He looked away again, ahead, where another taxi — what looked like a Chevrolet — had just drawn up outside the hotel. A moment later Pol came limping out under an umbrella held for him by one of the doormen, carrying his attaché case in one hand and a rolled raincoat in the other. He hauled himself in with a great alacrity, while his two white cases were stowed in the boot. The Thai doorman took his tip through the window, stood back and bowed low, and Murray let out the clutch.
A big sedan screeched to a standstill a few inches from the Volkswagen’s left bumper, but the driver seemed totally undismayed. Murray did a swift slalom between two more cars, stopping several cyclists dead in their tracks, keeping his eye on the mirror. He had lost the Toyota in a mass of swerving bumpers warped by the dense rain. He let the Chevrolet pull ahead, positioning himself near the middle of the stream of traffic where it would be difficult for anyone to pass.
Then he saw him again, about five cars back, keeping steadily to the inside lane. A lone middle-aged American tourist in the back of a taxi, among a scrum of taxis. He wondered if this might be a deliberate diversion. Pol had said there might have been more than one. A subtler sleuth, he realised, would have tried some back-tracking tactic, cutting in at a crossing further ahead — even varying the pursuit by following in front of the Chevrolet. The Toyota was just following the traffic. And Murray’s job, according to Pol’s briefing, was more or less the same. He was under no obligation to take risks; just a dependable chauffeur, a pick-up man scheduled to arrive after the lead began to fly. He wondered what Pol was carrying inside that rolled-up raincoat.
The rain was now slamming down in solid gusts of water, washed blindly back and forth by the windshield wipers. But the pace of the traffic only seemed to increase, all throttle and no brakes now, with the egregious cyclists dodging spiderlike between the cars, drenched to the skin and apparently impervious to all danger.
Murray began to watch these cyclists more carefully: mostly young men, lithe and sinewy in white shirts, jeans, the occasional solar topee. A few girls riding under umbrellas with children strapped to the pillion. And he remembered how it was a favourite trick in Saigon — rush-hour traffic in the rain, the terrorist flicking between the cars, the grenade tossed casually through an open window as the cycle vanished among fifty other cycles, forgotten in the chaos of the explosion.
He wondered whether Pol had the nous to keep his windows shut. And suddenly both Chevrolet and Toyota were lost: the traffic funnelled into a neck of road between cranes and cement-mixers, the dull crack of a steam-hammer even above the gravel-roar of the rain — boom CRACK! — the traffic slowing through a deep trough of water, almost to a standstill now. Then he glimpsed what he thought was the Chevrolet again, about a hundred yards ahead, as they speeded up towards a roundabout — gimcrack hoardings looming above the shanty-shops, giant skeleton beer bottles and Western sewing machines, Chinese film posters dripping blood from Mandarin hands and dragons’ teeth (oh subtle mysteries of the Orient!), shops brilliant with raw silk, emerald-green and crimson and deep indigo and saffron. But still no sign of the little cream Toyota.
The road had widened now, the cars skimming the surface like motorboats. Seventy, eighty kilometres an hour — the Chevrolet pulling away in a heavy wake of water, with Murray straining forward in his seat, sore-eyed, sweating with the slow crawl of fear as he watched the Chevrolet disappear. And now he caught the flash of headlamps in his mirror, as the little cream Toyota pulled out suddenly from behind and slid past on the inside lane.
Porkpie-hat was sitting back, eyes front. Not even a sideward glimpse at the Volkswagen. So perhaps Pol’s ruse of using two cars had some point. Yet the little Japanese taxi was obviously supercharged; Murray had his foot down flat on the floor, the Volkswagen straining up to a hundred-and-ten km/h, while the tail of the Toyota veered off into a fine after spray from its wheels. Other cars flicked by, travelling very fast. The city thinned into tin and wattle shacks, swamp and paddy fields blistered with rain, children squatting down with fishing rods, water buffalo and hand-carts and high bold airline hoardings. A signpost said Don Muang Airport: 8 miles.
The road now opened on to two strips of steaming concrete leading to the horizon. The rain was letting up and a dim sun seeped down across the fields. He saw the Chevrolet about a quarter of a mile ahead, pulled up on the mud verge. It was alone, closed, no one in sight. Murray slowed into the inside lane, watching carefully in his mirror. He let a couple of fast cars and an oil tanker roar past, his view blotted out for several seconds by their spray. When it was clear again he turned the Volkswagen abruptly off the road, swinging it round a few feet in front of the taxi, and stopped.
