The Bangkok Asset

24

“There were two hundred and thirty-three of us at the peak,” Dr. Christmas Bride says as the truck trundles slowly through the jungle tunnel with Amos at the wheel. “Including a dozen American women, all of them white.”

His somber mood has quite dissipated; he is a scientist again, fascinated by his life’s work. Now the plight of the women and their children doesn’t seem so sad to him. On the contrary, the circumstance was serendipitous, looked at from a scientific point of view.

“It was before your time, of course, a distant epoch when men were men and women were women.” He smiles. “I have nothing against gender equality, nothing at all, but as a psychiatrist I have to say that if you go about it by degrading the sexual identity of both male and female, you end up with infantilism. After all, in nature the only humans without developed gender identity are infants. Haven’t you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it most needs men and women of mature judgment it seems there aren’t any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation.”

“Why so?”

“Think about it, what do dissatisfied children do? They complain, they cry-but it never occurs to them to rebel effectively. In the end they grumble and obey. Infantilism and slavery go hand in hand. It is almost as if the West has been softened up for that very purpose by forces beyond its control.”

“You got that right,” Amos says, at the wheel and concentrating on the track.

“So what about the others, the GIs in your care? Where did they all go? You surely didn’t eat them all?”

“ ‘Some flew east, some flew west, some flew over the cuckoo’s nest,’ ” he quotes. “Natural wastage-people without hope die young. Many were too far gone for anyone to save them. One used whatever drugs would keep them calm, if that was what they wanted. I never discouraged them from taking their own lives, once I was sure that’s what they intended. The simple truth is that mental pain may be as unendurable as the physical kind-indeed, it may be much worse. I was working in uncharted waters, I had to take each case as it came and after a year or so make a decision. Some simply wandered off into the jungle. One assumes they died, but not necessarily-after all, many of them were skilled jungle survivors. One heard rumors from time to time about crazed vets wandering the jungle and using crossbows to hunt for food.”

“So now there are eight?”

He hesitates, then looks at me, waiting for something. “Eight plus three.”

“Those three derelicts living in Klong Toey Slum?”

Dr. Bride sighs. “It’s really very simple. The man who believes he is your father led two of his chums to Bangkok. It was a kind of last adventure before death, and a bid to reach back to his personal history before Ultra. For him you exist on the far shore of the sea of madness.” He stares at me, then looks away. “Someone had brought news of a Eurasian detective in Bangkok, just the right age, with a mother named Nong.” His eyes examine me again for a second. “He took Willie J. Schwartz and Larry Krank, to use their official names, who were the three most able to appear normal in public, and they all went off to see if they could find a way of making a living in the world. They wound up doing a little trafficking in Bangkok, in the slum of Klong Toey. They kept very little for themselves, sent most of what they made back to their brothers in the compound. Jack was shy about contacting you, though. He was biding his time. He found out where you worked and spied on you there. He asked about you, but you have to understand he was like a jungle animal: cautious, shy, given to scuttling away at the first sign of psychic danger. He took a few pictures of you, I’m told, on a cell phone, and stared at them for hours on end.”

“Which cell phone? There were two,” I ask. Bride seems not to understand the question. He shrugs. “So who planted the bomb? Why?”

“To be frank, I’m not sure. It is certain that Goldman saw a security threat to his program just when it was gaining commercial traction. On that theory the bomb was intended to send them scuttling back-remember how fragile are their mental states. They weren’t supposed to be in the hut when it went off.”

“But there’s another theory?”

“Well, as we both know, there’s another player, isn’t there?”

“The Asset ordered the bombing?”

Bride doesn’t answer.

“None of this explains why I’m here, now, today. Why would you spill the beans on a whole secret operation like this, just because one old derelict thinks he’s my father?”

Once again, the Doctor seems disinclined to answer. He stares out of the window with that gargoyle expression on his face, as if he hasn’t heard.

The long slow journey through the tunnel is over, and the truck emerges first onto bumpy cleared land, then finally onto a paved road where a people mover is waiting. The Doc explains that since we are not only nearer to Vietnam than to Phnom Penh, but, as a matter of fact, nearer to Saigon than Phnom Penh, it is easier to drive across the border than take a plane from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh.

The border guards let us through even though I have no visa: the Doc speaks fluent Vietnamese and bribes them as a matter of course. I guess he must use the crossing a lot. Once we are in Vietnam the road is pretty clear. I am silent all the way.