Naked in Saigon (Naked Series Book 3)

by Colin Falconer

  But it hadn’t turned out like that.

  When I looked back, the only time I had ever found happiness was the one time I hadn’t planned for it to happen, with the one man I never trusted, the one least like my father. It had scared me out of my wits. When you have happiness you have to control it, have all the pieces perfectly in place, or else you’re going to lose it.

  When Connor talked about kids I was surprised that it was me that wanted to put it off. I heard myself saying: I don’t think it’s time.

  You couldn’t plan it out in the end; you couldn’t make a list and find happiness when you finally ticked everything off. It was an unpredictable accident. I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as a happy ending anymore and if there was I didn’t have the first clue how to find it.

  I just hoped it was out there, somewhere, waiting for me.

  I reached over the table and took his hand. “Let’s go home,” I said.

  “Just two more weeks.”

  “I’m afraid, Connor.”

  “I can’t walk away from this. I’m thinking Pultizer Prize, honey.”

  “I’m thinking funeral, sweetheart.”

  “I can’t let these guys scare me off, what kind of journalist would that make me?”

  “A live one.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t,” he repeated.

  A thought came to the back of my mind and I tried to push it away. If he dies I will be free.

  Is that what I want?

  “I’m going home, Connor, with or without you.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “I want a normal life.”

  I waited for him to say something but he just bit his lip and shook his head.

  “You’ll wait for me?” he said, finally.

  “I don’t know.”

  I remembered what he had said and the look on his face when he said it: “I don’t know what I’d do if you ever left me. I mean it. I’d die without you now.”

  “Don’t do this. Please.”

  “I am not going to sit by and watch you kill yourself.”

  “Just give me another two weeks.”

  If he died, I would always know there was a part of me that wished for it. The only way I could sleep easy was by saving him from himself. I knew Angel meant what he said. What the hell was I supposed to do?

  “I’m booking a flight back to New York tomorrow. If you love me, you’ll be on it.”

  We sat there for a long time staring at each other across the table. Finally he got up and left and he still hadn’t given me an answer.

  Chapter 13

  REYES

  He met Walt in the Givral for croissants and cafe au lait. Walt liked the place because it was air-conditioned. Even though he had worked in Asia and the Caribbean all his life, he was born and bred in Michigan, and he still wasn’t accustomed to the heat and sweat poured of him in rivulets every time he stepped outside.

  He crammed the rest of his croissant in his mouth and shook his head. “You look like crap, Reyes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No, I mean it. What’s up with you? I never seen you looking so hangdog. Is this about what happened in the bar?”

  “It’s not the bar, Walt. I’ve spent my life dodging bullets.”

  He nodded over the road at the Caravelle. “So is it her?” A beat. “Come on, Reyes, we’ve known each other a long time, let’s cut through all the bullshit. I hear you did look her up after all.”

  “Since when has my private life been agency business?”

  “It’s not. I’m just curious.”

  Reyes wasn’t accustomed to talking about things that didn’t concern anyone else. But this morning he felt like he needed to talk to someone. “I guess I just wanted to see her one last time,” he said.

  “Now, I ask myself what does that mean? Seeing someone one last time.” It implies unfinished business. I’ve known you a long time and you never go back.”

  “This thing is never going to happen. I met this guy, her husband, he came looking for me. He’s a blowhard but he loves her, he’s nuts about her. I’m not even thinking about it.”

  “You’re nuts about her, too.”

  “I blew it. You only get one chance at these things. And besides, I don’t go stealing other men’s wives, even if I can. I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of but I never did anything like that and I’m not adding it to my list of sins, it’s long enough.”

  “Just tell me this, if he wasn’t around, what would you do?”

  Reyes took out a cheroot from the silver case and lit it.

  “I thought you’d given up.”

  Reyes made a face. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “If he wasn’t around? If he wasn’t around, I’d chase her to the ends of the earth and try one more time.”

  “Well you are in a sumbitch situation then, aren’t you, fella?”

  “What would you do?”

  “I never found anyone I ever thought about ten minutes after she got out of bed. I guess I’m not a romantic like you.”

  “Fuck you,” Reyes said.

  “No, I mean it. I’m almost jealous, Reyes. I never felt like that, not even once.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t recommend it, not when it gets screwed up.”

  “You were the one that screwed it.”

  “No, I had help.”

  “But you could have gone back, years ago.”

  “I guess.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t like feeling that way, Walt.”

  “What way?”

  “She scared me. I knew she could hurt me.”

  “She did hurt you.”

  “Well I didn’t want to live like that, wanting someone that bad. It’s like walking through a minefield every day. I had my life the way I wanted it. Until she came back into it, I was doing just fine.”

  “Well, sounds like the problem’s solved then, because according to you, she ain’t coming back. So what’s next?”

  “I don’t know, I’m thinking maybe I’ll head back to the States.”

  “You want to do me a favour before you go?”

