Naked in Saigon (Naked Series Book 3)

by Colin Falconer

  NAKED IN SAIGON

  Book 3 in the Naked trilogy

  Colin Falconer

  Chapter 1

  Saigon, 1970

  REYES

  There is no better way for a man to kill himself than by slowly drinking himself to death in his own bar surrounded by scantily dressed girls dancing to rock music. If there was a better way to drown disillusion then he hadn’t found it. He might have gone on that way, too, if the VC hadn’t tossed a grenade through the door and saved his life.

  He was watching an American sergeant in the corner of the bar and was starting to get curious. The guy was sipping at his beer like a virgin, sending the girls away, fiddling with the straps of the leather briefcase he held under his arm like he was petting a dog. No one ever came in his bar with a briefcase. If he didn’t want to drink like a man and he didn’t want a girl, what was he doing here?

  He didn’t like the look of him, had a wrong feeling that just wouldn’t let up. In fact, something didn’t feel right about the whole day.

  Someone put another song on the jukebox: “All in the Game.” He hated that damn song. It took him back to Havana, just before Fidel walked in and changed things around forever. It reminded him of Magdalena, and he didn’t like to be reminded.

  He still supposed another man would have played that differently, would have believed her when she said she wanted a second chance. But he hadn’t made a career out of believing people, only watching what they did.

  Still, wasn’t a day -went by he didn’t regret it.

  Should he have given her a second chance? Rules were rules and it was rules that kept you alive, not sentiment. It was the same with women. If a girl did it to you once she’d do it again. He’d given her the chance and she blew it. Maybe it was a lucky escape, perhaps he was better off this way, this was the life he knew and understood.

  He wondered where she was now. He knew she was safe, and that she’d gone back to Hollywood. The mob had finally signed off on Kennedy. An amateur’s job in his opinion, there had been two attempts in the weeks leading up to November 22: one in Chicago, one in Tampa. Hoover could have stopped it if he’d wanted to, so could a lot of other people. Now they talked about old Jack like he was the love child of Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi. Camelot, for Christ’s sake. When he was alive, they hated his guts, and Bobby and Joe as well.

  They caught up with Bobby finally, too, a couple of years back. Took the idea straight out of Sinatra’s movie, The Manchurian Candidate. Those boys on the East Coast were just too cute.

  All of it was inevitable, and the only people who didn’t know that were the American public.

  Kennedy’s assassination had worked out well for everyone; the military that wanted this dirty little war, and Salvatore and the rest of the East Coast mob bosses who wanted the war every bit as much as they did. They needed the fight for democracy in Indochina so they could get access to the poppy fields.

  It was getting on towards evening, but there was no sign of the heat letting up. The strip was just starting to come alive, pulsing with gaudy neon signs: The Capitol, Blue Diamond, Fifth Avenue, The New York. The servicemen could get anything they wanted right here, from a pizza to a blow job. Rock music pumped out of the bars over the constant tinny whine of a thousand two-stroke motorcycles on the Tu Do.

  Saigon had changed beyond recognition these last few years. When he’d first arrived the tree-lined boulevards had been filled with bicycles, now the streets were choked with Vespas and Lambrettas weaving and honking their way between the convoys of olive drab trucks and jeeps belching black diesel smoke, massive finned Chevrolets with red, white and blue stickers on the chrome bumpers showing an American and Vietnamese handshake.

  American and ARVN soldiers were everywhere now, their fingers hovering over the triggers of their M-16s. There were sandbagged machine guns outside the Doc Lap palace and tanks in the streets.

  Most of his customers were inside the bar, despite the heat. There were a few bentwood tables and iron chairs out on the sidewalk but his customers rarely risked those any more, most sat inside where the wire mesh grill on the window at least offered some protection against VC grenades.

  He paid a boy to stand guard on the door; it was his job to watch for any unwelcome parcels the Viet Cong might think to toss through the door. One of the bar girls stood there messing with him, her hand on her hip, smoking a cigarette. She had on an electric pink mini skirt and a tight white t-shirt . There were hookers on the Strip back home had more subtlety. He thought the Vietnamese girls looked so much prettier in their traditional ao dai, but that wasn’t his call.

  One of the bar girls sat herself down on the lap of one of the GI’s and put her tongue down his throat. There was the sickly sweet smell of marijuana from the journalists parked in the corner. It was just another night at the Nevada.

  His eyes went back to the sergeant in the corner. He looked like he was waiting for someone. The guy was sweating too much, sure it was hot, but it was always too damn hot in this country. One of the girls sat down and started flirting with him and he just ignored her. What was the guy’s problem?

  “Light My Fire” started playing on the jukebox. That was better. A crowd of crew-cut soldiers came in, wearing jeans and t-shirts, and the bar girls launched themselves at them like sharks hitting raw bait. This moving riot surged towards the bar. It was just another night at the Nevada.

  Seven years since he had seen her. Why did he still even think about her? He had tried to put her out of his mind for so long, he had this trick--whenever he thought of her he would make himself think of something else: the weather, the football results back home, the ache in his knee where he had got himself shot that time in Guatemala. It had worked okay for a while, but then it just stopped working at all.

