The Tale of the Lazy Dog

by Alan Williams

  Only once, on a bend where Ryderbeit leaned out almost parallel with the road, and Murray found himself leaning the other way, did he catch a sudden glimpse of the speedometer. The needle was hovering just above the 200 km/h mark. The machine had been spotlessly clean when they left, he remembered: probably not even run in. It seemed incredible that Ryderbeit had not done this run before. But as a pilot he would have studied the large-scale ordnance maps and would have memorised every turn, every twist of the road. He had worked to a careful time-schedule too: to catch the evening traffic into Biên Hòa, without attracting undue attention, then breaking through the out-of-town curfew into darkness.

  They were coming into a town, a miserable clutch of hovels that was well on what the maps showed as the red line. Ryderbeit did not slacken his pace, although the road did. It suddenly swung round in a steep turn and seemed to stop. Shadows darted about among the huts. The Honda lurched, shrieked over on the edge of its tyres with a spray of sparks drifting up from the heel of Ryderbeit’s boot as he crouched forward, shoulders level with the handlebars.

  Murray only saw the roadblock as they were going through it. A ramshackle barricade of crates and sharpened bamboo staves arranged in a double row, overlapping with a narrow gap between the two. Ryderbeit took the gap like the finest professional rider, the machine swinging over, first one way, then the other, with a great squeal of rubber even above the roar of the engine. Small men in black with guns whipped past the corner of Murray’s eye. The bat swerved through, its front wheel almost leaving the ground as it leapt back up on to the broken camber of the disused French road, heading into the Highlands a few minutes later.

  They were out of the rainforest now and a last twilight remained across the hillscape ahead. Sound, blotted out by the total noise of the machine, had become irrelevant. In this sense the huge country before him seemed very quiet indeed. No Phantoms dived out of the sky: no rolling burst of orange napalm, followed by the slow sticky black smoke; no mushrooms of mortar smoke, smouldering fields, little whirring ‘choppers’ like dragonflies blinking death. Ahead, Route Nationale Dix-Sept wound like a ribbon of tinfoil up into folds of furry jungle, looping down again between long neat rows of rubber trees, broken by stretches of undergrowth — wild roots writhing on to the road, cracking the tarmac into a series of sharp, agonising bumps. Then miles of more trees, interrupted by the occasional shell of a house — derelict mansions that had once belonged to the French rubber barons, rising now at the end of overgrown drives like great hotels boarded up in the offseason.

  Insects whirled in the headlamp, growing sticky on Murray’s brow, beginning to gum up his eyelids. Birds and bats swept low across their path, leaping away into the shadows as they slowed into a bend. And now, with the coming of total darkness, they entered on the final fifty-kilometre burst up the road to An Loc. The road here was broad and straight and curiously unravaged, even by nature. The roots of undergrowth were gone, and the tarmac borders were cut sharp and firm with a faded yellow line on either side. A ghost road into the ghost town of An Lộc, once a bustling market-centre at the foot of the Southern Highlands, now a damp sprawl of rusting sheds, barracks and fortified towers, the remaining inhabitants living in little huts built from unrolled beer and Coca Cola cans — the excremental rubble of an industrial society left strewn about this remote and gentle province.

  Ryderbeit swung up on to a smaller, scrappier road — almost a dirt track where the dust flayed their faces raw. Murray glimpsed the time on his wrist. These last thirty miles had passed in just over eleven minutes. He had no chance to ask Ryderbeit their next destination — the mysterious place called Dong San, somewhere on the borders with Cambodia — although, from its position close to An Lộc, he guessed it to be near one of the infiltration routes, part of what is known as the Sihanouk Trail.

  Ahead, across the line of hills, the sky was now lit by dull flashes, soundless against the roar of the Honda, but too regular under the clear sky to be even a freak electrical storm. Either 155-howitzers, zapping everything that moved at a range of eight miles, or the B 52’s doing the same with their saturation sticks of H.E., from the same distance, only vertically.

  An hour ago Murray would have felt a kind of resigned anger at this grotesque spectacular — although it was not every journalist in Vietnam, let alone the war protesters back home, who had the chance to witness one of these monster airstrikes. Now, however, he felt a curious detached exhilaration, as though these man-made firestorms flaying the jungle-tops were merely part of the howling unreality of the ride — that they did not belong to the ordinary run of physical or emotional experience. If he had been told, in those last minutes before Dong San, that Ryderbeit was a demon driving into hell, he would not have entirely disbelieved it.

