Big Mango (9786167611037) (6 page)

The head of the man in the picture seemed
perfectly normal on one side. A dark eye stared so directly into
the lens of the camera you could almost imagine it was about to
blink. The other side of his head was something else again. It
resembled a ripe pomegranate that had been dropped onto the street
from a very great height.

Recognizing Harry Austin after twenty years
would probably have been hard enough anyway, Eddie thought as he
examined the clipping, and having only half a head to work with
didn’t make the task any easier. Maybe this wasn’t him. Then Eddie
noticed two words in Western script that stood out quite clearly
among the monotonous lines of unfathomable print below the picture:
Harry Austin.

“After everything he lived through, he walks
down the wrong street on the wrong day and dies in an accident. It
doesn’t seem right,” Eddie said, then he looked up and caught the
strange look on Wuntz’s face. “What?”

“You’re assuming this was an accident.”

Eddie quickly glanced down at the clipping
again to see if he was missing something, but nothing jumped out at
him and he shifted his eyes back to Wuntz.

“It wasn’t?”

“My guy says DEA thinks maybe it wasn’t.”

“Why would they think that?”

“He didn’t know. He’d just heard around that
some people thought your man Austin was taken out.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t a drug
dealer.”

“He wasn’t.”

“Then why would anyone want to kill him?”

Wuntz rolled his eyes. “I look like the
Amazing Randy to you or what, Eddie? How the fuck would I
know?”

“I thought maybe your DEA guy told you.”

“Well, he didn’t.”

Eddie blew air out between his teeth and
studied the clipping some more. “This is sure a hell of a
coincidence.”

Wuntz reached over Eddie’s shoulder and
tapped his finger on a date that was stamped on the bottom of the
clipping. “DEA logged this in three weeks ago, just before those
pictures started showing up in your mail. Still think it’s a
coincidence?”

Eddie didn’t much care for the way the
conversation was developing or for what he gathered Wuntz was
suggesting. “Do you know what this story actually says?”

“There was no translation in the file. Maybe
one of those Asian hoods you call clients can read Thai.”

Eddie’s eyes flicked up to Wuntz.

“This is from a Thai newspaper?” he
asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s where Captain Austin was killed?”

But Eddie knew, of course, what the answer
was going to be before he finished the question.

“Yeah. In Bangkok,” Wuntz replied, right on
cue.

Eddie’s reaction must have been easier to
read than he would have liked.

“Bangkok,” Wuntz repeated, giving Eddie a
long look. “You know, the place with all the little broads and the
big massage parlors. That mean something to you?”

Eddie quickly shook his head. He knew Wuntz
didn’t believe him, But he let it go anyway and Eddie was grateful
to him for that.

He didn’t really want to talk about it
anymore right then and, even if he had, he couldn’t imagine what he
would say.

EDDIE
was walking slowly
along Market Street still trying to get his mind around the
conversation with Kelly Wuntz when his telephone began tweeting. He
hated that sound. Every time he heard it he wondered why nobody
could make a mobile telephone that just rang instead of making a
noise like a canary with gas.

“Get back here now,” Joshua snapped before
Eddie could say hello.

“Hello, Joshua. How are you?”

“I said get back here now.”

“I heard you.”

He gave it a second, but Joshua didn’t add
anything.

“We having a fire or something?” Eddie
prompted.

“There are some men here to see you.”

Joshua sounded a little strange.

“I don’t have any appointments this
afternoon.”

“Eddie, I’m telling you there are some people
here to see you and you have to come back right now.”

“‘People,’ Joshua? I thought you said ‘men.’
Now which is it? ‘Men’ or ‘people?’ You know that might have a very
significant effect on whether I come back because—”

“Eddie,” Joshua interrupted. “Cut the shit
and get back here.”

Then he hung up.

***

WHEN
Eddie walked into his
outer office a few minutes later, he half expected to find Joshua
tied to a chair with a gag in his mouth, but everything looked
normal enough. Joshua gestured toward the closed door of Eddie’s
office with a tilt of his head and went right on typing without
looking up just like he always did. Eddie opened his door with a
shrug and went in.

