The Tale of the Lazy Dog

by Alan Williams

  ‘They’re not killers,’ Sy Leroy said drily. ‘Besides, it’s not Sihanouk we’re after. He’s no friend of the U.S., to be sure, but that’s a State Department affair. It’s this man Pol that bothers us. The fact that he’s killed an American is bad enough, but when he’s able to hire a professional killer from North Vietnam who can terrorize the house-girl through her family back in Hanoi, then kills an official of the IMF and disappears back into North Vietnam — well, that begins to worry us a lot, Mr Wilde.’ There was a meaningful pause. ‘So we’d appreciate it if you could find out just what this man Pol is up to. Who else he works for. And what exactly he’s doing in Cambodia.’

  ‘And if I don’t find out?’

  ‘We don’t want to be vindictive, Mr Wilde. And I think we’ll know if you’re holding back.’

  ‘So when do I report?’

  ‘Only when you’ve got something. Have you planned to meet Pol again?’

  ‘Nothing definite. Perhaps I’ll be going to Phnom Penh — in two or three weeks’ time,’ he said carefully. ‘Who do I report to?’

  Conquest answered: ‘Mr Leroy is here every day till five-thirty except weekends. If there’s anything really urgent outside those hours you call this number.’ He thrust a card at Murray with the name of Major D. Curry, and a telephone number, then stood up, nodded at Sy Leroy and left without another word.

  Murray began to stand up too, as Leroy slid gracefully from the desktop and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You must excuse Maxwell. He’s dedicated, and he’s good, but sometimes I wonder if the FBI oughtn’t to have had him, and that he just got mixed up in the shuffle. No offence, Mr Wilde?’

  ‘Not so far. Did you mean that about getting me kicked out?’

  ‘Blackmail’s a dirty word and all that. But you must admit, your associations with this man Pol look, to say the least, rather too coincidental?’ His hand stayed on Murray’s shoulder, guiding him gently towards the door. ‘We’re after Pol — but it’s a bit more than that. Pol’s got a history and it doesn’t add up to anything we like. That’s to say, the computer doesn’t like it. You probably know it — Spain, Algeria, close to de Gaulle, now Snooky, then going in for bare-faced murder. We want to find out what he’s up to in these parts — and we don’t want to find out afterwards by reading about it in the newspapers. You understand, Mr Wilde?’

  ‘I understand.’

  Leroy squeezed his shoulder. ‘Always remember the old saying — a man who kills once will kill again.’ His monkey mouth widened, the crows’ feet stretched white round his eyes. ‘And anyway, we’d like to hear something about Cambodia. I hear Sihanouk’s just completed his sixth feature film out there?’

  ‘That’s right. He plays two parts — hero and villain. The hero’s himself and the villain’s employed by the CIA.’

  Leroy chuckled, his manner easy and infectious. ‘Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t get him on our side — maybe teach us to keep the Communists out the gentle way. Well, good luck, Mr Wilde.’

  Murray left the chilly JUSPAO building, puzzled and thoughtful. Perhaps Conquest and the civilised Sy Leroy were not the only ones who had reason to be troubled by Pol.

  He wondered what Conquest would be doing tomorrow at 12.30.

  CHAPTER 2

  At just past noon Murray stepped out of the cage-lift, freshly shaved and wearing a tie, crossing the terraced bar to the front steps where a figure insinuated itself beside him: ‘Cyclo-pousse, M’sieur Wilde?’ Murray found himself staring at that dead white eye at his elbow. He nodded, and almost at once a solar-topeed rider had slid to a stop at the pavement.

  ‘Où allez-vous, m’sieur?’ blind eye whispered behind him.

  ‘Cercle Sportif,’ Murray said, climbing in under the sun-hood. The sky was a hard blue and the heat fierce, exhausting. He heard the boy chattering in Vietnamese, and this time Murray passed him a 50-piastre note under the hood.

  They began to wobble across the square, round the Palladian facade of the defunct State Opera House, up bustling Le Loi Boulevard with the steel shutters coming down for lunch and siesta; past the sandbagged railings of the half-finished Presidential Palace — a great husk of naked concrete and fluted columns standing back behind heavy trees. The blue shade of a French boulevard with the rumble of traffic growing muffled; áo dàis flitting like moths among the shadows. Murray closed his eyes, half-dozing as the knobbly brown legs behind peddled him along, into patches of blinding light, swerving, rocking to a halt for some diesel-belching Army truck.

