“Fair enough,” I said. “Now, who’s the straightest feller you know?”
“I used to think it was you.”
“Why don’t you think so now?”
“You’re coming on pretty strong, Jack.”
“I’m looking for work,” I said. I was getting impatient. “You told me you had a proposition. All I want to know is — is it still on? Because if it is, I’m your man.”
The Kachang was speeding alongside a wharf where a high black tanker was tethered. The tour guide was saying, “—fourth largest port in the world—”
“It was just an idea,” said Shuck finally. “And the whole thing’s pretty unofficial. I mean, it’s my baby, not Uncle Sam’s.”
“All the better,” I said. “So it’s just between us two.”
“There’s someone else,” said Shuck. “But he doesn’t know a thing.” Shuck spoke slowly, teasing me with lisps and pauses. “Let’s call this guy Andy Gump. He comes to Singapore now and then. From Saigon. Is there anyone behind me? No? Andy Gump doesn’t do much here — probably picks up a hooker and rips off a piece of ass. That’s not news to you. In Saigon, though, it’s a little bit different. He makes policy there.”
“How high up is he?”
“High,” said Shuck. “Now this is the crazy thing. No one finds fault with what he does there, but they’d shit if they knew what he did here. I’m talking about pictures and evidence.”
“Can we be a little bit more concrete?”
“I’m just sketching this thing out,” said Shuck. “Take a guy that’s got the power to keep a whole army in Vietnam. He says he’s idealistic and so forth. Everyone believes him, and why shouldn’t they? He’s got some shady sidelines, but he’s a family man, he’s fair to his troops — more than fair, he covers up for them when they kill civilians. He does his reports on time and flies to Washington every so often to explain the military position. So far, so good. Now, let’s say we know this guy is screwing Chinese whores — maybe slapping them around, who knows? Ever hear of a credibility gap?”
Even in the stiff sea breeze my hands were slippery. I said, “For a minute I thought you were going to ask me to kill him.”
“You’re not that desperate for work,” said Shuck. “Are you?”
“In despair some fellers contemplate suicide,” I said. “I’m different. I contemplate murder.”
“From what we hear, the same might be true of Andy Gump.”
I said, “You want something on him?”
“That would be nice,” said Shuck, squashing “nice” with a buzz.
“A few years ago,” I said, “you would have been pimping for him. With a smile.”
“That was a few years ago,” said Shuck. “Now you’re going to pimp for him. You know all the girls, you’ve got friends in the hotels. It should be easy.”
“I don’t monkey around with a feller’s confidence,” I said. “This is pretty nasty.”
“It stinks,” said Shuck. “I wouldn’t do it myself. But you might think it over and if it interests you — you say you’re looking for work — maybe we can talk about the details.”
“There’s only one detail I’m concerned about,” I said. “Money.”
“You’ll be paid.”
“Who names the price?”
“Good question,” said Shuck. “Tell me, in your business who does that?”
“With hustling?” I said. “The gal does.”
“The whore?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The one that does the work.”
“So what’s your price?”
I scratched my tattoos; the tourists hooted in the cabin below; the breeze on my face was so warm it made me gasp, and when I looked at the kampong on stilts we were passing I saw some children swimming near the hairy bobbing lump of a dead dog. I said, “I won’t lift a finger for less than five grand.”
Shuck didn’t flinch.
“And another five when I finish the job.”
“Okay,” said Shuck. Was he smiling, or just making another fishmouth?
“Plus expenses,” I said.
“That goes without saying.”
“I could use a drink.”
“They pass out Green Spot when we get to the model shipyard in Kallang Basin,” Shuck said. “What’s wrong?”
“I was just thinking about Andy Gump,” I said. “How old would you say he is?”
“Mid-fifties.”
I shook my head. “I might have known.”
“I’ll tell you a couple of stories,” said Shuck, “just so you don’t go and get a conscience about him.”
3
“AND GET THIS—” Shuck rattled on, itemizing Andy Gump’s waywardness with such gloating and sanctimonious fluency he could have been lying in his teeth. Still, the image of the man, whose proper name was Andrew Maddox, rank major general, was a familiar one to me — so familiar that twice I told Shuck I had heard enough to antagonize me: it was not the man I was after, but the job. I did not need convincing; my mind was made up. This effort of mine, a last chance to convert my fortunes in a kind of thrusting, mindless betrayal, had required a number of willful deletions in my heart.
But Shuck was unstoppable. He ranted, pretending disgust, though the man he described was of a size that every detail, however villainous, enhanced. Shuck’s accusations were spoken as the kind of envious praise I always thought of when I overheard someone in a bar retailing the story of a resourceful poisoner.
“You name a way to make a fast buck, and he’s tried it,” said Shuck. And he added in the same tone of admiring outrage that General Maddox had a yacht, smoked plump cigars, sported silk shirts, went deep-sea fishing off Cap St. Jacques, and stayed in expensive hotels.
“I know the type,” I said.
The stories were not new — the fellers at Paradise Gardens had told me most of them without naming the villain, and Shuck had alluded to him before. But while I had taken all of it seriously, none of it had given me pause. I had lived long enough to know how to translate this bewilderment. I heard it as I heard most human sounds — Leigh’s pastoral retirement plans, Yardley’s jokes, Gunstone’s war stories, my old openers (Years ago—and I once knew a feller—), and especially the exultant woman’s moan of pleasure and pain, half sigh, half scream, while I knelt furiously reverent between her haunches — all this I heard as a form of prayer.
Vietnam stories throbbed with contradiction, but were as prayerful and pious as any oratorio. Like the tales of murder and incest associated with Borgia popes — horror stories to compliment the faith by supposing to prove the durable virtue of the Church — the song and dance about corruption in Vietnam never intended to belittle the bombings and torturings or the fact of any army’s oafish occupation (the colonial setup, with Maddox as viceroy), but were meant as a curious sidelight on a justly fought war in which Shuck maintained, and so did some of the fellers, we had already been rightfully victorious: “But human nature being what it is—”
“I’ll tell you another thing about him,” said Shuck. He screwed up his face. “He’s got a finger in the B-girl rackets.”
“So he can’t be all bad,” I said. The Kachang, turning to port, pitched me close to Shuck’s face. “Ed, I’ve got a whole arm in those!”
“He’s a general in the U.S. Army,” said Shuck. “You’re not.”
Shuck then set out to describe what he took to be the darkest side of General Maddox, his operating a chain of Saigon brothels, and his involvement with the less profitable skin-trade sidelines — which I knew to be inescapable — wholesaling massages, pornography, exhibitions; forging passports, nodding to con men, and smuggling warm bodies over frontiers — for the servicemen. Without wishing to, Shuck convinced me that, murder apart, this general was a more successful version of myself, his charitable carnal felony a fancier and better-executed business than “Kinda hot,” the meat run, or Dunroamin. I hadn’t bargained on this; warm wretchedness thawed my resolve.