The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (28 page)

Their flight back to the States wasn’t for another week, giving them time to wind down after Vietnam. They spent most of their time sitting by the pool and drinking beer. The salesman, Cummings, Stebbings, Henderson and Speed had stuck to themselves on the plane to Bangkok, and from the conversations Lehman overheard he gathered that they had enjoyed their visit and had all felt they had benefited from the experience. Certainly Henderson and Speed seemed a good deal more relaxed and didn’t appear to have to stay as close to each other as they did before their visit. Cummings, too, seemed more at ease and not so dependent on his wife. For them, maybe, it had been a worthwhile endeavour. For the rest of the group, however, the trip to Vietnam seemed to have done more harm than good. Carmody’s anti-Vietnamese rhetoric was worse than it had been, and Horvitz kept falling into long, sullen silences as if trying to deal with uncomfortable memories. Lewis had confessed that he’d been having more nightmares since he’d returned to Vietnam, and Lehman had to admit that memories which he thought had long since lost their sting were now troubling him once more and he was getting flashbacks – bad ones, images which he’d hoped had faded. Apparently they hadn’t, they’d been lying somewhere in his subconscious waiting for the trigger to bring them to the surface: the night attack when two Hueys had collided just yards in front of him; the morning when his co-pilot, a nineteen-year-old farm boy called Ted, took a sniper’s bullet in the face; the marine sergeant who walked into the rear rotor of Lehman’s Huey and died in his arms, the top of his skull crushed into mush.

“You okay, Dan?” said a voice and Lehman looked up to see Lewis sitting and stretching. The tension had faded from his face.

“Bad memories,” said Lehman, rubbing his cheeks with the palms of his hands as if he were putting on aftershave.

“Yeah, tell me about it. They worse for you, after Vietnam and all?”

Lehman nodded. “Yeah. It’s to be expected, I guess. It was twenty-five years ago, I was just about coming to terms with it.”

“Man, you don’t ever come to terms with it. Never. Hey, you wanna go look round the city?”

“Yeah, I reckon I’ve been in the sun long enough. Do you want to eat?”

Lewis patted his stomach. “No. I’m okay. Just fancy a look-see. Check out the markets maybe. See if I can find a souvenir for my boy.”

“Didn’t know you had a son,” said Lehman.

“Eight years old,” said Lewis proudly. He fished his wallet out of his shorts and took out a small colour photograph. He showed it to Lehman. A crinkly-haired boy with a mischievous grin beamed out of the tiny picture. He had his father’s wide forehead and square chin. A good-looking boy.

“He’s definitely your son all right,” said Lehman. “Looks just like you.”

“Yeah. I don’t see much of him these days. One weekend in four.”

“Divorced?”

“Yeah. Wife couldn’t take it any more, she said. The nightmares. The flashbacks.”

Lehman stood up and draped a towel over his shoulders. “Come on,” he said, “we need a change of atmosphere. This is starting to get too depressing.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” laughed Lewis. He got to his feet and asked if Horvitz or Carmody wanted to go along. They both declined but Carmody reminded them that they’d promised to meet Tyler later that night for a tour around Pat Pong, Bangkok’s red light area. Rest and Recreation, Tyler had said. Rape and Run, Carmody had called it.

Lehman and Lewis left the poolside to go back to their rooms to change. On their way through the hotel lobby they met Tyler. He wore a light blue safari suit and a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses.

“Where are the boys?” he asked them.

“By the pool,” said Lewis.

“You guys still okay for tonight?”

“Sure thing,” said Lewis. “Nine o’clock, right?”

“On the dot,” said Tyler, grinning. “You going somewhere special?”

“Check out the shops and stuff,” said Lewis. “Present for my boy, maybe.”

“You should look at the computer stuff they’ve got here,” said Tyler. “Pirate copies. Dirt cheap. Anyway, see you both later.”

He nodded a farewell and headed for the pool.

“What do you make of him?” asked Lehman as Tyler disappeared through the door.

