“Don’t do it, Reyes.”
He walked into the warehouse. He could get Walt and some of his friends to come by later and clean up. They’d cleaned up bigger messes than this in Saigon.
The big guy was already turning grey. Angel was still sobbing on the floor, his hands across his ruined face. He wasn’t going to be so pretty anymore.
He aimed the automatic at his head. There were a lot of things going through his mind right then and none of them were coherent. The sweat ran into his eyes. What was he going to do?
Chapter 44
MAGDALENA
If anyone ever tells you they know the difference between right and wrong, then ask them what Reyes should have done that afternoon in the warehouse. If they come up with an answer too easily then perhaps they’ve never really known evil, in themselves or in someone else.
I waited outside for the gunshots, then realized I would not hear them. The Glock had a silencer. Finally he came out and went to the water’s edge and threw the pistol as far as he could. I watched it splash into the Saigon River. He walked back and took my hand. “Let’s go,” he said.
I kept thinking about what Connor had said before he left that last time: Everyone has to believe in something. I had asked myself what I believed in over and over ever since he left, and finally the answer came to me. I believed in Reyes and me.
Chapter 45
When I came downstairs Reyes already had a taxi waiting in the forecourt of the Caravelle. He threw my suitcase in the boot. “Airport,” he said to the driver.
“When will I see you again?” I said.
“I don’t know, I have to fix things with Walt.”
“What about Connor?”
“Leave it to me. The Embassy has a lot of experience getting dead Americans home.”
“But our apartment...”
“Listen, right now all you can do is get away and hide. Remember the island?”
“I remember.”
“I’ll make some calls. Get yourself to Dar-es-Salaam. I’ll have a charter plane waiting for you. You remember Jean-Luc?”
I nodded.
“Wait for me there.”
“What will you do?”
“Just do it. They’ll be looking for me, not for you.” He pushed me into the cab. He kissed me through the window. Some Marines wolf whistled at us from the other side of the street.
“You’ll come back?” I said.
“I promise, and next time I’m never leaving you again.” He hammered on the roof with his fist and the cab pulled out into the square and headed down Tu Do.
Chapter 46
Shofa was delighted to see me again. Even before I had unpacked my bags he brought me tea and rice and fish while his children stood in the doorway grinning at me. He wanted me to have dinner with him and his family that night and I knew it would be impolite to refuse, so I went to their hut and sat on a bamboo mat beside them while they pushed plates of crab and grilled stingray at me. His little girl remembered me and kept pinching my arm and then running off giggling while her father smiled indulgently and her mother scolded.
I took my leave as early as I could and went to sit by the shore and let the water lap around my hips and my ankles. I watched the moon rise over the sea and the shock finally hit me. I shook uncontrollably as the adrenalin flooded out of me.
I looked at my wrists. Even in the moonlight I could see the burn marks from the ropes where they had tied me to the chair in the godown. I had expected I would die there.
I started shaking and I couldn’t stop. It felt like it went on for hours. It happened countless times in the next few weeks. I was coming undone.
I still had on my wedding ring, but when I thought about Connor I felt too numb to cry. Then one day walking along the beach it hit me, and I fell to the sand and brought my knees up to my chest and howled. Shofa came running, he thought I had been bitten by a jellyfish, he carried me back to my hut and his wife sat with me for a whole day and night shooing away anyone who tried to come inside and fanning me with a palm leaf.
It would be another month before I had an undisturbed night’s sleep.
At night in the absolute quiet I could still hear the traffic on the Tu Do. There was a thunderstorm late one night and when I saw the lightning shimmer across the horizon I thought it was B-52s carpet-bombing the coast of Africa. I had only been in Saigon a few weeks, but I thought the ghosts of that that city would never leave me.
I didn’t worry that Reyes would never come back, not at first. I supposed that whatever it was he had to do in Saigon would take at least two days, perhaps three, and then he would come and find me. But as the days turned into a week and the week passed to a month, a profound depression fell over me.
Jean-Luc flew in and out of the island on a new seaplane now, tying up at the jetty half a mile along the beach. Whenever he arrived with the newspapers I asked him if he had heard from Reyes but I got only a Gallic shrug.
Could he find out for me?
“They ring me,” he said in French. “I don’t ring them.”
I went down to the beach one morning and spelled out ‘SOS’ in giant letters in the sand. Shofa’s children watched me, wide-eyed, thinking I had gone crazy. Perhaps I had.