  He wondered what she was doing and he hoped she was okay. He had done all he could for her at the time.

  Or could he have done more?

  He looked back at the guy with the briefcase, he would have to go over there and talk to the guy. He looked like he had been led into the bar at gunpoint. What was his problem? Yet another of the girls, a stunner called Noi in a tight red dress and red stilettos went over to give it a try. She put her hand on his knee and he pushed her away, but little Noi was a tiger and she took his indifference as some kind of challenge and grabbed the big sergeant by the crotch and put her tongue in his ear, her trademark move.

  He pushed her away so hard she almost fell onto the floor. Noi changed from kitten to devil in half a second. “You fuck off number ten cheap Charlie! Why you no fucking want girl you bum bum boy, hey? You fuck off out of my bar!”

  Well now he would have to go over there, remind Noi--yet again--that it wasn’t her bar, and then have a longer conversation with the sergeant about treating the girls nicely. They weren’t his employees, technically, but he didn’t hold with abuse towards women. If a guy couldn’t handle a bar girl without throwing his weight around then he had no business in the Nevada.

  Reyes came around the bar and pushed his way through the crowd. Noi was still screaming and the guy was staring back at her scared and angry like he wanted to start throwing punches. He had a white-knuckle grip on the damned briefcase.

  It was then he noticed that the boy on the door wasn’t there and he knew in that moment what was going to happen. He saw a blur of movement at the edge of his vision, someone ran past the bar and threw something, there was a shout and a dull thud as something hit the floor and bounced off the jukebox.

  “Grenade!”

  Bar stools crashed over and girls shrieked. Those closest to the door hurled themselves outside, others scrambled for shelter behind the bar.
The sergeant just sat there, his mouth open. Reyes threw himself at Noi, knocked her down and covered her with his body.

  You can’t burrow through a cement floor with your fingernails while your body is curled into a ball on top of a flame-dressed bar girl, but shit, you can try. Jesus, it was Havana all over again.

  Afterwards, it was just so damned quiet. He sat up, astonished to find himself alive. Everything was still. Some people didn’t move because they were in shock, others because they were dead or so badly injured that they couldn’t.

  He had been saved by three big Marines who had no chance of getting out of the way and took most of the blast. There was not much of them left.

  He looked down at his legs, checked himself for wounds. He couldn’t believe he was in one piece, though his clothes had been shredded and singed by the blast of heat.

  The explosion had deafened him. He watched one of the bar girls run for the door, it looked like she was screaming but he could barely hear her over the constant ringing in his ears. Noi lay next to him, curled in a ball, shivering with shock. He shook her, tried to get her to sit up, but she wouldn’t move.

  His bar looked like a butcher’s shop. Some of the bodies were twitching. The big sergeant with the briefcase was still clutching the briefcase, but his arm was no longer attached to the rest of him.

  Flames crackled between lumps of shattered concrete and corrugated iron. Smoke billowed out into the street. He thought he was going to choke.

  He decided to take the briefcase. He uncurled the dead man’s fingers from the handle and hauled Noi to her feet, led her out into the street through the tangle of wreckage and the black pools of blood.

  He saw one of the girls trapped under some debris, pulled her clear of the burning lintels.

  The black smoke was burning his eyes but at least the ringing in his ears had started to clear. He heard police sirens and the clanging of ambulance bells in the distance. Already there was an army chaplain moving among the bodies, giving last rites. A soldier was kneeling over one of his buddies, making a tourniquet from strips torn from his own uniform.

  Reyes didn’t remember wandering away. He had walked two blocks before he remembered where he was and realized he was still holding the briefcase. People in the street were staring at him.

  He went back to his apartment and sat down hard on the floor. He started to shake. Shock, he thought, I’m in shock. He slid onto the floor and lay on his side and closed his eyes.

  The last thing he saw before he passed out was the battered leather briefcase. He wondered what the hell was in it that had made that sergeant look so scared.

  Chapter 2

  It was dark when he came to. He couldn’t have been out for long--he could still hear the ambulance bells on the Tu Do. He realized his hands were burned, he guessed from dragging the smouldering piece of lintel off one of the girls.

  He got up at the second attempt and staggered to the bathroom, looked at himself in his shaving mirror. Jesus Christ. His face was blackened form the blast and there was dried blood crusted to both his ears. He had a gash in his scalp and his hair was matted with blood, one half of his face was black with it. His shirt was ripped, his pants too, they had practically been torn off his body by the force of the blast. He was half naked. No wonder people had been staring at him.

  He had to get himself to the hospital, get his scalp stitched.

  When he came out of the bathroom he saw the briefcase lying on the floor, he tried to open it but it was locked. Well, not the first time he’d sprung a lock. He got a screwdriver from his kit and jimmied it open.

  He rocked back on his haunches and swore softly under his breath. Inside were seven one-kilogram bags of Double UO Globe brand refined heroin, pure China White.

  He shut the case and tried to think this through. He had not lived a sheltered life by anyone’s standards but this was totally unexpected. He put the case under his bed, put on fresh clothes, washed the blood off his face best he could with his burned hands and went out to find a doctor.

