Dead and Kicking (5 page)

There was a brass plate with Vietnamese writing next to the buzzer by the front door. Jack waved the cyclo driver over and pointed to the sign.

‘I speak Vietnamese better than I read it,’ he explained.

There was a brief conversation and a pantomime of wavy hand movements and then a rocking motion, and finally Jack seemed to understand.

‘Something to do with baby fish, or little fish, I think. Fish, anyway.’

Jack paid off both our drivers and then rang the doorbell. A crackly intercom conversation with a woman ensued, and five minutes later the door opened and a man in a white lab coat stepped out into the sunlight. He was about thirty-five, I guessed, handsome with a face that had a more Eurasian than Vietnamese bone structure.

‘My name is Peter Tranh,’ he said, handing each of us a business card. ‘How can I help you?’

Tranh had a hint of an American accent and his card told us that he had a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and was the research director of Tranh Fisheries and Aquaculture Enterprises, which was based in Hanoi.

I let Jack do the talking. He explained we were trying to trace a man who had been dropped off outside the building last night.

‘I was here till midnight, all by myself,’ Tranh said, ‘and we had no visitors. Perhaps the man in the cyclo was looking for another address, or the driver made a mistake about the street.’

Jack showed him the photograph. ‘So you don’t recognise this bloke?’ he asked.

Tranh shook his head. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be of more help. Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to my work.’

‘This place doesn’t look like any fish farm I’ve ever seen,’ I said.

Tranh smiled. ‘We don’t farm the fish here. We do research, and hatch and raise fingerlings – the baby fish.’

‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘it sounds like our cyclo driver must have made a mistake. We’ll let you get back to your work. Sorry for disturbing you.’

Tranh smiled. ‘No worries. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

The steel door slammed shut behind Tranh with a very solid bang. I turned around to look for a taxi but Jack was already dodging traffic and crossing the road towards an alleyway, where our cyclo driver was sitting under an awning having a beer. We joined him and Jack ordered a couple more 333 beers.

Jack handed the driver the photograph and they chatted back and forth. The driver became quite animated and pointed emphatically across the street to the concrete building several times. Eventually Jack nodded and smiled and bought the driver another beer.

‘What’s the scoop?’ I asked.

‘It’s the right building. Not only that, but young Peter Tranh was waiting outside and he and the passenger got into a right little barney before they went inside. They were speaking English so the driver couldn’t understand what was said. He came over here for a beer and a snack, and after about half an hour a big Merc with tinted windows pulled up and took our mystery man away. But not before he gave Tranh a big farewell hug.’

Jack took a swig of his beer. ‘So you noticed the similarity?’ he asked. ‘I mean between Peter Tranh over yonder and the late Peter Cartwright?’

I nodded. ‘There’s certainly a resemblance to Cartwright in some of those photographs taken in the sixties.’

Jack took another swig. ‘And did you happen to notice what young Peter said when we left?’

“ ‘No worries” – not exactly the kind of phrase you might pick up at UC Berkeley.’

‘Too bloody right, mate,’ Jack said. ‘Too bloody right.’

Jack left me at the hotel and headed off to try to find out as much as he could about the fish-raising business we’d visited, and to see if and how it related to Major Peter Cartwright. I’d taken a snap of the brass nameplate by the door of the factory building that I figured might help so I made him a quick print.

Since I now had some welcome time off in an exotic city, I decided to leave Jack to it. For once in a very long time, I wasn’t sticking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted, and nobody wanted me dead because of it. My plan was to have no plan, just to toss my camera bag over my shoulder and head out picture hunting.

Brett Tozer was sitting in the lobby reading the
International Herald Tribune
. He waved as I stepped out of the brass-caged elevator, so I walked over to speak to him after I’d dropped off my key at reception.

‘A couple of the picture editors in New York have been making complimentary noises about your most recent snaps, Alby,’ Brett said. ‘They’re comparing them to Tim Page’s work, and some of Don McCullin’s stuff.’

Page and McCullin were just two of a whole gang of shooters who put their lives on the line daily to graphically show the world the reality of the conflict in Vietnam. At least 150 photographers never made it home from the South-East Asian wars, and those that did often shared the physical and mental scars of the combat soldiers.

