The sarge called out, “Frank?”
Frank lifted his Coke in salute and smiled, just a little, and his old friend Nate Atkins beamed at him and made a beeline.
Nate sat and grinned and said, “You’re too old to get drafted. What the fuck are you doing on this turf?”
“Thought maybe you could recommend a good Thai banker.”
Nate blinked a couple times. “Got a major deposit to make?”
“Yeah. A major deposit. And maybe a sergeant major deposit, too.”
Nate liked the sound of that. He gestured to the dingy, debauched surroundings. “What do you think of the place?”
“All the comforts of home. Soul food with dope on the side and a blow job for dessert. You’re not still in the service...?”
“No! Hell no.” He gestured to the uniform. “This is just to make the fellas feel comfortable. So I heard about Bumpy. You taking over for him, or what?”
“What. Protection’s out.”
“But you’re still moving powder.”
“Yeah. And I want to move some more.” He flicked half a smile at his old friend. “I hear the quality is high, your neck of the woods. Rumor or fact?”
Nate’s brown eyes, always alert, took on a sharpness. He got up easily, saying, “You got a few minutes? Let me make a call.”
Frank sat at the same table with Nate, but they had two guests, a couple of young Thai wise guys in sportshirts with big pointed collars and too much gold jewelry.
The conversation going on right now was in the Thai language, which Frank didn’t understand; but he trusted Nate, a shirttail relation from North Carolina.
A skinny, dead-eyed Thai punk asked Nate, “He say how much stuff he wants?”
Nate, also speaking Thai, said, “He said ‘a lot.’ What that means I don’t know. Four or five keys, maybe.”
Both Thai hoods studied Frank like he was a modern art painting they were trying to comprehend.
Then the skinny Thai said, “And he’s your cousin.”
“My cousin-in-law,” Nate said by way of full disclosure. “My ex-wife’s cousin, actually. But he’s family to me. I trust him.”
The Thai kid thought about that. Then he said to Nate, “Ask your cousin-in-law how much he wants.”
Nate asked Frank.
Frank said, “A hundred kilos.”
Now it was Nate studying Frank like modern art.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Frank?” Nate asked.
“Am I known for my sense of humor, Nate?”
The next day, pushing through the paradise-for-pickpockets throng on the sidewalk along a row of steamy food stalls, Frank and Nate walked and talked.
“No one I know can get that much,” Nate said.
“I heard you were connected.”
“I am connected. I know every gook gangster in town, and that’s a lot of gook gangsters. I know every goddamn black soldier in the Army from the cooks to the colonels, and on up.”
“Good to hear.”
They stopped and bought mangos from a vendor, and munched as they went on.
“Well,” Nate said reflectively, “I suppose I could piece together that many keys, from different suppliers. But ain’t none of it gonna be one-hundred percent pure.”
Frank shook his head. “Then I don’t want it. Not what I want.”
Nate grunted in exasperation. “I know that. I see where you’re comin’ from, my man. I just do not think it’s possible, without risking floating facedown in one of these fuckin’ canals.”
“It’s my risk.”
“It’s my risk, too!”
“If you want to get rich, it is.”
Nate bit into the mango. “Means dealing with the Chiu-Chou syndicates in Cholon or Saigon... if they’ll even deal with your stateside ass.”
But Frank was shaking his head. “No. Not good enough.”
Nate’s jaw dropped, part in reaction, part for effect. “What the fuck...?”
Frank was still shaking his head. “Too late. It’s been chopped. I want to get it where they get it. From the source.”
Nate slowed, and Frank didn’t. Catching up, the big man eyeballed his old friend and then started laughing. “Pullin’ my chain, right?”
Frank’s eyes said Wrong.
Astounded, Nate managed, “You’re gonna get it. Your own self.”
Frank shrugged with his face. “Why not? Good shit in life don’t come around to hand itself to you. You got to go after it.”
Nate tossed the mango pit in the gutter. “You mean you’re gonna go into the fuckin’ jungle like fuckin’ Tarzan?”
Frank shrugged. “I lived in jungles all my life, Nate. Where I lived, fuckin’ Tarzan wouldn’ta made it.”
Nate put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and stopped him, right there on the sidewalk, making a thousand people walk around the ex-soldier and the tourist. “No, you don’t get it. This isn’t a jungle. This shit is the jungle. Tigers. Vietcong. Fuckin’ snakes alone will kill you!”
Frank raised an eyebrow. “And how is that different from Harlem?”
Khaki-clad Frank felt like he was leading the goddamn Dirty Dozen, so motley a bunch were these Thai thugs and black soldiers, riding mules with shoulder-slung automatic weapons through jungle dense as a pussy patch. Funny thing was, he was enjoying himself, arrayed with pistol, rifle and ammo bandolier like a bronze Pancho Villa.
Days had passed since he’d sold Nate on the plan. They’d ridden in trucks and on boats and up and down every damn river in the Golden Triangle, as far as he could tell. And now they were about to arrive at the opium farm where Frank would do the deal that would change everything back home, that would make Bumpy Johnson a footnote in the Frank Lucas story.
If Frank didn’t get himself killed, instead.
Right now they were under a pleasantly cooling canopy of foliage thick enough to blot out the sun. He could see the sunlight ahead, the light at the end of this tunnel, and when the canopy finally opened up, Frank Lucas found himself breathing in a syrupy sweet scent and staring down at a green-dotted-purple poppy field the size of Manhattan.
They stopped here and Nate had a confab with a Thai mercenary in the native gibberish. Frank waited for Nate to translate.
“He says,” Nate said, “this whole area’s controlled by the Kuomintang — Chiang Kai-Shek’s army. Defeated army...”
Frank nodded. “They’re on guard down there.” He’d already spotted the Chinese soldiers with their outdated weapons. “But what about those boys — they ain’t Chinese.”
He was indicating a handful of white sentries in camouflage jumpsuits, Americans probably, with weapons that were real up-to-date.
Nate said, “CIA, likely.”
“Is that a problem?”
“I don’t know. Let’s see.”
Nate dispatched the Thai he’d spoken to before, sending him down to talk to the Chinese guerrillas, having no idea how the American spooks would figure in.
But all went well. Before long Frank and Nate were in a natural cavern the size of an airplane hangar, which Frank gathered was a major processing center. In this rocky cathedral, Frank and Nate used their Thai point man to translate a negotiation with what turned out to be a vanquished Chinese general.
Not that this shit didn’t get tense: Thais with CIA advisors guarded Frank and Nate and their boy, while the Chinese and their CIA advisors guarded the guards.
Pretty soon Frank found himself in a bamboo dwelling that was goddamn nice for a shack, sitting opposite the general at a desk where the mucky-muck sorted through Frank’s papers — passport, visa, bank receipts and the really important paper: cash. Lots and lots of cash...