Gone Bamboo

by Anthony Bourdain

  Kevin ordered a Chivas, pleased, at least, that nobody was asking him to pay for drinks. There was music playing upstairs, merengue, and he could hear women's voices, laughing and talking in Spanish.

  "So whad are ya doin' now?" he asked Little Petey, wanting to goad the gun-toting hood with the tan into admitting he wasn't up to the job himself. "You gonna be in on the thing or what?"

  "Me?" said Little Petey, raising an eyebrow. "Nah . . . I'm here on somethin' else. I'm lookin' for a guy. Another guy. I been all over the Caribbean - Anguilla, Antigua, Virgin Islands, you name it, tryin' to locate this prick. It ain't easy, believe me."

  "Sounds tough," said Kevin, thinking again about how Little Petey's accommodations differed from his own.

  "Hey. It is tough! This guy don't wanna be found. And when I do find him, it ain't gonna be easy. This guy ain't no old man. He's a stone fuckin' killer, and I'm supposed to be retired."

  "You ain't up to it, when I'm through with this—"

  "Fuck you," said Little Petey, straightening up and looking directly at Kevin. "I'm no fuckin' virgin at this, asshole. Okay? I may look like fuckin' Island Jim over here right now, but don't make that mistake. I done plenty . . . plenty back in the City. A year ago . . . a year ago, I severed a guy's fuckin' head off."

  "That's nice," said Kevin, clinking his glass against Petey's. There was no point getting his back up any further. This was the biggest job he'd had in years. As much as he'd have liked to grind a broken shot glass into Little Petey's neck, what was the use?

  There was more laughing from upstairs, and Kevin looked up, hoping to see women better looking than the one slag at the pool table. The alcohol was working now; a few more, Kevin knew, and he'd fuck a barbershop floor if there was enough hair on it.

  "Relax," said Little Petey, his feelings still hurt. "Have fun. Try out the beach. Ruben'll fix ya up with a broad, take you down there, show you the lay a' the land. Life could be a hell of a lot worse, believe me."

  "You leavin'?"

  "Yeah. I gotta get back, check in with some people. It ain't all play down here. So enjoy it while you can. I'll be in touch." Little Petey put down his empty glass, patted the gun in his waistband.

  "Good luck," said Kevin. "I guess I'll be seeing you, then."

  "Yeah. I'll be by."

  When he was gone, Kevin sat down on a broken couch by the single fan in the room and closed his eyes. The music sounded good . . . music and the voices of laughing women . . . creaking bedsprings. In a while, he'd check out the beach. Maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all.

  20

  From the dock, Burke watched unhappily as Tommy and Henry helped Charlie Wagons aboard the fifty-foot Chris-Craft. Henry had brought the boat over from Captain Oliver's Marina an hour ago, and Burke and the other marshals spent most of that time searching the vessel for weapons, explosives, or places where someone might be hiding. It was seven-thirty on a cloudless morning. The little information Burke had received over the weekend about Henri Charles Denard, while tantalizing to an experienced reader of government documents, had been insufficiently incriminating to deny Charlie his fishing trip. This Henry fellow looked the part of the fishing guide, at least, thought Burke, trying to assuage his doubts. The deep tan, the earring, the graying ponytail - he looked like other boat bums and burnouts he'd come across, ex-dopers, juice-heads, failed Unitarian ministers, former businessmen making up for lost adolescence. Maybe it would be okay.

  Introducing themselves as the notional Monsieur Pastou's security team, they'd asked Henry a few cursory questions, patted him down for weapons, a light frisk; unnecessary, but Burke had insisted on one anyway, just to see how he reacted. Sometimes you can tell when a guy has been through a frisk before. He reacted well, not going limp, the way ex-cons do, looking down at the ground, all yessirs and nosirs the way people who've spent a long stretch in prison come to respond to authority when challenged. This Henry seemed, if anything, relaxed, submitting to the pat-down with amusement. That was in his favor. As far as Burke could see, however, there weren't too many more in that column.

  The bare outlines of Henri Charles Denard's life and times had arrived by fax the day before. A few sheets of paper, culled from DMV records, Selective Service, army discharge papers, a transcript from two years at Columbia University . . .

