Saigon Wife

by Colin Falconer

  Reyes nodded across the street, a crew-cut serviceman was standing just off the street talking to a Vietnamese kid in a white vest. He handed over a few piasters and the kid gave him a small plastic packet. He put it in his pocket and walked away.

  “Because half the army is stoned.”

  “Actually, the figure is closer to twelve percent than fifty,” Walt muttered.

  “That means one in ten of your boys are doped out. I don’t figure that makes for a well-oiled fighting machine. It’s refined number four heroin, Walt. Two years ago, you never saw this shit on the street. Now every mama-san from here to Hue is a dealer. Where the hell is this stuff coming from?”

  “Salvatore.”

  “He’s here, in Asia?”

  “He paid us a visit last year.”

  “I thought he got his supply from the Corsicans.”

  “He’s had a few problems with the Marseille connection.” Walt leaned in with his elbows on the table, lowered his voice a little. “You know all that opium we used to help them ship out of the Triangle? Well someone had the bright idea of bringing all these whizz-bang Chinese chemists from Hong Kong and setting them up in laboratories right fucking there in the jungle. Now instead of hundreds of leaking bags of black jelly you just have a few bundles of powder, plastic wrapped like little white bricks, easier to load, easier to transport. Who needs to take the stuff back to the States? You got half of America right here, you sell it to them. And if they make it home after their tour, even better, you got yourself a brand-new customer in Detroit and Miami and Philadelphia and the Bronx. Beautiful. Some business plan, huh? They even package the stuff like soap powder. They call it ‘Double UO Globe,” got a little red stamp with a tiger on it.”

  “How are they bringing it in?”

  “The fucking Vietnamese air force flies it straight in from Laos. It’s easy. No worrying about customs, they just unload it and ship it. The Corsicans are still over there, they’ve done a sweetheart deal with the government, people are making so much money it’s coming out their fucking ears.”

  “And you guys are letting them do it?”

  “The President of Vietnam has a big stake in this. I mean, everybody’s getting a cut and he’s a friendly government. What do you do? You know how it is, you played this game a hundred times before.”

  “Christ, Walt.”

  “We can’t stop ‘em doing this; it’s called venture capitalism. We’re here to defend against the evils of communism.”

  “You don’t believe in this shit anymore either, do you?”

  “I stopped believing in anything a long time ago. Now it’s all about the pension. Don’t tell me you still believe in love, faith and honor?”

  Reyes finished his beer. “I’d like to think there’s still some things I believe in.”

  “Yeah? So what are they?”

  Reyes shrugged. “When I find out, I’ll let you know,” he said finally and finished his beer.

  It was dark when he got back from the Continental. Reyes pushed open the green louvered windows and sat out on the balcony, his feet on the wrought iron balcony, the briefcase balanced on his lap. There were flashes along the skyline, the USAF carpet-bombing the jungle as they did every night. The rumble sounded like distant thunder. The city was breathless hot.

  Tet, the Chinese New Year, had come and gone. He had decorated the apartment with sprigs of plum tree blossom, but they had withered and died. It was time to throw them out.

  He stared at the briefcase. There were some brown spots of dried blood on the leather and he scraped them off with a fingernail. Finally he opened the lid. How much was this worth? He supposed he could retire in style on what he had right here. But would money fix his life right now? He doubted it.

  Anyway, it was irrelevant because he didn’t have a buyer for this junk and he wouldn’t have sold it to them even if he did. He supposed he was a man whose morals had been at best questionable during his life, but he had a few principles and he knew them well enough to know that this windfall was useless to him. He wasn’t about to sell it and he wasn’t about to give it back to its rightful owner, if that was the right word.

  What was he going to do?

  Chapter 4

  MAGDALENA

  The moment I stepped out of the plane I almost reeled back from the wall of heat and the stench of gasoline and rotting fruit. Within seconds my crisp white blouse was soaked in sweat.

