The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  “I don’t know.” He said it as if he’d pondered the question himself. “I suspect it has to do with you, an American, poking into affairs that are none of your business. Saigon is suspended in an equilibrium, which you and your power-drunk country unsettle. Whoever is after Kim Thi might relax if you left matters alone.”

  “Can’t be done,” I mimicked. “Turns out that Gerard was involved with some U.S. military officers.”

  “Your problem.”

  “He crashed near the Gavet Plantation, for which your wife serves on the board of advisors. His lover was one of your dancers. His papers say he worked for you. It’s not only my problem.”

  This may have resonated with André, who asked, “So what was his business with the American officers?”

  “Ever since my investigation started, an American general has been trying to smother it. I traced a radio that had been in Gerard’s possession to an officer who works for the general. Whatever the reason that Gerard ended up in Tay Ninh Province that night, they were helping him in some way.”

  André nodded slightly, as if he finally comprehended why I’d come to see him. “The general complicates your job, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “And why would he be involved with Gerard?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely you can imagine a reason.”

  “I can’t prove anything.”

  “Let’s hear what you can’t prove.”

  “Gerard flew between Vung Tau and Cambodia. The antenna at the Gavet plantation is visible at night; he may have used it as a landmark. My guess is that it’s a drug runner’s route. Heroin entering Vietnam originates from the so-called Golden Triangle in Burma and Thailand and passes through Cambodia.”

  “And how was your general involved? Was Gerard sharing the profits with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Those are your three favorite words.”

  “I believe it’s all linked.”

  He scoffed. “All linked. It’s what an amateur says.”

  André’s eyes showed a yellow tint, perhaps from an old fever. Having drained the glass, bottoming-up his kepi drink in a move that might have snapped a neck less thick than his, he began mixing another. He regarded me as if he pivoted on a decision, to speak or hold his tongue, a judgment that goes poorly when soaked in booze.

  I said, “General Huang issued a complaint about me yesterday. It carried my correct name and alleged that I’d killed two Montagnards and kidnapped Kim Thi.”

  “You seem to have provoked his ire.”

  “The complaint didn’t mention the dead kid or the commotion at your club.”

  “Why should Huang know what happens here?”

  “The police say he’s your partner. That you’re a smuggler of narcotics.”

  “The police are easily confused.” I thought he might elaborate, but he seemed to have undergone another transformation. A minute ago he’d been attentive. Now he looked bored.

  I said, “Nobody else had my name.”

  “Nobody? The way you bandy it about?”

  Remembering how the Frenchman had perked up when I’d mentioned his wife the other night, an instinct shot in front of me like a chameleon across a dinner plate. “What happened between you and Simone?”

  “What happened? Marriage. Life.” He said it dismissively, yet the fancy drink coursing in his blood spurred him to talk. “Nogaret is her maiden name; I took it when we married. One of my many concessions. My Marseille origins had served me well in the rough-and-tumble world, but she considered them coarse, not the lineage she wanted appended to her. For myself, I was happy to climb society’s ladder. Her lofty status captivated me, though I suppose it was not my milieu.”

  “But it was hers.”

  “Oh yes. Hers is a natural sophistication, the sublimity of the elite, with herself at the pinnacle. She represents a race that is becoming rare these days, that of the born colonialist. I don’t think you have people like them in your country.”

  “We have them, maybe in a different form.” I was thinking of the American brands of elitists, the arrogant bankers on Wall Street, or the residents of the Panama Canal Zone, nicknamed Zonians. I’d spent a few months training in Panama and had run across this privileged breed, the rulers of their American enclave who looked down their noses at everyone else, including the soldiers who protected them.

  He lit another cigarette. “They are not the same as her, you can be sure. When she enters a crowded room, everyone rests their eyes on her. They might not know who she is, yet they will act deferentially, to the point of absurdity. It is the expectation she creates, a quality she wears like an aristocrat.” He watched the smoke drift upward like an embodied memory. “Remarkably, she selected me out of such a room. It was 1954, around Christmas, and I was at a party I might not have been invited to. I was not of her class, but the world was disordered then. The defeat at Dien Bien Phu had shaken the rigidity out of the social structure, and I was a former officer of paratroops, self-confident in a way that set people’s minds at rest. Not that I lacked charm, I could fill a white gabardine suit as well as a set of fatigues, chat at dinner parties in the same hour I inspected the perimeter of guards. For a while I protected her. But I was never a colonialist.” He said it with conviction, as if the title unsettled him.

