by Peter May
They drove the rest of the way in a silence punctuated by Slattery’s curses, down Rajadamri Road, past the Royal Sports Club on the right and Lumpini Park a little further down on the left. The traffic was still heavy, buses, trucks, private cars, taxis and tuk-tuks – small three-wheeler samlors, extended motor-scooters with two seats at the back for passengers. Great multi-storey blocks rose up now on either side of them, cheek by jowl with the mean little rows of Chinese and Muslim shops, multicoloured, multilingual signs hanging out over shambolic broken pavements from which rose the stench of the sewers below.
They crossed Rama IV Road at a busy junction and turned into Silom Road, where the nightlife was gathering momentum in the sticky heat. Past Patpong Road with its noisy clubs and bars, sexual floorshows and hundreds of bar girls who were little more than children. Slattery pulled in outside the Narai Hotel. It towered above them, rising into the inky black of the south-east Asian night. Elliot got out and Slattery pushed his case at him. ‘You check in, chief. I’ll park the car then come and find you.’
The chill of the air conditioning beyond the sliding glass doors was delicious after the humidity outside. Tourists sat drinking coffee in a pizzeria coffee shop while young girls, white robes glowing in the ultraviolet of the Don Juan bar, smiled alluringly as he passed. An incongruous Christmas tree sat in the lobby, erected no doubt to make Western tourists feel at home. It seemed peculiarly out of place in this deeply Buddhist country. Elliot filled out the paperwork at the reception desk, feeling tired for the first time. It was almost ten o’clock, though it was not yet three back in London, and he had been in the air for more than thirteen hours. He never slept on aeroplanes.
It was a relief to get to his room. He sank back on the bed and closed his eyes, the drone of aircraft engines still in his ears. A scraping noise at his door made him sit up abruptly. A small card had been slipped beneath it from the corridor. Elliot picked it up and smiled wearily. A massage parlour somewhere in Chinatown. They didn’t waste any time. A sharp knock at the door startled him. Slattery stood there grinning. ‘Saw some greaseball slip a card under your door.’ He took the card from Elliot and examined it. ‘We could go see McCue tomorrow.’
Elliot shook his head. ‘Don’t you ever give up?’
The grin again. ‘Only kidding. Got a tuk-tuk waiting downstairs. Ready when you are, chief.’
The tuk-tuk spluttered and bumped its way perilously through the traffic in Silom Road, taking a right into Charoen Krung Road and then sharp left down to the Oriental Hotel landing stage. The jetty was ablaze with light, crowded with all manner of people – children with mothers in black pyjamas, men in smart evening wear, monks in saffron robes – all coming and going on a variety of craft, large and small, that bobbed gently on the slow-moving waters of the Chao Phraya river. A hubbub of voices competed with the noise of the traffic on this east bank, haggling over the price of a cross-river trip on a waterborne taxi.
‘Back in a sec, chief.’ Slattery slipped off through the crowds to do his own haggling. Elliot was content to leave him to it. Slattery was an old Bangkok hand, knew his way about. Elliot let the city night wash over him. He had forgotten how many people in this sprawling river port lived on or over water, along the hundreds of klongs that ran like veins off the main artery of the river. He had read somewhere that Bangkok was sinking at the rate of half an inch a year. The incredible sinking city. In the rainy season you had to wade hip-deep through some of the streets. Perhaps, he thought, most of its people would one day be living on or over water – and some of them under it.
Slattery re-emerged from the crowd, wearing his habitual grin. ‘Alright, chief. Got us a ride and saved us a few baht.’
The ride Slattery had got them turned out to be in a sleek yellow hang yao canoe. The propeller that powered it was fixed at the end of a long driveshaft which the toothless Thai driver used as a rudder. The driver showed his gums in what was clearly meant as a friendly grin. His eyes were glazed, and he babbled something incoherent as Elliot climbed in. Elliot turned to Slattery. ‘He’s pissed!’
‘’Course he is. These guys don’t function without at least a half-bottle of Thai whisky inside them.’
