4
Middle of the night, seriously jet-lagged. Middle of the day back home. Charlie lay on the bed in his overchilled room, channel-surfing. He’d traveled halfway around the world and gone nowhere: just another hotel, complete with CNN. This one was nicer than those he’d endured during the campaign: a big Sheraton, not a motel—muted graymauve carpet and matching, deeper mauve bedspread and drapes; Chinese-style bamboo prints on the walls. There was a floor-to-ceiling window; it faced the river, which seemed the only Asian thing left in Bangkok, a mucky chaos of ships and skiffs. There was high-rise construction on both banks; the scaffolding appeared rickety and was cocooned in green canvas, Western banality about to burst forth—the city was in the midst of a reverse metamorphosis, from butterfly to caterpillar.
Charlie found a Courvoisier in the minibar, settled back in his bed and wondered if he were being overly nostalgic: had Bangkok ever been a butterfly? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t remember much about how Bangkok looked in 1967; he remembered other things. The girls in Patpong, of course. But breathing had been memorable, too, breathing without fear—a tingly phenomenon, like regaining the use of a leg after it had fallen asleep. The ability to inhale and exhale freely, after months of constant trepidation, was unexpected and intoxicating.
He remembered the faces of the other soldiers on the plane out of Danang. He didn’t know any of them, but that didn’t make a difference—they had far more in common than not: they had all seen too much and this was a moment they’d been dreaming about for months. They shucked their ancient warrior faces midair, transforming themselves into adolescents again, slapping on aftershave, breaking out Hawaiian shirts and cigars. They were gloriously, unapologetically, transcendently horny when they hit the ground.
Charlie accompanied several of them—fellow Marines; he couldn’t remember their names, only their extravagant swagger—to a joint where the girls wore American college T-shirts and short-shorts and flip-flop sandals; his girl had a Cornell T-shirt and she leaned casually, collegiately, elbow on the bar, long black hair falling over her eyes, laughing and chatting, asking about America. “Why they call it hot dog, Joe?” She shouted in his ear, competing with the Rolling Stones. “Why they call it jukebox?”
He sipped his Courvoisier, fully dressed on his bed, and debated whether to risk a walk over to Patpong. He had heard that the district had become less exotic, more touristy. There was a night market now; souvenirs—T-shirts, wallets, fake Rolexes—were sold outside the sex clubs. He was curious, but he couldn’t go; a stroll through Patpong was politically, and morally, untenable. There was no such thing as innocent naughtiness anymore, if there ever had been. In 1967, he’d been a kid, not much older than the girls; now he was old enough to be their grandfather—and now he knew that many of them were there involuntarily, dragooned from villages all over Asia (he wondered if that had been true in 1967: they’d seemed so happy, so free).
He clicked his way through the late-night TV options. Jack Stanton worked southern crowds on CNN. There was week-old NBA basketball on the sports channel. The latest Rolling Stones video was on Asian MTV, which was appropriate: for Charlie, the Stones would always be part of Bangkok. They sounded the same, but they looked ancient, ridiculous; Mick Jagger was still flailing his arms and pooching his lips, but now he seemed an aged, wizened Mick Jagger impersonator. There was a gorgeous young Chinese announcer on MTV—she chattered in Mandarin, switched effortlessly into Valley Girl: “The Red Hot Chili Peppers, very cool—from the city of angels . . . Ellayy . . . they’re up next with, uh-huh, uh-huh . . . ‘Under the Bridge.’ ”
Click. Elvis on TNT. Not just Elvis, but Elvis as an Arab? Actually, a relatively young Elvis as an American movie star in Saudi Arabia, pretending to be an Arab in order to escape from—assassins? Amazing. He was singing now. What was this movie?
And then Charlie clicked onto the hotel’s service channel: trips to the boonies were on offer. Terraced chartreuse paddies of new rice, phlegmatic water buffalo, peasants in cone hats, haunting lute music. He drifted off, and found himself deep in the dull horror of the plane back to Danang after R&R. A different group of guys, same faces. All of them hung over on oxygen and other things, the tenseness and anger and absurdity reclaiming them. Two rows back, a boy sat staring out the window, tears streaming. No one said a word. How many would get blown away that first day back because they weren’t paying sufficient attention? How many would take out their frustrations on the natives? Had he been thinking of the girl in the Cornell T-shirt, or of Johanna, or of cornfields, when Richie Radio took the step? And who or what had Richie been thinking about? He was blown back, sliding down, crashing heavily like a log falling through a watercourse. . . .
And up. The phone was ringing. He glanced at his suitcase, not yet unpacked—and knew it never would be. Sorry, Corporal Kenny. Bad idea. This was far too serious a part of the world for a vacation.
The phone: it was, of course, Lincoln Rathburn. Linc was bound to track him down. They hadn’t spoken in more than a week, their longest radio silence in thirty years. “Have you contracted anything serious yet?” Linc asked, in his nasal, edgeless baritone, a butter knife of a voice.
“Maybe a cold. The Asians have gone berserk over air-conditioning, it seems.” He clicked back to the Elvis movie. “Hey, an Elvis where he’s an Arab?”
“Harum Scarum,” Rathburn said. Linc didn’t exactly know everything, but he knew lots of things—and allowing him to show off early in the conversation might spare Charlie some hurt down the road. “But he’s only pretending to be an Arab. And isn’t Mary Ann Mobley in that one?”
“Is she a dark, bland, interchangeable early sixties sort with big hair?”
“A former Miss America,” Lincoln said, “from Mississippi, if memory serves. And I always thought she was . . . sultry.”
“God, you’re such an asshole,” Charlie observed. “I thought it was Annette Funicello, or something.”
“I don’t know that Elvis ever worked with Annette.” Linc had the ability to sound equally grave discussing nuclear proliferation or schlocky date movies of the sixties. “So,” he said. “It’s three in the morning. You’re in your room, watching an Elvis movie. Does this mean that you’ve already made a fool of yourself with some pathetic bar girl, or are you building up to that—or maybe you’re in the process?”
Linc also had the ability to always know what time it was everywhere in the world. “Oh, that’s right,” Charlie said, annoyed by Rathburn’s condescension. “I forgot: you always worked the high end of the Asian female market.”
“You know that’s not true,” Linc replied, with some heat.
“Gotcha,” Charlie said. Rathburn was rumored—unfairly, he’d always insisted—to have been linked romantically with Madame Nhu. It was, in a way, Charlie Martin’s fault: back in ’65, they’d been up on the roof of the Caravelle one evening, watching the war with some of the press guys—Linc morose, still trying to figure out a way to move Washington toward sanity at a moment when everyone else was coming to the conclusion that it was probably futile. There were times for being morose and serious, and knocking back 33’s at dusk on the Caravelle roof wasn’t one of them. So Charlie said, “Linc, you haven’t had a smile on your face since Madame Nhu left town.”
He looked up, startled. Had Charlie gotten close to something?
“What?” he said.
