Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brown.” The pretty young woman spoke in both staccato gasps and perfect English tinged with a slight French accent. “But I wanted to talk to you, and I couldn’t do it in the office.”

  “Who are you?” Cat asked when she paused to catch her breath.

  “My name is Nguyen Kim Chi.” She pronounced her first name new-yen. “And I am—”

  “Colonel Howard’s secretary,” Cat said in a burst of recognition.

  The smile that curved the girl’s lips revealed teeth as tiny and shiny white as the pearls at her ears. Her long, loose hair was black and silky-looking and her pale complexion was flawless. But it was her almond-shaped eyes, so dark and yet so sincere, that made Cat believe she could be trusted.

  “As I was saying, Mrs. Brown—”

  “My friends call me Cat.”

  “And my American friends call me Kim.” She glanced around them warily, as if afraid someone might be eavesdropping, then grabbed Cat’s arm in a surprisingly strong grip for someone of her size and pulled her back from the sun-drenched curb and into the shade of a building.

  She rose up on tiptoe then and whispered, “I know where Cain is.”

  Cat gaped at her. “Where?”

  “He was in Hanoi over Tet—”

  “But that’s the capital of North Vietnam!”

  “Please believe me when I say that Cain is an honorable man. He helped me get my job, although Colonel Howard doesn’t know that. More important, he asked nothing of me in return.” The way Kim leaped to Cain’s defense, combined with the look in her eyes, made Cat wonder if there wasn’t more than just gratitude in the girl’s heart.

  Which was none of her business, she reminded herself firmly. “Where is he now?”

  “He was wounded while he was in Hanoi—”

  Cat’s stomach clenched. “Is he all right?”

  Kim nodded. “He’s recuperating in Cholon.”

  “Cholon?”

  “The Chinese quarter of Saigon.”

  Pulling the returned envelope out of her purse, Cat showed it to Kim. “So is this his address or not?”

  “His old one.”

  Cat’s fingers closed around a ballpoint pen. “And his new one?”

  Now Kim shook her head, causing her long hair to swirl about her narrow shoulders. “I promised him I wouldn’t give it to anyone.”

  “I won’t tell—”

  “But my oldest brother, Loc, drives a staff car for the American Embassy. Cain helped him find employment too, after his jewelry store was bombed during Tet.”

  A question flowered, full-bloom, in Cat’s head. If Cain was as bad as Colonel Howard claimed, how was he able to get these people such good jobs? She was still trying to come up with a plausible answer when she realized that Kim was looking at her expectantly.

  She blinked and blew her drooping hair out of her eyes. Her tongue, when she ran it across her lips, told her that they’d long since lost the “Peach Petal” frost she’d applied that morning. And judging by how damp and sticky her underarms were, her Secret deodorant was turning tattletale on her.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “The heat must be getting to me. Did you say something?”

  “I asked you where you’re staying.”

  “Oh, the Continental.” Her father had made her reservation on his old reserve commander’s recommendation. It was the hotel of choice for many of the American correspondents who were covering the war. It was also supposed to be one of the more secure buildings in Saigon.

  “Loc finishes work at six o’clock, so he’ll meet you in the lobby at six-fifteen.”

  Before Cat could ask Kim how she would recognize her brother or thank her for helping, the girl turned on her spiky high heel and ran back the way she had come.

  * * * *

  Her “cool” shower had consisted of little more than a tepid dribble of water, her ceiling fan barely stirred the muggy air, and she didn’t have any ice for the grape Kool-Aid in her glass.

  And yet, being half-French, Cat was wholly intrigued by the almost seamless blend of East and West in the city that had once been touted as the “Paris of the Orient.”

  From the balcony off her hotel room, she could see the red-bricked twin spires of Nôtre Dame Cathedral. Johnny had mentioned attending Mass there in one of his tapes, and she planned to do the same if she was still here on Sunday. In the opposite direction, the phoenix-shaped roof of a Buddhist temple rose out of the surrounding rubble of the Tet Offensive.

