by Jeff Wallace
On the sixth floor above the First District, the apartment must have featured a glorious view of downtown Saigon. No need for the tawdry grenade screens up here. Perhaps to block the impending sunset, she’d shut the drapes, leaving the room at the mercy of a set of table lamps that struggled to penetrate the smoke of her cigarette. She said, “You may be the first American I’ve hosted here, Major Tanner.” She drew out her s’s, her voice like the brush of fingertips on a silk pillow.
“To what do I owe the honor?”
“A change in outlook. For years I found it impossible to see your countrymen as other than usurpers. You stood by as France lost Indochina. Then you stepped in, to fill the vacuum, so to speak. An old story, so old the resentment has faded. I’ve come to regard you with sympathy.”
“Sympathy?”
“For your naïveté. Nothing your supremacy inspired has taken root. You’ve made Vietnam no more progressive, merely busy. Having failed, you undergo the inevitable reduction, as we did. Your exit may not be as dramatic as ours after Dien Bien Phu, but you are leaving with your tails tucked just as humbly between your legs.”
I was tempted to point out that neither had she left after Dien Bien Phu, nor were the Americans leaving anytime soon, but I parried my irritation at being lectured by a French colonialist for the second time in three days.
She turned to Tuy. “I apologize for the politics. So boring, eh?”
Tuy smiled disarmingly.
“I won’t take more of your time than necessary,” I said.
“Are you in a hurry?”
“Miss Dobier said you had an appointment.”
“I suppose I do,” she said, her memory jogged either to the appointment or to its fabrication. “So you should go on with your business.”
“Eight days ago, about ten kilometers south of the Gavet Rubber Company’s Tay Ninh plantation, a man was killed. He was walking alone at night, and he roamed too close to an American infantry unit. The encounter’s outcome was tragically knowable. His identity wasn’t. I’m trying to find out who he was.”
“Yes. I’ve heard of this incident. A reporter has been petitioning for an interview. Gribley is his name. Nettlesome, like all the press.”
Recalling the bumpy sequence of inquiries I’d followed to Simone, I wondered how Gribley had done it. Maybe a few investigative skills lurked behind the reporter’s pudgy mien.
I said, “Do you plan to talk to him?”
“My connection with the plantation is unofficial. What does it gain me, to speak to a reporter?” Her statement sounded rhetorical, still she peered at me as if she wanted my opinion.
“I don’t see what it gains you either.”
“Then I’ll reject his request.” From an imperialist, such a tone decided fates. I sensed Tuy go tense beside me.
Simone exhaled a cloud, tipped the ash into a jade ashtray on the glass-topped table. “So, you postulate that this poor man was a lost soul from the plantation. Mssr. Gavet must have made it clear this was implausible.” She used Gavet’s wording; she must have spoken with him. Not surprising. The surprising part was that she’d decided to see me anyway.
“There aren’t many places the man might have come from,” I elaborated. “One is the Gavet Plantation on foot. The other is the site of an air crash, which suggests the plantation as his point of origin, or his destination.”
“The plantation has no airstrip. The closest is at An Loc.”
“I’m sure that a helicopter could find a spot.”
“Yes, if you wish to speculate. However, the plantation is not one of your free-fire zones where everyone shoots at everything and helicopters touch down as they please. The land is controlled, incidents reported. The management would have been informed of a helicopter landing.”
“When were you there last?”
“You are interrogating me now, Major.”
“I apologize. It’s a habit of mine.” From the leather pouch I fished out the photos. “I have two identifications to ask of you. One of them is unpleasant.” I waited for her permission, which came with a resigned nod. First I handed her the morgue shot, the dead eyes of the unknown staring up.
She shook her head. “And the other?”
I passed her the original marquee photo of the dancer. From its ride in my folder, it had lost the curl. “Who is she?” Simone asked.
“I don’t know. I found the photo among the dead man’s effects, wedged in the rifle stock of his M16, an unusual and inconvenient place for him to keep it. Hiding it that way implies she was important to him. Good chance she would be able to identify him.”
