Big Mango (9786167611037) (37 page)

He figured he might have caught a break, but
now he wasn’t so sure. One of his locals had stumbled over an
attendant at a place called the Sixty-Nine when he was shaking down
the short-time hotels and the kid said he might remember Eddie and
Winnebago from the night before. Juiced up with a couple of
purples, the kid quickly became certain of it. He also claimed that
he had overheard them talking to some old guy about the Little
Princess massage parlor earlier in the morning. After that, he
said, all three
farangs
had left and none of them had come
back again. That clicked with McBride’s memory of where Harry
Austin’s corpse had turned up and he had no doubt he had found his
guys. The old
farang
would have been Bar Phillips. It all
fit perfectly.

McBride tried to find out whether the Chinese
muscle boys he had sent around the massage parlor circuit had been
to the Little Princess yet. He called their mobile telephones over
and over, but all he got was that stupid recording that said they
weren’t answering, which of course he already knew, so he decided
he had better hustle over to the Princess and take a look for
himself.

But now that he had been sitting there
watching the place for a couple of hours, he wasn’t so sure anymore
that he had made a wise decision. He was getting way too old for
this surveillance crap. What was he doing sitting in a car watching
a cathouse and peeing in the bushes? That was the kind of stuff the
kids got stuck with. He had earned a lot better than that by
now.

McBride shook off his irritation and leaned
forward, examining the Little Princess carefully again. Jesus
Christ, if it turns out Dare is just in there getting a hand job,
he thought, I’m going to feel like a monkey fucking a football
sitting out here.

Two women crossing the street in front of his
car suddenly pulled McBride out of his reverie. They wore short,
straight skirts and form-fitting silk jackets. Both were probably
in their early twenties, he figured, but with Thai girls who could
ever tell?

McBride followed the girls’ progress
appreciatively as they threaded their way nonchalantly through the
traffic, dodging puddles and casually leaping cracks in the
concrete. Their smart pumps clicked crisply against the pavement
and the unselfconscious poise with which they moved nimbly from
foot to foot made his crotch ache. The day he stopped being awed by
the beauty and gracefulness of Thai women, McBride figured, would
be the day on which he was stone cold dead.

Strangely, that was exactly what Chuck
McBride was thinking at the very moment the hand grenade rolled
underneath his car.

The grenade made a couple of lazy circles,
tipping from side to side like a child’s top slowing down, and came
to rest just beneath the Volvo’s gas tank. For a moment after it
stopped it rocked gently and, when the last of the energy from its
momentum was spent, there was one brief instant in which it lay
completely still.

A second later, two at the most, it
exploded.

Lek’s eyes had followed the hand grenade
carefully after she released it and slipped behind a cement truck
parked a couple of dozen yards from the white Volvo. Hand grenades
bewitched her. They were truly beautiful, she thought, elongated
steel teardrops with symmetrically spaced dimples animating their
colorless surfaces. When one exploded and the steel of the casing
was shred into microscopic slivers by the power concealed inside,
when the needle-like shards were hurled outward with a symmetry as
perfect as a skyrocket bursting on Chinese New Year, it had always
seemed somehow right to her, as if an object like that
should
explode.

It had taken Lek only a few hours to find out
where Eddie, Bar and Winnebago had gone after they left her at the
Forty Winks. By three that afternoon, her people had not only
flushed out a boy who knew where they had stayed overnight, he even
knew they had all left around noon and exactly where they had
gone.

That was something
farangs
just didn’t
seem to understand. They could never hide anywhere in Bangkok.
There would always be someone who watched where they went and heard
what they said, and that information would always be for sale. That
was one thing she truly loved about Bangkok: the joyous,
unrestrained corruption of it, the way anything could be
bought.

Lek cupped her hands over her ears as the
grenade did its work, quickly and efficiently transforming the
Volvo and Chuck McBride into a column of fire and smoke.

She had had an uneasy feeling about the
Little Princess for a long time, suspecting there was some
connection between it and Harry Austin that was more than
coincidental, but she had never been able to nail down exactly what
it was. After Harry’s body had been found nearby, she sent some men
around to talk to the girls there, but nothing came of it. They had
reported back that the woman who ran the place was stupid and
drug-addled, and that none of the girls knew Harry Austin.

