French Kiss, page 42
“Are you well?” General Kiu asked.
“This isn’t… what I expected,” Mun said.
General Kiu swung around. “No?” He grinned. “Oh, you mean all that talk about torture?” He grunted. “You know Mogok. He often gets carried away. He’s useful, I suppose, because he takes his role as spy exceedingly seriously. But, as you can see, that can sometimes present, er, distortions in zealousness.”
Mun was having difficulty believing any of this. Wasn’t General Kiu the enemy? Wasn’t this the same General Kiu who, in years ago, had refused to deal with him and Terry, who had, in fact, tried several times to kill them? He said all this.
General Kiu waved away his words. “That was a long time ago,” he said. “Furthermore, the current climate here has shifted dramatically. Sun Tzu counsels that to be master of his enemy’s fate, the successful general must be both resolute and resilient.”
“You must be talking about the deal Admiral Jumbo made with the Caucasian.”
General Kiu pulled at the end of his mustache. “Everything changed here when that happened. Admiral Jumbo’s greed will destroy us where even the Chinese army cannot.”
Mun, watching the warlord, felt his guard slipping. Was this what General Kiu intended, or was he being honest and straightforward? He was as yet reluctant to mention the Magician’s name. He told himself that if General Kiu confided a secret which he, Mun, could verify—such as the identity of the Caucasian—he could be trusted. Mun felt as if he had a weight in each hand, and though they both felt equal, he was being forced to decide which one was the heavier. How was he to do that? “Do you know who killed Terry?” he asked.
The startled look in General Kiu’s eyes told Mun a great deal. “Terry Haye dead? I had not heard. This is something Mogok did not relay to me. You say he was murdered?”
“If I read the situation correctly, the same people with whom Admiral Jumbo made the deal for the opium killed Terry.”
General Kiu nodded. “That is a logical deduction.”
“Does that mean you know who is muscling in on my territory?”
“Come,” General Kiu said. “Let us take a walk along the Shan.”
Mun heard the whimpering long before they came upon Ma
Varada. General Kiu’s men had tied her to a rough wooden cross, inverting it so that her head was not more than six inches from the ground.
It was not until he was quite close that Mun noticed that her eyelids had been taped back so that she could no longer blink. Mun was so repulsed by the sight that he was brought up short.
“Why are you upset?” General Kiu said. “She is a spy and, as such, is no longer your concern.”
“She is still a human being.”
General Kiu was looking at him shrewdly. “I see it is good I had you brought here,” he said. “I am beginning to get a measure of you. I think now that I understand what motivated you and Terry to burn the tears of the poppy you bought from Admiral Jumbo.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you think nobody knew your secret, Mun? I am the only one who suspects. Do not be alarmed, it is as safe with me as a newborn baby is on my knee.” He folded his hands across his chest. “I admit that I had thought you two mad, beyond any understanding. What you did was like swallowing the best rubies, turning them into shit. What could be the purpose, I asked myself, except madness?
“Then, for a long time, I suspected you of working for the Communist Chinese. I thought they had discovered an innovative method of destroying us. Next, I feared, you would pay Admiral Jumbo to burn his crops. But when that never happened, I began to get curious. What if you weren’t mad? And if you weren’t working for the Chinese, then what?”
“What Terry and I did is our own business.”
General Kiu shrugged. “But Terry is dead, and perhaps so, too, will you be.”
“Then it will no longer matter to anyone.”
General Kiu was somber. “In that you are wrong, Mun. It will matter to me. You see, the Shan is my world. It may not have been my cradle, but it has become my mother. Surely, it is my god. I cannot allow anything or anyone to destroy it, or change it in any way.
“That is why I tried to kill you and Terry Haye. I believed that you wanted to destroy us.”
“And now?”
“Now I am not so certain of that. Now I find myself increasingly of the mind that you and I are not so far apart in our goals.”
Mun glanced at Ma Varada and shuddered.
