Pol looked interested. ‘Do you remember what it said?’
‘It didn’t make any sense at the time — something like “instruct inventory morning Lazy Dog,” datelined the Bangkok office of FARC.’
Pol nodded slowly. ‘If you go through to my bedroom you will find a black attaché case. There is something in it I would like to show you. You will excuse me, but this leg still gives me pain.’
Murray got up and went through to the bedroom. He found it on the bed, beside two white leather bags already packed. He carried the attaché case back outside and laid it in Pol’s lap. The Frenchman unlocked it from a ring of keys, opening it delicately as though it were a display at a jewellers. Inside was a sheaf of photostats of Xeroxed files, letters, printed documents, held in place by a pair of spring wires. He riffled through them for a few moments, finally selecting the photostat of two foolscap sheets reduced to single quarto, pushing them across to Murray.
At first glance they looked like company reports: four long closely-printed columns of names and figures. He ran his eye down the first column — Banque de L’Indochine, Federal Reserve (S.E.A.), Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Bank of Vietnam, Bank of India, Bank of Japan — each listed against an eight-, sometimes nine-figure number. Many of the other names were of international companies with commercial interests in Vietnam; one of these — an American corporation with large Defence Department contracts, was set against the figure 159,698,727.
Murray marvelled at the clinical accuracy of the accounting: trying to imagine what dry myopic mind could have set about such a task, so simple and definitive, right down to the odd seven. One five and two ones, perhaps? — two little old used ‘greens’ with the head of George Washington, traced, docketed, packed away among the stack of Lincolns, Hamiltons, Grants and Ben Franklins… Bloody bankers! he thought: mean, passionless little men sharpening their pencils, deducting interest, calculating the dividend. Money without a soul. Banque de L’Indochine — 125,899,600. And he nodded his approval. At least here was someone totting up the loot, give or take a few bucks to make a round figure.
He handed it back to Pol and gave himself another glass of champagne. ‘You’re giving me an appetite. What is it?’
‘Confidential report issued in Zurich ten days ago concerning the total American dollar holdings in the Republic of South Vietnam when the books closed on the first of the month.’
‘Closed?’
‘There’s to be a new issue of Scrip on the first day of next month — two weeks from this coming Monday. And on the Sunday night the United States Government will evacuate’ — he ran his fat finger down the rows of figures — ‘precisely this amount of money in cash from Tân Sơn Nhất Airport, Saigon, to Guam airbase in the Philippines. The operation has been given the codename Lazy Dog, and the total sum involved is in the region — if you add those figures up — of around fifteen hundred and forty million dollars.’
Murray felt a weight pressing on his chest. It grew heavier, becoming intense, suffocating. He struggled forward, almost toppling from his chair. His ears were singing and a wild laser-gleam had come into his eye. ‘Flush-out two weeks from Sunday,’ he muttered, stifling a crazy laugh, knowing that the passion was alive again — all the carefully-plotted details, the hopes and frustrated lust for those greenbacks, fired again in a sudden rush of adrenalin — a fierce, greedy, physical lust that grabbed at him deep inside, pressed and pummelled and twisted at him, making him want to jump up and laugh and leap round Pol in a crazy drunken jig.
‘Over one and a half billion dollars,’ he added, his teeth bared over his champagne glass. ‘Bigger than last time — bigger than Happy Hound or Mighty Mouse. The biggest ever, Charles!’
‘To Lazy Dog!’ said Pol, raising his glass.
‘To Lazy Dog.’ Murray relaxed with a great glowing sense of release. He had forgotten the bomb, the nail in Finlayson’s neck, Pol’s complicity in cold-blooded murder. The whole angry world, from Vietnam to the vaults of Wall Street, was focussed in that moment on those monotonous photostated figures, the equivalent of five — or would it be nearer six? — tons of paper money. He sat back with a long easy sigh. ‘And this was all found and photographed in George Finlayson’s office?’
Pol nodded cheerfully: ‘Monsieur Finlayson was a very methodical man.’
‘And your hired help must have been a fast worker with a camera!’ But he softened the malice with a quick smile, as Pol pushed across a second photostat, this time with the seal of the U.S. Treasury — Federal Reserve Board of International Monetary Fund, Bangkok. Most Confidential. There followed the ugly devitalised prose of international high finance: — ‘containerization dollar-par movement of FRB/VN Reserve Exchange…’ Murray looked up, frowning: ‘How long did Finlayson have these documents?’
‘Since almost immediately after they were issued by the Zurich headquarters. In fact, as soon as he asked for them. In his case — as head of the Lao branch of FARC — it would have been a perfectly normal request.’
‘So he had them when I talked to him three days ago?’
‘Almost certainly. He was getting the final confirmation figures, according to the telex message you read, the next day. But he said nothing about it
