A DECADE LATER, SOON AFTER CHRISTOPHER LIVED OUT THE PROPHecies of Lê’s fortune-teller and disappeared into China, Patchen met Vo Rau on the River of Perfumes. They went out at midnight in separate sampans rowed by agents of the Outfit—Khmer not Annamese or Tonkinese or Cochinchinese—who lashed the hulls together so that the two men could talk as they drifted with the current.
In the lantern light, Vo was white-bearded and emaciated, with the weary eyes and benevolent air of the very old, but in fact he was only sixty-four. Like his long-ago friend the O. G., he was venerable before his time.
Patchen and Vo had never met.
“Do you know who I am?” Patchen asked. “Do you require other proofs of identity?”
“No. He describes you in one of his poems. You couldn’t be anyone else.”
“As you know, he has disappeared.”
“And you think you will find him in Vietnam?”
“No. He’s in China. I hope I can find out why in Vietnam.”
“ ‘You will have your choice of explanations.’ I am quoting poetry:
“ ‘When you ask the makers of the dead to remember the reason why, you will have your choice of explanations.’ “
“That sounds like Paul.”
“Yes. He wrote it ten years ago, here in Hue. Even then he was curious about murderers. Too curious, too imaginative, too brave. He was born under a very unpredictable star.” The old man smiled. “We Vietnamese are superstitious in these matters.”
“Did he explain his theory to you?”
“That your American President had been killed in revenge for the murders of Ngo Dinh Diem and his two brothers? Yes.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I thought it was a very dangerous idea. It suggested that the most powerful man in the world had been assassinated by the weak, and that he was in some way responsible for his own death. Whether it was true or not, the thought was intolerable.”
“Did anyone in Vietnam besides yourself understand this?” Patchen asked.
“Everyone who heard it. We’re weak, not stupid. But I think you’re too late. There are no answers in Vietnam. Everyone here who wanted to harm Paul is dead. They were all killed after he was in China, and out of danger. That is rather strange.”
“Yes,” Patchen said, “it is.”
Every one of Christopher’s Vietnamese enemies had been murdered one after the other within twenty-four hours after the small plane he hired strayed off course and crash-landed on Chinese territory. This handful of deaths, occurring among so many others, had hardly been noticed.
Patchen said, “You say they were killed after he was out of danger. Is it your opinion that being in the hands of the Chinese Communists is the same as being out of danger?”
“No one can reach him in one of their prisons,” Vo said. “Not Americans or Russians, and least of all Vietnamese.”
“Especially if he is in a Chinese grave.”
“Why would the Chinese kill him?” Vo asked. “They are glad to have him. A few years from now they can sell him to you for something they want. Then he will be free, they will be richer, and you will have paid your debt.”
“You’re happy he’s a prisoner,” Patchen said, truly surprised at his own thought.
“Of course I am,” Vo said. “Otherwise he would be dead.” Patchen shifted his weight, and the movement of his stiff body made both sampans rock.
“Are you suggesting that all this was arranged as a rescue?” he asked.
“That would imply that a very, very clever person made the plan.” “Who?”
“Someone who loved our friend and wanted to save his life.” “You?”
Vo smiled benevolently. “I wish I could say yes. But no, this was someone with powerful friends, money, debts that he could call in _ for payment.”
The two sampans bumped softly at the gunwales. Nothing else stirred. In the seamless Vietnamese night, sky and river were the same shade of black; water, air, and human skin the same degree of temperature. Patchen felt immersed in Vietnam, the subject of some biological process, like gestation or coma, that could only come to an end in its own natural time.
“Where will you look?” Vo asked.
“For what?” Patchen said.
“For the person who did this. For the explanation.”
“Closer to home, if you’re right in thinking that Paul’s friends did this to him, instead of his enemies.”
“And if I’m right and. you decide what this person did was a good thing, what then?”
All the more reason to kill the bastard, Patchen thought. But he said, “I’m not sure motivation is the question. Everything is a matter of trust, in the end.”
“Quite true,” Vo said. “And now I think we should say goodnight.”
Patchen reached into the other boat and shook hands. “You’ve been a great help,” he said. “Thank you.”
“It was a pleasure to see you at last after knowing you for such a long time in Paul’s poem.”
“The one you quoted?”
“No, another one. It’s one of my favorites.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about one soldier saving another’s life in battle,” Vo replied. “Both are wounded, but the rescued one is blinded. He thinks his rescuer may be Death. The rescuer can’t see, either, because the night is so dark. He is struck by bullets. He wants to lie down beside the other man and die. He makes himself go on by imagining that he is carrying his wounded father toward a reunion with his mother, who has been lost for a long time. The battle sounds to him like the roaring of lions in a dream he had as a child. The last line was very difficult to render in Vietnamese: ‘German is the only language that lions understand.’ It would have been better, for the Vietnamese ear, to substitute ‘Chinese’ and ‘tiger.’ But when I translated it he insisted on a literal rendering. Paul was always on the side of the original meaning.”