Still showing his gums, the driver gunned his engine and they powered away from the landing stage, knifing through the wash from the overladen rice barges that trafficked up and down the river. They headed south, the hot breeze and cool spray in their faces, exhilarating. Under the Krungthep Bridge, then turning in a wide arc into the Dao Khanong Canal, their progress shattered city lights reflected on dark waters. Tall lamp-posts rose from the water on either side, wooden poles linked by a confusion of arcing cables carrying electricity and telephone lines. They slowed suddenly, turning again, this time into the maze of klongs, a shambles of teak houses raised on stilts overhanging the banks, linked here and there by ramshackle wooden bridges that spanned the waters.
Lights shone in most of the houses, many of the stilt-raised shops still trading. A confusion of sounds filled the night air – a babble of voices giving way to the tinny blare of Thai pop music and the Americanized jingles of a million television sets. They passed men and children bathing in the water at the foot of wooden steps leading to their homes, women perched precariously on narrow wooden terraces, peeling potatoes. Myriad small boats gave way to the hang yao, resentful faces briefly glimpsed, raised voices calling after them in the dark. ‘Tell him to slow down,’ Elliot shouted. ‘We’re going to hit someone!’
Slattery called something to the driver, who shrugged and pulled back on the throttle, slowing them down to a walking pace, and reducing the roar of the engine to little more than a throaty idle. They cruised slowly through the maze for another ten minutes or more, turning into increasingly narrow canals, thick vegetation and leaning palms crowding in on either side, choking the gaps between the houses. Slattery leaned forward and spoke to the driver, who pulled over at the foot of a short flight of wooden steps leading up to a narrow drooping teak house that stood in darkness atop its spindly legs. He cut the engine and a silence encroached with the night, broken only by the constant gentle slapping of water against stilts. A rank smell hung in the air. Rotting vegetation, human waste, woodsmoke. Something heavy thudded against the side of the canoe. Slattery leaned over to take a look, shining a small pocket torchlight into the water.
‘Dead dog,’ he said, and grinned. The decaying creature, bloated by putrid gases, drifted away. ‘We’re here.’ He jumped out on to a tiny landing stage and Elliot followed.
‘He lives here?’ Elliot asked incredulously.
‘Sure. Married a Thai girl, a bar girl. I bet she thought she was escaping from all this.’ He laughed softly, ironically. ‘And all the time it was old Billy doing the escaping. Don’t worry about the driver. He’ll wait.’
As they climbed the steps, Elliot glanced back and saw the driver taking a long pull from a murky-looking bottle. A veranda with a rickety rail ran the length of the house at the front. It creaked under their weight, and an old rocking chair tipped slowly back and forth. Mosquito nets hung loosely in open windows. Slattery rapped gently on the door. ‘Hoi, McCue!’ His voice sounded inordinately loud in the whispering silence. ‘Get out yer scratcher. Got a man here wants to see you.’
A light came on somewhere within, then after a moment the door opened and McCue appeared in a dirty white singlet and shorts, barefoot and blinking in the light. ‘Shit! What time of night’s this to come calling?’ He was a small man, no more than five-five. Sinuous, wiry arms and legs, lean-faced with a nose like a blade and a chin with a cutting edge. His eyes were dark and hostile, and his skin tanned a deep, even brown. His black hair was tousled, and had it not been for the Midwest drawl, at a glance you could have taken him for a Thai. He was younger than either of his visitors. Early thirties, Elliot guessed.
‘Hey, Billy boy, that’s no way to greet an old buddy. The chief wanted to meet you.’
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McCue eyed Elliot darkly. ‘You’d better come in.’
Inside, the main room was neat and spotless, stone jars lined up against one wall, a wooden dresser with a water bowl and jug. There were no chairs, no table. McCue squatted cross-legged on the floor and indicated that they should do the same. As he sat, Elliot saw, through an open doorway, a half-naked woman slipping into a panung, a large sarong-like garment drawn up between the legs like an Indian dhoti. Beyond her, a mosquito net hung from the ceiling over a big square mattress on the floor. Inside, a baby stirred restlessly. ‘You hungry?’ McCue asked.
‘Starving,’ said Slattery.
