‘You’re doin’ fine, soldier. Better and better! Another nip of the hard stuff, and we’ll be able to start talking turkey — as they say in the great big country across the water.’
Murray took a second, longer sip from the flask, and this time there were no ill effects. He looked at Ryderbeit, crooked-faced under the light from the window, and suddenly it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nothing mattered. Like after Huế when he’d got drunk at the base camp in Da Nang and insulted two Marine Colonels — hard bitter men who looked as though they wanted to use their fists in the long slack of the evening after the day’s fighting — but instead had suddenly turned all reasonable, realising he had been through it too, and wanting to quieten and comfort him. That had infuriated him even more — just as Ryderbeit, all bruised and soft-voiced, was doing now. He said slowly: ‘When I get you outside alone, Sammy — without your bodyguard here — I’ll break your back legs!’
Ryderbeit smiled: ‘We’ll keep the courtesies for later, soldier. First I want to hear a little story — the one you told our mutual friend, Mr George Finlayson — who, as we both know, is an upstanding English gentleman with a responsible position with the International Monetary Fund, and is conning ’em rigid.’
‘I didn’t tell Finlayson anything.’
Ryderbeit spread his hands out, palms upward: ‘All right, so you met some Frenchman down in Cambodia, and he told Finlayson. Correct?’ Murray said nothing. A fly droned and bumped against the ceiling. ‘I just want to know what Finlayson knows,’ Ryderbeit went on. ‘Just as you told the Frenchman, and the Frenchman told him.’
‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’
‘Because he won’t tell me. Says it’s none of his business. He’s a man of honour, is our Filling-Station.’
‘I should try twisting his arm. He’s a big chap, but he doesn’t look all that fit to me.’
Ryderbeit unscrewed the brandy flask. ‘Look, soldier, I’m as patient as the next man. But we’re a long way from home out here — in what the Yanks call the boondocks — and there aren’t many people to shout for — unless you count Mrs Conquest and that sap of a USAID man.’
Murray stared dismally back at him. Two of them, one of me, he thought. Negro heavy by the door and the man in the chair putting a proposition backed up by an unspecified threat. He was curious to know the precise nature of the threat, and asked.
Ryderbeit chuckled: ‘Murray old soldier, you went and got footless pissed just now and got into a fight. The owner saw it all — I even had to give the little bastard five thousand kips to soothe his feelings. Doesn’t like his place being turned into a rough-house by a lot o’ drunken round-eyes — ’specially when one of ’em damn near falls into that sewer at the back. Because if No-Entry here hadn’t held you up, just as sure as Moses wasn’t conceived on the Sabbath, you’d have fallen in. And you’d have had no one to blame but yerself. No one.’
‘There’s still Mrs Conquest.’
Ryderbeit shook his head: ‘She didn’t see a thing. She ran out so fast she didn’t even see Jones helping you outside. That’s how bloody loyal and helpful is your Mrs Bloody Conquest!’
Suddenly Murray felt very frightened. It was always possible that Ryderbeit was bluffing, and was hoping he’d talk because he’d had a few drinks and been badly knocked about — not counting the crash. But it was also quite possible that Jackie Conquest had been right: that Ryderbeit was slightly mad, a sadistic psychopath who might dump Murray in the bubbling black sewer at the back just for the hell of it. He looked helplessly at No-Entry Jones.
‘Why don’t you just tell us, Mr Wilde,’ Jones said, in his gentle drawl. ‘After all, there’s no real harm done — just a few bumps and scratches. Sammy and I don’t bear you no malice, and you got nothing to lose. Nothing, that is, if you tell us.’
This sounded like good sense to Murray. At least better sense than anything he himself could think of for the moment. After all, the story was sufficiently fantastic for there to be always the chance — a dangerous one perhaps — that they wouldn’t believe it anyway. ‘I’d like some more brandy,’ he said, settling back against the bolster on the bed.
Ryderbeit tossed him back the flask. ‘We’ve got about forty minutes, soldier. Take yer time.’
‘Well, it was like this. I was in Bangkok a couple of months ago, in an R-and-R bar on the Strip down Petchburi Road, and I got talking to a young sergeant in the M.P.’s stationed in Saigon, at Tân Sơn Nhất Airport. He does regular guard duty, mostly on the main gate and the traffic complex. Then, about four months ago, he had a funny experience. He’d been posted one night to guard a hut inside the big ordnance depot there. A perfectly ordinary hut, about three times the size of this room, with no windows and a double steel door. There are hundreds of them all over the airfield — but with this one there was a difference.’
The room had become very quiet. Murray took another sip of brandy and went on. ‘Just after he came on duty that night a civilian car drove up and a major got out — very flustered, he said — and asked him how many men he’d got in his detail. He said three, which was normal, and the major ordered it to be doubled. He also told him to get up on the roof and keep an extra lookout for the next three hours — till a special detail under a colonel would arrive to take whatever was in the hut out