‘Yeah, right,’ I said. ‘Page and McCullin and the rest of those guys didn’t have five-star on-set catering and air-conditioned limos and portaloos. They didn’t get to ask for retakes. They had landmines and booby-traps to contend with, along with blokes chucking grenades and shooting actual AK-47s and RPGs in their direction. The blood and guts in their photographs was real, not something poured out of a bottle by a make-up artist.’

Brett put out his hands defensively. ‘Hey, I’m just passing on what they told me. Don’t shoot the messenger.’

‘Sorry, Brett,’ I said. ‘Touchy subject. Anyway, I thought you’d be long gone by now. Most people can’t wait to hit the road when a movie wraps.’

He nodded. ‘And I’m one of ’em. Just got to pick up one more suit from my friendly tailor and then I’m on a flight out at three this afternoon.’

‘Back to the grindstone in the Big Apple?’

‘Yep, for a couple of weeks anyway,’ he said, ‘until the shooting starts again in Australia. What about you, Alby? Heading off with Jack and VT?’

‘No. We’re going our separate ways for a bit. I’m planning on hunting down some good food and great pictures. VT’s got more relatives to visit up north and Jack’s got a bee in his bonnet about our Major Peter Cartwright not being as dead as everyone seems to believe.’

Brett stared at me. ‘That seems highly unlikely, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘After all this time, I mean.’

I shrugged. ‘I snapped a picture of someone last night that could have been him. Bloke in the picture looked a bit similar, but it’s more than thirty years on so who can say for sure?’

‘You have the photograph with you?’ Brett asked.

I pulled the Leica from my bag and scrolled through to the picture.

Brett studied the image and shook his head. ‘Just looks like your average round-eye tourist to me.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I said, tucking the Leica into my pocket, ‘but I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell the screenwriter he needs to redo the whole end of the movie. Great hook from a PR angle though – “Dead war hero back from the grave”.’

‘That could work,’ Brett said. The ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ began blasting out from his jacket pocket. ‘New York calling,’ he said, glancing at the screen of his mobile phone. ‘Head office. I’d better take this.’

I nodded. ‘Have a safe trip home. See you back in Oz.’

As I walked out of the lobby, I heard him grunt, ‘Tozer here,’ in his best Masters of the Universe voice.

I glanced back through the hotel’s revolving glass doors while I waited for the doorman to get me a cab, and saw Brett pacing up and down as he talked on his phone. He seemed agitated, but from my experience walking up and down looking agitated was the associate producer’s lot in life, and Brett did it well.

A shiny white Vinasun taxi pulled up and I forgot all about Brett, the movie and the maybe not-so-dead Major C. The cab was clean and air-conditioned, with a meter and a neatly dressed driver who was sitting on the ubiquitous beaded seat cover. Behind me, a young American couple had walked out of the hotel and were waiting politely.

‘You guys want a cab?’ I asked.

They nodded.

‘Why don’t you take this one?’

‘You sure?’ the woman asked.

I nodded. ‘Yep, I’ve changed my mind.’

They climbed in happily and drove off, while I headed down the street on foot, looking for a cyclo. One day soon there’d be nothing but nice, clean, air-conditioned taxis in this town and I figured a bloke has to get his thrills while he still can.

Come dinnertime I had sore feet, half a dozen memory cards full of pictures tucked in my jacket pocket and a yearning for something spicy. After snacking and snapping my way through half the back alleys in Ho Chi Minh City, I still figured I had room for a light dinner. Vietnamese pop music and the noisy buzz of happy locals drew me to a brightly lit café opening onto the street. I grabbed a table, ordered a beer and, looking around, found I was the only foreigner in the place.

Ignoring the menu, I pointed to what looked good on other tables and chatted in broken English and bad French with the young woman who owned the joint. I wound up with too much food, all of it amazingly fresh and tasty: rice-paper-wrapped spring rolls filled with shrimp and pork, crab noodle soup, lotus-stem salad, king prawns in tamarind sauce and a rice pancake with shredded pork, mushrooms and fried shallots. The owner’s ten-year-old daughter put her homework aside and insisted on showing me how to wrap various items in fragile rice paper and lettuce leaves, and which dipping sauce to use. I don’t think she was too impressed with my technique, but at least she was polite about it.

