The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  “What the hell can they have been thinking of?” asked Coleman. “Most of the stolen cars we know about are whisked over on speedboats, so fast that even the Marine Police can’t catch them. Why use bags?”

  Donaldson shrugged. “Amateurs maybe. Maybe they were just taking a gift over for relatives on the mainland. According to the boys in Tai Po, they weren’t triads, just fishermen. Whatever, it’s a bloody laugh, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” agreed Coleman.

  Donaldson looked at Coleman and raised an eyebrow. “How’s business?” he asked.

  “Overworked, underpaid, you know how it is.”

  “How’s the group, staff-wise?”

  “We’re about thirty per cent understaffed right now. Two constables are working out their notice. I’ve been promised a transfer from one of the district offices, but I doubt it’ll come through. Recruitment is down about eighty per cent from three years ago. Hell, Phil, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already. They just can’t get the people.”

  “What about you? You got anything yet?” Both men had been looking for other jobs for at least a year. It had already been made clear to them that they, like the rest of the expatriates on the force, had no future with the Royal Hong Kong Police. Any promotions were to go only to locals, in preparation for the handover in 1997. And only Beijing knew what would happen then.

  Coleman snorted. “Two rejection letters, one from Avon and Somerset, another from Devon and Cornwall.”

  “You gotta thing about the West Country, or what?”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that I’ve already been rejected by the big city forces. It’s down to the provinces, now. What about you?”

  “I’ve given up on the UK,” said Donaldson. “But I was never keen on going back, anyway, not with the taxes they have over there. I’m trying Taiwan.”

  “Taiwan? What’s there?”

  “Pat Dugan set up a private detective outfit over there some years back, after his brother-in-law got killed. I’ve been on the blower to him and he’s given me a few leads. There’s a couple of American firms hunting down counterfeiters in the region; it sounds like fun. I’ll give them a try.”

  “Good luck,” said Coleman. “I’m getting nowhere. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? They say that they want to phase out the expats, but they can’t get enough locals to sign up. So the strength of the force keeps falling, morale is at an all-time low, and meanwhile the crime rate is going through the roof as the triads try to milk Hong Kong for everything it’s got. You know robberies are up forty per cent this year? There are almost twice as many cars being stolen than three years ago. And more and more of the criminals are carrying guns. They’re getting to the stage where it’s all or nothing. Their only chance is to make a big score now and buy their way off this stinking island. I tell you, Phil, I know just how they feel.”

  “Life’s a bitch,” said Donaldson, sympathetically.

  “And then you marry one,” added Coleman.

  “Speaking of which, how’s the lovely heiress?” Donaldson had met Debbie Fielding on Coleman’s second date with her, and he’d been impressed with her beauty, and with her money.

  “Debbie? She’s fine. I think. I haven’t spoken to her for a few days.”

  “Path of true love not running smooth, huh?”

  The phone on Coleman’s desk rang and Donaldson magnanimously waved him to answer it.

  “Neil?” said a girl’s voice.

  It took a moment for Coleman to recognise her, then his heart leapt. “Debbie!” he exclaimed.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Great. Fine. God, you must be psychic. We were just talking about you.”

  “We?”

  “Phil Donaldson’s here. You met him at Hot Gossip, remember?”

  “The cute guy with the bald patch? Sure I remember.” Coleman felt a sudden surge of jealousy at her description. He’d never considered Phil Donaldson as cute and he was annoyed that she did. “So what were you saying?” she continued.

  Coleman flushed as he remembered what Donaldson had said. “Oh, just how much I was missing you, that’s all.” On the other side of the room, Donaldson pretended to make himself vomit by putting two fingers down his throat. Coleman looked away and tried not to laugh.

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  She sounded cool and distant. “How are you?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days.”

  “I bet,” said Donaldson.

  “Have you been away?” asked Coleman. Debbie worked as an advertising sales rep for a glossy travel magazine and spent a lot of time jetting around South-East Asia. The travel was her main reason for taking the job; she sure as hell didn’t need the money.

