WINTER 1968-SUMMER 1969:
Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam/Cambodia; Mougins/Paris, France

When Terry Haye arrives under cover of night in Ban Me Thuot, in the central highlands of Vietnam, his first thought is of a line from Paul Valéry, the great French Symbolist poet: “Power without abuse loses its charm.”

When he has been there a week and there is blood on his hands, he is reminded of what another Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld, said: “If we resist our passions, it is more from their weakness than from our strength.”

Because by the time Terry Haye gets to Vietnam he is ready to learn how to kill.

“Killing is easy,” Captain Claire says, during the first orientation lecture inside the Special Forces compound, “so don’t spend time sweating it. You’ve all heard the horror stories, about kids freezing with their fingers on the trigger. I’m here to tell you those stories are pure bullshit. Anyone can kill; it’s a snap.

“You take anyone—and I mean anyone—your so-called pacifist, conscientious objector, fucking Martin Luther King himself, I don’t care who he is, and you put him in a room with a loaded pistol. Then you show him his wife or teenage daughter being raped, and see how fast he picks up the weapon and kills the motherfucker that’s doing his family hurt.”

Terry Haye, sitting, one leg casually draped over the other, thinking, What is this, the army’s version of a homily?, but part of him certainly wanting—perhaps needing—to believe it in the same way one believes the doctor when he says, Now this won’t hurt a bit. Not a homily exactly, just a lie one needs to believe.

“You think it’s a big deal under those circumstances, you’re in for a rude awakening,” Captain Claire continues, “ ’cause war is just like seeing your wife or your teenage daughter raped in front of you. Once it happens, you’re in it, and you’ll find no matter what doubts you brought with you, you’re gonna kill those motherfuckers out there.”

By this time Terry Haye has been through both basic and advanced individual training, OCS, airborne school at Fort Benning, just outside Columbus, Georgia, and Special Forces school at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Terry Haye, listening to Captain Claire drone on about what it means to kill human beings, how the mind perceives it one way while the reality is another way entirely, wonders what all the fuss is about. After all, he muses, man has been killing since the dawn of time, since the first piece of meat or the first female was stolen, since one stone-age tribe encroached on the territory of another. So what?

Terry can’t figure what the big deal is. His mind has set none of the traps, illusions of guilt or pity, to which Captain Claire keeps alluding. There is the enemy, Terry thinks, square in your sights. You pull the trigger and, boom! he is gone, finis, that isn’t particularly complex or difficult to understand.

“What you have volunteered for,” Captain Claire says, “is the Studies and Operations Group within Special Forces.” He grins, a rare and peculiarly ominous expression. “Sounds kind of like you’ve signed up to be librarians, but that’s only army acronese. What you’ll be doing first is recruiting CIDGs, that is, for you poor, uninitiated swine, Civilian Irregular Defense Groups. More useless acronese.

“You’re going behind enemy lines for sabotage work, laying sanitized antipersonnel mines. Because you’ll be in what amounts to uncharted territory, you’re gonna need all the help you can get, so the powers that be have authorized use of Khmer Serei, members of the hill tribes along the northwestern frontier and those indigenous to the area of the Mekong delta. Those who are chosen will be given unit designations since Asian names are difficult, at best, to remember. The CIDG recruits will be carefully integrated into your units for use as you see fit, as guides, as sacrifices if need be.”

Captain Claire is walking around the room, watching them as he speaks. “Okay, so much for the good news. The bad news is that you’re in Asia, and Asia is what can get you killed. First thing to remember is that you’ll never understand the place. It’s hooked into a different reality, and if you try to make it conform to your Western ideas, you’ll wind up causing someone else’s death, or worse, be dead yourself.

“The second thing to remember is that death means nothing to the Asians, it’s just some kind of process that gets them from one plane of reality to another. So the only difference that counts between you and your enemy is that he doesn’t mind dying and you do.”

Captain Claire stops. “I see some of you smiling, so I have to assume that you think what I’m saying is funny. The first time you go to help a little girl across the road and the grenade in her armpit blows your legs off, you’ll know what I’m talking about.” He glares at them. “Or you can get it straight here where all it’ll cost you is some time and mental effort.”

Afterward, in what passes for the officers’ lounge, while Terry is wondering why they need Cambodian, not Vietnamese, guides, Kid Gavilan, one of the new unit, says, “What does it matter anyway? We’re here because we believe in America, and keeping the communists out of Vietnam is vital.”

Heads nod and there is a general murmur of assent. Terry looks around at the West Point types, strapped into the military ethic at an early age, and wonders what is stirring in their secret minds. Why are they really here? Is it straightforward patriotism, an unwavering sense of duty, my country right or wrong, or are there other more personal imperatives being played out among this elite corps of soldiers?

It is not the idle question of the intellectually curious. Quite soon, Terry knows, he might be dependent on any one of these men for his safety, his very life. Knowing their motivations may one day mean the difference between lying facedown in one’s own blood and getting out alive.

What, after all, is stirring in Terry’s secret mind? He had been a boy who never quite fit in with his contemporaries. He was envied by them because of his exceptional skills in almost every field of physical endeavor. And he, who could run faster, jump farther, think faster than any of them, despised their slow-wittedness, their inability to see solutions which were eminently manifest to him.

Because in high school and college he was so sought after by both athletic teams and girls—for he was exceedingly handsome and magnetic as well—his sense of isolation was heightened. All the girls in one way or another disappointed him, leaving him feeling foolish for having given them so much of his time. He felt constantly besieged, defensive, and exasperated.

Yet he was not, as one would think, lonely. Terry was connected to his thoughts—that is, his thought processes—in the same manner that a city is hooked into its supply of electrical energy. And he took immense pleasure in exploring this unique natural resource, unaware of Francis Bacon’s warning that whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

As a boy he had not been given to dreams or imaginings. For as long as he could remember he had known—or he had thought he had known—what it was he wanted out of life. He observed from the proximity only innocence can bring his father’s business dealings, divining with appalling swiftness that the only commodity that never decreased in value was power. Power is universal, understood and obeyed in all languages, all ages; it is the golden fleece, the Holy Grail.

He remembers a Christmas morning when his father plucked from under a tree decorated with genuine sugarplums two long, thin decorated packages. “Happy Christmas,” he said, handing them to his sons.

Terry was thirteen, Chris twelve. They were in their father’s office, where, traditionally, the Christmas tree was put. Terry took his present over to the giant leather sofa. It was set across the office from his father’s thick-columned Roman desk, beneath a bay window as long as a ship’s side, overlooking a grove of beech trees bare save for a rime of frost. A fire made with hickory logs blazed in an oversized fireplace surmounted by an eighteenth-century French marble mantel carved with sweet-faced cherubim.

Malcolm Haye, tall, mustached, splendidly dressed, stood, grinning, in front of his desk while his sons opened their presents. Terry still remembers the feeling he got when he saw the Remington 30-30 hunting rifle. A little thrill, a little chill moving up and down his spine, making his heart skip a beat.

Malcolm Haye, in bold hunting tweeds, taking his sons out into the countryside, setting up cans on a tree stump, letting them pop away—spang! spαng! spang!—laughing excitedly, contentedly as Terry’s cans, hit through their center, cartwheeled in the frigid air.

But it was not cans Malcolm Haye was after, it was deer. His father had taken him stag hunting in Wales, he told them, when he was only ten. “The old rifle he gave me,” Malcolm Haye said, “was longer than I was tall. But I handled it. I handled everything my father gave me.”

It was, of course, both reproach and warning. Early on, Terry had learned that his father did not idly tell stories. He always had a point to make. Life, he had said many times, is a series of lessons to be learned. The better one learns them, the more successful one will be. Malcolm Haye greatly valued success, which is why he fell in love with America, the land where success is the royal family; king, queen, and prince.

In the woods, snow, old and crusty, lay here and there in icy pockets. “Look for the hoof prints,” Malcolm Haye said. “Search for the spoor, where the bark is rubbed off the tree trunks by their rutting. The evidence is all around you. You’ll see. Just remember to keep the wind in your face so the deer won’t scent you.” He seemed, at that moment, not unlike Terry’s private vision of Sherlock Holmes, strong, broad-shouldered, the answer to all enigmas at his fingertips, in control of the mysterious. How Terry admired him!

Then Chris said, “I don’t want to look. I don’t want to kill anything.”

Malcolm Haye stopped in his tracks. He turned, and Terry could see the fire in his eyes. “You’ll do as I tell you, Christopher.”

“I’ll shoot cans off a log,” Chris said. “But I won’t shoot at an animal.”

“You have lessons to learn—important lessons,” Malcolm Haye said. “It is not for you to choose among them.” He reached out, took Chris by the scruff of his neck, shoved him deeper into the woods. He gestured. “Terry, see that he does as he’s been told.”

Terry, thankful that he had never given his father cause to turn on him in that manner, loped after Chris.

“What’s the matter,” he asked his brother, “don’t you want to learn how to hunt?” Chris shot him a look, and Terry said, “What’s with you, anyway?”

“Let me alone, okay?”

“No. It’s not okay, you jerk. Who’s gonna protect you from Dad? You really pissed him off back there. The only reason he didn’t hit you, I think, is it’s Christmas. But you keep on like this and, Christmas or no, you’re going to get a hell of a whomping.” Malcolm Haye, who had been raised with iron law backed up by a hickory switch, strongly believed that corporal punishment was a major character builder.

“He’s hit me before,” Chris said. “No one’s going to stop him.”

“But why do you always have to piss him off? Sometimes I think you do it on purpose.”

“You’re his son,” Chris said. “I must be someone else’s.”

“Jesus, you’re impossible. I don’t know why I try to help you.”

“Is that what you think you’re doing? Helping me?” Chris said. “You aren’t. You just want me to believe in all the things you believe in. You’re just like Dad, a mirror image, and he loves you for it.”

“He loves both of us,” Terry said. “The difference is you spend all your time trying to prove you’re not like him.”

“I don’t know whether he loves me or not,” Chris said. “But it’s clear he doesn’t like me. I’m not what he wants me to be. That’s too bad, but I don’t need his approval.”

“You’re wrong, kiddo,” Terry said as Chris moved off. “Only you’re too goddamned stubborn to see it.”

Of course, it was Chris who found the deer, a large, antlered buck. They were downwind, within a copse of densely packed pines, excellent cover. Terry was overcome with excitement. The animal was so large. The thought of bringing it down was thrilling.

