American Gangster

5. Ding Dong

A sprawling jumble of a city, Bangkok had all the humid heat, rank pollution, snarled traffic and diseased prostitutes its ragged reputation promised. Despite the colorful if grotesque palaces and temples, this was a world chiefly of weather-beaten cement with occasional splashes of tropical green poking through. Dirty, poor, crowded, its sidewalks clogged by stalls selling knock-off T-shirts and cheap jewelry, Bangkok made Harlem seem a paradise.

In the deceptive candy flush of neon at night, Frank Lucas — in a short-sleeved sportshirt and chinos, just another anonymous tourist — rode along in back of one of the three-wheeled motorized vehicles called a tuktuk. Bicycles darted around like flies (and flies were darting around everything and everyone else), but the tuk-tuk did its own share of weaving in and out of the impossible traffic.

Frank had checked into the Dusit Thani Hotel, where he’d skipped any tourist bullshit to catch the three-wheel taxi to his destination: the Soul Brothers Bar, which he’d been told back home was the top hangout for black GIs on R & R.

This was Frank’s first trip to Southeast Asia, and — though he didn’t impress easily — the sights and sounds and smells had overloaded his sensory system. What a shock it was to enter the Soul Brothers Bar and find the kind of black joint you might find in a funky corner of Atlanta or Chicago or Harlem itself.

The only way the joint could have been smokier was to be on fire. Otis Redding was singing “Dock of the Bay” courtesy of the Rockola jukebox, and at tables and booths and along the bar, black soldiers — Frank was the only man other than the two bartenders not in uniform — were putting the moves on slit-to-the-thigh-silk-dress Thai girls, who didn’t look hard to seduce.

Frank ordered a Coke at the bar and found his way to a small table, where he sat and surveyed the scene. And some of what he saw would not have been allowed in the funkiest hole in Atlanta, Chicago or even Harlem...

Not every GI had a hooker on his arm or in his lap; a few were zonked out, slumped in booths laughing lazily or flat-out sleeping, and a few others were drunk out of their minds. Dope was being rolled and smoked and even shot up. A staircase, up which went soldiers and their “dates,” meant the second floor wasn’t so restrained.

After a while a trio of ex-GIs started playing Southern blues tunes — “Gone Dead on You” by Blind Lemon Jefferson was their opener. Authentic-sounding shit, Frank had to admit.

Just as authentic were the smells that found their way through the smoke and general bar stench to tickle both his nostrils and his memory: ham hocks and collard greens served by waiters in stripeless army uniforms. Home away from home for Uncle Sugar’s boys.

One uniformed figure stood out from all the others, perhaps because he wasn’t wasted on dope or booze, and didn’t have a hooker hanging on his arm, either: an army master sergeant. The tall, commanding figure, whose Apache cheekbones added an edge to affable, handsome features, threaded through the tables and patrolled the booths and bar as if on inspection.

At first the sarge seemed to be checking on the GI customers’ well-being. Then at one booth, he shook hands with a patron and, through the smoke, Frank could barely see the pass-off of cash from the client for some packets of white from the sarge.

Frank must have been staring, because the sarge was suddenly squinting at him through the smoke, the guy’s expression sinister at first, then shifting into a kind of loose-lipped shock.

The sarge called out, “Frank?”

Frank lifted his Coke in salute and smiled, just a little, and his old friend Nate Atkins beamed at him and made a beeline.

Nate sat and grinned and said, “You’re too old to get drafted. What the fuck are you doing on this turf?”

“Thought maybe you could recommend a good Thai banker.”

Nate blinked a couple times. “Got a major deposit to make?”

“Yeah. A major deposit. And maybe a sergeant major deposit, too.”

Nate liked the sound of that. He gestured to the dingy, debauched surroundings. “What do you think of the place?”

“All the comforts of home. Soul food with dope on the side and a blow job for dessert. You’re not still in the service...?”

“No! Hell no.” He gestured to the uniform. “This is just to make the fellas feel comfortable. So I heard about Bumpy. You taking over for him, or what?”

“What. Protection’s out.”

“But you’re still moving powder.”

“Yeah. And I want to move some more.” He flicked half a smile at his old friend. “I hear the quality is high, your neck of the woods. Rumor or fact?”

Nate’s brown eyes, always alert, took on a sharpness. He got up easily, saying, “You got a few minutes? Let me make a call.”

Frank sat at the same table with Nate, but they had two guests, a couple of young Thai wise guys in sportshirts with big pointed collars and too much gold jewelry.

The conversation going on right now was in the Thai language, which Frank didn’t understand; but he trusted Nate, a shirttail relation from North Carolina.

