It wasn’t really pitch-black inside, but after the dazzle-bath on the street it seemed that way until Belew’s eyes sorted themselves out. He took off the Ray-Bans and tucked them into his jacket pocket to speed things along.
On a rat’s-ass little stage to the left of the door a couple of listless babes gyrated to Madonna, lit by cyan and magenta spots that made them look more like tropical fish than go-go dancers. Both of them wore bikinis. For a town where everything was for sale, Bangkok had its surprisingly prim side. You could see anything your deviant heart desired, if you were willing to pay, but not walking in flat off the street. Even down in the gut of the Chao Phrya slum.
As he got his bearings, Belew listened to the music. It was not really his kind of sound — if he had to hear modern music, he preferred speed metal — but it brought back pleasant memories. Madonna was a dear girl, sweet and genuinely vulnerable behind her sex-bitch-goddess onstage persona. Still, José Canseco probably fit better into her lifestyle…
“J. Ro-bear! Mon dieu, fuck me, it is good to see you!”
It sounded like a man trying to bellow with a mouthful of pebbles, and it gave you a major clue why Demosthenes failed to keep the Macedonians out of Athens. Still squinting, Belew saw an oblong oasis of relative light that was the bar, and outlined against that light a hulking shadow.
Grinning, Belew threaded toward that shadow between tables of serious drinkers, who all looked like pirates off the South China Sea and conceivably were pirates off the Chao Phrya. He held out his hand to have it engulfed by a vast black-furred paw. The barkeep and owner of the Headless Thompson Gunner was an enormous lumpy man with a square, scar-tracked face beginning to sag at the jowls, a nose like a bad potato, large and basset-soulful eyes, and, despite the hot humidity that filled the bar along with smoke in defiance of the creaking ceiling fan, a toupee stretched across the top of his head like black-dyed road-kill.
He was, of course, named Roland.
He claimed to be the inspiration for the Zevon song, which was to say the least, unlikely. For one thing he wasn’t a Norwegian. For another there was the inconvenient matter of him still being in possession of his head — which, as his old black-war buddy Belew loved to remind him, no sane man would pick for himself and thus was surely the one he had been born with, QED.
“So how are things, you ugly Walloon ape?” Belew asked, reclaiming his hand, which his sometimes comrade-in-arms had tried yet again to crush and, as always, failed.
“Well enough,” Roland rumbled. He tipped his large head toward the stage. “If they don’t cause trouble.”
They were four Thai Rangers knocking back brews and raising a general hooraw. They had checked their AKs at the door — four men with assault rifles were not stud enough to force their way into a Chao Phrya bar — but the dancers kept giving them apprehensive looks.
“They are either on furlough from the northwest, raping the Karen of their teakwood at the behest of the army of Burma — pardonnez-moi, Myanmar — or from the east running guns to the Khmers Rouges. If you wish to know more, you must ask them yourself — do you still drink nothing stronger than fruit juice?”
Belew nodded. “Still.”
Shaking his head at Belew’s foibles, Roland poured him a glass of apricot juice. He had gone into the Congo as a Belgian paratrooper in 1960 and gone back as a mercenary under Schramme to fight the murderous Simbas in 1964. Since then he’d bounced around the Third World, from the Yemen to Nicaragua to Syria to splintered India, fighting mostly communist and communist-backed insurgents. Ten years ago, pushing fifty, he had bought the bar and retired.
He pushed the glass at Belew. “How the times change,” he said with a sigh. “When I quit, I was convinced the Soviets were winning, slowly but surely.”
He shook his head and laughed. “How quaint that fear seems now, when it is a good morning for Monsieur Gorbachev if he awakens to find he still has Moscow.”
Belew raised his glass. “To changing times.” Roland poured a splash of cognac in a glass, and both men drank.
“But plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose did not become a cliché for no reason,” Roland said, setting down his empty glass with a solid thunk. “Perhaps history has ended, as one of your people has written, but whatever is taking its place still offers employment to such bad men as you, it seems.”
Belew grinned. “And so it does. And bad men like me still have need of bad men like you.” He leaned across the bar. “Roland, I need your help. Right now. The risk is high. So is the pay.”
Ten minutes later J. Robert Belew emerged from the Headless Thompson Gunner. As the sunlight hit him full in the face, he paused long enough to put his Ray-Bans back in front of his eyes. Then he took off down the street like a man on a mission.
Half a block in the other direction, nearer the Menam Chao Phrya, Lynn Saxon and Gary Hamilton sat under the gaudy fringed shade of a tuk-tuk motorized-tricycle cab. Saxon had added a Panama hat with a band that matched the rest of his ensemble, He looked like an up-market drug mule who thought he was on the fast track to middle management but was actually being cultured to take a fall. Hamilton was carrying some extra marble to his beef, and in the wet Chao Phrya heat was sweating as if it were a medal event in the Goodwill Games.
As Belew receded from them without a backward glance, Saxon held up his hand.
“Did I not tell you?” he crowed. “Did I not?”
“You did.” Grudgingly, Agent Hamilton slapped his palm.
“All right, then,” Saxon said. He pulled his Sonny Crockett Bren Ten from its waistband holster and pulled back the slide to check the load. “Let’s rock and roll.”
Chapter Seventeen
The young woman slowed way down on her 50cc Suzi scooter, scoping Mark over the tops of the white heart-shaped shades she was wearing despite the fact that night had settled in to stay on Ho Chi Minh City’s main drag. She wore a sleeveless denim vest patterned in swirls of studs, blue denim gloves clear to the elbow, and white capri pants. She caught Mark’s eye, bobbing around up there in the ozone, gave him a phosphorescent smile, and putted away.
He watched her rump recede, caught himself, and felt like a male chauvinist. But it had been a long time for him. He thought of Tachyon’s sister, Roxalana. She was back on Takis. One more reason to question his decision to leave.
Naturally Jumpin’ Jack Flash had gotten to her first. It didn’t seem fair somehow.
Hey, can I help it if I’m the one with dangerous charisma? came the sardonic voice from the back of his mind.
“Hey, man, You like?”
“Huh?” Mark said intelligently. He blinked his way back to reality, such as it was.
A pair of Vietnamese dudes in shades sat fore-and-aft on a 100cc Honda scooter. The pillion rider nodded after the woman on the Suzuki. “You like her, man? She number one.”
Mark blushed. He was completely unprepared for this kind of situation. Either they were trying to engage him in some sort of thigh-slapping male-chauvinist ritual, hooting after the hapless woman like New York construction workers, or they were her brothers, bent upon cadging an admission from him that he liked their sister so that they could set upon him and stomp him silly. Only Mark, at least a foot taller than either of them and carrying some of the most powerful aces the world had ever known in a back pocket of his faded Levi’s, would worry about that.
So he smiled like a goon, bobbed his head and kind of waved, and walked on. Behind him the dudes on the bike shrugged and zoomed past him into the people flow.