The Tale of the Lazy Dog

by Alan Williams

  Suddenly he stopped. Jackie Conquest had begun to cry. It was a stiff soundless weeping, two tears rolling out of her large dark eyes and dripping on to her tunic before she had time to catch them, then recovering almost immediately, with that look of embarrassed fury she had shown when she had been sick on the plane. For a moment Ryderbeit hesitated. Then he stretched out and touched her hand. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ He sounded almost gentle.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all!’ She sat shaking her head violently, reaching for a handkerchief.

  ‘Something I said?’ he asked: ‘Something about the Legion?’

  ‘La Légion,’ she repeated, in a curiously wooden voice. ‘My father was a commandant — twenty-two years with the Legion. He killed himself in 1961 after the uprising in Algiers. He preferred to die rather than face the shame of selling out to that long-nosed traitor, de Gaulle!’ She sat glaring round the table, her eyes suddenly dry again and very bright. ‘You see, I’m from Algérie. I was born in Oran — what we call a pied-noir, a “black-foot”.’ She gave a harsh laugh, her eyes grown wild now, and Murray wondered whether she were slightly drunk, or perhaps suffering from delayed shock. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything about La Légion!’ she went on; and Ryderbeit leaned over and refilled her glass. He was looking faintly confused. At the end of the table No-Entry Jones watched and listened behind his dark glasses. Murray felt a certain grateful confidence in him, sitting there still and quiet, and dead sober over a bottle of mineral water.

  As for Jackie Conquest, her outburst had explained everything. The bold Mediterranean beauty, the unflinching devil-may-care attitude with which she’d boarded the C 46 — and now this sudden passion about her dead father, lost son of a lost empire. For after the final collapse in Algeria, it was not hard to see why she had fallen for marrying an American. But instead of the Great Society, she had found herself back in the wreckage of France’s previous colonial disaster, living in the claustrophobic squalor of an American Saigon. The only mystery was how she managed to be there at all. Wives of U.S. personnel were rare in Vietnam. Murray wondered how old Maxwell had swung it? Or how his wife had stuck it? Perhaps it was simply because she had nowhere else to go. For a girl reared since childhood on the beaches and boulevards of French Algeria, to have to resign herself, still in her twenties, to become a grass-widow of the CIA — inhabiting some neat little American suburb among the lawn sprinklers and two-car garages, bumping trolleys with the permed housewives in the local supermarket — must have been a dismal prospect indeed.

  Ryderbeit was tossing more bourbon-soaked morsels to the fish — one of whom to his annoyance appeared to be stirring to life again — and was now telling about his ill-fated adventure in Europe. ‘I tried to sell an aircraft carrier in Genoa to the Syrians. Just imagine a Jew selling arms to the Arabs!’

  Murry smiled bleakly: in Ryderbeit’s case he had no trouble imagining it at all. ‘What sort of carrier was it?’ he asked.

  ‘One o’ the big Yank jobs. Beautiful deal. I had it goin’ for only forty million bucks, on a two and a half per cent commission. Trouble was, y’see, the bloody carrier didn’t exist. I was sweatin’, I can tell yer — on speed-and-stress pills for a whole month until the deal fell through. Only that’s the last one that does fall through for Samuel D. Ryderbeit. The very last.’ His eyes, with their ugly glare at the edges, swivelled round and met Murray’s, holding them with a slow leer.

  Murray did not look away; he remembered, through the miasma of bourbon, that back in the plane, before the final crisis, Ryderbeit had promised that they would talk more about their ‘business proposition’. How much, he thought again, did the man really know? How much had Finlayson told him, before arranging to have him contacted through Luke Williams? And supposing Finlayson had told him everything — as much as he knew himself from Pol — how much was Ryderbeit to be trusted?

