A girl had come into the bar, strolling towards them. She was European, tall and very dark, dressed in trousers and a leopard-spotted combat jacket. Hamish Napper looked round and greeted her in faultless French, his good humour rapidly recovered. He introduced Murray: ‘This is Jackie. Mrs Jacqueline Conquest,’ he added, with rather less enthusiasm. She and Murray shook hands. She had a round, pretty face, calm and unsmiling.
‘What will you have?’ Napper asked her in French.
‘I can’t stay,’ she said, her eyes straying round the dark corners of the bar. ‘I have to meet someone.’
Napper’s pebble glasses gleamed slyly; the French language had sharpened his manner, giving him an almost predatory cunning. ‘So it’s someone else, is it?’
The girl gave the nearest thing to a smile and hunched her shoulders: ‘Tu penses!’ She turned to Murray: ‘Bon soir, Monsieur Wilde. Salut ’Amish!’
They watched her leave, stepping gracefully over the drain and out of sight. ‘Who is she?’ Murray said, calling the bar-girl’s attention to their glasses.
‘Jackie? French girl, married to a shit. American chap called Maxwell Conquest — ridiculous bloody name! — seconded up here from Saigon. I don’t think they’re happy. She spends half her time wandering round in a dream. She wasn’t looking for anyone in here — she just didn’t have anywhere else to go. She wouldn’t be seen drinking in here with us — her hubby wouldn’t like it. Hubby’s a good clean all-American boy who has three showers a day and never takes a drink unless the ice has been made from chlorinated water. Bastard.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Spook. CIA. Spends most of his time closeted with Colonel Buchbinder’s boys in the American compound, hatching plots against the Lao politicians. He’s supposed to be my opposite number. We don’t get on.’
‘And you do the same thing — hatch plots?’
‘Me? Bah!’ He chuckled again — just a little too easily this time, Murray thought. ‘Usual odds and sods — they wouldn’t put an old crock like me on to anything important.’ He finished his drink and struggled off his stool. ‘Still, must be toddling along now. H.M.G. calls!’ He pulled out a fistful of large tissuey hundred-Kip notes — delicate pink and mauve like the old French franc notes, with the chateaux and cardinals replaced by pagodas and dancing girls — and before Murray could stop him, had thrust them across at the bar-girl. ‘On me, old man. See you before you leave.’ He gave a little wave as he went, moving in a kind of crab-footed shuffle, punctuated every few steps by a quick hop.
Murray felt he should have been amused by the man; yet he wasn’t. Vientiane could never be described as a first-grade diplomatic posting, but while Britain remained a co-signatory of the Geneva Agreement on Laos, it still mattered; and Murray was beginning to wonder whether even the British Foreign Office would continue to tolerate an ageing, heavy-drinking, garrulous ex-opium-addict, unless he was of some real worth. For Hamish Napper was still employed — and had probably been so for more than two decades — in what is loosely called ‘political intelligence’, which can be a sensitive area of work, especially in South-East Asia. Yet instead of putting him out to pasture long ago, they were allowing him to reach full retiring age at the end of the year. And the year, Murray reflected, as he started up the stone steps to his room on the first floor, still had several months to run. He hoped he was not going to regret Mr Hamish Napper.
CHAPTER 2
Murray walked the few hundred yards down to the river where the reception was being held at the Lang Xan Royal Palace Restaurant. The sun had gone down and an astonishingly large amount of traffic had appeared, roaring in both directions down the pitted main street: a ceaseless gleam of chromium, with headlamps on high-beam — Chevrolets, Citroëns, VWs, dozens of little Japanese models driven ferociously in the middle of the road. Murray, hesitating under the awning of the Bar des Amis, remembered wondering, on his last visit to Laos, at this phenomenon of Vientiane. For where did all these cars come from, and where did they go? The road south, following the Mekong down to Savannakhet, was passable in the dry season only by large buses or vehicles with four-wheel drive; while the old Route Nationale Treize up to the Royal Capital of Luang Prabang had long been cut by the Pathet Lao forces and was open for only thirty kilometres. There were no other roads out of Vientiane — only the laborious and infrequent ferry that plied across the river to Thailand.
But then nothing in Laos, Murray reflected, was quite as one expected. Visiting wits on sabbatical from the State Department dubbed it ‘Laos-Chaos’. A war had convulsed its jungles and mountains for a decade; had on at least two occasions sent shockwaves through the Chancelleries of the Free World; had caused the 7th Fleet to be alerted and hasty conferences convened between Moscow, London and Washington.
Yet here, in the eye of the hurricane, the Communist Pathet Lao still maintained an official headquarters in the centre of town — a well-appointed French mansion hung with bougainvillea and the portraits of Mao and Ho, and boasting a beautifully-tended vegetable garden that faced the Morning Market where raw opium and cannabis resin were on sale alongside dyed silks and fresh fish and ballpoint pens. Murray Wilde, grown cynical and tired of the silliness and cunning and brutal charm of this continent, had once written of Laos, ‘The war that never happened in a country that never was’. It was as near the truth as he ever hoped to get.
He had reached the river swelling through the soft twilight, with the din of traffic drowned by the sustained screaming of cicadas in the
