When the three Americans appeared at the front door of his home to take him to the Armed Forces Language School, Hao felt uncertain as to the nature of the encounter. The only one of them who spoke, a black man, did so politely, introducing himself as Kenneth Johnson from the American Embassy. They drove downtown in a closed, air-conditioned Ford with diplomatic plates, Hao in the back with one of the two younger men.
At their destination the two younger men both got out, and each opened one of the doors for the passengers. Hao and Kenneth Johnson proceeded alone past the concrete barricades toward the fine new building. Its predecessor had been wrecked in the Tet attacks the previous year. Two or three thousand members of the Vietnam military studied English here. The interior smelled of fresh paint and sawn wood.
As far as he knew, the building housed no prisoners.
Johnson led him down a stairwell to the building’s basement, where a uniformed marine fell in with them. The students thronged the upper stories and their footfalls vibrated in the ceiling overhead, but in this basement hallway Johnson, Hao, and the marine walked alone. At the corridor’s end they came to a door with something like a small adding machine fixed to the wall beside it, four or five buttons of which Johnson now pressed expertly, and the door lock hummed and clacked.
Johnson said, “Thank you, Sergeant Ogden,” and he and Hao entered a hallway lined with closed doors. Here it was quiet, air-conditioned. Johnson led him through the only open door into a small lounge furnished like any parlor with a couch and padded chairs, also a large electric-run cooler, red, with the words “Coca-Cola” on it. The room had no windows. This basement must be far underground.
Johnson lifted the cooler’s heavy lid, took out a dripping bottle, and, levering off its cap on an opener attached to the cooler’s side, handed the drink to his guest. It was very cold.
Feeling obligated, he took a sip. He pursed his lips and sluiced it down the right side of his mouth and swallowed. He had a bad tooth, a left molar. The colonel had spoken of a dentist.
“Have a seat,” Johnson said, and Hao sat himself on the edge of the couch’s cushion with his feet poised under him like a runner’s.
Johnson remained standing. He was small for an American, with big stains in the armpits of his white shirt. Hao had never before conversed with a Negro.
They’d taken him an hour or so after Kim had left for the market. That meant they hadn’t wanted her to see. That they cared to keep this visit a secret. That no one knew where he was.
Johnson sat down comfortably in the chair across from him and offered him a cigarette. Hao accepted it, though in fact he possessed a pack of Marlboros, and lit it with his own lighter and dragged deep and blew smoke out through his nostrils. Nonfilter. Delicately he spat out a shred of leaf. The fact that this man’s forebears had been a race of slaves embarrassed him.
Mr. Johnson returned his cigarettes to his shirt pocket without taking one for himself, and stood up. “Mr. Nguyen, will you excuse me a minute?” While Hao tried to make sense of the question, the black man went out without shutting the door and left him alone with his thoughts, which weren’t happy ones. He dropped the last of his cigarette into the bottle and it hissed, floated, darkened, sank halfway to the bottom.
Through the open doorway Hao saw his wife Kim, accompanied by another American, passing along the hall. A fissure opened in his soul. She watched her feet as if negotiating a rocky path. Apparently she didn’t notice him.
The black man came back. “Mr. Nguyen? Let’s relocate the discussion, do you mind?” Johnson hadn’t sat down. Hao understood that he didn’t intend to, that he himself must stand up. He let himself be guided only a few steps along the hallway to a second windowless room in which sat a thin, angular, youthful man with reading glasses far down on his nose, one ankle crossed over his knee, looking down and to the left at the contents of a manila folder opened on the table beside him. He smiled at Hao, saying, “Mr. Nguyen, come on in, I want to show you this thing,” and Hao searched for hope in his almost sociable tone of voice. On the table were arranged devices and wires like an elaborate radio system.
“I’m Terry Crodelle. Everybody calls me Crodelle, and I hope you will too. Okay if I call you Mr. Hao?”
“Okay. Yes.”
“Sit, sit, please.”
He sat in the hard wooden chair beside Crodelle’s. A third chair waited, but Mr. Johnson remained at attention. Here were two very different American types, both dressed the same in their somber slacks, their brilliant shoes, white short-sleeved shirts: Johnson standing, extraneous, mildly uncomfortable, brown-skinned and black-headed, Crodelle relaxed and in charge, with pale, freckled skin, and hair the color of straw.
Mr. Johnson said, “Do you want Sammy?” Crodelle gave no answer.
“Mr. Hao,” Crodelle said, “we’re going to keep this short, never fear.”
“That’s good.”
“You’ll be back home within the hour.”
“Today we’ll plant a tree for the Tet.”
“Do you understand my English?”
Hao said, “Sometimes I don’t understand many things.” He still held his half bottle of Coke with its drifting cigarette butt. Gently Crodelle took the beverage from his grip and placed it on the table.
“No, thank you. But it’s quite good.”
Crodelle put his glasses in the pocket of his shirt and leaned in to contact Hao’s gaze without hostility or guile, but studiously. He had stubby eyelashes the color of his hair, and irises a pale blue. “I don’t want an interpreter in here. Can we talk without an interpreter?”
“Yes. My English is not good to speak, but I understand better.”
“Good enough,” Crodelle said.
And Johnson said, “Good enough,” and left the room, shutting the door behind him.
“Do you know what this contraption is?”
“Maybe a radio.”
“It’s a machine that can tell who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. Or so they claim.”
Did the machine transmit this news about himself now?
“How can it work?”
“It’s not my area. We won’t be using it today.”
Hao said, “I am searching true peace. I cannot wait for you to make the peace. I cannot wait for you guys.”
Crodelle smiled.
“War is not peace.”
Crodelle rose and went to the door and opened it. “Ken?” he called, and then said, “Excuse me, Mr. Hao.”
It was Johnson who appeared.
“We need a translator.”
Johnson left the door ajar. Crodelle arranged the third chair, saying, “Just someone to help us get things across.”
He sat down and again crossed his ankle over his knee.
Hao wondered if they’d let him smoke in here.
“When was the last time you saw the colonel?”
Hao patted the Marlboros in his shirt. Crodelle produced a lighter and held out the flame while Hao steered the tip of his cigarette into it and puffed, reflecting that life in this city of feints and reversals called for nimble steps and a long view, and he lacked this combination. He found himself unable, for instance, to cope with his wife’s brother, who owed him money, who had lived in Hao’s father’s house since the old man’s death, when it became Hao’s property, but who refused to acknowledge his debt. Relatives and business: he’d failed to navigate between them. And since his father’s death he’d run the family’s enterprises into the ground. He couldn’t handle the day-to-day of simple commerce; much less whatever these people had in mind for him now. He inhaled delicious smoke and said, “Not for a long time.”
“One month? Two months?”
“I think maybe two months.”
Johnson had returned. “Here’s Sammy,” he said, and a very young Vietnamese man dressed in slacks and shirt just like the Americans’ sat in the third wooden chair while Johnson left again and Crodelle spoke rapidly, looking at Hao.
“Mr. Hao,” the boy translated, “we’ve invited you here instead of arranging an apparently chance encounter in a public space. I will tell you the reason.”
“Tell me,” Hao said in Vietnamese.
“Because we want you to understand that this inquiry has the weight of the United States government behind it.”
In English Hao said, “I’m a friend for the United States.”
“Do you have a lot of friends?”
Hao asked the interpreter, “What does he mean by such a question?”
“I’m not sure. Do you want me to ask him to explain?”
“Why did they bring me here? Why do they ask if I have a lot of friends?”
“That’s not my business.”
“Sammy,” Crodelle said, “just ask him the questions. I talk to you, you talk to him. He talks to you, you talk to me. You two don’t sit back chatting.”
“It’s best just to speak to him, and not to me,” the boy suggested to Hao.
Hao held his cigarette almost vertically so as not to lose the two-inch-long ash and put his lips under it to get a puff. Crodelle said, “I forgot the ashtrays. I don’t actually smoke myself.”
Sammy said, “Can I get one?”
“An ashtray? Please, if you don’t mind.”
Now he was alone with pale Crodelle again. A lot of friends? Not a lot. Perhaps the wrong ones. He’d clung to the colonel as to a mighty tree, expecting it to carry him from the tempest. But a tree isn’t going anywhere.
Sammy knocked and came back in with an ashtray as well as his own burning cigarette, put the tray on the table in front of Hao, dipped his own ash. “It’s all right?”
“Smoke away,” Crodelle said. “Smoke like Dresden, man,” and Hao brought his Marlboro gently above the ashtray and let fall the pendulous ash.
“American cigarette,” he said. “I like it better than Vietnam.” He stubbed it out and sat back.
“Who’s the friend who visits you? The VC.”
A simple enough question. But the route to the answer started some distance from it and passed through a thicket of irrelevant histories. He spoke of his training at the New Star Temple. Of how the tenets had seemed, in a way, cowardly excuses for old men to hide behind, but afterward, in middle age—now—had begun to reveal their importance. He spoke of the Five Hindrances—they did, indeed, hinder—and the Four Noble Truths—they were actually true. When he’d run out of things to say, the translator Sammy dragged from his cigarette and said: “Buddhist.”
Crodelle said, “To each his own. I’m not here in the name of any particular outfit except Five Corps. So your friend’s name is Trung, correct?”
“Trung. A very old friend. We went to school at the New Star Temple.”
“What name does he travel under now?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s Trung’s full name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You went to school with him, and you don’t know his full name?”
Hao said in English: “Wait one minute, please.”
“Mr. Hao, his name is Trung Than.”
“I think so.”
“When was the last time he came to your house?”
“Please wait one minute.”
—And Kim, in the hallway, her head down. Had they arranged it that way? Possibly. Probably. To what end? He didn’t want to think this out too far. He hoped he understood his position. He hoped he had a grip on his goals. He said, in English, “I want to go from here to a good place. To Singapore.”
“Singapore?”
“Yes. Maybe Singapore.”
“Just you?”
“My wife also, please.”
“You and your wife want to emigrate to Singapore.”
“ ‘Zeckly.”
“Is that your first choice?”
“I want to go to the United States.”
“Then why did you say Singapore?”
“The colonel says I can go to Singapore.”
“Colonel Sands?”
“He’s my friend.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Malaysia’s a better bet.—That is, if we’re the ones helping you.”
Hao didn’t want their help. But the choice seemed help or harm.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Do you understand the expression?”
“Sometimes I don’t understand.”
“We need to talk later about things like where we put you. Right now we need to become friends. Nothing more.”
“It’s bad stuff.”
“What’s bad stuff?”
“Now is bad stuff? Here and now?”
“Yes. Please. I am the colonel friend.”
“You have the wrong friends.”
“No. He is a good man.”
“Certainly. A good man. Yeah—you have to wonder how many operations have been code-named ‘Labyrinth.’“ The boy didn’t translate. “Do you want another Coke?”
“No, thank you. Sorry. My tooth has a sore.”
“Hao, it’s not bad stuff. In fact, if I can’t pour another Coke down your gullet, I believe we’re finished for today. I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ve done that, and I really don’t have much else to say. Except I hope we can be friends. Once in a while I’ll contact you, bring you down. We can talk. Get further acquainted, have a Coke. That okay with you?”
“Yes. A Coke,” Hao said in English.
“Does Sammy need to translate what I just said?”
“No, it’s okay. I understand.”
“I guess we’ve lost the car. Let me give you some cab fare. You’re planting a tree for Tet?”
“Yes. Every year, each year.”
“Kumquat? With the orange fruit?”
“Kumquat.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Yes. That kind.”
“Like the ones you have now in your front yard.”
“Yes.”
“You plant one every year? How many have you got?”
“Ten.”
“And this one makes eleven.”
