The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  “Can you manage 48 hours? I’m on a tight timetable.”

  Hollis tapped his pencil against his teeth. The clink echoed among the file cabinets. “Tell you what. I’m short handed, but if you can you send me somebody who can go through a lot of paperwork without his attention wandering off, I can tell him what to look for.”

  “A sergeant named Lopez will be over to see you today.”

  “Deal.” Hollis rested his hand on the radio. “And I’ll keep this specimen for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  * * *

  When I told Lopez about the research project, I mentioned Colonel Larsen’s comment about the soldier who got lost after taking a shit in the jungle.

  He lit a cigarette. “That’s happened to me. We were on long-range patrol. I stepped out of column to take a shit, and I spent so much time cleaning my ass that when I looked up, my buddies had moved way down the fucking way. I couldn’t hear them, and it was dark as hell. So I chased after them, thinking they must have veered off in a different direction, and all of a sudden I heard ‘uhhhhh.’ I was standing on this motherfucker who’d sat down on the ground at the tail of the column. I tried to get off him, and ‘uhhhhh, uhhhhh’—I was stomping all over his ass. He was mad that I stepped on him, but if you ask me, it served him right, for sitting down.”

  “He asked for it.”

  Lopez sucked on his cigarette, blew out a contemptuous cloud. “Fuckin’ A.”

  * * *

  Before I went out, I ate the dinner Tuy had cooked. We sat quietly, leaning over steaming shallots and rice, our chopsticks clicking on the plates. Finished, I looked up. “I have a favor to ask.”

  “Why not? It’s been at least a day since the last one.”

  “I need to know more about Simone Nogaret.”

  “How would I learn such a thing?”

  “Hipolite mentioned that she had a fascinating history. Maybe it’s in the newspaper archives.” I guessed that Tuy’s father’s friends in the local press could find old articles.

  She said, “In the French-language papers? Or in others?”

  “The French ones first, then try the English-language.”

  “And the Vietnamese last?”

  “Last, or not at all.”

  A faint smile touched her lips. “I really am your contact, aren’t I, Tanner?”

  “My number one.”

  At the prefecture, I looked for Trong. He was away from his office. I found Giang sitting at a desk bereft of the usual files and reports—apparently he didn’t deal in paperwork. The skin around his left eye had turned black, the eye was cloudy, and I guessed the sight in it was gone, the latest increment in his slow death. His yellowed nails lightly balanced a cigarette. He said, “You were right about Quartier Latin.”

  “Did you find the dancer?”

  “I sent the boy in. He pretended to be a village kid seeking his big sister. The employees at the club chased him away before he could get inside. Very heartless, those people. So I sent him to another club. Not French, this one. Corsican. They listened to him and looked at the photo. They said it shows Quartier Latin’s stage.”

  “The stage?”

  “You can tell from this.” He tapped on a blurred shape in the photo, in the molding below the dancer’s kick. I hadn’t noticed it before. “The carving of a rubber tree. Only Quartier Latin’s stage has it.”

  “That’s damn good work.”

  He tipped his cigarette, the equivalent of a shrug. “Now we wait. I put a policeman down the block in plain clothes. He has a copy of the picture. He will watch for her.”

  “How long?”

  “A day. A week. Maybe longer. A cop has to be patient.”

  * * *

  “Do you see the rabbit?” Supine on the straw mat, I pointed at the pattern the cigarette smoke made against the ceiling.

  “That’s a fish,” Tuy said. She saw fish in everything.

  The ceiling fan patted the smoke through the window screen. During the cooler dry season, the fan had hung dead. The humidity had resurged and become unbearable, and I found in the Cholon industrial market an electrician whose bulgy eyes suggested he’d been shocked enough times to know his trade. I’d stood at the bottom of his ladder while he repaired the fan, handing down clippings of fabric-sheathed wires as old as the building. When he’d finished, I asked, “Safe?”

  He’d laughed. “Nothing safe.”

  He’d been around.

