Honourable Schoolboy (56 page)

Mellon was a creepy English trader, nobody knew what he did. A little of this, a little of that, Charlie said. People were scared of him. Mellon said he could get Lizzie into the bigtime heroin trail. ‘With your passport and your body,’ Mellon had told her, ‘you can go in and out or Hong Kong like a princess.’

Exhausted, Charlie sank to the ground and crouched before his mud-house. Squatting beside him, Jerry fastened his fist to the back of Charlie’s collar, careful not to hurt him.

‘So she did that for him did she, Charlie? Lizzie carried for Mellon.’ With his palm, he gently tipped Charlie’s head round till his lost eyes were staring straight at him.

‘Lizzie don’t carry for Mellon, Voltaire,’ Charlie corrected him. ‘Lizzie carry for Ricardo. Lizzie don’t love Mellon. She love Ric and me.’

Staring glumly at the mud-house, Charlie burst suddenly into raucous dirty laughter, which then petered out with no explanation.

‘You louse it up, Lizzie!’ Charlie called teasingly, poking a finger into the mud door. ‘You louse it up as usual, honey! You talk too much. Why you tell everyone you Queen of England? Why you tell everyone you some great spook-lady? Mellon get very very mad with you, Lizzie. Mellon throw you out, right out on your ass. Ric got pretty mad too, remember? Ric smash you up real bad and Charlie have to take you to the doctor in the middle of the damn night, remember? You got one hell of a big mouth, Lizzie, hear me? You my sister, but you got the biggest damn mouth ever!’

Till Ricardo closed it for her, Jerry thought, remembering the grooves on her chin. Because she spoiled the deal with Mellon.

Still crouching at Charlie’s side and clutching him by the scruff, Jerry watched the world around him vanish and in place of it he saw Sam Collins sitting in his car below Star Heights, with a clear view of the eighth floor, while he studied the racing page of the newspaper at eleven o’clock at night. Not even the clump of a rocket falling quite close could distract him from that freezing vision. Also he heard Craw’s voice above the mortar fire, intoning on the subject of Lizzie’s criminality. When funds were low, Craw had said, Ricardo made her carry little parcels across frontiers for him.

And how did London-town learn that, your Grace - he would have liked to ask old Craw - if not from Sam Collins alias Mellon himself?

A three-second rainstorm had washed away Charlie’s mud-house and he was furious about it. He was splashing around on all fours looking for it, weeping and cursing frantically. The fit passed, and he started talking about his father again, and how the old man had found employment for his natural son with a certain distinguished Vientiane airline - though Charlie till then had been quite keen to get out of flying for good on account of losing his nerve.

One day, it seemed, the General just lost patience with Charlie. He called together his bodyguard and came down from his hilltop in the Shans to a little opium town called Fang not far inside the Thai border. There, after the fashion of patriarchs the world over, the General rebuked Charlie for his spendthrift ways.

Charlie had a special squawk for his father, and a special way of puffing out his wasted cheeks in military disapproval:

‘So you better do some proper damn work for a change, hear me, you kwailo spider-bastard? You better stay away from horse gambling, hear me, and strong liquor, and opium. And you better take those Commie stars off your tits and sack that stink-friend Ricardo of yours. And you better cease financing his woman, hear me? Because I don’t gonna keep you one day more, not one hour, you spider-bastard, and I hate you so much one day I kill you because you remind me of that Corsican whore your mother! ‘

Then the job itself, and Charlie’s father the General still speaking:

‘Certain very fine Chiu Chow gentlemen who are pretty good friends of pretty good friends of mine, hear me, happen to have a controlling interest in a certain aviation company. Also I got certain shares in that company. Also this company happens to bear the distinguished title of Indocharter Aviation. Why you laugh, you kwailo ape! Don’t laugh at me! So these good friends, they do me a favour to assist me in my disgrace for my three-legged spider-bastard son and I pray sincerely you may fall out of the sky and break your kwailo neck. ‘

So Charlie flew his father’s opium for Indocharter: one, two flights a week at first, but regular, honest work and he liked it. His nerve came back, he steadied down, and he felt real gratitude toward his old man. He tried, of course, to get the Chiu Chow boys to take Ricardo too but they wouldn’t. After a few months they did agree to pay Lizzie twenty bucks a week to sit in the front office and sweetmouth the clients. These were the golden days, Charlie implied. Charlie and Lizzie earned the money, Ricardo wasted it on ever crazier enterprises, everybody was happy, everybody was employed. Till one evening, like a Nemesis, Tiu appeared and screwed the whole thing up. He appeared just as they were locking up the company’s offices, straight off the pavement without an appointment, asking for Charlie Marshall by name and describing himself as part of the company’s Bangkok management. The Chiu Chow boys came out of the back office, took one look at Tiu, vouched for his good faith, and made themselves scarce.

