by Alex Carr
“Does he have a number yet?” the provost marshal asked.
“We put him in the PUC system, sir.”
The PUC system was a limbo of sorts, a way of cheating the military bureaucracy machine. Detainees declared “persons under U.S. control” were allowed to remain in the facility for up to two weeks without being entered into the official system.
“Good, that'll buy us some time. You can go now, Sergeant.”
Kat got up to leave, saluting as she did so and receiving only a halfhearted gesture in return.
“And for God's sake,” the man added. “Get him out of the cages.”
AN OBLIGATION, Kat thought as she took the key from the receptionist and started across the hotel's vast lobby. And Colin, laughing when she'd told him this: Our only obligations in this place are to ourselves and our friends. The callousness of the remark had angered her at the time, and she still believed Colin was wrong.
She was not naïve enough to think Jamal's interests were the only ones at stake here; clearly, Morrow's reasons for wanting to find him were not purely altruistic. But neither did she doubt that the boy was in trouble. Despite the assurances she herself had made to the contrary, Jamal's situation in Madrid would have been a perilous one. If his connection to the Americans had been found out, as Morrow had intimated, Jamal's life would certainly be in danger.
Yes, she had had an obligation to Jamal then, and she still did. After all, she was the one who had gotten him into this mess. It seemed only right that it fall to her to get him out. If she did find him, she might even arrange for him to go to America, as she had promised she would. Clearly, Morrow could make such a thing happen.
Besides, she reminded herself as she made her way down the long first-floor corridor, scanning the room numbers as she went, the decision was not hers to make. Her orders had been clear.
KURTZ HAD BEEN OFF by a year; Kat was nineteen, not eighteen, as he'd guessed that first night on the beach. When he saw her in his Arabic class the morning after the welcome party, he made a point of sitting next to her.
The odd amalgam of gawkiness and grace that had drawn Kurtz to Kat on the volleyball court was nowhere evident in the classroom, where Kat was entirely without contradictions. Besides being notoriously difficult, the Arabic track at DLI at the time had the smallest enrollment of any of the courses the institute offered. Only the most gifted students were funneled into Arabic, and, among them, Kat still managed to stand out.
The late-in-life child of a German war bride and an American GI, Kurtz had been raised in a bilingual household, and he had a talent for languages. But he quickly recognized that Kat's ability was not merely talent but a gift. There was uncorrupted confidence to her voice, as if she had been born to the language, her speech in class like the sound of her hand on the ball that first night. Kurtz had been both captivated and covetous.
It had taken him nearly the full year to approach her on his own. Eleven months of group outings and late-night study sessions. Hundreds of shared meals in the mess. And when, drunk off cheap beer, he'd finally leaned toward her in the doorway of her dorm one evening, she had laughed at him.
SHE HAD LAUGHED, Kurtz thought bitterly, remembering the moment, the look on Kat's face as she'd moved instinctively away from him, part pity and part disgust. Amused at his presumption, at the fact that he would even think she could want such a thing. And then, recovering herself too late, she had mumbled something about friendship.
The door opened and Kurtz watched Kat step into the room's narrow foyer, pausing to let her eyes adjust. Wanting to give himself the advantage, Kurtz had purposefully drawn the curtains and turned off the lights in the main room. It would take a few moments for Kat to pick him out of the darkness, but he had a clear view of her.
Physically, she had not changed in the two years since Kurtz last saw her at Bagram. She was cleaner, of course, lacking the high-altitude tan that had been an inevitable side effect of life on the Shomali Plains. But the rest of her was the same, her body neat and trim, her hair cut just above her neck in a military style. She was dressed simply, in a cotton shirt and a pair of jeans, with a small canvas bag at her side.
A soldier at heart, Kurtz thought, with a soldier's sense of the world, that same antiquated notion of duty she had always possessed. But then she owed everything to the army, her sense of self even, so such loyalty was to be expected.
She blinked, then scanned the room, her gaze coming to rest on Kurtz.