“Shoot,” he hissed at his brother. “Go on, shoot it!”

Chris did nothing but stare at the deer. He said something that Terry could barely hear, It’s beautiful, perhaps.

“Well, if you won’t,” Terry said, aiming his rifle.

“No! This isn’t Labyrinth. You’re not going to win!” Chris kicked out, and the Remington slammed into a tree trunk, knocking the barrel out of line, rendering it useless.

“Shit,” Terry breathed. “Look what you’ve done. Dad’s going to kill you.”

Just then Terry turned, saw Malcolm Haye making his stealthy way through the woods. He, too, had spotted the buck. Was he yet aware of the presence of his sons?

Terry threw down his rifle, made a grab for Chris’s. “No!” Chris said. “I won’t let you—”

But Terry was the stronger, Terry knew what he was doing. He raised Chris’s 30-30 until it was pointed at the buck who had moved slightly, standing broadside to the boys. Terry, reaching around, curled his forefinger over his brother’s. Pulled the trigger.

The shot was like an explosion, reverberating off the corridors of trees. The buck skidded sideways as if it had slipped on a patch of frozen snow. Then it went down, its forelegs crumbling. Its side was bloody. Its head twisted, searching perhaps for the source of its pain. Then it fell to the forest floor.

Malcolm Haye hurried up. He saw Chris holding the rifle, Terry’s on the ground. “Well, Jesus, you’ve made my day,” he said, clapping Chris soundly on the back. “This is one hell of a Christmas present!”

Looking over at his brother, Terry thought, Why don’t you feel what I feel, the exhilaration? And then, joy turning to anger, I’ve saved you, you ungrateful idiot, and all you can do is stare at me in hatred while you cry like a baby.

Still, that was not the moment when he gave up on Chris. That came some weeks later. When Chris threw Terry’s gift back into his face, Terry promised himself then that he would never put himself into someone else’s debt. He never wanted to be weak, in an inferior or indefensible position.

“Always deal from strength,” he hears his father saying again, “and the world will be yours.”

The team dressed in baggy black Khmer leggings and shirts is inserted by helicopter into an area just outside An Loc. Captain Claire the CO, Terry the looie, second in command. They are barely three miles from the Cambodian border. They wait, crouched in the darkness, while the rising ’copter swirls dust and grit into their faces.

A pair of grim-faced Khmer Serei, the right-wing faction of Cambodian tribesmen, that the team has named Donner and Blitzen guide them through rice paddies and swampy jungle rank with mangrove. A kind of thunder stops them in their tracks. They turn their heads skyward, see beacons passing over them like eerie extraterrestrials. Moments later the earth trembles and the horizon in the west leaps with bright gouts of flame, quick bursts, then a line so brilliant it hurts the eyes.

“What the hell is that?” someone whispers.

Captain Claire says nothing, but privately Terry is doing some quick calculating. He wonders what B-52s are doing bombing targets across the frontier in neutral Cambodia.

Presently, they move on and, within a mile, come upon the perimeter of a Viet Cong encampment. Their guide signals to Captain Claire. The team spreads out. Terry, as yet nicknameless, and Kid Gavilan are assigned to take care of the sentinels.

Terry slings his AK-47 machine gun across his back, takes out a length of wire. At each end he has affixed a piece of dowel with which he can get a firm grip.

He has not yet killed a man, and in an intellectual way he is curious as to what feelings the act will engender in him. He finds his target, little more than an indistinct silhouette amid the foliage. The jungle is buzzing with insect life, the heat and humidity oppressive even after midnight. Terry contemplates the narrow back. How small and light the Viet Cong looks, how puny and insignificant.

Terry wraps the wire around his neck and pulls on the dowels. Feels the first quick spurt of blood as Charlie’s arms whip backward, trying to free himself.

Terry down on his knees, clamping tighter on the handles as death approaches. He becomes aware of its heat, its smell. The Viet Cong dances like a drunk or an epileptic.

Terry feels a kind of bond springing up between them, the taker and the giver, the master and the vanquished, the god and the mortal. He jerks the VC around so that he can stare into his flat face.

What he expects to find there he cannot say, though, perhaps after all it is the hope of a glimpse of the infinite. Instead, he watches eyes as opaque as muddy water stare into his with an expression of such unalloyed hatred that for a moment he is taken aback. The man’s cocoa lips part, and he spits into Terry’s face.

Terry growls deep in his throat, his brow knotted, his knuckles white with the pressure he brings to bear on the killing wire. There is an awful, fecal stench. Then the man is dead.

Unwinding the wire from the darkened flesh, Terry thinks that he has never before experienced the meaning of power, he has merely dreamed its existence.

He turns, sees Kid Gavilan in trouble with his target. Draws his knife, slams it between Charlie’s shoulder blades with such murderous force that the Vietnamese leaves his feet. For a moment Terry and Kid Gavilan stare at each other. Then, bloody face grinning, Kid Gavilan waggles his thumb skyward.

Terry advances over the slumped enemy, unstrapping like the rest his AK-47, firing brief, accurate bursts into the encampment. He sees the giant nicknamed Axman, played guitar back in Red Hook, wading into Charlie, mowing down the enemy. Ten minutes later the team has made its way back to the point set for the rendezvous with the ’copter. It appears, and Captain Claire says, “Right on the money.”

They all feel invulnerable as they ascend into the heavens, immortal as if they are Norse gods returning to Valhalla. But Terry, sitting in darkness, with the ether singing past his ears, his weapon across his knees, is thinking of the bombing run about which Captain Claire was silent.

The seventeen-year-old Kid Gavilan, tape cassette player around his neck, slaps Terry’s knee and, grinning, says, “That was great work back there. I figure you’re Butcher now. Yeah, Butcher.” He slaps out a spunky rhythm on Terry’s knee. “Hey, man. Everybody agrees.”

They are led into the jungles each night for mission runs, but the talk is not about Vietnam. Terry does not see a map of the country or even an update regarding the status of the war in their area. They might be in the Philippines or Guam for all they know of Vietnam.

At other times, bored, filled with dreams he cannot recall, Terry prowls Ban Me Thuot like a vampire unafraid of daylight. Increasingly, in his forays into the tumbledown Coca-Cola-can shanties, Terry is hearing about Cambodia. In between blasts of Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, Terry gleans the morsels of the only history to survive here, the one that existed yesterday.

Terry coming out of a gray-green rain so torrential that he literally cannot see three paces in front of him. Even the ubiquitous motorbike traffic has been temporarily curtailed. It is so hot and steamy that the rain feels warm to the skin. The only good thing about the rain is that it has also temporarily curtailed the ferocious mosquito attacks.

Inside the corrugated-tin shack bar, a neon sign glimmers DRINK COCA-COLA in Vietnamese script. Terry orders a “33” beer. No sooner does he settle on a seat than a swarm of girls in multicolored ao dais descends on him, making him think that he would prefer the mosquitoes.

At the next table he hears conversations like music. “All you have to do is look in a fuckin’ history book,” a pimply-faced former farmhand is explaining to his black buddy. “Don’t disappoint me, Fist, you can read.” A strong-arm man with an upraised fist painted on the side of his scarred helmet. “Sanctuaries have been essential to every successful guerrilla war.” In Vietnam every boy is an expert. “The rumor is that COSVN HQ is in one of those sanctuaries in Cambodia.” COSVN, Terry has already learned, being the acronym for Central Office for South Vietnam, the legendary nomadic base from which, according to Command, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese are conducting the war. “Unless we can find and destroy it, we’ll never win this shitty war.”

In the days and weeks to come Terry hears this plaint over and over, as if it were a litany or a catechism. A Way to get out of here.

It is always raining, it seems, in Vietnam. Certainly, Terry is soaked each time he enters the rattletrap bar with its DRINK COCA-COLA neon buzzing fitfully, like a bad dream of another time, another place. Another life.

Always there is a blue-bearded bear of a man, sitting in the rear corner of the place where it is dark, hunched over his own bottle of hooch. Like a cowboy from the Old West, he wears a handgun holstered on one hip, a marine KA-BAR knife with a handle carved in the shape of a screaming American eagle sheathed on the other hip. Terry is interested in him because the girls leave him alone, which means that either they know something about him or that he had been incountry since Noah stepped off the Ark.

One day Terry sits down at this man’s table.

“Get outta here,” the bearlike man says. He’s got lieutenant’s bars, so it can’t, Terry decides, be an order. Nevertheless, with the looie glowering menacingly at him, he whips out a bottle of single-malt Scotch he bought on the black market, puts it on the table next to the man’s almost finished bottle of Canadian Club.

The man stares at it. “Get outta here,” he says, “but leave the Glenlivit.”

Terry laughs, breaks the seal on the Scotch, pours them both hefty shots. “They call me Butcher,” he says, lifting his glass.

The bearlike man wraps a meaty hand around his glass, downs the Scotch in an instant. Terry thinks he hears him sigh, though it’s hard to tell with Jimi Hendrix singing about kissing the sky.

The man pours another, begins to sip it slowly, lovingly, like a connoisseur. “Name’s Virgil,” he says.

“Is that your nickname, or is it Lieutenant Virgil?”

Virgil shrugs. “Who remembers anymore. Whoever I once was, I’m Virgil now.”

“I’m with the Special Forces SOG,” Terry says. “What do you do here?”

“I find things,” the looie says. “I hold my lamp high, look into the burning darkness.”

“You been incountry a long time?” The Glenlivit is fast disappearing, and Terry realizes he should have bought two bottles.

“It depends,” Virgil says, “on how you measure it.”

Terry nods. “I know what you mean.”

“Nah,” Virgil says. “You don’t. You’re like all these other suckers who don’t know why they’re here or what the fuck they’re supposed to do. Take it from me, pal, this is the most shitfaced excuse for a war that has ever been perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. And the public is us.”

“That so?” Terry says, interested. “Well, I’d sure like to know what the fuck I’m doing here.”

Virgil stares at him for a long time, as if he is an archaeologist holding a vase, wondering what it is made of. “Okay,” he says. “You asked for it, you’re gonna get the whole nine yards.” Pouring more Glenlivit. “These generals here at MACV don’t know shit about being here. They think they can take an army essentially trained for heavy tank warfare on the open, rolling terrain of Northern Europe and have ’em adapt to guerrilla warfare in this stinking pesthole.

