Restless Soul - Alex Archer [106]
She remembered those exact words from one of his answering-machine messages to Lanh.
“Something horribly rotten. Cancer of the pancreas, the doctor told me. He gives me a month at the most. Hurts like hell. War is old men dying in the fullness of their promise while there is still madness in this world. War is hell.”
“Which is where you’ll end up,” Annja said. She swung him around and pushed him toward the back of the shop. He was easy to push, frail and weak, and his hands were twisted from arthritis. “Go in.” She intended to make sure he spent whatever days he had left rotting in a cell somewhere.
Annja flipped on the lights, wanting to better see the inside.
“Records?” she asked.
He gave a clipped laugh. “Never bothered with them. Lanh, neither. Not records on our…real dealings, anyway.”
She pointed to the skull bowl she’d left on the desk and fought a crashing wave of dizziness. “What do you know about that?”
“Oh, the skulls? Only that Lanh liked them. Said he put souvenirs from the war in them. Said he picked them up in the States before the war. Must have had a dozen of them. Talked to them like they were childhood imaginary friends. Rubbed them like a magic genie’s lamp and called them Papa Ghede.”
Annja nudged him up one aisle and down the next. She found eight more skull bowls among the treasures on the shelves, all filled with dried blood and dog tags. She forced him to carry some of them to the back room.
Free, she thought when she broke all of the seals.
There were eight bowls, plus the one on the desk made nine. And the one from the mountain made ten. Two were unaccounted for, if indeed he’d had a dozen. All of them were filled with dog tags.
She looked at the Sandman’s dog tag. Sanduski, Merle M., Catholic.
“Pretty demon, what did you do with that sword you were waving around?”
Annja shoved him into a chair.
“That sword looked old. I could probably find a buyer who’d give you a sweet dollar for it, pretty demon. Set it up for you if you let me walk out the door. I’ve only got a few weeks, anyway. I’ll be dead before any trial. No need to put me through that, huh?” He rubbed at a spot on his pant leg. “So, about that sword…”
She clocked him on the side of the head to knock him out and reached for the phone, calling the Chiang Mai consulate again because in her fuzziness it was the only number she could remember.
ANNJA WOKE UP TWO DAYS later in a hospital bed in the heart of Hue, Pete from the consulate at her side and three Americans in suits with him. “From the Ho Chi Minh consulate,” he explained, gesturing to them. “Some of the fellows I’d asked you to call.”
The room was simple, but at least it was private. The bed was small, and there was no television, radio or phone. Annja scowled at the IV drip in her bandaged arm.
“You lost a lot of blood,” Pete said. “And picked up a nasty infection. The nurse said you were covered with mud and blood when they brought you in.”
Annja would find out later just who brought her in and who called the authorities—probably Pete for the latter. “There were some unusual bowls in the antiques store. Made of skulls and—” Annja started to say.
“I don’t know anything about the antiques store, other than that you were found in it…along with a collection of U.S. servicemen’s dog tags that were turned over to the Ho Chi Minh consulate. Found more dog tags in a carry bag in a Jeep.”
“There was a man with me, in the antiques store.”
“Ah, that would be Mr. Merle Sanduski. I do know about him.” Pete rocked back on his heels. “He’s on the floor below you.”
“He’s a—”
“Crook. And a deserter from the military from a long time back.”
“A smuggler,” she said.
“I gathered that. There’s a guard outside his door, and they say he’s going to prison, probably for the rest of his life.”
For however many weeks he has left, Annja thought. “How about me? Am I going—”
“To prison?” Pete laughed. “I’ve no doubt that you should…for something. Quite a few bodies you leave in your wake. Are you sure you’re only an archaeologist? But they’re calling you a hero, stopping the biggest