Black Market

From Fourteenth Street, where he'd boarded the inhospitable subway train, up past Thirty-fourth, Forty-second, and Fifty-ninth streets, Hudson objectively contemplated the first days of his capture in Vietnam. An old Doors song, “ Moonlight Drive,” drifted through his mind. A period piece.

He was vividly remembering the La Hoc Noh prison now. Above all else, Colonel David Hudson was remembering the one known as the Lizard Man…

La Hoc Noh Prison, North Vietnam: July 1971

Captain David Hudson, his nervous system a mass of fire, felt each bruising, jarring bump, even the smallest stones underfoot, as four prison guards half carried, half dragged him toward the central thatch-roofed hut at the La Hoc Noh compound.

Through the flat white glare of the Asian sun, which resembled a bleached pe

The command post.

What an incredible, existential joke this all was. What a cruel joke his life had recently become.

Well muscled once, clean-cut and always so perfectly erect, so proper, the young U.S. Army officer was pitiful to behold now. His skin was wrinkled and sallow, almost yellow; his blond hair looked as if it has been pulled out in great, diseased clumps.

He understood and accepted the fact that he was dying. He weighed less than a hundred and fifteen pounds; he'd had the dreaded yellow shits literally for months without end. He'd gone beyond mere exhaustion; he lived in a shifting, hallucinatory world where he doubted even his own sensations and ordinary perceptions.

All Captain Hudson possessed now was his dignity. He refused to give that up, too.

He would die with at least some essential part of himself intact, that secret place deep inside that nobody could torture out of him.

The SNR officer, the one they had called Lizard Man, was waiting expressly for him inside the dread command hootch.

The North Vietnamese leader sat in awful silence, crouched like some feral animal, behind a low, lopsided table.

He almost seemed to be posing for a photo beneath a twirling bamboo fan that barely stirred the hundred-and-five degree air.

North Vietnamese cooking smells-green chili, garlic, litchi, durian, and spoiled river prawn-made David Hudson suddenly gag. He clutched violently at his mouth. He felt himself begin to faint. But he wouldn't allow that. No! Honor and dignity! That was everything. Honor and dignity kept him alive.

He stopped at his own mental command, drawing on the scant resources, the human spirit, that remained in him.

The North Vietnamese guards held him up. He collapsed, a weightless puppet in their tangle of bony arms. A guard punched David Hudson's jaw with a hard bare fist. Hot blood filled his mouth, and he gagged repeatedly.

“You Cap-tan, ah Hud-son!” the senior officer suddenly screeched, cawing like a heat-crazed jungle bird. He peered at the wrinkled notepad he always carried. His fingers struck hard into the page to emphasize certain words.

“Ho-Ho. Twen-six yea-ah old. Veetnam, Lah-ose since nineteen six-nine. Yow spy six yeah. Ho-Ho. You 'ssain! 'ssassin! Convic to die, Cap-tan.”

The prison guards let Captain David Hudson fall to the dirt floor, which was littered with gaping fish heads and rice.

Hudson 's fragile mind was reeling, crashing, exploding with sharp-pointed lights. He'd understood only a few of the Lizard Man's fractured English words. “ Vietnam… spy… assassin… convicted to die.”

Hudson 's eyes absently ran over the highly polished board surface. Games? Why did they all love games?

The Lizard Man snorted obscenely. A distorted smile appeared across his face. His jaw moved slowly, seemingly unattached to the rest of his skull. David Hudson imagined he could see, just behind the loose lips, a flicking, reptilian tongue in the man's mouth. He shook his head, trying vainly to find a clearing, a little area of reality, within his wildly confused thoughts.

“Yow play game? Yow play game me, Hud-sun?”

David Hudson's eyes were riveted to the game table, trying to focus. Play a game with Lizard Man?

The board appeared to be real teak. It was precious wood, exotic and beautiful, incongruous in this sodden armpit of a place. Even more striking were the hundreds of polished black and white stones, exquisite playing pieces. They were circular in shape, convex on each side.

For a lucid moment, Hudson remembered a marble collection. Something magical and forgotten from his youth in Kansas, on his father's farm. Collecting solids and cat's-eyes. Had he actually been a boy in this same lifetime? He honestly couldn't seem to remember. Die with dignity! Dignity!

“Play game for your life? Ho?” the Lizard Man asked.

The game board was divided into vertical and horizontal lines, creating hundreds of intersections. There were 180 white stones, 181 black.

Beside the pile of black stones, the Lizard Man's hand rested on a bulky Mosin-Nagant military rifle. One of his long yellowed fingers tapped the table relentlessly.

“Yow play. Play game me! Loser die!”

Captain David Hudson continued to stare hard at the game board. Focus, he thought. Concentrate. Die with dignity.

What did this man want from him now? It was an obscene joke, Hudson knew. One more way the Lizard Man had of torturing him.

The black and white stones seemed to be moving by themselves. Spi

Finally Hudson spoke up. His voice was surprisingly strong, angry, even defiant.

“I have never lost at the game of Go,” Captain David Hudson said. “You play, asshole!” Dignity!

Manhattan: December 1985

The New York subway train braked noisily at a station stop. The soiled platform was bathed in eerie blue.

A few passengers on the sleepy, early morning train were staring absently at David Hudson. Even at a casual glance, he seemed like someone quietly in control of his environment. Beneath the drab street clothes, there was about him a sense of purpose. He was a man accustomed to taking command.

Hudson stared back at the other passengers. He peered into their hollow, pathetic eyes until most glanced away. The majority of American people were devoid of any real basic integrity, any sense of themselves. Civilians tended to disappoint David Hudson again and again. Maybe it was because he expected too much from them-he had to remind himself constantly that he couldn't apply his own high standards to others.

More listless passengers struggled onto the subway train at the West Eighty-sixth Street stop. There were mostly older whites, time-bent men and women, small-business merchants, ciphers who managed or owned the rip-off clothing stores, the rip-off food markets, in Harlem and the Bronx. One of the men boarding, however, was completely different from the rest.

He appeared to be in his mid-thirties. His striking black hair was brushed straight back. He wore a tan cashmere overcoat with a paisley scarf, pressed navy dress slacks, super-WASP duck boots. The impression he gave was of someone boarding a subway for the first time in his life and finding something amusing in the phenomenon of a slum on wheels.

He sat beside David Hudson and immediately snapped open Saturday's New York Times, coughing idly into his fist. As the subway rumbled forward, he crisply folded the newspaper into quarters.

“You made the front page. Congratulations,” Laurence Hadford finally offered in a guarded, casual whisper. His voice was exquisitely controlled and as smooth as his expensive silk scarf. “I watched the intriguing spectacle on the six o'clock, the seven o'clock, the ten, and the eleven o'clock news shows. You've succeeded in totally baffling them.”

“We've done reasonably well so far.” Hudson nodded in agreement. “The difficult steps are still ahead, though. The true tests of the plan's legs, Lieutenant.”