Bleeding in Black and White

by Colin Cotterill

  Bodge turned over the photograph. On the back, someone had written, “Time isn’t on our side.” It made no sense. None of it made any sense. Even with such blatant evidence, Bodge still didn’t believe he could spend that many years with another man, and not have an inkling of his tendencies. He hadn’t studied the psychology of these people, hadn’t investigated their illness, but he was sure it wasn’t just a quirk. He didn’t believe a man could suppress desires and hide them from his friends. There had to be physical manifestations. When it had passed over his desk at Trans-National he’d browsed through the Eightieth Congressional Sex Pervert bill. It was suggested these people were more to be pitied than condemned because in many it was a pathological condition, very much like the kleptomaniac who had no choice but to go out and steal. But, if that were so, why hadn’t Lou come to him for help? And was it really such an awful affliction that someone would want to kill him?

  Bodge’s first instinct was to destroy the photograph, but some unheard voice told him not to. There had to be a reason they’d gone to the trouble to give him a copy. With the cops still waiting outside, he carefully unglued the back and front covers of the bedside Bible, inserted the photo and his CIA card, and resealed them with horse glue he’d found under the sink. This would have to wait.

  He sat in the back of the cruiser without saying a word. The troopers weren’t that talkative either. They dropped him in front of the Northwest door at Washington National at eight-thirty — plenty of time for their passenger to catch his flight. He said thanks, they said no problem, and they watched him swing open the door and walk inside. Their chore was complete. They were long gone by the time he reached the ticket desk. He was there just long enough to change his flight, turn around, and head back to the taxi stand.

  There wasn’t a great deal he could do at night, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to leave DC without a few answers. A week of orientation? Was this how you got treated at special ops? No, they couldn’t do that to a curious guy.

  25.

  Ban Methuot

  “Get off.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Petit rolled off the Administrator’s wife. She lay on sheets that were sodden with sweat and semen, but sadly not with the juices of her own orgasm. A fee had been arranged for the chaperone’s absence and silence and she sat on the front veranda with her knitting. It wasn’t proving to be money well spent.

  “Do you want me to use my finger again?” he asked sheepishly.

  “No, I do not want you to use your finger. I have perfectly good fingers of my own. All I ask is for your cock to remain in me long enough so I might join you in that final pleasure.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re so glorious. You fill me with a passion I have no control over.”

  “Obviously.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and considered the other scant possibilities amongst the sorry assembly of Ban Methuot men. The community of wives was so close-knit she knew a dip in the husband pool would be social suicide. The General’s wife was ten thousand miles away, but he was nearing sixty and looked seventy. It appeared she’d have no choice but to find herself a well-hung native. She had no taste for the oriental man but she assumed in the dark she could put any French head on him. Perhaps even a Montagnard would suffice. She’d seen enough impressive torsos on her travels. All they’d need was a good scrubbing with carbolic soap and…Oh, what was the point?

  “Petit?”

  “Yes, my love?”

  “It’s time for a new lesson.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Have you ever observed how a cat drinks milk?”

  26.

  Bodge arrived in Saigon in early March in a fog of jet lag and frustration. The place was hotter than Hell. He wasn’t surprised there was nobody to meet him at the airport. It was bizarre to be there in the orient but no more disorienting than his last few weeks in the States. As the old taxi with all its windows wide open took him through the rustic stick-and-straw suburbs of the town, he went over the previous forty eight hours in his mind.

  On the night he left Washington National and went in search of answers, he’d found only more mysteries and confusion. He’d come up against a brick wall and had been left with no choice in his course of actions. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find the Casually Yours warehouse closed for the night. He’d been prepared to wait till morning to speak to Palmer, to Ramos, to anyone who could give him an indication as to what the hell had happened and why they’d abandoned him in a safe house.

  What he hadn’t been prepared for was finding the building boarded over and padlocked. He’d asked the waitress at the Little Tavern down the street. She told him she’d heard the company had gone bust. “They shut the place down, ooh, a month back. We’ve been deserted since then. We relied on their custom.”

  A month? The same time they’d shipped him off to Delaware. What could possibly have happened to throw a government agency into such a panic? There wasn’t so much as a night watchman to ask. Bodge used the restaurant pay phone to call the two numbers he had for Casually Yours, but all he got was the hum of a disconnected phone line. He didn’t have private numbers for Palmer or Denholm. He bought a meatball hero and phoned police headquarters. No one had heard of a detective called Denholm Deets.

  His last and most heartbreaking attempt was to his old pal Mooney, the man he’d gone through the agency with, side by side. He got his home number from the operator and listened to the phone ring a dozen times. Mooney and his wife turned in early. The supervisor picked up on the thirteenth ring.

  “Mooney residence.”

  “Stan?”

  There was a long silence before,

  “Bodge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you?” Bodge interpreted the edge in Mooney’s voice as annoyance at being woken.

  “Listen, Stan, there’s a lot of strange stuff going on. We have to talk.”

  Mooney hesitated again.

