Turn of the Cards

Chapter Forty-five

“No way,” Belew told the Revolutionary Oversight Council.

It was an L-shaped cinderblock building, blocky and overgrown, off in the woods not far from the clearing in which Croyd had been experimenting to see what powers he had awakened with. Nothing remained by way of furnishings — the long collapsible table and the auditorium chairs were formerly the property of the nearby village’s executive committee, its governing apparatus, whose members had sensibly made themselves scarce or jumped to the rebellion. Still, Mark was convinced it was an American-built school. It just had that familiar feel to it.

And while the French and the communists both had their more than somewhat slightly conspicuous failings, who but Americans would have thought to build a flat-roofed building in rain-soaked Vietnam?

Young Nguyen of the trai cai tao faction gave Belew the fish eye. Dong, the dapper gangster, showed no emotion, but telltale sweat domes popped out along his hairline.

“I don’t mean any disrespect to our representatives from Saigon,” Belew went on. “I simply do not believe it is in the interests of the rebellion to commit the bulk of its forces to a defense of Saigon at this time. We have the advantage of dispersal of forces, the will-o’-the-wisp’s upper hand. The government has many targets and cannot possibly strike them all. If we concentrate in Saigon, they’ll have just one.”

In the place of honor at the other end of the table — directly opposite Belew — Mark swallowed. He’s got a point. He made himself stand straight.

“You could be passing up a very fine opportunity, my friend,” Dong said, in that head-back, hissing way of his. His mannerisms made Mark think of a Vietnamese William Buckley. “Our nation’s rightful capital has taken up arms in support of the rebellion. The mayor, Vo Van Kiet, is ready to declare for us.”

“The soldiers in Saigon are expelling their officers,” Nguyen Cao Tri said breathlessly. “They’ve called on Moonchild to come and lead them. This is what we’ve all been waiting for.”

“A massive popular rising was what Vo Nguyen Giap was always waiting for too,” Belew said. “He never did get it. And the times he judged the time was ripe and gambled on getting it, like Tet ’68, he lost his shirt. Even if the world media did turn it into a victory for him, after the fact.”

“But we already have a revolt,” Mark pointed out.

Belew shrugged. “The Saigon mob is fickle. Mobs are, everywhere. But the Saigon mob is worse. You can relax, by the way, Dong,” he added with a cool grin. “I mean ’mob’ in the sense of the rabble in the streets, not your people.”

That did not much seem to mollify the crime boss, though he was too cool to show his agitation in any very overt way. Several of the other Saigon representatives were shouting and jumping up and down. Ernie had to wedge himself between Nguyen Cao Tri and the equally tough, equally young, and equally hotheaded Ngo An Dong to head off an incipient fistfight. A Southerner himself, the Cao Dai leader obviously had little love for the big-city boys.

“Gentlemen!” Mark rapped, hardly even remembering to be abashed at raising his voice. “Are we here to fight the government, or are we here to pound on each other while our enemies recover their strength and laugh at us?”

Silence bit like a guillotine blade. Shamefaced, Ngo and Nguyen stepped away from each other, avoiding one another’s eyes and those of Mark, who stood at the table’s head, stern and looming as a teacher confronting unruly third-graders. They forgot to take umbrage at the fact a dirty moi had laid hands upon them. Or maybe they understood by now that a display of racism would get the inhumanly tall American really pissed off.

Mark stood there, blinking, briefly at sea. The council-table commotion had bumped him off balance, as it always did. Mark always thought of Asians as reserved, polite. Generally they were, in his experience. But if something got them going, they earned on like a cageful of jays. Not the kind he used to smoke either.

All right, a voice in his head said — and it was his own— you’ve got center stage. What do you do now?

The old Mark, with a score or two of large dark eyes turned on him like spotlights, would have stammered, turned red, and sat down. This Mark took his balls in his hand, metaphorically speaking, and plunged on.

“I think this is too good an opportunity to pass up,” he forced himself to say as quickly and smoothly as he could. “Saigon has great, uh, symbolic importance, both for the world and for Vietnam as a whole.”

There you go again, you scramble-brained addict, Traveler sneered from his box seat in the back of Mark’s skull. Recklessly putting us all smack in the middle of the bull’s-eye again. You stumbled there for a moment, didn’t you? Wasn’t that incipient common sense tugging at your sleeve, trying to get you to think again before you senselessly put us all at risk?

That did it. Mark drew a deep breath, inflating himself to his full six-four.

“I also think its time to put up or shut up,” he said firmly. “If we say we want a revolution, we can’t very well hang around scuffing our feet when we get one.”

He looked around the room. “You, Ngo; you, Nguyen. What do you think you’re doing? You, Bui — you say let the big-city Southerners fend for themselves; you ask what have they done for Annam? But the question isn’t what they’ve done for you. It’s what the Northerners and the communists have done to you. Are your petty jealousies more important to you than getting the Tonkinese boot off your neck? Are your chains so comfortable that you’re willing to stay in them so long as you can make sure your neighbor doesn’t break his?”

He slammed his fist on the table. It startled him into brief speechlessness. Oww! Cosmic Traveler whined. That hurt.

His audience had jumped as one and hadn’t seem to notice the break in his rhythm. Maybe they thought it was a pause for effect.

“I tell you what I’m going to do,” he said, and his words seemed to rattle off the thickly painted cinderblock walls like bullets. “I’m going down to Saigon and do what I can to help.”

He glared around the table. “The rest of you can stay up here and make faces at each other until you all have long gray beards, if that’s what you want to do. I’m outta here.”

The Council jumped to all its feet at once, yelling. At first Mark — who had actually gotten himself so worked up he was in the process of stomping out of the school — thought they were hooting him from their midst. Then he realized they were cheering.

All but Colonel Nguyen, who sat back in his chair with arms tightly folded. Great, Mark thought. It was about the way life worked — his life, anyway. Colonel Nguyen thought Isis Moon walked on the water now. But he had no use for Mark, and when Mark appeared before the Council rather than Moonchild, he got these tremendous testosterone attacks.

A glint in the PAVN deserter’s eye touched off realization in Mark’s mind like a magician’s flash paper: He thinks I’m sleeping with her. Well, for Christ’s sake.

“What does Moonchild say upon this?” the colonel asked in his best bone-piercing voice-of-command. The conferees stopped in the midst of their acclamations and turned and looked at him, bewildered. “She is the Field Marshal of the Revolution.”

Field Marshal of the Revolution? Mark thought.

Gotta admit it has a ring to it, said J. J. Flash.

At the foot of the table J. Bob Belew rose. He cleared his throat.

Mark looked at him glumly. Here it comes. He can put the kibosh on everything I’ve said and done. And I thought I was doing so well.

And just what is a kibosh, anyway?

“May I remind the Revolutionary Council,” Belew began in his best orator’s voice — which was pretty damned good, and Mark felt a spur of Isn’t-there-anything-he-can’t-do? jealousy rake him — “that Dr. Meadows is Moonchild’s fully accredited voice on this Council?” He hit the word doctor hard. The Vietnamese had an almost German regard for titles, especially academic ones.

“With her own lips Isis Moon said, ‘He speaks with my voice.’ Is that not true, Colonel?”

The colonel found something highly fascinating to look at on the tabletop. “It is.”

Belew nodded. “Then his words are hers; she has spoken. And now I’ll speak.

“Earlier I raised the voice of caution. Caution has its place. There’s also a time to cast caution to the winds. Dr. Meadows has shown us that that time has come. Let me remind you of the Duke of Montrose’s famous toast.”

He raised the cracked white-enameled metal cup he’d been sipping tea from and declaimed, “‘He either fears his fate too much, or his desserts are small, who dares not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.’

“Gentlemen to Saigon!”

Mark walked along with his head down. The moon was high, shaming the stars and the broken clouds, who seemed to be scurrying to get out of her way. He hoped the clouds didn’t get too fat He had mostly stopped worrying the place Starshine had been the way a child does the gap of a missing tooth, but he still took the stars best in small doses.

The water buffalo had worn a trail in the head-high, razor-edged buffalo grass. It felt strange to walk these trails freely, without fear of ambush or booby traps, after the paranoid weeks of patrol with the New Joker Brigade. But the people who laid the traps were his devoted followers now.

Moonchild’s, rather. And that was fine. He didn’t have much ambition to be a great captain. From the former DMZ to the Mekong Delta, the rebels ruled the night. It was appropriate that they should follow Moonchild.

A footstep behind him. He stopped, spun, clutching the familiar silver-and-black vial hung on a rawhide thong around his neck. If he turned into Moonchild again right now, he was certain he’d flip out — that was why he had appeared at the Council in propria persona — but the thought of getting wasted on his moonlight cruise by a government infiltration team, or maybe the NJB’s new heavyweight aces, was too much to take. He wasn’t acting in fear of his life; he was disgusted.

“Just me, Mark,” the quiet voice of J. Bob said.

Mark stood watching his back-trail as Belew materialized out of the dark. He did not initially remove his hand.

Belew grinned and preened his mustache with a thumb. “You still don’t trust me, do you?”

Mark moistened his lips and dropped his hand as if the vial had grown hot. Then defiance surged up within him.

“No.”

“Good…” The Master said, “‘A gentleman in his dealings with the world has neither enmities nor affections; but where he sees Right he ranges himself beside it.’ I do like you, Mark, but that’ll never stop me doing what I see as right. It never has yet.”

“Me neither.” Which had maybe not always been true, but was now.

“Good.” He came alongside Mark and patted him on the shoulder, inviting him to continue his walk. Mark did.

“A couple of days ago I told you not to give yourself too much credit,” Belew said.

“I remember,” Mark said.

“I’ll bet. I’ll bet you remember every negative thing — or thing you could take as negative — that was ever said to you. And I bet you’d be hard pressed to remember a single compliment. But remember this: don’t sell yourself too short either.”

Mark made a helpless side cut in the air with his hand. “Moonchild is the one who’s doing it. I’m only along for the ride.”

Belew stopped and turned. The magnet of his personality made Mark stop and turn to face him.

“Hogwash,” Belew said. “It wasn’t Moonchild facing up to the Council and facing bad old me down — back there.”

Mark shrugged. “I’m just her mouthpiece, you said so yourself”

“I was touching up the stragglers, Mark. Every man on horseback needs a few outriders, though history usually manages to overlook the fact. Yes, Moonchild is the figurehead of the revolt. And our best evidence is she’s merely a part of you.”

Mark’s mouth drew tight. He moved his head from side to side, not shaking it, quite.

“That’s moot. The fact is, you did it in there. All by yourself. You know what you are, son?” He clapped Mark on the biceps. “You’re a leader.”

“Oh, no, man, you got it all wrong —”

“I never get things all wrong, though I’ve pulled some sockdolagers in my day.”

“Some what?”

“Nineteenth-century slang. Don’t mind me. The important thing is, I know what I’m talking about.”

A strong forefinger stabbed Mark in the sternum. “You are the real leader of the revolt. Don’t ever forget it.”

Denial bubbled up in Mark so furiously, he couldn’t find words to vent it. He just shook his head.

“You’ll see,” Belew said. He took Mark’s arm and steered him into motion again.

“Now, something else. Don’t take anything for granted. Walking out here alone like this —” He shook his head. “The bad guys have gotten lucky before. And not all the bad guys wear PAVN khaki; you and your foxy alter ego in the yin-yang mask have roused some pretty fierce jealousies. Not everybody thinks it’s too swell that farang types are leading this revolution. And remember what Confucius said about the gentleman, affections, and the Right. We won’t always walk the same path, maybe, and I won’t necessarily warn you when I head another way.”

“Me neither,” Mark said, from sheer bravado.

“Excellent.” Belew put fingers in his mouth and whistled.

To both sides of the trail the elephant grass parted. On the right were Montagnards in their ponchos and bracelets. On the left stood Khmer Rouge in red headbands.

“You were safe,” Belew said, “tonight. Your guardian angel J. Robert was looking out for you. But there’s one thing you should bear in mind, son.”

“What’s that?”

“What happened to the Duke of Montrose.” The guerrillas faded back into the high grass. Belew turned and walked back down the trail, whistling. He would have called the tune “Marlbrouck S’en Va-t-en Guerre.” To Mark it was “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”