“It’s been a long, strange trip, hasn’t it, Eddie?”
The man studied Eddie in the mirror a little longer, drank deeply from a bottle of Singha cradled loosely in one hand, then pushed around on the stool until the two of them were face to face. Winnebago and Bar waited silently, their eyes shifting back and forth between Eddie and the man at the bar.
“You look pretty good for being dead.”
The man seemed to consider that for a moment.
“I’ve looked a fucking sight worse, I guess,” he nodded. “Yeah, I sure as shit have.”
Then he reached back and put his beer bottle on the bar behind him. The slapping sound it made against the worn wooden surface added a kind of exclamation point to what he had just said, and that seemed to please Captain Harry Austin quite a lot.
Thirty-Three
CHUCK McBride spent most of the afternoon just up the road from the Little Princess sitting in a white Volvo that he checked out from the embassy motor pool. He watched the place carefully, waiting for something to happen, but nothing much did. McBride didn’t notice anyone he recognized going in or out, and by the time it began to get dark, he was fidgeting.
He figured he might have caught a break, but now he wasn’t so sure. One of his locals had stumbled over an attendant at a place called the Sixty-Nine when he was shaking down the short-time hotels and the kid said he might remember Eddie and Winnebago from the night before. Juiced up with a couple of purples, the kid quickly became certain of it. He also claimed that he had overheard them talking to some old guy about the Little Princess massage parlor earlier in the morning. After that, he said, all three farangs had left and none of them had come back again. That clicked with McBride’s memory of where Harry Austin’s corpse had turned up and he had no doubt he had found his guys. The old farang would have been Bar Phillips. It all fit perfectly.
McBride tried to find out whether the Chinese muscle boys he had sent around the massage parlor circuit had been to the Little Princess yet. He called their mobile telephones over and over, but all he got was that stupid recording that said they weren’t answering, which of course he already knew, so he decided he had better hustle over to the Princess and take a look for himself.
But now that he had been sitting there watching the place for a couple of hours, he wasn’t so sure anymore that he had made a wise decision. He was getting way too old for this surveillance crap. What was he doing sitting in a car watching a cathouse and peeing in the bushes? That was the kind of stuff the kids got stuck with. He had earned a lot better than that by now.
McBride shook off his irritation and leaned forward, examining the Little Princess carefully again. Jesus Christ, if it turns out Dare is just in there getting a hand job, he thought, I’m going to feel like a monkey fucking a football sitting out here.
Two women crossing the street in front of his car suddenly pulled McBride out of his reverie. They wore short, straight skirts and form-fitting silk jackets. Both were probably in their early twenties, he figured, but with Thai girls who could ever tell?
McBride followed the girls’ progress appreciatively as they threaded their way nonchalantly through the traffic, dodging puddles and casually leaping cracks in the concrete. Their smart pumps clicked crisply against the pavement and the unselfconscious poise with which they moved nimbly from foot to foot made his crotch ache. The day he stopped being awed by the beauty and gracefulness of Thai women, McBride figured, would be the day on which he was stone cold dead.
Strangely, that was exactly what Chuck McBride was thinking at the very moment the hand grenade rolled underneath his car.
The grenade made a couple of lazy circles, tipping from side to side like a child’s top slowing down, and came to rest just beneath the Volvo’s gas tank. For a moment after it stopped it rocked gently and, when the last of the energy from its momentum was spent, there was one brief instant in which it lay completely still.
A second later, two at the most, it exploded.
Lek’s eyes had followed the hand grenade carefully after she released it and slipped behind a cement truck parked a couple of dozen yards from the white Volvo. Hand grenades bewitched her. They were truly beautiful, she thought, elongated steel teardrops with symmetrically spaced dimples animating their colorless surfaces. When one exploded and the steel of the casing was shred into microscopic slivers by the power concealed inside, when the needle-like shards were hurled outward with a symmetry as perfect as a skyrocket bursting on Chinese New Year, it had always seemed somehow right to her, as if an object like that should explode.
It had taken Lek only a few hours to find out where Eddie, Bar and Winnebago had gone after they left her at the Forty Winks. By three that afternoon, her people had not only flushed out a boy who knew where they had stayed overnight, he even knew they had all left around noon and exactly where they had gone.
That was something farangs just didn’t seem to understand. They could never hide anywhere in Bangkok. There would always be someone who watched where they went and heard what they said, and that information would always be for sale. That was one thing she truly loved about Bangkok: the joyous, unrestrained corruption of it, the way anything could be bought.
Lek cupped her hands over her ears as the grenade did its work, quickly and efficiently transforming the Volvo and Chuck McBride into a column of fire and smoke.
She had had an uneasy feeling about the Little Princess for a long time, suspecting there was some connection between it and Harry Austin that was more than coincidental, but she had never been able to nail down exactly what it was. After Harry’s body had been found nearby, she sent some men around to talk to the girls there, but nothing came of it. They had reported back that the woman who ran the place was stupid and drug-addled, and that none of the girls knew Harry Austin.
This morning when Lek found out that Eddie Dare was snooping around the Little Princess she got a sinking feeling that she might have been careless. When she got there and found Chuck McBride sitting outside in a car watching it, there was no longer any doubt in her mind. This was on her. She should have been more exact, more rigorous.