“Instead of training the South Vietnamese in guerrilla warfare, Command has seen fit to take our own guys—kids whose average age is nineteen—and pit ’em against Charlie.

“Well, let me give you a bit of news, pal. We’re losing this fucking war. General Westmoreland’s famous ‘Search and Destroy’ missions against the VC—the linchpin of our so-called tactical approach to the war—are dismal failures.

“Of course, now that he’s gone, Command is either too stupid or too vain to admit to such a monumental blunder. So neutral Cambodia is fast becoming the war’s scapegoat.”

Virgil takes the last of the Scotch. “See, Cambodia is where the VC is building sanctuaries, arming itself with supplies from the Chinese communists through Laos via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Now Command knows we won’t win it in Vietnam, so they’re planning an insane and illegal invasion of Cambodia. And with it, everything—and, pal, I do mean everything—is going down the drain.”

Virgil watches the girls in the peacock ao dais moving through the room. “Y’see, Butcher, Cambodia is the key. If you don’t know anything about Cambodia—which most guys here don’t—you’ll never understand this war. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s leader since 1945, has spent decades treading a damned dangerous political tightrope, holding hands first with the communists, then the French and the Americans, and back again. Sounds stupid, huh? Well, it wasn’t. It was just about the only thing that allowed his country to remain free and nonaligned in the battle for Indochina.

“Just as importantly, he kept Vietnam, Cambodia’s stronger, age-old enemy, at bay, while receiving aid from both Peking and Washington.

“But, shit, now Cambodia’s in for it. Because Sihanouk’s allowed the COSVN sanctuaries, Command’s decided to go in there. Invade Cambodia.”

“You’re nuts,” Terry says. “What an insane idea. The military’d be pilloried. The administration wouldn’t stand for it.”

Virgil smirks. “Nixon and Kissinger. Yeah, well, this war’s being run by madmen, so what can you expect? Everything’s going to come apart in Cambodia, and it’ll spread from there. This, Butcher, is the beginning of the end. The fall, as it were, of the American Empire.

“Already there are rumors that the left-wing maquis, who Prince Sihanouk calls the Khmer Rouge, are much more powerful than he has led us to believe. Unlike the right-wing Khmer Serei who do our dirty work, we have no control over the Khmer Rouge. They’re a wild card in this fucked-up deck, and I think the most potentially dangerous element.

“Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sihanouk out, maybe assassinated, within six months. And, when it goes down, you can bet one way or another, we’ll have a hand in it.”

“What do you mean, one way or another?”

Virgil shrugs. “It’s not only the armed services are over here, Butcher. Vietnam’s become a den of CIA thieves. Who the fuck knows what evil those bastards are up to?”

One moonless night, as the ’copter takes the Special Forces team through cloud-filled skies, Captain Claire speaks to them. This is most unusual. SOP is for the team to receive their premission briefing on the ground just before departure. This time there is none.

Over the heavy vibration, the yammering of the rotors, Captain Claire says, “We’re on pretty much of a milk run tonight, a recon ops. Surveille the immediate sector you’ll be assigned. As you know, the weather’s been lousy recently, so Command needs firsthand confirmation of extent of damage. It sounds simple, and it is.”

The team with their heads together as if they are praying before an important football game, Captain Claire shouting to be heard over the din.

“We’re essentially picking over a target site of an ‘Arclight’ bombing run. I don’t know if any of you have seen the devastation that kind of a carpet strike causes. Take it from me, it’s awesome. Nothing is apt to be left alive. But you’re likely to find tarmac roadways, semipermanent buildings, even concrete bunkers. If you do, make immediate note of the number and size.”

Terry looking down as the moon slides out from a bank of black cloud, seeing An Loc already to the east, the river twisting by below, shining dully, overhung by slanted trees, ropy vines, knowing now for certain that they are crossing the frontier into forbidden Cambodia, a neutral country where they have no business being. And he thinks, if we’re bombing Cambodia—no matter what the cause—then surely we’ve lost all reason, all perspective.

Knowing this has a peculiar effect on him—it makes him cautious. The aura of invulnerability, the sense of being part of a cadre of male Valkyries being dropped from the skies, abruptly seems to him absurd, an adolescent’s wild dream. It occurs to him that the man who seeks power need fear only one thing, the madness of his superiors.

He turns his attention to the other men in the ’copter, sees by the tiny red interior lights their expressions of hungry anticipation, as if by their stares they can melt plastic and steel.

The ’copter dips, banks steeply, circling briefly like a bird of prey. The team, bristling with hardware, jumps from its belly, bastard offspring of the mechanical mother.

Deposited on the dark side of the moon, the team spreads out. They are confronted by a holocaust. Craters, their edges still charred and smoking, pock the devastated area. The clearing has been made by the carpet bombing run. Stumps of trees dot the area. No roadways, structures, or bunkers.

Remnants of supplies litter the ground like a garbage dump. Terry, kneeling, can make out Chinese ideograms as he turns over what is left of the wrappings. These supplies have made their way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the VC. So this bombed site has nothing to do with the Cambodians, but with Command’s almost monomaniacal quest to destroy COSVN.

And yet, it has everything to do with Cambodia since, in order to appease North Vietnam, Sihanouk has given his tacit consent to allow the VC sanctuaries inside his country’s borders.

Cautious, moving slowly on, Terry finds the first of the blasted bodies. Beside him, the CIDG known as Tonto, squats, checking faces or what is left of them.

“VC?” Terry asks.

Passing from one corpse to the next, Tonto shakes his head. “Khmer,” he says. “Cambodians.” He raises his head, and Terry can see his resemblance to those dead faces.

“Not soldiers, surely.”

“Where are their weapons? Their ammunition?” Tonto shakes his head again. “These were peasants who never knew of this war, or understood its nature.”

Terry says, “Do you know any of these people? Are they family?”

Tonto gives him a slow, sad smile. “My family is far from here. I am not Khmer Serei. I am not tied to your government or to Lon Nol. I am a Cambodian soldier who has spent much time in Burma. My real name is Mun.”

The earth shaking, the sky red around the edges, full of whipsawed debris, lethal as bullets. Even the stumps of trees disintegrating between them, the dead killed all over again, joining the living, inundated with a hail of automatic fire.

As he goes down, Terry sees Captain Claire being hit in half a dozen places, his blood exploding along with the bark and flesh of the trees. Kid Gavilan lurching like Frankenstein’s monster with half his head blown away. Donner and Blitzen, the team’s two Khmer Serei guides, are dead, sprawled facedown in a crater.

“Jesus Christ!” Terry says as he lies half over Mun. “They told us that this was a milk run, a recon, no one left alive after the ‘Arclight’ carpet bombing.”

“What the American army doesn’t know about this war,” Mun says, “would fill many volumes.”

“This is insane,” Terry says. “I can’t even see a single VC.”

The chattering of the automatic cross fire is deafening. Mun closes his eyes and sighs. “Butcher,” he whispers, “is this your blood or mine?”

Terry feels between them a swamp, a hot and sticky morass. “I don’t feel anything,” he says.

“I don’t either,” Mun says. “I think I’ve gone numb.”

Terry rolls carefully off the Khmer, sees the deep wound in Mun’s side.

Quickly, he strips off his black cotton top, makes a crude but quite serviceable tourniquet. The blood stops oozing.

He sees Mun staring at him with his black marble eyes. “Where is it?” he asks. “Will I die?”

“The captain said dying doesn’t matter to Asians.”

“It matters to me,” Mun whispers. “I have my family to think of.”

Terry squeezes Mun’s shoulder, not trusting himself to answer an unanswerable question. He puts his lips against Mun’s ear. “I’m going to find the radio. A signal’s the only way we’ll get out of here in one piece.”

“Assuming,” Mun says, “I’m still in one piece.”

Terry scrambles away, into the darkness and the death. He creeps from shadow to shadow, from crater rim to the darkened hollow of a charcoaled tree stump. Radio, radio, a child’s song rang in his head, who’s got the radio?

Axman. He remembers now, the big black guitar player, always doing Jimi Hendrix riffs. Axman, the radioman. Finds what is left of him, clutching the radio as if he had been in the process of signaling for help when the automatic fire tore him in two.

Reaching over, Terry rips the radio out of his desperate grip, sees in the corner of his vision a spark as of a faraway match, hears the familiar brrraatt! of Charlie’s automatic fire, then the sickening, tearing pain in his side.

He rolls, or lurches or jerks, spasming like a fish. Hurtling into the darkness at the bottom of a crater. Drawing breath is an effort, heat and cold suffuse him, alternating to the beat of his rapid pulse.

Curled in a fetal position, eyes staring upward at the rim of the crater, waiting. Waiting for the inevitable. Waiting for Charlie to come.

Mosquitoes all over him, feeding on the blood, and flies coming, licking up the salt sweat on his face. He dare not move. Dare not.

Until the silhouette, three of them, cautiously hovering at the rim, too far away, but spotting him, coming down, coming nearer, and Terry biting away the pin, throwing the grenade, screaming with the pain it causes him, hearing, or perhaps only imagining the buurrpp! of their AK-47s before the world turns white and the earth, appalled at this further abomination, vomits him up.

He lies for a long time, bathed in the sweat of fear, listening to the night chitter and moan. He thinks, This is not the way I thought it would be, not at all what I bargained for. Where’s the power here? In death, only death?

There has to be more.

And he thinks of his brother, Chris, flown away from America, from the army, from his duty. In France, the sun shining on his bronzed body, framed by the quaint white Côte d’Azur buildings and the cobalt Mediterranean. A French girl kneeling beside him, oiling his body, relaxing him.

While he, Terry the Butcher, lies here stinking, bleeding, dying of the fear. Is it fair? Terry asks himself. Is it right? To be here so far from France, so far from home? How he hates his brother, Chris, how he envies him, as he always envied the genuine pleasure Chris found in girls, the mundane society of school life that Terry could not help but disdain. But how far that disdain removed Terry from the mainstream of life, consigned to observing it from afar, like a god on Olympus.

Lying here, bleeding, dying of the fear, while Chris, the coward, neatly sidestepping his duty, his responsibility, soaks up sun and sex. How he wishes he was his brother now.

There is a bitter taste in his mouth. A shudder of dread overcomes him. It is far better, he decides, to die than to be dying of the fear. There is nothing, he thinks, worth that.

