The Second Biggest Nothing

by Colin Cotterill

  The Australian ambassador continued to smile and nod even though his interpreter said nothing.

  “I’m assuming they lost control and drove into a river,” said Phosy.

  “A fish pond,” said the man with the net. “I was lucky I wasn’t standing four meters to my left. I’d just cast my net, pulled the draw string and felt the tug of a carp when this red monster leaves the road, takes off from the bank and flies into the water.”

  “And . . . ?” said Phosy.

  “That was it,” said the fisherman.

  “You didn’t go and help?”

  “Can’t swim.”

  “How deep exactly is that fish pond of yours?” Siri asked.

  “Three or four meters at its deepest, I’d say.”

  “Then why didn’t they open the door and swim to the surface?” asked Siri.

  “Don’t know,” said the fisherman. “I was expecting something like that, but all I see is bubbles. I go to the local cadre’s house and tell him, and, well, here I am and here they are. All a bit of a funny day really.”

  “How did you get the bodies out?” asked Phosy.

  “The cadre sent his boys down,” said the fisherman. “They smashed the windshield and dragged them out. They couldn’t get the doors open.”

  “Hmm,” said Siri.

  Phosy turned to Captain Sihot. “Is anyone raising the car?” he asked.

  “No,” said Sihot.

  “Where did this happen?” asked Phosy.

  “Kilometer forty just past Ban Donhai.”

  “Okay, I want you to go out there and organize that. Make sure the cadre doesn’t claim it as a souvenir. Bring it back here.”

  “We should get Dtui to start on these two,” said Siri.

  “Start on what, exactly?” said the minister.

  “Determining the cause of death,” said Siri.

  “Obviously they drowned,” said the prosecutor.

  “I agree,” said Siri, “but unless they were on some crazed suicide pact, two healthy, mentally astute men do not drive at speed into a pond and sit there waiting to drown.”

  “Well, you and your people are certainly not performing an autopsy,” said the minister.

  “We’re not?”

  “They’re foreign citizens,” said the prosecutor. “They were driving an old, poorly maintained vehicle. They had a terrible accident caused by their recklessness and they died. The Australian government would like their citizens returned as soon as possible.”

  The ambassador’s interpreter awoke from his mute slumber and hurriedly summarized the prior conversation. The ambassador affirmed that he would take responsibility for the repatriation of both bodies. All was settled. The minister ordered the bodies to be locked in the morgue freezer before collection the following day. The officials filed out of the room, leaving Siri and Phosy.

  “Anything you can do without cutting them open?” Phosy asked.

  “I could take some samples. Do some tests. But I don’t actually know what I’m looking for. If they were poisoned or stoned out of their minds, I’d need to get to the stomach. I think the car will tell us more than the bodies at this point.”

  Phosy stared at the doctor. “The second letter,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “It said there may be one or two collateral victims who fall outside the parameters of his mission. Do you think this could be his demonstration? The mysterious killer showing us what he’s capable of?”

  “In that case he’d be someone with access to Silver City or friends in high enough places to get him into the warehouse,” said Siri.

  He looked down at the photojournalist. The poor man had survived wars, yet here he was defeated in peacetime.

  “Last night he said something about meeting up with an old acquaintance,” said Phosy. “Marvin didn’t want him to talk about it. I wonder if it was the friend who got them access to the warehouse. And I wonder if it’s the person we’re looking for. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting anyone to recognize him, and he had to silence the two of them before his cover was blown.”

  “That’s an awful lot of wondering,” said Siri.

  “He asked about you.”

  “Who did?”

  “Jim. He said one of the Swedes was looking for you.”

  “That couldn’t have been our man,” said Siri. “He’d already found us.”

  “Perhaps someone was trying to warn you.”

  “This is too much conjecture for one old fellow to take on. Why didn’t you mention this when we met today?”

  “I don’t know. You kept disappearing. I didn’t have a chance.”

  Siri walked around the dollies and went over the chain of events in his mind.

  “What do you suppose the Swede was doing here this evening?” asked Siri.

  “Witness? Apart from the mysterious contact person, I suppose he was the last to see these two alive. He was the only one who knew what their plan was.”

  “But how would any of this crowd know that unless he volunteered the information himself?”

  “I’ll find out who it was that invited him,” said Phosy.

  “All right. But first things first. I’ll start work on these two and see what I can find without leaving wounds. You follow up with the Ferrari and get someone to interview the other journalists. It won’t be easy but see if you can find someone who hates me.”

  Chapter Ten

  Hanoi, 1972

  I remember the night of Hanoi Jane very clearly because it followed the first afternoon of Hanoi Hilton Henry. Both of these events, in their own way, made me think about misperception. I’d been without Boua for seven years already, but being without her was very much the same as being with her during those final years. She’d taken on the burden of hammering communism into the heads of the peasantry. She’d begun to show the signs of addiction. She’d never taken drugs, but she was so high on righteousness she could no longer listen to those of us who were witnessing her mental decline. She was untreatable. She was a total fool for a hopeless cause. Her suicide was not the most tragic event in her life.