  It was not really a town at all — even less than An Loc. The trees thinned a little; there was a stream, a patch of dark rice paddy, a small lake with huts crouched along the edge. A solitary light winked at them from the porch of one of these huts. Ryderbeit swung the great machine on to the verge of the track, cut the throttle and they bumped to a halt. Murray climbed off, stiff and bandy-legged, into the sudden silence. He pulled down the neck of his sweater and stretched the muscles of his face, flexing his fingers which were curled stiff from gripping Ryderbeit’s leather suit.

  Two men — Vietnamese in flimsy black pyjama-costumes — appeared from the edge of the track. Both held Chinese AK 47 machine-pistols level with their hips. One of them flashed a torch into Ryderbeit’s face, muttered something, and the second walked round them both, frisking them professionally under the arms, round their waists and down their legs. He removed Murray’s passport without a word, putting it in a jacket pocket. The first man now led them along a slippery track towards the light.

  It was a single hurricane-lamp set on a table. A number of men, also in black pyjamas, sat on rush-matting round the walls. There was a thick cloying smell of smoke, paraffin and rotting fish. The lamplight seemed very strong. Murray stood for a few minutes, blinking through his bruised eyelids. Ryderbeit had stripped off his scarf and pushed his goggles up on to his forehead, peering quickly round the walls.

  ‘Friends of yours?’ Murray said softly.

  ‘Friends o’ friends.’ Ryderbeit took a step forward towards a wattle door, but one of the two guides motioned him back with his AK 47. They waited.

  ‘They look like Victor Charlies,’ Murray murmured. ‘Some sort of joke by old Pol?’

  ‘They’re members of the Cao Đài. Know ’em?’

  Murray nodded, with some surprise. In these days, when all the excitement was about escalation and phoney peace talks, one rarely heard any more of the Cao Đài, that legendary gangster-religious sect, who — along with the more notorious Bình Xuyên and the Hòa Hảo, both little more than licensed bandits — had long controlled what had then been Cochin-China, now South Vietnam. The Cao Đài, headed by warlords and its own self-appointed saints and prophets, had controlled most of Saigon’s gangsterdom and vice. It had also been closely connected with the long struggle against the French, even been allied with the Viet Minh themselves, and went on wielding enormous political power until President Ngo Dinh Diem finally suppressed them in the fifties.

  ‘How the hell did you get involved with them?’ he whispered.

  Ryderbeit grinned: ‘I was ordained last week, soldier. I’m one of their priests — one of the beholders of the Cao Đài — the Supreme All-Seeing Eye.’

  ‘It sounds wonderfully psychedelic,’ Murray said sourly, wondering if it could all be worth a brand new Honda and a ride through death to the edge of nowhere. Ryderbeit went on: ‘My non-Asian saints are Victor Hugo, Sir Winston Churchill and Joe Louis. All fully recognised spiritual leaders of the sect.’

  ‘And where does Charles Pol come in?’

  ‘He’s a priest too. Has been for some time. This is the contact, y’see?’

  Murray shook his head: ‘I don’t see, Sammy. You mean we’re now in allia
nce with the Cao Đài?’

  But before Ryderbeit could reply, the wattle door swung open and a very thin Vietnamese with a spine curved like a spoon came in bowing gracefully. ‘Messieurs!’ He motioned them through towards the door.

  It was a square windowless room, dark except for another oil lamp with the wick turned down so low that it was guttering. Two men sat on cushions on either side of a round table laid with small metal cups, a pointed teapot, and an array of rubber piping, needles and shallow bowls. There was also a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, almost full and stoppered.

  One of the two men was Pol, reclining Roman-style on a heap of cushions. ‘Salut Murray! Tout va bien?’

  Murray nodded, looking at the second man. It was hard to tell at first whether he were European or Asian. A pair of slit, pouched eyes peered up at him out of a face that looked like a contour-map of the Mekong Delta. He was dressed in a white silk suit and an expensive, discreet tie. Three points of a handkerchief peeped from his breast-pocket, just below the unmistakable rosette of the Legion of Honour.

