by Jeff Wallace
The music broke; the phonograph arm skittered. The spotlight beams jumped around, and in their chaotic effulgence I had about a second’s warning of somebody stepping toward me. A head cut the beam. I recognized Danh, who cawed, “Bobby John, what you do?” Striding within range, he threw his left foot in an arc meant to crash into my head. I ducked and the foot swished over. In the instant it took him to regain his balance, I chopped my hand against his collarbone. It snapped like a rice cracker, and he staggered, bouncing off one table, then another.
Heads swam in the beam. Opening my billfold, I thrust my military-police credentials in the air, the plastic cover glinting. It stopped them, at least for a minute. The light caught the chartreuse stripes of a shirt. Everybody froze, their faces white in the glare. My arm was getting tired from holding up the creds, it smacked of absurdity, still I guessed the Statue-of-Liberty pose was the only thing keeping them from rushing me. Then the sandy-haired man waved his hand, and the tension subsided. I let my arm fall.
“What do you have to say?” he asked.
“I thought I’d bring back your boy. He didn’t make it through the ambush outside Kim Thi’s building. Two more are still in the water. Or maybe they’re in the bed of a police pickup by now.”
He edged over to the stage, placed his hand lightly on the boy’s hair. No display of grief, just the resignation of experience. “Who are you, exactly?”
“Major George Tanner, U.S. Army military police.”
“I’m André Nogaret.” He motioned to Danh, who, cradling his arm, eclipsed into the shadows with the other employees. “I had nothing to do with your unfortunate incident, Tanner. Follow me, before you embarrass yourself further.”
Aware of how easily they might have clobbered me if they’d wanted to, I stepped out of the radiance. In French, André ordered them to right the overturned tables. He said his apologies to the customers, the few who’d not already fled. Then he ushered me to a chair. His gaze was disdainful. “The boy has a family. What shall I tell them?”
“He was an apprentice in the wrong business.”
“You seem to think he had choices.”
I recalled the last look on the kid’s face. André was right. The kid hadn’t been offered a choice, by me or anyone else.
I said, “I saw your wife the other day.”
His eyes flared. “You are a virtuoso of surprises.”
“I spoke to her on business, the reason I’m here now.” I told him about the investigation, showed him the soggy marquee photo of Kim Thi, explained how it had been hidden in the unknown’s M16. Then I handed him the morgue photo. He leaned back, the photo on his chest, and studied it briefly before he tossed it on the table.
He said, “So you believe Kim Thi will recognize him?”
“That’s why I went to see her.”
Danh appeared. Still cradling his arm, looking a bit piqued, he leaned over and whispered to André, who scanned the club through the lingering cigarette smoke. He said, “Someone is here for you, Tanner.”
Across the club I spotted Giang. He stood among the tables like a scarecrow. The employees stayed well away from him—they must have interpreted his desolation and wanted none of it. André seemed intrigued. He pushed back his chair to observe, and when he spoke, his tone was civil. “We can talk again tomorrow. For now, you and your spectral friend should leave.”
* * *
Giang led me to an intersection along Nguyen Cong Tru. A Sony billboard streaked the wet pavement red and white, and the neon bled to a dented Fiat parked carelessly away from the curb. Against the door leaned Trong. “A bulletin said that an American had kidnapped a woman and killed two men. When I saw it, I thought I should come looking for you.”
“They tried to shoot me.”
“You were supposed to be discreet.”
“The shooters didn’t know that.”
He folded his arms and regarded the reflections on the damp pavement. “What a mess you have made. There will be consequences. Enemies.” New tones were slipping into my friend’s voice, new tones for new enemies. Yet André Nogaret was not among them. I couldn’t have explained to Trong, or even to myself, how I knew that.
I said, “Kim Thi ran off. I need to find her.”
The detective frowned. My chits with him were not so many.
“What a mess you have made,” he repeated.
