Play the Red Queen E-Book

Juris Jurjevics

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 462

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Vietnam, 1963. A female Viet Cong assassin is trawling the boulevards of Saigon, catching US Army officers off-guard with a single pistol shot, then riding off on the back of a scooter. Although the US military is not officially in combat, sixteen thousand American servicemen are stationed in Vietnam 'advising' the military and government. Among them are Ellsworth Miser and Clovis Robeson, two army investigators who have been tasked with tracking down the daring killer. Set in the besieged capital of a new nation on the eve of the coup that would bring down the Diem regime and launch the Americans into the Vietnam War, Play the Red Queen is a tour-de-force mystery-cum-social history, breathtakingly atmospheric and heartbreakingly alive with the laws and lawlessness of war.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FORPLAY THE RED QUEEN

‘Steamy and atmospheric… a great gift of a novel’ – Dan Fesperman, author of Safe Houses

‘The year is 1963 and the city is Saigon, still a humid backwater but about to become the red-hot center of a geopolitical firestorm… Jurjevics brings all of it to colorful, fragrant, often ugly life’ – New York Times

‘Jurjevics brings the heat, the smells and the corruption vividly to life… masterfully pulled together’ – Sara Paretsky, author ofDead Land

‘Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished [the] seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art’ – Robert Olen Butler,Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofA Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

‘The authenticity throughout is dead-on. Jurjevics makes the feel of the Vietnam highlands so true – even to the sensation of slime and insects on the skin – that I sweat when I read it’ – Washington Review of Books

‘The plot speeds along faster than the Red Queen’s Vespa… Jurjevics brings all of it to colorful, fragrant, often ugly life… Brace yourself’ –New York Times Book Review

‘Play the Red Queeneffectively recreates the tangled politics at work as the US slouched its way into war, and ordinary soldiers were learning that cynicism was necessary to survival’ –Booklist

In memory of Jānis Ivars Rozēns

Ralph Gold and

Charles Thanhauser.

War is a racket.

MAJOR GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER, USMC,

TWICE AWARDED THE MEDAL OF HONOR

BY THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other.

– VIET THANH NGUYEN, THE SYMPATHIZER

PROLOGUE

On 24 August 1963, the newly arrived American ambass-ador to South Viet Nam, Henry Cabot Lodge, received a cable from Washington. A few days earlier, the South Vietnamese government had conducted brutal raids on Buddhists throughout the country. Washington instructed Ambassador Lodge to inform South Viet Nam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, that he must immediately remove his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, whose police and Special Forces had carried out the beatings, arrests, and killings, from power. Many in Saigon and Washington feared Nhu was already running the government nominally headed by Diem.

‘If, in spite of all your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses,’ the cable read, ‘then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.’

SAIGON OCTOBER 1963

CHAPTER ONE

The dead American major lay faceup on the sidewalk in his stocking feet. His khaki shirtfront gleamed with blood, a sizable pool now spreading toward the gutter. A stray dog, weighing the odds of sampling some, cringed when a waiter clouted it with a broom. Street hustlers with pointy sideburns cackled as their leader mimicked the mutt’s lapping tongue.

Two plainclothes Vietnamese dicks were chatting up some military police in green fatigues with QC in white letters on their black helmet liners. The tallest of the army cops stood bareheaded in an open jeep, forearms leaning on the bar of red flashers that ran along the top of the windshield. Our own Air Force military police were in khakis and black boots, MP emblazoned in white on their sleeve brassards and helmets. One sergeant took 35-millimeter photographs of the major while another readied a body bag.

Saigon municipal police – who everyone called ‘white mice’ both for their all-white uniforms and their cowardly inclinations – busied themselves waving away vehicles streaming past the cordon. The higher ranks stood in the shade and made a bored show of checking their wristwatches, as it was nearly time for their ngu trua, the long midday break the Vietnamese took during the worst of the heat. Another American getting himself murdered had them acting even more inconvenienced than usual.

As agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, me and Robeson had jurisdiction over the victim; the Viets, over the killer. I flipped open my spiral notebook and entered 11:28 hours, 16 October 1963. Then the basics: Staff Sergeant EllsworthMiser and Sergeant Clovis Auguste Robeson, CID investigators atscene. One entry wound, upper torso.

From the damage, it looked like the round might’ve flattened as it struck, smacking into his chest like a quarter driven by a pickaxe. Sergeant Robeson turned the body partway but found no obvious exit wound. The slug was lodged somewhere in the corpse.

In the first incident, a week and a half ago, the shooter had aimed for body mass on an American army captain and let the bullet do its work. Six days later she’d gone for a head shot on a major. ‘Hit ’im straight between his running lights,’ Freddie Crouch had announced to the office on returning from the scene.

Lying in front of us, her third kill was much less messy. Perfect placement: straight to the heart. Struck in the breast pocket, the major had been slammed right out of his shoes. The shot bordered on impossible, given the moving motorbike on which the sharpshooter had balanced, firing from behind the driver.

We approached the closest witness to the killing, a staff sergeant like me, three gold chevrons on his sleeve above a single rocker. He stopped teeter-tottering his café chair midair and lowered the front legs to the sidewalk.

‘Can you describe the assailant?’ I said, ready to take notes.

He reared up again on the back legs of the chair. The cap of his lighter chinged open and clicked shut over and over as he spoke.

‘Drop-dead gorgeous, you might say.’ He smiled faintly at his lame joke. ‘Way better-looking than my broad. Otherwise typical: no knockers, not much ass. Coal-black hair way past her shoulders. Slender as a sparrow.’

‘Wearing?’ Robeson said.

The sergeant didn’t so much as glance Robeson’s way. He looked straight at me like I’d asked the question. ‘An ao dai. White. Loose dark pants underneath.’

‘Head covered?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Cone hat tied under her chin.’

‘Height?’

‘No idea. Little. Course they’re all little. One cute baby-san, I tell ya. My Fifth ARVN guys iced some female VCs last week out in the boonies, but they were nothin’ to look at compared to this kid.’

‘Kid? What age?’

