The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  “Where is she?”

  He flicked his head toward the corridor. She must be in one of the other cells.

  I assumed we were meeting in this dungeon because it was the least likely place for him to be seen with me. Then I thought of another reason. “You think Huang will try to grab her?”

  “Worse. A contract is out on her.”

  “A contract?”

  “To kill her. It is known on the street.” He said it as if everyone but me were already aware.

  “Who?”

  “Maybe André Nogaret. Or General Huang.”

  I said, “If it’s Andre, maybe I can get him to call it off.”

  The facial muscles he made a habit of keeping placid twitched too fast to read. They steadied to his rare just-fucking-listen look. He said, “A contract is a powerful thing. Expensive. Complicated. It takes 48 hours to set up. Once started, it is almost impossible to stop.”

  “She’s a club dancer. Why would someone pay to kill her?”

  “Why is not important. She has been here too long already. You must take her to an American base. Nowhere else will she be safe.” He’d never asked for anything in return for all the favors he’d done for me. Now he wanted Kim Thi off his hands. He wasn’t a farmer who could quit the police and go back to his land. A man of integrity, he survived at the whim of a corrupt bureaucracy he couldn’t afford to ignore.

  “All right. I need time to arrange it.” I thought of the bridges I’d set ablaze this very day. Could I rebuild them? “While I’m doing that, she’ll have to stay at Tuy’s.”

  His eyebrows peaked. He opened his mouth as if to warn that this was unwise, then stopped, realizing it was the only choice either of us had.

  He left to get Kim Thi.

  * * *

  She stood behind the prefecture, in an alley below sooty buildings fettered in clotheslines. The twenty-four hours since I’d seen her had blemished her formerly serene face. Swellings rimmed her eyes, her lips bulged where she’d bitten them, and a bruise smirched her forehead. Her wrinkled and stained ao dai made her look like a pauper. From far enough away that they wouldn’t provoke the police, real paupers watched.

  Trong spoke to her in the voice he reserved for his children, soft but insistent. I caught fragments and gathered he was trying to convince her she’d be safer with me than on her own in the city. Considering that the last time she’d been in my escort, she’d been shot at and forced to leap through a broken rail into a garbage mound, it must have been a hard sell. Somehow it worked, for she let herself be ushered into the dented Fiat’s back seat. I climbed in alongside, and Giang started the engine, his fingers like bird talons around the steering wheel. Trong remained at the prefecture. On his controlled mien, he forced a smile.

  The way Giang leaned forward and squinted, I doubted he could see far past the hood. By hazard or design, he took an indirect route, swerving near the nocturnal canal whose surface glinted picturesquely, the window reflections shimmering on the water. The rain had stopped and the roofs glistened. The clarity was rare. Most of the time, the traffic fumes and smoke from the cooking grills melded the cityscape into a fuscous smear.

  The tiny back seat jammed me against Kim Thi. Leg to leg, arm to arm, I could feel her body tense each time the Fiat creaked. She regarded our driver, an escapee from a tomb. When the car rattled around a corner, the bumpers scraped the pavement, and her eyes widened in terror. They reflected me darkly, and I wondered what I looked like to her, if not an ominous figure with a foreign voice. When I spoke, I tried to modulate it, which was like trying to keep a phonograph needle steady on a bronco ride.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I know where he’s going.”

  “Okay.” She sounded anything but comforted.

  “Can you tell me who he was, your friend?”

  “Who he was,” she echoed, as if I’d reminded her of the tragedy she’d managed to put out of her mind. She accepted the cigarette I offered, and I cupped my hands around the Zippo flame as best I could in the jerky ride. “Gerard Penelon,” she said, and in doing so she pronounced him dead and released the coiled tension. She leaned into me, and her breath came like the puff of a sleeper. She lifted her ao dai’s hem to blot her tears, revealing the pantaloons and her sleek dancer’s legs pressed together.

  “Gerard was French?” A guess.

  “Yes. My fiancé.”

  “You said you were waiting for him. Where was that?”

  “We always meet at the cathedral square.”

  She meant the square at Saigon’s Notre Dame Cathedral. In 1964, the South Vietnamese government had renamed the plaza in honor of the late President Kennedy. Americans called it JFK Square.

  “When?”

  “For three days I go there to wait. Thursday I stay home, until you come. I afraid he crash his helicopter.” She said it offhandedly, as if I already knew about the helicopter. I thought about the woods east of Hill 71. Colonel Larsen’s men had searched the area. Not thoroughly enough.

  “Where did he fly his helicopter?”

  “Across the border.”

  “Cambodia?”

  She nodded.

  “You both worked for André Nogaret. Is that right?”

  She glared at me in a way I couldn’t interpret.

  “Do you know who sent the gunmen last night?”

  No answer. Having leaned against me, she now sat upright, her guardedness returned, triggered by the utterance of a name.

  Nogaret.

  Giang rounded a familiar corner, and we squeaked to a halt outside Tuy’s apartment. Over the canal, fresh rain clouds migrated toward Saigon, darkening the street and leaving the dancer almost invisible scurrying from the car to the enclosed stairwell. When I left to follow, Giang caught my arm.