McCue called into the back room and the woman appeared in the doorway. She pressed her palms together and bowed solemnly to the strangers. You could see she had once been very beautiful. Thai girls are considered by many to be the most beautiful in the world. But it is a beauty that fades quickly with a life that is hard, features coarsening, skin withering, so that by forty they can often look like old women. This woman – Lotus, McCue had called her – was perhaps thirty. Already well down that road. McCue spoke to her curtly in stuttering, guttural Thai. She nodded, and without a word moved off into another part of the house.
‘This is Jack Elliot,’ Slattery said.
McCue reached out a hand for a cursory handshake. ‘Elliot.’
‘How much has Mike told you?’
‘Enough to know it’s fucking madness.’
‘So why do you want to go?’
‘Because there’s a big fat pay cheque at the other end.’
Elliot glanced around him. ‘Thinking of moving upmarket?’
McCue inclined his head towards the back room. ‘This ain’t no place to bring up a kid. I’m taking him home with me.’ He spoke softly with a voice like Thai silk, his face expressionless, his eyes impenetrable.
‘Shit, Billy, you could have gone home anytime.’
‘I never wanted to before. But then, I never had a kid before.’
Elliot looked at him thoughtfully, taking in the scars on his thighs and calves. ‘What’s your track record?’
‘Three tours in Nam, sixty-nine to seventy-one.’
‘Nobody did three tours.’
‘I volunteered for the other two.’
‘With the Big Red One?’
‘First Engineer Battalion, First Cavalry Division. Sergeant, Tunnel Rats.’
The Tunnel Rats had been an eight-man elite team operating in the Iron Triangle north of Saigon, flushing VC out of the hundreds of kilometres of tunnel networks where the communist guerrillas lived and fought – a dark, subterranean existence where they had contrived sleeping chambers, food and ammunition dumps, and even makeshift hospitals. It was an extraordinary complex of tunnels, dug by hand out of the hard, laterite soil over twenty years, built on several levels to protect against flooding and gas. They were riddled with booby traps.
The VC would pop out of hidden trapdoors on the ground, catching American GIs unawares, and then vanish again into the tunnels. The soldiers sent down after them were almost invariably killed, either by booby traps, or by VC waiting with grenades or AK-47s. The twisting dark tunnels were only big enough to allow a small man to crawl on his belly. Operating here took special skills. Techniques for engaging the enemy, and a very special kind of soldier, quickly evolved. The Rats were formed in 1967.
‘You knew Batman, then?’ Elliot asked.
Sergeant Robert Batten Batman had been the most famous of the rats, and the most feared by the Viet Cong. So much so that he had made it on to their ten-most-wanted list. All the VC in the tunnels knew his name. McCue shook his head. ‘Before my time. But I heard the stories.’
‘Why were you picked?’
‘I wasn’t. I volunteered.’ A slight ironic smile hovered on his lips. ‘I loved it in the tunnels,’ he said. ‘When they told me they had a VC down there I came unglued.’ The most dangerous moment for the Rat, when he was most exposed, was when he was lowered into the hole. Often a VC would be waiting for him at the bottom with a poisoned bamboo punji stake, or a grenade, or he would just cut the Rat in two with a burst of automatic fire. It was one of those moments that had finally got to McCue, a split second when he lost his nerve and just couldn’t do it any more. Just six weeks earlier he had almost been killed in a tunnel. He remembered the cold horror of the moment. They knew there was a VC somewhere up ahead in the dark. McCue had inched his way forward, his flashlight held out to one side in his left hand, his gun in the other. A second Rat followed about five metres back – the distance at which a grenade would not be lethal.
As they came to a bend, McCue had reached round and fired three shots into the blackness. Nothing. So he had moved on. The tunnel straightened out and came to a dead end. A slight earth-fall betrayed the presence of an overhead trapdoor. As he reached it, sweat running in clear rivulets down his blackened face, the trapdoor slid into place. The VC was right above him. His mouth dry, he had raised his pistol, ready to fire, and pushed the trapdoor up. Something fell, almost into his lap. ‘Grenade!’ he screamed, and started scrambling back along the tunnel. The explosion ruptured one of his ear drums, and his legs were peppered with grenade fragments. The second Rat had dragged the bleeding and half-conscious McCue back along the tunnel. It had taken nearly an hour to get him to the surface.
