Vientiane was not a party town. That was Walter’s first impression. It was nothing like Saigon. The capital city of Laos, unlike the capital of Vietnam, was not filled with tens of thousands of twenty-year-old Americans-thirsty, horny, heavily armed and scared shitless. Walter’s Saigon was a city electric in its madness, a plastic conceit of glitzy bright lights and sparkling colors, gold and blue, yellow and blood red. Saigon was all about sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and death. Violence was the universal language. People got killed there every day. Many American soldiers came to Saigon, moved out to fight in the steamy jungles filled with thatched-roof huts, grouped together in tiny villages, and they never came back. New meat arrived. Saigon carried on. Vientiane, however, was quiet, reserved, an ancient city, a place where people were comfortable with intermittent water and power and almost no telephones at all. Traffic consisted of an occasional car or bus. People walked and never seemed to be in a hurry. It was a city of dark colors, all greens and maroons, purple and black. While all roads in Vietnam led to Saigon, there were no roads in Laos.
Vientiane lay along the Mekong River in a valley of sweet-smelling flowers, cooling rains and warm breezes, blessed for centuries with solitude and isolation. Free and peaceful Thailand, once the hated warrior kingdom of Siam, was on the far bank of the river. Nearly two centuries ago, a Siamese army crossed the river and turned Vientiane to rubble. The city was burned to the ground. Laotians were slow to forgive and forget. They still viewed Thailand with suspicion. In the twentieth century, Vientiane received plenty of foreigners. They were almost all French, mostly middle-aged, most of them fluent in Lao and one or more of the various other languages spoken in that exotic part of Southeast Asia. A far cry from the Americans in Vietnam. They were unwelcome visitors, crude, cruel temporary conquerors. The French lived in Indochina. If they were not quite the equal of the British, born and raised in India in the nineteenth century-never having set foot on English soil-they were close enough. Many of the Indochinese French, especially after a few glasses of wine from the home country, fancied themselves more Asian than European. After all, they owned Laos-or thought they did. Walter liked Vientiane from the moment he arrived there in the spring of 1971.
The airport at Vientiane was not the worst Walter had ever seen but it was near the top of any such list. The tower, such as it was, identified his Southern Air flight as one coming in from Burma. Actually, it had been a quick and easy trip from Saigon. He left at 06:30 and was in his hotel in Vientiane in time for breakfast. His passport and other papers said he was Fred Russo, an American engineer from Chicago. Quite an irony, he thought. Freddy Russo.
His mission in Laos was simple. Weren’t they all? This time he was to find a Dutchman named Aat van de Steen. They didn’t tell him why. Just find him, they said, and bring back any message the Dutchman wished to transmit-whatever the hell that meant. Van de Steen could be found, they told Walter, with the Yao. The problem, of course, was no one had any idea where the Yao were. “They’re in Laos,” the Colonel said. “Somewhere in fucking Laos.” Walter had three days to prepare. The Colonel said, “We’ll put you in wherever you want. Just tell us where.” On the second day Walter told him. “Get me into Vientiane,” he said.
There were inhabitants in Laos as early as the fourth century, or so Walter had read. The modern history of the small nation began somewhere between 1349 and 1353, depending on who you believed, when the Emperor Fa Ngum founded the landlocked kingdom he called Lang Xang- Land of a Million Elephants. Walter could not wait to see them-the elephants. The Yao had come to Laos some time later, drifting south, migrating from China, desperately looking for some place to live safely. They eventually found their happiness in the Laotian highlands. They settled in and were still there more than half a millennium later. They brought with them a peaceful culture of literacy, scholarship, agriculture and religious intellect. It was a way of life they protected and nourished in their new land. They spoke an almost unknown language, Mian, but the material Walter read about them said they also spoke Lao, Khum and Hmong Njua, the three most common languages of Laos. They were an educated people. Walter hoped some of them also spoke English. When they first arrived, the Yao were few in number. As the centuries passed, they showed no evident desire to expand the size of their tribe. In fact, they did their best to prevent growth. They felt there was safety in numbers-small numbers-and they taught their children accordingly. Among the peoples of Laos-the Lao Loum, Lao Theung and the Yao-the Yao were the tiniest minority.