“Hello, Kat.” Kurtz leaned forward in his chair, watching her face change. “Weren't you expecting me?”
“No,” she conceded, closing the door behind her, failing to hide her obvious discomfort.
“How was your flight?”
“Fine.”
“The red-eye,” Kurtz observed. “I never can get any sleep on a plane.”
“I managed.”
“I can call room service if you'd like.” Kurtz reached over and switched the desk lamp on, illuminating the room's sharp angles, the distance between them. “You must be hungry.”
“I'm fine, actually.”
“Coffee, at least.”
“I'm fine,” she repeated.
Kurtz motioned to the chair opposite his. Did she know about Colin? he wondered. “I assume you've had a chance to reacquaint yourself with Jamal's file?”
Kat set her bag down but remained standing. She was not going to make this pleasant for him. “Yes, briefly.”
“And? Do you have any thoughts on where he might be headed?”
“It would help if I knew who he was running from.”
Did she really expect him to tell her this? Kurtz wondered, ignoring the comment. “The consensus seems to be that he's going home. Is this your opinion as well?”
Kat shrugged. “He has nowhere else to go.”
“He'd have to get across the strait first. Do you really think he'd risk that again?”
“I guess it would depend on how desperate he is. But it might not be so dangerous going back. There's a lot more supply than demand heading south. If he knew who to ask, he could probably find a boat willing to take him on.”
“And?”
“There was a man in Algeciras he mentioned a few times. A Moroccan. His name is Abdullah. He runs a rooming house of sorts for newcomers. Jamal stayed there when he first got to Spain. Not exactly a charitable enterprise, if you know what I mean. If I were Jamal, that would be my first stop.”
Kurtz glanced at his watch. It was midmorning already, but if they caught the fast train they could be in Algeciras by that afternoon.
IT HAD BEEN an especially bad night for Susan, the worst in an increasingly grim series. She'd woken up five times in seven hours, her hoarse and anguished cries carrying up through the floorboards to Morrow's room. Each time, Morrow had heard the Russian go to her, stumbling wearily down the dark first-floor corridor like a nursing mother to a child.
The beginning of the end, Morrow thought as he lay in bed and listened to Marina struggling yet again to calm Susan. He had seen many people die, but never like this.
Promise me you'll do what needs to be done, Susan had said, rolling toward him in the same bed the night after they had first found out about the cancer. Morrow had thought she was already asleep, and her voice in the darkness had startled him. You can't let your weakness get the best of you. Not about this, Richard. But he had not been able to answer her.
The following week she'd called the nursing agency. A week later, Marina had moved into the little guest room. Susan's very own angel of mercy and death, and a constant reminder of how Morrow had failed her.
He often wondered just what kind of contract the two women had, for he knew Susan well enough to be certain there was one. Unwritten, perhaps, but a contract nonetheless: the terms of her suffering, of just how much she was willing to bear. Surely, not much more than this.
The phone on Morrow's bedside table rang, jolting him from his sleepless meditation. Not quite seven, he thought, as he
turned and fumbled with the receiver. An hour reserved exclusively for bad news.
“Sorry to wake you, Dick.” Peter Janson was immediately apologetic on the other end of the line. “But I thought you'd want to know. We've had some news from Madrid.”
“Go ahead.”
“It turns out some friends of ours in Spain had a line on the phone at the butcher shop where the boy was staying. They've been listening in since the train bombings.” Janson paused dramatically. “The boy made a phone call the night after the meeting in Malasaña. You won't believe who to.”
Morrow didn't say anything. It was too early, and he was too tired to indulge Janson.
“Harry Comfort!” Janson revealed finally, sounding just slightly deflated by Morrow's apparent lack of enthusiasm. “Well, not Harry but his ex-wife. Evidently Harry's gone and retired to Hawaii, of all places. I have to admit, I never would have expected that from him.”
Harry and his goddamned card games, Morrow thought, remembering what Comfort had said when they spoke the night before. His last posting as a field man and he'd committed the number-one sin: he'd given the boy his number.