Charlie broke off in order to weep on Jerry’s shoulder.

‘Now listen to me carefully, sport,’ Jerry urged. ‘Listen. This is the bit I like, okay? You tell me this bit carefully, and I’ll take you home. Promise. Please.’

But Jerry had it wrong. It was no longer a matter of making Charlie talk. Jerry was now the drug on which Charlie Marshall depended. It was no longer a matter of holding him down, either. Charlie Marshall clutched Jerry’s breast as if it were the last raft on his lonely sea, and their conversation had become a desperate monologue from which Jerry stole his facts while Charlie Marshall cringed and begged and howled for his tormentor’s attention, making jokes and laughing at them through his tears. Downriver one of Lon Nol’s machine guns which had not yet been sold to the Khmer Rouge was firing tracer into the jungle by the light of another Bare. Long golden bolts flowed in streams above and below the water, and lit a small cave where they disappeared into the trees.

Charlie’s sweat-soaked hair was pricking Jerry’s chin and Charlie was gabbling and dribbling all at the same time.

‘Mr Tiu don’t wanna talk in no office, Voltaire. Oh no! Mr Tiu don’t dress too good, either. Tiu very Chiu Chow person, he use Thai passport like Drake Ko, he use crazy name and keep a very very low appearance when he come to Vientiane. Captain Marshall, he say to me, how you like earn a lot of extra cash by performing certain interesting and varied work outside the Company’s hours, tell me? How you like fly a certain unconventional journey for me once? They tell me you some pretty damn fine pilot these days, very steady. How you like earn yourself not less than maybe four to five thousand bucks for one day’s work, not even a whole day? How would that personally attract you, Captain Marshall? Mr Tiu, I tell him’ - Charlie is shouting hysterically now - ‘ without in any way prejudicing my negotiating position, Mr Tiu, for five thousand bucks US in my present serene mood I go down to hell for you and I bring you the devil’s balls back. Mr Tiu say he come back one day and I gotta keep my damn mouth shut.’

Suddenly Charlie had changed to his father’s voice and he was calling himself a spider-bastard and the son of a Corsican whore: till gradually it dawned on Jerry that Charlie was describing the next episode in the story.

Amazingly, it turned out, Charlie had kept to himself the secret of Tiu’s offer until he next saw his father, this time in Chiang Mai for a celebration of the Chinese New Year. He had not told Ric, and he had not even told Lizzie, maybe because at this point they weren’t getting on too well any more, and Ric was having himself a lot of women on the side.

The General’s counsel was not encouraging.

‘ Don’t you touch that horse! That Tiu got some pretty highly big connections, and they all a bit too special for a crazy little spider-bastard like you, hear me! Jesus Christ, who ever heard of a Swatownese give five thousand dollars to a lousy half-kwailo to improve his mind with travel? ‘

‘So you passed the deal to Ric, right?’ said Jerry quickly. ‘Right, Charlie? You told Tiu sorry but try Ricardo . Is that how it went?’

But Charlie Marshall was missing believed dead. He had fallen straight off Jerry’s chest and lay flat in the mud with his eyes closed and only his occasional gulps for breath - greedy, rasping draughts of it - and the crazy beating of his pulse where Jerry held his wrist, testified to the life inside the frame.

‘Voltaire,’ Charlie whispered. ‘On the Bible, Voltaire. You’re a good man. Take me home. Jesus, take me home, Voltaire.’

Stunned, Jerry stared at the prone and broken figure and knew that he had to ask one more question, even if it was the last in both their lives. Reaching down, he dragged Charlie to his feet for the last time. And there, for an hour in the black road, struggling on his arm, while more aimless barrages stabbed the darkness, Charlie Marshall screamed, and begged, and swore he would love Jerry always if only he didn’t have to reveal what arrangements his friend Ricardo had made for his survival. But Jerry explained that without that, the mystery was not even half revealed. And perhaps Charlie Marshall, in his ruin and despair, as he sobbed out the forbidden secrets, understood Jerry’s reasoning: that in a city about to be given back to the jungle, there was no destruction unless it was complete.