He dropped me off near the Kinh Ben Nghe canal two blocks from Tuy’s place. The pall of cooking smoke had dissipated, and the canal mirrored the city lights. A gunfight replays itself in jolts to the nervous system, and I treaded unsteadily over the paving stones I’d walked many times. Facing her building, I noticed that her apartment’s single window was unlit. I took the two switchbacks of stairs, slid in the key. The door was pulled open before I could turn it. Air scented with jasmine puffed against my face.
More than a year and a half ago, when I returned to Saigon and found Tuy, she’d been standing in front of the airline office where she gave language lessons. In the sun, her hair had shimmered, the ends had twirled as she whipped her head. Rapid movements were her nature, no matter in which act she was engaged. She’d stared at me openly. She was like a magic picture card whose image changed in the angle of view. One angle was profoundly native, from a Buddhist family that traced back a thousand years, a woman in whom the Vietnamese culture was alive. The other flashed the descendent of a French Catholic from two generations ago, far enough so that the manifestations should have washed thin in her blood, yet the directness of her gaze and the variegated shading of her hair portrayed no woman of pure Vietnamese heritage. She spoke French and English flawlessly. Was drawn to western ideas. Had chosen me as a lover.
Tonight in the doorway she wore one of my t-shirts. Its hem reached her upper thighs. She must have awakened from a slumber; temporary lines and swellings surrounded her eyes that embraced me calmly, though I was covered with blood and dirt and the stink of the garbage I’d rolled in.
“Come in,” she said. “Take a bath.”
Sleep had tangled her hair, and she brushed it while I squatted in the bathtub. The first filling had purged the night’s tangible and mental filth. In the second, I soaked restfully. She brought me a Scotch, hooked her thigh on the tub’s edge, and tapped her cigarette into an ashtray on the pile of newspapers. The brushing and the drink were bridges to intimacy; her cigarette smoke blended into the steam. Yet hauteur traced in the way she moved, and I knew that it angered her to see me return home in this condition.
The jolts came less frequently now. Between them I succumbed to exhaustion. I tried to think, and it was like trying to focus candlelight through a magnifying glass. Then the adrenalin bit and I was talking. “I met André, Simone’s husband, tonight.”
“Is he like her?”
She meant elitist. I shook my head. “He’s a former soldier. Owns a club downtown. Seems to be in his element there.”
“So you have a new contact.”
“I don’t think so. I walked into his club carrying a dead body and dumped it on the stage. Then I broke the collar bone of one of his employees and pulled out my police ID.”
“The French are not fond of Americanisms.”
“There may be repercussions. I could be sent away.”
She nodded at what must have seemed a reasonable sequence of events.
“We need to speak,” I said.
She stubbed out her cigarette. “We can talk later.” She was finished with her hair; it smoothed darkly along the sides of her neck. In the steam she pulled off the shirt, slipped into the tub, and settled on me.
* * *
In the morning, it surprised me to find Trong waiting outside. He leaned against the Fiat sedan, the same pose as last night. “Let us walk,” he said. He adopted a slow gait toward the Kinh Ben Nghe. The French had called it the Arroyo Chinois, and in their time it had been a busy conduit for rice from the Mekong Delta. A small European cemetery came into view ahead of us. He held my hand in the customary way, and I
was reminded of the conversation with my father after Vaughn Tanner’s funeral.
“Your gunmen last night were Montagnards. No way to trace such people. We may never know their identities.” He said it offhandedly. People died, nobody knew who they were, just more victims, an aspect of the city and the times. But he’d not stopped by this morning to tell me about the Montagnards. He was my friend, no less correct in his ways, and we walked quietly for a minute until he had formulated his words. “There is trouble, as I feared. It arrived even sooner than I expected. You should have come to me after the shooting, not gone back to the club.”
“What happened?”
“General Huang contacted my superiors. He phoned personally, so nobody could mistake his seriousness. They do not like Huang, but he is too powerful to ignore. He demanded to know why an American officer was shooting people in Saigon last night. And he has your name. Who did you give it to? Nogaret?”
“Yes.”
