by Ian Slater
“All right,” she said, “but let’s keep it strictly business.”
LaSalle spread his hands as if asking what other possible motive he could be thinking of. “Certainement. Business, sure. But—” He wagged a finger at her. “No monkey business — I promise. Oui?”
“Oui,” she responded, adopting his friendly tone. As he left, she was still thinking about what she’d thought was his erection, or was it simply the way the crotch of his pants had bunched up? It was something that even as a young girl used to fascinate her — to think that women had the power to make it stand up like that. She toweled herself vigorously, throwing her hair back in abandon and feeling herself getting moist.
When Pierre LaSalle returned, she was much more hospitable, and her khaki uniform, meant to hide any feminine aspects, had failed miserably by making the size of her bust a tantalizing guessing game.
The champagne was poured, the stream of tiny bubbles ascending like chains of golden pearls winking at the brim.
“Cheers,” she said, raising the glass.
‘To peace,” he responded, neither of them meaning it and each knowing the other had said it merely as a social nicety. They liked war — not being in it, but watching it, being close to it, being in less danger than the front-line fighter but close enough to smell it; to be scared and exhilarated by the rumble of the heavy guns, by the threat of it, the way it had of putting everything else into perspective, of showing just how thin the thread of life could be, of how you might as well enjoy yourself wherever and’ whenever you could.
“That was a good piece you did,” LaSalle said, complimenting her.
“Which piece was that?” Had he read any or was this just bullshit too?
“The one about the difficulties of commanding a U.N. force. It’s hard to do, I know. No pretty pictures, and the editor always want to show the viewers, eh? Not tell them. Explanation is much ‘arder.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” Marte said appreciatively. She was weighing it up, considering the possibilities. No way was she going to let him in her, even with a condom. He’d have one, of course. With his looks, he probably ordered them by the gross. But even a rubber, which most men hated anyway, wasn’t any guarantee against catching something like AIDS, hepatitis B, syphilis, gonorrhea, or any of a legion of subtropical and tropical sexually transmitted diseases.
“What do you think of Freeman’s demotion?” LaSalle asked.
Marte took another sip. “I think it was a blessing in disguise — for the U.N.”
“Oh? You think this Jorgensen will be much better, then?”
Marte shrugged. She wasn’t going to let the Frenchman slobber all over her either. You could catch stuff that way too. “I think,” she said, “it doesn’t matter a shit whether Jorgensen is here or not. He’ll be Washington’s man, a figurehead — press conferences. Freeman’ll do the actual work, only now he’ll be able to do it without Washington and Hanoi breathing down his neck.” Now Freeman, she thought, was a man you could get laid with and not worry. She didn’t know why, but she intuitively felt he’d be safe. With young Pierre here, however— what was the expression the EMREF boys on the plane had used? “Dipping your wick.” Well, young, or maybe not so young, he had probably dipped his at every stopover between here and Paree.
He was filling up her glass again and saying something now about some sensational photograph he’d heard she’d taken.
“Of what?” she wanted to know, figuring that as she’d been drinking her champagne, he’d been only sipping his. She could read him like a book — didn’t want to get too pissed, then the old wiener would just lie there.
“Some picture of Freeman I heard about — somewhere near the Lang Son road during the—” The Frenchman sneered. “—the so-called ‘friendly fire’ incident.”
“Huh,” she said, affecting puzzlement. “I took some shots of him giving orders — that kind of stuff.”
He lifted the bottle again.
“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “You’ll get me drunk.”
“Not at all,” he said, pouring more champagne anyway. “So,” he went on, as if that piece of business was over. “You do all your own developing?”
“No,” she answered just as easily. “I send all my film to Hanoi Kodak. That way anyone who wants to see what I’ve taken can have a peek. You know, sort of supermarket — take what you like.”
Pierre LaSalle laughed. Was it a response to a joke or the truth?
“You want to embarrass Freeman — that it?”