‘Maybe twenty, tops.’ He clicked his Zippo shut and laid it on the pack. I read the sentiment etched into its side:

I LOVE THE

FUCKING ARMY

AND THE ARMY

LOVES FUCKING ME

‘She have the piece in a bag before she produced it?’

The sergeant lit a Lucky Strike and inhaled deeply. ‘Had it in this red silky scarf. Slipped away as the barrel came up. She fired as soon as she had the gun raised and nested.’

‘Could you make out the weapon?’

‘Looked to be a .45.’

A .45 pistol had a lot of stopping power but wasn’t everyone’s weapon of choice. The piece was a lot to lift – three pounds – and its iron sights sucked. The recoil from the large-caliber bullet was notoriously hard to handle. Harder still to hit anything at all with a .45, much less while balanced on the back of a moving vehicle. But smacking into you at high velocity, the stubby slugs could dislocate your shoulder if they so much as struck a finger. Like reaching up and catching a cannonball, our firearms instructors liked to boast. A .45 could knock you upside down if it struck low, or toss you backward like a puppet, as it had the major.

‘She had no problem handling the kick?’

‘None. One shot. No hesitation. Hit ’im dead center and flung ’im.’

‘Standard issue .45?’

‘Looked to be standard,’ he said, ‘except the finish was lighter.’

‘Shiny, you mean? Plated like?’

‘No. Just not blued. And the grips… they could’ve been light too.’

‘Pearl.’

‘Not pimp grips, no. Not sparkly. More like bone.’

‘Ivory?’

‘Like that, yeah. Sort of grayish-yellow.’

Sweat dripped down my chin. I brushed it away.

‘How is it you saw the grips,’ Robeson interjected, ‘if she was clutching the piece?’

Again, the sergeant answered me. ‘She took it by the slide right after the discharge. Held it at her side like a hammer. Had a finger through the trigger guard riding away.’

‘How far was she when she fired? Ten feet? Fifteen?’

‘I’d say twenty-five to thirty.’

‘Jesus. No mean feat.’

‘She oughta shoot for their Olympic team, if the zips ever get their act together to have one.’

‘You get a look at the motorbike driver?’

‘Not a motorbike. A scooter. Young stud. Dark pants, red and black short-sleeve shirt. Plaid, like yours.’

Robeson and me had on our civvies: tan desert boots from the base exchange, beige socks, drip-dry pants. No underwear. CID credentials rode in the breast pockets of our short-sleeve shirts, left untucked to cover our holstered revolvers.

I glanced across the black macadam, trying to imagine the scene just before the shot. ‘The major, was he sitting when he got hit?’

‘He had just stood up. The poor bastard was smiling.’

‘He was leaving?’ Robeson said.

‘Don’t think so,’ the sarge said to me. ‘Just got up.’

‘Why, if he wasn’t leaving?’

‘No idea.’

‘And you said he was smiling?’

‘Yeah. The major said something as the weapon popped up.’

‘What exactly?’

The sergeant frowned. ‘I wasn’t paying no mind. The gun had my full attention.’

‘Who did he say it to?’

‘Maybe the pro who had planted herself at his table. I’m not sure.’

‘She still here?’

‘No. When the little lady got splashed, she wailed and bolted.’

‘And were you socializing with a tea girl too?’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded to where she stood, quaking.

I let the sergeant retreat to another table and went to talk to the tea girl who’d been sitting next to him during the attack. She was wearing white, as decreed by the Diem regime’s morality laws. The laws also forbade hostesses to consume alcohol, but a waiter was plying her with liquor after what she’d seen. ‘Lousy VC numba ten,’ was the extent of her English. I took down her name from her hostess ID for our office interpreter to follow up, but I wasn’t expecting much from that quarter.

I blotted my eyes with my sleeve. ‘Lady Death,’ the Saigon press had dubbed the shooter. At the shop we called her ‘the Red Queen’ because a playing card bearing a red female figure in a cone hat and ao dai had been left at each of the first two shootings, a detail our boss had held back from the press. Though they’d have it soon enough: Saigon was a sieve.

Our military press was lucky to report on it at all. The new Armed Forces Radio broadcasts were censored both by the Vietnamese and by us in solidarity with our ally’s restricted news accounts. Also in keeping with our commanding general’s morale directive – no lurid shit. Our service rag wasn’t much better. Most days Stars and Stripes read like a small-town weekly filled with photo spreads of Saigon’s orphan boys learning ‘simple trades and civic responsibility’ at the local Lions Club.

What it didn’t have was hard military news about Green Berets arming Montagnard tribesmen in the highlands and building fortified mountain camps for them along the border with Laos. Not a thing about our secret air bases in Thailand flying missions against VC supply lines running south down through Cambodia. Nada about the black-op coastal raiders launching out of Da Nang into North Viet Nam’s waters. Instead we got the ‘landslide’ victory of the Vietnamese president’s party in a country that practically outlawed opposition, alongside stirring stories about American ground crews servicing choppers in the blazing sun and guys getting care packages from home. I could hardly wait for this year’s Christmas piece on Santa’s sleigh taking fire over Bien Hoa. But today there had been a rare short article – barely two inches of type – about the two previous attacks by the deadly damsel. No names or details, just a quick cautionary tale meant to warn uniformed advisors off Saigon’s streets, from its swank boulevards to its narrow stinking alleys.

An American MP brought over the major’s wallet and dog tags. James Calvin Furth, blood type A, Presbyterian. Officer and gentleman by Act of Congress, career concluded three thousand leagues from home. Back there it was a little before midnight, his kids asleep, his wife drifting off. Dreaming. Or maybe jarred awake by terrible dread like people bullshitted about in movies.

CHAPTER TWO

Trucks, sedans, and overloaded buses rolled past the newly dead body at speed. Among the mass of vehicles jamming the boulevard rode women on bicycles, scooters, and the benches of pedal rickshaws, their long hair trailing behind them. Most of the younger ones were dressed just like the Red Queen in white ao dais and woven cone hats, their eyes flitting over us from beneath black bangs. The gauzy silk tunics billowed as the women floated by.

