The Kaisho (31 page)

Do Duc was certain that Rock was right—only he wasn’t so sure now they were working under the correct premise.

He pointed into the mist-shrouded trees. “This way.”

The doleful drip of moisture enclosed them in a clammy embrace. They moved very slowly, as if they were underwater or on a planet where the gravity was many times that of Earth. Breathing become laborious, and they moved through the jungle with extreme difficulty.

“I imagine it’s me you’ve come all this way to find.”

They stood stock-still, watching as first one, then five or six shapes appeared as if conjured out of the trees themselves. Do Duc took a brief look at all of them—could they be the Gwai?—but quickly concentrated on the man in front, the one who had spoken.

“Michael Leonforte, I presume.”

The man smiled. “Mick will do. You recognize me from the photos they showed you back at Pentagon East. I assume that’s where you’re from.”

“Not exactly,” Do Duc said, answering both questions. This Michael Leonforte was different from the one in the photo Bowel had showed him, though the more Do Duc studied him the more the resemblance became apparent. “We’re not official like the party Pentagon East sent. We’re Werewolves.”

Mick Leonforte grinned. “Science Fiction Werewolves, huh? I’ve heard of you.”

He was surrounded by the lean Chinese faces of the Nungs, and he wore what they wore: surplus camouflage fatigues, high-topped paratrooper boots, web belts—all U.S. WWII stuff. They were armed with the Chicom K-5Os like the ones in the cache Do Duc had found in the bunker. None of them wore any insignia, not even Leonforte, but when he held up his left hand for silence, Do Duc saw tattooed on the inside of the wrist a curious image: a human face, the left side skin-colored with its eye open, the right side blue with a vertical crescent where the eye should be.

It passed like a flash as his hand came down. It had been small, less than three inches in height, but the power of it electrified Do Duc’s mind.

“You guys’ve done some pretty heavy shit in your time,” Mick Leonforte said. “It’s gonna be a damn shame to kill you.”

Do Duc, feeling Rock shift against him, said nothing. He continued to study Leonforte because it was essential now to figure out what had happened to him. Do Duc had heard of one or two cases of Marine officers in charge of CIDG montagnards out-country going native, but he suspected that was too facile an answer to the enigma. He had only a few disparate clues to go on, but he could see by the heightened tension among the Nungs that he had very little time.

“My CO sent us here to bring you back.”

“No surprise there.” Mick Leonforte had let his hair grow. It was as black and lustrous as the hair on the Chinese mountain tribesmen who were his companions. His full beard was neat, but it hardly fell into the guidelines set by Army regs. His cheeks were a bit hollow, and there was something about his eyes, a clarity that bordered on the feral, that for sure would have disturbed the people back at Military Intelligence. “My handlers have been trying to recall me ever since they realized they sent the wrong man to do the wrong job.”

“You were dragooned into MI, weren’t you?” Rock said.

“Dragooned into MI and all the way through it. I came out the other side, and like Alice found myself in Wonderland taking orders from someone called the Jabberwocky.” Leonforte laughed. “Fucking spooks. They’ve all got names like that: Jabberwocky, the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen.”

“You’re supposed to be a prisoner!” Rock exclaimed. “What the hell—”

“Forget MI. It was the spooks who sent you on this mission, wasn’t it?” Do Duc said, overriding Rock’s voice. “That’s why the Jabberwocky plucked you out of LBJ. He thought he had you over a barrel. You either did what he told you or he’d kick your butt back into jail.”

“And ‘lose the key for ten thousand and one nights,’ as the Jabberwocky put it.” Leonforte laughed, but he was looking more shrewdly at Do Duc. “Yeah, that was the gist of it, more or less. Too bad he put the gun to the head of the wrong Joe. I was brought up to mete out threats, not buckle under them. My father taught me early how to handle arrogant bastards like that.”

He shrugged, made a gesture. “What the fuck’s the difference, anyway. They sent you for my scalp; I can’t allow that.” The Nungs leveled their K-5Os at Do Duc and Rock. “Time to say your prayers, assholes.”

For Do Duc, it was time to gamble everything. “We never had any intention of bringing you back.”

“That’s a laugh.” Leonforte took a step toward them, ran a finger across Do Duc’s forehead. “Is this flop sweat I feel?” He made a hard sound in the back of his throat. “Why else would you make the trek all the way out here to my territory?”