The smell of cooking came to them from the back of the house. Outside, the cicadas kept up an incessant chorus and the murky waters of the klong lapped constantly at the stilts. Slattery passed round cigarettes and the three men sat smoking in silence for some minutes. At length McCue looked at Elliot and broke the silence. ‘You were responsible for the Aden massacre.’
Slattery glanced at Elliot anxiously, but the Englishman was impassive. ‘It’s what they said at the court martial.’ He stared back at McCue, unblinking.
‘Apart from that, I don’t know anything about you,’ McCue said.
‘No one does, Billy boy, no one does,’ Slattery said cheerfully. ‘But he’s the chief. And take my word for it, a handy man in a scrap.’
McCue’s eyes never left Elliot. ‘What’s your experience in south-east Asia?’
‘Nam.’ McCue raised an eyebrow, and Elliot answered the unasked question. ‘Freelance.’
A flicker of distaste crossed McCue’s face. ‘A headhunter.’
‘I only counted them.’ It wasn’t a defence. Just a statement of fact. In the early days in Nam, some of the mercenaries had been paid by the head. Literally. Elliot had not been squeamish about it. Just practical. Heads were bloody and cumbersome. He knew McCue was weighing him up, and he liked that. Soldiers who thought before they acted stood a better chance of survival. He had already decided that McCue was in.
McCue said, ‘When do we go?’
And Elliot knew that he, too, had passed muster. ‘Ten days. My fixer in the UK has set us up a contact here in Bangkok. He’ll provide arms, kit and supplies. We’ll make contact tomorrow. He’ll also provide passes to get us into selected camps along the border. I want to do a recce, talk to some of the refugees. And we’ll need a guide. Someone to get us across the border. Then we’ll be on our own. Initial planning meeting in a week.’
Lotus brought in half a dozen bowls of steaming food on a tray and laid it on the floor beside them. With a careful, elegant precision, she knelt down and placed each of the bowls on the floor in the centre of the small circle of men. McCue described each dish. ‘Kaeng jeud, soup with vegetables and pork. Khao phat muu, fried rice with shrimp. Phat siyu, noodles and soy sauce. Plaa priaw waan, sweet and sour fish. Phat phak lai yang, stir-fried vegetables. Yam neua, hot and sour grilled beef salad.’
‘Jesus, that’s some spread, Billy. Tell the little lady it’s much appreciated.’
She nodded, unsmiling. ‘Thank you.’ She passed them each a bowl and chopsticks.
‘Tuck in, chief. Thailan
d’s finest. All cooked in lovely klong water, that right, Billy?’ McCue inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Wash, shit and cook in the stuff.’ Slattery glanced at Elliot. ‘But don’t worry, chief, suck it and see. You’ve had your cholera booster, ain’t ya?’
*
On the way back Elliot was silent. The hot air battered against his face as their driver, now glazed and unreachable, drove their hang yao through the myriad waterways with a reckless disregard for the safety of anyone. Slattery hung on to the side of the boat grinning maniacally, eyes on fire. ‘Fantastic, chief! Absolutely fantastic!’ They had consumed enough Mekong, a distilled rice concoction, to leave them with as much disregard for their safety as their driver.
Elliot was miles away. McCue’s total commitment to his child had touched a raw nerve. However little he cared for himself, or even his wife, he was prepared to die to provide the chance of a better future for his son. Elliot had a picture in his head that wouldn’t go away. Of a young woman in a churchyard, all in black, lifting her veil and looking at him without recognition. Somehow that had been more painful than the years of denial. He had known her at once, felt he would have known her anywhere. And he had provided for her, hadn’t he? After a fashion? He shook his head. It was the Mekong talking, not his conscience. He had no conscience, or if he had it had never offered him guidance, only pain, somewhere deep inside, buried away from public gaze.
‘I could do with a real drink,’ Slattery shouted above the roar of the engine.
Elliot looked at him. ‘What age do you reckon McCue is?’
Slattery frowned. ‘I dunno. About thirty? Why?’
Elliot shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
