Play the Red Queen

by Juris Jurjevics

  “Thanks, doll. ‘Animal answer my scream,’” Robeson repeated. “What would howl back at him? Another prisoner being tortured? Jungle monkeys? Squealing pigs? Maybe he’s being held in a slaughterhouse. What’s the closest SEPES shithole?”

  I turned to Missy Blue. “You ever hear of P-42?”

  “You no go,” Blue snapped.

  “So it’s a real place?”

  “No go,” Blue repeated.

  Robeson glanced at her. “Go where?”

  “A little out-of-the-way spa run by Nhu’s party police,” I said. “Supposedly somewhere underground in the Saigon zoo.”

  “I thought that was made-up bullshit, like the Pacific island where GIs with super serious venereal diseases get sent to watch their dicks fall off and die.”

  “It real,” Blue said. “You no go.”

  Robeson looked at her with concern, then back at me. “How do we do this? The only credential we got is from the National Police—standard-issue paper in three languages saying they should treat us kindly, let us pass checkpoints after curfew, and not interfere in our work. We can’t just sashay up to the door of some slope stalag and politely demand to parlay with a prisoner being worked over in their dungeon.”

  “It worked in Da Nang.”

  “These SEPES boys don’t sound like Da Nang night-watch yokels. And we don’t have enough Vietnamese between us.”

  I turned to Blue. “Missy, would you—”

  She looked terrified but slouched toward the door.

  Robeson didn’t look happy either. “If Tam’s been here in Saigon this whole time,” he muttered to me, “we didn’t need to go to Con Son. That sentry’d still be alive instead of patrolling through my dreams.”

  “Us unfortune,” Missy said, clutching herself like a mourner.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I forewarned Captain Deckle’s clerk about where we were headed and what we might have to do if SEPES took exception to us invading their turf.

  We signed out two flashlights big as clubs and swapped our .38s for .45s—more bang, more bullets. We filled extra magazines, then set off in the open jeep, Robeson at the wheel, Miss Blue alongside. Clovis took us straight up Catinat to the cathedral and hung a right, heading northeast on the broad Thong Nhat Boulevard. A half mile later we were at the gate of the high iron fence that surrounded the Jardin Zoologique et Botanique.

  Six cents’ worth of coins bought the three of us admission to the grounds. We strolled toward the zoo, trying to look casual. With four pounds of warm gun up against the crack of my sweaty ass, I felt anything but. I just hoped the .45 wouldn’t take my pants to the ground during a confrontation.

  Blue took the lead. We followed a horde of schoolchildren and their escorts, Vietnamese women in Western dresses and teachers in raspberry ao dais. The path took us past a gazebo, a long stone dragon, and some boys diving off a wooden footbridge into a pond filled with swans.

  A wedding party passed, the bride in red, heading toward a grove of red Japanese maples. Blue and the other Vietnamese visitors stood still, not moving a muscle or speaking. Blue looked worried.

  “What’s wrong, Sweetness?” Robeson said.

  “Cross path wedding people bad luck.”

  Robeson laughed. “That’s all we need.”

  When the wedding party was finally out of sight, we continued through immaculate gardens with wood follies, cactuses and bonsai trees, reflecting pools of lilies and lotus blossoms, trestles covered with flowering vines, shrubs sculpted in the shapes of wild animals. Birds dozed in cages decorated with wrought-iron curlicues and bunches of grapes. Kids ran around the zoo tempting the captives with sugarcane.

  Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

  We circled a sunken enclosure for black bears, ducked a python knotting itself in a tree, and came to a large fenced-in area of gibbering red-assed monkeys. How were we supposed to find a hidden clink in all these acres? It’s not like signs pointed This Way to the Dungeons.

  “Animals answered his screams,” I said. “Gibbons? Macaws?”

  Robeson shrugged. “Could be any critter short of a snake.”

  “Big cat,” Blue interjected, so confidently I wondered if she already knew.

