Dead and Kicking

by McGeachin, Geoffrey

  ‘Heading back to Sydney soon, Boxer?’ I asked. ‘To be with the wives and kids?’

  One of the girls gave him an angry look.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Boxer said, slipping his arms around both women. ‘He’s just a sad, jealous little man. Trust me, I only have eyes for you, babe, and for you.’

  The angry looks were redirected towards me, and Boxer grinned and winked. Bastard. I spotted Jack and VT standing at the edge of the terrace, which was a great excuse for making myself scarce.

  The Luxe Royale’s terrace fronted a brightly lit square, noisy with street vendors, pedestrians, cars, motor scooters and the odd cyclo, the Vietnamese version of the three-wheeled pedal-powered bicycle taxi. The raucous din of engines and car horns, the humidity, the smells of street food, sweat, incense and leaded petrol fumes all added up to my favourite word: Asia.

  A tall, slender Vietnamese woman wearing a diaphanous white silk ao dai was standing with the two men. The ao dai, a high-necked, long-sleeved, ankle-length tunic split at the sides and worn over matching trousers, has got to be the sleekest, most graceful and sensual national dress going.

  I guessed the woman was in her late twenties, almost my height and nicely curved in some excellent places. A small white flower was tucked behind one ear and her long, glossy black hair was swept up, framing the most beautiful face I’d seen in a very long time.

  ‘Alby, Mr Murdoch,’ VT said. ‘I would like to present Miss Nhu Hoang.’

  Miss Hoang was gorgeous. She smiled and held out a delicate hand with long elegant fingers. As our skin touched, I felt an electric tingle shoot up my arm, run across my shoulders and down my legs, all the way to my toes. I knew instantly I was about to get myself into a whole lot of trouble.

  FIVE

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr Murdoch,’ Miss Hoang said in perfect English, with just a slight hint of an American accent.

  Jack took a sip of his champagne. ‘Miss Hoang is the granddaughter of VT’s sister,’ he said, giving me a look that I read as a warning to behave myself.

  ‘Miss Hoang is an officer with the national police,’ VT said, his voice giving me the same warning.

  ‘Some of my best friends are coppers,’ I said, reluctantly releasing Miss Hoang’s hand, ‘and believe me, none of them could wear a dress like that, not even the women.’

  I took two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter and offered one to Miss Hoang, who accepted it with a smile.

  ‘Miss Hoang is also the national police pistol champion,’ VT said.

  It was game, set and match in the ‘warn Alby to behave himself’ stakes. I looked Miss Hoang up and down. That ao dai was one hell of an outfit.

  ‘You don’t appear to be armed at the moment, Miss Hoang,’ I said. ‘I mean, not as far as I can see.’

  She smiled. ‘Looks can be deceiving, Mr Murdoch.’

  I knew that to be a fact from bitter experience.

  ‘I hear from Uncle you are interested in the cuisine of our country, Mr Murdoch.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ve got a couple of weeks to kill so I’m planning to go wandering, hit some markets and maybe take a few cooking lessons.’

  ‘Please just ask if there is any way I can be of assistance,’ she said.

  Jack gave me that look again.

  ‘You guys still planning on heading north?’ I asked.

  Jack nodded. ‘Probably. The production has the chopper leased till the end of the week so we’ve got clearance to fly up that way to visit some of VT’s relatives near Hanoi. Then we thought we might take a quick side-trip out to have a squiz at Dien Bien Phu. The joint was a bit out of reach last time I visited Vietnam.’

  Jack was a military history buff and Dien Bien Phu had military history in spades. The valley near Vietnam’s north-western border with Laos was where the French colonial government had built a massive and heavily fortified base in 1954. They’d crammed it full of Algerian and Vietnamese soldiers and elite French Foreign Legionnaires, and dared Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh rebels to bring it on. Bad call. When the smoke finally cleared, the fortress was pretty much obliterated, along with most of the men inside it. The majority of those who survived the catastrophe died in captivity.

  The music suddenly cut out and there was a murmur of voices behind us. When we turned towards the terrace door-way, the film’s producers and stars had joined the party and someone was tapping on a wine glass with a spoon to call for silence.