It was suddenly very quiet outside. A car swished past down the opposite carriageway and was gone. Murray was just about to get out, when he heard the snap of a door handle. A huge short leg appeared with a tiny shoe, a hand pointing the rolled-up raincoat at the Volkswagen, as Pol’s head crept out under the Chevrolet door, his great body following, lowering the raincoat and reaching back into the taxi for his black attaché case. The Thai driver got out at the same moment and went round to the boot.
Pol came across and Murray opened the door for him, pushing the passenger seat forward to make room first for the two suitcases in the back. ‘You’re early,’ Pol said through the window.
‘I thought I’d better keep close. Nothing’s happened?’
‘Nothing.’ He looked almost disappointed. ‘And you?’
‘There was another taxi. It passed me about three miles back.’ The taxi driver was putting the cases in the back, while Murray described the incidents with porkpie-hat. Pol nodded and squeezed himself in with a wince of pain. ‘American, you say? Ah merde! You couldn’t have chosen something bigger than this German insect?’ He pushed a twenty-dollar bill through the window at the driver, who stared at it with a big smile. ‘Was he alone?’
‘Alone. You know him?’
‘Possibly. Start the engine, but don’t move for a moment. Give the taxi time to go.’ He shifted his mighty rump, cradling the rolled-up raincoat in his lap, and burped gently. The Chevrolet started up with a roar and squelch of mud, cutting straight across the road and bouncing up on to the grass verge dividing the carriageways, doing a swift U-turn as it headed back towards Bangkok. Pol watched it almost laconically.
‘So we get moving?’ said Murray.
‘Give it a couple more minutes.’
‘The American’s well ahead by now,’ Murray said, feeling impatient, nerves overwound, cramped with anti-climax. He glanced again in the mirror. Several big American cars stole up and hissed by, without incident. He nodded down at Pol’s raincoat. ‘And what have you got there?’
The Frenchman unrolled it with a mischievous grin. Inside lay a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, sawn off about a foot from the breach. The mechanism was modern, unembroidered, of blue-black steel set in light varnished wood. It looked well-oiled and new. He broke it open and eased out the two cartridges. One bore a well-known British trademark — Number One Shot, the heaviest birdshot on the market. The other was an American brand, and of metal, with a blunt hard-nosed bullet that can blow a man’s head off at thirty yards. Pol snapped it shut, patting it affectionately. ‘My little gangster toy.’
‘You still plan to use it?’
He gave a grandiose shrug that made the car sway. ‘Ça dépend! If they had planned something on the road, they would have already done it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We should be getting on to the airport.’
Murray put the Volkswagen into gear and jerked her quickly back on to the road. ‘And then?’
‘If they intend anything,’ Pol said evenly, ‘they will try it at the airport. It will be their last chance.’ He rolled the shotgun back inside his coat.
The first call for passengers on Air Vietnam, Flight 247 to Phnom Penh and Saigon, had already gone out. Pol was limping heavily between two tiny porters, with Murray hard behind, carrying both the attaché
case and his own grip-bag, leaving Pol with the raincoat under his arm, both hands free. A blast of birdshot would be unthinkable in these crowds; his only hope now would be the .22.
They passed quickly through the Air Vietnam checking-in counter and joined a long line of American civilians — grave, loose-jowled men with the rumpled baleful look of those who spend their lives between airports and hotels.
Murray studied them more closely. These were no soldiers, no leathery acne-raw veterans of the Marine Corps or First Cav., no flint-eyed Special Forces — those ‘warriors for the hearts and minds’ — no pale draftees with five days’ R-and-R behind them and the nagging doubt of venereal disease. No sir. These men on AVN Flight 247 were strictly civilians: Government employees, agents of USOM, USIS, JUSPAO, cost-efficiency experts, public relations officers, functionaries, fixers, desk men. The clerks of war.
