“You’re shitting me now, man. You couldn’t have known.”

“Oh?” Belew tipped his head to the side. “Does the name ‘Dark Lady’ ring any bells?”

Mark swallowed.

“All right. You win. You’re so damned slippers I’ll never be able to prove you’re giving me a line.”

Belew’s grin widened improbably. “See? We’re getting to know each other already.”

“What do you want?”

Belew leaned forward across his lotus-crossed legs. “You say you want a revolution? You joined the New Joker Brigade to change the world for the better. Okay, Doctor.” He held his right hand out, palm up. “Here’s your chance. Grab it. You have nothing to lose, and you know it.”

“Grab it how?”

“Take it to the max. Vietnam’s primed to explode. Light the fuse.”

“I can’t decide for the others, man.”

“Then don’t. You lead; they’ll follow.”

“Why don’t you lead this revolution, if you’re so hot for it?”

Belew shook his head. “Not my style. I’m a shadow-boxer. A gray-eminence type. I don’t want a throne.”

“But you’re looking to be the power behind one? I won’t be your puppet, man.”

“I won’t do anything to you that you don’t let me.”

“You’re a sneaky son of a gun.”

“And you’re a charismatic naпf, who is also an incredibly powerful ace.” Belew’s face split again in a grin. ’And admit it: together we make one hell of a team, don’t we?”

Chapter Thirty-eight

“Weak sisters.” Colonel Nguyen said, sitting back in the chair to Moonchild’s left with his head arrogantly tipped, smoking an American cigarette in a black holder. He was tall for a Vietnamese, five-ten or eleven and lean, with a USAF mustache and khaki PAVN walking-out dress with all Vietnamese insignia carefully removed. He wore what Mark – buried currently beneath the expressed persona-recognized as American full-colonel eagles pinned to his lapels. His English was excellent, if occasionally archaic. He was almost as handsome as he obviously thought he was.

He rolled his head to give a highly overt eye to Moonchild. She disliked him. She felt guilty for it.

“Weak sisters are the greatest threat to our success.”

The meeting was taking place in the lantern-lit ballroom of a brick French colonial villa outside a remote Highland hamlet. The hardwood floor was black-mottled with mildew, and lizards ran the walls between patches where the whitewash had peeled away in sheets. They made Moonchild nostalgic for the sleeping Croyd.

The eleven resistance leaders and Moonchild were seated around a long table of imported oak. J. Robert Belew presided at its head. Though the shape and seating arrangements of tables had a history of being bones of contention at Vietnamese negotiations, Belew had handled the matter simply by pointing at the long oblong table and telling people where to sit. The attendees complied without demur, primarily perhaps because their hosts had the most powerful factions present, roughly a hundred New Joker Brigaders and a recently arrived company of one hundred seasoned irregulars from Cambodia, who had been – and as far as Mark knew might still be – members in good standing of the notorious Khmer Rouge.

“So all that stuff about Khmer Rouge massacres was just imperialist propaganda, huh, man?” Mark had asked the previous afternoon when the Cambodian contingent rolled in.

“Oh, no,” Belew said. “The stories are understated, if anything. They were exterminating angels in a way the Manson family could only dream about. Their main man, Pol Pot, is, demographically speaking, the top genocide in history. Stalin? A wimp. Hitler? A weenie. The KRs rubbed out a third of Cambo’s population.”

Mark gaped at him. It felt as if all his blood was draining into a seething pool in the pit of his belly. “These people were involved in that?” His words ended in a strangled squeak.

Belew shrugged. “I’m not sure. Probably. Lot of them are early-to-mid thirties now, which would’ve made them early-to-mid teens back in 1975. Golden age of the Khmer Rouge, those middle teens.”

“What are they doing here?”

“We fought the Vietnamese together, after they invaded and ran the KRs out in ’79.”

“But – mass murderers – they’re your friends?”

A shrug. “War, like its pallid reflection politics, makes strange bedfellows.”

“And why are they here now?”

“They’re combat vets. And we have history together. Blood is thicker than water; I can rely on them.”

Mark ached to ask about the thickness of the blood they’d shed, and he also did not fail to notice Belew’s use of the singular first-person pronoun. But somehow he had lacked the stomach for further questions.

Or, more accurately, further answers.

Now Moonchild glanced uncertainly at the Khmer Rouge leader, a round-faced, innocuous little man in glasses named Suon San, who sat on the table’s far side next to Belew’s Montagnard buddies, who answered to the names Bert and Ernie, and across from Colonel Nguyen. He smiled at her and nodded politely, shyly almost. Colonel Nguyen slammed his hand on the table. “Anyone who collaborates with the enemy must pay the price!”

The man on Moonchild’s left laughed softly. “A fine way to speak, for a man who stills wears the uniform of the People’s Army – complete with rank badges he was never entitled to, in any man’s army.”

The colonel purpled. The speaker was even taller and more dapper than he, in his white linen suit and Panama hat. His name was Dong. He was an out-and-out crime-lord from Ho Chi Minh City, whose grandfather had been a chieftain in the Binh Xuyen criminal sect, wiped out by Ngo Dinh Diem.

“We’ve all collaborated, in one way or another,” said the man to his left. Nguyen Cao Tri was quite young, his accent likewise Saigon. He represented his father, who was a power in Saigon giai phong’s more respectable resistance wing. Though his father’s followers were primarily thuong gia – “trading persons” (“yuppie wannabes,” was how Belew put it) – the younger Nguyen held himself like a soldier. He had made NCO during his compulsory military service, no easy task in the People’s Army.

“I haven’t,” said the man who sat at J. Bob’s left hand, next to Colonel Nguyen. He was short but muscled almost like a Westerner, bulkily powerful, and his iron-gray hair was cropped close to his head. He was Nguyen Van Phu, the third Nguyen in the room, none of whom was related. He was an authentic by-God VC, who had spent his whole life as a resistance fighter. In his day he had fought the French, the Americans, the ARVN, and the victorious North Vietnamese – who had been more assiduous about wiping out their former VC allies than any other group in the country’s history. He had spent eight years in a communist “reeducation” camp. He had entered the ballroom limping; he carried an American bullet in his left hip, a PAVN one in the thigh.

“Perhaps you would care to cast the first stone,” said Ngo An Dong from across the table. The fiery young warlord of the southern Cao Dai sect, he wore oddments of military uniform and a red headband around his bushy dark hair. Belew described the Cao Dais as “zany but well motivated.” Ngo was another former PAVN noncom.

“I won’t shrink from taking strong action,” the ex-VC replied, ignorant of or just ignoring the biblical reference,

“You’re talking terrorism,” young Nguyen Cao Tri said.

“The purpose of terror is to terrorize.”

Colonel Nguyen laughed. “I’m glad there’s at least one other man here. Fools will be tempted to betray us to the government if they are not given adequate -” Pause for word. “- disincentives. Our first priority is to make sure the penalties of crossing us outweigh any benefits.”

“I disagree,” Moonchild made herself say.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “The woman speaks,” he said deliberately. “It is because you are nurturing that you speak that way, no? Your woman’s heart bleeds for the unfortunates whom we would discipline.”