Shadow of the Dragon полностью

Clark and his friends had frequented the market during his first trip to Saigon. U.S. Navy HQ had been only a few blocks away and Ben Thanh provided a good place to meet girls, grab a plate of shrimp dumplings, or maybe buy a couple of knockoff T-shirts to send to your kid brothers who were getting all their news about the war from Walter Cronkite or The Huntley — Brinkley Report. Saigon had been loud then, and crowded, too, though nothing like it was now.

Many of the old buildings were gone, gaudy new ones with higher rent having sprung up in their place. It was hard to say which were the flowers and which were the weeds — the old buildings or the new. Maybe it was a bit of both. The people seemed better off than they’d been when he was here before, but Clark supposed that was more a function of pushing the poorer folk to the outskirts of town.

Thousands of scooters, called motos in Vietnam, groaned and buzzed on the teeming street outside the market. Clark and Lisanne Robertson were merely two in tens of thousands of other bees moving en masse inside a hive. Clark was unarmed, and he’d long since moved his wallet into the front pocket of his loose chinos — not because Vietnamese people were inherently more likely to pick his pockets, but because they were people and the odds around so many people were that some of them were going to try and pick his pocket. And of all the species of animals on the planet, Clark mistrusted people the most.

The sizzle and smell of banh xeo, an especially delicious shrimp crepe, twined around Clark’s memory and pulled him sideways toward the stall. The crowd moved on behind him as he stepped out of the flow. Clark spoke quickly to the stooped mama behind a wooden board she’d set over two upturned crates. He paid for two cardboard baskets of yellow tacolike banh xeo, one for him, and another for his trainee, and then waited while the mama dished up his order. Clark couldn’t help but wonder what this woman cooking banh xeo had been up to when he was here the first time. Had she been cooking then, too? Had they passed on the street? In a club? Had she or one of her relatives shot at him, killed his friends? Had he killed any of hers? Whose side had she been on? Likely her own side, Clark thought, trying to stay alive when two unstoppable forces were bent on grinding everything between them into the greasy monsoon mud.

Clark closed his eyes for a quick moment, just long enough to take in the riot of odors and sounds — fish, black vinegar, and scooter exhaust. When the wind shifted just right, he could smell the Saigon River, mere blocks away.

Clark passed one order of crispy shrimp crepes to Lisanne — who’d snagged them a couple of seats at one of the half-dozen low plastic tables beside the food stall. It wobbled badly and looked like something the kids would be relegated to at Thanksgiving. Clark didn’t care. They’d been on their feet all morning and it was good to sit down.

Lisanne tucked a lock of dark hair behind her ear, and leaned across the rickety plastic table toward Clark. She wore khaki shorts and, like Clark, a loose microfiber shirt with the long sleeves rolled up above her elbows. The deep olive complexion she’d inherited from her Lebanese mother helped her blend in a little better than Clark. Though, he had to admit, old men were invisible just about anywhere in the world. It was a fact he used to his advantage. Clark was still in better-than-average shape, jogging five miles every other day. He was admittedly not nearly as fast as he used to be. He’d kept up with his lifting, lower weight and higher reps. He could still bench his body weight, an ability he’d used as a sort of litmus test for his personal fitness. These days, he spent a good deal of time recovering between sets, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about his grandson — or whoever he happened to be training at the moment.

“Doesn’t this bug you?” Lisanne asked, her eyes darting from face to face in the crowd of passersby. “I’ve never thought of you as a person who’d like to turn his back on anyone.”

Clark smiled at that, resisting the urge to call his young acolyte Grasshopper.

“We’re predators,” he said, biting into one of the banh xeo. “Our eyes are set in the front of our heads, perfect for being a hunter. When we focus those eyes on someone in particular, we have to turn our back on someone else.”

“Still,” Lisanne said, scanning the crowd. “It creeps me out to have anyone get behind me.”

“I agree,” Clark said. “That’s a good quality for you to have in our line of work.” He nodded to the food. “Go ahead and eat. We won’t sit here long.”

“Glad to hear that,” she said. Supremely feminine, she still knew how to shovel down food.