  Murray was feeling almost too drowsy to care. No-Entry had gone to sleep again, and Ryderbeit was regaling Jackie with more tales of adventure — this time in South America where he’d got a job catching snakes. If Murray had been more alert he would have read the danger signals in Jackie’s dark brooding stare. Her expression was not just one of dislike for Ryderbeit, but of deep, uncompromising, contemptuous loathing. But the Rhodesian — with less than two inches left in the bourbon bottle — seemed blissfully innocent of her reactions. Perhaps the knowledge that she was a Daughter of the Legion had blinded him to her more sensitive emotions. She would not quickly forget that coarse, evocative threat to thrash her — and she was not going to let him forget it either.

  He was now telling her: ‘I used to sell ’em for two dollars apiece — not for their skins but their meat, which was canned as cocktail delicacies. I’d creep up behind the little bastards and snatch ’em up by their tails, then crack ’em like whips so their heads came off.’

  Jackie Conquest interrupted: ‘May I ask you a question, Mr Ryderbeit?’

  ‘Anything you like, darling — providin’ it’s not hush-hush stuff for old Maxwell.’

  Jackie stubbed out the cigarette she had just lit, and from the fixed look in her eyes Murray knew there was going to be trouble. ‘Mr Ryderbeit —’

  ‘Sammy to my friends, darling!’ He emptied his glass, still oblivious.

  ‘Mister Ryderbeit, are you a sadist?’

  He looked at her dead straight, with his bloodshot cat’s eyes, and said, in a dangerously soft tone: ‘I don’t know, Mrs Conquest. You tell me.’

  Murray broke in: ‘Come on, that’s enough.’ But she ignored him.

  ‘If you are not a sadist, then you must be a pathological liar. A psychotic, I think they call people like you. What is your opinion?’

  ‘Come on, that’s enough!’ Murray said again, feeling absurdly British and inadequate.

  ‘Keep out o’ this,’ Ryderbeit said, in the same soft voice. ‘This is strictly between me and the lady.’ Very deliberately he poured himself another drink — the last of the bottle — and sat for several seconds squinting at the dark golden liquid, his head half turned towards the girl as though waiting to catch her next words. Then, with a smooth sweep of his hand, he emptied the entire contents into her face.

  She gave a short scream and Murray hit Ryderbeit across the table. He hit him hard on the nose and mouth, feeling the skin of his knuckles split; then again very hard in the left eye, with the rage rising uncontrollably within him as he looked into the girl’s face, wet and white with fury — springing round the table and trying to strike him again, a final blow on the jaw to silence the drunken lout, but instead the thin figure of Jones loomed in front of him and something collided with his head, carrying on through like the point of a spear to the back of his skull, and he went out cold.

  He came to, looking at a confusion of legs — chair legs, trouser legs, legs in black suede — as he started grappling his way slowly up the side of the table, trying to mumble something, worrying about the girl, when someone hit him again — a low, nasty, calculated blow that made him think of Ryderbeit and his smashed cheek at the hands of the karate expert, Maxwell Conquest.

  This time he took a lot longer to get to his feet, blinking through warm blood as he was helped down some steps past a row of foul-smelling vats of food, to be sick over a wooden parapet into a cesspool full of bubbles that were like pustules on a wet black skin, and he was sure he could hear them popping as he stood retching down at them. He had no idea how long he stayed there. He stood up at last, still heaving and blinking through blood. All in the cause of chivalry, he thought. And at the end of it all he somehow had the vacant, dismal realisation that Mrs Jackie Conquest had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 2

  On the steps Murray found he was still being helped, slowly and steadily, but he could not quite see who it was. Some things he saw very clearly indeed. He passed the boiling vats and saw a gibbon on a chain sitting astride a very thin cat. The gibbon looked up at him with bright button-black eyes, furtively, as though i
t knew it were doing something it shouldn’t.

  He was led up more steps, into a stone room and was sat down on a bed. It was a low double bed covered with one grey sheet, under a mosquito net that had holes in it that would not have kept out a fairly large rat. The walls were bare and peeling, and there was a rusted iron bidet and a huge armchair in the corner under the half-shuttered window.

  In the armchair a man was sitting. The door closed and Murray looked up and saw No-Entry Jones. He guessed it was he who’d helped him up the steps. He looked back at the man in the armchair. He recognised Ryderbeit — but he looked different now, like a photograph of someone in a newspaper that’s been badly folded. The lean satanic grace of the features was gone, oddly misshapen, and one side of his face was swollen the colour of a plum. ‘Hello soldier! How d’ye feel?’