A skinny, dead-eyed Thai punk asked Nate, “He say how much stuff he wants?”

Nate, also speaking Thai, said, “He said ‘a lot.’ What that means I don’t know. Four or five keys, maybe.”

Both Thai hoods studied Frank like he was a modern art painting they were trying to comprehend.

Then the skinny Thai said, “And he’s your cousin.”

“My cousin-in-law,” Nate said by way of full disclosure. “My ex-wife’s cousin, actually. But he’s family to me. I trust him.”

The Thai kid thought about that. Then he said to Nate, “Ask your cousin-in-law how much he wants.”

Nate asked Frank.

Frank said, “A hundred kilos.”

Now it was Nate studying Frank like modern art.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Frank?” Nate asked.

“Am I known for my sense of humor, Nate?”

The next day, pushing through the paradise-for-pickpockets throng on the sidewalk along a row of steamy food stalls, Frank and Nate walked and talked.

“No one I know can get that much,” Nate said.

“I heard you were connected.”

“I am connected. I know every gook gangster in town, and that’s a lot of gook gangsters. I know every goddamn black soldier in the Army from the cooks to the colonels, and on up.”

“Good to hear.”

They stopped and bought mangos from a vendor, and munched as they went on.

“Well,” Nate said reflectively, “I suppose I could piece together that many keys, from different suppliers. But ain’t none of it gonna be one-hundred percent pure.”

Frank shook his head. “Then I don’t want it. Not what I want.”

Nate grunted in exasperation. “I know that. I see where you’re comin’ from, my man. I just do not think it’s possible, without risking floating facedown in one of these fuckin’ canals.”

“It’s my risk.”

“It’s my risk, too!”

“If you want to get rich, it is.”

Nate bit into the mango. “Means dealing with the Chiu-Chou syndicates in Cholon or Saigon... if they’ll even deal with your stateside ass.”

But Frank was shaking his head. “No. Not good enough.”

Nate’s jaw dropped, part in reaction, part for effect. “What the fuck...?”

Frank was still shaking his head. “Too late. It’s been chopped. I want to get it where they get it. From the source.”

Nate slowed, and Frank didn’t. Catching up, the big man eyeballed his old friend and then started laughing. “Pullin’ my chain, right?”

Frank’s eyes said Wrong.

Astounded, Nate managed, “You’re gonna get it. Your own self.”

Frank shrugged with his face. “Why not? Good shit in life don’t come around to hand itself to you. You got to go after it.”

Nate tossed the mango pit in the gutter. “You mean you’re gonna go into the fuckin’ jungle like fuckin’ Tarzan?”

Frank shrugged. “I lived in jungles all my life, Nate. Where I lived, fuckin’ Tarzan wouldn’ta made it.”

Nate put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and stopped him, right there on the sidewalk, making a thousand people walk around the ex-soldier and the tourist. “No, you don’t get it. This isn’t a jungle. This shit is the jungle. Tigers. Vietcong. Fuckin’ snakes alone will kill you!”

Frank raised an eyebrow. “And how is that different from Harlem?”

Khaki-clad Frank felt like he was leading the goddamn Dirty Dozen, so motley a bunch were these Thai thugs and black soldiers, riding mules with shoulder-slung automatic weapons through jungle dense as a pussy patch. Funny thing was, he was enjoying himself, arrayed with pistol, rifle and ammo bandolier like a bronze Pancho Villa.

Days had passed since he’d sold Nate on the plan. They’d ridden in trucks and on boats and up and down every damn river in the Golden Triangle, as far as he could tell. And now they were about to arrive at the opium farm where Frank would do the deal that would change everything back home, that would make Bumpy Johnson a footnote in the Frank Lucas story.

If Frank didn’t get himself killed, instead.

Right now they were under a pleasantly cooling canopy of foliage thick enough to blot out the sun. He could see the sunlight ahead, the light at the end of this tunnel, and when the canopy finally opened up, Frank Lucas found himself breathing in a syrupy sweet scent and staring down at a green-dotted-purple poppy field the size of Manhattan.

They stopped here and Nate had a confab with a Thai mercenary in the native gibberish. Frank waited for Nate to translate.

“He says,” Nate said, “this whole area’s controlled by the Kuomintang — Chiang Kai-Shek’s army. Defeated army...”

Frank nodded. “They’re on guard down there.” He’d already spotted the Chinese soldiers with their outdated weapons. “But what about those boys — they ain’t Chinese.”

He was indicating a handful of white sentries in camouflage jumpsuits, Americans probably, with weapons that were real up-to-date.