There was quite a crowd waiting for him:
three men and a woman. At least they looked like a crowd all
squeezed at once into Eddie’s office. He had only two
straight-backed chairs for visitors and one of the men and the
woman sat in them while the other two men leaned against the wall.
The expressions of bored contempt on his visitors’ faces
unmistakably marked them as cops to anyone who had been around the
Hall of Justice as long as Eddie had.

Wondering what kind of roust this was going
to turn out to be, Eddie moved around his desk at what he thought
was a stately enough pace to suggest a complete lack of interest
and then settled slowly into his own chair. No one spoke, and he
studied the man and woman facing him while he waited for something
to happen.

Eddie could work out easily enough who was in
charge of the raiding party. The seated man wore the same kind of
costume as the Olsen twins over against the wall, but he was older
and had a look that made his authority obvious. With his short
hair, wiry build, and rimless glasses, the man made Eddie think of
an astronaut who had retired and taken up running a used-book
store.

The woman had close-cropped blond hair and a
very fair, slightly ruddy complexion. She looked Irish, Eddie
thought. Not bad really, for a cop at least. But then he spotted
something considerably more interesting about the woman than her
complexion. She had a pair of headlights on her that would freeze a
moose.

He remembered in college some woman telling
him that the great tragedy of her life was being born with big
breasts since men wouldn’t take a woman who had really huge ones
seriously. He had cooed and comforted her, saying how wrong she
was, but he would have said damn near anything just to get her to
shut the hell up and take off her bra. Eddie wondered for a moment
if the big headlights ever got in this woman’s way, professionally
speaking of course.

“What can I do for you, detectives?” he
finally asked when no one seemed inclined to break the silence.

“We’re not from the police, Mr. Dare.” The
seated man spoke slowly without any change in his bland
expression.

Uh-oh.

The man took a slim, black wallet out of his
coat pocket. He laid it on Eddie’s desk and flipped it open.

“I’m Agent Reidy. United States Secret
Service.” He indicated the other two men and the woman by inclining
his head slightly toward each with an economy of movement that
Eddie found a little scary for some reason. “These are Agents
Booth, Evans and Sanchez.”

Reidy returned his identification wallet to
the inside pocket of his coat and resumed his inspection of
Eddie.

“You know, you remind me of somebody.”

Oh, Christ. Not now.

“Yeah, you look a lot like—”

Eddie held up his right hand, palm out.

“Sure. And that’s Julia Roberts outside doing
the typing.”

He smiled, but no one else did.

“We’re investigating a situation, Mr. Dare,”
Headlights said in a voice so toneless that it sounded synthesized.
“We think you can help us.”

Eddie tried to look her in the eye,
struggling hard to avoid the obvious alternative.

“That’s an interesting word,” he said.

Reidy and the woman glanced at each
other.

“What word is that, Mr. Dare?” Headlights
asked, shifting her gaze back to Eddie.

“Situation.”

“What do you find interesting about it?”

Eddie saw this was going nowhere good, so he
worked his face into a blandly pleasant expression, shut his mouth,
and waited for developments.

Another glance between the two agents, then
Reidy took over again.

“Is it because you already know why we’re
here, Mr. Dare?”

Teasing Headlights was one thing, Eddie
quickly decided, but Reidy was another matter entirely.

“Maybe we could start over.” Eddie
accompanied the mea culpa with his most sincere smile. Still,
nobody smiled back.

“No, I don’t know why you’re here,” Eddie
went on anyway. “I assume you’re going to hassle me about one of my
clients. After that I’ll probably tell you some stuff you already
know about the lawyer-client privilege, toss in a little speech
about the Constitution, and then wish you a nice day.”

Reidy’s eyes tightened and he leaned forward
slightly.

“You seem to be real good at talking. How are
you at listening, Mr. Dare? You listen as good as you talk?”

“Yeah, I can listen.”

