Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  Eddie sat down hard. He tried again to get his own voice moving through its normal cadences, but without immediate result.

  “What did you do to her?” he whispered. “She didn’t know anything.”

  “True. She really didn’t.” Collier continued to play with the lighter. “I’m sorry you wound up in jail. It seems that the police misunderstood the situation. They were supposed to take you into custody but not lock you up. They had been told to deliver you to the American MPs, who had orders to see you safely on board the plane leaving for Hawaii at 2300. It seems you missed it.” Flick went the lighter: On. Off. Eddie wondered how it would feel to be burned with it, and whether he would soon find out. He put the ice pack on the chipped desk, because clutching it felt like a sign of weakness. He would live with the pain. George Collier’s flat hunter’s eyes followed his every move.

  “I was being expelled? Can you do that?”

  “Vietnam’s a sovereign country, Mr. Wesley. They can do what they want.” On. Off. On. Off. “My understanding, however, is that the order was for your own protection. You obviously have somebody back home who thinks you’re in trouble here and wants to get you out of it. Are you, Mr. Wesley? In trouble?”

  Eddie seated himself carefully on the bedspread. He was sweating. The air conditioner was loudly unreliable. The deluging rain had yet to undo the day’s long heat. Or maybe the sweat had another source. Collier seemed perfectly cool.

  “I wasn’t until tonight, when you had me beaten up by the police.”

  “You were at the scene of the crime, Mr. Wesley.”

  “That explains the arrest. Not the beating.”

  “I had nothing to do with that. Don’t you read the official handouts, Mr. Wesley? The Republic of Vietnam happens to be a sovereign country. We’re the guests. Certainly we cooperate with their armed forces, but we have zero involvement in domestic affairs. We don’t control their police forces. I have no idea what laws you might have broken. I have no idea what you’ve bought, or smoked, or stolen. The police seem to think they do. Yes, they let you out, but only as a courtesy. General Loan—have you met him? No? Air Force officer, runs the National Police. Very smart. Very honest. Can’t bribe him. You’ll recognize him if he comes for you. Only one leg. And a very angry man, Mr. Wesley. I’ll arrange an introduction if you like. General Loan owes me a favor or two. So he turned you loose. But you have to realize, Mr. Wesley”—the blue eyes were really too casual—“that General Loan can throw you back inside any time he wants.”

  “Then why am I out? Why are you here?” Eddie found that he had balled his fists. This afternoon, he had sat in the swankiest club in Saigon chatting with a dead man, and now he was sitting in his hotel room chatting with a murderer.

  “You’re a writer, Mr. Wesley. You’re a writer, and I’m a source. I’m going to give you a big story, and then you’re going to go home and be famous.”

  (II)

  EDDIE WAS A MOMENT ADJUSTING to the new dynamic of the conversation. “Why would you do that?”

  The lighter flicked on again. “We share a common objective, Mr. Wesley. I believe that we can help each other.”

  “I doubt that very much, Mr. Collier. And if this is some convoluted effort by Perry Mount to buy me off, you can tell him—”

  “I am not employed by Perry Mount.” The killer’s voice for the first time lost its playfulness. This time it was steel, tempered with a hint of—what? Disdain? Fury? Frustration? Then the magical smile was back. He pointed to the desk. “Get your notebook out.”

  “Somebody stole my notebook.”

  “Third drawer from the top, behind the extra toilet paper.”

  Refusing to show any surprise, Eddie flipped through the pages. He found them undisturbed.

  “Ready?” asked Collier.

  “I suppose.” But he could not still the trembling in his fingers.

  The eyes glittered. “I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Wesley, and, if I were you, I would be thinking the same thing. But orders are orders, and I have been ordered to leave you, let us say, unmolested.”

  “But not Benjamin Mellor.”

  Again Collier pointed to the notebook. “Write this down: America has never lost a war, but we’re going to lose this one.”

  “We are?”

