by Jeff Wallace
No answer. Tilting her head to show the unblemished curve of her neck, she blew smoke at the ceiling.
“All day you sloshed ahead. The adrenalin burned off and the fatigue set in. You emerged from the swamp into the thicker rain forest, only to find your way blocked by a deep tributary of the Saigon River. It inspired a decision, as such places do. Here was a clearing to rest. At the water’s edge, you might be spotted from the air. You knew somebody would come searching for you, but you couldn’t be sure how long it would take. So you decided that Gerard should continue on, swim across, and reach the road, far away though it was. To hedge your bets seemed wise. Leaving the radio with you, he set out, probably in the late afternoon. Before he entered the water, he took pains to protect something important to him. He sealed a photograph of his Vietnamese fiancée in the buffer well of his rifle. He never showed you the photo or told you about the girl. It seems you trusted him, but he didn’t trust you.”
I thought Simone might react to the last line. I was wrong. Through the smoke, she regarded me detachedly.
“That night you stayed on the riverbank, until, in the morning, you finally heard a response on the radio. Again you got lucky, because your batteries were running out. Gerard had forgotten to leave you the spare D-cells he’d rolled up in his poncho. When Major Stobe found you, his crew lowered a rescue harness from the helicopter to pull you up, and it was all you could do to hang on, so you abandoned the radio. You also left behind the second poncho and canteen, the C-ration cans, and a bottle of iodine tablets. You kept a few items. A flashlight. The weapon Gerard handed you—a nine-millimeter pistol. You probably had other maps, to cover the remote areas the helicopter flew over. I’m betting you tossed the maps in the water, but maybe you took them with you.”
At my revelations, her eyes crinkled—all the affirmation I was going to get. I knew about the pistol from the solitary 9mm bullet; he wouldn’t have left her unarmed. The flashlight was obvious—it was the only way he’d have found the vine tunnel at night. He wouldn’t have taken the sole flashlight, leaving her without. The maps were a guess; I’d found no trace of additional maps either in the helicopter or by the river. I didn’t mention the screwdriver, I hadn’t found it, but somewhere nearby, or maybe in the tributary, was the one he’d used to open his rifle stock to fit in Kim Thi’s photo.
Animated now, pumping her crossed leg, she stared at me, her dusk-in-the forest eyes lively. “You didn’t come here to regale me with your cleverness.”
“No.”
She lit another cigarette. “What do you want?”
“To help me keep someone alive.”
“Who?”
“Kim Thi. The dancer in the photo.”
“You found her?”
“Yes. There’s a contract for her assassination.”
She tossed her head, and her hair flayed out and curled back precisely on itself. “You are a man driven, George. I sympathize. But how can I help you with that?”
“I need to find out why somebody is trying to kill her.”
“Have you spoken to my husband?”
“Yes.”
“You should speak to him again.”
I thought of the moment, as André had described, when sixteen years ago she’d walked into that room, and he’d turned with everyone else to behold the teenage aristocrat, the beautiful heiress who refused to listen to the adults urging her to abandon Indochina and leave for France. The sinewy insurgents who planted mines in the road hadn’t frightened her. With her ex-para mate, she’d fought to keep her colonial birthright. The years of war should have carved more lines in that perfect face. She’d handled everything, the war, her failed marriage, the helicopter crash, with the same aplomb she evinced now.
The dismissal came in a subtle shift of her posture. When I rose she followed me, smiling softly, a reward for picking up her signal—she knew how to train her men. “Thank you for returning my jewels, George. Perhaps we shall meet again.”
The two French security men stood outside her door, where I suspected they’d waited since she’d let me in. They escorted me to the lobby and out.
* * *
Tuy had asked me to buy towels and a few other things for Kim Thi, and for half an hour I perused Cholon’s market stalls where I haggled lightly with the vendors. When I got to Tuy’s street, the wind had picked up. The hanging clothes leapt like puppets. I lingered in the tree shadows looking for Trong’s sentinel. He wasn’t there. A clatter like a dropped plastic saucer wobbled eerily. Against the stucco, her second-floor window made a dark rectangle.