  The war we thought we’d already won raged on. But now the enemy no longer shouted insults in French from the trenches. Overnight the Tricolor had rearranged its colors, and we awoke to the sounds of Janice Joplin and The Doors. And the weapons were grander and more efficient, the budget ballooned and the motive for killing us was no longer merely to pillage. They were here to stop us reds from taking over the world. We all knew, of course, that if our new American minders hadn’t stepped up to the plate, we would have flooded the planet with failed cooperatives and incompetent officials. But we had a weapon more effective than the B-52s, which could level a village in tenths of a second, and more slick than Agent Orange, which could strip a hillside and anyone standing on it, and more cunning than the bombies that burrowed into the soil and would blow the legs off buffalo and inquisitive children for decades to come.

  We had heroin.

  Boua wasn’t the only one in Vietnam who’d lost all sense of right and wrong. My surgeon friend in Paris had been right. By late ’71 there were already 560,000 heroin addicts in the US. Most of the product came via the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand. Seventy-five percent of urban crime was fueled by this addiction, and Nixon had called for a war on drugs. The CIA Indochinese opium policy had found its way back home.

  A quarter of American troops in Vietnam were using heroin. Thousands were addicted, and the bad news for the gentlemen in Congress and the generals in their Saigon offices was that heroin made more sense to the reluctant soldiers than they did. It was a universally available brain tranquilizer. Any soldier could buy it on the roadside near the bases where young boys sold it along with snacks and soft drinks and cigarettes. The Vietnamese army was shipping and distributing it so nobody was afraid of
getting caught. We in the north were being bombed to hell and back, but we were defeating the enemy one brain cell at a time.

  That didn’t make much of a difference to us on the ground in those days. I don’t know how many young men and women I’d put back together as best I could. I’d cried with each failure. I’d drunk with officers who would be dead the next morning. Ours wasn’t an army of guerilla soldiers. These were shopkeepers and farmers and teachers in uniform, and they were no less terrified of being in the jungle than the young American boys from the Midwest. But whoever it was there in the rain and the muck, they asked the same question. Down through the elephant mahouts of Hannibal, the foot soldiers of Kublai Khan, the Germans and English in the mud of the Somme—they all wanted to know the same thing: “What in God’s name are we doing here?” But no matter what god you asked, you’d not get your answer because no god has ever seen any sense in war.

  Which is all a long detour on the way to telling my story. You’ve probably worked out how it started. I was sitting at a table in front of the Metropole Hotel, which had recently rechristened the Reunification. There weren’t many roadside bars in Hanoi back then. North Vietnamese had better things to do than lounge and booze. But there were some. There was a tourist trade of sorts. Curious foreigners came to see what it was like to party in a war zone. There was the Vietnam-American Friendship Association for one, shipping in anyone willing to pay their exorbitant prices. So there were cafés and restaurants and the odd bar, and there was me at the only occupied table at the Metropole that morning.

  “Anyone sitting there?” came a voice I’d been expecting to hear.

  I turned to see Civilai in full North Vietnamese Army dress uniform. His hair had retreated even further from his brow and he looked, I don’t know, hardened. In his left hand, he held a rattan mango-plucker, which, from a very long distance, might have looked like a tennis racquet. I stood, kissed his cheeks and shook his right hand.

  “That’s the best you can do?” I asked.

  “Do you know how hard it is to find a tennis racquet in war-torn Hanoi?” he asked.

  “Sit down before someone asks you to harvest mangoes,” I said.

  He laughed and sat and looked around for a waiter. There was a greater chance of seeing a penguin stroll along Ly Thai To.

  “How long are you in town?” he asked.

  “Just long enough to pick up supplies. I head back to Vieng Xai on Thursday.”

  “Then I’m lucky I got to see you,” he said.

  “Always a pleasure. Why are you dressed like a postman?”

  “It’s . . .”

  A waitress, obviously attracted by the uniform, came running out of the hotel. She had a permanently troubled scowl but pretty eyes. Civilai ordered four glasses of Cognac. She only had rum. He ordered Bacardi. She only had Saint James. He asked about beer. It wasn’t cold. We settled for Saint James but ordered cola to take the taste away. That was warm too. The lengths we went to for a little alcohol buzz.

  “And?” I said.

  “And what?”

  “The uniform.”

  “Right. It’s the latest from Peking. Our allies want us to look stylish at the handover ceremony.”

  “Who’s handing over what?” I asked.

  “They’re convinced that, with all the anti-American war demonstrations in the States and the obscene amount of money they’re spending on eradicating us, it’ll be over by next year.”

  “Haven’t they been saying that for fifteen years?”

  “Yes, but now we have uniforms so it’s serious.”

  “Marvelous. I look forward to it.”