  He wondered how he would greet her, wine her, lunch her, talk her round in circles and lie to her. Because that was the only way unless he confided in her, and whatever else she might say, she was still married to Maxwell Conquest who was good and truly dedicated — who might blink at a million dollars but would not necessarily accept them. Or would he? And would she? Would she believe him? Believe him after the third drink, in bed for the second time? For he knew that the second time, the disavowal of the common hasty one-night stand, was usually a critical manoeuvre. Or had she come to warn him — like Hamish Napper, the one-eyed boy, Conquest himself? he thought, as he shook himself awake, coughing with dust.

  They were tearing down the old Saigon, replacing the soft yellow houses with modern blocks of concrete cells where the plumbing was nearly impeccable, but the children lay crammed in bundles down the corridors while tipsy GI’s picked their way over them to be pleasured by their elder sisters who preened themselves in miniskirts and washed themselves in cheap scent.

  He looked up and saw it was a quarter to one. The street was low and mean. No sign of trucks, jeeps, those reassuring M.P.’s with their Southern voices and machine-pistols snapped on to automatic. He struggled up and shouted at the driver: ‘Cercle Sportif!’ But the words sounded so hopelessly alien — they carried no meaning. He shouted ‘Stop! Halt!’ — jabbing one leg out of the cab, with the memory of those four journalists who had been gunned down brutally, stupidly while riding in a Mini Moke in just such a meagre little outlying street. He realised that he was also nowhere near the Cercle Sportif. The driver pulled up at last and began jabbering something unintelligible. Murray was trying his best Vietnamese, from Huế, which is rarely understood by the lower classes of Saigon, when the explosion came.

  There were two thuds and the shockwaves touched him a moment later with a ripple of air. The driver and the few other people in the street were staring back towards the city centre. A third sound — a strange crumbling growl — reached them now like the rumble of an avalanche. Murray was shouting at the driver: ‘Hotel! Hotel Continental — vite!’

  This time the man in the solar topee seemed to pedal very slowly, as though exhausted by the long crawl out of the centre. After a couple more streets Murray gave up. The ambulance sirens were converging in a great animal howl just ahead near the Presidential Palace. American and Vietnamese M.P.’s were flagging down traffic, driving the cyclo-pousses and pedestrians back, as Murray scrambled out and gave the man 500-piastres — the going black market rate for the dollar — but the man still tried to whine and haggle. (Had Murray known then what he was to learn later he would gladly have paid double.) As it was, he called back a Vietnamese obscenity and began running in the general direction of the crowd.

  Several Vietnamese police patrols had been set up, their jeeps stuck diagonally across the street, checking everyone who passed. Murray had flashed his Press card through three of them when the second explosion came — a huge shuddering clap, followed this time, it seemed, by a numbing stillness. He turned a corner and found himself back under the trees of the boulevard. He ducked sideways and began running between the shelter of the trees and the stone gate-posts of the old French villas on his left.

  There was another road-block ahead — Australians this time, big lean men in floppy hats standing with self-repeaters field across their hips. ‘Where yer goin’!’ one of them yelled.

  ‘Cercle Sportif!’ He had his card out again, breathing fast, an
d one of them grinned nastily: ‘Yer won’t find much of it left!’ His voice was gone as three ambulances screamed up, headlamps on full beam. Murray slipped through and joined a nervous crowd under the trees. Some were trying to back away, others forcing them forward.

  The gateposts of the Cercle had been splintered and inside was a great scrum of uniforms and white shirts and howling faces. Above there were high trees with hanging branches, some of them stripped and clotted and broken. The clubhouse, pale blue and white, had been cracked like an eggshell. The steps up to the swimming pool were crammed with bodies, some of them twitching like the tails of sundered reptiles. A man’s body, naked except for his blue socks, lay across Murray’s path, his suntan a curious brownish-blue against the white strip of his waist. There was part of a girl further on, still wearing her bathing-top, but with no head. Flesh was spattered about like meat among the dust. He was pushed aside by two enormous Negroes carrying a stretcher.

