There were no women present — besides a few dead or dying bathers lying flopped about on the wet concrete — and Virgil Greene stopped and breathed a good Texan obscenity. Then he saw Laughing Larry Lung, one of the few Vietnamese officers he respected, and they exchanged salutes. ‘They’re goin’ to pay for this, Colonel! You see they pay for it.’
Larry giggled: ‘Sure thing, General!’
Virgil Luther Greene nodded gravely and swung on his heel. Water from broken ducts was now mixing with the blood, washing down the steps and across the azure forecourt of the bar by the pool. Bodies were being carried out on stretchers, and Murray looked at each and saw that none was Jacqueline Conquest.
The General now stopped at the edge of the empty pool and stood gazing down through the cracked concrete, while a young officer explained how the VC had laid the first charges — strips of plastique round the glass ceiling of the downstairs bar where the men could sit over their drinks and watch the girls swimming above. Most of the water had drained down into the wreckage of this bar and the ground was strewn with shards of green glass and blue-painted concrete. Murray knew that if she had decided to meet him down there, and not in the bar upstairs, the night in Luang Prabang would be a lost idyll, and he’d have to find someone else to push Virgil’s secret button.
The General was standing a few yards away, contemplating the body of a plump middle-aged man in the corner of the pool. Murray went up and said bluntly, ‘Excuse me, General, your secretary — Mrs Jacqueline Conquest — is she all right?’
The General’s fine grey eyes swivelled slowly in his head. ‘Jacky?’ he drawled.
‘I was meeting her here about the time the bombs went off.’
‘Who are you?’
Murray told him and the General nodded thoughtfully. ‘Newspaperman, eh? Well, you get this straight, boy. Forget all the horse-crap about us scuttlin’ outta Veetnam and leavin’ it to these dirty little motherin’ Commie bitches! We’re stayin’, boy. We’re stayin’ for the duration!’
‘Your secretary,’ Murray said: ‘Is she all right?’
‘I guess so. I left her back at the office when the news came through. She did say something about a lunch date she’d had to cancel.’ He looked at Murray narrowly. ‘You the date?’
Murray forced a tired grin. ‘Strictly business, General. As long as she didn’t turn up. Can I quote you on this atrocity?’
‘You sure can!’ And Murray was still scribbling awkwardly as the lithe little Vietnamese firemen, dressed in rubber diving suits, began to creep down into the flooded bar.
Ten minutes later he was back at the hotel, trying the Tiger exchange. She came on the line almost at once. ‘Ah Murray! Thank God, you’re alive!’
‘Where were you?’
‘I tried to call you, twice. Someone phoned here — I don’t know who it was, but it sounded Vietnamese — and said if I was going to the Cercle, keep away. N’y allez pas, he said.’
‘At what time was this?’
‘About noon. I called at once.’
‘You called anyone else?’ He could see it all now: that dead white eye and crooked face muttering to the cyclo-driver, not daring to tell him personally not to go to the Cercle, but warning the girl anonymously after he’d heard himself that the charges had been planted… Murray wondered for a moment if he ought to go himself to the police — then recalled Ryderbeit’s maxim and thought better of it. This was not only a city at war — it was a city of ancient ritual crime, gangland intrigue, political skulduggery that might have nothing to do with the temporal struggle of the Free World against the forces of Marx and Mao.
She said: ‘No one. I didn’t have time. And then I heard about the bomb. I was scared. Murray, who was it? Who phoned? What’s going on?’
‘Can you get away?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘At the hotel then. Downstairs at the bar — as soon as you can make it. I’ll be waiting.’
He hung up, thinking: She had been in a state of shock the first time he had seduced her. She was in a state of mild shock now, and he’d seduce her a second time — cards on the table, their success in her hands — because if she were going to go along with them, it would have to be all or nothing.
He ordered a bottle of 1961 Chablis to be put on ice and sent up to his room.
PART 8: BAT INTO HELL
CHAPTER 1
‘He won’t do it. He would never do it. I know him — it’s impossible for him.’ She had rolled over and was now splayed out like a star on the stripped bed. Her voice was slow, broken with thought. ‘He would never do anything that was illegal. He has a very respectable, orthodox outlook.’
Murray watched her in the striped light from the shutters — her short pretty features almost buried in hair, the deep curving profile of her back rising steeply into the wide-spread buttocks. He said, ‘All right, we’ll forget