Nate said, “CIA, likely.”

“Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see.”

Nate dispatched the Thai he’d spoken to before, sending him down to talk to the Chinese guerrillas, having no idea how the American spooks would figure in.

But all went well. Before long Frank and Nate were in a natural cavern the size of an airplane hangar, which Frank gathered was a major processing center. In this rocky cathedral, Frank and Nate used their Thai point man to translate a negotiation with what turned out to be a vanquished Chinese general.

Not that this shit didn’t get tense: Thais with CIA advisors guarded Frank and Nate and their boy, while the Chinese and their CIA advisors guarded the guards.

Pretty soon Frank found himself in a bamboo dwelling that was goddamn nice for a shack, sitting opposite the general at a desk where the mucky-muck sorted through Frank’s papers — passport, visa, bank receipts and the really important paper: cash. Lots and lots of cash...

The general had the kind of diamond-hard eyes that had seen everything (including lots of cash) before; and those eyes spent as much time examining Frank as they had the papers.

“How,” the general asked, as if inquiring about the weather, “would you get it into the States?”

Frank’s kept his face as unreadable as the general’s. “What do you care?”

The general responded with a question of his own: “Who do you work for where you come from?”

“Again,” Frank said, nonconfrontational but giving nothing, “why do you care?”

The general shifted his chair. His mouth tightened; his eyes, too. “Who are you... really?”

Frank nodded toward the passport and visa on the desk between them. “You read it. Says right there: Frank Lucas.”

The general drew in a sharp breath. “I mean, who do you represent?”

“Frank Lucas.”

The general studied Frank some more, seemed to understand that he wouldn’t accomplish anything down this road, and let it go.

The general said, “You think you’re going to take a hundred kilos of heroin into the United States, and you don’t work for anyone? You expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t care what you believe.”

“Someone is going to allow you to do this?”

Frank shrugged.

The general glanced at one of his bodyguards, and said in Chinese, “I don’t believe a word of this.” Then he said to Frank, “After this first purchase, if you’re not killed by Marseilles importers — or the Italians in the States — then what?”

Frank flipped a hand. “Then there’ll be more — and on a regular basis... though I’d rather not have to drag my ass all the way up here every time.”

The general thought about that. Then, after a glance at the various papers (including the cash), he said, “Of course not.”

Frank did not smile, outwardly; but inwardly he was grinning.

The tough old general was ready to do business.

Two days later, at an army landing zone in Vietnam with monsoon rains pounding down, Frank climbed out of a UH-1 helicopter having traded his bandolier for the necklace of a press card. Nate, in uniform, climbed out of the Huey, too.

Nate alone was led by black enlisted men to an LZ tent where a black colonel was waiting. Frank cooled his heels under some dripping camouflage, hanging out with some other brothers in uniform. He could not hear the conversation that Nate and the colonel were having, but he knew what was going down.

The colonel said to Nate, “Jesus — that’s a lot of powder. Where’s it now?”

“Bangkok,” Nate said. He shrugged. “I can bring it here. Or anywhere in between. Your call.”

The colonel shook his head. “A hundred damn kilos... I never seen that much dope in one place, have you?”

Nate grinned. “I just did. You ever see one of them Amana refrigerator-freezers?”

“Sure.”

“Bigger than that.”

“... Let me talk to your partner.”

Nate nodded out to Frank, who joined them in the tent and did some negotiating. Then they watched the colonel exiting the tent, rain still coming down like God machine-gunning, to cross the torrent on duck-boards to another tent, where a white officer, a two-star general, waited.

This negotiation was brief: fifty grand in advance, covering the pilots and the guys on the other end, as well.

But Frank told Nate, “No.”

Nate goggled at him. “No? Frank, we—”

“Give them one hundred.”

“What? Give ’em more than we negotiated?”

Frank nodded. “A hundred. That’s all I’ve got left, anyway. So if that dope doesn’t arrive, for whatever reason, I won’t need it, the extra. We’ll buy a little good will.”

“If you say so, cousin.”

Then, suddenly, Frank embraced Nate and whispered in his ear, “Cousin or no cousin — don’t let me down.”

The words weren’t overtly a threat, but as he handed the fat envelope of cash to Nate, Frank knew that Nate knew.

Knew that Frank would kill him, if things didn’t go to plan.

Nate said, “Don’t sweat this a second. I’m all over it. And I’ll let you know when the shit’s in the air... Anybody ever tell you you’re a kind of genius?”

“No. I been called a fool before.”

Nate grinned. “Well, you’re that, too. But aren’t we all?”