The street cops’ white uniforms blazed as they went through the motions of searching for the expended shell casing among the automobiles and motorbikes darting around them like spooked fish. They weren’t exactly busting ass, but you could hardly blame them. There was no mystery as to who had killed the major or why. It’s what we did – hostiles and friendlies. It’s what we were there to do to each other. Any so-called evidence wasn’t going to tell you much more than that. This wasn’t a crime of passion or common murder. It was a skilled assassination, a stranger coming upon a stranger and cutting him down. Nothing personal.

A QC sergeant found the red silk scarf she’d used to cloak the pistol and turned it over to me. I got a whiff of gardenia and gun oil. Righting the major’s café chair, I sat down at his table, still feeling kind of hollow from a touch of fever the week prior. Something crackled underfoot – looked like pieces of windshield glass and bits of chalky stucco. I leaned down to see what it was. Pinned beneath a leg of the major’s chair was a torn wedge of paper – a corner of an astrological chart, common as candy in Saigon. I piled the debris on the paper scrap and lifted it onto the table. ‘Well, I’ll be,’ I muttered. Bleached bones from the skeleton of a small creature, maybe a tiny bat. A miniature fang stuck to my thumb. The glassy fragments were broken mirror.

‘Might’ve been getting his fortune read when he bought it,’ I called out to Robeson. He came over to examine my collection, then went to check with our witness, who looked mighty pissed at being questioned by Robeson on his own. The staff sergeant was lucky we were outside in broad daylight. If this had gone down in a bar after hours, whitey might have ended his night picking glass out of his skull.

‘You were right,’ Clovis called over to me. ‘The sergeant here says an astrologer was squatting next to the major when he bought it.’ A fortune-teller poring over small mirrors and bones, divining the American’s destiny. The Year of the Cat hadn’t lined up so good for Major Furth.

Robeson joined me at the table. ‘You think this dude gave Furth a break on the price when he saw how little work it was gonna take to lay out the guy’s future?’

A Vietnamese police captain, in gray slacks and snappy white shirt with black epaulettes, fanned himself with his hat and called his men out of the road. They sidled to the curb, exhausted. Come evening, they’d be dragging themselves to second jobs, the lucky ones at hotels and businesses, the others doing hard-ass manual labor. Elite nabobs and shitbags lived well in Saigon but even ranking soldiers and police struggled, doing menial work far beneath them just to get by. Which had Vietnamese cops like these forever fishing for bribes, and threatening shopkeepers with raids if they came away empty-handed. The more ambitious ones saved up to buy promotions. Higher rank would let them extort more and work less, like their bosses and the plainclothesmen standing in the shade.

One of the street cops handed me what looked like a face card, but not any of the sixteen cards in the standard Vietnamese deck. I took it by its edges: a female figure in a black ao dai beneath a black cone hat, with a red skull for a face and empty black eye sockets. Instead of a suit symbol, a yellow Communist star gleamed in the upper corner.

‘She’s using revenge cards,’ Robeson said. ‘Same as our side.’ He reminded me about the rumors that some of our guys had started marking their kills with an ace of spades stuffed in the victim’s mouth or wounds. ‘It’s like she’s mocking us, tossing it right back in our faces.’

My buck sergeant was good. Robeson ground it out, working the details until they talked. I liked to think I didn’t have the patience. More likely his kind of smarts is what I didn’t have. Not that he needed them. The fucker had family money. He’d gone to college for a couple of semesters and had kicked back in places like Paris and Morocco. He could read music, speak some French and do arithmetic in his head. He knew things that weren’t in Army manuals.

I slipped the card into my breast pocket without touching the face or back. ‘The bystanders give you anything useful about her driver?’

‘Mostly no one remembers a whole lot more than hearing the gunshot. One of the waiters said a male in his twenties, on a pale green Vespa.’

Vespa motor scooters puttered all around Saigon, humming like hornets. A few red, the rest a watery pea-soup green. ‘Some getaway vehicle,’ I said, peeved at the humiliation. ‘Fleeing on a two-stroke lawn mower engine.’

A waiter delivered us each a small aperitif. I sipped the blond liqueur and sifted through the contents of the major’s wallet. Pictures of two kids, the wife, a pickup truck and a Ford Falcon parked in the driveway of a sprawling white Victorian with a wraparound porch. A wallet-size hand-tinted photo showed a pink-cheeked ARVN ranger in a beret. In a tiny insert next to him, a tinier paratrooper rappelled down a rope. In another black-and-white, a properly shy Vietnamese girl in a tight, high-collared, long-sleeved ao dai stood next to the major. In with the piasters in the bill compartment was a condom packet that had raised a permanent round impression in the leather.

The Virginia driver’s license had him at age forty, nine years older than me. I groped my pants pocket for my mentholated Newports and examined his tiny bank-card calendar. Three months left to mark off from his tour of duty. He’d be home earlier than expected, Glad-bagged inside a crate, his personal effects in a ditty pouch between his knees, his body seen off by an honor guard from the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, the ARVN troops he had come such a long way to instruct in the art of war. Never mind that they’d been soldiering since before the baby Jesus drew breath.

Judging from his starched khakis and MAAG shoulder patch, Major Furth was more likely a Saigon warrior, a REMF: Rear Echelon Motherfucker. Even so, unarmed and ambushed on a city street by a woman in civvies was no way for any soldier to go.

In ’62, fifty-three Americans had gone home in flag-draped boxes, yet the embassy kept insisting we all were non-combatants. Though five thousand of us were in the field, Washington insisted all sixteen thousand US military in-country were ‘advisors.’ Whether we bore arms or wielded pens, flew missions or desks, didn’t seem to matter. We were paying the price for taking a stand alongside the South Vietnamese. As we closed in on the last two months of ’63, the casualty toll was already double last year’s and rising as the Red Queen trawled the streets, adding her kills to the total.

Before the Red Queen showed up, weeks had gone by without shots being fired. We had explosions in town – bombs, plastique – and restaurants had started to put up latticework grills to keep out tossed grenades, but gunplay was rare. Your chances were still far better of getting killed by a barstool than a bullet.