  “Later, the circumstances changed. She sold the plantation and became the consultant to people who accommodated themselves to the communists. They obtained peace in exchange for certain payments and freedoms of passage. When that transpired, my soldier’s skills suffered a decline in their premium. I became the one who ran errands. Ennui and my old malaria supplanted each other in turn, like two skeletons on a see-saw.”

  “You wax poetic,” I said.

  “The truth is, I grew tired of it.”

  “So you moved to Saigon and took over the nightclub?”

  “By way of other things. I didn’t acquire the club until 1963. Simone had her own interests too, by then.” I hoped he would expound on those interests. He didn’t. Purposefully, as if sighting on a moving target, the Frenchman positioned the empty glass between the two bottles. “This is how life plays out. I can’t say I wasn’t to blame.”

  “That was a long time ago. Yet you’re still married to her.”

  He grimaced. I’d breached a forbidden topic. Then he shrugged. “Why should she bother with a divorce?” Across the club, somebody swept the floor, the phone jingled and went unanswered, all passing André by. I wondered if he made a daily rendezvous with his drinks, caught in a reverie that roiled over him like a storm. If he’d started with a full bottle of the clear stuff, he had downed a third of it already.

  I asked, “Was she connected to Gerard?”

  He squinted like a man staring into the sun. “You are in your milieu, aren’t you, Tanner? You would interrogate me forever, if left to yourself.” He shook his head. “Go now. Don’t make me summon Danh. It was hard enough to keep him from bashing you the first time.”

  On the street, hailing a scooter cab, I tried to make sense out of what André had said. If his booze-sopped tale conveyed a message, it was as jumbled as the traffic on Nguyen Cong Tru.

  Trong had warned me about André. But Trong breathed the city air where truth and rumor tumbled amok—André conspired with his partner General Huang to murder the showgirl Kim Thi; he might try to kill me too; he was a drug smuggler, and nothing he said could be genuine.

  I couldn’t fit my mind around Trong’s reality. He would scoff at me for trusting André, but I did, at least insofar as I believed the Frenchman wasn’t out to assassinate me or Kim Thi.

  Better than nothing.

  * * *

  Toward Tan Son Nhut on Cong Tuy street, my scooter joined the queue of vehicles at a drop gate blotched with a red and white bulls-eye sign: ‘HALT!’ Nearby, like two repulsive toads, ARVN and U.S. armored personnel carriers baked under the sun. An American sergeant in a track-command
er’s helmet occupied a pathetic wafer of shade. I dismounted the bike, walked over to him, and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Checkpoint for extra security, sir. You should keep up with the news. We invaded Cambodia yesterday.” From the tread, he picked up a copy of the Pacific Stars and Stripes and handed it to me. Units of the 1st Cavalry Division and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment had punched across the Cambodian border at locations in the Fishhook to the north, and the ARVN in the Parrot’s Beak northwest of Saigon. I pictured the swarm of forces: tanks and APCs crashing through the bamboo groves, helicopters darkening the skies—Hueys to ferry troops, the big twin-rotor Chinooks slung with artillery for the forward fire bases, the even bigger CH-54s to lift trucks and bulldozers. On TV, President Nixon had explained the operation’s purpose—to destroy the sanctuaries where the enemy assembled supplies and staged infiltrations into South Vietnam in violation of Cambodia’s neutrality. Nixon’s rationale had done nothing to mollify the political left, which decried the invasion as an outrageous expansion of the war.

  I asked, “Trouble around town?”

  “No sir. Situation under control.” He said it with certitude, not having witnessed the war come calling on Saigon as it had in Tet 1968. I was sorely tempted to turn around and head home to Tuy, just to reassure myself she was safe.

