by Jeff Wallace
I sat beside Tuy to catch up on the news I’d missed. I read about Cambodia, a country I’d paid little attention to until now. Cambodia had been part of French Indochina, and I wondered if it was as complicated as Vietnam. If so, it seemed that we should be wary of getting sucked into another quagmire.
Kim Thi and Giang ignored the newspapers. I asked him, where was Trong? He shrugged.
The climbing sun braised the walls. The heat today would soar. I reassured the women that they’d be out of here before evening. Tonight they’d sleep in soft beds in military quarters.
“For how long?” asked Kim Thi.
“A week or two. Until General Huang agrees to lay off.”
Her expression stayed dubious. I didn’t wish to explain how I’d arranged the deal. For once, I was glad not to see Trong. He would read everything too accurately.
* * *
The Quartier Latin club’s showcase lay on the sidewalk, the pink neon tube sectioned like a snake run over by a harvester. Stepping over it toward the entrance, I was less curious that the marquee was down than why nobody had picked it up. Broken glass crunched under my boots. The lights inside were smashed, and the only illumination spilled feebly from the open doorway over what resembled a field of reeds: the legs of upended tables, strewn bottles, the backs of demolished chairs, and the crumpled stage curtains minus a torn strip that stretched like a sampan sail from the carved rubber tree to the ceiling. Three employees, including Danh, his arm slung, clinked through the ruins in search of things not broken. They were empty-handed. At first I thought I was viewing the aftermath of a bombing. Then I saw that the front door, walls, and pillars were unmarred, and I detected no charring or smoke odors.
Toward the far side I heard a moan whose volume peaked when I entered the kitchen that now served as an operating room. Sprawled on a carving table, his legs and arms dangling over, a Vietnamese man endured stitches to a gash on his forehead. An older gentleman pulled the bloody thread while two others struggled to hold the victim still. A step away, André watched. Blood dabbed his white shirt, and his face was so crimped that he might have bitten into the lemon from his kepi drink.
He saw me. “More questions, Tanner?”
“This time I have something to tell you.”
He led me to the stage base, righted a table, found a surviving bottle of ‘33’ beer, two chairs that retained their legs, and from somewhere came up with two unbroken glasses. “They burst in last night as we were closing, Huang’s men, swinging wooden poles. They smashed everything and hurt two of my employees: one you just saw; the other is in the hospital. Is this sufficient to convince you I am not his partner?” He poured the beer, four fingers to each glass. He wasn’t in much of a drinking mood.
I asked, “How often does Simone visit your club?”
“Your quips about my wife grow tiresome.”
“It’s just a question.”
He studied the foam on the beer. “She stops by occasionally. Why not? She owns a stake in the business.”
“Makes sense. It’s familiar and safe. A place she discreetly could meet with Gerard.”
“Please get to the point.”
“They’re going to kill you, André.”
He laughed. I was indeed an infinite well of non-sequiturs. “Nonsense.”
“I’m in a hurry, I’ll spare you if you’re not interested.”
Lighting a cigarette, his hand shook slightly. “Please do explain. It was a long night.”
“For me too. Last night a man told me that time stalked him like a hellhound, not germane to anything, except that it reminded me I hadn’t been paying enough attention to time.”
“You’ve only become more cryptic.”
“I’m talking about a chronology, the examination of when events occurred, and in what order. It’s a tool to determine causality. For example, a man dies in the jungle, an investigation follows, and a murder contract materializes on a showgirl. Last night, I thought about the contract on Kim Thi, and I asked myself, when did it start?”
He lit a Gauloises. “And this is pertinent how?”
“The shooters were waiting for her outside her place on Thursday night, so the contract was running then. It wasn’t active before Wednesday, because she was out in public that day, at JFK Square, hoping Gerard would show up. She went there for three days, Monday through Wednesday, and nobody bothered her. It means that Gerard’s death didn’t trigger the contract. Not of itself. It was something that happened after.”
“Something that happened after,” he echoed sardonically.
“I have a friend on the Saigon police who says it takes forty-eight hours to set up a contract. To choose the killers, instruct them, orchestrate the conditions. The two Montagnards who attacked us Thursday night probably had waited for hours, maybe all day, for Kim Thi to come out. Subtract forty-eight hours from Thursday, and you get Tuesday. So the starting point was Tuesday, or possibly the night before—the night of Monday the 27th.”
“So?”
“Come on, André, you told me yourself, in your little speech about Americans upsetting the balance, remember?” I took a sip of the beer that somehow had preserved its coolness.
