The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  Senator Karp had a divided face like a broken baked apple upon which some joker had dropped a false moustache. He was short and overweight yet actually wore sideburns. “The reason I called you yesterday to come up here today,” Karp said, “was about a young man I’d like you to see because—”

  “What?”

  “He’s getting set to leave the CIA and—”

  “What?”

  “He is Herbert Ryan Willmott’s nephew. The only nephew.”

  “You couldn’t tell me this on the phone? You couldn’t put it in a letter? I didn’t even feel like coming in today.”

  “His name is Hobart Willmott Simms.”

  “It sounds like a colored undertaker.”

  “Did you ever hear of Ataturk, J.D.? Or King Harold Godwin?”

  “No.”

  “That’s the whole point. Many vitally important people exist of whom neither of us has never heard.”

  “Important to you or important to me?”

  “At present only to me. After you meet him, to you.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants you to make a couple of hundred million dollars. Maybe more.”

  Mr. Palladino blew three perfect smoke rings. “Yeah?”

  “He’s a remarkable young fellow.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You have to meet him on the nine-fifteen Staten Island ferry to St. George tomorrow morning. He’ll know you.”

  “With a gorgeous layout like this I should meet him on a ferryboat?”

  “He thinks you’ll have a harder time bugging the conversation on a ferryboat.”

  “What kind of crap is that?”

  “And if you don’t want the couple of hundred million,” Senator Karp said, “humor him anyway. He’s—uh—very special CIA.”

  8

  February–March 1971

  In the winter of 1971 a Viet Cong courier made a routine stop for information at the back door of Happiness City, which had just closed for the night in Saigon. He accepted a funny cigarette from Big Lickie, the bar madam. The courier spoke Tonkinese. Lickie spoke Annamese. Their comprehension was about the same as in a conversation between a Vermonter and an Alabaman. After they had covered how much the courier’s feet hurt, he said, “If you hear of anybody who has anything to do with Long Nose troop assignments, let me know.”

  “What’s troop assignments?”

  “You know—somebody who moves the grunts from one unit to the other.”

  “I have the man!” Lickie said with amazement.

  “Who?”

  “I have the master sergeant who is the Chief Clerk there, that’s all.”

  “The chief clerk?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What does he like that he can’t get so that we can get it for him and he’ll owe us?”

  “It’s so easy you’ll never believe it.” Lickie chuckled out a St. Nicholas effect and shook when she laughed like a bowl full of jelly. “You’ll never believe it—Soochow cunt.”

  “No kidding?”

  “That’s all he ever talks about. And he can never get close to the kind he really likes.”

  “What kind?”

  “A top Soochow professional. I know—they all say they’re from Soochow—but I mean a real old-fashioned mechanic with a hip line of chatter, thick with rice powder who is also a looker.”

  “You can’t get that for him?”

  “Of course I could get it for him. But this guy fucks all the time. Why should I let him tie up his money in one Soochow hooker when I got two dozen of my own little chicks around the bar depending on me? It wouldn’t be worth it to fix him up.”

  “Well, that’s great.”

  “When do you want him?”

  “I’ll have to find out. I’ll tell you tomorrow night.”

  “It certainly ought to be worth ten thousand piastres. I’ll be doing everything. I’ll have to find the right hooker. I’ll have to coach her. I’ll have to lift the sergeant on. It won’t be easy.”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow night.”

  The next night they settled on three thousand piastres as Lickie’s fee. “How much time do we allow for the girl to break him in?” the courier said.

  “Three months.”

  “Forget it.”

  “The girl has to build confidence. The sergeant has to have a chance to fall in love. The girl has to establish that he makes her ecstatically happy and so forth.”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow night.”

  The following night the courier told Lickie she could have two months.

  “Okay. Give me the list of guys,” Lickie demanded.

  “Now?”