  Henri Charles Denard, born April 8,1950, in New York City to parents Jean-Pierre and Marie-Therese, Belgian nationals who had been naturalized during the Second World War. Son Henri (by now Henry) was educated at the prestigious McBurney School, a private boys' academy in New York, until his expulsion for cheating in 1967. He finished his last months in New Jersey, at the Englewood School for Boys, a slightly less tony establishment, and after graduating applied to join the Peace Corps. Rejected for less than stellar grades, he had, strangely enough, joined the army.

  Burke, a veteran of two tours of Vietnam himself, was surprised at this. In 1968, at a time when everybody else was actively seeking to avoid the draft, young Henry had enlisted. This was after Tet, when even Burke's fellow soldiers in country knew it was hopeless, and here comes Henry, joining the Airborne fucking Rangers.

  Specialist Denard served with the Seventy-fifth Infantry Division along the Cambodian border, receiving, in the space of three years, three Purple Hearts, the Combat Infantryman Badge, and the Bronze Star. A weapons specialist, Burke had noted with displeasure.

  After receiving his third Purple Heart, Henry had been evacuated stateside, where Uncle Sam, uncharacteristically, had been generous enough to send him off to the Monterey Language School and then, even more uncharacteristically, to Columbia University. This aspect of Henri Charles Denard's particulars really ate at Burke. What did the army, or whoever, expect in return for their investment in young Denard? Burke wondered. The whole thing reeked of spookism. Burke's jaw tightened, the lack of response from subsequent inquiries of DIA and CIA burning a hole in his stomach. Whereas Woody and Robbie had been impressed by Henry's military records, he had been made uncomfortable. To him, young Henry Denard, in 1973 a war hero fluent in French, Spanish, and Vietnamese, had been exactly the sort of misguided young man they liked to take under their wings in the climate-controlled fool factories of Langley, Fort Meade, and certain windowless subcellars of the Pentagon. In those heady years of Nixon and Watergate, all sorts of death freaks and chest-thumping war lovers found employment informing on fellow students, doing black bag jobs, and worse.

  Burke looked over at Rick, joyfully revving the twin Mercury engines of the marshals' rented speedboat, Woody sitting behind him, cradling an MX-70 rifle with scope. Henry would be familiar with that weapon, Burke thought. He remembered Woody that morning discussing the slim file on Henry, expressing regret he couldn't go along on the Chris-Craft. "I'd love to talk with this guy," he'd said. "You know, just to shoot the shit."

  Burke wanted to talk to the guy, too. Where Woody saw "War Hero," Burke saw "War Lover." In his worst fears, he imagined Henry as a reader of Soldier of Fortune, a man with an overheated imagination, a grandiose sense of himself as a maker of history, G. Gordon Liddy with a ponytail. That was, however, hard to reconcile with the laid-back aging hippie he gazed at now, another troubling possibility.

  That morning, frustrated by the lack of response from Washington, Burke had watched from the pool deck, through his field glasses, as Henry left his room at the Oyster Pond, boarded the little inflatable Zodiac, and buzzed across the pond to rent the Chris-Craft. He'd watched him load the fishing equipment, the beers and provisions, thinking all the while how he'd like to take a look inside Henry's rooms. Now, having made up his mind, he waited impatiently for the fishing trip to get under way so he could go through every square inch of Henri Charles Denard's lair with a goddamn microscope.

  "I hope you jamokes are hungry," yelled Charlie from the stern of the big boat, " 'cause I'm gonna be cookin' up some serious fish I get back!" Henry, on the flying bridge, threw the burbling engine into reverse, and they pull
ed slowly away from the dock. Tommy, strangely silent, hovered over Charlie. For a young man going fishing, he didn't look very happy. When they swung around and headed out to the channel, only Charlie waved.

  Rick hit the throttle on the speedboat and roared away from the dock. He made a wide arc, coming back in toward shore, waiting for the Chris-Craft to gain some distance, turning sharply away from the dock at the last second, showering Burke, Burt, and Robbie with his wake. The VHF radio in Burke's hand crackled to life, Rick screaming into it, "Yeeeeeee-hahhhhhh! This bad boy can move!"

  Burt and Robbie went back to the house. They would maintain radio contact from there. Burke, ostensibly to watch from the beach, took his leave in one of the jeeps.

