Deckle sighed. He might not like my saying all this out loud but he knew it was true. He didn’t bother to contradict me. “If Counselor Nhu thinks the Red Queen is lining up on Diem, he’ll suck every drop of information from this Tam. But if it’s Lodge she’s after, he may be happy to leave us ignorant while she plots on undisturbed.”
“Let her go after Lodge? Don’t it matter we’re allies?” Robeson protested.
Deckle said, “Things are looking rocky on that score. Lodge has been sent from Washington to deliver the tough message that the Nhus have got to go, and Diem has to make the reforms he promised or he’ll be joining them.”
I said, “So could be Nhu is sending back a message of his own.”
The captain nodded. “And your Red Queen is a pretty convincing messenger.”
Robeson said, “If the CIO goons have Tam and are under orders not to help us, how the hell are we gonna find out what he’s spilled?”
Deckle rocked in his swivel chair. “Calls for some major juju.” The captain scribbled a message by hand and shouted for a courier.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Have we got anybody with that kind of juice, Captain?”
Captain Deckle emptied his ashtray into the wastebasket. “We’ll find out tomorrow. You’ve got a breakfast meeting in the morning at oh eight hundred. At the Cercle Sportif.”
I blanched. The Cercle Sportif Saigonnais was an exclusive club set inside a thirty-acre park, right across from the new presidential palace rising slowly from the ashes of the bombed-out ruin. I’d only been to the club a few times when I’d driven the provost’s wife to her every-second-Monday meeting of the American Women’s Association of Saigon.
“Captain,” I said, “they don’t exactly appreciate the likes of us enlisted at the Cerc.”
“Not ‘us,’ Staff Sergeant Miser. Just you.” No Robeson. The Cerc appreciated black enlisted even less.
“Yes, sir. Who am I meeting?”
“The old American Fox himself. Our new ambassador.” He shoved a dossier across his desk. “So leave your goddamn attitude at home. And for Chrissake, put on some underwear.”
Chapter Eleven
Back at the Majestic, we cracked open a bottle of Jim Beam. Robeson checked his watch and switched on the shortwave to the English newscast from Manila. A British voice was giving a rundown on “Freedom Day” in Selma. Days earlier, three hundred and fifty Negroes had baked in the Alabama sun for hours, waiting to register to vote. Students trying to bring them food and water had got beat with clubs, shocked with cattle prods. The BBC could have been describing Nhu’s Red Berets and police descending on Buddhist protesters. Same-same.
Robeson took a healthy belt of whiskey as the broadcast continued. Elsewhere in the South, cops were swinging truncheons with abandon and sheriffs were setting dogs on uppity Commie-inspired blacks and white “outside agitators.” Clovis switched to the new Armed Forces radio station broadcasting out of the Rex Hotel. The announcer reported the third street attack on an American officer in Saigon and cautioned all US personnel to be vigilant.
The mellow voice slid right from murder into the weather: a hundred percent humidity and clammy hot. Right on cue the air turned liquid, pouring down on the balcony in a solid sheet. I massaged my aching leg.
Robeson shut off the radio and took up Crouch’s lame excuse for case notes on the previous killings, looking for anything that might point to her next kill zone or high-value target. I rifled through the broadside on Lodge from the embassy’s information officer, along with the much less puffy Agency profile.
Subject: Henry Cabot Lodge.
Major General, US Army Reserve.
US Senator, Vice Presidential Candidate,
UN Ambassador, Ambassador to South Viet Nam.
Lodge came from old New England money and had bounced on Teddy Roosevelt’s knee as a kid. Silver spoon? Hell, the guy was born with a whole fucking place setting. Surprisingly, he hadn’t chosen a gentleman’s war. Africa in tanks, then liaison with the French in Europe until the armistice.
JFK and Henry Cabot Lodge were both sons of big-time Boston clans. Lodges had entertained George Washington and made the family’s first fortune as privateers—a polite name for pirates the new revolutionary government licensed to operate against its enemies on the high seas. The Cabots, on the other hand, made their fortune in the opium business.
