The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (18 page)

“Where are we going?” Lewis asked Tyler.

“No idea, Bart, but I think we’re in good hands.”

The cyclos made their way through a series of badly lit side-streets, turning left and right until the Americans had no idea of where they were or where they were going. Despite the late hour the streets were still full of mopeds, bicycles and cyclos, and the sidewalks were thronged with people eating, talking or reading under flickering oil lamps. Faces looked up when the Americans went by and small children jumped up and down and waved and called out: “
Lien Xo! Lien Xo!
”

The convoy eventually came to a halt outside a roadside bar which had a sign saying “Hot Bar” outlined in red light bulbs. Two young girls in tank tops and miniskirts came out of the bar and stood giggling as the Americans climbed out of their cyclos. The bar was open to the side-walk and inside, bathed in red lights, were half a dozen low tables and wooden stools. Country and Western music crackled from a teak-veneer speaker fixed to the wall and a middle-aged woman with short, curly hair polished a glass with a cloth that had seen better days. When she saw the Americans she called into a back room and four more girls came into the bar, one of them wiping her mouth with a tissue. The girls surrounded the Americans like pilot fish around sharks, touching them and giggling and following them to a corner table.

The men sat around the table and the girls pulled in extra stools to sit close to them while another woman put bowls of peanuts and crisps in front of them and asked what they wanted to drink.

“Beers,” said Tyler. “Five beers.”

Lehman was now used to Tyler taking charge, and it seemed that the rest of the group didn’t mind him making their decisions for them. Lehman was certain that Tyler had been more than a pilot during the war. He was clearly a man who was used to giving orders and to seeing them obeyed. A natural leader. Or one who’d been well trained.

The girls spoke next to no English but the woman who brought the beer did so Tyler asked her to sit down and join them. She said her name was Annie and when Tyler complimented her on her English she told them that she had worked in bars when the Americans had been in Vietnam.

“Bad day for Saigon when Americans go,” she said. “Communists kill my husband, take my son to work in fields.” She shrugged. “I still here, still run bar. Now Americans come back.” She said she was forty-three years old but she looked a lot older; her upper lip was lined and she had deep grooves either side of her mouth and folds of skin around her chin that settled over the string of cheap pearls she wore. Her smile was too eager and her eyes kept flicking from man to man to check that they were happy and that they weren’t making a move to go. When Carmody got to his feet to go to the toilet she mistook it for a sign that he wanted to go and she reached to grab his hand and pull him back.

“Was this bar here during the war?” Lehman asked her.

“No. The communists closed down all the old bars. Took away the girls. Took away the managers. Took away everybody to re-education camps.”

“What about you, Annie?”

She grimaced. “I had a friend, an NVA officer. He took care of me.”

“Where are we?” asked Lewis. “What part of town?”

“This Dong Khoi Street,” she said. “Before NVA come it was Tu Do Street. The French call it Rue Catinat.”

“Tu Do?” said Lehman. “Christ, that was where all the bars were. It was the hottest street in Saigon. There were more fights here than in the jungle.”

“And probably a higher body count,” said Tyler, sipping his beer from the bottle.

“It’s changed, all right,” said Lehman. He walked to the entrance of the bar and looked up and down the street. So far as he could see the Hot Bar was the only such drinking establishment in the street. Last time he’d been in this road he couldn’t move for pimps offering him their sisters and girls offering him their virginity. There wasn’t a vice or drug or perversion that wasn’t available in Tu Do, at a price. The place had been packed with Jeeps and soldiers, war-weary grunts with wild eyes and hair-trigger tempers on their first R&R and Saigon-based military with crisp fatigues and new boots. Now it looked like every other road in Saigon, run-down and decaying. The garbage had gone, though. There were always piles of it during the war because the government couldn’t match the salaries paid by the American bases so they never had enough workers to carry it away. There was no anti-blast tape on any of the windows either. And the beggars had gone. The street used to be packed with widows and disabled ex-ARVN soldiers asking for handouts and gangs of child pick-pockets. Maybe the changes weren’t so bad after all, he mused. Annie appeared at his shoulder, fearful that he was about to leave.