  A fighter screamed overhead and climbed into a baking sky. I gripped Connor’s hand tight as we hurried across the apron, between the camouflaged fighters and the huge troop transports. A tank rumbled out of the belly of one, guided by a shirtless ground crew holding large orange paddles.

  Tan Son Nhut was bedlam. Heavily armed soldiers patrolled the terminal in bottle green uniforms, their knuckles white around the stocks of their M-16s. Vietnamese shoved in front of us, screaming at each other as we made our way between the barriers. Thankfully the hotel had sent a driver for us, and he hustled us through the crowds and into a waiting car.

  We drove into the city past sandbagged checkpoints and towering billboards of blonde American girls holding bottles of Pepsi Cola. A man with no legs scuttled along the pavement, pushing himself along on a child’s trolley. The air was sulfurous and there was garbage everywhere.

  The traffic was chaotic, a choking, rancorous tangle of army trucks, ancient Renault taxi cabs and rickety siclos, driven by the same kind of skeletal Vietnamese who had run the rickshaws in the days of the French.

  As we got closer to the city it slowed to a crawl, these French provincial boulevards had been designed for bicycles, not the juggernauts of the American military and the Pontiacs and Chevrolets of American officialdom, each of them the size of a sampan. Our car was trapped behind an ARVN lorry loaded with Vietnamese conscripts, some of them barely taller than their M-16s. Black diesel fumes coughed from the exhaust.

  Sputtering two-stroke motorcycles were weaving in and out of this chaos, some of them with families or even whole farmyards balanced on the back. Many of the younger men had a girlfriend perched daintily on the back, nearly all of them in a beautiful silk ao dai with a mandarin collar, a flowing silk scarf wrapped around their faces to counteract the choking engine fumes.

  The car had no air conditioning, just a little plastic fan attached to the dashboard next to some Day-Glo stickers of the Buddha. It did no good as far as I could see except give off an annoying buzzing sound.

  “Are you all right?” Connor asked me.

  I nodded. After all, I didn’t have to come. I could have stayed home in Manhattan with a cat and a pile of manuscripts. I had complained of being bored; I would clearly not be bored here in Saigon with Connor.

  He looked as excited as a small boy on his first road trip. He asked the driver endless questions about everything we saw. I just stared, both fascinated and horrified, at the savage and incomprehensible world around me.

  I saw a child push a packet of white powder into the pockets of a soldier outside a cafe. The soldier whirled around, thinking someone was trying to steal his wallet, and then felt in his pocket and found the powder. He smiled and raised his hand in acknowledgment to the kid, who was already running off down the street after another GI.

  “Did you see that?” she said to Connor. “What was that?”

  “Heroin,” Connor said. “The guy just got a free sample. Back home they call it marketing.”

  Despite the shock of heat and violence and poverty, there was something about this city that I immediately recognized. This was what Havana had felt like in those last few months before Fidel took over. Everyone here had the same look of desperation on their faces, the half-panicked expressions of people who knew that time was running out.

  It was like a giant hand had clawed out a piece of Las Vegas and dropped it in the middle of a fever swamp. We passed strips of girlie bars with local women in outrageous electric pink and green miniskirts lined up outside smoking cigarettes, aping every ba
d blue movie ever made.

  I compared them to the girls on the backs of the Vespas and Hondas, in their white silk trousers, their long mauve jackets fluttering as gracefully as butterfly wings. What would it take to make one of them swap their gossamer for cherry red lipstick and a mini skirt?

  A scooter pulled up next to our car and for a moment I found myself staring at a beautiful doe-eyed creature with beautiful almond eyes and a heart-shaped mouth. Look what you have done to us, her expression seemed to say.

  There was something eerily familiar about all this; Vietnam led the news every night back home. It seemed like the war here had gone on forever.

  Hard rock pumped into the street from every one of the bars even though it was still early in the afternoon: The Stones, Hendrix, the Doors. From somewhere I heard a snatch of the Four Tops, “All in the Game.” It immediately took me back to Havana and the first time I met Reyes.

