by Jeff Wallace
I leaned over the windshield socket. “Don’t try to catch this.”
“What?”
“Just get it out of the water fast.” The instrument shot through the vine tunnel and splashed.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Zuniga.
“You got it?”
“It nearly got me!”
Bracing on the seats and doorframe, I laddered toward the cargo compartment, and it was pure chance that I caught the glint of color from a crevice where the aluminum skin had popped loose from the rib. Whatever the item was, gravity had tugged it beyond my outstretched arm. Eventually I contorted far enough to scissor my fingertips on the edge and ease it out.
You don’t expect to find a silk purse in the jungle. Orange, delicately embroidered, it had stayed pristine in the crevice. A closed zipper protected objects I could feel through the fabric, but to unzip it here risked spilling them into the unforgiving trees and marsh. I tucked the purse into my button-down shirt pocket.
The discovery inspired an idea. Instead of reversing my path, I climbed down by way of the window socket and vine tunnel, as I guessed that Gerard had done, not the fastest route, but he hadn’t had the advantage of daylight. The descent took six minutes. I’d have gone quicker, but I paused along the way, searching the vines and the protruding thorns, until I found what I was looking for.
Day 10
__________
Midnight at the French Fort. A glow through the closed louvers—Lopez had left the lights on for me. The desk surface was bare. No messages.
I phoned Hollis at his unit, waited minutes while the duty NCO went to get him. Examined my legs for swamp leeches I might have missed when I’d checked before, until his groggy voice came on the line: “Whaddya got, sir?”
“I need to trace an aircraft instrument.” I read him the plate numbers on the attitude indicator.
“Where did it come from?”
I told him.
His yawn filled seconds. “An engine number would have been better.”
“I know. It was the best I could do.”
“How soon?”
“Tonight, if possible.”
“It’s not. I can’t access the file stacks before morning. The soonest I can get back to you will be tomorrow afternoon. The absolute soonest.”
“This is important, Chief. My investigation fails without it.”
A pause. Hollis must have heard my disquietude over the crackly phone line between Tan Son Nhut and Bien Hoa. He said, “If the stakes are so high, you’d be smart to put your money elsewhere. You were lucky on the radio. Snake-eyes lucky.”
“Guys like you make for all the luck in the world, Chief.”
“That’s bullshit, sir.”
“First thing tomorrow, Sergeant Lopez will bring you the instrument.”
* * *
Motoring into town at zero one hundred hours, I had to pay the scooter driver an enormous tip, for curfew had fallen an hour before, and I made it through the checkpoints only by flashing my MP identification. The streets of Cholon lay deserted; a puce vapor lingered on the tile and corrugated roofs. Half a block from Tuy’s building, I waited by a tree until I spotted the glow from the police sentinel’s cigarette. So Trong was still helping me, despite the risks. A few steps farther and I saw the yellow rectangle of Tuy’s apartment window. A light burned inside. No doubt she would have been asleep this late but for her chats with Kim Thi.
On the smooth-worn floor, in a close coven under the lamp, Tuy and Kim Thi knelt with me as I spilled out the orange purse’s contents. The light glittered on a necklace, earrings, and bracelet all in brilliant gold and inlayed ornately with diamonds.
“They are beautiful,” said Tuy, smiling at Kim Thi. “Gerard must have bought them as a gift for you.”
Like a jeweler, Kim Thi held the bracelet to her eye. I guessed that the dancers at Quartier Latin developed expertise in every form of currency. She said, “Fine gold. The diamonds half carat or bigger. This set cost many thousand dollar. Gerard not have so much money.” She fingered the purse’s embroidery, turned it inside out, felt the stitching, sniffed the fabric as if it were a used garment she might buy, and held it up for Tuy to smell. Tuy, who never wore perfume, pronounced, “Exquisite.”
Silently Kim Thi restored the purse and jewelry to the floor.
From my pocket I laid out the item I’d found in the tunnel below the chopper, a tassel of black threads eight centimeters long, ordinary until you felt the texture. “The helicopter crashed into the vines,” I explained. “The climb down was at night; there was no way to avoid the thorns.”
