The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  He said, “Her address cost one hundred.”

  For the address of a Saigon bar dancer, one hundred dollars rated so steep that even a heart-achy American would balk at it. I paused as if to reflect. While Danh squinted impatiently, I reached in my pocket, folded three twenty dollar bills into the drink napkin, and nonchalantly slid it across. As practiced as the waitress, he swept his hand and the napkin disappeared.

  “The rest?”

  “Sixty now. The rest when I find her.”

  “How I know you pay?”

  “Send somebody along.”

  Vietnamese sophisticates tended to think of Americans as an artless race, with the subtlety of a donkey. In enacting this negotiation, I figured that I’d progressed from a donkey to a clever monkey. “You stay here,” he said.

  He hipped to the alcove to consult with the sandy-haired man. As I watched, their discussion spanned two cigarettes smoked. Lead-in drums signaled a fresh dance act, and the spotlight snared the sequins of a dancer warming up at the stage side. I contemplated the dregs of my Singapore Sling, a bloody puddle that as the minutes ticked by resembled my melting enthusiasm for finding the dancer. What was I doing, enacting this pathetic pantomime, risking the ruin of my best police contact and friend, when all I had to do was sign Cobris’s certification and be finished? In the stare of the club’s employees, I felt like an act on stage, a donkey to be sure, and I was mulling over whether to leave when Danh slipped into the other chair. “Outside is a boy who will take you to her. Pay him.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t come back.”

  “No reason to.”

  * * *

  Just before twenty-three hundred hours, a lightning storm dazzled the city. The rain scraped leaves from the trees and flooded the streets, momentarily restoring Saigon to its origins as a marsh on a river bend. In the district behind the docklands, through mist rising from the ankle-deep rainwater lakes, my guide weaved his two-seater Vespa scooter while I clung to its slippery rails. He was the kid who’d shown me the dragon face, and although his expression had reverted to normal, for the ride he’d donned an improbable Humphrey Bogart hat. I guessed his age to be 18, draft eligible. For males, military service was universal, though many tried to evade it. I’d seen would-be draft dodgers flee from the conscription squads, usually to be caught and hauled off by their skinny arms. He might be among the tens of thousands who’d deserted. Or maybe the kid’s underworld patrons had bought him a pricey exemption. With his tough-guy hat, rolled-up black sleeves, and insouciant mien, he was doing their bidding tonight in the streets the rain had made our private sanctum.

  We buzzed along a wire-mesh fence, beyond which, shrouded in wood smoke, squatted hundreds of cardboard huts, banged-up CONEX containers, and plastic tents. The refugee camp was a panorama of discarded U.S. military packaging. Fleeing their villages, hundreds of thousands of refugees had assembled in overcrowded, sordid ghettos that spattered the city. This camp cluttered over uneven ground, higher than the street in places, lower in others, and in the flooding it balanced its water level by puking out garbage and open sewage in pulpy washouts below the fence. Across these the kid maneuvered the scooter, until he banked toward a block of tenant houses opposite.

  He pulled in at the mouth of an alley between buildings. We faced a lake deeper than the Vespa could power through. “We walk,” he said. He ran a chain through the wheel spokes and around a vertical wall pipe and clamped on a padlock.

  Following the kid, carrying my shoes, my trousers rolled to my knees like a sampan operator, I waded into the water. It deepened, and things slithered against my calves, threads of slime I hoped were not able to propel themselves toward my genitals. Uncomfortable to toddle through, the flooding nonetheless added a dab of security; nobody could follow us without making the same splashing racket.

  My guide halted near an edifice of cinder blocks three stories tall. A rickety wooden stairway bridged a mound of garbage to the second-level entry. We stood at the joint of alleyways bent crookedly like the leg of an insect. Having just splashed through the upper limb, we faced the lower that receded into pitch black. Denizens, junkies, or fence-jumping refugees might lurk here unseen. The only light spilled weakly from a bulb by the stairs.

  I said, “Where do I find Kim Thi?”

  “Top floor.” He held out his hand, no doubt as Danh had instructed.

