Naked in Saigon (16 page)

MAGDALENA

The first flush of pleasure was immediately smothered by the guilt. The look on his face scared me. I hoped he might smile, but he looked just as tormented as I felt.

I didn’t want to think this might be our last time together. I wished Reyes didn’t have to play by his rules, but then if he didn’t, I supposed I would never have fallen in love with him.

“I really thought I’d never see you again,” I whispered. “It just seemed impossible.”

“Did you know I was in Saigon?”

“I rang my agent a couple of years ago. You remember Ted? He told me you were here.” I put my arms around him. “I can’t lose you again now I’ve finally got you back. Can’t someone else go?”

“Who’d be crazy enough to do it?”

“If they ambushed him, won’t they do the same to you?”

“Yeah, but I can talk their language. I’ll negotiate, I’m good at that.”

“Are you going to offer them money? Connor doesn’t have much. We could sell the apartment in New York.”

“I have to find him alive first and I’m not counting on it.”

I wrapped my leg over his thigh, I would have kept him prisoner in my room forever if I could. “Before he left, Connor told me that everyone believes in something. Afterwards I racked my brains trying to think what it was that I believed in and I couldn’t think of anything. When I was a little girl I used to believe that my handsome prince would come along and sweep me off my feet, and when I left Havana I dreamed that I would be famous and rich and no one would ever look down on me ever again. But since that time on the island it’s like I’ve been sleepwalking through my life. I stopped believing in anything.”

“What about now?”

“I believe in you and me. I believe that somehow we’ll get away from all this, away from wars and away from men like Angel and just find peace. That’s what I dream about.”

“You’d be bored in five minutes.”

“No, not this time. I know what I want now. What about you, Reyes?”

“I guess that’s my dream, too.”

“So you’d better make sure you come back, then.”

“I promise.”

He laughed, a little too easily. I knew what he was thinking, and I was thinking the same thing. This could be our last time together. It was as if life had just brought us back together again to make sure I knew exactly what I was missing when it was snatched away again forever.

Chapter 25

REYES

Vientiane was a hot sleepy town nestled among the oar-blade palms on the wide and muddy banks of the Mekong River. It was still mostly rural, the people lived in thatch and bamboo huts built on stilts, with chickens and black pigs fussing around underneath. Pirogues with high swept prows glided up and down the brown river as they had done for hundreds of years. It was one hour and a million light years from Saigon, a most unlikely staging post for an international drug trade and a proxy war between the world’s great superpowers.

But the ugly blights of the modern century were catching up. Two storey brick buildings were mushrooming in the centre of the town, wreathed in bamboo scaffolding, challenging the upswept golden eaves of the temples and the blazing flamboyants for domination of the skyline. American two-tone cars with big fins scythed between the oxcarts and water buffaloes, orange-robed
bonzes
with begging bowls walked hatchet-faced past cheap girlie bars where Air America pilots in Hawaiian shirts went for a whisky or a blow job, or sometimes both, sometimes at the same time.

It was a comic opera kingdom, the ‘Land of a Million Elephants’. Most Americans would never be able to find it on a map.

Reyes dropped off his bags at the Setthya Palace Hotel and made his way to the Purple Porpoise. It was only just afternoon and it was still quiet when he walked in; the ambassador of a large South American country was asleep in a rattan chair, snoring, the
Lao Presse
covering his face; two guys in aviator sunglasses and baseball caps sat in another corner, blearily playing poker and smoking marijuana. There was a bottle of White Horse whisky on the table between them, and two straws. Reyes noted their gold identity bracelets--they were Air America pilots.

The barkeep’s name was Monty Banks, an Australian who sounded like Prince Philip when he was sober. He was leaning on the bar in his shirtsleeves, sipping a pink gin.

“I’m looking for James Brandt,” Reyes said to him.

“James Brandt?” He pronounced it ‘Brarnt.’

“You mean Buzz?” He looked at his watch. “He’ll be here in ten minutes. Chum of his?”

“Friend of a friend. He said he’d meet me here.”

“What’s your poison, old boy?”

“Got any decent rum?”

“Havana Club.” Hav-arna. “That do you?”

“With lime and soda, thanks.”

When Buzz arrived he saw Reyes and nodded. He looked more like a jockey than a spy, a small, whippet-like man with short sandy coloured hair and steel-rimmed glasses. As soon as he walked in Monty slapped a glass of Jack Daniels on the counter. Buzz took it and led the way to a table in the corner.