Abandoning her languid recline, Simone leaned forward. She aligned the photo on the glass tabletop to examine. Unlike the sedentary Mssr. Gavet, she sleeked effortlessly from one posture to the next, and I gathered that she could configure her body any way she liked. “This is too big to fit into an M16 stock well,” she declared.
From this fashionable Frenchwoman, it came as a curious observation, but then she’d lived here through the two Indochina wars, had owned a plantation in the midst of an insurgency, so why shouldn’t she be aware of the physical characteristics of the American assault rifle? The stock well was a small compartment to store cleaning equipment. Some M16s had one; the unknown’s did not. “It wasn’t in a stock well,” I explained, “but between the buffer sleeve and the fitted hole in the stock it slips into, in which it was rolled up. To put it in there, he’d have needed a screwdriver and a few minutes.”
Her perusal of the dancer’s photo took a few minutes too; she studied it with care. When she lifted her face, a slight smile had settled, softening her persona from abrupt to friendly. I didn’t know how to interpret the change.
“So you’re trying to locate a club girl in Saigon. Surely you’re up against the odds. How many like her? Thousands?”
“Yes. Luckily, I have contacts on the Saigon police with the acumen to find people.”
“I’m impressed.”
I retrieved the photos, tucked them away. “You’ve been most gracious, Madame Nogaret.”
“Where are you from, Tanner?”
“Massachusetts. In our northeast.”
“Ah. The people speak French there, no?”
“Some of them. Mostly farther north.”
“Do you?”
“It would grate your ears,” I said.
“After hearing Saigonese French all my life? I think not.”
Tuy sat perfectly still.
“And your given name?”
“George.”
“George,” she repeated, her g resonating like cello strings under a bow. “Call me Simone. You shouldn’t contact Mssr. Gavet again—you would upset him. If you have questions, please come to me directly. That way, no trouble, eh?”
“Thank you.”
“Now I have my appointment to tend to. Time is for me, how would you say, a hellhound?”
An odd expression; I wondered where she’d heard it. As we left, Tuy in the lead, me next, the fabric of Simone’s sweater suddenly pushed against my arm, the soft pressure of her breast. Had this graceful woman bumped into me? The slightest smile creased her face, and her lips pouted as if she were blowing me a kiss.
* * *
Simone’s door fell shut, and Tuy and I stood in the alcove waiting for the elevator whose cables groaned beyond the sliding panels. I could still smell Simone’s perfume, feel her breast against my arm. We entered the elevator, and Tuy stared straight ahead, as if we were strangers. I took her arm and she pulled away. “I just want to get out of here,” she said.
She led us past the security guards, her heels clicking in the direction of Tu Do Street three blocks away. Her step was brisk. Two minutes along, at a small traffic circle, she stopped, scanning for the taxis that commonly lingered at such places. Nothing stirred, and the absence seemed to trouble her. The slender muscles on her jaw tightened into cat scratches.
I asked, “What is it?”
“Why is nob
ody around?”
The same spot that in its history might have witnessed grenades burst and men shot dead in their tracks slumbered peacefully. Save for the occasional bicyclist going by, it hosted a single human activity, a barber in coveralls who fussed over a man on a metal stool, the quiet so consummate I could hear the scissors snip the hair strands. In a stall that sold tropical fish, a black eel glided in an aquarium. I did not pretend to sense the city’s undercurrents, but to my eye this circle posed no malice.
I said, “People are getting ready for the evening, that’s all.”
She breathed deeply. I held her arm, and this time she let me. Eventually a cyclo came along, and we squeezed into the space that normally accommodated two thin Vietnamese or one fat westerner. The cabby pushed off, his calves bulging with the strain on the pedals, and we left the circle and the barber and the eel behind. Minutes later, on the boulevard Tran Hung Dao, pedestrians and the city’s familiar babble surrounded us.
I asked, “Are you all right?”
“That woman. I don’t care for her.”
“She’s a spoiled colonialist who grew up here,” I said.