“In any case,” Janson continued, “they didn't talk for long. She seemed to think it was a wrong number at first. But the kid said something about an S. Kepler. It's probably nothing, but I've got some people looking into it.”
“Not S. Kepler,” Morrow corrected him. “Johannes Kepler. The astronomer. You remember Harry and his ridiculous telescope. It's nothing.”
“Still,” Janson persisted, “the kid might try to contact him some other way. Should we put someone on him?”
The prospect seemed unlikely to Morrow. Even if Jamal did manage to track down his old handler, there was nothing Harry could do. He'd been half-drunk when Morrow called the night before, as he no doubt was most of the time. Hardly a threat. But still, if the boy did call again they would know exactly where he was.
“Yes,” Morrow agreed. “And put a line on the ex-wife's phone, too, in case he tries there again.”
“I thought the war was over,” Harry had remarked, looking dubiously out over the dark countryside to which he was to be stationed.
It was July of 1973, six months after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, four full months after the last American troops had left Vietnam, and from the roof of the Caravelle Hotel the flash of artillery was clearly visible in the distance.
“Tell that to the Vietnamese,” somebody quipped, and everyone at the table laughed.
It was Harry's first night in Saigon after five years on what was commonly and gruesomely referred to as the night-soil circuit, for the Third World custom of draining septic tanks at night. Sweating it out with a permanent case of the runs in the worst of the backwater bases in Asia. And somehow he'd expected something different from Vietnam.
The usual welcoming committee had turned out for the free meal in Harry's honor: Jack McLeod and Steve Robinson, both case officers at the Saigon base; Peter Janson, the deputy chief of station; Dick Morrow, who was chief of base at the time. Plus two pretty secretaries to round out the crowd.
“You won't be up there for long,” Jack McLeod remarked. “The ARVN are losing a good thousand troops a month to the Vietcong.”
Pete Janson skewered an escargot with his tiny silver trident and stuffed it into his mouth. “Jack's got money on next December,” he said, winking. “But I think we'll be here at least through spring. It's going to be a fight getting into Saigon.” He shrugged in the direction of one of the secretaries, who was seated to Harry's right. “Susan's in charge of the pool, if you'd like to contribute.”
“It's fifty dollars to buy in,” Susan said, smiling condescendingly, issuing the information as if it were a warning.
She was thin and impossibly pretty, with the kind of nose the girls in his Ridgewood, New Jersey, high school often paid large sums of money to acquire. Though it was not her looks Harry had fallen in love with at that moment but her obvious and concrete sense of herself, something that Harry had never seen in a woman before.
“So what are we supposed to be doing here in the meantime?” he asked, taking a sip of his Côtes du Rhône, ducking Susan's gaze.
“Standard wine and dine,” Steve Robinson said. “We've been focusing on the ICCS. The Poles, mainly. The Hungarians, as I'm sure you know, won't give us shit.”
“No defections!” Janson interjected. “We'd have the whole Polish delegation in a matter of days.”
The same old dance, Harry thought, only here instead of the consular staff it was the fruits of peace they were reaping, the very people the Paris Accords had sent in to make sure everyone got along.
The Vietnamese waiter appeared with their dinners. Harry, watching the man's calm face as he distributed the plates, thought naïvely, Well, he's not afraid.
“Nha Trang's not so bad, actually,” Robinson offered, tucking into his steaming coq au vin, seemingly oblivious to the tropical heat. “I was up there for a while this past winter. Your quarters come with a doll of a housekeeper. Pretty Vietnamese girl. Keep her in French chocolates and she'll do just about anything you ask. I'll get you the name of a good shop in Saigon before you leave.”
Harry felt himself flush. He glanced over at Susan, who seemed unfazed by Robinson's remarks.
“Harry's quite the amateur astronomer,” Morrow announced in a tone that verged on mockery. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” Harry answered. “That's right.”
“And what's your weapon of choice? Unitron? Zeiss?”
