Rain Fall

by Barry Eisler

  I snapped upright, my body coiled like a spring. Easy, John. Just a dream. I tightened my abdomen and forced a long hiss of air out through my nostrils, feeling like Crazy Jake was right there in the room with me.

  My face was wet and I thought it was bleeding again, but when I put my hand to my cheek and looked at my fingers I realized that it was tears. What the hell is this? I thought.

  The moon was low in the sky, its light flowing in through the window. Midori was sitting up on the couch, her knees drawn to her chest. “Bad dream?” she asked.

  I flicked my thumb across the sides of my face. “How long have you been up?”

  She shrugged. “Awhile. You were tossing and turning.”

  “I say anything?”

  “No. Are you afraid of what you might say in your sleep?”

  I looked at her, one side of her face illuminated by moonlight, the other hidden in shadow. “Yes,” I said.

  “What was the dream?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, lying. “Mostly just images.”

  I could feel her looking at me. “You tell me to trust you,” she said, “but you won’t even tell me about a bad dream.”

  I started to answer, then all at once felt irritated with her. I slid off the bed and walked over to the bathroom.

  I don’t need her questions, I thought. I don’t need to take care of her. Fucking CIA, Holtzer, knows I’m in Tokyo, knows where I live. I’ve got enough problems.

  She was the key, I knew. Her father must have told her something. Or she had what whoever had broken into his apartment on the day of his funeral had been looking for. Why couldn’t she just realize what the hell it was?

  I walked back into the bedroom and stood facing her. “Midori, you’ve got to try harder. You’ve got to remember. Your father must have told you something, or given you something.”

  I saw surprise on her face. “I told you, he didn’t.”

  “Someone broke into his apartment after he died.”

  “I know. I got a call from the police when it happened.”

  “The point is, they couldn’t find what they were looking for, and they think you have it.”

  “Look, if you want to take a look around my father’s apartment, I can let you in. I haven’t cleaned it out yet, and I still have the key.”

  The people who had broken in had come up empty, and my old friend Tatsu, as thorough a man as I have ever known, had been there afterward with the resources of the Keisatsucho. I knew another look would be a dead end, and her suggestion only served to increase my frustration.

  “That’s not going to help. What would these people think that you have? The disk? Something it’s hidden in? A key? Are you sure you don’t have anything?”

  I saw her redden slightly. “I told you, I don’t.”

  “Well, try to remember something, can’t you?”

  “No, I can’t,” she said, her voice angry. “How can I remember something if I don’t have it?”

  “How can you be sure you don’t have it if you can’t remember it?”

  “Why are you saying this? Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Because nothing else makes sense! And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t like the feeling of people trying to kill me when I don’t even know why!”

  She swung her feet to the floor and stood up. “Oh, it’s only you! Do you think I like it? I didn’t do anything! And I don’t know why these people are doing this, either!”

  I exhaled slowly, trying to rein in my anger. “It’s because they think you have the damn disk. Or you know where it is.”

  “Well, I don’t! Oai nikusama! Mattaku kokoroattari ga nai wa yo! Mo nan do mo so itteru ja nai yo!” I don’t know anything! I’ve already told you that!

  We stood staring at each other at the foot of the bed, breathing hard. Then she said, “You don’t give a shit about me. You’re just after what they want, whatever it is.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true! Mo ii! Dose anata ga doko no dare na no ka sae oshiete kurenain da kara!” I’ve had enough! You won’t even tell me who you are! She stalked over to the door and picked up a bag, started shoving her things into it.

  “Midori, listen to me.” I walked over and grabbed the bag. “Listen to me, goddamnit! I do care about you! Can’t you see that?”

  She tugged at the bag. “Why should I believe what you say when you don’t believe me? I don’t know anything! I don’t know!”

  I yanked the bag out of her hands. “All right, I believe you.”

  “Like hell you do. Give me my case. Give it to me!” She tried to grab it and I moved it behind my back.

  She looked at me, her eyes briefly incredulous, then started hitting me in the chest. I dropped the bag and wrapped my arms around her to stop the blows.

  Later, I couldn’t remember exactly how it happened. She was fighting me and I was trying to hold her arms. I became very aware of the feel of her body and then we were kissing, and it seemed as though she was still trying to hit me but it was more that we were tearing at each other’s clothes.

  We made love on the floor at the foot of the bed. The sex was passionate, headlong. At times it was like we were still fighting. My back was throbbing, but the pain was almost sweet.

  Afterwards I reached up and pulled the bedcovers over us. We sat with our backs against the edge of the bed.

  “Yokatta,” she said, drawing out the last syllable. “That was good. Better than you deserved.”

  I felt a little dazed. It had been a long time for me, a connection like that. It was almost unnerving.

  “But you don’t trust me,” she went on. “That hurts.”

  “It’s not trust, Midori. It’s . . . ,” I said, then stopped. “I believe you. I’m sorry for pushing so hard.”

  “I’m talking about your dream.”

  I pressed my fingertips to my eyes. “Midori, I can’t, I don’t . . .” I didn’t know what the hell to say. “I don’t talk about these things. If you weren’t there, you couldn’t understand.”