  I put twenty dollars into it. “The rest after I see her.” I pointed to the lower steps. “You wait.” The sight of him might deter anyone watching us from coming closer.

  Halfway up the outer stairs, I heard shouts of anger or alarm from beyond. No telling if the disturbance had anything to do with me or was merely the normal ambiance so close to the refugee camp. For the first time tonight, I was tempted to draw my .45, but on the rain-slick staircase, I might drop it through a gap into the garbage beneath. Or somebody might see the gun, panic, and start screaming. I left it in the waistband under my shirt.

  Through the maw of the doorway, waiting for my vision to adjust to the obscurity, I paused to tie on my shoes and roll down my trouser legs. I peered up the inner stairs to the single landing whose broken window pickpocketed the dim bulb. As I climbed, the smoke from the refugees’ fires intensified and blended with urine, cigarettes, mildew. One of the doors canted open, and I glimpsed a black-stained porcelain sink sagging out of the plaster above sideways-turned floorboards, a former hiding place pillaged of its drugs or explosives; nobody was left to say. I swished away mosquitoes whose buzz blended with faint mandolin chords. At the stair top I stood in front of a door framed in orange light. I knocked and the music halted.

  “Ai do?”

  “Kim Thi. I want to see her.”

  “My?”

  The door cracked open. In the slit, backlit in orange, a woman much older than the girl I was looking for. Incense wafted through. She studied me a moment, enough to determine that I was indeed My—an American. Rapid chatter in Vietnamese followed with someone behind her. Opening the door, she ushered me into a room where a lava lamp on a side table cast an unworldly glow upon four women, ages between fifteen and thirty, who sat on the floor staring at me, their expressions anticipatory. None resembled the woman in the marquee photo. I noticed on the ceiling a centimeter-wide crack bleeding water from the earlier rain. Wadded newspaper had failed to seal the fissure, and most of the drips missed the can set out to catch them. The wadding reminded me of a wounded Viet Cong I’d once encountered who’d stuffed his bullet holes with paper to stop the bleeding. Then he’d died.

  “What you want?” The question carried from an older man who sat cross-legged in a corner next to a mandolin on the floor. His balding scalp bore a long scar, as if in imitation of the ceiling. He held up his forearm to display muscles ablated above the wrists, a permanent disfigurement that a man obtains from having his hands bound over an extended period. “French,” he cackled. He lit a cigarette and plucked a sad chord on the mandolin.

  The older woman wore a maroon silk robe faded to the same blush of rouge as on her face, the makeup of an old whore. She barked to the man, who rose and slipped through a doorway of hanging beads to an adjoining room. Then she turned to me to determine if fate had delivered her—tuyet vo’i!—a fool on whom she could ply any number of inventive jigs to amplify her profit. “You pay me,” she said.

  “How much?”

  “Ten dollar for girl. Five more for room.”

  I handed her fifteen in greenbacks. The man reappeared through the beads, his cigarette ash leading the way. A girl who wasn’t Kim Thi trailed him. So far I’d counted seven Vietnamese in this room.

  She tipped her head toward the beads. “Go.”

  Curtains sectioned the second room into cubbies. In the right corner, one draped slightly ajar, and I fingered it aside to find Kim Thi kneeling on a mat. She was the photo’s likeness minus the costume and stage presence. Raven hair flowed to the satin pillow behind her, and her lean figure contoured the robe
belted snugly at her waist. In the space that measured no larger than a double bed, she’d decorated the walls with yellow boas that might have been the scraps of a dancer’s dress, looped in flower patterns that created the feel of a child’s room. She’d tucked her various possessions into two side-turned, tinsel-wrapped cardboard boxes in the corner. More pillows lay about, and I guessed that the girl I’d seen pass through the beads slept here too. The others must sleep in the other cubbies or the dreary room where I’d come in.

  Stooping, I entered and knelt alongside her on the straw mattress. My eyes stung from the incense and lingering opium smoke. Accustomed, hers shone like paper lanterns. Her honey-brown face evinced neither lines of age nor protuberances of bone; she might be eighteen or twenty five, I couldn’t tell. She didn’t know why I’d come to see her, so she assumed the obvious. “I am not a prostitute,” she declared.

