Payback (7 page)

“Or while I was away.”

There was nothing this morning, but he asked her if she'd go check the folder on his desk. He waited, pulling Scotch, pacing on the carpet till his leg almost buckled, then sitting on the bed.

Janet said thoughtfully, “No. I don't see it.”

“Well, I don't think it would only be an it. According to Melda he's been calling me a lot. Starting … I don't know. First Monday I was gone.”

“Oh. I don't know.” She was riffling paper. “Well … the only person who was calling you a lot, if you're starting that Monday, was a jewelry salesman. He didn't leave his number and he—”

Right. That was it. “No name? just ‘jewelry salesman'?”

“That's it,” Janet said. “And he never left a number. He simply kept telling me to give you the message. I don't think he really believed you weren't here.”

“I can see that,” Mitchell said. “Just one other question. What was the date of the last time he called?”

“Last Wednesday,” she said. She sounded concerned. “Was it something I really should have told you long distance? I really thought it—”

“No.” He handed her a tale about looking at a Rolex and the guy was just a pest. “But there wasn't any Cat.”

She assured him there wasn't.

Rule #4: After you've thought about it carefully, act.

He picked up the envelope and studied the number. 212. Manhattan. New York. He dialed, fudged it, hung up, dialed again, and got a feminine machine. “This is Marian Cleaver. I'm sorry I can't take your call right now—”

Mitchell hung up and then dialed it again, carefully and slowly.

“This is Marian Cleaver …” He waited for the beep. Hesitated. Then he said, “Tell him it's the jewelry buyer and I'm back in L.A.”

He sat for a moment wondering if Melda'd really fucked up the number, transposed a few digits.

He might never know.

He got into the bathtub. The water had cooled to a temperature that wouldn't quite boil a lobster, just stun it. He lay there kneading at his leg, the whisky and an ashtray sitting on the rim.

He could see how it went. The putative Cat felt ignored by the mouse so the value of the “family jewels” went up. By a count of seven and, according to the radio, possibly nine.

Against all logic, his leg was relaxing. Dumb little fucker didn't have a logical bone in its bone, hadn't gotten the message. You could calm it with water, comfort it with Scotch.

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples
, he suddenly thought.

Comfort me …

His mind went back to Vietnam.

1969. The Year of the Rooster.

The Year of the Cat.

7

Catlin took his eyes very slowly off his feet and looked at the mountain he was marching to. Everything incredibly green. Even the skies could look green in Vietnam. The color of vomit. The color of mold. Vertiginous rot. He shifted his pack. The guy up ahead of him—bare shoulders rippling and gleaming in the heat—had a boil like a burgeoning tomato on his neck.

He looked at his feet.

His father'd been in Paris in August '44. He'd liberated seven Parisian virgins. He'd learned how to say “
couchez avec moi
,” and sometimes he'd whisper it to Catlin's mother—“
couchez avec moi
,” and she'd giggle in the kitchen, flushing, hit him with an elbow in the ribs. But that had been, Christ, maybe ten, twelve years ago. Before things had changed. It was ancient history. Like World War Two. Like Liberating Armies and Paris champagne.

He wondered, just briefly, what his father would've thought, from his high-point in France, of this particular army, this particular platoon that was marching into glory. Hair to their shoulders; headbands ripped out of camouflage parachutes; earrings; beads; transistor radios that dangled like ornaments from bandoliers of ammo that were strapped across roiling bugbitten chests; passing off a lighted joint down the line.

Catlin took a pull and then, waiting, he passed it on to Ammo behind him. The guy was called Ammo, no other name. Half the time you didn't know anybody's name except the name they got stuck with or decided on themselves. Day-Tripper. Red Dog. Doctor. The Monk.

Ammo said sullenly, “Hot enough for ya?”

Catlin said nothing. He moved on ahead again looking at his feet as they settled into deep red in-country mud. He lit a cigarette and the smoke seemed to hang there, supported on the air. It was eerily quiet. Too hot for the birds, too hot for the snakes. It was too hot for anything except the mosquitos, which seemed to have adopted a kamikaze spirit towards mosquito repellent, approaching Last Suppers with defiant, frenzied, fatalistic intensity.

Catlin envied them.