“You sit,” said Annie. “You sit, I get you nice girl.”

Lehman turned to her and smiled, saddened by her over-eagerness to please. “Annie, it’s okay, I’m not going anywhere. Relax.”

She nodded too quickly and held him by the arm until he sat down again. The girls noticed his Mickey Mouse watch and giggled.

Carmody came back from the toilet and sat down again. The girl next to him, a teenager with her hair in two long braids tied with blue ribbons, leant over and whispered to her friend sitting on the other side of Carmody and the two of them burst into a fit of giggles, covering their mouths with their hands.

“What are they laughing at?” Carmody asked Annie.

“She wonder how you go to the toilet,” she said.

“Because of my claw?”

Annie nodded. “You not angry?” she asked anxiously.

“No, I’m not angry,” said Carmody, putting down his beer. He held his claw in front of the girl with pigtails and her eyes widened, not sure how to react. Annie spoke to her in rapid Vietnamese and the girl smiled and reached out to touch the stainless steel. Carmody twisted it out of her grasp and ran the cold metal softly down her cheek and then along her neck and down to her blouse. The smile froze on her face as the claw traced a line along her collar and then slowly scraped across the material and moved down between her small, firm breasts. All conversation had stopped, and everyone was looking at Carmody. The claw reached the first button on her blouse and he made a small flicking movement that popped it open. He pushed the claw against her skin and drew it down, parting the material and revealing a white lace bra. When the claw encountered the second button he popped it as easily as he had the first and moved down to the third, but before he reached it he looked over at Annie and grinned. “That’s how I do it,” he said, and cackled.

Annie laughed and the girls joined in, but the girl with the pigtails kept her eyes on the claw and her laugh had a nervous edge to it.

Carmody ran the claw along the line of her jaw and she flinched. He turned to Annie. “Tell her that’s not all I can do with it,” he said.

Annie spoke to the girl and she nodded but didn’t smile.

“How much to go with her?” Carmody asked.

“She very young girl,” Annie said. “She not been here very long. Other girls better. Better in bed. I think you be more happy if you choose them.” She pointed at a thin girl with long straight hair who sat opposite Carmody. “She very good girl. Very clean.”

“I believe you, mamasan, but I want this pretty little thing.” He put the claw on the girl’s bare leg and moved it up her thigh, dragging the skirt with it. She tried to push it down and whimpered, tears welling up in her soft brown eyes.

Annie looked at Tyler as if appealing for help. “Go easy, Larry,” he said quietly.

Carmody held Tyler’s gaze for a second or two and then nodded. He withdrew the claw and picked up a red and white pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He opened it with the claw, took out a cigarette, put it in between his thin lips and then, still using the claw, took a gunmetal Zippo lighter from the pocket of his cut-off jeans. He spun it around in the grip of the claw, snapping it open and flicking a flame into life. He lit the cigarette, put the lighter back on the table and then used the claw to hold the cigarette while he blew a plume of smoke up towards a slowly revolving ceiling fan. Annie clapped and the rest of the girls joined in the applause. Carmody went on to show them how he could use the claw as a bottle-opener and they all clapped again. Lehman noticed that at the first available opportunity Annie motioned the girl with pigtails to go into the back room where she stayed until the Americans had left.

A moped drove by, its engine buzzing like a dying insect, then its brakes squealed and there was the crunch of a badly timed gear change and it came back and stopped by the kerb. There were two men on the moped. The driver stayed at the kerb while the passenger, a young Vietnamese guy in his late teens or early twenties, dismounted and walked into the bar. He was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and light brown cowboy boots and had slicked-back hair that glistened redly under the lights. He had a used car salesman’s easy smile and the swagger of a pimp with a stable of eager whores. Annie said something to him but he waved her away with a grin and walked over to the Americans.

“Hi, you guys Americans?” he asked.

“Maybe. Who wants to know?” said Carmody.

“Hey, no sweat,” said the man. “My name’s Ricky. I was just wondering if you guys wanted to do a little business.”

“What sort of business?” asked Lewis suspiciously.

“Currency,” he said, brushing his oiled hair back behind his ears in a gesture that was almost feminine. “I’ll give you a better rate than you’ll get in the hotels. What hotel are you staying at?”

“The Floating,” said Carmody, lifting his beer with his claw and keeping it raised until he was sure that Ricky had seen it. Then he drank and used the sleeve of his other arm to wipe away the foam from his upper lip, watching Ricky all the time.

Ricky raised his eyes and looked at the ceiling. “Hey, I guarantee that I can do you a better deal than you got there. They’re pirates, real pirates. How many dong do they give you to the dollar?”

Carmody was going to answer but a crafty look flashed across his face. It was so transparent that both Lehman and Lewis noticed it and they began laughing. Carmody glared at them. “What are you offering?” he asked Ricky, and took another drink.

Ricky looked at the faces of the men around the table as if hoping they would offer some hint but five pairs of cold eyes looked back. He pulled a face and ran his hands through his hair again. “I’ll give you 6,000.”

That was considerably better than the rate offered by the hotel, but Carmody wasn’t satisfied. “Eight,” he said.

“Eight thousand dong for one US dollar!” exclaimed Ricky, his hands on his hips like a flamenco dancer. “You are crazy!”

“Yeah, and you’re a black marketeer,” answered Carmody.

Ricky’s lips tightened as if he’d just tasted something very sour. “How much you want to change?” he asked.

Carmody unzipped the money pouch he carried around his waist. Because the Trading with the Enemy Act forbade the use of American credit cards in Vietnam, all the Americans had to carry lots of cash around. They’d found that many places accepted US currency quite happily, but always gave a lousy exchange. They always got a better deal if they paid in the local money, the dong, but as there were several thousand dong for one US dollar and as the biggest Vietnamese banknote was just 5,000 dong, it usually meant carrying a wad of currency around about the size of a house brick. Carmody’s pouch was fairly light so nobody was surprised when he looked up and said he wanted to change 250 dollars.

After several minutes of bartering they agreed on two million dong and Ricky went out of the bar to confer with the moped driver. The driver kicked the moped into life and drove off in a cloud of grey smoke while Ricky waited at the roadside. Five minutes later he was back with a small plastic bag which he handed to Ricky. He kept the moped engine turning over with occasional blips on the accelerator as Ricky brought the bag inside and motioned to Carmody to go with him to a table at the back of the bar.

Carmody sat down and placed five fifty dollar bills on the table and laid his claw on top of them. Ricky swung the plastic bag on the table and took out stacks of notes. They were all 5,000 dong notes in piles of nine with the tenth folded around them. Two million dong meant forty piles, and Ricky slowly counted them out. He took one of the piles at random and spread the notes out to show that they were all 5,000 dong bills. He chose another and did the same, and another. Carmody nodded and lifted his claw from the American bills and began scooping the Vietnamese money back into the bag.

“Maybe we’ll do business again, Ricky,” he said.

Ricky laughed, pocketed the bills and stood up. He froze when Tyler’s hand clapped him on the shoulder. “Wait just a minute, Ricky,” said Tyler quietly. He pushed down, hard, and Ricky’s legs buckled. He crashed back on to the stool, protesting loudly.

“Hey, man, what’s your problem?”

“Dan, keep an eye on his chauffeur, will you?”

“Sure thing,” said Lehman. He got to his feet and went over to the entrance of the bar where he leaned against the wall as if he had nothing more on his mind than a breath of fresh air. The moped driver looked at him and Dan raised his bottle of beer in friendly salute.

Ricky continued to protest but Tyler’s grip was like steel and he remained on the stool. “Larry, why don’t you slide those bills back out of the bag and have another look at them?”