But watching the Volvo burn comforted her. She was making up ground fast.
Killing a CIA field agent was not something to be taken lightly, of course; she knew that, but what else could she do? Besides, everybody in Bangkok thought McBride was DEA anyway and using the grenade on him would cause them to assume that some desperate heroin trafficker had been responsible for his demise. Hand grenades were standard procedure when the local dealers wanted to thin out the competition a little. Langley would put it all together differently some day, she had no doubt of that, but the day would not be soon; and even when it came, what would they be able to do about it?
Everything had started coming down around her like a rock pile. There was no reward for subtlety anymore. All that counted now was to get to that money first. And she would do what she had to do.
McBride’s death would not interest anyone all that much she felt certain. And once the money was back in Vietnam where it belonged, it wouldn’t matter to anyone at all.
R.I.P. Chuck McBride.
***
ALTHOUGH the place looked like it had been closed down for a long time, Short Time still managed to produce ice-cold beers from somewhere. After she set them out on the bar, she disappeared and Eddie, Winnebago, Bar and Harry Austin sat on stools quietly drinking from bottles of Singha so cold that the condensation formed four little pools on the wooden bar top.
“How do you like my club, boys?” Austin asked. “Got a few others just like it, too.”
Eddie glanced around at the dusty room. “I hope they’re doing better business than this one is,” he said.
“This used to be the Green Latrine,” Bar spoke up. “Air America and United Press had their offices over there…” he waved off in the direction of the main road, “but this was where you found their guys most of the time. Every other reporter, spook, hustle
r, and ex-military hard case in Bangkok hung out here, too. Until around the mid-eighties, this was the hottest place in Southeast Asia, a legend with the old hands. It was where the elephants came to die.”
“That’s right,” Austin nodded. “Finally closed it down about eight years ago. Ran out of elephants.”
“You sent the pictures to me, didn’t you, captain?” Eddie’s voice seemed to float in the dim room. “And the one to Bar.”
“Yep,” Austin nodded. “Sure did.”
Winnebago looked even more bewildered than he already was. “How did you know that?” he asked Eddie.
“Process of elimination mostly. Who would do something like that? Maybe not someone who wanted to scare us away at all, but instead someone who wanted to get our attention.” Eddie watched Austin closely. “How am I doing?”
“No better than I expected.”
“So, you’ve got our attention, Captain. Now what?”
Austin sipped lightly at his beer. He thought for a moment, as if deciding how best to work up to it, but then he gave up and just went at it head on.
“I need your help real bad right now.”
“You could’ve just called me, Captain. I’m in the book.”
“Oh, yeah,” Austin snorted, his voice gathering strength. “I can imagine ringing you up San Francisco one day and saying, ‘Hey, Eddie, been a long time, huh? And by the way, I’ve got a big pile of money over here in Bangkok that I need you to give me a hand with.’ You’d have thought the old bastard had fried his brains on booze and pussy, then made some soothing noises to shut me up, and that would’ve been that.”
“Then it’s true? You really have the money?”
“We’ll get to that.”
Austin chugged the rest of his beer and slammed the empty bottle onto the bar. Short Time materialized from somewhere with fresh bottles of Singha and put one in front of each of them. Winnebago fumbled for his Camels and shook out a cigarette.
“There’s no smoking in here,” Austin said, waggling a finger at Winnebago. “We’re just as full of shit as California is.”
Winnebago glanced around in disbelief and then reluctantly pushed the cigarettes back into his shirt pocket.
“What about those Secret Service agents?” Eddie asked. “Were they real?”
“What Secret Service agents?”
Eddie thought Austin seemed genuinely surprised.
“The ones that followed me from San Francisco,” he pressed on anyway. “It must have been a lot of trouble for you to arrange all that, Captain.”
“Weren’t no trouble at all. I had nothing to do with it. Probably was the Secret Service. I always said it was better to be lucky than smart.”
Bar couldn’t hold back any longer. “I am completely, fucking lost,” he said.
“Hush up, boy,” Austin snapped. “Eddie’s got it figured out, and that’s what matters.”
“All except the part where you died,” Eddie said. “Whose body was that they found in the street?”
“Some poor tourist, I guess, but I don’t know for sure. A taxi driver came running into the Princess one night and said a farang had gotten all busted up in the street. I went out there and…well, when I saw how much the guy looked like me, the whole idea just kind of came to me right then.”
“You were the man who identified the body as yours, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, and I arranged the cremation, too. I needed to lie low until you turned up. All kinds of shit was starting to come down.”
“You mean the government was on to you?” Eddie asked.
“Yeah, but not ours as far as I knew then.” Austin popped his lips a few times, thinking. “It was the woman the Vietnamese sent who scared the piss out of me. She went around claiming to be a Thai who was married to me, except she ain’t Thai and I ain’t ever been married to nobody. Not really.”
Bar leaned forward until he caught Eddie’s eye. “Where do you figure Lek went after we left her at the Forty Winks last night?” he asked.
