THE OUTFIT HAD NO HEADQUARTERS. ITS EMPLOYEES, WHOSE NUMbers, cost, and true identities were kept secret from everybody except the O. G., were scattered around Washington in gimcrack temporary government buildings left over from the First World War, or in offices with the names of fictitious organizations painted on the doors, or in private houses in discreet residential neighborhoods. This milieu, in which daring undertakings were planned and spacious ideas were discussed in mean little rooms by ardently ambitious men who were mostly very young, preserved a wartime atmosphere long after World War II was over. This was exactly what the O. G. wanted.
“Nooks and crannies, visibility zero—that’s the ticket,” he said. “The day we move into a big beautiful building with landscaped grounds and start hanging portraits of our founders is the day we begin to die.”
The O. G. himself worked in a disused town house on a wooded knoll above the Potomac River. Until the last elderly member died during the fatter days of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration, this had been the clubhouse of the Society of Euhemerus, made up of men directly descended in the male line from the original American colonists, and the ceilings were frescoed with scenes showing Bradfords, Oglethorpes, Newports, and other members of the nation’s First Families in heroic postures. The watercolor on the O. G.’s ceiling depicted Squanto, a heap of dead mackerel at his feet, teaching Myles Standish and John Alden how to plant and fertilize corn.
“My Uncle Snowden called this picture ‘the parable of the oafs and the fishes,’ “ the O. G. told Patchen on his first day on the job. “He was the one who got the club to leave this place to the government. Do you know who Euhemerus was?”
“No, sir.”
“He was a Greek who believed that the gods were originally human heroes. Hence the members of the Society were descendants of the American gods, who were, unfortunately, as yet undeified.”
It was a humid August day, and the tall french windows were open, admitting a feeble river breeze. The O. G.’s office, a vaulted room with three exposures, was located at the top of the house. He stepped out onto a small balcony and gestured to Patchen to follow. The view from the balcony was famous: you could see the whole length of the Mall, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol. Beyond this, the unroiled Potomac flowed between grassy banks.
“Washington,” the O. G. said with a wave of the hand; he wore a gold ring with the seal of the Society of Euhemerus on his left little finger. “What do you think of it?”
“I like it,” Patchen replied.
“Good for you. Not many people appreciate it.”
Patchen was genuinely surprised to hear this. “Why not?”
“It’s not fashionable—it’s a backwater. You’re just supposed to serve your time here with complaining while waiting to be sent to Paris or Vienna or London.”
“I think it’s beautiful. I feel at home here.”
This was true. On arriving in Washington, although Patchen had never visited the place before, he had felt a puzzling sense of homecoming. He liked to walk at night along Constitution Avenue, past the massive city-within-a-city of silent, deserted Greco-Roman government buildings. At such times he felt like an archeologist transported by time machine to an Athens or Rome that had not yet been informed of the glories that awaited it. Washington was like the site for the capital of a world empire that had not yet come into existence; it was pregnant with the history of the future. Or so it seemed to Patchen on his lonely midnight walks; he did not confess these high-flown thoughts to the O. G., who had been chatting to him as his mind wandered.
“I’ve always liked this town, too, except for the climate,” the O. G. was saying. “It’s something like Weimar must have been in the time of Goethe. Big old houses filled with toadies and arrivistes, all wanting the same things—the ear of the prince, membership in the inner circle, decorations to wear to each other’s fancy dress balls. There’s no real conversation, just gossip, but there are good paintings in the museums, some pretty darn good chamber music, amateur theatricals—even, until Franklin Roosevelt passed away, a benevolent prince. But no Goethe. Anyway, I’m glad you like Washington, because this is where you’re going to be for the rest of your career.”
“No hope of Paris or London?”
“Nope. You’re a born headquarters man.”
The O. G. did not explain this statement. He was famous for his impulsive judgments. As Patchen himself would say years later, when he knew him better than anyone alive, the old man decided everything between his pelvis and his collarbone. He meant this as a compliment: any damn fool could be an intellectual.
“You’re going to work for me, and only for me, right next door,” he said. “Does that suit you?”
“Yes, sir,” Patchen replied. “It does.”
“I’ll work you like a slave, but you’ll be right at the hub of events, and if I’m right about you, you’ll go up and up. Do you like .that trade-off?”
“Sounds fine to me.”
“Then let’s get started.”
He showed Patchen his new office, a musty cell lighted by a single horizontal aperture, like a cellar window, just below the ceiling. It adjoined the O. G.’s office, to which it was connected by a low door, plastered and set flush with the wall. The room was furnished with a battered metal desk, a straight chair, a gooseneck lamp, a wastebasket with the word BURN stenciled on the side, and a chipped Waterford crystal tumbler filled with sharpened yellow pencils. The dead air smelled of fresh pencil shavings. Enormous steel double doors led into a vault that was somewhat larger than the cubbyhole itself.
“This is where Uncle Snowden and his fellow Euhemerians used to hang their togas,” the O. G. said. “Not much air or light, but it’s got location.”
He walked into the open vault. There were other safes within this safe, battered olive-drab file cabinets fitted with combination dials; these were stacked one on top of the other. After climbing a library ladder, the O. G. opened one, working the combination from memory, and rummaged in a drawer. He withdrew a stack of files stamped in carmine with the words TOP SECRET • EYES ONLY • NOFORN.
“Here,” he said. “Read these and tell me whether you think these fellows have got any chance of bringing this operation off.”
Patchen switched on the gooseneck lamp and began to read. It took him hours to work his way through the jumbled files, in which significant passages were sometimes separated by thirty or forty pages of seemingly irrelevant cables, dispatches, letters, and reports written in dense bureaucratic prose. The various parts had been contributed by many different people, some of them foreigners who had only begun to learn English, some of them Americans who had mastered the esoteric vocabulary of the inner government so thoroughly that their sentences were incomprehensible to anyone but another initiate. Neither human beings nor places went under their own names in these documents, but were identified instead by pseudonyms which sounded like real names, by cryptonyms which were gibberish, or sometimes by numbers or a combination of numbers and letters.
In the end Patchen understood, or thought he understood, that he had been reading the raw files of a plan to set up a network in Berlin, using the Russian-speaking daughters and widows of men who had been killed by the Communists to become the mistresses of high-ranking Soviet officers and entice them to reveal secrets. Many girls had already expressed interest in the scheme; it was thought that they would be both effective and reliable because they were motivated by hatred and revenge. Those who succeeded in trading sex for military secrets would be given new identities and allowed to emigrate to the United States.
“Well, what do you think?” the O. G. asked when Patchen knocked and entered the O. G.’s larger office.
“I think the idea is all right,” Patchen replied. “But I think the operation itself is a recipe for disaster.”
“Do you? Why’s that?”
“We’ll either get caught or get burned. The Russians must keep a close eye on their generals, and if two or three of them suddenly acquire good-looking young mistresses who all speak Russian, they may regard that as a suspicious circumstance.”
“True. Anything else?”
“There’s nothing in the files to suggest we’ve investigated the girls.”
“That would be very difficult. They’re all displaced persons from inside Russian-occupied Europe.”
“You mean we picked them up on the streets and accepted their stories on faith?”
The 0. G. nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”
“So all we really know about them is that they speak Russian and they’re willing to sell their bodies in the cause of freedom.” “Yep.”
“Then how do we know the Russians aren’t sending these girls to us?”
“Why would they do that?”
“So that they can feed us false and misleading information through the girls. I think we should get rid of them and whoever introduced us to them, and then begin over again and concentrate.”
The O. G. had been listening intently. “Concentrate on what?”
“New girls, just plain whores with no political motivation,” Patchen said. “The targets should be younger Russians—captains, majors, lieutenant-colonels. Men young enough to think with their peckers. The girls should act like virgins, make the Russians fall in love with them. Then the girl says, ‘Prove your love and I’ll sleep with you. Bring me some little thing from your unit, a photograph of your tank, a telephone book, something written in Russian.’ Then, when they’re hooked, we move in and threaten to expose them unless they play ball. Some may know useful things right ńow. Others may be useful for the future.”
The O. G. poured himself a glass of water from the thermos’ pitcher on his desk, and drank.
“Want some?” he asked, pointing to the pitcher.
Patchen nodded, poured himself a full glass, and drank thirstily; the O. G. watched him.
“The moral question doesn’t trouble you?” he asked.
Patchen said, “What moral question?”
“Turning girls into whores. Blackmail.”
“No. As you say, it’s just a case of finding out what people want to do and making it possible for them to do it.”
The O. G. gazed at him for several seconds in great seriousness. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
“I was right, by golly,” he said. “I saw that you had your head screwed on straight up in Boston, over the codfish cakes. Couldn’t believe my luck.”
“May I ask why, sir?”
“Because. Son, you’re a skeptic and you say what you think. I’ve got all the enthusiasts I need around here.”
Thereafter the O. G. and Patchen were together all day every working day from seven in the morning until whatever hour the O. G. went home. He met everyone the O. G. met, heard everything the O. G. heard, went with him to lunch every day. At the end of the day he rode with him to his house above Rock Creek Park, absorbing instructions that would require another two or three hours of work after he dropped the old man off.
The O. G. called Patchen “Son”; Patchen never called him anything but “Sir.” Gradually, as his powers grew, Patchen became known and feared throughout the Outfit, but his duties and his position were never defined. Others thought that he operated outside the apparatus; in fact he was implanted so deeply within it as to be detached from its rules. At Harvard, Patchen had been a familiar but nameless figure; men in the Outfit who had been there at the same time remembered him because of his appearance, though few had ever known who he was. It was a puzzle to them why the O. G. preferred this grotesque outsider without background or connections to themselves.
As more and more prankish operations were disapproved before they could begin, many thought that Patchen was exercising a puritanical influence over the sunny nature of the O. G., that he was systematically robbing the Outfit of its schoolboy élan. One disappointed officer tried to saddle him with the nickame “Rasputin,” but a cleverer rival gave him a crueler name, “The One-Eyed Man.” It stuck.