“Yes. Eleven.” Eleven years since my father died.
Crodelle seemed to study the lying device, which was made up of several components laid out on the tabletop. “Jesus, will you look at all these wires.” He’d said nothing about keeping this visit a secret from the colonel. It probably suited their purposes either way. Or they guessed he’d never mention it because it could only lead to questions, and he’d be grappled down by lies. But Trung—should he tell Trung?
Crodelle said, “What on earth is all this for? … This thing obviously attaches to your finger …”
He’d wait for the next time Trung sought him out, and at that time he’d decide how much to tell.
Crodelle said, “One of these days you and I and a technician will sit down and find out how all this works.”
Hao said, “It’s the same.”
“The same?”
He meant it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter, everybody’s lying.
Kim waited out front of the house beside the tree, its roots wrapped in newspaper, until her husband came home in a cyclo cab. She watched him climb from the cart and pay and come at her smiling, as if nothing had happened.
“Those people asked me about Trung,” she said. “Your friend.”
“They asked me too,” he said.
“Did you see me there?”
“I saw you in the basement.”
“What do they want?”
“It all concerns Trung. I think he’s in trouble.”
“They said he comes here to visit us.”
“No, Trung doesn’t come here. Have you ever seen him here?”
“No. They asked me if he comes here, and I said no.”
“They asked me too, and I said no, he doesn’t come to my house.”
“Good. If my grandmother’s ghost chases you tonight howling at you, I’ll tell you what she’s saying: Don’t scatter your kindnesses.”
“That’s the end of it,” he said. “No trouble.”
“This one’s exactly the same size as most of the others,” she said, meaning the tree. “I went to the market on my way home.”
“Kim,” her husband said, “listen to me: You know who I am.”
“I can’t find the shovel,” she said. “Do you expect me to dig with my hands?”
“You know me,” he said.
“Don’t make trouble.”
“I want peace.”
“Then listen to my grandmother. She always told us, Don’t scatter your kindnesses in the forest. Plant them where they’ll grow and feed you.”
“Good advice.”
“Are those Americans angry at you?”
“No. Everything’s good.”
“Did they give you money for a cyclo?”
“More than enough.”
“Me too. Where’s the shovel?”
“I don’t know.”
They went to the edge of the low ironwork fence, and there, using the corner of a small board and his hands and fingers, he scraped out a hole, and they put the tree in it. From the next street over they heard singing, firecrackers, the cries of children. With the side of her foot she kicked the dirt into the hole, careful to get as little as possible on her sandal. Her husband stared at this operation as if wishing he could grow tiny and throw himself in.
Tomorrow she’d have her fortune told. She’d been looking forward to it. Now it seemed a punishment.
“Ah,” he said, “I remember.”
“What?”
“The shovel is in the …”
“Where?”
“No, no. It’s not there,” he said.
He came to the villa in the black Chevrolet, with an entourage, Hao, Jimmy Storm, the colonel, even Hao’s young nephew Minh, formerly the colonel’s helicopter pilot, now back with the Viet Nam Air Force but not, today, in uniform. To Skip it seemed a gathering unnecessarily inclusive.
They all sat in the parlor—the double Trung on the divan, between the colonel in his loud Hawaiian shirt and the uniformed Jimmy Storm—and Sands ordered coffee and studied this person he’d waited two years to get a look at.
Trung was about five-six, and bowlegged. He could have been any age between thirty and fifty, but Skip understood him to be Hao’s old schoolmate, which would make him just past forty years old. He didn’t grease his hair; it spiked upward in the middle of his scalp. He had dark skin of the kind in which miscellaneous shallow scratches left scars. Thick eyebrows came together sparsely over the bridge of his nose. He had large ears, a weak chin. An ugly face, but friendly. He wore Asian-looking, strangely tinted blue jeans and a green T-shirt a little small for him—both quite new-looking—and black high-top tennis shoes, also apparently Asian-made, also new, and no socks. He kept his hands on his knees and both feet on the floor. Between his feet lay a forest-green knapsack, probably new; collapsed, probably empty. In a kindly way, Trung met his stare. The whites of his eyes had a yellow tint. Maybe his relaxed manner came from illness.
At this moment, the most genuine and legitimate in Skip’s journey as a Cold Warrior, his uncle seemed distracted, wouldn’t sit down, walked from window to window looking out, and failed to make introductions.
“Skip, come with me. I’ve got some news. Come out front with me.”
They stood outside the entry in the muggy morning, Skip thinking he should go upstairs and get into something besides bathing trunks and a T-shirt, and the colonel said, “Skip, I’ve got bad news.”
“It looks more like good news.”
“Yes, that’s him, that’s our man.”
“That is good news.”
“No. Yes,” the colonel said. “Now. Skip. Your mother has died. Beatrice. Bea.”
The statement struck him like a blow to the chest. Yet its meaning eluded him completely.
“What the fuck?” Skip said.
“The timing’s terrible. And the cable is three days old.”
“No. I don’t believe it.”
“Skip, sit down. Let’s sit down.” They rested themselves on the step. Cool, worn granite. His uncle was reaching into his breast pocket with his right hand. He placed his left on Skip’s right shoulder. Now Skip held in his hands a pale yellow piece of paper. Whenever afterward he reviewed this moment he was unable to suppress these details, he had to include them.
The colonel said, “I’ll be back with a drink,” and left him alone with the cablegram. He read it several times. In it his mother’s pastor explained she’d passed away due to complications following a routine radical hysterectomy. Whatever that meant. The pastor offered his sympathies and above all his prayers.
The colonel returned with a glass in his hand.
“ ‘Routine radical,’ “ Skip said. “How do you like that?”
“Here. Please. Here. You need a good stiff shot.”
“Jesus, okay.”
His uncle stood over him holding out the glass, but Skip failed to accept it. Palms up, he held the cablegram like a big delicate ash. “I’ll miss the funeral.”
“It’s bad stuff.”
“I hope somebody’s there.”
“She was a fine woman. I’m sure she has many mourners.”
The colonel drank away half the glass he’d carried here for his nephew. “The cable came three days ago. I was in Cao Phuc. They radioed me that a cable had come, and I meant to get in touch with somebody and find out the content, but I failed to make it a priority—there’s so much cable traffic, and it’s generally so picayune, as you know … And in all honesty, Skip, I was distracted.”
“Well, no, you don’t need to—you know.”
“It’s all done. No more Echo. Courtesy of Johnny Brewster, probably. But maybe not. For all I know, they’re just getting us out of the way so they can carpet-bomb the place.”
“Jesus.”
“So I’m sorry about the delay. When I got back, Trung said he was ready to move. In all the excitement about losing Cao Phuc, I’d almost forgotten him entirely.”
“The funeral is day after tomorrow.”
“Go, if you feel you have to.”
“Obviously, I can’t.”
“The folks back home understand. They realize you’re off to war.”
“Can I have my drink?”
“Oh, shit.”
Skip drained the glass.
“Skip, I’m going to leave you a few minutes to collect yourself. Then we’ll need you back inside ready to do your work.”
“I know. Jesus. Both in one day.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”
“Sure. I’ll be in.”
Skip watched the road beyond the gate. Not thinking about his mother at all. He supposed he’d think about her later. He couldn’t predict the order of these emotional events, his mother had never died before. Nor anyone close to him. His father had gone before he could remember. His Uncle Francis had lost a young son, drowned while sailing off Cape Cod, to say nothing of all the comrades fallen in war. Skip himself had watched his uncle shoot a man who hung from a tree branch. Guess what? People died. He wished he didn’t have to take this moment alone. It was useless to him. He was glad when his uncle returned and sat by his side.
“Well, Uncle. I’m your orphan nephew.”
“Beatrice was a wonderful wife to my brother. I never thought of it before, Skip, but he must have died in the midst of his happiness. It was short, but she made him very happy.”
“They killed her. The butchers.”
“No, no, no. They know their stuff. You’ve seen what they can do. You bring in a foot soldier in half a dozen pieces—a year later he’s ready for the parade.”
Skip folded the cable in half and again in half but couldn’t choose which one of his pockets to defile with it. He tossed it overhand toward the road.
“You know what? Your dad knew what counted. He married early. He wasn’t like the rest of us. Hell, in our family none of us is like the rest of us. I’m five-toot-eight with shoes on. Your Uncle Ray is six-four.”
“Is he your senior?”
“Ray? He’s two years younger. Two years and three months.”
“Oh.”
“The point is, you’ve got family. You’re not an orphan. I guess that’s the point.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it. But you know that. You always have. Now, listen, it’s bad stuff, and the timing’s terrible …”
“I’ll be fine. Let’s go in.”
Mr. Skip had said the local priest might know where to buy a certain kind of powdered bark from which Kim wished to brew a medicinal tea. These days her health seemed good. But herbs and medicines still enthralled her. Hao and his nephew left the Americans and went looking for the priest’s house, taking the creekside path for only a couple of hundred meters, passing behind a series of small yards, each with one or two or three monuments covering family graves, and entered the Catholic domain by the back garden.
In the homes up and down the creek old women boiled the day’s rice over charcoal or sticks of kindling, but no smoke came from the priest’s. Minh had to whistle twice. The little man came from the back of the house barefoot, cinching his belt, buttoning a long-tailed American-style shirt hanging nearly to his knees.
Hao felt irritation at finding him home. He’d only wanted to talk to his nephew about the family business.
“Yes, I know you,” the priest said when Hao began to introduce himself, and Hao explained he needed herbs for his wife. Also, perhaps, something for a bad tooth.
“I can give you directions, but I can’t escort you.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’m not going out today,” the priest said. “I’m staying in. I had an important dream.”
Minh asked, “Did the dream tell you to stay indoors today?”
“No, I just want to be quiet and remember and understand.”
Hao wished he didn’t have to talk to such people. But his wife—ghosts, dreams, potions, every kind of nonsense. So here he was. “Do you know of an herbalist or not?”
“Take the road north out of town. The third hamlet you reach, ask for the Chinese family. They’re not really Chinese,” he added.
“Thank you.”
They walked back to the villa by the roadway. Hao decided this quest for phony remedies would end here. No enchanted powders for Kim. He’d make up a lie. “It doesn’t matter,” he told his nephew. “I only wanted to talk to you. We haven’t seen you for weeks. Three months, at least.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle,” Minh said. “I’m the general’s slave. I can’t get away.”
“And the last time you visited you didn’t even stay for tea. It wasn’t us you came to the city for. It was your woman friend.”
“It’s difficult, Uncle.”
“I asked the colonel to bring you to my house today, or you probably wouldn’t have come.”
“And the colonel brought me here.”
“Is it such an inconvenience?”
“It’s a journey. I’m not necessary here, but I like to see you, and it’s good to see the colonel.”
“There’s a problem with my wife’s brother. Huy.”
“I know about it. Uncle Huy.”
“It’s impossible. Do you have guns on your helicopter?”
“It’s General Phan’s helicopter.”
“What kind of guns?”
“One machine gun.”
“I want you to attack the house.”
“Uncle Huy’s house?”
“He doesn’t belong in it. It’s my house. He owes me eleven years’ rental.”
“You want me to strafe the house?” Minh said, using the English word.
“No,” said Hao in English, “not strafe. Not strafe. Destroy.”
“With much love and respect, Uncle, that’s not a good idea.”
“You see how angry I am.”
“I see.”
“Then go back home to Lap Vung. Talk to your Uncle Huy, tell him how angry I am. Will you go home for Tet?”
“No, I can’t go. I’ll go for my aunt’s birthday.”
“His wife?”
“In March.”
“What date exactly?”
“March eighteenth.”
“Talk to him, please.”