  “They have threatened Trong! Huang’s people.”

  “How?”

  “A phone call. For his safety, he must stay out of this.”

  I tried to step toward the stairwell. Giang still clung. “The girl is yours now, understand?”

  “Yes.”

  In her typical way, while I was fumbling with my key, Tuy opened the door and immediately turned back inside. She dropped to sit on the straw mattress, her back against the wall. On the floor around her spread newspapers in the familiar fan pattern.

  “We have a guest,” I said.

  She looked up, from me to Kim Thi. First she noticed her attractiveness, which must have disconcerted her, this woman arriving in my presence. Then she saw her dishevelment, weariness, and fear. Tuy stood, approached, and gently laid her hand on Kim Thi’s shoulder.

  And so began a night of twitter in Vietnamese, woman to woman, excluding me, forcing me outside to the landing while Kim Thi soaked in the bathtub. Their laughter penetrated the door and rang in the stair shaft where I smoked.

  * * *

  “Are you awake?” I asked softly, so as not to disturb Kim Thi sleeping across the room. Tuy glanced protectively to the blanketed form.

  I pushed up and folded into my Buddha. A comfortable silence wrapped us for a minute, until I said, “They’ll send me home soon.”

  “A month ago, you said the same. And the month before that. You are still here.”

  “This time it’s different.”

  I lit a cigarette and she beckoned for it at once. It flared as she dragged on the filter, her eyes torched red, locked on mine. She’d detected in my tone an urgency I hadn’t consciously introduced, telling her to listen closely.

  I said, “I want you to go with me to the States.”

  “And leave my mother?” Her voice was barely audible, and I had the feeling she was thinking too of her father, though long dead, as if the realm of the ancestors were another of Saigon’s districts.

  “Maybe just for a time.”

  “A long time,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  The light through the window split her face, one side sulfurous, the other amber in the cigarette’s glow. The twin hues seeme
d to project the rift she felt. I thought she might be waiting for me to make a hopeful declaration. Nothing felt certain enough.

  “I need time to think,” she said.

  “There’s not much.”

  She handed back the cigarette and settled on the mat.

  Day 9

  __________

  In the morning, the questioning resumed. Tuy’s sisterly kindness had soothed Kim Thi like a balm, and I tried to preserve her mellow state of mind with a compatible tone. To build rapport, I asked about things that mattered to the average Vietnamese: her family and village. Next I gently raised her engagement and wedding plans. Her tears summoned Tuy’s comforting arm over her shoulder.

  I said, “You mentioned that Gerard flew to Cambodia. Why?”

  “I only know what he tell me. I do not know the reason for anything.”

  “When he went, how long did he stay away?”

  “He go two time. First time for a week. Second time same, but he no come back.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “A boarding house by the central market.”

  “What’s the name of the boarding house? Or the street?”

  “He no tell me.”

  I pictured the mishmash of side streets around the high-roofed, crowd-frenzied central market. I’d never find the boarding house without an address.

  “Is that where you went, when you were together?”

  “We go to...” She said something in Vietnamese.

  “The kind of place where they don’t ask for names,” Tuy translated.

  Gerard had hid his relationship with the girl he loved. Why?

  “Where did he get the helicopter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did he keep it? Did he mention an airfield? A hangar?”

  She said something to Tuy.

  “By the seacoast,” Tuy translated.

  “The seacoast. Was it Cape St. Jacques?” The French name for Vung Tau.

  “Yes. The cape. He tell me that.”

  “The cape is a big area. Did he describe the place where he landed?”

  “No.”

  “Did he mention a villa that faced the ocean?”

  A shrug. “He only say the cape.”

  “Where did he land in Cambodia?”

  “He no say.”

  “Who was he working for?”

  Kim Thi cast an imploring glance to Tuy, who said, “She doesn’t know these things.”

  “Please relax. The questions are normal, just part of the process. Don’t be upset.”

  Tuy spoke, and Kim Thi gave the slightest bat of her head.

  “Did he fly alone, or did others go with him?”

  Another exchange between the women. “She doesn’t know,” Tuy repeated.

  “Who was he working for?” She did know, I was convinced.

  She folded her arms and turned her head away.

  “Kim Thi?”

  “No more,” she said.

  * * *

  I found Tuy’s hand and turned it over in mine, studying it like a tropical flower. “Have you thought about what I asked you last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “I haven’t decided.” As if preoccupied, she stared toward Kim Thi, who lay across the room, face to the wall.

  “Will you decide soon?”

  “Yes. What about her?”

  “I’m going to try to get her onto a U.S. military base. In the meantime, she has to stay inside. She mustn’t go out, the streets are too dangerous for her.”

  Digesting this, Tuy’s face shaded over as I’d not seen before, her eyes flecked with doubts.

  I said, “Don’t worry. She’s safe here as long as nobody knows where she is.”

  “Who does know?”

  “Us. Trong. And one of his detectives.”

  “Too many by my count,” she said, softly, so Kim Thi wouldn’t hear.

