Three elephants walked slowly down the road, trunks and tails swinging in unison. Each had a man sitting astride its neck, and ahead of them walked a man carrying a string bag full of coconuts.
Thirty minutes later a grey minivan pulled up in front of the bar, driven by a middle-aged Thai man in a pale blue safari suit. The man went into the bar and a few minutes later the swing doors opened and he reappeared, followed by Doc, who was pushing O’Leary’s wheelchair. They all headed over to the minivan. The driver climbed back into the cab and opened a side door. A lifting mechanism swung out and down and Doc pushed O’Leary’s wheelchair on to it. The wheelchair slowly lifted into the air and back into the van. Doc climbed in with O’Leary and the two men were deep in conversation as the van pulled away from the kerb.
Wright pointed after the van. The driver nodded and followed.
O’Leary lived half an hour’s drive from Cowboy Nights, in a row of modern townhouses in a quiet side street. Wright told the driver to keep his distance and they stopped at the end of the street, behind a black pick-up truck. The van parked and the safari-suited driver helped Doc unload O’Leary and his wheelchair. Doc pushed O’Leary up a ramp to the front door and into the house.
Wright’s driver turned around and looked expectantly at Wright. The detective handed over another purple banknote.
Doc left the house fifteen minutes later. He climbed into the front of the minivan and it drove off down the road.
Wright waited a few minutes, then went over to the front door and knocked on it. A Thai woman answered it, barefoot in T-shirt and jeans. Wright told her who he was and said that he wanted to speak to Dennis. She stepped to the side to let him in.
Dennis O’Leary was sitting in his wheelchair at the far end of the room, a bottle of whisky on the table next to him. An Eric Clapton CD was playing on an expensive stereo system under one of the windows. Wright recognised the album. Journeyman.
‘What do you want?’ O’Leary asked.
‘Just a chat,’ said Wright. The girl who’d opened the door padded up an open wooden staircase and disappeared into a bedroom. ‘Your wife?’ asked Wright.
O’Leary shook his head. ‘No. Not my wife.’ He drank from a tumbler. ‘Doc says we shouldn’t talk to you.’
‘Do you do everything Doc says?’ asked Wright.
O’Leary put his head on one side as he considered the question. ‘Pretty much,’ he said.
The room was large, with dark wooden floorboards and rosewood furniture and several large Buddha statues, most of which looked very old. Thai embroideries hung on the walls. At one end of the room there were two guitars on stands, like sentries on duty. There was no airconditioning but two metal fans whirred overhead and the windows had been left open so that a gentle night breeze blew across Wright’s back. Two doors led off the main room and both had been widened to accommodate O’Leary’s chair. Across one of the doorways was a metal pole which Wright guessed O’Leary used for arm exercises, and in the far corner of the room was a set of dumb-bells and weights.
‘Nice place,’ said Wright.
O’Leary shrugged but said nothing. His face was flushed. He’d untied his ponytail and his long hair hung around his shoulders like some sort of Viking warrior. A crippled warrior, thought Wright. Maybe that was why he was drinking so heavily.
Wright gestured at the bottle of whisky. ‘May I?’ he said.
‘I thought you were a lager drinker,’ said O’Leary.
‘I’ll take what I can get,’ said Wright.
O’Leary waved at the bottle. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.
Wright took a glass from a cabinet. There were several photographs in brass frames on a shelf below the glasses. Pictures of O’Leary with a pretty Thai woman and two children, a boy and a girl. In none of the photographs was O’Leary in a wheelchair.
‘Yeah,’ said O’Leary from behind him. ‘That’s my wife.’
‘She’s lovely,’ said Wright. ‘Great kids, too. How old are they there? Four and six?’
‘The girl was five then, the boy seven. They’re sixteen and eighteen now.’
‘They don’t live with you?’
O’Leary sneered and took another long pull at his whisky. ‘No profit in it any more,’ he said, and slapped the wheelchair. ‘Half a man.’
Wright sat down on a wooden chair that had elephants stencilled into the back of it. ‘I’m sorry about before, when I was asking if it happened during the war.’
