‘Standoffish?’ Hatcher offered.
‘Standoffish. That’s good,’ Schwartz said.
‘When I talked to Hugh Fraser,. he gave me the idea Cody was some kind of suicidal war lover leading his men to certain death.’
‘See, Fraser was always a pretty bitter guy,’ said Schwartz. ‘His accident didn’t help any.’
‘What happened, exactly?’ Hatcher asked.
‘He was making his approach to the Forrestal, flamed out on his final, had to ditch. Broke his back. That’s a real irony, y’know, all he ever wanted was carrier duty. Glamour city.’
‘Yeah, but the Cody thing was bug before that.’
‘Y’see, Fraser was a jet jockey, lie dreamed the carrier dream,’ said Schwartz. ‘The Brown Water Navy definitely wasn’t his idea of big-time war duty.
‘Brown Water Navy?’ Hatcher asked. It was a term with which he was not familiar.
‘That’s what they called our outfit,’ Schwartz explained. ‘We were the only inland squadron in the Navy. We were there mostly to support the Riverine Patrol Forces, covering river convoys, that kind of diddy-bopping shit, but what we really did was support ground movements. It was rotten duty. I suppose there’s an element of truth in what Fraser says. We had big losses. But suicidal? Never. That’s bullshit.’ Schwartz thought for a minute then went on, ‘I’ll tell you, it was like he didn’t want to get too close to anybody, Cody I mean. No favorites. What we were doing, that was the worst, and Cody’s outfit had — a reputation for doing the meanest jobs and working the longest hours. Nobody wanted to go to his outfit.’
‘Did you fear going there?’
‘Yeah, sure. But it was, uh, because of the unexpected, so much talk, y’know. Apprehension.’
‘Okay.’
‘Anyway, Murph really pushed hard, man, like seven days a week, day, night, around the clock, bad weather, night stuff, you name it. He was like, uh, crazy to get the war over with. Don’t get me wrong, he went out there just like everybody else. I’d guess Murph flew more individual sorties than any other man in the outfit..’
Hatcher’s mind wandered back to the night before and his meeting in Seattle with Hugh Fraser, Cody’s other wingman, who had quite a different impression of Cody. At first, Fraser had refused to talk to Hatcher. His crash had left him a pitiful cripple. He walked in a crouch, like an old man, and breath spray could not hide the sickening, end-of-the-day smell of vodka, nor could Visine wash away the broken blood vessels in his eyes. Because Fraser had refused to take Hatcher’s calls, Hatcher had waited for him in the parking lot of one of the small satellite buildings clustered around Seattle-Tacoma International where Fraser was vice president of a small charter airline. Hatcher felt sorry for the man. He had obviously aged considerably since his accident. He was vitriolic, like a grouchy old man, and in the conversation that was occasionally interrupted by one of the big commercial jets taking off, he lashed out with each question.
‘Would you like to hear what Fraser had to say?’ Hatcher asked Schwartz. He took a s nal1 recorder from his pocket and pressed the play button.
Fraser: I’m a busy man. You have five minutes.
Hatcher: I just want to talk a little about Murph —
Fraser: Who’d you say you were with?
Hatcher: Navy Review Board. We —
Fraser: God damn Navy.
Hatcher: — just want to close this thing out once and for all.
Fraser: So what can I tell you that you don’t know already?
Hatcher: You saw Cody go down, isn’t that—?
Fraser: I told you boys all this before.
Hatcher: One more time for the wrap-up.
Fraser: (Sighing) I was flying off his port side, half a mile behind him. I heard his Mayday and saw him barrel-roll in.
Hatcher: Any chance he got out?
Fraser: (Skeptically) C’mon. He set half the Mekong Delta on fire.
Hatcher: I got one report says he may — (there was a pause while a jet roared over) have got out of the plane and made a run for —
Fraser: Whoever told you that’s crazy.
Hatcher: How would you rate him? As an officer, I mean.
Fraser: First-class asshole trying to impress his old man. He loved war, a typical career officer. He ate it up with a spoon. He didn’t give a damn what happened to his men.
