Dead and Kicking (7 page)

Nhu holstered her pistol. She joined me at the table and ordered a bowl of
pho
while her officers fanned out in a loose circle around the table, looking outwards to scan the crowd. Last night Miss Hoang had been very, very hot and this morning she was just way too cool.

‘Mr Murdoch, please excuse the use of my gun and the handcuffs but it is necessary to show anyone observing us that you are in my custody.’

‘Necessary why?’

‘Following our investigations, we now feel confident that the incident in the alley last night was more than just thieves wishing to steal your camera. We have become aware that there is a plan to kill you. I believe you would say there is a price on your head.’

I kept my mouth shut, since the rule with cops is to never volunteer any information. Even with a cop as hot as Miss Hoang.

‘Any society,’ she continued, ‘even one such as ours, has its undesirable elements, and certain of these elements have been offered large amounts of money to eliminate you as quickly as possible. Would you perhaps know why?’

I shook my head. From the look on Nhu’s face, I sensed there was something else coming.

‘What can you tell me about a man named Brett Tozer, who was also working on the film with you?’

What did Brett have to do with this? I wondered. ‘Mr Tozer is an associate producer,’ I said, ‘and people with that title don’t usually do any actual work. He was flying out to New York yesterday afternoon, as far as I know.’

‘Mr Tozer does not appear to have boarded his flight and this morning the body of a man answering his description was discovered floating in the Saigon River.’

This was a bit heavy. ‘Did he drown?’ I asked. ‘Was it an accident?’

Nhu said something in Vietnamese and one of her officers produced a photograph from a satchel. It was Brett Tozer all right, no question of that. The photograph had been taken using harsh direct flash, which isn’t too flattering at the best of times, but poor old Brett was way beyond caring. He was on his back on a mortuary slab, and he hadn’t drowned, that was for sure. He probably had enough lead in him to make swimming difficult, though. The photograph clearly showed five big bullet holes smack in the middle of his chest. Brett hadn’t needed to fly all the way from New York to the Gold Coast for the shooting to start again – the shooting had come to him.

‘It appears it is most dangerous for you to be in Vietnam,’ Nhu continued. ‘It is imperative that you leave the country immediately. I assume you have your passport with you.’

I nodded. ‘Zippered pocket inside my jacket.’

She spoke to one of the officers, who found the passport and handed it to her. She passed it to one of her waiting entourage with brief instructions. He saluted and left.

‘Now, Mr Murdoch,’ said Nhu, standing up. ‘We will leave this market with you in my custody in full view of everybody. Several streets from here at a convenient location we will remove the handcuffs and you will leave my vehicle. The officer who just left will meet you at the airport with a ticket and boarding pass for the next available flight out of the country. He will also escort you onboard the aircraft.’

It looked like she had everything sorted.

‘This way you will bypass all normal immigration formalities,’ she continued, ‘but there will be an official departure stamp in your passport to avoid difficulties on arrival at your next destination. Please ignore the fact that your boarding pass may be in a name not your own, since you are officially in police custody.’

Nhu seemed to have thought of everything.

‘My clothes —’ I started to say, but she interrupted me.

‘Are being collected from the hotel and will be waiting for you at the airport.’

She really had thought of everything.

‘I suggest that after you leave my vehicle you go by cyclo to the airport,’ she advised. ‘Inefficient, yes, but less obvious than a taxi and more difficult to follow without being observed. I doubt anyone will think you would travel this way. One of my officers will travel behind you, discreetly, to ensure there are no … incidents on the journey.’

This wasn’t the way I’d hoped to end my stay in Vietnam, especially after just meeting Nhu. You had to wonder about the whole karma business. Why was it that every time I met a nice girl, someone came out of the woodwork looking to kill me? Was I paying for mistakes I’d made in a past life? Or was it because of some nasty incident I’d been involved in during this one? God knows, there’d been enough of those.

And what about Brett Tozer? Last time I’d seen him alive he was on his phone, which was just minutes after I’d shown him the picture of the bloke who might be Cartwright. Later that night, someone had tried to whack me. I wondered if it was the same shooter in that jeep who’d been a bit more successful with Brett than he’d been with me.