  ‘Let me introduce Monsieur Banaji, my compatriot,’ Pol began. ‘Monsieur Banaji is a Vietnamese citizen, but is of French origin. He used to be one of the great racehorse owners of Saigon.’

  The shrivelled contours of M. Banaji’s face stretched into a smile: ‘Ah, that was in the old days,’ he murmured: ‘Before the Japanese came, when my horses were stolen or poisoned by my enemies. Please sit down.’

  Pol waved his hand at the whisky bottle: ‘Or perhaps you would like to smoke? The two do not mix though.’

  ‘I would advise you to smoke.’ Banaji’s voice was soft and bored, his face without expression. ‘The Cao Đài do not admit alcohol, except to their most honoured members.’

  Murray glanced at Pol and shrugged. ‘I’ll smoke,’ he said. Banaji now spoke to the Vietnamese who had showed them in, and who now knelt by the table and began the elaborate preparations for the pipe.

  ‘You have both arrived in excellent time,’ Banaji went on. ‘You travelled by what means?’

  Ryderbeit told him, and he nodded, without any apparent surprise. ‘There was a big raid tonight,’ he added, ‘just east of here. Perhaps you saw it? Their bombing is preposterous. There is nothing here but jungle and a few peasants. Twice a month now they bomb this region and there is never anything. Just one small hamlet. It is of no importance. Nothing in Vietnam is of any importance except the people. As the fish are to water. You have read your Mao?’

  ‘Some of it,’ said Murray. ‘Textbooks for schoolboy revolutionaries.’

  Pol chuckled from his nest of cushions. ‘Ah but he doesn’t write for sophisticates like us, my dear Murray!’

  Murray turned to Ryderbeit and said in English: ‘What is all this — a teach-in at the London School of Economics?’

  Ryderbeit grinned: ‘Have to take ’em in their stride, soldier. Just talk easy and gentle. They’ve been smokin’.’

  ‘Speak French, please,’ said Banaji. ‘We have no secrets here.’

  ‘Very well.’ The Vietnamese was teasing a tiny brown pellet of opium into the bowl of a rubber-tubed pipe, basting it with the flat end of one of the needles. ‘Why are we here, Monsieur Banaji?’ Murray said at last.

  ‘We must talk business.’

  He looked at Pol. ‘On whose terms?’

  ‘The terms must be mutually agreed,’ said Pol. ‘There should be no problem. My friend Banaji has close contacts with some of the most influential men in this part of South-East Asia. Even with a war on, my dear Murray, basic things do not change so very much.’

  Banaji spread out a pair of long chicken claws of hands. ‘The Japanese,’ he murmured, ‘the French, the Americans — it’s all the same thing. Foutus. Le Vietnam est foutu.’

  ‘You know what we have to offer?’ Murray asked him, and the Vietnamese passed Banaji the pipe, nimbly setting a flame to the bowl while the old Frenchman reached for the nozzle, his lips distending now like an oboe player’s, sucking deeply with a long rasping sound, ending in little crackles of spittle as he rested back on the cushions and let the smoke drift slowly, almost endlessly it seemed, in three streams from his nostrils and a small gap at the edge of his mouth.

  It was some time before he answered. ‘You have money for us, I think? A great deal of money. For a certain consideration I am prepared to ask friends of mine to help you dispose of this money. We have many methods and great experience. In Vietnam itself we are limited. There are patrols, the bombing, the Viet Cong and the Americans together — they make business very difficult. But outside Vietnam — in Laos, perhaps…’

  Murray looked again at Pol: ‘Have you discussed Cambodia?’

  ‘Cambodia is impossible,’ said Banaji. ‘It is too well controlled. As Pol here will tell you, Sihanouk has many problems — he plays too many games at once — to risk troubling the Americans more than is necessary.’ He passed the pipe suddenly to Murray. ‘But Laos is altogether another matter.’

  Before accepting the pipe, Murray turned again to Pol. ‘How much of the operation have you discussed, Charles?’

  ‘I have had to be frank, my dear Murray. As Monsieur Banaji says, we have no secrets here.’

  ‘He’d think me a damned fool if I blurted everything out on our first meeting.’

  ‘You confided in me. And in Sammy here.’