  ‘Fine. But you look bloody awful.’

  Ryderbeit tried a lopsided grin. ‘You should see yerself!’

  ‘Is there anything to drink?’ said Murray: ‘Something quickly medicinal?’ The pigskin flask plumped on to the bed beside him.

  ‘Help yerself. Cognac on whisky — not the best combination, but it’ll have to do.’

  Murray took only a sip and had to go and retch again into the bidet. When he got back to the bed he felt slightly better. ‘Did you know there’s a monkey downstairs trying to screw a cat in the kitchens? Seriously. I’ve just seen it.’ He nodded at Jones by the door, feeling slightly light-headed.

  ‘Disgusting,’ said Ryderbeit. ‘Throw us the brandy.’

  Murray tossed the flask back, surprisingly accurately, and Ryderbeit fielded it low in the slips. ‘Soldier, you’re doin’ fine. In a moment we can get down to serious business.’

  Murray sat for a moment, breathing hard. ‘Did you do this to me?’ he said at last. ‘I don’t mean old Muhammed Ali here. I mean the second job?’

  Ryderbeit nodded. ‘That was me. Real mean, eh soldier?’

  ‘Why didn’t you try it on Maxwell Conquest? Why me?’

  ‘Perhaps because you’re not as good as Maxwell Conquest.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Murray thoughtfully. ‘Where’s the girl?’

  ‘She’s gone back to the USAID office to wait for the chopper. We’ve still got about half-an-hour.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have thrown that drink in her face,’ Murray said.

  ‘She insulted me. You heard what she said. I don’t usually waste good bourbon, even on a bitch like that.’

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ Murray said lamely. ‘No bloody excuse at all. I have no apologies’ — remembering vaguely that he still owed his life to Ryderbeit and the Negro by the door.

  ‘You’re doin’ fine, soldier. Better and better! Another nip of the hard stuff, and we’ll be able to start talking turkey — as they say in the great big country across the water.’

  Murray took a second, longer sip from the flask, and this time there were no ill effects. He looked at Ryderbeit, crooked-faced under the light from the window, and suddenly it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nothing mattered. Like after Huế when he’d got drunk at the base camp in Da Nang and insulted two Marine Colonels — hard bitter men who looked as though they wanted to use their fists in the long slack of the evening after the day’s fighting — but instead had suddenly turned all reasonable, realising he had been through it too, and wanting to quieten and comfort him. That had infuriated him even more — just as Ryderbeit, all bruised and soft-voiced, was doing now. He said slowly: ‘When I get you outside alone, Sammy — without your bodyguard here — I’ll break your back legs!’

  Ryderbeit smiled: ‘We’ll keep the courtesies for later, soldier. First I want to hear a little story — the one you told our mutual friend, Mr George Finlayson — who, as we both know, is an upstanding English gentleman with a responsible position with the International Monetary Fund, and is conning ’em rigid.’

  ‘I didn’t tell Finlayson anything.’

  Ryderbeit spread his hands out, palms upward: ‘All right, so you met some Frenchman down in Cambodia, and he told Finlayson. Correct?’ Murray said nothing. A fly droned and bumped against the ceiling. ‘I just want to know what Finlayson knows,’ Ryderbeit went on. ‘Just as you told the Frenchman, and the Frenchman told him.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

  ‘Because he won’t tell me. Says it’s none of his business. He’s a man of honour, is our Filling-Station.’

  ‘I should try twisting his arm. He’s a big chap, but he doesn’t look all that fit to me.’

  Ryderbeit unscrewed the brandy flask. ‘Look, soldier, I’m as patient as the next man. But we’re a long way from home out here — in what the Yanks call the boondocks — and there aren’t many people to shout for — unless you count Mrs Conquest and that sap of a USAID man.’

  Murray stared dismally back at him. Two of them, one of me, he thought. Negro heavy by the door and the man in the chair putting a proposition backed up by an unspecified threat. He was curious to know the precise nature of the threat, and asked.