Tuy rubbed the threads. “Wool and silk.”
Kim Thi stared at the tassel.
I struggled to keep the insistence out of my voice. “André Nogaret wouldn’t say what Gerard was up to. Can you tell me?”
“You know,” said Kim Thi.
“I want to hear it anyway.”
Perhaps Tuy’s presence had kindled trust, or the dancer was just tired of resisting. “Gerard the pilot for one passenger. Important person.”
“Who?” asked Tuy.
I filled in the silence. “The threads are from a woman’s sweater. The purse and the jewelry belong to a woman. What woman would have been in that helicopter?”
Kim Thi didn’t answer. She gazed straight ahead at nothing. It was how people lived with the ambiguity of a guerrilla war. She stood up, walked to her blankets, and folded herself into them.
A minute later, ever the proper hostess, Tuy turned off the lamp.
* * *
Tuy wanted to talk, though not about whether she’d go with me to America. For power failures, she kept candles. She lit one, and the flame illuminated the notes in her lap.
“On Friday, I reached a friend from my father’s old circle, to ask him if he could find archived stories about Simone Nogaret.” Her voice barely surmounted a whisper, while across the room, Kim Thi slumbered in the aria of the rain outside. “Yesterday, he called to invite me to visit him. He said I should come at once; he had found something. So I left Kim Thi alone for a while. She was okay with it.”
In the fracas over Kim Thi, it had slipped my mind that I’d asked Tuy to find old press clippings about Simone.
“His name is Huynh, and he engraves wood blocks. It is an old art that the printers revived during the Second World War, when the paper quality became too poor for the modern ways. He has many acquaintances in the newspapers around town, and through them he located three articles, two from the Saigon papers and one from a Paris magazine.”
I listened as Tuy related the details. In my early days in Saigon, it would have struck me as odd she’d have asked such a man to locate published articles. Her logic followed the city’s warped paths. Only rarely did she glance at her notes, and I guessed she’d staged them as a prop whose purpose was to cloak the shine of her intellect, which if displayed might convey arrogance, a breach of etiquette for a Vietnamese woman. Even with me, her lover.
Huynh had taken her to his shop’s back room, a place she’d never been, where stacks of wood blocks alternated with newspaper piles. Among the papers were some of her father’s, their turquoise paper blanched to the shade of hemp. The stacks summoned to mind how he’d collected the back editions around his desk, where she’d played among them as if they’d been the parapets of a fort, and her delighted screeches had resounded with the parrots’ squawks outside.
The three articles proved disappointing; they delivered none of the insights she’d hoped for. She said as much to Huynh, who replied that Madame Nogaret was quite discreet in her ways; the press had no access to her. Anyway, why did Tuy wish to collect information about this privileged Frenchwoman? She answered that she was simply curious, not a convincing reason, for Huynh knew she didn’t care about exploring her French lineage the way some métissés did. She said her motives were private, no less important to her.
He said, “Private, not official?”
“You know I have no dealings w
ith anything official.”
“People say your lover is an American soldier.”
“What is private to me stays private.”
The reply seemed to satisfy him. They drank tea for a while, and Huynh’s voice became whispery; she had trouble hearing him when he explained that he had a friend, a woman who had moved to Saigon from Tay Ninh Province, where, years ago, she had worked at the Nogaret rubber plantation. Might Tuy wish to speak to this woman? If so, he would bring her, she lived close by, and they could talk. Strange, the way he said this, and Tuy suspected that this woman, rather than the insubstantial articles, had been Huynh’s true reason for summoning her. But why the subterfuge?
While she waited, she studied the pages of her father’s newspapers from more than fifteen years ago, watched the cyclos glide past in the street beyond the shop panes. From the back room’s doorway, she observed people stop at the locked front door, heard their taps. Huynh had given her instructions not to show herself; she was to linger in the shadows. She thought this odd, but of course she complied, she must respect the wishes of her friend who had closed his shop to venture out on her behalf.