At night, listening to the roll of the waves on the shoreline, I imagined a hundred possible endings for our story. I imagined that Reyes had not shot Angel after all and that Salvatore’s men had got to Saigon before he had time to escape; I imagined that he lingered too long getting rid of the bodies and that Salvatore had somehow linked him to the missing heroin and his missing son-in-law anyway; I imagined he had gone to Vientiane to see Connor’s body safely home and the Corsicans had tracked him there. I had one other idea, even more bitter—that he had decided to go off alone so that if Salvatore’s men found him, they did not find me as well.
On those tormented nights the moon seemed to pulse like a heart and I imagined a different world, one in which certain souls are drawn inexorably towards each other, like the tide on the beach. In the gentle ebb and flow of the waves I heard a whisper of something that Reyes was pleased to call fate, something that pursued every one of us in its different way to a million times a million beaches somewhere between the sea and the moon.
As I sat there I thought of Reyes’ eyes when he’d first picked me out among all the beautiful girls that afternoon in old Havana. My dream of him seemed as close now as the moon, as if I could reach out and touch it. But perhaps that was just an illusion, a madness of gravity and light.
But I had something to believe in now, and I would not give it up. I believed in our happy ending and I believed he would come. If something, somewhere, was to make sense, then he had to come.
And then one morning almost six weeks after I had arrived, I heard the drumming of aircraft engines and I squinted up at the sky. A shadow passed across the sun. I saw a seaplane skim across the water and then motor towards the dock. I ran breathless along the beach and saw him step out on the jetty. He was wearing a white shirt and cotton pants, as if he was on his honeymoon.
I shouted and waved but he could not hear me.
I would have to wait a few minutes longer for our reunion. But I had waited this long, so I guessed a few more minutes wouldn’t kill me.
I wondered if Papi was watching me somewhere; maybe now he could let go. He’d seen me fight; now he could watch me fly.
THE END
Read an Excerpt from Colin Falconer’s “Opium”
Vientiane, Laos
April, 1959.
NOELLE thought she would have noticed him even if he hadn't driven his Packard through the front bar of the Hotel Constellation.
He was outrageously handsome, even when he was drunk. He had blue-black hair, with a pronounced widow's peak, swept straight back from the forehead, and the damnedest blue eyes. His skin was olive dark and there was a reed-thin black moustache on his top lip. He wore a white linen suit, an affectation usually reserved for visiting potentat
es and ambassadors. It looked as natural on the Corsican as his own skin. Underneath the suit he wore a black silk shirt.
The bar was open to the street, so there were no walls to absorb the impact; but the unexpected arrival of a large burgundy red American automobile with massive rear fins quickly scattered the occupants, who were mostly bored foreign correspondents and diplomats. The chrome bumper bar splintered several rattan tables and chairs, and demolished half of the bamboo bar. Dusty bottles of Vermouth, Byrrh and black rum toppled off the shelves and shattered on the floor.
There was a deathly silence.
Then Baptiste Crocé leaned out from the driver's side and beckoned the startled Lao barman. “I'll have a large cognac,” he said in French.
There was a ripple of applause from the western journalists, who were also drunk. Any madness was a welcome diversion. At that moment Baptiste saw Noelle, stood on the bench seat of the Packard, and gave her a low bow.
“Imbecile,” Noelle's escort muttered. “He's drunk. A disgrace.”
Marcel Rivelini was her father's choice for her escort that evening; he certainly would not have been hers. He was one of his business associates from Bangkok, wealthy, sophisticated, insufferable. He was also almost as old as her father.
The barman brought the Corsican his cognac. He raised the glass towards her in salute and climbed out of the Packard. He made his way, a little unsteadily, across the bar towards them. Rivelini looked tense.
This should be interesting.
“May I have the pleasure of this dance?”
Noelle smiled. “But Monsieur, there is no music,” she said.
“That is beside the point, Mademoiselle. All I want is the exquisite pleasure of having such a lovely young woman in my arms.”
Rivelini stood up and punched him under the jaw. The Corsican fell backwards, breaking another rattan table. There was a hiss of disappointment from the gathered journalists.
Noelle stood up.
“I'm sorry if he offended you,” Rivelini said to her.
Noelle threw her Pernod at him. He gasped in surprise, staring in horror at the stain on his silk shirt. The journalists cheered again.
“You little bitch,” he muttered.
Noelle pushed him in the chest, harder than she intended. He fell backwards, his legs tangled in his chair, and landed in a sprawl among the tables. He twisted his knee as he fell.
