Nashville woke up un-hungover, wrapped a towel around his waist and shuffled to the shower. It was a windy morning. The flagpole rattled. Sand blew around his legs, fizzing like static on his skin. He washed under a slow flow of tepid water, and returned to his hut to find Shorty standing outside.
‘They let you in, then,’ said Nashville, redundantly.
Shorty pointed to the outside wall of the hut, where a pattern of curves had been freshly sprayed in army green paint, just below Caution’s window.
‘The walls have ears,’ he said.
Nashville spat in the sand. ‘It don’t look like ears to me,’ he said. ‘More like tits.’
Life, to Nashville, was one long Rorschach test.
‘Is there anything that doesn’t look like’ – Shorty forced himself to use the word – ‘tits to you?’
Nashville stroked his chin. ‘Ass,’ he said.
He went into the hut and methodically put on his uniform. He checked his pistol was loaded. He slapped his nightstick into his palm. He did not speak to Shorty as they drove a long, apathetic loop around the town. They shared a silent breakfast at a noodle stand, then Nashville took Shorty to Sam Singh’s.
The tailor greeted them with his customary bow, and Nashville bowed lower, as if they were in a bowing competition. Shorty dipped his head. Sam Singh presented Shorty with a silk suit. Shorty tried it on in the cubicle. The jacket sat lightly on his shoulders, the sleeves reached his wrists, and the cuffs of the pants rested on the insteps of his size-fourteen feet.
‘This is a wonderful suit,’ said Sam Singh.
Shorty brushed his fingers over the cloth.
‘It will change your life,’ promised Sam Singh. ‘No longer will the women laugh, and whisper, “Here comes the goalpost,” “Look at that bamboo tree,” or, “It would be like going to bed with a giant joss-stick.” Never again will you be known as the tailor’s needle’ – he pointed to his own – ‘or pipe-cleaner man. The girls will cease to see you as a cherry hayseed from a town nobody has heard of in a country no one knows. This suit may even draw attention away from your enormous feet, which are like skis in a land without snow.’
Shorty stared at him, embarrassed and shocked. He hadn’t realised he was a joke.
Sam Singh returned his gaze, humbly and sincerely, through round glasses that lent him the air of a butterfly collector. Then he giggled. ‘I am sorry, Mr Short,’ he said. ‘Nashville asked me to say those things.’
The shop smelled of turmeric and cumin, fried onions and chopped garlic.
‘Is your daughter cooking?’ asked Nashville and, as he spoke, the girl slipped in from the back of the shop, and gave her father a bowl of swollen, dimpled samosas.
Sam Singh blocked Nashville’s view of her body. ‘For you I have no daughter,’ he said, ‘you sick motherfucker.’
He pointed the men out of the door.
On the side wall of his shop, half-scrubbed away, Shorty noticed a large and ugly spray painting of a pair of ears.
In the sky above the Flags, rain burst the bellies of overfed clouds and pelted the jeep with their entrails. A crowd of schoolgirls in elegant ao dai laughed under the shelter of an overhang. When the rain passed, Nashville realised he needed a piss. Shorty wanted to stretch his legs.
‘They sure do need stretching,’ said Nashville.
Shorty didn’t know why everyone always felt they had to point out he was tall, as if he hadn’t noticed.
Both men walked to Le Boudin. Moreau was in the cellar. Baby Marie took their order.
‘I found Tâm at home last night,’ said Nashville to Shorty. ‘She was bathing Bucky in an oil drum.’
Shorty felt he was being asked to explain himself. ‘There was nothing I could do,’ he said, although he no longer believed that was true. ‘Caution thinks Bucky’s VC.’
‘No, he don’t,’ said Nashville.
‘He just likes to hurt people,’ said Shorty.
Nashville nodded.
‘Why isn’t Caution on charge for going AWOL?’ asked Shorty.
‘Because it turns out he weren’t hardly AWOL at all,’ said Nashville. ‘His R&R was legit, and the commander at Long Binh authorised the girls’ show. So Caution was only technically AWOL for the day that I was technically AWOL, and I’m not greatly inclined to push things in that direction.’
Nashville drank a coffee laced with cognac, then another, trying to loosen the knots in his thinking.
‘I’ve got a strategy for your suit,’ he said to Shorty. ‘You’re gonna wear it tomorrow night. I’ve found a restaurant for you and the nurse. Can you get out by nineteen hundred?’
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Betty’s on days. We were supposed to go to the movies on the base last night, but she had a headache.’
‘I would’ve thought,’ said Nashville, ‘that in the event of a fucking headache, a nurse would be able to get aspirin.’
Shorty, too, had entertained this thought, then supressed it.
‘Did you see the ears on the wall outside the tailor’s?’ he asked Nashville. ‘I think it’s a threat. I think they’re singling out their enemies, and telling them their time’s up.’
