Big Mango (9786167611037) (39 page)

Austin patted his open palms against his
thighs a few times, his eyes darting among the faces in the soi. No
one said anything. No one knew what to say.

“You boys think I’m just a romantic old fool
who’s gone all soft in the head, don’t you?”

“No, sir, I think…” Winnebago began, and then
stopped. “Actually, I got no fucking idea
what
I think.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Austin smiled
sideways at Winnebago. “That’s not such a bad way to go.”

There was a pause that lingered until Austin
finally gave up waiting for someone to say something.

“All this used up a lot of the money,” he
went on, “and I gave some more away upcountry, but there’s still
quite a bit left. Probably about $200,000,000, maybe a little more.
I can show you where it is, but I don’t know what I can do to help
you from there.”

“Are you saying you’re
giving
us
$200,000,000, Captain?” Eddie heard himself asking the question out
loud, but it didn’t sound like one that made any sense, even though
he listened carefully to each of the words as he spoke them.

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Giving it to us?” Eddie asked again. He
cleared his throat, which had suddenly gone very dry. “Just like
that.”

“Sure am,” Austin grinned. “But first you
have to promise me something.”

“Uh-oh,” Bar said, glancing at Eddie. “I knew
there’d be a catch.”

Austin briefly engaged each man’s eyes and
held them a moment, as if he wanted to reassure himself of
something before he went on. When he spoke again, it was in a firm
and resolute voice.

“You can divide the money up among yourselves
or give it all to the Little Sisters of Charity,” he said. “Hell,
you can burn it for all I care. You can do any fucking thing you
want with it. But you’ve got to promise me one thing: that you’ll
get it out of here right now and make it all go away forever.”

Eddie considered that a minute, and then he
told Austin about the bounty the Secret Service had offered him for
turning the
money in.

“No!” Austin snapped. “No fucking way. You
promise me that you’re not going to do that or this is over right
now.”

Austin grabbed his wrist. Eddie could feel
the urgency in his fingers. “Look, you’d probably be better off if
you burned most of it, that’s my opinion, but I don’t reckon you’ll
do that. The important thing to me is this. No government can ever
have it again. Not ours. Not theirs. Not anybody’s. You understand
that?”

The silence that fell was heavy with
anticipation, and it was left to Eddie to break it. When he did,
his voice sounded thin and scratchy, even to him.

“Okay, Captain, you’ve got a deal.”

Harry Austin smiled at that.

“So…ah, where is it?” Eddie asked.

And that was when Harry Austin started to
laugh.

***

AFTER
the girl in the black
dress told Lek everything she knew about Short Time and Harry
Austin, after she told her about the closed-down bar once called
the Green Latrine from where Harry Austin ran his Soi Cowboy
empire, Lek was done with her. One of the Vietnamese men shot the
girl where she stood and another shot the one who had been
screaming, putting both of them away with professional double taps
angled upward from the back of the skull.

The four Vietnamese men made a quick but
thorough search through the massage rooms upstairs. One found two
girls and a fat German entwined together in a big bathtub and shot
them all without hesitation. Another found the two Chinese men tied
up together and dumped on a round bed watching themselves in the
mirror on the ceiling. When he also found the duffel bag of weapons
lying on the floor at their feet, he called Lek.

She considered the possibilities as she
rifled through the bag. She was pretty sure she recognized the
Chinese as McBride’s men, but the question was, what were they
doing tied up there in the Little Princess? Had Eddie done it? Was
he making his run for the money and left them there to get them out
of the way? But then why had the bag of weapons been left behind?
Had Eddie decided he didn’t need guns at all, or had he just left
the small ones behind, taking only heavier stuff?

She could probably roast the Chinese until
they told her, but that would take a while, and they might not know
very much that was useful anyway. No, there wasn’t time for that.
Eddie Dare was too far ahead already. She’d just have to keep
moving and take her chances.