As gently as he could, Jerry carried Charlie Marshall down the road, back to the villa and up the steps, where the same silent faces gratefully received him. I should have got more, he thought. I should have told him more as well: I didn’t tend the two-way traffic in the way they ordered. I stayed too long with the business of Lizzie and Sam Collins. I did it upside-down, I foozled my shopping list, I loused it up like Lizzie. He tried to feel sorry about that but he couldn’t, and the things he remembered best were the things that weren’t on the list at all, and they were the same things that stood up in his mind like monuments while he typed his message to dear old George.

He typed with the door locked and the gun in his belt. There was no sign of Luke, so Jerry assumed he had gone off to a whorehouse still in his drunken sulk. It was a long signal, the longest of his career: ‘Know this much in case you don’t hear from me again.’ He reported his contact with the Counsellor, he gave his next port of call, and gave Ricardo’s address, and a portrait of Charlie Marshall, and of the three-sided household in the flea-hut, but only in the most formal terms, and he left out entirely his newfound knowledge regarding the role played by the unsavoury Sam Collins. After all, if they knew it already, what was the point of telling it to them again? He left out the place names and the proper names and made a separate key of them, then spent another hour putting the two messages into a first-base code which wouldn’t fool a cryptographer for five minutes, but was beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, and of mortals like, his host the British Counsellor. He ended with a reminder to housekeepers to check whether Blatt and Rodney had made that latest money-draft to Cat. He burned the en clair texts, rolled the encoded versions into a newspaper, then lay on the newspaper and dozed, the gun awkwardly at his side. At six he shaved, transferred his signals to a paperback novel which he felt able to part with, and took himself for a walk in the morning quiet. In the place, the Counsellor’s car was parked conspicuously. The Counsellor himself was parked equally conspicuously on the terrace of a pretty bistro, wearing a Riviera straw hat reminiscent of Craw, and treating himself to hot croissants and café au lait. Seeing Jerry, he gave an elaborate wave. Jerry wandered over to him.

‘Morning,’ said Jerry.

‘Ah, you’ve got it! Good man!’ the Counsellor cried, bounding to his feet. ‘Been longing to read it ever since it came out!’

Parting with the signal, conscious only of its omissions, Jerry had a feeling of end-of-term. He might come back, he might not, but things would never be quite the same again.

The exact circumstances of Jerry’s departure from Phnom Penh are relevant because of Luke, later.

For the first part of the morning that remained, Jerry pursued his obsessional search for cover, which was the natural antidote, perhaps, to his increasing sense of nakedness. Diligently he went on the stomp for refugee and orphan stories which he filed through Keller at midday, together with a quite decent atmosphere piece on his visit to Battambang, which though never used has at least a place in his dossier. There were two refugee camps at that time, both blossoming, one in an enormous hotel on the Bassac, Sihanouk’s personal and unfinished dream of paradise; one in the marshalling yards near the airport, two or three families packed in each carriage. He visited both and they were the same: young Australian heroes struggling with the impossible, the only water filthy, a rice handout twice a week and the children chirruping ‘hi’ and ‘bye bye’ after him, while he trailed his Cambodian interpreter up and down their lines, besieging everyone with questions, acting large and looking for that extra something that would melt Stubbsie’s heart.

At a travel office he noisily booked a passage to Bangkok in a feeble attempt to brush over his tracks. Making for the airport, he had a sudden sense of déjà vu. Last time I was here, I went water-skiing, he thought. The roundeye traders kept houseboats moored along the Mekong. And for a moment he saw himself - and the city - in the days when the Cambodian war still had a certain ghastly innocence: ace operator Westerby, risking mono for the first time, bouncing boyishly over the brown water of the Mekong, towed by a jolly Dutchman in a speed launch which burned enough petrol to feed a family for a week. The greatest hazard was the two-foot wave, he remembered, which rolled down the river every time the guards on the bridge let off a depth charge to prevent Khmer Rouge divers from blowing it up. But now the river was theirs, so was the jungle. And so, tomorrow or the next day, was the town.

At the airport, he ditched the Walther in a rubbish bin and at the last minute bribed his way aboard a plane to Saigon which was his destination. Taking off, he wondered who had the longer expectation of survival: himself or the city.