The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  He lived on a street where colonial Saigon blended into Cholon, in a neighborhood where French bureaucrats fifty years ago had built houses more fashionable than they might have afforded in Paris. Wrought-iron gates under street lamps lent the illusion of stateliness. Over the sidewalks arched tree limbs that softened the traffic murmurs from Tran Hung Dao a block away. I sniffed jasmine and Nuoc Mam. Decades of wood smoke had steeped the bricks ash gray.

  I knocked and waited a polite step from the entrance, until the throw-bolts clicked and I faced Trong’s wife, a short, doughy woman who peered like a turtle from its shell. Inside, I deposited my boots and followed her across the tiles to a walled garden, where, cross-legged on a straw cushion on the stones, reading a newspaper, reposed Trong. His hair was dark and rich. He slicked it with oil, parted it with a razor line. Strands sometimes flopped over his forehead, and he restored them with a characteristic two-fingered flick. Alongside crouched a little propane stove like the one Tuy used. I’d given it to him a year ago.

  Languidly he turned the news pages. The garden was full of bugs, and the pages might have been the wings of a giant butterfly. He asked, “Where have you been, my friend?”

  “Working at Tan Son Nhut.”

  “A waste of your talents. What other American knows Saigon like you do?”

  “I don’t know it well enough. That’s why I’m here to see you tonight.”

  He acknowledged my remarks with the slightest smile. The banal exchange had become our customary greeting, and we both played along. “To drink?”

  “The same tea as you’re having.”

  Trong was among the few of my Vietnamese contacts whose command of English did not require the presence of an interpreter. He was a northerner, a Catholic who’d grown up on the outskirts of Hanoi. As a youth, having impressed the French nuns with his intelligence and diligence, he found himself cast as a priest. His enrollment at the pre-seminary coincided with the end of the collaborationist French regime that the Japanese had allowed to administer Vietnam through most of the Second World War, and which in early 1945 they ruthlessly snuffed out. After the Japanese surrender, communist resistance leader Ho Chi Minh set up an independent government that the returning French soon forced into the mountains. By then, Trong had advanced to the high seminary, a fortunate status that kept him out of the conflict—he wasn’t sure which side would have recruited him first. After the 1954 debacle at Dien Bien Phu and the ensuing Geneva Accords, he joined his parents along with hundreds of thousands of other Catholics who fled south, fearing repression at the hands of the victorious communists.

  Had he mastered the priesthood the way he had English and French, he’d have ascended to bishop by now. Instead he’d become a detective, and he brought his northern qualities of persistence and hard work to the job, though, like everything else in Saigon, these had to be weighed against the consequences. Saigon’s officialdom tarnished men as thoroughly as the tropical air corroded metal into brittle chips. Competence alone wouldn’t advance a policeman with his superiors. Installed in their posts through family connections, running side businesses they bolstered with their police leverage, they valued loyalty, and they sneered at American-brand naïveté. Trong couldn’t afford to be labeled as a fool. He’d spoken to me of this candidly in the weeks after the Phu Lam ambush: “All comforts are stolen ones. If we lose, this will be the reason.”

  An experienced cop, he was brave, which perhaps explained his admiration for how I’d saved his son. Across his forehead below the unruly strands ran a scar whose outlines blushed red. By coincidence I’d been with him when he got it. He’d been hosting me around the police headquarters when a crazed Cholonese tried to knife his way through the police. Trong had waded into the rumpus and wrestled the cutter to the ground. Rising from the melee, blinking the blood out of his eyes, he’d registered no anger, merely grit. He was the most valuable contact I might have had in Saigon, a friend who transcended police business, notwithstanding that it was invariably the reason I visited him.

  Handing me a steaming teacup, he regarded my leather pouch conspicuously awaiting its turn. I fished out the photograph of the girl. “I need to find her.”

  “A club dancer? Are you certain she works in Saigon?”

  I explained how I’d found the photo in the rifle stock of an unidentified man killed in the jungle. “He died in Tay Ninh Province, closer to Saigon than to other cities with fancy clubs.”