“No, I grew up here; she is from the outside. Anyway, that wasn’t what I meant. There is something false about her.”
“False?”
“Deceit. It surrounds her like the smell of a dead animal.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s what I sense. I can’t explain.”
* * *
In the apartment, she hunched in the bathtub silently anticipating the steaming water I poured in. Most of the things I’d given her had been practical and small, like the Ivory soap and the portable radio. The bathtub was practical and big, an antique from an era that had judged its griffin feet as other than grotesque. It had adorned the bathroom of a downtown hotel, where a fourth-story balcony had proven handy for an American Army officer intent on ending his Vietnam tour early. The shaken hotel manager had told me he’d already begun remodeling the room to get rid of the accoutrements that American guests considered passé—as if the behind-the-times decor had provoked the suicide. I’d seized the opportunity to buy the tub. Fifty bucks and four sweaty laborers later, it crouched in the apartment’s corner behind the door. Privacy came from a PX shower curtain I hung from a wire stretched between the adjacent walls, cold water from the hose I ran from the sink tap, hot water from a metal bucket on the electric hot plate. Because draining the tub proved tedious, I paid a plumber to fashion a pipe that ran along the floor’s edge to a hole in the masonry through which the bathwater could dribble to the rain gutter. While I handled the logistics, Tuy decorated the space. On the walls she hung fabric strips in brilliant shades that overlapped in an arrangement I’d never seen before. The colors were like the three tones of her laugh, unique to her.
Hard to judge the mix of hot and cold, to keep the water temperature high without scalding. Tuy folded her reed arms around herself, and I thought I’d made it too tepid until I saw the vapor smooth against her cinnamon skin. She swooned under the sponge I ran over her shoulders, the water’s ethereal trickle.
Since we’d come home, I’d pondered what she’d said about Simone, turned over the interview for the signs that Tuy had intuited as deceit. In the curls of steam, I found one. “Do you remember how Simone reacted when she saw the dancer’s photo?”
“She was quite interested.”
“At once she went from condescending to attentive. I thought at first she was simply curious about the dancer, but it was more than that. She examined it carefully. Why?”
Tuy rested her head on her knees, her eyes barely open. “After she saw the photo, she put on a different persona. She wanted to be friends. But she doesn’t fit with friends like me.”
“Or me.”
She asked, “So you think it means something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe deceit, as you said.”
She dipped her head, touching her hair to the water. “Better to stay away from her. She portends bad things.”
Day 5
__________
Bad things.
Bad people.
Bad for the soul.
Crowley’s definition of Saigon.
So he was sending me to a combat zone.
I boarded a resupply flight to Tay Ninh Province, part of the infamous War Zone C. Relatively close to Saigon, War Zone C always had merited a high priority. It featured aggressive NVA units, savage fighting, and easy access for reporters who wanted a quick taste of combat. Often they got their taste and more. The name had become synonymous with horror, enshrined in the soldier’s ditty that played in my head as I buckled myself in:
War Zone C, War Zone C,
The place you don’t wanna beeee…
The ride took thirty minutes in a Huey ‘slick’ hammering northward. The cargo doors were open and the wind billowed my fatigues and plowed back my hair. We crossed rain forests, elephant grass fields, and rice paddies. Rivers and streams and a paved road made shallow cracks in the vegetation. Occasionally we pierced round clouds that floated like cotton balls tossed in the air, and the fine droplets dashed my face.
The Second Brigade’s tactical operations center occupied a jungle clearing. Like barber clippers gouging into a thick scalp of hair, soldiers had chain-sawed the trees to nubs ankle high. Tent ropes and the guy wires for sectional antennas made a spider’s web; a pole bristled with arrows and signs reading LATRINE, LZ, MESS HALL, BUNKER; white engineer tape trailed to the sites that would be used at night, especially to the latrine that owed its privacy to stacked sandbags. The sandbags abounded. Around the TOC trailers, they climbed to chest height, reminding me how men always felt safer behind walls, even if the safety they afforded was make believe.