Until now, Americans in Saigon had rarely been targeted. And never their dependents, like the kids in the stateside yellow bus passing in front of us, carting students home from their half day at the unairconditioned American Community School, the older boys in the back puffing on Bastos, impressed with themselves ’cause they could buy beer and smokes anywhere in the city or bum them from the armed GI on board. The boys stared at the body, the girls mostly looked away. All of them worried it might be somebody they knew.

Guerillas were embedded in Saigon’s Chinese district and encamped in swampy wetlands within sight of the city, yet poor and posh alike denied that the Viet Cong were at the gates. The terrifying executions took place out there. Whenever violence erupted locally, the regime blamed ‘bandits.’ But last month, during a crowded matinee of Lady and the Tramp at the theater leased for American use, a bomb had smashed the ladies’ room. And across town in Cholon, a thirty-foot section of the wall surrounding General Harkins’s headquarters had gotten blown out. These incidents made everybody edgy with the thought that the VC had something new in mind for US personnel that might even include their families. Nevertheless we’d carried on like everything was normal – until these slayings.

Not that there was much we could do if Viet Cong assassination teams started targeting unarmed American advisors. We lived and worked in locations scattered across the city. Being dispersed allegedly made us less noticeable and safer than if we were concentrated. At least that was the official bullshit the brass put out. The simple truth: there wasn’t any huge, impregnable base to take shelter in. Tasked with our well-being, the US Navy didn’t have the manpower to secure the bus lines, the dispensary, the American library, the brand-new naval hospital, the bowling alley, the swimming pool in Cholon, the USO, the motor pools and commissaries, the mess halls, or the big base exchange where everyone shopped. Much less our widespread workplaces or the villas and apartments throughout the city the Navy leased for service members and their families. Security at our bachelors’ quarters was only slightly better.

I drained the aperitif, letting the chilled alcohol drench my tongue and glide down my throat. An MP collected the major’s dog tags and wallet, slipping them into an olive-drab drawstring bag. Two other MPs hoisted the stretcher with the body onto a small Army truck, HANG LOOSE WITH THE DEUCE stenciled on the bumper.

Pedestrians stepped around the waiters sluicing blood off the sidewalk. A siren announced high noon, the beginning of the three-hour siesta. The Vietnamese cops scattered.

I squinted against the stabbing flashes of light as we got back into our jeep. A pang turned into pain in my hips. A recent bout of dengue revisiting the scene.

Me and Robeson went over the little we knew from Freddie Crouch, our voices raised over the engine and the hot air streaming past us in the open jeep. Two Americans had been cut down in the street in quick daylight attacks, the first shot dead near a flower market, the next a few days later at a food kiosk. ‘She’s in and out lightning fast,’ Crouch had said, ‘improvising targets on the fly.’ And now this third blitz attack curbside at a café, using the same shoot-and-scoot tactic. The drivers varied, the shooter didn’t.

‘She’s always the button – and deserves to be. She doesn’t miss,’ I said.

‘You think this is one of Madame Nhu’s paramilitary broads? She puts her sharpshooters up in contests against guys.’

True, the president’s pain-in-the-ass sister-in-law had created her own women’s paramilitary corps. But much as she loved attacking America in the press, I doubted she’d have the balls to start ordering hits on us herself. If you asked me, she just liked having 20,000 uniformed women saluting her for the cameras. But this was how Robeson covered all bases, casting a wide net before he circled back toward simpler possibilities.

‘If the Dragon Lady was sending a message the shooter would have been wearing the corps’ blue jumpsuit and regulation dark lipstick. She acts like her ladies’ militia’s a force to be reckoned with but they’re mostly for show. Her “little darlings” may be decent enough at target practice, but they couldn’t pull off shots like this.’

‘Yeah, our girl’s got some serious skills.’

I leaned toward him. ‘I’d say a decade’s worth.’

‘So maybe she’s a Viet Minh veteran?’

‘No,’ I objected. ‘Too damn young. If she’s twenty, she would’ve been, what? – ten or eleven back when the Viet Minh were kicking French ass up north.’ The independence fighters had recruited some awfully young teens, but that still seemed like a stretch.

‘She got herself trained real good by somebody somewhere.’ Robeson wiped his brow. ‘The North’s got Chinese and Russian advisors. There’s gotta be some decent pistol instructors among ’em.’

I shook my head. ‘Taking down a live target from the back of a moving scooter – she didn’t learn that on no VC firing range or live-fire course up north.’

‘Point taken,’ Robeson agreed. ‘She got thrown in the shit.’

Robeson navigated us expertly through the sea of vehicles. Saigon traffic was a chaotic mix of hand-drawn carts, oxcarts, bicycles, three-wheeled cyclo-pousse rickshaws, overloaded scooters, motorcycles, Renault taxis, buses, and military vehicles like ours. Vietnamese drivers could buy their licenses whether or not they could drive. In an accident, the foreigner was always in the wrong – and would be expected to pay to make it right. The army was known to shell out up to a thousand bucks, so accidents were not always so accidental.

We cruised down a street lined with eateries that specialized in snake dishes, then passed under a long canopy of flame trees. I swiped at the sweat stinging my eyes, grateful for the shade. Saigon had hardly a traffic light to slow our progress. At intersections, vehicles never stopped or slowed, but passed between each other at right angles like synchronized drill teams.

The heavy air was muzzy with exhaust fumes. A derelict villa loomed over the road, barely visible through creepers growing upward along its façade, its roof slowly being lifted off by vines. The purple and red flowers smelled great but couldn’t hide the aroma of raw sewage in the street. Saigon was like a booby prize. The Vietnamese had surrendered it to the French a century ago hoping they’d be devoured by the mosquitoes. The colonists brought in mosquito netting and built four thousand kilometers of canals to protect themselves. The French had planned for half a million residents. Four times that many had flooded the town for protection and profit, overwhelming the roads and plumbing. Saigon’s sewers were bursting. The poorer neighborhoods – like the shantytowns on the outskirts and the sampan slums on the canals – had none. No running water, no electricity either.

