Big Mango (9786167611037) (14 page)

“You don’t have much to say.”

Eddie lifted his right hand and wriggled it
in a close approximation of the general’s own gesture.

The general laughed. “Fair enough, Eddie.
Okay, I’m all yours. Ask me anything you like.”

“I want to know who you are and what this is
all about.”

The general nodded thoughtfully a couple of
times and then cleared his throat. “It’s about this: I want you to
find out for me what Captain Harry Austin did with the $400,000,000
he smuggled out of Saigon in 1975.”

“Austin’s dead. I already told you that.”

“All the more reason why I need your help,
Eddie. Harry Austin may indeed be dead but, as they say, he
certainly didn’t take it with him.”

Eddie watched the gray clouds dancing off in
the distance and decided that the rains were coming soon as they
often did in the afternoons in the tropics.

“You understand that this is all a little
hard to take seriously.”

“Yes, of course. That’s why I had my
solicitors bring you the wire transfer order today. $100,000.
Exactly as promised.” The general looked at Eddie and dropped his
voice a little. “Isn’t that serious enough for you?”

“It doesn’t change what I told you in San
Francisco. I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about any money
and after 1975 I never saw Harry Austin again.”

“All I ask is that you draw on whatever
resources you have to do your usual thorough job of representing a
client to the best of your ability, Eddie. No one can ask more of
you. I certainly do not.” The general pursed his lips and thought
for a moment. “For example, bringing Mr. Jones along on this trip
with you shows admirable foresight. I’m sure he’ll be very
helpful.”

“Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Not a great deal.”

“Except where Austin stashed the money.”

“Except that.”

“If he ever had it.”

“Oh, he had it. He had it all right. We’re
sure of that.”

“Even though you know Captain Austin’s dead,
you still think I can find that money for you?”

“Absolutely. I don’t think there’s a better
man for the job.”

Eddie mulled that over. He didn’t have the
first idea who this guy was, let alone where to start looking for
any $400,000,000. And that was assuming Austin ever had it in the
first place, which Eddie doubted.

Then again, what did he really have to lose
here? Couldn’t he just walk away any time? Couldn’t he just get on
a plane if things got weird, fly back to San Francisco, and forget
any of this ever happened?

Eddie cleared his throat. “I’d have to ask a
lot of questions before I agree to anything.”

“I would certainly think so.” The general
stood up abruptly and stepped around Eddie’s chair, holding open
the door that led from the terrace back inside to the dining room.
“Shall we have lunch?”

TO
Eddie’s surprise, the
general didn’t say another word about Harry Austin, the Bank of
Vietnam, or the missing money until after dessert was served and
the coffee had been poured.

As Eddie forked his first strawberry, the
driver who had escorted him upstairs slipped quietly back into the
dining room and politely ushered the attendants outside. It wasn’t
until the door had closed behind the last of them that the general
began to talk.

“Please listen carefully, Eddie. I want to
tell you exactly what happened in Saigon in 1975.”

The general sounded like a man who was
hearing his own voice from somewhere else, like it was coming out
of a radio.

“Do you remember those shuttle flights from
Tan Son Nhut to U-Tapao Airbase in Thailand, the ones they were
running every few hours right up until Saigon went down the
crapper?”

Eddie nodded and the general went on.

“You and your squad were on one of those
flights two days before you were shifted to guard duty at the
embassy. You did escort duty for a shipment of embassy archives.
Remember?”

“Sure,” Eddie said. “When we got to U-Tapao,
we turned the whole load over to the Air America guys.”

“And after that…” the general prompted.

Eddie tried to remember.

“I think we went straight back on the next…”
Eddie stopped and reached back to a time more than twenty years
before. “No, the guys wanted to go to Pattaya and get laid instead
of sleeping at the base, but Austin came up with a van somewhere
and insisted we all drive to Bangkok.”

“Go on.”

“That was about it. We all got pretty much
wiped out in Patpong and slept wherever we could find a spot that
hadn’t been puked on. Nothing special happened.”