  The troubled waitress returned without a tray for some reason. They’d probably been requisitioned for the war effort. Instead she nuzzled the four full rum glasses, one bottle of cola and an ice bucket against her modest breasts. The bucket contained actual ice, which surprised us given that nothing else was cold. But we didn’t bother to ask why. Those were hardship days. In her mouth she had the bill, which she handed to me. Perhaps the man dressed as a civilian was expected to pay for the soldier out of gratitude. Civilai grabbed it from me.

  “Had a bit of luck in a card game last night,” he said.

  I didn’t put up a fight. Even with ice and cola, the drinks were as bad as we’d expected. People passing in front of the hotel looked at us as if we were actors in some production that didn’t need a camera.

  “So,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Any luck?”

  “Six months since our last meeting and you want to start our reunion with a favor?”

  “Yes. Did you do it?”

  “In a way,” he said. “But there’s a catch.”

  “Any catches are acceptable if she said yes.”

  “She said yes.”

  I was so happy. I’d never wanted more to throw myself at Civilai and rain kisses down on him. Naturally, I didn’t. I merely nodded and said, “That’s nice.”

  “But the catch is a rather large one,” he said.

  “Do I have to perform erotic acts with a member of the central committee?”

  “Not unless you want to.”

  “Then there’s nothing I wouldn’t agree to,” I told him. “Name it.”

  “Four American prisoners are to be released before the end of the year as a gesture of peace.”

  “After years of torture?”

  “We prefer to call it ‘custody with discipline.’ In most cases it was just confinement. But over the years there may have been the odd renegade camp director with sadomasochistic tendencies. And there were factions that kept their own downed pilots like pets. It was hard to monitor all the jails.”

  “How long were these four locked up?”

  “The longest was seven years.”

  “Seven years in a bamboo cage?”

  “After a brief probationary period, they were all moved to one- or two-star accommodation. Some were quite comfortable.”

  It was one of my many sore points about our Viet Minh neighbors.

  “Civilai,” I said, “imprisonment should be punishment enough. Anything else is just gratuitous. Cruelty makes us look ignorant.”

  Civilai finished his first glass. The rum tasted better the more we drank.

  “I don’t want to get tangled up in this discussion again,” said Civilai.

  “Your average downed pilot has nothing more to tell you than—”

  “Siri!”

  “. . . than you already know,” I said.

  “They’ve been bombing us for fifteen years,” said Civilai. “Them and their Hmong puppets in Laos. They fly in. They press their button. They kill. They go home, have a nice meal and get drunk. They wake up the next day with a hangover and do it all over again. With their technology, it’s like spraying ants. They’re up there in their airplanes, and they have a pleasant flight over unspoiled jungle scenery, and they locate the village they’ve been instructed to liquefy, and they do as they’re told. There’s no accountability. They switch off all human dignity. When we shoot one down and a man survives, he carries the responsibility of all those who came and went before him. He needs time to be aware of what he’s done. We give him time to think until he understands that it’s not about targets; it’s about families.”

  “So you want me to meet these four and assess whether they feel enough remorse?”

  “No, I want you to go into each cell with a small medical team and make sure they’re healthy. Treat whatever needs treating. Fix whatever’s broken. And put together a brief medical report for them to take home. But while you’re examining them, I want you to be yourself and joke and laugh and listen to their stories.”

  “Isn’t it a bit late for that?” I asked.

  “For what?”

  “Basic love and kindness.”

  “It�
��s never too late,” he said. “But if you think it’s too demanding . . .”

  “You’d really blackmail me?”

  “You said there’s nothing you wouldn’t agree to.”

  He gave me one of his looks and I gave him one of mine.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “But only because I’ve been looking forward to this evening for weeks. If I have to play Tom Dooley to earn it, I’ll play the part. When do I meet the pilots?”

  “Whenever you’re free. They’re at Clinic Twelve.”

  “Really?” I said. “The clinic behind the fuel depot?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Do you think the B-52 pilots know that’s where we’re keeping them?”

  “They should. We’ve leaked enough information about their whereabouts and we weren’t subtle. Even the CIA should have understood.”

  We worked our way down our second glasses of rum. I could feel my intestines smolder.

  “You do remember I don’t speak English?” I said.

  “Don’t worry. It’s all taken care of,” he said. “And one of the pilots speaks Lao.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “He was held by a militia group in Bolikhamxai for over five years. He learned it from his captors. See how accommodating we can be to our guests? Free language classes.”

  We decided against ordering another drink as I had to stock up on medications and that involved getting things signed. Those Vietnamese loved to get things signed. We stood to leave.

  “Have you got time for a movie or two before I go back?” I asked.

  Hanoi had an impressive network of living-room film nights back then. Nobody dared congregate in numbers in a cinema for obvious reasons. So some bright spark had set up a smuggling route to bring up movie reels from Saigon. And they all had Vietnamese subtitles courtesy of the CIA propagandists. They had a department just working on translations. Nice of them.

  “I’ll see what’s playing,” he said. “And tonight, I want you on your best behavior.”

  “I can’t think of what you mean,” I said.