Robeson sang to himself as we rolled. ‘Oh mama don’t youweep and moan/Uncle Sam he got your man and gon’.’ On a traffic island, sentries dozed in shaded hammocks while their fortified pillbox stood empty. On the sidewalks, vendors slept beside their covered wares or atop their outdoor counters. I wondered where the Red Queen had tucked herself away for the noontime siesta after her morning’s success.

CHAPTER THREE

The Headquarters Support Activity Saigon office was an aging French villa covered with wisteria and sandbags. HSAS was a bastard unit with a few agents from each of the different investigative agencies of the armed forces: OSI, ONI, AIC, and us, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. CID was on the second floor, across the hall from the Office of Naval Intelligence. Our work space was a large room with metal desks, a fake fireplace, and French doors that looked out over rue Pasteur.

On the floor above us were the offices of the provost. Three gentlemen lawyers were the total Judge Advocate presence in Saigon, which meant all court-martial proceedings had to be held in Okinawa. Our operation was nearly as small, usually just six of us CID investigators. We had no police lab or even so much as a legitimate jail in-country, only a jury-rigged brig near the baseball diamond at Pershing Field, out by the airport. But me and Robeson were content, happy to be out of the boonies. No more rice paddies, forests, mountains, or jungles. We were comfortably posted in the capital of the eight-year-old half-a-nation we’d come to save from the red tide of Communism that was leaching down from its northern half in support of VC insurgents in the south. Taa fucking raa.

On our first tours, the two of us had advised a Vietnamese battalion of about four hundred men. Robeson ran an ambush academy, training troops in combat assaults, shoot-and-scoot patrolling, pincer movements, and bracketing with mortars. Me, I taught basic commo: radio discipline, Morse code, and how to transmit commands for directing small-unit maneuvers. Our instruction was barely tolerated and largely ignored. Hot pursuit of the enemy wasn’t a popular subject either, when we took the training into the field. You could bed down in a dicey night position with an entire ARVN company and wake up all by your lonesome if they didn’t care for you or your advice. Turns out they weren’t interested in engaging the enemy. All the South Vietnamese wanted were the goodies we could deliver and for us to shut the fuck up.

Viet Nam was nothing like Korea, where the US commanded both the American and Korean troops, and everyone was dropped into the crap together. Here we were strictly outsiders – guests – making suggestions our hosts happily spurned. Dealing with ARVN was like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. Me and Robeson grew weary of the struggle to get Buddhist troops fired up about battling Communists on behalf of their abusive and unloved Catholic government. We both got real tired of jungle rot, biting bugs and ground leeches, the foul dysentery that vacuumed you out and the heatstroke and tropical fevers that stewed the gray matter in your brainpan. One day we concluded that the longer we stayed out in the woods with the unhappy lads of the ARVN, the worse our odds got of going the distance in this non-war.

So we’d both grabbed at the chance for military police training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Half a year later we came back to Viet Nam as newly minted ‘Sidneys,’ Criminal Investigation Division agents. We didn’t have to worry anymore about motivating badly served Asian troops or playing hide-and-seek in the woods. Our jurisdiction was strictly limited to American soldiers in-country. Granted, these numbered in the thousands, with few of us ‘Sids’ to police them. But the mostly small-time lawlessness that accompanied the undeclared conflict suited us both. We lived on the cheap and tax-free, most everything expensed, and we didn’t have to sweat about who was winning and who wasn’t.

Our office interpreter, Xanh Lan Hoa – Blue Orchid – sat at her Underwood in a lavender ao dai, her long black hair cinched in a French braid. She was a young widow whose husband had perished in a skirmish in the highlands years ago. ‘Missy Blue’ had a thing for Robeson. One day when some Vietnamese had jeered at them walking together in the street, Missy had pointed to the small brown birthmark on her right cheek and touched Robeson’s wrist. ‘Same-same,’ she’d said, and giggled. ‘We same.’ Robeson had tried his best not to be moved, but he was. I’m not sure what their relationship was doing for her English, but it had certainly done wonders for his Vietnamese.

‘Đại úy want you both,’ she said, her soft brown eyes fixed on Robeson.

Our boss, an MP captain, was a mustang – an up-from-the-ranks enlisted man who caught a field promotion in Korea that put an officer’s butter bar on his helmet. We trudged dutifully into his lair, formerly a large wardrobe closet.

‘’Bout time, gents,’ Captain Deckle said, sounding none too happy. Captain Deckle told us he was just back from briefing his superior, an obnoxious major half his age, a ping-pong-playing super soldier with custom-made boots we lovingly referred to as ‘Major Asshole.’

‘Sir,’ I said, as Deckle waved us into the chairs facing his antique desk. Rent on the office was next to nothing but renting the furnishings cost plenty. Go figure. In one of the endless twists of Vietnamese law, income from rents was heavily taxed, income from leasing furniture was not. So renting out cheap places expensively furnished was one of the many schemes the Saigonese employed to hold on to their money, not that many Vietnamese paid taxes at all.

We filled the captain in on the latest killing. He listened, then said he was taking Crouch off the case for good. ‘Henceforth you two are officially in charge of this death-dame business.’

I could tell from Robeson’s expression that he was thinking the same as me: if Freddie Crouch wasn’t such a fuckup, he might have gotten somewhere on the first two killings, and our frustrated captain wouldn’t have dumped the third killing – and now the whole case – in our laps. Robeson sighed, making no secret of being put out.

Deckle glared at him. ‘The three men she’s gunned down are our people, and the locals aren’t showing much interest in catching her,’ the captain stressed. ‘So don’t look so damn disgruntled, Agent Robeson.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Robeson said, ‘but how do we protect our people from random street attacks?’

‘Sounds like a personal problem. Did you hear me ask for questions?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Captain, he has a point. How do we interdict this broad? She’s got the run of the city. Anywhere she spots an American uniform and the glint of an officer’s insignia, she’s got a target. How do we possibly stop that?’

Captain Deckle eased back in his chair. ‘We might have caught a break.’

