Turn of the Cards w-12 Read online

  More hands were laid on Mark — purple hands, feathered claw hands, a pair of hands shiny with what looked like mineral oil. He expected the bum’s rush back to the street, but instead they propelled him away from the bar, in the general direction of the saloon-style doors.

  He figured he had received a pretty clear message, though, so he kept walking that way. He was almost out when a boozy voice hailed him from the dim depths of the bar.

  “Where’s your hurry, mate? Come along on back. I’ll set you straight right quick.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Heat lightning flashed and grumbled over the Thonburi slums across the Menam Chao Phrya. Sitting in the quietly opulent dining room of the Oriental Hotel, Helen Carlysle set down her wineglass and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows, out over the terrace toward the river, where the bow-and-stern lanterns of barges bobbed like fireflies.

  “I wonder where Lynn and Gary are,” she said.

  Belew sat back with his arm cocked over the back of his chair. “On a plane for Ankara,” he said, and sipped wine.

  She looked at him, her eyes huger than usual. “What are you talking about?”

  “They packed up their gear and flew out a couple of hours ago.”

  “What on earth are they doing?”

  He smiled into the wine he swirled in his glass. “Following leads, I expect.”

  “But why — why didn’t they tell us?”

  “‘The gods love the obscure and hate the obvious,’ the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad tells us. One assumes they had their reasons.” He set his wineglass down and signed for the waiter. “Here, you’d best eat something, child. You need to keep your strength up.”

  Monsoon arrived that night, blowing sheets of rain and white pulses of lightning before it. Belew and Helen made love in her room with the French doors to the balcony wide open, the curtains snapping like banners, the rain splashing across their naked bodies in raw, stinging gouts.

  Belew had been the gentlest lover she had known in her limited experience, and far and away the most skillful. Tonight he was wild, obsessed, and the things he did left her shaking and breathing in short, desperate gulps, sure she could not endure any more. But she could; and he drove her again and again to the point of pure overload.

  Deep in the night, with her hands twined in fists around the silken bands that bound her wrists to the brass bedstead, she felt his lips go away from her. She moaned, and reached with her hips, and then looked up to see him kneeling Buddha-like between her smooth outstretched thighs, and lightning silvered her skin and his as he quoted again from the Upanishads.

  “‘This Self is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this Self’” he said, and lowered his face into her once more.

  “You may wonder,” the man at the corner table boomed as Mark threaded his way past the pool table, “why I’m not off in Manila running Flip whores like all the other expatriate Ozzies.” He frowned. “Often wonder myself. Habit, mostly, I suppose.”

  Mark, who was wondering no such thing, stopped by the round knife-scarred table and dithered. “Sit down, sit down. Christ, you make me nervous.”

  Mark sat. He glanced toward the bar. The dozen or so American jokers there seemed to have forgotten about him. He turned his attention to his host.

  He was a vast man, not fat, just big and broad, with a baggy appearance, as if he were losing a grip on his substance, losing cohesion, and was in the process of gradually pooling around his own ankles in the heat. A white linen suit, rumpled and stained, seemed to give him what shape he had. His head was large and square and running into jowls. His eyes were small and blue and set close to a red lump nose. His hair was graying blond, combed over a broad, bald crown and stirring gently in the downdraft from a ceiling fan.

  “I’m Freddie Whitelaw,” he said, offering a large, damp hand. “I’m a journalist of sorts. What might you happen to be?”

  “Mark Meadows. I’m an ace.”

  Whitelaw settled back in his chair. “Damned lucky on you you didn’t say that to the boys at the bar. Things might have gone hard with you. They like aces even less than they like nats.”

  “Uh, like, who are they?”

  “The New Joker Brigade, being recruited to make the Socialist Republic safe for socialism — its two-point-nine-million-man army not being up to the task, apparently. What are you drinking?”

  “Pepsi.”

  Whitelaw’s face crumpled in distaste. “Never touch the stuff God knows it’s probably safer than the water. I never touch that either. Waitress! Another gin over here, if you please. And, God help us all, a Pepsi.”