Patchen did not object to the nickname because the proverb it came from—”In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,”—expressed so aptly the situation in which he perceived himself to be from the first day he opened a secret operational file until his last day on duty.
ONLY DAYS AFTER HE STARTED HIS NEW JOB, PATCHEN CAME THROUGH the door and found Paul Christopher seated in front of the O. G.’s desk.
“I think you fellows know each other,” the
O. G. said. “Sit down next to your rescuer, Son.”
Rescuer? Patchen did not understand the allusion. The O. G. went right on talking.
“Paul is going out to Indochina,” he said, pausing to light his pipe. He gave Christopher a confiding nod. “David knows all about it.”
This was true, in the sense that Patchen had studied the details of an operational plan that involved penetrating the Vietminh, as the guerrilla force fighting the French in Vietnam was called, in order to try to find out what its resources, tactics, and fighting spirit were. But the penetration agent had been identified by a pseudonym; Patchen had no idea that Christopher had also been recruited into the Outfit, much less that he was the agent in question. It was a very dangerous assignment; both the Vietminh and the French were likely to kill any American who got between them.
“I want you two to work with me on this,” the O. G. said. “No desk officer—just the three of us.”
“What about Waddy?” Christopher asked.
Wadsworth Jessup, Alice Hubbard’s brother, was already in Hanoi, and the operational plan called for Christopher to report to him.
“Be kind to Waddy,” the O. G. said. “Carry out his schemes with due regard for your own neck; observe the niceties. But Waddy’s schemes aren’t the reason for the trip.”
The mechanism in a long-case clock standing against the wall whirred but did not strike; the O. G. kept it wound even though the chimes had been disconnected. The O. G. always ate his lunch at noon precisely, and now, as the clockwork clicked out the hour, they heard the rattle of china and glassware as a trolley from the kitchen approached his doors. So that the waiter would not see Christopher, he and Patchen went into Patchen’s cell while the luncheon table was set up.
In Patchen’s cell, he and Christopher exchanged amused smiles. “I guess I’m not supposed to say this is a pleasant surprise,” Patchen said.
“Or ‘fancy meeting you here,’ “ Christopher replied. “How was Paris?”
“All right. Martha is here in Washington. We’ve just bought a house. Can you have supper with us tonight?”
“Bring her. She and Martha can discuss the issues of the day.”
They smiled again. Christopher’s girls, invariably pretty, invariably earnest, invariably defenders of one political faith or another, had seldom warmed up to Patchen, or he to them.
The O. G. flung open the door to his office; a table was laid by the fireplace with a white cloth, dishes, and silver.
“There’s a pretty nice rockfish out here,” he said. “How about helping me eat it? I’ll be Mother.”
He fileted the grilled fish expertly, spooned asparagus and halved lemons onto the plates, and handed them around. Like the dented silver platters and the knives and forks, the china bore the seal of the Society of Euhemerus, a golden column surrounded by a wreath of Greek letters.
“Can you read the Greek, Paul?” the O. G. asked.
Christopher pushed his food aside with his knife and studied the seal. “ ‘Sacred scripture?’ “
“Correct. That’s how I want you fellows to communicate after Paul gets out there—in Greek cipher.”
“I don’t read Greek,” Patchen said.
“No need to,” the O. G. said. “All you have to do is learn the Greek alphabet—a morning’s work. During the Indian Mutiny British officers sent hundreds of secret messages to each other through enemy country by writing plain English in the Greek alphabet. The code was never cracked.”
The O. G. poured water into chipped crystal goblets. After their first lunch together Patchen never saw him drink wine again in daylight. The Montrachet he had ordered in Boston was meant to help him, Patchen, relax.
“The Brits all know about the Greek cipher,” the O. G. said. “It was a jolly prank on the Wogs in addition to being useful. I knew a villain of a Brit who seduced the young wife of an American millionaire and used the Greek cipher to write her indecent letters describing their assignations. The husband found the letters, all tied up in a blue ribbon, got suspicious, and asked a Greek he knew to translate them. The Greek read every page, lingering here and there over an especially fine passage, then handed the letters back. ‘This is a translation of Alice in Wonderland,’ said the Greek, a fellow of some wisdom and experience. ‘The letters are from your wife’s teacher. She must be a remarkable woman—this is a most ingenious way to learn a foreign language.’ The Greek dined out on the story for years afterward.”
Before he spoke again the O. G. finished his lunch, working rapidly with his knife in his right hand and his fork in his left, bolting the food like a European. Then leaned back in his chair and lighted his pipe, studying his guests over the flare of the match.
“Ever heard of the Quoc Hoc School?” he asked.
The two younger men shook their heads.
“Famous high school in Hue, the imperial capital of Vietnam,” the O. G. said. “Quoc Hoc is the womb of the revolution. Half the Vietminh went there—Ho Chi Minh among others. With darn few exceptions, every one of them came from a good bourgeois family. And thereby hangs a tale.”
The O. G. taught by parable, and the tales he told often came out of his own experience. The moral was always the same: things done on impulse always turn out better than things done by calculation.
“During the war,” the O. G. said, meaning the First World War, in which he had enlisted as an aviator while still in his teens and long before the United States became a belligerent, “I was posted to a French squadron for a while, flying Spads. Under the French system, every officer had a servant, and mine was this little Tonkinese fellow, no bigger than an American twelve-year-old and a lot less hairy. His name was Vo, and Vo was the worst servant in the squadron. He was always reading; another reason why he and Paul will get along. Vo would get lost in a book and forget to shine your boots or whatever. He’d had a hell of a time, fellows kicking him in the pants for lollygagging and so forth, but I thought he was all right. One morning I caught him reading Rousseau by the dawn’s early light instead of heating up my shaving water, so I had to go up and search for the Red Baron without a shave. When I got back, he acted like he expected something pretty bad from me, but all I did was take him aside and talk to him about schedules. Had a hell of a time getting him to see my point.”
The O. G. lived by his schedule, believing that it set him free; by using his time according to a predetermined plan, he enjoyed a hundred little moments of satisfaction in the course of every day, and also quarantined himself from bores. He was a good mimic. Now, speaking French with a flat American accent while acting the character that had been himself at age nineteen, and the same language with a singsong intonation when playing the part of Vo, he reconstructed a conversation that took place thirty years before and three thousand miles away. He made himself large and earnest when he was the American, small and doubting when he was the Vietnamese. Finally Vo was convinced. The O. G. unstrapped his wristwatch, which Vo knew to be his most cherished possession because it had been given to him by his father, and gave it to the Vietnamese.
“Well, sir,” the O. G. said, returning to real time and place, “Vo started living by a schedule the very next morning, and by George, he liked it! Changed his life. The first benefit came immediately: he was out of trouble for not doing his duty, because he had plenty of time to do whatever was required of him with plenty more left over to read to his heart’s content. To make a long story short, Vo turned into a great scholar, which is the very highest and most respectable thing someone from his part of the world can be, and he went back to Hue and got a job teaching at Quoc Hoc School. He taught all those fellows that are out in the jungle now—taught ‘em Rousseau, who begat the Vietminh. That’s where it all began. How about some coffee?”
He poured muddy coffee, made according to the Euhemerian recipe by pouring boiling water into a bed of well-aged grounds to which a handful of fresh-ground coffee and an eggshell had been added. Cream poured into this liquid had no effect on its color, nor did sugar affect its taste. The O. G. drank a large cup of it, black, before he spoke again.
“Now this plan to penetrate the Vietminh is a good one,” he said. “There’s no telling what kind of information a smart young fellow might come back with, but information is funny stuff. In this game, there are lies, damn lies, and what you want to believe. What really counts is action, not words. Anyway, Vo’s boys are going to beat the French, so what interests us is not the present, about which we can do nothing, but the future, where we might possibly have some influence. Paul should get in as deep as he can with these Communists and still walk back out. Remember, they’re not simple peasants by a long shot. Keep eyes and ears open. Report all that stuff to Waddy. It’s a nice diversion.”
Eyes shining, the old man paused and looked from one young man to another.
“Diversion from what, sir?” Patchen asked.
“From Vo,” the O. G. said. “That’s Paul’s real target. There was an inscription on the back of that watch I gave him. ‘Sed fugit …inreparabile tempus—time is flying, never to return.’ Virgil. Look him up for me, Paul. Quote him the Virgil; he’ll remember. He knows who and what I am now or I don’t know Vo. If he doesn’t turn you away from the door, get him to teach you Vietnamese. Become his student—that’s the way to his heart. He must be thinking about the future, too. Find out what it is he wants to do, and let’s see if we can make it possible for him to do it.”
THE GIRL CHRISTOPHER BROUGHT TO DINNER AT THE PATCHENS’, AN intense young woman named Maria Custer, was enthralled by Martha’s adventure among the drunken Indians of Guatemala. She had just graduated from Vassar College.
“God, how I envy you,” she said after hearing about the guaro cult. “How did you ever find these amazing people? You are going back, aren’t you? You must be a legend to them. I mean, this white woman simply appearing out of the blue and binding up their wounds.”
“I’ve thought of going back,” Martha said, “but I have a husband now.”
“What difference does that make? You must go back—I mean, they must be waiting for you. Look at the Aztecs. Cortes conquered them in no time because they thought he was the golden-bearded god they had been waiting for. What was his Aztec name, Paul?”
Patchen answered the question. “Quetzalcoatl.”
“No, that’s wrong; Quetzalcoatl is the plumed serpent,” Maria said. “It starts with an ‘M.’ Malinche! That’s it!”
“That was what Montezuma called Cortés, because that was the name of Doña Marina, Cortés interpreter, and the two of them were always together,” Patchen said. “Quetzalcoatl had a long, dark beard.”