  “Just busy,” she said. Her offhand reply was like an ice dagger plunging into his heart. He wanted to ask her where she’d been and why she hadn’t called him, but he couldn’t, not with Donaldson listening and making obscene hand gestures. “Hey, Neil, I’ve got a favour to ask.”

  His heart soared. He was sure she was going to ask him out.

  “It’s my father, he’s had his car stolen.”

  Coleman’s spirits slumped. He reached for a pen and his notebook. “What happened?” he asked, the two words loaded with bitterness.

  She didn’t appear to notice. “His car was stolen from outside our house. Last night. He’s furious.”

  “I’m sure he is,” said Coleman. “I thought he had a chauffeur.”

  “He does but it was his day off and the bank’s got a shortage of drivers. Dad prefers to drive himself rather than use one of the pool drivers, most of them haven’t been with the bank for long. You know how it is, they’re always moving jobs for more money. Anyway, he parked it outside our house and sometime during the night it was stolen.”

  “Was it locked?”

  “Of course it was locked,” she said sharply.

  “Okay, give me the details.”

  “Details?”

  “Make, model, colour, registration number.”

  She gave him the details. It was a blue Mercedes 560SEL.

  “Was it the bank’s car, or his own?” he asked.

  “The bank’s, of course,” she said testily.

  “Debbie, are you okay?” he asked. Donaldson pulled a face from across the room. Coleman gave him the finger.

  “Sure, why do you ask?”

  Coleman sighed. “I don’t know. You sound a bit brittle, that’s all.”

  He heard her laugh, a harsh, dry sound. “No, but you can imagine what the atmosphere is like here. Dad’s furious.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to get it back, Neil? I promised Dad I’d ask you.”

  Great, thought Coleman. The recovery rate for Mercedes was about fifty:fifty. And she’d told her dad that he was on the case. “There’s a good chance,” he lied.

  “Oh, Neil, it’d be great if you could find it. He’d be so grateful.”

  “I’ll give it my best shot,” he said. “Hey, are you doing anything tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow? Saturday? Oh yeah, I’m seeing a girlfriend, she’s just got back from the States.”

  His heart fell. He wanted to try to persuade her to go out with him instead but he knew it would sound like begging and he didn’t want to do that, not in front of Donaldson. “Okay, what about next week sometime?”

  “Oh sure,” she said brightly. “I’ll give you a call. Bye.” She cut the connection and he replaced the receiver.

  “Thanks for the privacy, Phil,” he said.

  Donaldson grinned. “Sounded like business to me, mate. Father of the bride mislaid his motor, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can’t have the chairman of the Kowloon and Canton Bank without any wheels, can we?” said Donaldson. “Still, with ace sleuth Neil Coleman on the case it shouldn’t be too long before the car has been recovered and returned to its rightful owner, the bad guys ar
e languishing in Stanley Prison and our hero is in bed with the girl.”

  “I wish,” said Coleman. “Say, are you doing anything Saturday night? Fancy a drink?”

  “Darling, I thought you’d never ask,” simpered Donaldson.

  “Phil,” said Coleman, “fuck off, why don’t you?”

  Lehman showered as soon as he got back to the Floating Hotel. He felt dirty and it wasn’t just the heat and the dust, it was as if he’d been tainted by the exhibition of war crimes and Judy’s biased commentary. He soaped himself all over, shampooed his hair, and then repeated the whole process but he didn’t feel any cleaner.

  Tyler had suggested that they go for a drink later on that evening and they’d arranged to meet in the lobby at nine. Lehman looked at his watch and saw that he still had ten minutes to kill. Rather than sit in his room he decided to wait in the lobby bar with a glass of beer. Lewis was already there, sipping a Perrier water and wearing another of his multicoloured shirts.

  “You on the wagon, Bart?” Lehman asked, sitting down opposite him.

  “My stomach doesn’t feel so good,” said Lewis, raising the glass of bubbly water in front of him. “Thought I’d give it a chance to settle down, get some heavy drinking done later.”