“Just kidding.” Charlie shrugged. But everyone else there—Lanny Scott was a young ABC correspondent, fresh in town; Nick McMichael from Life; Peter Solomon from the Times—saw that a nerve had been touched, at the very least. And from that night on, the word went forth. It was just a joke in the immediate Saigon circle, but it spread the way truly inspired gossip does—and it expanded to fit Lincoln Rathburn’s presence, which was rather imposing even in his midtwenties. He was a solid six feet with thick, straight, straw-colored hair and light blue eyes—in those days, he affected McGeorge Bundy glasses, with very unflattering flesh-colored rims, the eyewear of choice for the foreign policy elite—and he had a shockingly handsome, easily caricatured chin, with a deep cleft. That he was almost always in the company of a stunning woman (back then, and ever since) didn’t hurt the Madame Nhu rumor, which came to include several of the Soong sisters. The story had taken on a life of its own, Charlie suspected, because of a need among people who barely knew Linc, and didn’t like him, to render his apparent perfection imperfect.
Linc remembered exactly where and when the rumor had started, and who had started it—but he had never used that against his friend, which was his way of using it, his way of letting Charlie know that it was something he had done, however inadvertently, that was so hurtful to Linc’s reputation that he couldn’t bear to burden their friendship with it. Charlie played along with the conceit, usually. It was a measure of his desperation that he raised it now. He wasn’t proud about that. He supposed that he owed Linc some honesty.
“This wasn’t too bright, coming here,” he said. Linc was silent; masterfully so. “I just had to get out of there, out of Washington . . . before Lynn filled up my social calendar. Condemned to eternal social contrition.” Linc still hadn’t said anything. “But what happened in Colorado was so absurd—so much a perfect comeuppance for making a fool of myself in the campaign. I mean, the worst possible fantasy. Stanton thinks I was asking for it, traveling without an aide. . . .”
“You talked to Stanton?” Linc asked, always ravenous for the latest—and curious now, to see if a rapprochement could be effected between the Martin and Stanton camps. Charlie assumed that Rathburn had been testing the Stanton waters, to see if some kind of foreign policy advisory position might be worked out for himself. And, no doubt, he’d been spending a good deal of phone time doing postmortems with reporters about the Martin campaign. Somehow Linc managed to be a helpless gossip and remain a deathless friend, a balancing act of breathtaking complexity.
“We talked. He was all yak-butter and horseshit.” Charlie said. “It was nothing to write home about. You know, I still think I could’ve beat the sucker, if I’d ever gotten him one on one.”
“Charlie, we’ve known each other for nearly thirty years, and during that time you have done two astonishingly self-destructive things,” Linc said, in a tone of voice he might have used to introduce the senator as the after-dinner speaker at a banquet. “First, you had yourself transferred out from MACV to the snake-eaters—at the very moment you’d come to the conclusion that the war was not only unwinnable, but also wrong—”
“Well, I was pissed—”
“And second, you decided to run for president well before your time, when you had nothing to say, when you were unprepared, and then you stayed in long after it became obvious that—”
“What about my marriage?” Charlie tried to short-circuit the lecture.
“That was private.”
“Going to the boonies was a private decision.”
“That affected your public career—”
“Yeah, it made me a political commodity.”
“And that’s why you did it? Oh, come on, Charlie—you’re fifty-what, don’t you think it’s time to get serious?”
“You’re fifty-what,” Charlie said. “I’m forty-nine.”
“I could understand your decision, back in ’65,” Linc continued, “it was a cockeyed sort of honorable.” Interesting that Rathburn would acknowledge that now, Charlie thought: the decision had been made after Linc had been rotated back to Washington. They’d never really discussed it. “And classic you: only you would protest the war by going to war.”
Back in Saigon, Linc had sensed that Charlie might eventually ask for a transfer to the front lines; he could feel the guilt and tension whenever they went out into the field together. They would drive down Highway 4 through the cane fields to My Tho, to the Seminary, where the U.S. Army advisers were based in the Delta, and check out the war. Charlie was friendly with Colonel Tom Charles Kelly, the American adviser attached to the ARVN forces in the area. T.C. was a perpetually infuriated red-neck—he hated the Communists, and he hated the Vietnamese troops under his command for not wanting to fight the Communists, and he hated the American higher-ups in Saigon for not wanting to take the war by the throat and wrestle it to the ground.
Tom Charles showed them the war. He took them out on helicopter patrols with skittish ARVN troops; he showed them, by day, villes the Viet Cong controlled at night. And he was the one who’d christened them: “Well, if it ain’t the Lords of the Delta,” he’d proclaimed as Linc and Charlie pulled into the Seminary one day—the two of them brilliantly symmetrical, light and dark, diplomat and soldier, tall, clean and in khakis, defiant of the dust and sweat that came with the territory. They were the most fabulously American Americans imaginable. “We are so fucking honored by your presence.”
In other circumstances, Charlie and Linc probably would have been rivals—and they were, at first, suspicious of each other—but they didn’t have the luxury of competition in Saigon. They soon found that they could confide in each other about the impending disaster, the brutal reality that so few of their superiors were willing to face, which was an immense relief to both of them. It meant they weren’t going dinky-dau: a fairly major issue since it was clear, to both, that T.C. was sliding off the charts, furious with the fates, talking too much to the press—he eventually was court-martialed for shooting a Vietnamese colonel who tried to withdraw his troops in the midst of a battle.
At times, Gideon Reese—chief of the embassy’s political section—and Mike Coleman, Gid’s assistant, would join the conversation; certain reliable journalists were allowed into the inner circle as well. But the innermost circle was Charlie and Linc.
Linc did most of the talking, of course. He was a walking library of military history and American diplomacy; he knew every detail of the French war; he had read Sun Tzu, long before that became popular, and understood Asian military strategy. He was one of those people who was somewhat older than he looked, which worked to his disadvantage among the higher-ups who didn’t know him: he seemed a perpetual acolyte. He had a wife and children back home—a marriage going nowhere, he confided—and a striking, upper-class Vietnamese girlfriend in Saigon; Charlie had a marriage back home, too, also going nowhere. That was another thing they had in common.
For Charlie, the daily conversations with Linc balanced the ceaseless meetings where Lieutenant Martin had to sit against the wall, watching the pompous fools—including his pompous fool—at the main table, and not say a word because he was just a junior G-2 and no one ever asked his opinion. Junior intelligence officers weren’t supposed to be intelligent; they were merely supposed to be officers.
For Linc, Charlie was a ticket to military authenticity—he couldn’t hope to have guys like T. C. Kelly talk to him with any candor about the war. He was amazed and honored by Charlie’s friendship: most military hotshots disdained the striped-pants boys. But Martin treated everyone the same. Even diplomats. It was an odd, democratic tic he had.
“Charlie,” Linc said, less dismissively now—remembering who Charlie was, who Charlie had been, and trying to steer their phone conversation in a more affectionate direction. “You went to war because you were angry about the war. What pissed you off enough to run for president?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Charlie said, laughing at Linc’s formulation. “They all seemed like such dopes. It was beginning to seem so dopey.”