  ‘Bugger me,’ Jack said glumly, ‘speech time.’

  With exquisite timing, Nhu excused herself. ‘I have some police matters I need to attend to. Have a safe trip, Uncle.’

  She smiled at me. ‘Perhaps we shall be able to get together some time soon, Mr Murdoch. Do you have a card?’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ I said, handing over my WorldPix business card and getting another warning glare from Jack as I found myself watching her disappear into the crowd.

  Thankfully, the speeches were short and to the point. Mention was made of the fact that it had taken over twenty years to finally get Lost in Action into production. The Peter Cartwright story had seemed jinxed from its inception, with insurmountable legal, logistical, political or financial problems always popping up at the last minute. In fact, the project had broken the spirit and emptied the bank accounts of a large number of very experienced film producers over the years.

  As the producer wound up his speech, Jack turned around and looked out over the busy square, glass in hand. The moon, just on full and sitting low in the sky, had come out from behind a cloud and the square was bathed in soft light. The two men standing together made a great picture: VT, his arms folded while watching the speaker, Jack facing the busy square with his back towards me. I took the tiny Leica D-Lux from my pocket and carefully framed them against the action.

  Behind me, the producer finished by thanking the cast and crew for their efforts on a difficult location shoot, and said how much he looked forward to us all meeting again in a few weeks on the Gold Coast. Then he proposed one final toast to the man who had brought us all together on this terrace in Saigon. ‘Ladies and gentleman,’ he said, ‘I give you the late Major Peter Cartwright VC, Lost in Action.’

  There were murmurs of ‘Peter Cartwright VC’ from the crowd on the terrace, and as I gently pressed the Leica’s shutter button I saw Jack stiffen and heard a barely audible, ‘Bugger me dead.’ He turned back and emptied his champagne glass in one gulp.

  ‘Problem, Jack?’ I asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said quietly. ‘You just take a picture?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Let me see it.’

  I brought up the image on the D-Lux 3’s crisp, bright viewing screen. It was a good picture, I thought, nicely composed with the two men on the left of frame, the moon shining and the hustle and bustle of the crowded square filling the right half.

  ‘Can you blow it up?’ Jack asked.

  ‘We can’t see your face, Jack,’ I said. ‘The viewer will just have to assume that you are ruggedly handsome.’

  ‘Not me, you dill, that cyclo,’ he said, pointing to a pedicab with a red plastic roof that was on the edge of the frame.

  I pressed the magnify button a couple of times to make the picture bigger on the screen, toggled the cyclo to the centre of the frame and then used the magnify button again to make it as large as possible. The passenger was a man, European, maybe in his sixties. He’d been looking up towards the terrace as I’d pressed the shutter. There was something vaguely familiar about that face.

  ‘Friend of yours, Jack?’ I asked.

  ‘Used to be, Alby,’ he said, staring at the image intently. ‘If I’m not going crazy, and I don’t think I am, then our hero Major Peter Cartwright VC, dead and gone for thirty some years, just went past sitting up like Jacky in the back of that cyclo.’

  SIX

  Back in my room after the wrap party, I fired up my laptop and downloaded the picture from the terrace. Using Photoshop, I cropped it down to
just the cyclo, driver and passenger, then sharpened and tweaked it as much as possible before printing out a hard copy.

  Jack studied the photograph for a long time before speaking. ‘Could be the bastard,’ he said, taking a swig of the outrageously overpriced Scotch from the minibar.

  Thanks to the excellent optics of the Leica’s Vario-Elmarit lens, the faces of both the driver and passenger were surprisingly clear, even though I’d focused on Jack and VT, and the shutter speed was slowish due to the low light levels.

  ‘Last time we saw each other was over thirty years ago,’ Jack continued. ‘Bastard dragged me down into a shell hole and out of the line of fire of a couple of companies of stroppy Vietcong who’d taken exception to me calling in an artillery strike in the middle of their smoko.’

  ‘Was that where Cartwright got his Victoria Cross?’

  Jack nodded. ‘We were cut off, surrounded and running low on ammo when he shot his way into our position, rallied the boys, formed a perimeter and then, after making sure we were all dug in, borrowed my radioman to call in that air strike right on top of us.’