  The scents, the bright colors, the muffled mandolin—all conspired to suspend the tawdry reality. After the foulness outside, Kim Thi’s eyes seemed like the peace at the end of the world. Perhaps the man in the Tay Ninh jungle had loved her for this, to be in the presence of tranquility. The robe flowed to reveal in shaded glimpses the cleavage of her small breasts and the mounds of her thighs pressed together.

  I brought out the marquee photo. “You gave this to a man. Could you tell me his name?”

  “Where you get this?” Apprehension squeaked in her voice.

  In a gesture of kindness, I lowered my gaze. Grief normally touches a woman’s face like a wrecking ball. Kim Thi’s features altered not a twitch. With a tissue she dabbed at her eyes, though I’d seen no tears.

  “How?”

  “He was killed north of Saigon, deep in the woods. He walked up on American soldiers at night. They blew him up. It was an accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “They thought he was a Viet Cong.”

  She shook her head as if this were incomprehensible.

  I repeated, “What was his name?”

  She might not have heard me. “He due back Saigon Monday. For three days I go to meet him, still he no show up. I cannot work. Too upset. Today, I stay inside.”

  A rattle of beads, footsteps, a hip’s indentation in the fabric, and the madame’s crowed authority: “Anh ay dang lam gi the?” She must have heard our exchange and disliked the tone.

  “Cut di!” nipped Kim Thi. My meager grasp of Vietnamese sufficed to understand that she’d just told the madame to go fuck herself.

  I leaned closer, whispered, “I need to talk to you. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Not for sex. Just to talk.”

  “I have no place else.”

  “I do. It is safe.”

  She studied my face. Who was I? Why was I doing this? Why should she trust me? What did I mean by safe?

  No such thing. She’d been around.

  She said, “This place belong to you?”

  “It belongs to a woman,” I replied. “My friend.”

  “She there, or just you?”

  “She will be there.”

  More contemplation. Through the fabric, beads rattled, water dripped. The piccolo of voices. Her eyes darted side to side. What was she seeing, that I couldn’t?

  “Wait outside. I put on clothes.”

  While she dressed, I stood in the leaky outer room. The madame had posted herself like a checkpoint by the door. “You finish?”

  “I’m leaving. Kim Thi is going with me.”

  “Cost more!”

  I threw a fiver on the side table, and the madame’s claw landed on my sleeve. “Twenty!”

  I don’t like to be grabbed, and when she seized my shirt, I flinched. With a clasp around her wrist, I twisted and she flopped amid the girls, bumping the table and tipping the lava lamp into a crazy jiggle. Like the audience in a wrestling match, the rope-scarred mandolin player watched her tumble. He wasn’t about to get himself hurt—he’d learned that much from his sessions with the French. The curtain opened and Kim Thi came out, surveyed the scene, and trilled harshly to the woman. I guessed that most of the girls were meek mice the madame lorded over. Not Kim Thi.

  I tossed a folded ten bill that landed on the mandolin.

  In the dark stairwell, I held her hand. It was an improper gesture with a Vietnamese woman of brief acquaintance, but I did it for my own safety. She’d descended these steps many times. I hadn’t.

  She asked, “Where your friend live?”

  “In Cholon.”

  “How you come here?”

  “A scooter. Don’t worry, I’ll get us a cab.”

  At the second-floor landing, I peered down the outer stairway. The scooter kid waited at the base. Light from the single bulb glazed his shoulders; the flooded street winked. I went first, holding onto the spindly railing, trying not to trip. Then the kid took off his hat, and for an instant I thought his gesture showed politeness to Kim Thi. But he hadn’t graduated from a school for manners. His dragon’s grimace was gone; his eyes flickered oddly.

  The kid was terrified.

  A droplet slapping tile makes the same sound as a gun hammer cocked.

  The slap came.

  Two of them, pistols blazing. A bullet went under my chin. I spun, heard wood cracking, and it was me going through the railing. As I plummeted, I remembered the grin that had crossed Giang’s face when I’d insisted on going to Quartier Latin—maybe that cloudy eye of his had foreseen my death. Pitching sideways, I landed in the pile of trash, and immediately I was thumped down with bruising force—Kim Thi must have leapt or fallen through the broken rail after me. The impact crushed me into the trash, face in the mush, and probably saved my life.