  The traffic line started moving, and my driver frantically waved for me to get back aboard the scooter. We glided through the checkpoint toward Tan Son Nhut.

  * * *

  At the French Fort, an envelope lay on my desk.

  HEADQUARTERS, MILITARY ASSISTANCE COMMAND, VIETNAM

  OFFICE OF THE PROVOST MARSHAL

  1 MAY 1970

  OFFICIAL ORDERS

  INVESTIGATION NUMBER H-7406 IS HEREBY CLOSED. PERSONNEL ASSIGNED SHALL ASSUME THEIR REGULAR DUTIES. ALL MEMORANDA, FILES, AND RECORDS SHALL BE REMANDED TO THE CUSTODY OF THE PMO, MACV.

  FOR THE PROVOST MARSHAL

  CROWLEY(ACTING)

  I punched two holes in the onion-skin copy and fitted it onto the flexible metal prongs in the folder. When I looked up, Sergeant Lopez was standing in the doorway. He must have guessed what the orders said. “A courier delivered it last night. Then Colonel Crowley phoned. He said he wants you to sit tight and wait. He didn’t say for what.”

  “They’re preparing my transfer.”

  “To where?”

  “Someplace I’ll be helpless to follow up.” If they wanted to keep me in country for a while, they might send me to a unit near the DMZ, or to the Mekong Delta—they had plenty of woebegone spots to choose from. I thought of an installation I’d visited during an investigation, Can Tho Base Camp on the Mekong, utterly flat, an infinity of puddles. It was only 80 miles from Saigon, but it might as well be five hundred.

  Or they might book me on the next Freedom Bird to the United States.

  I’d left Kim Thi at Tuy’s apartment, the two women sitting on the floor staring up at me. What would become of them if I didn’t return tonight?

  The thought burned like napalm.

  Maybe I could get to General Abrams. Like all commanders, he upheld a so-called open-door policy, meaning that any soldier who wanted to see him could gain an audience, one time, to state his complaint. In practice, at Abrams’s level, the sessions happened only rarely. Subordinate leaders almost invariably resolved problems before they reached the commanding general. If a petitioner insisted on pressing forward, he must explain how his leaders had failed to treat him according to the regulations. This was the policy’s true purpose—to install a warning bell in case the chain of command malfunctioned.

  What would I say to Abrams if I insisted on seeing him under his open-door policy? That Cobris had amorphous ties to a dead Frenchman? That he’d interfered in an official investigation? I pictured myself in front of the commanding general’s desk dispensing the fragments of evidence I’d collected. At some point, Abrams would phone Cobris, who in a few well-chosen words would discredit everything I’d said. Crowley would agree, and when he abandoned me, whatever credibility that attached to my investigator’s mantle would vanish. Unless I delivered proof so compelling that it convinced Abrams on the spot, I’d never be taken seriously again.

  Without intending to, I’d settled into my seat at the desk.

  “You okay, sir?”

  “Yeah. I’m just thinking.”

  Thinking was insufficient. I couldn’t piece together the scraps I’d gathered. Gerard had been carrying a radio that belonged to Major Stobe, Commander of the 29th Aviation Company. An isolated fact—what did it mean? That Stobe, and by extension Cobris, had prior knowledge of Gerard’s activities? But who was Gerard, what was he doing, and why did Cobris care? Why had Stobe given him a tactical radio? Kim Thi said Gerard had been flying a helicopter between Cambodia and the Cape, yet this was another uncorroborated assertion—nobody had found a helicopter. What role had Andre Nogaret played? Why would anyone put out a contract to kill Kim Thi? I evaluated what I knew, straining for a single, tangible thread.

  To present this to General Abrams would be like Thich Quang Duc dousing himself in gasoline and striking a match.

  The roar of a C-141 momentarily drowned my ruminations. I could smell the aviation gas suffusing the air over the base. The fumes spread from the continual logistics flights that fed the war. More bombs. Ammunition. Radios.

  Stobe had given Gerard a radio. Maybe a rifle too. Gear to be used on the ground.

  Stobe was an aviator.

