Big Mango (9786167611037) (10 page)

Jesus, Eddie thought. A half dozen words out
of my mouth and I’m already sounding like a goddamned lawyer.

“Those scumbags you work for do a lot worse,”
Michael said. “So if they arrest me, maybe you could work for me,
too, Dad. How would that be?”

“I don’t work for those guys, Mike. They’re
my clients.”

It was a distinction that Eddie had always
treasured, but now it sounded embarrassingly lame. There was a
sullen silence from the other end of the line, and for once he was
grateful for it.

“So where did you get the gun?”

There was no answer. Eddie realized that it
had been a stupid question to ask, and worse, pointless.

“Okay, let’s try this a different way. Why do
you have a gun?”

This time he allowed the silence to go on,
determined to wait Michael out.

“I just keep it around.” Eddie could hear the
shrug in his son’s voice. “Most of the time it’s not even
loaded.”

“So why do you have it?”

“Just…you know, protection.”

“No, I don’t know. Protection from what?”

“From stuff. Whatever.”

The silence started up again and Eddie let it
go on until Mike broke it.

“I figure I’d better start looking out for
myself.” The cruelty in his voice was unmistakable. “Who else is
going to do it? You?”

It was a finger straight in the eye, but
Eddie blinked it away. “Is there something you’re not telling me
here, Mike?”

“Look, let’s just cut the father-son
bullshit, huh, Dad?”

Michael’s voice was steely and distant and
Eddie started to feel a little numb.

“I just want to be sure my ass is covered.
You ought to understand that. You spend enough time covering
yours.”

Eddie was fighting back his growing anger at
Michael’s wild swings when, with a sudden flash of horror, a
thought dawned on him. Had some former client of his been harassing
Mike?

“There’s nothing going on, honest,” Michael
answered the question before Eddie could ask it. “I just want to
take care of myself if I have to. You’re sure as hell not going to
be around to help.”

The conversation rattled around a little
after that, but essentially it was over. Mike had said his piece
and Eddie was left with no real response other than to get angry
and hit back, and he was not going to do that. If that was what his
son thought of him, that was what his son thought of him.

The gun wasn’t the issue, Eddie knew. He was
the issue. The gun would no doubt disappear in a few days, maybe it
already had, but he wouldn’t. Jennifer could worry about the gun.
Eddie was going to worry about why his son thought he was such a
jerk.

After he hung up, Eddie replayed the
conversation in his head several times searching for subtle
meanings and thoughtful insights he might have missed the first
time around. He found none.

Okay, maybe he wasn’t any big deal—he hadn’t
done all that much with his life, he supposed—but why did his son
see him as such a loser? It certainly wasn’t true. Was it?

As he thought about his conversation with
Michael, Eddie idly picked up the envelope Rupert had left on his
desk and toyed with it, sliding it absentmindedly from hand to
hand. Forgetting his vow not to open it until he had decided
whether to accept Rupert’s offer, he slipped his forefinger under
the back flap, ripped it across the top, and shook the contents out
onto his desk. As he sat for a long time looking at what spilled
out, he could feel the sting of Michael’s words being shouldered
aside by a growing sense of foreboding.

There was nothing particularly sinister or
even surprising about what was in the envelope. It was exactly what
Rupert had said it would be. Still, looking at it spread out across
his desk, Eddie thought he could feel the air around him start to
grow heavy. At the very moment he opened the envelope, he was
certain the atmosphere began to give off a restless, distinctive
odor: oxygen being burned into ozone somewhere nearby, the first
forewarning of an approaching storm. It was a vivid premonition.
Bolts of lightning, still too far away to be seen, were coming
closer by the minute. Soon, he felt absolutely sure, they would be
slashing the sky around his head.

Eddie cautiously picked up a rectangular red
and gold folder and opened the cover. Inside was a ticket for a San
Francisco to Bangkok flight on Singapore Airlines leaving Wednesday
just before midnight. It was a round-trip ticket with an open
return. At least, Eddie noted, it was first class.