“Did he? Maybe that explains the confusion over names,” Maria said, smiling brightly as she waited for the interruption to end. She had very dark hair herself, set off dramatically by pale bluish skin. Her large, somewhat bulging eyes were placed very wide apart above high cheekbones. The hair was dyed, as Christopher realized when he encountered her a year or two later in Paris after it had gone back to its natural toast brown color.
“Anyway,” Maria exclaimed to Martha, “you must go. Maybe you could adopt one of those pathetic children. Maybe you could get others to adopt them. Then when they grow up they can all go back and save the others.”
“Maybe you can set something up with the Junior League,” Patchen said. “Orphans by Peck and Peck.”
Maria ignored him. “I’ll bet plenty of American women would be willing to adopt a kid,” she said to Martha. “I’m not talking about taking these children out of their way of life. I’m talking about raising them in such a way that they’d be able to go back and rescue their culture from the ghost of that Spanish drunk. The symbolism of it—him sitting there in his chair in his breastplate and helmet! How could you bear it? Can’t you see our kids going back and heaving the bastard out the door, like Pizarro did with the Inca mummies? Do you know that story?”
Martha shook her head. Maria provided a detailed synopsis of W. H. Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, books she had read for a political science course taught by a crypto-Marxist. It was her opinion that the effigy of Maximón in the drinking hut represented the specter of imperialism; although she was a Russian major, Maria had taken courses in psychology at Vassar, and she thought that the guaro cult itself was clearly an attempt by the Indians to escape from imperialism by entering into another state of consciousness.
“I mean it has to be entirely unconscious,” she said. “But that only goes to show you how the masses have this deep need to have their natural disgust explained to them. I mean, teaching is all. In Poland, the schoolchildren sing this wonderful song, ‘Long live Uncle Stalin, whose lips are sweeter than raspberries.’ Now that’s a work of genius, to turn the natural love of kids for the man who saved their country into poetry.”
“Baloney,” Patchen said. He was mildly drunk after consuming most of the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that Christopher had brought as a house gift.
“The same to you,” Maria said. “In a just society, powerful men can love little children, and be loved by them, instead of proving their manhood by making war on women and children.”
“You’re saying that Stalin’s Russia is a just society?”
“Not yet, not entirely, but it is consciously trying to become one. Do you read Russian?”
“No. Do you?”
“I majored in it. At least women are equal in the Soviet Union, eligible for anything, in contrast to the capitalist states, where they are regarded as the property of men and have no function except to breed and suffer.”
“No kidding. Apart from childbirth, how do middle-class women suffer in America?”
“They suffer all right, and always have. Far more than men ever do.”
Patchen poured himself another glass of wine. “Right,” he said. “All those brave girls sleeping under the white crosses in war cemeteries all over the world. And who can forget the Titanic—the men sitting in the lifeboats in their fur coats with their jewel boxes on their laps while the band played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ and the women went down with the ship.”
Maria took Martha’s hand and looked at her with deep sympathy. “You poor thing,” she said.
A silence fell. Martha blushed. Maria turned a look of withering superiority on Patchen. She had exceptionally pretty breasts, quite large and widely separated like her eyes; her blouse clung to their contours, suggesting nipples without actually revealing them. For some reason this symmetry of eyes and breasts was acutely erotic. Patchen’s good eye flickered from her face to her torso, and Ma ria’s glare changed into a smile of scorn. She had possessed these extraordinary breasts since she was in the seventh grade, and she knew that no normal male could look at them without wanting to hold them in his hands and whimper. She inhaled, expelled the breath through her nostrils, turned to Martha, and started talking again.
By now they had finished the food, a watery casserole of potatoes, onions, and beets that Martha called “red flannel hash.”
“Let’s go outside,” Patchen said.
On the screened porch, Patchen said, “Does she always spout that bullshit?”
“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “It’s just small talk.” “Is she someone you’re interested in?”
“No. I only have custody for the evening. She’s job-hunting in Washington.”
“She’s not going to turn up in the 0. G.’s office, is she?” Patchen asked.
“I don’t know,” Christopher replied. “But it was the 0. G. who arranged this blind date. He says she speaks fluent Russian and has a first-class mind. He knew her uncle in the Navy.”
“Good gravy.”
The two friends smiled at each other. They were sitting on a tattered wicker sofa on the screened porch, which looked out onto an alley; the house itself was a flat-roofed wooden structure resembling a very large packing crate. It was sparsely furnished with canvas butterfly chairs and an uneven table made by laying an old door on sawhorses. The night was very hot, scarcely cooler than the feverish August day that had preceded it. Radios played on neigh boring porches. A feeble breeze stirred the leaves of the old trees that had been planted to seclude these slave quarters from the big house to which they had formerly belonged.
Patchen asked a question. “What did the 0. G. mean today when he called you my rescuer?”
In the spotty light from the streetlamp, Christopher shrugged. “Who can keep up with what the 0. G. means?” he said.
“I thought he meant something different from what he was saying.”
Christopher gave him a steady look. “What would that be?”
“I don’t know,” Patchen said. “That’s what bothers me. Let me tell you something. Don’t laugh.”
“All right.”
Patchen collected his thoughts before speaking. “I’ve always thought that I knew you before the hospital, that there’s something about you that I don’t remember. Sometimes I feel I’m on the verge of remembering it, whatever it is, but I never do.”
Christopher made no reply.
“For example,” Patchen said, “when you and your father recited that poem in German I thought I remembered it.”
“The poem?”
“No, the part about German being the only language that lions understand. Had you ever told me that before?”
“It’s possible,” Christopher said. “It’s a family saying.”
THAT WINTER MARTHA RETURNED TO THE VILLAGE IN GUATEMALA. On her approach—she was still driving her surplus Army Jeep—the Indians fled from their village and hid in the jungle. Knowing their shy ways, Martha assumed that they did not realize that it was she who had come back to them, so she unpacked her belongings, moved back into the hut where she had formerly lived, and serenely awaited their return.
Several days passed; the Indians did not come back. It was, as she told Patchen when she returned to Washington the next spring, a mysterious experience.
“I don’t know if thee can understand,” she said, “but I felt there was some hidden or secret thing all about me in the air, trembling, as if the word of truth had been spoken in a powerful voice, but I was deaf and could not hear it.”
Martha had known that the Indians were observing her, even though she could not see them. She thought it was possible that they thought she was someone else: with their golden skin and their straight black hair, they all looked alike to her; why shouldn’t white people look alike to them? She would go outside from time to time and halloo, hoping that her friends would recognize her. She moved her hammock into the open and lay in it, feigning sleep, in case the Indians should tiptoe into camp and gaze into her face. They had taken with them the effigy of Maximón and the wooden tub they used to ferment guaro, along with the marimba. Each day, in the early morning, as Martha hoed and watered the village gardens, she noticed that corn had been plucked and beans and squash had been picked in the night.
Clearly her Indians were hidden somewhere in the jungle, gathered around Maximón, drinking. But why were they hiding? All day she heard the marimba playing in the distance, and finally she decided to walk toward the sound. But after she had sauntered under the trees for a few moments she realized that she could not locate the music accurately. She turned back, but even though she had traveled only a short distance into the forest she had trouble finding her way. Howler monkeys shrieked in the trees above her; she knew there were poisonous snakes and even jaguars in this place. Yet she felt no fear.
“None at all?” Patchen said. “That’s amazing. Why not?”
“The Inward Light was very strong—it is strongest in the village compared to any other place in the world. And, of course, I knew that my Indians would save me if I became lost. They were watching over me every minute. I could feel them all around.”
Finally she stumbled into a little clearing where a buried temple stood. For reasons of their own, the Indians had cleared a narrow path to the pinnacle, fifty or sixty feet above the ground, and Martha climbed up. The ground underfoot was free of stubble, in fact it was bare stone, and it was a pleasure to walk on a smooth surface. Nevertheless, it was a hard climb, and by the time she got to the top her body was running with sticky, thick sweat. From the summit, the deserted village was clearly visible. Martha took her bearings and regained it without difficulty.
A few days later the Indians came back. Martha woke up one morning to the notes of the marimba and found the village repopulated, Maximón back on his throne in the drinking hut, and the children playing their usual games. But as soon as she came outdoors, smiling in delight that the mistake over her identity had been corrected, the children ran away over the beaten earth between the huts, staring at the ground. This did not surprise her; the children had always stared at the ground in her presence. Even the adults were curiously shy about eye contact, preferring to stare downward or turn their backs when they conversed with her. Some even closed their eyes or covered them with their hands in her presence.
Martha did not pursue the children or try to coax them to come to her, but instead joined the women as they straggled toward the vegetable patch. They were all drunk, of course, and they staggered as they walked. About half of the women were with child; it was more difficult for drunks in the last stages of pregnancy to walk on the rough ground, and they often fell. Martha wanted to help them, but the other women kept her away by forming a screen with their bodies.
Otherwise they did not interfere with her. As before, they behaved as though she was not there. They did not speak to her, or reply when she spoke to them; she communicated with them, as she had formerly done with the children, in Spanish phrases that she was not sure they understood, and by working with them. The fact that they and she were making the same movements, performing the same tasks, seemed to soothe them; sometimes they even smiled, shyly and secretly, as they stared down into the dirt. Martha had got so used to this way of being close to the Indians during her last visit that she had very nearly lost the need for speech, but it seemed strange to her now as she resumed her old behavior.
Every day Martha went outside and waited for the children to come back, but they did not do so. To entice them, she took the Jeep apart and put it back together again and sat on a chair in the sunlight, embroidering bright flowers on a blouse. These techniques had worked before, but they produced no results now. Evidently the children had satisfied their curiosity about her the year before and had no further interest in her or her ways. If she happened to come upon them, they would scatter. They were particularly shy if she happened to meet them after she had been working in the sun.
