Twenty-three. I’ll be there to make introductions.”
Janson nodded and started to peel off large-denomination drachmas, keeping his
hands under the counter. “The other half when I meet you in the morning.”
The seaman’s eyes danced. “Fair enough. But later, if the captain asks what you
paid me, leave a zero off. OK, my friend?”
“You’re a goddamn lifesaver,” Janson said.
The sailor wrapped his fingers around the roll of bills, appreciating their heft
and thickness, and smiled. “Anything else I can do for you?”
Janson shook his head distractedly, gripping his ring finger. “I’ll tell her I
was mugged.”
“You tell your wife an Albanian mugged you,” the seaman counseled. “Who wouldn’t
believe that?”
Later, at the Izmir airport, Janson couldn’t help but reflect on the curious
pattern of such ruses. People gave you their trust when you proclaimed just how
untrustworthy you were. Someone victimized by his own greed or lust was a
readier object of sympathy than someone who came on his bad luck honestly.
Standing shamefaced before a British tour guide, he trotted out a version of the
story he’d told the seaman.
“You shouldn’t have been cavorting with those dirty girls,” the tour
guide—pigeon-breasted, with shaggy, white-blond hair—was telling him. His grin
was less sporting than sadistic. “Naughty, naughty, naughty.” The man wore a
plastic badge with his name on it. Above it, printed in garish colors, was the
name and slogan of the cut-rate tour company that employed him: Holiday Express
Ltd.—a package of fun!
“I was drunk off my arse!” Janson protested, slipping into a lower-middle-class
Home Counties accent. “Bloody Turks. This girl promised me a ‘private show’—for
all I knew she was talking about belly dancing!”
“I’ll just bet,” the man replied with a leering smirk. “Such an innocent you
are.” After several days of having to jolly along his paid-up wards, he was
relishing the opportunity to stick it to a customer.
“But to leave me here! It was a packaged holiday, all right—but that wasn’t
supposed to be part of the package! Strand me here like they couldn’t give a
toss?”
“Happens. Happens. One of the lads goes on a binge or gets lost. You can’t
expect the whole group to miss the flight home because of one person. That’s not
reasonable, now, is it?”
“Sodding hell, I’ve been a complete bleedin’ idiot,” Janson said, remorse
creeping into his voice. “Lettin’ the little head do the thinking, not the big
one, if you see.”
” ‘Who among us?’ like the Good Book says,” the man replied, his tone softening.
“Now tell me the name again?”
“Cavanaugh. Richard Cavanaugh.” Lifting the name from a Holiday Express manifest
had taken him a full twenty minutes at a cybercafe on Kibris Sehitleri Street.
“Right. Dicky Cavanaugh takes a dirty holiday to Turkey and learns a lesson in
clean living.” Needling the hapless customer—one whose misadventures left him in
no position to file a complaint—seemed to amuse him no end.
Janson glowered.
The platinum-haired man called the Izmir affiliate of Thomas Cook Travel on his
Vodaphone and explained the customer’s predicament, leaving out the interesting
parts. He repeated the name twice. He remained on the line for ten minutes,
doing progressively less talking and more listening.
He shook his head, laughing, after he hung up. “Hah! They think you’ve arrived
at Stansted two hours ago, with your group.”
“Bloody hell?” Janson looked incredulous.
“Happens,” the man said philosophically, savoring his own worldliness. “Happens.
The manifest says a tour group of twenty is arriving, nobody wants to redo all
the paperwork, so the computer thinks all twenty’s accounted for. Couldn’t
happen on commercial service, but charter airlines are a bit dodgier. Oops—don’t
tell the boss I said that. ‘Cut-rate prices for a top-rate experience,’ is what
we like to say. If the computer was right, you’d be larking about in your
optician’s shop at Uxbridge, instead of quaking in your boots in bloody Izmir
and wondering if you’re ever going to see home and hearth again.” A sidewise
glance. “Any good, was she?”
“What?”
“The bird. Was she any good?”
Janson was abashed. “That’s the tragic part, see. I was too pissed to remember.”
The man gave him a quick squeeze on the shoulder. “I think I can fix things for
you this time,” he said. “But mind you, we’re not in the dirty-holiday business.