Nashville sucked a Marlboro. ‘I think they’re painting them everywhere I go,’ he said, ‘so I can find my way back when I’m drunk.’
Shorty realised Nashville hadn’t smiled all morning.
Caution came into the bar, and Nashville’s heart twitched.
Not here, he thought. Not now.
Baby Marie disappeared. Caution looked around for Moreau.
‘Where is that asshole?’ he asked.
Nashville finished his beer. ‘Only asshole here is you, TJ,’ he said.
Caution laughed, as if Nashville had made a joke and Caution had enjoyed it.
‘Tell me something,’ said Nashville. ‘Why’d you beat up on the baker’s boy?’
‘What do you care?’ he asked. ‘He ain’t your retard.’
‘Bucky didn’t deserve it,’ said Nashville. ‘That’s all.’
‘So what’re you going to do about it, Nashville?’ asked Caution. ‘Are you going to frag me? Are you going to whup me?’
Nashville stared at Caution standing over him, with his legs apart, his mouth tight, his eyes slit, his jaw set, his fists balled at his waist, trembling. He nauseated Nashville with all his conscious meanness. Nashville saw Caution’s messy, vandalised nose, the stitching scars on his brow, the burst lip raised like a sneer, but just because you took a beating when you were a kid didn’t mean you had to give a beating to a kid. You couldn’t get rid of a hurt by passing it on. Nashville knew, because he had tried as hard as anybody.
‘What are you looking at?’ Caution asked Shorty. ‘You got something to say, asshole? So why didn’t you say it in the street? Oh, you were too busy whacking the retard.’
Caution turned to Nashville.
‘Did you know that, asshole?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t me that bust Bucky’s fucking head, it was your pal here, Mr My Asshole Shits Holy Water.’
Moreau climbed up from the cellar, like a guerrilla coming out of a tunnel.
‘Pour me a drink, asshole,’ said Caution.
Moreau looked at him with tremendous regret, and turned up the volume on his gramophone. He was playing Jacques Brel’s ‘Ces Gens-là’, all that anger about nothing.
Izzy Berger shuffled in, and asked Moreau for un café s’il vous plait. Moreau served him immediately.
‘Do you have to speak fucking French around here?’ asked Caution.
Berger approached Caution waving his white flag of legal papers. It was the third time he had tried to corner Caution in a bar. Caution pushed him aside with a big, open hand.
Moreau gave Berger his coffee. It had a rousing, bitter smell.
‘Give me,’ said Caution to Moreau, ‘a fucking drink s’il vous plait, asshole.’
Moreau shook his head. ‘You’re not welcome here,’ he said. ‘Please leave.’
Moreau kept his old service pistol under the counter. He had never used it in the bar.
‘You damaged the boulangerie boy,’ said Moreau. ‘He works for my bakery, Sergeant Caution. Get out of my restaurant.’
‘I’ll go when I’ve had my drink,’ said Caution.
‘Here,’ said Moreau, and he threw a cup of Algerian vin ordinaire in Caution’s face.
Droplets of wine clung to Caution’s cheeks like tears of blood. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes with his fists. When he dropped his hands, his irises were pink. He shook his head vigorously, a hunting dog drying off after a swim.
It’s so easy to confuse him, thought Nashville.
Caution grinned then grimaced, searching for the right response. Berger saw Caution’s hand move towards his pistol and stepped back, but Shorty jumped in and gripped Caution’s forearm.
Nashville watched, surprised.
Caution shrugged off Shorty. He tried to make it look casual, but it was an effort. Shorty was young and strong, and Caution’s fingers were shaking. Shorty hadn’t noticed they did that. Shorty pressed his body against him, crowding Caution’s holster.
Moreau touched his own pistol and only Nashville knew. That was the thing about Moreau: he would never show his hand. He appeared angry, but Nashville wondered if even that were true. Somebody had to dispose of Caution, and it might as well be here, over this. A Frenchman, a neutral, would have a better chance of getting away with it.
Caution jabbed Shorty with his elbow. It caught him under the ribs and made him gasp.
Nashville looked around the bar, and the girls had all gone. Caution saw it too. Only Shorty didn’t understand the situation. He thought it was a battle between him and Caution.
Shorty was getting tired of people thinking he couldn’t fight. With his hands down by his sides, he began to muscle Caution out of the bar. Just lately he had started to get the feeling that the Yanks were all piss and wind.
Caution was easier to move than Shorty had imagined. Shorty made sure he stayed lightly off balance as he bullied him to the door.
Moreau laid his hands flat on the bar. It made him look stronger, as if he drew his power from the hardwood. This was his place.
Caution stared at Moreau, to show he wasn’t backing down, while he backed down.
‘You’re a dead man, Frenchie,’ he said.
‘From one to another,’ said Moreau.
Shorty huddled Caution out. Berger followed them both, with his documents.
‘Sergeant Caution,’ he said, ‘you have something of mine and I have something of yours.’