  ‘What were you doing while all this was happening?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘Bleeding. Cartwright lay on top of me in that shell crater until it was all over and then waved goodbye as I was flown out in a medevac chopper. He was reported killed a month or so later, probably before he heard about the medal.’

  That explained why Jack had wanted to work on the movie and why he hadn’t been impressed with our director’s habit of changing history.

  I opened a manila folder marked ‘Photo Reference’ that I’d borrowed from the film’s art department. Inside were dozens of press clippings and photographs from the sixties, including shots of soldiers from the Australian task force on patrol, in action and relaxing off-duty in South Vietnam. There were some shots of a very young Peter Cartwright, and it looked like Jack was right. The bloke in the cyclo was a dead ringer for the major.

  ‘Even if it is him, Jack,’ VT said, ‘it’s a very long time for someone to play dead. What about his family?’

  ‘Cartwright was an orphan,’ Jack explained. ‘He grew up in a series of foster homes, some good, some not so good. He was a very smart kid but a bit of a hooligan. Back then, magistrates offered bad boys the choice of joining the army as an alternative to a spell in the clink, and as it turned out Cartwright and the army were made for each other. Some bright spark spotted his potential as officer material and he was on his way; career army, in it for the long haul. If he hadn’t got himself killed I reckon he’d have been chief of the defence force by now, and all set to retire and write his autobiography.’

  ‘Instead of dead and kicking in a cyclo in downtown Saigon,’ I said.

  Jack nodded. ‘It’s an interesting concept,’ he said, picking up the photograph of the cyclo once again and studying it closely. ‘Still, I had my reasons for playing dead and if that’s really him I imagine he has his.’

  ‘Something murky you reckon?’ I said.

  ‘Not the Cartwright I remember. I did hear rumours just before he died that he was mixed up in something dodgy, but I didn’t give them much credence. We weren’t exactly bosom buddies but as far as I know he was a straight shooter.’

  Jack glanced over towards VT, who was out on the balcony smoking a cigarette. ‘Hey, VT – you mind if we put off heading north for a day or so? I want to have a sniff around town to see if I can track this bloke down.’

  ‘It’s fine with me, Jack. I’ve still got a lot of gifts to buy for my family in the north – Nhu reminded me I have more nieces and nephews than I realised. What about you, Alby? You going with Jack to keep him out of trouble?’

  ‘I guess I can spare a morning,’ I said, ‘but I’m pretty sure Jack can look after himself.’

  ‘VT likes to worry,’ Jack said, laughing.

  ‘Saigon’s a big city. You don’t think it might be like looking for a needle in a haystack?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s find the haystack first,’ Jack said, pointing at the person in the photograph who was driving our mystery man.

  SEVEN

  Next morning, bright and early, Jack and I were up and looking for a cyclo. They aren’t all that hard to spot in Ho Chi Minh City, but we wanted a specific cyclo. Luckily we had a photograph to help us.

  We also had the help of the government, which was trying very hard to limit the number of cyclos by restricting the areas they could work in and the roads they could travel on. Eventually, they would go the way of the rickshaw in Hong Kong, now reduced to just a couple of examples parked outside the Star Ferry terminal in Central, the bored operators giving short rides to tourists or charging to pose for photographs.

  It took us a couple of hours of hailing cyclos to get a name and then another couple to get a confirmed last sighting. Jack had a pretty good grasp of Vietnamese, which came in handy. We eventually found the cyclo we wanted parked near a food stall down an alleyway, its driver sitting on a small plastic stool slurping noodles. It was close enough to lunchtime by now, so we pulled up a couple of stools and joined him.

  I ordered pho bo, a Hanoi dish of beef soup with rice noodles, while Jack had the same as the driver, which appeared to be the offal special, featuring beef tendon, liver, kidney and other assorted tasty bits. It was no surprise the bloke could pedal all day in the tropical heat with a dish like that inside him. The driver was no spring chicken, and the sinewy sun-browned legs poking out of his faded shorts looked a bit like some of the things floating in his soup.