  The fan, the tub, the electric griddle, and the woman who used them had shaped this space into my home. How could I leave? I thought, maybe I could return in the guise of an entrepreneur, the rep of some American outfit that peddled tractors, and Tuy and I could move to the safe First District, become the neighbors of Simone Nogaret.

  An ungrounded wire. No such thing as safe. And we were not First District people.

  I said, “It’s all going to end, isn’t it?”

  “What?” She was still hunting shapes.

  “Saigon.”

  “No. The Americans will end. Saigon will stay.”

  “How? We’re part of it.”

  “Not really. You are like the ceiling animals, made of smoke.”

  “That’s not nice.”

  “What do you want, nice or true?” She stubbed out the cigarette and rolled on top of me.

  Day 7

  __________

  I reached the French Fort just as Crowley phoned. He’d received another call from Major Vangleman. Since General Cobris’s lecture on the verandah, three days had gone by, and I had yet to certify that the unknown wasn’t an American. What was taking so long?

  I explained about Quartier Latin.

  “Let’s see if I have this right,” said Crowley. “A plain-clothes gook cop is hanging around by the door of a nightclub, waiting for the showgirl, on the assumption she might appear. Nobody has actually spotted her.”

  “He’s not by the door. They put him across the street.” That sounded better than down the block.

  “Doesn’t matter. I can’t tell any of it to Vangleman.”

  “Sure you can. Tell him that if I find the girl, we’ll know the unknown’s identity. If he stops the investigation now, we won’t know. If he wants to figure this out himself, he can go ahead.”

  “You’ve got one more day.”

  “Is that from Vangleman?”

  The receiver clicked.

  I thought of the Army like an old Roman road. Commanders were its stones fitted together to withstand heavy loads.

  Crowley had crumbled like a clay clod under a boot.

  * * *

  At fifteen hundred I returned to the prefecture to find Trong in his office. Giang was with him. It was the first time I’d seen Giang out from behind his desk. Thinner even than Tuy, he stood with a slight stoop, like a dead tree on which people hung laundry.

  Trong grinned. “Giang told you the news?”

  “You’ve confirmed Quartier Latin.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you haven’t found the girl.”

  “We will find her, in time.”

  I shook my head. “It can’t wait. You have to go in and ask.”

  “Not possible. It is a protected club. Very powerful. General Huang.” When Trong was upset, his English became choppy. I assumed his annoyance stemmed from General Huang’s nexus to Quartier Latin. A luminary in the South Vietnamese Army, Huang controlled parts of the military district around Saigon. He was reputed to be one of its most pernicious profiteers. “Huang will not tolerate interference in his interests. He shelters Nogaret, who runs drugs out of Cambodia.”

  “You’re sure about the drugs?”

  My question about surety didn’t resonate with Trong. He flipped his hand, which meant it was in the air, the bit about Nogaret and drugs and Cambodia, between fact and rumor, a tendril of smoke. For him, it was enough. “A dirty setup. Untouchable. Huang’s involvement makes it so. I cannot send in a detective. A police commander foolish enough to do so would be ruin
ed.”

  “Then I’ll go.”

  Trong laughed. Then he saw I meant it. “I cannot help you in there.”

  “Just tell me how to find the place.”

  “Quartier Latin does not cater to Americans. It is very exclusive.”

  “I’ll dress up.”

  “You could get killed.”

  Giang grinned, a death’s head. The prospect of mortal danger evidently amused him.

  Trong stared at the photo on the desk. He must have asked himself how finding a club dancer possibly could merit all this fuss. He was too polite, and his culture too restricting, for him to declare his thoughts directly. When his eyes flicked to me, they beamed a message: My insistence was reckless.

  Giang said something in Vietnamese, and the two men exchanged clipped syllables that dissolved in silence. Stepping to the window, Trong seemed to weigh the consequences of my request the same way that Tuy had deliberated our jaunt to Le Cercle Sportif. He muttered, “You cannot say you’re working with us.”

  “I won’t. If they ask, I’m working on my own.”