There was cash, too: hundred dollar bills,
ten of them. And there was a letter from the Oriental Hotel in
Bangkok confirming that a suite had been reserved for Mr. Rupert
Edward Dare for an indefinite stay. The letter begged to thank Mr.
Dare for the $5000 cash deposit to his account. A suite at one of
the most famous hotels in the world and a first-class ticket on
Singapore Airlines would normally be fine with him, but there was
something about the open return and the indefinite stay part of the
letter that bothered him a lot.

When he thought about it later, Eddie
realized he had acted unconsciously after that. He dug around on
his desk until he found the remote control and then punched on the
little Sony that he kept in the office for watching sports when he
was pretending to work on weekends. He had only been going to check
out CNN, as he remembered, just to see what the weather was like in
Bangkok; purely out of curiosity.

“Anything else before I leave, Eddie?” Joshua
was standing just inside the door and Eddie registered the concern
on his face even in the fading twilight of the office. He had no
secrets from Joshua, so he had told him about Marinus Rupert and
about the Secret Service. He had told Joshua what he knew, and that
hadn’t taken long.

“I’m okay, Joshua.” Eddie hesitated and then
decided to take the easy way out. “The call from Jennifer was no
big deal. A problem with Mike. Nothing I can’t handle.”

Joshua nodded, but his expression remained
the same as he watched Eddie closely. Eventually Joshua tilted his
head toward the television set. “I’ve always liked that movie,
too.”

Eddie rotated his chair slightly and saw that
the set had come on to a channel that was playing some old western
he didn’t recognize. A man dressed all in black was galloping on a
sleek white horse through the dusty streets of a small western town
while its awestruck residents gazed at him with a mixture of
respect and admiration.

“I wasn’t watching—”

“You know, Eddie, I’ve always thought that’s
what America is really all about,” Joshua interrupted, pointing his
forefinger at the television set.

“About riding horses and shooting
people?”

Joshua hardly even noticed Eddie’s smirky
ripostes any longer, at least not that he let on.

“It’s about people who are willing to go out
over the next horizon. Men who aren’t afraid to step right off into
the future, to make something good happen. Those are the real
American heroes.”

Eddie smiled slightly. So that was what
Joshua’s sudden interest in western movies was all about.

“I don’t want to be an American hero,
Joshua.”

Joshua slowly smiled in such a sweetly
melancholy way that Eddie felt the goose bumps start to rise on his
forearms.

“Oh yes you do,” Joshua murmured in a voice
that was like the wind rattling dead leaves high up in an oak tree.
“Yes, you do.”

Then he slipped out the door, closing it
behind him without a sound, and was gone.

WHEN
Eddie walked into the
bookstore the next morning and told Winnebago about Marinus
Rupert’s proposition, Winnebago looked exactly like someone who
didn’t want to hear a word of it.

“Forget it, man.” He rapped his open hand on
the counter next to the cash register for emphasis. “Just forget
it.”

“I can trade this in for two business class
seats,” Eddie said, holding up the red folder with the first class
ticket. “We’re covered on the hotel and have a thousand bucks in
cash. What have you got to lose?”

Winnebago looked at Eddie in amazement.

“You’re kidding, right?” He took off his
glasses and leaned forward until his face was just inches from
Eddie’s. “What have I got to lose? My fucking life is what it looks
to me I’ve got to lose.”

“Don’t worry so much, Winnebago. Everything
will be fine.”

“Oh, sure it will. We’ll just fly 10,000
miles around the world; I’ll get the trots from the food, emphysema
from the air, the clap from the girls, and my ass handed to me in a
bag by somebody who thinks I know where $400,000,000 is. Oh yeah.
It’ll be fucking fantastic, it will.”

Winnebago folded his arms.

“No goddamned way,” he said.

Eddie exhaled slowly and studied a tall
bookcase labeled with a neat sign tacked to the top shelf. It was
hand-printed in black ink and read FETISHES—HARDBACK.

“Why do you really want to do this,
Eddie?”