  She reached over and gently pried my fingertips from my eyes, then held them without self-consciousness at her waist. Her skin and her breasts were beautiful in the diffused moonlight, the shadows pooled in the hollows above her clavicles. “You need to talk, I can feel that,” she said. “I want you to tell me.”

  I looked down at the tangled sheets and blankets, the shadows carving stark hills and valleys like some alien landscape in the moonlight. “My mother . . . she was Catholic. When I was a kid, she used to take me to church. My father hated it. I used to go to confession. I used to tell the priest about all my lascivious thoughts, all the fights I’d been in, the kids I hated and how I wanted to hurt them. At first it was like pulling teeth, but it got addictive.

  “But that was all before the war. In the war, I did things . . . that are beyond confession.”

  “But if you keep them bottled up like this, they’ll eat you like poison. They are eating you.”

  I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to let it out.

  What’s with you? I thought. Do you want to drive her away?

  Yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe that would be best. I couldn’t tell her about her father, but I could tell her something worse.

  When I spoke, my voice was dry and steady. “Atrocities, Midori. I’m talking about atrocities.”

  Always a good conversation starter. But she stayed with me. “I don’t know what you did,” she said, “but I know it was a long time ago. In another world.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can’t make you understand, not if you weren’t over there.” I pressed my fingertips to my eyes again, the reflex useless against the images playing in my mind.

  “A part of me loved it, thrived on it. Operating in the NVA’s backyard, not everybody could do that. Some guys, when they’d hear the insert helicopters going off into the distance and the jungle go quiet, they’d panic, they couldn’t breathe. Not me. I had over twenty missions in India
n country. People would say I had used up all my luck, but I just kept going, and the missions kept getting crazier.

  “I was one of the youngest One-Zeros — SOG team leaders — ever. My teammates and I were tight. We could be twelve guys against an NVA division, and I knew that not one of my people would run. And they knew I wouldn’t, either. Do you know what that’s like, for a kid who’s been ostracized his whole life because he’s a half-breed?”

  I talked faster. “I don’t care who you are. If you wade that deeply into the blood and muck, you won’t stay clean. Some people are more susceptible than others, but eventually everyone goes over the edge. Two of your people are blown in half by a Bouncing Betty mine, their legs torn from their bodies. You’re holding what’s left of them in the last moments of their lives, telling them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay, you’re going to be okay,’ they’re crying and you’re crying and then they’re dead. You walk away, you’re covered with their insides.

  “You lay your own booby traps for the enemy — that was one of our specialties, tit for tat — but there are only twelve of you and you can’t win that kind of war of attrition no matter how much more you bleed them than they bleed you. You take more losses, and the frustration — the rage, the strangling, muscle-bunching rage — just builds and builds. And then one day, you’re moving through a village with the power of life and death slung over your shoulder, sweeping back and forth, back and forth, muzzle forward. You’re in a declared free-fire zone, meaning anyone who isn’t a confirmed friendly is assumed to be Vietcong and treated accordingly. And intel tells you this village is a hotbed of V.C. activity, they’re feeding half the sector, they’re a conduit for arms that are flowing south down the Trail. The people are giving you sullen looks, and some mama-san says, ‘Hey, Joe, you fuck mommie, you number ten,’ some shit like that. I mean, you’ve got the intel. And two hours earlier you lost another buddy to a booby trap. Believe me, someone is going to pay.”

  I took two deep breaths. “Tell me to stop, or I’m going to keep going.”

  Midori was silent.

  “The village was called Cu Lai. We herded all the people together, maybe forty or fifty people, including women and children. We burned their homes down right in front of them. We shot all their farm animals, massacred the pigs and cows. Effigy, you know? Catharsis. But it wasn’t cathartic enough.

  “Now what are we supposed to do with these people? I used the radio, even though you’re not supposed to because the enemy can triangulate, they can find your position. But what were we supposed to do with these people? We had just destroyed their village.

  “The guy on the other end of the radio, I still don’t know who, says, ‘Waste ’em.’ This was the way we described killing back then — so and so got wasted, we wasted ten V.C.

  “I’m quiet, and the guy says again, ‘Waste ’em.’ Now this is unnerving. It’s one thing to be on the brink of hot-blooded murder. It’s another to have the impulse coolly sanctioned higher up the chain of command. Suddenly I’m scared, realizing how close we had been. I say, ‘Waste who?’ He says, ‘All of ’em. Everybody.’ I say, ‘We’re talking about forty, fifty people here, some women and children, too. Do you understand that?’ The guy says again, ‘Just waste ’em.’ ‘Can I have your name and rank?’ I say, because suddenly I’m not going to kill all these people just because a voice over the radio tells me to. ‘Son,’ the voice says, ‘I assure you if I told you my rank you’d shit your pants for me. You are in a declared free-fire zone. Now do as I say.’

  “I told him I wouldn’t do it without being able to verify his authority. Then two more people, who claimed to be this guy’s superiors, got on the radio. One of them says, ‘You have been given a direct order under the authority of the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Obey this order or suffer the consequences.’