There it was, the confirmation he had been looking for.
My territory.
“Why should we bring you back?” Do Duc said. “That would be like cutting the throat of the golden goose, wouldn’t it?”

The smile came off Leonforte’s face like the shine off chromium. The ensuing silence gathered its own energy until it generated a kind of kinetic buzz that set the short hairs to stirring at the back of Do Duc’s neck.

“Golden goose,” Leonforte said in the exact tones Ali Baba might have uttered “Open Sesame.”

“Sure. That’s what you’re doing leading the Gwai—this rogue sect of Nungs.”

Leonforte’s eyes opened a bit wider. “What do you know of the Gwai, except rumor and hearsay? They’re a deeply religious people.”

“Right now, I’m more concerned with the golden goose,” Do Duc said. “I think that’s an apt description for the man who’s had the balls to appropriate a VC supply line into the Golden Triangle. How much could that kind of drug trade be worth a year? Speaking for Rock as well as myself, I can tell you we’d both rather have a piece of this than try to bring you back.”

“Listen to you!” Leonforte turned to the Gwai. “Can you believe him? What a mouth!” He turned back. “And speaking of balls…” He drew an American Army officer’s .45 pistol and pressed its muzzle hard against Do Duc’s temple.

Rock made a small move and a Gwai jabbed him with a K-50 in the small of his back.

“Don’t even think about it,” Leonforte said, without turning his head.

“Lights out.” Gripping the .45, he squeezed the trigger.

Save for the sound of the hammer coming down on an empty chamber, nothing happened.

Leonforte, his face close to Do Duc’s, grinned hugely. Then he removed the muzzle from Do Duc’s temple and, at almost the same time, kissed him energetically on each cheek.

The Gwai, putting up their weapons, began to whoop.

“Welcome,” Michael Leonforte said, “to the Land of the Dead.”

In that eternity between the instant Leonforte’s finger pulled the trigger and the hammer hit the empty chamber, a piece of Do Duc’s past came rushing at him like a train out of control.

It began with the auras, light refracting from the people nearest him as if their skin and flesh had dissolved, transforming the remainder into lenses through which he now peered. He stared, transfixed, as if he could see in those pulsating shards of color their very souls laid bare like a corpse on a stainless-steel slab.

Then came the trilling of the white magpie, the bird’s call expanding and echoing as if it were being simultaneously amplified and heard from a very great distance.

The magpie, big as a child, sat on his shoulder, preening its long, iridescent feathers while its gold-and-red eye peered at him with intense curiosity. If it spoke, Do Duc had the impression the entire episode would explode like a bubble or a dream, but it never did, and he remained under the spell of the auras.

Ao, the Nung elder, the initiator, the shaman of the tribe, would often take Do Duc down the mountain to the wide, muddy river where the Nungs fished. These seemed more like idyllic outings between father and son than pre-initiation rites.

Once, on a day so hot the sun seemed to sting Do Duc’s bare flesh, Ao trapped a crocodile, and riding its ridged back while Do Duc had looked on agog with electric fear, he had pried open those mighty jaws, inserted a thick polished stick, and rendered the beast harmless.

Ao settled Do Duc on the croc’s back, placing his palms against the armorlike crests of its spine. Do Duc, his heart in his mouth, could hear the thunder of his heartbeat, the rushing of his blood in his inner ears. And then, for no good reason he could think of, Ao shoved him far over, so that his head was hanging just above the croc’s face. He had peered into the beast’s reptilian eyes.

What was it he was supposed to see there? Even now, recollecting the moment with utter clarity, he could not say for certain. Yet the suspicion remained: that he had been meant to seek out a kindred spirit in a beast because he could not find one among humans.

Others might find that to have been a horrible notion, but not Do Duc. It had been he alone who had watched Ao plunge a knife into the croc’s brain, midway between those eyes that regarded Do Duc if not with outright curiosity then at least with interest.

That evening, while watching the Nungs feast on the roasted meat that he had helped Ao strip from the bones, Do Duc felt the onset of the aura, and he remembered the white magpie crying in the trees as if offended by his hands ruddy with the reptile’s blood.

For the first time since he had come to the Nungs, Do Duc disobeyed Ao, submitting willingly, almost eagerly to the punishment he was certain the white magpie had meant for him.

