Turn of the cards

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 naпvetй 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?”