The waitress arrived with their drinks. She was a very attractive joker woman, not much taller than the locals, covered with fine golden fur, with pointy ears sticking out through her red-blonde hair, whiskers, and a bushy, tawny tail springing out the back of her short skirt.
“Thank you, Sylvie. You can put it on my tab, there’s a love.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Rick says no credit,” she said in a Scandinavian accent.
“Bloody hell. I’ve lost my religion; I’m good for it.” He dug in his pockets, tossed a handful of coins and bills at her. She scooped them up, curtsied, and left.
“Saucy little minx. I wouldn’t mind cleaning her fur after the manner of a cat, I can tell you that much.” He fixed Mark with a boiled-onion eye. “So, what do you think of our triumphant socialist paradise?”
“Um,” Mark said. “They — they’ve cleaned up the streets. Gotten rid of the pimps and the prostitutes and all.”
Whitelaw slammed his hand on the table and guffawed. “You think so, do you? You Yanks! Your naïveté is always so disarming.”
He leaned forward and breathed gin across Mark. “Listen well, my ingenuous boy. Just because one doesn’t see the Saigon tea — what your media used to call B-girls — any more, just because one doesn’t encounter the ‘me so horny’ sucky-fucky types immortalized in Full Metal jacket and that rap song the new head of your DEA hated so much, does not mean that prostitution has been vanquished. It’s alive and well and flourishing on Dong Khoi, just as it did when it was called Tu Do, Freedom Street.”
Mark stuck out his underlip rebelliously. To his dismay he had not yet seen much to like in the Socialist Republic. But it did not seem right to just sit by and listen to Whitelaw badmouth the place.
“Where are they, man?” he demanded. “I didn’t see any.”
Whitelaw sat back smirking in triumph. “Oh, I’ll just wager that you did. Did any young ladies on motor scooters happen to slow down and give you the obvious eye?”
“Yeah,” Mark said guardedly.
The Aussie nodded. “And did a pair of young men on another scooter promptly stop beside you to ask if you liked the aforementioned young lady?”
“Oh,” Mark said.
“You are learning, my lad. The communists haven’t eradicated vice. They’ve just made it damned inefficient. Like all the other circumstances of life here in Saigon giai phong.”
“Like, what does that mean, giai phong? I thought the town was called Ho Chi Minh City now, but everybody calls it Saigon, and then they tag giai phong onto the end, like some kind of religious thing or something.”
“You might call it a superstitious thing: apotropaic, designed to avert evil — a wonderful word, and God bless you for giving me the pretext for using it. Giai phong means ‘liberated.’ People tack it on when they call the place Saigon to keep from getting in trouble. Nobody but government employees and foreigners calls it Ho Chi Minh City.”
Mark sat for a time and nursed his Pepsi and thought about things. He wasn’t coming to many conclusions.
“Well, what do you think of the revolution here, then?” he finally nerved himself to ask.
“It sucks. It’s dirty, inefficient, repressive, regressive, and in my humble opinion is getting ready to blow sky-high. And no, I won’t keep my voice down. They’d never dare send me to reeducation camp, or even disappear me; I may be a sodden old lush, but I was a damned good journalist in my day, howbeit a soul-purchased one. I know where skeletons are buried all the way from here to Hanoi.”
Mark frowned. “Come on, surely it isn’t that bad. I mean, look what they’re doing for wild cards —”
“Cramming them into a ghetto in Cholon. Recruiting the able-bodied to herd peasants into New Economic Zones, which is a fancy word for concentration camps — just like the New Life Hamlets of the late, unlamented South Vietnamese regime. Making propaganda cat’s-paws out of the lot of you —”
The double doors opened. Whitelaw broke off and settled back to watch as a big man in a poor-fitting suit entered with a drunkard’s shuffle. He had a shock of thick blond hair. His collar was open around his thick neck, and he wore no tie.
The Joker Brigade boys paid him no attention until he came up to the bar and dropped great hairy hands on the shoulders of Luce and his looming buddy with the claw.
“I … am friend,” he announced in a thunderous Russian voice. “I love much American. I love much American joker. We all capitalist tovarishchy now, da?”
Luce turned to him, round face purpling with fury. “You’re a traitor to socialism, is what you are. You’re bogus, man. Bogus!”
The tall joker pivoted and drove the tip of his claw into the Russian’s midriff. The Russian doubled. Luce clasped his top pair of hands and clubbed him to the floor. The other jokers all clustered around and kicked him until he crawled, moaning, out the door.
“Give Peace a Chance” came up on the box.
The jokers went back to the bar, Luce dusting two pairs of hands together in satisfaction. “That was righteous, Brew. Stone righteous.”
“I always thought of myself as a teacher,” Brew said, buffing his claw with a bar rag.
“Yeah. You really taught that fucker good,” said a purple-skinned man with what Mark thought was severely reduced cranial capacity.
“Never a dull moment when the boys are in town,” Whitelaw commented. “Pity they’re heading back upcountry in a few days.”
He tossed off the last of his gin and leaned his elbows on the table. “So tell me, Mr. Mark Meadows. Just what kind of an ace are you?”
Chapter Nineteen
When Helen Carlysle awakened with Thai daylight blasting through the open French doors like laser beams, she was alone. On the pillow beside her where Belew had lain was a note:
Don’t think ill of me, my child. What I do now, I must do. And what happens next will be for the best.
This was never a game you were meant to play in. “Heaven and Earth are not humane,” Lao-tzu says. “They regard all things as straw dogs.” Go back to your world; fly happy, high, and free. Forget the past, and all else which lies beyond your power to affect. And try — if I may beg a favor — not to think too harshly of me.
Beside the note lay a single red rose.
She rose, walked nude into the bathroom, spent a very long time washing her face. She took a light robe off its hangar and put it on. Then she came back into the bedroom and sat in a chair by the French doors, letting the smell of sun on wet pavement wash across her on the morning breeze.
She was just sitting there wondering whether to cry or not when the phone rang.
O. K. Casaday was a tall man with a tropical-weight suit hung on broad shoulders and a large and extremely round head with a fringe of yellow-white hair set on top of a granite slab of jaw. His eyes he hid behind amber shades.
On the phone he had introduced himself as being “from the embassy” Now he sat across from Helen on the terrace in the shade of a parasol with his long legs folded and drummed his fingers on the white tablecloth as if she had called him here to waste his time.