After downing a couple more beers I was feeling content, relaxed and comfortable, so when my cyclo driver tried to kill me it came as a bit of a shock.

It was around nine o’clock when I finished dinner, and an empty cyclo was parked right outside the restaurant, the driver casually smoking a cigarette. He was a lot younger than the cyclo drivers we’d spoken to earlier in the day, but at the time it didn’t ring any alarm bells.

I showed him a card from my hotel, since apart from saying
dúng
to beer and noodles and
xin loi không
to offers of young girls, drugs or pirated DVDs, the Vietnamese language is pretty much beyond me. The driver looked at the card and nodded, so I climbed in.

It had been raining, and the streetlights flared orange and green against the black night sky and reflected off the shimmering, water-slick roadway. The traffic was mostly scooters now, ridden by young people off doing whatever young people do on a humid Ho Chi Minh City evening. They crossed in front of us, drifting casually from right to left and left to right, almost in slow motion, their headlights and tail-lights blending into hypnotic psychedelic patterns enhanced by the noise of Asian pop songs and the aromas from roadside food stalls.

We passed people standing chatting in doorways, and nightclubs with speakers blaring out modern dance music. One club, Captain Willard’s Bar, blasted out songs from the sixties and inside there were go-go girls, flashing strobes and a crowded dance floor. Middle-aged men with crew cuts and buffed, gym-tight bodies gyrated in camouflage trousers, T-shirts and combat boots, fake US Army dog-tags from Dan Sinh Market jangling around their necks, living out some weird fantasy of a long-lost Saigon and a war they almost certainly only ever knew from movies and TV.

I’d felt so relaxed after dinner that I’d neglected to negotiate a price upfront for the trip, but now I noticed we were on quieter backstreets. It was a bumpy ride right from the start, and just as I was beginning to wonder how long my driver had been pedalling a cyclo, we turned hard left down a dark, narrow alleyway. The headlights of a waiting car flared into my face, blinding me. Then I heard the squeal of tyres as what sounded like a Russian jeep accelerated straight towards us.

The cyclo driver leapt clear as the jeep hit, squashing the frail metal frame of the pedicab into the brick wall of the alley and me with it. I was jammed in tight against the wall, and could feel several people tugging at me, trying to pull my camera bag from my shoulder. I deflected a fist flying towards my face, but missed the boot aimed at my groin. My vision blurred, there were shooting stars and my stomach was up in my throat.

Then loud shouting came from somewhere further down the alley and I could hear boots pounding on the cobblestones as my camera bag was savagely wrenched from my shoulder. Suddenly, with more squealing of tyres, the jeep was gone, taking my attackers, the camera bag and the cyclo driver with it.

My rescuers were two green-uniformed police officers, who helped me from the mangled remains of the cyclo and dusted me down with their hands, helpfully smoothing out the wrinkles in my clothes, which was a very odd feeling. When the pain in my nuts subsided a little, I realised the police officers were asking for ID. My wallet was still safely inside my jacket pocket, along with the little Leica and my passport. I handed over the passport and my WorldPix press card.

One of the officers wrote down some details while I slowly walked around in circles for a moment to see if everything was still working. I found I was in surprisingly good condition, apart from some moderate to excruciating testicular discomfort. I downplayed this fact as much as possible, as I was a bit concerned they might offer to helpfully pat that part of me down, too.

The officers walked me slowly to the other end of the alley, where a police motorcycle was parked. I said the words ‘hotel’ and ‘taxi’ several times and one of the cops flagged down a bright yellow Vina cab, which was fine by me as I was well over the romance of the cyclo for the time being.

Both police officers saluted me as I closed the door. I smiled and waved and if I hadn’t been so well brought up I would have dropped my trousers right then and there to let the chilled air inside the taxi swirl around my aching groin.

A note from Jack was waiting for me at the hotel reception desk when I collected the key for room 427. He and VT had checked out right after lunch and were heading north in the Huey. Jack had tracked down another place with connections to the Tranh fish-farming enterprise somewhere outside Hanoi, and he wanted to look into it. He finished by saying he’d keep in touch.