“A lot of people think we know something
about what happened to the money from the Bank of Vietnam.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, we were there, somewhere. If I take
this guy’s money and we use it to poke around a little, maybe we’ll
remember things; start to put it all together.” Eddie waited, but
Winnebago didn’t say anything, so he spelled it out. “Maybe we can
find out where that money is.”

“Did it ever occur to you that someone
probably doesn’t want anyone to find out; that maybe they’re
getting rid of anyone they think knows anything?” Winnebago’s eyes
had shifted away from Eddie, but now they shifted back. “That’s
probably why Captain Austin ended up with his head busted open, and
you can bet your sweet ass that’s what those big red circles around
us on those pictures are supposed to mean.”

“I don’t think so,” Eddie said. “If someone
wanted to kill us, why put us on guard like that? The photographs
have to mean something else. We just haven’t figured it out
yet.”

Winnebago didn’t have an answer for that, but
his skeptical expression remained unchanged. “You haven’t been to
Bangkok in twenty years,” he said. “You’ve got no chance screwing
around out there, man. No fucking chance.”

“I’ve been to Bangkok since we were there.”
Eddie’s voice sounded a little defensive, even to him. “A couple of
times.”

Eddie had loved Bangkok in the seventies when
he and Winnebago had taken their R&R there. He had been back
twice since: once on a banking case when he was still an uptown
lawyer, and again about a year ago getting an unlucky druggie whose
father owned half of Santa Cruz out of jail. He had to admit that
Bangkok had changed a lot over twenty years and he was less certain
what he thought about it now.

“Look, Winnebago, I’ve never asked you for
anything before, but I don’t want to go out there without someone
watching my back.”

“Then don’t go, Eddie.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Bullshit. Don’t risk your life in some
fucking crazy treasure hunt, man.”

“It’s not the money.”

“Not the money?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you can explain to me what I’m
missing here.”

Eddie looked down at his feet, inhaled
deeply, and made little popping sounds with his lips. The question
was more than fair. He knew Winnebago would ask it, he had asked it
of himself over and over since last night when he decided what he
was going to do, and he had been thinking all the way over to the
bookshop about how to explain his answer sensibly.

Everyone he knew daydreamed about trading in
their old life for a new one. Everyone said that someday they would
really do it. Now Eddie’s someday had walked right up to the door
and knocked. He was staring straight into a gaping exit hole from
the scattered debris of his life and an unshakable conviction had
taken control of him. He
had
to crawl through that hole.

Maybe Winnebago had nailed it. Maybe it
was
a treasure hunt. But what would the treasure turn out to
be? The money from Operation Voltaire? Maybe. But perhaps it would
be something else entirely; something completely unexpected. The
more Eddie thought about it, the less he figured there was any real
difference. The truth was he just wanted to hunt for treasure
before he got too old to know what it looked like when he found
it.

That was it really. That was what
mattered.

Here lies Eddie Dare. He was okay.

Fuck that shit.

Eddie tried to explain that to Winnebago, but
the more he talked the more ridiculous he thought it sounded.
Finally he just trailed off.

“I’m going to Bangkok, Winnebago,” Eddie
finished. “Maybe I can’t make you understand why, but I’m going,
and I’m asking you right now to come with me.”

Winnebago tapped a Camel out of a nearly
empty pack and took his time about lighting it. “You don’t have the
first damned idea what you’re going to do when you get there, do
you?”

He was still shaking his head, but Eddie got
the feeling that he was coming around.

“Sure I do.”

“And that is… “ Winnebago made a little
gesture with his hand.

“If we can find out what Captain Austin was
doing in Bangkok, who he knew there and what he did before he died,
we can put that together with what we already know and I’ll bet
we’ll have something.”

“And how are you going to do all that?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Eddie admitted, “but I
got a place to start. I know a guy in Bangkok.”

“Oh well, you know a guy in Bangkok. The
population there is…what? Six, eight million?”

“About ten, I think. Give or take.”

“And you know one guy. That’s just great. I
can certainly see how that solves everything.”

Eddie was sure now he had Winnebago. He could
see it in his eyes. “Yeah, but you’re going to come with me anyway,
aren’t you?” he said.