  “Of course now. This guy is on top of an operation where everybody in the fucking army wants to be his pal because he has the power to keep them alive, fahcrissake. The girl has to talk about these guys like they were friends of her sisters or something. Why is everything always an argument? It takes time so when the time comes to make the switches he’ll be all set up.”

  “Okay. Tomorrow night.”

  The courier brought back the list of seven names. Lickie copied the list before she went to bed. At noon the next day she sent a note to an American colonel who was an old friend. The colonel, a man with busy eyes and noisy bones that snapped and popped with every move he made, came in through the side door at three peeyem. He looked like a Bedlington terrier. Lickie brought him two cold Cokes.

  “I think I have something you’ll want to buy, Colonel,” she said.

  “Show me.”

  Lickie told him the story about how the Cong wanted seven men shifted out of the Three Platoon, Bravo Company in the 414th, and seven other men switched in. The colonel’s eyebrows shot up under his hairline.

  “You wanna buy?” Lickie asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Ten thousand piastres?”

  “Nothing is worth that, Lickie, and you know it.”

  “How much?”

  “Three.”

  They settled for forty-seven hundred. Lickie gave him the list. The colonel asked if Little Carmen from Ba Nihn was still around. “Oh, yes,” Lickie said. “She talks about you all the time. Come on upstairs.”

  On his way back to Intelligence headquarters, the colonel was feeling so good that he stopped off for an aperitif at a large sidewalk café on the main boulevard. It was crowded, but he got a table in the front row. He ordered a St. Raphael and sat soaking up the sun. A pedo came roaring past. The man on it threw a plastique into the crowd on the café terrace. Both the colonel’s legs were blown off. He was DOA. The orderlies found the list in his tunic pocket, but it was meaningless to everyone in the Intelligence unit and was thrown away.

  Master Sergeant Lamar Breitel did like a certain kind of Chinese woman. He sat with Lickie at the bar of Happiness City the next afternoon and said, “They have class, that’s all. They are women, not girls. Shit, Lickie, I like Annamese women, you know that. But I am saying Chinese women—and I speak now about your top Soochow professional—they just happen to know where sex is.”

  “What they tole you?”

  “They say sex isn’t just a cheap thrill.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know her name.”

  “Thass shit. Chinese girl can’t make it wit’ you. They say you smell like a corpse, alla meat you eat.”

  “Me?” He rammed his forefinger into his chest and stepped back from the bar. She reached out with an arm like the Michelin tire trademark and pulled him back. “Not jes’ you. Alla Long Noses. Chinese girl say you stink.”

  “Do you think I stink?” he demanded, uptight.

  “How do I know? Now I eat meat all time. Now I stink.”

  “Well this certain Soochow professional certainly didn’t think I stunk. Man, she loved it. She measured it out with her hands afterward how our guys had more length and strength and width and depth and heft. I mean—what is your itty-bitty Chinese guy next to your average American? I
mean, we are hung. That is a natural fact. Jesus, I wish I could take you out to the Company shower room.”

  “Quit it, Sarge,” Lickie said. “You gettin’ me all hot.” She yawned daintily. “Buy me a drink fahcrissake.” She licked out the inside of the shot glass with her famous silver tongue.

  “You know how the Chinese people really know food?” Breitel asked. “Well, that’s how a great Soochow hooker knows sex.”

  In a hapless, commercial kind of way Sergeant Breitel was a big stud. If he wasn’t balling or talking about it he didn’t know he was there. He spent every cent he could get lining up women. Lickie delivered the best, even if they all had a tendency to look alike to him.

  “How much you pay?” Lickie asked.

  “For a really highly trained, gorgeous Chinese woman, I mean trained in Soochow since childhood, who is capable of falling in love with me?” Sergeant Breitel was twenty two.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d have to see her first.”

  “Okay.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe tomorrow night.”

  Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon, had been a city all by itself before the war. It was four miles away from the Happiness City Bar. Cholon was more Chinese than any treaty port. There were over nine hundred thousand Chinese in Cholon, all either first- or second-generation immigrants, nearly all of them from South China seaports. Since the Han emperors more than two thousand years ago, the Chinese south had been the home of lost causes and hot tempers; the cradle of political change.

  Lickie sent a silent, white-haired Chinese man to take Sergeant Breitel to the restaurant in Cholon. They rode out together in a bus that had chicken wire over the windows to keep the grenades out. There were more chickens than passengers and three small piglets. They walked the last three blocks. The streets were packed with people, the men naked to the waist, the women in the black trousers and white short-sleeved jackets of South China. Breitel drew in his breath like warm soup through clenched teeth when a heavily painted concubine passed by under an umbrella held by her mu-tsai, a slave girl whose hair hung down her back. Coolies, naked except for loin cloths, shoved past him wearing wallets threaded to belts that held them to the small of the back where the skin is especially sensitive to touch.

  The restaurant was a high Canton-style building in the rue des Mariniers. The lower floor was a café that smelled of dried fish and herbs. Upstairs there was a common dining room. On the floor above that the room had been partitioned halfway to the ceiling into cabinets particuliers. Each private room had half-height swinging doors like old-time American saloons.

  She was the most gorgeous thing he had ever seen: rice powder, heavy makeup over that, the ceremonial hookers’ costume, fan, everything in the total Soochow realism. He got an instant erection he could not lose. Her name was Alice Choy. Her English was better than Lickie’s.

  “Are you really Soochow-trained?” he asked eagerly, after the presentation.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Were you a child slave there? I mean—you know—from when you were a little kid or something?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I mean, like did you have to let big, you know, men—like when you weren’t practically old enough to go to school?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Late that night, after he had fallen in love, after she had demonstrated for all time that he had been absolutely right to hold out for a real Soochow hooker, she confided that her mother had been a famous Dutch cellist, Dame Maria van Slyke, who had given herself to Alice’s father, a Manchurian war lord. Later, her mother and father had had a tragic argument after Alice was born, over whether Alice’s feet should be bound or not. Winning the argument, Alice’s mother had left China but had sold Alice to Soochow to be raised and trained in the oldest profession, just to embarrass the father. Lickie may have gone a little far in building that story, Alice had complained to her at first, but Lickie reassured her, “This is an American,” Lickie said. “They believe anything, particularly anything they want to believe.” In fact, his new knowledge about Alice’s parentage set Sergeant Breitel on fire. He was exultant. Exultant! A Eurasian princess! Her Dad was a war lord! And she had hands that were lovelier than any hands he had ever seen. Secretly, Sergeant Breitel was a hand man. Thirty-seven nights later, on a special family request from Alice, Sergeant Breitel transferred seven men out of the Third Platoon, Bravo Company, 414th Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 9th Light Infantry Brigade of the Colombio Division. In their place he dropped the seven men of Alice’s choice. They were fiancés of Alice’s step-sisters.

  “But, baby,” he protested, “if these guys are gonna be family, this is dangerous duty. Infantry is no place—I mean—that is where combat is.”

  She tickled him softly along the bottom of his penis. “You know you’re getting a Soochow accent?” she giggled.

  A Tech Sergeant named John Kullers was doing the dullest of all Intelligence work, checking troop transfer reports out of Headquarters Company in Saigon. That was all he did, so he was used to it and he never got sleepy because he had nothing to contrast it with. He went over the rosters for Three Platoon, Bravo Company, 414th Battalion for the third time. After a while he thought he had figured out what was wrong, so he got up and took the previous week’s rosters out of the file. When he had compared the two he went in to see Lieutenant Downs.

  “I got a peculiar thing here, Lieutenant,” Kullers said.

  “What?”

