Big Mango (9786167611037) (31 page)

Eddie watched Lek’s face closely. It was a
lovely face, he still thought, but suddenly she also looked to him
like a woman capable of great cruelty.

“That’s a bunch of shit,” Bar growled. “You
were yanking a poor old guy’s pud just to find out where the money
was. If you’d found it, you’d have killed him and taken it.”

“I am Vietnamese. Harry Austin took something
that is ours, something that he had no right to take. Returning it
to my country justified whatever means were required.”

“Oh, I see,” Bar snorted, “and you people
took…what? South Vietnam? An entire country that you had no right
to?”

“The Vietnamese are one people,” Lek shot
back. “We had the right to bring our nation together again.”

“Knock it off, both of you,” Eddie snapped.
“You sound like the Larry King Show.”

He pushed himself back in his chair and
folded his arms. “Okay, let’s cut the crap, Lek. What’s the deal
you’ve got for us?”

“Why do you think I have a deal for you?”

“Everyone else seems to have one. Why should
you be any different?”

Lek dropped her hands into her lap. Her face
went blank and her voice turned toneless. “I won’t haggle with you.
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has authorized me to pay you up
to $5,000,000 if you can find where Harry Austin hid the money he
took from us. So that is my offer. $5,000,000.”

At least the price was moving in the right
direction, Eddie thought.

“All you have to do is find the money and
tell me where it is,” Lek finished. “After that, we will do
everything else.”

“I’ll bet. Then I suppose you’ll just send me
the $5,000,000. The check is in the mail? Something like that?”

“We would be prepared to offer you reasonable
guarantees if you insist.”

“I can hardly wait to find out what those
might be,” Eddie chuckled. “Maybe the same kinds of guarantees
Captain Austin got, you think?”

When Lek said nothing, Eddie stood up and
walked to the edge of the deck. The Chao Phraya looked like a
painted river in the darkness. He leaned on the rail, his back to
the table, and breathed in the Bangkok night.

After a while he turned back and said, “I’m
too tired to think anymore tonight.”

“So what now?” Lek asked, glancing at the
boys blocking both ends of the deck.

“Nothing,” Eddie told her. “The three of us
are leaving, but you’re staying. These guys will turn you loose
tomorrow at noon and you can do whatever you want. I figure we’re
at least entitled to a little head start.”

“What are you going to do if I try to leave
tonight?” Lek seemed balanced between amusement and surprise. “Kill
me?”

“No,” Eddie shook his head. “I wouldn’t do
that.”

“But he might,” Bar suggested in a helpful
voice, pointing to the tallest of the four boys.

The boy was standing just to Lek’s right
holding a black revolver with polished wood grips. He had both
hands wrapped around the gun and, although the muzzle was pointed
up, the expression on his face left no doubt that he could bring
the weapon into action quickly.

Lek glanced at the boy. “Does that mean
you’re refusing my offer?” she asked.

Her tone was so stilted that Eddie found
himself wondering for a moment if their conversation was being
recorded. He looked back out at the water again and realized that
was ridiculous. Their conversation was rolling past and
disappearing into the darkness just like the river.

“No, it doesn’t mean that,” Eddie replied in
a soft voice. “Not yet, at least.”

He watched a large log drift by on the
current. As it passed, it spun slowly through a full circle and
then abruptly it sank out of sight in the inky water. Eddie waited
for it to bob back to the surface, but it didn’t. He hoped that
wasn’t an omen.

No one said anything else. Bar and Winnebago
stood up and, together with Eddie, they walked away. Lek picked up
the passport Bar had left on the table and flipped open its red
cover. Neither her picture nor her name was where it should have
been. She was gazing at blank pages.

“Where did you get it?” she called after
Eddie, laughing a little in spite of herself.

“Like Bar said,” Eddie called back. “He has
friends around here.”

When they reached the corner of the building,
Eddie stopped and looked back at Lek although he had promised
himself that he wouldn’t. She had extraordinary features—strong,
yet still delicate—and the way her long, upper lip was pushed out
and drawn taut made him think for a moment of a petulant child who
had been caught doing something naughty.

“You are a very clever bastard, Eddie Dare,”
she said as he watched her.

“Think so?”