  Her room was high enough that she could, if she chose, watch the fire-and-light show of war in the distant hills. She chose instead to watch a huge freighter sailing upriver from the sea, toward the Port of Saigon. In its wake, junks and house barges bobbed and a fisherman angled for shrimp from a small sampan with a red eye painted on its bow to protect him from demons.

  Closer to home, the lowering sun dimly penetrated the polluting haze of diesel smoke that hung thickly in the air and the heat that radiated off the shell-pocked pavement. But come the dark, Cat knew diners would crowd around tables at the outdoor cafés or into the tiny noodle shops that lined the boulevards and crammed the alleyways. The rooftop restaurants that specialized in venison steaks and French fries and front row seats on the ever-present violence in the streets would attract their share of patrons as well. And the neon lights would wink on along Tu Do Street as those Vietnamese bargirls smiled their enticing smiles at American GIs whose own smiles didn’t quite reach their eyes.

  A cacophony of screeching brakes and honking horns drew her attention to the street below.

  Motor scooters whizzed in and out of the traffic to shouted curses and shaking fists. Jeeps and Army trucks claimed the right of way, drawing resentful looks from the automobile drivers who ceded it. At the corner, a Mercedes bus with screens bolted over its windows to keep out hand grenades wheezed to a stop, disgorging a blue-gray haze of exhaust smoke along with a knot of passengers.

  The sidewalks were as busy as the streets. A woman carrying leafy produce in a net bag scolded a man toting a live pig under his arm. Shopkeepers stood in front of their stores, alternately smiling at passersby and scowling at the Vietnamese war casualties who sat on their haunches, hands outstretched, like a living version of the Stations of the Cross. Children wearing blue-and-white school uniforms wove their bicycles in and around the foot traffic as children the world over are wont to do.

  “Song voi,” Johnny had called it, just shortly after he’d dropped the bombshell that he’d volunteered for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. “It means ‘fast tempo’.”

  Then, Cat had been too dazed by his news to fully absorb his description of the city’s frenetic pace. She’d sunk down on the wicker sofa she’d slip-covered in an avocado, rust and gold print for his homecoming and listened to him rattle on and on about the exotic place and the foreign people she’d only read about in magazines and newspapers or seen on a television screen. To hear him tell it, war-buffeted Saigon was a veritable Shangri-La.

  “You sound like a man in love,” she’d said when she finally found her voice.

  Johnny had hesitated just long enough to make her wonder if he was hiding something, then had brushed off her remark by taking her in his arms and murmuring, “I am in love. With you.”

  Unfortunately, the memory of his tender lovemaking that night didn’t alleviate her lingering guilt over their ugly fight the next morning. Or the fights that followed it. All it did was strengthen her resolve to meet Cain. And to ask him when, where, why and how he’d met Johnny.

  The question was, would he have the answers she was seeking?

  Cat had wrapped herself in a seersucker robe after her shower. Now she glanced down at her watch and saw that it was six o’clock straight up. Time to get dressed. She turned back into her room, making sure to close the louvered doors behind her before draining the last of her lukewarm Kool-Aid and setting the empty glass on the bureau.

  In deference to the heat, she’d tied her
hair back into a ponytail with a scarf and decided against wearing any makeup. Getting ready to go then was simply a matter of pulling on a gauzy yellow sundress that was hemmed just above her knees and slipping her bare feet into her sandals. And of checking to be certain that her suitcases were locked.

  After dinner at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant her first night here she had returned to her room to find the balcony doors ajar. Convinced that she had interrupted a burglary in process, she’d slammed the door and, eschewing the elevator, had run the four flights down to the lobby, screaming for the police all the way. A hotel security officer who had reminded her of a young Peter Lorre had accompanied her back upstairs and helped her search the room.

  To her relief, nothing was missing. Nor was there anyone hiding in the closet, the bathroom or under the bed. But as he’d closed the louvered doors, the officer had cautioned her not to leave anything of value behind when she went out because the maids would probably come back while she was gone and steal it.

  “The maids?” She’d found it difficult to envision the tiny, work-worn woman who’d furnished her with an extra towel to dry her hair as a thief.

