THREE

Nashville drove to Le Boudin, where Nguyễn Van Tran had recently been shot by Sergeant TJ Caution, and fresh bullet holes punctured the furniture. A heavy ceiling fan turned ponderously to the sound of Edith Piaf on the gramophone. Shorty looked around the bar, at elegant women with sleepy eyes, silently eating noodles.

Quyn was the oldest of Moreau’s girls, so she had to start early on any new man. She walked slowly to the MPs, made as if to sit on an empty chair, but dropped into Shorty’s lap.

‘Hellogoodmorning. You veryhandsomeman,’ she said, although she could speak English like an attorney. ‘You too tall for American.’

‘Me Australian,’ said Shorty, like Tarzan.

‘No!’ screeched Quyn, although, of course, she knew. ‘Uc da loi number one!’ She giggled and covered her mouth.

Shorty tried to ease her off his knee. Over her shoulder, he saw Baby Marie with the hibiscus-flower lips.

Quyn grabbed his face and pulled his eyes back to her.

Baby Marie called Tâm to come out of the kitchen where she was learning to be a chef, chopping onions and filleting fish for the mute who cooked. Tâm stood taller than the other girls, and regarded Nashville as if he were a stranger.

‘Meet my friend,’ said Nashville to Shorty, ‘the lovely Natalie Susan Mitchell.’

Nashville leaned across and squeezed Tâm’s ass, then felt a terrible tenderness, which made him drop his hand. ‘This is my new buddy,’ said Nashville to Tâm. ‘He’s from Austria. Like Hitler. But more uptight.’

Behind the bar, a head emerged from a hatch as Moreau in his Foreign Legionnaire’s cap climbed up the ladder from the cellar and gazed, disappointed, at the first customers of the day.

Quyn slipped off Shorty’s lap to give her boss full view of this new client.

‘Bonjour,’ said Nashville to Moreau.

It was the first time since high school that Shorty had heard anyone speak French.

Moreau snorted. He had a sharp, drawn face, long eyes and an almost hidden mouth, like a thwarted vulture, beaten to the roadkill.

‘Monsieur Moreau, this is Shorty,’ said Nashville. ‘He’s Austrian.’

‘Guten morgen,’ said Moreau.

Moreau passed each of them a cold can of American beer. Shorty secretly spilled his Budweiser into a spitoon while the other men talked, as it was against regulations to drink on the job.

Whoever Moreau once had been, he had ceased to be when he came to Vung Tau. It was thought he’d served in another army before he’d joined the legion. He had been Polish, it was said, then French, but now he called himself Vietnamese. He’d stayed in town when les colons had pulled out, and said he would still be there when the Americans were gone. He carried a swastika tattooed on his wrist – a Buddhist symbol, he said, a homage to a local wife. Shorty noticed he was missing a finger. It looked as though it had been severed at the first knuckle.

‘You want bisque?’ Moreau asked Nashville. ‘I have fresh shrimp.’

‘Two bowls,’ said Nashville.

Moreau passed the order to Tâm.

Nashville shook his empty can. ‘Time for another?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Moreau. ‘Shall I give one to your friend the ostrich, to spill on his foot?’

‘He ain’t an ostrich,’ said Nashville, ‘he’s an Australian.’

‘C’est la même chose,’ said Moreau, ‘both keep their heads in the sand.’

Nashville struck a match on Moreau’s bar. ‘You know, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a misunderstanding that when an ostrich senses danger, he buries his strangely fucking Gallic-looking head in the sand. Au contraire, croque monsieur, he drops to the ground and flattens his head against the earth, and continues to keep watch on the enemy with the largest eyes of any land animal.’ Nashville lit a Marlboro.

‘You are a boring man,’ said Moreau.

Nashville smiled. ‘Women love me,’ he said.

Moreau bared his yellow teeth. ‘You pay me to fuck them,’ he said.

Nashville grabbed Moreau around the back of the neck, and pulled him close, so their skulls met at the forehead. They rubbed heads and were content.

Nashville and Shorty sipped their bisque which, to Shorty’s surprise, was a soup served in a cup. He had been expecting a biscuit on a plate. He dipped a piece of baguette into the saffron broth, which tasted like prawns that had been trawled from an ocean of cream. Shorty imagined waves of milk. He ate self-consciously, aware Quyn was watching him.

‘I hear there was a shooting,’ said Nashville to Moreau.

Moreau sniffed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Caution killed a zombie.’

