Big Mango (9786167611037) (38 page)

Eddie made some kind of a gesture, but even
he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean.

“Anyway,” Austin continued, “I’ve only got a
few weeks left and I’m still stuck with more than half the money. I
can’t let any of those bastards get it after I’m gone, and that’s
why I sucked you boys in. I want you to take it before that
happens. I want you to get rid of every last dollar I haven’t
managed to give away yet.”

Austin stopped talking and looked so hard at
Eddie that it was almost as if he was willing him to say something.
When Eddie remained silent, Austin went on in a sad voice.

“But you think about it before you agree to
anything, son. Think about it real careful. I’m not sure I’m doing
you any favors here. Not sure at all. Money has a way of fucking
people up. And a lot of money just fucks people up a lot.”

Winnebago and Bar shifted back on their
stools and watched Eddie. He had a strange expression on his face,
and neither of them could quite figure out what it meant.

“Maybe you’d better tell us the whole story
before we go any further, Captain,” Eddie finally said.

“That’s fair. When you want to hear it?”

“Any time you’re ready to tell it, sir.”

Austin nodded crisply.

“Now’s good,” he said.

ABOUT
a dozen people
appeared right after the Volvo went up, drawn from the Little
Princess and the other buildings in the area by the sound of the
explosion. Lek noticed that no one seemed particularly alarmed by
the event. The spectators stood casually in a ragged half-circle
and watched the car burn, as if a Volvo bursting into a fireball
wasn’t remarkable enough in that particular neighborhood to inspire
any overwhelming excitement.

With everyone’s eyes were on the fire, Lek
led four Vietnamese men—all of them slim, fit-looking, and dressed
nondescriptly in dark trousers and short-sleeved white
shirts—across the parking lot and into the Little Princess. She
paused just inside and waited for the men to take up their
positions. Lek thought to herself how much she hated being drawn
into macho posturing. Her reputation for finesse, for getting what
she wanted with only the most surgical application of violence, was
something she was proud of; but this time it hadn’t done the job
and time was something she was running out of.

Everything she had worked for was slipping
away from her; Lek could feel it. Worse, it was an American who was
getting the upper hand. If Eddie Dare got to that money before she
did, the loss of face would be devastating. Westerners didn’t
understand face. They seemed to regard it as something like a
credit rating, a record from which black marks could always be
erased if you knew how to do it. But face just didn’t work that
way. Once lost, it was gone forever. You had to live without it for
the rest of your life.

It was time to forget finesse, something she
knew her superiors often dismissed contemptuously as too feminine
anyway, and to adopt the only approach to solving problems that men
ever really respected. It was time to pile on the weight until
things started snapping.

Behind the bar of the Little Princess a
skinny girl in a short black dress wiped at dirty beer glasses with
half-hearted swipes. Two other girls sat in straight chairs at a
Formica table in the back of the room eating fried rice. The rest
of the Little Princess was dim and empty. It was too early for
customers so few girls were around.

“Where is the mamasan?” Lek asked.

The girl in the black dress shrugged
listlessly. “Go out.”

“Where?”

Another shrug as she placed a glass on the
shelf, but the girl didn’t say anything else.

“Alone?” Lek asked.

Now no response at all, not even a shrug.

“Did you know a man named Harry Austin?”

When the girl began silently wiping down the
bar top with indifferent strokes of her towel, Lek turned away
without another word and walked to the table in the back where the
two girls were eating. Neither paid any attention to her.

“Do either of you know Harry Austin?” Lek
asked them.

The younger of the two girls continued
shoveling rice into her mouth and ignored Lek completely. She
looked to be not more than seventeen and a thick cascade of glossy,
coal-black hair hung around her tiny shoulders like a nun’s habit.
The other girl briefly glanced sideways at Lek with a nervous
twitch in her eyes, but then she too went on eating.

Lek pointed a finger at the closest of the
four Vietnamese men and he covered the distance to the table in a
few quick strides. With a movement so smooth that it seemed at
first not to be occurring at all, he pulled a matte-black automatic
pistol from under his shirt and buried the muzzle in the younger
girl’s cloak of shiny black hair.