This morning when Lek found out that Eddie
Dare was snooping around the Little Princess she got a sinking
feeling that she might have been careless. When she got there and
found Chuck McBride sitting outside in a car watching it, there was
no longer any doubt in her mind. This was on her. She should have
been more exact, more rigorous.

But watching the Volvo burn comforted her.
She was making up ground fast.

Killing a CIA field agent was not something
to be taken lightly, of course; she knew that, but what else could
she do? Besides, everybody in Bangkok thought McBride was DEA
anyway and using the grenade on him would cause them to assume that
some desperate heroin trafficker had been responsible for his
demise. Hand grenades were standard procedure when the local
dealers wanted to thin out the competition a little. Langley would
put it all together differently some day, she had no doubt of that,
but the day would not be soon; and even when it came, what would
they be able to do about it?

Everything had started coming down around her
like a rock pile. There was no reward for subtlety anymore. All
that counted now was to get to that money first. And she would do
what she had to do.

McBride’s death would not interest anyone all
that much she felt certain. And once the money was back in Vietnam
where it belonged, it wouldn’t matter to anyone at all.

R.I.P. Chuck McBride.

***

ALTHOUGH
the place looked
like it had been closed down for a long time, Short Time still
managed to produce ice-cold beers from somewhere. After she set
them out on the bar, she disappeared and Eddie, Winnebago, Bar and
Harry Austin sat on stools quietly drinking from bottles of Singha
so cold that the condensation formed four little pools on the
wooden bar top.

“How do you like my club, boys?” Austin
asked. “Got a few others just like it, too.”

Eddie glanced around at the dusty room. “I
hope they’re doing better business than this one is,” he said.

“This used to be the Green Latrine,” Bar
spoke up. “Air America and United Press had their offices over
there…” he waved off in the direction of the main road, “but this
was where you found their guys most of the time. Every other
reporter, spook, hustler, and ex-military hard case in Bangkok hung
out here, too. Until around the mid-eighties, this was the hottest
place in Southeast Asia, a legend with the old hands. It was where
the elephants came to die.”

“That’s right,” Austin nodded. “Finally
closed it down about eight years ago. Ran out of elephants.”

“You sent the pictures to me, didn’t you,
captain?” Eddie’s voice seemed to float in the dim room. “And the
one to Bar.”

“Yep,” Austin nodded. “Sure did.”

Winnebago looked even more bewildered than he
already was. “How did you know that?” he asked Eddie.

“Process of elimination mostly. Who would do
something like that? Maybe not someone who wanted to scare us away
at all, but instead someone who wanted to get our attention.” Eddie
watched Austin closely. “How am I doing?”

“No better than I expected.”

“So, you’ve got our attention, Captain. Now
what?”

Austin sipped lightly at his beer. He thought
for a moment, as if deciding how best to work up to it, but then he
gave up and just went at it head on.

“I need your help real bad right now.”

“You could’ve just called me, Captain. I’m in
the book.”

“Oh, yeah,” Austin snorted, his voice
gathering strength. “I can imagine ringing you up San Francisco one
day and saying, ‘Hey, Eddie, been a long time, huh? And by the way,
I’ve got a big pile of money over here in Bangkok that I need you
to give me a hand with.’ You’d have thought the old bastard had
fried his brains on booze and pussy, then made some soothing noises
to shut me up, and that would’ve been that.”

“Then it’s true? You really have the
money?”

“We’ll get to that.”

Austin chugged the rest of his beer and
slammed the empty bottle onto the bar. Short Time materialized from
somewhere with fresh bottles of Singha and put one in front of each
of them. Winnebago fumbled for his Camels and shook out a
cigarette.

“There’s no smoking in here,” Austin said,
waggling a finger at Winnebago. “We’re just as full of shit as
California is.”

Winnebago glanced around in disbelief and
then reluctantly pushed the cigarettes back into his shirt
pocket.