  One of my bruises later would take the angled shape of the .45 that the fall slammed against my lower back. Now I clawed for it, pried it out, snapped down the safety, ascended like a fiery Phoenix from the pile, leveling the gun in the style of night shooting, not looking for the sights, I couldn’t have seen them. Muzzle flashes illuminated the walls, mine and theirs. I carried seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, and I put eight shots in the air in less than three seconds. The first shooter, exposed by the stairs, made a silhouette at point-blank range. He crumpled. The second squared in the space beyond, and in the flurry he had the advantage, but he scattered his shots and mine went slightly high and blew off the top of his skull. He hit the water and blood haloed his mauled crown.

  Vomit surged in my throat. Legs trembling, I leaned against the wall. Reloaded the .45. My face was a collage of hot and cold spots. Adrenaline shock. I didn’t see Kim Thi. Was she buried in the trash and not coming out? The shock drained the strength out of my legs, and if not for the wall, I wouldn’t have been able to stand. I hadn’t frozen, I told myself, I’d performed as I’d been trained, but no training could prepare me for that much go-juice in my system. Forcing myself to breathe, concentrating on the cathartic air in my mouth, I clawed for equilibrium. Move and breathe. I balanced in the water and studied the bodies. In the ambience from the light pole, I distinguished the dark skin and round eyes of Montagnards.

  Until recently, Montagnards hadn’t been part of Saigon’s refugee scene. They were a tribal people who dwelled in the Central Highlands in their thatch villages, their culture so primitive that it approximated the stone age. Isolated geographically, eschewed by the South Vietnamese, they’d been courted by the Viet Cong, French, and Americans. A number of the tribes had found their way to the anti-communist struggle thanks to the intrepid efforts of U.S. Special Forces teams. The Montagnards had become loyal allies to the Americans. But taking sides had proved costly; local dwellings had to be abandoned, the populations conglomerated for security. Farmers were able to reach their tracts only in daylight and after trudging kilometers alongside armed escorts. Inevitably, some had fled the mountains and moved to the cities, where they found themselves adrift in economic and social currents beyond their comprehension. These two had become gunmen, probably on someone’s payroll.

 
The scooter kid lay face down. His hair spread like a black water lily alongside the bobbing fedora. Maybe one of my rounds had got him, or one of theirs. It didn’t matter. A parvenu of the gangster world, he’d earned his Bogart hat.

  From the refugee camp, the crackle of fireworks, string after string going off. I glanced at my watch. Midnight. Maybe it was a holiday. Or the refugees were celebrating having survived through another day.

  I found no trace of Kim Thi in the trash pile. She’d made it out alive. The women in the apartment upstairs might know where she’d gone. Trong could ask them, later.

  Now was for other business.

  Day 8

  __________

  When I picked up the kid, silty water and blood poured off him in a cataract. I hoped the Saigon police would take their typical time reacting to the gunfire—they were unpredictable, and I couldn’t count on my MP credentials to mollify them, not until Trong could be summoned. At the scooter, I dug the key from the kid’s pocket, opened the padlock, straddled the seat, and draped him across my knees. I hadn’t driven one of these, and saw-horsing a dead person wasn’t the ideal way to start. Slowly I wobbled, buttressing the unbalanced bike with my feet. Twice I fell, and I had to remount the bike and rework the kid back on.

  Curfew time. The clubs off Nguyen Cong Tru were emptying when I walked into Quartier Latin with the kid cradled in my arms. Blood and slime made me an apparition. Two nicely dressed Europeans in the doorway leapt aside, their faces shocked—the grim reaper hadn’t been featured here tonight, n'est-ce pas? On the stage, the dancer was grinding out her last gyrations. I kept expecting somebody to confront me, but the help was busy cleaning the tables or counting their profits. A handful of customers lingered, late-stayers unaware of me as I threaded past, until I laid the kid’s body on the hardboards by the dancer’s feet. Glancing down, she tapped a few steps backward and screeched.