Noelle knelt down beside the Corsican.
“Are you all right?” she said.
He was bleeding from the lip. He felt around the inside of his mouth with his tongue. “Are any teeth missing?” he said.
“You're lucky he didn't kill you. He's a gangster from Bangkok. Are you crazy?”
“Look, my suit's ruined. Bastard.”
“Here, I'll help you up. You're drunk.”
“Just a little.” As she held out her hand he pulled her towards him. “But not so drunk that I don't know I've just met the most beautiful woman in Asia.”
“Get back in the car.”
Rivelini had struggled to his feet. His knee would not take his weight and he had to lean on a table for support. “Where are you going?”
“Thank you for an entertaining evening, Marcel,” she said and helped the Corsican into the Packard. Then, to a final chorus of cheers from the journalists, she got behind the wheel and reversed out. A rattan chair was tangled in the rear bumper and was dragged along behind as she drove down the street.
Noelle drove slowly through the darkened streets looking out for the dogs and pigs that sometimes slept in the middle of the roads. The night was warm and smelled of ripe fruit and kerosene. In the moonlight the stupas of the Pha That Luang looked like a cluster of missiles. An unsettling impression, considering what was happening just over the border.
The Corsican put his head on the back of the seat and took out a packet of Gitanes. He lit one and let it hang insolently from his lower lip. He groaned.
“Are you all right?” Noelle asked him.
“A little headache, that is all.” He looked at her and grinned, his teeth powder-white in the dashboard light. “Do you like how I seduce women? I have them fight for me then offer to take me home.”
“This is not seduction,” Noelle said. “Where to?”
“The Bungalow.”
She knew it. It was a hotel just down the street, it's real name was the Settha Palace. “You could have walked. Why didn't you tell me?”
“I'm drunk but I'm not crazy.” As she turned the car around in the street, he took a silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabbed gingerly at his lip. “Will you sleep with me tonight?”
She felt herself flush to the roots of her hair. “If you weren't already beaten up, I'd break your nose!” she hissed. She took one hand off the wheel and cuffed him across the face anyway. “What do you think I am? Some kind of whore?”
“No, I think you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
“What's your name?” she said.
“Baptiste. Baptiste Crocé.”
“Well, Monsieur Crocé, you are going to wake up in the morning with a massive hangover and the police banging down your door.”
“You think so?”
“Do you know how much damage you did to the Constellation? They'll probably lock you up. What were you thinking?”
He reached out and stroked her arm, with the back of his hand.
“Don't do that!”
“I can't help it. Your skin is like velvet. If you won't sleep with me, will you marry me?”
The Settha Palace was no palace; it was actually an old colonial guest house long fallen into decay. Noelle drove to the front steps. Several of the guests, mostly junior foreign diplomats, came out onto the porte cochère to stare at them. How starved we all are of entertainment in Vientiane, she thought. A man with a bleeding lip and a woman driving a battered American car will be the main talking point at tomorrow's breakfast.
“Tell me, Monsieur Crocé, what are you? Some sort of diplomat?”
“Do I act like a diplomat?”
“Frankly, no.”
“I'm a pilot. '
“A pilot?”
“I was the French air force's greatest hero during the war with the Viet Minh. Now I have my own airline, Wattay Air. Perhaps you have heard of it?”
“No, I haven't. And I'm amazed you can persuade anyone to get into an airplane with you. How do you land? Do you just crash through the terminal doors?”
“It depends if I'm drunk or not.”
Noelle allowed herself a smile. “Goodnight,” she said. She got out of the car and walked towards a siclo parked on the other side of the courtyard. The driver was asleep on the cracked leather seat of his machine. She kicked the tire to wake him. He sat up with a start, rubbed his face and climbed onto the seat of the bicycle.
Baptiste stumbled out of his car and ran over. “Wait! You can't go. I don't even know your name!”
"Bardot. Brigitte Bardot. And next time you wish to make love to me, Monsieur, make sure you are sober. All right?
Baptiste watched the siclo disappear into the darkness. He grinned. Well, he thought, I won that round.
About the Author
Colin Falconer has written over twenty novels, mainly historical fiction and crime. His work is enjoyed by a wide audience and has so far been translated into 23 languages. Though he still has his roots in his native London, he now lives in Australia.
To find out more about Colin Falconer, please visit his website at: http://colinfalconer.org or follow his author page on Facebook.
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Saigon Wife Page 16