So he picks up the radio and calls for help, “Nantucket, Nantucket, this is Pequod! We walked into an ambush! We got heavy casualties! Get us the hell out of here, pronto!” though he knows that it hurts, coughing up blood in heavy clots, though he suspects that he will be heard by Charlie, now things are different, things have changed, vita vice, because he loathes that feeling, that dying of the fear, more than he is afraid of anything else.

You been here a long time?

It depends, Virgil says, on how you measure it.

And now Terry knows what he means. Because he is slowly, painfully making his way back to Mun in the night filled with mosquitoes as big as leeches, his skin crawling, everyone out for his blood, which, with every inch he is leaving in this fetid soil.

Somewhere out there in the chittering darkness Charlie lurks, waiting, patient as Buddha, malevolent as a serpent’s bite. But that is not what frightens Terry now. Rather, it is the knowledge that Charlie is inevitable here, is as much a part of the landscape as the blasted trees, the scorched earth. Charlie is inescapable, and he knows that if the chopper doesn’t arrive within the next five minutes, he and Mun will either be dead or will take a long time dying in Charlie’s cage, somewhere past the river Styx, in the bowels of hell.

He finds Mun, dragging himself through the mud, the pain making sparks fly behind his eyes, in his brain. Mun’s eyes are closed but, for a moment, Terry is so exhausted that he lacks the energy to see if Mun is still alive.

He listens to the night, to the insects’ chatter, the tree frogs’ mating calls, straining for portents, for some sign that Charlie is on the march, closing in. Terry is not yet ready for Charlie, but neither is he ready to die.

Opens his eyes, calls, “Mun. Hey, Mun.” Softly, a breath on a breeze stinking of rotting vegetation, decomposing bodies. He is being eaten alive by bugs. “Wake up, Mun.”

Beside him, Mun stirs. “Is it the Butcher,” he says, “or Ravana?” His voice is furry, thick as syrup.

“I radioed for help. We’ll be out of here soon.”

“Ah, Butcher.” Mun sighs. “Then I am still alive.” He cries out, Terry’s hand on his wound.

“Sorry, buddy,” Terry says. “But I wanted to check. The bleeding’s stopped.” At least for the moment, he thinks. And then, Where is that fucking chopper?

“I heard an explosion,” Mun whispers. “Was I dreaming?”

“I put Charlie to dreamland,” Terry says.

“What?”

“A grenade in his shorts.”

“There’s more of them, Butcher,” Mun says. “I can feel them out there.”

“We’ll be gone in a minute,” Terry says. “Then let Charlie fuck himself.”

“And if the chopper doesn’t come?”

“What do you mean? It’s on its way.”

“And Ravana is on his way,” Mun says. “Which one will get to us first, I wonder?”

“Ravana? Who is this Ravana?”

Mun turns his head to look at Terry. “I am a Theravadan Buddhist, Butcher.” Terry can plainly see the pain etched into his face. “Ravana is the supreme demon in our cosmology.”

“Powerful little devil, huh?”

“So much so,” Mun says seriously, “that he can even turn Buddha away from his meditation.”

“Well, if he’s coming after us,” Terry says, “I hope to hell the chopper gets here first.”

“But it may not, Butcher,” Mun says. “In which case, we must make preparations.”

Terry whistles him to silence. He has heard something—what?—a stealthy footstep, the swish of foliage, the brief cessation of the tree frogs’ endless sexual dance? All of these, or none? He cannot tell, he cannot fully trust his senses. Pain, like panic, distorts reality, making you miss things, forget about others. It is a dangerous state to be in at any time, in this situation it is absolutely lethal.

Terry checks his AK-47, puts in a new clip. He wishes he was mobile. He feels helpless, totally vulnerable. And, of course, he does not want to fire his weapon unless it is essential, the flame will give away their position.

“What is it?” Mun says after a time.

“I don’t know,” Terry says. “Nothing.” Then, to take his mind off the unbearable tension of uncertainty, “What were you saying?”

“Ravana will not come after you,” Mun continues. “He wants me.”

“Just you? How come?”

“Because I have something that belongs to him,” Mun says. “The Prey Dauw. The Forest of Swords.”

Up until that moment Terry has not really been paying attention or, if he has, he was not believing any of it, Khmer demons, Buddha, all of that Eastern nonsense. But then he thinks of what Captain Claire said about Asia. First thing to remember is that you’ll never understand the place. It’s hooked into a different reality, and if you try to make it conform to your Western ideas, you’ll wind up causing someone else’s death, or worse, be dead yourself.

“You’re telling me you’ve got something that belongs to a demon?” Terry says. “What the hell is it?”

“Not the demon directly. A talisman that belongs to Mahagiri, the outlaw priest who was Ravana’s disciple many eons ago. With the demon’s assistance, Mahagiri composed the Muy Puan, a forbidden book of Theravadan scripture that describes the one thousand hells, and how to invoke the evil spirits who dwell there. The Prey Dauw, forged by Mahagiri with Ravana’s guidance, is the living embodiment of the Muy Puan. Whoever wields it controls this entire quarter of the world. This is what my people believe.”

“Do you believe it?”

“In a way,” Mun says, eyelids drooping, “that does not matter. Their belief makes it so.”

“How did you get this thing?”

Mun hesitates for a moment and, for the first time, Terry catches a hint of real fear in the Khmer’s eyes. “I come from a long line of priests, Butcher. A special line, it is said.” He blows out a hissing exhalation. “We do not talk of it, my father and I. And since I am the eldest son, my father told only me. We are the descendants of Mahagiri. It is how my father had knowledge of the Prey Dauw’s location. The burial site was passed down from generation to generation.

“No one ever touched the talisman or dug it up—or even dared go near it. Until I did.” Mun’s eyes are so wide with fear that Terry can see the whites all around the pupils. “Times change and I wanted to make sure that the original burial site would not be compromised. I wanted to move it to a safer hiding place. Or at least this is what I told myself. Then I held the sword in my hands, and I did not want to let it go. I could feel its power, Butcher, like the thunder of a dark river, endlessly flowing. Its strength became my strength. Then I understood fully why it is a symbol of power that Khmer and Burmese alike—all the Theravadan Buddhists—acknowledge.

“I grew frightened, and did as I had meant to do. I buried it again in a safer spot.”

Mun is quiet for a time. It is a strain even to speak. But still the fear emanates from him, seeping into the night like a noxious gas.

Terry considers Mun’s words. For the first time since they are in this position, the gnawing fear is pushed aside. His mind is hard at work. “Tell me,” he says, “is this Prey Dauw feared also by the mountain tribes in the north of Burma, in the Shan State?”

“You mean by the opium warlords?” Mun nods. “Oh, very much so. These are highly superstitious men. The Forest of Swords has a special meaning for them; they would kiss the ground on which it lies. But that is of no concern to me, Butcher. If Ravana comes and the Forest of Swords is in my possession, he will devour me. I will be with him and with Mahagiri forever, banned from samsara, outcast from the wheel of creation.” He shudders.

Now Terry understands Mun’s terrible fear. He knows what a hideous fate banishment from samsara is for a Buddhist, who believes in the cycle of regeneration. To take the wheel of creation away from a Buddhist is tantamount to condemning a Catholic priest to hell. That is, if one believes in samsara—or in hell.

The only hell Terry believes in is the one he finds himself in now. But as Mun has said, the belief of the people created the power of the Forest of Swords. Terry thinks, What I could accomplish with that power!

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes.” Mun is grave. “Now I must will you the Forest of Swords, Butcher. You must accept it of your own free will. You see, you are not Buddhist. As far as Ravana is concerned you do not exist. He will not be able to take me, and the Forest of Swords will be safe from him.” His black eyes beseeching Terry’s. “You will do this for me?”

Terry, believing it, not believing it. What the hell? Who knows the difference here in the land of make-believe and death? Seeing how agitated Mun has become, how the bleeding has begun again along a ragged seam of the Khmer’s wound, says, “Yes,” because he wants him calm, he has already lost too much blood. But also because he can already feel the Prey Dauw in his hands, can see himself walking up the Shan, the talisman in his hands, the mighty Shan opium warlords kneeling before him like liege knights, giving over their priceless fiefdoms to him to do with as he will. Power! Unlimited power!

But all that will be meaningless unless they can get out of hell. Mun will, Terry calculates, be dead inside of a half hour. And, if Charlie comes now, they will both die before that. Where is that fucking chopper?

“Swear it, Butcher!”

“I swear it, Mun.”

Mun begins to speak. Terry sees movement now, definite, voices jabbering in sharp, harsh Vietnamese, quickening on the sodden breeze. Charlie is coming. Not the damned Ravana, not the goddamned chopper; Charlie.

“I buried the Prey Dauw in Cambodia. Listen closely. When I tell you where it is, it will be yours, I will be free, Ravana cannot harm me, take me out of samsara forever. It is within Angkor Wat. Have you heard of it? The ancient city of the Khmer kings. It is full of spirits, a fitting place for such a talisman to rest . . .”

Listening to Mun with one ear, memorizing the location of the Forest of Swords, if such a thing truly exists, Terry draws a bead on the moving shadows, is about to fire.

Thwup-thwup-thwup!

The night lights up like New Year’s Eve as the chopper, swooping in from the east, turns on its powerful spotlights, automatic fire coming from its open ports, ventilating Charlie, riddling Charlie, exploding Charlie.

Thwup-thwup-thwup!

And Terry, feeling the big wind whipping at him now, sending cinders upward into the night, the tornado about to whisk Dorothy and Toto off to Oz, drops his head on Mun’s chest, and thinks, Saved.

“Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes.”

And just like that, Terry pops into consciousness. Feels a whirlwind of events-emotions-half-dreams inside his head. For a moment, he is full up. Then it is all gone like a puff of smoke in a conjurer’s act, and he recognizes the face hovering over his.

“Bellum longum, vita brevis,” Virgil says.

“You look like a bear.” Terry’s voice is more of a dry croak.

Virgil grins. “The better to eat Charlie with, my dear.”

“Where the hell am I?”

Virgil looks around. “This particular bit of hell is the field hospital at Ban Me Thuot.”

“Can you find out about the guy they brought in with me? How is he?”

“Ah, the Khmer, Mun.” Virgil nods. “Shot up some. Worse than you, they tell me.”

“Wait a minute,” Terry says. “How come you know his name?”

“He’s one of mine,” Virgil says, “that’s why.”

Terry digests this, says, “Will he be okay?”

“He’ll survive. Not yet his time to check out of this stinking pit. Yours, either, I see. You had a rough time of it?”