“He’s a stubborn man. I don’t want to ruin Aunt Giang’s birthday.”
“Ruin it. I don’t care. You see how angry I am.”
They’d arrived at the low iron gate of the big villa in which his old friend Trung, surrounded by Americans, gambled negligently with his future. So. Trung had all along been completely sincere. Hao had never believed him.
Inside, the colonel was talking, seated on the divan next to Trung with a teacup in one hand and the other hand on Trung’s shoulder. Hao had seen little of the colonel lately, and in any case was terrified of him now. On Trung’s other side sat Jimmy Storm, his arms crossed in front of his chest and an ankle resting on his knee, as if someone had tied him in a knot and left him helpless. Trung, however, seemed completely at ease.
Hao and Minh took chairs at the border between parlor and office, not quite in nor out of the gathering. The colonel stopped talking to Skip in order to interrupt himself, saying, “It’s two families helping each other. In the end it’s all about family. Do you have family, Mr. Trung?”
Trung looked confused, and Hao translated.
Trung told Hao, “I have a sister in Ben Tre. My mother died a long time ago. You remember.”
Hao spoke Vietnamese: “The colonel’s sister-in-law just died a few days ago. The mother of his nephew here.”
“This man with us now?”
Hao nodded once.
“Sounds like he’s got family,” the colonel said.
Hao told him Trung had one sister whom he hadn’t seen for several years.
The colonel caressed Trung’s shoulder. “This guy’s the goods. He’s been on board since ‘46. Twenty-plus years.”
Mr. Jimmy hadn’t said a word. Hao disliked the way he stared.
Trung said, “This young man’s mother just died?”
“His uncle brought the message this morning.”
“Please tell him I’m sorry.”
But the colonel was addressing Skip: “What I want you to apprehend above all is that you’re not running this man. In a sense you’re not even collecting data. Definitely not interrogating. Definitely not. Just serve as a sponge.”
“I understand, sir.”
“If you regard yourself as learning, just getting his story in general, we’ll all be much better off.”
“All right.”
“And I don’t want you sweating under any elaborate fiction, either. Whatever he asks you, I want you to be completely honest with him—long as you’re sure he’s not digging for product.”
“All right.”
“But, I mean, if he asks about your background, your family, your life—everything, tell him all of it.”
“Very good.”
“What is he saying?” Trung asked Hao.
“He’s giving instructions. He told his nephew to be honest with you.”
“Will you say for me that I’m grateful?”
Hao wanted to shout: I’m lying to all of you.
“You two, you’ll have to work out your commo,” the colonel told Skip.
Skip said, “We’ll get along.”
Going back to Saigon, Minh rode in the backseat with Jimmy Storm. Minh didn’t know why he’d been asked along on this outing. Because they were two families helping each other, he understood this, but still, he played no role. As short as a month ago he’d have resented the time out of his furlough, but Miss Cam, his girlfriend—her father had turned cold toward Minh, the house was closed to him, and she refused to meet him secretly. Apparently the father had depended on marrying his family to Uncle Hao’s wealth. He must have learned there wasn’t any.
His uncle’s problems had crushed the good sense from his head. The preoccupation with the house on the Mekong and the rental he surely knew he’d never see, and the suggestion Minh murder the whole bunch, it was all too silly. Meanwhile, Hao hadn’t even mentioned the colonel, particularly not the change in him. The colonel was pale, breathing was work, all morning he’d sipped his Bushmills rather than gulping it, and he’d held the glass with his fingertips rather than in his fist. And Jimmy Storm had kept unusually silent, unaware, or pretending to be, of the colonel’s deepened loneliness.
Minh himself had seen little of the colonel since his C&C chopper had gone back to the Viet Nam Air Force, and Minh with it, still its pilot. Except for the .30-caliber machine gun his uncle was so anxious to have him turn on his own family, the craft carried no assault equipment; he was spared combat and remained an aerial taxi driver, now for General Phan. The general had given him an unprecedented week’s furlough. He felt grateful, but saw the leniency as part of a new pattern. The military’s attitude had changed. He didn’t like it. The fire had died.
“Hao,” the colonel said, “stop the car.”
They’d reached Route Twenty-two by now. Hao pulled to the side of it and the colonel got out, in order to relieve himself, Minh presumed.
But he only stood beside the vehicle, fixing his attention, it seemed, on a solitary cloud in the sky ahead of them like a small, wispy moon perhaps many dozens of kilometers distant, perhaps poised over the China Sea, which was invisible to them. The colonel moved toward the front of the car, knuckles of one hand resting on its hood, right hand on his hip, and waited in the brown landscape of dirt, once thick jungle and paddies, now poisoned rubble, nothing but jags and skeletons, and glowered at the cloud as if trying to influence its activity, staring down this thing of nature until its drift had taken it some ways southward out of their path.
He got back in the car. “Okay. Roll on.”
No one else spoke. Even from the sergeant there came only silence. Minh had once felt himself acquainted with the rhythms of these two comrades. He sensed a blank space where Storm should have made a dry comment, or one of his jokes.
Skip realized he’d overprepared. What had been left to him these past two years but to memorize the labyrinths of doubt and J. P. Dimmer’s “Observations on the Double Agent”?
“Experience suggests,” Dimmer warned his readership, that some people who take to the double agent role—perhaps a majority of willing ones, in tact—have a number of traits in common … Psychiatrists describe such persons as sociopaths.
They are unusually calm and stable under stress but cannot tolerate routine or boredom.
They do not form lasting and adult emotional relationships with other people because their attitude toward others is exploitative.
They have above-average intelligence. They are good verbalizers—sometimes in two or more languages.
They are skeptical and even cynical about the motives and abilities of others but have exaggerated notions about their own competence.
Their reliability as agents is largely determined by the extent to which the case officer’s instructions coincide with what they consider their own best interests.
They are ambitious only in a short-range sense: they want much and they want it now. They do not have the patience to plod toward a distant reward.
They are naturally clandestine and enjoy secrecy and deception for its own sake.
The double who’d never encountered J. P. Dimmer said to Sands, “Your tea is delicious. I like it strong.”
Skip carried a pair of dictionaries from his study and laid them on the coffee table. He assumed this man waited for instructions he couldn’t give him, while he, Skip, the officer-on-site, wanted what? To stop waiting. To serve. To make himself indispensable in putting this man to use against his own people. To know this man, and his uncle was right, you won’t map a traitor’s mind with thirty yes-or-no answers and three lines traveling a polygram. Better the floundering and backtracking and getting lost, bilingual dictionaries and mismatched goals. And even with these difficulties and with his bridges on fire behind him, this Trung savored his tea, allowed himself to be completely caught up in Mrs. Diu’s shortbread pastries, and enjoyed his introduction to M. Bouquet and recommended roasting the dog on a spit rather than boiling him in pieces. No slippery gaze, no tenseness about the knuckles, nothing like that. Where was Judas? Skip began to wonder if this wasn’t perhaps some off-course neighbor of Hao’s, here by some ludicrous miscommunication. The double had only a little English, and Skip’s Vietnamese was simply inadequate. Both spoke French with slightly less than true facility. In all three languages they might make zigzag progress toward crossed purposes.
“In the United States we don’t eat dogs. Dogs are our friends.”
“But you are not in the United States now. This is Vietnam. You’re far from home, and this is a sad day. Mr. Skip, I’m very sad for you. I wish I came on another day.”
“You understood my mother passed on?”
“My friend Hao explained it. I’m very sad for you.”
“Thank you.”
“What was your mother’s age?”
“Fifty-two.”
“I came back from the North in 1964. After ten years in that place. The march home was very hard. All the way I thought about my mother, and my love for her came to life again strongly. I remembered many things about her that I didn’t know I remembered. I was very sad to think she’d be an older person when I returned to her. I wanted my mother to be young again. But when I reached Ben Tre she was dead for six months. She lived to be almost sixty. Her name was Dao, which is a kind of blossom. So I cut the dao blossom for her monument.”
“Do you have a wife? Children?”
“No. Nobody.”
“He died when I was a small child. Killed by the French.”
“Mine too. Killed by the Japanese.”
“Any wife for you? Some children?”
“Not yet.”
“So it’s very hard. I see it. Very hard when the second one goes away. How did your mother die?”
“I’m not sure. Some surgery that went wrong. How about yours?”
“An illness. My sister said it lasted for almost four months. Our mother died while I myself was very sick and I had to stop along the way down from the North. A fever came over me. Not like malaria. Something different. I lay in a hammock for two weeks. Other sick comrades came and strung their hammocks in the same place and we lay there without anyone to help us. After a few days some of the hammocks held corpses. I survived my illness and waited to feel my mother’s arms around me again. I was very sad to find she’d died, but in those days I had strength, and my passion for the cause was much bigger than my sadness. I was sent to Cao Phuc, where one of my first orders was to assassinate your uncle. But I didn’t kill him. My explosive failed. Aren’t you glad?”
“Very glad.”
“If it had functioned, my friend Hao also would have died. But the cause meant more than Hao. I’d already lost many comrades. You bury a friend—that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result—to deafen you against your own voice when it wants to ask questions.”
“And you began to ask questions. Is that what brings you to us?”
“I had questions from the beginning. I didn’t have ears to hear them.”
“What changed for you, Trung?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps my mother’s death. For a man without children, that’s a big change. Then the time is ready for your own death. Any time it can come, even before your body is killed.”
“What exactly do you mean? I don’t think I understand.”
“Perhaps you don’t want to.”
During supper, when his lousy Vietnamese kept the talk to a minimum, Skip observed his environment anew—wondering what the visitor must see—fine old mahogany and rattan furniture, an imposing front door where normally in this region the home’s entire face would stand open to the air, protected at night by iron gatework; and plastered walls decorated with paintings on lacquered wood, brushstroke pastorals: studious, silent scenes with sawtoothed coconut palms in a world without a soul to be torn. Mrs. Diu served a beef-and-noodle soup, greens, steamed rice. This morning she’d placed small yet striking arrangements of blooms around the house. Skip realized she did it daily. He’d hardly noticed. She and Mr. Tho lived just upstream from the villa in a hooch surrounded by palm and frangipani trees with white blossoms … At one point the double covered his mouth with a hand and yawned.
“Are you sleepy?”
“Not yet. Where will I sleep?”
“I have a room ready upstairs.”
“Anywhere.”
“It’s not elegant.”
Trung then either asked for a pistol or declared he possessed one.
“Excuse me?”
He said it again, in French: “Do you have a pistol for me?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
The request called him back to the situation. He’d ceased thinking of this man as anyone in particular. A guest, someone deserving of hospitality, nothing more.
“For protection only.”
“You won’t need protection. You’re safe here.”
For dessert Mrs. Diu served a delicate egg custard. Trung and Skip got out the dictionaries. “Sorry about my Vietnamese. I’ve studied, but I can hardly make out a word you say.”
“People tell me I picked up an accent from the North. But I didn’t pick up much else there. In the North we southerners stuck together. We have a style down here. It’s very different from up there.”
Skip said, “That’s true in our country too.”
“What are the southerners like in your country?”
“They’re known to be very gracious and slow of speech. Among their families and friends they’re very open with their affection. Whereas in the North we’re thought to be more restrained, more cautious, we give less of ourselves. That’s how we’re known. But there are exceptions. A person’s birthplace can’t tell you everything. And you know, we had a civil war too. The North against the South.”
“Yes, we know your history. We study your history, your novels, your poems.”
“It’s true?”
“Of course. Even before your military came to Vietnam, America was important in the world. The world’s major capitalist nation. I like Edgar Allan Poe very much.”