“But there’s one thing I really do
wonder.”

“What’s that?”

“If in the end, you will be clever
enough.”

It was a good question, Eddie thought to
himself. A hell of a good question actually.

Eddie knew he would find out the answer soon
enough anyway so he wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about
it right then. Instead, he grinned, cut Lek the biggest wink he
could, and wiggled his eyebrows. It was a gesture so silly he
laughed out loud when he did it.

Then Eddie turned back toward where the taxi
was still waiting for them somewhere off in the darkness and walked
away. He didn’t look around again.

***

THEY
didn’t have to drive
too far, only a mile or so to a wharf further up the river next to
a darkened Buddhist temple. Bar paid off the taxi and Eddie and
Winnebago followed him to the edge of the river and down a ramp of
creaking planks that had been bleached by the sun to the color of
paper. A half dozen or more shallow-bottomed longboats, their hulls
striped in brilliant reds, greens and blues, bumped against a wall
of old tires, the boatmen stretched out asleep inside.

There was a pay phone on a post at one corner
of the wharf. Eddie stopped and looked at it.

“Think this thing works?” he asked Bar.

“Probably not. Use my mobile.”

“I’m going to leave a message for McBride at
the embassy. They can probably tell if the call comes from your
phone and I’d rather he doesn’t know we’re together.”

“What difference would that make?” Bar
asked.

“McBride thinks I’m on my own and he isn’t
taking me very seriously. He probably figures I’m stumbling around
somewhere with Winnebago and haven’t got a clue what to do.”

“Yeah,” Winnebago mumbled as he reached for
his Camels, “imagine him thinking a thing like that.”

Eddie lifted the receiver and smiled when he
heard the hum of a dial tone. “Where’s a good place for me to meet
McBride tomorrow?” he asked Bar.

“Why do you want to see McBride after the
kiss-off he gave you at the embassy?”

“We need help, Bar. The CIA must be
interested in that money just like everybody else is. Maybe McBride
will toss in with us if I tell him what I know.”

“But you don’t know anything,” Winnebago
pointed out, exhaling smoke and adding his dead match to the other
garbage floating in the river.

“I’ll make something up.”

Bar eyed Eddie. “What kind of a place do you
have in mind? Public or private?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just as long as it’s
somewhere McBride will have a hard time tailing me after I leave.
You know he’ll try.”

Eddie and Winnebago watched Bar while he
sorted through the possibilities. The boatmen, all wide awake now,
sat quietly in their boats and watched the three
farangs
watch each other. Finally, Bar told Eddie what instructions to
leave for Chuck McBride and gave him some coins and the night
number for the embassy. Then he spoke quietly in Thai to the
boatmen while Eddie was on the phone.

After Eddie hung up, Bar pointed toward one
of the boats, a new-looking one with a long band of red and green
striped canvas over a metal frame that formed a canopy from bow to
stern. They all climbed down into the narrow shell and made
themselves as comfortable as possible on its hard, wooden seats.
The boatman fired up the massive automobile engine in the stern,
racked the throttle a few times—for good luck, Eddie hoped—then
powered away from the pier and made for the middle of the wide,
oily river. After ten minutes, the boat slowed and began a gently
arcing turn into a narrow canal that flowed east, away from the
river.

“This is the Saensaeb Canal,” Bar screamed
into Eddie’s ear loud enough to be heard over the roar of the big
engine. Then he pulled a handkerchief out of the back pocket of his
trousers. “Everyone calls it the sewer run. If you’ve got anything
to use, I’d suggest you cover your face.”

Eddie watched Bar fold his handkerchief into
a triangle and wrap it over his nose and mouth like he was getting
ready for a game of cowboys and Indians. He glanced down at the
black muck through which the boat was plowing and then back toward
the garbage that was spiraling in their wake. He didn’t have a
handkerchief, so he just crouched down and tried to breathe as
little as possible. The spray off the boat’s bow misted back over
him like dirty water flowing from a shower.

