R&R

by Mark Dapin

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’ asked Shorty. He hoped it would be something legal.

  ‘I’ve got an alibi,’ said Nashville. ‘While Caution was out getting himself murdered again, I was with Tâm at Le Boudin.’

  Shorty frowned. ‘I thought you took a Lambo home after the fight,’ he said.

  Mosquitos screeched around the cell, whining for the dusk.

  ‘I did,’ said Nashville. ‘There was a note on my pillow, telling me to go back to Le Boudin and get what was coming to me. I thought it was from Tâm, and Caution’s note must’ve been written by her too.’

  ‘Was it?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘I never asked her,’ said Nashville. ‘We were too busy. Go take a statement from Moreau, Shorty. Find Tâm, and get her to tell you how I made her scream like a cat in a bear trap. That’s what our MPs should be doing, but they’re too fucking frightened to move until the big investigators come down from Saigon to fuck me up.’

  Nashville locked his fingers together and rested his forearms on his thighs. ‘I hope the irony of this don’t escape you, Shorty,’ he said. ‘This is your first real case – and a fucking homicide at that – given to you by the guy who’s done his level best to shield you from the cruel realities of police work since the day you arrived from Bendigo, Victoria.’

  Betty was waiting for him at the hospital, sharing a pot of tea with Dr Clarke. Shorty saluted the doctor, who smiled and waved down his hand. Shorty wasn’t going to kiss Betty in front of her boss, and he wasn’t going to salute her either, so he ignored her and spoke to the doctor about the weather.

  The ward was clean, with only two patients. Anderson the orderly was changing bedpans and watching Betty. Shorty wondered if Dr Clarke needed to sit so close to his fiancée, as if he were about to examine her, and whether Betty couldn’t do up the top button of her blouse, no matter how hot it might be.

  But Shorty knew he was jealous and in love, and the doctor was a gentleman, and an Aussie would never mess around with another Aussie’s girl.

  He and Betty strolled around the MPs’ lines. She stopped for a smoke by the small prison compound, which was empty but for the guards, who were themselves smoking and looking out between the wires.

  Betty said she’d had her R&C cleared by Dr Clarke, and it was fine to go to Saigon, providing she travelled up the highway with a convoy escort. She’d been told of a good hotel, where one of the other nurses had spent a weekend. They served foie gras in the restaurant, and cognac in the bar.

  ‘It’s going to be lovely,’ said Betty, stroking the back of his thigh, out of view of the guards. ‘Just you and me together in the Paris of the Orient. Trying new things. It’ll be like a honeymoon.’

  They had always said they would honeymoon at Batemans Bay.

  ‘We’ll have two honeymoons,’ said Betty.

  Shorty wondered if she’d still wear white at their wedding, or cream like a divorcee. He worried that her mother would know, and that she’d blame Shorty. It didn’t seem right to get married in church if she wasn’t going to be pure, but Shorty was surprised to realise he was no longer sure if he believed in God. Religion had never been a spiritual matter for him: it was something he accepted, along with everything else he had been told. And he’d never come upon anyone who wasn’t a Christian until he’d met Izzy Berger.

  Night fell sharply and suddenly. Betty’s fingers crawled towards his fly.

  ‘Do it,’ Shorty whispered.

  ‘This would be so much better,’ said Betty, ‘in a hotel room.’

  Joint police patrols with the Americans were suspended, perhaps forever, and the post at ALSG was reinforced by provosts from Nui Dat. Shorty was made partners with Jack Adams. They immediately worked together well, even though Adams was a Queenslander who’d only played rugby league. Shorty hadn’t realised he had come from the land. ‘Cattle country,’ said Adams, and Shorty wondered how an Australian could use two words to say something that a Yank would need half an hour to explain.

  But Shorty knew he talked more than he used to, and sometimes said things that didn’t really need saying, like a woman. Americans had a lot in common with women, he thought – he’d caught Nashville looking at his reflection and combing his hair.

  On the other hand, Adams had opinions, which was rare among the Australians, who tended to be more interested in doing their job than thinking about it.