Next they talked of the mistake of the war, without mentioning whose mistake it was. “In Vietnam,” Trung said, “we have the Confucian mode for times of stability—for wisdom, social conduct, and so on. We have the Buddhist mode for times of tragedy and war—for acceptance of the facts, and for keeping the mind single.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that said.”
“The war will never stop.”
“But it has to.”
“I can’t expect to see the end. I want to go to the United States.”
“We understand that. And it can be arranged.” He pictured this man standing on a corner in San Francisco, waiting for a sign that said WALK. Some of Skip’s childhood schoolmates had come from immigrant parents, Scandinavian, most of them. He’d visited their stuffy homes, felt his lungs clutched by alien odors, looked at unimaginable bric-a-brac and cloudy photographs of military men with feathers jutting up behind the brimless caps of their uniforms, and heard the parents fumble the grammar and drop small words, thick-spoken and sincere, everything about them an affront to their sons, who endured the fathers in silence and rushed past their mothers’ offerings: “Yes, Ma—okay, Ma—I gotta go, Ma.” Naturally at his age Skip had overlooked these grown-ups, heroes of dogged risk, ocean-crossers, exiles. With their little questions they touched the walls of their children. On the other side, this child for whose sake they’d wagered their lives rolled his sleeves up tightly above his biceps, plastered back his hair with Wildroot Cream-Oil, lied about girls, performed surgery on firecrackers, golf balls, dead cats, propelled loogies of snot at lampposts, laughed like an American, cursed without an accent. But his best friend in the seventh grade, the Lithuanian Ricky Sash—probably from Szasz, come to think of it—said “please” and “thank you” as much as “fuck you,” and tied his shoes with a big double knot. Nothing else gave him away. Asians wouldn’t have it so easy. “Certainly,” Skip said, “we’ve wondered about your motives.”
“Do you want a practical reason?”
“Can you give me one?”
“No.”
“You understand: for us, it’s an important question.”
“You need something simple. You need to hear me say I stole some Communist Party funds or I’m in love with a forbidden woman and we must escape.”
“Something like that.”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“Can you tell me?”
“With every gesture I make in betraying my comrades and my cause, I feel pain in my soul, but it’s the pain of life returning.”
The poignant shreds of a torn heart, or high-minded sewage?
“Trung, you say you want the U.S. But you say you’ll go north.”
“First the North. Then the USA. I know a way north.”
“The colonel mentioned you worked with primitives.”
“Some boys from Ba Den. It’s true. There was a program to enlist the tribes, or at least indoctrinate them. I don’t know what happened to the program. There’s so much wasted effort. And pointless death.”
“The colonel is interested in such people.”
“It’s true, he wants me to accompany a group to the North again.”
“Why would you go back north?”
“The question is why didn’t I get out a dozen years ago, when I went to the North and hated it there? In 1954 some people stayed in the South because they knew the party expected nothing in two years, no election, no reunification. The rest of us weren’t so smart. We boarded the ships for the North with our eyes put out by hope, and saw nothing. They took us north to make us forget our homes, our families, our true land. But I only remembered more clearly. I remembered the red earth of Ben Tre, not the yellow earth of the North. I remembered the warm southern days, not the chilly northern nights. I remembered the happiness of my village and not the rivalry and thieving of the kolkhoz. The life of the family, the life of the village, that’s the communal life—not the kolkhoz. You can’t throw people together and forbid them to leave and tell them they’re a commune united by doctrine. I thought Marx would give us back our families and villages. That’s because I only thought of the end Marx talked about: I don’t know the English or the French, but he says that at the end of the future the state is like a vine that will die and fall off. That’s what I expected. Do you know Marx? Do you know the phrase?”
“I know the English.” Together they paged through the dictionaries and Sands devised an equivalent for the expression “the withering away of the state.”
“Yes. The withering away of the state. And when it withers away, it leaves my family and my village. That’s what I saw at the end of the future: the French are gone, the Americans are gone, the Communists are gone, my village returns, my family returns. But they lied.”
“When did you realize they lied?”
“Soon after I came to the North. But it didn’t matter to me then that they lied. The Americans were here. First we must deal with the Americans, then we can deal with the truth. I was wrong. The truth is highest. The truth first. Always the truth. Everything else comes after the truth.”
“I agree. But what truth are you talking about?”
“The Buddha describes four truths: Dukkha, Samudaya, Nirodha, Magga. Life is suffering. Suffering comes from grasping. Grasping can be relinquished. The Eightfold Path leads to this relinquishment.”
“You believe it?”
“Not all of it. I can only tell you my experience. I know from experience that life is suffering, and that suffering comes from clinging to things that won’t stay.”
“Well, those are facts. What we in America would call ‘the facts of life.’”
“Then what is the truth for you in America?”
“Something beyond the facts. I suppose we’d call the Word of God the truth.”
“And what is the word from God to America?”
“Let me think.” He laid his hand again on the French-English volume. But he was tired now. Ten minutes’ conversation had dragged them through a hundred dictionary entries and taken nearly two hours. He knew only the Word as imparted by Beatrice Sands, his Lutheran mother: This life, she’d wanted to tell him at moments that transported her, moments that embarrassed him because he viewed her as a woman unworthy of them, a woman trapped by clotheslines in a yard of tall grass by the railroad tracks, this life is but the childhood of our immortality. Mother, now you know if it’s true. And I pray to God you weren’t wrong. And as for America—inalienable rights, government by consent, parchments, mountains, elections, cemeteries, parades … “Well, all of it can be debated,” he said in English. “In any language it can all be argued about. But the facts you name can’t be argued with. But there’s something beyond that.” He tried French: “There is a truth, but it can’t be told. It’s here.”
“Yes, there’s nothing else. This place, this moment now.”
“And now I’m very tired, Mr. Than.”
“I am too, Mr. Skip. Have we done enough today?”
“We’ve done enough.”
He put Trung upstairs, across the small hallway from his own quarters, in the room full of the colonel’s files, among which he hoped the double slept soundly. Skip slept, but not soundly. He woke in the dark and looked at the iridescent dials of his watch: a quarter after two. He’d dreamed of his mother Beatrice. The details evaporated as he tried to remember them, and only his grief stayed, and a certain excitement. He’d been everything to her. That could stop now. No longer a widow’s only child—once on the long train ride to Boston he’d looked out the car as it moved slowly through downtown scenes—Chicago? Buffalo?—to see two boys on the street outside a small grocery, eight-or nine-year-olds, ragged, sooty, smoking cigarettes, and had assumed they must be orphans. Hereafter, that’s who he was.
Then remorse crushed him physically, the blood pounded in his head, he struggled for breath—he hadn’t called, hadn’t written, left her to ride to her death on a gurney all alone in helplessly polite apologetic midwestern confusion and fear. He flung the netting aside, put his feet on the floor, straightened his shoulders, raised his face, and drew air in short gasps. Maybe a drink.
Trung turned in upstairs in the big house in a storeroom filled with boxes, on a bed made of boards stretched between two foot-lockers and covered with a Japanese straw tatami. The CIA’s representative had given him a butane lamp, and he had a socialist-realism novel in Vietnamese which he didn’t care to finish and a copy of Les Misérables in French. He’d read it so many times it no longer interested him. He lay in the dark feeling the house around him and wondering if he’d ever slept in a dwelling this large, outside of the New Star Temple of his boyhood.
He heard the hallway’s other door open. With the soft tread of bare feet Mr. Skip passed the storeroom and took the stairs down to the rest of the house.
What now? Grief, sleeplessness, Trung believed. Noises from the kitchen—It’s best to leave him alone. His mother is gone.
Mother, I grieve for you still.
He lay in the dark ten minutes and then got up and followed. Downstairs he found the American in shorts and T-shirt, sitting beside a hissing butane lantern in the study with a book, and a glass with ice in it beside the lantern. “Did you get some sleep?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m having some Irish whiskey. Can I get you some?”
“All right. I’ll try it.”
Mr. Skip started to rise, and then said, “We have glasses in the kitchen,” and settled back in his chair.
When Trung had found a glass and returned, the American was paging through one of his phrase books. He reached to the floor beside his chair and raised his bottle of liquor. Trung held out the glass and he poured a little into it.
“Do I drink it fast or slow?”
“How do you drink rice brandy?”
“A little slowly,” Trung said, and sipped. Musky and medicinal. “It’s quite good.”
“Please. Sit.”
Trung took the chair at the desk, sitting sideways.
Mr. Skip said, “I’ve been looking for your name.” He closed his phrase book.
“ ‘Than’ means the color of the sky, and there’s a flower that color also, with the same name.”
“I don’t know it. You mean the blue of the sky?”
“Blue, like the sky.”
“And ‘Trung’ means ‘loyalty,’ doesn’t it?”
“Loyalty to the country. It’s humorous today that I have this name.”
The study was lined with shelves, the shelves full of books. Tight netting covered the two windows, also the eaves in the main room and the ironwork on either side of the wooden door to the outside. Nevertheless small bugs attacked the butane lamp and died.
“You have a lot of books.”
“They don’t belong to me.”
“Who lives here?”
“Just me and a ghost.”
“Whose ghost?”
“The previous owner. The man who built the house.”
“I see. I thought perhaps you meant me.”
Mr. Skip emptied his glass and poured a little more whiskey over what was left of his ice. He didn’t speak.
“Perhaps I’m intruding.”
“No. I appreciate the company.”
The American finished his drink. “I thought you’d be Judas,” he said, “but you’re more like the Christ.”
“I hope that’s good.”
“It is what it is. Do you want some more?”
“I’ll finish mine slowly.”
The American said in English, “You’ve gone there. You’re there, aren’t you? What is it like to carry two souls in one body? It’s the truth, isn’t it. It’s who we really are. The rest of us are just half of what we should be. You’re there, you’re there, but you killed something to get there. You killed—what.” Trung couldn’t follow.
And the resignation to the truth, the final resignation, the despair that breaks into liberation, where was the word for that in all these books?
In silence the American poured another for himself and drank it slowly. Trung stayed, though it was clear the American didn’t want conversation.
Next morning his friend Hao came again. The woman served breakfast, and he and Skip and Hao sat down to eat, but Trung sensed some trouble.
Mr. Skip asked them about their days at the New Star Temple. They told him about the times they’d stolen brandy during the Tet celebrations, told of laughter and singing; all three conducting themselves like students in a foreign-language exercise called “Breakfast with an American.”
“Trung, the library’s all yours today. I have to go to Saigon on an errand. I’ll be back around noon tomorrow.”
“I’ll stay by myself?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Trung walked them to the black car. He detained Hao a minute. “What is it about?”
“Only a quick meeting.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t. I don’t know.”
“Nothing serious?”
“I don’t think so.”
The American had heard them. Standing on the other side of the car, he spoke across the hot metal roof. “A friend has invited me to lunch. A colleague. I think I’d better see what he wants.”
“Perhaps there’s a safer place for me until you come back.”
“No, no, no. Nobody knows you’re here.”
“But they know that you are here.”
“That’s not a problem,” the American said. Trung disbelieved him.
Dietrich Fest of Department Five of West Germany’s Bundesnachrich-tendienst boarded a night flight at the National Airport near Washington, DC, and for eighteen hours had nothing to do but read and nap and nothing to think about other than his father’s medical crises. Seven, eight months since the old man had seen the outside of a hospital. Gallbladder; liver; heart; a series of small strokes; hemorrhaging in the bowels with massive blood loss and transfusions; a feeding tube in his stomach; latest of all pneumonia. The old man refused to die. But he would. Perhaps already. Perhaps earlier while I dozed with a sagging head. Perhaps now while I look at a stupid mystery book. “Claude,” the old man had called him when he’d visited in October—wires and tubes exiting from him everywhere, blue eyes shining into space. “Look, it’s Claude,” he’d told the urine-smelling, otherwise empty room, and Fest had said, “No, it’s Dirk,” and his father’s eyes had closed.