Well, well. Not so different from his rival’s old man. Papa Kennedy had made his dough smuggling the best hooch during Prohibition. He clinched his reputation as a stud banging Hollywood starlets while fathering a horde of kids with his wife, Rose. Young Jack was following close in daddy’s footsteps. Gossip about his womanizing had reached all the way to Indochina.
I turned the page. Henry Cabot Lodge had followed his grandfather into the Senate, but neglected his own re-election while managing General Eisenhower’s campaign for the White House. Ike won, Lodge lost—to young congressman Jack Kennedy. Seven years later Lodge lost to Senator Jack Kennedy again, this time as Dick Nixon’s running mate. It seemed like the ambassador might soon return the favor by challenging President Kennedy in next year’s election.
His fierce debates with Soviet envoys as UN Ambassador had fired up his popularity. Accepting the dangerous posting in Viet Nam added further kindling. Henry Cabot Lodge was looking like presidential timber about to burn bright. Especially if he succeeded in his present assignment. Maybe Diem’s wasn’t the only presidency at stake in Southeast Asia.
“You done with those?” Robeson said, setting down the file he’d been reading. “All three officers she’s zapped,” he announced, “were from Military Assistance Advisory Group.”
“So? Most everyone in Saigon is MAAG.”
“True, but all three MAAG officers she tapped were G-5s.”
“Civil affairs? Three kills and she hasn’t managed to hit a field advisor yet?”
“Nope. All administrators. Captain Edward Victor, a fancy numbers-cruncher advising in the Vietnamese comptroller’s office. Reserve Major Henderson LaValle, economist, called up to hand-hold Diem’s assistant secretary at their Economy Directorate. Target three, Major James Furth, master’s degree from Harvard Business School, oversaw import licenses for USAID in a STEM office, whatever that is.”
“Saigon commandos in the rear with the beer.”
Robeson yawned and I realized how bone-tired I was. Neither of us had slept much on Con Son. I left Robeson nursing the Jim Beam and went to my room to rack out. We both slept until dark, when we staggered up to the roof for dinner. Across the river, a couple of forty-pound parachute flares floated down like smoking suns.
“Une nuit blanche,” said the barman. A white night.
We knocked back cocktails and dined on oysters, fried noodles, and cutlets washed down with cold beer. I was feeling no pain and Robeson seemed to be recovering from the shock of what he’d done to the sentry.
“This ain’t makin’ a whole lotta sense,” he said, wiping his mouth with a linen napkin.
“Which part?”
“The woman’s dressed as a civilian and murdering advisory personnel, so we get the assignment. I understand that.”
“So what don’t you get?” I said, sipping my beer.
“Why our CIA agents and their badass counter-terrorist trainees haven’t taken over the job of chasin’ down lovely Lady Death. Given what’s on the line, I mean. Big-shot targets. So why ain’t serious measures being taken? If she’s aiming to grease our esteemed ambassador, CIA ought to take the reins, no? Likewise if she’s looking to put our client’s head of state in the ground. There’s American spooks across Saigon who are tight with the regime. The CIA’s tutoring our Asian pals in the dark arts, training and advising Nhu’s gestapo outfits. Their people are totally plugged into all the National Police forces.”
“So you think the spooks should be out front, taking p
oint.”
“This spook says exactement. Eyes everywhere. Resources galore. But do you see any sneaky petes on CIA payrolls invitin’ us to confer with their Vietnamese counterintelligence contacts?”
“So you’d be happier if our spooks and their informants would just get together to do their back-alley shit?”
“And leave us the hell out of it, yes. Those good old boys take pride in their unsung deeds. Let them take it all, go for the glory. Instead they’re leaving all two of us out front to take whatever heat is coming. I don’t even particularly want to be in the caboose on this fucker. Or maybe you’re thinking we’re the lead investigators ’cause they hold us to be such splendid GI detectives? That based on our heretofore stellar work on PX pilfering cases they somehow decided we should be the ones to crack an assassination ring?”