“Tyler?” said Lewis, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“He’s nothing like any pilot I ever met,” explained Lehman. “I feel like I should salute every time I see him. And have you noticed that Carmody has started calling him ‘sir’? There’s more to him than meets the eye, I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah, well I think he talks a lot of sense. I thought he handled himself really well with Judy. He stood up for himself. Hell, he stood up for us all. I think if he hadn’t been there we’d have all laid down like Henderson and Speed. Yeah, I like Tyler. We could have done with more officers like him in Nam. You know who he reminds me of? Oliver North. Marine Corps through and through. A professional soldier, someone you can rely on, somebody who’d die to protect his men and who’d expect them to do the same.”

“But not a pilot?” pressed Lehman.

Lewis shrugged. “Pilot. Marine. Who gives a fuck? He’s just an A-One guy. Come on, let’s go get changed and get a tuk-tuk.”

“Hell, can’t we get a cab? You die of fumes in the back of those things. And they’re dangerous, too.”

“Come on, man,” laughed Lewis. “Who wants to live for ever?” He slammed Lehman on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth and pushed him towards the elevator.

They got back to the hotel just after dark, their shirts soaked in sweat after a thirty-minute ride in the back of a two-stroke tuk-tuk, the hybrid of a scooter and a rickshaw which buzzed like a wasp in a bottle as their driver recklessly weaved through the dense Bangkok traffic.

They arranged to meet at the bar at just before nine o’clock and went upstairs to shower and change.

When Lehman arrived in the bar in a clean red polo shirt and white slacks, Tyler was already there talking to Horvitz and Carmody at a table in the far corner. All three looked up when Lehman walked in and for a moment it seemed to Lehman that they were sharing a secret and that he was an intruder. Horvitz and Carmody quickly turned their faces to Tyler as if seeking his advice but his expression didn’t change and he asked Lehman what he wanted to drink.

Lehman asked for a beer and Tyler waved over a slim waitress in a tight-fitting purple and gold dress which covered her from the neck to the floor and asked for four Singha beers.

“Make that five,” he said as Lewis arrived. He was wearing a short-sleeved green and white striped shirt and blue jeans.

“Like it?” he said, holding out his arms and modelling the shirt. “It’s a fake Yves Saint Laurent, cost just thirty baht.”

“A bargain,” said Lehman. Two waiters in jacket and trousers made from the same purple and gold material as the waitress’s dress scurried over with two more chairs which they arranged around the table and before the beers arrived they had placed a wooden bowl of crisps and another of salted peanuts in front of the Americans.

“Isn’t the service here just out of this world?” asked Carmody. He was the only one of the group wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt, and it covered up all of his artificial arm except for the claw at the end. He scratched his bare leg with the claw. He was also the only one of the Americans to be wearing shorts. His sweatshirt had a large orange sun on the front with “Bangkok” written in oriental script.

“Unbelievable,” said Lewis as the waitress returned with the tray of drinks. She knelt skilfully by the side of the table and poured the beers into cold glasses with small, economical movements, all the time smiling and averting her eyes demurely.

“Can you imagine them doing this in Baltimore, Bart?” laughed Carmody.

Lewis rolled his eyes. “Just wouldn’t happen, not in a million years,” he agreed.

“So,” said Tyler, helping himself to a handful of crisps. “First we eat, then we hit Pat Pong. How does that sound?”

“Sounds perfect,” said Horvitz. Despite the darkness of the bar he was still wearing his sunglasses.

They finished their beers and made their way to the front entrance of the hotel where they discovered that Tyler had hired a white Mercedes for the journey. “I thought you might like to go in style,” he explained.

“All right!” cheered Carmody, climbing into the back seat.

Tyler opened the front passenger door and got in while Horvitz, Lewis and Lehman joined Carmody in the back. The Mercedes was the large 560SEL model so there was plenty of room for them.

“Where we going?” Lewis asked.

“A place I know,” said Tyler and he spoke a few words of Thai to the driver. The driver, a middle-aged Thai in a white uniform with gold buttons, nodded and started the car.

“You speak Thai?” Lehman asked.

“Not so you’d notice,” replied Tyler. “I asked the concierge to tell me how to pronounce the name of the road.”

“Your tones sounded good,” said Lehman.

“Let’s wait and see where we end up before you start complimenting me on my Thai,” said Tyler, good-humouredly.