Fifteen minutes later I was rubbing my wrists and choking on the fumes of Saigon’s morning rush hour while sitting in a cyclo with the hood pulled as far forward as it would go. The trip to Tan Son Nhut International Airport was uneventful but hey, I was just another bloke who was supposed to be dead riding a cyclo through downtown Saigon.

The next available seat out of Ho Chi Minh City that morning was on a Thai Airways flight heading for Bangkok. Getting deported at short notice severely limits your options for seat preference and I found myself on the aisle in economy, jammed in next to a Japanese bloke about the size of a two-door refrigerator. If it came down to a fistfight over who got the armrest, it was pretty obvious who was going to win.

Bangkok isn’t a bad destination if you’re a fan of humidity, hot chillies, smog and a freeway system in desperate need of a high colonic. But this time around, Thailand suited me just fine. As a matter of fact, any place where I didn’t have a price on my head would have been okay.

Travelling with just a carry-on backpack had me through customs and immigration at Suvarnabhumi Airport in double-quick time. I hit the terminal toilets twice – the first time because it’s always smart to use the facilities before getting stuck in Bangkok traffic for an indeterminate period of time, and the second to make 100 per cent sure I wasn’t being followed. Straight in and straight out really confuses a tail who has to do the same thing, and it makes them stick out like dog’s balls.

When I was sure I wasn’t being followed, I took a taxi to Sukhumvit Road and grabbed the Skytrain to Mo Chit Station in the north of the city. From there, it was just a ten-minute taxi ride to Mo Chit bus terminal.

An afternoon bus for Chiang Rai was just leaving, so I grabbed a ticket with a voucher for a meal at the halfway rest stop. In Asia I’m usually more of a fan of overnight buses, since you can sleep if you’re lucky or watch some noisy local sword and sarong epic on DVD. Another plus is that the oncoming traffic and suicidal local driving techniques are moderately less terrifying in the dark. However, I didn’t feel like hanging around in Bangkok for another five or six hours.

On the cab ride from the airport I’d talked the driver into selling me his spare balisong, and I now had it safely stowed in my jacket pocket. I’m not crazy about folding butterfly knives, or knives in general, but this one had a nicely honed eight-inch doubled-edged blade tucked inside the handle. My seat at the back of the bus would let me keep an eye on the rest of the passengers for the next eleven hours, and in the event that I needed the balisong, and could get it open without cutting off my own fingers, I could probably do someone some serious damage.

The bus’s afternoon departure would put us in Chiang Rai sometime around midnight. The northern Thai province of Chiang Rai is located in the Kok River basin in the Golden Triangle, where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand bump into each other. Its attractions range from magnificent mountain scenery, the ruins of ancient settlements, Buddhist shrines and a bunch of ethnic villages, since the province is also home to a number of hill tribes. Of course, right now there was one thing in particular that made it my destination of choice and that was the presence of the Dutchman.

Once we cleared Bangkok’s urban sprawl, the scenery was mile after mile of green rice fields, blue sky and distant mountains. As the bus chewed up the highway, and it appeared less and less likely that one of my fellow passengers was going to come after me with a machete or MAC-10 submachine gun, I made use of the time to do some thinking.

Someone had pressed a very big panic button very quickly and they’d pressed it hard. They’d taken out Brett and it looked like they wanted me out of the picture PDQ. The connection had to be Cartwright. Jack was hot on Cartwright’s trail – were he and VT now in danger? And what about the lovely Nhu? She’d poked her delicate little nose into the middle of things to rescue me, and that couldn’t be good.

On the flight out of Ho Chi Minh City, I’d considered heading back to Australia but had decided against it. I was still suspended from D.E.D., my movie stills gig was on hiatus for another two weeks, and someone had put a price on my head and I wanted to figure out who. I needed to lie low and work out my next move. If you wanted a place to drop out of sight, you couldn’t beat Asia. And if you needed to drop out of sight in Thailand, then the man to see was the Dutchman.

Travelling at what seemed a tad under the speed of light, we passed through a succession of provinces: Angthong, Singburi, Phitsanulok, Uttaradit and Phrae. As with Hong Kong taxis, Thai buses always have their air-con set to Ice Age and the twenty-minute meal stop at the Phitsanulok bus depot, some 450 k’s north of Bangkok, wasn’t so much to eat and stretch the legs as to defrost. This being Thailand, the food was fresh, good and ridiculously cheap.