“Listen, if Diem’s her target there’s no way Brother Nhu is sitting this out. CIO, VBI, all his secret police and our CIA gotta be looking for her, too; they’re just doing it under the radar.”
“Maybe so,” said Robeson, “but I’m thinking our red, white, and blue-blooded finest are deliberately keeping to the weeds.”
“You might be right, especially if she’s after Lodge. Maybe the CIA is okay with Lodge being in her sights.”
The local gossips had been saying for months there was no love lost between Lodge and the CIA. From day one, Ambassador Lodge had thought the CIA station chief was far too chummy with the Ngo clan, Brother Nhu in particular. Lodge had wanted Jocko Richardson gone, but Langley refused to recall him. The White House neither. Out of nowhere, a two-bit DC paper reveals that Jocko Richardson is Agency. Smears Richardson as a rogue spymaster and accuses him of sharing closely held information with Nhu, the man behind the murderous attacks on the Buddhists. Then the rest of the press joins in. Pictures of Richardson run next to shots of a protesting Buddhist monk melting in a bubble of fire, gulping flames into the round black hole of his mouth.
“Lodge played nasty,” I said. “Maybe Richardson’s faithful are paying him back, dragging their feet on the Red Queen.”
“I don’t give a goddamn why they’re doing it,” Robeson said, looking worried. “I just don’t want to be holding the claim check when whatever happens happens.”
He had a point. If she popped either bigwig before we found her, we would be the first ones held to account.
“We’re strictly ‘use and toss’ in this,” he said. “Handy-dandy if they need some fools to catch the blowback when she plants the next dude. Especially if it’s an Old Fox. Me, I don’t wanna land some payback assignment to the ass end of nowhere. You get what I’m saying, Sarge?”
I did. It was all too easy to picture the STRAC information officers at a bullshit afternoon press briefing, khakis starched, demo boards up on easels, reciting rote crap about Free World Forces. They’d flip through charts of our failings, their pointers indicating exactly at which junctures Sergeants Miser and Robeson had gone disastrously wrong.
Chapter Twelve
The blue-and-white seersucker jacket I’d borrowed from Robeson was too big in the shoulders and too small at the waist. I could carry it off as long as I left it unbuttoned. The matching slacks hadn’t fit me at all so I grabbed my plain tan trousers. At oh seven thirty, I hailed a blue-and-cream Renault taxi to take me to the Cercle Sportif, where Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge liked to swim his morning laps in the outdoor pool. He’d only been in-country a few months, but his daily routines were common knowledge.
The city was already in motion. Citizens had risen out of their comfortable cots in doorways and up from improvised pallets on the bare sidewalks, where parents and kids squatted to relieve themselves. Ever since the Buddhist protests and government crackdown, a lot of them had made a point of doing their business on the rear wall of the secret-police headquarters near the bloodstained Xa Loi pagoda.
The hack let me off in the parkland among stately trees and flowering bougainvillea. The red of the flame trees was brilliant; the shrubbery the deepest green, some of it groomed in the French style in the shape of animals. A couple of giggling American girls trotted by on small Asian horses, their ponytails bouncing in time with their butts.
Reaching the back of the stucco pavilion, I climbed the outside stairs to the elevated pool, where jacketed waiters were serving coffee and croissants to half-clad young Frenchmen and Corsican girls in the tiniest bathing suits. I walked around the pool’s tiled apron, which was lined with Greek columns, trying to spot Lodge. He wasn’t in the water.
I scanned the throng in reclining chairs and at poolside tables. The Cercle Sportif was an aging piece of colonial luxury enjoyed by Western swells, including our Republican Yankee ambassador, invisible at the moment. The Cerc had become popular with Americans and their families, but was still dominated by the French: bankers, merchants, Le Monde correspondents, Gaullist doctors, plantation owners, and all their privileged sons and bikini-clad daughters. From what I could see, they’d been joined by a smattering of the Vietnamese elite who’d previously been denied membership, and by senior Vietnamese military; many had served under the French and held both passports.
