“You guys could do it,” McBride said.
“I’m thirty-seven,” Wu said. “That makes me too old to try because I’m too young to die.”
“You guys could do it,” McBride said stubbornly.
“We called somebody we know in Zurich,” Durant said. “He goes in and out of Saigon.”
“Jesus, you didn’t tell him about the whole thing, did you?”
“We told him just enough,” Wu said. “No more.”
Durant stared at McBride. “He wouldn’t touch it, not even for half.”
“You tell him how much half was?”
“We told him.”
McBride gave his lower lip a couple of bites. “Well, shit,” he said again. He looked at Durant and then at Wu. “Why don’t you look at it like this. Maybe you can’t get in this year — or maybe even next. But at the end of a couple of years they’re gonna have diplomatic relations with Nam again. Hell, you know it and I know it. They’re already talking about it. So why don’t you look at it as a long-term investment? For five thousand bucks you can have everything — my ten percent, the map, everything. Then when things calm down, hell, maybe even three years from now, you can find some asshole on the embassy staff and cut a deal with him. Even if you cut it fifty-fifty, you’d still be a million bucks ahead.”
Eddie McBride had been selling, something that he didn’t do very well and, worse, knew that he didn’t. The effort had made his armpits sweat, and they felt cold and damp and nasty. They can probably smell it, he thought. Even from where I’m sitting they can probably smell it.
Durant fished an unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He looked at it for a moment with something like revulsion, then sighed, put it into his mouth, and lit it with a disposable lighter.
“You’re forgetting something, Eddie,” Durant said.
“What?”
“There were two of you, right?”
“Yeah, two of us.”
“Who was he?”
“Some spook. He’d been out in the boonies and he came in at the last moment and they assigned him the money.”
“And you were shotgun?” Wu said.
“That’s right.”
“Was it his idea?” Durant said.
McBride stared at them for a moment. “I was a Marine sergeant. He was a CIA heavy. Who the fuck’s idea do you think it was?”
Wu blew a smoke ring. “And you were to split it how — fifty-fifty?”
“Yeah.”
“When?” Durant said.
“He said we’d work it out.”
“How?” Wu said, and blew another smoke ring and stuck his right forefinger through it.
“He said he had some connections that he was leaving behind.”
“Did you believe him?” Durant said.
McBride took another swallow of beer. “No.”
“So how much did you take out with you?” Wu said.
“We both grabbed about twenty thousand.”
Durant nodded as if that were sensible. “Then what?”
“It was fucking panic after that. The slopes were coming over the goddamned walls. I was on the last chopper out.”
“And the spook?” Wu said.
McBride shook his head. “We were supposed to let everything simmer down and then meet here in L.A. Six months ago — January fifteenth. We were going to meet in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He didn’t show on the fifteenth — or the sixteenth, or the seventeenth. He just didn’t show. I spent a month in that lobby.”
“Did you try to find him?” Durant said.
It was a pained look that McBride gave Durant, who shrugged and said, “Maybe more to the point, did he ever try to find you?”
“I just told you that. No.”
Durant put his cigarette out. He did it carefully, and while he was doing it and without looking up he said, “What was his name?”
“Who?”
“The spook.”
“Why?”
Durant shrugged. “Maybe it might be worth something.”
“Who to?”
“To you,” Wu said, and blew another smoke ring, a fat one. It was time to be smart, McBride told himself. The trouble is that you’re just smart enough to know that, but not smart enough to do anything about it.
“How much?” he said.
“This jam you’re in,” Durant said. “How bad is it?”
“Bad.”
“You’re in how deep?”
“Five thousand.”
“And you’re what, a week behind?”
“Almost two. Two, Saturday. Noon.”
“Who’s the shylock?”
“Solly Gesini.”
“Jesus,” Wu said.
Durant looked at him. “You know him?”
“I’ve heard of him,” Wu said. “He’s the worst, the real basement.”
“Is he lined up with anybody?” Durant said.
McBride shrugged. “Solly drops a lot of names. He’s always talking about all the Wop gongos he knows in Chicago or Miami or Vegas or someplace.”
Durant studied McBride for several moments. He looks exactly like what the taxpayers pray that the Marine Corps looks like, he thought. Not too tall, not too heavy, and tough without being mean. Fairly competent, maybe even half clever, but certainly not brilliant. Presentable, almost handsome, but far from pretty. It’s Eddie McBride, the can-do kid, the perfect embodiment of the American ideal that lies somewhere between a shorter Gary Cooper and a taller Steve McQueen.
“You weren’t too smart, Eddie,” Durant said finally.
“Smart?” McBride said. “Smart’s got nothing to do with it. Nobody goes to a loan shark because it’s the smart thing to do. They go because they’re desperate. They go because they got no place else to go.”
He jerked his head at the newsprinter. “You guys,” he said. “You guys take a chance every now and then, don’t you?”
Durant nodded.
“Okay, and the bigger the risk the bigger the payoff, right? Sure. You can look it up. Well, you take a risk when you go to a loan shark, too. You know that something awful’s gonna happen to you if you don’t pay ’em back, but it’s not as awful as what’s gonna happen if you don’t get the money. You follow me?”
“So what’s going to happen to you, Eddie?” Wu said.
McBride bent over and pulled up his pants leg, peeled down his sock and pointed to his Achilles tendon. “They’re going to cut it,” he said, “right about there.”
Durant sighed. “How much would it cost to keep you from getting cut?”
“A thousand.”
“That would keep you out of trouble for how long?”
“A week, maybe two.”
“That’s not long.”
McBride snorted. “If you’ve been living the way I’ve been living, a week’s forever.”
He watched as some silent message passed between Wu and Durant. Wu shrugged slightly, reached into his pocket, and brought out a flat, thick, folded sheaf of bills that were pressed together by an oversized solid-silver paper clip. Wu counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills and then ten fifties, folded them lengthwise, and almost, but not quite, offered them to McBride.
“Who was the spook, Eddie?” Wu said.
McBride swallowed. Then he cleared his throat before speaking, because he was again afraid that what he was going to say would come out high or maybe even squeaky.
“He had a funny name.”
Wu waved the sheaf of bills, not much, just a little. “So.”
“Childester,” McBride said. “Luke Childester.”
Wu handed him the money without comment. Durant leaned back on the couch, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. He seemed thoughtful.
“I... I don’t know when I can pay you guys back,” McBride said.
“That’s for services rendered,” Durant said, still staring up at the ceiling. “We took up your time and time’s worth something, so we pay for it.”