Keep it in your trousers, mate. Like my girl says, careful you don’t poke
someone’s eye out.” He roared with laughter at his own coarse wit. “And you with
a bloody spectacles shop!”
“We prefer to call it a ‘vision center,’ ” Janson said frostily, settling into
the role of the proud shopkeeper. “You sure I’m not going to have any problems
getting off in Stansted?”
The tour director spoke in a low voice. “No, see, that’s what I’m trying to tell
you. Holiday Express is going to make sure there’s no snags. You take my
meaning? We’re going to help you out.”
Janson nodded gratefully, although he knew what was really motivating the sudden
show of altruism—the dismay that the tour guide’s call must have precipitated in
the firm’s offices. Janson’s stratagem, as it was meant to, had put the company
in a bind: officials of a packaged-holiday company had plainly misinformed
British customs that one Richard Cavanaugh, of 43 Culvert Lane, Uxbridge, had
arrived in the United Kingdom. The only way to avoid an audit of its activities
and a review of its license was to make sure that Richard Cavanaugh did arrive
in the United Kingdom, and without the sort of data trail that could lead to
awkward questions about careless business practices. The temporary papers that
the pigeon-breasted man was drawing up for him—Urgent Transport/Airline
Personnel—were a crude recourse, normally reserved for transportation involving
medical emergencies, but they would do the job. Holiday Express would tidy up an
embarrassing little slipup, and “Dickie” Cavanaugh would be home by suppertime.
The tour guide chuckled as he gave Janson the sheath of yellow-orange pages.
“Too bloody pissed to remember, what? Makes you want to break down and cry,
don’t it?”
A small chartered plane took them to Istanbul, where, after a two-hour layover,
they changed to a bigger charter plane that would carry three separate Holiday
Express tour groups to Stansted Airport, just north of London. At each junction,
Cavanaugh waved the yellow stapled pages he’d been given in Izmir, and a
representative of the packaged-holiday company personally escorted him on board.
The word had plainly come down from the head office: take care of this berk, or
there would be hell to pay.
It was a three-hour flight, and the Uxbridge optician, sullied by his offshore
adventure, kept to himself, his look of hapless self-absorption repelling any
attempts at conversation. The few who heard his story saw only a tight-assed
shopkeeper vowing that his indiscretions would be left behind in the Orient.
Somewhere over Europe, eyes shuttered, Janson drowsed, and eventually let
himself succumb to sleep, even though he knew well the old ghosts that would
stir.
It was three decades ago, and it was now. It was in a jungle far away, and it
was here. Janson had returned from the debacle of Noc Lo to Demarest’s office in
base camp, without even stopping to clean up. He had been told that the
lieutenant commander wanted to see him immediately.
The stench and stains of battle still on his clothing, Janson stood before
Demarest, who sat pensively at his desk. A medieval plainsong—an eerily simple
and slow progression of notes—emerged from small speakers.
Finally, Demarest looked up at him. “Do you know what just happened out there?”
“Sir?”
“If it doesn’t mean anything, it happened for no reason. That’s not a universe
you want to live in. You’ve got to make it mean something.”
“As I told you before, it was like they knew we were coming, sir.”
“Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?”
“You didn’t—don’t—seem surprised, sir.”
“Surprised? No. That was my null hypothesis—the prediction that I was testing.
But I had to know for sure. Noc Lo was, among other things, an experiment. If
one were to file plans for an incursion with the local ARVN liaison to Military
Assistance Command-Vietnam, what consequences could one expect? What are the
information relays that lead back to the local insurgency? There’s only one way
to test these things. And now we’ve learned something. We have an enemy that is
committed to our root-and-branch destruction—committed with all its heart and
soul and mind. And on our side? A lot of transplanted bureaucrats who think
they’re working for the Tennessee Valley Authority or some damn thing. A few
hours ago, son, you narrowly escaped with your life. Was Noc Lo a defeat, or a
victory? It’s not so easy to say, is it?”
“Sir, it did not taste like victory. Sir.”
“Hardaway died, I said, because he was weak. You lived, as I knew you would,
because you were strong. Strong like your dad—second wave of the landing on Red