French Kiss, page 34
“I have come for La Porte à la Nuit, and for her. Not finding the one, I will take the other.” His lips were like a butterfly’s wings against Chris’s ear. “Now, when I free your mouth I want you to say, ‘Soutane, come over here. I think I’ve found something.”
Chris felt the pressure against his lips disappear, and he gulped fresh air. He said softly, “Soutane, come over here. I think I’ve found something.” All the while his mind was working furiously.
He could see Soutane rising, moving cautiously toward him. She was looking around her, rather than at him. She had no idea as to the whereabouts of their pursuer. He peered into the gloom. Was she carrying the harlequin with her? He prayed that she was.
She was almost upon him when he saw it tucked under her arm. He strained backward a little as if he were momentarily off balance. It bought him the bit of room he needed to position himself between his captor and Soutane’s left side, where she held the long package. The Puss ‘n Boots was his only hope now. If the man behind him saw that Soutane was carrying something of that shape, he’d know immediately that they had found where Terry had hidden La Porte à la Nuit.
Now Soutane was close enough for the man to reach her over Chris’s shoulder. Once he had her and the harlequin, it would be too late. Chris would be without leverage.
He was almost in position, almost able to touch the package, almost ready to move. But, as if he were able to sense Chris’s intention, the man gripped Chris’s right arm with such power that Chris’s eyes began to water.
“Don’t move,” he hissed in Chris’s ear.
Chris felt overcome by despair. Alix had nearly given her life for him. Now he was consciously putting Soutane in the same position. But what could he do? The painful grip on his arm was like a metal manacle. He was no superman; he had had no special training, except those semesters of aikido so long ago. Did he remember anything of the underlying principles?
“Chris?”
He closed his eyes, conjuring up the image of a circle, the centrism of aikido’s energy. Through the darkness he felt his captor reach out for her, and knew all was lost. He was powerless to stop—And in that moment they all heard the leathery fluttering above their heads as the bat, alarmed by the abrupt movement below, began to batter itself against the ceiling beams. Besides, it smelled blood.
Chris and Soutane, of course, recognized the sound, but Chris’s captor did not. His attention was drawn upward. In his surprise his grip weakened, and Chris, using a basic aikido irimi, the tide furi undo, pivoted away.
It was only a moment in time, less than the blink of an eye, but in that time Chris, freed, snatched the harlequin from Soutane as she was jerked forward against M. Mabuse.
He held her hard against his chest, his forearm across her throat so that he was already half choking her. “I’ll have you both,” he said, “for supper.”
“No, you won’t,” Chris said, breaking open the harlequin marionette. “You’ll turn her loose.”
M. Mabuse’s laugh was cut off prematurely as Chris thrust the dagger into a shaft of light. “See it?” he said. “It’s the real one. This is what you really want, isn’t it?” He waggled it, so that the blue light struck the jade blade, darkening it. “It’s yours, if you let Soutane go.”
“Chris, no!” Soutane was staring at him. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I know, all right,” he said, and to the man behind her, “What about it? The dagger for the woman.”
M. Mabuse grinned. His greedy eyes drank in the black dagger. At last, he thought. He pushed Soutane forward, closer to where Chris stood.
Chris, retreating, keeping the distance between them.
“Why should I bother?” M. Mabuse said. “I can have her and the dagger.” And he tightened his hold on Soutane, so that she began to gag with the lack of air. “Give it to me.” M. Mabuse’s voice was like glass. “She won’t last long.”
Chris reversed the dagger, held the fragile jade blade between his hands. “If you don’t let her go right now,” he warned, “I’ll snap the blade in two.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Chris had expected this. He exerted pressure, and the blade bent to the limits of its tolerance.
M. Mabuse’s eyes nearly bugged out. “No!” he yelled. “You can’t!”
“Let her go.”
M. Mabuse dropped his arm from around Soutane’s neck, and she almost collapsed onto him. She was white-faced, gasping for air.
“Let her go,” Chris repeated. “Now!”
“La Porte à la Nuit. ” M. Mabuse was nearly in a frenzy.