“You have been too long in the West,” General Kiu said. “You have forgotten that here life is cheap.”
“Cheap,” Mun said, “but not unimportant.” He shuddered again. “Cut her down. There must be another way to get what you want.”
“But you must know there isn’t,” General Kiu said. “Everyone in the area needs to know what she is, and to see her inevitable fate. It is a valuable lesson to be learned.”
“Didn’t Sun Tzu write that it is better to capture an enemy than to kill him?”
“Yes, but here we are talking about a spy.”
“Didn’t Sun Tzu advocate turning an enemy spy so that he spied for you?”
General Kiu regarded Ma Varada. “She is a woman and, therefore, untrustworthy. Furthermore, she despises me because of certain of my, er, sexual preferences with women.”
“But she does not hate me,” Mun said. “Let me retrain her and set her back on her master.”
General Kiu pulled at the corner of his mustache. “An interesting idea,” he said after a time. “It requires further thought.”
Mun did not think so, and in any event it was time to begin testing General Kiu’s intent. He crouched in front of Ma Varada and carefully removed the tape. She blinked rapidly several times until her eyes began to tear. She focused on him.
“Mun?”
“Be calm, be patient,” he said softly so that only she could hear.
Then he got up and turned around. General Kiu’s reaction now would be critical.
“Were you born compassionate?” General Kiu said wonderingly. “Or did the West do this to you? Compassion, you know, is an unsafe emotion to indulge. It can be the death of you.”
“Whether you cut her down,” Mun said, coming up beside him, “is entirely your decision.” He did not want this to become a matter of face. No one but General Kiu would ever know what he had done. “Use her or destroy her at your will.”
But because he had invoked Sun Tzu, he hoped he knew what General Kiu’s decision would be—if he had been telling Mun the truth and not, as Admiral Jumbo apparently had, one version of a lie.
“You know,” General Kiu said, “in many ways, the Shan is like Shangri-la or Eden. It stirs the world around it while being absolutely isolated from it. It is a universe in and of itself, with its own laws that encompass even creation and destruction. It is as if time—the clock by which all men calculate life—does not survive here. And if magic exists anywhere in the world, surely it is here, because I have fashioned it out of superstition and fear.”
They walked on through leafy glades. Mun was content to let General Kiu continue talking, knowing that the more he spoke, the more he was likely to reveal of his true motives.
“Into Eden comes the devil,” General Kiu continued. “The fast-talking Caucasian with decades of contacts, ready to take up where he left off years ago.”
“Then you do know who Admiral Jumbo made his deal with.”
“As I said, the devil.” General Kiu looked out over the mountainside. “A man once called Virgil. Now he has another name, another face. But, inside, the same venom runs through his veins, threatening to poison everything he possesses. And what he wants to possess now is the Shan.”
Diana was waiting for a callback from Dick Andrew, her contact at the CIA’s main office in Washington. Sitting at the computer, its glowing green letters reflected in her face, she was staring at the sum total of a life. It stared blankly back at her, revealing nothing.
Back in New York, after a rotten night’s sleep missing Seve, she had come into the office an hour early so she could run a computer check. Returning from Vietnam in May 1974, Marcus Gable was soon into transshipping cargo to and from Asia. By that time he had settled in New York City, where he met his wife, the former Linda Starr. He had no brothers or sisters, no children.
But the curious thing was that Jaegger had said Gable had been pulled out of ‘Nam at the end of 1972. That left a gap of eighteen months. Where had Gable gone, and what was he doing during that time?
Diana had begun her current line of inquiry with the FBI and CIA.
She had drawn a blank with her contacts at the first agency, which came as no surprise to her. She was waiting for a callback from Dick Andrew at CIA when her captain summoned her into his office.
“What’s this I hear about your extracurricular activity?”
“Sir?”