  When the driver had finished off his meal, Jack passed him over a packet of cigarettes and the photograph. The man nodded as he accepted the cigarettes and then laughed when he saw the photograph. He said something to Jack, who also laughed.

  ‘He reckons a million tourists must have taken his picture, but this is the first time he’s actually got to see one.’

  The conversation went back and forth while I finished off a second bowl of soup. I couldn’t help myself. Simmered for hours, and rich in colour from charred onion and ginger, the clear beef stock was bloody delicious, spicy and salty-sweet at the same time. Thinly sliced beef, rice noodles and crunchy bean sprouts filled the bowl, dressed with ngo gai, sawtooth coriander leaves, the purple basil called hung que and hung lui or spearmint, a popular northern addition. Adding a final squeeze of lime brought a tart edge to the complexity of the deceptively simple dish.

  Jack filled me in on the conversation while the old man smoked his cigarette.

  ‘Our mystery man hailed him near the airport and wanted to go to a street by the river. He reckons the bloke spoke almost perfect Vietnamese but with a Hanoi accent. Said he hadn’t been in a Saigon cyclo for years.’

  ‘Could he show us this street by the river?’

  Jack spoke briefly to the man, who nodded.

  ‘We’re on,’ Jack said. ‘In exchange for the photograph, he promises not to overcharge us too much and I think there was a subtle hint in there that we should pay for his lunch.’

  Five minutes later we were in a couple of cyclos negotiating the horror that is Ho Chi Minh City’s road system. Jack was in the lead with the old man, while I was in the second cyclo following behind. On some cyclos the driver sits in front and pulls his passengers along by pedal power, but on this one the driver was behind me, pushing. You knew it had to be hell on his calf muscles but right now I had my own little hell going on. With the driver sitting behind, there was nothing between me and the rest of Saigon, and the rest of Saigon was coming at me full throttle.

  EIGHT

  The best way of coping with traffic in Asia is to ignore the stink of leaded petrol and diesel exhaust fumes, the roar of engines and the noisy squawking of scooter and car horns, and not look too closely at what’s ahead of you. I concentrated on the passing faces of bewildered backpackers and tourists standing almost catatonic with terror on the kerb, wondering how they were ever going to be able to safely ford that manic never-ending stream of vehicles.<
br />
  If pedestrians find negotiating Saigon traffic difficult, for cyclo passengers it feels like a cross between ballroom dancing and a boxing match. The driver’s aim is to bob and weave smoothly in and out of the oncoming, overtaking and merging onslaught of trucks, buses, cars, scooters, carts, cyclists and pedestrians. You can only live in hope that your driver is watching out for the one-two punch of anything bigger and heavier than you.

  Honking scooters and motorcycles zoomed noisily by us with pretty girls riding pillion or whole families perched on every possible roost. Taxis were drifting lazily left and right across the front of my frail little cyclo, passing so close that I could almost reach out and touch the driver or passenger. The local men, women and children were unfazed and wandered casually through the chaos, going about their business.

  We cruised past shops and cafés, and roadside food vendors hunched over charcoal stoves or tending wicker baskets of colourful fruit. The streets were bustling with women wearing trendy dresses or designer jeans and others in ao dais or peasant pyjamas and conical straw hats. Shopping malls and boutiques featuring Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton competed for trade with vendors pushing bicycles laden with brushes, brooms and homewares, or goldfish in water-filled plastic bags.

  Multistorey glass office towers festooned with flashing signs and posters for expensive watches, mobile phones and cognac were jammed up against older two- and three-storey colonial buildings hung with banners or the yellow-starred red national flag of Vietnam. The city renamed in honour of the great revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh looked like it was stuck in one last battle with decadent Western consumerism, and things weren’t going all that well.

  The combination of stifling exhaust fumes and this visual and aural kaleidoscopic assault was numbing, so it was a relief to come to a stop outside a large four-storey factory building near the river. It had a nondescript façade of crumbling rendered concrete, barred windows, a steel security shutter over what appeared to be a delivery dock, and rolls of rusty barbed wire around the balustrade on the top level. There wasn’t a welcome mat out in front of the locked main entrance.