At 3:00 p.m. local time Fest landed in Hong Kong. He gave his cabbie inaccurate instructions and was forced, some blocks short of his hotel, to get out of the taxi and continue on foot. Even this tiny vehicle was too large for these tiny streets. With his one bag Fest climbed a steep stair-stepped alley jammed with doorless shops selling nothing but junk.
On a larger thoroughfare he hailed a pedicab and rode behind a stringy old man wearing a kind of diaper who pedaled him swiftly to his hotel, which was right there, looming three blocks straight ahead, as the old man might easily have told him. Two minutes after climbing aboard the strange conveyance, Fest had arrived. A printed notice posted just behind the bicycle’s handlebars listed the official rates, and for a journey of this small distance Fest owed four or five Hong Kong dollars; but the old man smacked fist on fist and shouted, “Tunty dollah! Tunty dollah!” Fest didn’t begrudge him. At his age, the old man deserved whatever he could get for such labor. But Fest believed in fair dealing in business. He refused. In seconds he was hemmed in by pedi-cabs and besieged by diapered drivers of all sizes, babbling, frothing. He thought he saw a knife. An angry bellboy came out and drove them all off with magical outward-chopping gestures of his hand. The old man remained. He’d rather die. Fest turned over the twenty dollars. He went upstairs and slept through the afternoon, woke at 2:00 a.m., and read a short novel—Georges Simenon, in English. He called the hotel’s operator and asked about overseas calls to Berlin, but his mother’s number was somewhere in his bag, and he let it go. He’d called her frequently of late, almost daily in recent weeks, while she dealt with his father’s failing health.
At eight he showered, dressed, and went downstairs to the lobby to meet his contact. They drank coffee, sitting across from one another in large uncomfortable mahogany chairs. The contact was an American, youthful, impressed with his assignment, a little pious about his role. At first he told Fest only where he was going. Of course he knew where he was going, he had the ticket in his pocket.
“Do you have the ID materials for me?”
The young man lurched downward to rummage in his leather briefcase, clasping it between his shoes. “We have two versions for you.” He handed over a manila envelope. “While on assignment you use the one with the predated entry visa. Destroy it before you leave. For your exit use the one with the postdated visa.”
“How long is determined for this assignment?”
“You mean according to the visas? The postdated one says you entered on—what does it say? February eleventh, I think. So you’ll have to stay in-country till then, at least. But the visa’s good for six months.”
He didn’t like the sound of six months. But the purpose of a visa postdated by two weeks was to say he’d entered after the period of the assignment. He took it, therefore, that they’d planned for no more than two weeks’ duration.
Fest laid the envelope across his lap, pinched together the clasps, opened the flap, and raised its open end to peek within. Two German passports—he took one out and read the bearer’s name—Claude Gunter Reinhardt.
“Interesting. My son is named Claude.” After the old man. And my dead heroic brother.
“Whatever’s on top of the stack.”
“Of course. A coincidence.”
The face was his own. He’d always looked somewhat like a spoiled boy, but the beard covered the softness and made him look, he believed, a little like Sigmund Freud or Ernest Hemingway. In clothing, perhaps, he appeared portly, but he felt solid. Even in the States they’d kept him taking courses, including physically challenging operational training. But he was thirty-six and two months. This couldn’t go on. In fact he’d thought it was over with the American posting.
“You enter on your own passport. Whatever you’re traveling with now.”
“Of course.”
As the man paid for their rolls and coffee and rose to go, he assumed an insufferable casualness and mentioned, as if in afterthought, the pass-signs and the time and place arranged for Fest’s briefing in Saigon.
Fest distrusted Hong Kong’s drivers now. He skipped lunch and left for the airport two hours early and arrived without trouble and sat watching his fellow passengers assemble for their journey home, cheery affluent Asians returning from holidays in Hong Kong or Bangkok or Manila with pastel shopping bags, smiles, even laughter. He didn’t know what he’d expected—the beleaguered members of a ravaged populace, hunched shoulders, tight faces—he hadn’t thought much about this war, had never expected to come to it, had been sent, he was sure, ill-advisedly, like everybody else. The stewardess gave him a purple Vietnam Airlines traveling bag and he held it empty in his lap looking down at the clouds and nodded off until late afternoon, when the same stewardess touched his shoulder to tell him they were descending toward Tan Son Nhut.
In a deteriorating terminal crowded with soldiers both American and Asian, the floor piled with boxes and baggage, he found his man, a Negro holding up a small sign saying MEEKER IMPORTS. “Mr. Reinhardt,” the man said. “I’m Kenneth Johnson. Anybody else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. But we’ll take all comers.” A man of good cheer. There was nobody else.
“How was the flight?”
“All flights end on the ground.”
“That’s what the ducks say. Jesus,” he said, “who thinks up these pass-signs?”
“I don’t know,” Fest said, and added nothing, though he understood this was probably the moment for a joke.
They came out through the front entrance to a line of taxis whose drivers leapt up waving, and Johnson said, “You’re all set up under the name of Reinhardt at a place called the Quan Pho Xa. You’re papered for Reinhardt, right?”
“Correct.”
“All right. Off you go, Mr. Reinhardt.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This is as far as I go. I’m just verifying arrival.”
“I see.”
“You’ll get a glimpse of me tomorrow. Just a glimpse.”
“At the briefing?”
“Yes. Just a glimpse.”
“Will I use the same pass-sign?”
“No. I’ll be there to introduce you.”
They shook hands, and Kenneth Johnson put him in a cab and spoke to the driver briefly and was gone.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yes, sir. Little bit.”
“Do you know where my hotel is?”
“Yes, sir. Hotel Quan Pho Xa.”
“What does it mean?”
He got no answer. The taxi entered the city proper, passed down an avenue crowded with buildings painted pink or blue or yellow, and slowed, stopped, moved a couple of car lengths, stopped. The driver told him it was the New Year. Everyone was going somewhere. “What is New Year this time?” Fest asked. “Year of Dog? Year of Goat?” The driver said he didn’t know. A buzzing tide of motorbikes flowed around the larger vehicles. One went past with a woman passenger seated sidesaddle, ankles crossed, reading a magazine. Engines coughing out exhaust. The palms looked none too healthy. He watched a foursome of street boys who lounged on the pavement playing cards for cigarettes.
Why had they stopped him in Hong Kong to pick up documents prepared in Saigon?
The traffic moved again. On gravestones in a tiny cemetery he saw emblems in a swastika shape, and swastikas carved on the door of its small temple. The sight shocked him. Years since he’d seen one, except in photographs. Including two or three taken of his father. Fest watched for street signs and landmarks, trying to inscribe it all on his mind, to locate himself. He checked his watch. In nineteen hours he’d be briefed as to schedule and method. The brusque treatment at the hands of Kenneth Johnson told him much. His colleagues wanted him only at a distance. Possibly he’d been sent here after an American—even Kenneth Johnson himself.
It was raining lightly but felt no cooler when he got out of the cab at the hotel. A woman sat on her sandals outside the entrance. He guessed Americans didn’t stay here—she was its only protection.
While he checked in, the two girls downstairs in the lobby, the receptionist and her assistant or her friend, sang unintelligible lyrics along with their radio.
“What is your name?” he asked the clerk.
“Thuyet.”
“Thuyet, can I make an overseas telephone call?”
“No, sir. Only cable. Only the telegram.”
She wore a blue skirt and crisp white blouse. She interested him. Bizarre and delicate of face. No jewelry, no paint, but probably all of them were whores.
He showered and changed and went down to the street, wondering where he’d find an overseas telephone to call his mother. It was night now. In the distance above the city, helicopters tore up the air with their rotor blades, and tracer bullets streaked upward into the darker reaches. From over the horizon, bombs thundered. Down here, innumerable little horns and small engines. Radios playing silly local music.
Sandbags lined the curbs. He walked along the fractured sidewalk, picking his way among holes and people’s outstretched feet and parked motorbikes, chased by beggars and pimps and snide, sassy children who offered him “cigarette, grass, boom-boom, U-globe, opium.”
“Bread,” he said.
“No bread because of Happy New Year,” a vendor explained.
He gave up hope of a telephone and had dinner in a place with hostesses wearing fringed red miniskirts and small red cowboy hats and fancy plastic gun belts with empty holsters. The waitress said because of the New Year they had no bread today.
Fest had seen the signs and banners saying “Chuc Mung Nam Moy” and gathered they wished him a Happy New Year, though they could just as easily have meant The Plague Is Terrible.
He woke in the night, as he’d done the night before. He heard gunfire outside. He fumbled with the bed net, and keeping low he crossed the room and chanced a look over the windowsill. A woman walked along in the glow of a paper lantern. Her hand, swinging the light by its wire haft, looked like a claw. Children chased past her in the street, setting off firecrackers. He heard music, and voices singing. He went back to bed. His pattern hadn’t changed yet, he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. He had two books and he’d read them both. The ceiling fan whirred at its top speed but didn’t cool him. Out the window the madness continued. It seemed to him absurd that people surrounded by warfare should entertain themselves by lighting off explosives.
He stayed in bed rereading Georges Simenon, fell asleep at dawn, and woke around ten in the morning.
Not long before his lunch date, he took a cab to Sung Phoo Maps and Charts, only, as the driver had assured him, a few blocks from the hotel, but hard to find. Inside, a brisk young man greeted him in English. When Fest explained he wanted the most current available map of the region, the young man led him up narrow stairs into a chamber full of women seated at drafting tables under circular white neon tubes, and very soon he stepped back into the Saigon morning with three scrolls wrapped together in brown paper and tied with twine: hand-colored, French-language maps: North Vietnam; South Vietnam; Saigon.
The day was sunny, clear, hot, bright, with black shadows on the pavements under the trees. He walked a block and hailed a taxi. The cabbie said because of the New Year he couldn’t turn the meter on and would have to be paid copiously. Disgusted, Fest got out and took a cyclo to his rendezvous and arrived, by his watch, four minutes early at the Green Parrot Restaurant, a very narrow establishment much like a locomotive’s dining car with tables for two—no more than two—along either wall, and an aisle between. No maître d’ greeted him, only a young man behind a cash register, who raised his eyebrows.
“Do you speak English?” he asked the cashier.
“Yes, please.”
“Do your facilities have a flushing device?”
“Sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Plumbing with water.”
“I don’t know what you say.”
“Where is your bathroom?”
“Yes, sir. To the back.”
He took a seat. Almost everyone in the place was Vietnamese.
Only three tables away, alone, sat an American he recognized from the earlier assignment in the Philippine Islands, the nephew, he believed, of the bullish colonel who’d so enjoyed joking with Filipinos. His contact? A flush of warmth, familiar ground under his feet, a friend to work with, or anyway an acquaintance.
Basic craft required they not greet each other without a pass-sign. Fest headed for the men’s room, passing close to the American’s table as he made his way. He leaned his tubular parcel against the damp wall, washed his hands, and waited three minutes, until exactly twelve-thirty. When he went back out the American was gone and a different American waved to him from a different table—Johnson, who’d picked him up at the airfield yesterday and so quickly disappeared. A Vietnamese officer in uniform, wearing aviator’s sunglasses, sat facing the Negro; nothing before him on the table but a pack of cigarettes.
Johnson rose as Fest approached. “Mr. Reinhardt, meet Major Keng.”
“It’s a pleasure,” Keng said, and reached up to shake hands.
“Where can I sit?”
“Take my place,” Johnson said. “I’m running late. You’re in capable hands.”
“It’s local business?”
“What’s that there?”