For the next ten minutes they plowed steadily
through the fetid canal, the high-pitched yowling of the boat’s
engine obliterating every other sound. Eddie watched the darkened
city on both banks. It was a crazed and tangled world that rolled
past his eyes: soaring towers of glass and steel; rickety, wooden
shacks on the verge of sliding into the water; marble shopping
palaces sheathed in lights; empty lots strewn with garbage and
sleeping bodies; glittering hotels with expensive automobiles
around them; massive slums of tarpaper shanties packed under
bridges; and roads that, even after midnight, were still snarled
with traffic and enveloped in clouds of exhaust smoke.

A giant numeral, a three drawn in white neon
and surrounded by a circle, loomed on top of a dark building on
their left, but Eddie had no idea what it might signify. He saw
another lighted sign that read HILTON INTERNATIONAL float past on
the right and disappear behind them in the darkness. Not long after
that, the boat’s engine cut out and they glided silently into a
rotting wooden platform moored underneath a concrete bridge.

Bar paid the boatman and then led them over a
metal ramp and up a set of steps cut into the concrete of the
bridge supports. Crossing the busy road at the top of the steps,
they walked down a block and turned left onto a smaller street,
then left again into a tiny alley. Soon they were facing a metal
gate set into a concrete wall. It looked to Eddie almost exactly
like the gate at the Forty Winks.

There was another group of young boys waiting
outside this gate, too, all wearing white shirts, dark trousers,
and bow ties exactly like the other boys had been. They seemed to
know Bar well and greeted him with smiles and nods. When they
pushed the gate open, Eddie could see another line of parking bays
hung with dark vinyl curtains. Most of the dim red lights over the
parking bays were lit.

“What’s this one called?” Winnebago asked
Bar.

“The Sixty-Nine.”

“A hell of an improvement over Forty Winks,”
he said.

They passed through the gate and looked
around as it clanged shut behind them.

“It seems just like the other place,” Eddie
said to Bar.

“Yeah. Probably a thousand of these in
Bangkok.”

“And do they know you at every one of
them?”

“Pretty near,” Bar admitted as they followed
one of the boys down the driveway between the darkened rows of
vinyl curtains.

They bid each other goodnight under the
fronds of a scraggly coconut palm that rattled softly in the warm
breeze and then they were each shown to a room by one of the boys.
Nobody suggested a nightcap. They were all too drained of thoughts
and emptied of words.

Eddie lay awake for a long time after that
counting the boats as they roared by on the canal and watching
himself in the mirror on the ceiling above his bed. Eventually he
slipped off to sleep. It was sometime in the early morning and, for
a few hours at least, he was adrift in a deep and dreamless world
and didn’t think once about piles of money abandoned in a burning
city, or even about a Vietnamese intelligence agent with smooth
skin and slim ankles.

EDDIE
left the Sixty-Nine
just after eight the next morning. He let himself out through the
gate, the bow-tied schoolboys there the night before having
vanished like apparitions in the daylight, and turned right
following the directions Bar had given him.

A narrow, cracked sidewalk stretched out in
front of Eddie, empty except for a line of food vendors carts
closed and draped with tarpaulins. Two scruffy dogs dozed in the
shade. They raised their heads as Eddie passed and almost
immediately lost interest in him. The sun had barely cleared the
surrounding buildings and Eddie was able to keep mostly in their
shade, but still the heat poured over him like scalding water.
Before he had taken fifty strides, he was already sweating.

He could see the main road a couple of
hundred yards away. It was thick with traffic and out there beyond
it lay the rest of Bangkok. The gossamer fragility of the night had
disappeared as completely as the boys at the gate and now the city
looked harsh to Eddie, even menacing.

For a second he flashed back to his mornings
at the Buena Vista, eating breakfast and watching the Mason Street
cable cars rotating on the big turntable down at the end of Hyde.
He could be there right then, he supposed, sipping strong black
coffee from those white ceramic mugs that looked like they had been
stolen from a Mississippi truck stop, maybe even flirting a little
with Suzie just to keep his hand in. But he wasn’t drinking coffee
in San Francisco. He was running from Vietnamese Intelligence and
the United States Secret Service, hiding out in a Bangkok
whorehouse, and strolling down a potholed alleyway to meet a CIA
agent so they could have a conversation about $400,000,000 that had
been stolen from the Bank of Vietnam more than twenty years ago. It
was enough to give a man a serious case of whiplash.