“I meant the following day.”

“We went back to U-Tapao the next morning to
catch the shuttle to Saigon. Then…” Eddie reached back in his
memory again. “We were transported to the embassy and turned around
again to ride shotgun on another convoy out to Tan Son Nhut. I
think it was the last one before the airport was closed.”

“Then you went back to the embassy
again?”

“No, Austin sent us…”

The general’s face relaxed into something
that was almost a smile and his eyebrows started to ride up.

“That was it, wasn’t it?” Eddie said.

He was beginning to see how this was going to
come together.

“It was that warehouse Austin sent us to
after we left Tan Son Nhut. The Operation Voltaire money was
there.”

“I never mentioned the name Operation
Voltaire to you.”

“No, but the Secret Service did. That was it,
wasn’t it? That’s when we had the money.”

The general seemed to think about it for a
moment, and then he spoke very softly.

“Not exactly. There were crates in the
basement of that warehouse Austin sent you to, you’re right about
that, but the currency and the gold from the Bank of Vietnam wasn’t
in them. The crates you were guarding were just decoys.”

Okay, so I’m not beginning to see how this
is going to come together.

“The crates containing the money and the gold
had been in the warehouse all right, but they’d already been taken
out before you got there.”

“And of course, you don’t know how the real
crates got out of the warehouse or where they went.”

“Oh, yes,” the general smiled. “I know
exactly how they got out, and even to a point, where they
went.”

Eddie said nothing. He waited, tilting his
head back and closing his eyes.

“They were all in the load you flew to
U-Tapao the day before. They were the crates labeled as embassy
archives.”

Eddie opened his eyes. He should have seen it
coming, but he hadn’t.

“Only two people knew that,” the general
continued in the same crisp tone. “A CIA guy named Sterling, and
Harry Austin. Even the ambassador didn’t know. Sterling was afraid
that the South Vietnamese would stop them if anybody knew he was
moving the money.”

The general’s left hand went off on a little
expedition of its own, made a fist, and knocked twice against the
dining table.

“You used two planes. Remember? Sterling was
in the first, and you and your squad were with Austin in the
second. Sterling only took a few crates on his plane so he could
make secure storage arrangements in Thailand. Austin had most of
the money in the plane you were on.”

Then something came back to Eddie, distantly.
“Sterling never made it to U-Tapao, did he?”

The general sat looking at Eddie, as placid
as a Buddhist monk.

“His plane went down in the Gulf of
Thailand,” Eddie said. “There were no survivors.”

“That’s exactly right. Then when Harry Austin
landed at U-Tapao and found out Sterling’s plane had crashed, he
just arranged for Air America to store the crates you were carrying
and didn’t tell anyone what was in them.”

“Son of a bitch,” Eddie muttered.

He briefly glanced away, letting everything
settle; then he looked back at the general.

“That’s why Captain Austin chose to stay in
Thailand after the evacuation instead of rotating back to the
States with the rest of us, wasn’t it? Because he knew where the
money was, and nobody else did.”

The nod of the general’s head was barely
visible.

“How did he get it out of U-Tapao?”

The general shifted in his chair, pursing his
lips.

“It wasn’t hard. He commandeered a big truck,
got some guys to load up the crates, waved some pieces of paper,
and drove out the gate.”

“You mean Captain Austin just loaded up a
truck and drove away? With ten tons of money?”

“That was about it. The evacuation from
Saigon had turned the base into chaos. Nobody gave a rat’s ass
about paperwork.”

The general took a cigar from his inside
jacket pocket. A cutter and some matches lay on the table and he
busied himself clipping and lighting the cigar without looking at
Eddie.

“I want you to find that money for me, Eddie.
None of it was ever accounted for. None of it. Austin still had
most of it hidden somewhere when he died. We’re sure of it.”

“Now I understand why you’re willing to pay
me the hundred grand.”

“No, Eddie, I doubt you do.”