‘Did you see it?’ asked Nashville.

‘Non,’ said Moreau, who preferred to lie in French.

Soup dribbled down Shorty’s chin. Baby Marie came over with a white cloth and wiped it away. Her skin was the colour of the bisque, thought Shorty.

‘What do the zipperheads say?’ Nashville asked Moreau.

‘They want to know what happened to the old man’s ears,’ said Moreau. ‘They’re disturbed by the thought that they may be sitting with their ancestors and yet a foul-mouthed and murderous American drunk might still dig them out of the ground, cut off their ears, take them to a bar and shoot them.’

Nashville nodded.

‘What does the Mamasan think?’ he asked.

‘The Mamasan does not concern herself with this,’ said Moreau, ‘but she feels dead bodies do not belong in bars.’

A rifle section of axe-faced Australians wove cautiously through the bistro, and harboured at a cluster of corner tables from which they could see everything that came in or out. Baby Marie brought them cold beers on a tray and each man tried to touch her as she served him.

‘Who’s the Mamasan?’ Shorty asked Nashville.

Moreau turned his back to fetch two more beers. Nashville grinned and slapped Shorty on the back.

They both think I’m an idiot, thought Shorty.

‘What do you know about the dead guy?’ Nashville asked Moreau.

‘He was nobody,’ said Moreau, ‘a madman who lived on the hill.’

‘So how did he get to the bar?’ asked Nashville. ‘Being as he was dead.’

‘He’d cleared part of the hillside,’ said Moreau, ‘so he could camp by the family tomb. When he died, the Annamites took away his tent, and the coffin maker buried him beside his ancestors. But, with the bivouac gone, the stormwater flowed into the clearing and flooded his grave.’

Once again, Nashville congratulated himself on choosing Moreau as his one and only informer.

Moreau said he believed the GIs who carried the corpse into the bar had nothing to do with Caution. He didn’t know why Caution had shot the body, or who had cut off its ears, but he’d already had press-agency reporters in the bar, who acted disappointed when they didn’t see dead men without ears in Le Boudin every night. They bought themselves drinks but didn’t tip the girls, and asked questions when they could be fucking.

‘Do you know where Caution went?’ asked Nashville.

‘Non,’ said Moreau, ‘but mes amis tell me he is dead.’

‘When did that happen?’ asked Nashville.

‘Soon,’ said Moreau.

When Baby Marie saw Shorty, she noticed his nose first, like a trunk flanked by elephantine ears. In the time before the French, people would pay rice to look upon a Tonkinese his size, who’d trek from village to village and pluck coconuts from the trees. They danced for him and drank, because they knew he would die young. Tâm understood that Nashville’s new friend was a fool, born in the same dark cave as the other blind men from Australia. Quyn found something else in the boy, because she looked for other things.

Shorty appreciated all the girls and their different kinds of beauty. But he realised Moreau was a pirate, and wondered why Nashville seemed to like him.

Nashville dipped towards Moreau. ‘The Captain thinks the Mama­san’s got Caution,’ he said.

Moreau shrugged.

‘What is a Mamasan?’ asked Shorty.

‘Him,’ said Nashville, pointing to Moreau.

Shorty would ask the same question until he had an answer. People mistook his persistence for foolishness, as if a more intelligent person would surrender rather than face the humiliation of appearing unimaginative through repetition, but Shorty generally found out what he wanted to know.

‘I don’t recall seeing TJ here too often,’ said Nashville to Moreau. ‘Did he have a girl?’

For an instant, Nashville imagined Moreau’s eyes pointed towards Tâm.

‘Not here,’ said Moreau. ‘He came sometimes, but only to make trouble.’

Nashville pressed the side of his jaw with his thumb.

‘So what brought him here that night?’ asked Nashville. ‘Were you cooking grits and cornbread?’

Moreau frowned.

‘I meant that metaphorically,’ said Nashville, looking at Tâm.

Shorty pushed into the conversation. ‘This Mamasan, who is she?’ he asked.

Moreau shook his head, as if such matters were not to be discussed with Australians. Nashville put an arm around Shorty and guided him to a table. He leaned back in a shot-up chair and hooked his hands behind his head, the storyteller about to share his truth.