“Maps of the area. I just bought them minutes ago.”
“Walk me to the door.”
At the entrance Johnson handed him a business card on which the name was Kenneth Johnson, of Meeker Imports. “In the event of something unforeseen, go to the basement of the Armed Forces Language School. I’ve written the street address on the back there. The basement, okay? You’ll be greeted by a U.S. marine, so hand him this card.”
“Many thanks.”
“That’s only as a last resort. Only and absolutely.”
“Yes. I understand you. A last resort.”
Once again the black man vanished like a fugitive.
Fest placed the card in his money clip, taking extra time for himself. Another native handler. That meant the same kind of business as in the Philippines. Over at the table the Vietnamese had removed his sunglasses to look at the bill of fare. His khaki uniform looked slept in, but his black boots shone brightly. Local business. Fest didn’t like it.
He took the seat across from his contact.
“Mr. Reinhardt, what will you eat?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Some tea?”
“Tea, all right. And bread, if possible.”
“Of course it’s possible. I’m having pho-ban, some beef soup with noodles. It’s very inexpensive here.”
Without the sunglasses Major Keng’s eyes seemed small and black and polished. As Fest looked at the faces around him they all had their differences, but all the faces, including this man’s, were identical to his recollection of, say, the face of the desk clerk Thuyet, or any others he’d seen in this city. Their language sounded impossible. Fest observed he was now the establishment’s only white patron.
He remained stubborn and had only bread and weak tea. The major asked him what he’d seen of the city, shoveled into his noodle soup a salad of greens and pallid sprouts, and slurped viciously at it, using enameled chopsticks for everything, including, somehow, the liquid, and spoke of his university days here in Saigon.
“Do you like your baguette?”
“Yes,” Fest said sincerely, “it’s wonderful.”
“Many things survive from the French.”
“I see. Of course.”
Keng pushed his empty bowl aside, took a cigarette from his pack, and brought a lighter from his tunic. “May I offer you a cigarette and also a light?”
“No, thank you.”
With a look Fest interpreted as one of light contempt, or disappointment, the major produced a flame. “It’s a Colibri of London. Butane.”
“Is this a good place to discuss business?”
“Of course. That’s why we’re here. I have some things for you.” He reached for the floor between his feet, almost laying his chin on the table’s surface, and sat back with a brown briefcase in his lap. “I have the goods.” It was a parcel wrapped in brown paper and string. “Now you have two packages. Did you say you have some maps there?”
“Yes.”
“I worried that perhaps a rifle.”
“No. Is this the pistol?”
“Yes. Use the silencer.”
“Is it as I requested?”
“It’s a three-eighty automatic.”
“I asked for twenty-two caliber.”
“We don’t have anything that small.”
“Do I have surveillance photos?”
“At this time there has been no surveillance.”
“What can you tell me about the target?”
“Not yet identified to me. You’ll be told.”
“How long can I expect to stay in Saigon?”
“At this time the schedule is uncertain.”
“I was told I’d receive the timetable at this meeting.”
Keng made a long business of finishing his cigarette and stubbing it out in a small dirty ashtray. He folded his hands in his lap. “We lost him.”
Fest believed this man was amused. What now? Even to remark on such incompetence seemed pointless. “I am here as a courtesy only.”
“We’ll find him.”
“Can you understand me? If I stay or go, that’s completely up to me. My decision. That is my brief.”
“I can only give you the facts. Then you must make your own decision,” the major announced, as if Fest hadn’t just said precisely the same thing.
“All right, give me facts. Who is the target?”
“A Vietcong.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“There are a couple of armies here for killing Vietcong.”
Keng lit another of his cigarettes with his marvelous silver butane. “A couple of armies, yes. And today also one extra guy, eating lunch with me. Reinforcements.”
Now Fest believed him. This man was angry. Possibly the extravagance of this operation insulted him, and he’d decided to view it as an entertainment.
“I can tell you it’s simple to find him. The Americans are working on it.”
“So you know him.”
“I can be a little more specific. The truth is that we don’t have his location, and we are trying to get more specific information without causing alienation of the source.”
“You have a source, but you don’t want to jeopardize.”
“Correct. We have to be careful. We can’t put a gun to someone’s head in this case. Do you see what I mean?”
“This is not my area, Major.”
“We need our sources for future use.”
“I understand.”
“In the meantime, we have a secure drop point for communication close to your hotel.”
“I want another one.”
“Two drops?”
“No. Just one. The lavatory of this restaurant. On the underside of the sink.”
“You’re going to check it every day? It’s a lot of trouble to get here.”
“No. You will check it in three days. The message will give you the location for a new drop.”
For a full minute the major didn’t reply. “I’m not going to fight you,” he said at last. “But don’t make the new drop too far from here.”
“We are agreed, Mr. Reinhardt.”
They parted, and with his maps and the weapon in their two brown packages Fest charged down the walk looking for a cab. He perspired heavily but kept his pace, daring anybody to block his course, the beggars rushing at him to display their stumps, their crumpled heads, their stick-figure infants blotched with ulcers, and what does this one want—attacking my flank with offers of opium, U-globe, grass, and what is U-globe? It was 3:00 p.m. before he reached the Quan Pho Xa.
The next morning he moved. The small desk clerk Thuyet was on duty downstairs. “Checking out?” she said when she saw his valise, and he said he was. As he waited for transportation, he asked her about the name of this hotel. “It means ‘Around the Town,’ “ she said.
“I see.”
“Are you leaving for the Europe?”
“I have to do a lot of traveling.”
“Okay. It’s good for your business.”
“This is the New Year.”
“We call Tet.”
“Happy New Year.”
She laughed, as if surprised by sharp wit. “Happy New Year!”
“Is it the Year of the Dog? Goat? Monkey?”
“Not now. The Year of the Monkey is finish. Now will be the Year of the Rooster.”
An hour later he checked into Room 214 at the Continental Hotel. This place was famous, and somewhat expensive, and it had air-conditioning. He took lunch in a restaurant downstairs full of Europeans and Americans. Afterward he went down to the square out front, where seven or eight celebrations seemed to be taking place, each oblivious to the others, all under the eyes of armed figures in a variety of uniforms and helmets—local police, American MPs, American and Vietnamese infantry.
Fest spoke with a cyclo driver, who walked with him to a side street and introduced him to a girl in a café and then proposed to escort them both to a room in a hotel Fest had never heard of.
“We’ll go to my room.”
The driver explained this to the girl, and she nodded, smiling, and wrapped Fest’s upper arm in a full embrace and put her head on his shoulder. Her deeply black hair smelled like vanilla extract. Perhaps she used exactly that as a perfume. He didn’t want her, but something like this was necessary. He’d learned on these operations that he came as a predator, he must violate the land, he must prey upon its people, he must commit some small crime in propitiation of the gods of darkness. Then they’d let him enter.
Richard Voss spent the morning at the embassy reading and sorting cables that had come in over the weekend designated “Classified,” which meant almost everything. Anything of importance had already been dealt with, but somebody—anybody—from Internal Ops had to see every word, that was the rule. “Send it Classified,” his first boss at Langley had once told him, “otherwise they won’t read it.” He didn’t mind being shut away. He preferred it to drinks with foreign diplomats and Vietnamese semi-dignitaries, and if Crodelle stretched their lunch with Skip Sands far enough into the afternoon, he could return here, look over the new cables, and find some excuse for hanging around through the cocktail hour.
At noon he left the embassy and made his way down the block and across Tu Do, through the mass of vendors and celebrants who all week had made the thoroughfare impossible for four-wheeled traffic. He found a taxi on a side street. For this short trip he’d allowed thirty minutes; even so he was ten minutes late when they came into view of the Green Parrot.
Skip Sands stood out front in the noon sun wiping perspiration from his eye sockets and looking confused—and don’t we all these days, Voss thought. Skip had gained weight. And haven’t we all done that too. Aren’t we all fat and sweaty and confused.
Voss opened the cab’s door and beckoned him in. “Long time, my man! Come on—I thought of a better place.”
“Good. Scoot over.” Sands climbed in beside him. “I saw a guy I don’t like.”
“Who?”
“A guy from Manila. Let’s move, okay? I need a breeze.”
“Cross the river,” Voss told the driver.
“What about the Rex?”
“We can’t go downtown,” said Voss, “they’ve got checkpoints everywhere. Uncle Ho won’t catch us sleeping! We are absolutely thoroughly prepared for one year ago.”
“What’s going on across the river?”
“Not a thing, brother. It’s like real life. Some nuns opened a French place last month.”
“Nuns? Can they cook?”
“Outrageously well. Nobody goes there yet, but they will.”
The driver said, “One bridge no good. I take other bridge.”
“Go ahead, make a buck,” Voss said.
Sands said, “How’s the family?”
“They’re great. Haven’t seen them since April. I missed Celeste’s birthday.”
“How old is she?”
“Jesus… No, wait—four. What about you? Still solo?”
“Afraid so.”
“Completely? No fiancée in the States?”
“Not yet. Completely single.”
They crossed the bridge to the east side, where junks and miscellaneous unsinkable wrecks jammed against the bank.
“Jeez, the river stinks worse than ever.”
“Welcome back.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“No, I’m serious. It’s good to see you,” Voss said, and he meant it. “How long have you been gone?”
“I’m in and out.”
“So you’ve been gone all this time?”
“I’m just back for a week or two. Collecting stories. How goes the fray?”
“Oh—we’re winning.”
“Finally someone who knows.”
“You’re collecting stories?”
“Stories, yeah—folktales. Fairy stories.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place for that stuff.” Neither of them laughed. “Folktales.”
“Yeah—remember Lansdale.”
“I never knew Lansdale.”
“ ‘Know the people’—songs and stories.”
Voss heard himself sigh. “Hearts and minds.”
“Yeah. It’s for a project at the Naval Grad School.”
“Over there in—where.”
“Carmel.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“A beautiful place.”
Small talk, Voss thought, in the Terminal Ward. He had to take over directing the driver, and he was spared.
Only a few blocks across the river, and not far from the neighborhood of the old CIA-Psy Ops villa where for several weeks Voss and Skip had lived together, they found the Chez Orleans. “I like these vines,” Voss said of the incredible overgrowth almost extinguishing its façade. “You can hardly see through the windows. Privacy.” I sound like a fool.
“Do you still stay at the old place?”
“The old place is no more. I think the army got it. I’m at the Meyerkord.”
The vines continued around the building and flourished over lattices to make relatively cool shade for the flagstone patio. Music emanated from a burlap-wrapped PA high in the coolest corner of the trellis—flamenco, classical guitar—and beneath the speaker, near the small fountain, three officers with large yellow Fifth Cavalry patches on their sleeves ate without speaking. Otherwise not a soul. They sat down and Sands ordered 7Up and grenadine. “I’m having a martini,” Voss said.
“I don’t like olives,” Sands said. While Voss wondered how you reply to such a statement, Sands went on: “I didn’t mean to sound cynical a while ago.”
“I’m the one who sounded cynical. And I kind of think I meant to.”
“No, no, I understand. We’ve all got questions.”
“Yeah, and the left thinks we don’t, we’re all brainwashed and stupid, we have to have somebody shouting up our ass—do they think they’re intellectuals? Who wants to be an intellectual? Who cares how powerful your equipment is if you can’t safely operate it? What have the intellectuals got?”
“Chess.”
“Cross-eyed Communism. Unhealthy unsatisfying perverted sex lives.”
Sands said nothing. He seemed as clear-eyed as ever, and just as blind. Where, Voss thought, is the fun in this? Crodelle, you’re a shit.
“Skip. Skipper. What’s the matter?”
“My mom died.”
“Oh, shit.”