“What?” Linc asked. “Politics?”
“No.” Not politics. He loved politics—at least, the craft that Patsy Dunn and Clarice Martin had taught him: a cross between Petunia pragmatism and Mother Martin’s morality. There was an elegance to good politics. It was celestial navigation—indirect, subtle, measuring your path by flickering lights, calibrating moving targets. It was all about finding the most artful way to frustrate your enemies, to achieve what you wanted. But the game had been mechanized and denatured by the marketers; it had grown ugly and stale. “Linc, you ever been to a focus group?”
“No.”
“Bunch of average folks in a room,” Charlie said. “It seems okay, almost natural. They’re drinking coffee. They’re eating cookies. Chatting about politics. You run things by them. Not you, a guy who you hire: you stand behind a two-way mirror and watch. You don’t talk to the folks; they are talked to on your behalf. That’s how you find out what works, what they want to hear—not just positions, but words. You find out which words are effective and which aren’t. And then, you go out and use the good ones. Remarkable, huh?”
Linc didn’t particularly think so. Everyone knew about focus groups.
“It’s the exact opposite of leadership,” Charlie said.
“No it isn’t,” Linc said. “It’s just a tool.”
“It’s fucking cheating,” Charlie said, furious. Linc realized that for Charlie Martin, running for president had been John Henry against the steam drill, starring Jack Stanton as the steam drill. The things that had always worked for Charlie—the spontaneity and informality, the casual courage, the willingness to think aloud and sometimes get angry—were disadvantages in a modern campaign. Anachronisms, perhaps.
“Linc, this focus group stuff is fucking dangerous. How can you trust someone to lead when they can’t trust themselves to say the right thing?”
“Depends on the person,” Linc said, not wanting to get into an argument about the efficacy of political marketing methods. He had hoped Charlie would eventually pause, reflect and adapt, but he was beginning to suspect that might never happen. Anyway, there was other business to discuss.
“You know, you’re an asshole calling me this time of night, figuring I’d be awake,” Charlie said, not too interested in ragging Linc about politics, either. “What is it, midafternoon there?”
“Coming up on four in the morning,” Linc said. “I’m in Singapore.”
“No kidding. Watching Harum Scarum?”
“Sumo wrestling on Prime Sports,” he said. “But I flipped around. I knew it was there.”
“What are you doing in Singapore? Bidness?”
“Yes, and also . . . Actually, I was going to do a bit of work for the government. . . .”
“You’re working for the Republicans now?”
“There’s some work the Republicans can’t do for themselves, not while they’re in office—at least, they don’t think so, which is ridiculous.”
“Enough, Linc. What are you doing?”
“Vietnam,” he said. “You been following this Mustafa Al-Bakr situation?”
Charlie hadn’t been following anything except Schollwengenalia.
“Vietnam vet, black guy, gets caught by the Vietnamese coming down the Mekong from Cambodia in an outboard. They toss him in jail, the word gets out and the veterans’ groups back home are going berserk. What the veterans don’t know, what the Vietnamese don’t say, is that the boat is filled with all manner of combat matériel—Kalashnikovs, Thompsons, RPG launchers, ammo—and heroin and, you are going to love this, a stash of Rambo tapes, just to really piss them off.”
“Cool,” Charlie said. “Why don’t the Vietnamese just tell the world what they caught him with?”
“For several reasons.” Rathburn was now deep into smooth, mellifluous briefing mode. “Mostly, because they don’t want to keep him. They don’t want anything that looks like a POW situation just as they’re angling for diplomatic recognition. They also probably figure that if they announced what he was carrying, no one would believe them.”
“So, why was he—”
“Don’t know. He won’t talk to the Vietnamese. Just gives name, rank and serial number. The spooks think he’s either running guns to one of the drug gangs in the area or, more likely, that he’s just some madman who wanted to restart the war.”
“And what is his name, rank and serial number?”
“Mustafa Al-Bakr. Born Frederick Carter, Paterson, New Jersey—honorable discharge from the Marines, purple heart. No criminal record, except for a couple of possession busts right after he came back. Worked in the shipping department for a catalog company in York, Pennsylvania, until three months ago. Then he disappeared. He’s got a common-law wife and a couple of kids. She says she doesn’t know why he’s in Vietnam, and doesn’t care. Just as long as he never comes back.”
“Why? Did he smack her around or something?”
“Don’t know,” Linc said.
“Noncom?”
“A corporal.”
“And let me guess,” Charlie said. “Since the administration doesn’t deal with the Vietnamese officially, they asked you to go in and get him out.”
“Well, I was going to do that,” Linc said, working up to the punch line. “Then I heard that you were out here—and I figured that you’d be a lot better at this sort of mission than me. In fact, even if you hadn’t been out here, I would have suggested you for this. . . . Interested?”
“Fuck no.”
“Charlie—”
“No.”
“A United States senator. A decorated veteran. A fellow Marine. I wouldn’t know what to say to the guy. You can bond with him,” he said, laughing now. “You can tell war stories—”
“Fuck you, Jack.”
“And you can make everyone forget about Martha Schollwengen, get a little bit of your good name back, become a hero to the veterans’ groups. If you bring him back alive.”
“Bring some loony grunt back into the world? No thanks, Linc,” Charlie said, but he was beginning to think about it.
“Have you been back to Vietnam?” Linc asked, knowing that Charlie hadn’t been. “It’s still there, the way it was. It’s not like Bangkok. You might want to check it out before it becomes like everyplace else.”
“It will never be like everyplace else,” Charlie said, “for me.”
“There’s an added bonus,” Linc said. “You know who the Vietnamese contact is, the guy we’re working through?” He paused a beat. “An old friend of yours, Quoc Van Huong.”
“Thua’s uncle?” Charlie said. “He worked for AP?”
“And for the VC, as it happened. He mustered out a general.”
“Thua’s uncle was VC?”
“They don’t make that distinction,” Linc said. “They now say there never was a Viet Cong. It was all one liberation army—”
And Charlie had been a prime source of information: all the meals and drinks they’d had, bitching about the stupidity of the brass—how many times had Quoc been there, quietly listening? How much had they told him?
“The Frito Bandito,” Charlie said.
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t remember, Linc?” They had called him the Frito Bandito because he had the miniature Mexican look that some of the Vietnamese men seemed to favor: longish, curly black hair, small round face with cocoa skin and a scraggly black mustache. A deep, residual fear began to rise from Charlie’s innards up through his chest: “God, Linc—what did we tell him? You think we got anyone killed?”
“We got a lot of people killed,” Linc said softly. “But not because we were talking to him.”
“Did you see Thua?” Charlie asked. “You think she knew?”
“Who knows?” he said, too easily.
Clearly, he hadn’t seen her or even thought to ask about her. Thua would be in her forties if she was still there, still alive: Other memories of Saigon were beginning to come back now—not the obvious things, the nights on the roof of the Caravelle or in the café at the Continental—but street scenes, the street the AP office was located on, the reporters who lived on Rue Pasteur, and Thua, who had been Rathburn’s girl, demure and gorgeous, prohibitively proper, the Vietnamese equivalent of a Calvinist.
“Remember your going-away party?” Charlie asked.
“Barely,” Rathburn said. “At Brodard’s, right?”
“Yeah.” Charlie said, wincing at a particular memory of that night.
“Brodard’s is still there,” Linc said. “The government runs it now. And Givral’s as well. So—”
“I’m not going,” Charlie said.
“Oh yes, you are,” Linc replied, utterly confident. And with good reason: they hadn’t been friends so long for nothing.
* * *
Remarkably, the Vietnamese government provided Charlie with a room at the stolid, stucco Rex Hotel in the center of Saigon, where he had been billeted in 1964. It was another case of traveling an eternity and going nowhere—although the Rex was not quite the same as it had been in his day. It was now air-conditioned and renovated for the Japanese businessmen and German tourists who clumped through; and there was cable—CNN, even there. He was given a better room than he’d had in the old days, as a junior staffer. It faced the small park in front of the hotel, but was close enough to the corner of Le Loi that Charlie could see a good slice of the Music Hall, painted a blinding noonday yellow, and a thinner slice of the Caravelle Hotel, which was where the journalists had hung out. Saigon was like a dream, he thought, literally like a dream: as if the Americans, the big Green Machine, had never been there.
He had landed in late morning. A silent, smiling Vietnamese driver wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and gray pants picked him up at Tan Son Nhut—where there were still reinforced concrete revetments near the runways, but most of the old military construction, including the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) headquarters, had been torn down. He was breezed through customs, and into an air-conditioned official sedan, recently purchased from the Japanese.
They floated slowly through the traffic, which was, if anything, thicker than he remembered—only a few cars, but millions of motorbikes, scattered cyclos, bicycles and carts. The trees were still painted white at the base. And then there were the girls: They paraded on motorbikes, wearing baseball caps or—fabulously, incomprehensibly—straw trilby hats, with long opera gloves to protect their skin from the sun. Not so many in ao dais anymore, which was unfortunate: he’d always thought it the perfect garment for an Asian woman, a deeply slit sheath over billowy pants, prim and sexy and exotic. Now they wore T-shirts and blue jeans. He did not take notice of a single male Vietnamese on the ride from the airport to the hotel, only the women—their hair, long and lustrous, or stylishly bobbed, their faces shielded by sunglasses, and sometimes surgical masks; there wasn’t much of them to be seen, in truth, but what there was . . . was understated, unspoiled; the juxtaposition of their slight, shy femininity and the jauntiness of their motorbikes was stunning. And that, he realized, was part of what had gotten the Americans into so much trouble: a not very subtle—indeed, a rather virulent—strain of sexual arrogance. They had mythologized the women; underestimated the men. No wonder the Banditos had fought back so tenaciously, so well.
Charlie had been given no instructions by the driver, and he was so overwhelmed by the sights and memories and oddities that he didn’t think to ask about ground rules. He wondered if he was allowed to leave his hotel room. No one was guarding the door. He ambled down the hall to the elevators. Up or down? Up, to the Rex roof bar—which was much as he’d remembered it, with the kitschy plaster statues of elephants and such, tropical fish swimming in tanks and birds in cages—and the city rumbling below in the deep heat of early afternoon, beneath the preindustrial luxury of a blue sky; Bangkok’s had been a sickly, polluted banana-pulp yellow. He looked south, to where the war had been. They had spent evenings on that roof watching the distant tracers and flashes, an insinuation of percussive impact in the wind.
For the first time in years, Charlie had a craving for a Coca-Cola. But he was too wired and antsy, too curious about the possible limits on his theater of operations to order one at the rooftop bar, which was populated by the inevitable, bleached Aussie-Israeli backpackers, who were busy discussing nature walks through the Delta or buses to Dalat, in the highlands. They were quite oblivious to what those place names conjured to an American of his vintage—and Charlie didn’t want to tell them, as he knew he would have to, when they asked, “Ever been to . . . ?” So he went back down to the lobby, and out to the street—and into Vietnam.
There was a crowd of barefoot children in front of the hotel, with postcards and trinkets; they were precisely the same as the kids of his era, pushy and cheery. There were cyclo drivers and motorcycle boys—Charlie shook them all off, glanced over his shoulder to see if there was anyone following him (if there was, he probably wouldn’t know—he wasn’t trained in that sort of streetcraft), and surprised himself by turning right at the corner of Le Loi, away from the more intense memories located along Tu Do, into the full blast of the city. And quite a blast it was: noise and traffic and heat and smell, the familiar, funky Asian combination of sweat and spice and shit, of exhaust fumes and cooking oil. He walked along the shady side of Le Loi.
There was a row of souvenir shops with goods spilling out into the street. Charlie felt a sudden shock of nausea—the souvenirs were remnants of his defeat, the personal effects of his comrades: dog tags, compasses, field maps and kits, shell casings, utility belts, neatly stacked piles of Zippo lighters; a blithe, matter-of-fact display. He reached out for the dog tags, but couldn’t quite bring himself to it—he reached, he realized, with his left hand, as if it were still there—and pulled back, terrified, steadying himself with his right hand on the chilled smoothness of the Zippos. A mamasan guarding the stash said, “No fake. No fake. Real stuff. Cheap.”
So that was it. They seemed pretty real. The Zippos were personalized, engraved, with maps of Vietnam on one side and words on the other. The words were sappy or defiant, with few stops in between:
To Corporal Ronald Dekins
From Joanne Mokreski
Love Always
Marion, Ohio, May 12, 1969.
One said:
PFC Eugene Lenwood—My Epitaph
If I Die in a Combat Zone
Bury me Facedown
So the World Can
Kiss My Ass.
Charlie turned away, into the street, into the traffic and froze there, a woman on a red motorbike bearing down on him, just brushing past him, passing him by. The traffic bent and curled to avoid him, as if he were a rock in a stream. It was a curious sensation, half remembered and not unpleasing; he began to move, gingerly, across the street—and through the traffic, which parted effortlessly for him, as it always had. He disappeared into the middle of it, and came out the other side, into the harsh sunshine. He walked diagonally, along Ham Nghi, toward the river, sweating now, pitting out his knit short-sleeved shirt.
He spent the next few hours walking as the shadows lengthened. Up Tu Do, the main restaurant and hangout street, which the French had called Rue Catinat and the Communists now called Dong Khoi, down to the prim, redbrick cathedral—and then right, down Le Duan, where the American embassy stood spectral white in the late afternoon shadows, locked and abandoned, the spookiest place in town. He gazed up at the abrupt, flat helipad on the roof: a perfect monument, the indelible symbol of defeat and disgrace—a result he had predicted, but never expected, in 1965. He stood there for a time until a man approached, a youngish-looking older man, with thick, slicked-back black hair, and harsh, angular cheekbones that seemed far too large for his tiny, hollow face.
“You know this place?” the man asked. Charlie nodded. “I work here, drive for the Americans.”