  “You know, Bodge. This isn’t a good time. What do you say you give me an address and a number I can call you back at.”

  “You gotta make this a good time, Mooney. I’m in the shit. I need your help. I need some phone numbers and names.”

  “Gee, Bodge. I’m at home, man. I don’t know.”

  Something was wrong. Bodge was certain now. This wasn’t the Mooney he’d known all those years. He could tell from the tone something had happened.

  “Mooney? What’s up?”

  “Look, Bodge. Can you tell me where you’re staying? I’ll call you back in an hour.”

  “I’m not staying anywhere. If you’re thinking of calling me back, you need a number, not an address. Do you want to tell me what the problem is?”

  Another pause.

  “Okay. Okay, I’ll tell you. You’re the problem, buster. You make me sick is the problem.”

  Bodge’s heart thumped.

  “Mooney?”

  “A lot of folks are on your tail, boy, and, tell you the truth I hope they catch you. I don’t know what I’d do if I laid my hands on you.”

  “Stan, I don’t know what it is you think I’ve done, but I—”

  “Don’t. Don’t even start. I know, Bodge. I know what you’ve done.”

  “Mooney, I—”

  “Bastard.”

  Bodge half dropped, half slammed down the hand set. The waitress and the only customer looked over. Bodge’s hands were shaking and he stood staring at the phone as if it had joined the ranks of the enemy. In the month he’d been at the safe house, the universe had turned upside down. He’d gone from good guy to villain without so much as squeezing a trigger. What in hell’s name was going on? The uneaten meatball hero was still in his hand but food didn’t seem that important any more.

  The bus journey to Chevy Chase had been tense with apprehension and paranoia. Bodge had a billfold thick with hundreds but he didn’t dare check into a decent hotel downtown. He couldn’t say why that was. Something about Moony�
��s attitude told him he was likely a wanted man. He needed to stay out of bright lights for a while. The motel he’d stayed at before was a cash-over-the-counter, no ID joint with a receptionist roster that turned over more frequently than the guest list. He paid the fee and walked to the room. There was just the one station wagon parked in front. The sounds of a family bickering came through the window and calmed Bodge’s paranoia.

  He threw his hold all and raincoat on the bed and sat beside them. There wasn’t a lot in the bag — mostly the props from the last night he’d spent there; Bible, glasses, clothes that were now several more sizes too big for him. That night here in this room had been the last taste of normality he could recall, yet it had hardly been a normal night. Him and Stephanie — Reverend and Mrs. Rogers. That was probably the last time he’d had any control over his life. He unfastened the clasps of his bag and took out the Bible with its awful secret hidden in the back cover. “What have you gotten me into, Lou?”

  He was about to reread Denholm’s letter to see if there were any missing clues, when a thump on his door rattled the glasses beside the bed. He leapt to his feet and instinctively looked around for first a gun, then an exit. There was another thump, loud but not urgent. The door was so flimsy a serious assassin or bounty hunter could have booted it down.

  “Who’s there?” Bodge yelled from the bathroom where he inspected the small window above the toilet.

  “It’s me, man. Ernie.”

  “Ernie, who?”

  “Ernie, from Ernie’s garage across the way.”

  Bodge recognized the voice and recalled the car he’d rented from the guy. It occurred to him he probably hadn’t ever gotten it back. He opened the door to a short, balding black man in overalls. He was wiping oil from his hands on a rag. He looked up at Bodge.

  “Yeah. I thought it was you. Good eye for faces, me.”

  “Look. I’m real sorry about your car. But this isn’t…”

  “You kidding? I did better on that deal than I shoulda.”

  “Eh?”

  “Yeah. Your guy give me twice what it was worth. Better’n I deserve considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “You kidding me? Considering it blew up, is what.”

  Bodge’s stomach dropped. “The car I rented from you?”

  “How come you sound like you don’t know?”

  “I…er, went overseas. Just got back. What happened?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. It’s been sitting heavy on me since that day — that day you brought your girlfriend’s Chrysler over for the oil change. I was listening to the radio later and I hear about this beige Skylark convertible that blew up just down Normanston. Well, there’s plenty of Skylark’s so I just kinda filed it away in my brain. Then, next thing you know my place is crawling with Feds. They tell me it was my car that exploded and they grill me about all kinds of stuff. I was sure they’re gonna run me in for renting out death-traps. But I just tell them about you and your girlfriend and that guy I seen hanging about and they say ‘thanks’, call me ‘sir’, and — poof — they vanish.”

  “The next day this friend of yours comes by and hands over a mess of money and tells me I don’t need to go mouthing off about any of this — specially if I wanna stay in the rental business. I don’t need telling twice.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Big wetback in a fancy suit.”

  “Did he say anything about the woman — my friend?”

  “Not a word. But, like I say, I been feeling bad about it all. I can’t help wondering if it was my fault. Did she die?”

