Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  “Where is the mamasan?” Lek asked.

  The girl in the black dress shrugged listlessly. “Go out.”

  “Where?”

  Another shrug as she placed a glass on the shelf, but the girl didn’t say anything else.

  “Alone?” Lek asked.

  Now no response at all, not even a shrug.

  “Did you know a man named Harry Austin?”

  When the girl began silently wiping down the bar top with indifferent strokes of her towel, Lek turned away without another word and walked to the table in the back where the two girls were eating. Neither paid any attention to her.

  “Do either of you know Harry Austin?” Lek asked them.

  The younger of the two girls continued shoveling rice into her mouth and ignored Lek completely. She looked to be not more than seventeen and a thick cascade of glossy, coal-black hair hung around her tiny shoulders like a nun’s habit. The other girl briefly glanced sideways at Lek with a nervous twitch in her eyes, but then she too went on eating.

  Lek pointed a finger at the closest of the four Vietnamese men and he covered the distance to the table in a few quick strides. With a movement so smooth that it seemed at first not to be occurring at all, he pulled a matte-black automatic pistol from under his shirt and buried the muzzle in the younger girl’s cloak of shiny black hair.

  He pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession.

  When the two rounds exploded in the girl’s head, they shattered her skull. Blood and bone sprayed over the wall, across the table, and into what was left of the two plates of rice. The other girl began to scream hysterically, writhing frantically in her chair and slapping both hands over and over against her face. Ignoring her, Lek turned and walked with deliberate steps back to where the first girl was frozen in place behind the bar, her towel motionless on the wooden top.

  Lek raised her voice just enough to be heard over the screams.

  “I asked you if you knew Harry Austin.”

  The girl behind the bar began to tremble uncontrollably. Her body convulsed with sobs and she desperately tried to draw breath through the bile rising in her throat.

  But she nodded quickly.

  ***

  THE Green Latrine was still and quiet, and the perpetual twilight shrouding its interior made it seem to Eddie they were drifting in a place that was outside time.

  “Why me, Captain?” he finally asked. “There must be someone else.”

  “You saved my life, didn’t you? Took a damned bullet for me.”

  “Don’t bring that up again,” Eddie sighed. “You know that was just an accident.”

  “I’m not so sure of that.” Austin poked his tongue into his cheek and rolled it around. “But what difference does it make? Either way, I figure I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. Besides, you’re the only man I know who’s decent enough to trust with something like this. At least you used to be. You still a decent man, Eddie?”

  The word sounded exotic, almost antique the way Austin used it.

  “I don’t know,” Eddie finally replied when he realized that Austin was actually waiting for him to answer. “I haven’t thought about it much.”

  But he had thought about it, and when he glanced up and caught Austin’s eye, he saw that the captain knew he had.

  “Did you ever wonder why I called it Operation Voltaire?” Austin suddenly asked.

  The question caught Eddie by surprise, and he hesitated.

  “I’ll bet you thought that an old hick like me never read anything more intellectual than Zane Grey, didn’t you, Eddie?”

  “You always had a reputation as an unusual man, Captain.”

  “Maybe that’s just another way to say crazy, huh?” The captain laughed and Eddie wondered where this was going. “Anyway, sometimes it worried me that I might have gotten a little cute, sticking the operation with a slick name like that, but nobody’s ever caught on as far as I know.”

  “I have,” Winnebago spoke up quietly.

  Eddie twisted around and looked at him with a surprised frown. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “It didn’t occur to me until just now.” Winnebago leaned forward until he caught Austin’s eye. “It’s because of Candide, isn’t it?”

  Harry Austin pointed his forefinger at Winnebago and winked.

  “Voltaire wrote a novel in the eighteenth century called Candide,” Winnebago looked at Eddie, explaining.

  “I know that,” Eddie snapped. He glanced at Austin, but the look in the captain’s eyes was too gauzy to make any sense out of, so he turned back to Winnebago. “What’s that got to do with this?”

  “Candide was about a man who wanted to learn how to live,” Winnebago went on in a voice like a junior college lecturer. “He journeyed the world trying to find out. Sometimes he wondered if it was all worth it, but he never quit looking for the right way.”

  Bar threw Eddie a look. Eddie ignored it.

  “By the end of the book,” Winnebago continued, “Candide had found the right way to live.”

  “I’m holding my breath,” Eddie said, making a beckoning gesture with his right hand. “What’s your point?”

  “Candide found out that men who acted were always happier than men who only observed. He decided a valuable life came from trying to do something, rather than doing nothing and only waiting for others to act.”

  “You’ve pretty much got it,” Austin nodded.

  “Got what?” Bar flung his hands up in exasperation.

  “Look at it this way,” Austin explained patiently. “The South Vietnamese who were left at the end were mostly a bunch of useless candy-asses. They were going to sit there and let the North grab all that money just to make themselves look true-blue. I had a way to save the money from falling into any of their no-account hands. So I did.”

  “The Voltaire money was in that shipment we took from the embassy to Thailand just before Saigon went down, wasn’t it?” Eddie said. “It was on that run where the other plane crashed. The one with the CIA guy on it.”