Returning one day from the cornfield, she broke a strap on one of her sandals and the other women got far ahead of her on the winding path. She took a shortcut through an isolated patch of jungle, and when she came to the other side, she saw the children waiting on the path. They had their backs turned, and as the women approached, smiling happily at the sight of the children, they did a puzzling thing: every one of them touched every one of the children on the crown of the head. As soon as they had done so, the children turned around and gazed upward, like normal boys and girls, straight into the eyes of the adults, who picked the smaller ones up in their arms and continued on into the village.
Martha let them go, and following stealthily by darting from hut to hut, managed to leap out and surprise the children at play. She touched one, then another, then a third on the hair, and then all the others, chasing them through the village giddily as if in a game of tag. As soon as she had touched their heads, they stopped running away and even looked into her eyes. But still they did not come to visit her and work with her.
She had brought a number of new things with her this time—a phonograph and records, a portable Singer sewing machine, and two bicycles. She played the phonograph in the evening. Somewhere the children were listening, because one morning as she woke she heard them singing the songs on the records: “Amazing Grace” and “Shall We Gather by the River” and “The Old Rugged Cross.” Although they could not pronounce the English words, the children sang the music in voices of almost unbearable sweetness. Martha crept toward the sound and found them standing in rows like a choir, singing with their eyes closed. Watching from her hiding place and listening, she felt that the Inward Light was kindling in their tiny, glowing bodies.
The next morning she got out one of the bicycles and rode it through the village, looking neither to right nor left as she pumped up the gentle slopes and coasted down again with her hands clasped behind her head. This broke the spell, whatever it had been, and the children began coming to her hut again. But the Jeep no longer interested them, and they shunned the sewing machine after one of the girls sewed her index finger to a piece of material. She went about for several days with the cloth still stitched to her flesh until Martha coaxed her to let her snip the thread and sterilize the wound. They seldom sang the hymns; they did not really care about the phonograph; it interfered with the sound of the marimba. Weaving did not interest them; the Indians had their own looms and thought the one Martha had brought clumsy and inferior. Or so she thought: living in silence with her Indians, she had never learned even the rudiments of their language, and there was no possibility of learning it from anyone but them because no priest had ever been able to convert them and their speech had, consequently, never been written down.
What the children liked was the bicycles. They learned to ride with very little trouble. The village, with its clayey paths trampled smooth by generations of bare feet, was a good place to ride. Martha would line them up, stroke their hair, and send them off one by one. They rode as they had sung, like angels, bare feet on the pedals, arms outspread, inky bowl-cut hair flying, faces aglow; they could not get enough of it. At night she dreamed of them riding.
Early one morning, two of the larger boys borrowed the bicycles while Martha slept and carried them to the top of a buried temple. They tried to ride down it, pushing off from the site of the buried sacrificial altar, about sixty feet above ground level. One boy fell ‘ after only a few feet, but the other rider managed to stay upright until he was going fairly fast—fast enough so that when he went over the edge of a hidden rock shelf or step, his bicycle shot out into space. Along with all the children and the many adults who had gathered to witness the ride, Martha watched him fall. It was a beautiful sight in its way. His crown of lustrous black hair opened like some miraculous flower. This gave a breathtaking impression of liberation and elementary happiness; it really seemed to Martha that he could fly. And if she thought that, what must the Indians have been thinking?
Then, still clinging to the bicycle, the boy hit the ground and lay still. The Indians turned their backs to the child. He simply lay there in the wreckage of the bicycle, his marvelous skin seeping blood from a dozen scrapes and cuts. Martha ran to him and knelt down. He was conscious but in deep shock. His dark brown eyes looked directly into Martha’s. She touched his hair and was surprised to find that it was soaked with sweat; but then she thought, Of course it would be, thee has climbed up the pyramid in this heat.
The boy’s pulse was strong. Martha had studied advanced first aid during one of her extramural courses at college. She felt his bones and discovered that he had broken his arm, and maybe his collar bone. She rose to her feet and ran back to her hut for her first aid kit. The Indians, still utterly silent, still with their backs turned, did not interfere, but when she came back they were all gone, including the injured boy. Only the crumpled bicycle remained, and near the top of the buried temple where it had crashed, the debris of the second machine.
She tried to find the injured boy, but the Indians had taken him into the drinking hut, and when she followed and tried to go inside with her first aid kit, they formed a silent wall with their bodies, shutting her out. She could see over their heads quite easily. The boy was reclining at the feet of Maximeón, happily drinking guaro from the effigy’s own huge cup. She tried to tell them that his arm would be crooked if the broken bones were not set, but she could not make them understand. A month or two later she saw him again, walking through the village, drunk, with a deformed arm. When she tried to touch his hair, he ducked his head and ran away, limping.
In Washington, the O. G. had engaged dozens of men and women who were experts in arcane subjects. Their only duty was to know what they knew and keep abreast of their specialty, in case the knowledge was ever needed by the Outfit. Among these specialists was an anthropologist whose field was the Indians of tropical America. He had lived among them, studied them, written about them; his office was piled high with nearly every book and monograph ever published about them and some that were unpublishable. He knew their ways, their diets, their legends, their poisons, their systems of belief.
“There is,” he told Patchen, explaining the importance of an open mind, “no such thing as superstition. A belief in snakes that fly and talk is inherently no more ridiculous than the account of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast. Exactly the same critical faculties are suspended in both cases.”
Patchen told him Martha’s story. The anthropologist listened intently, asking many questions in a rumbling Central European accent and scribbling down Patchen’s sketchy answers on large file cards that he retrieved from an inside pocket.
“What notes, exactly, do these Indians play on the marimba?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Patchen replied. “My source doesn’t read music.” “But one must! Otherwise what is the point? The skills must go with the field worker! They cannot be acquired in situ!” “No doubt. But that was not the mission.”
Patchen did not reveal that Martha was his wife, and the expert naturally assumed that she was an agent sent on some bizarre secret mission that had no intelligent purpose and was unlikely to produce any result that a sane person could regard as useful.
“Do you have an opinion about the Indians’ behavior?” Patchen asked.
“Which aspect of it?”
“The shunning, the refusal to make eye contact, the vanishing act when they all left the village.”
“It’s quite obvious,” the anthropologist said. “These people think your friend is possessed of the evil eye; that is why they touch the children on the scalp before they look at them to dispel its power. They think the evil eye, his evil eye, is causing all these accidents, these calamities, flags sewed to fingers, bicycle crashes, et cetera. Did that not occur to him?”
“It’s a her,” Patchen said. “Apparently not. Are they likely to harm her?”
“They harm her? That’s a good one.”
Patchen persisted. “Is she safe in that village?” he asked.
“As long as she stays out of the way of falling bicycles. But she should try to get a little education before she blunders into another situation.”
Patchen did not repeat this advice to Martha, or tell her about the anthropologist’s suggestion concerning the evil eye. She was incapable of believing such things.
“Thee will not be angry if I go back again?” she asked.
“No. But what’s the point? They won’t have anything to do with you.”
“That is the point. If I stop now, the good that I was called to do may not be done.”
“And if you go back what will happen?” Patchen asked. “Perhaps I will be noticed.”
“By whom? The Indians seem to know you’re there.”
She kissed him. They were in bed. “I’m not talking about the Indians,” she said.
“Then who are you talking about?”
Her face was suffused with a smile of deep contentment; at that moment Patchen loved her with all his heart: her simplicity, her goodness, her obliviousness to the world as it really was and to the evidence before her eyes.
“Thee knows Who,” she said.
PATCHEN’S MOTHER DIED, IN HER SLEEP, OF AN ANEURYSM, WHILE Martha was in Guatemala and Christopher was in Vietnam. His grandfather, the judge, had her body cremated before Patchen arrived in Ohio.
“It was her wish; nobody else in the family has ever done such a thing, but I suppose it had something to do with this,” the judge said, handing Patchen a shoe box containing the photographs of his father in their silver frames, the wedding and birth certificates he had been invited to examine so many times, and his mother’s wedding ring engraved with her initials and those of Captain David Alan St. Clair Patchen, R. F. C., engraved inside. As she had often explained, her husband had so many initials that there had been no room on the circlet for the date of their wedding, July 12, 1918. The judge inserted an oblong pasteboard envelope into the shoe box. “You may take anything else you want that belonged to your mother.”
The oblong envelope contained an insurance policy on his mother’s life for twenty thousand dollars. Patchen was the sole beneficiary; his mother had designated the American Red Cross as secondary beneficiary in case her son predeceased her—which, of course, he nearly had.
The room was very large and was fitted out as a boudoir, with the bed and dressers in one corner and a sofa and chairs in the other, arranged around a blue Belgian rug. It seemed forlorn without the shrine to Patchen’s father, but he did not set up the photographs and framed decorations again. The drawn window shades glowed like parchment in the afternoon sun. He opened the closet; his mother’s dresses, muted plaids and prints and polka dots, all in shades of gray and dark blue, hung on their padded hangers; her Red Cross shoes, laced and low-heeled, stood in a row; her white, long-skirted Red Cross nurse’s uniform with its blue cape, lined in red, with the impressive enamel badge of her training hospital pinned to the collar, hung in a transparent plastic bag. The closet smelled of rose leaves; his mother had collected roses after they died, laid them in the sun to dry, plucked the dehydrated leaves, which retained their original brilliant colors and looked and rustled like dead insects, and sewn them into cheese cloth pouches for her closets and bureau drawers.
Holding the shoe box on his lap, he went through her souvenirs one by one, thinking that she might have left a letter for him, but there was no posthumous message. His curiosity about his father was overwhelming. Was there some piece of evidence concealed somewhere in this room? After all, his mother had died before she knew what was happening, so she would have had no time to conceal it. He paced the parquet floor, looking with a new and knowing eye at likely hiding places. If evidence existed, he knew that he could find it. The Outfit had trained him; he knew where to look and how to look. Had something been taped to the back of a dresser drawer? slipped between the rug and its pad? inserted into the pages of a book? sewn into a mattress? folded very small and jammed into the toe of a shoe? buried in the Chinese jar among the rose petals?