‘That’s okay,’ said O’Leary. ‘In a way it would have been better if it had happened then. At least then I’d have got disability payments. Two tours of duty without a scratch and I have to fall off a fucking motorcycle.’
‘It’s not going to get better?’ asked Wright.
O’Leary shook his head. ‘I’m in this chair for life,’ he said. ‘My wife came to see me in hospital, spoke to the doctors, and I haven’t seen her or the kids since. She sold my business, the house, the car, took the money and went upcountry. That was seven years ago.’
‘That’s rough,’ said Wright.
‘It’s Thai style,’ said O’Leary. ‘No matter how much you think they love you, no matter how much you give them, they always want more. She knew I’d never walk again so she figured she’d better look for another man before she got any older.’
‘And the kids?’
‘She probably told them I’d died.’ He drank and swirled his whisky around the glass as he stared into it. ‘Might have been better if I had. Bastards.’
Wright wasn’t sure who O’Leary was cursing. He went over and refilled the man’s glass, then poured more whisky into his own.
‘Thais,’ said O’Leary, as if sensing Wright’s confusion. ‘Give them your finger and they’ll take your hand. Give them your hand and they’ll want your arm. Give them your arm . . .’ He scowled. ‘Been to the bars yet?’
Wright shook his head. He sat down again.
‘Pat Pong, Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy. The red light areas. You’ll meet beautiful girls there, stunners, and they’ll be all over you. They’ll smile and they’ll bat their gorgeous brown eyes at you and they’ll fondle your dick and they’ll take you for everything they can.’
‘Yeah, but you’re talking about hookers,’ said Wright.
‘Ha! They’re all fucking hookers,’ said O’Leary. ‘Every last one of them. Any girl you see driving an expensive car in Bangkok has either fucked someone rich or is the daughter of someone who’s been fucked by someone rich. It’s all about money, and when my wife thought her gravy train had come off the rails, she ran like the fucking wind.’
‘What about this?’ said Wright, indicating the room. ‘This is a nice place.’
‘It’s Doc’s,’ said O’Leary. ‘He lets me live here. If it wasn’t for Doc, I’d be on the fucking street.’
‘It’s a better place than where I’m living,’ said Wright. He told O’Leary about his own domestic situation, about his divorce and the arguments over access to his son.
O’Leary nodded sympathetically. ‘Yeah, it’s the kids I miss most,’ he said. ‘Not knowing what they look like, what they’re doing. Not knowing if they even know that I’m alive. Don’t let her keep your son away from you, Nick. Do what you have to do. Fight and don’t stop fighting, okay?’
Wright raised his glass in salute. ‘Here’s to that,’ he said, and the two men toasted each other. Wright could feel the warmth of the spirit spreading comfortingly across his stomach and he stretched out his feet.
‘Tell me about Doc,’ said Wright.
‘Like what?’
‘You met him in Vietnam, right?’
‘Yup.’
‘And you’ve all stayed together for twenty-five years? I don’t think I’ve any friends from twenty-five years ago. There must be something special between you all to keep you together.’
O’Leary flicked his hair away from his shoulders with a quick movement of his head. ‘Do you know much about Vietnam, Nick?’
Wrig
ht shook his head. ‘Not much.’
O’Leary helped himself to more whisky. The bottle was almost empty when he put it back on the table. ‘Doc wasn’t being facetious about it taking a hundred years to describe what it was like,’ he continued. ‘If you weren’t there, you’d never understand. There’s a bond formed with the people you fought with, a bond that’s stronger than marriage, than family, than loyalty to your country.’
Wright cradled his glass with both hands. O’Leary stared at the floor, almost as if he was talking to himself.
‘The VC had a network of tunnels right across the country, built when the French occupied Vietnam, and then expanded when we went in to help the South. By the time the war was almost over, they had hundreds of miles of tunnels, stretching from Saigon to the Cambodian border. They started off as a way of getting from village to village without being seen, but by the time we were there they had huge underground installations: training rooms, armament factories, bomb shelters, hospitals, dormitories. Thousands of VCs and civilians lived underground, coming out to fight at night, then disappearing as soon as they came under fire.’