Walter figured that’s why nobody at Headquarters Company had any idea where they might be. It was clear to him, even in the limited time he had to prepare for this mission, that the ancient Yao had been right. For a mountain people, the fewer of them there were, the more effective was their defense. Their Chinese persecutors did not follow them to Laos. New enemies found them elusive and soon turned to other pursuits, easier prey. The Yao stayed to themselves. Farmers mostly, they were a proud and stable people, firmly rooted in the central highlands for six centuries. Unfortunately for their would-be handlers in the CIA and the U.S. Army, they were damn hard to find.
By 1970, the Central Intelligence Agency had more than thirty case officers actively engaged in Laos. Back in Washington the joke was they had an unlimited budget and had already overspent it. The central tenet of the American CIA was that everybody had a price-no exceptions. Anyone could be bought, even an ancient people like the Yao. Somewhere within that tribe someone in authority would be tempted by the assorted pleasures available in and from the most modern, most powerful civilization on Earth, the United States of America. They were sure this was so because it was true everywhere else in the world. The CIA circled the globe carrying bags of money. The list of their collaborators seemed endless. Had they any doubt at all about the Yao, they had only to look at their success with the Hmong, Laos’ largest ethnic tribal group. To the folks at Langley, the Hmong appeared every bit as backward as the Yao and far more numerous. Their economy centered around opium, and while the Hmong were more sellers and refiners than growers, their fortunes rose and fell with the poppy. To enlist the Hmong in the American battle with North Vietnam, part of the epic struggle to defeat worldwide communist expansion, the CIA was happy to set up shop in the heroin trade. Since the poppy was the cash crop of the Yao, they were certain this tribe of savages would be just as eager for American help as the Hmong had been. If only they could find them. That’s where the Dutchman came in.
Aat van de Steen was an up-and-coming gunrunner. He’d made a few deals in Eastern Europe. According to CIA information, van de Steen had sold weapons to rebels in Georgia and Estonia, and had, as well, provided the Soviets with artillery pieces they dearly sought, artillery made in the United States. Although he was a kid, a youngster still in his twenties, the Dutchman had shown a high degree of skill and a big set of balls. More than once his name was mentioned in important circles in tones of respect. “Jesus Christ,” one Agency Deputy Director had remarked in disbelief. “This kid sold stuff to the Chechens and the Russians at the same time and lived to tell about it?”
At twenty-three, Aat van de Steen got his first contract in Laos. The deal came to him in Indonesia but had really been brokered in Washington. His job was to get to the Yao, determine their needs and capabilities with respect to weapons and report his findings to his Indonesian client. On his end, he would serve as sole supplier for those weapons. His contacts in Indonesia made it plain they had no strong interest in haggling over price. Whatever the Yao could effectively use, van de Steen would see they got it. The cost would be paid, in U.S. dollars, in advance, in Amsterdam. Aat van de Steen was a smart kid. He must have known the money was coming from the CIA. So what. He’d worked before under circumstances where his real client remained masked. And the CIA could not have cared less. Discretion was never a big concern with them. Within the agency was the world’s biggest denial apparatus. A strapping colossus, it came complete with the world’s biggest budget. Wit
h all that money, there was nothing they could not effectively deny. Thus, they felt little or no fear of disclosure.
