“I don’t understand English,” she said in French.
Kim switched to French. “I’ll teach you,” he said. “Tell me your name.”
“Dominique, monsieur.”
“English is a fantastic language, Dominique. You mustn’t be against it just because it’s spoken by Americans.”
Kim had seen Christopher get aboard. He let go of the stewardess and she hurried away. Kim stood up and took off his jacket, folding it neatly and placing it in the overhead rack. He went on smiling even when he was alone; he had learned affability as well as English at UCLA. Kim was a member of the royal Nguyên family; his ancestors had been kings of Vietnam. Now he floated between the new order and the old, taking money and doing whatever was necessary to earn it. Because of his ancestry he believed that he had more right to live than others; certainly more right than any pompous Frenchman or any hulking mongrel of an American.
“Hello, Paul,” he said. “Did you notice the eyes on that stew? They’re the eyes of a whore, very scornful. Every man in the world wants to fuck me. Bourgeois white women think that they understand everything because they understand lust. Why don’t we sit together?”
The jet began to move onto the runway. Kim looked at his watch, a solid gold Patek Philippe with a gold band. He wore a heavy gold ring, set with large rubies, on each index finger.
The plane gathered speed and took off. Kim looked at his gold watch again, rings flashing.
“Right on time; good,” Kim said. “I had to run to make this plane. It pisses me off when I do that and it takes off late.”
The stewardess passed by and Kim caught her hand. “I’ll bet you could find some champagne for my friend and me,” he said. “Are we going to eat pretty soon?”
“There’s a snack.”
“Even the snacks are glorious in France. What food!”
“I’ll have a Perrier,” Christopher said.
When the stewardess brought the trays, Kim waved his food away and asked for more champagne. He had already drunk half a dozen glasses. His eyes were growing dull.
“This food is disgusting,” he said to Christopher. “I’ll tell you a strange thing. As soon as I get on a plane for Vietnam, I lose my appetite for everything that isn’t Vietnamese. French food, French wine are so coarse, so crude. Frenchwomen are cows. Not like home—fragrant silky silent pussy. . . . Am I boring you?”
“I don’t mind a little racism,” Christopher said. “What’s the Truong toc up to?”
“Brooding about you, mostly. I’m on your side, Paul. I understand Americans. I keep telling the old man there’s nothing personal in your campaign to destroy him and his family and all he holds sacred.”
“Does he believe that?”
“Of course not. ‘Who is this mad American?’ he asks. ‘What does he want? What made him what he is?’”
“Will he talk to me?”
“What’s the point? You’ve already told the U.S. government everything you know.”
“Maybe they didn’t believe me.”
Kim laughed, a rare sound from a Vietnamese. “That is funny,” he said. “I’ll have to tell the Truong toc that one.”
The jet was climbing through the clouds. As the lights of Paris vanished, the plane emerged into bright moonlight.
“You don’t have the lovely Molly with you?” Kim asked. “But then you’re not like the other Americans, are you? They make comrades of their women, taking them everywhere. No wonder they have so much trouble thinking clearly.”
Kim moved to an empty row of seats, pulled out the armrest, and wrapped a blanket around himself. For the rest of the journey, he was silent. He did not look out the window. He ate no food, drank no alcohol. He sat with his legs folded beneath him, his back perfectly straight, staring ahead, like a monk in the act of meditation.
As the plane approached Saigon, Kim emerged from the lavatory and knelt on the seat in front of Christopher’s, ringed hands folded on the backrest. He had transformed himself. Now he was dressed as a Vietnamese in a transparent white shirt, loose trousers, sandals. His black hair gleamed with oil. His face had lost its animation and was composed and solemn. He had stopped speaking English.
“I suppose you know the Truong toc is in Hue,” Kim said.
“Do you have an address for him?”
“You really want to see him?”
“Yes.”
“When you get to Hue, visit the royal palace at five in the evening. Carry a copy of Le Monde. Open it and read it by the royal tombs. Sometimes the old man posts lookouts there. They’ll notice you.”
In one final Western mannerism, Kim winked at Christopher. Then his face lost all expression as he waited for the wheels to touch the runway.