  I had tried to find him when I got back to Los Angeles after the Kennedy assassination, but he had disappeared. Someone else had leased his house on Mulholland, and no one knew where he had gone. Someone told me he was in Africa, doing God knows what.

  I supposed he wouldn’t have wanted to see me anyway. If he did, he could have told Jean-Luc, or written a number, an address, in his very last letter. I thought he’d made his intentions clear enough.

  We passed a burned-out bar, the neon sign - ‘Nevada’ - presiding over the blackened timbers and sinister dark stains on the footpath. “Viet Cong,” their driver said. “Throw hand grenade in bar. Kill American.”

  Connor turned to me. “Isn’t that what happened to your father’s club in Havana?” he asked.

  “Only it wasn’t a hand grenade,” I said, thinking about Inocencia. “It wasn’t even supposed to be a war.”

  “Many VC in Saigon,” the driver said ominously. “Not go in bar with soldier, just stay in hotel. More better.”

  A black soldier lay on his back under a neon palm tree outside one of the clubs. A crowd had gathered around him. A syringe lay on the cracked pavement at his feet.

  “Too much numbah-four that one,” their driver said, matter-of-fact. “He die now.”

  The Caravelle was all concrete and glass. Connor and I followed our driver up the polished stone steps into a gaudy Oriental foyer. The air-conditioned chill was a blessed relief after the street, and I felt the sweat freeze-dry my clothes. A uniformed bellboy hurried behind us with our luggage.

  Connor was in heaven. He had been aching to come here for over a year, he was just bouncing to get back out of those doors and throw himself at Vietnam. He must have seen the look on my face. “You’ll be okay here, sweetheart. It’s safe here.”

  We went up to our room. I showered and joined him at the window, looking down at the ragged sprawl in the street; burned-out girlie bars, soldiers, stink, danger. Connor O’Loughlin was in his element.

  I put my arms around him and he kissed me back, without much enthusiasm. I didn’t care. I had given up on passion—these days I would just settle for nice.

  Chapter 5

  REYES

  Reyes sat on the terrace of the Continental Hotel with a glass of Havana Club and a two-day-old copy of the New York Times. The few remaining tamarind trees along the Tu Do hung limp in the fierce heat. Even the two hideous green cement soldiers on the war monument in the middle of the square seemed ready to drop.

  He was anticipating a long, leisurely lunch and perhaps a few more drinks. He looked up and swore under his breath, knowing that his pleasant afternoon was now a forlorn hope.

  “Well here’s someone I never expected to see,” Angel said.

  He was overdressed, as usual; a white linen suit, silk tie, a white Panama with a jaunty black silk band. The brim had been carefully worked in. Perhaps he had one of his minions do it.

  When Walt told him Salvatore had been seen in Saigon, he knew Angel would blow into town one day. If you own a Rottweiler, you know one day it will leave a dead rat by the front door. He just didn’t expect it to be so soon.

  There had been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since they’d last seen each other in the bar at the Fontainebleau in Miami. Angel was not as pretty as he used to be; too many cigarettes and too much rich food. He had gained a lot of weight and lost his boyish looks.

  There was a black Mercury parked in the foyer. Two men sat themselves down at one of the tables by the entrance—Angel’s minders.

  “Can I join you?” Angel said and sat down.

  Reyes sighed and folded up his newspaper.

  “You don’t look surprised to see me.”

  “I heard your family had connections here.”

  “You heard that, huh?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Loose lips sink ships. Can’t keep a secret in this town.”

  Angel settled himself. The waiter scurried over but he sent him away with a casual flick of his hand. He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. “Life treating you well, Reyes?”

  “Every day is a holiday.”

  “You look well. Except for that hole in your head. That anything to do with the unfortunate incident in your bar?”

  “What brings you to Saigon, Angel?”

  “You know, business.”

  “What kind of business would that be?”