“You’ll get it.”
“Chris, you mustn’t give it to him.” Soutane’s voice was thin and hoarse.
“Quiet,” he said. He was staring at M. Mabuse. “It’s a standoff.”
“What?”
“I have what you want, and you have what I want. Neither of us trusts the other to make the first move. Besides, I don’t know what you’ll do after you have the dagger.”
M. Mabuse grinned.
“You can’t trust him, Chris,” Soutane said.
“I don’t think I have a choice,” Chris said. “I want you safe.”
“I’ll destroy the dagger,” she told him, “before I’ll see you let a beast like that have it.”
“That’s just what Terry Haye thought,” M. Mabuse said. “He never had any intention of selling Milhaud La Porte à la Nuit.”
M. Mabuse dragged Soutane forward into the light, and Chris took another step backward. Soon he would be against the wall with nowhere to retreat. “But now the Butcher is dead.” M. Mabuse’s voice was eerie in the darkened void of the stable. “That was what we called him in Vietnam.”
“We?”
M. Mabuse ignored Chris’s interrogative. “Whatever he thought or wanted no longer matters. One way or another I will have the sacred dagger. Even if I have to slaughter you both. Do you think it will make any difference to me?” He shook his head. “So many scars inside me refusing to heal, I’ll never even feel two more.”
“You knew Terry in Vietnam?” Chris asked. “Who are you?”
“My name is Monsieur Mabuse. Or it is Trangh. One and the other, I can no longer tell them apart. My name or theirs, it doesn’t matter.” He pointed to the jade-bladed dagger. “This is what matters.”
“Then you must want it as badly as I want Soutane.”
“Chris, don’t—“
“I told you, Soutane, that I didn’t give a damn about your triple-bladed sword. Now you can see I meant it. I care about you; I care about what happened to Terry.”
“But don’t you see how important the Doorway to Night must have been to Terry? Look at the trouble he took to keep it hidden, to keep it away from these people.”
M. Mabuse listened to this dialogue with mounting apprehension. He knew that he was on the verge of getting Christopher Haye to hand him over the dagger. If only the Khmer woman would keep her mouth shut.
Losing patience, he jerked hard on her shoulder, and she screamed.
“That’s it. I warned you,” Chris said, about to break the jade blade in two.
But M. Mabuse spun Soutane away. Free, she ran to Chris’s side. She reached for the dagger. “Put it away now. It’s ours.”
But Chris would not let her have it. He was staring into M. Mabuse’s eyes. “He’s still here, Soutane. I’ve seen what he can do. Besides, we have a deal.”
“A deal with a monster like him?” she cried. “You must be mad. He’s Vietnamese. No one trusts their word.”
“I do.” Chris went across the rectangle of light to where M. Mabuse stood, still and watchful. “I have Soutane,” he said. His gaze had never left the Vietnamese’s eyes. “And now you have the Doorway to Night.” He handed over the sacred dagger of the Muy Puan.
“Chris, you fool. He’ll kill us the minute he has the dagger.”
But it was as if, for that instant, she did not exist. Now there was only the two of them. It was clear that there was more to M. Mabuse than he had allowed either of them to see. Chris burned to know his secrets.
Chris could see that like a normal human being M. Mabuse might eat and drink, but he subsisted on hate. In the center of those black eyes a cold flame burned. In other observers it might engender repulsion and fear. Chris felt only sadness, and an odd kind of kinship he was at a loss to explain.
It was as if he confronted a homicidal child. Who was to blame for the damage he might cause? That did not make him any less dangerous. On the contrary, it was obvious that he was quite lethal. But the distinct sense of good and evil one often discerned in human features was not there. Rather, it was as if M. Mabuse’s face were a skull, devoid of flesh and cartilage.
Could one divine intention from such a stark and stripped-down visage? Could not one fashion redemption from such primordial clay?
At last Chris backed away from him. “We both have won,” he said, “and both have lost.”