  Ryderbeit chuckled: ‘Murray old soldier, you went and got footless pissed just now and got into a fight. The owner saw it all — I even had to give the little bastard five thousand kips to soothe his feelings. Doesn’t like his place being turned into a rough-house by a lot o’ drunken round-eyes — ’specially when one of ’em damn near falls into that sewer at the back. Because if No-Entry here hadn’t held you up, just as sure as Moses wasn’t conceived on the Sabbath, you’d have fallen in. And you’d have had no one to blame but yerself. No one.’

  ‘There’s still Mrs Conquest.’

  Ryderbeit shook his head: ‘She didn’t see a thing. She ran out so fast she didn’t even see Jones helping you outside. That’s how bloody loyal and helpful is your Mrs Bloody Conquest!’

  Suddenly Murray felt very frightened. It was always possible that Ryderbeit was bluffing, and was hoping he’d talk because he’d had a few drinks and been badly knocked about — not counting the crash. But it was also quite possible that Jackie Conquest had been right: that Ryderbeit was slightly mad, a sadistic psychopath who might dump Murray in the bubbling black sewer at the back just for the hell of it. He looked helplessly at No-Entry Jones.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell us, Mr Wilde,’ Jones said, in his gentle drawl. ‘After all, there’s no real harm done — just a few bumps and scratches. Sammy and I don’t bear you no malice, and you got nothing to lose. Nothing, that is, if you tell us.’

  This sounded like good sense to Murray. At least better sense than anything he himself could think of for the moment. After all, the story was sufficiently fantastic for there to be always the chance — a dangerous one perhaps — that they wouldn’t believe it anyway. ‘I’d like some more brandy,’ he said, settling back against the bolster on the bed.

  Ryderbeit tossed him back the flask. ‘We’ve got about forty minutes, soldier. Take yer time.’

  ‘Well, it was like this. I was in Bangkok a couple of months ago, in an R-and-R bar on the Strip down Petchburi Road, and I got talking to a young sergeant in the M.P.’s stationed in Saigon, at Tân Sơn Nhất Airport. He does regular guard duty, mostly on the main gate and the traffic complex. Then, about four months ago, he had a funny experience. He’d been posted one night to guard a hut inside the big ordnance depot there. A perfectly ordinary hut, about three times the size of this room, with no windows and a double steel door. There are hundreds of them all over the airfield — but with this one there was a difference.’

  The room had become very quiet. Murray took another sip of brandy and went on. ‘Just after he came on duty that night a civilian car drove up and a major got out — very flustered, he said — and asked him how many men he’d got in his detail. He said three, which was normal, and the major ordered it to be doubled. He also told him to get up on the roof and keep an extra lookout for the next three hours — till a special detail under a colonel would arrive to take whatever was in the hut out under armed guard. Well,
the major went off and the sergeant climbed on to the roof, and went through.’

  ‘How d’yer mean, through?’

  ‘The roof collapsed. A gimcrack Vietnamese job where they’d watered down the cement. The usual story. Anyway, he just turned to me in this bar — a kid of about twenty-two who’d had a few drinks over the top — and showed me his foot. It was still in plaster after his fall. That’s what had got him his R-and-R. Then he said, “You know what I fell on to?” And I said no and he said “Four feet of money.”’

  He paused. Neither of the other two said anything.

  ‘I asked him what sort of money and he said greenbacks — just like that. I asked him in what denominations and he said, “All of them — fives, tens, twenties, up to C’s.”’

  ‘He had time to count ’em?’

  ‘Only a few packets. But enough to see what was inside.’

  ‘So how did he know it was all greenbacks? Did he check it all? How was it packed?’ Ryderbeit was sitting forward now, greedy and impatient.

  ‘In packages of waterproof paper. His boot went through one of them, which was all twenties.’

  ‘Used?’

  ‘Used. Then he got curious, even with a broken ankle, and slit open a couple of others, and it was all good U.S. currency, mostly in high denominations — fifties and hundreds — and again mostly used.’