Caution felt he’d walked out of a drama and into a comedy. His relief kept him fixed to the ground for a moment, and he stood face-to-neck with Berger as the little man argued at his throat.
‘Under the terms of our deal,’ said Berger – Caution smiled at the words ‘terms’ and ‘deal’ – ‘I was to supply you with a top-quality, all-girl disciple act, which was guaranteed to be a sensation with the heroes of the US Army. According to the contract I have in my hand, I was to arrange passports and visas for my girls, and advance a daily stipend totalling twelve hundred dollars, to keep the three of them financially secure during their month-long tour of this great, young nation. In return, you were to buy their plane tickets and book them concerts from Vung Tau to the DMZ, from the proceeds of which you would repay both my advance and a premium on my investment.’
Caution composed an expression designed to look as if he was giving all this due consideration.
‘But instead,’ said Berger, ‘an inexplicable situation arose, in which you cancelled the tour and locked up the girls on a military base.’
‘And so?’ asked Caution.
‘And so I want them back,’ said Berger.
Caution shook his head. ‘Those girls,’ he said, ‘are dogshit. They’re stuck on the base because they’ve been blacklisted by the United Services Organisation. They’ll never get another gig. Even the fucking Koreans wouldn’t have them. All I’ve done is give them a safe place to stay while they wait for their flight home.’
Berger raised both eyebrows, which made his hat move up and down. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ he asked.
‘Can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t play,’ said Caution.
Berger sucked his teeth. ‘My associates in Kings Cross assured me they were of hit-parade quality, or better,’ he said.
Caution listened coldly. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll cut you a new deal. In Vung Tau, I know guys who’d kill any man for ten bucks.’
Berger nodded. ‘I’ve met them too,’ he said.
‘If you hop back to fucking Australia,’ said Caution, ‘I won’t pay them to shoot you.’
Berger smiled, as if he and Caution were men of equal size, strength and authority.
‘You’re not the only one with ten bucks,’ he said.
Caution laughed. ‘If any asshole was gonna grease me in Vung Tau,’ said Caution, ‘they’d’ve done it long ago. The people who don’t like me are all scared of me, and ain’t nobody in this whole country afraid of a Jew in a yellow hat. Anybody you give money to kill me is going to take it from you and walk away, just like I did.’
Berger turned his back on Caution and stamped off towards town.
The next day, Nashville seemed more calm, although he still wasn’t talking the way he used to. He sat with Shorty in the jeep, his fingers interlaced in his lap, as if he were waiting for something. The radio paged car one. Shorty cringed.
‘I didn’t turn it on,’ he said.
‘I did,’ said Nashville.
They were called to an accident at the Grand Hotel, whose notepaper was found all around town, and where Izzy Berger had been tricked into sleeping with a man.
‘By a strange fucking coincidence,’ said Nashville. ‘I was at the Grand last night. Tâm was not in Le Boudin, so I sought solace in the ass of a stranger.’
Shorty felt suddenly concerned. ‘Did you do it with the light off?’ he asked.
Nashville took a gulp of water from his canteen.
‘We did,’ said Nashville, ‘as a matter of fact.’
‘Did you pat her pussy?’ asked Shorty.
Nashville spluttered. ‘Did you say pussy?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t think they had a word for pussy in Austral-alien.’
Shorty blushed.
‘Is that your thing, Shorty?’ asked Nashville. ‘Pussy patting? Are you a pussy patter? Does your nurse let you pat her pussy?’
‘The next time you mention her,’ said Shorty, ‘I’ll break your jaw.’
‘Ease off,’ said Nashville. ‘Pussy patter.’
Shorty looked pained.
‘I don’t even know what it is,’ said Nashville. ‘Pussy patting.’
Outside the Grand Hotel, Simpson from Simpson was directing stove carts and cyclos around the Captain’s black Cadillac, which had a pair of ears sprayed on the bonnet and another on the trunk.
‘The Captain was inside, carrying out a routine inspection,’ Simpson told Shorty. ‘I was assigned to watch the car, but there was a traffic accident on the corner, so I went over to see if I could help. When I came back, the Caddy was like this’ – he waved at the bonnet – ‘and the zipperheads had siphoned all the gas.’
‘Was anyone hurt?’ asked Shorty.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Simpson.
‘In the accident,’ said Shorty.
Simpson turned away from him and spoke to Nashville. ‘I’ll get the car cleaned up in town,’ he said. ‘Reckon you could take the Captain back?’
Nashville shrugged.
The Captain was waiting in the car. Simpson opened the door for him, and led him into the jeep.
‘Nashville,’ said the Captain.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Nashville, as if he been asked a question. ‘And this is Corporal Long.’
Shorty saluted.
‘He’s my pussy patter,’ said Nashville. ‘I mean, my partner.’
It was only a short trip from the Grand Hotel to the PMO on Le Loi Street, but the Captain counted three pairs of ears on the walls along the way.