SUMMER 1969: Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam/ hinterlands; Angkor, Cambodia
When Seve Guarda arrives in the smoking pit known as Vietnam, he is overwhelmed by the stench. Brought up in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, he is well acquainted with the stink of poverty: dirt, grime, week-old sweat, month-old garbage, burning rubber, the decay of dead rats. But even this does not prepare him for the miasma of Vietnam.
It is everywhere: in the exploding air, in the blood-matted fatigues he wears, the often unidentifiable food he eats, the watery beer and liquor he drinks. It is the smell of death, and it is inescapable.
Only music mutes the stench of death, only moving to the raw, rock ‘n’ roll rhythms dulls the senses enough to forget what constantly invades his nostrils.
He hears from the jukebox the familiar beginning bars of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” In a moment his surprisingly well-modulated voice sings along with Jagger’s.
He dances with a girl he does not know, and can never know, a mysterious atom of the war, a warm body representing a culture lost now amid the debris and the destruction.
It is in this hut made of cannibalized corrugated iron and Coca-Cola cans, this place of a lost civilization, where Seve comes to lose the stench, to lose perhaps himself, that he meets the Magician.
Seve is impressed by the Magician. Seve is not easily impressed; he has far too suspicious a nature for that.
After seven months here Seve has become a kind of anomaly. His nature has been forged in the crucible of war. Here, life is essentially a cut-and-dried affair. Men are sent out to kill one another, and women—well, they are around to bed in between missions.
In such a hellish atmosphere it is not surprising that human beings should lose their value. Life is reduced to a commodity, to be bought and sold, to be possessed or to be terminated. Hearts quickly become so callused that the wretchedness of existence can no longer be perceived.
But somehow, Seve has managed to keep his heart safe from the horrors that the war engenders. As wild as he is in battle, as wicked as he might be roaring drunk in one grimy city after another, he is invariably gentle with his women. In fact, it is an obsession with him. The only way he can be certain that the jungle has not taken everything away from him is when he returns to what the Vietnamese laughingly called civilization, and takes a local girl to bed. There, he can reassure himself that, no matter how many VCs he has killed, how much blood is on his hands, he is still Seve.
A month before he meets the Magician, he gets his brother Dominic assigned to his unit. Dom is an orphan survivor of a Special Forces communications detachment massacred by VC while they were moving field HQ. A week before he meets the Magician, he and Dominic and Captain Bork, their outfit’s CO, have gone on a binge, a two-day drunk without parallel. The three of them have taken out a VC vampire patrol—one of those feared, lethal entities that steal through the lines at night, killing soldiers in their sleep.
It is revenge, pure and simple. Half of the original complement of Bork’s unit has recently been dismembered by a “Bouncing Betty,” a VC-planted explosive device that shot out of the ground when one of the men stepped on its trip-wire. It was odd when it happened, Seve thinks, because this unit, like all the others here, was not shipped over en masse. Rather, its six members were assigned individually. Consequently, no one knew anyone else, there was no camaraderie, no sense of family, of belonging or of protection.
Half the time they sat around drunk on bad liquor or stoned on dynamite grass because they were bored out of their skulls. The other half, they were so terrified they would step on a mine Charlie had buried that they often became paralyzed with dread.
Despite all that—or, perhaps, because of it—Bork wants to do more than destroy the patrol; he wants to make an example of them, to let the enemy know what they are capable of.
They string the eight VCs up by their feet. They hang, mute, staring like rabbits in a trap. Over Seve and Dominic’s objections Bork orders them to slit the VC open from neck to pubis, a line of stinking decaying humanity, a testament to the power of human hate and the corruption of the human soul, the true and lasting damage war inflicts on its participants.
Afterward, of course, they are obliged to save themselves—from going mad or, perhaps, from savoring what they have done. Alcohol takes care of that, for forty-eight hours, at least. By that time they are as horny as toads. Executing the release from life precipitates the need for that other release.
Weeping, Dominic soon passes out. Seve is with his girl, a sinuous Vietnamese who might be as young as fourteen. Softly he strokes her thick night-black hair, runs his callused hands over her velvet flesh with such tenderness that she rises off the straw pallet to kiss in gratitude the hollow of his throat.