  She pointed to the tigers staring up at us from a large open-air enclosure below grade. One tiger was napping in the water of a large pool, his head resting on a dry rock. A huge turtle slunk along the bank. Other tigers lounged deep inside a cage at ground level. A handful of visitors stood watching one of the cats pace back and forth along its bars. Pausing, it peed in their direction. A young girl shrieked. The rest of the visitors laughed. Ignoring the puny humans, the huge creature resumed its prowling.

  Robeson pointed with his chin toward a French-era building set in a grove of casuarina trees loaded with green flowers spiky as pinecones.

  “You think there’s a back way out of there?”

  “Probably,” I said. “Why?”

  “Take a look at those guys stepping real lively like they got a serious destination. They sure don’t look like no zookeepers to me.”

  Both men entering the building wore aviator sunglasses. One had on a jacket of thin Italian leather, the insane gestapo look Vietnamese special-branch policemen favored even in the heat. I looked at Blue. She nodded. Me and Robeson touched the extra magazines in our pockets to make sure they faced the right way for quick reloading.

  “We stroll in that same door, real brazen,” I said. Once inside, we slunk along a corridor that led straight back to a guard wearing a shoulder holster and sitting at a crude desk. He didn’t look like an animal lover, any more than the guys we’d seen coming in.

  In a shrewish voice I’d never heard before, Missy Blue announced we were there to interrogate Prisoner Tam. We held up our credentials. The guard popped to his feet and called out. Armed men appeared, Sten guns at the ready. One reached out a hand to frisk Robeson, who slapped it away.

  Missy brashly kept talking. Robeson muttered under his breath to give me the gist: Missy was insisting we had clearance to question the prisoner. She pointed at me and said I had been sent this memorandum from the Personalist Party. On her cue, I casually flashed the SEPES interrogation report, pointing to the official signatures, which clearly startled him. Missy bluffed good.

  A captain in a red beret stormed toward us, swagger stick under his arm. He read out the prisoner’s name and number from the memo and announced to Blue that the man was no longer available for interview. No, he had not been moved elsewhere. He was dead.

  “Oh hell,” Robeson groaned. “Dead again?”

  Blue insisted we would need to confirm this for our superiors. The officer gave a nod. Robeson shot me a look that said this was too easy. He was right. I got the distinct feeling they knew we were coming.

  The guard manning the desk led us down a steep set of stairs into an airless underground labyrinth. The farther we went into the maze of passages the hotter it got. We smelled them before we saw them, packed solid in sweltering cells: men penned like chickens, jammed so tight they couldn’t possibly all lie down or sit at the same time. They hadn’t bathed in weeks or even months. Their latrine boxes smelled like they hadn’t been emptied in days. Half-naked prisoners in tattered underwear stared blankly, lowing like cows as we passed. Some squatted with their wrists shackled to their ankles and then to a rod in the floor. The ones closest to the bars fanned stale air to others farther back. The fingernails on the hands that reached out to us were missing or black. Gagging at the stench, we went by like tourists in hell, not wanting to see, unable to look away.

  Robeson said, “Tell me we’re gonna get outta here as easy as we got in, bro.”

  “Oh, now you come with the ‘bro.’”

  “Damn, Ellsworth.” Robeson’s voice was hoarse. “Your leadership ain’t inspirin’ confidence.”

  “No way t
hey’re keeping us here—bro.”

  A crude sign outside a dim room read La Morgue. The guard urged us to enter and like fools we did. Two bare bulbs hung above a row of draped bodies laid on packing crates almost the size of caskets. A fan barely disturbed the air. Something skittered behind the crates as we approached: a large bug or a small rat. The corpses were ripe, their decomposition accelerated by the tropical heat trapped underground. I lifted the sheet off the first body. It was not uncommon for the lips of the deceased to be cosmetically sealed to spruce up a corpse. But this guy’s lips had been sewn shut while he was alive. I dropped the sheet. It was hard to think straight with demons leering from the shadows.

  A civilian in a soiled white coat and apron entered behind us and introduced himself.

  “He doctor for dead,” Blue said through the hanky she held to her face.

  “Ask him which is Tam.”