“What do you do now?” Charlie asked.
“My family go to America,” he said, not answering. “You help me go there, too?”
“No,” Charlie said. “Sorry. I can’t.”
The man didn’t seem surprised or disappointed. “You want girl? You want massage?”
Charlie went back to the hotel, lay down and fell asleep. It was a groggy, inappropriate jet-lag sleep and he awoke, chilled and hungry, around two in the morning. There was no room service, or phone service; there was nothing to do but wait.
By morning, the lack of official attention was beginning to get on his nerves. It seemed a distinctly Asian power trip: were the Vietnamese demonstrating their utter control by leaving him adrift, without a minder? Or had they just forgotten him? He ate breakfast, tried to phone out—to the consular officer in the Bangkok embassy who had handled his papers (in the vain hope that he might know something), to Rathburn, to Donna. The mechanically polite operator said, “Oh yes. You hang up. I make call.” He waited an hour. He wasn’t very good at waiting. He called the operator again. She said, “Oh yes. You hang up. I make call.” He watched CNN: Stanton had won more primaries. Larry King came on at eight in the morning, real time: it was still the night before back home—and various familiar faces were yapping about what the latest Stanton victories meant. It was torture, watching this.
At about 10:45 A.M., the Vietnamese who had met Charlie at the airport knocked on the door and said, “Okay?”
They drove back out toward the airport through the noonday heat, hung a left down a narrow lane of small restaurants and shops, the restaurants filled with tiny people squatting on miniature plastic stools, slurping pho from deep bowls, heads bent over their work with the intense time-conscious focus of pieceworkers in a sweatshop. The lane ended abruptly in an arched entrance to what was obviously the prison. A tall iron gate, painted a very serious gunmetal gray, loomed on the far side of a courtyard. There was a small door cut into the gate, emphasizing its hugeness; the surrounding walls were ten feet high, whitewashed stucco, topped with concertina wire. Inside the walls was a gray stone building of colonial vintage. This had once been a French prison.
The two gatekeepers were wearing fresh, vivid olive uniforms, with fuchsia and gold epaulets. They weren’t exactly spit-and-polish. One was overweight; his partner’s shirttail was almost hanging out. So these were the enemy? Actually no, they weren’t: these were their children—and they obviously weren’t cadre; they were prison guards.
The driver showed his ID at the guardhouse, and they pulled into the courtyard. As they passed through the gate, Charlie felt a bit constricted and, he had to admit, frightened. He was in an enemy prison. He was made to wait in a small room—made smaller by a high ceiling, made higher by barred window slits near the top of the wall, slants of light hitting a foot higher than head level, which enhanced the sense of inaccessibility. It was an intelligently planned room, designed by a sadist. There was a blond wood table in the middle of the room—a Soviet import, no doubt—and wooden chairs on either side. Charlie sat and waited, practicing the slow breathing technique he’d learned in recon school: combat repose.
After fifteen minutes, an officer with lighter skin than the guards entered and offered his hand. “Senator Martin,” he said. “I am Lieutenant Truong.”
Charlie nodded. Truong seemed a bit unsettled; he glanced about the room and sighed. “Senator, the prisoner says he does not wish to see you.”
“How do I know that?” But Charlie knew how he knew that: jailers usually can find a way to make prisoners do what they want.
“Senator, this is very embarrassing for us, too,” Truong said.
“Can I go to where he is?” Charlie asked.
“I . . .”
“You don’t want me to see the conditions in this prison,” Charlie said, standing abruptly. “That is outrageous, a violation of the Geneva Convention.” Although he was pretty sure it wasn’t.
“No, Senator, I assure you,” Truong said. “Excuse me for a moment. Allow me to make a phone call.”
Another fifteen minutes. Charlie was torn between the stern official outrage that he was trying to affect, and sympathy for the Vietnamese: Mustafa was clearly a handful. Of some sort.
“All right, Senator,” Truong said, when he returned. “We can go.”
Through yet another set of bars, down a corridor running along a triple-layer cake of cells, the echoey sounds and pungent smells like the elephant cage at the Des Pointe Zoo. Through another set of doors—Charlie had completely lost his sense of direction now—to a guardpost. Truong said something to the guard, who handed him a single key. “We have him in the guard’s room,” Truong said, “away from other prisoners. We bring in food from hotel, but he refuses it. He wants prison food. . . .”
“Open the door,” Charlie said, attempting impatience. “Please.”
“Of course,” Truong said.
Mustafa Al-Bakr, dark and tall and overweight, was stretched out on a cot. He was wearing jeans, a blue denim shirt and construction boots; Charlie assumed these were the clothes he’d brought with him. The room was less threatening than the first. There was a desk and chair; a locker. The walls were beige, hung with travel posters from Vietnam Airlines. There was a small black-and-white television on a shelf in the corner, a dim picture buzzing with interference, a Mexican soap opera dubbed into Vietnamese.
Charlie pulled the chair from the desk and nodded at Truong, who left them. “You okay?” he asked Mustafa, who stared at the ceiling, arms crooked behind his head—and ignored his visitor ostentatiously.
“Is this where they keep you, or did they just plant you here for my benefit?” Charlie asked.
No answer.
“All right,” Charlie said. “I’ll just sit here until you say something. I can stay as long as you want to be an asshole, but you don’t strike me as the sort of guy who does well with roommates.”
Mustafa pulled a long, thin pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket—Virginia Slims; he lit up with a Zippo, then reached down to the floor with his left hand and retrieved a saucer, which he placed on his stomach. He held the cigarette delicately, incongruously, in his right hand; he seemed to caress the smoke, drawing it in through his nostrils, exhaling perfect rings, still staring directly at the ceiling.
“The Rambo tapes were a brilliant touch,” Charlie said.
“I wanted to piss them off,” Mustafa replied, in a heavy, resonant smoker’s voice.
“And the drugs, and the arsenal?” Charlie asked. “Was that to piss them off, too?”
“Takes a fair amount to get them ticked, it turns out,” Mustafa said, with a satisfied smile—but still without looking at Charlie.
“So why’d you want to piss them off?” No response. “Still fighting the war?” Charlie immediately regretted that: it was the sort of thing someone who hadn’t fought the war might say. He considered the possibility that he just wasn’t very good at hostage negotiation.
“They put me up at the Rex,” Charlie said, trying the tactic that always worked in similar situations in the movies: first establish a point of common experience. “It was my BOQ in ’64.”
“REMF,” Mustafa said, meaning: rear echelon motherfucker. “In the rear with the gear,” he said.
“For a while,” Charlie said. “Then I MOOSEd.”
“MOOSEd?”
“Moved Out Of Saigon Expeditiously,” he said. “It was a MACV deal when the Vietnamese get nervous about having so many of us in town. Actually, I MOOSEd myself—out to the boonies.”
“MOOSEd,” he chuckled. “That’s good.”
“It don’t mean nothing,” Charlie said, falling back—a little too consciously—into gruntspeak.
“It didn’t,” Mustafa corrected him, “mean nothing. . . . So what’s your story: I’m from the government and I’m here to help?”
“Happened to be in the neighborhood, so I decided to drop by.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“They don’t want you here,” Charlie said firmly. “I’m here to negotiate your withdrawal.”
“Oh really?” he said. “I thought you were the USO.”
“So why did you insert yourself in an enemy prison?” Charlie was beginning to lose patience. Mustafa had stopped smoking and put the ashtray back on the floor; he stared at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his head. He had not deigned to look at Charlie yet.
“None of your fucking business,” Mustafa said. “I belong here.”
“In Vietnam or in jail?”
Silence again. The prisoner closed his eyes and yawned.
“You’re still here?” Mustafa said, after a moment. He looked at Charlie, finally. “Leave,” he said, with perfect, understated drama. Mustafa, it seemed, was something of a thespian. Then, noticing the senator’s mangled hand, he said: “How’d you get that, sir? Grunts frag you?”
“Enemy grunts,” Charlie said.
“There you go. Why, you must have been a hero,” Mustafa said, staring at Charlie evenly now.
“No more than most,” Charlie said, refusing to acknowledge the sarcasm. “You got a purple heart, too, I hear.”
“Big fucking deal.”
“How’d you get it?”
“Shrapnel,” Mustafa sighed. “It wasn’t the most interesting thing that happened to me here. It was just something they gave me a medal for. I bet you got a shitload of medals. You look the type.”
“What was the most interesting thing that happened to you here?”
“You get the medals for killing lots of enemy? Did you get some?” Mustafa asked, using the old grunt term of art.
“I did—kill some. Of them.” Charlie noticed that Mustafa didn’t call them gooks or slopes.
“How?”
“How did any of us do it?” Charlie said. “We did it, didn’t we?”
“It didn’t mean nothing,” the prisoner said disdainfully. “Right?”
“Why are you here?” Charlie asked again, but less officially—he really was curious now. “What’s this about?”
“I belong here,” Mustafa said, again. “That’s what it’s about. Now get lost.” He rolled onto his side, turned his back.
“Corporal,” Charlie said, “the Vietnamese want you to come out with me. They’re willing to forget about the guns and drugs, and the Rambo tapes. They don’t want you here.”
Silence.
“Let me lay it out for you,” Charlie said. “The veterans’ groups think you’re a POW. The Vietnamese are desperate for diplomatic recognition and they will do anything to make the American Legion and the VFW forgive and forget. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think it’s time we let them off the hook. That’s not going to happen as long as you’re here. You’re a complication. A bone in the throat.”
Silence. Truong was back now. He’d obviously been plugged into the conversation somehow. “Do you want more time?” he asked.
“Yes,” Charlie said.
“No,” Mustafa said. “Get Colonel Martin the fuck out of here before I do something stupid and hurt someone.”
* * *
The driver met Charlie at dusk to visit, finally, with Quoc. It was a lovely time of day in Saigon, soft light and a mild breeze off the river, the afternoon heat broken. “Let’s open the windows, turn off the air-conditioning,” Charlie suggested. “I want to feel the night.”
“The night smelly,” the driver said, making a face. Charlie sat back, suitably chastened. He was still stymied by Mustafa. He’d tried to call out from the Rex—to Linc, to Donna, to the Bangkok embassy—desperate for advice. Weren’t there people who did this sort of thing for a living? He felt incompetent, foolish. The presidential campaign—another festival of foolishness that he’d managed to forget in the wonder of Vietnam—came rushing back. He considered the possibility that he was becoming habituated to failure. How did a person walk along the street, look in colleagues’ eyes, or in the mirror, having been judged a perpetual loser? It was unimaginable.
Quoc’s house was not far from downtown. It was situated on a narrow side street near the Circle Sportif, the old colonial tennis club. There was a whitewashed cement wall, and a wide wrought-iron gate, painted baby blue, that opened into a driveway filled with bikes and a red Toyota sedan. The house was an unimposing, boxy rectangle—it looked high enough to carry two stories, but there was only one. There was a small dirt yard with several banana trees and assorted palms in the front.
An ancient, petite mamasan answered the door and did not introduce herself. She ushered Charlie into a large, high-ceilinged room that seemed to serve as living room, dining room and kitchen. The dining room table was in the rear right corner, surrounded by bookshelves. There was a parlor area—a couch, two chairs, a wooden plank coffee table—in the front. There were electric lights, but they seemed dim; there was a ceiling fan, but it was not on. A UNESCO calendar and faded rural prints were scattered about the walls, which were painted a washedout gray-green. The room seemed a relic of the late sixties, recently reopened after several decades of nonuse.
Quoc entered from the rear. Charlie barely recognized him. His mustache was gone, his scraggly Bandito hair slicked back, the flesh on his face wrinkly and slack, but his dark eyes were as coy and quiet as ever. He was wearing a white shirt with thin blue pinstripes, the sleeves rolled up, the top two buttons undone. The skin on his chest seemed a waxy gray-green, like the walls of the room. He carried a package of Rothman cigarettes and a gold lighter in his left hand; he extended his right to his visitor. “Senator Martin. Charlie,” he said. “So good to see you.”
“Mr. Quoc,” Charlie said, with the hint of a bow. “Or should I call you General Quoc?”
“Oh,” he laughed, a tiny laugh. “They just called me a general after the war—in order to annoy the Americans, I think. Are you annoyed?”
“A little,” Charlie admitted. “But I would have been annoyed anyway. At myself. For not knowing. For anything I said that helped you.”
“You have very little to be annoyed about,” he said, sitting down, putting his feet—he was wearing Nikes and white athletic socks—up on the coffee table. “You didn’t reveal very much. There wasn’t much to be revealed. My work was defensive, to save lives—”
“I’ll bet,” Charlie said. “The restaurant bombing—at the floating restaurant, was that you?”
“No,” Quoc replied. “I knew nothing of that, or any of the other acts of sabotage. It would have been dangerous for me to know, or for those cadre to know about me. I had a happy job. I watched over your journalists, and your diplomats, and reported back what you knew and what you were feeling. You knew nothing. You were feeling depressed.”
“We were geniuses,” Charlie said.
Quoc lit a cigarette. “You don’t smoke, of course,” he said. “My doctor says I should not. I am not feeling very well these days. My health has not been good since reeducation camp.”
“Reeducation camp? Why?”
He smiled. “I spent too much time around Americans. My superiors are very cautious. They do not like to take chances. I never gave them good information, they think. But as I said, there was no information. You didn’t know anything.”
“And were you reeducated?”
He snorted, derisively. The mamasan, a tiny woman with skeptical eyes, barefoot, wearing gray cotton pajamas, came in with tea—and Fritos. “A little joke,” he said. “This is Madame Quoc.”
Charlie stood. She waved him back down, scowled and left. Quoc poured tea, offered the Fritos with a smile.
“We were fools,” Charlie said. “You must think we’re real jerks. First, the war. Now we’re back looking for skeletons. You must love us.”