‘A mama-san is a brothel keeper,’ said Nashville. ‘They’re as common as crabs in this town. The Mamasan, on the other hand, is unique. The question of her identity troubles every law-enforcement officer when he first arrives in Vung Tau. But, like a girl in a blowjob bar, no one’s quite sure who she is, or how she got to be under the table. I call my girls – every one of them – Natalie Susan Mitchell, after the cheerleader who refused to let me rest my hands on her rack after the Troy, Tennessee, Minor League Super Bowl. And the Mamasan guards her identity like Natalie Susan Mitchell protected her chastity. But while Natalie Susan Mitchell now works as a pump attendant in Blytheville, Tennessee, the Mamasan runs every racket in Vung Tau.’

The Australian soldiers called out for more beer.

‘Have we ever tried to arrest her?’ asked Shorty.

‘Rein it in, Junior G-Man,’ said Nashville. ‘The Mamasan’s got the only effective police force in town. She keeps the cowboys in line. Without her, there’d be gang war, the US Army’d be just one of the gangs, and the Aussies would be – I don’t know – completely fucking irrelevant. In absolute contrast, I might add, to their situation today.’

Shorty smiled, to make Nashville think his disdain went unnoticed.

Baby Marie attended to the Australians. To Shorty, she looked so small and fragile. The Australian soldiers joked around with her, asking if she had a boyfriend while they felt her hips and thighs. She told them she did and he was from Tasmania. They asked to see her map of Tassie and tried to lift her dress. She said her boyfriend’s name was Tommy, and she pronounced it ‘to me’, as in ‘come back to me’.

Tommy Callaghan had been working as a shipping clerk in Launceston, Tasmania, in an office that smelled of polished teak and pipe tobacco, when he was called up for national service in 1966. He was small and light, and could pull himself up a rope like a spider scrambling on silk, so the other men in his platoon called him Monkey. This made Tommy Callaghan proud, because nobody had ever thought to give him a nickname before. Now he was Monkey, with Polly and Biggsy and Bilko and Reffo and Tony the Wog, and he was happy that he belonged.

After six months in the bush in Phuoc Tuy province, Callaghan was given three days’ rest and convalescent leave in Vung Tau. At Le Boudin, he met Baby Marie. One night in the bar, he sat beside Nashville, who was eating steak frites and drinking a carafe of red wine. Nashville spoke first, because he was the most drunk. He asked Callaghan if there was a particular breed of dog he admired. Callaghan had grown up with a border collie, and told Nashville unremarkable stories about an energetic animal that had herded cattle before it retired to a life in town. Nashville asked for details, such as the colour of its eyes and the size of its ears.

Nashville had called for another wine glass. Callaghan had never drunk red wine before. It tasted of cinnamon and vinegar, of castles and kings. Callaghan had grown up in the country, and confided in strangers easily. ‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘that you can find love in war.’

Nashville misunderstood him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I love this war.’

Callaghan told him about Baby Marie, whom Nashville had fucked acrobatically for two weeks in July, and who had left him with gonorrhoea. Nashville listened, enchanted. He asked for details, such as the colour of her eyes and the size of her ears.

Callaghan said Baby Marie was unlike him in every way, and yet he felt he knew her. He could see her sadness, and feel it as if it were his own.

‘What’s she sad about?’ asked Nashville, wondering if it was gonorrhoea.

‘Her whole life,’ said Callaghan, ‘and the war.’

Baby Marie came in from the kitchen, carrying a plate of fish. She kissed Callaghan on the forehead, and asked him his friend’s name.

Nashville introduced himself and called her ‘ma’am’, and thought of her on the bed in the back room, with her ass in the air.

Nashville left them to find Natalie Susan Mitchell who, that night, was a noisy, friendly village girl with strong legs and thick, black hair. Nashville found it hard to keep an image of a border collie out of his mind.

Callaghan planned to take Baby Marie home when his tour of Vietnam was over. They would open a shop in Launceston like the Chinese stores in Vung Tau, and he would record in his account book the sales of watches, scents and eight-track tapes shipped from Hong Kong. He would tell his father she had been an air hostess, and they had met on a plane. Ted Callaghan would believe him, he thought, because Baby Marie was beautiful, and Ted had never seen an air hostess. Baby Marie would cook duck on the barbecue in summer, and serve Ted Callaghan red wine.

Tâm, who read fortunes, told Baby Marie she would be buried in a land of dancing kangaroos. Baby Marie asked who would lie in the grave beside her. Tâm said she saw Tommy, and a tomb swept at Tet by light-skinned sons with grey-green eyes. She did not tell Baby Marie about the demons hiding behind her headstone, feasting on a human heart.