“I just got the news yesterday.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m dealing with it.”
“I guess you have to.”
“I know. What can you say? Let’s eat.”
The lunch menu was light, salads, crepes, and sandwiches, and Voss recommended the salade niçoise, which he promised was made with real tuna and which Skip declined because of the olives. Sands asked instead for the salade d’epinard et crevettes, and they spent the interval looking over the dinner menu with admiration: filet de porc rôti, carré d’agneau aux pistaches, thon aux pignons de pin, these nuns had it all—and privacy—if in fact the management were nuns. He’d never seen any nuns here. “Better than the Yacht Club,” he told Sands, “and cheaper, man.” He was hungry, and he took his salad as a reprieve. But Sands, after going at his shrimp and spinach for several bites, drifted visibly from the scene and began poking with his fork, stirring whorls in his orange-and-caper sauce, and Voss felt terrible about Skip’s situation and said, “It’s hard to believe people back home can pass away. It gets so you think we have all the dying right here. All the death in the world.”
Skip looked up in surprise and said, “That’s true. I’ve felt just that very thing.”
“We all do. Remember last Tet?”
“Yeah.”
“You were here?”
“I was around.”
“Cao Phuc?”
“Off and on.”
“You’ve been getting mail pretty regularly at the embassy.”
“Oh. You keep track of those things?”
“Every little thing, somebody keeps track of it. But who’s keeping track of who’s keeping track? So Cao Phuc. Yeah. You guys did some nice work on Labyrinth.”
“Yes, thanks—do you really mean that?”
A cab stopped out front, and even through the viney lattice Voss could see who it was.
“Well, Skip,” he admitted with sudden irritation, “no. Not really. What the heck do I know about Labyrinth? I’m just being—you know—generally and vaguely complimentary.”
“Okay. Generally and vaguely thanks. Look, Rick,” Sands said, “maybe we can talk straight.”
“Always. Always.”
At this moment Crodelle made his appearance, moving directly toward their table as if he’d consulted a map and planned the route. Tall, angular—not tall enough for college basketball, but surely pressed into it in high school. Physically he looked the drowsy, slouching intellectual. A misapprehension. He had a redhead’s characteristic fire. Voss had led himself to believe that redheads outgrow their freckles with childhood, but Crodelle still sported several across his cheeks. Voss was aware that he considered these things too often, that they’d lodged as irritants in his thoughts—Crodelle’s height and type, his intellect, his freckles—because Crodelle frightened him.
“I want soup!”
Sands said, “I’m not sure they have soup.”
“Bizarre. No soup?”
“Not for lunch.”
“Terry Crodelle.”
The two shook hands. Voss said, “Skip Sands.”
Crodelle sat down and said, “Indeed,” and called across the room: “Martini? And a salad”—he pointed a bony finger at Voss’s plate—”comme ça.”
“And some tea,” Sands said.
“And tea, please.”
Sands said, “Were we expecting you, Terry?”
“I’m stuck this side of the river. Nothing on the other side but banners and flags and firecrackers. So—you’re back in Cao Phuc? Or you were never gone.”
Sands kept good control of his physical presence, but couldn’t hide his surprise. “I assume you’re working with us.”
“Us who?”
“We. Us. The outfit.”
“I’m with the Regional Security Center.”
“Stationed here?”
“Visiting. A visitor to your charming planet.”
“First time in-country?”
Crodelle blinked and stared. “I’ve been in the region off and on since ‘59. I’m pre-Kennedy.”
“Wow. You look younger.”
“I looked in on Cao Phuc once or twice. How’s the scene there these days?”
“A lot quieter. Quiet.”
“Have they broken down that relocation facility?”
“I don’t know the official status of that endeavor.”
“But what do you see?”
“It’s hard to tell what stage they’ve reached”—Sands looked up and around as if seeking their waiter—”whether they’re breaking it down or if it’s just been more or less abandoned. But I’d say the Buddhist temple is pretty much the center of things again.”
“Are the VC moving in?”
“I haven’t been bothered.”
“What have they got you doing over there?”
“Collecting stories. Folktales.”
“Gimme a break! Rick, here, thought you’d left the country.”
“I’m in and out.”
“So the base is broken down?”
“We didn’t call it a base. Landing zone.” Sands seemed inexplicably content.
“Did you ever get over to the Purple Bar once in a while?”
Skip laughed. “Only at the legitimate cocktail hour.”
“You know what, Skip? I’m glad we finally meet.”
“Hey, you guys,” Voss said, and excused himself.
He went to the restroom and found its urinal filled with ice cubes, a fascinating extravagance.
Voss wished Crodelle had stayed away from lunch longer. Maybe some straight talk after all, he and Sands—who can you talk to but a man on the way out? He’d worked in intelligence for only six years, but he would have liked to crawl out of its waters and into a cave and confess to some giant mollusk. Absurd, yes. But it had the right elements. Air and drowning. Darkness, damp.
What a monstrous stupid fucking mess.
One of the army officers joined him in the bathroom, hawk-faced, crew-cut, major’s bars on his shoulders and the yellow sleeve patch of the Fifth Cavalry, a man without secrets, a man who relieved himself in front of others. While the major pissed meditatively down onto the piled ice, Voss washed his hands and dried them on one of the cloth napkins stacked beside the sink and tossed the napkin into a wicker basket. This place had class. Above the cloudy yellowish mirror that gave his face back as if he were the victim of some viny invasion of hepatitis were painted in a precise, feminine, nunlike script the words:
Bon appétit!
When Voss returned to the table they were already on the subject Crodelle wanted to raise, at least to begin with—the colonel’s insane article—and Crodelle was showing off. He managed to seem blithely expert on any area that strayed into his conversational grasp. Voss didn’t mind it so much, but he minded that at this moment he was bullying Sands. This business of tracking “command influence,” Crodelle wanted to know—had the colonel considered how tricky the whole idea was? Hadn’t the Mayo brothers written of Dr. Gorgas, “Men who achieve greatness do not work more complexly than the average man, but more simply?” Wasn’t the problem with trying to show “command influence” through experiments just that almost all such experiments, those Crodelle knew of anyway, had been carried out to determine the impact of an intervention, a treatment, a new drug, rather than to prove the presence or absence of a causative-actor?—like Lind’s eighteenth-century tests with treatments for scurvy, or, a more recent instance, the Salk vaccine trials? On the other hand … was Sands maybe familiar with the nineteenth-century Yellow Fever Commission and the-hen-new science of bacteriology?—with the efforts of Walter Reed and James Carroll? Maybe trials could be run, but what would serve as the experimental “marker” for “command influence”? And the struggle against malaria and typhoid and yellow fever, hadn’t that been as much a war as this one?—hadn’t Jesse Lazear died a martyr’s death in a sick ward in Havana, cut down by the disease he was helping to conquer? Wars demanded new ideas; and maybe the colonel had landed one: could we maybe, just maybe, inject the elements we think would provoke “command influence” into pre-selected information channels? Crodelle’s curiosity overpowered him, an earnest wish to communicate charged his features, he held up his hands before his face, fingers splayed, head forward, taking careful and passionate aim, as if each of his concepts were a basketball—but, come on, who was the colonel in all this, Walter Reed the careful investigator, or Guiseppe Sanarelli, the guy with the quick answer to the wrong question? The colonel needed an Aristides Agramonte to get in there and dig into the corpses. Did Skip know the work of Agramonte? Did Skip know, come to think, that with that mustache and high forehead he resembled Agramonte?
This last question seemed other than rhetorical. Crodelle stopped. He waited.
Voss couldn’t tell whether Sands was a fool, or the Buddha himself. From where came this poised, shiny-eyed amusement?
Sands said, “Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty wild.”
“What is your interest in all this, Terry?”
“Purely academic. Disease control was a passion of mine in college—premed. Then I dropped out and wandered into our world, and I never thought I’d see anything from that field that applied to our field, the field of intelligence.”
“It’s just a draft. He’ll never finish it.”
“What you need to do is prove the existence of ‘command influence.’ What you need to do is isolate these different channels running up the chain of command, and randomly inject information among these channels to see how much they get distorted. How do you, so to speak, ‘clean’ a channel? You need channels you affect and channels you keep unaffected. This isn’t new. Yellow fever again, polio, et cetera. What you’d really need is two or more unconnected intelligence organizations—get some of our allies to participate. It would be interesting. It might get us somewhere. It might bring on a revolution. But do we need to start one until we need to start one?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“It’s just remarkable he’s opened the whole question. The colonel. I mean, is it possible to create markers, intelligence markers, and follow them up and down the chain of command and out through the lines of commo, and draw conclusions about the way we do things? It’s pretty wild, man. Your uncle’s a wild revolutionary.”
“Have you met him?”
“Once or twice. I enjoy the colonel. He’s a sizable personality. I mean, Cao Phuc—case in point. As far as we can trace things he talked someone, some drunken commander of one of the helicopter assault groups, into securing a landing zone on that mountain in ‘64, then when the Twenty-fifth Infantry arrived he sort of borrowed a platoon and kept them out there twenty-four months, on one pretext after another, and had the Twenty-fifth serving that LZ as if it were a base. Then he sold the ville as the world’s best place for a relocation camp. At the peak he had half a dozen platoons running up and down that mountain, and his very own helicopter. That is one impressively large personality, man. Unfortunatamente, during the Tet thing he took casualties and lost a whole platoon we can only hope are POWs now, and folks started asking what in tarnation is going on in Cao Phuc. If it wasn’t for last Tet, by now he’d probably have his own brigade. And he’s not in any way connected to the military!—except as liaison to Psy Ops, hardly any of whom have actually personally encountered the guy, ever. He did it all on his personal authority. I mean, man, he did it all on balls and bullshit. Can you believe it?”
“You seem to know more about him than I do.”
“There’s a lot to admire there. He’s a warrior—”
“A genuine war hero, Terry.”
“Of course, let’s say a hero, he’s got medals up the ass, okay—but he’s not a spook, he’s not that type. He suspects everybody’s against him, but he acts like he hasn’t got an enemy in the world. You know what a guy once told me about the colonel? ‘His enemies are only friends he hasn’t defeated yet.’”
“John Brewster, right?”
“Who?”
“You heard me.”
“Matter of fact, it might have been John. I don’t remember. Look. Come on. Look … your uncle has something to teach us, which is: Trust the locals. He’s never separated himself from them. He works with them, he’s joined to them. But in doing that, he separates himself from us, his people.”
Skip said, “I think you’re misinterpreting the facts, and then exaggerating your own misinterpretation. Or at least you’re just allowing your interpretation to enlarge itself.”
“Have you read The Quiet American?”
Skip said: “Boo-coo fuck you.”
Voss said, “Boy, this is quick. I thought we’d shoot the shit awhile.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Crodelle blinked. Nothing more. “He was living at the Continental when he wrote it.”
“Graham Greene. Next door to the colonel.”
“Skip … a man outgrows his mentors. It’s inevitable.”
“Look,” Skip said, “I get it.”
“Then explain it.”
“You explain it.”
“I’ve been explaining it. If the colonel wants to make empirical sense out of his theories, then let him propose a random-assignment study using two systems—a control, and a system into which he introduces some agent or catalyst whose effect he can measure against the control system without the agent. Think back: the old proposals for the cause of polio, the days when they were just banging away with any idea that came into their heads—dog feces, for Christ’s sake; injecting polio patients with their own urine. That’s the colonel, man. Shooting piss into the intelligence apparatus. I mean,” Crodelle said, “even in Washington he was legendary for his three-hour hydraulic lunches.”
Sands turned to Voss. “Fuck you too, Voss.” He stood up. “Speaking of shooting piss. I gotta whiz.”