The general consulted the ash that was
forming at the tip of his cigar.

“I paid you $100,000 purely to ensure that
you’d come to Bangkok. I wanted to make certain you understood that
I’m an honorable man who meets his commitments.”

The general let a small silence fall, clearly
intending for it to feel significant to Eddie.

“If you can find out where Austin hid the
money, you’ll receive the full one million dollar bonus we spoke of
in San Francisco. All of it.”

Eddie took a deep breath and considered that
in silence while the general puffed contentedly at his cigar.

“You’re telling me that Harry Austin just
loaded up a truck and drove away with all the gold and currency
from the Bank of Vietnam?”

It was an unnecessary question, if it was a
question at all, and the general didn’t bother to answer.

“You’re telling me he stole the entire
contents of the Bank of Vietnam, and now you want me to find it for
you.”

The general drew on his cigar, inhaling a
tiny portion of the smoke, and then he exhaled slowly and
deliberately.

“Harry Austin didn’t steal anything,” he
said.

“Oh, they just gave all that money to
him?”

The general didn’t bother to respond.

“If you say he didn’t steal it, what would
you call it?”

“It was abandoned property. I think
‘salvaged’ is probably the correct term.”

“Give me a break,” Eddie snorted. “Austin
stole it.”

Eddie’s concerns didn’t appear to worry the
general, but when he spoke again, Eddie noticed that the words came
more quickly than they had before.

“Let me walk you through this. Let’s just say
you’re in Saigon in April of 1975. The city is falling apart right
in front of you. Panicked mobs control the streets; overloaded
Jolly Greens are pounding out of LZs all over town, even snatching
people off rooftops; the communists are shelling Tan Son Nhut; and
their ground troops are less than five miles from where you stand.
Let’s also say you control the security arrangements for all the
Bank of Vietnam’s cash reserves and have the means to get them out
of the country immediately. What would you do?”

“I’d send them somewhere like I was supposed
to. I wouldn’t take them. The money belonged to the Vietnamese
government. “

“The Vietnamese government?” The general drew
on his cigar again. “Which Vietnamese government would that have
been, exactly?”

“The South Vietnamese government, of
course.”

“But South Vietnam effectively ceased to
exist before you ever touched the money.”

Eddie could see without much difficulty where
all this was going.

“Then I’d have just gotten the money out like
I was supposed to,” he said, “and let the State Department or
someone else straighten it all out.”

“You’d have turned the South Vietnamese money
over to the United States government?”

The general raised an eyebrow
thoughtfully.

“And if you had, what do you suppose they
would have done with it? Maybe give it back to the Vietnamese, who
were now of course the North Vietnamese?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then what would they would’ve done with
it?”

“Probably just kept it.”

The general nodded a few more times, almost
as if he was thinking everything through for the first time
himself.

“Did that money belong to the United States
government?

“No.”

“But you concede they would have just kept it
anyway, although they plainly had no right to it.”

Eddie didn’t say anything.

The general nodded a couple of times anyway,
exactly as if Eddie had spoken and he was in collegial agreement
with whatever he had said. Then he rose and started toward the
terrace.

Passing behind Eddie, he stopped and leaned
over until his lips were right next to Eddie’s ear. Eddie could
smell the flakes of heavy tobacco clinging to them.

“Then why the
fuck
would you give it
to them?” he hissed.

The general straightened up, took another
puff on his cigar, and strolled outside. Eddie could hear the crowd
from the racetrack roaring as the door to the terrace swung open
and then, when it closed again, the roar was gone.

EDDIE
called the
Post as soon as he got back to the hotel, but Bar Phillips wasn’t
there and no one seemed to know when he might be.

That didn’t surprise Eddie, not from what he
remembered about Bar, so he just left a message. The rest of the
afternoon Eddie and Winnebago lay around the pool at the Oriental,
dozing away their jet lag in the sun and letting the pool boys
bring them brightly-colored drinks with tiny purple and white
orchids floating in them.