  * * *

  Sited in the same block as its American counterpart, the French Embassy was as much an icon of central Saigon and almost as busy. A notable difference was the absence of military uniforms at the French legation, and mine may have explained why the receptionist responded helpfully to my inquiry. She summoned a young consular officer, Mademoiselle Juliet Devereaux, who led me to a vaulted anteroom off the lobby, to a tired chair whose back might once have been straight, in front of a low table whose many coats of varnish failed to smooth the nicks, and I wondered if, on the undersides of these pieces, property tags showed 1887, the year France had annexed Indochina.

  Taller than me, Juliet sported washed-out fawn hair and sunless arms lilting from a short-sleeved linen dress. Her bloodshot, bulgy eyes had seen too much since she’d left the Paris school for diplomats. Across the table corner under the whirling ceiling fan, she seemed to ponder whether to insist that I take my questions through official channels.

  “Why are you interested in Mssr. Penelon?” She opened her notebook on her bare knee. In a different dress and style of hair, she would have been striking.

  I said, “MACV is seeking civilian pilots to fly helicopters. A local contract. His name came up. I’d like to confirm his status and sponsorship.”

  “For a military police officer to inquire about a French pilot for hire is a bit unusual, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Perhaps you can explain to me, Mademoiselle Devereaux, how you decide what is unusual, and what is not.”

  A smile tweaked the edges of her cracked lips. A lover of irony, this one.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  * * *

  The scooter buzzed across the cobblestones, cutting through the narrow mercantile side streets and the wider boulevards. With one hand I clutched my leather pouch so Saigon cowboys wouldn’t snatch it away, with the other I gripped the bumper rail. The driver craned for maneuver space, found an opening, darted through. The crowd released energy in a chase of boys, the march of a clique of women whose straw hats meshed like pagoda roofs, a crippled war veteran who waved his tin beggar’s cup in an agitated arc. The rain evaporated and the people drifted in a white steamscape.

  I told the driver to head for the nightclub Quartier Latin.

  “No open yet,” he said.

  “Go anyway.”

  Knitting his brows, apparently concluding that my stupidity was my own problem, he skirted JFK Square, zipping around pedestrians like racing pylons. Two blocks down he skidded to a halt behind a jam of cars. Ahead, the intersection of Tu Do and Le Loi was closed—a crew was felling a row of plane trees for some reason—so I dismounted, slapped piastre bills into his palm, and set off on foot.

  Scents filled the air: tea and orange, dust and diesel, incense and fabric. I turned to find a sidewalk vendor hawking bolts of silk. He held one for me to view, striped coral and white—electric colors that might complement Tuy’s decorations. But I couldn’t afford the time, and I continued along the decorative yellow sidewalk tiles, past a hissing grill whose cook flipped fish. An urchin in a burlap dress dashed up and tugged on my trouser leg. I tossed her a 50-su coin, and at once three other urchins joined her. I told them to go away. They followed me along the four blocks to Nguyen Cong Tru and its side street. When I reached the door of Quartier Latin, they halted and backed off, as if they sensed something dreadful.

  In the doorway leaned Danh. Arm slung below his broken collar bone, silvery suit jacket draped over his shoulders, he sulked. “Go tell André I’m waiting,” I said. He was better at obeying orders than at fighting, and he left and was back in barely a minute. I followed him through the tables and upturned chairs to the alcove where André Nogaret sat in the cigarette smoke that erected a fourth wall around him.

  “A drink, Major?” He gestured to the second chair.

  “No, thank you.”

  He waved a match against a Gauloises, drew on it fiercely, puckering his lips. His face was redder than I recollected, his sandy hair unkempt. He must have been plowing his fingers thro
ugh it distractedly, like a man balancing his troublesome account books.

  I took out the morgue photo. “Remember him?”

  “Your wanderer.”

  “His name was Gerard Penelon. A Frenchman and helicopter pilot. Former French military. Also, former resident of Bui Thi Xuan Street west of the central market.”

  “Congratulations.” He lifted his glass. “The name and the residence too.”

  “The place is a cheap boarding house. I stopped by this morning. His room was cleaned out, the bill settled. The manager didn’t remember much else. Seems like somebody slipped him some piastres, the usual way things are done in Saigon.”

  “Unfortunately so.”

  On the table posed his pack of Gauloises cigarettes and two bottles with labels in French. One enclosed a clear liquid, maybe Vermouth, the other an opaque amber spirit. In his glass, they blended to the color of a French officer’s kepi. He squeezed in the juice from a sliced lemon. Served to a customer, the cocktail might wear a little umbrella, though I doubted that anyone else drank this concoction.

  I said, “The French Embassy has papers saying that Gerard Penelon worked for you.”

  “I was going to tell you. But you have ruined my surprise.”

  “He was a friend of yours?”

  “I merely sponsored him so he could get his local license.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “A common arrangement. Why do you care? You told me you were trying to discover whether or not your dead drifter was an American. Now you have your answer.”

  “There’s a contract out on Kim Thi. Was she really your employee, or was that an arrangement too?”

  “She was one of my dancers.” His eyes clung to the table. “I heard about the contract. Very bad.”

  “It needs to get turned off.”

  “Can’t be done. She should leave Saigon until the situation settles down.”

  “What situation? Why would anybody want to kill a showgirl?”