  “So I went back to the rest of the unit to talk this over. They were guarding the villagers. I told them what I had just heard. For most of the guys, it had the same effect it had on me: it cooled them down, scared them. But some of them it excited. ‘No fucking way,’ they were saying. ‘They’re telling us to waste ’em? Far out.’ Still, everyone was hesitating.

  “I had a friend, Jimmy Calhoun, who everyone called Crazy Jake. He hadn’t been contributing much to the conversation. All of a sudden he says, ‘Fucking pussies. Waste ’em means waste ’em.’ He starts yelling at the villagers in Vietnamese. ‘Get down, everybody on the ground! Num suyn!’ And the villagers complied. We were fascinated, wondering what he was going to do. Jimmy doesn’t even slow down, he just steps back, shoulders his rifle, then ka-pop! ka-pop! he starts shooting them. It was weird; no one tried to run away. Then one of the other guys yells ‘Crazy fuckin’ Jake!’ and shoulders his rifle, too. The next thing I knew we were all unloading our clips into these people, just blowing them apart. Clip runs out, press, slide, click, you put in a new clip and fire some more.”

  My voice was still steady, my eyes fixed straight ahead, remembering. “If I could go back in time, I would try to stop it. I really would. I wouldn’t participate. And the memories dog me. I’ve been running for twenty-five years, but in the end, it’s like trying to lose a shadow.”

  There was a protracted silence, and I imagined her thinking, I slept with a monster.

  “I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said, confirming my suspicions.

  I shrugged, feeling empty. “Maybe it’s better that you know.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s an upsetting story. Upsetting to hear what you’ve been through. I never thought of war as so . . . personal.”

  “Oh, it was personal. On both sides. There were special medals for NVA — North Vietnamese Army soldiers — who killed an American. A severed head was the proof. If it was a SOG man you killed, you’d get an extra ten thousand piastres — several months’ pay.”

  She touched my face again, and I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes. “You were right. You’ve been through horrors. I didn’t know.”

  I took her hands and gently moved them away. “Hey, I didn’t even tell you the best part. The intel on the village being a V.C. stronghold? Bogus. No tunnel networks, no rice or weapons caches.”

  “Sonna, sonna koto. . . ,” she said. “You mean . . . but, John, you didn’t know.”

  I shrugged. “Not even any telltale tire tracks, which, c’mon, we could have taken a second to check for before we started slaughtering people.”

  “But you were so young. You must have been out of your minds with fear, with anger.”

  I could feel her looking at me. It was okay. After all this time, the words sounded dead to me, just sounds without content.

  “Is that what you meant that first night?” she asked. “About not being a forgiving person?”

  I remembered saying it to her, remembered her looking like she was going to ask me about it, then seeming to decide not to. “It’s not what I meant, actually. I was thinking of other people, not of myself. But I guess it applies to me, also.”

  She nodded slowly, then said, “I have a friend from Chiba named Mika. When I was in New York, she had a car accident. She hit a little girl who was playing in the street. Mika was driving at forty-five kilometers per hour, the speed limit, and the little girl drove her bicycle out right in front of the car. There was nothing she could do. It was bad luck. It would have happened to anyone who was driving the car right there and right then.”

  On a certain level, I understood what she was getting at. I’d known it all along, even before the psych evaluation they made me take at one point to see how I was handling the special stress of SOG. The shrink they made me talk to had said the same thing: “How can you blame yourself for circumstances that were beyond your control?”

  I remember that conversation. I remember listening to his bullshit, half angry, half amused at his attempts to draw me out. Finally, I just said to him, “Have you ever killed anyone, Doc?” When he didn’t answer, I walked out.
I don’t know what kind of evaluation he gave me. But they didn’t turn me loose from SOG. That came later.

  “Do you still work with these people?” she asked.

  “There are connections,” I responded.

  “Why?” she asked after a moment. “Why stay attached to things that give you nightmares?”

  I glanced over at the window. The moon had moved higher in the sky, its light slowly ebbing from the room. “It’s a hard thing to explain,” I said slowly. I watched her hair glistening in the pale light, like a vertical sheet of water. I ran my fingers through it, gathered it in my hand and let it fall free. “Some of what I was part of in Vietnam didn’t sit well with me when I got back to the States. Some things belong only in a war zone, but then they want to follow you when you leave. After the war, I found I couldn’t go back to the life I’d left behind. I wanted to come back to Asia, because Asia was where my ghosts were least restless, but it was more than just geography. All the things I’d done made sense in war, they were justified by war, I couldn’t live with them outside of war. So I needed to stay at war.”

  Her eyes were pools of darkness. “But you can’t stay at war forever, John.”

  I gave her a wan smile. “A shark can’t stop swimming, or it dies.”

  “You’re not a shark.”

  “I don’t know what I am.” I rubbed my temples with my fingers, trying to work through the images, past and present, that were colliding in my brain. “I don’t know.”

  We were quiet for a while, and I felt a pleasant drowsiness descend. I was going to regret all this. Some lucid part of my mind saw that clearly. But sleep seemed so much more urgent, and anyway what was done was already done.