Play the Red Queen

by Juris Jurjevics

  “A story. She wants to be a journalist.”

  “Ah,” Seftas said. “Or at least that’s her story.”

  “See? I ought to at least run it by my captain.”

  He shook a finger at me. “You’re not listening. Way too tempting for the security freaks. They’ll jump on you for the exercise, blow it all out of proportion.”

  “Shit. They’ll jam me up for falling into a honeypot.”

  “It’s not like your cop notes contain earthshaking military secrets. You’ll get yourself fucked up for nothing.”

  “You got a point, Sef. Never happened.” I saluted him with tamarind juice, hoping he was right. After last night, it was a chance I was willing to take.

  Sometime in the night a cruise ship with a huge seahorse logo on its funnel had tied up at the mooring across from the hotel for a two-day port call. Passengers crowded the gangway, cautiously disembarking for a little war tourism. Toward evening they’d drift back, wearing peasant hats and black pajama tops, the wives carting vases made from fired artillery shells. Shiny drilled-out bullets strung on lanyards would drape their husbands’ necks, souvenirs that would cost them a hundred and forty piasters apiece—one dollar, a day’s pay for a local.

  Seftas pushed back his chair and stood up. “I look okay?”

  “Absolutely STRAC, Lieutenant.” Strategic, Tough, Ready Around the Clock!

  He raised a victory fist. “Where you headed today?”

  “Graves Registration out at Tan Son Nhut.”

  “Need a lift?”

  “Thanks, but I got a chore to take care of first,” I said, and headed downstairs to the fourth floor to rap on McClutchen’s door.

  McClutchen’s day job was constructing reinforced concrete revetments that protected parked aircraft. Evenings he hosted high-stakes card games catered with first-class dope and booze.

  “It’s me, Miser,” I said loudly.

  A crack opened. I stepped inside to warn McClutchen that word on the street was that the Corsicans intended to put him out of business in a very permanent way.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” he muttered, groggy and still a bit stoned. “Man, I gotta sky outta here. Put some miles between me and them mafia motherfuckers.”

  He couldn’t stop thanking me as he threw his stuff into a B-4 bag. Going around the room with a brown plastic tote, he pulled his stash from its various hiding places: a four-pound bag of fine Cambodian Red, some hash, skag, amyl nitrate poppers, red pills, blue pills, and wads of the little aluminum foil packets of French downers sold at every Saigon pharmacy. The tote would be easy to ditch if necessary. In the meantime, it was currency.

  He laid half a kilo of pure Laotian horse on me and a sealed carton of Park Lane cigarettes filled with tobacco marinated in opium. I wished him luck and let myself out. Downstairs, I left the cigs and the smack with my favorite bellman to put in the safe. He informed me Robeson had left word I should fetch him out by Tan Son Nhut, where he’d gone in the wee hours for some late-night loving.

  I snagged one of the small blue-and-cream Renault cabs at the front door but was immediately sorry when I had to sit with my feet on either side of a sizeable hole in its badly rusted floor as the pavement sped by beneath me. Before picking up Robeson, I stopped at the Army Procurement office for a consult with Sergeant Major Pamelle. Better to do that alone, as sweet, down-home “Pammy” didn’t exactly care for black soldiers, especially ones making rank fast for hazardous duty. I’d seen Pammy turn surly and snake-eyed at the mention of the civil-rights struggles back in the States.

  Pamelle was in the last months of his final enlistment, about to retire after thirty years. He sat at his steel desk, pencils knife-sharp and forms at the ready, his heavy white coffee mug filled with diesel. Miss October reclined on the bulletin board behind him, big Xs marking off the days.

  The linoleum was buffed, the shelves empty—dusted every hour from the look of them. The only personal item was the framed presentation pistol he had won a few years back in the Army’s annual All-Pacific competition. The sarge knew his guns.

  “Counting down, Sergeant Major?”

  “Seventy-six more sunsets and a wake up. How the hell are ya?”

  I told him I was hoping he might help identify our shooter’s unusual weapon. He nodded as I read him the notes. Right off he said, “It’s a Vis Radom.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Pistol manufactured in Radom, Poland, for their army officers.”