“No, no,” he said. “Quite the contrary. Vietnamese have a great deal of respect for the Americans.”
“Why?”
“You build good roads.”
Charlie laughed.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You did amazing things here. The bridges, the buildings, the runways that appeared overnight. Our people talk about the things we did—the tunnels, the networks of resistance, the devotion. But you were devoted, too. We learned a lot about how to work from you. More in ten years from you, than in a hundred years from the French. We have great affection for you Americans.”
“Sure you do,” Charlie said.
“You have good qualities.”
“We build good roads.”
“And you’re not Chinese. That is an excellent quality,” Quoc said, coughing. He covered his mouth, turned his head, paused a moment and then added, “And you’re not Japanese, which is also very good.”
It was dark outside now; the light inside was grainy and weak. Quoc decided to get down to business. “So, Senator, this drug-dealing hero who is now enjoying our hospitality,” he said. “Will you be able to ‘liberate’ him?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie replied. “If he was only a drug dealer, there wouldn’t be a problem. He’d want to be liberated. But I don’t think he was very interested in dealing drugs.”
“Neither do I,” Quoc said.
“Why didn’t you just hustle him out of the country? Or dispose of him quietly. There must be ways.”
“We were fortunate that none of our people who captured him took action,” Quoc said, and then, seeing the senator smile, he added, “No, really—we were quite lucky there wasn’t an . . . accident. There are sensitivities involved here, and not just among your veterans’ groups. And there was—is—always the possibility that Mr. Mustafa is one of your operatives, a little test for us. A test of our civility, our willingness to cooperate.”
“If so, you passed,” Charlie said.
“Quite so,” Quoc said. “Now, can you handle this for us?”
“I’m not sure.” Charlie shrugged and shook his head.
Madame Quoc was back, with pho. She put out bowls for the two of them on the dining room table, and retreated to the kitchen. The smell—garlic and lemongrass and cinnamon—blended naturally with the faint tropical mildew of the room. Quoc immediately attacked the soup, slurping noodles noisily, unself-consciously; he looked up at his guest, saw him delicately pincing bits of beef and sprouts with his chopsticks. Charlie decided to ease Quoc’s hostly concern about the quality of the meal by diving in.
“So,” Quoc asked, when they were done. “Will you talk to him again?”
“Sure, but—he didn’t seem very interested in talking to me.” Actually, there had been one thing Mustafa seemed interested in talking about, which Charlie had avoided. “Why don’t you tell him I’m coming back, and I’ve decided to answer his question.”
“Which question?”
“You’ll find out when you transcribe the tapes.”
Their business was finished. Quoc leaned back in his chair.
“Have you heard from . . . ?” They both started, simultaneously.
“Thua,” Charlie finished. They might have laughed at the coincidence, but they were both shocked—at least, Charlie was. And confused, too: Why did Quoc think he would have heard from her?
“She’s in America. In Houston,” Quoc said. “I would have thought—”
“I didn’t know,” Charlie said. “I don’t think Rathburn knows, either.”
“Ahh, Rathburn,” Quoc said, with a smile. “You really don’t know, do you?” He called out something in Vietnamese. Madame Quoc shuffled back in, with a photograph. A family picture. There was Thua, looking rather matronly, but still beautiful in a white, sleeveless dress, standing between two men on a terrace. There was a Caucasian man on her right—dark suit, balding, glasses, solid but unspectacular, his left arm was around her back. The man on her left was a boy, a teenager; their son, no doubt—with a splash of dark Asian hair, but with a casual, decidedly American look to him.
“Who’s the guy?” Charlie asked.
“Dr. Richard Rosenbaum,” Quoc said. “Thua is Mrs. Richard Rosenbaum of Houston, Texas.”
Charlie suppressed a smile. But then he noticed that Quoc, and Madame Quoc, were staring intently at him. “It’s an old photograph,” Quoc said. Charlie nodded. Madame said something in Vietnamese to her husband. “A wedding photograph,” Quoc added. “From 1982.”
A wedding photograph. “So the boy is not their son?” Charlie asked.
The Quocs exchanged a glance, and more Vietnamese. “No,” Quoc said.
Charlie looked more closely at the boy. There was something about his look. It emanated from his eyes, his eyebrows, his left eyebrow; it was an insouciance—a performer’s look, he was performing for the camera in a way Thua and Dr. Rosenbaum weren’t. And then, from a distance of time, from deep in his childhood, Charlie heard the words that went along with that look. It was Buzz, saying, “Thank you. Thanks a bunch, folks. You want to hear another?”
Charlie disappeared. He felt himself falling into the photograph, then back to the night of Linc’s Saigon going-away party, a raucous and liquid evening at Brodard’s. Everyone had gone with Linc to the airport; he remembered the humidity and jet fuel hanging dense in the air, a numbing fog. He had taken Thua home. She was fairly well blasted, as was he, and, well—this was one time when she hadn’t been entirely dignified. The next afternoon, he went to her house and apologized, wondering if the apology would be the start of something nice for them—but she had collected herself, was a very proper Thua again. The night before hadn’t happened. And then, very soon, Charlie was gone, too.
“The boy is my grandnephew.” Quoc moved behind Charlie, and put a hand on his shoulder. “And your son.”
“Whoa,” Charlie said—another familiar sound from his past: the sound he’d made flying through the air, after being blown back by the toe-popper on that paddy dike. Whoooooa . . .
* * *
“You asked how I killed them,” Charlie said quietly, staring at Mustafa Al-Bakr. “And I didn’t answer you directly. I killed them with guns and grenades, mostly. But once, on a mission into the north, I killed with my hands, and with a k-bar knife. I didn’t feel anything. We were trained to not feel. It was a precise, mechanical operation. We called ourselves surgeons of death. That was the style. We were very proud of that. We didn’t leave aces of spades on the bodies, like some of the other recon teams—that would have been inefficient, a waste of time and effort. We didn’t even take ears.”
“You look like shit,” Mustafa said. They were sitting across from each other in the visiting room with the high slit windows. “You look like you’re back in Vietnam.”
“Rough night,” Charlie said. There had been several other photographs, though none recent. The boy—his name was Cao Van Rosenbaum—was a guitar player. Thua, ever proud, had gone to Hong Kong during her pregnancy; she had gotten to America, somehow, from there. Quoc did not know why she hadn’t contacted Charlie, or whether she had told the boy who his father was. And, of course, Charlie was the father—there could be no doubt of paternity. Actually, it was grandpaternity that was most clearly established. This was Buzz’s grandson. He would be twenty-seven or so now. Charlie was curious, and appalled: his son, and Thua’s? A bizarre combination. Too weird to contemplate. Too monumental to ignore.
“Reliving it?” Mustafa asked.
“What?”
“Killing them.”
Oh, that.
Charlie didn’t think much about that. The Vietnamese were warriors; the Americans were warriors. But he figured it wouldn’t do any harm to let Mustafa get the impression that he was reliving the war—it seemed the sort of strategy a hostage crisis negotiator might use. He nodded quietly.