He started to open a dresser drawer, into which he had never looked, but closed it again before it had moved more than an inch on its guides. His mother had died in this room where she had spent twenty-five years recovering from her one night of love. He did not want to catch his mother in a lie now, any more than he had wished to do so when she was alive.
That evening he dined with his grandfather. Bunches of oak grapes decorated the table, the sideboard, the plate shelf that ran around the walls. The house was a vast red-brick Victorian structure, turreted and gingerbreaded, with every room trimmed in a different kind of polished wood, with furniture to match. His grandfather called the dining room the Oak Room, the parlor the Cherry Room, his study the Walnut Room. His grandfather had never treated him as a child, much less as a grandson: no rough rubbing of the head, no trips to Cleveland to see the Indians play, no quarters or half-dollars pressed into his small hand. Patchen called him “Judge”; he called Patchen “Young Fellow.” The old man had treated Patchen courteously, even kindly, as if he were• an uninvited guest who would sooner or later realize that it would be better to leave.
The judge was a Quaker, but in name only; he believed in the death penalty. It put him in a good ‘mood to mete it out, and he always drank a glass of bourbon before dinner on days when he had sent someone to the electric chair; Patchen never smelled liquor on another man’s breath without thinking about capital punishment, and he did not drink spirits himself until he was in his forties. The judge had approved of Patchen’s joining the Marines, calling him into his study, which resembled a courtroom with its massive desk and somber woodwork and its rows of leatherbound books, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good lad!” he said. “No matter what your mother may tell you, a man has to fight for his country or he’s no damn good.” The judge took up swearing—”damn” and “hell” and “little yellow bastards”—for the duration of the war, but gave it up as soon as the Japanese surrendered.
After finishing his plate of boiled beef and vegetables the judge Said, “You know, your grandmother died of the same thing, aneurysm in the night. Hard to imagine a better death, but it’s an old person’s death. They were both young. Too young. It’s something to think about if you believe in heredity.”
He was a believer in eugenics, a popular theory that argued the superiority of some ethnic and racial groups over others and defended the necessity of maintaining such superiority by careful selection of mates from suitable breeding stock.
That night Patchen slept in his old room. Like the rest of the house it was kept absolutely free of dust by female inmates of the county jail who did the housework. Even the tissue-paper wings and fuselage of the model Sopwith Camel Patchen had made at age nine were spick and span. So were all his books: Zane Grey, James Oliver Curwood, William Allen White. As a boy Patchen had imagined himself a hunter and trapper, alone except for his horse and dog in the Rocky Mountains or on the frozen tundra above the Great Bear Lake in Canada. He had wanted to live among the Indians, with an Indian name and an Indian wife; before he went to sleep in these surroundings he realized why he understood Martha’s passion for her Indians.
The funeral was a Quaker one, with no eulogist or minister. An urn containing the ashes of the deceased rested on the table. Because of the judge’s high position, the funeral home was crowded. Finally the judge’s old law partner, now a state senator, rose and spoke at length about the deceased, dwelling on her brave service in France and the tragic circumstances of her marriage. “Here lies one of our own, a heroine who fell in love with a hero and gave birth to a hero son!” the senator said. His words released some pent-up tension in the mourners. A collective sigh whispered through the room. Many looked at Patchen; women wept, men cleared their throats. Afterward many of them told him how much they had admired his mother. Looking into their remorseful faces, he realized that his wounds somehow made it impossible for anyone in town to doubt that his mother’s story had been true.
The next morning Patchen packed his bag and went to the courthouse to say goodbye to his grandfather. The judge was trying a case of incest, and Patchen, leaving his suitcase in his chambers, took a seat in the courtroom and watched the proceeding. The defendant, an emigrant from Kentucky, was found guilty of having carnal knowledge of his fourteen-year-old daughter. Before sentence was passed, the man’s wife, who was also the victim’s mother, asked for permission to address the court. “She’s his, Your Honor,” she said. “She belongs to him. She knows that, I know that, you know that. The only reason she told the sheriff on him was because she was mad just because he drunk a few beers down to Pondi’s and didn’t have no money left to buy her this hat with Mickey Mouse ears she thought she had to have to wear to watch TV. That’s all there was to it, Your Honor, spite. And that’s the truth.”
The judge sentenced the man to serve five to seven years in the state penitentiary and remanded the daughter into the custody of the county orphanage. Afterward, in his chambers, the old man said, “The trash just don’t understand, David; it’s in the blood, nothing can change the way they are.”
“Well, Grandfather, goodbye,” Patchen said.
“Goodbye, young fellow.” His grandfather was still wearing his black judicial robes. “Got everything?”
“I think so,” Patchen replied. “I took Mother’s Chinese jar, the one with the rose petals in it. And her ashes.”
“Did you now? I guess that’s all right.”
Patchen used the insurance money, a vast sum (the judge’s house with its beautiful woodwork had cost four thousand dollars to build only forty years earlier), to paint his house and enlarge and paper the rooms. He had learned about antiques in order to monitor the overt business transactions of an antique shop the 0. G. set up as a meeting place and dead drop for Balkan exiles, and he applied this knowledge to buy American versions of eighteenth-century English furniture, as well as some inexpensive still-life paintings by a for gotten American artist called Raphaelle Peale.
“How do you like the house?” he asked Martha when she came back from Guatemala the following spring.
“Thee has made it very worldly,” she replied. “But I like the pictures of the fruit. It looks real enough to eat.”
DURING HIS NIGHTTIME WALKS THROUGH THE CITY, PATCHEN OFTEN had the feeling that he was not alone. He had no evidence that this was so. Despite his training, he never detected anyone following him, and he certainly felt no fear. Postwar Washington was a law-abiding city almost to the point of farce: during the lunch hour, government workers stood on the curb along Pennsylvania Avenue, waiting for the WALK sign to flash even though no moving car was in sight for blocks in either direction. If someone jaywalked, the others would follow like sheep, but in the absence of a leader, they would wait patiently for the machine to tell them what to do. One day Patchen saw a herd of pedestrians being helped across the street by a policeman who held up his hand to stop invisible traffic, blew his whistle, and put them in motion with another hand signal: the WALK sign was broken, and they had waited obediently to be rescued.
This behavior interested Patchen, and he described it later to the O. G.. “Maybe we should get the psychologists to study pedestrian behavior in various foreign cities,” he said.
Ordinarily the O. G. loved ideas of this kind; human eccentricities were his passion. But he didn’t like this one.
“All mammals like to be in big groups with everybody heading in the same direction and eating the same kind of grass,” he said. “Man is no exception. We already know that. We’re not interested in the herd—that’s politicians’ business. Our animal is the maverick, God bless him.”
“Do you remember what you said to me in Boston about the game of baseball and the English sonnet?” Patchen asked.
“About their being the only perfect systems ever devised by man?” the O. G. replied. “You bet. That’s the Shakespearean abab, cdcd, efef, gg sonnet I was talking about, not all that other pap that doesn’t rhyme.”
“Is that what you’re trying to create here, Sir? Do you want the Outfit to be the third such system?”
The O. G. jumped a little in his surprise, then threw back his head and laugh.
“By golly, Son,” he said, “you’re really something. I never thought of it that way, but I guess maybe that is what I’m trying to do around here. Let’s just keep it between you and me.”
His pince-nez flashed in the artificial light. The O. G. had come into Patchen’s cell at the end of the day to return the files he had been working on to the vault. The stifling room was now brilliantly lit by buzzing fluorescent lights that covered the entire ceiling. In the glare from overhead, the O. G.’s skin lost its usual pink hue and his hair appeared to be several shades whiter than usual.
With his single eye, Patchen read hundreds of pages of reports, dispatches, and cables every day, then digested them for the O. G. Accomplishing this task by the light of the original gooseneck lamp had given him piercing headaches and nagging anxiety about his eye; despite the Navy surgeon’s reassurances, he had never really believed that it would not eventually go blind. The appearance of the O. G., leached of most of his natural color, gave Patchen something else to think about: how he himself must look under this unnatural light. His visible wounds, and the impression they made on others, were never far from his mind.
“Meanwhile,” the O. G. said, “come into the other room for a minute. I’ve got something to show you.”
Patchen followed him through the door and saw Barney Wolkowicz standing in front of the fireplace, holding the leash of a large black and tan dog.
“Sorry to keep you, Barney,” the O. G. said. “We got to talking baseball. You two know each other, I think.”
“Yeah,” Wolkowicz answered in his raspy voice, nodding to Patchen. “Patchen and me dug up some skulls and bones together once.”
“Barney just flew in from Europe,” the O. G. said.
Wolkowicz looked as if he had been traveling for days instead of hours. His shirt was smudged at the collar and the tail was out; he had not shaved; his Tyrolean hat, with its plume of pheasant tail feathers and horsehair, dangled from his free hand. In his other hand he held the leash; at the end of it the dog sat absolutely motionless, gazing into space like a bored soldier assigned to orderly duty.
“That’s a beautiful dog,” Patchen said.
“Glad you like him,” Wolkowicz said.
“D’you recognize the breed?” the O. G. asked. He was fond of dogs, and sometimes brought his own elderly spaniel to work with him, where it slept peacefully in the kneehole of his desk.
Patchen said, “It’s a Doberman pinscher, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” the O. G. said. “Good work. Not many people know about Dobermans outside of Germany. Best war dogs in the world. Incredible fighting spirit, amazing jaw strength. What’s this one’s name, Barney?”
“Faust.”
“Crackerjack name. Think you can remember it, Son?” “Me?” Patchen said.
“Yep.” The O. G. was pleased with himself. “It’s yours,” he said. “Barney brought him from Berlin for you—I thought you’d appreciate company on your walks through the night.”
OVER THE NEXT FEW NIGHTS WOLKOWICZ ACCOMPANIED PATCHEN ON his walks and taught him how to control the Doberman.