  “Like everyone else in Saigon,” he’d said with a shrug, “they get by any way they can.”

  Now, shuddering at the thought of strangers pawing through her personal things, Cat put the keys to her suitcase in her purse along with her visa, her money and those two letters before she left the room to meet Loc.

  * * * *

  “Mrs. Brown?”

  While the Vietnamese man who greeted her when she stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby spoke with the same French accent as his younger sister Kim, he looked nothing like her. His hair was gray and cropped close to the skull, his skin had been baked to a leathery brown by the sun, and his smile showed betel-nut-stained teeth. Instead of the uniform of an Embassy driver, he was wearing a bright orange T-shirt with DOW SHALL NOT KILL printed on the front, baggy black pants and flip-flops on his feet.

  “You must be Loc,” she said.

  He bowed his head, closing his eyes in a gesture of Oriental respect. “At your service, Mrs. Brown.”

  “Call me Cat, please.”

  Nodding, he moved his arm as if drawing aside a curtain. “Shall we go?”

  “How far is it to Cholon?” she asked as she fell into step with him.

  Loc’s head swiveled as if it were mounted on a turret. The reporters had already left for their briefing, but the lobby was crowded with guests. Four silk-clad Oriental women were playing mahjong at a rattan table. A middle-aged man, dapper in white linen, was sitting on a plump sofa sipping red wine from a crystal stem-glass. GIs in clean jungle fatigues were standing around in small groups, swapping stories of battles lost and beauties won.

  “It’s best not to discuss our destination until we’re in the car,” he cautioned her under his breath.

  “But why would anyone here care where we’re going?” She lowered her own voice to a whisper, though, when she noticed a man sitting in a fan chair near the door. His face was hidden behind a newspaper, yet his cold weather attire—gray flannel suit and black wing-tipped shoes—made him stand out like a sore thumb in this tropical climate.

  “People are not always who they seem in Saigon,” Loc replied in that same undertone.

  It was the second such warning that Cat had received since her arrival two days ago. No, she thought, remembering how Kim had contradicted Colonel Howard’s vitriolic assessment of Cain, it was the third. All at once, she felt totally alone. And more than a little frightened. If what everyone was saying was true, she had no way to judge who were friends and who were enemies.

  Loc led her out of the air-conditioned lobby and into the late-day heat. His ’67 black Pontiac Tempest was illegally parked in front of the hotel, but his diplomatic license plate apparently gave him immunity. Or else the policeman at the intersection had been paid to turn a blind eye.

  Cat had just stepped down from the curb to follow him around to the passenger side when she felt a tug on the hem of her skirt. Startled, she turned and saw a little boy standing right behind her. Except for the conical straw hat that shaded his shiny black eyes and the rubber sandals that shod his tiny feet, he might have been one of her former students.

  “You buy?” The child peddler plucked a bright red balloon from the bouquet of balloons in his hand and held it out to her.

  Before she could ask him how much the balloon cost, Loc stepped between them, angrily waving his arms and shouting at him in a rapid-fire barrage of Vietnamese.

  His lower lip trembling, the boy turned and ran.

  Cat scowled at Loc. “Why did you chase him off?”

  His expression hardened as he opened the passenger door for her. “The Viet Cong use their women and children to kill Americans in Saigon.”

  “But it was only a balloon,” she argued, still standing in the street. “And he was just a little boy.”

  “Last month another balloon seller—a girl, this time—asked an American soldier to hold her wares while she made change for him. The balloons, which had plastique explosives in them, blew up.”

  “Wha . . .” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “What happened to them?”

  The sadness in Loc’s black eyes made her sorry she’d asked. “Both she and the soldier died.”

  Her stomach churning at the thought of Americans being so hated and innocent children being used for such evil purposes, Cat got into the car. “I’m sorry,” she whispered when he swung in behind the wheel. “I had no idea that kind of thing was going on.”

  “There are atrocities on both sides in this war.”