  ‘This is a town for cowards,’ said Adams. ‘They’re hiding here because of the harbour. When the government falls, they’ll all rush out to sea in their little wooden fishing boats, and sail all the way to Australia. And why do you think we’re in Vung Tau, digger? It’s so we can run too, when the time comes.’

  The snakeman watched the Australians pass in their jeep. His robes were stained with sap, his flesh smelled of liniment. He had been sick and wandering inside the rubber plantation, but women had found and massaged him. The snakeman’s own death flowed through his veins, the venom in his blood, and made him one with his animals. The affairs of men seemed peculiar to him now, twisting, meandrous and serpentine.

  Adams felt the war was a waste of white men, and the South Vietnamese weren’t worth saving, but agreed with Shorty that the main thing was to try to help Nashville, because a bloke should never abandon his partner, no matter what. They drove to Le Boudin, expecting to find the bar empty of all but Moreau and his girls. But outside the building, in the spot where Nashville and Caution had fought, a knot of cowboys and hostesses was tied around the door.

  A few yards away stood half a dozen younger men holding placards. They all wore the same white shirts and schoolboy faces, sulking and spotless, paralysed by innocence, uncertain if they were a picket or a vigil.

  Adams and Shorty bullied through the crowd. Bodies yielded gratefully, thankful for the chance to step back from the headless corpse that lay across the entrance to Le Boudin.

  The body was naked and bled white, twisted like a courtesan in a painting, but it was a man, or it had been. His body in death was a private thing; it shouldn’t have been left outside. The snakeman approached, vigilant but incurious. There were flies around the dead man’s neck – a fat, severed power cable, with dozens of stranded, twisted wires. He was a butchered animal, meat to be boned.

  Adams used his Ray-Bans to hide his disgust. He wanted to look at this thing, but not have it crawl into his memory.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked Moreau, who was trying to roll the corpse into the road.

  The bar owner would not have chosen to do this kind of work, when Truong with his French switchblade and Quôc the Deserter were standing by. Adams guessed the cowboys had refused to touch the body.

  ‘He’s got no head,’ said Moreau. ‘Can’t you see?’

  Adams watched Moreau sweat under his kepi. He didn’t believe Moreau had been a legionnaire. The kepi, he thought, was an affectation, a disguise. Moreau told Adams the corpse had been dumped at his door by cowboys.

  ‘Cowboys or VC?’ asked Adams.

  Moreau shook his head. ‘VC, VC,’ he said. ‘Where are the VC in Vung Tau, Adams?’

  They were in people’s eyes, thought Adams. Anyone could see that.

  ‘So where’s the Mamasan?’ asked Adams. ‘Did she do this?’

  Moreau shrugged.

  ‘Why do all the bodies end up at Le Boudin?’ asked Adams.

  Moreau shrugged again.

  Adams forced himself to glance at the stump of a neck on the dead man’s shoulders. It looked like it was ready to be assembled, waiting for its head.

  ‘He’s been dead two days,’ said Moreau, who had buried many.

  ‘Are you saying he got dug up and cut up?’ asked Adams. ‘Like the other guy? And will you stop fucking shrugging.’

  Moreau shrugged.

  The boys with the placards began a low, quiet chant.

  ‘What do their signs say?’ asked Adams, pointing to the demonstrators.

  ‘“Defend the dead”,’ said Moreau.

  Adams wro
te that down.

  ‘Those boys VC?’ he asked Moreau.

  But when he looked up from his notebook, they were gone.

  Shorty came to stand with Adams and take over looking at the corpse, as if one of them had to keep it under observation. Adams accepted his presence as permission to look away.

  The local police turned up in ten minutes. The police sergeant – splendid in starched, laundered whites – walked over to the body and kicked it, like he thought it might still be alive. He was a small man with short legs and high boots.

  ‘This man VC,’ the sergeant said to Adams. ‘The people hate him, so they cut off his head.’

  The sergeant had a pleasant smile. He turned to Moreau, and demanded money for the removal of the corpse.

  Nashville had shaved in his cell, but the razor had opened old lesions and excited new cuts. The hair on his head stood on end, encouraged by Nashville’s constant tousling and moussed by its own grease. Shorty thought he should probably be in hospital.

