Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty

A fist slammed into the side of Mark’s face. He felt his cheek split. His head snapped sideways until the tendons of his neck stopped it. His brain just kept spinning.

Mark had seen lab rats, picked up inexpertly, frantically propeller their tails in circles. Unless they had their semi-prehensile tails curled around something, they felt unmoored, unsafe. Mark felt that way now inside his own head.

Gotta keep conscious, he thought, though he knew deep down that keeping or losing consciousness was a symptom, not something in his control. If you go all the way under after blows to the head, it’s a bad sign; it usually means there’s some crockery broken in there, the movies notwithstanding. Subdural hematoma: brain implosion time.

“You should truly thank us for our grandmotherly kindness,” an astringent voice said in precise Vietnamese-accented English, from beyond the blaze of lights that was going to be all Mark could see once he got his eyes open again. “Minh is really being quite gentle with you, comparatively speaking. We have among us as guests, citizens of the former People’s Republic of Germany who, betrayed by their countrymen, find themselves unable to return home. They are experienced in interrogation, and they have a good deal of frustration to work out.”

A pause for a movie-torturer drag on the cigarette Mark could smell. “You don’t want to meet them, let me assure you.”

Well, you’ve gone and done it this time, a disapproving voice said from the roaring ringing depths of his skull. I’ve always known it would happen.

It was just Mark’s luck that being to all intents and purposes fucked would have the effect of producing in the conspicuously cowardly Cosmic Traveler a curious calm, so that instead of cowering in the back of Mark’s head and yammering in terror, he criticized.

Mark tried to hold his head up, but it dipped and wobbled like a kite in the wind, so he let his chin drop to his bare chest. “I don’t even know what you want from me,” he said through swollen lips.

“The truth.” This voice was vibrant, passionate, and All-American. “Who sent you here?”

“Nobody.”

Wham. Lights flashed, buzzers went off. The guy with the ham hand must have won a free game with that one.

“That’s ridiculous,” the All-American said earnestly. “You can’t seriously expect us to believe that. Now, let’s take it from the top: Who are you?”

“M-Mark,” he managed to say. “Mark Meadows.”

“What are you?”

“I’m a biochemist. No, don’t hit me again – I – I’m an ace too.”

“And what were your powers?” the Vietnamese asked.

“I called myself Captain Trips. I had… friends.”

“If you’re Trips,” the American said, “where are your potions?”

You had to play it smart, didn’t you? the Traveler’s voice sneered. You left us behind. We’re safe here in Vietnam, you thought…

Well, so he’d fucked up again; it wasn’t as if it was a new experience or anything. He really did figure he’d be all right stashing what remained of the powders he’d whipped up after his Athens score in Whitelaw’s digs, and he was wrong again. On the other hand, God alone knew what the minions of the notoriously blue-nosed Socialist Republic would be doing to him now if they’d caught him with a fanny-pack full of the most outlandish concatenation of outlaw pharmaceuticals they’d ever seen.

He shook his head. “Don’t… have any. Gave it up.”

A deep chuckle in the voice that belonged to the American. He felt breath on his face, lightly flavored with anise, for God’s sake.

“If you are the notorious American ace,” the Vietnamese voice hissed in his ear, “who sent you here to spy on us?”

“Nobody, man! I keep telling you. I’m – just – a refugee -”

Time for another allegro for face and fists, fortissimo. This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, the Traveler put in between beats of the beating.

For Christ’s sake, Trav, J. J. Flash responded, show some originality. Meadows at least has the sense to play dumb, and God knows he’s got practice.

Do not be cruel, came Moonchild’s voice, black silk and silver. Are we not all one?

Great, Flash said. Just what we need: inscrutable Eastern wisdom. If the East’s so goddamn wise, how come its anointed representative is doing a bang-tango on our corporate head?

… Mark became aware the debate was no longer being accompanied on percussion. And there were voices speaking outside the bruised box, his skull.

“- all bullshit, Vo, I’m telling you,” the All-American was saying confidently. “He’s no ace.”

Mark heard a click, smelled a cigarette coming alive, coughed. “We still await the results of the blood tests, Colonel,” the Vietnamese interrogator said.

“No, no, no,” the All-American said confidently. “I know aces. They’re arrogant bastards. No ace would put up with this kind of treatment, I can promise you. Besides, this Captain Trips character is known to be a major druggie. This guy isn’t holding squat.”

Mark could feel the wind off his headshake. “He’s not Captain Trips. He’s some random hippie burnout on the run.”

A smoky sigh. “As you say, Colonel Sobel. I bow to your superior experience. Very well, Minh: get rid of him.”

And just like that he was out on the sidewalk again. Oh, they threw some water over him before they threw him out, and they threw his shirt at him as he stood swaying on the sidewalk in front of the former French villa, blinking in the hot rain and feeling the eyes of passersby all over him.

It could have been worse, he assured his various selves, as he struggled his arms into the sleeves and started buttoning his shirt up crooked. When Vo had told his silent partner with the heavy hands to get rid of him, Mark assumed that meant he was going for a swim in the Saigon River with a brand-new smile beneath his chin. Sometimes it was a relief to be wrong.

“Oh, mama,” Flash crooned, “could this really be the end?

“To be stuck in Ho Chi Minh City with the Bangalore Blues again.”

“‘Bangalore?’” Mark asked aloud. The pedestrians and bicyclists streaming nearest him glanced at him and streamed a little quicker. It was not propitious to tarry near those encountered bloody-headed and talking to themselves in front of this particular address. “I thought that was in India.”

You got bangs galore back inside there, wouldn’t you say?

Funny, Flash. Real fucking funny.

Oh, dear, Moonchild thought. I believe we’re going to throw up.