He handed over a sheet of foolscap on which he’d scribbled the name and holding location of a Viet Cong who’d recently deserted, using one of the new safe-conduct passes regularly scattered across the countryside to tempt the half-starved guerillas into switching sides. This one had surrendered himself to a Psy Ops advisor in Da Nang. Looking for favors during his debriefing, the VC had nervously brought up the Commie heroine who’d started zapping Americans in the capital.

Deckle said, ‘The deserter, Tam, swears he doesn’t know the lady’s name or so much as her nom de guerre, but claims the Viet Cong command holds her in very high regard. Says her prowess battling ARVN made such a big impression on the commissars, they’ve put her in charge of Unit Eight.’

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Robeson mumbled. ‘Another kid in charge of Unit Eight.’

The captain nervously tapped the desktop. ‘Yeah, yeah. Your witness says she’s barely twenty but old before her time and commanding our favorite local terror cell.’

‘Kids making war on American officers,’ I said.

‘The defector also claims the Committee of the South recently gave their bad girl an additional objective – liquidation of a major player. Says he doesn’t know who or when. Just that it’s soon. But maybe the right questions haven’t been put to him. Go see if this hoi chanh can give you a line on her and who the honcho is they’ve added to her to-do list.’

I said, ‘This bigwig she’s been assigned. Do we at least know whether he’s American or South Vietnamese?’

‘Not clear.’ Captain Deckle fired up a Salem. ‘“Cáo già” was the quote.’

‘“Old fox,”’ Robeson said. ‘She’s going after an “old fox”?’

‘Miss Blue’s translation too,’ Deckle said, impressed. ‘The Red Queen’s unit is likely after someone pretty senior. Remember a year ago last May? The brat in charge of Unit Eight before her tried to take down our esteemed secretary of defense.’

Robeson nodded. ‘A sweet-lookin’ sapper boy trying to blow up McNamara.’

‘And when the charge didn’t go off,’ I said, ‘he switched to grenades. We got him with, what, fifteen strapped to his chest?’

‘That sweet-looking boy,’ said Captain Deckle, ‘had already killed eight Vietnamese and was drawing a bead on a member of President Kennedy’s cabinet.’

‘Does Counselor Nhu still want him in front of a firing squad?’

‘Badly.’

Ngo Dinh Nhu, President Diem’s loathed and feared younger brother, had nearly limitless power. He was effectively the country’s attorney general, head of its FBI, Secret Service and CIA, the secretary of state, and speaker of the House for good measure. Oh, and he controlled all the newspapers, too. Tall and gaunt, Nhu was the physical opposite of his squat older brother. Gary Cooper on a bad day. For my money, Diem was nuts and Mr and Mrs Nhu were evil shits who ran the country for their own benefit, lining the pockets of the business guys and generals who backed them, at the expense of everyone else. Brother Nhu squashed his political opponents like bugs. If he wanted the sapper killed, the kid was already as good as dead.

‘Except if the kid’s executed,’ Deckle was saying, ‘the Viet Cong will reciprocate and kill an American prisoner they’re holding.’ He handed us travel orders for Da Nang. ‘Check out the late Major Furth’s effects while he’s still with us. Then get yourselves to Da Nang and shake this collaborator. Do it somewhere private; wring the guy out. He’s the only lead we’ve got.’

‘Should we haul him back here when we’re done, sir,’ I said, ‘or take him over to the Vietnamese turncoat program?’

‘We can’t keep him, no way. So be fast, be thorough. I doubt you’ll get a second go at Tam once the Vietnamese take charge of him.’ The captain fixed us with his hombre stare. ‘Our betters are already in a twist about this Red Queen. If she manages to take out somebody prominent, that will really ratchet their knickers. They want the lady dealt with before she gets that chance. Questions?’ he said, pointedly looking at Robeson.

‘Our orders, sir?’

‘Find her and do her – quick.’

‘Detain her, you mean?’ Robeson said, even though he knew damn well what Deckle meant.

The captain absently rubbed his slight paunch. ‘She’s in civilian clothes,’ he said, ‘killing unarmed US soldiers in uniform. That ain’t legal. She’s not playing by the rules. You’re within your rights to shoot the bitch where she stands. Got it?’

Robeson looked uneasy. ‘We ain’t one of Counselor Nhu’s death squads, captain.’

I put a hand on his shoulder. Times like these, I remembered how many years I had on him, especially the three in Korea.

‘The laws of war say she’s not a lawful combatant,’ Deckle said slowly. ‘If you detain her, it’s gonna be the same dragged-out business as her predecessor: arguments about her tender age, threats of retaliation. Und so weiter. So do unto her before she does any more of ours.’ He paused to look us each in the eye. ‘I want this woman off my planet. Verstanden?’

We exited Deckle’s closet and pulled Crouch’s meager file on Lady Death. The details didn’t make for light reading, especially the color pictures. The body of the second officer she’d killed looked like a white-chocolate Easter bunny with raspberry filling, its hollow head chomped open.

I rummaged around in the file drawer on Crouch’s side of the desk for the ammo box where he kept the envelope with the first two Red Queen cards, the scarves, and spent shell casings. I carefully added the third card and took possession of the box. So much for forensics. It wasn’t like any of the JAG lawyers upstairs would ever be taking this to court.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Number one rue Catinat,’ Robeson announced as we pulled up. ‘Home from the fields.’ I lashed down the radio antenna. Robeson chained the steering wheel while he haggled with the street kids who controlled the curbside spot outside our hotel over the price for guarding the jeep to make sure our tires didn’t get slashed or stolen, our gasoline didn’t get siphoned off. Wherever we went, Robeson drew Vietnamese kids to him. To them he was a wonder with his Bazooka bubbles and African skin. Not so to their elders, who kept their distance, even though they could see how respectful he was, knowing not to touch the tops of the children’s heads where the sacred energy entered and evil spirits could suck out your soul.

We got regular complaints from the hotel manager about paying the young hustlers protection money, but I didn’t care. With the street kids on the job, our vehicle wouldn’t get stripped, go AWOL, or get booby-trapped. Besides, extortion was necessary training for the boys’ criminal futures if they were going to survive the tough straits they’d gotten themselves born into. Their other options were few: the overcrowded schools turned away more kids than they accepted.