Terry, the recent past rushing in on him like a tidal wave, says, “They’re all dead—Captain Claire, Kid Gavilan, Axman, the Khmers, the whole rucking outfit except me and Mun.”

“Tough luck.”

“You think that’s what it is? Luck?” Terry struggles to sit up, is overcome by a spell of pain and vertigo, lapses back onto the pillow.

Virgil shrugs. “In war,” he says, “nothing else exists but luck. Shit, Butcher, I’m a hero. Want to see my field decorations? Want to know how many VC I’ve killed? That was a long time ago. I was older then, I’m younger than that now.

“You’re following in my footsteps, son. You’ll get a medal for this. We’re both heroes now. So how does the army repay your bravery under fire? They ask you to go back and try again to get yourself killed. That’s all they really want from you, Butcher. Your life.”

Terry is not so groggy that he does not understand what Virgil means. “And what is it you want from me?”

“How’d you like to get together a whole new unit? Be in charge, recruit them, be the CO?”

“You can fix that? How?”

“I hold my lamp high, look into the burning darkness.”

“In other words, don’t ask.” Terry looks at the looie. “And what would it do, this unit I would lead?” he asks.

“I’m Virgil now. I told you, I find things. I thought maybe, after this event, you might want to join me in finding things.”

“Things like what?” Terry says, thinking, What does he need a Khmer for?

“All kinds,” Virgil says. He grins suddenly. “Anyway, what does it matter to you? This is the war, remember? Getting rich sure beats the shit out of dying.”

It does not take him long, thinking of the stench of death, of being eaten alive, of, more than anything, dying of the fear, which he has promised himself he will never again feel. Thinking of the madness of his superiors, the madness of those directing this war, the administration. Virgil saying, That’s all they really want from you, Butcher. Your life.

Considering, too, that with his own unit he will have a chance to get back into Cambodia, to Angkor Wat, where the Forest of Swords, the talisman of power, is buried. A power more potent, even, than the ubiquitous death that dominates Vietnam.

Studying the looie, wondering what he sees there, good or evil. Or maybe just a Way out, a better Way than trying to find COSVN, trying to find death. “What the hell,” Terry says, holding out his hand. “Like you said, war is long, life is short.”

Taking Terry’s hand, Virgil laughs. “That’s the spirit.”

Outside, on a white latticework patio, leafy climbing hydrangea grows in dense profusion, its pink flowers perfuming the air. Tendrils, curled and reaching, spread across the weathered boards of the patio, twined around the wrought-iron legs of the chair. In the chair, Soutane lounging, bare feet up, the hem of her blue-and-white summer dress kicked high above her knees, firm tanned thighs crossed one over the other.

Chris Haye can see all this from the rumpled bed where he lies coming slowly to life. His body aches, and he thinks, This is pathetic, I’ll never get in shape. Staring at Soutane’s long, gorgeous legs, thinking, Jesus, you’ll never get in shape that way. But for sure you’ll get to heaven.

Abruptly, as Soutane moves, the legs disappear beneath a swirl of blue and white. She comes into the house, and her nose wrinkles.

“C’est le souk ici!” she cries. It’s like a cattle market in here!

Chris laughs, rises just in time to catch her as she throws herself onto him. “Sometimes, for an athlete,” Soutane says, “you’re disgustingly lazy.”

Chris, his face in the forest of her night-black hair, thinks, That’s because, unlike Terry, athletics never came naturally to me. I had to work my butt off for every mile I ran or biked. But sometimes while the body is strong, the mind tires of the constant grind, it craves some rest, wondering what it is, after all, working toward.

Rolling off her, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

“What do you see there, cat?” Soutane asks. “Only cats see life in shadows.”

“The future,” Chris says. “The past. Nothing.”

She laughs, climbing athwart his naked chest, running her palms down his flesh. “I see this beautiful body coming through the Arc de Triomphe, covered by the yellow jersey.” She means the coveted shirt worn only by the leader of the Tour de France, the world’s greatest bicycle race. The Tour de France, which has brought Chris to France.

Watching his expression, her laugh fades, and she hits him with her balled fist. “Have I ever told you that you are terrible when you’re depressed?”

Chris eschews watching the shadows, instead watches the green motes in her extraordinary brown, almond-shaped eyes. He lifts a hand up, gently strokes her hair back from the side of her face. “Sometimes,” he says, “I don’t know why I am here. Sometimes I pray it’s to win this race.”

“Now you are thinking about the war, are you not?”

“I am.”

“What precisely are you thinking about the war?”

“Not about the war, really,” he says slowly. “About my brother, Terry. He’s there, in the war. So I guess I am thinking about the war, after all. I’m wondering if Terry is hurt. Or dead.”

“And why you’re here in France instead of in Vietnam.”

“Okay.”

Soutane makes a derisive sound. “You Americans!” she says, as if that, by itself, is a sufficient epithet. “You say ‘okay,’ and think that explains everything. What does this mean, anyway, ‘okay?’ ”

“This time,” Chris says, getting up, “it means, enough.”

“I can’t,” she says, turning to watch him, “beat you as efficiently as you beat yourself.”

Chris draws on a pair of shorts, a dark green T-shirt with NANTUCKET silkscreened in faded white across the chest. Out on the patio, the gentle Provençal morning falls across his shoulders. Sunlight, the artist’s soul mate, seeps through the stands of sentinel cypresses in, it seems, discrete drops, as if it were, instead, rain, forming ever larger patterns that construct, finally, the whole.

He has rented this small house in Mougins because it is in the pre-Alps, the run just long enough to Digne, a town in the Alps maritime, a crucial stage in the Tour de France. Digne will be, Chris believes, a turning point in the race. Whoever wins the Digne stage will have the best shot at winning the Tour de France. Chris has become intimately familiar, over the past several weeks, with the topography in and around Digne.

This house is on the mountainside facing, like many of the old mas—the farmhouses of the region—the valley north beyond which the Alps maritime rise in mysterious splendor. It is a far different view from that which the million-dollar villas face on the other side of the mountain: the breathtaking vista south, down to the curling Mediterranean. Chris has often seen that view from Soutane’s parents’ summer villa and, all things considered, he prefers this one.

Sometimes, on perfectly clear mornings, with the sunrise burnishing the Alps, Chris imagines that he can see Digne, lurking in the shadowy mountain pass, waiting.

“What are you painting these days?” Chris asks as he hears her come through the doorway.

“What are you writing?” she says.

She is still in the shadows of the eaves, and Chris turns. “With that body,” he says, “you should have been one of les petits rats.” He means the student ballet dancers with the Paris Opera.

Soutane draws her hands through her hair, making a chignon, the dancer’s signature. “I almost took the veil, instead.”

“I never believed that story about Soutane being your nickname.” Prendre la soutane means to enter the Church. “It’s just like you to embellish the origin of your name. It heightens the mystique of the artist.”

She smiles. “But you’ll never know for certain.”

“These days,” he says, serious again, “I don’t seem to know anything for certain.”

She comes to him, wraps her arm around his waist. “Except that you’ll win the Tour de France.” She goes inside, says, “What do you want for breakfast?” Before he can answer her, she has put her favorite Charles Aznavour tape on the portable stereo. Just like her, Chris thinks, but he does not mind. Whatever she prepares he will willingly eat because it will get him through his grueling morning ride, into the mountains to Digne. In the afternoon Soutane will drive up to meet him, and take him back.

Later, as he cycles, building up speed along the twisting rural roads, he thinks of home. Of his father, the proud son of a Welsh farmer who had done nothing more than scratch out a living for his family from the spectacular but unforgiving countryside.

Chris imagines his father emerging from the gray mists of Wales with only a slice of hard bread and a couple of shillings in his trouser pockets. Coming to London for his schooling, joining the Welsh Guards, fighting proudly for the Empire, meeting Chris’s mother, an American from Connecticut, a Jew of Polish heritage, not at all the kind of woman Malcolm Haye had envisioned falling in love with. Because of her, and because by then all of Malcolm Haye’s family were dead, emigrating to the States.

Enter, one by one, like bullets from a gun, Terry and Chris, the brothers Haye.

Terry. It seems to Chris that he had to struggle for what came so easily to his brother. Terry was born an athlete. He was stronger, faster, more clever than anyone else Chris can recall at school. Chris always struggling, making the second team instead of the first, second string instead of starter, in the shadow of Terry.

And that shadow, stretching, made him try all the harder to equal or surpass his brother’s accomplishments. It was an impossible task, which, in a way, was why he felt compelled to take it on. That, sweet Soutane, is what I see when I watch shadows. I see what I should be, and am not, no matter how hard I try.

The one good thing: it led him to cycling, at first a solo event, where he would not be consigned to the second team—he could merely lose. He did that a lot, in the beginning. But slowly, painfully, he worked himself into second-place finishes, then firsts.

By then high school was over, and he and Terry had gone their separate ways. Terry, every bit the Welsh brigadier that Malcolm had once been, had wanted his sons to be. What do you have to possess, Chris wonders as he cycles through sunlight as thick as maple syrup, to be a soldier? Is it patriotism, pure and simple, or, as he suspects of his father and his brother, a kind of burning, personal anger that needs to be assuaged?

He was never touched by that peculiar kind of anger, that need he had observed in some other males to kill. He is a pacifist; that is why he is in France. Or, again, is it as his father claims, cowardice that has sent him here, running with his tail between his legs, running from the dark chaos of war, the possibility of death?

True, this is a war in which Chris does not believe, but so what? Is that enough? “How can you do this?” Malcolm Haye said when he met Chris at the airport. “I still can’t believe that you’re going to France instead of to Vietnam. Chris, it is your duty to fight this war, to help to keep the communists from overrunning Southeast Asia, to keep alive capitalism and free enterprise, those fundamental policies that make America great.” There is no more fervid proselytizer than the man who has adopted, as Malcolm Haye has, his religion. His religion happens to be America.

America, Chris thinks, my country right or wrong? Has he used his pacifism as an excuse to cut and run? Chris wishes he was certain.

“Don’t you want me to be proud of you?” Malcolm Haye said just before Chris slipped through the departure gate. “Don’t you ever want to learn how to be a man?”

Soutane’s father, a distinguished man in his early forties, is much more philosophic. He eerily resembles Charles de Gaulle. All he needs to complete the picture is the kepi on his head. His politics, oddly enough, are quite radical. He is adamantly against the war. He abhors what his country has done to Indochina, Vietnam, and Cambodia. “What we greedily began,” he says, “the United States seems intent on finishing.”