Spooks? he wondered, as they shuffled through Customs and Immigration, where their cases and luggage were chalked without comment. It was a heavy afternoon and the officials were drowsy. They passed into the crowded chaos of the departure hall. Would they dare try here? Noise, swelling confusion, porters, police, miniature high heeled girls with slit skirts and clipboards, elegant finger-snapping Thais with white smiles and white holsters, bored American M.P.’s with black and white helmets, old women with pails and mops, young airmen in unzipped flying-suits chewing gum like athletes between events.
At the end of the hall a vast air-conditioner howled like a vacuum cleaner. The confusion was heightened by the TV screens, hung at regular intervals from the ceiling and relaying — between unintelligible flight bulletins — a frantic feature film in which a number of men on horseback were riding at the camera, loosing off rifles aimlessly into the air.
The entire staff paused, heads upturned, transfixed by the flickering grey actors, the ringing shots, crescendos of music. ‘Will all members of Hotel Company, Jackdaw Division, please report to Gate Five!’ a Negro master-sergeant in a smart. Army suit was intoning through a hand-loudhailer.
Outside, a silver double-decker troop-carrying B 76 jet of the U.S. Air Force crept slowly past the plate-glass windows. Pol was elbowing his way towards the bar, sweat flowing in rivulets out of the folds of his neck, his jacket buttoned crookedly so that one flap hung lower than the other, covering his trouser pocket with the gun. He made a tragically vulnerable target, thought Murray: a sneak shot from any one of a hundred angles — crack of a small calibre, another .22 perhaps, lost in the whine and jabber of aircraft and loudspeakers, synchronised with the endless TV battle — and they wouldn’t even need a silencer. The crowds were no help either: if anything they made the killers’ job easier. Murray wondered what Pol had meant by saying they wouldn’t choose a public place, like the hotel. Or was the hotel not quite public enough?
The only thing to do was keep moving. For unless Pol had a very good idea who it was who was after him, he was in bad trouble. The long string of his life, he’d said: he’d pulled it so many times and still couldn’t feel the end. Was he pulling it now? He looked magnificently unruffled, pressing up close to the bar, a huge saffron bandana flourished in his free hand, mopping his face and brow, careful not to disarrange the kiss curl. ‘You want a drink?’ he called back to Murray.
‘Brandy and soda,’ Murray said. The TV screens were flashing up another bulletin: Garuda Airlines, Flight 360 to Singapore and Djakarta, now boarding at Gate 9. And a nasty thought came to him: Would they perhaps try for the plane? — another neat little device slipped aboard among the last-minute luggage — a phial of acid eating through a wire while the aircraft put on an extra thrust, climbing away from the mainland over the sea, with a bright flash, smoke curling downwards, metal ripping like paper — mangled machinery, seats, flesh, clothes, bones, luggage — tumbling down in a ball of blazing high-octane fuel, all over in a few seconds, lost under the South China Sea.
He looked round at the faces of his fellow passengers and felt a small ripple of comfort. If the people who were after Pol were those Murray thought they were, they wouldn’t go for a plane-load of American Government officials. No, Pol had chosen his airline with intelligence — or perhaps luck?
Pol pulled him closer: ‘Is anything wrong?’
Murray laughed grimly: ‘Nothing at all, mon vieux! It’s just —’ and he lowered his voice, even while speaking French — ‘I’m worried about the codename.’
‘The what?’ Pol had called for two brandies.
‘Codename Lazy Dog. It’s ominous. You know about “Lazy Dog”, the weapon?’
‘You told me about it. Eh bien?’
‘It was a disaster. Heat-seeking missile designed to be fired from a thousand metres on to a lighted cigarette. Trouble is, the Viet Cong don’t smoke. It used to zoom around and find some poor American platoon about five miles away, busy lighting up their Salem filter tips.’
Pol chuckled, handing him a brandy in a warm glass. ‘I find it a good omen, my dear Murray — a non-motivated weapon!’ A man on the TV screen, with a long scarred face, was reloading his rifle. The crowd along the bar stood watching. All but Murray, who was watching Pol hoist his drink over the head of a little man beside him. Pol was still holding his bandana. Murray looked at the little man and their eyes locked like magnets. He felt his mouth drying up. The man had taken off his porkpie hat and his head was as bald as a stone.
Pol slipped and fell against the American, splashing some of his brandy over him, his bandana flapping for a moment round the man’s neck and down over his shirt. Three horsemen on the screen fired a volley of shots, the scarfaced man grimaced and began to fall, and the bald man at the bar opened his mouth, staring at Murray with a face the colour of wet sand.