He took off his reading glasses. Joe Kline was a shiny-cheeked, clean-shaven man in his midfifties. He was well dressed, and was often seen on the network news shows, which meant that he knew how to play the game from the commissioner’s point of view as well as television’s. He was at once avuncular and articulate. Anyone seeing him on TV could not help but feel that the city was secure. The mayor thought him invaluable.
“Don’t play dumb with me,” Captain Kline said. “Leave that attitude for the slobs who look at you and see only a girl in blue.”
“Yes, sir.”
He waited a moment, rubbing the frames of his glasses across his wide forehead. “You’re a pain in the ass, Ming, do you know that?”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sir.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Otherwise your loyalty to me would supersede your loyalty to Seve.”
“You are my captain, sir.”
Captain Kline sighed. “Sit down.” He put aside his glasses and stared at her. “Now would you kindly tell me what the fuck you’re doing that I should get a call from Washington?”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“Why the squeeze?” He meant the investigation. “Marcus Gable’s a hero of the war, for chrissakes.”
“Is that the call you got from Washington?” Thinking about what Jaegger had told her, that if Gable was still inside the Company, he’d be protected.
“They’re very conscious down there about the image of Vietnam veterans. They’ve spent a lot of time and money cleaning things up, changing public perception. It’s a mandate left over from the Reagan days, and they don’t want any problems.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was presenting a problem, sir.”
He squinted at her. “Sometimes,” he said, “I have the feeling by your tone that you’re laughing at me.”
“Completely erroneous, sir.”
He sat back, hands locked behind his head. When he spoke again, his tone had changed. “You know, Diana, I’m not ignorant of what goes on around me. I know that some of the blues call me ‘Live at Eleven’ Kline. They see how far off the street I am, and it galls them that I’m chosen to speak for the department.
But I don’t think they realize the heat I take off them. Contrary to popular notion, I serve a legitimate purpose around here.”
Diana said nothing. She was wondering about the call he had gotten.
“Have you heard from Seve?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes,” Diana said, and immediately regretted it. This was what he was really good at. Maneuvering. That was what she got for allowing her mind to drift.
“He’s on leave, Ming. I thought I made that plain.” Captain Kline slipped on his glasses. “You have, I imagine, legitimate police business to occupy your time. If your workload is inadequate, I will be happy to add to it.”
“That won’t be necessary, sir,” she said, sliding out of the hot seat. At the glass door to his cubicle she paused. “Sir?”
“What is it?”
“Who did that call come from?”
“Morton Saunders at State.”
“The State Department? Not the CIA?”
“Are you asking me for verification?”
“No, sir,” she said, about to swing out the door. She had to contact Seve right away. “Thank you.”
“Ming.” His voice held her one last moment. “If your first loyalty isn’t to Seve Guarda, how come you don’t call me boss?”
“Put it together.”
A room, lit solely by bars of light filtered through bamboo shades. Outside, beyond the winding Seine, the École Militaire and the Pare du Champ de Mars.
“What will happen when the pieces are fit together? Will there, I wonder, be lightning and thunder?”
M. Mabuse hunched over Milhaud’s desk, his deft fingers pressing metal against metal.
“I have never seen the three swords together,” Milhaud said.
“Perhaps Terry Haye and Mun are the only ones who have,” M. Mabuse said.
“Imagine. This priceless artifact was once buried right under my nose. It would be amusing if it weren’t so infuriating.”
M. Mabuse’s head came up. “Why infuriating?” he said. “You have the Prey Dauw now.”
But not for long, Milhaud thought, if the Magician has his way.
I must outfox him as once he outfoxed me. The Magician’s genius, he knew, was in utilizing the talents of those around him. Milhaud knew that he had been bested in Angkor by Terry Haye. That moment in time, he had some years ago realized, had marked the waning of his own power.
Once, he had been as strong as Alexander. His influence had stretched throughout Southeast Asia, from Burma to Vietnam. He had educated the Khmer as he saw fit, manipulating their schooling much as a single-minded parent would, to create his offspring in the image he had envisioned for them.