Odd because Soutane remains untainted by matters of politics or philosophy. She explains, while rubbing him down with liniment, “I had many boyfriends from a very early age. They were, it seems to me now, radicals, revolutionaries, Marats all, rather than Robespierres, irritants rather than reformers. They were too busy being angry to think of reform.”

“Like your father?”

“My father is, perhaps, difficult to like. But he is likewise easy to admire.” Her talented hands bleeding the aches and pains from his heavily worked muscles. “My father believes that change is the only legitimate path to progress. For him, change begins with freedom from the past.”

“History,” M. Vosges, Soutane’s father, says, “is a manacle. Take Cambodia, for instance. We French made of it a colonial protectorate. While extracting from it her valuable natural resources, we undercut all native industry, driving the country’s economy into an inexorable downward spiral. Artisans were forced into poverty, we created no new industry to take the place of the old. At the same time we encouraged in its leaders excesses, gross indulgences, corruption in the furtherance of our own wealth and power. In French manacles Cambodia retrogressed.

“The only way to change this deplorable state is to break the manacles, turn away from a history that holds nothing of value for the Khmer, who are prepared to enter the modern world.

“In short, it is clear that the only way to make Cambodia work is to free it of the past. To start over, wipe the slate clean.”

M. Vosges grows excited, rubicund when he speaks in impassioned tones of righting the terrible wrong his country has perpetrated on Cambodia. It is, Chris thinks, as if he views his mission as a kind of jihad, as if he is armed not only with the lightness of ideology, but the sanctity of the Supreme Being as well.

One evening, at a dinner party in the Vosgeses’ summer villa, a spectacular white stucco and terra-cotta-tiled estate named Mon Repos, Chris is introduced to a rather roly-poly Khmer in his early forties named Saloth Sar. He is, M. Vosges tells Chris, the leader of Cambodia’s maquis freedom fighters, the Khmer Rouge. He also happens to be a former student of M. Vosges. “The one,” M. Vosges says, “of whom I am most proud.”

Saloth Sar shakes Chris’s hand, they exchange pleasantries in French; he makes a joke of how much the French radicals have helped him, more even than Marx. When he laughs, he seems jovial and avuncular. But afterward, Chris overhears his comment to a group of dark-suited men, no doubt influential French communists, “Cambodia is already a land of blood and bitter tears.” Chris observes a strange, disquieting darkness in Saloth Sar’s eyes.

Chris joins the fringes of the group as Saloth Sar goes on, “It is my belief that General Lon Nol, Sihanouk’s prime minister, has struck a deal with the Americans, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency. The Americans are notorious for ignoring history, for ignoring the realistic flow of internal events. They are blind to ideological currents.”

He has a way of speaking in public that is riveting. His very presence commands attention. But when he speaks he becomes positively charismatic. Chris is oddly reminded of newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler he has seen years before. Of course, he thinks, there can be no comparison between the two, Hitler and Saloth Sar. And yet, their ability to incite and enthrall a crowd seems quite similar.

“It is my belief,” Saloth Sar is saying, “that the Americans view Lon Nol as their Chiang Kai-shek, their great white knight against the scourge of communism in Cambodia. If we assume this is so, then we must assume that within a year Lon Nol will be running Cambodia. The people will have exchanged one despot for another. It will still be a land of blood and bitter tears.”

“That would truly be a terrible thing for Cambodia,” one of the French communists says. “We must do everything in our power to work against it.”

Saloth Sar smiles, and again Chris sees that odd, disquieting darkness in his eyes. “On the contrary, my friend. We will do nothing at all to oppose Lon Nol.

“It will be incorrect to assume that nothing will have changed in my country. Following Lon Nol’s ascension, we will be one step closer to true revolution. Lon Nol’s hard-line policies will further antagonize the people. Their hardships will double, then quadruple. And, out in the countryside, in the mountains and the rice paddies, the Khmer Rouge will be gaining strength. Men and arms will be flowing to us like rivers to the sea.

“We are as inevitable as the monsoons. Our eventual victory is inevitable, too. Why not allow the Americans unwittingly to help us, as they unwittingly helped Mao by backing Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek?”

Sometime later Chris sees Saloth Sar and M. Vosges standing in a shadowed corner. Above them is the open balcony of the second floor. Curious, Chris mounts the stairs. When he is directly above them, he stops.

“As usual,” Saloth Sar is saying, “the Americans are in the process of destroying themselves.”

“You mean the bombing runs inside Cambodia?” M. Vosges says.

“Precisely. These illegal acts of war are ostensibly to flush out Viet Cong and North Vietnamese strike teams, but over two thousand Cambodian civilians have been killed by these American bombs. You and I both know that the Americans have designs on Cambodia. But they do not—cannot—understand my country. Now, aided by me, anti-American sentiment runs rampant in Cambodia. This, I promise you, will be Sihanouk’s downfall.” That charismatic fire transforms Saloth Sar’s face. “The American imperialists’ terrible transgression is the leverage I need to rally more men to the Khmer Rouge cause. It is to our benefit to keep the myth alive that we are a ragtag bunch, in hiding from our own people. Now that the Americans have brought the war to Cambodia, the people see how wrong they have been to ignore the Khmer Rouge. Now they are joining in droves. Within months my army will outnumber Lon Nol’s.”

M. Vosges is about to reply, but at that moment a bejeweled woman approaches them, engaging the two men in conversation. Soon after that Saloth Sar slips away.

Outside the French doors the garden of violets and woodbine is lit with candles. Beyond the vine-laden walls, the twinkle of lights in the valley, the glitter of moonlight on the Mediterranean, as far away as a photograph, as close as the soft scent of sea salt.

Celeste, Soutane’s mother, dressed in Dior’s finest, presses another glass of champagne into Chris’s hand. With her copper-colored skin, her almost Polynesian features typical of the Khmer, her commanding height, she is extraordinarily beautiful, but perhaps less exotic than her daughter, who carries the traits of both East and West in her face.

Celeste has a personality that is akin to the calm before the storm, smooth, exquisite without, bands of flashing electricity within. She seems, if possible, even more politicized than her husband, M. Vosges.

She also seems avid to take Chris to bed.

“Don’t you think that Soutane will mind?” Chris asks her.

“Anger varies,” Celeste says, “with the extent of arousal.” She leans over, trails a kiss across his cheek. “Trust me. It will be good for my daughter. I have been trying to get a rise out of her ever since I bought her her first brassiere.”

Chris thinks, What would I have done with a mother like this one?

“And your husband?”

“As far as he is concerned,” Celeste says, “I am a free agent. He has learned over the years that the only way to hold me is not to hold me at all.” She smiles, engaging but not at all ingenuous. “So you see, you have nothing to fear. Quite the contrary.”

“You’ll have to explain something to me first,” he says, deliberately staring into her provocative cleavage. “How do Marx and Dior enjoy inhabiting the same space?”

Celeste laughs. “Well, well,” she says, squeezing his muscular arm, “all this and brains, too. Now I really must have you.”

“La curiosité est un vilain défaut,” Chris says. Curiosity killed the cat. “Do you have an answer, madame?”

She strokes the inside of his wrist, where the twist of the blue veins intrigues her. “You are quite right. Marx would never have understood the importance of a Dior,” she says. “I am a radical. But I am not dead. Besides, even for a radical, money has its uses.”

Carefully, as he would an octopus’s tentacle, Chris disengages her hand from his arm. “I love your daughter, madame,” he says.

When Celeste laughs again, there is a flintlike edge to it. “You have so much to learn about life, mon coureur cycliste.” She presents him with a smile that he cannot define. “You are still young. You think that you can hold passion in the palm of your hand. You have not yet learned that passion is like sand. It disappears no matter how tightly one tries to hold on to it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” Celeste fixes him with an unnerving stare. Then she gives him a smile so radiant it is seductive. “Well, you are still young enough, I suppose, to make foolishness a virtue.” She is standing so close to him that when she takes his hand and presses it against her mons, no one can see.

Chris tries to jerk away, but Celeste, unexpectedly powerful, holds fast his wrist. “No, no,” she says. “You should know what a real woman feels like.” She is hot, pulsing beneath his fingers. It is clear that she wears nothing under the Dior. She moves his hand. “Rub it, rub it.” His middle finger begins to disappear in a newly opened fold of cloth, and Celeste’s eyelids flutter.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to be part of something,” she whispers. “Something larger than yourself. The eternal love you think you feel for my daughter is nothing compared to having participated in social change. Upheaval! Manning the barricades! It is our God-given duty to free those not as fortunate as ourselves.” Her face twists in a sneer. “Do you really want to live your life as she has chosen to live hers, afraid to commit herself to any cause? How cheap, how worthless life is under those circumstances.”

In the heat and the smoke of the party Chris feels abruptly lightheaded. He has trouble breathing. Then, as he feels Celeste’s fingers close around his hardened penis, he breaks away from her.

Is she laughing as he stumbles away, drunk on her ministrations and her words?

“All my mother really wants,” Soutane says later as they dance to the music of a South American band, “is to discover what it will take to corrupt men.”

“Does she hate all men so?” Chris says, wondering if he should tell Soutane that her mother has tried to seduce him.

“Oh, definitely,” Soutane says, her samba creating a stir in the room. “But only if they are Western. She blames them for what has happened to her country, to Cambodia.”

He is thinking of how committed to a cause Celeste is, of how little Soutane wants to contribute. She is, like him, essentially self-involved. “She has reason to hate.”

“But not, I think, to do what she does. To my mother, anything that resists politicization is contemptible. Celeste believes in destiny and extremism as if they are canon.”

Sweat like jewels springs out on her bare shoulders. She has flung off her shoes. A young, black-haired Brazilian woman sings in Portuguese, “We will be together forever, my love, on the white sand beach, in the blue ocean, my sweet love.”

“Are you hungry?” The green motes in Soutane’s eyes have grown large in the low light. “Do you want to eat?”

They are near the open French doors, and he pulls her into the garden filled with candlelight and moonlight, warm light, cool light, striping them like tigers.

He leads her running, panting, down ancient stone steps, partially reclaimed by moss and lichen, past tall pilasters, pale and pitted, a sober reminder of how time works.