  “No. You are not working at all. When you are inside, you are not a cop, simply a customer with money to spend. Throw a little to the bar girls. Not too much. Ask for a drink a fool would order, like a Singapore Sling. Pay for a drink for the girl who waits on you. She will come back. When she does, ask about the dancer. American sentimentality is well known; the club will weigh this when they find out you are asking the wrong questions. Maybe you will walk out in one piece.”

  * * *

  Quartier Latin’s doorway opened in a side street that hooked off Nguyen Cong Tru a block from the river. The facade was unremarkable except for a neon tube that squiggled above the glass showcase. In daylight, this was a buzzing commercial district where everyone competed—the rolling carts with the shops and the customers with the proprietors in spirited bargaining. At night the bargaining was of a different sort. The carts withdrew, the shop grates rattled down. Tepid illumination from the clubs splashed the sidewalks. Arriving by taxi, the customers scampered nervously to refuge inside. This wasn’t a hangout for Americans. In the infamous bars along Tu Do, the GIs got a display that was loud, blatant, and artless. The few clubs off Nguyen Cong Tru offered something else. What was it? The swagger of the Saigonese nouveau riche? The sneers of the older elites? The pseudo worldliness of the Europeans? They all thought they were smarter than the Americans. Maybe they were.

  In civilian clothes, I took a table in the shadows away from the stage. I made out the carved molding of a rubber tree—the feature the photo had revealed—in the center below the flailing spotlights. Two tables of Europeans occupied the foreground. They glanced at me to gauge if I was someone they should worry about or merely disdain. Apparently I was the latter, for they restored their attention to the dancer, Li Hoa. I knew her name from the showcase photos that depicted her in several saucy poses, the prints the same size as the one nesting in my pocket. The spotlight speared Li Hoa’s abdomen in a brilliant circle, sculpting her muscles like ivory. Forward and back she banged her pelvis while the spotlight dot contracted and enlarged, the rhythm suggesting she was fucking the light beam. She mouthed a rock and roll refrain and the drums kept beat. Behind her, the mural of a Paris street scene—ochre edifices fronted by café tables topped with orange umbrellas—created a certain je-ne-sais-quoi effect.

  When the tables were full, Quartier Latin might host tens of clients buying drinks in front of the stage show. The waitresses were village girls who’d flocked to the capital to take up their dual jobs as servers and that which is served; enough cash would buy them. Even Li Hoa, queen of the dancers, was surely available, though for more green than the casual bar dabbler would pay. And probably not tonight. With the pre-monsoons outside and a handful of placid European customers, I had the feeling the club wasn’t going to get busy. Squirming in my seat to relieve the irritation of my .45 pressing into my back where I’d tucked it in the waistband, I ordered my Singapore Sling, paid along with a heavy tip, and tried to look worldly.

  It didn’t take long before I became the favorite of one of the waitresses. In a lace top frilled with sienna fabric that made her look like a moth, she watched me for a few minutes, surmised I was an American, and decided that her sexual subtlety should be on a par with Li Hoa’s pelvic thrusts. She gave a few preliminary smiles and eyelash flutters, approached, and commenced plowing her long fingernails through my hair.

  “Why don’t you get yourself a drink?” I said.

  She took my money, returned with a whisky glass, its sepia-tinted liquid probably cold tea, and slinked onto the second chair, a practiced act judging from the grace with which she pulled it off without jarring the drinks on the spindly table. On the stage, Li Hoa had reached the climax of her act; her hips gyrated like an electric mixer. When the music stopped, spinning the umbrella from my Sling, I asked the waitress, “You work here a long time?”

  “Maybe three month.”

  “So you must know everyone.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m looking for one of your dancers.”

  “Why?”

  Over the tabletop I pushed a ten dollar bill—real currency, not the military-issued script. Halfway across, it brushed her fingertips and was gone.

  “I saw her perform. I couldn’t get her out of my head.” I laughed my best fool’s laugh, which emerged more naturally than I’d have thought. “I bought one of her pictures.” I pushed across the marquee pic.