Van de Steen made his way to Laos, traveled inland to the central highlands in search of the Yao and hadn’t been heard from since. The Indonesians were getting jumpy. The CIA waited and wasn’t happy about it. Some back in Langley wrote the young Dutchman off. Dead, they figured. Killed by the Yao, the Hmong, the snakes-who the hell knows what. More than a month had passed. Then they heard, from one of the Hmong commanders in the area, that a white man fitting van de Steen’s description had been seen in the company of some Yao tribesmen. News of the sighting was only days old. None of the CIA people in country had ever seen or talked to the Yao. Sure, they were in the mountains, but who had any idea where? No one in Vientiane or Washington. No one from the CIA would go looking. “This ain’t Viva Zapata,” one of them said. Someone had heard about a man called The Locator, an Army sergeant in Saigon, and what they heard about him was quite amazing. The word went out. Hours later Walter Sherman was summoned. Three days after that he was enjoying a nap after breakfast in an elegant, old hotel in the middle of Vientiane.
Aat would do anything he could to help his friend, no matter what, no questions asked. A dozen years after Vientiane, Walter had located Aat’s brother who panicked and ran from an unpaid gambling debt. It hadn’t occurred to Jan van de Steen that his brother’s reputation alone protected him from any real harm. Three weeks after he fled Holland, Walter found him in Canada, returned him to his brother’s care and into the arms of his grateful wife and children. Walter refused to take a fee, even expenses. “We’re friends,” was all he said to Aat. And now Walter asked the Dutchman for a favor-check out Bergen op Zoom to see if Harry Levine was there. Walter gave his friend no details, no reason, no explanation. These things were not required. Van de Steen said he would call back when he knew something. When he did, less than an hour later, he laughed. Harry Levine had indeed gone to Bergen op Zoom and-this is what Aat van de Steen found so funny-he registered at a hotel under his own name. Walter thanked him and said, “Aat, I’ll call you when I get there.”
“Ik zal je meenemen naar Yab Yum dan krjg je de beurt van je leven!” said the Dutchman. “How wonderful it will be, my friend.” Walter looked at the phone in his hand and chuckled. He understood nothing van de Steen said, but he had heard of the Yab Yum, the most elegant and expensive of Holland’s brothels.
Late that same afternoon, Walter left Billy’s, rode the ferry over to the Rock and flew from St. Thomas to New York, where he boarded a Lufthansa flight to Amsterdam, with a stop at Frankfurt. He slept most of the way across the Atlantic. He liked Lufthansa’s Business Class. He’d flown it before. They let you sleep unless you specifically asked to be awakened. Unlike so many other carriers, that practically insisted you partake of each and every service offered with your $12,000 round trip, the Germans were content to let you spend five-hundred bucks an hour to sleep. In his younger days, there had been a time when Walter was a terrified flyer. Back then, he couldn’t help it. He always considered the serious possibility of a fiery crash, ending, naturally, in his own death. Before he met Gloria, such thoughts afflicted him whenever he boarded a commercial flight. In his opinion every plane he got on could quite easily go down. One time, he flew from Detroit to Chicago on an airplane that also had onboard the entire Detroit Pistons basketball team. It was a short flight, not much more than a half-hour in the air, and the weather was perfect. But for the whole way he pictured the headlines in the next day’s Chicago Tribune: Detroit Pistons Die in Plane Crash. Buried deep in the story, he saw the sentence: Among the dead was an unidentified man. It was strange, he thought, he never once worried about flying in an open helicopter in Vietnam, with bullets and rockets whizzing by all around him. But once he headed into the Friendly Skies, the worst-case scenario came immediately to mind. As time went by, he lost that fear. Once, he even helped Gloria to fly comfortably, and she was as scared a flyer as ever bought a ticket. Now, only the tiniest remnant of his fear of flying remained.
No matter how he felt about his flight, landing at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s airport, was always a pleasant event. There were some airports-they were everywhere it seemed-where the landing pattern required a corkscrew approach to a runway devilishly nestled between jagged mountain peaks. He still hated that. Schiphol, on the other hand, was in a country that didn’t appear to have a hill more than ten or fifteen feet high anywhere. The airport had once been a lake. The Dutch drained it, at the beginning of the twentieth century, constructing a complicated pattern of small canals, irrigation ditches and pumping stations that spread for miles. Land reclamation was a high art in the Netherlands and Schiphol provided a canvas the whole world could admire. The lakebed, dry as it could be, at first became a military base. It was turned into a wartime airport during World War One. Because, in truth, it was little more than a mud field, French pilots who never liked it at all called it Schiphol-les-bains. The name stuck for many years until state-of-the-art renovation made it suitable for the modern fleets of passenger jets and prepared Schiphol Airport to become the busiest in Europe.