  Lehman ordered a beer from a slim waitress with shoulder-length hair and studied Lewis as he sipped disdainfully at his Perrier. “That exhibition sure was something, wasn’t it?” said Lehman.

  Lewis shuddered, and Lehman wasn’t sure if it was the water or the memory. “Brought back some of the pain,” he said. “Brought back a lot of memories.”

  “You were drafted, right?”

  “No, I got no one to blame but myself. I couldn’t get a job in sunny Baltimore so I signed up to get a trade. I got that all right. Army trained me as a mechanic and then put me on helicopters once they became the rage. Never thought I’d end up fighting another man’s war, just went in to learn to fix engines so that I could set up my own place. Then The Man invited me on an all-expenses tour of South-East Asia and told me it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. Even when they shipped me over I still thought I’d be sitting in some fortified behind-the-lines camp with the rest of the Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. Came as a hell of a shock to find myself at the sharp end. I guess it would’ve worked out the same way, even if I hadn’t joined up. I was everything Uncle Sam wanted for battle fodder. I was young, healthy and poor.”

  “And black?”

  “Yeah, you noticed that, right?” He lifted his glass to Lehman and then took a mouthful. He looked as if he was deciding whether to swallow it or spit it out but eventually gulped it down with a pained expression on his face.

  “So why did you come back?” asked Lehman.

  Lewis shrugged. “Through the Veterans Administration,” he said. “I went to see them about a …” He paused as if checking himself. “A medical problem,” he finished. “A few days later I got the offer of a free trip to Nam.”

  “Free?” said Lehman, surprised.

  “Yeah, some psychiatrist involved with something called the US-Indochina Reconciliation Project fixed me up. Same guy got Horvitz on the trip, too.”

  Lehman frowned. “A guy called Marks? Dick Marks?”

  “Yeah, that was the guy. Don’t tell me he picked you, too.”

  “I was planning on coming anyway, but the day after I spoke to a travel company he rang me up and said he represented an organisation which would pay for the trip, providing I was flexible about the timing and that my service record met their criteria.”

  “Flexible?”

  “Yeah, they had a spare slot and it meant leaving almost right away. That suited me just fine.”

  The lift doors opened at the far end of the lobby and Tyler and Carmody came out. Tyler was wearing a light blue safari suit and Carmody was in shorts and a grey sweatshirt on which was printed in large black letters, “Vietnam Veteran And Proud Of It”. Above the lettering was a leering black skull.

  “Oh, man,” sighed Lewis. “Don’t he ever give it a rest?”

  “Doesn’t appear so,” said Lehman.

  Tyler and Carmody sat down and ordered beers.

  “Anyone else coming?” asked Lewis.

  “Just Eric,” said Tyler. “Where do you guys fancy going?”

  No one had any ideas so they decided to ride around in cyclos until they made up their minds. They were listening to a four-piece Filipino band tuning up when Horvitz stepped out of the elevator in black Levi jeans and a white shirt. “Let’s go,” said Tyler. They stood for a few moments outside the hotel while cyclo drivers rushed up like flies attracted to dead meat. Carmody did the haggling and seemed determined to squeeze every last dong out of the deal until Tyler sat in his cyclo and told his driver just to go.

  The sky had darkened and the cyclos were constantly swerving to avoid cyclists who were driving without lights. Lehman’s driver caught up with Tyler’s cyclo and the two drivers synchronised their pedalling so that the two Americans could talk. Despite the gathering gloom Tyler had put his sunglasses on and the lenses shone blackly as he looked at Lehman. “Something distinctly colonial about this, isn’t there?” he said.

  “Like the last days of the Raj,” agreed Lehman. “It must be one of the few places in the world where they still use human power. Legacy of the French, I guess.”

  “Enjoy it while you can,” said Tyler. “This country is about to take off, take my word for it. It’s got huge undeveloped oil resources, coal, minerals, and a population that’ll work its balls off once communism is killed off. The Japs are already in here, and the Hong Kong Chinese. In a few years it’ll be taxis and five-star hotels and high-rise office blocks. It’ll be as if the war never happened. Like the Germans and the Japanese these days. Sometimes you wonder just who won the Second World War.”