We rolled into the Chiang Rai bus terminal close to midnight and I woke up a sleepy cab driver near the night market and gave him the address. There was minimal traffic so we reached the bar in five minutes. After paying off the cabbie I wandered inside. The place was almost empty, and there was a good reason. You could hear the din a couple of blocks away.

A five-piece ensemble was jamming on a stage at the rear of the small brick and tin establishment. Four of the group were heavy-metal Thais and the fifth was a skinny Dutchman with a crew cut, a gravelly singing voice and a twelve-string acoustic guitar. The combined effect was like an aural train wreck.

‘Struth, mate,’ I said, during a pause, ‘what a nightmare. It’s like a sixties Bob Dylan playing live at the Budokan with an eighties Cheap Trick.’

Henk the Dutchman looked around. ‘And I suppose you’ll be the music critic from
Rolling Stone
we’ve all been expecting.’

A lot of expats living in Asia get fat from the cheap food and the booze, but Henk apparently lived on adrenaline so he stayed thin. He had sleepy eyes and a slightly bent nose, reshaped by a broken beer glass when he helpfully tried to break up a fight in a pub a few days after he first arrived in Australia. He learned the hard way why they used to call certain Melbourne hotels blood houses way back then.

Henk told the band to take five. ‘Let me guess,’ he said, after shaking hands and studying me briefly, ‘it’s just on midnight, you’ve got bugger all luggage, no cameras and you look like shit. Someone’s trying to kill you, right?’

I nodded. ‘Story of my life, Dutchman.’

‘Maybe you should do what I did, Alby, get yourself a new one.’

‘Mate, I bloody wish,’ I said.

Henk lived in a big rented house on the edge of a small lake inside an old military base. His landlord was an army general who was redeveloping the place into a secure housing estate and he had armed, off-duty soldiers keeping an eye on things. Having someone else keeping an eye on things suited me fine.

I slept till about three in the afternoon, which was really no surprise given my long hours on the film shoot, the recent attempted homicide, testicular trauma, short-notice deportation and a long-distance Thai bus ride. Chuck in my unexpected night of passion with Miss Hoang, and I was surprised I woke up at all.

When I finally surfaced and climbed out of the shower and into a sarong, Henk had some food ready out on the balcony overlooking the lake.

‘You’re too late for breakfast or brunch so this could be either a late lunch or an early dinner.’

‘Linner, then?’

‘Or maybe we could call it dunch,’ he said. ‘Actually, I don’t really care what you call it as long as you wash your own bloody dishes. I’m temporarily between love interests and housekeepers, so there’s just fruit and toast and coffee. Probably some eggs in the fridge, too, but you can sort that out for yourself.’

‘Coffee’s fine for now,’ I said, pouring a cup. It was good coffee, locally grown and roasted.

Henk headed off somewhere to do whatever expats in Thailand do and I wandered around the house. Everything on display dated from Henk’s arrival in Thailand a couple of years back. The Dutchman’s past was a bit shadowy, with periods in Oman on the Persian Gulf, Réunion Island off the African coast near Madagascar and some time living in Indonesia. He’d also spent fifteen years in Australia, where we’d met, and had links to oil companies, international shipping and God knows what else.

When Henk decided to retire from whatever it was he didn’t say he did for a living, he claimed it was a toss-up between a pricey studio apartment in Woy Woy and curried sausages at the local RSL or an unbelievably cheap three-bedroom house with maid’s quarters on a lake in the tropics, where freshly cooked
pad thai
noodles and a couple of beers in a local café set you back less than two bucks. I sipped my coffee and decided the Dutchman had made the right choice.

Henk had set up a home recording studio to practise his music and a home photography studio to shoot good-looking locals, plus he was involved in a number of volunteer tourism-development projects amongst the hill tribes and refugees up near the Thai-Myanmar border. The Dutchman reckoned he was so busy being retired that he might have to think seriously about putting on staff.

I made a fresh pot of coffee and sat out on the balcony for the rest of the afternoon. Dragonflies and birds flitted around, and there was a four-thirty torrential downpour followed by a short tropical twilight. I thought about fit young blokes steering cyclos into alleyways full of waiting assassins, my ransacked hotel room and Brett Tozer getting cut down in a hail of bullets. None of it made any sense.