  The doc consulted his notebook and led us to the farthest body. He delicately pulled back the sheet from the face and torso.

  “Trời ơi,” Blue gasped, her voice coarse with shock.

  “God in Heaven,” Robeson croaked.

  Was it even Tam? I held up my flashlight while Robeson compared the pulp of the formerly human face to the Polaroid snapshot the Psy Ops captain had taken in Da Nang.

  “Whaddya think?” I said, mopping stinging sweat from my eyes.

  Robeson squinted. “He’s beyond fucked up.”

  “He Tam,” Blue said, peering from behind her man.

  How could she tell? The bludgeoned face was swollen and clenched, mutilated beyond reason. He had bitten through his lip in two places.

  “Maybe you should turn away now,” I said to Missy.

  She didn’t. I pulled aside the rest of the sheet, exposing welts and cuts and huge bruises all over his scarred flesh, strips of which were missing. Fluid and pink blood leached from everywhere. Most of his major bones looked broken. Bulges and discoloration covered him all over, even his dick, which stood erect and huge. It was red, yellow, black, purple, blue. He had been ripped up, taken apart, the mechanism completely undone. Pieces of him were destroyed or missing altogether. No way he could ever have been put back in working order.

  “I seen a lot of nasty cadavers in my day,” Robeson said, “including a boy roasted to death inside burning tires.” Sweat dripped from his face, his arms. “Never seen nobody this wrecked.”

  Dread washed over me. No way were we going to let ourselves be detained in this hell. If we were challenged, it would be on.

  The doc spoke again. Blue listened closely and interpreted politely, like we were at a diplomatic function.

  “Doctor say family come on bus today, from Tuy Hòa. Collect body. He say prisoner die from beating.” The doc nattered again. “Die of other prisoner beating.”

  “Ask him why the . . .”—I pointed—“the member is so large and hemorrhaged.”

  The coroner looked uncomfortable as she put my question to him. He said something, smiling broadly, and left the room.

  “Let me guess,” I said, “he remembered pressing business elsewhere?” Blue nodded.

  Robeson said, “You okay, Miss Blue?” She looked gray, holding her hands tightly in front of her.

  “Dây thần kinh run rẩy,” she whispered. “Shake nerve.”

  Robeson took out his big pistol. He swayed from foot to foot and pointed it toward the man’s privates. “That . . . that just ain’t right.”

  I shone my flashlight where he was pointing. Something stuck out of the man’s dick, glistening.

  Robeson leaned closer. “Glass. Looks like glass,” he said, voice gravelly. “A catheter?”

  “What?” I snapped. “They fucking embalm him through his johnson?”

  Robeson breathed heavily, his mouth open. “It’s solid. A glass rod.”

  “Why in the hell’d they shove that in him?” I said.

  “To get everything out of him.”

  “Nobody knows everything.”

  “The man must’ve wished he did,” Robeson said, “when they snapped the rod.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Except for the penned-up prisoners, no one was around to wish us a fond farewell from Hades until we got to the top of the stairs. An armed party of six men and their leader had gathered by the duty desk, blocking the exit. Robeson made a noisy show of racking a round. I followed suit and we marched straight at ’em like they weren’t there. Blue seemed to be mumbling a prayer as she trailed behind us.

  Twenty steps from the not-so-secret policemen of the Personalist Party’s finest, she started making terrifying moans. As we turned to look, she took the gold ring from her finger and threw it at the wall, keening like a banshee.

  “So many,” she cried out, hysterical.

  “Many?” Robeson asked, perplexed. “Many what?”

  “Ma đói! Ma đói!” She continued in fast, howling Vietnamese. I looked at Robeson.

  “She’s talkin’ about hungry ghosts.”

  Blue pleaded with the unhappy spirits. Wrestling her purse open, she threw a handful of coins toward the wall, and another. Coins flew and bounced everywhere.

  Every Vietnamese feared wandering souls. The cops yammered rapidly to one another and backed away. Blue laid into them, screeching. They started pulling loose bills from their trouser pockets and tossing them in the direction of the wall. Their leader shouted angrily, but two of the cops turned and bolted for the door, quickly followed by the other four, everyone but the leader. The door banged behind them.