  Chapter 3

  Reyes and Walter Winstone - Walt - went back a long way. Reyes had run guns for him in Cuba. Walt was his contact in Miami when he was running messages for the Kennedy administration after the missile crisis. When Walt had shown up in Saigon he had tried to recruit Reyes for the Agency again, but he’d told him he was officially retired. They still saw each other for drinks at the Continental once or twice a week, and Walt never gave up trying.

  Walt did not look like a spook. He wore loud Hawaiian shirts and outsized Bermuda shorts, even at night. His thinning fair hair straggled over his collar, and he affected a long salt and pepper beard. He even smoked a pipe.

  “Holy shit, look at you,” he said when he saw Reyes. “You look like you got hit by a truck, man. The fuck happened to your hands?”

  They were swathed in bandages. “Doctor says I have second-degree burns. He put eleven stitches in this,” Reyes added, pointing to his scalp.

  Twenty-four hours since the grenade had exploded inside his bar; two more Marines had since died in hospital, bringing the final tally to six. Three of the bar girls had died, too, but they wouldn’t appear in the official figures. Two more had no hope of ever working again.

  But the war wasn’t going to stop for one bomb. No one here on the terrace of the Continental Palace was going to send back their cocktails and go home because of a loose grenade on the Tu Do. Already the roof was filling up with embassy people like Walt and other desktop warriors from the Military Assistance Command. A few preening Vietnamese with American or government connections were dotted among the crowd. Walt had got there early to make sure of a corner table facing the old Opera House, which these days served as the National Assembly building.

  The plaza was jammed with army trucks and Honda motorcycles and it sounded like every one of them were revving their engines and pounding their horns. Reyes sat down and took a deep breath. ‘Ah, breathe in that tropical air. Petrol fumes and the smell of burning bars.”

  “Man, when I heard about it, I thought you’d cashed in.”

  “Only the good die young, Walt.”

  “Well then you got nothing to worry about.” He leaned forward, examined the trackwork of stitches above Reyes’ temple. “Another scar to impress the ladies with, you rugged son of a bitch.”

  “There’s a dozen young boys not nearly so damned lucky. Half of them are in the morgue. Two of the girls are going to be cripples the rest of their lives.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Remember that bolerista in Havana, Inocencia Martinez, used to sing at the Left Bank? Happened to her, lost both her legs when a rebel left a bomb in the foyer. She ended up taking her own life in the end. She was only in her thirties.”

  The beers arrived. Reyes downed half of his in one swallow. When he put down his glass he caught Walt staring at his hands, they were still shaking.

  “Nowhere’s safe in ‘Nam,”” Walt said.

  “There was a kid I paid to watch the door. I knew him for three years, took medicine and food to his family. When the grenade went off he’d disappeared, haven’t seen him since.”

  “You can’t trust any of these damn gooks, they’d sell their own mothers.”

  “Only if their mothers were American, Walt.”

  “Well I’m glad you walked away from it, my friend. What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have grenade insurance.”

  Walt smiled. “I hear the premiums are prohibitive.”

  “I have money in the bank. Do I put it back into fixing up the Nevada? Because, you know, I don’t think we’re going to be here much longer.”

  Walt’s expression changed; in a moment he had slipped on his Agency face. “What makes you say that, my friend?”

  Reyes nodded across the street, a crew-cut serviceman was standing just off the street talking to a Vietnamese kid in a white vest. He handed over a few piasters and the kid gave him a small plastic pa
cket. He put it in his pocket and walked away.

  “Because half the army is stoned.”

  “Actually the figure is closer to twelve percent than fifty,” Walt muttered.

  “That means one in ten of your boys are doped out. I don’t figure that makes for a well-oiled fighting machine. It’s refined number four heroin, Walt. Two years ago you never saw this shit on the street. Now every mama-san from here to Hue is a dealer. Where the hell is this stuff coming from?”

  “Salvatore.”

  “He’s here, in Asia?”

  “He paid us a visit last year.”

  “I thought he got his supply from the Corsicans.”

  “He’s had a few problems with the Marseille connection.” Walt leaned in with his elbows on the table, lowered his voice a little. “You know all that opium we used to help them ship out of the Triangle? Well someone had the bright idea of bringing all these whizz bang Chinese chemists from Hong Kong and setting them up in laboratories right fucking there in the jungle. Now instead of hundreds of leaking bags of black jelly you just have a few bundles of powder, plastic wrapped like little white bricks, easier to load, easier to transport. Who needs to take the stuff back to the States? You got half of America right here, you sell it to them. And if they make it home after their tour, even better, you got yourself a brand new customer in Detroit and Miami and Philadelphia and the Bronx. Beautiful. Some business plan, huh? They even package the stuff like soap powder. They call it ‘Double UO Globe,” got a little red stamp with a tiger on it.”

  “How are they bringing it in?”

  “The fucking Vietnamese air force flies it straight in from Laos. It’s easy. No worrying about customs, they just unload it and ship it. The Corsicans are still over there, they’ve done a sweetheart deal with the government, people are making so much money it’s coming out their fucking ears.”