Awaiting my appointment with Colonel Larsen, I sat on an avocado-green food case called a Mermite container, the Tupperware of the U.S. Army in the field. The place hummed purposefully. Generators whined out current for the lights and the radios; doors banged on the trailers that connected to form an L, one wing for the staff and the other for the commander’s briefings. When the doors opened, I noticed rubber pads like yoga mats lining the floor. A shotgun-cradling sentry guarded a smaller trailer—no doubt the commander’s quarters—beyond the L’s exterior angle. From it, an intestine of flexible plastic duct snaked to a chugging metal box—an air conditioner. Every piece airlifted in.
In the TOC’s doorway appeared a reedy major who must have studied at the same school for manners as Vangleman. “Hurry up, the colonel’s waiting.”
He led me past staff officers in spotless fatigues and polished boots who peered intently at their map boards. Lounged in a nylon-webbed beach chair beside a console of radios, Colonel Andrew Larsen held his metal canteen cup like the flagon of a king. His eyes were the shade of an old tortoise shell and just as hard. Deeply tanned in the face and arms, his skin hung like a loose hide—the air-conditioner hadn’t kept the jungle from sweating off his extra pounds.
“Welcome, Major Tanner. Thanks for makin’ the trip. As you know, my brigade is attached to the 1st Cav Division to help secure War Zone C, a right nasty sector. I’m mostly stuck at my headquarters at Tay Ninh City, but I like to displace to the boonies every now and then. Keeps my folks on their toes.”
“Yes sir. Thank you for hosting me.”
His gaze roved over my jump wings and Combat Infantryman’s Badge and up to the combat patch on my right shoulder. “I’m glad they gave the job to somebody who’s been around the block a few times.” Years in the Army had sanded his Southerner’s twang to a homey inflection; I suspected he could dispense with it when he wanted to. He tipped the cup toward my chest and shoulder. “Where’d you come by those?”
“During my first tour, I was an advisor for a company of Viet MPs. We worked with the 101st Airborne busting VC ambush sites.”
“Good on you. I was with the Screaming Eagles too, when they first got here.” Along with a Marine expeditionary force and the 1st
Cav Division, the 101st had been among the first major U.S. combat units to reach Vietnam in 1965. “What have you learned about our mystery boy?”
I related my findings from the morgue and described my plan to locate the dancer via the Saigon police. I laid out the Polaroid of the death face and the dancer’s marquee pic I’d found in the buffer well. Sipping his coffee, he looked them over.
“As to how he ended up in Tay Ninh Province,” I went on, “I’m betting on an air crash south of the Gavet Plantation. Based on what he was carrying and the unhardened condition of his feet, he couldn’t have been walking in the jungle for more than two days, meaning that he set out from his point of origin at the earliest on Friday 17 April, at a radius of about ten klicks.”
“That roughly matches the search grid we’ve been using,” said Larsen. Stepping to the map board, he waved his cup as a blunt pointer. “Since the incident, I’ve ordered our choppers to keep an eye out for a downed aircraft, as a coda to their regular recons. Ground patrols are doing the same. So far, nobody has reported any signs of a crash. Over the years we’ve defoliated the hell out of War Zone C, especially the northern part, but this area where we operate west of the Saigon River features tracts of rain forest as dense and inhospitable as they come. A small aircraft falling unobserved into the triple canopy might as well be a needle dropped in a haystack. I’m considering shutting down the extra efforts—they bleed resources from other missions. And General Cobris doesn’t condone the searches. He contends that we’re chasing our tails for somebody who wasn’t an American. He was pretty emphatic about it.”
“With me, too.”
“What did he say?”
“He wants a conclusion fast, to kill the bad press.”
“And your reply?”
“I said I needed to collect more facts.”
He grinned. “I’d like to have seen his face when you said that. Not many people stand up to him. And you’re justified—the Army doesn’t retreat from a valid inquiry because of the press. I don’t understand his position. Why should he care about my search operations or your investigation?”