  “Whenever I do a favour for you, it starts to get expensive.”

  “Then think of it as doing something for your country.”

  “I don’t have a country, I have a passport.”

  “Look, you know me, Reyes, I’m not like some of these other bastards here, it’s not a fucking crusade it’s just a job. And there’s times I get troubled by the things I see and hear.”

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “Angel Macheda. Can you play him?”

  “Why?”

  “You know him, right? He knows you.”

  “It’s not like a friendship, Walt.”

  “Do you know why Angel is here?”

  “You’re the intelligence service, I’m just an unemployed barkeep.”

  “I hear it’s about the eight keys of scag that went missing. But is that the only reason? I need sources close to him, Reyes.”

  “The Salvatore family were going to help you kill Fidel. They’re your friends, not mine. Why don’t you call Bobbo up for a pizza and ask him?”

  Walt shrugged. “Well, I tried.”

  “The one you should talk to is this Connor guy.”

  “The one who married your ex?”

  “He’s writing a book about the whole mess over here. Maybe he’s got some leads you can use. He sounds like he’ll do anything to bring Utopia a day closer.”

  “He won’t work with us, you know that.”

  “I can’t help you, Walt. I don’t know why he’s here. I find out anything I’ll let you know.”

  Reyes finished his coffee. “Damn, that’s good coffee.”

  “The secret is using good bourbon.”

  “You should open a cafe.”

  “The VC would blow it up.�
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  “Yeah, there’s always a downside to everything,” Reyes said and clapped his friend on the shoulder as he went out. Actually he thought he already knew why Angel was in Saigon and he guessed that Walt did, too. But getting the proof was the dangerous part and the fact of it was, he was through with putting his neck on the block for anyone anymore.

  At three in the morning the air was still stifling. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his back. It was still another hour before the end of the curfew, but the rumble of military convoys moving through the empty streets seemed never-ending.

  When he had first come to Saigon there was no curfew and the roar of trucks and tanks moving through the streets didn’t wake him up at night. It still looked like a little France then with boulevards of tamarind and lime trees and painted stucco villas with red tiled roofs and white porte-cochères. You could even still hear the sound of bicycle bells on the Tu Do. It was all very charming and it couldn’t last.

  The carpet-bombing and American search-and-destroy operations had brought millions of refugees flocking into the cities. Nixon kept throwing more conscripts at the problem. The city was sinking under the weight of its street kids and army trucks, the tamarind trees were dying from pollution, and soon the whole place would look like Detroit.

  He was still shaken from seeing Magdalena again. She hadn’t changed at all, unless getting even more damn beautiful counted as major transformation. He hadn’t expected that seeing her again would affect him the way it had. He thought at worst he might feel a moment’s regret.

  Instead he couldn’t sleep and couldn’t think, and had spent the last forty-eight hours in an alcoholic haze.

  What could he have done differently? Life was so much easier to live looking backwards. She was right--he could have looked for her all those years ago. But when you are younger you have your pride, and he thought he would get over her, like he got over every other woman in his life.

  He had tried taking home bar girls, he’d had a few casual affairs, but none of these things pleased him anymore. Sex was just sex, like eating or drinking. She was different, she had made him feel alive in ways he hadn’t counted on or thought of and he hadn’t really felt alive ever since he left her on Comoros.

  The first time he had seen her he knew there was something different about her. He had expected to win her over with a little patience, back then he always got the women he wanted. He even planned on letting her tame him a little; he had felt ready to give away his womanizing by then.

  But it hadn’t turned out anything like the way he had planned. He had rules and he always swore he would keep to them; a woman was unfaithful once, she would be unfaithful again, and you never risked a second time. That was his rule.

  But now rules didn’t mean anything, now she was married to someone else and he still couldn’t think of anyone but her. What a fucking mess.

  The whole point of his life had been to not care too much about anything or anyone and always play the main chance. Now it seemed his life was pointless.

  When he first came to Asia in ’63, he was still working for the Agency, running opium from Laos. He came back in ’65 and started up the Nevada when US servicemen started arriving, and it had paid off big time. Back then it had seemed like the perfect life for a man as dissolute as himself. Took him way too long to work out what a damned fool he was and by the time he changed his mind and went back to New York, he found out she was already married to this hotshot journalist, and so he stayed two nights at the Ritz and then went back to Saigon. He decided she was happy and it was best to leave her alone.

  If it wasn’t for the VC he probably would have disappeared inside a bottle forever. The fixtures and fittings weren’t worth a goddamn, and if he wanted he could get out clean and start a new life. But no kind of life that he could think of appealed to him anymore. What he wanted was to be back in the Hollywood hills in the pool with the princess.

  He reached for the bourbon bottle beside him. After all these years of not believing in anything he finally longed for something to really care about, one reason to make living worthwhile.

  He closed his eyes, remembered once seeing a rice field golden under a dipping flat sun, cranes silhouetted for a moment by the sky. For all the bars and battlefields he had seen this one moment was somehow seared into his memory. It suggested the possibility of finally finding peace. He just didn’t want to find it alone.