Lek sighed and beckoned one of her men over.
They had a brief whispered conversation and, when they all left the
building a few minutes later, the flames were already beginning to
bite through the pasteboard-thin walls of the massage rooms,
flowing along the cheap carpeting on the stairway like water
rippling down a terraced creek bed.

Another five minutes and the crowd that was
beginning to drift away from the remains of McBride’s Volvo would
have a fresh source of entertainment. Another fifteen, and there
would be nothing left of the Little Princess but moist memories,
and nothing at all of the bodies scattered around inside it.

***

“I
was wondering how long it
was going to take you to ask where the money was,” Austin chuckled
as they trooped back inside the Green Latrine.

“I figured you’d tell us when you were ready,
Captain,” Eddie said.

“I’m ready now. I just want to be absolutely
sure I have your word that neither the Vietnamese nor the Americans
will ever see any of this money again. I want to know that you’ll
destroy it if you have to before you’ll let that happen. Do I have
your word on that, Eddie?”

“You have my word.”

“You boys okay with that?” Austin’s eyes
darted first to Winnebago then to Bar.

They both nodded.

Austin whooped loudly and bounded across the
room. “Then let’s get to it!”

With a half-dozen quick strides, he rounded
the end of the bar, reached underneath, and produced a fire ax. He
raised it over his head with both hands and swung it straight down
with all his weight behind it. The bar top splintered from the
impact of the heavy blade and, after a second swing, it split into
two separate pieces. Austin gave the ax a twist as he pulled it out
of the bar top, sending one of the halves sliding sideways and
crashing to the floor.

Austin turned the ax over, holding its head
down like a clock pendulum, and dropped it into the open cavity
beneath where the top had been. He slammed the flat of the blade
forward and backward until first the rear and then the front of the
bar collapsed in a ruined heap around his feet. Kicking some of the
pieces aside, he extended the ax out at arm’s length, pointing with
it into the rubble.

“There you go.”

Clearly visible was one end of a line of
wooden crates. They were each sitting on two-by-four skids and
bolted to shipping pallets. Eddie could only see one of the crates
in its entirety from where he stood, but that was enough.

Stenciled across its side in large, white
letters was something in Vietnamese. Below that, something else had
been added in English with black paint in what looked like a hasty,
hand-done job. The Vietnamese meant nothing to Eddie, of course,
but he could read the English easily enough, and that told him
everything he needed to know.

FROM - US EMBASSY, SAIGON.
DATE - APRIL 3, 1975
CONTENTS – EMBASSY ARCHIVES

SOI
Cowboy wasn’t much more
than a short, dusty lane from which most of the automobile traffic
had been chased away. The street was inconsequential in daylight,
but after sundown it flowed with the lifeblood of nighttime
Bangkok.

It was only about a hundred yards long and it
ran straight from busy Soi Asoke on the west to quiet little soi 23
on the east. For its entire length, it was lined solidly on both
sides with narrow, dilapidated shophouses that had been turned into
bars. The wide porches along the front of most of the structures
made the whole place look vaguely reminiscent of Main Street in an
old western town straight out of a Hollywood movie. All it needed
was hitching rails.

Lek entered Soi Cowboy from the east, the soi
23 end. Two of her soldiers trailed a dozen paces behind keeping
her in sight. The other two had already circled around to the Soi
Asoke end of Cowboy and had sealed it off.

It was still early and there wasn’t much
going on. Some of the hardcore locals nursed drinks at tables on
the front porches and a few knots of curious tourists were already
cruising, mostly Japanese and Taiwanese men grouped into packs for
mutual courage who giggled nervously anytime they encountered a
Thai woman under sixty.

Lek picked her way carefully past an open-air
beer bar, its dented stools stacked upside down on the battered
wooden countertop. A skinny, shirtless old man wheezed raggedly as
he piled brown cardboard cartons of Singha underneath it. Here and
there, groups of women sat on the tiny stools provided by the
street’s food vendors, perched on the parked motorcycles, or just
squatted in the street. They ate, gossiped, and inspected the
skirts and T-shirts that the street hawkers hauled up and down the
soi in big wicker baskets.