“Melt yourself some ice,” Voss said.
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
He left, and Crodelle watched him until he’d gone inside the restaurant.
“Gee, Terry. What took you so long?”
“Rick? Do you know your role?”
Voss didn’t answer. He watched Crodelle sip from his martini.
“Is there a window in there?”
“He’s not going out the window.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s having too much fun.”
“Are you?”
Voss thought of ordering another drink, but felt the remark about hydraulic lunches had rendered such a thing inadvisable.
“If he pushes, I’m gonna push back. Just to keep the balance in my favor, okay? And things are gonna speed up.”
“They certainly are.”
“Fine with me. And you do have a role to play. When the balance tips too far, you jump on the teeter-totter—on my side, incidentally.”
“I’m clear on that.”
“On the way here I picked up something at the shop.”
“What shop?”
Crodelle convulsed into life again. “Will you look at this?” He took from his breast pocket what looked like a large cigarette lighter. Holding it in his palm, he pressed its side with his thumb. “Open it up, and—zow.” Two tiny reels within. “The tape is—you see it? That little wire? That is one one-thousandth of an inch in diameter, man.”
People from Manila’s Regional Security Center showed up in town regularly and Voss thought he knew them all; Crodelle wasn’t one of them. He’d set up a shop in the Language School’s basement, and Internal Ops had been told to give him what he needed, and today he needed a twenty-first-century recording device.
“You guys have all the nifty stuff.”
“These things have been around for a dozen years.”
Sands was back. He sat down, and Crodelle held out the recorder, its face still open. “Behold.”
“Where’s the tape?”
“The light has to be right. See?”
Voss said, “One one-thousandth of an inch.”
“Is it on?”
“Why the hell not?” Crodelle said, and shut its lid and left it between them on the green linen tablecloth. “Let’s give it a whirl. We’re here at the Aragon Ballroom with bandleader extraordinaire Skipper Sands … Sands. German? English.”
“No. Irish.”
“Irish?”
“My great-grandfather came from the Shaughnesseys. Apparently he started calling himself Sands on the ship over.”
“A bit of a turncoat.”
“I never met him. I wouldn’t know.”
“Was he in trouble?”
“No. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Am I?”
“The Aragon Ballroom is a place of music and frolic. No one’s in trouble here.”
“Hell. Why not polygraph me?”
“That’s not out of the question.”
“I mean right now, Crodelle.”
“No, Skip. Not right now. We’ll need to prepare you if we want to end up with a decently conclusive polygram.”
“Any old time.”
“What about Crodelle? C’est Français?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, French. It may be a misspelling of ‘Cordelle.’—Where’s Uncle Francis, Skip?”
“I don’t know. Right here in town, I assume.”
“Do you know he was recalled to Langley seven weeks ago, eight weeks ago—anyway, early last November?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No, because he never went.”
“He goes where he wants to.”
“Yeah. And when he wants to, he’ll just whip out a pistol and shoot a bound prisoner.”
“Really, now.”
“Didn’t he execute a prisoner at Cao Phuc during Big Tet?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“Well, it’s known you know something about it. We know you know.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re confusing a story from World War Two.”
“He executed prisoners back then too? We’ll have to look into that. But you’re located at Cao Phuc right now, right? And last Tet too? Is Cao Phuc your station, more or less?”
“In-country, yeah. I’m in and out. Mostly out. I keep some stuff there.”
“Well, you spend a lot of time there. You’re bound to have some stuff. When we say you keep some stuff there, we’re including some of the colonel’s stuff, right? His footlockers and such.”
“Footlockers?”
“You know, here’s the crux of it all. I think these guys we admire so much, I believe that every one of them has fallen away from the faith, each in his own way. We fight Communism, but we ourselves exist in a commune. We exist in a hive.”
“You think they don’t believe in freedom anymore?”
“I think they’ve just gotten numb.”
Silence.
Crodelle said, “What do you think, Skip?”
“I think it’s too complicated for discussion.”
Crodelle said: “What’s in the footlockers?”
Skip kept his peace.
“Why the silence?”
“Am I supposed to answer suddenly just because you ask suddenly?”
“Three of them, three footlockers. You had them at Clark Field on December thirty-first, 1966, and they arrived with you at the CIA villa right over here on Chi Lang Street on New Year’s Day.”
Sands hadn’t once touched his teacup. His focus was amazing.
“I’d like to ask what you’re doing in Cao Phuc,” Crodelle said.
“Well, I don’t think you should even be wanting to know.”
Crodelle stared. “Gosh-darn it.”
Sands stared back.
“You’re in business. You’re running something. Something or somebody.”
“Who, exactly, are you?”
“All right. Let’s get ourselves identified. I’m Terrence Crodelle, Regional Security Officer.”
“Congratulations.”
“Your turn. The Saigon base has two branches, designated Liaison Operations and Internal Operations. Which are you, Skip?”
“I Ops, working mainly with military Psy Ops.”
Crodelle sat back and sighed. “I Ops with Psy Ops,” he said, and Voss thought: I believe you’re on the ropes.
With an actual mounting nausea, Voss forced his own face into the muck: “You remember the footlockers? Those three foot-lockers? Sure you do. I don’t think you would’ve forgotten those footlockers. Do you remember the name on those footlockers?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Can I ask what name you’re here under?”
“My name is William Michael Sands.”
“What’s the name on your passport?”
“That is the name on my passport.”
Crodelle said, “Where’s the colonel’s hideaway?”
“He’s got a room at the Continental, last I knew.”
“I understand he has some associates on the Mekong Delta. One in particular. A female.”
“That’s news to me.”
“Near Binh Dai.”
“Further news.”
A vehicle stopped outside. Skip rose, went to the patio’s edge, and spoke through the vines: “Hold that cab for me, please.”
He still had his napkin tucked into his belt. It was the only off move Voss had seen him make all day.
He came back and laid his napkin on the table and said, “Lunch is on you guys,” and walked out.
Certain that he was spending too much, that the GIs and local businessmen got lower prices, Fest passed the afternoon with the young woman whose hair smelled of vanilla, who charged him thirty dollars for four hours in his air-conditioned room. She huddled under the blankets, she insisted on using the phone many times, though he didn’t think she knew anyone to call and was only pretending to have conversations, she plucked at his beard and the curls on his chest, and tried to squeeze the blackheads on his nose—in fact she played constantly with his nose—delighted with its European dimensions, and in general behaved like the stupid harlot she was. Just as Fest was a stupid customer. He ordered champagne for the room and she refused it—chattering, giggling, fearful—as she might the offer of a particularly nasty bedroom game. Fest drank it all himself. She wouldn’t eat. He showered while she fraudulently telephoned. His greatest hope for this hotel had been extinguished—that its phones reached Berlin, and news of his father. Cables were no good. He had to keep his whereabouts to himself. Apparently it was possible to call Berlin, but not from the hotel. The concierge had promised to arrange it, to take him somewhere personally. Meanwhile, the old man would die. Perhaps already. Perhaps yesterday while I bought the maps. Right now he’s dead while I shower in tepid, diseased water and a whore stinks in my bed. People die when you’re thinking of something else. That’s the way of it. Claude had done so; shot in the throat by a sniper of the French Resistance. Their father had been a strong man, a patriotic German, an acquaintance of Heinrich Himmler. His older brother had been an officer of the Waffen-SS. These were facts. They were not to be disputed, covered over, or despised. And Claude had given his life for the Nazis, another fact. But Claude was more than a fact: the family legend, constantly on his father’s lips; dead, yet throughout Fest’s youth more alive to their father than Fest himself. He gave the girl some Vietnamese money, he didn’t care how much, and sent her away.
While celebrants out in the square produced the music and explosions of warfare, defeat, and victory combined, he took dinner in his room and prepared to turn in early. He had a drop point, a point of rendezvous, and a point of last resort. As of this moment, no one could find him, in particular not his local handlers. The champagne left him with a headache that kept him awake. He sat at the writing desk of Room 214 and broke apart and examined his equipment. The gun had been ramped and throated, he saw. It wouldn’t jam. He reassembled it. Both clips went into it smoothly and the bullets cycled through it almost without sound as he worked the slide backward and forward. Both the silencer and the barrel to accommodate it were factory-made. Somebody was paying attention. But the pointless meeting in Hong Kong, his quick treatment at the hands of Kenneth Johnson, the sense he was being passed from cousin to cousin, always farther from the source … And that he was being used at all. Not that work for other services was unprecedented. Nine or ten years ago an Algerian in Madrid; and a man on a yacht in Como, Italy, whom Fest thought might have been Mafia. And the Philippines, the American priest. Not one of them an enemy of his homeland. Eleven operations in all, counting this one. Showalter had described it as “a hurry-up,” and yet Showalter had entertained them for a couple of weeks before ever mentioning an assignment, and next not another word until a month ago, and even then no discussion of scenarios, and now the gun was in his hands … And would they even have picked me if I’d taken the family to Berlin on our summer leave, if I hadn’t avoided, like a coward, another look at my father’s deathbed, if I hadn’t spent my leave showing New England to young Claude and Dora from the small windows of a rented caravan? In Cape Cod they’d parked behind Showalter’s summer place. Both families knew each other well, considered themselves friends, in fact, but he’d never been associated with Charles Showalter on any kind of operation. He was a superior, that’s all. Showalter displayed no illusions, none tainted him, that’s why they liked each other. That’s why Fest trusted him. Stay another week, stay another day—of course they’d stay, he was a superior. Meg too—even after two weeks with cords going out the window from her kitchen outlets, three guests running down the hot water and wetting all her towels, Dora complaining about Langley, holding forth in her fluent English about American idiots, young Claude nibbling out of her fridge, talking about school and sports because Meg was beautiful and because she listened—Meg too: Stay a while, we love it, it’s rather lonely here in the sandy woods. Two weeks along, Meg’s smiles turned brittle, mixed with invisible perspiration. The stress brought out her strength and grace, and seemed to underscore her intelligence. Charles took Fest to the cape’s Atlantic edge, only the two of them, to show him a beach house he thought of purchasing. Fest praised it but wouldn’t have lived there. The panes rattled in a relentless wind and the surf ate at the shore only yards from the supporting posts. Showalter stood on his future balcony before his future Atlantic, his gray locks snatched up in all directions like a poet’s. “There’s some business in Saigon. I’d like to put you on it. It’s a hurry-up job.”
“In Saigon?”
“Or the environs.”
The Philippines, and now this. And why send him across the world on a single operation when whole armies crawl over the region?
“It’s ten thousand miles to there,” Fest said.
“That’s nearly accurate.”
“Are you assigning me to the Phoenix Program?”
“It’s not Phoenix, and it’s not ICE-X. We don’t want our people to know about this.”
“It’s quite a sensitive target, perhaps.”
“I guess,” Showalter said in a way that meant he thought it, perhaps, not so much a sensitive target as a senseless operation. “He’s been promised our protection.”
“I see. How much more can you tell me?”
“Nothing. We’ll talk more in Langley. When we’re back on the clock.”
“Will I hear from my people first?”
“Consider that you’re hearing from them now.”
“No need to check about that.”
“No need. And—Dirk.”
“Yes, Charles.”
“It’s a war. Go ahead and use a gun.”
He now possessed a .380 automatic, a very American and warlike weapon. With it he could probably put together three-inch groups at forty feet. Beyond that range he found it unpredictable. Not quite as good as the sumpit, the blowgun. But how would he know until he aimed and fired?
No team, no discussion of scenarios, no drilling with the weapon.
Why couldn’t they have given him U.S. documents here in Saigon, official passports with genuine Vietnamese visas? Why stop in Hong Kong for German ones?