  Blue gasped and moaned louder. The boss walked, as slowly as he dared, out to the daylight after his men.

  I bent to retrieve Blue’s gold ring and coins.

  “No, no,” she called out, her voice shaky. “Better you leave.”

  The three of us emerged into the heat of the most beautiful ever-lovin’ day I’d ever seen. Robeson held his arm tightly around Missy’s waist. “You totally saved our bacon.”

  She looked confused, but leaned into his embrace.

  As we passed the jittery SEPES creeps, Robeson grinned. “Go piss up a rope, pig swill,” he said, with a rictus smile.

  We informed Captain Deckle that it looked like we were never going to learn what else Tam had told his interrogators.

  “Was there anything useful in the interrogation report?” Deckle demanded.

  I tried to run through it in my head, barely able to think after what we’d seen.

  “Maybe one thing,” Robeson said.

  “Yeah? What?” Deckle looked hopeful.

  “Tam says he was assigned to her second team in Saigon. And then he says he was the replacement for one of her three go-betweens.”

  “Christ,” I said, catching Robeson’s drift. “We should have suspected.”

  “Suspected what?” Deckle said.

  “The size of her operation. She kills three—four, counting General Lang—in what, less than two weeks? Tam said the legwork for just one premeditated killing took his discipline committee weeks. She managed four in half the time his group took to execute one traitor. How? Because it’s three separate teams, not one team rotating roles. She don’t have to rotate nobody.”

  “Damn,” Deckle blurted. “We’re thinking we have to identify which Old Fox she’s going after. She could be prepping to take out both—and lining up on a third.” Which could easily be me.

  I shook my head at the scope of what we were facing. “Three death squads, three different cells, each one walled off from the other two. Each team sets up its own target. When they have the person, the place and the time, she activates that group, has herself delivered to the scene at the precise moment.”

  Robeson whistled. “Twenty years old and coordinating three assassination committees?”

  I leaned on Captain Deckle for extra agents, arguing that she had
way more people prepping her targets than we had hunting for her. And if Lodge was next, his existing security wasn’t worth shit. We needed help guarding him if the ambassador was going to stay in one piece while me and Robeson were chasing her down. Plus a man to spare to get up to Tay Ninh.

  “All right, point taken.” Deckle folded and put out the word to three good investigators in Nha Trang to drop everything and report to CID in Saigon.

  I swapped the .45 for my holstered .38 while Corporal Magid briefed us on the personal information he’d been able to gather about the first two murdered MAAG officers. Like Furth, both had recently been seen in the company of demure local women. Nothing definite. But I couldn’t help wondering if, far from remaining hidden until the moment of attack, the Red Queen was moving anonymously aboveground, personally taking the measure of her victims, charming them, maybe even bedding them, as she made ready for their murders. Had she made them all come to her?

  If that had been her play with the three MAAG officers and General Lang, it wouldn’t get her anywhere with Cabot Lodge or celibate Diem, whose personal life was a zero; the only girl he’d ever wooed had signed on with a religious order and taken vows. A Bible was all that sorry soul ever curled up with. Diem only had eyes for the Virgin Mary and Lodge only for his wife. Neither one was a womanizer. She’d need a different tactic.

  Robeson and I were too quaky to sit around the office listening to the captain stoke himself up to convey our revised assessment of the Red Queen’s reach upstairs to Major Asshole. Missy Blue, Robeson and I went back to the Majestic. They disappeared into his room and I called up to Nadja’s. Happily, she had retreated from her office when their air-conditioning failed.

  We shared a quick, distracting shower. I badly needed to walk off my nerves, so we set out along rue Catinat, me in desert boots and drip-dry civvies doused with water, Nadja in canvas sandals and a forbidden thin sleeveless dress. The dress was plain, the bare-armed girl beautiful. I draped a soaked kerchief around her neck and tied one around mine. A rivulet slid down her skin and disappeared under the bodice. I traced its path with my finger as far as I dared in public.