  “Club dancers are not loyal like your girlfriend Tuy. This one might not remember him from a hundred others.”

  “I think she would. He hid her picture away for a reason.”

  Examining it, he evinced a frown, unusual for him. “To find her, we have to approach the clubs. They are protected by powerful interests. They don’t like the police.”

  “You’re just asking about a girl.”

  “They do not see it that way. Cops are an intrusion. If the owners thought I was investigating their clubs, they would complain to their patrons, who would chastise my superiors. They would have no choice but to rebuke me. I have seen it happen many times.”

  Never before had he thrust out an objection to one of my requests. Maybe he wished for me to withdraw it. He had to live with his decisions; a bad one could ruin his reputation and conjure enemies. How easy, for someone to lob a grenade over the wall into his garden, the playground for his two youngest children, and where in the evenings his teenage daughter and her friends gathered to peruse the latest fashion magazines—more gifts from me.

  We sat for a while, Trong studying his tea leaves while I studied mine. I didn’t let him off the hook; without his help I couldn’t find the dancer. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a large brown spider crabbing up my shirt sleeve. Casually, trying not to flinch, I swatted it away. Trong paid no attention.

  Eventually he said, “Perhaps there is another way. Have you met Phan Quang Giang?”

  “No.”

  “He is one of my sergeants. A strange man, but loyal to me. He knows Saigon’s underworld quite well.”

  Day 2

  __________

  Tuy had donned her midnight-blue dress. The garment had been her mother’s, imported years ago from Paris and re-tailored to the current style. The hat was silk and mesh and meant to be canted rakishly. While we waited for a ride on Dong Khanh, the brim’s shadows crisscrossed her face.

  A seagull might wing the distance between Cholon and Le Cercle Sportif in five minutes across the neighborhoods and streets and police checkpoints. The cyclo took considerably longer, and I worried that I’d miss my appointment. The guards disallowed cyclos beyond the street, so we had to proceed on foot along the lengthy promenade. From a second-floor balcony, armed sentinels perused us. The sidewalk echoed the clicks of Tuy’s heels and the dress’s swish against her legs. At the main door, the French security men held us for awhile. They rooted warily through her purse in search of bombs, guns, knives—the implements of well-dressed Viet Cong women who accompanied American officers to sports clubs. Me they regarded with apathy. Lots of Americans attended the club. In Saigon we were like solar radiation, irritating but unavoidable.

  The Saturday luncheon crowd mingled on the verandah. We heard the splashes and shouts of children in the club’s swimming pool. Tennis balls sailed to and fro beyond the enameled rails where we balanced our drinks. From a court unseen, metal pétanque balls clinked their hollow clinks. Most of those present were Caucasians. Quite a few were French, vestiges of the colonialists who’d taken Indochina by force nearly a hundred years ago, only to lose it in 1954. Since then, to retain their business interests, they’d cut deals and siphoned influence from their American successors. I noticed on some of the white sport shirts the Gavet Company’s colorful rubber-tree logo.

  We were ignored until a man in a poplin suit, his physique like a pear, bulging abdomen trimming upward to diminutive shoulders, sidled up next to Tuy. His goatee masked a face of deep pocks, probably from a childhood illness, that served
to obscure his age. I guessed him to be in his late forties, more than twenty years older than her. He flashed huge incisors. “What a long time since I’ve seen you!” Kissing her on both cheeks, he glanced briefly at me, and the teeth submerged. To Tuy he spoke now in rapid French. She came back with two or three words, then ignored him until he left.

  I asked, “Who’s he?”

  “His name is Christian. He is a wealthy businessman and a busybody. I met him through my uncle years ago. Since I was with an American, he queried if there were financial hardships. Why else would I be seen with an American officer, unless you’d paid for me?”

  “He said that?”

  “He intimated.”

  The man was a pig. Yet he was exactly what Tuy had expected to encounter, and I was grateful she’d been willing to put up with it just to accommodate me.