When he returned, he had with him an older woman who introduced herself as Diu. A plain cotton ribbon cinched her brown-gray hair. Difficult to guess her age; she had the countenance of a grandmother, the tone and enthusiasm of a young woman. She claimed to be a seamstress, and for a while she went on about how she would like to open her own shop someday, and it would be as stylish and abundant with fine materials as the boutiques in the Eden Arcade downtown. Diu declared her ambition in earnest, as if her clothes were not harlequinesque patches sewn together. Was she crazy? Yet her voice sounded melodious and pleasing, and Tuy sensed that the older woman liked having one so attentive for an audience. Then Diu asked, did Tuy understand why she couldn’t give her real name? Not sure she’d heard correctly, Tuy managed to reply that Diu must have relations in Tay Ninh to protect. The older woman seemed satisfied with this.
What a discerning eye Diu had, I thought, to perceive that Tuy wouldn’t hand her over to the authorities. Coming face to face with a Viet Cong, a Saigonese might feel fear, hatred, ambivalence. If people harbored scant trust for the guerrillas, they had even less for South Vietnam’s regime. In the run-up to the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong had staged thousands of fighters on the outskirts of the city. Their presence must have been noted, many people might have informed. Yet the attacks had achieved overwhelming tactical surprise.
Diu’s quaint talk went on seemingly aimlessly, leaving Tuy to wonder if Huynh had explained to this woman the reason they were here. To interrupt would have been impolite, so Tuy listened patiently to Diu’s stories about her youth in Tay Ninh. Forty minutes passed before the older woman brought herself around to the subject of Simone Nogaret. As she spoke, Tuy guessed that the long lead-up had been Diu’s way of preparing a topic that had great significance for her, and that revealed her as capable of dealing with terrible things.
* * *
Simone’s father, Diu explained, had been a successful French businessman. He moved to Indochina in the late 1920s and purchased a rubber plantation in Tay Ninh Province and a smaller tract twenty kilometers north in Cambodia. Where the Tay Ninh plantation bustled with activity, the northern sister drifted in the languorous mists, and it was to this serene site that Simone’s mother traveled to give birth to her daughter in the year 1936. Just before the monsoons flooded the roads, the Nogarets brought their baby to Tay Ninh. The Vietnamese workers gathered to welcome the black Citroën with the luggage roped to its roof. Diu, then fifteen years old, caught her first glance of two-month-old Simone cradled in her mother’s arms.
Six years passed. Diu labored in the rubber groves where she gathered the raw sap. She carried the buckets on a coolie pole to the drums that would be transported to process the contents for export. A slender, fine-boned girl, she struggled under the weighted pole. The pace and heat exhausted her, weakened her concentration. One afternoon, not watching her footsteps in the shady aisle between the closely spaced rubber trees, she tripped over a fallen branch and broke her ankle. She could barely walk, let alone haul the heavy sap buckets. Learning of her injury, the Nogarets brought her to the plantation house to help the maids and the seamstress.
In those days, the Nogarets employed ten house servants. They cooked, washed laundry, polished furniture, beat dust from the oriental rugs, chased snakes from around the house, sterilized the water, and served the European guests who flopped in the wicker chairs and fanned their sweat-beaded faces. Diu’s house duties were minimal and intended only to keep her busy while her ankle mended, but to everyone’s surprise, even her own, she discovered that her callused fingers could perform magic with a needle and thread. On her first morning, limping around the second-floor rooms swishing a feather duster, she noticed through the window little Simone playing amid the garden flowers. Diu pictured a dress whose sections took shape in her mind. The next day, out of scraps of vellum and gingham the seamstress had tossed aside, she fashioned the garment—which turned into a romper because the materials ran out. Assembled from mismatched leftovers, it was not elegant, save for one feature—the shoulder straps.
“Who taught you to sew these?” asked Mme. Nogaret.
“No one, Madame.”
“Well, they are marvelously done, as slender and pristinely stitched as those on my dresses from Paris. Of course, the romper is too big for Simone (Diu had had no opportunity to measure the child). But perhaps you’ll do better if I keep you here to make her clothes.”