Hatcher: Oh . . . (the rest of the comment was obscured by another jet)
Fraser: (partially inaudible) . . . Army brat. Annapolis man, big-shot father. Never drank with the guys, never hung out. He had this hoochgirl, a real beauty. You know, perfect skin, perfect teeth, those limpid eyes you could take a swim in. She waited on him like a slave. When he wasn’t flying, he was laid up with this hoochgirl balling all day.
Hatcher: Well, hoochgirls were a dime a —
Fraser: This one was a real piece, I’ll tell you that. Couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sixteen. Eyes for him, nobody else. He treated that stinking slope like she was his wife, like family for Chrissake. God damn Nam hoochgirl.
Hatcher: What happened to her?
Fraser: When he bought it, everybody in the outfit moved on her — but she wasn’t having any. Next day, she was gone. Vanished. Like Puff the fucking Magic Dragon. (Pause) Listen, the son of a bitch got more men killed than the Vietcong.
Hatcher: You mean doing his job?
Fraser: There’s doing it and there’s doing it. He was a maniac, you ask me. ‘Get it in the gutter, get it in the gutter!’ he’d scream. Christ, we were . . . (Another pause while a jet took off) flying down tunnels as it was. Lost half our planes to ground fire. Shit, we blitzed some Charlie, burned some boats, whacked out some villages. Next day they were right back. Like stepping in a puddle, you take your foot out and never know it was there. All those guys gone for that.’
Hatcher: C’mon, nobody goes into combat expecting room service and the Holiday Inn.
Fraser: He was like all those military academy grunts. All they care about is looking good on the record so they’ll be sure to make admiral before they retire. Listen, do you think you’d be here now if Cody wasn’t a general’s son.
Hatcher: (Pause) No.
Hatcher snapped the machine off.
‘Well, hell, we were all crazy as loons after a few weeks on the line with him,’ Schwartz said. ‘I mean, we were dragging the gutter every time out. I used to come back with tree limbs stuck in my wings. But Cody didn’t like it, Hugh’s wrong, Murph wasn’t any war lover, quite the opposite. It ate him up, sending all those guys out there day after day. He knew most of us were jet pilots who hated fighting a ground war in those old De Havillands. They were just . . . twin-engine crates loaded down with hardware — Gatlings, a twenty mike-mike in the nose, four fifty-caliber machine guns, cluster bombs. But we flat tore up the fucking Mekong Delta. Trouble was, everybody had a bullet with his name on it. We were flying so much, sooner or later it had to be your turn. Our losses were running sixty, sixty-five percent, about — a third of them MIA or POW. You can understand why Cody’s outfit wasn’t considered Shangri-la by the flyboys.’
A steward brought their lunch and Schwartz attacked his hamburger with animal fervor.
‘God was good to me in one respect,’ he said, his mouth half full, ‘I don’t grow any taller when I eat a lot, but I don’t get any fatter either.’ He took another bite. ‘What happened to Fraser, it gets to me a little. I’ll tell you something, I may have done four years’ hard time but I’m lucky.’
‘That’s a generous attitude,’ Hatcher whispered hoarsely.
‘Reality,’ Schwartz said.
‘What happened the day Cody bought the farm?’ Hatcher’s grinding voice asked.
Schwartz didn’t have to think about it, the scene was still fresh in his mind after all the years. It had been raining that morning and Cody was jumpy. There were reports of Charlie activity upriver and the infantry was asking for help. As soon as the weather lifted, Cody called a scramble. They went off so
fast, Cody had to give them the coordinates of the ground action after they were airborne. They had made two passes, dropping cluster bombs along the river’s edge, then suddenly he heard Cody’s ‘Mayday!’
At first Cody didn’t seem to be in trouble. His De H. was a half mile in front of Schwartz. Then Schwartz saw the plane begin to weave. Its one wing dipped and began to crumble. He’s taken an RPG or some kind of rocket, Schwartz thought, and then: My God, he’s going in, as he watched the cumbersome plane begin to dive toward the green blanket below. Schwartz clipped his nose and began raking the woods in front of Cody’s plane, blasting a path with twenty millimeters and fifty calibers. Jesus, Schwartz thought, all he needs is about five hundred yards and he’s got the river and, on the other side, friendly country. Come on, come on, Schwartz repeated to himself as he continued to riddle the forest in front of the stricken plane. Then the scratchy voice over the radio, ‘ . . . I’m going in . . .‘ and suddenly the plane rolled over like a large animal dying, and almost flopped into the trees. The green carpet streaked beneath Schwartz, and as he pulled over the shattered wreck of the De Havilland and swept out over the river, he saw an SAR Huey below him heading toward the crash site, then the jungle seemed to erupt. A geyser of fire shot up from the wreckage and he felt the wave of the explosion wash over him. He banked sharply trying to circle back, then heard the voice of the Huey pilot, ‘Corkscrew, this is Rescue one . . . We lost him. . .