  And that was the question that had stuck with Bodge halfway round the world. In sticky airports and on rickety air planes that vibrated the hope out of him. First Lou, now Stephanie, and it should have been him. Why? He had to get himself right way up in the world. If he was suddenly such a villain why wasn’t his placement in Vietnam cancelled? Why did he have a ticket and fake ID? The only thing he could figure was that Palmer wanted him out of the country. It was a long way to travel for an answer but he’d run out of options in the States. The following day with no check-in luggage, rhyme or reason, he’d boarded the flight to Hong Kong and Vietnam.

  Compared to the hustle of the British Colony, Saigon was a beautifully exotic place. Even on a stifling summer’s day it retained its elegance like a fine boned duchess in a sauna. It seemed able to disguise its role as a city of invaders in a country of war. As he neared the center, the boulevards opened out like broad carpets umbrella’d by the leaves of young tamarind trees. He passed expensive looking shops and open-air cafes and cinemas. Well-heeled Europeans in light-hued clothes walked along the neat sidewalks. There was nothing of the tentative tourist about them. They shopped and dined with the sophistication and confidence of owners. This was their city.

  The lovely Vietnamese women on their sturdy bicycles gliding alongside his cab caused his heart to miss beats. If they asked him in thirty years for the most memorable moments in his life, he knew this sight on his first day in Vietnam would be prominent on the list. With the tails of their white silk ao dai floating behind them, they seemed to Bodge like gorgeous herons hovering on the wind. Their half faces below wide straw hats focused on the roadway ahead, not looking left or right, lips pursed in concentration. He looked for Mlle. Hong knowing well the Emperor’s concubine wouldn’t be on a bicycle in the mid-day heat. But even without her, being in this flock was as near to calmness as Bodge had been for years.

  His driver brought him to a hotel whose ground floor was a gash that opened onto the street. If it weren’t for the word HÔTEL painted vertically down the central post, Bodge would have taken it to be a small bus terminal. But he wanted to remain anonymous until he could find Palmer and this type of establishment was exactly what he’d had in mind. Four very young girls with eerie powdered faces sat around the lone coffee table that floated in the center of the foyer like an island. They wore colored pajamas and managed to make their chunky wooden chairs look comfortable by curling themselves like cats. They didn’t make eye contact with Bodge as he walked past but they commented and giggled behind his back.

  The manager was an elderly gentleman who perched on a high stool behind the reception desk. He didn’t smile, speak, or respond to Bodge’s “hello”. He just slid the registration card and pen over the counter. The card was written in French and Chinese. Bodge wondered if there was a second card for locals or whether Vietnamese knew better than to stay there. Bodge slid the completed form back to the manager who calculated on his fingers the room rates for the number of days requested. He wrote a surprisingly low figure on the card and held out his palm for Bodge to pay up.

  Money received, the old man slapped a key down in front of his guest. It was attached to an enormous slab of plywood with the number 13 painted on it. It was then the manager uttered his first word.

  “Femme?” He nodded towards the girls on their coffee table island.

  “Barely,” thought Bodge, but he smiled and declined, using a phrase he’d memorized from his Vietnamese text. The old man raised one eyebrow just a fraction which suggested to Bodge he was surprised to hear a foreign devil speaking his language. But he obviously wasn’t that impressed.

  27.

  Despite the low price and the off-putting lobby, room thirteen was surprisingly livable. The ceiling fan blew up a gale and there was an endless supply of tea in solid thermos flasks. The bed sheets were candy striped and if he stood on a chair, Bodge could see the far bank of the Saigon River over the corrugated roofs. One entire wall was a tropical island lovingly painted in orange and red. As no other rooms he saw had murals, he imagined a long-term guest locked up in this one for months with nothing else to occupy his mind.

  Bodge stared at those still palms as he formulated a plan of his own. He decided he’d go to the American embassy and let them know where he was staying. He could leave a message in case anyone wanted to get in touch with him. That was the plan. He
’d wait for Palmer, get his answers, then go home to sort things out. He couldn’t start to sort his life out until he knew what those things were.

  Nothing in his plan included Ban Methuot. In his mind, the mission was over. Vietnam was, what? A holiday? R and R from the rigors of being a fugitive? And here was a weekend, the perfect start to an exotic foreign vacation. His plan began with doing nothing at all for two days until the embassy opened on Monday. Whilst doing nothing, he might even watch a few pretty girls glide back and forth on their bicycles.

  A Saturday of girl-watching went pretty well. It was a hobby he’d probably never tire of. He wondered whether he’d been Asian in a former life because he was enchanted by the gentleness of even the plainest girls. He ate a two cent bowl of noodles at the market, then made a coffee last for four hours at one of the classy places overlooking Place Charles De Gaulle. He learned there that sooner or later, everybody worth seeing, and every service and commodity available in the city, would pass in front of that café. The suburban Vietnamese came to discreetly ogle the Europeans without being caught doing so. The Europeans came to be seen by one another. The food sellers wheeled their carts, and the broom sellers pedaled their tricycles. The quack medicine dealers, the masseurs, the dentists and the hairdressers all passed by with card posters of their services drawn in cartoons for even the most ignorant of Westerners to understand. And, without fail, the pretty girls came gliding.