At least their mission had a fathomable purpose, understandably selfish. Catlin could understand nothing of his own. When they'd drafted him they'd tried to explain it in a sentence that was ripe with “liberation”; markers over maps, images of dominoes, but Catlin had only seen images of death. Earth made useless, people made blind, crippled, ugly, terrified, and some of them ultimately dead—the final Liberation.

He looked at his feet.

Onward Christian Soldiers, he thought. Marching off to what they'd marched to before. Just the way it happened: thirty-six grunts had been marching up a mountain and bang, there were none. None except Catlin who'd swallowed his breath and then hidden under corpses when the Cong had come ferreting, shooting into bodies, hacking off earlobes, testicles, dicks.

He looked at his feet. What amazed him was that here they were doing it again, marching up a hill again with thirty other grunts; giving brand-new meaning to My feet are killing me.

A Rolling Stones record kept playing in his head. “Two Thousand Light-Years from Home.” He could hear it now as though it were actually playing in a room. And with it, some knowledge that he'd better wake up because the Battle Scene was coming and he knew what it would be. It held no surprises. He'd seen that movie, he'd seen it every night and it never got better. There was nothing at the end of it but gun-smoke and noise—smoke so thick you couldn't see through it, couldn't breathe through it, automatic fire so loud you couldn't even hear the screams of the wounded. Diving for cover he'd crash and come up with something evil on his fingers that was somebody's brains. And he'd have to look at Ammo with the hole in his stomach, and The Doctor with his head blown cleanly from his neck, and he'd have to keep shooting—just standing there shooting with the M-16 going fully automatic, automatically feeding it with clip after clip until it suddenly occurs to him there's nothing up front. There's nothing coming back at him. Everything's dead. Everything. Desperate silence on the hill. He felt like an astronaut—lonely, lonely.

He opened his eyes. The music had been playing on a fading cassette. He'd been sleeping on a carpet. Living room in somebody's suite in Saigon. Continental Hotel. A window was open and he squinted in the light. Sounds from the sidewalk. Motorcycles revving. A faint hot breeze. The cassette playing “Two Thousand Light-Years from Home.” Stones to the stoned. Dayton, on the couch. Scarf on the floor, his hand gripped tightly on a half-empty fifth. The guy named Mitchell was the only one awake, or half-awake anyway. Or maybe he slept with his eyes half-open.

“Real spooky,” Handler'd said. Couple of nights ago. First night that Catlin was assigned to the squad. Sitting in the bunker and it feels like the whole fucking planet is shaking. Rolling Thunder. The old whiz-bang. Later you'd go out, there'd be fires in the mountains like the fourth rim of hell. “Spooky,” Handler'd said. “That is one heavy dude. That's an actual tripper on the Mystery Tour. What you want to do is give the man a very wide path,” Handler'd said. “You don't want to make him mad. I'll tell you what he does, he gets mad,” Handler said. “You want to ask about the sergeant.”

Catlin didn't ask.

The sky was really violent with incoming now.

“So what happened,” Handler said, “he just slit the guy's throat. Guy was just sitting there shitting on the can and the next thing he's got himself an ear-to-ear grin about three inches lower than it ought to be, right? Story was officially it's Charlie's on a call. Only nobody's telling me that Charlie hits a can, does one shitty sergeant, disappears,” Handler said. “No way,” Handler said. “That was local expression, if you follow what I'm saying. That was something like the finish of a war within a war. That guy holds a grudge,” Handler said, “like a knife.”

Catlin heard the story maybe half a dozen times, maybe half a dozen versions, but the ending was the same. Catlin wasn't sure. Mitchell was a guy who inspired speculation, who seemed to be practically barnacled with myth. Mitchell was a Lurp—one of the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrollers, guys who went out to the jungles in the night, “looking for trouble,” was the way they liked to put it, following up on intelligence reports, creeping alone around VC base camps or moving columns of Charlie-on-the-run. When there wasn't any recon patrolling to do, no intelligent rumors to attempt to check out, they were sent to the jungles as Nightstalkers, “Midnight Ramblers,” they said; teams of maybe four, maybe half a dozen guys, only spread so thinly they were basically alone. Get up in the morning and you'd see them come back, faces still blackened up with nightfighter paint, knives at their waistbands glistening with red. And whatever was out there was written in their eyes. Talk about the long dark night of the soul.