“I use a Celestron C-8, actually.”
Morrow nodded. “There will be plenty of stars in Nha Trang.”
Harry cut into his steak. He had ordered it medium-well, but it was still bloody, and the sight of the undercooked meat made him nauseous.
Susan leaned toward him. “You can send it back, you know.”
Harry shook his head. “It's fine.” He took a bite and chewed, washed the steak down with more red wine.
Susan watched him dubiously. “For chrissakes!” she said, waving to get the waiter's attention. “How did you want it cooked?”
“Really,” Harry told her, blushing again. “I guess I'm just not all that hungry. Must be the heat.”
But the waiter was already on his way over.
Susan pointed to Harry's plate. “Take it back,” she commanded in perfect French.
Harry smiled at the waiter. “It's fine,” he insisted. “It's really fine.”
The waiter looked down at him, and Harry could tell by the look on the man's face that even he thought the steak should go back. But the entire table was watching by now and Harry, for reasons entirely beyond his control, could not back down.
“It's fine,” he repeated, grinning crazily. “It's absolutely fine.”
Then another flash lit up the countryside, this one bigger than the last, capturing the attention of everyone at the table, and Harry was mercifully rescued from himself.
After dinner, as they all stood on the steps of the Caravelle waiting for their cars, Pete Janson had nudged Harry. “Don't even think about it.”
“Think about what?”
Janson snorted. “You think I'm some kind of asshole?”
Morrow's Mercedes pulled up, and Harry watched Susan climb into the passenger seat. “She have a thing with him?”
“She doesn't have ‘a thing’ with anyone. Believe me, we've all tried. Besides, Morrow's married.”
“So?”
“So, nothing. Just trying to save you some trouble.”
Harry nodded. He could see Susan through the car's window, her face dark, half hidden by the reflection of the hotel's façade. She turned to Morrow and said something, her bare shoulders curving intimately toward him. Then she reached over and rolled down her window.
“Welcome to Vietnam,” she called out, still laughing at whatever joke she and Morrow had just shared.
THE FIRST OF HOW MANY HUMILIATIONS, Harry wondered as he rolled over in bed, dragging h
is insufficient allotment of covers with him. In the grainy, predawn light, he could just make out Char's shape beside him: hips and shoulders and shadowed face, mouth parted slightly like a child's in sleep. He should have seen everything coming that night at the Caravelle, he told himself, should have taken Janson's advice for the gift it was, but of course he hadn't. For a moment, the part of himself he dared not acknowledge was wretchedly gleeful at the thought of Susan's death.
Down in the pasture, the cattle were voicing their complaints. Life in paradise, Harry thought, and what more could they want? Another day of balmy sunshine? Yet more of that plush grass? If only they knew how bad most beasts had it.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb Char, Harry pushed the covers aside, swung his legs slowly off the bed, and reached for his worn copy of Harmonies of the World on the nightstand. My Koran, he could hear himself tell Jamal. It had been a foolish thing to say, as foolish as his final gesture had been. The torn page not just the sum of all his regrets but the worst of them as well. The final triumph of nostalgia over reason. Though even now Harry could think of no better vehicle for his failure than the work of Kepler, who had sacrificed so much in the futile service of longing, who had spent his entire life trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, who had believed he could somehow resolve science and God.
If you're ever in real trouble. He winced now, remembering the words. And what he should have said: If you're ever in real trouble, for God's sake, don't call me.
“Can't sleep?” Char reached out and touched Harry's back.
He shook his head, then turned to look at her. She had pulled the sheets aside, revealing her nakedness. Not Susan's body, he thought, looking at her, and not Irene's, but a body scarred by everything it had ever nurtured. Breasts and belly and thighs irrevocably changed.
She patted the bed in a gesture of invitation, not to sex but to sleep, and Harry thought, Yes, here is the sweet forgetting, absolution for the taking.
“Come back to bed,” she said impatiently, reaching out for him, pulling him down beside her, until there was nothing left for Harry to do but acquiesce.