Had the women gone out, despite my warning? If so, would Tuy have left a note for me?
The soggy canal air muffling my footsteps, I crossed to the stairwell door, prepared to use my key, found it unlocked, not unusual for the afternoon, but Tuy’s awareness of the threat against Kim Thi made it inexplicable. I entered the stairwell and strained for the timbre of a woman’s voice or the music from the portable radio. At the switchback landing halfway up, I paused. A shift in the air as subtle as a breath. The staircase led nowhere except to her apartment; no others used it but for the cleaning woman who swept out the dust. Stairways inevitably collected scents, of cooking, mildew, sweat, but now a metallic acridness welled, as if from a broken moped. The smell grew prominent when I breached the plane of the upper floor. At the landing outside her door, I caught the odor enough to identify it.
Burnt gunpowder.
Somebody had fired a gun here.
The safety on my .45 clicked. For a minute, I froze against the opposite wall, staring at the brown monolith of Tuy’s door. My heart hammered. Beside me, the landing window—the one in which I’d first seen her below the Roman frieze—threw pale swatches of light against the panels. What awaited me inside? I pictured her face and the panic mounted. Then I noticed that the door was not entirely closed; the shot-out lock distended from the wood.
A shooter would have had a better chance at me from the top of the stairs. Nobody was inside, I concluded.
Nobody alive.
I almost pushed the door open.
Doors. May 1968. Mini-Tet, they’d called it. The severed torso of a South Vietnamese soldier had dangled upside down in the tree branches, his boots still upright where his feet last had filled them, in front of a door he’d opened to search a house the Viet Cong had taken over in a skirmish in western Cholon. Below the suspended torso, a crowd of spectators had gathered, and like me they must have wondered why the soldier hadn’t used the window—surely he’d been trained to avoid the doors of houses the enemy recently had occupied. Exploding behind the rigged door, the bomb had ripped away the house the way a ravenous mouth bites a rice cake.
I ran my fingertips along the inside edge of the jamb, to the bolt recess and over a bullet gore in the wood, nearly to the floor where, moving as gently as water droplets, they brushed the wire. It was half slack. I might have pushed the door open a forearm’s length before the wire tugged out the pin on the grenade taped to the lower wall. Gently fingering the wire to judge its tautness, I slid my hand between the door and the jamb and gripped the grenade, the shape and texture revealing an American M-33. It was a good choice for a booby trap, more reliable than Chinese or Russian grenades, probably with the fuse shortened to one or two seconds rather than the standard four-second delay. My thumb on the handle so it wouldn’t detonate, I pried it free, unspun the wire, and bent down the pin’s edges to fix it firmly. The grenade in my hand was secure. Was there another?
It was a risk, a jackhammer turned loose in a house of mirrors, but I had to know what was in there, so with my foot I gave the door a shove, straining in the silence for the telltale zing of a grenade handle that would have sent me vaulting over the stair rail. The door arced open and thumped unimpeded against the bathtub.
I stared at an empty room, quiet except for the drip of the tub’s hose.
Where were Tuy and Kim Thi?
It is one thing to command yourself to logic, ano
ther to obey, as the vortex of panic whirls around your head. My fingers clenching the grenade had gone white. Roving the room, I saw the trail of wood debris on the floor, no other signs there had been a disturbance here.
Whoever had shot off the lock had not found the women. They would have killed them on the spot and not bothered to booby trap the door. I told myself the grenade was proof Tuy and Kim Thi were alive.
What if the women had been taken and the booby trap set to keep me off their trail?
Stand still and think!
Trong must have learned of the danger in advance and pulled the women out. He might have ordered the police sentinel to move them somewhere.