We finished raising the canvas roof so they’d have some shade, and took in the glistening Saigon River just across the street from the hotel. The tide was out, the pylons exposed on the concrete dock that paralleled the shore. A couple of sampans lay on the bank, their owners asleep beneath makeshift lean-tos.

The Hotel Majestic was curved like a boomerang, with the entrance at the bend where its two wings hinged. The ground floor of the stucco building was reddish-brown, topped by four pale-yellow stories. Turquoise awnings shaded the balconies and the ground floor’s tall arched windows, five on either side of the identically arched front door.

Robeson breathed a sigh of relief as we entered the dim, high-ceilinged lobby. The Majestic wasn’t luxurious, but from our point of view, it couldn’t be better: the hotel hadn’t been commandeered by the Navy and remained privately run. We were some of its few military residents. That the Majestic was overstaffed suited Clovis Auguste Robeson perfectly. He came from one of the richest black families in the state of Louisiana and liked being waited on. Great-grandfather Robeson had started a small undertaking and burial business that made his descendants wealthy. By the time he took up final residence in his own cemetery, his was the largest black funeral business in the county and second-biggest in the state. His great-grandson Clovis should have been back at Shaw University in Raleigh, finishing his studies in funeral management so he could take it over. But the young man wasn’t partial to the field and had quit school to escape into the army. Same as me, except for the college part and the fat-cat money.

Me, I spent my seventeenth summer with my bachelor uncle on his Pennsylvania farm, dipping live chickens and turkeys upside down into a metal funnel that worked like a garbage disposal to lop off their heads. In my senior year of high school, he started talking about my going into his poultry business. I joined up on my eighteenth birthday and got sent to the ‘police action’ in Korea.

The air-conditioning cut out as we plodded across the dark marble floor to collect our keys at the long front desk. As Saigon brownouts went, this was a short one: in a minute, the lights flickered back on and the ceiling fans above the club chairs resumed stirring the heavy air. Still, we were taking our chances stepping into the cage elevator. The printed daily schedules of brownouts and blackouts were completely unreliable. One second you had juice, the next you didn’t. We could easily find ourselves stranded between floors, sleeping standing up. But we were both too punked to make the climb, and grateful when the white-jacketed lift operator got us to the third floor. I did my best to ignore the insecticide smell in the hall as we dragged ass toward our rooms.

‘You all right?’ Robeson inquired, lighting a joint and passing it over. ‘Still feeling feverish?’

‘Fucked up but functioning.’ I took a hit and passed it back.

Robeson unlocked his door and disappeared. I let myself into 302, hurrying to the big tiled bathroom to piss. Another Majestic bonus: the Western toilet worked. As did the bidet and the shower, although a mama mouse and her babies liked to keep me company whenever I stepped under the enormous brass showerhead.

Like the mice, our aged barefoot housemaid Mama-san Kha went about her business as though I wasn’t there, and thought nothing of popping in no matter how undressed I might be. She’d raise the toilet seat and climb up on the pedestal to squat and relieve herself while I shaved, or use the bidet to pee if I was on the throne. She had shooed away the other chambermaids to claim us, but otherwise stayed strictly in her zone: shining shoes, changing sheets, making the bed, doing my washing in an aluminum basin, hanging my drip-dry shirts and slacks in the shower. To keep away mold, she kept the electric light burning in the armoire, and left me a daily bottle of potable water for brushing my teeth or rinsing the city’s grit out of my eyes. Clovis and I loved our irascible Mama-san. By garrison standards, she had us living like kings.

The hit of dope had melted the muscles in my neck and shoulders. I hung my dog tags and room key on a hook and threw open the balcony doors. Across the narrow three-hundred-yard waist of the Saigon River stood warehouses and grubby factories. Beyond them nothing but marsh. Downriver to the right, the smokestacks and bridge of a departing ship passed into the Long Tau channel that snaked south along the edge of the huge tidal marsh all the way to the sea. The river’s edge was dotted with wooden shacks, their backs propped on stilts. Small boats lay stranded on mud and sewage; the tide had borne most of the raw waste toward the bayou. High tide would carry it back.

I must have drifted off because Robeson’s loud knocking woke me. I stumbled over an armchair to let him in. After I showered, we headed for a local food counter on the street where a small sign advertised MÓN ĂN ĐẶC BIỆT – ‘special dish,’ meaning grilled dog meat on skewers. Mama-san Kha had urged us to try it. Yellow dog tasted best, she insisted, especially the ones with speckled tongues. She was right.

We squatted on low stools under a tarp while the proprietor turned strips of frog meat and threw the ugliest water creature I’d ever seen onto the grill. Elephant-ears fish, he called it. Swear to God, looked like a piranha with dentures, but it tasted great. Robeson swatted away flies while I ordered us cold bottles of Coke. He winced at the first sip. ‘Damn knock-off. Tastes like cough medicine.’ I downed half my bottle. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

The overcast sky blackened and opened with a rare flash of lightning. My bum knee hurt. The end of Saigon’s monsoon season was just about upon us. Warm rain bucketed down, pelting the tarp. A stream hit my back and raced for my ass crack, which actually felt good. The quick downpour weakened and stopped. The ground steamed, making the air thick as a sauna’s.

‘This Red Queen situation is choice,’ Robeson said. ‘A city the size of Saigon and we don’t have even a rough idea where she’s gonna strike next, much less a real police force to go after her with.’

‘And suppose we knew and were there waiting for her? We’d stand out way too much. She sees us, she just rides on by and hits somebody else somewhere else.’

‘No wonder Crouch dropped this mess on us.’ Robeson exhaled his exasperation.

Freddie Crouch was a Class-A prick. Whenever he got drunk we had to hear about the VC he ‘almost’ got when he was out in the field advising. Except the truth was the kid had hauled ass bare-assed, leaving behind only his pants. What a battle – what a victory. We even heard the Charlie’s Mama-san hit Crouch in the face with some cow shit. More power to her.