  He drove immediately over to the Oyster Pond Yacht Club and parked down by the tennis courts, away from the hotel parking lot. Walking the short distance up the dirt road past the reception area, he saw that the chambermaids had just begun to clean the rooms in the main building of the hotel, their linen-filled carts parked outside on the side away from Henry's rooms.

  Burke figured he had an hour. He took a thin plastic strip out of his pocket, walked casually up the steps to Henry's room, and began working on the latch. It gave him no trouble at all.

  He shouldn't be doing this, he knew. But by the time he'd stepped into the room, underarms running with sweat, it was too late. He was committed. The French doors on the sea side of the room were open. Burke steered clear, not wanting to be visible from the Chris-Craft in the water. There was something hanging over the open doorway, a piece of clothing drying in the breeze. A woman's bathing suit.

  There was no sound. Turning his head, he saw that Henry did not live here alone. The evidence of a woman's presence was abundant. Two impressions in the unmade bed, sheets torn back, an ashtray on each nightstand loaded with cigarette butts. A row of dresses hung on hangers in the open walk-in closet, and a battery of cosmetics bottles and jars, two deep, crowded the bathroom counter by the his and hers sinks.

  He considered leaving immediately. There was no telling when she'd be back. She could be down at the pool, the beach, due back at any second. But he couldn't resist. A peek. Just a peek inside Henry's nightstand drawer, maybe a look in the white wicker desk in the corner. He stepped silently over to the bed and saw on the nightstand a framed photograph of a woman, an out-of-focus posed shot of a dark-skinned, attractive brunette, features blurred, standing under a palm tree, a wide smile on her face. Someone had written in lipstick over the photo the words GONE BAMBOO!

  He leaned over and, as gently as he could, slid open the drawer. Swelled by humidity, it gave him a hard time. He had to use both hands, one to brace himself and keep the nightstand from pulling away from the wall, the other to slide the drawer. It gave a slight creak, but he got it open. He was reaching for a U.S. passport when something very hard smashed against his head over the right ear. Suddenly, his cheek was resting on the cool terra-cotta floor.

  "Who the fuck are you}" hissed the voice.

  Burke tried to turn his head, but something sharp and threatening was pressing into his ear.

  "Don't move," said a woman's voice. The pressure in his ear increased, the pain pinning him to the floor like a frog in biology class. "One fucking twitch out of you and I hammer this thing through your skull."

  The pain from the head blow diminishing ever so slightly, his cheek flat against the ground, Burke peered cautiously out of the corner of one eye and saw a tall, slim, very tanned woman sitting astride him, holding a heavy glass ashtray over his head in one hand. He couldn't see what was in the other, but it felt like an ice pick, or a meat skewer. Whatever it was, it was sharp.

  "If you think I won't hammer this thing right into your brain­pan," she said, "if you think that" - she pushed a little harder "then you're making a bad fucking mistake."

  From what he saw of her expression and the calm, even tone of her voice, Burke had no doubt at all that she'd do it.

  "I don't get all wobbly, the sight of blood," she said. "You should know that."

  He felt her press a knee into the small of his back where he kept his Glock.

  "Uh-oh. What's this?" she said. "Alright. . . slowly, very slowly, I want you to reach down and remove the gun and your wallet and put them on the floor. Left hand. And slowly. Any other part of your body moves an inch and you get a cut-rate lobotomy. Gun first, then wallet."

  She sat back down on him with her full weight, the sharp object in his ear probing deep again, the other hand tensing with the ashtray, ready to pound it into his cortex.

  To get the gun, he had to slide his hand down behind his back. He did that, removing the Glock and placing it to his left.

  The wallet was farther down, in his right back pocket. He hesitated. He'd have to move his hand between her legs to get it.

  "Wallet next. Come on. I want to see who you are. Breaking into a lady's rooms. It's deplorable."

  He pushed his hand down behind, felt terry cloth move out of its way. Christ, she wasn't wearing anything under the towel! His wrist brushed against pubic hair, passed under her, his fingers feeling awkwardly for the wallet. And she didn't flinch. Not a muscle moved the whole time. He finally managed to get two fingers around his wallet.

  "Now pull it out slow. Don't hang out to enjoy yourself down there . . . I'm not," she said, the weight on her pubic bone not diminishing in the slightest.

