark at the back
of the restaurant. As I entered he looked up at me, opened his hands expansively and grinned. I stared at his wasted face and felt like hugging him.

  ‘Shit you’ve dropped to lightweight - you look like you haven’t eaten for a month! Sit down.’ He said patting me on the arm. I could barely speak. I clutched his hand and shook it. It seemed like an age since we’d first met at Mum’s house.’

  ‘You’ve no idea how glad I am to see you, Sammy,’ I said breathlessly, ‘we’ve got to get out of here, I’ll tell you on the way.’

  ‘Hey - easy soldier! I just hightailed it out of Bangkok to reach you – can we get something to eat first?’

  I shook my head and scoped about. He didn’t seem to grasp the urgency of my situation. ‘It’s not safe here. They know I’m here… they have eyes on every corner.’ I was blabbering like an idiot.

  ‘Alain, nothing’s going to happen to you. In fact, we’re going to catch the evening flight out at ten pm, I’ve already booked you a ticket.’

  ‘Sammy, I don’t have a passport, remember? Now please, listen to me. The police here are corrupt as hell, we can’t go to them. We have to leave before they find us.’

  His expression blanched as if to say, ‘Well, there goes my escape route for you?’ I also had the sense he was catching my nervousness. I felt my bladder running, but I didn’t want to leave the safety of his company lest he disappear. There were turquoise paintings on the wall, snakes and dragons coiled around one another, their bodies the colour of that bitch’s eyes.

  ‘Do you want to take me through this?’ he said anxiously. ‘You want my help you’ve got it - one hundred percent… but I need to know what we’re up against. You said you know who killed your friend, right?’

  I nodded and cast about suspiciously. I didn’t know where to start so I snuck into the booth.

  ‘And then they followed you here?’ he prompted,