“So, you’re Walt’s pal from Saigon.”

“We’ve known each other for quite a while.”

“He says you were an Agency man.”

“Not directly. A contractor.”

Buzz looked him over and nodded, as if he was everything he had expected. “He says you’re fucking crazy.”

“Crazy is as crazy does.”

“Yeah, I guess. This is not your first time in Laos?”

“I was here a few years ago.”

“Yeah? What were you doing?”

“I was an agricultural adviser.”

Buzz smiled. They both knew what that meant. “Well they sure now how to grow agriculture in this country; you must have advised them real good. So you know your way around, right?”

“A little.”

“And you want a ride upcountry.”

“There’s a village I lived in for a few weeks in ‘62, just out of Sam Thong. They’ll probably remember me, I guess they don’t see too many round eyes.”

“Oh, they’re seeing more of us all the time. But yeah, we can get you up there. Whether you’ll get out again, that’s quite another proposition.”

“I’m looking for this guy O’Loughlin. You know if anyone at the Embassy has made any efforts to get him back?”

“Hell, no, we’d rather he stayed lost. You find him, well that’s up to you, but you’ll get no official help from us. I’m doing this as a personal favour. Anyway what’s your reason, is this guy a friend of yours?”

“Not really.”

“Not really? Then what the fuck, you don’t mind me asking. You know you could get killed?”

“It’s a favour for a friend.”

He grinned. “She must be some friend. Because I tell you, I wouldn’t give you great odds of getting out of that jungle again if you go ahead with this crazy idea.”

“I was born in Havana. It’s a big gambling town…or it was before Fidel took over. For a while I helped run a numbers racket in Miami, so I know all about odds.”

“Well, I wish you luck, pal, but I can tell you, I’m not betting on seeing you again.” He raised his glass.

Reyes returned the toast. “I think you underestimate me.”

“What’s your plan?”

“Your people get me to the village--it’s called Ban Soea. I’ll get a guide and we’ll go search the area. I figure the Pathet Lao will find us before we find them and when they do I’ll do some tough talking. I can speak the language.

“Or else they’ll shoot you, too.

“That’s the risk, yeah.”

“What are you going to bargain with?”

“Money. Everyone can be bought. But if I can find some other way, I will.”

“You must be out of your fucking mind.”

Reyes thought about the
Nevada
, all those empty years looking for something that would matter to him again. He was pretty damned sure he’d found it now. Dying for a reason now didn’t seem as bad as living without a purpose. “It probably seems that way to you,” he said.

Buzz clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re one crazy motherfucker. You should stick around if you pull this off, you’d fit right in around here.”

Chapter 26

Reyes took off from Wattay just before dawn in an Air America Piper. The airfield was still blanketed in mist. There were just two other passengers, both journalists heading to Sam Thong as part of the Embassy’s feel-good package. They wanted to talk and Reyes didn’t. Reyes got his way.

They flew northeast over the Mekong plain as the sun rose over the jigsaw of green rice paddies below. In the distance he got his first glimpse of the jagged towers of limestone rising from the mountains of Luang Prabang.

Thirty minutes later they were getting ready to land in one of the most heavily bombed places on the earth.

Sam Thong was marked on all the maps and the airstrip was designated Lima Twenty by the Americans. They dropped into the valley between mist-shrouded pinnacles of rock. It looked like they were about to land in a Chinese feather and ink painting. The rest of the mountain city appeared through the fog; maintenance hangars, operations buildings and crew billets all clustered around the tiny airstrip.

The air base at Sam Thong was one massive public relations exercise. American aid agencies were based there organising rice drops to the hill tribes in the surrounding mountains, who were beleaguered by the ongoing war between the government and the communists. What was seldom mentioned was that the villagers were starving because their men were all away fighting the communists for the CIA.

Reyes knew that as an accredited journalist, Connor would have had no trouble getting a ride up here in a Piper like this one or on an Air America Huey. He would have sat through the lecture about the beneficence of the US rice drops and the dangers of communism and then had the free tour of the two hundred bed hospital and the USAID schools.

How he got away from the Embassy officials and got a ride out of there was anyone’s guess. He plainly had balls and determination. Money as well, Reyes guessed, because he must have bribed someone.