  Chapter 14

  MAGDALENA

  I had bought my ticket from the Pan-Am office; this time tomorrow I would be on my way back to New York. I had no plans after that; it was my final bluff, the one call that might make Connor change his mind. If he stayed in Saigon they would kill him, I was sure of that. What would I do back in New York? Go back to work, I supposed, and wait for the call informing me my husband had disappeared.

  If he came home with me, we could start again, I could be a good wife and a good mother, as I had always planned to be. I would forget about Reyes and keep a promise to myself never to see him again.

  I wasn’t sure which outcome I dreaded the most.

  I sat on the edge of the bed fretting. It was a quarter of an hour before the midnight curfew and he still wasn’t home. It was as late as he had ever been. Perhaps I’d left it too late to call my bluff.

  Finally, there was a muffled knock on the door. I leaped to my feet. “Who is it?”

  No answer.

  I hesitated, thinking about Angel standing out there in the corridor with his goons. I didn’t think he would come back, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. I heard another faint knock and I made up my mind and threw open the door.

  Connor had been leaning on the door, and as I opened it he fell into the room and lay sprawled in the entrance. I only recognized him from his clothes; his face was a bloody pulp. Dios mio. I took a deep breath to brace myself and knelt down beside him. He was conscious but only just. Every time he breathed, a bloody froth bubbled around his mouth and nose. His eyes were swollen shut.

  There was so much blood at first I thought he’d been shot.

  “Connor? Connor, can you hear me?”

  He grunted and twisted in pain. He reached for me and I gasped in shock. What had they done to his hands? I forced myself to stay calm. “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get help.”

  I wondered how he had gotten up to our room and why they didn’t stop him down at the desk. Perhaps they were too scared.

  I picked up the telephone and called downstairs and told them to get a doctor.

  Then I fetched a wet cloth from the bathroom and tried to clean him up as best I could. He had rolled onto his back and lay on the carpet, spreadeagled. He groaned every time I touched him. He had lost at least two teeth on his lower jaw and some of the others were loose. His nose was bent out of shape and I guessed his jaw might be broken, because he couldn’t talk. But the worst of it was the fingers of his right hand, they were a mangled and pulpy mess. Angel’s boys had been thorough and pitiless.

  I wondered if he had been there when they had done this. May you rot in hell, I thought.

  I heard the lift doors open and saw the duty manager run down the hall. He gasped and took a step back when he saw Connor. “Doctor come,” he said.

  I put my arms around my husband for comfort and held him in my arms until he got there. I couldn’t think of anything else I could do.

  It reminded me of other hospitals, other waiting rooms, that smell of antiseptic, the grim, white walls. I’d sat in a corridor just like this one that night in Miami, the night Papi and I escaped from Cuba. They were lonely places when there was no one to hold your hand, no one to share your grief and the fear.

  I just wished Reyes were here.

  The doctor emerged from the emergency room and gave me a grim smile. He was French, he had a thin beard and he was probably not much older than me. “He is badly injure,” he said, in broken English, ‘but he will be okay. He has break to cheek, to nose. Some concuss. No fracture to skull. W
orse is the hand. All finger break. I give him something for pain.”

  “Will he be able to use his hand again?”

  A Gallic shrug. “I hope so. We tell better a few day.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Yes, but not long. Okay?”

  “Okay, thank you.”

  Connor’s face and right hand were swathed in bandages. Someone had smashed his fingers with a blunt instrument, or so the doctor told me at the hotel. It was obvious to me why they had tortured him that way; it was to keep him away from the typewriter.

  His eyes had swollen shut so I could not tell if he was awake in the darkened room. His face was so misshapen with bruising that he was unrecognizable. I could hear him breathing from the other side of the room.

  I sat down in the chair beside the bed. I put my hand on his arm. He stirred. “Connor.”

  He tried to say something but his mouth was too swollen, and anyway, the drugs had done their work.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said.

  In moments he was snoring.

  I sat there for a long time in the darkness, listening to his breathing, feeling hollow inside. What had Reyes said to me once? He said that it was fate that had brought us together. I didn’t know what fate was, or if there was such a thing, but it seemed that no matter what I did the road always led me back here, to the two men who had changed my life.

  I thought about finding Reyes and asking him what he thought I should do, but by then it was almost dawn. And as the sun came up over Saigon, I decided my place was with Connor, it was the right thing now, no matter what.

  Chapter 15

  It was days before he could tell me what happened.

  He didn’t remember much; he had been talking to a contact he had made inside the Air Force base at Tan Son Nhut, they’d arranged to meet in a bar in Le Loi. As he was leaving two men approached him, dragged him off the street and then something hit him hard on the back of the head and he blacked out. The rest was a blur. He woke up later in an alley beside one of the clubs. He didn’t remember the beating, only the agony of waking to a smashed right hand.