  He nodded. “North is stronger than we thought, Mr. Wesley. NLF won’t quit. Big debate just now: can they attack Saigon or not? Most of our people say they can’t. Some of us think they can. If they do, we’ll drive them out, but I think they’ll be here no later than January or February of next year, and after that, even if we win the battle, we won’t look so invincible.” Flick. Flick. “Americans like to look invincible. A battle in the streets of Saigon would be bad news, even if we win. And some of the things we’re doing to try to win—well, we won’t win the hearts and minds of the people that way.” Flick. Flick. “I believe in this war, Mr. Wesley. Communism has to be stopped. Lose one domino, the rest fall. All right, you don’t agree. So go home and vote. Maybe your side wins the next election. Meanwhile, there’s still a war on, and I don’t have the discretion to stop it, even if I wanted to. People are dying out there in a cause I believe is right. But I don’t think we can win. I would love to be proved wrong, but I think I’m right.” Was that a smirk? “I bet you hope I’m right, don’t you?” Collier said. “You’d love to see us lose.”

  Calmed by the appeal to his intellect, Eddie took the question seriously. “I think America could use a little humility.”

  “So could anti-America.” He put the lighter back in his pocket. “Tell me, Mr. Wesley. Your search for Perry Mount. Is this related to your search for your sister?” He saw the writer’s face. “Everybody knows what you’re up to, Mr. Wesley. You don’t know the first thing about searching on tiptoes.”

  “I’m not prepared to talk about my sister,” said Eddie stiffly. “Not to you.”

  “I don’t blame you, Mr. Wesley. You’re a loyal brother. Every girl should have a brother like you. As I am sure you understand, however, if I ever decide I want you to talk about your sister, you’ll do exactly that.” Before Eddie could object, his visitor was on to the next subject. “Do you remember the last time we met? In Harlem? At Mr. Scarlett’s place?”

  “I remember he was getting ready to put a nail through my hand, and you were on the sidelines cheering him on.”

  “I wasn’t cheering him on, Mr. Wesley. I told him to stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Understand me, Mr. Wesley. I am not a free agent. I work for others. Now, were it up to me, with all the trouble you’ve been causing, you’d have taken a little drunken tumble one night into one of those gorges that make Ithaca so famous.”

  “I don’t drink,” said Eddie, suppressing the shudder.

  “That night you would have reverted to old habits. Depression over writer’s block. Probably the reason you asked your girlfriend to help you find that little stone cottage in the first place.” A helpless smile, an innocent bewildered by the ways of the world. “But it’s not up to me. I follow orders. Orders are to let you run.”

  “Run where?” A thought struck him. “You think—they think—whoever you’re working for—you’re expecting me to lead you to Junie. That’s why you’re letting me go.”

  “I told you. I’m going to give you a very nice story. All about what’s going on in Long An Province. The CIA is torturing people out there, Mr. Wesley. Killing them, too. You can write about how the big bad Agency is doing its usual nasty mischief. Most people will hate you, but your leftist friends will love you.”

  “Why would you want to stop whatever’s going on out there?”

  “Because it hurts the war effort. Because we don’t win the hearts and minds of the people by getting them to inform on each other and torturing them to death. Do you think you’re the only one with a conscience, Mr. Wesley?” The killer seemed amused. “You and I both love our country. We just see our duties differently.”

  Eddie shook
his head. Knowing he was not going to die tonight emboldened him. “No. That’s not it. You want me to run because you want me to lead you to Junie. And the Long An story—that’s what Perry is doing over here, isn’t it? The torturing, whatever else. Perry is a part of it. You want me to smoke him out for you. That’s why you’re giving me this story.” A chilling thought. “He’s too good for you, isn’t he? You can’t find him. Perry Mount is part of the Council, like his father was, and you need to kill him and you can’t track him down. Not in Asia. This is his turf. You want him sent back to yours. Is that it?”

  Collier was on his feet. “There’s a plane at 0730 to Hong Kong. You’ll be on board, Mr. Wesley, whether you like it or not. The only question is whether you want to leave empty-handed.”

  His manner was too lazily confident. Eddie had guessed wrong. He was not sure which part of his thesis was wrong but some part of it was. “Tell me about what’s going on with you and Perry.”