“What about those Secret Service agents?”
Eddie asked. “Were they real?”

“What Secret Service agents?”

Eddie thought Austin seemed genuinely
surprised.

“The ones that followed me from San
Francisco,” he pressed on anyway. “It must have been a lot of
trouble for you to arrange all that, Captain.”

“Weren’t no trouble at all. I had nothing to
do with it. Probably
was
the Secret Service. I always said
it was better to be lucky than smart.”

Bar couldn’t hold back any longer. “I am
completely, fucking lost,” he said.

“Hush up, boy,” Austin snapped. “Eddie’s got
it figured out, and that’s what matters.”

“All except the part where you died,” Eddie
said. “Whose body was that they found in the street?”

“Some poor tourist, I guess, but I don’t know
for sure. A taxi driver came running into the Princess one night
and said a
farang
had gotten all busted up in the street. I
went out there and…well, when I saw how much the guy looked like
me, the whole idea just kind of came to me right then.”

“You were the man who identified the body as
yours, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, and I arranged the cremation, too. I
needed to lie low until you turned up. All kinds of shit was
starting to come down.”

“You mean the government was on to you?”
Eddie asked.

“Yeah, but not ours as far as I knew then.”
Austin popped his lips a few times, thinking. “It was the woman the
Vietnamese sent who scared the piss out of me. She went around
claiming to be a Thai who was married to me, except she ain’t Thai
and I ain’t ever been married to nobody. Not really.”

Bar leaned forward until he caught Eddie’s
eye. “Where do you figure Lek went after we left her at the Forty
Winks last night?” he asked.

Austin snorted so loudly they all jumped. “So
that bitch got her hooks into you, too, did she?”

“It’s not that way, Captain,” Eddie said.

“How much did you tell her about what you’ve
figured out?”

“Not much.” Eddie tried to look nonchalant
but, when Austin fixed him with a hard stare, he confessed. “Well…a
little, I guess.”

“Do you know who she really is?”

“Yeah, I found out.”

Austin lifted both hands in a gesture of
exasperation and Eddie changed the subject as quickly as he
could.

“Don’t you think dying was a pretty dramatic
way to disappear, Captain?”

“Nah…” Austin hesitated for a moment, but
then he plunged on quickly. “I was just practicing.”

Eddie slowly rotated his head toward Austin.
The sudden pitching sensation in his stomach told him what was
coming next.

“The big C’s done blown the bugle for me,
boys. Another few weeks, the quack says, then that’s it.” He took a
long pull on the Singha, draining the bottle. “Man, that is
so
good.”

Winnebago started to say something, but
Austin quickly waved him into silence.

“I don’t want to hear any horseshit about how
sorry you are. It took me a while, but I’m okay with it now, so
don’t fuck me up again.” Austin looked rueful. “I wouldn’t have
told you at all, but it explains why I need you now.”

Austin chewed on his lower lip briefly while
they all waited.

“I don’t want that money to go back to any of
the bastards who had it before. None of ‘em. They’d just find a way
to use it to kill people again: theirs, ours, somebody’s.” Austin
was looking at Eddie now, but not looking at him. “It doesn’t
really matter if it’s their government or ours that gets it. Same
thing would probably happen either way. It’s blood money, boys.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Austin’s eyes were still on Eddie’s, but his
mind appeared to be focused off in the middle distance.

“I’ve spent twenty years trying to wash that
money up a little. Put some of it around here, some up in Laos to
build schools and hospitals. Make up for some of the damage we’ve
done to all these nice people.”

“You mean you’ve been giving away millions of
dollars for twenty years and no one was even curious about where
you got it?” Eddie asked.

Suddenly Austin snapped back into focus.

“Shit, man, this is Bangkok, the capital of
the unknown world. Everybody thinks I’m the biggest drug dealer in
town.” He burst into a cackling laugh. “Ain’t that the damnedest
thing? Here I am giving away money as fast as I can, just trying to
do right and help people, and the reason no one asks any questions
is because they think I’m a heroin dealer. The world’s real fucked
up, ain’t it?”