  She wondered if that explained his T-shirt, which protested against the chemicals being used to defoliate the jungles where the Viet Cong usually hid, but didn’t pursue it.

  He turned on the ignition. Then he turned into a maniac. He threw the Pontiac into gear, floored the accelerator and rocketed away from the curb with a force that plastered her back against the front seat.

  The drive from downtown Saigon to Cholon took less than ten minutes, but it was the longest ten minutes of Cat’s life, with Loc flying through busy intersections, rounding corners on two wheels and careening across lanes like some berserk bumper-car driver at an amusement park.

  “What’s the hurry?” She gripped the armrest with one hand and the dashboard with the other, trying to brace herself as he hit another one of the potholes that cratered all the streets. In her peripheral vision, she could see huts fabricated of sheet metal, wood scraps and cardboard whizzing by. Through the open car windows she could smell the malodorous Ben Nghe Canal mingling with the aroma of a cabbage dinner cooking on a charcoal stove for some luckless family that lived along its banks.

  “I need to be sure we’re not being followed.” He glanced into his rearview mirror, then did a one-eighty in the middle of the road, barely missing a truck carrying a load of chickens. Apparently satisfied that he’d done enough zigging and zagging and backtracking to lose anyone who was trying to tail them, he slowed to a crawl and turned onto a dim back street.

  Cat’s head was spinning crazily as Loc braked to a stop. Still glued to her seat, she breathed a sigh of relief and smiled over at him. Only to find herself facing the back of his head.

  “Foreigners are not welcome in Cholon after dark.” He continued staring out his window as he spoke.

  Hearing herself called a foreigner, even though it was true in this instance, made her feel strange. She sat up with the intention of asking him if there was an alley they could use so no one would notice their coming and going. But peering across him and seeing the dump Cain lived in struck her dumb.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “It’s six-thirty now,” Loc said. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  Cat blinked in dismay. “You’re not coming in with me?”

  “I have business of my own here in Cholon.” He turned his dark eyes back to her. “And the less I know about your deal
ings with Cain, the better for me.”

  “Oh, of course . . .” Embarrassed to realize that she hadn’t even considered the potential consequences of the risk he’d already taken on her behalf, she grabbed hold of the door handle and said as she alighted, “I’ll see you at seven.”

  As the Tempest pulled away, Cat set her jaw firmly and started toward Cain’s house. It was even more dilapidated than it had appeared from the curb—like something out of “The Munsters.” Which made her wonder what he did with all the money he was earning from his criminal activities.

  The white stucco exterior was stained with black mildew caused by the moisture from the nearby rice paddies, while the red barrel-tiled roof was broken and jagged in places. Some of the shutters were closed, others partially open, giving the house the air of an old unshaven drunk staring at her through half-closed eyes. A mangy yellow cat digging through the pile of smelly garbage that littered the courtyard hissed at her as she passed through a wrought-iron gate hanging rusty and broken on its hinges. And a beady-eyed rat crossed her path when she approached the front door.

  No one answered her knock, but the door creaked open of its own accord.

  “Cain?” She called his name into the dim interior, but got no response. Clearing her throat nervously, she tried again. “Mr. Cain?”

  The chippering of a sapphire swift as it swooped across the sky was her only reply.

  Maybe Loc had gotten the address wrong, Cat stewed. Or maybe Cain had left Saigon again. There was one way to find out, of course, but the idea of entering someone else’s house without their permission—especially when she’d already been warned that she wasn’t welcome in this part of town—scared her silly.

  She dashed a trickle of sweat from her cheek with the back of her hand. Reached up and tucked in a tendril of damp hair that had escaped from her ponytail. Waved away an annoying fly. Then another one. Finally, she checked her watch and saw that she’d already wasted five of her allotted thirty minutes waiting for someone to answer her.

  Forcing down her trepidation, she entered the house and stopped just inside the door. The sudden shift from daylight to gloom nearly blinded her. Long shadows cut a swath through the small front room and the shuttered windows admitted only enough light to limn the cracks in the bare walls and gild the dust motes drifting through the stale air. When her eyes finally acclimatized, she looked around.