He pulled the trigger twice in rapid
succession.

When the two rounds exploded in the girl’s
head, they shattered her skull. Blood and bone sprayed over the
wall, across the table, and into what was left of the two plates of
rice. The other girl began to scream hysterically, writhing
frantically in her chair and slapping both hands over and over
against her face. Ignoring her, Lek turned and walked with
deliberate steps back to where the first girl was frozen in place
behind the bar, her towel motionless on the wooden top.

Lek raised her voice just enough to be heard
over the screams.

“I asked you if you knew Harry Austin.”

The girl behind the bar began to tremble
uncontrollably. Her body convulsed with sobs and she desperately
tried to draw breath through the bile rising in her throat.

But she nodded quickly.

***

THE
Green Latrine was still
and quiet, and the perpetual twilight shrouding its interior made
it seem to Eddie they were drifting in a place that was outside
time.

“Why me, Captain?” he finally asked. “There
must be someone else.”

“You saved my life, didn’t you? Took a damned
bullet for me.”

“Don’t bring that up again,” Eddie sighed.
“You know that was just an accident.”

“I’m not so sure of that.” Austin poked his
tongue into his cheek and rolled it around. “But what difference
does it make? Either way, I figure I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t
for you. Besides, you’re the only man I know who’s decent enough to
trust with something like this. At least you used to be. You still
a decent man, Eddie?”

The word sounded exotic, almost antique the
way Austin used it.

“I don’t know,” Eddie finally replied when he
realized that Austin was actually waiting for him to answer. “I
haven’t thought about it much.”

But he
had
thought about it, and when
he glanced up and caught Austin’s eye, he saw that the captain knew
he had.

“Did you ever wonder why I called it
Operation Voltaire?” Austin suddenly asked.

The question caught Eddie by surprise, and he
hesitated.

“I’ll bet you thought that an old hick like
me never read anything more intellectual than Zane Grey, didn’t
you, Eddie?”

“You always had a reputation as an unusual
man, Captain.”

“Maybe that’s just another way to say crazy,
huh?” The captain laughed and Eddie wondered where this was going.
“Anyway, sometimes it worried me that I might have gotten a little
cute, sticking the operation with a slick name like that, but
nobody’s ever caught on as far as I know.”

“I have,” Winnebago spoke up quietly.

Eddie twisted around and looked at him with a
surprised frown. “Thanks for telling me.”

“It didn’t occur to me until just now.”
Winnebago leaned forward until he caught Austin’s eye. “It’s
because of Candide, isn’t it?”

Harry Austin pointed his forefinger at
Winnebago and winked.

“Voltaire wrote a novel in the eighteenth
century called Candide,” Winnebago looked at Eddie, explaining.

“I know that,” Eddie snapped. He glanced at
Austin, but the look in the captain’s eyes was too gauzy to make
any sense out of, so he turned back to Winnebago. “What’s that got
to do with this?”

“Candide was about a man who wanted to learn
how to live,” Winnebago went on in a voice like a junior college
lecturer. “He journeyed the world trying to find out. Sometimes he
wondered if it was all worth it, but he never quit looking for the
right way.”

Bar threw Eddie a look. Eddie ignored it.

“By the end of the book,” Winnebago
continued, “Candide had found the right way to live.”

“I’m holding my breath,” Eddie said, making a
beckoning gesture with his right hand. “What’s your point?”

“Candide found out that men who acted were
always happier than men who only observed. He decided a valuable
life came from trying to do something, rather than doing nothing
and only waiting for others to act.”

“You’ve pretty much got it,” Austin
nodded.

“Got what?” Bar flung his hands up in
exasperation.

“Look at it this way,” Austin explained
patiently. “The South Vietnamese who were left at the end were
mostly a bunch of useless candy-asses. They were going to sit there
and let the North grab all that money just to make themselves look
true-blue. I had a way to save the money from falling into any of
their no-account hands. So I did.”