What with the change in time zones from America to Europe, turning one day into another just by, arbitrarily it seemed, skipping the night, plus Dutch Customs being very touchy in the midst of continued terrorist threats, and then a change of trains in Rotterdam, it wasn’t until late afternoon, technically the next day in Holland, that Walter arrived in Bergen op Zoom. Door-to-door, the trip had taken more than 30 hours. Despite sleeping across the Atlantic, he was tired, but he had work to do and no time for rest. There weren’t many hotels to stay in. Aat had told Walter he found him at the first place he looked. Walter was not surprised. Harry Levine was no different from the rich kids who ran away from Houston or Kansas City or wherever their parents lived, to New York City. They always took a room at The Plaza. Maybe figuring that Harry Levine would go to Bergen op Zoom wasn’t easy, but once done, finding him there was child’s play.
At the Mercure de Draak, just as Aat had reported, Walter found Harry Levine registered under his own name. Harry was an innocent, a babe in the woods. He carried a passport saying he was Harry Levine. So, what other possibility was there? It probably never occurred to him to try to register under another name. Walter had seen people who were pretty good at running and hiding make the same mistake many times. He called Harry’s room from a house phone in the lobby. “Mr. Levine’s room, please,” he asked the operator. “Yes sir,” she said, and an instant later the phone rang.
“Hello,” said Harry, tentatively. He had considered not answering at all.
“I’m Walter Sherman. I’m coming up.” Harry started to say something. Walter cut him off. “Not on the phone. I’ll be right up.”
“Nice to meet you too,” said Walter incredulously, shaking Harry’s hand. Christ! he thought. This guy greeted me with a “glad to meet you . ” Nobody’s glad to meet anyone under circumstances like these. A worried Walter wondered what he had gotten himself into.
“Call down to the desk and tell them you’re checking out. Throw your stuff together. Let’s get out of here.” He stood there and looked at him-Harry Levine, target. He looked pretty much like his photos, every bit the average American male in his thirties. A little taller, a little darker and a little better looking perhaps, but easy to spot, for sure. If those looking for him had any sense of what they were doing, they would find him in no time.
Not everyone Walter had searched for looked like their photographs. Often, the pictures he was given were too old to be of much use. This was especially so with teenagers. A family photo of a fourteen-year-old girl-one taken at home with the whole family gathered around a Thanksgiving meal or a Christmas tree-bears little resemblance to the same girl, three years later, sexed-up, high as a kite, with a couple of new piercings, a tattoo and colored hair. Over many years, many cases, Walter had developed quite a skill identifying live people from photographs that would be useless to
others. The fact that the others always seemed to include the authorities had guaranteed a brisk marketplace, a deep vein in Walter’s gold mine of a profession. He really could do what others couldn’t. Some pictures of some targets never went far away. Walter had never really gotten over being fooled so badly by the photos of a man he looked for, and eventually found, four years ago. Leonard Martin was his name and every cop in America was trying to catch him. Martin fooled them all and Walter had allowed himself to be buffaloed just like they were. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The pictures of Leonard Martin and the real Leonard Martin were so dissimilar… Just thinking about it bothered him all over again-Leonard Martin, Michael DelGrazo, the cowboy with the floppy hat… Sonofabitch, he thought. Here I am standing in the doorway of Harry Levine’s room in one of the oldest hotels in the world, and all I’m thinking about is-Leonard Martin.
“I just arrived,” said Harry. “I’ve only been here a few…”
“Registered under your own name.”
“Not a good idea?”
“No, Harry. Definitely not a good idea. Check out and move into my room until I figure out where to go next.”
The Lacey confession l-2 Page 20