  “You think they should be punished for ever?”

  “I think that we fought to preserve democracy in this country. And the politicians wouldn’t let us fight it to the finish. They wouldn’t let us win. So I don’t see why we should start co-operating now, I don’t see why we should help them out of the mess they dug themselves into. What do you think, Dan?”

  Lehman thought for a while as he listened to the breathing of the drivers and the clicking of the cyclo chains. “I think it’s been pretty well proven that communism doesn’t work. It didn’t work in Russia or Eastern Europe and it sure as hell won’t work in South-East Asia. If the Vietnamese have come to realise that, then maybe we should help them. Show them that capitalism and democracy are the only way to go.”

  “And we forget what happened during the war? The boys who died?”

  Lehman leant forward in his cyclo. “That’s not what I’m saying, Joel. I lost a lot of friends in the Nam, and I’d do anything to get them back. No, I don’t want to think that they died for nothing. I can’t ever forget that these people were our enemies. That’s one of the reasons I came here, to see if they are still the enemy, or if it’s time to stop hating. When I flew out on the Freedom Bird I left something behind and I want to straighten that out.”

  Tyler nodded, and smiled. “Is that the only reason you came back?” he asked quietly.

  “What do you mean?” said Lehman, frowning.

  “You look like a man who’s running away from something, Dan. That’s all. Problems back in the States, maybe?”

  Before Lehman could answer, a young girl on a Honda moped zipped up, her long hair streaming behind her. She was wearing a tight blue T-shirt and a black miniskirt. “Hey, you American?” she shouted.

  “Yeah,” said Carmody.

  “You want girls?” she called, swerving to avoid a man on a bicycle loaded with baskets of dead chickens. “I know where many girls. You follow me?” She kept twisting the accelerator to keep the moped level with the cyclos. The man who was driving Tyler shouted over at the girl and she called back and then drove off.

  “Hey, what did you say to her?” asked Carmody.

  “You want girls?�
�� said the driver. “I know much better place. Better girls. Very clean.”

  “What do you gentlemen think?” asked Tyler. There was a chorus of whoops and whistles and Carmody waggled his legs in the air. Tyler turned round to look at his driver. “I think that means yes,” he said.

  The driver shouted to his companions and the cyclos turned left at the next junction in almost perfect formation.

  “Where are we going?” Lewis asked Tyler.

  “No idea, Bart, but I think we’re in good hands.”

  The cyclos made their way through a series of badly lit side-streets, turning left and right until the Americans had no idea of where they were or where they were going. Despite the late hour the streets were still full of mopeds, bicycles and cyclos, and the sidewalks were thronged with people eating, talking or reading under flickering oil lamps. Faces looked up when the Americans went by and small children jumped up and down and waved and called out: “Lien Xo! Lien Xo!”

  The convoy eventually came to a halt outside a roadside bar which had a sign saying “Hot Bar” outlined in red light bulbs. Two young girls in tank tops and miniskirts came out of the bar and stood giggling as the Americans climbed out of their cyclos. The bar was open to the side-walk and inside, bathed in red lights, were half a dozen low tables and wooden stools. Country and Western music crackled from a teak-veneer speaker fixed to the wall and a middle-aged woman with short, curly hair polished a glass with a cloth that had seen better days. When she saw the Americans she called into a back room and four more girls came into the bar, one of them wiping her mouth with a tissue. The girls surrounded the Americans like pilot fish around sharks, touching them and giggling and following them to a corner table.

  The men sat around the table and the girls pulled in extra stools to sit close to them while another woman put bowls of peanuts and crisps in front of them and asked what they wanted to drink.

  “Beers,” said Tyler. “Five beers.”

  Lehman was now used to Tyler taking charge, and it seemed that the rest of the group didn’t mind him making their decisions for them. Lehman was certain that Tyler had been more than a pilot during the war. He was clearly a man who was used to giving orders and to seeing them obeyed. A natural leader. Or one who’d been well trained.