“That’s good.” Reidy nodded seriously. “Maybe
I can hold your interest for a few minutes here then, Eddie.”

Apparently he was no longer Mr. Dare. That
was not, in his experience, a good sign when you were talking to
cops.

“I’m all ears.”

“You mean as opposed to all mouth, which I
gather you usually are.”

Reidy grinned around at the other agents as
if he had said something funny and they all grinned back right on
cue. Eddie could have sworn he even saw the headlights blink, but
he might have been mistaken.

Reidy shifted his full attention back to
Eddie. “You were in the marines, weren’t you?”

“You going to tell me what this is all
about?”

Eddie had been rousted plenty of times
before, but these jokers weren’t playing by the rules.

“Were you in Vietnam in April, 1975?”

Eddie looked at Reidy without answering,
determined to wait him out.

“Yes, you were in Vietnam in April, 1975. You
were in Saigon. We know that.”

“Then why did you ask me?”

“What was your assignment?”

“Do you already know that, too?”

“Do
you
?”

To hell with this.
“I took pap smears
from bargirls.”

Eddie was sure this time. The headlights
definitely blinked.

Reidy just kept on rolling. “You were a tech
sergeant in Company A, Fifth Battalion. You were assigned to assist
with the evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon and you went
out on one of the last choppers from the compound.”

Eddie’s irritation was suddenly swept away by
a swiftly rising tide of anxiety. First the two pictures of the
group of marines with the red circles on them, then the clipping
out of the DEA file about Harry Austin’s death, and now this.

“What do you remember about Operation
Voltaire, Eddie?”

Eddie almost laughed out loud. “Operation
what
?”

“That was your last assignment before you
were evacuated from Saigon, wasn’t it?”

“I never heard of Operation Voltaire. I was
never involved in anything that sounded remotely that
intelligent.”

Reidy made a dismissive gesture.

“You were assigned to Operation Voltaire all
right, Eddie. But just to refresh your memory, that was the
exercise to rescue the Bank of Vietnam’s currency and gold reserves
before the North Vietnamese took over. You were in charge of the
guard detail for Operation Voltaire, weren’t you?”

What in God’s name is this guy talking
about?

“We secured the perimeter of the embassy
compound and protected the evacuation,” Eddie answered carefully.
He was hearing alarm bells going off all around him, but he
couldn’t for the life of him figure out what they meant. “That’s
all I remember.”

Reidy obviously didn’t really care what
answers Eddie gave him. He couldn’t have been stopped with a
howitzer.

“All the Bank of Vietnam’s reserves
disappeared during the evacuation. We’re looking for them.”

That was interesting, Eddie reflected through
his wariness, even if he still couldn’t work out what it had to do
with him.

“How much is missing?” he asked.

“Using today’s values?”

“By all means, use today’s values.”

“A little over $400,000,000.”

Eddie started to laugh, but then he noticed
that none of his visitors looked even slightly amused.

Christ on a goddamned crutch! Are these
people serious?

Eddie’s mind raced, trying to remember
anything that might connect to what Reidy was talking about.
“You’re telling me that someone just got around to noticing all
that money was missing?”

“It was always assumed the money had been
abandoned in the panic and that the North Vietnamese eventually got
it,” Reidy answered with a half smile that Eddie found somehow
unsettling. “When diplomatic relations were restored last year, we
discovered the Vietnamese didn’t have it. A task force was formed
at Treasury to account for it.”

“Well, if you’re looking for $400,000,000
around here…” Eddie gestured at his modest office, “you’re shit out
of luck.”

“Maybe not.” Reidy leaned forward very slowly
and rested his forearms on Eddie’s desk. “Pentagon records say that
on April 27, 1975, you were the ranking NCO in a squad assigned by
Captain Harry Austin to secure a warehouse about two blocks from
the American Embassy in Saigon. That was where Austin had stored
the Bank of Vietnam’s money, all crated up and ready to be flown
out of the country.”

Reidy had leaned so close to his face that
Eddie could smell the peppermint tic-tac he must have popped before
he came into the office.