  Again Collier ignored the gibe. He flexed long fingers. “I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Wesley. You could name me as your source. You could even try to accuse me of something worse.” The smile was back. “I wouldn’t want you to go to that trouble. Those gorges are so deep. And the way Mrs. Garland drinks at night, when she’s feeling morose—well, you see my point.” He stuck out a hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  “I have a question first.”

  The killer smiled indulgently. “Of course, Mr. Wesley.”

  Eddie wanted to put no foot wrong. He saw the risk of speaking up. But Wesley Senior would never have let the matter pass, and, just now, neither could Wesley Junior. “What you did earlier tonight. To Mellor. To Teri. How can you work for people who would—”

  “You have no idea what I may or may not have done earlier tonight,” Collier interrupted pleasantly, waggling a finger. “I would advise you not to speculate.”

  “But you know,” said Eddie. “You know what kind of people you’re working for. You don’t have to speculate.”

  Collier’s eyes widened. His good humor faded, and, for a moment, Eddie glimpsed the beast beneath the bonhomie. The killer rose from the chair, and the room seemed very small indeed. Eddie looked around for a weapon.

  But Collier only shrugged. “The job is what it is, Mr. Wesley. Some days are more complicated than others.” Again he extended his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  Eddie shook.

  CHAPTER 45

  Water View

  (I)

  TWO MONTHS LATER, in July of 1967, the magazine published an exposé, authored by the great Edward T. Wesley, novelist-turned-war-correspondent, of a Central Intelligence Agency program carrying the code name of PHOENIX, under which cash bounties were offered to South Vietnamese nationals who turned in informers or leaders for the Viet Cong. Too often, wrote Eddie, especially in the demonstration phase of the program out in Long An Province, those who were turned in, turned up dead, or worse. Moreover, there was an incentive to make up stories to get that bounty, or to get your enemies taken care of, or both. Intentionally or not, Eddie wrote, America was sponsoring a wholesale campaign of torture and murder, in the guise of pacifying the countryside. The article cautiously named no names, but cited “intelligence sources.” Military spokesmen ridiculed the story. Back home, even some leaders of the antiwar movement distanced themselves. Much later, when a fuller account came out in the mainstream press—Congress would not hold its first hearings on PHOENIX until nearly three years later—Eddie Wesley would be tarred for getting some significant facts wrong, although, in essence, his account turned out to be true. Already there were circles in which he was considered a hero, and, for Eddie of the late sixties at least, those were the circles that mattered.

  In Ithaca, Aurelia fielded a telephone call from a furious Richard Nixon, the man she had contacted to try to get Eddie out of Vietnam when she thought his life was in danger.

  “Do a man a favor and this is how he pays me back? Let me make something clear, Aurelia. A thick skin doesn’t make a man an idiot. All right, terrible things happen in war. I’ve been in a war, so I know. But you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Everything we’ve done for him, and look at this mess.”

  “I’m sure he’s just doing what he thinks is right,” Aurie murmured.

  “Good for him. Back in my day, a man disclosed classified information, he went to prison. Do you have any idea how this could harm the war effort?”

  He finally calmed down, but by this time Aurelia had divined his true purpose. She promised him, unasked, that she would never mention to a soul the favors he had performed over the years for the notorious Eddie Wesley.

  Later that afternoon, Megan Hadley, Tristan’s wife, popped in, waving the clippings and telling Aurelia how sensational her Eddie was. She was so glad, she said, that he had wound up on the right side. Eddie and his sister both, she added. Aurelia was relieved to see her friend in such a good mood. Recently she had been morose. Megan had confided to Aurelia the cause of her unhappiness: she thought her husband was having an affair.

  “With somebody on campus,” she had said, as Aurie cringed.