“All right. Tell me what happened, the night of Monday the 27th.”
“I showed Simone the dancer’s photo. And her demeanor changed. It wasn’t dramatic—she’s nothing if not adept at keeping her composure—but I noticed, though I had no idea what it meant. I’ll bet she recognized the club’s stage in the photo. She may even have called you that night to ask about the dancer.”
No comment. I hadn’t expected one.
“Simone realized I’d find the girl and learn about the helicopter. But what of it? The revelation posed no risk to her. She had to be worried about something else. What might have menaced her so much that she’d set up a contract?”
“You have an answer for that too, I assume.” His gaze didn’t rise from the beer glass.
“She trusted Gerard completely. He flew for her, knew where the helicopter came from, understood everything. Nobody trusts another person that much without a reason. I’m betting they were old acquaintances. He’d proven himself to her before, maybe as one of your ex-soldier buddies who protected the plantation.”
His eyes narrowed as if in remembrance. Tricky to read affirmation in a man’s expression. I read it in his.
“Simone must have puzzled over why her pilot had bothered to conceal an affair with a Saigon showgirl. Then the implications hit her. If this girl had meant so much to him, what had he told her? Details of his business—which meant Simone’s business? Even then, the showgirl wouldn’t have been a problem by herself. It was when I entered the scene, searching for her with my Saigon police contacts, and the certainty I would question her, that she became significant. Without knowing it, I’d delivered a crisis to your wife.”
He stared at me.
I said, “Simone didn’t fly to Cambodia so she could rearrange the doilies on her antique furniture. Those were money-making excursions. They were especially rewarding because she didn’t have to share the profits. I’m guessing that her slighted partner in the venture was General Huang. His involvement can’t be a coincidence. With the helicopter, she could get back and forth without going through his checkpoints. What was she hauling, André? Heroin?”
“I don’t deny that you are perceptive,” he said softly. “But none of this concerns me.”
“Kim Thi is not the only one who poses a threat to Simone. You know a lot more.”
“She trusts my discretion.”
“She knows you’ve talked to me. You’re talking to me now.”
“Are you trying to be a son of a bitch?”
“I’m trying to save your life.”
“Why? As a gift for my cooperation? I’m afraid I cannot accept.”
He knew there was no quid pro quo. Our conversation was a mutual hiatus made possible by the kindred spirits of soldiers. At his core, that’s what André was, and
I got along well with men like him. I probably would have gotten along nicely with Khiêm too, had he not been the enemy. And dead.
I said, “You locked her in a bad position. She can’t risk a court case to divorce you, not when you know enough to destroy her. So what do you think she’ll do instead?”
Maybe seeking the answer, André surveyed the wreckage of his club. The place was silent; the yelling from the kitchen had stopped.
Time to go. Wending through the powdery light, André trailing, we emerged onto the sidewalk where Quartier Latin’s boys finally were dragging away the showcase. We reached the nearby intersection, and I began to scan the traffic for a scooter cab.
He said, “Why did you go to the trouble to deliver your grim warning?”
“Last night I cut a deal. It was my only way to protect Kim Thi and a few others. My part is to back off. You weren’t part of the bargain, so I figured I could play it how I liked.”
“Noble of you.”
“No. The opposite of noble. What counts is to get my people clear.”
“And after your friends are clear, as you put it, what will you do?”
“You mean, will I burn Simone?”
He nodded slightly.
“I don’t think anyone would believe me.”
A shadow passed over his expression. Perhaps it was gratitude. He asked, “So you think I should give her what she wants?”
“That would be smart.”
“I’m seeing her today, at the Gavet plantation. She called me last night, soon after Huang’s men wrecked my club.”
“A coincidence?”
“I don’t think so. You have your deal. I expect she will offer me mine.”
“You’re driving to Tay Ninh Province?”
“How else—do you think I have a helicopter too?”
A scooter cab reacted to my gesture, cruised to the curb. I climbed on. “Highway 13 is dangerous,” I said. “Be careful.”
Amusement lifted his tired face. He’d said all he was going to say, and my scooter already was swerving away from the curb. Glancing back, I watched the Frenchman’s figure recede in the saffron light. The driver banked suddenly—all scooter-cab moves are sudden—and I snapped my head instinctively as we dodged around a bicycle. When I looked again, André was lost to sight.