My choices were to wait here or to go searching for them. Best to find Trong first, I thought. No telling if the attackers had posted a watcher. If so, they’d know I’d disarmed their welcome-home surprise, and I might expect visitors momentarily.
Where to stash the grenade? From the landing, I recovered the bag of purchases, brought it to the table, and took out the towels. Under them I nested the grenade like a steel egg.
* * *
The people on Dong Khanh ignored me craning over their heads. It was the hour when they crowded the curbs for a ride. A cyclo was too slow—I needed a taxi or a scooter. Too hyped to wait my turn, I tried to crab past them, but they were quick and slipped into the vehicles ahead of me. Jostling along the sidewalk, I passed a side street whose specialty was coffin-making, and the notion of choosing one for Tuy—a narrow, tapering box—frenzied me even more. A woman stepped toward a yellow and blue Renault, and I bumped her aside, climbed in, and barked the name of Trong’s street. Heads swiveled, men spat on the ground and uttered verdicts. The smoke from the fish cookers could have made a banner: The Ugly American.
Twelve years ago, journalists Eugene Burdick and William Lederer had published their memorable novel about how American naiveté had made us saps for the communists in a make-believe Southeast Asian country suggestive of South Vietnam. The title had become synonymous with our arrogant image abroad. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations had spoken of the book and its lessons. I’d read it. All of us had read it. Yet here I was, making a jackass of myself and branding my fellow Americans. I was the man who, warned over and over not to walk into a wall, walked into it, as if the wisdom of the past amounted to nothing, and all that mattered was my trepidation of the moment.
At Trong’s house, I paid the driver to wait for me while I ran to the door and banged. It opened a few inches. His wife’s face hovered in the slit, her expression as unmoving as the chain. “No here!”
“Xin loi...” I struggled for my few words of Vietnamese. “Bao lau?”
“He go.”
“Where?”
The door shut and I knocked again. It cracked open. I said, “Noi du’o’c Trong?”
“Sureté,” she trilled. The door thumped shut.
Sureté. She meant the police.
At the prefecture, the taxi driver refused my offer of extra money to wait, and I entered by the door where the demonstration had formed two days ago, now quiet under the rain-pending sky. The payless policemen were gone, having been paid or tear gassed. En route to Giang’s office, I took a wrong turn into a corridor where dozens of men gawked at me from behind the bars of an overcrowded detention cell. The custodian yipped and shooed me away. Finally I reached Giang’s door. It was closed. I knocked. No answer.
I headed toward Trong’s office, hoping the door would be open. He could wink and lead me to a discreet place to talk. The door was shut; I had to stand there and knock. People in the adjacent hallway stared.
No response from inside. I didn’t know the other detectives, and to ask them might invite trouble for my friend, so I said nothing. Cops froze in their steps. Perhaps they perceived panic in my ceaseless tapping on the wood. From a plainclothesman, in English, “He no work here anymore.”
“Where does he work?”
Nobody knew.
* * *
Across the street, children chased each other along a concrete blast barrier. Every two meters or so, gray runoff lines segmented the wall, and the kids blurred from line to line like figures in an old film reel. It was comforting to see them indulge in the normal antics of children, not begging or peddling cigarettes. Rarely had the Vietnamese evoked my envy, but I envied these kids now for their heedless frolic.
I had to think clearly. Trong was neither at home nor at the prefecture. The plainclothesman had said he didn’t work there anymore. A possibility clapped in my head. What if the two women hadn’t been warned? What if they’d been out on their own? They might return to the apartment to find that whoever had set the booby trap had returned too, and was waiting inside.
A scooter cab snarled into view. Waving it down, I directed the driver to Tuy’s apartment, tapped his shoulder, held out my fist, pumped it. The message connected—money for speed. We cut across a shopping street, threading between startled pedestrians, onto Dong Khanh where we shot through a popcorn popper of angry exclamations. Hooking a precarious right-leaning turn at Tuy’s street, he kicked up the gravel in front of her building. Into his open palm I slapped piastre bills that he didn’t count; he fishtailed away, the smoke and dust billowing.