‘Motherfuckin’ Crouch,’ I said, and we clinked bottles. ‘While we’re here drinking somebody’s half-assed idea of a Coke you can bet the Red Queen’s commissars are toasting her with the good stuff.’

‘You gotta give it to her. She’s gutsy, that woman, going after targets in public places.’ Robeson blotted his wet hair with a napkin. ‘She don’t seem to worry about anybody drawing down on her.’

I set down my bottle. ‘The government may not like us walking around their capital strapped, but for damn sure a lot of guys are gonna carry from here on. Things might not go so smooth for her next time.’

‘But you’d have to see her coming,’ Robeson said. ‘Small chance of that. Bang and she’s gone. No time to react. Even if some onlooker gets his piece out in time, she picks crowded streets. No way to fire without hitting bystanders.’

‘We need to find her before she rolls up on her next target.’

‘And we ain’t got the manpower to flood a block, much less a whole district.’

He was right, of course. The odds of us finding her in Saigon were less than lousy.

‘Remind me to leave some cow shit in Crouch’s desk,’ I said.

FULL AND LAZY, we flagged a Lambretta for the short ride to the hotel. The elevator operator let Robeson off on three but I felt restless and continued up to the partially enclosed saloon-restaurant on the roof terrace.

The sun was burning into the canals and marshes to the west. Speckled turquoise geckos were congregating around the sconce lights on the wall, working on their first course. At the far end of the bar a bunch of raucous Aussie construction men were knocking back martinis and tossing olives into one another’s mouths. A dark-skinned brunette and a pale young thing with fiery red hair sat on either side of the junior banker who lived on four. Both round-eyes were lookers.

I took a stool next to Lieutenant Nick Seftas and ordered a rum and Coke, but had to settle for a Sarsi sarsaparilla and rum. Seftas wasn’t staying long, he said. He needed to be fresh for the morning’s planeload of congressmen he was welcoming on behalf of General Harkins, MAAG’s commanding officer.

General Harkins lived in what Seftas liked to call the Hawaiian Room: a happy can-do state, completely out of touch, that caused you to insist against all indications that everything was swell and getting sweller. Paul Harkins was personally convinced the recent Viet Cong surges would subside, and that he’d be sending a thousand American boys home by Christmas. He’d promised the same thousand-man hump a year ago last May. Said we’d all be out of Viet Nam by last Christmas. Head in the sand, hell. Harkins would need a Rome plow to pull his head out of his ass.

Meanwhile Nick Seftas spent his days playing tour guide for VIP visitors: mayors seeking out local boys among the advisors and support detachments, governors eyeing higher office, senators and their staffs searching for insights on the guerilla war at hidden brothels and underground clubs.

‘They’re pouring in from everywhere,’ Seftas said. ‘Congress, the Pentagon, Pacific Command in Tokyo and Honolulu, the goddamn Peoria Chamber of Commerce.’

‘Peoria? Sounds like hazardous duty. You putting in for the extra pay?’ I enjoyed busting his chops.

‘This guerilla war’s a boondoggle. It’s fucking Fantasia: they never stop coming. The lefties opine that we’re helping Diem oppress the Buddhist protesters and prolonging colonialism. The right-wingers wonder why we’re not bombing China with nukes and Bibles. And don’t get me started on the actual Bible-thumpers. Got word today Cardinal “Moneybags” Spellman of New York is coming to spend another Christmas with the troops and encourage his favorite altar boy – Diem – in his fight against the godless enemy.’

‘He came every Christmas I was in Korea,’ I said. ‘Never heard him called “Moneybags,” though.’

‘Seems His pain-in-the-ass Worship has the second-most valuable coin collection in the whole fucking world.’

‘Oh, yeah? He travel with any of it? I’ve been thinking of taking up coin collecting. Might be nice to pick up a starter set on the cheap.’

‘No problemo. I’m sure he keeps it bedside right next to his tiara.’

I ordered another round as Del Shannon hit the high notes on ‘Runaway,’ spun on the 45-rpm turntable by the cash box in open defiance of Madame Nhu’s music ban.

‘While the Dragon Lady’s away, the mice will play rock ’n’ roll,’ Seftas said.

‘Madame Nhu? What’s she up to now?’

‘She’s been speechifying across the States, roasting President Kennedy every chance she gets. Left town with strict orders not to make any public pronouncements, but you know they haven’t invented the muzzle yet that would keep that woman quiet. The White House is doing its best to ignore her, but the Republicans are loving her up. I hear her return’s gonna be delayed by a stopover in Beverly Hills for a little plastic surgery around the eyes.’ Seftas yawned and slid off his stool. ‘Gotta shine my brass and hit the rack,’ he said, and settled up.

I looked around for my other regular drinking buddies but the patio was empty except for the banker, who had maneuvered the brunette and redhead to a table close to my perch and was working hard to impress them with his worldly understanding of Saigon.

‘The whole system’s corrupt,’ he announced. ‘Every government department is its own little gift shop. Anyone with a rubber stamp and a little authority has his hand out for “gratitude”.’

‘How frightful,’ said the redhead, all exaggerated and breathy. ‘I simply had no idea.’ He didn’t notice she was having him on. The banker and the brunette were obviously into each other, so Red got up to leave, and – surprise – parked herself on the stool alongside mine. She ordered a vodka and tonic. ‘With ice, please.’

I tipped toward her. ‘Wouldn’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Ice,’ I said. ‘There’s a cholera outbreak.’

‘Neat, then. Tonic back.’ Her accent was flawless Brit with just the tiniest hint of something else.

I signaled the barman to give her a chilled shot glass from the short fridge under the bar.

She knocked back her shot and said, ‘Guess my line of work and you win a drink.’

I didn’t take her for a pro. Not a professional do-gooder either. More like some oil honcho’s flashy secretary.

‘Reporter?’ I said. Sexier sounding than ‘flack for a petroleum company.’

She shook her head but looked pleased. ‘Nadja Kowalska,’ she said, extending her hand. A wide silver bracelet shackled her wrist. ‘I do for the ICC.’

‘International Control Commission.’

‘Quite.’