— 7 —
At the airport, Horace Hubbard waited near the entrance to the passenger terminal, a Vietnamese official at his side. Horace was very tall and the Vietnamese was very short; neither man seemed to be aware of the difference in stature. They chatted easily, smiling, and as Christopher approached, Horace lifted a negligent hand in greeting. He wore his embassy tropical costume: seersucker jacket, polka-dot bow tie, khaki trousers, loafers polished to a high shine. His handshake was strong and as he looked down into Christopher’s eyes, his own blue eyes, set deep beneath bushy dark brows, twinkled benevolently.
“Horace,” Christopher said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Barney’s orders. Binh, this is my cousin.”
The Vietnamese official held a stamp and stamp pad in his hands. He smiled and held out his hand. Christopher gave him his passport. The Vietnamese stamped it without looking at it and handed it back.
A Thai, a squat muscular man whose feet seemed to grip the earth as he walked, joined them. His powerful biceps filled the sleeves of his immaculate white jacket.
“Hello, Pong,” Christopher said. “How are you?”
“Alive and well.”
Pong was Wolkowicz’s man: driver, cook, thug, bodyguard.
Horace walked Christopher to his car, an embassy Chevrolet guarded by a Vietnamese policeman. The engine was running; the air conditioner, set on maximum, blew lukewarm air into the baked interior. Pong trotted across the tarmac with Christopher’s suitcase. He had taken it directly from the plane’s baggage bay.
“I didn’t know you provided these services,” Christopher said to Horace.
“I have the loan of Pong until the new chief of station arrives. It’s Barney’s farewell gift to his faithful assistant.”
“Why are you meeting me?” Christopher asked.
“Why not? It’s not likely to destroy your cover. You don’t have any cover left in this country.”
“That sounds like a quote from Barney.”
Horace shrugged. There was no need to explain Wolkowicz’s pronouncements; they only startled because there was so much truth in them.
Horace started a Beethoven tape, the “Emperor Concerto,” on a portable player. He pulled the curtains over the rear windows. Pong maneuvered the big shiny car through the jammed streets. A boy on a snarling Honda darted out of the shouting mass of pedestrians and bicyclists. Pong nearly hit him. He shouted angrily through the windshield at Pong and kicked the side of the Chevrolet, hard, with the sole of his glossy plastic shoe. Pong, expressionless, looked through the glass at the motorcyclist. The boy kicked the American car again. Pong reached beneath a newspaper on the seat beside him and produced the submachine gun that was hidden there. He stopped the car and, with the weapon in his hand, gazed calmly at the boy on the motorcycle. The boy sped away.
Horace put a canvas satchel into Christopher’s lap. Christopher unzipped it. It contained the standard homemaker’s kit for Outfit personnel in Vietnam: two grenades, a double-edged knife, a can of Mace, a loaded 9 mm Browning Hi-Power pistol with an extra thirteen-round magazine, and a Swedish Kulspruta submachine gun like the one Pong had pointed at the boy on the motorcycle. The designers of the submachine gun had done nothing to make it beautiful.
It was all metal, brutal and clumsy with its long ammunition box and the thick cylinder of a silencer fitted to its muzzle.
Horace was embarrassed. “Barney asked me to offer this to you,” he said. “Are you familiar with the Swedish K, also called the Carl Gustav? It shoots six hundred rounds of special secret Parabellum ammunition a minute. It’s the most powerful machine pistol in the world, and we’re the only ones in Vietnam who’ve got it.”
Christopher smiled at Horace and closed the zipper on the canvas bag. “No thanks,” he said. “I come in peace.”
“Barney particularly wanted you to have this stuff.”
“No.”
The cousins had lunch together. Horace was staying in Wolkowicz’s house until the new chief of station arrived.
“Maybe the new man will sleep here,” Horace said. “Barney never would.”
“No? I didn’t know that.”
“Barney keeps it quiet. He never sleeps where he lives. Someone might catch him asleep.”
Christopher was amused. This was a new fact.
“Where does he sleep?”