Seve hears a howl from the next room where Bork is with his girl. Thinking VC, Seve grabs his combat knife and runs to his CO. What he sees turns his blood to ice. Bork has tied his girl with flex so tightly that her flesh bulges obscenely between the strips. Here and there, where the metal has bitten most cruelly into her, she has begun to bleed.
Bork, naked, is beating her with a length of bamboo. His erection stands out before him, red and quivering.
Seve is so incensed that he rips the bamboo from Bork’s hand and beats the captain senseless. Then he carefully unwraps the flex from the weeping girl.
“What is happening?” Seve’s girl says from the open doorway. “What you doing?”
“What does it look like?” he says. “Look at all this blood.”
“It is nothing. It happen all the time,” she says. She holds out her hand. “What the matter with you? Come back to bed; it is fuck time.”
Seve, with Bork’s girl leaning on him, bleeding all over him, stares at this dark-eyed child in the shadows. And he is overwhelmed by an awareness of the utter hopelessness of life.
He needs to forget, so he dances in the Coca-Cola-can shanty the next day, with another child. They are interchangeable, he has found to his utter dismay, these aimlessly drifting atoms of a lost civilization, ghosts who walk through the incinerator life has become.
Sam & Dave shouting their pop-tinged R&B, a funky, chunky piano a wall of sound erected between Seve and the ubiquitous stench of death. In midstep the Magician taps him on the shoulder. “Go away,” Seve says, his face buried in hair smelling of jasmine, only faintly of death.
“Yo, buddy.”
“Sing the blues in someone else’s ear.”
“You’re in a heap of shit, so I hear.”
Dancing still to Sam & Dave and their Stax piano, better by far than jazz, the true soul of America. Swinging the girl around. “You’re right,” he says. “This fucking war is the biggest heap of shit I ever hope to step in.”
“I’m talking court-martial.”
And, for the first time, Seve looks into the Magician’s face. “Do I know you?”
“You do now,” the Magician says. He gives Seve a wide grin. “Buy you a drink?”
Seve lets the fragrant body go, whirling, an dai-clothed mote in the dim vastness. The Magician leads him to a corner table, where another man sits slowly sipping a drink.
“I hear,” the Magician says, “that Bork the Dork’s in the hospital with four fractured ribs, a broken collarbone, wrist, all that good shit.”
“Yeah?”
The Magician nods. “Way I hear it, you’re responsible.”
“That so?”
The Magician leans forward, exaggerating his formidable size. “Hey, buddy, Bork’s out for your blood. He’s gonna get you fried, if he can.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“I’m not surprised,” the Magician says. “Maybe I got contacts you don’t.”
Now Seve is getting the hang of it. “What do you want?” he asks.
The Magician laughs. It is too dark for Seve to see what the other man is doing. “It’s more like what do you want. Me, I’m doing some recruiting. My name’s Virgil, but around here I’m sorta known as the Magician.” He hooks a thumb in the direction of the other man. “The Butcher here gave me that moniker and it’s stuck.”
He takes a swig of beer. “Thing is, the Butcher’s getting a team together. A survival unit, you might call it. Our aim is to survive this insanity, and maybe make some bread while we’re at it.”
“You’re not talking about desertion, or anything like that?”
“Hell, no,” the Magician says. “You want to kill Charlie, you’ll get plenty of chances. We’re just gonna make sure we do it on our own terms.” He grunts. “If I thought Command had a clue as to how to win this war, I’d be in the thick of it. Christ, you can be dead sure I’d be the first man in.
“But the only thing that Nixon seems to believe in is that clarity weakens power. He’s following in Westmoreland’s footsteps. To date, the sole consequence of this ‘war of attrition’ we’ve been waging is that it’s wearing us down. I’ll be goddamned if I’ll die for a man like that.”
“But Nixon says—“
The Magician’s face twists in a sneer. “Let me tell you about our good president. He has more power than will. Whatever he says is only to squirm out of the messes his orders get us into.