Behind some potted palms, a gang of French teens, happily taunting a pair of American boys, suddenly spat in their faces. I wanted to smack the little frog shits but didn’t think getting ejected from the Cerc was what Deckle had in mind.
I surveyed the tennis courts and the large gingerbread clubhouse beyond that contained the bar, the club’s dining hall, and a mahogany-paneled library where white-haired gents kicked back in armchairs after breakfast, heads nodding over foreign newspapers. Tables on the huge porch were already being set for their lunch; its gold railing glinted in the sun.
Between the pool and the clubhouse the ten clay tennis courts were all in use. Surprisingly fit American officers in middle age rallied with paunchy Asian men and thin Vietnamese military types with close-cropped hair. All wore regulation whites, a strict club rule. I easily spotted Ambassador Lodge serving in the farthest court, all six-foot-four of him.
Lodge’s court seemed a bit more private than the others, but still plenty risky. Two US Marines in short-sleeve khaki uniforms and garrison caps stood at either end, girded with white pistol belts and holsters, each packing a .45 Army automatic, their backs to the game. I wondered if they’d noticed the light flashing off a lens in an upstairs window of the clubhouse, because Lodge was doing almost nothing to protect himself. Luckily, a sniper’s scope wouldn’t produce that kind of reflection. But someone was watching Lodge’s game through binoculars or a camera lens.
I descended to the wide path between the paired courts. An unfortunate-looking Vietnamese general in fatigues stood hatless near the net, arms folded. A gun butt stuck out from his worn leather shoulder holster. The closer I got the worse he looked, the flashing black eyes in the large smooth head as hard as the metal stars on his collar. Not a face you wanted to get to know better. Next to him a stiletto-thin captain with a Sten gun leaned on the net post. He was no Miss Congeniality either.
Cabot Lodge could hit the ball but he was panting for air, sweat dripping from his chin. His fleet-footed tennis partner, “Fatty” to his friends, was two hundred pounds easy. Almost six feet tall, “Big” Minh was the country’s most popular general. When he and Lodge finished their joust and came to the net to shake hands, Big Minh flashed his famous toothless smile. Japanese interrogators had broken off all but one of his teeth during the war, and he often didn’t wear his dentures. He preferred to display his ruined mouth like a badge of honor, especially when meeting Tokyo dignitaries, happily recounting the story of how he’d strangled his Japanese warder and escaped.
A graduate of the General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, these days Minh served as “special advisor” to President Diem. Translation: he was out of favor, a field commander without troops, smiled upon but suspected. He’d been benched, but not because he was Buddhist when
the clique at the top calling all the shots were Catholics. And not because one of his brothers was said to be a Communist general, or because the Americans liked him too much, although that didn’t help. What made him odd man out was his success in the field, which had turned him into a national hero. Worried that Fatty could easily rouse his many admirers among the officers and enlisted men to mount a coup, Diem had assigned Big Minh to desk duty, allowing the general plenty of time for his orchids and mah-jongg and Japanese doll collection, but keeping him far from his men. No surprise that Big Minh had not stirred himself from his hobbies to help his president during the last two coup attempts.
President Diem had similarly mothballed a number of the better ARVN field commanders to keep them from temptation. Nor did he trust any single officer with the authority of supreme command. Instead, he divvied up that authority among a few loyalists, keeping the position of defense minister for himself. The few he allowed field commands were forbidden to maneuver their battalions without his personal okay. Just to keep his commanders off-balance, he’d regularly bypass them to personally deploy their men by radio from the palace.
With Buddhist protesters still regularly rioting and demonstrating, President Diem had brought a whole division up from the Delta to just across the river from Saigon—close enough to protect him, but not so near as to endanger him if subverted by a rebelling commander. The Reds took full advantage of this division’s absence from the field, but for Diem, fighting the Communist enemy was taking a back seat to foiling plots against his regime. Saigon buzzed with speculation about who might be conspiring against the unpopular president, his loathed brothers, and his much-hated sister-in-law. Lodge’s tennis partner, General Big Minh, led the list.
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