  “So, why don’t, uh, why don’t they bother you?” Mark asked. “I mean, you’re a nat … aren’t you?”

  “Too right. The reason they don’t bother me, my boy, is that I’ve been here longer than they have. Since ’68, in fact.”

  “In this bar?”

  “Much of the time, boy, much of the time. I got here just in time to cover the NLF attack on the American embassy that kicked off the Tet Offensive — not that it was Rick’s then; he took it over just a year or so ago, after the government launched this wild card sanctuary scheme. Do you know what? I found that a bar’s the very best place to cover a war. Walls tend to keep the bullets off, and sooner or later you hear everything that’s to be heard. Damn sight sooner than the American command, I’m bound”

  “Weren’t you afraid that somebody would bomb the place, man?”

  “Heavens, no. NLF drank here too. Don’t shit where you eat’s a universal principle, my downy-cheeked lad. Besides, the Front was fairly careful to take good care of me; I was on the side of the angels as far as they were concerned. Rising star of the radical press I was in those days, wasn’t I just? Always crawling through those wretched Cu Chi tunnels on my hands and knees with Bob Hope afflicting the Yanks with his ghastly jokes right over my head, dashing off to Hanoi to have my photo taken with Jane Fonda, that sort of thing. Those were the days.”

  The waitress arrived with their drinks. She was a very attractive joker woman, not much taller than the locals, covered with fine golden fur, with pointy ears sticking out through her red-blonde hair, whiskers, and a bushy, tawny tail springing out the back of her short skirt.

  “Thank you, Sylvie. You can put it on my tab, there’s a love.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Rick says no credit,” she said in a Scandinavian accent.

  “Bloody hell. I’ve lost my religion; I’m good for it.” He dug in his pockets, tossed a handful of coins and bills at her. She scooped them up, curtsied, and left.

  “Saucy little minx. I wouldn’t mind cleaning her fur after the manner of a cat, I can tell you that much.” He fixed Mark with a boiled-onion eye. “So, what do you think of our triumphant socialist paradise?”

  “Um,” Mark said. “They — they’ve cleaned up the streets. Gotten rid of the pimps and the prostitutes and all.”

  Whitelaw slammed his hand on the table and guffawed. “You think so, do you? You Yanks! Your naïveté is always so disarming.”

  He leaned forward and breathed gin across Mark. “Listen well, my ingenuous boy. Just because one doesn’t see the Saigon tea — what your media used to call B-girls — any more, just because one doesn’t encounter the ‘me so horny’ sucky-fucky types immortalized in Full Metal jacket and that rap song the new head of your DEA hated so much, does not mean that prostitution has been vanquished. It’s alive and well and flourishing on Dong Khoi, just as it did when it was called Tu Do, Freedom Street.”

  Mark stuck out his underlip rebelliously. To his dismay he had not yet seen much to like in the Socialist Republic. But it did not seem right to just sit by and listen to Whitelaw badmouth the place.

  “Where are they, man?” he demanded. “I didn’t see any.”

  Whitelaw sat back smirking in triumph. “Oh, I’ll just wager that you did. Did any young ladies on motor scooters happen to slow down and give you the obvious eye?”

>   “Yeah,” Mark said guardedly.

  The Aussie nodded. “And did a pair of young men on another scooter promptly stop beside you to ask if you liked the aforementioned young lady?”

  “Oh,” Mark said.

  “You are learning, my lad. The communists haven’t eradicated vice. They’ve just made it damned inefficient. Like all the other circumstances of life here in Saigon giai phong.”

  “Like, what does that mean, giai phong? I thought the town was called Ho Chi Minh City now, but everybody calls it Saigon, and then they tag giai phong onto the end, like some kind of religious thing or something.”

  “You might call it a superstitious thing: apotropaic, designed to avert evil — a wonderful word, and God bless you for giving me the pretext for using it. Giai phong means ‘liberated.’ People tack it on when they call the place Saigon to keep from getting in trouble. Nobody but government employees and foreigners calls it Ho Chi Minh City.”

  Mark sat for a time and nursed his Pepsi and thought about things. He wasn’t coming to many conclusions.