Rain began to beat on the leaves. I was about to head up the stairs when I spotted a figure leaning against a tree. Perhaps Giang supported himself on the tree because he didn’t have the strength to stand for long. The cigarette he brought to his mouth was as thin as the bones that held it. Folding his lips back from yellow teeth, he sidled closer, and his voice came low and raspy; it would have been low and raspy had he shouted. “You should not bring drivers so close.”
“Where is Tuy?”
“A safe place. We go.”
* * *
The rain cascaded; the sky orbed low over Giang’s hood. He drove westward into Cholon, through alleys like flooded sewers. Twice the engine expired and he had to restart it.
“Trong too loyal to you,” he said. “He get himself killed for you.”
“He’s my friend.”
Giang looked like he might spit.
I asked, “When did he find out?”
“This morning.”
“How?”
“He has other friends.”
I related my visit to the apartment, the booby trap behind the door.
“They very bold,” he warbled. “Even for Huang’s men. Too much trouble for club dancer.”
“She must know something that could hurt them.”
“What could she know? Huang too powerful to care about her. She nobody.”
Nobody. A shadow in a crowd. A presence unfelt. I’d fancied that I knew Saigon, but truly it eluded me. What could have lent Kim Thi the gravitas to merit a paid hit? My hip still ached from the fall through her banister when the shooters had opened fire. An hour ago, I’d nearly triggered a booby trap entering Tuy’s apartment. All for a showgirl Saigon’s underworld was striving to kill.
Giang u-turned and stopped briefly to watch for anyone following. From Pham Phu Thu he spun into Pham Van Chi. At last he swerved into a flooded alley between shanty walls of flattened tin cans nailed on like shingles. Splashing through puddles, he reached a wider space where I thought he’d do another u-turn. Instead he drove ahead, eased the car underneath a corrugated overhang, and got out. He led me along a walkway where our shoulders brushed the tin cans. I saw why Trong might have found advantages in this place, a nook within a labyrinth. Giang halted at a recessed door, tapped, and pushed inside.
On the straw mats sat Tuy and Kim Thi. They stared expectantly, and Tuy read the relief in my face. When she pressed into my arms, I squeezed her, and the sweet aroma of her hair almost buckled my knees. Across the room, Giang dropped weakly into the corner beside Kim Thi, offered her a cigarette that she lit with a candle. No longer wary of her skeletal protector, she smiled at him. The cigarette and candlesmoke blended into a thatch overhead.
Reluctantly I explained what h
ad happened, the booby trapping of our home. The news hit Tuy like the death of a loved one. Never before had I seen her weep. She drew her breaths in short gasps, squeezed her eyes against the rushing tears. The rain plinked the tin cans. Rain and tears. I rested my cheek on her hair. How could I have delivered this misery to her life?
In the corner, Kim Thi and Giang, the dancer and the ghoul, regarded us with expressions between sympathy and indifference.
An hour later Trong arrived. He played father to everyone, arranging the containers of rice and chicken he’d brought, making Tuy and Kim Thi laugh at the mirth in his voice. He served the food, steaming hot and spicy, and the aromas and his presence calmed the mood in the little room. I couldn’t help but be cheered too. Together we sat on the piled straw mats that kept the floor’s dampness from seeping through.
While the others continued eating, he gestured me outside to the walkway and along to where he’d tucked his car. Spill from the sloped roof rutted the ground. Over the shacks I could make out a line of buildings pronging TV aerials, profligate even in Saigon’s poor neighborhoods. He turned, and his happy facade fell away like a Chinese New Year’s mask whose cord had snapped. “Huang has the whole city out searching for her. He has put big money on her head. You must get her to an American base.”
“I’ll try.”
“To try is not enough!” From a man who would go far to avoid confrontation, it was quite an outburst.