“Unwise. Nogaret must have communicated with Huang, his ally. And my friendship with you is known. So they have turned on me.”
No point reminding him that the shooting had been in self defense, or that I’d come within a centimeter of taking a bullet in the face. Or that bringing the dead kid to the club had been an act of courtesy. None of it mattered to the corrupt interests that backed the nightclubs.
“The people in the building told the police that you kidnapped Kim Thi. Nonsense, of course. Huang repeats it only to justify his involvement. An American officer kidnaps a girl, it becomes the business of the Army. Huang has put out orders to find her.”
“Why does he care about the girl?”
“I don’t know.”
I remembered how the two shooters had materialized when Kim Thi and I had reached the outer stairs. If they’d wanted to kill me, they’d had opportunities to do so before I entered the building. Was it possible she was the target? Why would anyone want to kill a club dancer?
A block from the Kinh Ben Nghe, we reached the European cemetery that occupied a discreet mound behind a wrought iron fence. Set in crumbling cement, the bars spiked to tips in the shape of teardrops, while on the other side, the gravestones lined the low promontory like crooked teeth. Names embossed the surfaces alongside bullet scars from a forgotten gun battle. Trong noticed the bullet pocks too, and he stopped as if to survey the scene of a crime. It was a warm, sticky morning, but from the sight of him, hands tucked in the side pockets of his work shirt, he might have been on the chilly streets of a northern city. “I was ordered to halt my involvement in this affair. I must obey.”
“I can’t find Kim Thi without you.”
“Giang will continue to seek her in his discreet way, among people who do not otherwise talk to the police. But he must not approach the club or question the employees. He will not be able to learn who sponsored the two Montagnards, or search openly for the dancer.”
“I’m grateful anyway.”
He shook his head. “His chances to find her are poor. Now that Huang is interested, his people probably will get to her first. When they do, they will deliver her to him.”
“And then?”
“What he wants from her, he will take.”
* * *
On my desk I found two messages. The first was from Hollis at the Bien Hoa PBO—please call. The other was to phone Colonel Crowley immediately. I did. “Stay put at your office,” he said. “I’ll be there soon.”
After a few hours at the French Fort, you no longer noticed the rice-paddy smell outside. The same held in reverse; an absence restored the odor viscerally, and when I sat down to type my report, I might as well have climbed into a dung barrel. Whether it was the unpleasantness or the latent tremors at being shot at last night, I had trouble rendering my impressions on paper—of Kim Thi, the shooting, André Nogaret. They seemed borne in murky runoff.
I left out mention of Simone Nogaret.
Crowley arrived at ten. His face wrinkled when he smelled the paddy fumes, reminders of the country he despised. No doubt he wanted to turn around and flee. I didn’t wish to think about his submissiveness to Vangleman. It shouldn’t have surprised me—most men buckled when confronted with a power greater than they could handle. But I’d expected better from him.
I pushed the typed report across the desk. Dropping into one of the metal chairs, he read it slowly, making me think that my prose must run as syrupy as my thinking. When he looked up, he said, “Vangleman phoned this morning. He said that General Huang of the Capital Military District has made a complaint about you. They say you killed two men in a gun battle. They also say you kidnapped the woman Kim Thi.”
“What about the third victim, the scooter driver? What about the commotion at the Quartier Latin?” I’d mentioned both in my report.
His dipped brows could have plowed up the dung garden. “No, nothing about that.”
“But the complaint contained my name?”
“In full. Major George Tanner.”
If, as Trong suspected, André had given up my name, why hadn’t he mentioned the dead scooter kid? Or the bedlam I’d caused at his club? Why throw around a false accusation and leave out true ones?
Crowley tucked my report into the manila folder he carried. “Vangleman said that General Cobris is irritated as hell. He wanted this to be fast-tracked, but thanks to you, the South Vietnamese Army is involved.”
“How else was I to learn the identity, but to have a go at the club?”
Crowley didn’t answer.
I said, “So Cobris will close the case?”