“He won’t sit up or roll over,” Wolkowicz explained. “He’s only got one trick—homicide.”
Otherwise the dog was perfectly trained: it would sit, heel, stay, come, or attack in instantaneous obedience to a command from its master. Patchen, who had never before owned an animal—his grandfather believed that unneeded food should be given to the poor, not to pets—was puzzled as to the reasons the O. G. had given him this one.
“Security reported you were wandering around by yourself at night,” Wolkowicz said. “I guess it worried the O. G. He thinks you need protection.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s picked you to be the all-seeing eye of the Outfit. If the other side grabbed you, they’d know damn near as much as he knows.”
“You think a dog would stop them?”
Wolkowicz looked him over. “You sure as hell wouldn’t be able to. C’mere.”
Wolkowicz stepped into the light of a streetlamp, gave the dog a command to prevent it from attacking, as it had been trained to do, at the sight of a firearm in the hand of anyone except the man holding its leash, and produced a Walther P-38 pistol.
“You know how to use this?” he asked.
“I know how to fire a pistol. This kind is new to me.”
“The principle is the same as the forty-five automatic you carried in the Marines, except when you point this weapon at something, you hit it and it dies. The clip holds eight rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum ammo plus one in the chamber. Forget safeties. It’s double-action, like a revolver. To shoot, just squeeze the trigger. This one is fully loaded. See the pin sticking out of the slide? That’s how you know.” He shoved the pistol into a chamois-skin holster fitted with a spring-loaded clip designed to be slipped over the waistband of the wearer’s trousers. “Here, take it,” he said. “It’s all yours.”
Patchen took a half step backward. “No thanks.”
Wolkowicz, stepping closer, continued to proffer the weapon. Patchen made no move to accept it.
“Look, kid,” Wolkowicz said, “I know you’re a Quaker and wouldn’t hurt a fly and all that shit, but you either carry the gun and lead the dog when you’re wandering around alone at night, or you get a baby-sitter. I’m the guy who picks the baby-sitters, so don’t get me pissed off at you.”
“Because that’s the way it’s going to be. Now take the fucking gun and put it on. Here’s your permit.”
Patchen examined the card, which bore his photograph and a false name signed in an imitation of his handwriting that was undetectable even to him. It identified him as a member of the United States Park Police.
“Is this I. D. phony, too?” he asked. He meant: Was it false-genuine, a real Park Police credential issued to an imaginary identity, or was it a simple forgery manufactured in one of the Outfit’s print shops?
“Not so’s anybody will notice it,” Wolkowicz replied, telling him nothing. “If you want to shoot that thing off to get the feel of it, let me know and I’ll call the firing range. You should be pretty good, using your right hand and your right eye. You’ve got no choice. I’m left-eyed and right-handed, so my nose gets in the way.”
Patchen took the holstered pistol and slipped it over his belt.
“Get yourself some suspenders,” Wolkowicz said. “The gun weighs a little over two pounds, loaded. You wouldn’t want your pants to fall down and go boom.”
Wolkowicz remained at Patchen’s side for more than a week, picking him up at the office in the evening and dropping him off at home afterward, until he was sure that he could handle the Doberman. He seemed to have little else to do. Patchen remarked on this.
“I’m waiting for somebody,” Wolkowicz said. Patchen did not ask who this might be. Wolkowicz mocked his curiosity anyway. “The key suspect,” he said with an exaggerated wink.
He led Patchen to a car parked a few paces away on Constitution Avenue, then drove across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery, entering through a back road. They got out of the car and walked among the rows of white markers, the neon glow of the city providing enough light to find the way. Because the cemetery lay on a hill it was cooler there, and a whispering breeze stirred the trees and the many small American flags that had been thrust into the sod.
Finally Wolkowicz found a place to stand that was out of earshot for any possible eavesdropper, and began to talk.
“This is about Christopher,” he said. “I know you’re monitoring the op he’s on in Indochina.”
“Yeah, I do. Let’s cut the shit, okay? We’re standing among the honored dead here, and I think we should tell each other the truth.”
“All right. You first.”
“His case officer is Waddy Jessup. Waddy was my commanding officer in Burma. Do you know about that?”
“I know what’s in the files. I looked you both up.”
“You ever met Waddy?”
Wolkowicz wore a look of crafty expectation; Patchen did not know why.
“No,” he said.
“Wrong,” Wolkowicz retorted. “He was your training officer—good old Archie. Remember him?”
Patchen snorted in surprise and amusement. He had never before put the two identities together.
“They say you’ve got total recall,” Wolkowicz said. “I want you to visualize Archie, remember that accent, remind yourself of all the asshole things he said to you in that Yalie accent. Got the picture?”
“I remember Archie.”
“Waddy. Let me tell you what’s not in the file. He used up our whole unit—‘Force Jessup,’ Waddy called it—in a stupid attack on a fortified Jap position because he wanted an elephant to ride and the Japs had some elephants. Killed everybody except me. The other guys were Kachins, very good troops. Then he jumped on an elephant and ran away and left me to the Japs.”
Wolkowicz lifted his hand to his mouth and spat two full dental plates into his palm. He held them out, perfect porcelain teeth glistening with spit, for Patchen’s inspection.
“The Japs pried out all my teeth with the point of a bayonet,” he said. “Waddy got away. When he got back to base, he put himself in for the D. S. C., and got it. I’m telling you all this for two reasons—first so you’ll know I’m not exactly an unbiased observer, and second so you’ll understand that I know what I’m talking about when I talk about Waddy.”
Wolkowicz opened his toothless mouth wide and put his teeth back in, then wiped his palm on the seat of his pants.
“Now, down to business,” he said. “I’ve got some sources in Vietnam, and they tell me that Waddy is going to get Christopher killed unless you get him out of there fast.”
“Waddy sent him out on a combat mission against the French with the fucking Vietminh. Then Waddy described the whole operation to a Vietnamese kid the French have planted on him.”
Patchen felt a wave of nausea rising toward his throat.
“What Vietnamese kid?”
“A pretty little boy with a bottom like a peach,” Wolkowicz said. “Christopher’s still out in the jungle with the Communists. If they don’t kill him because Waddy’s told somebody they’ve got going down on him that he’s an American spy, the French will.”
He stepped closer, so that his face was only inches from Patchen’s and whispered his next words: “Get Christopher out of there.”
THE FLIMSY DOOR OF WADDY JESSUP’S APARTMENT IN HANOI WAS opened by a slender young barefoot Vietnamese who smiled contemptuously when he heard Patchen’s French pronunciation. He showed him into the living room, where Waddy lay on a bamboo sofa, reading Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard and drinking some cloudy liquid out of a glass shaped like a tulip.
“My, this is a surprise,” Waddy said, rising to his feet. “I guess the best thing for me to do is confess and get it over with. I lied to you. My name really isn’t Archie.”
They shook hands. Waddy was barefoot, too, and he was wearing a sarong; it was hotter in Hanoi than in Washington. “Would you like one of these?” he asked, holding his glass aloft. “It’s Pernod poured over ice. Ice.”
“No, thanks. I was hoping you’d join me for dinner in a restaurant.”
“Actually, Jean-Pierre was just making a cold supper when you arrived. I’m sure there’d be enough for two.”
Waddy opened his eyes wide, drew a breath, and turned with a smile to the houseboy, who was hovering behind Patchen, as if to give an instruction.
“No, thank you,” Patchen said. “I’d rather go out.”
Lips already parted, Waddy paused for the briefest moment, then spoke at length to the servant in Vietnamese. The boy glowered and left them without uttering a word.
“I was just telling him you’re a former student of mine who wants to treat me to dinner,” Waddy said. “Changes in plans upset him. He’s a moody fellow. He likes to be called Jean-Pierre, but his given name is Cu. That means ‘penis’ in Vietnamese. He had two older brothers who died in infancy. Naturally, when he was born his parents gave him an ugly, horrible name so the evil spirits wouldn’t be envious and take him, too. The Vietnamese are wonderful, David. Be with you in a minute.”
Joss sticks, burning in front of a collection of Jessup family photographs, filled the torpid air with sickly fumes. This arrangement suggested, while not quite imitating, the family shrine that was a fixture in every Buddhist home. The apartment, in fact, was furnished entirely in the Vietnamese style; Patchen supposed that the decor was designed as a statement of Waddy’s sentiments in regard to the revolution. So, possibly, was the book of Mallarme’s poetry. He tried to read it while he waited, but the verses were written in such rudimentary French that he assumed there was some meaning beneath the banal surface which eluded him.
When Waddy emerged from his bedroom he was dressed in Ivy League clothes: white bucks, khaki pants, Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, “regimental” tie, seersucker jacket. He wore the small red, white, and blue enamel badge of the Distinguished Service Cross in his lapel, a touch he had not allowed himself when working under his alias in the safe house in Foggy Bottom.
The temperature was in the nineties. They dined in an open-air French restaurant on food invented in a cold and rainy country. Waddy discussed the wine list in voluble French with the listless wife of the owner-chef and despite the heat ordered a full bottle of Pouilly Fuisse and another of Vougeot. He drank most of the wine himself, but ate very little as he plied Patchen with questions about his village in Ohio, about Harvard, about Quakerism.
“Do you mind?” he said. “I’ve always wondered about George Fox and the Inner Light and all that. Do Quakers actually quake?”
“Inward Light,” Patchen replied. “What church do you belong to?”
Waddy was chewing his asparagus. “Episcopalian,” he said. “Don’t Episcopalians quake?”
“They barely twitch when they ejaculate,” Waddy replied. “I don’t mean to offend you. All I know about Ohio I learned from a classmate at Yale whose family made sheets and tubes in Youngstown.”
“Weren’t you in Burma with someone from Ohio?” Patchen asked.
Waddy’s face did not flush on hearing this question, but Patchen had the impression that he prevented it by a conscious effort of the will.