  ‘With you, Charles, there was no operation — just a nice fantasy by the walls of Angkor. But with Sammy and his third-degree approach I was hardly left much option. And what does Monsieur Banaji mean by a consideration?’

  ‘Why not ask him?’

  Murray asked him.

  ‘Thirty million American dollars, Monsieur Wilde.’

  Murray lifted the nozzle to his lips, nodding to the Vietnamese who put a light to the opium, and he inhaled carefully, watching the little brown kernel bubbling in the bowl, drawing the sweet smoke down past his lungs into his belly, holding his breath now like a deep-sea diver as he passed the pipe sideways to Ryderbeit who was already crouching forward, both hands eager.

  ‘Thirty million,’ he said slowly, ‘is a fortune. It is ridiculous.’

  Banaji did not move. ‘No more ridiculous than the operation you have proposed, Monsieur Wilde.’

  ‘I have proposed no operation, Monsieur Banaji. Everything that has happened here has been by arrangement with Charles Pol and Sammy here. I am no party to it.’

  ‘Without my help you can do nothing, Monsieur Wilde. What use is your own share of this fortune unless you can transport it to a safe place?’

  ‘Let’s get one thing quite straight,’ Murray said, relaxing a little with the quietening effect of the smoke. ‘Pol has informed you of our proposed operation. This may succeed or it may not. If it does succeed we are to hand over to you thirty million dollars. Is that correct?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Banaji.

  ‘We pay you in cash on some mountain-top in Laos?’

  ‘Or an airfield, Monsieur Wilde. It is all understood and arranged. Your own plan — the plan you have devised yourself — has many intelligent qualities. I congratulate you on the details. If I have understood Charles correctly, you are to walk on to Saigon’s airfield dressed as military policemen, and will then take charge of a plane carrying one and a half billion American dollars. You will fly it out of Vietnam and land it on an unfinished barrage just north of Vientiane, where the necessary equipment exists to move the money out and load it into sacks of rice. These will then be transported down to Vientiane’s Wattay Airfield, where they will be loaded aboard a plane belonging to the Air U.S.A. line. Am I right so far?’ Murray nodded. ‘Only the pilots,’ Banaji went on, ‘will not be from Air U.S.A.’

  He held up his hand to interrupt Murray: ‘No please! From now on you will follow my own plans, or you will make your own arrangements. The pilots will be substitutes provided by myself — by my friends. They will fly you to an airport of our choosing in northern Laos where the money will be unloaded and the
plane destroyed. Shortly before this a mayday signal will be sent on the plane’s frequency, indicating that you have serious engine trouble.’ He bent forward to accept the pipe once again. (Pol, Murray noticed, was sipping Scotch from one of the metal teacups; clearly he passed as one of the honoured members of the Cao Đài?) M. Banaji breathed out his last gasp of smoke and pushed the pipe to Murray.

  ‘The final distress signal,’ he continued, ‘will be sent on a false frequency, indicating that the plane is preparing to make a forced landing on an airfield about two hundred kilometres to the west. Vientiane Control will receive no further messages. This, we calculate, should give us at least three hours to exchange the cargo.’

  He paused, and Murray’s pipe bubbled in the silence. Monsieur Banaji did not sound a fool.

  ‘You must understand, however, that from this moment the cargo will have to be conveyed by the hands of my friends? They are men of professional experience. The money will be transported from Laos to India. You will each of you be paid at a slightly later date — I do not anticipate more than two months — in either gold or any foreign currency you desire. The transaction will be perfectly honourable.’

  ‘Why?’

  Banaji’s eyes were sunk deep in his wrinkled, ruined face. ‘Because for this amount of money it would be foolish to be anything that was not honourable, Monsieur Wilde. On the airfield we shall take out thirty million dollars. That will be sufficient for ourselves and the porters.’

  Murray began to laugh: ‘And the rest? You know how much the rest is?’

  ‘They don’t want to know.’ It was Pol who spoke, with his impish smile: ‘It would make them unhappy — greedy — they would not know how to digest such a sum.’

  Murray nodded: ‘So they just help themselves to thirty million dollars — in bundles of Centuries, I suppose — leaving us with the rest?’

  Pol’s smile grew wistful: ‘Isn’t it enough?’

  ‘It’s enough, if that’s all they want. But how do we know that’s all they want?’