  “I got here seven men transferred out of Three Platoon, Bravo Company, 414th Battalion. Nothing unusual, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But—hoHO!—where do the seven men come from who are transferred into that platoon? Lemme tell you. First, to answer my own question backwards. They are nothing but ordinary grunts who are gonna be moved out inna field. But—hoHO!—evvey one a these seven guys is bein’ transferred out from Stateside installations.”

  “Were they requested? I mean did the Headquarters Company ask for them by name?”

  “I gotta query that. I’ll go look at the orders.”

  He left the lieutenant, but he returned in ten minutes, fairly excited because nothing unusual ever happened in his duty.

  “Yes, sir. By name. Six dogfaces one officer. Each guy is flown—like some as far away as New York—to Saigon. What for? To do what five hundred thousand other guys already in Saigon could do—to get shot at.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well—mine not to figure it out. You know? But there is something fishy here, Lieutenant.”

  “Where did the guys go who were transferred out of Three Platoon?”

  “Like next door. They’re working, if you know what I mean. Guys get transferred out and guys get transferred in alla time, but nobody requests six dogfaces and a lieutenant from like the East coast, if you know what I mean.”

  “Leave it with me.” Kullers turned to go. “No, wait. Go down to the computer room and get me a profile on every man on that list.”

  “Yessir, Lieutenant.”

  Lieutenant Downs took the file in to see Captain Maas at 2:45 P.M., just three hours later. “I got a real puzzler here, Captain,” he said. “I mean, nobody but Sergeant Kullers could even have stumbled on this, but he used to be a Skip Tracer and he is keen, I mean he is something.”

  “Whaddee git?” Captain Maas was short, slow and sometimes difficult to understand, especially when he lapsed into the speech of what he claimed was Lufkin, Texas.

  “Seven men transferred out of a platoon of thirty-five men—that’s a two-squad platoon?—all seven of them from the same squad—then their replacements were flown in from Stateside, five of them from as far away as New York?”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “So I run a check on these seven Stateside men and—funny thing—every one except two of them is an ex-convict. You know? I mean here are five guys all of who done time for armed robbery.”

  “Well, holy shit, Downs.”


  “Yeah.”

  “Any officers?”

  “One.”

  “Well, he ain’t no convict.”

  “Worse than that, Captain. I mean the implications. He’s Academy.”

  “Well, for crissake.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lemme tay yew Academy mixed up with a buncha convicts purely worries the shit outa me.” He raised his voice to carry outside his office. “Sergeant Mount will you please do somepin about this air conditioning’?”

  “It’s worse than that, Captain.”

  “Worse?”

  “There’s a man Albert Cassebeer in this roster. Cassebeer’s an experimental physicist. Now just how do we figure that out?”

  “I donno whut it is, but you cain’t beat it fer bayd,” Maas said. “Gimme that file. I gotta take that inuh Colonel Purcell.”

  He took the file from Lieutenant Downs, shaking his head. He kept going right past Downs and walked out into the compound toward Colonel Purcell’s dug-out. They always identified things with World War I terms where they could because the Navy was always calling the walls “bulkheads” and toilets “the head.”

  “Be till tomorrow morning fore they can get a man in to fix this air conditioning, Captain,” Sergeant Mount said.

  “Shit!” Captain Maas said.

  He laid the case out in front of Lieutenant-Colonel Lucius Purcell. He was the commander of the section and the only professional soldier, professional Intelligence wizard and career Army man on the floor. He was on his way to full colonel and he bragged that he would be sent right back to Asia to head up a combat regiment.

  He studied the file.

  “What is the recommended action, sir?” Maas said. He felt that if he didn’t call Purcell “sir,” Purcell would just whack him across the chops.

  “This is the recommended action, Captain Maas,” Purcell said. “We’re going to fly Dr. Baum and the three colonels out there and we are going to have one of these seven men de-briefed.”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “The situation warrants it.”

  “We’ll be up the creek if that man doesn’t survive it, Colonel,” Maas said. “I am sayin’ he hastuh suvvive it. If we gonna find out anything here all seven men got to stay intact.”