It was the first time he became aware of sin—not the sin the loathsome Catholic missionaries preached with such peremptory zeal, but a sin against the natural order. If the white magpie had not spoken to Do Duc, there was in its eye the corona of desire, the halo of divinity, the thorned garland of sin.

And even when he went to his own priesthood with the Nung elders, he kept a secret part of himself free, pure for the holy trine the white magpie had tucked away in its heart of hearts.

At his initiation he had been required to hunt and kill a crocodile much as Ao had done thirteen months before. He was obliged to bring back its bloody meat in strips for the celebratory feast so that all of them—elder and initiate—could share in its strength.

Do Duc had gone alone, as was dictated, and he found his crocodile—a monstrous beast lying like a log in the still waters of the Song Ba. What a magnificent creature it was, utterly placid yet ready as a drawn bow to snap the bones of anything that crossed its path.

The stillness and the power: it was just this juxtaposition Do Duc was certain the white magpie meant for him to understand. What human could teach him this and other like mysteries? Not even the Soucha priests. None.

Instead of killing the crocodile, he had spoken to it as the magpie had once spoken to him through its radiant eye, and he had climbed astride the croc’s back, gliding with it through the leech-infested water until he came upon one of the Catholic missionaries who so badgered the lowland people with their talk of God and the devil and hellfire and eternal damnation. These missionaries who were so disdainful of the forest, so disconnected from their environment. Their world was Rome and nothing more.

The priest had come down the muddy bank to cool himself in the brown water, and the crocodile, launching itself forward with appalling speed, had caught his bare ankle, had held him long enough for Do Duc to stop his screaming by killing him. Languid once more, the croc had watched patiently as Do Duc skinned the missionary, cut slabs of meat off the chest and back. Only when he was finished did the beast roll what was left down into the water, dragging it beneath the surface.

What strange strength flowed into the elders that night as they feasted on the fresh meat Do Duc had triumphantly brought them? In Do Duc’s ears the shrill cries of the white magpie reverberated like an aria as, smiling, he consumed the fragrant roasted flesh with the others.

“I could have killed you both,” Mick Leonforte said. “Maybe I should have.”

“You won’t be sorry we joined you.”

Rock said it with such conviction that Leonforte stared at him for a long time. At last, he said, “You don’t know the whole story. After you do, we’ll see what measures have to be taken.”

“So we’re on probation,” Rock said.

“You’ll be stone dead unless you can accept certain precepts that may be hard for you to swallow. That’s certainly been the case before.”

“Before,” Do Duc said. “You mean the party the spooks at Pentagon East sent out after you.”

“See, I’m God here,” Leonforte said just as if he hadn’t heard a word Do Duc had said. He lifted his hands to include the Gwai who squatted with them in the bush. They were eating a simple midday meal of dried, salted fish and cold sticky rice balls, which to Do Duc and Rock tasted like manna from heaven after the Charlie rats. “Just ask my subjects.”

Again, Do Duc saw that it would be easy for someone from Pentagon East to assign a madness tag to Leonforte. DWW, they called it. Dangerous when wet. He had no doubt that this was how he was currently viewed by those in Saigon who were aware of him. That was a dangerously easy—and spurious—conclusion to draw. Maybe it was what had gotten the Pentagon East party killed. Do Duc knew that this conclusion would certainly get him and Rock dead right quick if he persisted in it.

“I liked what you said about the golden goose,” Leonforte said now. “What do you know about the pipeline from the Golden Triangle?”

“Only what I’ve deduced,” Do Duc said. “My CO told me jack shit about it, although I’m now convinced he’s at least aware of it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“First, he’s very well connected at Pentagon East.” Do Duc paused a moment. “I often wondered about that. I mean, he’s not a career Army man, far from it. He was a college professor before he got bored with life and enlisted. What’s he doing cozying up to the big honchos at HQ?” He licked salt off his fingertips. “Second, my orders were to extract you from your environment and bring you back to my CO, not to Pentagon East.” He grunted. “That also didn’t sound kosher. Not until I met you and figured out you were on a spook run. Then everything started falling into place. If my CO had been a civilian spook—say, a recruiter for the Company on his college campus—it would all make sense: his being sent in-country, being asshole buddies with Pentagon East, his outfit being given the assignment of bringing you back, wanting me to deliver you to him personally.”