“In secret places. He changes all the time. It started when his wife left him, he said. He’d slept with her all that time, and she could just as well have stabbed him in the heart as have committed adultery. Ever since, he’s slept alone. He advises it for everybody.”
“What secret places? Safe houses?”
Horace shrugged. “There didn’t seem to be much point in asking. Barney has his eccentricities.”
A python lay sleeping beneath a sofa. There was a lump in its smooth body. The snake was another of Wolkowicz’s eccentricities.
“The python goes with the house,” Horace said. “Barney fed it a pig before he left; it’s supposed to sleep until it has digested its meal. Snakes are not very responsive pets. I wonder how the new chief is going to feel when it wakes up and asks for the second little pig.”
— 8 —
In the late afternoon, Horace took a nap. As soon as it was dark, Christopher went out. In a leather shoulder bag he carried a change of clothes and a toilet kit, enough for an overnight trip. He thought that Pong might follow him, but he did not.
As soon as he was sure that there was nobody behind him, Christopher called Gus, the pilot Wolkowicz had recommended, from a public phone.
In a ripe cockney accent, Gus gave Christopher instructions: “I do business on the roof of the Majestic Hotel. Show up at eleven-thirty. That’s too late for the dinner crowd and too early for the serious drinkers, so there’ll be nobody there but you and me and the spies. I’m always at the same table, northwest corner. Do you want to tell me your name?”
“Crawford.”
“Crawford, right. Bring money. It’s very dear, the Majestic is.”
Walking toward the hotel through the nighttime crowd, Christopher heard a loud explosion in the distance. Neither he nor anyone else in Tu Do Street paid any attention to the sound; faraway explosions were not objects of curiosity in Saigon. He reached the Majestic Hotel and went upstairs. From the roof, he could see a large fire burning on the western edge of the city, beyond the weak glow emitted by the streetlights and the neon signs.
The headwaiter pointed out Gus at his table by the parapet.
Gus was a Chinese. Christopher was surprised: Gus’s voice, coming over the phone, had evoked a picture of a stocky red-faced former sergeant-pilot of the RAF. Gus sipped beer from a bottle and watched the glow of the flames.
“What have you chaps got out there that would burn as bright as that?” he asked Christopher.
“I don’t know.”
“Lovely fire. You’ve got to hand it to the little sods. They know how to blow things up.”
The waiter brought Christopher a Heineken beer. Gus clinked his bottle against Christopher’s.
“So,” he said. “You want to go for an airplane ride.”
“What kind of a plane do you have?”
“Piper Apache.”
“That has two engines?”
“Right. Where do you want to go?”
“North.”
“Where precisely? I have to file a flight plan, consult my maps.”
“Near Da Nang.”
“Near Da Nang. That’s a risky flight. It’s always riskier to go near a place than to go bang to it, isn’t it?”
Gus’s eyes flickered between the flames on the horizon and Christopher’s face. He looked away and said, “It’ll cost you a thousand, American, before takeoff. If you change destinations, you’ll owe more money.”
“How much more?”
“Depends on the destination. The nearer Hanoi, the dearer. That’s fair enough, ain’t it?”
Gus drained his upturned Heineken bottle.
“I want to leave tonight,” Christopher said.
“Right.” Gus lifted a fresh bottle of beer. “As long as you don’t mind the pilot having a bit of alcohol in his bloodstream.”
“You’re equipped for night flying?”
“You wouldn’t believe the truth on that subject, mate. Time, gentlemen.”
This stream of cockney jabber issuing from the flat wrinkled face of a Chinese, a painfully thin man who was no longer young, amused Christopher. Gus paid the check and overtipped the waiter.
He led Christopher at a fast walk down Tu Do Street. In the men’s toilet of a cellar bar, Christopher handed over ten one-hundred-dollar bills. Gus counted the money as he urinated, placing his bottle of beer on the porcelain top of the urinal.
“We’ll catch the floor show, then go,” Gus said. “That way it’ll look like we’re just having a good time. Or don’t you mind who sees us taking off under a von Richthofen moon?”
“That sounds fine,” Christopher said.