  Might he have given the Frenchman a helicopter?

  The notion was preposterous. A helicopter was an expensive piece of machinery, with its own air crew, a team of mechanics on the ground, other teams to gas it up, calibrate its instruments, fuss over it in every conceivable way. Even with thousands of military helicopters in country, they were all accounted for. Surely.

  “Sergeant Lopez?”

  He still leaned in the doorway. “Yes sir?”

  “How long would it take to put together map sheets of the area from Vung Tau to the Cambodian border above Tay Ninh? Full coverage.”

  “The Special Forces S-2 shop has every map series in country. I can ask a buddy of mine over there.”

  I tossed him the padlock keys to my jeep.

  * * *

  We pushed my desk aside, and the tile floor became a placard for twelve map sheets. We trimmed their margins, aligned them, taped them together, weighted down their outer ends with chairs. Crawling backward over the maps, I extended the string Lopez held steady at Vung Tau on the coast, where the blue matte of the South China sea washed the palm-tree-shaded shoreline at MACV’s villa, northward to Tay Ninh Province and the symbol for the radio tower at the Gavet Plantation.

  If my instincts were right, the string marked Gerard Penelon’s flight route.

  Lopez applied a piece of tape to hold it steady. “You said his destination was the Fishhook in Cambodia. That’s farther north. Why should he go to the antenna?”

  “Air navigation is tricky at night, even for a trained military pilot. Gerard needed a reference point. With its red lights, the antenna is a perfect marker. American pilots use it, why shouldn’t he?”

  “What makes you think he flew at night?”

  “Most of what I’ve come upon in this investigation I’ve had to pry loose from some attempt to conceal. This is a well-traveled air corridor, full of troop ships and recon and logistics flights. If Gerard had flown this route during daylight, every aircraft in the sky would have spotted him.”

  I stretched a second string from Hill 71 to the spot on the tributary’s eastern edge where I’d found the radio, extended it in a straight line to intersect the flight route. The strings crossed over printed blue sprigs.

  Marshland. Area Zulu.

  “Cover for me as best you can,” I told Lopez.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To see Larsen.”

  * * *

  Toward Cu Chi I drove northwest. In the distance, water buffalos
made black dabs next to the pointy ticks of their straw-hatted tenders, an alphabet of two characters that said everything. No boundary existed between Saigon and rural Vietnam. Agricultural lands and rain forests rimmed the city, and to go a few kilometers was to be among peasants and in the realm of the Viet Cong. Not long ago, the woods north of Cu Chi had harbored an enemy stronghold called the Iron Triangle, infamous for its intricate tunnels into which whole VC battalions could disappear. The U.S. Army never had found a way to destroy the tunnel network, and so the VC might have survived had they not swarmed out to fight above ground in the Tet Offensive. Juiced by their own propaganda, the VC had expected the people to rise up and fight alongside them against the Saigon government. The people didn’t rise up, they ran for cover. Battling in the open with U.S. and South Vietnamese regular forces, the VC died by the thousands. According to MACV, the enemy in the Iron Triangle had been decimated, the area pacified, as if Larsen and his soldiers might have done fine without their sandbags and barbed wire and machine-gun bunkers.

  At the Cu Chi camp, I passed rows of decrepit Quonset huts. Saddled with age, the seams seeping rust, the huts resembled a ghetto. Between the buildings loitered soldiers, probably from Larsen’s headquarters element. Some shot hoops or lazed on sandbags, smoking cigarettes and drinking from soda bottles. The scent of marijuana drifted across my jeep. Among these young men, the tedium of camps spawned almost as much destruction as the pungi stakes, snipers, and mines. Drugs and indiscipline weren’t new to the U.S. Army in Vietnam, but it seemed strange to run across them today, with the Cambodia incursion afire just to the north.

  I had phoned ahead and exhorted the staff officer who’d answered to schedule a meeting with Larsen right away. I found the colonel in his headquarters sipping coffee out of his eternal metal canteen cup. We were alone in the building, and I guessed that he’d cleared out everybody else in case our meeting aired topics he didn’t want them to hear.