Austin snorted so loudly they all jumped. “So that bitch got her hooks into you, too, did she?”
“It’s not that way, Captain,” Eddie said.
“How much did you tell her about what you’ve figured out?”
“Not much.” Eddie tried to look nonchalant but, when Austin fixed him with a hard stare, he confessed. “Well…a little, I guess.”
“Do you know who she really is?”
“Yeah, I found out.”
Austin lifted both hands in a gesture of exasperation and Eddie changed the subject as quickly as he could.
“Don’t you think dying was a pretty dramatic way to disappear, Captain?”
“Nah…” Austin hesitated for a moment, but then he plunged on quickly. “I was just practicing.”
Eddie slowly rotated his head toward Austin. The sudden pitching sensation in his stomach told him what was coming next.
“The big C’s done blown the bugle for me, boys. Another few weeks, the quack says, then that’s it.” He took a long pull on the Singha, draining the bottle. “Man, that is so good.”
Winnebago started to say something, but Austin quickly waved him into silence.
“I don’t want to hear any horseshit about how sorry you are. It took me a while, but I’m okay with it now, so don’t fuck me up again.” Austin looked rueful. “I wouldn’t have told you at all, but it explains why I need you now.”
Austin chewed on his lower lip briefly while they all waited.
“I don’t want that money to go back to any of the bastards who had it before. None of ‘em. They’d just find a way to use it to kill people again: theirs, ours, somebody’s.” Austin was looking at Eddie now, but not looking at him. “It doesn’t really matter if it’s their government or ours that gets it. Same thing would probably happen either way. It’s blood money, boys. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Austin’s eyes were still on Eddie’s, but his mind appeared to be focused off in the middle distance.
“I’ve spent twenty years trying to wash that money up a little. Put some of it around here, some up in Laos to build schools and hospitals. Make up for some of the damage we’ve done to all these nice people.”
“You mean you’ve been giving away millions of dollars for twenty years and no one was even curious about where you got it?” Eddie asked.
Suddenly Austin snapped back into focus.
“Shit, man, this is Bangkok, the capital of the unknown world. Everybody thinks I’m the biggest drug dealer in town.” He burst into a cackling laugh. “Ain’t that the damnedest thing? Here I am giving away money as fast as I can, just trying to do right and help people, and the reason no one asks any questions is because they think I’m a heroin dealer. The world’s real fucked up, ain’t it?”
Eddie made some kind of a gesture, but even he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean.
“Anyway,” Austin continued, “I’ve only got a few weeks left and I’m still stuck with more than half the money. I can’t let any of those bastards get it after I’m gone, and that’s why I sucked you boys in. I want you to take it before that happens. I want you to get rid of every last dollar I haven’t managed to give away yet.”
Austin stopped talking and looked so hard at Eddie that it was almost as if he was willing him to say something. When Eddie remained silent, Austin went on in a sad voice.
“But you think about it before you agree to anything, son. Think about it real careful. I’m not sure I’m doing you any favors here. Not sure at all. Money has a way of fucking people up. And a lot of money just fucks people up a lot.”
Winnebago and Bar shifted back on their stools and watched Eddie. He had a strange expression on his face, and neither of them could quite figure out what it meant.
“Maybe you’d better tell us the whole story before we go any further, Captain,” Eddie finally said.
“That’s fair. When you want to hear it?”
“Any time you’re ready to te
ll it, sir.”
Austin nodded crisply.
“Now’s good,” he said.
Thirty-Four
ABOUT a dozen people appeared right after the Volvo went up, drawn from the Little Princess and the other buildings in the area by the sound of the explosion. Lek noticed that no one seemed particularly alarmed by the event. The spectators stood casually in a ragged half-circle and watched the car burn, as if a Volvo bursting into a fireball wasn’t remarkable enough in that particular neighborhood to inspire any overwhelming excitement.
With everyone’s eyes were on the fire, Lek led four Vietnamese men—all of them slim, fit-looking, and dressed nondescriptly in dark trousers and short-sleeved white shirts—across the parking lot and into the Little Princess. She paused just inside and waited for the men to take up their positions. Lek thought to herself how much she hated being drawn into macho posturing. Her reputation for finesse, for getting what she wanted with only the most surgical application of violence, was something she was proud of; but this time it hadn’t done the job and time was something she was running out of.
Everything she had worked for was slipping away from her; Lek could feel it. Worse, it was an American who was getting the upper hand. If Eddie Dare got to that money before she did, the loss of face would be devastating. Westerners didn’t understand face. They seemed to regard it as something like a credit rating, a record from which black marks could always be erased if you knew how to do it. But face just didn’t work that way. Once lost, it was gone forever. You had to live without it for the rest of your life.
It was time to forget finesse, something she knew her superiors often dismissed contemptuously as too feminine anyway, and to adopt the only approach to solving problems that men ever really respected. It was time to pile on the weight until things started snapping.
Behind the bar of the Little Princess a skinny girl in a short black dress wiped at dirty beer glasses with half-hearted swipes. Two other girls sat in straight chairs at a Formica table in the back of the room eating fried rice. The rest of the Little Princess was dim and empty. It was too early for customers so few girls were around.
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