  “That’s right,” Austin nodded again. “How’d you work it out?”

  Eddie told Harry Austin about the general, but went on quickly before the captain could start asking questions.

  “It all went into the Air America warehouse at U-Tapao Airbase, didn’t it, Captain?”

  “Yep.”

  “So how did you wind up with it?”

  Austin scratched his ear and pushed his stool around a little.

  “It was just lying around in that warehouse after everybody hauled ass out of Saigon, sealed up all nice and safe inside a bunch of unmarked crates. Nobody but me knew it was there. After I was evacuated to Thailand, I just borrowed a truck and got some guys to load it up. Then I gave the kid in charge of the place some old orders I had from somewhere. He never even looked at them. I just drove away. It was no big deal.”

  “You just loaded up a truck and drove away? With ten tons of money?”

  “Yeah,” Austin said. “That was about it. I parked the bastard for two months in a garage. Didn’t even unload it. Once I had all that money, I didn’t know what the hell to do with it.”

  So what did you do with it?” Winnebago blurted out, never one to mince words. “It’s not like you could stick it under your bed.”

  “Come on,” Austin said, standing up and starting for the door. “I want to show you something.”

  When they got outside, the sun was down and the last traces of the day’s light glistened on the ring of glass office towers encircling Soi Cowboy. There was a scent of bougainvillea in the languid, gray-brown dusk, and a child wailed off in the distance. Thai music started to play from a radio somewhere: a woman’s voice hovering halfway between discord and sweetness.

  In daylight, the forest of neon signs over Soi Cowboy had looked shoddy and lifeless to Eddie. Dirty glass tubing and shabbily rigged electrical connections dangled grotesquely out of holes hastily chopped into the fronts of the buildings. The whole place l
ooked like a half-finished demolition site.

  But now, in the fading light of early dusk, Eddie could sense a transformation taking place. As the colored lights on the signs flickered tentatively and snatches of garish animation twinkled in the dimness, the real Soi Cowboy started to appear before his eyes like Brigadoon rising from a pile of trash.

  “See that building over there?” Austin asked, pointing above the rooftops of the shophouses to where a glass-clad office building soared forty or more floors into the night. Without waiting for an answer, he pointed the other way to a forest of towers that loomed in the distance down Sukhumvit Road. “And that? You see that hotel down there with those other buildings?”

  Eddie glanced at the others as they stood grouped around Harry Austin, but their expressions were as off-center as he supposed his must be.

  “I bought a lot of land over the years, mostly around here,” Austin said. “I kept the soi pretty much like it always was because I liked it that way, but I built that shit out there because it makes money.”

  Austin glanced around and a softness came over his face.

  “You want to know where the Voltaire money is?” he asked.

  The question was clearly rhetorical.

  “This is it, boys. This is it right here.” He flung his arms open, seeming to embrace everything within his sight.

  Bar gaped slack jawed at Austin. “I always heard some shady Chinese guy owned this place.”

  Austin reached up to his face with both hands, extended his forefingers, and very deliberately pushed the outer corners of both eyes upward until they took on a decided slant.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve always heard that, too.”

  “Oh man,” Bar laughed. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Anyway,” Austin released his eyes and went on. “I’ve given all this away now. Signed most of the little places over to the people who worked in them and the rest to a trust some big-shot lawyers in Singapore set up. I don’t have the first fucking idea how it works, but all the income goes to a foundation that operates hospitals and orphanages up north.”

  Austin waved a hand at the Thais drifting into Soi Cowboy to begin another night of work.

  “Look at ‘em boys. You don’t see anything but a bunch of whores and thugs, do you? That’s all I saw for a long time, but most of them got shitty lives because of where they were born, not because of who they are. They work hard, they love their kids, and they deserve a better shake than they’ve gotten up to now. They’re good people, mostly.”

  Austin patted his open palms against his thighs a few times, his eyes darting among the faces in the soi. No one said anything. No one knew what to say.

  “You boys think I’m just a romantic old fool who’s gone all soft in the head, don’t you?”

  “No, sir, I think…” Winnebago began, and then stopped. “Actually, I got no fucking idea what I think.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Austin smiled sideways at Winnebago. “That’s not such a bad way to go.”

  There was a pause that lingered until Austin finally gave up waiting for someone to say something.

  “All this used up a lot of the money,” he went on, “and I gave some more away upcountry, but there’s still quite a bit left. Probably about $200,000,000, maybe a little more. I can show you where it is, but I don’t know what I can do to help you from there.”

  “Are you saying you’re giving us $200,000,000, Captain?” Eddie heard himself asking the question out loud, but it didn’t sound like one that made any sense, even though he listened carefully to each of the words as he spoke them.

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Giving it to us?” Eddie asked again. He cleared his throat, which had suddenly gone very dry. “Just like that.”

  “Sure am,” Austin grinned. “But first you have to promise me something.”

  “Uh-oh,” Bar said, glancing at Eddie. “I knew there’d be a catch.”

  Austin briefly engaged each man’s eyes and held them a moment, as if he wanted to reassure himself of something before he went on. When he spoke again, it was in a firm and resolute voice.