Colonel Vo Van Song, People’s Public Security Forces, drew smoke through his black-lacquer cigarette holder. He turned in his chair to gaze out the blinds at the broad, tree-lined avenue outside, and let the smoke out.

“So he is the ace called Captain Trips, after all,” he said.

Folded into an uncomfortable French wooden chair, O. K. Casaday grinned. “Don’t be too hard on our boy Charles. He’s a halfwit, sure. But who’d know Meadows is a real ace just from looking at him?”

Colonel Vo turned to regard his visitor. He had large black eyes, sad and heavy-lidded. His cheeks were hollow, so that the cheekbones formed a tau with his jaws. He had a mouth very reminiscent of a carp’s. Jocularly pointing out the resemblance in the mess was not a way for young officers to secure rapid advancement in their careers. Colonel Vo believed in the axiom better police for a better police state, and he believed surveillance begins at home.

Vo and Casaday went back a long way. They had been actual antagonists, back in what both of them, ironically, thought of as the good old days – when they were not so tightly bound about by rules, unlike today, when you had to file a request form two weeks in advance to take a leak.

He had started out as an up-and-coming battalion political officer in a division working the wrong side of the DMZ. It was a job he hated. You faced the same risks as the grunt riflemen, but you got extra headaches. Lots of them.

To be sure, he enjoyed the sinister powers attributed to commissars in Western popular fiction. But the popularizers didn’t tell you the downside. There were the constant political meetings and self-criticism sessions he had to run, for example, which, not being a complete imbecile, he found as boring as everybody else in the PAVN. He also combined the roles of chaplain and guidance counselor, which meant that everybody in the battalion who had a problem whined about it to him. Finally, he was responsible for the performance of the unit in combat as well as out, which meant that his neck was at risk from the blunders of the actual unit commanders, whom he found to be a succession of alternately glory-hungering psychotics and dolts who didn’t know which end of Vietnam Hanoi was in.

His own indoctrination had not adequately prepared him for this.

His luck came in at the battle for Hue in 1968. His battalion got chewed up with great revolutionary panache – its current commander was the psychotic type – and he himself took a shell fragment in his shoulder from one of his own side’s 130mm field guns – the battery commander was a dolt. It was what the Americans would call a million-dollar wound. It wasn’t all that serious, though it hurt like a bastard the first few weeks, and it impressed the higher-ups enough to win him the transfer to Intelligence he’d been maneuvering for.

After some more training, he spent the rest of the war in the south, living undercover, playing spymaster, and generally having the time of his life. Much of his effort had gone into setting up loyal South Vietnamese so that the joint CIA and Special Forces Phoenix program would assassinate them for being part of the NLF infrastructure. O. K. Casaday had been with the Phoenix in those days.

He’d had more hair then.

“It will presumably be more difficult to enlist Dr. Meadows’ willing participation,” Colonel Vo murmured.

Casaday barked a laugh. He barked everything in fact. He reminded the slim, precise colonel of some kind of great ungainly Western hound.

“Now, Colonel. Sobel may not be the swiftest runner in this foot race, but give the devil his due: he’s a charismatic son of a bitch. Some of those monsters of his are right off the Rox, and they think the only good nat’s an entree. He’s got them eating out of his hand. He can bring Meadows around.”

The mirth left his face and he gave Vo a stare hard and flat as a basalt slab. “He’d better, Vo. And if there’s any little thing you can do that might give him an edge in recruiting Meadows, you might give serious thought to doing that little thing. My superiors feel Meadows is too prize an asset to let him just slip through their fingers. And with the Soviets withdrawing aid, and the Chinese openly arming your nut-cutting enemies the Khmer Rouge, and your own rebels running wild out in the Delta and up in the Highlands, this is not a time to be losing influential friends, is it, old pal?”

There is something almost refreshing about the American lack of subtlety, Vo thought. Still, Casaday was doing little more than retailing the unattractive truth. The money and power of the group Casaday represented were vital to the survival of the Socialist Republic. They also had come to form the matrix in which Vo’s own power structure was implanted.

He sighed smoke through his nostrils. “I will see to it, Mr. Casaday. You are perfectly correct about Colonel Sobel’s powers of persuasion.” Sobel’s silver tongue had been vital in bringing his own superiors around, money or no money. Vo’s masters liked wild cards little better than Casaday’s did, though they were nowhere near as hipped on the subject.

Casaday grinned and bobbed his huge head. “Great. It’ll be good to get a major ace on board. Most of these monsters don’t have much firepower, unless you count the ability to make their enemies puke their guts up.”

“Much as I hate to raise continual objections,” Vo said, “I must also point out that Colonel Sobel is recruiting a new joker brigade. Dr. Meadows is no joker, and it’s my understanding that Sobel’s recruits care little enough for nats, much less non-joker aces.”

“Do I have to handle everything around here?” Casaday threw up his hands. “This all seems simple enough to me. The party line is, Meadows is a fugitive from American nat injustice, just like all the other pussbags. If the Establishment will lean that hard on a blond and blue-eyed nat like him, who knows what they’ll do to jokers who look like detached hemorrhoids? You sell that line to Sobel, he sells it to the monsters. You play it right, it’ll motivate ’em to fight harder.”

He rose, sauntered to the window to loom down at the passersby teetering their bikes through the rain, holding black umbrellas overhead with one hand, their wheels spraying mud in their wake.

“What a hoot,” he said. “Sobel and his crazies think you’re empowering oppressed wild cards here. Little do they know we’re setting them up to take a big fall. And you get to use them for expendable muscle, into the bargain.

“This is a beautiful goddam scheme, Vo, just beautiful. We can’t lose here. We just can’t lose.”