  An American voice on a loudhailer was calling: ‘Stand back! Stand back! There may be more bombs! Please stand back, get clear, make way for the ambulances!’

  He was shoved against a wall, face-to-face with a dazed American civilian who was gingerly stroking his crewcut. ‘What happened?’ Murray cried.

  ‘Don’t quite know. Was down in the men’s room and ah just kinda hit mah head.’ He began to grope along the wall, muttering, ‘Bastards set off a second bomb, ah guess, just when the ambulances came. Lucky ah was in the john.’

  Murray found a young hard-faced soldier with the shoulder-flash of the Special Forces, the Green Berets. ‘What happened?’ He didn’t show his card this time, and the man said bitterly: ‘Two charges. First under the pool, laid along the roof of the observation bar. Blew the swimmers into the air like a lot o’ goddam fish out of a tank. Second charge laid in a dustbin just inside the gates. Killed a lot o’ the ambulance boys and spectators. Who the hell are you, anyway?’

  Murray looked down and saw a shoe lying near them with a foot in it. He groped for his Press card, mumbling: ‘Were there any survivors?’

  ‘In this mess?’ The Green Beret frowned at the Press card. ‘If I know these VC bastards they may have set a third charge. I should get the hell out o’ here if I was you. There’s nothing to see, unless you like stockyards.’

  ‘There was someone I was going to meet here. I’m staying.’

  Up the steps towards the pool and the bar he had to control himself. He had seen this thing before, many times, but this — perhaps because it was sited in such luxurious, familiar décor — was peculiarly horrible. An American in bathing trunks, his legs wrapped in blood-soaked towels as he was borne down on a stretcher, waved at him: ‘Hey, you a newspaperman? Better get this. Hold it, boys! Name’s Larrymore — Don Macaulay Larrymore — ex-Marine, seen it all, was up there and I saw it all. You can quote me.’ He did not sound sober.

  Murray had started up the steps again when the blood met him, in two snake rivulets, their noses glinting with dust as they crept across the clean concrete floor, swelling fresh and rich as they expanded and dropped their heady load on to the step below — and all Murray could do was run, toppling, staggering upwards, thinking that some of that awful blood might belong to a girl he thought he loved. An arm stopped him at the top of the steps. He recognised Colonel Luong of the South Vietnamese Third Corps, otherwise Laughing Larry Lung, so nicknamed on account of his nervous giggle while shooting prisoners. He was giggling now. ‘Hello, Mr Wilde — this is very bad thing!’

  ‘You were here when it happened?’

  ‘Oh no, I was across the street in the restaurant. They were trying to kill General Greene.’ He stood there in a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and drainpipe slacks, his rubber-soled sneakers sticky with blood.

  ‘What happened to Greene?’ said Murray.

  Laughing Larry twitched and began flicking his tiny wrist on which dangled a heavy silver identification disc. ‘General Greene not come, I think. He was late.’

  ‘So was I,’ Murray murmured. ‘Are you sure it was Greene they were after?’

  ‘He was to come here for lunch. These VC are pigs.’ He giggled again, beginning to sidle away past a naked torso of no definable sex from which a blue bubble of intestine shone dully in the sun. ‘Very bad here,’ Larry said again, smiling, and Murray started down the steps again.

  Had she been coming with Greene? he wondered, as another scream of sirens rose from the gates. A motorcade of black sedans with Vietnamese outriders bounced to a halt and American M.P.s sprang from the doors, coming to attention as a knot of officers converged on the shattered gates.

  General Virgil Luther Greene was a tall handsome man with grey eyes set deep in an oven-fresh suntan. But the tan was perhaps a shade paler than usual as he walked solemnly towards the steps up to the empty, blasted pool. It was not for nothing that General Greene had the reputation of being a ‘shooting general’: he had killed as many men — Huns, Huks, Koreans, Vietnamese — as almost any serving officer in the U.S. Armed Forces; he was a crack-shot and when his tank had been burned out in a village near Rome in 1944 he had drawn his twin Colt .45’s and dropped four SS men dead at his feet. These two Colts, with ivory handles, still adorned the belt of his plain Army fatigues. As he began to walk up the steps he was heard to mutter, in a loud Texan undertone, over and over again: ‘Oh my God! My Lord God in heaven!’