“You’ve been talking to Barney,” he replied after another reproving silence. “He had a good war, as the Brits say, whatever he may say about it now. Actually he’s not a Buckeye at all, you know. He’s a muzhik.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s Russian for ‘peasant.’ He was born in Russia, carried out as a child on his father’s back. Barney père walked two thousand miles through the Russian Civil War, cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left of them, corpses everywhere, and they both came out without a scratch. Amazing saga. Makes you wonder.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know,” Waddy said with his bright smile.”Fate. Un coup de dés—a throw of the dice. Craps, as they say in Youngstown, Ohio.”
After dinner they rode in rickshaws to one of the many lakes within the city limits. Speaking Vietnamese again, Waddy told the rickshaw boys, who were in fact emaciated gray-headed men, to wait for them. They walked along the shore beneath lanterns strung between trees.
“Your Vietnamese seems to be pretty good,” Patchen said.
“Not really,” Waddy replied. “You should hear Paul. He’s the polyglot. Of course, all Vietnamese words have only one syllable, and he learned the language in bed from the most delicious little girl in Hanoi, but all the same he’s a prodigy. He’s like a musician with perfect pitch—amazing. Play it once and he repeats it with variations.”
“Where is Paul?”
Waddy feigned surprise that the question should be asked by someone who was not, so far as he knew, authorized to know about Christopher’s activities.
“He’s out of town,” he said.
“When will he be back?”
Waddy paused, to let Patchen know that he had gone far enough. “I really don’t know,” he said.
They had been moving through a thin crowd of Vietnamese, all of whom were fanning themselves with cheap bamboo fans. Waddy had one, too. Patchen turned into a path that led away from the lake.
“Wrong way,” Waddy said.
Patchen continued on without replying. Waddy hesitated, then followed. The three Vietnamese men who had been following them ever since they left Waddy’s apartment drifted in and out of the lantern light at the end of the path, peering into the darkness after them.
When he reached Patchen, who had stopped in the middle of the path, Waddy put a hand on the small of his back.
“You don’t remember your training very well, David,” he said. “Those fellows who were following us now know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we know they’re tailing us.”
“I don’t think the surprise will kill them,” Patchen said.
“Maybe not, but there’s such a thing as the niceties. I have to live and work here.”
Patchen interrupted him. “Here,” he said. “I have something for you.” He handed him an envelope and a penlight.
“You want me to open this and read it here?” Waddy said. “If you please.”
Waddy tore open the envelope, turned on the little flashlight, and read, with his body hunched over the page to conceal it from the men at the end of the path. It was a letter from the 0. G., in his own hand, informing Waddy of the death of his dear Aunt Judith and asking that he come home at once to deal with the estate. As he read, Waddy chewed his lower lip.
When he finished, Patchen handed him another envelope con taining a ticket for the next day’s flight to Paris.
“You’ll be met at the customs barrier at Le Bourget by a man holding a sign that says ‘Voyages Jean et Jeanne,’ “ Patchen said. “Someone else will approach him. Follow the two of them out of the terminal to the car.”
“ ‘Voyages Jean et Jeanne’? Can’t I just call the office?” Patchen took back his penlight. “Those are the arrangements. I didn’t make them.”
“Who did? The Scarlet Pimpernel?”
“Do you want me to go through the details again?”
“I don’t think so. How could anyone forget? When will I be back?”
“As soon as you settle Aunt Judith’s estate, I guess. Meanwhile I need to know the time and place of your next contact with Paul, and the fallback.”
All the possible meanings behind the letter he had just read, and the bizarre instructions he had just been given, were now flooding into Waddy’s mind. No unit in the Outfit except Security would have made arrangements of this kind: they were like something out of a training film. Even in the dark, Patchen could sense his anxiety, but Waddy said nothing to betray it; he was already acting like a suspect.
“Paul and I have a date to play tennis at six-thirty in the morning next Tuesday.”
This was three days ahead. Waddy gave the address of the tennis court.
“What’s the fallback?”
“Same time the following Tuesday at the tomb of Thieu Tri in Hue.”
“Why Hue?”
“Because it isn’t Hanoi.”
“And if he doesn’t make that meeting?”
“Then I wait to hear from him. Except I won’t be here.” “Who else would he contact?”
Waddy stood mute. He was very close to Patchen because they had been carrying on their conversation in whispers.
“Look,” Patchen said. “I know what you’ve got him doing. How do you get a message to him if you have to?”
“Through friends of Cu’s,” Waddy said.
In the distance, the three Vietnamese were conferring, glancing in their direction. Rats gamboled on the path between them.
“Come closer,” Patchen said. Waddy did so. Without warning, Patchen, whose undamaged arm and leg were very strong, gave him a powerful shove, knocking him off his feet.
“For Christ’s sake!” Waddy said. “What was that for?” “Cover,” Patchen said. “You told me it should always be consistent with the character of the agent involved.”
He stepped around Waddy’s prostrate body and walked back to the rickshaws, telling his boy to take him to his hotel.
“What about the other one?” the boy asked.
“Monsieur a fait un jugement erroné,” Patchen said in his awful French: the gentleman made an error in judgment.
The boys smiled; Waddy and his habits were well known in Hanoi.
CHRISTOPHER APPEARED ON SCHEDULE FOR HIS GAME OF TENNIS. THE courts, hidden among masses of bougainvillaea, were located at the rear of a large colonial villa in a French residential quarter that was strongly reminiscent of Passy. Patchen had arrived by car half an hour early for the meeting. This was a breach of security—clandestine meetings were supposed to be precisely timed to reduce the period of exposure—but Patchen did not see how the rules could possibly matter in this case: He had been followed by a team of Vietnamese ever since he first made contact with Waddy Jessup. On his way to the tennis court, however, the streets behind and ahead of him had been empty.
“There’s no need for them to follow you here,” Christopher explained, when Patchen mentioned this odd circumstance. “The courts belong to a Frenchman Waddy picked up at the Cercle Sportif in Saigon. He’s in the colonial service, so the surveillance just gets here first on meeting days. A lip-reader watches through binoculars from the upstairs windows of the house.”
“Waddy knew this?”
“He thinks it adds to the picture of innocence, as he calls it. Just two American pals, hitting at each other by the dawn’s early light and talking about baseball. Besides, he says, it’s flattering to have your own bilingual lip-reader. Where is Waddy?”
“The O. G. called him home.” Patchen did not explain why; Christopher did not ask. “I’ve brought you a new friend,” Patchen said, nodding in the direction of a young man on the other side of the net who was practicing his backhand by hitting a ball against the back wall of the court. “Not,” Patchen said, “that you’re going to need him. We want you to come home, too.”
“Not yet,” Christopher said.
His gaze, always intense, was now almost feverish. He looked as if he had just recovered from an attack of malaria—gaunt, weakened, pallid beneath a deeply tanned skin. No doubt he had; like many who fought in the Pacific, he was infected. He had been in the jungle with the Vietminh for exactly a month, a fact that impressed Patchen—not the duration of the mission but the timing. The guerrillas had picked Christopher up in the middle of Hanoi and then dropped him off on a streetcorner as if they were running a bus service behind enemy lines. If they could do that, how much longer could this war last?
He said to Christopher, “What do you mean ‘not yet’?”
“I’ve done what Waddy wanted. Now I’m going to do what I came here to do.”
“That may not be as important now as it seemed before.” “After what I’ve just seen, I have to disagree.”
Patchen made a noncommittal gesture. “We’ll talk.”
“We already have,” Christopher said, straightening up.
As he talked, Christopher had kept his back turned to the house and leaned over as if to tie his shoelaces. He had arrived ready for the game, wearing tennis shoes, shorts, and a faded knit shirt. Now he walked onto the court, called out to the partner Patchen had provided, and hit a ball to him. Patchen sat down to watch. Christopher was a good player; so was the other man. They split two sets. Although this was a concrete court, Christopher’s canvas shoes were spotted with grass stains and smudges of red clay. He never seemed to wear new clothes. Neither did the O. G. Neither, now, did Patchen, who was dressed in a seersucker suit and a black knit tie, the costume he would wear in summer for the remainder of his career.
At the end of the game, the players sat down side by side to cool off. When they got up they took each other’s racquets, which were identical American models. Inside the hollow handle of Christopher’s was his report on his journey with the Vietminh. Patchen read it later that afternoon in a safe house. It spoke in meticulous detail of night marches, tunnels, ambushes, political discussions, acts of atrocity. The writing was factual, neutral, stripped of opinion and emotion. Nevertheless, when he put it down, Patchen was convinced that Christopher had been changed in some fundamental way by his month with the Vietminh.
“Not changed, reminded,” Christopher said later, when Patchen suggested this to him. “These people are killers. I saw them massacre whole villages. They call it Dâu Tô—‘Struggle-Denunciation.’ From their point of view they’re not killing anything that has a right to live. Some of them talked to me about it. At first the work is disgusting, they said—the blood, the brains, the howls for mercy, shooting children or mutilating them. But you get used to it. It’s done in the name of the cause, so it’s virtuous. Everybody you know approves and sympathizes. The higher reasons are known to all. It gives you a moral glow. Heinrich Himmler said the same things about the Death’s-head SS after watching them shoot Jewish children: ‘Virtuous boys, to perform such unspeakable acts for the Reich.’ “
“You’re describing maniacs.”
“Believers.”
“According to your report they don’t spend all their time massacring innocent people.”
“No. They’re good troops. As good as the Japanese.”
“They seem to remind you of your enemies no matter how you look at them.”
“Except that this bunch are going to win,” Christopher said.
His voice, always difficult to hear, was practically inaudible over the scratchy music of a wind-up phonograph. They were drifting at night in a sampan on the River of Perfumes in Hue. It was very dark. The moving water splintered the yellow light from a lantern at the stern, where the boatman stood, bare toes gripping the deck as he sculled upriver, grunting a little each time he swiveled the oar. This was their first meeting since the tennis game.