A cockroach scuttled across the floor in front of O’Leary’s wheelchair, a big insect several inches long, but O’Leary didn’t appear to notice it.
‘We all went down the tunnels, Doc, Bernie, Sergio and I. Max and Eric, too. Bernie, Sergio and Max were with the Twenty-eighth Infantry, First Engineer Battalion. Eric was with Special Forces, but he was attached to the Tunnel Rats for six months. I was supposed to be mapping the tunnel network. Doc was a medic. You asked what sort of war we had? It was a shitty, dirty, nasty war, Nick. A war fought underground, in the dark, with guns and knives because there wasn’t room to use anything bigger, in a battleground totally of the enemy’s making, booby-trapped, full of poisonous snakes and spiders and God knows what else.’ He shivered and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if trying to stave off a sneeze.
‘Five of us stayed in South-East Asia after our tour of duty: Doc, Bernie, Sergio, Max and I. Max went over to the States in the ’eighties, then we met up with Eric five years ago.’
‘Why were you so reluctant to tell me that yesterday?’ asked Wright.
O’Leary looked across at him, his jaw set tight. ‘Why should we tell you anything? What happened back then is nothing to do with you.’
Wright didn’t say anything for several seconds. O’Leary looked away and took a mouthful of whisky. He gulped it down.
‘What did happen?’ Wright asked eventually.
O’Leary didn’t answer, nor did he look at Wright. The only indication that he’d heard the question was a slight shrug of his shoulders.
‘Is it connected to the way Horvitz and Eckhardt died?’ asked Wright.
O’Leary continued to avoid Wright’s gaze.
Wright decided to try a different approach. ‘Tell me about Doc’s lighter,’ he said. ‘The Zippo.’
‘What about it?’
‘There’s a rat on one side, a rat with a torch and a gun. And a Latin motto on the other.’ He screwed up his face as he tried to recall the words he’d read. ‘Non Gratum Anus Rodentum. Rodentum is rat, I guess.’
O’Leary smiled. ‘Not worth a rat’s ass,’ he said. ‘More of a credo than a motto.’
‘That’s how you felt?’ asked Wright.
‘We lost a lot of friends down the tunnels,’ said O’Leary.
‘Were you volunteers?’
‘The Tunnel Rats? Sure. There’s no way they could force you down there.’
‘So why do it?’
O’Leary pressed his glass against his cheek. ‘That’s the question,’ he said quietly. ‘If you could answer that, you’d know a hell of a lot about human nature.’
‘Self-destructive, was that it? Some urge to punish yourself?’
O’Leary shook his head. ‘We didn’t go down there to get killed, or to punish ourselves. We fought to stay alive, we took every precaution we could.’
‘But you didn’t have to go down in the first place.’
O’Leary flashed Wright a lopsided grin. ‘Doesn’t make sense, does it?’
‘What about Doc’s motivation? Why did he join the Tunnel Rats?’
‘He was already a veteran of the tunnels when I met him. I think he wanted to make sure we didn’t get hurt. He likes to take care of people, does Doc. He likes to lead, he likes responsibility.’
‘And Ramirez?’
‘Ramirez? I think he just wanted to prove that nothing scares him.’
‘Prove to who? To you? Or to himself?’
‘Another good question.’
‘Hammack?’
O’Leary swatted a mosquito that had settled on his left leg. ‘Bernie wanted to be special. There weren’t many blacks down in the tunnels.’
‘What about Horvitz?’
‘Eric was Special Forces. I think of any of us he was the one most reluctant to go. I don’t think he had anything to prove. But he was a good soldier and he obeyed orders.’
‘And Max?’
‘I didn’t really know Max, we only went on the one mission together.’
There it was, out in the open. Wright said nothing, allowing the pause to get longer and longer. O’Leary drained his whisky. He poured the rest of the bottle into his glass. A motorcycle roared by outside and Wright caught a whiff of exhaust fumes through the open windows.
‘I can’t tell you any more,’ said O’Leary softly.
‘You have to,’ said Wright. ‘You owe it to Eric and Max.’
O’Leary shook his head. ‘We can’t ever tell. Any of us.’