  At the end of January of 1968, North Vietnamese troops launched a surprise attack on Saigon, even gaining brief access to the exterior grounds of the heavily barricaded United States Embassy, after its police guards were unexpectedly withdrawn. The assault was driven off and carried no tactical or strategic significance, but American reporters, many of them caught in a pitched battle for the first time in their lives, wrote, inaccurately, that the Tet Offensive represented a powerful show of force by the other side. Back home, people began to consider the possibility that America might actually lose the war. That those…savages…might prevail. Surveys continued to show strong public support, but there was at the same time a sense of stasis, people saying yes out of habit but looking for signs that perhaps the tide had turned. Whispers began that Lyndon Johnson might actually not be re-elected. In March, the rumors came true. After a surprisingly strong showing by Senator Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson, despite having finished a comfortable first, dropped out of the presidential race. He would spend his remaining months in office, said Johnson, working for peace. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. But the left saw him as Johnson’s man and, therefore, the war candidate. Senator Robert Kennedy entered the race, and in the sleepy capital of a Midwestern farm state, a first-term Democratic Senator named Lanning Frost called together his backers and began to consider moving up his own run for President.

  Too soon, said the wisest, including his father-in-law, a political pro recently retired from the Washington wars: The Democratic Party is going to implode. Concentrate on your own Senate re-election campaign. The rest can wait until 1972.

  After certain consultations, his wife, Margot, agreed.

  (II)

  EDDIE WAS NOT IN SAIGON at the time of the Tet attack. As a matter of fact, he planned to leave Southeast Asia a few weeks later, taking a circuitous route ending in England, where, during the fall of 1968, aged just forty-one, he would hold a visiting chair in American studies at Oxford. Back home, the ground was shifting, but Eddie paid scant attention. Instead, rapt, he sat in his Hong Kong flat reading one account after another of the Tet Offensive. Everything George Collier had predicted had come true. The attack had been beaten, and nobody in America seemed to notice, or care.

  Very strange.

  Meanwhile, Eddie’s desk was piled high with letters and telegrams forwarded by the magazine and his publisher, many of them from journalists considerably larger than Eddie himself. A breathless note from Aurelia contained both congratulations and gratitude for his safety. Eddie was rather grateful himself. While working on the PHOENIX story, he had managed to intercept Ambassador William Colby at a Saigon restaurant. Colby had told him nothing, and left quickly, ignoring Eddie’s shouted questions. One of his minions had lingered, to warn Eddie off, whether officially or not: “This
is war,” the man said. “In war, people get hurt. All kinds of people.” According to a dismissive Pratt, lower-level Agency people said things like that all the time. Nobody took them seriously.

  Still, Eddie had returned to Hong Kong as swiftly as possible.

  Now, leafing through the messages, he found himself wondering if Junie had seen the story, and what she thought of her brother. He realized that he wanted to make her proud. Pinned to the wall above his desk was the photo of her law-school class, with her note to the professor on the back.

  I can’t stop them. You’ll have to do it.

  Whenever his gaze fell on the photo, he was besieged by the same questions that plagued his sleep: Were they working together? Had Mellor known where she was? Had he told before they killed him?

  Perry Mount might have the answer, but Eddie could not find him. Perry turned out to have a house in Hong Kong, just as poor Teri had said. Eddie had no trouble finding the place, over in Kowloon, on a narrow side street off Prince Edward Road, near Flower Market Road. There were very few privately owned homes in Hong Kong, but Perry had somehow managed to get title to one of them: a tiny cottage squeezed among tiny cottages, across the street from a small English church, where the burial ground around the side had headstones large enough to crouch behind. Eddie knew because he had crouched there a lot, at various hours of day and night, watching the door, but nobody had gone in or out except the Filipino amah, who claimed, in excellent English, not to speak any.

  In Kowloon, a lot of the houses had names. The plaque in front of Perry’s cottage read PANDEMONIUM.

  Eddie asked around, but none of the neighbors knew a thing.

  And so he sat in his flat and stared at the photo. The apartment had been found for him by David Yee, who now covered Southeast Asia for the Times. It was small but serviceable, on a high floor in one of several identical towers on a hillside, excitingly new because the units had individual bathrooms, which was not, said David dryly, the invariable custom.