  “Well, what do you think of the revolution here, then?” he finally nerved himself to ask.

  “It sucks. It’s dirty, inefficient, repressive, regressive, and in my humble opinion is getting ready to blow sky-high. And no, I won’t keep my voice down. They’d never dare send me to reeducation camp, or even disappear me; I may be a sodden old lush, but I was a damned good journalist in my day, howbeit a soul-purchased one. I know where skeletons are buried all the way from here to Hanoi.”

  Mark frowned. “Come on, surely it isn’t that bad. I mean, look what they’re doing for wild cards —”

  “Cramming them into a ghetto in Cholon. Recruiting the able-bodied to herd peasants into New Economic Zones, which is a fancy word for concentration camps — just like the New Life Hamlets of the late, unlamented South Vietnamese regime. Making propaganda cat’s-paws out of the lot of you —”

  The double doors opened. Whitelaw broke off and settled back to watch as a big man in a poor-fitting suit entered with a drunkard’s shuffle. He had a shock of thick blond hair. His collar was open around his thick neck, and he wore no tie.

  The Joker Brigade boys paid him no attention until he came up to the bar and dropped great hairy hands on the shoulders of Luce and his looming buddy with the claw.

  “I … am friend,” he announced in a thunderous Russian voice. “I love much American. I love much American joker. We all capitalist tovarishchy now, da?”

  Luce turned to him, round face purpling with fury. “You’re a traitor to socialism, is what you are. You’re bogus, man. Bogus!”

  The tall joker pivoted and drove the tip of his claw into the Russian’s midriff. The Russian doubled. Luce clasped his top pair of hands and clubbed him to the floor. The other jokers all clustered around and kicked him until he crawled, moaning, out the door.

  “Give Peace a Chance” came up on the box.

  The jokers went back to the bar, Luce dusting two pairs of hands together in satisfaction. “That was righteous, Brew. Stone righteous.”

  “I always thought of myself as a teacher,” Brew said, buffing his claw with a bar rag.

  “Yeah. You really taught that fucker good,” said a purple-skinned man with what Mark thought was severely reduced cranial capacity.

  “Never a dull moment when the boys are in town,” Whitelaw commented. “Pity they’re heading back upcountry in a few days.”

  He tossed off the last of his gin and leaned his elbows on the table. “So tell me, Mr. Mark Meadows. Just what kind of an ace are you?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  When Helen Carlysle awakened with Thai daylight blasting through the open French doors like laser beams, she was alone. On the pillow beside her where Belew had lain was a note:

  Don’t think ill of me, my child. What I do now, I must do. And what happens next will be for the best.

  This was never a game you were meant to play in. “Heaven and Earth are not humane,” Lao-tzu says. “They regard all things as straw dogs.” Go back to your world; fly happy, high, and free. Forget the past, and all else which lies beyond your power to affect. And try — if I may beg a favor — not to think too harshly of me.

  Beside the note lay a single red rose.

  She rose, walked nude into the bathroom, spent a very long time washing her face. She took a light robe off its hangar and put it on. Then she came back into the bedroom and sat in a chair by the French doors, letting the smell of sun on wet pavement wash across her on the morning breeze.

  She was just sitting there wondering whether to cry or not when the phone rang.

  O. K. Casaday was a tall man with a tropical-weight suit hung on broad shoulders and a large and extremely round head with a fringe of yellow-white hair set on top of a granite slab of jaw. His eyes he hid behind amber shades.

  On the phone he had introduced himself as being “from the embassy” Now he sat across from Helen on the terrace in the shade of a parasol with his long legs folded and drummed his fingers on the white tablecloth as if she had called him here to waste his time.

  “Did you call the Governor to confirm my bona fides?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “And did they tell you I was in your chain of command?”

  “Yes.”

  He bobbed his huge head. It reminded her of the spring-mounted heads of those stuffed puppies in the back windows of cars. She started to giggle, clamped down on it. She had a public image to maintain. She was still her father’s daughter, even if she’d killed him.

  “Are you all right?” Casaday asked, frowning irritably.