  Her mirth fell away and she regarded me coldly. At once I regretted the line about the photo; probably they were not for the buying. She perused it without touching. Softly she emitted, “Kim Thi.”

  “Is she around?”

  “Last time week ago. No come back.”

  “Too bad. I was hoping to find her. You wouldn’t happen to know where she lives?”

  Abruptly she got up and flitted off into the club’s recesses. I caught sight of her in the shadows beyond the bar facing a man in a silver silk suit and a color-matched tie. Just once did she tilt her glance my way, enough to confirm that I was the subject of the conversation.

  A minute later the silk suit came out from the shadows. Wending amid the tables, his hip movements a bit too flashy, he crossed the room to an alcove where a Caucasian with sandy hair and a striped chartreuse tropical shirt reposed at a table. Around forty, ruggedly tanned, he exuded gravitas, and I’d have put down money he was André Nogaret. The suited man leaned over and spoke to his ear. What I’d hoped would be a discreet inquiry about the dancer already had risen to the club’s management. My choices were to stay or get out. Nobody stood between me and the door. I could toss a few bills on the table and reach the street in twenty seconds, a safe exit, though it precluded coming back, at least in the guise of a customer. If I wanted to learn about Kim Thi, I had to play it through.

  The suit swished to a doorway behind the bar and disappeared. He emerged a minute later leading a sinewy youth whose nose had been broken a few times. When he saw me, the youth twisted his mouth into a menacing snarl, lips curled back, so excessive he rendered himself farcical. Leaning against the wall, he playacted the muscle while the suited man, as graceful in his maneuvers as the waitress, pulled out the extra chair at my table and slid into it. Coiffed and ostentatious, he wore greased hair combed to bisect his scalp. His teeth were so straight and white they could not have been natural. At an earlier phase of his descent to this ledge of Saigon’s underworld, someone had knocked out the real ones.

  He flamed a gold-plated Zippo over the tip of a Gauloises. “You GI?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What your name?”

  “Bobby John. What’s yours?”

  “Danh.”

  “That’s funny, rhymes with my name.” I chuckled.

  “You funny too, Bobby.” Danh didn’t laugh.

  “I’m just a customer looking for something extra special.”

  “Extra special?” The query had the ri
ng of tedium, as if his job was to solve minor problems. Confident on his own turf, he hardly needed the youth to back him up, and I guessed he’d brought the kid as a show, perhaps at the direction of the sandy-haired man. These were careful people at Quartier Latin. He asked, “What so extra special for you?”

  “Kim Thi.”

  “I should know her?”

  “She’s one of your dancers. I saw her perform a couple of weeks ago.”

  I kept my face unreadable, while Danh sucked on his cigarette for so long I thought he might have asphyxiated himself. In a huff of smoke, he said, “No work here anymore.”

  “You know how men promise things to themselves? For me, the promise was Kim Thi.”

  “You cannot promise something not yours.”

  “If she says no, then okay. I just want to ask her.”

  “You go to lot of trouble. Plenty of other girl around.”

  “I’m very sentimental.”

  “California is for sentimental. Here, business.” Gleaming teeth vice-gripped the cigarette. “Maybe I throw you out in the street.”

  I smiled at the sinewy kid whose repertoire was limited to grimaces, and who now flashed one resembling the paper dragons that writhed through Cholon’s streets during the New Year’s celebrations.

  Danh didn’t like my smile at his thug. “You officer, right? You look like officer. Bad idea you get in trouble downtown. Brass hear. Your career all fucked up.”

  When dealing with the Vietnamese, it was important not to contradict a man of authority in front of his subordinate, so I answered in a tone so low only Danh could hear. “I suppose it would be. The brass would find out. My career would go to shit. The brass would also hear about your club. Bad publicity.”

  If they got physical, I’d brandish my MP credentials. Roughing up a customer was bad for business; laying a hand on an American MP officer was an outrage even General Huang would frown upon. The creds were a last resort. They would proclaim that I’d come here on official business about Kim Thi, and I’d uncover nothing more about her, not until Giang could find her. Without information from the club, that might never happen.