  He pulled a book out of his drawer and flipped it open to a weapon that sure looked like a .45 automatic in silhouette.

  “Single action, nine-millimeter. Seven rounds to the magazine. Low muzzle blast. The Wehrmacht took ’em off captured Polish officers and traded or sold them to Luftwaffe pilots. The kraut flyboys liked ’em. Carved their own grips out of trashed cockpit windshields.”

  “Meaning they’re clear?”

  “The grips? Yeah, yeah. Kinda pale yellow.”

  “Any of these Radoms ever forty-five caliber?”

  “Some, yeah.”

  “A good piece?”

  “Yup. Lots of velocity. Real accurate and stable. Tear ya right up.”

  He handed me the book so I could take a closer look. I pointed to a black-and-white photo of a German pilot leaning against a dive-bomber, showing off his Iron Cross. “What’s with the picture?”

  “The Krauts slid ’em under the grips. I seen some with snapshots of sweethearts in one-piece bathing suits or starlets flashin’ their gams. Most GIs who got hold of Radoms left the Nazi pictures in place.”

  I handed back the book. “Thanks, Sergeant Major.”

  “Anytime, chief. So, is the scuttlebutt true? She hit ’im from the back of a moving motorcycle fifteen feet out?”

  “It was a goddamn motor scooter and more like thirty feet.”

  “Whoa. That’s some fancy marksmanship.”

  “Takes down each target with a single shot.”

  “Fucking Calamity Jane.” He gave me a wary look and nodded toward the black steel revolver holstered on my hip. “I see you’re still totin’ that heavy Japanese .38.”

  “I like my Miroku.”

  “Don’t go to anythin’ smaller, y’hear me? Or you’ll think you’re packin’ a pellet gun when you get into it with her. Me, I’d get a damn Magnum.”

  Amazingly, the rusted-out hack had waited for me. I retrieved Robeson where he’d shacked up in Soul Alley with the Malaysian beauty who loved him only for himself and two dollars, plus a little extra for her poor mama’s tuberculosis treatments.

  “Jesus,” he said, straddling the holes.

  “You got a problem?”

  “It ain’t got no floor.”

  “No shocks either, from what I can tell.”

  “You see the plate number on this wreck?” he said, his voice rising to falsetto. “Z666.”

  “Maybe it’s an omen. A warning not to be disrespecting Missy.” I glanced over at him. “You on the outs with Miss Blue?”

  “Sweetness was indisposed,” Robeson said. “Besides, you’re to blame for keeping me awake with all that caterwaulin’. That love racket got me so stoked I couldn’t sleep. Took forever going through all the checkpoints after curfew. Was damn sure worth the bother, though.”

  “Soon as we get to the office, I’m going to tell Missy you’ve been stepping out on her. Maybe she’ll finally come round to appreciating my charms.”

  “You best not tamper with her affections if you don’t want to disappear out the bottom of this cab. She’s still my yobo.”

  Graves Registration was a ten-man tent abutting a Quonset hut on the military side of the airfield. A refrigerator truck piped in cold air to keep the heavy heat from the plain wood coffin sitting on sawhorses. The Specialist-5 who had prepped and processed Furth said, “He’s good to go,” and
asked if we wanted to see the body. We said no but he un-bagged the major anyway so we could admire his handiwork. “Stitched him perfect,” he bragged.

  Future funeral director Robeson was unimpressed. Major Furth looked a little ashen against the white shroud he’d travel in. Stateside, the cheeks would get colored pink and he’d get fitted for a perfect green uniform, the medals and insignia exact.

  “Thanks, Specialist,” I said. “You can wrap him back up.”

  A corporal brought us Furth’s personal effects to voucher. We spread them across the top of his pine box. Wallet, immunization card. Gold wedding ring, Esterbrook fountain pen, Seiko wristwatch, and a large framed photograph of the family with both sets of grandparents.

  Robeson held up a college ring. “University of Chicago, class of forty-five.”

  A footlocker and duffel held his uniforms, fatigues, an Emerson transistor radio, two cartons of Marlboros, boots, dress shoes stuffed with rolled socks, underwear, stationery, saved letters, and one mink hat bought at the base exchange, most likely a Christmas present for the wife. A hardcover book about economics, two paperback novels, a 35-millimeter Konica. No film in the camera, no notes in the margins of the books.