  There were no women present — besides a few dead or dying bathers lying flopped about on the wet concrete — and Virgil Greene stopped and breathed a good Texan obscenity. Then he saw Laughing Larry Lung, one of the few Vietnamese officers he respected, and they exchanged salutes. ‘They’re goin’ to pay for this, Colonel! You see they pay for it.’

  Larry giggled: ‘Sure thing, General!’

  Virgil Luther Greene nodded gravely and swung on his heel. Water from broken ducts was now mixing with the blood, washing down the steps and across the azure forecourt of the bar by the pool. Bodies were being carried out on stretchers, and Murray looked at each and saw that none was Jacqueline Conquest.

  The General now stopped at the edge of the empty pool and stood gazing down through the cracked concrete, while a young officer explained how the VC had laid the first charges — strips of plastique round the glass ceiling of the downstairs bar where the men could sit over their drinks and watch the girls swimming above. Most of the water had drained down into the wreckage of this bar and the ground was strewn with shards of green glass and blue-painted concrete. Murray knew that if she had decided to meet him down there, and not in the bar upstairs, the night in Luang Prabang would be a lost idyll, and he’d have to find someone else to push Virgil’s secret button.

  The General was standing a few yards away, contemplating the body of a plump middle-aged man in the corner of the pool. Murray went up and said bluntly, ‘Excuse me, General, your secretary — Mrs Jacqueline Conquest — is she all right?’

  The General’s fine grey eyes swivelled slowly in his head. ‘Jacky?’ he drawled.

  ‘I was meeting her here about the time the bombs went off.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  Murray told him and the General nodded thoughtfully. ‘Newspaperman, eh? Well, you get this straight, boy. Forget all the horse-crap about us scuttlin’ outta Veetnam and leavin’ it to these dirty little motherin’ Commie bitches! We’re stayin’, boy. We’re stayin’ for the duration!’

  ‘Your secretary,’ Murray said: ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘I guess so. I left her back at the office when the news came through. She did say something about a lunch date she’d had to cancel.’ He looked at Murray narrowly. ‘You the date?’

  Murray forced a tired grin. ‘Strictly business, General. As long as she didn’t turn up. Can I quote you on this atrocity?’

  ‘You sure can!’ And Murray was still scribbling awkwardly as the lithe little Vietnamese firemen, dressed in rubber diving suits, began to creep down into the flooded bar.

  Ten minutes later he was back at
the hotel, trying the Tiger exchange. She came on the line almost at once. ‘Ah Murray! Thank God, you’re alive!’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I tried to call you, twice. Someone phoned here — I don’t know who it was, but it sounded Vietnamese — and said if I was going to the Cercle, keep away. N’y allez pas, he said.’

  ‘At what time was this?’

  ‘About noon. I called at once.’

  ‘You called anyone else?’ He could see it all now: that dead white eye and crooked face muttering to the cyclo-driver, not daring to tell him personally not to go to the Cercle, but warning the girl anonymously after he’d heard himself that the charges had been planted… Murray wondered for a moment if he ought to go himself to the police — then recalled Ryderbeit’s maxim and thought better of it. This was not only a city at war — it was a city of ancient ritual crime, gangland intrigue, political skulduggery that might have nothing to do with the temporal struggle of the Free World against the forces of Marx and Mao.

  She said: ‘No one. I didn’t have time. And then I heard about the bomb. I was scared. Murray, who was it? Who phoned? What’s going on?’

  ‘Can you get away?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘At the hotel then. Downstairs at the bar — as soon as you can make it. I’ll be waiting.’

  He hung up, thinking: She had been in a state of shock the first time he had seduced her. She was in a state of mild shock now, and he’d seduce her a second time — cards on the table, their success in her hands — because if she were going to go along with them, it would have to be all or nothing.

  He ordered a bottle of 1961 Chablis to be put on ice and sent up to his room.

  PART 8: BAT INTO HELL

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘He won’t do it. He would never do it. I know him — it’s impossible for him.’ She had rolled over and was now splayed out like a star on the stripped bed. Her voice was slow, broken with thought. ‘He would never do anything that was illegal. He has a very respectable, orthodox outlook.’