Anyway, I overflew him and started to peel around and I saw this SAR Huey coning up the river and then the plane blew,’ Schwartz said, finishing his story.
‘How long after he crashed?’ Hatcher asked.
‘Long enough for me to maybe do a one eighty.’
‘Long enough for him to maybe get out?’ Hatcher whispered.
‘Murph?’
‘Yeah.’
Schwartz shrugged. ‘Sure, I guess so. I disagree with Fraser — the notion Cody may have gotten out of the plane isn’t crazy.’
Hatcher nibbled at his soup, then asked, ‘How did his girlfriend take it?’ he whispered.
‘Inscrutably, the way hoochgirls always did. Hugh’s a little off-base there, too. The bottom line is, Cody didn’t like Fraser. Or maybe he sensed Fraser didn’t like him. Whatever, Fraser was never invited to join Cody.’
‘And the rest of you were?’
Schwartz nodded. ‘Hell, I’d go over there every once in a while, she’d cook up dinner for a couple of us. Viet shit, it was great.’
‘Does the expression “Thai Horse’’ mean anything to you?’ Hatcher asked.
‘You mean heroin?’
‘Does it mean anything else to you?’
‘Nope. What’s that got to—’
‘Did Cody have a drug problem?’
Schwartz looked shocked. ‘You gotta be kidding. Murph Cody? Cody didn’t even smoke. Where are you going with this?’
‘No place, just touching all the bases.’
The question about Thai Horse and dope had upset Schwartz, made him suddenly wary.
Hatcher quickly changed the subject. ‘Tell me more about the girl.’
Schwartz hesitated, still suspicious, but his obvious respect for Cody won over. He began to relax again. ‘Y’know, in a funny kind of way I think maybe Murph was in love with Pai.’
‘Pai?’
‘Yeah. I think what it was, he was kinda proud of her, was showing her off.’
He sat strangely quiet for a minute or two, sipping his beer, then he said, ‘You know, I went down three weeks later. Just — north of Binh Thuy. The first four, five months I was a prisoner, we were in transit camps. They just, like, y’know, moved us around a lot. Then finally they took us to Hanoi. Anyway, I heard rumors about this camp over in Laos. It was like a mobile unit, y’know, and they supposedly had a big shot over there.’
What kind of big shot?’
‘That’s it, a big shot. I heard everything from Westmoreland to Bob Hope. You know how rumors are. Anyway, until they took us north, I heard about this camp all the time. They called it, uh, Huie-kui, the spirit camp, I guess because it — seemed to disappear all the time.’
‘It wasn’t uncommon for them to move their camps around.’
‘I know. It never occurred to me before, I always assumed he was dead, but maybe the celebrity was Murph.’
‘Do me a favor, will you, Commander? Keep this under your hat. If Cody is alive, give me a chance to find him.’
Schwartz stared hard at Hatcher and then slowly nodded. ‘He deserves that.’
Hatcher’s thoughts went back to the hoochgirl. ‘Did you like his girl?’ Hatcher asked.
‘Are you kidding? She made Natalie Wood look like Porky Pig.’ Schwartz paused for a minute and then said, ‘Would you like to see her? I got a picture of her in my scrapbook.’
On the way to the airport, Hatcher’s pulse began racing, his nerves humming. Forty-eight hours before, the whole notion that Murph Cody was still alive had seemed like a big joke to Hatcher. Now there was a question in his mind. When Hatcher was studying criminal detection, Sloan, his mentor, had once said, ‘Don’t ever trust written reports. When it’s in writing, people tend to make themselves look good.’
It had cost him forty-eight hours to run that theory, but he was glad he had. He thought about the three men he had interviewed, each with a different view of Cody, each affected in a different way by his own role in the events of that fateful day when Murphy Cody had disappeared.