  ‘On the night of the murder,’ began Shorty, reluctantly. ‘What time did you go back to Le Boudin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nashville. ‘My watch stopped in the sea.’

  ‘But the fight ended at twenty-one thirty,’ said Shorty.

  ‘If the Jew says so,’ says Nashville. ‘Time is money.’

  Shorty knew Nashville just enjoyed pretending to be callous.

  ‘Then you swam, dried off, came back here, read your letter, went back into the bar and found Tâm,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville agreed.

  ‘Can I see the letter?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Captain’s got it,’ said Nashville. ‘He’s probably put it in his evidence cabinet.’

  Shorty made a note. ‘Did you take a Lambo back to Le Boudin?’ he asked.

  ‘I jogged,’ said Nashville. ‘There were no Lambos.’

  ‘So,’ said Shorty to Nashville, ‘by the time you’d walked back into Le Boudin, it would have been later than twenty-two hundred hours? Which room did you use with Tâm?’

  Nashville was losing his patience. ‘Which fucking room?’ he repeated. ‘The back room.’

  ‘I’ve never seen the back room,’ said Shorty.

  ‘You wouldn’t need to, would you?’ said Nashville. ‘On account of you being a cherry motherfucking virgin.’

  There was no call for Nashville to take his anger out on Shorty.

  ‘Describe the room,’ said Shorty.

  ‘Not the long back room in the restaurant,’ said Nashville. ‘The short back room in the house behind.’

  ‘What’s on the walls?’ asked Shorty.

  Nashville remembered a black man with half eyes. ‘Photos of guys who promised to come back,’ he said.

  Shorty felt it was time to bring out the beginning of his theory. ‘Do you think Tâm might be VC?’ he asked.

  Nashville groaned.

  ‘I’m just trying to establish the truth,’ said Shorty.

  ‘That’s very fucking fair-minded of you,’ said Nashville, ‘but why don’t you just try to establish my alibi instead? Did you find Tâm?’

  ‘I did,’ said Shorty. ‘She says she didn’t see you after the fight.’

  Nashville banged his fist into his palm. ‘Why didn’t you just ask Moreau?’ he said.

  Shorty chewed his teeth. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘Moreau says you weren’t there too.’

  Nashville fell silent, watching the flies and mosquitos that owned the air. He’d thought he could rely on Moreau, but he realised that was vanity. All he had left was Shorty. Nashville stared at the Australian.

  ‘Where were you?’ Nashville asked him. ‘Where did you see Berger? What time was it? It must’ve been late. How did you miss the curfew patrol?’

  ‘We were stopped,’ said Shorty. ‘Berger showed his civilian papers, and they waved us on.’

  ‘Who was in the patrol?’

  ‘Yanks and Kiwis,’ said Shorty.

  ‘You didn’t recognise them?’

  ‘No,’ said Shorty. ‘It was dark, and I was trying not to let them see my face.’

  ‘Because you thought they might identify you?’ asked Nashville. ‘You’re the tallest fucking Aussie in Vung Tau – maybe in the world – and you thought the cops might recognise you by your face? Every­one knows who you are, Shorty. You move among the people like a fish out of water.’

  ‘Well, it worked,’ said Shorty. ‘They let us go.’

  ‘Go where?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Le Boudin,’ said Shorty. ‘The thing is, I got to the bar after the fight, and stayed until midnight, and I never saw you there.’

  TWENTY

  The damp air was steaming in Nashville’s cell, as if it were a part of his punishment to boil like rations in a can. He wasn’t the kind of animal that should be kept in captivity. His eyes had lost their shine.

  ‘Moreau was outside the bar when I came back,’ Nashville told Shorty.

  ‘What was he doing outside?’

  Nashville rubbed his hair. ‘Sweeping the porch, looking up at the stars, fucking his dogs . . . How the hell should I know?’

  Shorty softened his voice, trying to sound less like an interrogator. ‘It’s just I’ve never seen him standing outside Le Boudin at night,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve never seen a broad open her legs,’ said Nashville. ‘That don’t mean it don’t happen.’

  Nashville couldn’t just tell an MP a story and expect it to stand, unexamined. Shorty was a trained cop, exploring Nashville’s alibi, helping him find his own way around it, leading him out of blind alleys and cul de sacs.