  The wallet picture of the parachutist was there but the photo of the major with the Vietnamese girl was gone. No condom either, just the circular impression in the worn leather. I took off my dog tags, removed my lucky grenade-pin ring from the chain, and slipped it into the raised circle. Close enough. Robeson returned everything to the personal effects bag and signed the form releasing the major’s possessions.

  A sweating honor guard led the pallbearers who slow-marched the pine box onto the tarmac, halting long enough for a Vietnamese military delegation to place a wreath of red and yellow flowers atop the American flag covering the coffin. The honor guard saluted as their five-piece Air Force band played a dirge. A pair of mechanics on the flight line and a passing courier stopped work to give a hand salute.

  Robeson and I went to get the wound-and-ballistics report. The doc presented us with an envelope containing the slug he’d removed. I tipped it into my palm.

  “The hollow tip mushroomed as it spun,” the doctor said. “Bullet increased size to a much larger caliber by the time it punched its way in.” He slid his glasses to the top of his head. “Brutal wound.”

  “How much bigger a caliber?”

  “Maybe sixty.”

  Standing on end, the deformed bullet looked like a miniature soufflé, discolored by the explosion that blasted it out of the muzzle.

  “Hollow point, you say.”

  “Yep, with a concave puckered tip. Soft as a lover’s kiss. Hit him like a train.”

  “Damn illegal ammo,” Robeson said, indignant.

  The doc frowned. “Nobody here’s paying any mind to such niceties, son. Not them with their souped-up bullets and nail bombs, or punji-stick booby traps laced with feces. Not us with our phosphorous artillery rounds and napalm. Same-same.”

  The man was right. No whistle, no foul. The Viet Cong wanted us gone, just like the French colonials who’d stomped their dicks for a hundred damn years until Ho Chi Minh’s army returned the favor in ’54. The French had conceded the north. Now Uncle Ho wanted Uncle Sam gone from the south and the two halves rejoined, as had been agreed. Sounded simple.

  We had to wait for a tandem of electric carts to pass, each carrying a ten-foot-long napalm canister to the flight line, burn in hell chalked along the flanks of both pods. Toasting at thirty-six hundred degrees, the canisters would certainly crackle and pop like they were in Hades. Our new war toys would be rolled out and tested, young officers blooded, the dinks saved from Communism. Easy as pie if they’d only let us bring in American combat units to sweep away the Commie infestation so the Vietnamese army could get back to fucking off.

  Chapter Seven

  The VC defector, Tam, was waiting to be questioned in Da Nang. It took the better part of the morning to cadge a flight on a noisy single-engine, six-seater STOL that took us up the coast, riding the thermals like a gull.

  Below us, winter monsoon clouds poured out of mountain passes in a thick foam of black rain squalls. Our bright silver plane banked across the dark sky. My knee ached. Eighty-four miles south of the demilitarized border between North and South Viet Nam, we descended through the cloud layer to emerge over Da Nang City. Dredgers huffed smoke as we circled over the water in a slow spiral to sweep across Red Beach, the long wide curve of sandy shoreline split by the mouth of the Tourane River where it emptied into the bay.

  Along the river’s western bank stretched the city’s wide streets and yellow houses topped by orange-tiled roofs. The eastern bank of the river continued, forming the flank of a peninsula that ended in a misshapen knob of land atop which hunched Monkey Mountain, home to the American air-traffic center. As we circled lower, government buildings, wooden barracks, and shacks with sheet-metal roofs sped by under our wings. Checkpoints bulged with layers of sandbags. We swooped over parked Vietnamese war planes and US Army helicopters, above bulldozers and backhoes lengthening runways, and finally touched down real gentle, coming to an immediate stop. The STOL could’ve set down in a backyard.

  Despite the rain, Americans housed in the helicopter detachment at the edge of the flight line were cooking hotdogs and hamburgers on a smoky grill made from a fifty-five-gallon drum. A buck sergeant worked the tongs while an E-7 held an umbrella over him. With their birds grounded by weather, the younger soldiers were playing football. The quarterback spiraled a sharp pass into the extended arms of a soldier who dove to catch it and slid through the muck, whooping like a banshee.

