'Okay.'
'But he send Drake Ko a damn long personal message all the same.'
Charlie Marshall breathed in, on and on, as if his little breast could scarcely hold enough air to feed him. 'That Lizzie. She some woman. Lizzie, she go personally to Drake Ko herself. Also on a very private basis. And she say to him: Mr Ko, you gotta take the heat off Ric. That's a very delicate situation there, Voltaire. We all got to hold on to each other tight or we fall off the crazy mountain top, hear me? Voltaire, let me go. I beg! I completely beg for Christ's sake, je m'abîme, hear me? That's all I know!'
Watching him, listening to his racked outburst, how he collapsed and rallied and broke again and rallied less, Jerry felt he was witnessing the last martyred writhing of a friend. His instinct was to lead Charlie slowly and let him ramble. His dilemma was that he didn't know how much time he had before whatever happens to an addict happened. He asked questions but often Charlie didn't seem to hear them. At other times he appeared to answer questions Jerry hadn't put. And sometimes a delayed action mechanism threw out an answer to a question which Jerry had long abandoned. At Sarratt, the inquisitors said, a broken man was dangerous because he paid you money he didn't have in order to buy your love. But for whole precious minutes Charlie could pay nothing at all.
'Drake Ko never went to Vientiane in his life!' Charlie yelled suddenly. 'You crazy, Voltaire! A big guy like Ko bothering with a dirty little Asian town? Drake Ko some philosopher, Voltaire! You wanna watch that guy pretty careful!' Everyone, it seemed, was some philosopher — or everyone but Charlie Marshall. 'In Vientiane nobody even heard Ko's name! Hear me, Voltaire?'
At another point, Charlie Marshall wept and seized Jerry's hands and enquired between sobs whether Jerry also had had a father.
'Yes, sport, I did,' said Jerry patiently. 'And in his way, he was a general too.'
Over the river two white flares shed an amazing daylight, inspiring Charlie to reminisce on the hardships of their early days together in Vientiane. Sitting bolt upright, he drew a house in diagram in the mud. That's where Lizzie and Ric and Charlie Marshall lived, he said proudly: in a stinking flea-hut on the edge of town, a place so lousy even the geckos got sick from it. Ric and Lizzie had the royal suite, which was the only room this flea-hut contained, and Charlie's job was to keep out of the way and pay the rent and fetch the booze. But the memory of their dreadful economic plight moved Charlie suddenly to a fresh storm of tears.
'So what did you live on, sport?' Jerry asked, expecting nothing from the question. 'Come on. It's over now. What did you live on?'
More tears while Charlie confessed to a monthly allowance from his father, whom he loved and revered.
'That crazy Lizzie' — said Charlie through his grief — 'that crazy Lizzie she make trips to Hong Kong for Mellon.'
Somehow Jerry contrived to keep himself steady in order not to shake Charlie from his course.
'Mellon. Who's this Mellon?' he asked. But the soft tone made Charlie sleepy, and he started playing with the mud-house, adding a chimney and smoke.
'Come on damn you! Mellon. Mellon!' Jerry shouted straight into Charlie's face, trying to shock him into replying. 'Mellon, you hashed-out wreck! Trips to Hong Kong!' Lifting Charlie to his feet he shook him like a rag doll, but it took a lot more shaking to produce the answer, and in the course of it Charlie Marshall implored Jerry to understand what it was like to love, really to love, a crazy roundeye hooker and know you could never have her, even for a night.
Mellon was a creepy English trader, nobody knew what he did. A little of this, a little of that, Charlie said. People were scared of him. Mellon said he could get Lizzie into the bigtime heroin trail. 'With your passport and your body,' Mellon had told her, 'you can go in and out or Hong Kong like a princess.'
Exhausted, Charlie sank to the ground and crouched before his mud-house. Squatting beside him, Jerry fastened his fist to the back of Charlie's collar, careful not to hurt him.
'So she did that for him did she, Charlie? Lizzie carried for Mellon.' With his palm, he gently tipped Charlie's head round till his lost eyes were staring straight at him.
'Lizzie don't carry for Mellon, Voltaire,' Charlie corrected him. 'Lizzie carry for Ricardo. Lizzie don't love Mellon. She love Ric and me.'
Staring glumly at the mud-house, Charlie burst suddenly into raucous dirty laughter, which then petered out with no explanation.
'You louse it up, Lizzie!' Charlie called teasingly, poking a finger into the mud door. 'You louse it up as usual, honey! You talk too much. Why you tell everyone you Queen of England? Why you tell everyone you some great spook-lady? Mellon get very very mad with you, Lizzie. Mellon throw you out, right out on your ass. Ric got pretty mad too, remember? Ric smash you up real bad and Charlie have to take you to the doctor in the middle of the damn night, remember? You got one hell of a big mouth, Lizzie, hear me? You my sister, but you got the biggest damn mouth ever!'
Till Ricardo closed it for her, Jerry thought, remembering the grooves on her chin. Because she spoiled the deal with Mellon.
Still crouching at Charlie's side and clutching him by the scruff, Jerry watched the world around him vanish and in place of it he saw Sam Collins sitting in his car below Star Heights, with a clear view of the eighth floor, while he studied the racing page of the newspaper at eleven o'clock at night. Not even the clump of a rocket falling quite close could distract him from that freezing vision. Also he heard Craw's voice above the mortar fire, intoning on the subject of Lizzie's criminality. When funds were low, Craw had said, Ricardo made her carry little parcels across frontiers for him.
And how did London-town learn that, your Grace — he would have liked to ask old Craw — if not from Sam Collins alias Mellon himself?
A three-second rainstorm had washed away Charlie's mud-house and he was furious about it. He was splashing around on all fours looking for it, weeping and cursing frantically. The fit passed, and he started talking about his father again, and how the old man had found employment for his natural son with a certain distinguished Vientiane airline — though Charlie till then had been quite keen to get out of flying for good on account of losing his nerve.
One day, it seemed, the General just lost patience with Charlie. He called together his bodyguard and came down from his hilltop in the Shans to a little opium town called Fang not far inside the Thai border. There, after the fashion of patriarchs the world over, the General rebuked Charlie for his spendthrift ways.
Charlie had a special squawk for his father, and a special way of puffing out his wasted cheeks in military disapprovaclass="underline"
'So you better do some proper damn work for a change, hear me, you kwailo spider-bastard? You better stay away from horse gambling, hear me, and strong liquor, and opium. And you better take those Commie stars off your tits and sack that stink-friend Ricardo of yours. And you better cease financing his woman, hear me? Because I don't gonna keep you one day more, not one hour, you spider-bastard, and I hate you so much one day I kill you because you remind me of that Corsican whore your mother! '
Then the job itself, and Charlie's father the General still speaking: