The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  “Who might recognize him?”

  “Perhaps the French Embassy, though I would not hold out much promise. I doubt he was the sort to frequent the diplomatic cocktail circuit. Also, this incident has been in the press, and anybody who wanted to claim him should have stepped forward by now.”

  For the first time, Tuy spoke up. “He was close to the Gavet Plantation’s boundary when he died. Yet he was not an employee you recognize. Are there employee files you don’t handle yourself, Mssr. Hipolite?”

  It was a question I’d have expected Hipolite to shrug off. Instead the Frenchman shifted his attention to Tuy. She showed no discomfort in his long gaze, met it boldly in a way Vietnamese women rarely did. In the humidity, her hair was as dark as it got, and Hipolite could not have recognized his French ego reflected back at him. After a moment, he commented: “You should take good care of her, Major.”

  “I know.”

  “As for your insightful question, Mademoiselle, it implies that some of the Gavet Company’s business is too delicate for the regular staff to manage. For instance, sections of Gavet’s land abut territory where the communists operate. The Viet Cong easily might render our business untenable, yet we continue. Presumably certain understandings are reached, special people consulted. These matters are outside my purview. If there are, say, quasi-employees, I cannot help you. I’ve never encountered them myself. Something like that would be in the hands of Director Gavet.”

  I asked, “Who else might know?”

  “Possibly Madame Simone Nogaret, a businesswoman with a fascinating history. You see, the Gavet Plantation was assembled from the tracts of former smallholders, and the western lands once belonged to Simone’s father. He was killed in the First Indochina War, along with her mother, by a communist landmine on the plantation road. A few years afterward, she sold the land to Gavet. She still holds a seat, ex officio, on the board of advisors.”

  “Any chance I can talk to her?”

  “Only by way of Mssr. Gavet. And I predict you would be wasting your time to ask. He is protective of Mme. Nogaret, extraordinarily so. I once tried to gain an appointment with her myself, to cross-check an employment reference. I was refused. For most people, she is—how would you say?—unapproachable.”

  Day 3

  __________

  Midnight. Saigon slept like a turtle in a pond’s sediment. Through the screened window seeped cricket chirps and a breeze the pre-monsoon humidity thickened. The eddies carried to the roll-out straw mattress where Tuy and I curled like the folds in a paper fan.

  Show me a rich cop and I will show you a crook, Trong once had told me. Show me a comfortable soldier and I will show you a fraud, I thought. My life was too cozy for Vietnam. It didn’t matter that this was a temporary condition, or that at times it had been difficult and dangerous. Bedded with Tuy, I existed in a place too sensual to be war, too pleasurable to be allowed to go on. And it would not. My time with her was slipping; already I could see past it to a certain road in Massachusetts framed in maple trees. Men counted the days toward such a picture of home. The same vision terrified me, because she wasn’t in it.

  The solution was to take her with me to the United States. As a plan, it relied on two assumptions whose validity quivered like the legs of an overworked coolie.

  One was that Tuy and my family would accept each other.

  I trusted the kindness of the Tanner family, particularly the women. Tolerant and empathetic, they would sense discomfort in a person and sooth it with genuine hospitality. They were nonetheless conventional. Tuy wouldn’t fit their notions of the Vietnamese; they’d misread her politeness and self-diminishing demeanor. Sophisticated, educated, prideful, she expected people to take her seriously.

  I recalled a night in the time of the late monsoons—the inverse of the current season—when the tiger stripes of orange clouds had cut crossways over the moon. It was soon after our courtship began, and in contrast to the black slacks and white blouse she wore in the day, she’d donned a silk ao dai. The wind streamed back the tails of her garment as we strolled Nguyen Hue Street after a movie at the USO. Around us Saigon hummed in petty events: the aria of sirens and their abrupt discontinuance, the artifice of young prostitutes trying to look like big-city women, the jeers of American GIs who construed something funny in the girls’ solicitations. We passed merchant stalls whose venders tracked us with their stares, no telling what thoughts we stirred, this American and his pretty Saigonese girl, of longing, envy, resentment, remembrance. We passed through the interwoven pools of light from street lamps and cars that streaked her with the plumage of a rare parrot. Turning onto Pasteur, one of the busiest thoroughfares in town, felt like entering an American main street: a surfeit of Caucasians. Number 137 had been the site of MACV’s headquarters before it moved to Tan Son Nhut in 1967. Set back from the picturesque lines of plane trees were BOQs for military personnel and other official Americans who worked downtown.

  Among the annoyances of Pasteur Street were the street urchins pressed into the beggar’s trade. Obeying their tutelage to harangue foreigners for piastres, kids began to circumambulate us, loping backwards or chasing alongside. We’d gone a block like this when she stopped and asked an urchin, “Where is your padrone?”

  The kid huffed.

  “Go tell him I want to talk to him.”

  Her tone impelled the urchin to race off, and soon afterward a man arrived. He looked to be in his thirties, a knife cut shorter than Tuy, his hair ruffled but clipped, his steel-green trousers and black t-shirt clean. He had a wrestler’s stance and musculature, his sandals on blunt feet, the toes clutched as if every centimeter of him were sculpted for violence. His confidence showed in the disdainful cant of his mouth. “What is it?” he asked impatiently in Vietnamese (as was their full conversation, which Tuy translated for me later).

  She said, “I wish to walk down this street in peace.”

  “These boys have to make a living.”

  “It is you who make a living from them. But not from me. What do I look like to you, a foreigner?”

  He held her gaze for a minute, then glanced off to the side, as if deliberating. After a minute he barked something to the children. When we resumed our walk, two of them stayed with us, at a distance ahead; they were clearing a path.

  The man flicked a glance to me, perhaps to gauge the American who had earned this woman.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  The second tentative assumption was more of a weak hope—that Tuy would agree to leave her country. Never had she hinted at a willingness to separate herself from Saigon or from her mother. The Vietnamese cling to the lands of their ancestors, and in this she hadn’t wandered far from the old ways.

  She spent the first decade of her life on a bend of the Saigon River, a place of weltering fields, groping marsh streams, and the hazy umbra of trees. The reeds climbed tall, and the children could watch their tips sway against the tropical clouds. It was a place of changing mists and light, continuity in all else, especially the ubiquity of water and the sprawl of birds. Her family lived in a house that pillars lofted above the patina, and she came to think of water as the true foundation for everything.

  Her father printed his newspaper on turquoise paper the shade of a lily pad. Lined in the diacritical-laced Vietnamese script, it was a typical daily with its essential horoscope and sensationalist headlines. Copies flooded the house. As she recalled, the floor contained not a square meter of space that papers, books, guests, or tables of food did not fill. The guests were her father’s friends or employees who spoke French and Vietnamese in equal measure, and they’d pause from their cigarettes and drinks to ask if she wanted to run her father’s newspaper when she grew up. If the press still existed by then, her father would quip, careful to express his anti-government sentiments as innuendo rather than as outright criticism. His business required him to spend most of his hours in the company of others, and he practiced his art well, many people claimed him for a
friend and consumed his time as if it were cheap opium. When released from their hold, he receded into the comforts of his wife and daughter and spoke wistfully of a future in which his moments with them would multiply to fill his days. In these fond sojourns, they sat together in their little triumvirate, her mother and father at a table, she cross-legged on the floor, and they would read newspapers. Sometimes they chatted, but mostly they read silently in a state she remembered as sublime peace.

  Her father had a younger brother, a protocol warrant who never visited their home, not even during the New Year’s holiday. Not all men could tolerate the presence of other people, her father explained, to which her mother rejoined that not all men were polite or dutiful either. On special occasions, they traveled to the uncle’s house in the Third District, and it was as if they’d gone from the natural world to the artificial. The house stood on a cement pad within cement ramparts, and the trees grew out of cement pots. Absent flowers, it exuded the smell of them, as if somebody went about tweaking a perfume atomizer in the rooms. Posed delicately on tables, frail-limbed statuettes begged a child to pick them up, and within her uncle’s house, Tuy sensed that the adults wished she were one of the statues, motionless so she couldn’t break anything or venture where she wasn’t supposed to.

  When her father died, her life became like a dun tableau set with the objects in her uncle’s house she could not touch. She heard the word debt for the first time, and she intuited that her father’s newspaper had draped it across their shoulders, a coolie-pole whose baskets bulged with stones. At first her mother said that their stay with the uncle would be temporary; soon they would save the money to return to their own house. Temporary and soon proved as insubstantial as the mists over the water. In the city beyond the uncle’s ramparts, poverty ravaged families like a dreaded disease, and her mother dared not relinquish the shelter he extended to them.

  His largesse came at a price. He insisted that the single language uttered in his earshot be French. One day he took Tuy aside and reminded her of something she’d known but hadn’t weighted as more than a stray fact: her grandfather had been a Frenchman. Proof of this, her uncle said, manifested in the restless coloring of her hair. Her heritage made her different, and though he offered no explanation of why this should be so, he clearly deemed it praiseworthy. To Tuy’s thinking it was irrelevant, and she told him so. For weeks afterward, he communicated with her only by way of her mother, who admonished her to show no further contrariness; it was a luxury they could not afford.

  When Tuy was fourteen, her school introduced English, increasingly the language of power. It was the subject she tended most diligently, and it gave her a new voice to remake herself in a way other than what her uncle had in mind. Henceforth she spoke French solely with him, or at the French social gatherings he insisted she attend. For a time the will of heaven favored her, for President Diem, in power now for four years, eschewed the French and exalted the Americans. She observed how resentment over this situation registered on the faces of her uncle and the French nationals he toadied to. Eventually they rewarded his loyalty by sponsoring him for French citizenship.

  She was eighteen when her uncle announced he would move to Paris. Before he left, he exhorted her mother to appeal to these same French benefactors. He told her this as he arranged to sell the house where they’d lived with him for seven years. Once again they would be left without a home. By now, however, her mother had been able to negotiate her way out of debt, earning an income working with old friends, virtuous people who had known Tuy’s father and who seemed to exist in every quarter of Saigon. She was able to rent a one-room apartment below Tran Quoc Toan Boulevard, near the Buddhist Institute in northern Cholon. Among the Chinese merchants, in a district where a single room often housed whole families, they were but two women.

  So began their journey back from poverty, toward the station meant for them, had Tuy’s father not died so young. Through their struggles, he watched over them from the principality of the ancestors—this she never doubted. When they sat together on the floor of the apartment, as her mother studied the real-estate ads for properties she might purchase for less than they were worth, Tuy could feel the presence of his benevolent spirit.

  Through the influence of her father’s old friends, and from the favorable impressions she made on those who met her, Tuy gained admission to the university, where she honed her English and digested the history of the Vietnamese people. Politics infused these latter studies, and inevitably she became acquainted with activists among the students and the faculty. Their views spanned from snobbish disapproval of the regime to fanatical resistance. To speak against the government of South Vietnam—a country facing an existential threat—demanded a mentality resigned to punishment. People were arrested. The pressure did not suffocate the political discourse. The Americans wanted to believe that President Diem upheld democratic ideals, and so as not to alienate his champion, he grudgingly tolerated some criticism from the students. When he chose to crack down, he claimed to be purging communists, but if a distinction existed between communists and other political opponents, those he arrested failed to perceive it. Just once did the authorities arrest her, during the student protests following the regime’s infamous pagoda raids in August 1963. They accused her of association with a tainted professor, a frail man who accommodated his captors by wilting like a flower and dying soon after they threw him in jail. A day later, they released her.

  Tuy’s mention of the professor recalled my uncle, Vaughn Tanner. When I described him, she replied that she would like to meet this fascinating man.

  The only relative of mine she ever expressed a desire to meet, a family exile, was dead.

  * * *

  In the dense air I strained to hear her breath. When I couldn’t detect the sound, a panic invaded, and I had to lean close to her for reassurance. She was my ligature to a certain way of thinking, an enthusiasm for life like a narcotic to me now. If she stopped breathing, surely I would too.

  Too late to reinvent myself. Reckless, this state of mind, to love a person from a land I must leave, to need her in a way that was almost incapacitating. I might not even be able to say goodbye. Like a miner in a tunnel under the earth, there were masses above me poised to fall, to seal me off from her without warning. Death was not the only one. I could be sent home to the United States, my extended Vietnam service deemed fulfilled. Or a rattle of the telex could see me transferred to the military police detachment in Da Nang, six hundred kilometers away. If she traveled across town to see her mother, as she regularly did, I might be gone before she returned home.

  Maybe it was the trickle of rain on the roof, the sluggishness of the breeze, but the urgency began to drift. Crowley was not about to send me to Da Nang, not with the investigation running. I still had time to resolve things with Tuy. In a week, this strange inquiry would be finished, and we’d decide what to do.

  * * *

  I caught a scooter to the police headquarters, a gray-stuccoed edifice, another souvenir of the French colonial administration. Erected at the turn of the century, its ornamented colonnades and plinths evoked a pompous officialdom; off-color cement patched the bullet scars from the First Indochina War. I entered through a side door into a vestibule of desks, fans, and typewriters, passing policemen of the Canh Sat in their pressed white uniforms and detectives in civilian clothes. Everyone was smoking cigarettes. The office furniture, the uniforms, and the ashtrays came courtesy of American foreign aid. Above them, on the whitewashed wall, an immense framed photo of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.

  In situation briefings, I’d heard more about President Thieu. He was an army general, and he’d grown up in a French colonial system that spooned out favors, lines of influence and control that traced between the loyalist and the patron. To those it benefited, the system was addictive. Yet he listened to the advice the Americans gave him. When we exhorted him to implement land reform, he did so. When we insisted that the villag
es be empowered and the village chiefs democratically elected, he made it happen. Too many refugees? He resettled hundreds of thousands. He understood how statistics stoked the success stories that Americans loved to hear, and he supplied them. The briefers said all this, and I could regurgitate it.

  Was it true?

  No idea.

  A detective noticed me and shouted for someone to summon Trong. A minute later my friend appeared, took my hand, and led me toward the building’s deeper recesses. We skirted a side office—the detectives’ bullpen—where two men slouched as languidly as tree sloths. Like every branch of the Saigon bureaucracy, the police employed sinecures whose relatives were governors or ministers or military commanders. The patrons demanded services, and the detectives might apply themselves exclusively to these, ignoring their police duties. I had to think that Trong wished he could boot these bastards out the door, but in Saigon’s way, neither he nor his bosses could do anything about them.

  Along the corridor we crossed a boundary where the American aid money had run out and the walls reverted to the original moldy paint. We reached an office whose furnishings were a desk, fan, and chair, not much different from my office at the French Fort, yet I had the impression I’d been lured into the den of an exotic animal.

  Trong said, “This is Giang, an expert on vice.”

  Giang had a young-old visage, and it took me a minute to recognize one who’d given himself over to addiction, probably to heroin. An authority on vice, he had become its practitioner. Heroin had emerged from the ancient opium trade as the cash drug to peddle to American GIs, and some of the white poison had found its way into the veins of Vietnam’s own population. Giang’s delicate hand with almost translucent skin and rosy nails held the dancer’s marquee photo, while his eyes, the only parts of him not withering in cachexia, studied it with seeming hyper alertness. Standing politely to the side, Trong adopted a respectful silence, quite unlike how he related to the other cops. In the West, custom requires a man to resist death, whereas in the East he might have other options. Giang had chosen to accept his terminal declination without fear, and it rendered him the object of deference, even from his superior officer.