Most of the women looked plain to Lek, plump
little peasant girls straight out of the family rice fields in the
Northeast, dried mud still under their fingernails. It was
something she would never fully understand. At night,
farang
men paid money to run their hands over the bodies of women they
would avoid walking too close to on the street in daylight. It made
no sense to her at all.

She walked by the shuttered grey building the
girl at the Little Princess had described. She glanced at it
quickly, saw the two men flanking the doorway, and continued
walking.

When Lek reached Soi Asoke, she stopped in
the shadow of a tall concrete wall and turned around to survey
Cowboy again. All four of her men waited patiently while she
considered her plan of attack, weighing carefully what they might
find themselves up against inside that darkened building. The girl
had claimed that the mamasan from the Little Princess had taken the
three
farangs
there. But why had she done that? She was
taking them to meet someone, Lek told herself, answering her own
question.

Although the two men sitting by the door were
young, they were obviously professionals. Their eyes were wary,
hard, and unblinking. Men like that were not there to guard three
fumbling Americans and a middle-aged whore, Lek was sure of that.
There would have to be someone of considerably greater importance
inside to merit that kind of attention. But who?

It was then that the thought crossed Lek’s
mind for the first time that Harry Austin might still be alive. She
toyed with the idea, trying it on, turning it this way and that.
She doubted it, when she thought about it but, if it were true, it
would explain a lot. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a
foreigner in Bangkok had faked his own death in order to
disappear.

One of Lek’s men ducked quickly away at her
signal. In a few minutes, he was back again and reported that the
two rows of shophouses lining Cowboy backed up to large buildings
on both sides. There could be no rear exits from any of them. That
suited Lek perfectly and she could feel the tension began to drain
away. She was back in control again. The only way out of the gray
building was through its front door and into Soi Cowboy. And the
only exit from Soi Cowboy was to walk out through one end or the
other. Whoever might be inside that building was now entirely in
her hands.

Lek sent two of her men down to the opposite
end of Cowboy where they found an empty table at a food vendor’s
stand and pulled up two red plastic stools. The old man who owned
the stand started toward them, but they waved him away. Glancing
quickly into their eyes, he retreated without protest. Both men lit
cigarettes and settled in.

Lek found a wooden box for herself and pushed
it up against the wall. She sat down on it, her other two men
squatting watchfully a short distance away, and studied the gray
shophouse some more. They had surprise on their side. It would do
no harm to wait and watch for a while before they made their move,
she thought, just to be on the safe side.

***

AUSTIN
chopped away the rest
of the bar while Eddie, Winnebago, and Bar stood and stared. Within
minutes, eight wooden crates—each of them about three feet square
and four feet high—sat lined up on their pallets making a neat row
in the middle of the wreckage.

“I hope you had a lot of fire insurance,”
Eddie said, looking at the crates.

Austin pushed the blade of his ax into a tiny
crack at the top of the crate nearest him. Putting all of his
weight on the handle, he wrenched the lid upward until it separated
from the crate with a cracking sound. With two sharp, chopping
uppercuts, he split the lid away completely. Eddie, Bar and
Winnebago all leaned forward together, straining to see inside.

The bundles of American currency were all
bound with identical yellow and white paper wrappers, each of them
reading $10,000, and they lay in perfect, neatly aligned rows. The
symmetrical blanket of Benjamin Franklins looked like a Warhol
print.

There was a full minute of utter silence.

Eddie’s first reaction, he was surprised to
notice, was no reaction at all. The money seemed more like a movie
prop or that play money sold at novelty shops. He wasn’t really
sure what it looked like, but it didn’t look like real money. Then
the smell hit him the way the smell of a new car spills out when
you open the door. It made him dizzy, and he reached out and held
onto the edge of the wooden case to steady himself. It was only the
odor of paper and ink, he supposed, but the aroma was still
unmistakable even after so many years, and it left him feeling a
little drunk as he breathed it in.