  “Why is he so eager to do favors for you?”

  “Since I was sixteen and men began to notice me, men like him have introduced themselves. He used to give me money in an envelope. To help me with the expenses of my studies, he claimed. Really it was his way of saying he wanted to fuck me.”

  “And you took it?”

  “The money yes. The fuck, no.”

  “I think I owe him a broken jaw.”

  “Sometimes it is better to accept the favors and ignore the innuendo than to refuse the favors altogether. He thinks he is making incremental progress, you see.”

  “For ten years?”

  “People are long suffering in this town.”

  A busboy ushered us to the second-floor sitting room where electrified oil lamps glowed tepidly over an oriental carpet that the treads of privileged insiders had worn thin. Mssr. Leon Gavet, Managing Director and predominant owner of the rubber company bearing his name, extended his hand with difficulty across the width of a lacquered coffee table. His stout lips forged a modest crescent. No doubt he practiced the same mien with many factions: the South Vietnamese authorities and the Viet Cong who taxed him, the local forces that kept the roads safe for passage, and now, interrupting his aperitif, an American investigator.

  The waiter delivered a glass of pastis, centered it upon a faded lace doily. “What are you having?” asked Gavet. I judged him to be in his mid-sixties.

  “Too early for me, thanks.”

  Almost imperceptibly, his smile widened. I suspected that I fit his stereotype of the blasé American.

  “And what about you, young lady?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You are here for what reason?”

  “To translate.”

  “Ah. A service we shall not require. But I beg you to stay. You brighten this old room.” He turned to me. “Major, you are a policeman, correct? How does it work with your jurisdiction? Does it encompass foreign businesses in South Vietnam?”

  I told him no, which he’d already understood. He’d asked the question as a means of setting a tone: I had no power here. He’d afforded me this interview as a courtesy, and he drew its boundaries as he chose.

  He said, “Tell me about this investigation of yours.”

  “The Gavet Rubber Plantation in Tay Ninh Province is close to the site where a man died early on Sunday morning. He was a Caucasian out on foot and alone. We haven’t been able to identify him or explain his presence in the rain forest.”

  “Yes, I read of the incident in the newspaper. The article was unclear about where it occurred.”

  From my leather pouch I took the map. Hunching over it, Gavet’s shoulders squeezed uncomfortably at his neck. He wore a white sports jacket, and the sleeves rode up his blimpy forearms as he followed the tip of my finger to Hill 71.

  “The location is ten and a half kilometers from the nearest edge of your plantation.”

  He relaxed from his exertion over the map, tugged his sleeves to their proper length. “We call it our western zone. I’m familiar with the landscape. Outside the perimeter, the foliage is all but impenetrable. Ten kilometers is a long way.”

  “I know. I pointed that out to somebody yesterday, in fact.”

  “Then you will concede that the incident cannot be taken as relevant to my company.”

  “The connection is circumstantial, so far.”

  His thick lip curled around the glass for a sip of the pastis. “Perhaps you can explain something to me. The newspapers said the fellow was lightly armed and equipped. What did they mean?”

  “He had a rifle and web gear. A canteen of water and a few rounds of ammunition. Not enough to get him far.”

  “The weapon and equipment, were they American?”

  “Yes. Even the Viet Cong carry American equipment they come across.”

  “Certainly. My point is, because you wish explore what you label as a circumstantial connection, I can assure you that our personnel at the plantation use only European military gear, supplied through the French Embassy. This is not by happenstance. We have no wish to be mistaken for Americans. As you are aware, France ceased its participation in the war a decade and a half ago. That one of my employees would be ten kilometers deep in the jungle, carrying American kit, is inconceivable.”

  “I agree, Mssr. Gavet. It’s also unlikely an American soldier would be so deep in the jungle by himself. I’m just eliminating possibilities.”

  His mouth flattened. “As you define them.”

  “Do aircraft come and go from the plantation?”

  “No. The roads are kept open nowadays, thanks to the Vietnamese Army. And yours.”

  On an unencumbered doily, I laid the original morgue photo of the unknown. “Do you recognize him?”

  The morgue shot triggered a grimace. “No.”

  Quickly I retrieved the disturbing photo.

  He said, “You should be cognizant of another fact quite pertinent. Only a few Europeans work in the plantation’s western zone. They maintain our radio tower, and their whereabouts are accounted for. Everyone else is Vietnamese. So I believe you can rule us out without further importuning your time, or mine.”

  “Mssr. Gavet, please bear with me. I have no wish to unfairly associate your company’s name with the incident. Is there someone who might recognize all the European employees of the plantation, to confirm that the man in the photo is not one of them? For the sake of certainty?”

  “Regardless of my arguments, you’re going to insist on pursuing this line, aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Gavet clapped his hands once and the waiter stepped in. “Bring me a telephone.” He dug in his coat pocket for a memo booklet. The phone arrived and he made the call in French, penning as he spoke an address on the back of his business card. He extended it to me. “Mssr. Hipolite is our administrator for personnel. See him at his office today at sixteen hundred hours.”

  No surprise that the French colonialists used military time. “Thank you.”

  “After you speak with him, I want you to cease references to Gavet Rubber in connection with this incident. If I hear otherwise, I will present a complaint personally to your superiors.”

  * * *

  Forty kilometers inland, on a river writhing to an estuary, Saigon was a port town, a military town, a place of extremes. This was the upper First District. If the fish had gold teeth, they would be here.

  A block away, the trees of the Botanical Garden were citron brushes against the sky. The rain had just cleared, and cotton-candy heads of mist tarried over the puddles and fallen tamarind leaves. Amid them we weaved, holding hands and scanning the facades for the Gavet Rubber Company’s personnel office that Leon’s penned address put on this street. We stopped at a gate where metal spires fronted a garden, and I pushed aside the bougainvillea to reveal a polished brass placard with the house number. After the second buzz, a caretaker, sandals slapping, trotted out and led us through a vine tunnel between the garden and the adjoining brick maisonette.

  Mssr. Michel Hipolite greeted us at the side door. Gray skinned, beset with a severe five o-clock shadow, he might
have been a decade older than me. He didn’t offer to shake my hand, rather he creased his face in what he may have intended as a smile. In his office upstairs, seated in cushioned wicker chairs, we faced screened windows open to a spirited breeze. Gusts tried to snatch papers that a few eclectic nick-nacks strained to hold down, and Tuy braced her hands on her knees to keep her dress hem from flapping. When I introduced her, Hipolite said, “Bravo on shattering my preconceptions. For an American officer, you have a wholly unconventional assistant.”

  “Tuy speaks excellent French. I thought I might need her to translate. Mssr. Gavet did not specify.”

  “He is tight with information. With money too, unfortunately.”

  I asked, “Did he tell you the reason for our visit?”

  “I am to deny something. What is it again?”

  I handed the Frenchman the morgue shot and explained my inquiry. The photo provoked no grimace, and I had the impression that he genuinely culled his memory. He said, “I don’t recognize him. I am instructed to tell you that we are missing no employees from our sites. Which happens to be true.”

  One of the nick-nacks on Hipolite’s desk was a coin inlaid in a square of lacquered teakwood. I couldn’t discern the lettering, only the distinctive parachute in the center. I asked, “Were you here in the First Indochina War?”

  “Too young. Mine was Algeria.”

  The breeze puffed hard, and Hipolite’s curios fought to preserve their papers. He might have closed the windows, but he was the type who needed the outdoors. How had this para settled to earth in the unlikely role of a personnel officer for a rubber company? Seeming to read my thoughts, he commented, “We draw many of our new employees from the French Army and the Legion. They come to Indochina for work that is hard to find in France these days. I meet all these ex-soldiers—my résumé lends me an advantageous rapport when the contracts are drawn up—so I know them. None are the man in your photo. I would not be surprised if your incognito turns out to have had a similar background, but he was not with Gavet.”