Behind a hedge, beneath a lotus tree heavy with fruit, they tumble down. The smell of lavender and earth. He can hear the pounding of her heart as he kisses her between her breasts.

He pulls up her tight dress, fumbles until she is bare underneath. Her dress is around her hips, just the lowest edge of her fringe is visible. He begins to lick her voluptuous mound. She opens to his caress, already wet.

“Mon coeur,” Soutane breathes, tangling her fingers in his hair. She frees her breasts, pulls his hands up to them. The nipples are very hard, and she moans as he rubs them.

Her marble thighs, strong as oaks, surround his head as, her abandon growing, she lifts them higher. Until, arching up, spasming, she clamps him in a soft, erotic vise.

Kissing him, she whispers breathlessly, “Mon ange, mon bel ange,” opening his trousers, enveloping him with her tongue, her lips, the inside of her mouth. She puts him between her breasts.

Chris, watching through eyes slitted with pleasure as she crouches over him, sees the moonlight drape her, burnish her skin, the pools of mysterious darkness between.

When she returns him to her mouth, he is overcome with delight, throwing his head back, closing his eyes, and moaning. Hearing her whisper, as her excitement mirrors his, “Yes. Oh, yes.” Then he is engulfed to his very root.

Afterward, they lie together, staring at the molten moonlight pouring through the layers of leaves above their heads. Sounds of the party come to them now and again on the breeze, another sensual samba, a brief gust of laughter, the clink of glasses together.

It is as they are kissing, gently, languorously, that they hear Celeste’s voice so close that she must be no more than several paces away.

“I am happy to give you everything you need,” she says.

And then, in answer, Saloth Sar saying, “I am pleased to say that I always get what I need at the house of Vosges.”

Chris rolls over. Soutane’s mother and Saloth Sar must be on the other side of the hedge. Soutane beside him, her hair, wild after their lovemaking, tickling his ear.

“I have gotten Kalashnikovs,” Celeste says. “They are absolutely the best weapons available. Better even than the American machine guns.”

Saloth Sar laughs. “That is, my dear Celeste, what I love most about you. Your authority in matters that by all rights should be outside your ken.”

“Outside the female domain, you mean.”

“Perhaps, yes.”

“That is how this family works,” Celeste says. “My husband covers the theoretical. I manage the practical.”

“Such as the procurement of the Kalashnikovs.”

“I am good at that. Even the unexpectedly large number you ordered did not faze me,” Celeste says without much vanity. “I am good at many things. For instance, I think that we should change your name.”

“My name?” Saloth Sar says. “Why?”

“To make you more memorable. More easily recognizable. Names are important, you know. Names of leaders, especially.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I think you should call yourself Pol Pot.”

“Pol Pot?” Saloth Sar seems to be rolling it around in his mouth. “It is not a Khmer name. It has no meaning.”

“All the better,” Celeste says. “You will give it its meaning.”

Saloth Sar—or Pol Pot—laughs. “Ah. The family secret is out at last. You are the dominant one.”

“Not at all,” Celeste says. “Many people have underestimated my husband. None of them are in power now.”

“Of course. Between the two of you, your contacts are quite extraordinary. I don’t know what my Khmer Rouge would do without your help.”

“We have raised quite a bit of money for you tonight,” Celeste says. “You are most persuasive.”

“The plight of the Khmer Rouge makes me so.”

“And what of the other Cambodian people?”

“Well, they are like sheep,” Saloth Sar says. “Worse, perhaps, because they have already been corrupted by the imperialists. The intellectuals, the priests all work against the good of the people, the teachings of the Khmer Rouge. This is a grave problem that needs solving.”

“What will you do?”

“The only way to rid a host of disease,” Saloth Sar says, “is to cut the disease out completely. In order for the balance of power to be truly overturned, we must cut the Americans’ legs out from under them. We must cut off their arms. Then we must castrate them so that they will never forget their transgression in Cambodia. To do this, all their contacts—Lon Nol’s people, as well as Sihanouk’s—must die. The government, the bureaucracy that perpetuates the hideous myth of American benevolence must be eradicated. So, too, the intellectuals and the priests. The new generation of Cambodian must be reeducated as we see fit without interference. ‘From the cradle to the grave’—as your husband has taught me. Educate the children properly and the right-thinking adult will follow.”

Chris turns to Soutane. He looks into her eyes, finds only despair. He thinks of his conversation with Celeste, how she longs to be a part of something larger. A social change, she said. An upheaval. But what Saloth Sar contemplates is mass murder. It is inhuman, unthinkable.

He motions to her, and they move away from the scheming couple. He whispers in Soutane’s ear, “Elle est le mauvais ange de lui.” She is a very bad influence on him.

Soutane says, “I think that they are very bad for each other.”

Chris draws her farther away from the hedge as if it contains poisonous serpents. “We have to do something,” he says fiercely. “We have to tell someone in authority.”

Soutane looks at him clearly. “No,” she says.

Chris is stunned. “What do you mean, no?” He watches her as she rises. “Do you understand what we just heard?”

“I am young,” she says. “I am not stupid.” The daughter curiously echoing the mother. She begins to walk back to the house, to the South American band playing its seductive music, to the flowing champagne, the acres of cut crystal and silver.

Chris, angry, grabs her wrist, spins her around. “Soutane, Saloth Sar means to gain control of Cambodia, to upset the balance of power in Southeast Asia. Saloth Sar hates the American presence. He’ll do whatever he can to drive them out, to eradicate any edge they might now have against the communists there. And if he is successful in getting the American military presence out of Vietnam, he will turn his attention inward. To Cambodia itself. You heard him. He will murder every priest, every intellectual. In order to start over, in the name of the revolution, according to the ideology he was taught here by your father, with the help of the weapons your family will provide the Khmer Rouge, he will commit what amounts to genocide on his own people. Doesn’t this mean anything to you? Doesn’t it affect you? Or do you see it as tiny and distant, part of another world that cannot affect you.”

Soutane’s eyes flash. “Let me go,” she says. She bares her white teeth in the moonlight. “He is doomed to fail. I know about the Khmer Rouge. They don’t have much support even among their own people.”

“They’re more powerful than you think,” Chris says tightly. “I overheard Saloth Sar and your father talking before. Their weakness has become a myth. Besides, from what I understand, they haven’t been well armed before. Now your family is taking care of that.” He stares into her stony face, anger welling up in him at her smug and casual attitude. “Anyway, can we afford to take the chance that he will fail? Do you want that on your conscience. That we knew about this intended coup, and kept our mouths shut?”

“I don’t care what you say. I want nothing to do with this.”

“With you or without you,” he says, “I am going to the authorities.”

“You fool,” she says, “do you expect me to implicate my family? Besides, with their contacts everything will be denied. I doubt that the Americans at the embassy or wherever you plan to go would even listen to such a fanciful story. You will accomplish nothing save embarrassing yourself.”

She is right, of course. But knowing this makes Chris even more furious. “I don’t care,” he says. “I can’t stand idly by. I have to do something.”

“Don’t you understand?” she cries. “If you go, if you try, my father will have you killed.”

“You’re not serious.” But, of course, she is. He knows this with a chilling certainty. Celeste saying, You have so much to learn about life, mon coureur cycliste.

He realizes that he is as helpless as Soutane is uninvolved. He realizes that there is after all no difference between them, that he has been a fool to flee here, a frightened refugee from life, trying to escape the war. Because the war has dogged his footsteps, following him all the way to France. It was around the corner all the time, lurking in the shadows to ambush him when he least expected it, a land mine in the gut, tearing away not flesh and bone, but the fabric of reality.

Looking into Soutane’s suddenly hard-lined face, he thinks, I could use a little thunder now, a little power at my fingertips, causing some sparks to fly in the night. But he has nothing, he understands, having come here unprepared, as it were, naked.

And now, at last, the truth. He feels not only inadequate to the task of dealing with the consequences of the war, but he finds himself unwilling to face up to them.

He hates himself but, unable to accept that burden, he hates her. He knows that she is right, it is better to remain uninvolved, but he hits her anyway, slaps her so hard across the face that she stumbles and falls.

Soutane is so surprised that she does not even cry out, but lies on the ground, her hand to her hot, hurt cheek, staring up at him.

“Nobody treats me this way.” Her voice flicks like a lash. “Get out of here. I never want to see you again.”

The countryside, sienna and forest green, slips by, the wind slipstreams past his hunched body. Chris, pedaling, picking up the pace, extending his daily runs, doubling, tripling the distance he managed when he first came to France. Dedicating himself to the Tour de France, focusing all his energy on the race, because it is all he has now; if he lets go of it for even a moment, he is engulfed in a well of despair so black that it freezes his heart.

During the long, grueling days of exercise and practice, amid the spectacular gorge of Haute-Provence, he believes that Soutane is far from his mind, but each night as he slips, exhausted, into sleep, she is there.

He encounters her in dreams filled with dark, Brazilian rhythms that seduce him back to the brilliantly lit house, back to her gray-green eyes, her voluptuous embrace. He reaches for her, with a silent groan he enters her, only to find that it is Celeste, not Soutane, into whom he plunges with such blind, aching desperation.

Always, he awakes from these dreams with an erection so hard, so unfulfilled it is painful. The unpleasant trip-hammer beat of his heart forces him to abandon sleep, instead to embrace dire thoughts in the night until the bitterness in his throat causes him to rise from the empty bed, silently dress, ride his bike into the darkness shimmering with incipient dawn.

He misses Soutane. But that he must deny himself her companionship, her warmth, her affection and love is, as Saloth Sar said about victory, inevitable.

Despite what he said to Soutane that night in the garden, he has told no one of the overheard conversation between Celeste Vosges and Saloth Sar. Much as he yearns for her, he thinks that her absence is hardly punishment enough for keeping it to himself. He does not understand his reluctance to expose himself to danger. He detests its very existence, yet he cannot deny within himself its truth.

It is raining now, the sun, suddenly fearful, has fled behind the protection of black clouds. Chris cycles in the rain, joining his team, the men with whom he will be sharing the victory or the defeat of the Tour de France.

Chris packs his bags. With the team he flies to Paris. They take time off to sightsee the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, the Place de la Bastille, the Louvre.

He cannot see these splendid monuments for what they are; instead of inspiring awe, they exhaust him, he feels lost inside them, Jonah in the belly of the Leviathan. But at night he cannot sleep. His mind is abuzz, a hive of unhappy activity. At last he goes to the U.S. embassy. The ambassador is away, the undersecretary is otherwise engaged.