“Oh,” he said with a Gallic shrug. “Don’t be silly. It’s nothing personal. You’re a good journalist. You know ‘ow it is. We get what we can.”
This time she put her hand over the tulip glass.
“Ah,” he said. “You think I’m up to no good. Yes?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly his whole tone, comportment, changed. “I want you, Marte. That is what I want.”
“So why didn’t you say so?”
He moved closer to her. “We French are more subtle than that.”
“So I noticed,” she said, “when you first came in the tent. Looked like you had a bazooka in your pants.”
“Marte!” He sat up, genuinely shocked.
“Well, didn’t you? Or did you just want to dance?”
“No — I mean yes, I was aroused.”
There was a pause as she let her hand trail along his thigh. “So was I,” she said.
“Oh, Marte!” He had his hand under her shirt, exploring, gently squeezing her breasts. “Oh, Marte!”
“You can’t go in me,” she said.
“I have a con—”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll let you lie on me if you like, but no—”
“All right, all right,” he murmured, almost incoherently, unzipping her slacks, pulling them down.
“Mon Dieu!” She was wearing skintight scarlet lace panties. “Mon Dieu!” Still gazing at the panties, he took off her bra.
As they began to move together, his weight between her legs, his elbows propped to keep his weight moving on her there and nowhere else, she could feel him sliding against her with more and more ease. She joined him in the rhythm of it. There was an idiotic smile on LaSalle’s face, as if he was genuinely surprised, enjoying it more than he thought possible.
Soon her hair began to whip from side to side as the excitement in her mounted and he could feel her growing abandonment beneath him. His fingers started to pull down her panties. “No!” she gasped. “No,” pushing his hand away.
“All right, all right,” he said quickly, sensing mat if he tried the same move again, she’d stop. “All right,” he said. “Oh, Marte—”
He heard her whimper, felt himself going and, her back arching suddenly, they climaxed together, now as one, now as two separate beings, each enjoying the fishtail arching of their bodies, each in its own orgasm.
“My God,” he gasped. “That was wonderful. I never believed—” His mouth was too dry to speak. He watched her, eyes closed, her body still moving against him until finally she gasped, utterly exhausted, utterly spent, her eyes closed in a sleep of reverie.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
In Dalat, Ray Baker had been awakened by yet another noise, again outside his door. He quietly got out of bed to check, his feet crunching the dead cockroaches that had fallen victim to the protective line of boric acid he’d put around the bed, and opened his door. A small fleeting shadow was going down the exit stairwell at the far end of the hall — a huge, gray rat, one of the hundreds that staked out the moderate- to low-income hotels.
It wasn’t till Baker stepped back into the room that he saw the piece of paper, some kind of note written on the back of a can label. Even those who could afford it couldn’t easily get their hands on writing paper, one of the casualties of the Vietnam War and Agent Orange having created enormous deforestation of parts of the country. The note said, “MIA — come market.”
It told Baker that the eve
r-vigilant Dalat police force must still be at work regarding MIAs, that someone dare contact him only in this way, that despite all the officialese about more mutual understanding and more economic aid since the U.S. had lifted the postwar blockade, there was still reluctance among the lower regions of the Communist bureaucracy to aid Americans, or at least a reluctance to be seen aiding Americans seeking MIAs and those who some Americans thought might still be POWs hidden in the jungles of ‘Nam.
No one who wanted to help, it seemed — for a price, of course — would be seen lingering around hotels to make contact. It had probably been considered a great risk by the note writer just to try to get the message to Baker’s room. Baker slapped himself on the forehead. “Stupid!” He wasn’t properly awake. It wouldn’t have been the man who made contact who left the note, but a runner — a kid — one of those thousands left homeless by the war with those who had been their enemies and were now their allies.
* * *
Baker collected his expired passport from the front desk and went out in search of a good coffee and pastry, one of the better legacies of the French colonial era. He found what he wanted at a sidewalk café. He sat first enjoying his trai quit juice. He had no intention of squandering the U.S. taxpayers’ money, but damned if he was going to hurry. He’d been chasing shadows for years and hadn’t found one of the more than two thousand MIAs or POWs.