“The Voltaire money was in that shipment we
took from the embassy to Thailand just before Saigon went down,
wasn’t it?” Eddie said. “It was on that run where the other plane
crashed. The one with the CIA guy on it.”

“That’s right,” Austin nodded again. “How’d
you work it out?”

Eddie told Harry Austin about the general,
but went on quickly before the captain could start asking
questions.

“It all went into the Air America warehouse
at U-Tapao Airbase, didn’t it, Captain?”

“Yep.”

“So how did you wind up with it?”

Austin scratched his ear and pushed his stool
around a little.

“It was just lying around in that warehouse
after everybody hauled ass out of Saigon, sealed up all nice and
safe inside a bunch of unmarked crates. Nobody but me knew it was
there. After I was evacuated to Thailand, I just borrowed a truck
and got some guys to load it up. Then I gave the kid in charge of
the place some old orders I had from somewhere. He never even
looked at them. I just drove away. It was no big deal.”

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

“Yeah,” Austin said. “That was about it. I
parked the bastard for two months in a garage. Didn’t even unload
it. Once I had all that money, I didn’t know what the hell to do
with it.”

So what
did
you do with it?” Winnebago
blurted out, never one to mince words. “It’s not like you could
stick it under your bed.”

“Come on,” Austin said, standing up and
starting for the door. “I want to show you something.”

When they got outside, the sun was down and
the last traces of the day’s light glistened on the ring of glass
office towers encircling Soi Cowboy. There was a scent of
bougainvillea in the languid, gray-brown dusk, and a child wailed
off in the distance. Thai music started to play from a radio
somewhere: a woman’s voice hovering halfway between discord and
sweetness.

In daylight, the forest of neon signs over
Soi Cowboy had looked shoddy and lifeless to Eddie. Dirty glass
tubing and shabbily rigged electrical connections dangled
grotesquely out of holes hastily chopped into the fronts of the
buildings. The whole place looked like a half-finished demolition
site.

But now, in the fading light of early dusk,
Eddie could sense a transformation taking place. As the colored
lights on the signs flickered tentatively and snatches of garish
animation twinkled in the dimness, the real Soi Cowboy started to
appear before his eyes like Brigadoon rising from a pile of
trash.

“See that building over there?” Austin asked,
pointing above the rooftops of the shophouses to where a glass-clad
office building soared forty or more floors into the night. Without
waiting for an answer, he pointed the other way to a forest of
towers that loomed in the distance down Sukhumvit Road. “And that?
You see that hotel down there with those other buildings?”

Eddie glanced at the others as they stood
grouped around Harry Austin, but their expressions were as
off-center as he supposed his must be.

“I bought a lot of land over the years,
mostly around here,” Austin said. “I kept the soi pretty much like
it always was because I liked it that way, but I built that shit
out there because it makes money.”

Austin glanced around and a softness came
over his face.

“You want to know where the Voltaire money
is?” he asked.

The question was clearly rhetorical.

“This is it, boys. This is it right here.” He
flung his arms open, seeming to embrace everything within his
sight.

Bar gaped slack jawed at Austin. “I always
heard some shady Chinese guy owned this place.”

Austin reached up to his face with both
hands, extended his forefingers, and very deliberately pushed the
outer corners of both eyes upward until they took on a decided
slant.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve always heard that,
too.”

“Oh man,” Bar laughed. “I can’t believe
it.”

“Anyway,” Austin released his eyes and went
on. “I’ve given all this away now. Signed most of the little places
over to the people who worked in them and the rest to a trust some
big-shot lawyers in Singapore set up. I don’t have the first
fucking idea how it works, but all the income goes to a foundation
that operates hospitals and orphanages up north.”

Austin waved a hand at the Thais drifting
into Soi Cowboy to begin another night of work.

“Look at ‘em boys. You don’t see anything but
a bunch of whores and thugs, do you? That’s all I saw for a long
time, but most of them got shitty lives because of where they were
born, not because of who they are. They work hard, they love their
kids, and they deserve a better shake than they’ve gotten up to
now. They’re good people, mostly.”