  She sipped iced water from a cut-crystal goblet. “I’m fine.”

  “The first thing I need to know is, where the hell are those bozos from the DEA?”

  “They’re gone,” she said, drawing pictures in the ring of condensation the base of the glass had left on the table.

  Casaday’s shades almost fell off. “Gone? Where the hell have they gone off to?”

  “Bob said they went to Ankara. In Turkey.”

  “I know where Ankara is. Jesus Christ. Whatever possessed those morons to —”

  He stopped, swung his head full to bear on her. She still couldn’t see his eyes, but she could feel their awful pressure. “Bob said. Bob who?”

  “Belew. J. Robert Belew.” She smiled faintly. “To use your phrase, I guess you could say he’s with the embassy too.”

  “I guess not!” Casaday exploded. “What the hell did that crazy cowboy sonofabitch have to do with this investigation?”

  “He was with us from the outset. He was the one who got us this far.” Why am I defending him? she wondered. He abandoned me. Like every other man I’ve… cared for. Yet he had never promised more than he had delivered, and he had delivered, in his own way, quite a lot.

  Casaday had gone dead pale beneath his Southeast Asia Incipient Cancer Tan. “What did you say?” he asked.

  “He was with us from Amsterdam on. He was our CIA contact. He took charge of the team, after Saxon and Hamilton messed up two straight grabs on Meadows.”

  Casaday took a deep breath and shook his head. “I don’t know how the fuck stupid you are. Belew is not with Central Intelligence. He had nothing to do with this case. Nothing.”

  She was glad of his rudeness, his masculine contempt; it helped her pull together. “Mr. Casaday, I am handling this case under contract to the Drug Enforcement Agency. DEA was satisfied with his credentials. It was neither my place nor my right to question his assignment to the team. Now, I would appreciate it very much if you would retract calling me stupid.”

  “Christ, is this bimbo for real?” Casaday murmured under this breath.

  A wind began to rise out of the Chao Phrya breeze like Godzilla from Tokyo Harbor. Parasols whipped on their staffs, women cried out as their skirts flew up, a waiter exclaimed as his tray was sucked from his hands in a clatter of breaking china.

  O. K. Casaday’s tie wound its
elf around his throat, seemed to be dragging him up out of his chair. It was not tight enough to strangle him, but try as he might, he could force no air into his lungs.

  “I am not a bimbo, Mr. Casaday,” Mistral said, smiling sweetly. “I am a fully accredited agent of the United States government. I am also an ace. Now, would you like to apologize for your rude and completely uncalled-for personal remarks, or shall I leave you breathless until you lose whatever brain cells you may have remaining?”

  Casaday started frantically nodding his head, then shook it just as vehemently. One of the parasol spokes above him gave with a musical ping.

  “Which, Mr. Casaday? Does that mean you’ll apologize?”

  He mouthed the word yes.

  The whirlwind stopped. The parasol quit flapping. Casaday fell back into his chair. Immediately he began tearing at his necktie.

  Mistral waited primly until he’d cleared himself an airway. “You had something to say to me, I believe?”

  A tendril of wind brushed his face. “Yes! I apologize! I’m sorry. Jesus. Believe me, I’m sorry. I take back everything I said about you.”

  “Very good, Mr. Casaday. I will probably find it unnecessary to file a sexual-harassment complaint against you when I return to Washington. Now, please explain the situation concerning Mr. Belew to me.”

  “Belew is what we call a cowboy. He’s ex-Special Forces, served several tours in ’Nam during the war. Since then he’s done a lot of contract work all over the world, for Central intelligence and freelance.”

  “He seems eminently qualified,” she murmured. “I see no reason anyone should have questioned his credentials.”

  “He’s a nut, Ms. Carlysle. He thinks he’s the last knight in shining armor and he still sees communists under the bed. More to the point, he is not currently in the employment of the CIA. He has no authorization.”

  There was a time, not long past, when she would have crumpled under the weight of Casaday’s revelations. Now she was … amused. I’m beginning to heal, she thought. She knew who had helped her begin the process.