  A crew chief took pity on our sodden selves and offered dogs and burgers under their tarp. We gulped a hotdog each and accepted a short lift in their jeep to the Marine detention point, where we stepped into ankle-deep mud. A platoon of GIs was unspooling concertina wire around the outside of a freshly laid minefield in a section of the perimeter. A large, crudely lettered placard planted among the explosives read don’t feed the animals. Dripping wet and innocent as angels, soldiers smirked as their lieutenant raged at their prank, far too dangerous now to undo.

  A corpsman pointed us toward a plywood-sided structure topped with corrugated metal. The rain surged as we jogged into the rickety building, ignoring the posted instructions to clear our weapons in a barrel half-filled with drowned sand. Inside, two Marines in utilities and an Air Force MP in khakis worked diligently at desks facing into the spartan room. In the center, a holding cell made of cyclone fencing was empty. No Tam.

  The Air Force MP said Rallier 57412 had been claimed by a detail of Vietnamese in military fatigues bearing a lot of official paper filled out in their native language. He showed us the stack of forms and apologized for the stains. “Fucking humidity’s already rusted the fucking staples. The Marines on duty couldn’t read them, and our translator wasn’t around. The gestures came through loud and clear, though, so they handed him over.”

  This handover to Vietnamese military cops was odd. “Any chance the combat police were taking Tam to the Open Arms halfway house?” I wanted to know. The brand-new Open Arms program offered VC the chance to defect without penalty. Commie deserters like Tam were supposed to go directly to special low-security halfway houses where they’d get daily volleyball games and sympathetic talks on fitting back into South Vietnamese society.

  The MP shrugged and gave us the use of their phone. But the local Chieu Hoi turncoat center had never heard of Tam or anybody designated 57412. Robeson cranked the phone again and called the ARVN field-police stockade, where the commanding officer claimed to know nothing either. Robeson tossed in some Vietnamese phrases to impress upon him our need to locate the man, but he’d already hung up.

  A sudden burst of rain drummed the roof. The jarheads broke out some bourbon with warm cherry soda chaser to counter the damp. The combo tasted like mouthwash. While Robeson tri
ed to find anything useful in the papers the MP had handed us, I nosed around and spotted a container of Sealtest frozen concentrated milk. Neither of us had seen nearly real milk in a while and happily downed a cup each.

  The Marines’ interpreter arrived and confirmed Robeson’s assessment that the stack of rusty paper might as well have been last week’s Stars and Stripes for all the good it would do us. Plenty of official language saying they were taking charge of the prisoner. Zero about what they planned to do with him. We asked the interpreter to phone the field police lieutenant who’d taken Tam away. After a heated exchange, he finally ferreted out the information that a man who might perhaps have been 57412 had been transferred, again—taken this time by four national policemen.

  “Transferred fucking where?” I said.

  “To National Police station,” the interpreter said, ear to the phone, “on way to prison.”

  The Saigon government didn’t always recognize VC guerillas as legitimate soldiers. In the eyes of the South Vietnamese, neither the laws of war nor the Geneva Convention applied to captured Viet Cong. Legal niceties aside, the Viet Cong didn’t take prisoners much either. Which meant most ARVN troops had lost someone to the Communists. With those scores to settle, they were known to take vengeance on any available VC POW. If they survived interrogation, the VC were interned in camps or stuck in one of Brother Nhu’s prisons. But our guy Tam hadn’t been captured. He’d quit, voluntarily surrendered to Americans. Number 57412 was a Viet Cong turncoat, not a prisoner of war. He should’ve been treated well, not hauled away to some hellhole.

  But which hellhole? One of the forty-four official prisons we knew about that were scattered around the country? No way to know how many more were unmarked on our maps. All of them squalid, overflowing with Diem’s own citizens who hadn’t loved their president enough.

  With the interpreter’s help, I called the Da Nang Military Interrogation Center, a notorious local clink. No sign of Tam there either.

  “This don’t make a damn lotta sense,” one of the Marines said. “Whaddya think got the guy jammed up?”