The atmosphere in Hue, the imperial city of Vietnam, was less warlike than in Hanoi. All around them, other nearly identical sampans, each with an awning amidships and a lantern on the stern, were carried by the current. Plaintive songs from other phonographs drifted through the darkness. Pleasure sampans, these vessels were called, and in some of them, no doubt, guerrillas back from the scenes Christopher had described were being entertained by prostitutes. Vietnamese women were the most beautiful human beings Patchen had ever seen.
The record ended. Christopher said something in Vietnamese. The boatman went on sculling, winding up the machine with his foot and delicately placing the needle on the 78-rpm record with his toes.
Patchen said, “Tell me what you want to do and how long it will take.”
“I don’t know how long it will take. I’ve already met the schoolmaster.”
He meant Vo, the 0. G.’s friend from the First World War. Even though his voice was virtually drowned out by the tinny music issuing from the gramophone, even though Vo was one of the most common surnames in Vietnam, Christopher was careful not to pronounce it. By itself it would mean nothing to an eavesdropper. Even the full name, Vo Van Tho, would have been a feeble clue; “Van,” the middle name of all Vietnamese males, means “civilized, literary,” while “Tho,” the given name, means longevity. The Vietnamese rarely tempt fate by using their given names among themselves, but are called by nicknames. Vo had a scraggly beard, like his classmate, Ho Chi Minh, and the nickname his students had given him was Rau, meaning “beard.” That would have been a dangerous name to speak, because it would have identified him to anyone who happened to overhear or read Christopher’s lips.
“How are you two getting along?” Patchen asked.
“All right, I think,” Christopher said. “We talk about poetry.” “Yours or his?”
Vo Rau, under that name, was a well-known poet. Between the wars he had written verses in French, but after the Japanese vanquished the French and occupied Indochina, demonstrating that Asians could defeat Europeans, he had written only in Vietnamese, and only about restoring Vietnam to its own people. These patriotic works, disguised as love songs, were the foundation of his appeal to the young. As for Christopher, he had published a book of poems the year before. They, too, were about war and loss.
“We’re exchanging favors,” Christopher said. “He’s helping me translate my stuff into Vietnamese, and I’m helping him with an English version of some of his poems.”
“You think there’s a market for the result?” Patchen asked. “I think it’s a way to talk about anything.”
“Is he a believer?”
“I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “Just as his old friend said, he’s a romantic. I think he’s surprised at the effect of his poetry and his teaching. What has he done? He may not know the details of the Struggle-Denunciation, but I think he suspects the truth.”
“Are you going to tell him his suspicions are correct?”
“In a poem, yes.”
AFTER PATCHEN RETURNED TO WASHINGTON, CHRISTOPHER MOVED to Hue and rented a small house near the Citadel. Hue was filled with Christopher’s fellow poets, many of whom were Communist terrorists. The Annamese girl who had been sleeping with him in Hanoi came with him and carried on with her work as a writer and printer for an underground Communist newspaper. She was also the Vietminh agent assigned to monitor Christopher and his activities.
Her revolutionary name was Phuoc, meaning “luck,” but Christopher called her Lê, or “Tears,” because like many people of deep political conviction, she cried easily over trivial experiences. A poem, a movie (even a French movie), a particularly lovely sunset beyond Imperial Screen Mountain, a song, an orgasm, would cause her soft brown eyes to glisten and overflow. She never sobbed, never made a noise she did not intend to make.
“Le is an unkind name to call me by,” she told Christopher.
But she liked it because it was poetic, and because it acknowledged her femininity. At heart she was a conventional girl in spite of the bombings and assassinations she had carried out. She was an expert rifle shot and maker of booby traps who had killed French soldiers and other enemies of the cause. She had seduced Christopher in the first place because she had been ordered to do so by the apparatus, making the proposition herself when he failed to invite her into bed in response to her signals.
She was surprised by her own ardor. He was her first white lover, and she had not expected to feel passion for a body that was so different from her own. As soon as they took off their clothes, however, she discovered exciting similarities: a French bullet had passed through the muscles of her arm and the tissue of her breast, leaving puckered scars. Christopher had been wounded in Okinawa in almost the same places: “Kissed by death before they kissed,” as he wrote in a poem after she compared their wounds to love bites. He made no attempt to teach her American-style lovemaking, if such a thing existed. Instead, he was content to discover Lê’s methods. She taught him the Vietnamese words for the sexual acts, as for everything else. Sometimes, as she taught, she felt something like amusement running through his body. She took strict precautions against pregnancy, knowing that any child they had would be ugly and an outcast.
Although Le was assigned to watch his every move, Christopher actually had a great deal of time to himself. Living the secret life in a country controlled by an intelligent enemy is time-consuming because of the elaborate precautions involved, and Lê’s days and nights were consumed by writing, printing, and distributing her newspaper, her skin smelling of ink when she crawled into bed with him after a night at the print shop. She was required by the Party to attend innumerable Marxist-Leninist study, discussion, and self-criticism groups. Her schedule was as hectic, and as filled with snubs, slights, boredom, and dreams of marriage as that of a young American matron who has let herself become too deeply involved in community affairs. Christopher wrote no reports now, so he had nothing to hide. In Hanoi, he had composed them when she was out, in invisible ink in the Greek cipher, between the lines of the great epic poem Kim Van Kieu, which he was copying from a book as a means of perfecting his Vietnamese and getting the rhythms of classical Vietnamese verse into his head.
Le came from a village about fifteen miles from Hue, and every Sunday she bicycled home to visit her parents after rising early to cook delicacies that she packed in a basket hung on the handlebars. Christopher never went with her. Her parents knew nothing of her politics and nothing about Christopher, or so she thought. They wanted her to marry one of the prosperous men of the village.
“As soon as the French are beaten I’ll have to get married and stop being your meo,” she said to Christopher. Meo, “kitten,” was the word for a married man’s mistress.
“How can you be my meo if I’m not married?” he asked.
“You will be,” she said. “In the next year of the rooster.”
Lê often made confident predictions about Christopher’s future. She had his horoscope drawn by the cu si, the Buddhist lay monk in charge of religious questions in her village. This man was not only an astrologer but also a geomancer, so she was in possession of a great deal of information about the three souls and the nine spirits that ruled Christopher’s life. This knowledge was based on the hour, day, and place of his birth in the year of the rat. Christopher had given her the correct data when she asked for it, drawing a map to locate his birthplace, the island of Rügen in what was now the Soviet zone of Occupied Germany. Of course she reported these facts to the apparatus as well as the cu si, and for a long time afterward there was a school of opinion among Vietnamese Communists that Christopher was in fact a German who had been tricked into revealing the truth about himself by his meo.
Some things about his fate Le did not tell him. He was accompanied in life by a benevolent con hoa, the ghost of someone who had died by fire and wished to protect him from the same fate. Nevertheless, bad things lay ahead for him, but not until he was in his thirty-seventh year. The cu si was quite specific: In the year of the hare a woman would betray him, another woman would die for him, his enemies would put him in a cold place and separate him from his family. Le did not warn Christopher of these misfortunes. It was useless: he could not change what was ordained by his stars even if he believed her (as few foreigners would), and besides, the years he was now living through were fortunate ones, dominated by tien, or good spirits, who had given him the gifts of intelligence, literary genius, and sexual grace and were protecting him for the time being from the wicked female spirits, the Ba Giang Ha, or Falling Goddesses, who were to cause such turmoil in his life later on.
Lê had no difficulty accommodating these beliefs, and many other superstitions, to the “scientific” Marxist-Leninism she studied so conscientiously and believed so blindly. Although this was never stated outright by any Vietnamese, she understood that Communism, like everything else that brought death and sorrow, was the product of the yêi and tinh and the other invisible demons that had always swarmed over Vietnam, catching at the legs of the Vietnamese and creating their mournful, inescapable history.
CHRISTOPHER AND VO RAU BECAME FRIENDS BY TALKING TO EACH other through their poems. They usually met in the cool of the evening in a sampan on the River of Perfumes, reading aloud in each other’s language. The listener suggested refinements in the translation. Christopher’s faint speaking voice was an asset to him in Hue, where Vietnamese was pronounced in refined, barely audible tones.
His friendship with Vo aroused curiosity, but no unusual suspicion. All but the most paranoid members of the Vietminh apparatus had lost interest in Christopher. In what way was he dangerous?
He was not French; he might even be German. It was also possible that he might be what he represented himself to be, a poet in search of experience who sometimes wrote articles about Vietnam for American and European magazines and newspapers. His journalism was scrupulously accurate and nonpolitical.
How can any man be nonpolitical? asked the apparatus. Why was he here in the midst of a colonial war that did not concern him or his country? When he went with the Vietminh in the jungle, though he refused to touch a weapon, they saw that he had been a soldier; maybe he still was.
The last thing they imagined was that an American might be patient enough to be interested in the future, that he was quiescent now in order to be the contrary in times to come.
Christopher never mentioned the O. G. to Vo, never gave him the slightest hint that he came from the Outfit. Vo did not need to know; he did not want to know. In time they came to understand each other completely.
When Vo was asked about his friendship with Christopher by one of his former students who was. now Lê’s control officer in Vietminh headquarters, he said, “He is a poet.”
“A poet or somebody who wants us to think he’s a poet?” “See for yourself.”
Vo showed the man a poem Christopher had written. It was about the fighters in the jungle, and if you understood how unsparingly truthful it was, it was very moving.
“You translated this for him?”
“No,” Vo said. “He wrote it in Vietnamese. He can do the same in English and French, and I suppose German. He is gifted.” “Then why is he here?”
Vo sighed before he answered. “I think because he believes that Vietnam is the place where truth and lies will have their next great battle, and he wants to be present.”
“On which side?”
“A poet is always on the side of truth,” Vo said.