  He pulled the wallet through and let it fall from his grasp onto the floor, relieved. Jesus, this broad was tough. Sweat was running into his eyes, and he felt something warm on his neck. Probably blood from the head wound.

  "Open it. Open the wallet," she said. He flipped it open, revealing his gold marshal's badge. She picked up the Glock. So quickly and efficiently did she do it that he didn't realize the thing in his ear was gone until he saw a Bic pen clatter to the floor next to his face. He heard her rack a round into the chamber.

  "A fine-point," she said, talking about the pen. "Woulda worked. Now put both hands behind your back."

  She removed his belt, looped it around his wrists, and tightened it, all with one hand, quickly, as if she did this for a living.

  "Alright, now. Let's see what we've got." She got up off his back and stepped back toward the French doors.

  When he pushed himself up onto his knees, finally managing to stand, his pants dropped around his ankles.

  "Turn around, Marshal Burke. You're sort of out of your jurisdiction here, ain't you?"

  She was standing in a picture-perfect two-handed firing stance, holding his own gun on him like she meant to use it. Even with the look of near-fanatical seriousness on her face, he could see she was a stunning woman. Ordinarily, he would have liked to have taken fuller account of the long expanse of brown flesh, looking even darker against the white terry-cloth towel she'd tied just over her breasts. But instead, he kept his eyes on hers, looking for a sign that he wasn't going to die.

  "Why don't we step out on the veranda, have a little chat?" she said, motioning with the gun. He shuffled awkwardly onto the balcony, tiny steps, his legs constricted by the trousers around his ankles. She stepped aside and back as he passed, the gun swinging around slowly to follow him.

  "Sit there," she said.

  There was a pitcher of Bloody Marys, sweating in the sun next to a chaise lounge. She had been there when he came in, he saw, sunning herself, watching the Chris-Craft with the field glasses on the little table. He sat down, almost reclining, on the chaise.

  "I guess you can pull your pants up now," she said, leaning against the railing across from him, the gun held waist high now but still pointing at him.

  He pulled his pants up, awkward with his hands tied, feeling utterly defeated; the ramifications of what was happening beginning to sink in. He almost hoped she would shoot him. Worse could happen. If she called the cops, it was all over. There would have to be an investigation. A hearing. The IG would be down. And they'd bury him. He thought about what the younger marshals back at the h
ouse - Burt, Woody, Rick, Robbie - what they'd say. They'd laugh, of course. Compromise of a protected witness, loss of service weapon, unauthorized, illegal break-in. His head swam, and the pitcher of Bloody Marys began to look real, real good.

  "Shit," he said.

  "Have a drink?" she said. "You look like you could use one." The gun was still aimed at his belly.

  "No, thanks . . . I—" he began to say, automatically.

  "On duty?" she said, skeptically. "I have difficulty believing that." She threw him a towel from where it had been drying in the sun on the railing. "You might want to clean up a bit, Marshal. You're bleeding. If you promise to be good, I'll untie the belt."

  "Thanks," he murmured. She untied him.

  "There's ice in a bucket next to you, for the swelling."

  "Thanks," he said, wrapping some ice in the towel and pressing it over his ear. There wasn't much blood. "Sorry about the towel," he said lamely.

  "Now . . . maybe you can explain to me what the hell you think you're doing. Breaking and entering. Menacing a lady with firearms, indecent exposure." She laughed. "Really, I should just call the French cops . . ."

  "No, please," he heard himself say.

  "What the fuck are you doing here?" she said.

  "I . . . uh . . . I was searching for a fugitive," said Burke, trying to cling to some vestige of a cover story, hoping that the name Iannello would not have to come up.

  "A fugitive," she repeated, not believing it.

  "A guy . . . a guy jumped bail and came down here. I thought . . . I thought this was where he was."

  "Have a drink," she said, passing a glass to him. "I'm surprised, you know. I'd think that if, as you say, you were on duty, you'd have a whole army of French police out there in the parking lot. This . . . this fugitive you're looking for . . ."

  "Well, it's sort of on my own," said Burke, looking at the pitcher of Bloody Marys, then back at his gun. "Can you take that gun off me, lady? Please. That thing could go off. It's loaded."