There was no possibility of conversation outside the men’s room. A band playing amplified instruments created a tremendous din. The bar was a hangout for American civilian pilots. Though there was a lot of cameraderie among the pilots, they ignored Gus, a fellow pilot, as he fought his way to the bar and ordered two more beers. They didn’t treat him as a stranger—for that matter they didn’t treat Christopher as a stranger—but neither did they treat him as a member of the club.
Christopher wondered whether it was Gus’s race or his accent that made him an outcast; he hoped it had nothing to do with his skill as an aviator.
A drunken Texan in a stetson, waltzing to a rock tune, crushed a fragile brown girl to his chest. The girl’s feet dangled two feet above the floor. The Texan swung her until her body was horizontal. Her shoes, red satin pumps, flew off her feet. “My shoes!” she cried. “My shoes!” The drums rolled for the floor show and the Texan dropped the girl. She scrambled on hands and knees for her shoes.
“Have you seen our Rosie?” Gus shouted. Christopher shook his head. “Ever been to the Green Latrine in Vientiane?” Christopher nodded. “Same sort of thing,” Gus said. “Lovely.”
The floor show began and ended with Rosie. She was taller than most Vietnamese girls. Several bright cloth roses were pinned to the curtain of black hair that fell to her knees. Otherwise she was naked. When she appeared onstage, the Americans gave her a raucous cheer. Christopher, seated at the bar, looked in the bar mirror at the men on the stools beside him. They were all drinking beer from the bottle. Each had an arm around a Vietnamese girl, and each wore a steel Rolex watch on his left wrist.
Rosie began to dance. As she swayed to a Hawaiian song, her hair parted like a hula skirt and cheers rose. There was a curious innocence about her frail body. The breasts were hardly more than swollen nipples. The faint shadow between her thighs might have been makeup.
The men began throwing packages of cigarettes onto the stage. Rosie caught a box of Winstons, extracted a cigarette, and danced to the edge of the stage to beg a light. She caught another package and lit another cigarette. The crowd cheered and peppered her with cigarette packages. Swaying and smiling, Rosie danced gracefully out of the way. Someone handed her a lighted cigarette. With
a pretty gesture, she put it into her mouth. Now she was smoking two burning cigarettes and holding two others.
Her hair hung down her back, so that her doll’s body was in full view. More lighted cigarettes were handed to her. She held four cigarettes in each hand and three in her mouth. Dancing all the while, whirling her magnificent hair, she transferred the burning cigarettes deftly from her fingers to her mouth, puffing rapidly to keep them all alight. There was something deeply perverse about the sight of this nude adolescent blowing clouds of smoke out of her nose and mouth. Excited hands reached over the edge of the stage, offering more lighted cigarettes. Rosie coquettishly refused them.
Finally Rosie accepted another cigarette. She had no place to put it; her hands and her mouth were full. She pouted and smiled and listened to the shouts of the men. She lifted one slender round leg and placed the foot on her other knee.
With a kittenish smile, she inserted a cigarette into her vagina. She moved the muscles in her stomach. The cigarette glowed. She inserted another cigarette, and another. The tips of the cigarettes glowed red as her stomach muscles contracted. Rosie did a full back bend, hands flat on the floor. The pilots, laughing and howling and slapping one another on the shoulders, watched as Rosie smoked six, then seven, then eight cigarettes at a time, the ends glowing between her splayed childish legs.
Gus touched Christopher’s arm. “This is the right moment to slip away,” he said. They moved through the crowd to the door.
“Rosie’s a marvel, isn’t she?” he said, when they were outside. “But I wouldn’t touch her with a barge pole. Clap is bad enough, but cancer?”
— 9 —
Gus’s small plane flew down the Mekong estuary, yawing and plunging as it crossed and recrossed water and land. “You cross seams in the air, flying over land and water this way,” Gus said. The plane plummeted and Gus trimmed the nose. “See?” he said. It was a remarkably clear night. The river was bathed in moonlight, and from the plane Christopher saw the shadows of masts and rigging, trembling on the sluggish river water.
The Last Supper Page 28