Dead and Kicking by Geoffrey McGeachin Read Free Book Online

couple more beers I was feeling content, relaxed and comfortable, so when my cyclo driver tried to kill me it came as a bit of a shock.
    It was around nine o’clock when I finished dinner, and an empty cyclo was parked right outside the restaurant, the driver casually smoking a cigarette. He was a lot younger than the cyclo drivers we’d spoken to earlier in the day, but at the time it didn’t ring any alarm bells.
    I showed him a card from my hotel, since apart from saying
dúng
to beer and noodles and
xin loi không
to offers of young girls, drugs or pirated DVDs, the Vietnamese language is pretty much beyond me. The driver looked at the card and nodded, so I climbed in.
    It had been raining, and the streetlights flared orange and green against the black night sky and reflected off the shimmering, water-slick roadway. The traffic was mostly scooters now, ridden by young people off doing whatever young people do on a humid Ho Chi Minh City evening. They crossed in front of us, drifting casually from right to left and left to right, almost in slow motion, their headlights and tail-lights blending into hypnotic psychedelic patterns enhanced by the noise of Asian pop songs and the aromas from roadside food stalls.
    We passed people standing chatting in doorways, and nightclubs with speakers blaring out modern dance music. One club, Captain Willard’s Bar, blasted out songs from the sixties and inside there were go-go girls, flashing strobes and a crowded dance floor. Middle-aged men with crew cuts and buffed, gym-tight bodies gyrated in camouflage trousers, T-shirts and combat boots, fake US Army dog-tags from Dan Sinh Market jangling around their necks, living out some weird fantasy of a long-lost Saigon and a war they almost certainly only ever knew from movies and TV.
    I’d felt so relaxed after dinner that I’d neglected to negotiate a price upfront for the trip, but now I noticed we were on quieter backstreets. It was a bumpy ride right from the start, and just as I was beginning to wonder how long my driver had been pedalling a cyclo, we turned hard left down a dark, narrow alleyway. The headlights of a waiting car flared into my face, blinding me. Then I heard the squeal of tyres as what sounded like a Russian jeep accelerated straight towards us.
    The cyclo driver leapt clear as the jeep hit, squashing the frail metal frame of the pedicab into the brick wall of the alley and me with it. I was jammed in tight against the wall, and could feel several people tugging at me, trying to pull my camera bag from my shoulder. I deflected a fist flying towards my face, but missed the boot aimed at my groin. My vision blurred, there were shooting stars and my stomach was up in my throat.
    Then loud shouting came from somewhere further down the alley and I could hear boots pounding on the cobblestones as my camera bag was savagely wrenched from my shoulder. Suddenly, with more squealing of tyres, the jeep was gone, taking my attackers, the camera bag and the cyclo driver with it.
    My rescuers were two green-uniformed police officers, who helped me from the mangled remains of the cyclo and dusted me down with their hands, helpfully smoothing out the wrinkles in my clothes, which was a very odd feeling. When the pain in my nuts subsided a little, I realised the police officers were asking for ID. My wallet was still safely inside my jacket pocket, along with the little Leica and my passport. I handed over the passport and my WorldPix press card.
    One of the officers wrote down some details while I slowly walked around in circles for a moment to see if everything was still working. I found I was in surprisingly good condition, apart from some moderate to excruciating testicular discomfort. I downplayed this fact as much as possible, as I was a bit concerned they might offer to helpfully pat that part of me down, too.
    The officers walked me slowly to the other end of the alley, where a police motorcycle was parked. I said the