The Mercedes was air-conditioned so they were insulated from the choking fumes and dust of the crowded city streets, but even through the closed windows they could not escape the night-time sounds: the sing-song Thai voices of the street hawkers, distant police sirens, car engines racing as impatient drivers kept their feet hard on the accelerator even when the roads were blocked, the ever-present buzzing of the tuk-tuks, nipping in and out of the stationary cars.

The Mercedes turned off the main road and into a narrow alley devoid of street lights, bumping and bucking over potholes. Lehman looked out of the side window but all he could see were pockmarked walls and sacks of rubbish. He saw a dark shape scuttling along the side of a building but he couldn’t tell if it was a small cat or a large rat. The car turned right and into another alley and then drove out of the darkness and on to another well-lit area, a street full of restaurants and shops with bright neon signs and the ever-present tuk-tuks outside.

“Here we are,” said Tyler as the Mercedes pulled to a halt. As the Americans piled out of the car, Lehman heard Tyler speaking to the driver in Thai. Lehman couldn’t understand what was being said, but he doubted that it was anything Tyler had learned from the concierge and the tones sounded as good as they’d heard on Thai radio. Tyler’s fluency with South-East Asian languages was something that Lehman would love to have had explained.

Lehman stood with Horvitz, Carmody and Lewis at the door to the restaurant where they waited for Tyler to join them.

“The car was a great touch, wasn’t it?” said Lewis.

“Yeah, Tyler has style all right,” agreed Carmody, his voice loaded with admiration.

“You guys don’t think there’s something strange about the fact that he speaks Vietnamese and Thai?” asked Lehman.

“So he’s good at languages, so what?” said Carmody, defensively.

“So how did a pilot get to be so good at Vietnamese and Thai?” said Lehman.

“What the fuck does it matter?” said Carmody. “Maybe he studied languages at college. Maybe he was in intelligence and doesn’t want to let us know. Maybe he was in the CI fucking A. All I know is that he’s a great guy. And that’s enough for me.”

Horvitz and Lewis were nodding agreement so Lehman raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m not arguing with that,” he said. “I was just wondering, that’s all.” As they went in, he wondered what Tyler had been saying to Carmody to inspire such loyalty, and why Lewis and Horvitz had been so quick to align themselves with him. He felt as if the three of them had been allowed into some secret that he was still not privy to. He remembered the guilty looks on the faces of Horvitz and Carmody when he’d walked into the hotel bar, and of the whispered conversations he’d caught glimpses of in Vietnam. Tyler walked up to the door, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm, perspiring from the evening heat, the climate hot and clammy compared with the ice-cold air-conditioning of the Mercedes.

“I asked him to wait,” Tyler explained. “We might not get a cab here and we’ll be sweating like pigs if we take tuk-tuks from here to Pat Pong.”

The restaurant was busy but it appeared that Tyler had had the foresight to book a table. They appeared to be the only tourists there. As they walked to their table three Thai girls in long white dresses bowed, their hands pressed together under their chins like children saying their prayers. Lewis copied their movement and they smiled at his antics, though their smiles faded when they saw Carmody doing the same, his claw up against his good hand. He grinned at their discomfort.

Tyler ordered five beers as they took their seats and a young maître d’ in a dinner jacket which was one size too large for him handed out red leather-bound menus.

“Would you guys mind if I ordered?” Tyler asked. “I’m a big fan of Thai food.”

The rest agreed and drank their beers while Tyler went through the menu with the maître d’, pointing at dishes on other tables and asking his opinion.

The food, when it arrived, was first class and more than justified the long trip from the hotel. There were small fried fish-cakes with a sweet, orangey sauce, crisp spring rolls with lettuce and mint leaves to wrap them in, and a spicy clear sauce with sliced chillies to add flavour, a hot, spicy prawn soup with a strong lemony tang which Tyler explained was a Thai speciality, prawns fried in garlic, and a huge fish which lay on a long metal tray under which charcoal glowed redly. The fish was in a clear liquid which tasted of liquorice. The rice was mixed with small pieces of seafood and came in half a hollowed-out pineapple.