Then the Americans had come with their arrogance and their wealth. There was not an American on the face of the globe, Milhaud suspected, who did not, in adolescent fashion, equate money with power. That was America’s secret, its strength and its hubris. It was young, brash. It had not yet been humbled as France had been by the invader’s boot.
Despite all its recent posturing it did not see Vietnam or Cambodia as a mirror to its own rotting soul, but rather as an object lesson in which several men in their zeal overstepped the authority of their office. But had they transgressed the law? America was still undecided on that count.
Like the Roman Empire, America was blind to the rot festering in the decayed facade of its culture. The stink of decadence was like a graveyard.
It seemed unfair to Milhaud, as he watched M. Mabuse fitting the three swords together, that for so many years he had been bound to the Americans as if to a wheel. He had been nothing more than their chief—if unwilling—pawn. They had ordered and he, craven and in servitude, had obeyed.
Now that he was free, now that he was able to manipulate them as they had for so long manipulated him, he could look back upon the past and see it for what it was. But, oddly, his newfound freedom did not lessen the bitterness of those years. If anything, the complete understanding of his enslavement—which had come upon him like an epiphany, as it had to St. Paul, struck down by God’s white light in the dust of a country road—enraged him all the more. Now he saw that it was this rage, formed from the acrid core of his enslavement, which would provide him with the energy he needed. He would make it the cynosure for all his subsequent actions.
Yet he could not help but wonder whether his rage would be enough to overcome his fear of the Magician. He knew Virgil far better than Mr. LoGrazie ever would, but he did not see this as an advantage. Quite the contrary; because he knew what the Magician was capable of, it fed his terror like a stoker fed a fire.
Excess and irony were two elements Virgil could be counted on to weave into all his schemes. He was a genius of a rather perverse sort. It was not so much his intelligence, but his sheer leaps of reasoning, defying logic and order, that made him so dangerous. If he were merely—as Milhaud believed Terry Haye to have been—amoral, it would have been bad enough. But the Magician was more. He was Chaos anthropomorphized.
Milhaud thought of Morphée, alone in her black bed. For the first time he realized how cleverly she had constructed her own private oblivion, surviving everything, in a place beyond pain and fear, beyond even time. For a moment he envied her this bastion constructed by her persistent introversion. She had protected herself from even the chaos that was Virgil.
Then he saw her world for what it really was, and knew with a fleeting melancholy that she had merely exchanged one prison for another.
How he hated the Americans! They were like lepers, these perverted sons of Midas, altering everything they touched with the promise of unlimited gold. First the Arabs, then the Germans and the Japanese, flush with inflated currency, emulated the Americans.
Their philosophy was anathema to him; he equated true freedom with equality. The guiding spirit of the French Revolution lived on in him, though it was either ridiculed or—worse!—forgotten by his countrymen.
The winds of change had stranded him, along with the rest of humanity, on this bleak shore. Mankind’s only hope now lay with Le Giron, the Society to Return to the Fold. Only the swift, unsparing scalpel applied to the disease spreading across the globe. Soon France, as Indochina had once been, would be stripped of its treasures by looters too greedy to see the nature of their actions.
M. Mabuse, almost finished with his task, nevertheless hesitated. Although the Prey Dauw was not of his culture, he was intimate with its legend. Many times he had scoffed at its power, feeling smugly superior to those primitives who believed in its sovereignty.
Yet now that he had all three blades together, now that he was about to link them into one, into the true Prey Dauw, he nevertheless felt a shudder of intimation. His fingers manipulating the ivory pins just below the shanks of the jade blades felt abruptly swollen and clumsy, and he almost dropped the talisman.
Milhaud, in the darkness on the other side of his desk, his fingers steepled as he sat lost in thought, did not notice. To him the Prey Dauw was simply a means to an end. What could he know of centuries of power, sleeping like a beast alien to the new world grown up around it.