  “You can divide the money up among yourselves or give it all to the Little Sisters of Charity,” he said. “Hell, you can burn it for all I care. You can do any fucking thing you want with it. But you’ve got to promise me one thing: that you’ll get it out of here right now and make it all go away forever.”

  Eddie considered that a minute, and then he told Austin about the bounty the Secret Service had offered him for turning the

  money in.

  “No!” Austin snapped. “No fucking way. You promise me that you’re not going to do that or this is over right now.”

  Austin grabbed his wrist. Eddie could feel the urgency in his fingers. “Look, you’d probably be better off if you burned most of it, that’s my opinion, but I don’t reckon you’ll do that. The important thing to me is this. No government can ever have it again. Not ours. Not theirs. Not anybody’s. You understand that?”

  The silence that fell was heavy with anticipation, and it was left to Eddie to break it. When he did, his voice sounded thin and scratchy, even to him.

  “Okay, Captain, you’ve got a deal.”

  Harry Austin smiled at that.

  “So…ah, where is it?” Eddie asked.

  And that was when Harry Austin started to laugh.

  ***

  AFTER the girl in the black dress told Lek everything she knew about Short Time and Harry Austin, after she told her about the closed-down bar once called the Green Latrine from where Harry Austin ran his Soi Cowboy empire, Lek was done with her. One of the Vietnamese men shot the girl where she stood and another shot the one who had been screaming, putting both of them away with professional double taps angled upward from the back of the skull.

  The four Vietnamese men made a quick but thorough search through the massage rooms upstairs. One found two girls and a fat German entwined together in a big bathtub and shot them all without hesitation. Another found the two Chinese men tied up together and dumped on a round bed watching themselves in the mirror on the ceiling. When he also found the duffel bag of weapons lying on the floor at their feet, he called Lek.

  She considered the possibilities as she rifled through the bag. She was pretty sure she recognized the Chinese as McBride’s men, but the question was, what were they doing tied up there in the Little Princess? Had Eddie done it? Was he making his run for the money and left them there to get them out of the way? But then why had the bag of weapons been left behind? Had Eddie decided he didn’t need guns at all, or had he just left the small ones behind, taking only heavier stuff?

  She could probably roast the Chinese until they told her, but that would take a while, and they might not know very much that was useful anyway. No, there wasn’t time for that. Eddie Dare was too far ahead already. She’d just have to keep moving and take her chances.

  Lek sighed and beckoned one of her men over. They had a brief whispered conversation and, when they all left the building a few minutes later, the flames were already beginning to bite through the pasteboard-thin walls of the massage rooms, flowing along the cheap carpeting on the stairway like water rippling down a terraced creek bed.

  Another five minutes and the crowd that was beginning to drift away from the remains of McBride’s Volvo would have a fresh source of entertainment. Another fifteen, and there would be nothing left of the Little Princess but moist memories, and nothing at all of the bodies scattered around inside it.

  ***

  “I was wondering how long it was going to take you to ask where the money was,” Austin chuckled as they trooped back inside the Green Latrine.

  “I figured you’d tell us when you were ready, Captain,” Eddie said.

  “I’m ready now. I just want to be absolutely sure I have your word that neither the Vietnamese nor the Americans will ever see any of this money again. I want to know that you’ll destroy it if you have to be
fore you’ll let that happen. Do I have your word on that, Eddie?”

  “You have my word.”

  “You boys okay with that?” Austin’s eyes darted first to Winnebago then to Bar.

  They both nodded.

  Austin whooped loudly and bounded across the room. “Then let’s get to it!”

  With a half-dozen quick strides, he rounded the end of the bar, reached underneath, and produced a fire ax. He raised it over his head with both hands and swung it straight down with all his weight behind it. The bar top splintered from the impact of the heavy blade and, after a second swing, it split into two separate pieces. Austin gave the ax a twist as he pulled it out of the bar top, sending one of the halves sliding sideways and crashing to the floor.

  Austin turned the ax over, holding its head down like a clock pendulum, and dropped it into the open cavity beneath where the top had been. He slammed the flat of the blade forward and backward until first the rear and then the front of the bar collapsed in a ruined heap around his feet. Kicking some of the pieces aside, he extended the ax out at arm’s length, pointing with it into the rubble.

  “There you go.”

  Clearly visible was one end of a line of wooden crates. They were each sitting on two-by-four skids and bolted to shipping pallets. Eddie could only see one of the crates in its entirety from where he stood, but that was enough.

  Stenciled across its side in large, white letters was something in Vietnamese. Below that, something else had been added in English with black paint in what looked like a hasty, hand-done job. The Vietnamese meant nothing to Eddie, of course, but he could read the English easily enough, and that told him everything he needed to know.

  FROM - US EMBASSY, SAIGON.

  DATE - APRIL 3, 1975

  CONTENTS – EMBASSY ARCHIVES

  Thirty-Five

  SOI Cowboy wasn’t much more than a short, dusty lane from which most of the automobile traffic had been chased away. The street was inconsequential in daylight, but after sundown it flowed with the lifeblood of nighttime Bangkok.