At the same time, because of his lack of success, his search to find at least one MIA or, less likely, a POW to justify all his efforts had now become an obsession. He ate the pastry, which was filled with fruit, and lingered over the remains of his coffee, watching the new Vietnam roll by.
At a glance nothing much had changed — the ever-present fish sauce smell, more scooters, more noise, only now the sound, instead of coming from jukeboxes, came from a jungle of video games emitting horrible screams of victory or defeat. So absorbed was he by the hustle and bustle of Dalat that it took Baker a couple of minutes to realize he was being watched intently by a boy of about twelve, in dirty T-shirt and ragged blue shorts, who even at this age appeared to be addicted to betelnut, now and then spitting out arcs of bloodred saliva on the sidewalk.
Whether it was the good weather, the pastry, or the rich, dark coffee he had lingered over, Baker was in no mood for a complicated day. He made a writing gesture to the waiter and at the same time with a dollar note he signaled the boy to come over to his table.
“You speak English?” he asked the boy.
“Sure.”
“Who are you watching me for?”
The boy either didn’t understand or didn’t want to answer. Instead he looked covertly at the dollar bill Baker was holding like a lure. “Who sent you?”
“A man.”
“Really,” Baker said. “Listen, boyo, tell me or no money.”
“Two dollars, okay?” the boy interjected.
Baker nodded.
“A man in the—” The boy couldn’t think of the word in English. “Cho.”
“Market?” Baker said. “There are a thousand people in the market. I want you to point him out to me.”
“Okay,” the boy said, holding out his hand.
“Khong,” Baker replied. No. “Not until you show me who.”
“One dollar now,” the boy said, spitting out another jet of saliva and betel juice, his smile a brownish gash, his teeth already stained by his addiction.
“Okay,” Baker said, and gave him a dollar. For any Vietnamese, it was good money — for a boy, a small fortune. As they walked past the Red Tulip restaurant toward the Mai Building, Baker wondered if they were being followed by either the police and/or the person who had hired the boy, who perhaps wanted to make sure that he, Baker, wasn’t being followed by someone else. As Baker followed the betel-spitting boy toward the market, he had no chance to double back or stop to see whether or not someone was following him. Just before they reached the market the boy glanced back at Baker, made eye contact, spat, and walked toward one of the stalls selling every kind of fruit from green dragon fruit, lychee, jujubes, and Chinese dates, to water apple. The boy leaned across the counter and said something to the woman serving the customer, her hands full of cherries she was dumping on the scales. She said something quickly to the boy, and he made his way back to Baker.
“You go now,” the boy said. “Ask her for chanh—lemon, you understand. She will tell you she has none but to come back tomorrow. She will have some. Other dollar.”
“What? Oh yeah. Here.” He gave the boy the dollar. “Am I to come see her tomorrow?” Baker asked.
The boy shrugged with an insolence that had broken out once he’d secured the second dollar, his shrug saying, How the hell do I know? “You go see her,” he said, spat once more— perilously close to Baker’s shoe — and melted into the crowd.
Baker asked the old woman for a lemon.
She promptly gave him one and held out her hand for payment. It had happened so fast, so unexpectedly, that he barely had time to think, but he immediately looked about for the boy. The woman repeated the price impatiently. The boy was gone.
“Damn!” Baker said, counting out the money and giving it to the woman. “Damn, I’ve been had.”
“Eh?”
“What?” He turned on the old woman, realized he was childishly taking it out on her. “Cam on”—Thanking you — he said, and walked back to his hotel, every youth he saw raising his ire. “Chia khoa phong!” he all but shouted at the desk clerk, who, despite the American’s bad temper, took his time getting the room key and sliding it across to Baker.