To Schwartz, Cody was a hero doing a dirty job; to Fraser, a war-loving madman; to Simmons, a haunting ghost whose cold fist squeezed Simmons’s heart. To Fraser, escape from the flaming wreckage of Cody’s plane was impossible; to Schwartz, it was a toss-up; to Simmons, it was a reality.
And, too, there was Schwartz’s report of this ghost camp, Huie-kui. Could that be the reason Cody had never turned up? Had he been a prisoner for all those years? And if so, how did he get out?
There was one other thing that gnawed at Hatcher’s brain. If Murphy Cody had died, where had Wol Pot, the Thai, come up with his name? Wol Pot had a lot of questions to answer.
There was only one thing on which Fraser and Schwartz seemed to agree — that Pai, Cody’s hoochgirl, was special. Looking at the photograph Schwartz had given him, Hatcher had to agree. It was a colour photograph, dog-eared and faded. In the picture, Cody was standing in front of his thatched hooch, his arm around a small, almond-colored beauty, her chin down, staring mystically up at the camera. She looked almost childlike. But while her body was the body of a young girl, her eyes seemed to reflect some inner knowledge that was far beyond her years. Hatcher stared at those eyes, felt them connect, could almost see them blink. He put the photograph back in his wallet.
He looked at his watch. In twelve hours he would be in Bangkok. He hoped Windy Porter would have a lot of answers for him. He had no way of knowing that at almost that same moment Windy Porter was dying in the dark waters of the Phadung Klong, four thousand miles away.
A good man who thinks he’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’ is hard to bring down.
—A TEXAS RANGER
STORK
The stork’s legs were four feet long from its knees to the soles of its feet. It bobbed through the crowd and every move was perfect. The four-foot stilts lifted the surreal bird a foot above the rest of the bizarre crowd, which it stalked, chin out, butt out, butt in, chin in, a rainbow- hued spray of feathers sprinkled with glitter bursting from its yellow bustle, its face painted white, its lips exaggerated and bright yellow, vertical blue streaks painted from its forehead through its eyes all the way down to its chin, a wig of bright blue feathers sweeping straight back from its forehead, its body encased in a yellow feathered body stocking. There was no way to tell whether the person encased in the costume was male or female.
Surrounding it was an eerie assortment of other surreal creatures, their heads jogging in waves to the Eurythmics’ ‘Would I Lie to You Baby,’ which thundered from a dozen mons
ter speakers. Spinning spears of flashing strobe lights augured down from the ceiling. Below the clear lucite dance floor, a six-foot Mako shark circled in its tank, agitated by the beat.
The Annual Critter Ball had attracted its biggest crowd yet to Split Personality — known as the Split — Atlanta’s environment club, a fancy name for a disco. In the balcony, Spears and Hedritch surveyed the crowd dubiously. In a roomful of bizarre people, they stood out by the very nature of their normalcy, dressed as they were in dark blue suits, even though they had taken off their ties and opened their shirt collars.
‘Christ, this is absolutely insane,’ said Spears, the taller of the two, a six-footer, blond and square-jawed, with the look of a forty-year-old surfer. Hedritch was five foot nine with balding dark hair, a neck the size of a tire and big ears. Very big ears.
‘Let’s call it off,’ Hedrich said, looking around the supercharged dance floor. ‘We don’t need this shit.’
‘You don’t call off Campon and you know it,’ Spears replied. ‘He does whatever the hell he wants.’
‘This goes way beyond a security risk,’ Hedritch snapped nervously.
‘So what’s new? Let’s give him the bad news. Maybe he’ll take our advice for a change.
‘Yeah, sure he will,’ Hedritch answered.
They turned and went back through the crowd to the balcony entrance. The stork’s eyes, glittering, watched them all the way.
Outside, the line waiting for entry through the magic portals of the club snaked halfway around the block. The black stretch limo sat in front of the door. Spears and Hedritch got in the backseat; the sweet smell of marijuana permeated the interior. General Hector Campon was leaning in the corner dressed in full military regalia, three rows of ribbons twinkling from the breast of the dark blue uniform, the joint glowing between his fingertips. His dark glasses swung slowly toward the two men.
‘Well?’ his Spanish-accented voice asked.