“Not yet. He doesn’t want to look like he’s backing down in the face of a complaint from General Huang, a notoriously corrupt figure. And Cobris knows you didn’t kidnap anyone.”
“That’s reassuring.”
He didn’t pick up the sarcasm. “You still haven’t done what he asked—to certify that the unknown wasn’t an American.”
“I still don’t have the facts.”
I must have sounded irrational; he stared at me in apparent disbelief.
I said, “My PBO contact may have traced the origins of the radio. I’ll drive to Bien Hoa to see him. Unless Kim Thi shows up, that’s all I can do.”
* * *
In the clammy PBO trailer, the air conditioner huffed, a fluorescent bulb flickered, Hollis’s balding pate glistened. Hollis and Lopez had organized stacks of paper-clipped records. Rising above them like an exhibit at a science fair, the PRC25 radio. “With the serial number eradicated, it’s impossible to be certain. Our starting lead was the manufacturer’s code stamped inside the casing. We got lucky—the series arrived in country in one shipment in May of 1968, with sequential serial numbers. The radios were distributed between two American units: the 1st Cav and the 9th Infantry Division. If the PRCs had gone to the South Vietnamese, we’d have been dealing with an insurmountable problem.” He’d attached the antenna to the radio; he must have replaced the batteries too, for when he clicked the on dial, it crackled immediately. Absently he spun the frequency knob, as if he expected his favorite country crooner’s voice to emerge.
“Here’s where Sergeant Lopez earned the fresh coffee I brewed for him. He went through two years of property records. Patient fellow, Lopez, he keeps his attention. Of the May ‘68 shipment, he found twenty-three crossed off the books, all missing in action or damaged beyond repair.” Enthusiasm lit Hollis’s expression, and I guessed it was the rare occasion for the warrant officer to flip back the shroud of anonymity and show off his competence. “Next we turned to two sets of documents, the Found Property Register and the repair slips. As I mentioned, units are notoriously spotty about reporting stuff they find, no surprise that none of the twenty-three serial numbers surfaced in the register. So we went through the repair slips.” He tapped a pile of pink carbon copies. “A radio handed in for repair can go to a number of facilities, including to the States for depot-level work. Here in ‘Nam, we keep radio repair records for a year. So we’re talking long shots.
We examined over two thousand pink maintenance copies. Sergeant Lopez culled through them until he hated the color pink. All for this. A single hit.”
He held out the top sheet as if it were a high-denomination bill rather than a ruffled square of onion skin overprinted with numbered spaces. “The 151st Maintenance Battalion at Long Binh prepared this form in March of this year for the repair of a PRC25. Read the entry in block seven.”
“Serial number 117134.”
“Turns out it’s one of our twenty-three expunged radios from ‘68.”
“The radio I found didn’t have a serial number.”
“Correct. So how do we know it’s the same one? Read the entry in block ten.”
“Repair certification 03/30/70. A.J..”
“The repair techs initial their work.” Hollis plucked the radio off the table by its corner handle, turned it sideways, pulled off the battery cover, and pointed to a slender paper sticker on the radio’s inside lip. “The rubber seal keeps this surface from the weather, otherwise the sticker would have worn off while it sat next to your tributary.”
The sticker read ‘Inspected 03/30/70. A.J..’
Hollis smiled like a geometry teacher who’d explained a theorem to a puzzled student. “There were two unusual things about this repair. One, it was a high-priority request. This is a common tactical radio—there are lots of them around. Why the urgency? Of course, some people want everything in a hurry.” He stared at me.
“What was the other thing?”
“Look at the remarks section.”
“‘Turned in without a battery cover,’” I read.
“Without a battery cover. When you consider that this one’s had been converted for D-cells, the reason becomes obvious. The modified cover would have signaled that it was found property, and the repair facility would have notified PBO—they do so at our standing request. Nobody ever reported the recovery of this radio. As far as the property records go, it’s still missing.”
“So when they repaired it in March, it had a serial number?”