The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [61]
Christopher described his flight through the apothecary shop. “The kid in the street must have thought I was a burglar when I came out of that crack in the wall” he said. “I hit him to make him let go of my arm.”
“I know these things mean something to you,” Wolkowicz said. “I was bullshitting you about your killing him—all he’s got is some busted teeth and maybe a slipped disc or two in his neck.”
“I know. I saw him get up.”
“And then the car blew up while you were still half a block away from it,” Wolkowicz said. “I don’t understand that.”
“They wired the door on the driver’s side. A Chinese kid ran ahead and yanked it open—he wanted to do me some damage. The priest saw me check under the hood when I was out there last night. You have to open the door to open the hood.”
“The cops think there must have been a kilo of plastique in the car. I guess you’re immortal, just like Patchen’s always said.”
“I was surprised that they were so public about it—why not wait until I was asleep in the hotel?”
“Maybe they thought you’d done enough talking. What did you say to them, anyway?”
Christopher’s hearing continued to clear; when Wolkowicz shook his glass, he heard the ice cubes rattle.
“They’re doing something with heroin,” Christopher said. “Jean-Baptiste Ho is an addict, but for some reason his church is the depot. That country is VC-controlled. They bring in the raw opium from Laos, Cambodia—wherever it’s grown. Luong told me there’s a tunnel complex under the village. They keep it there. It’s crazy, but that’s the way they’re doing it. They store it under the church.”
“Did you confirm any of this?”
“The tunnels, yes. I saw the priest’s woman disappear through the floor.”
“Opium isn’t heroin.”
“Tom Webster thinks they’re trying to buy the technology in Marseilles. Have you seen that traffic?”
“Yeah, I read the cables—two million bucks through Lebanon. But why take all the risk?”
“They figure they’re going to have a big market in-country pretty soon,” Christopher said. “The Yanks are coming.”
“That’s speculation—garbage,” Wolkowicz said.
Christopher shrugged. “Okay, Barney.”
“What’s their objective? They’ve got enough money not to have to take chances like that.”
“What chances? Jean-Baptiste is a member of the family— he’s not going to talk,” Christopher said. “If the police or the ARVN come smelling around, they’ll see them coming ten miles away. They can blow those tunnels in thirty seconds.”
“Thanks to you, they’re probably moving the stuff out right now.”
“Maybe. It doesn’t matter. They’ll do it some way—they’re not in it to make a profit,” Christopher said. “They want to send a few thousand junkies back to the States when all this is over. That’s the purpose.”
Wolkowicz tossed melting ice from his glass into his mouth and chewed it. “Why?” he asked.
“They think we killed Diem and Nhu,” Christopher said. “They think we ought to pay for that.”
Wolkowicz walked across the room and came back with a handful of ice cubes and a bottle of bourbon. He dropped ice into the glasses and filled them with whiskey. Handing Christopher one of the dark-brown drinks, Wolkowicz beckoned him to follow and walked out of the house. The garden was surfaced with gravel, so that Wolkowicz could hear footsteps approaching in the night. In the center of the garden was its only ornament, a bed of flowers surrounding an aviary. Wolkowicz paused by the cage and made kissing noises at the sleeping birds.
“You ought to come out in the daylight and have a look,” he said. “Some of these birds are really pretty—they don’t sing worth a shit, though.”
Christopher sipped bourbon; his hands were steadier than they had been in the first hour or two after the explosion.
“Now that we’re in the open air, how about coming clean?” Wolkowicz said.
“You’re the only man I know who goes outside to get away from his own bugs,” Christopher said.
“I think you told the