The room was a shambles, every drawer of the small chest pulled out, what few clothes he had strewn about the room, white streaks of boric acid all over the floor, the mattress upended and slashed open, its stuffing oozing out. Also strewn about the floor was the distinctively sweet smell, not at all stale, of an American cigarette, in itself signifying that whoever had hired the kid must not have been long gone. Had he or they left satisfied? Did they suspect him of having information on POWs or MIAs, or whatever it was that they could sell for a high price to more parents of an MIA, or were they looking for something else, or was all this mayhem among the dead roaches and boric acid simply for effect, a warning to quit his trip to the hamlets of Lat village below Lang Bian Mountain? As he looked out the window that framed the warm gold of morning light, Baker felt clammy and cold.
* * *
LaSalle, none the worse from the champagne he’d consumed, wanted to make love again. Marte Price didn’t. Once a night, she figured, was quite sufficient for any nice girl. Besides, no matter what all the sex manuals said, the second time more often than not proved to be a huffing, puffing affair— more a measure of fitness than passion — and plain wore you out, but not in that wonderful, satisfying, spent way. Besides, she was still languorous, in a warm, safe cave mood, and wanted it to last, and she told Pierre to leave her alone, she wanted to sleep. The Frenchman was happy to oblige, and rolling away from her, surveyed the tent with a more discerning eye, namely to see where she might hide her most prized photos.
Almost asleep himself, LaSalle had to concentrate hard to stay awake, his eyes searching the small tent, looking for something that would withstand the rigors of war. His gaze settled on a gray metal box about a foot square and a foot high. He’d seen that kind of box before. Usually they were asbestos-lined-and waterproof. Problem was, there was no key in the lock. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that the photos he wanted to see were in the gray box. Or did she play the fox and keep the photos in some very ordinary place — her Army-issue passport side pouch that he could see hanging from a suction hook on the tent’s center pole? Easing himself off the bed, looking back to make sure she was still asleep, he took down the pouch and quietly unzipped the rear passport section. Apart from the passport, Army press pass, and a sheaf of two thousand dollars’ worth of American Express traveler’s checks in hundreds and fifties, there was nothing.
The second,
smaller section of the pouch contained Chap Stick, lipstick, a two-pack container of tampons, a card of Midol capsules, Band-Aids, and assorted hairpins. The front section, which LaSalle left till last, it being no larger than a change purse, contained a hodgepodge of American quarters and tight bundles of red ten-thousand-dong bills, each bearing a flattering portrait of Ho Chi Minh, the man, LaSalle was reminded by the picture, who had started life as a waiter in Paris and ended up as the president of the republic. Then LaSalle saw a small safety-deposit-type key taped to the inside of the change pouch. In his eagerness to undo the tape, several quarters dropped out, clanging against the tent pole.
“Merde!” he hissed as he heard her moan and roll over toward him. He replaced the pouch.
“Pierre?” she called.
He was pulling on his pants. “Oui?”
Her eyes looked over at him dreamily. “I—” She yawned and stretched. “I thought you’d gone.”
“No, chérie. I fell asleep.”
“Hmm,” she murmured, happy that it had been good for both of them. “What time is it?” She yawned again.
“Eight o’clock, or twenty hundred hours if you’re military.”
“Christ!” she said, flinging the sheet off.
“What in—” LaSalle began.
“Freeman’s giving a press conference in half an hour.”
“I know — so?”
“So, mon cher, it takes us gals a little longer to get ready, especially after being violated.”
“Violated?”
“Just a joke, honey. I have to be ready for hookup in fifteen minutes. I’m doing a spot for CNN.”
“What’s wrong with their reporter?”
“Down with the runs. Too much tit.”
“What?”
She was dashing into the shower stall. “I wish you’d stop saying ‘What?’ every time I say something. Too much tit.”
He still didn’t get it, or at least if he did, he wasn’t saying anything.
“Banh bao,” she called out. “Pastry stuffed with veggies and meat. Looks like a boob — nipple and all. You must have had it.”