Talk in the bunkers. Talk in the night.

Story was he'd murdered this bastard of a sergeant when he caught the guy buggering a Vietnamese kid.

Story was he killed him for a stash of cocaine.

Story was he killed him simply, as he put it, “Cuz I don't like the fucker.”

Catlin wasn't sure. Stories were stories. They blossomed in the climate like indigenous weed. It was equally possible “the sergeant” never lived, that he'd sprouted in the mushroom clouding of a brain, getting realer in the telling. Reality was scarce. Catlin himself was “a strange cat,” “a black cat,” an incipient omen of immediate death, the sole survivor of two platoons; bad luck known to look fondly at threes, do you want to be caught in a platoon with this man? So Catlin himself had been given a “path,” had been “singled out,” in a manner of speaking, and the fact that he woke up screaming in the night or was silent for days didn't help his reputation. Catlin was “Cat,” the devil's familiar. Mitchell was “Mack,” a war-name shortened from “Mack the Knife.” “Mack” to his face, “The Knife” behind his back, and the only reason Catlin knew his actual name was through a mix-up in the mails, a misdirected card. A postcard. A girl had sent a postcard to a war. The girl's name was “Ginger,” and “Ginger” sent a postcard from Lauderdale. Message was Wish You Were Here.

Catlin sat up. Mack, sitting slumped down deeply in a wing chair, head in the corner, his long legs stretching out forward on the floor. He was quiet as a grave. He lifted his eyes till they landed on Catlin like a couple of not-very-energetic flies and then watched him for a while; lazy; appraising.

Catlin said, “You see something interesting, yell.”

Mack didn't move.

Catlin stood up. Feeling edgy and paranoid, he went to the bathroom and ran a little ice-cold water on his face. The face that looked back at him was bony and hard, the stubble on his chin showed gold against a deep almost leathery tan; his eyes looked scary and it made him want to laugh because that's the kind of look that had sprung him from the carpet and moved him from the room. His eyes didn't look a lot saner than Mack's. He looked like a blond Satan, he thought. Or both of them did.

He went back to the living room and lit a cigarette. Nothing had moved. The room, with its mostly threadbare antiques, might've been a photograph. Already frozen and locked in some album.
My Year in Vietnam
.

He had six months to go and wasn't sure that he'd make it.

Barefoot, he moved over carpeted flooring and went to the big French window at the front and looked over at the street. He felt as though he had to learn the basics again. Streets, stores, menus, cars, women, colors that weren't khaki. He was still turned around. He was still so tired. Down on the street there was everything, colors and cultures in a clash. Monks in yellow and priests in black, Arvins in off-centered red berets, bargirls in everything, kids in rags. He watched as a legless beggar on something like a handmade skateboard settled on the corner, setting up shop by turning his hat up. A grunt passed by and dropped a piaster. A kid passed by and scooped it from the hat.

He scratched at his shoulder blade and looked at his watch. It had stopped. Supposed to be a Terrible Omen.

Mack said, “You want to get some breakfast or something?”

Catlin turned around. “Time is it, you know?”

Mack shrugged lazily and said, “Time to eat.”

***

It was noon. They took a table on the downstairs terrace. The traffic was berserk. Tu Do Street, running from Eden Passage on the banks of the river to the Church of Our Lady ten blocks away, was the center of thievery and commerce in the city, a place where a man could get anything he wanted that would make him feel better or deliriously worse. Everyone was getting and spending on the street. Wheelers on wheels. Pedestrians, mini-mokes, bicycles, cabs; the street cowboys riding on the saddles of their Hondas. Talk about Now you see it, now you don't, forget about your wallet, they could steal your eyeballs—last thing you'd see would be the sweat from their palms.

A waiter came over and they both ordered vodka.

A kid came over selling yesterday's edition of the Saigon
Post
. Catlin bought a paper and set it on the ground. Mack, saying nothing, was looking at his watch, and Catlin looked away again, squinting at the street. Something in his mind kept waiting for a Claymore to
blam
on the corner, for the priest's umbrella to stutter at the crowd, spitting 5.56's,
bladadadadat
. He wondered if he suffered from In-Country Syndrome or merely from intelligent awareness of the odds. A couple of bargirls must have thought he was staring; they stopped now and one of them motioned with her head. Catlin looked away again.