Pol had grabbed Murray’s arm, as the TV cut to a flight schedule: AVN Flight 247 — Boarding Gate 6. ‘Let’s go!’ he said, moving with surprising speed despite his leg. Behind them, bald porkpie hat had disappeared behind a crowd of heads. Over the staccato shots and yells from the TV, someone called, ‘Hey get a doctor!’ There was a flurry of movement, a closing in round the bar. ‘Kiss o’ life!’ someone shouted, as a Thai policeman hurried across the hall, hand on his big white holster.
Pol was still gripping Murray’s arm as they reached the gate, handed out their boarding cards, passed through the plate-glass doors into a blast of kerosene and hot damp air, their clothes flapping in the slip-stream of a Boeing taxiing up to the Arrivals gate.
They reached the steps into the tail of the Air Vietnam Caravelle. Pol did not even glance back at the terminal as he began to heave himself up into the cool belly of the aircraft, where a slender girl in a flowing áo dài awaited them with a tray of hot scented towels.
‘All right,’ said Murray, when they were seated and the engines beginning to scream to life: ‘How did you do it?’
‘Do what?’ said Pol, unfolding the steaming towel across his face.
‘The little American at the bar — the one who followed me out in the taxi.’
‘Ah!’ He spoke with the towel still wrapped across his face like a mummy. ‘Yet another indiscreet question, my dear Murray! When the hostess comes round, we’ll have a bottle of champagne.’
PART 7: DATE AT THE ‘CERCLE’
CHAPTER 1
Murray lay on the bed behind closed shutters, feeling the draught from the fan flutter against his body every three seconds, regular as a metronome. He lay with nerves taut, alert to every sound from outside: roar and jangle of the square, jeeps, trucks, baby-taxis, bicycle bells, rasping whine of motor scooters, boom of ships from the crowded river.
A quiet afternoon in a city at war. The other sounds — the sudden swish of Soviet 122-millimetre rockets from across the river, falling with a crack and shudder of air, followed by the panting of ambulance sirens; or sometimes the dull flashes and steady trembling of the earth as the eight-engined B-52’s released their loads on the jungle north of the city — these sounds would come later, usually with the dark. They would come in ti
me for the cocktail hour when newcomers to Saigon, along with the more boisterous of the foreign Press corps, could watch the display from the bar at the Caravelle Hotel where the windows were taped across to protect them from flying glass and the Tonkinese waiter teased up the martinis with just the right chill and twist of lemon.
God what an awful war, thought Murray. Drab, dirty, dishonest, pitiless ringside war-without-end: a PR man’s war fed on cooked statistics, braced with spurious dogma and monstrous gadgets — all the beastly realities of the field compounded into sterilised logistics, the applied socio-psychology of the Madison Avenue boardroom. Murray hated the war, not out of any moral revulsion, or even intellectual judgment, but because it bored him. It bored him because he could see no respectable conclusion to it. He knew all the arguments, for and against: hawks, doves, hard-nosed pragmatists, soft-bellied liberals, bomb-happy pin-heads who wanted to take out Hanoi and tell world opinion go fly a kite; the anaemic experts who argued a middle course, a phased withdrawal, dissecting the anatomy of Marxism versus Nationalist Communism versus Maoism while the planes whined low and machineguns flicked and flesh was roasted and shredded and the platoon sergeants went in to tot up the ‘body-count’ — taking all the hands and feet and dividing by four, as the wags joked in the Caravelle bar.
But worst of all, the world was now bored with the war. It had become smug with self-righteous indignation, with the tedious long-range censure of international pundits, of little men with big jobs and puppet minds who sat in the United Nations, sounding off against U.S. aggression while they borrowed American money and squandered it; and those respected, comfortable intellectuals — men of letters, poets, professors, leader-writers, stars of stage and screen, mummers and celluloid-snippers who led demos, waving paper Viet Cong flags and braving Mace — who had now wearied of the whole bloody business and moved on to other pastures of protest. Even Uncle Ho’s wispy features had been superseded, as the middle-class revolutionary pin-up, by those of Che Guevara.
The Tale of the Lazy Dog Page 18