When Diu commenced work at the house, the Second World War had been underway for several years. The French colonialists had acceded to the Japanese, then dominant over all of Southeast Asia. To evade an oppressive occupation, the French had relinquished the ports and the production from the tea and rubber plantations. The Japanese in turn tolerated the colons’ administration whose allegiance was to the collaborationist Vichy government in France. Simone’s father oversaw his business as before, albeit without profit, and he pined for the day when the Japanese Empire would fall and the French be restored to their rightful power. Out of earshot of the Japanese, talk of this was open. One occasionally noticed Japanese soldiers in the big towns or on the roads, never at the plantation.
Simone lived amid the disquiet, yet she was by all appearances unaware of it. Diu mused that the little girl must be the war’s most favored child. With no brothers or sisters, in a house full of servants who doted on her, she skipped as if the world had been created for her pleasure. Children emit the illusion that they embody the goodness that surrounds them, and Diu, having observed from a distance the pretty girl whose hair was the shade of dried bamboo, accepted the opportunity to be her seamstress with this caricature in mind.
The next day turned it on its head. Like a martinet, Simone ruled the wing that housed her chambre d'enfant. She shouted at the servants, even struck them from time to time. “Do not look her in the eyes,” warned one of the maids. “It infuriates her.” Simone refused to pose for the measurements. In hopes that she could catch the little girl in a sedentary minute, Diu clutched the measuring tape all day, her clumping step a muted beat to Simone’s sallies around the house and grounds. Diu realized it was impossible. The child must be compelled to obey—in no other way could precise sizes be taken and the patterns created.
She asked the other servants for assistance. They demurred. Never had a servant confronted Simone; none was confident enough to discipline her beyond the dulcimer suggestions that she ignored. The servants clung to their stations, which meant light chores in the mansion’s coolness. Unfamiliar with the heavy labor in the groves, they dreaded it and so avoided a provocation that might reap their shattering demotion. Diu didn’t cherish the work in the groves, but she knew what it entailed, and in some ways she preferred its simplicity to the jittery life of a house servant. She harbored no terror at the prospect of being sent back.
After two frustrating days of
limping after Simone, Diu admonished her. Gripping the child at the shoulders so she wouldn’t dash off, in a steady tone she instructed her to stand still. Amazingly, the intervention produced obedience. From that day forward, alone among the servants, Diu wielded authority over Simone. For her part, the girl came to regard her new seamstress as an irreducible fact, like wet grass after the rain, or the snakes that always found their way under the house. No matter how ill tempered she might behave with the others, she heeded Diu. Decisiveness was a special quality of the girl’s character. Diu understood that, to Simone, obedience was simply expedient; it did not imply fondness for her seamstress. Even so, Diu began to feel love for the child whose clothes she painstakingly created. Her love followed no logic, required no reciprocity. It simply existed.
If nature and circumstances had shaped Simone into a little empress, they’d also bestowed certain talents. Adeptly she categorized people and manipulated them to her will. She cast Diu as the beleaguering sort, which didn’t mean her seamstress couldn’t be used to advantage. The girl began to participate in the design of her clothes, and the two of them traveled to Tay Ninh City to select the fabrics. They became a recognized pair in the tailors’ market, where Simone demonstrated an eye for finding quality that had become rare because of the war. Gasoline was rare too, yet Simone’s father indulged his daughter and lent them the Citroën and a driver for these trips. Arriving in town, Diu always stared for a minute at Nui Ba Den—the solitary Black Virgin Mountain that loomed beyond.
By the age of eight, Simone was confident, clever, articulate. She used her voice with an imperious disdain that could intimidate even her parents, and they approached her warily when she stewed in one of her legendary moods. No less could she be gloriously spirited and engaging. Gifted at games, she invented matches that diverted the servants with whom she played. Her favorite game used picture cards of threaded human faces that Diu had sewn according to Simone’s instructions. Some of the stitched faces were oriental, others French. The object was to collect the more valuable French cards and above all to avoid the worst card that one could be dealt, the Japanese face, which delivered instant loss.