  ‘I don’t remember Moreau going outside when I was drinking with Berger,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville always raised an eyebrow when Shorty mentioned Berger. ‘In a room full of high-class, freely available, circus-trained pussy, you were watching Moreau?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘No,’ said Shorty, ‘but he was talking to us.’

  Nashville had been confident in his story and he didn’t have another one. If Shorty couldn’t make it work, the problem was Shorty. He didn’t seem to be acting the way a partner should. Nashville had trusted him from the start, because he’d appeared too dumb to play both sides, but now he wondered if it was an act.

  ‘What did you have to talk with Moreau about, anyway?’ asked Nashville. Moreau generally spoke past Shorty, rather than to him.

  ‘Business,’ Shorty replied, and he knew it didn’t sound right.

  ‘Moreau was talking business with you?’ asked Nashville.

  It was even worse when Shorty heard it repeated.

  ‘Well, with Izzy mainly,’ he said. ‘They were speaking German.’

  Nashville stood, locked his hands behind his back, and paced three steps to the wall and three steps back.

  ‘Do you even understand what Moreau’s business is?’ asked Nashville.

  Nashville thought Shorty was still the naïve kid who’d stepped off the plane at Tan Son Nhut, a farmer in uniform. ‘Prostitutes,’ said Shorty.

  ‘Prostitutes,’ repeated Nashville, as if he’d chosen the wrong word.

  ‘Bar girls, hostesses, whores,’ said Shorty. ‘He’s a hoon, a pimp.’

  Nashville laughed, the way people did when they thought they knew more than Shorty.

  ‘Have you never fucking wondered,’ he asked, ‘why Moreau is the only Frenchman left in Vung Tau?’

  ‘Because he’s protected by the Mamasan?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘What does that tell you?’ asked Nashville.

  Shorty waited to be told.

  ‘You ask your friend Berger,’ suggested Nashville, and sat back down.

  Berger, thought Nashville. That fucking hymie leprechaun’s the key to all this bullshit.

  ‘Izzy went home,’ said Shorty.

  There was a long, cold silence in Nashville’s head, a space where he could hardly find a thought. He felt as though something he’d always held tightly was suddenly slipping away. Or maybe Shorty was pull
ing it from him.

  ‘Fucking what?’ shouted Nashville. ‘When the fuck did he go home?’

  Shorty was hesitant. ‘This morning,’ he said. ‘He had to take the girls back to Australia.’

  Nashville had a belly full of bees, and a rat running loose in his throat.

  ‘But they were fucking witnesses! ’ he shouted.

  ‘Witnesses to what?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Whatever the fuck is going on,’ said Nashville. ‘They’re a part of it. Did you even question them?’

  Shorty admitted he hadn’t.

  ‘That’s because the only guy who ever gets the third degree from you,’ said Nashville, ‘is me.’

  Nashville allowed this thought to settle.

  ‘I don’t really know who the fuck you are,’ said Nashville, ‘do I? You’re supposed to be some cherry-ripe country boy who turns up at my war with your slow smile and your blue balls and your pussy-wouldn’t-cum-in-my-mouth schtick, and as soon as you fucking get here, men disappear, people die, corpses lose body parts, the whole town goes fucking mad and me – the guy in this war who’s done the least to cause trouble for any man, friend or foe – gets fucking blamed for it.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m causing it?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘I don’t fucking know,’ said Nashville. ‘I don’t know who’s causing it. But I’m damned sure it ain’t me.’

  Nashville waited for Shorty to leave the cell.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ said Shorty. ‘A bloke’s had his head cut off.’

  ‘Of course he has,’ said Nashville, ‘because that’s the kind of shit that happens around you all the fucking time. Who was it?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Shorty, ‘but when we turned him onto his front, he had ears painted on his back. They looked like wings. Like they’d been trying to make an angel.’

  Nashville frowned. ‘So that means I’m innocent, don’t it?’ he asked. ‘Or do they think I cut off his head from here?’

  Shorty did a thing where he screwed up his eyes and mouth, as if he’d tasted gasoline. ‘They think it happened a couple of days ago,’ he said.