‘But it was twenty-five years ago, Dennis. A quarter of a century.’
‘I know,’ said O’Leary bitterly. ‘You think I don’t know exactly how long it’s been?’
‘Two men have died, and it’s connected with whatever happened in Vietnam. You said you knew who it was. Who, Dennis? Who’s killing the Tunnel Rats?’
O’Leary drained his glass and looked mournfully at the empty bottle. ‘A ghost,’ he whispered.
‘A ghost?’
O’Leary looked up, and there was no disguising the fear in his eyes. ‘He isn’t dead,’ he said, his voice a dry rattle. ‘He isn’t dead and he’s coming back for revenge.’
O’Leary slumped back in his chair and his eyes closed. Wright sat and watched him. After a minute or so O’Leary began to snore, and his head fell forward on to his chest. He’d drunk almost three quarters of the bottle of whisky, plus several beers at Cowboy Nights.
Wright stood up. One of the two doors led through to a kitchen, beyond which was a patio with a barbecue pit. A brown and white dog looked up at Wright and then settled back to sleep. The other door led to a large bedroom containing a king-sized bed swathed in mosquito nets. The furniture appeared to have been designed with O’Leary’s disability in mind: there was a dressing table built so that there was room for the wheelchair, and the wardrobes were all low so that O’Leary could remove his clothes while sitting. Wright went back into the main room and pushed O’Leary into the bedroom. He was a big man and it took all Wright’s strength to lift him out of the chair and roll him on to the bed. He loosened O’Leary’s shirt, then switched off the light and left.
International directory enquiries had no problem coming up with a number for the United States Playing Card Company. Hunter got through to a fast-talking girl in the public relations department whose enthusiasm came bursting out of the telephone with all the force of a tornado. She was even more excited when Hunter told her that he was a policeman investigating a murder, though considerably less pleased to discover that one of her company’s products was involved. Hunter explained that he wanted to speak to someone about the playing cards in general, and in particular any role they played in the Vietnam War.
‘I can’t think of anyone in the company, not off hand,’ she said, ‘but we do have a museum devoted to playing cards. They’ve got more than a hundred thousand different decks. Why don’t you call them?’
>
Hunter took down the number of the museum and thanked her. This time a man answered, and he spoke in slow, measured sentences as if he was considering each word before he allowed it to pass his lips. His name was Walter Matthau. ‘Not the actor,’ he said. ‘But we do share the same birthday. My friends call me Wally.’
Hunter explained why he was calling and asked Wally if the Bicycle brand had played any special role in the Vietnam War.
‘Sure did,’ said Wally.
When Wally didn’t elaborate, Hunter had to prompt him. ‘Could you tell me exactly what that role was?’ he asked.
‘The ace of spades,’ said Wally. ‘It was the death card.’
Hunter felt a surge of excitement. ‘Death card?’ he repeated.
‘They were left as calling cards by the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division. And by Special Forces in Operation Phoenix.’
Hunter was so shocked that for several seconds he couldn’t speak. He hadn’t expected to strike gold so quickly. ‘What do you mean, calling cards?’
Wally sniffed before continuing, and Hunter suspected that the man had just wiped his nose. ‘It was back in ’sixty-six, I think. The company got a letter from two lieutenants in the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division. Seems they’d been leaving the cards behind whenever they attacked the Viet Cong. They reckoned the VC were scared of the cards, you see? Part of their folklore, the ace of spades, it represents death. And the soldiers preferred the Bicycle brand because of the woman. The woman in white. The VC thought it was a ghost. You know what I’m talking about, Inspector Hunter?’
‘Yes, I’ve seen the card. It was always the ace of spades? I was watching Apocalypse Now and in the movie they used all sorts of cards.’
‘Yeah, I remember that scene. Robert Duvall, right? I don’t know what that was about. I heard of one long-range reconnaissance patrol that used one-eyed jacks, but generally it was our ace of spades. It was started by the infantry but Special Forces started using it as well once they realised how effective it was. They were so popular that they wanted us to send them a thousand aces of spades.’
‘A thousand?’
The Tunnel Rats (Coronet books) Page 26
