Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [21]
Honor and dignity. Somehow.
“You Cap-tan, ah Hud-sun!” the senior officer suddenly screeched.
He peered down onto the wrinkled note pad he always carried. His fingers struck hard into the page to emphasize certain words.
“Ho-Ho. Twen-six yea-ah old. Veet Nam, Lah-ose since nineteen-six-nine. Yow spy six yeah. Ho-Ho. You ‘ssain! ‘ssassin! Convic to die, Cap-tan.”
The prison camp guards let Captain David Hudson fall toward the dirt floor, which was littered with gaping fish heads and rice.
Hudson’s mind was reeling, crashing, exploding with sharp-pointed lights. His own private light show, his own palace of pain, he thought.
He’d understood only a few of the Lizard Man’s fractured English words. “Viet Nam… spy… assassin… convicted to die.”
On the table sagging between him and the North Vietnamese officer, there was a teakwood game board.
Captain Hudson’s eyes absently ran over the board surface. Games? Why did they all love games?
The Lizard Man snorted. A distorted smile appeared suddenly across his lower face. His jaw moved slowly, seemingly unattached to the rest of his skull.
“Yow play game? Yow play game me, Hud-sun?”
David Hudson’s eyes were riveted to the low-slung game table, trying to gain focus.
Play a game with Lizard Man?
The board appeared to be real teak. It was precious wood, exotic and beautiful, incongruous in this sodden armpit of a place.
Even more striking were the hundreds of polished black and white stones, exquisite game playing pieces. They were circular in shape, convex on each side.
For a nearly lucid moment, David Hudson remembered a marble collection. Something magical and forgotten from his youth in Kansas. Father’s farm. Collecting solids and cat’s-eyes. Had he actually been a boy in this same lifetime? He couldn’t seem to remember. Die with dignity! Dignity!
“Play game for your life? Ho?” the Lizard Man asked.
The game board was divided into vertical and horizontal lines creating hundreds of intersections. There were 180 white stones, 181 black.
Beside the pile of black stones, the Lizard Man’s hand rested on a bulky Moison-Nazant military revolver. One of his long yellowed fingers relentlessly tapped the table.
“Yow play. Play game me! Loser die!”
Captain Hudson continued to stare hard at the game board, at the beautifully gleaming teak table. Focus, he thought Concentrate. Die with dignity.
He only vaguely understood what was happening. What did this man want from him now? It was some kind of joke, Hudson knew. One more way the Lizard Man had of torturing him.
The black and white stones seemed to be moving by themselves. Spinning, crawling like insects in his badly blurred, tunneling vision.
Finally, Hudson spoke up. His voice was surprisingly strong, angry, even defiant when he finally found it.
“I have never lost at the game of Go,” Captain Hudson said. “You play, asshole!” Dignity!
Chapter 15
THE NEW YORK SUBWAY noisily braked at a Mid-town station stop. The platform was bathed in eerie blue.
A few passengers on the early morning train were absently staring at David Hudson.
Hudson stared back at the passengers. He peered into their eyes, until most glanced away. The majority of American people were devoid of any basic integrity, any sense of themselves. Civilians tended to disappoint David Hudson again and again.
More listless passengers struggled onto the subway train at the West 86th Street stop. There were mostly older whites, time-bent men and women, small merchants, ciphers who managed or owned the rip-off clothing stores, the rip-off food markets, in Harlem and Upper Manhattan.
One of the men boarding at 86th, however, was completely different.
He appeared to be in his mid-thirties. His black hair was brushed straight back. He wore a tan cashmere overcoat with a paisley scarf, pressed navy dress slacks, super-Wasp duck boots. The impression he gave was of someone boarding a subway for the first time in his life and finding something amusing in the phenomenon of a slum on wheels.
He sat beside Hudson and