  Angel took out a silver cigarette case, selected an unfiltered Turkish cigarette and tapped it on the edge of the table. “You like living here?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Long way from home.”

  “I wanted a change of pace.”

  “From what? The place is full of fucking gooks.”

  “They can’t help that, I guess. They were born here.”

  “Me, I don’t want to be here longer than I can help it. You know what I mean?”

  “I haven’t seen you in the hotel. When did you check in?”

  “Check in here? I wouldn’t stay in this shithole. I been in better brothels.”

  “Yeah, I guess you have.”

  Angel let that one go. “We have friends in the government here. They laid on a villa, servants, pool, the whole deal, some place we can guarantee security.”

  There was a loud bang from the street and Angel almost dove under the table. Even the two gorillas jumped in the air.

  “Car exhaust,” Reyes said and smiled.

  Angel flushed and eased back in his cane chair. He lit his cigarette, furious, all business now. “Here’s the deal, Garcia. We don’t like people stealing from us.”

  “Who’s ‘we?””

  “Don’t be a wiseass or I’ll put another hole in that fucking head. Do you hear me?”

  Reyes leaned forward. “How about you just tell me what you fucking want?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I hate to disappoint you, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “There was a guy in your bar when the grenade went off. A staff sergeant, big motherfucking nigger, size of a linebacker. You remember him?”

  “What is this? You planning a Klan lynching here in Saigon?”

  “You know who I’m talking about.”

  “I was paying no attention. We had a lot of customers that day.”

  “This guy, you can’t miss. Believe me.”

  “I don’t remember him, Angel.”

  “Well I want you to try harder because we figure he had our property with him when that grenade went off.”

  “Look, Angel, I’ll say this once and once only. Maybe you have never been inside a crowded enclosed space when a hand grenade explodes - though I hope one day you will - but let me break it down for you. Even if you walk out with all your body parts attached, you can’t hear a damn thing, your clothes are shredded off your body and you can’t even remember your own fucking name for hours afterwards. So maybe he was there, maybe he wasn’t. I sure as hell don’t remember.”

  Angel leaned back. He looked to be of two minds. Finally he stood up. “You better be telling me the truth, Garcia. Bobbo is re
ally pissed about this and his mood ain’t going to improve until he gets his property back. You think you’re in a war zone? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  He stormed out, his boys behind him. Reyes called over the waiter and ordered another rum with ice. He settled back to finish reading his newspaper.

  When Reyes got back to his apartment later that afternoon he found the lock was broken and the door was ajar. He nudged it open with his foot and peered inside, but whoever had invited themselves in had already left.

  The search had been thorough and pitiless. His souvenir opium pipe, inlaid with silver and ivory - a gift from a Hmong chieftain seven years ago - had been smashed against the wall. Every drawer in the armoire had been tipped out onto the floor and they had ripped up the floorboards and the carpets. He supposed that breaking the brass fittings in the bathroom had not been part of the search but just a show of frustration at not finding anything. They had even ripped the mosquito netting over the bed and torn a door off the ancient armoire.

  But what he couldn’t forgive was what they had done to his records; they smashed his 1958 copy of It’s All in the Game by Tommy Edwards and the rare 78 of Inocencia Martinez singing “Love is Dangerous.” It was literally irreplaceable.

  He stood among the litter of papers and broken glass and books with torn spines and promised himself that one day he would settle accounts with Angel Macheda. Sure it might take time because you didn’t mess with the family of one of Florida’s biggest crime bosses; it would require patience and a little guile.

  But he would settle with him.

  He sat down on the one unbroken chair. “Guess you didn’t find the briefcase, huh?” he said aloud to no one in particular and stared out of the window across the roofs of the city and planned his next move.

  Chapter 6

  Walt’s office was on the fifth floor of the US Embassy building in Saigon. He threw a bunch of files off a chair and sat Reyes down. Then he went to fetch two mugs of coffee, reached into the drawer on his desk and took out a fifth of bourbon. He poured a little into each cup.