“Why were you there, in the north?” Mustafa asked.
“Three of our guys got themselves caught up there. They were being held prisoner, in a corral, in a ville,” Charlie said. “We went in to take them out before they were moved to Hanoi.”
“But you said you had a grunt company,” he said.
“That wasn’t until later, after I left force recon,” Charlie replied. “I punched three tickets here. I did MACV in Saigon as a staff assistant in recon intelligence and planning. Then I went out with the snake-eaters, then I transferred back to the grunts.” Actually, the transfer had been more complicated than that: a mutual recognition, by Charlie and the recon boys, that he didn’t belong there. He could eat snakes, but he suffered from indigestion. So much had happened in Vietnam.
Mustafa was watching Charlie carefully, and Charlie stared back at him. Mustafa’s long, thin face was thoughtful. His eyes were quiet. He held himself well. Charlie wasn’t sure where to take it from there. “Why did you change your name?” he asked. “Are you religious?”
Mustafa chuckled. “Job security,” he said. “You come on Muslim, the boss ain’t gonna mess with you. You get treated real nice. They don’t want the brothers with the bow ties picketing the front gate. So I have dual citizenship: I’m Mustafa to white folks, Fred to my friends.”
“So, you want to tell me what this is all about?” Charlie asked. “Did you kill anyone?”
He laughed. “Of course I did. But this ain’t about killin’. . . . The ones you killed, you think about them?”
“Sometimes,” Charlie said. “More about the guys we brought out.”
“Why?”
“Because they were all fucked-up,” he said. “You don’t want to know.”
“All fucked-up,” Mustafa repeated. “That’s what we used to say. Say the words and see the pictures. You ever think we’d see things like that?”
“They trained the shit out of us in recon school. They trained us to eat glass,” Charlie agreed. “They couldn’t train us for the things we’d see.”
But they weren’t getting anywhere. “So if it’s not about killing—” Charlie asked.
“It’s about murder,” he said. “I killed, and that was what it was. A job, not an adventure. I also murdered . . . I murdered a girl.”
Charlie let it hang there. Mustafa was either going to tell the story, or he wasn’t. He lit a cigarette, staring at Charlie as he did. He curled the smoke in through his nose, puffed out a perfect ring. Charlie remembered doing that, back in the boonies; Mustafa made him want to smoke again.
“There was no reason for it,” Mustafa said evenly. “I just did it. I don’t know how old she was, you never knew with them, but she was—I think of her as a teenager, just ripe, high little tits.” He stopped.
“You raped her?” Charlie asked.
“No. That would have made sense,” he said. “There would have been something human to it. This was cold. See, we’re in a ville, just hanging, y’know? Waiting for the next thing to do. It wasn’t a bad day. Just another day. Nothing heavy going down; I wasn’t freaked or fucked-up or anything. I see this girl, walking along the road. She’s got on that cone hat, white shirt, black pajamas. Typical girl; nothin’ special. And I just dinged her. BAP. One shot, very precise. In the middle of the chest. No reason. No feeling. To this day. Nothing.”
“You didn’t think she was . . .”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “There were evil villes, you know that, right? And there were friendly ones. And there were villes that just were there. I had no fucking reason on earth to shoot that girl. It was just target practice. The blood spread out like a bull’s-eye on her chest. There must have been commotion, screaming, something after I did it. But I don’t remember that. It was just BAP. Single shot. No excuses.”
Charlie had heard a lot of stories. But never one like this: the most gratuitous atrocity imaginable. “And your squad leader, your lieutenant,” he asked. “They didn’t bring action on it?”
“We were depleted. They needed me. They hated my ass, but I did my killing work like a bastard. Lieutenant Randazzo said, ‘Fred, you are one cold, sick fuck.’ He got that right.”
“You must feel something,” Charlie said. “You’re here.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “There must be something. I’m looking for it. Like the man said, it don’t mean nothing. There should be hell to pay. But there ain’t. I can’t shed a tear for the girl.”
“That’s hell, too,” Charlie said, lapsing into therapeutic bullshit mode. It did seem the easiest way to go. “You ever try talking about this before? Go to a vet center or something?” Charlie had fought to fund the vet centers; he’d sponsored the bill. But now the words came out of his mouth stupid.
“Vet center. Right,” Mustafa snorted. “Overweight white boys talkin’ about how they can’t get it up, or how they can’t stop gettin’ it up, or about their nightmares, or bitchin’ about how America don’t appreciate them,” he said. “All of them so busy feeling shit. I ain’t felt anything at all since that day. Nightmares? I don’t even dream. Figure that one out, Chuck.”
“But you are here.” Again, Charlie thought he sounded stupid, formal.
“You commit murder, you do the time,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”
“You’re not giving them any satisfaction,” Charlie said. “You’re not repaying any debt. They won. They don’t care about making us pay anymore. You’re only making it tough on them.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Fucked-up world when you can’t even get yourself busted for committing murder without causing all sorts of shit.”
“So why don’t you let them off the hook?”
“And then what?”
“Come back with me.”
“And then what?”
“You go on like before,” Charlie said. “Maybe it’s God’s way of making you pay.”
“That’s cold,” he said.
“You want sympathy?” Charlie said. “I don’t have any. You killed a girl. A lot of us did fucked-up ugly things, but most of the guys I knew didn’t.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you,” Charlie replied, an involuntary reflex—but there it was. “Target practice! You say you want to pay, but what you really want is someone to say it’s okay. Well, it ain’t me, babe.” He stood up, stared at Mustafa, who had drawn back from the table, shocked by the explosion. “Far as I’m concerned, you can stay here and rot. I could give a flying fuck. Guard! Truong!”
There were, Charlie realized, other options. He could tell the veterans’ groups why the Vietnamese had busted this guy. He would have a certain amount of credibility. Truong and two guards appeared.
“No, wait,” Mustafa said, quietly now. “This ain’t no good.”
Charlie motioned to Truong with his hand.
“I need to think about this,” Mustafa said. “I need a plan.”
Charlie’s was about to tell him just how long he could sit there thinking, but his temper—which came and went—had gone. “That’s your business,” Charlie said. Then he thought of something: “My mother once told me a story about Gandhi—I’m not sure it’s true, but it probably should be: A man once came to Gandhi and said, ‘I’ve killed a child. Is there anything I can do to save myself?’ And Gandhi said, ‘Save a child.’ ”
“Phew,” Mustafa said. “That’s deep. . . . Your mother told you that?”
“Not only that, she lived it,” Charlie said. He didn’t add: to a fault.
“Yeah?”
“She did community stuff, ran an antipoverty agency,” Charlie said.
“You think I should do something like that?” Mustafa said.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “It’s your life.”
“That’s cold,” Mustafa said. “Hey, when you brought those other guys out, did they feel they owed you something?”
“One died on the way,” Charlie said. “Another killed himself back home. I’ve had enough respect for the third to steer clear of him.”
“Maybe you owed them something,” Mustafa said.
“Fuck you, Fred,” he said. “In or out, it’s your call.”