After waiting an hour and a half, Chris is ushered into a room as dark as twilight. It is filled with gross furniture that resembles monstrous children’s blocks. Its only view is of a ventilator shaft, so he knows this cannot be the ambassador’s office.

He tells his story of Saloth Sar and Cambodia to a sallow-skinned kid who cannot, Chris thinks, be that much older than himself. Halfway through, the kid says, Excuse me, but what did you say your name was? Chris tells him, the pimply-faced kid nods. He holds a pen officiously in his hand, but he takes no notes. Instead, he is drawing a doodle of a woman with big, high breasts.

I want to see the undersecretary, Chris says.

I’m afraid that’s impossible, the sallow-skinned kid says in the bored, practiced voice of the professional bureaucrat. He smiles rather absently, drawing in a thigh-high skirt.

Chris gets up.

Is that it? the sallow-skinned kid says.

In his hotel room Chris drafts a letter, rewrites it, sends it to the U.S. ambassador. What else can he do? He can think of nothing more. It is as Soutane said it would be.

The team is waiting for him. They travel northward to Roubaix. As they train, they discuss various strategies, up until the last nervous moments before the start of the race. In the rain, a chill at noon, they begin, jockeying for position through dangerously slick, cobbled streets. Then into Belgium and Holland for two days, riding through immaculately tended urban parks. Recrossing the border, nearing Meziers, climbing long hillside stretches, racing along narrow tree-lined roads, bounded by stone fortresses centuries old, remnants of a time before France was France.

They squeeze water into their dry, open mouths as the killing heat builds up. In the sun Chris sees Soutane, in the rain as well. In fitful sleep, caught each night in a different town, he tosses her image around in his mind, ceding her her time to torment him. With each ache of his muscles, her absence is apparent to him. She, or perhaps what she has come to represent, is a naked sore within him which he cannot stop himself from abrading.

Not first or second, but each day near the front of the pack, keeping the yellow jersey in sight. As the days progress, as the race grinds through its gut-wrenching middle, when endurance, conditioning begin to count, the Tour de France grows in his mind. Winning becomes something akin to attaining the Holy Grail, as if in crossing the finish line first he will somehow have earned a kind of salvation, a cleansing of his sin of omission, forgiveness for the transgression of being here, far away from the mortal danger of the war.

On the final day, beneath a scowling sky, Chris is still within hailing distance of the yellow jersey. Paris, which has been a dream for twenty-two days, over almost nineteen hundred miles, is here.

By the time they leave Creteil, within, as the cyclists say, the petticoats of the great metropolis, the crowds have built until they are in places twelve or fourteen deep. Chris feels the collective breath of the spectators as if it is a wind at his back, pushing him on. Pain flares in almost every place on his body, but the adrenaline, his greatest ally, continues to pump strongly, and he picks up the pace, passing first Troyes of France, then in quick succession, Jurco of Yugoslavia, Spartan of Belgium.

Only Madler and Castel remain. Castel, the Frenchman who has worn the yellow jersey for the past three days, strong, indomitable within his own element. Madler, the tenacious Swiss, who led during the first six stages of the race, has clung to Castel’s tail throughout this last, long day.

Though twice more he has come tantalizingly close, Chris has worn the yellow jersey only once. Just outside of Ballon d’Alsace, at the end of the sixth stage, a mechanical failure cost him a crucial eleven seconds—an eternity in this race. From Thonon-les-Bains to Chamonix, the ninth stage, he was close enough to reach out and touch the yellow jersey as he and Castel crossed the finish line one-two, the difference measured in inhuman terms, in hundredths of a second. And setting out from Digne, for the twelfth stage, he was wearing the yellow jersey he had taken from Castel.

None of that matters now, Chris realizes. It is the end, the finish line across the Champs Elysées, that counts. Soutane running her palms down his flesh, saying, I see this beautiful body coming through the Arc de Triomphe, covered by the yellow jersey. Oh, God, please let her be right.

From the outset the odds have been weighted against him. Long-distance cycling is the exclusive province of the countries of Continental Europe. His very acceptance on a team caused a bit of a stir, gave him celebrity status in all the prerace coverage. And, then again, as the race went along, and he was able to keep pace with, and even overtake, many seasoned professionals. He did well in the time trials, the sprints, especially in the arduous mountain stages through the French Alps, where it was assumed he would wither and fall back.

Now, on the last day of the Tour de France, he has a legitimate chance of winning it all. By placing first today, Chris will have accumulated enough points to be declared the overall winner.

Who would recognize him? He has lost almost ten pounds. He has had no time to shave, and a reddish-gold beard covers his face. Catching a glimpse of himself in a shop window one morning, mounted, ready to begin the day’s stage, he is startled to see the face of the Celtic warrior his father always wanted him to be.

His mind, blurred by fatigue, heightened by the abnormal amount of adrenaline being pumped into his system, concentrates on only one thing: the finish. He is, like the others, beyond exhaustion. Trancelike, in a state of grace, the leaders race toward the heart of Paris, there to make six laps of the Champs Elysées before they hit the tape strung beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

The crowd, the crowd. How they shout, call out the names of their favorites as they flash by. Chris hears his name. Amazing!

Down the wide, beautiful boulevard, Chris finally overtakes Madler, the Swiss champion. He will remember that moment vividly, the look of bewilderment on the cyclist’s face.

Now it is Castel’s back that Chris sees. He no longer feels his legs. His shoulders, hunched against the wind and the rain, are like concrete. They are on their fifth lap of the Champs. After twenty-two days, there are only minutes, so little time left.

Chris moves up, gradually, inexorably. At the last turn Castel skids slightly on the treacherously slick tarmac, and Chris gains perhaps three, four seconds. His front wheel is almost parallel with Castel’s back wheel.

He tries to make up the last several feet between them, but Castel desperately manages to hold him off. Chris can see the finish line now, distant, calling with a siren’s song in his head.

Now he knows that he has one more shot, just one. Instead of challenging Castel again, he moves slightly back, so that he is directly behind the leader. Immediately, he feels a lessening of the stiff wind, he gains strength, slipstreaming, riding in the quiet corridor of Castel’s wake.

And now, three hundred yards from the end, he makes his move, beginning his drive in the relative calm of the slipstream, building momentum, his leg drive, then at the last instant swinging out into the wind, moving up on Castel’s right shoulder, challenging him, gaining, gaining, almost there, and then past the stunned Frenchman, on his way to the finish, to wear, as Soutane predicted, the yellow jersey beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

There is a blur in his vision. So concentrated is he that at first he does not see the dog running out past the policemen lining the boulevard, keeping the crowds back.

It is almost upon him when its shape registers. Even so, in a dry surface he might have been all right, a slight swerve, okay. But the wet tarmac that was so cruel to Castel only moments before once more comes into play.

Chris swerves in order not to hit the dog, his tires skid, losing traction in the rain. Chris slams to the ground, his bicycle falling heavily onto his leg and hip.

Pain sears him, blood begins to run. He hears shouting, an ambulance’s high-low klaxon. Sees, from what seems an odd angle, feet running toward him.

He looks up, sees Castel crossing the finish line, back arched, arms held high over his head, fists clenched in victory. He looks down, sees his leg open, blood pumping. Flesh peeled away from the bone. He has never seen anything so stark and white in his life.

He falls back, cradled in someone’s arms. He is aware of a great relief from pressure as two policemen gingerly lift his bicycle off him. Then the pain rushes in, and he loses consciousness.

A dog. A lousy, stinking dog. He thinks: I should have hit him, gone right on through. Then he thinks: It would have been the same. I would have gone down anyway.

Another voice says: Who cares? It’s over.

He thinks: If I’d hit the dog, I would have killed it. I can’t kill anything.

He opens his eyes and, to his surprise, sees Soutane.

“What are you doing here?” I never want to see you again.

“I was there,” she said, bending over the hospital bed, “to see you win. And you would have.”

He thinks: I would have. What exactly does that mean?

“A dog—”

“I saw it,” Soutane says. “I broke through the police cordon. I held you while they took the bike off you. I went with you in the ambulance.”

He looks at her, wondering what he is feeling, besides empty. It seems he came to France for nothing.

“My leg—”

“Will be fine, the doctors say.”

“But not,” Chris says, knowing, “as good as new.” He sees Soutane look away. “Not, anyway, good enough to bike again in the Tour de France.”

“No,” she says softly. “That’s finished.”

Well then, Chris thinks, fuck everybody. He lies back on his pillows and closes his eyes. “Why are you here, Soutane?”

“I thought—” She breaks off. He hears her moving tentatively about the room. At last she says, “You wrote a letter.”

“About Saloth Sar, about Cambodia. Yes. I went to the embassy in Paris, but no one would listen to what I had to say. So I wrote to the ambassador, an impassioned plea for the Cambodian people. I’m glad some action was taken.”

“Nothing will come of it. The inquiry is dead, as I told you it would be.” She stares at him. “You implicated my mother and father,” she says. “I warned you not to do anything like that.”

“So?” Chris thinks: Fuck Saloth Sar, fuck Cambodia, and most of all fuck Soutane’s parents.

“So. You accomplished nothing but you put yourself in jeopardy. You asked, now I’m telling you. That’s why I’ve come. In a few days you’ll be able to leave the hospital. As soon as you are released, you must leave France.”

Now he opens his eyes, hearing in his mind her say, If you go, if you try, my father will have you killed. But he is still so angry. “Or what?”

Soutane is close to tears. “I don’t want you hurt.” She bites her lip. “I’ve come. I’ve done what I can. I’ve told you what I can, more than I should.”

She goes to the door, stands holding on to the steel knob as if without its support she will collapse. “You should have won, Chris,” she says. “I’ll always think of you in the yellow jersey.”

When she leaves, the room seems to shrink down to the size of a cell. Claustrophobic, Chris struggles to breathe. Lying in the bed, sweating with fright.

He hears footsteps coming along the corridor outside. He holds his breath until they pass by. But they do not. They stop outside his door. He imagines a man with a knife, merciless and deadly, about to silence him forever. If you go, if you try, they’ll have you killed.

Chris, panicked, tries to sit up but, as in a dream, he cannot move. It is too late anyway. The door is swinging open, and a dark-complexioned man pushes his way in.

He smiles at Chris, and says, “I am Dr. Devereaux. How are you feeling today, Monsieur Haye?”