* * *
A lull in the wind. The trees in front of Tuy’s apartment slouched. Passing them, I squinted up at the window. Three hours remained before I had to meet Vangleman. I’d phoned him to set the time—fifteen hundred hours. He’d been up most of the night and sounded groggy, and I might have gone light on him, but rudeness to the man had become requisite. No longer resistive, he answered my questions while I told him nothing. I didn’t say I’d be bringing two women, not one, to the base. It was unwise to supply Vangleman with information that he’d use like a devaluating currency, to be spent while it still bought something.
I’d intended to leave Tuy in Saigon and to ask Trong to shelter her until I could take her with me. But the city was too treacherous now. Too risky for the women to return to the apartment to get their things, which was why I was here, to pick up as much as I could carry. Trong could recover the rest later.
Trong’s sentinel no longer protected the side street, so I had the driver loop the block twice while I studied the rain-washed buildings. I scanned behind the fly-swarmed garbage bin and hanging clothes and chained scooters.
Nobody.
Off the bike, I crept forward, pausing every few steps to observe. At the stairwell door, I took out my .45 and snapped down the safety. The hours had dispelled the cordite; I smelled only the neighborhood’s odors—fish sauce, wood smoke, wet leaves. Keeping to the stairs’ edge where they creaked less, I reached the upper level and pivoted to cover Tuy’s door. I touched it, felt it move, kicked it lightly to swing inward, spreading light across the scattered wood chips. The sole noise, the bathtub hose’s torpid drip.
I stepped through.
A syringe needle jabbed into the side of my neck.
The pain seared. By impulse I flailed and knocked aside an extended arm, swung to shoot, saw the kick, too fast to stop. It smashed into my wrist and the pistol flew.
Glimpse of a bony face, long hair cut in imitation of a pop trend. A Saigon cowboy, ex-soldier gone to crime, a symptom of the war. He fancied himself a fighter, but he under-weighed me by thirty pounds. His fist brushed my cheekbone. With the butt of my hand I caught him aside the nose and felt the bone snap. His eyes rolled and he went down.
I plucked out the hypodermic. The plunger was extended—the cowboy hadn’t gained the leverage to push it forward. In the glass tube opalesced a milky solution, maybe morphine.
The cowboy could have put a bullet through my head. Why the syringe?
A whiff behind. I spun and a wooden pole collided with my forehead. The pole broke, a sliver twirled. The room glazed over and my knees began to fold. In the blur stood another cowboy. He stared at the stump he gripped. He might have won by striking again, with the stump, his hand, anything. Instead he gawked, and my glands spurted the adrenaline to tilt me into a football block, shoulder to his chest, driving him to the wall and down. A head kick would have finished him, but it was my turn to gawk. He writhed up like a thrown cat, slashed a knife at my face. My left hand leapt to catch his wrist, and I tried to hit him. He twisted. This one had wrestler’s moves. If we’d been in a ring, I’d have crushed him by weight alone, but this was Saigon and I had the wrong style. He squirmed until he was on my back, his left forearm monkey-gripping my throat while his right hand pressed the blade toward my eyes.
The cowboy wriggled his forearm tight. I tugged to break his grip. He was tenacious, to loosen him would have taken both my hands, and with the other I held off the knife. Riding my back, he dug his knees into my kidneys. I swirled and thudded him against the wall, accomplishing nothing, and the sinewy lever wrung my windpipe shut. A pall begin to descend. It occurred to me that an instant’s blackout, the least relaxation of the pressure against his knife hand, and the blade would ram to the hilt through my eye socket. Panic has the feel of freezing water when it soaks through to the skin. My panting became a shrill cry, the cowboy heard it too, the whinny of my impending death, and it spurred him to flex his forearm all the harder while we pirouetted grotesquely in the window light in which the apartment’s familiar sights—Tuy’s hanging fabrics, the tub, the rolled-up straw mattress—whirled dizzily. No act was too desperate now, I would have hurled us both through the window if it hadn’t been too high in the wall. The pall darkened, the knife waved like a snake’s head two centimeters in front of my right eye, and I anticipated the screaming jolt when it went in.
Airless, turning a leaden dance step, the way you dance with your grandmother, I watched the room spin, and wandering into view, a stack of new towels...
My rider did nothing to stop me when I released his choking forearm and groped under the towels, wrapped my fingers around the grenade, brought it up like a starving man who finds an apple, molars on the metal pin, pulling, chipping teeth...
The cowboy knew what I had. He must have believed he was within seconds of killing me with the knife, so he clung. Consciousness folding, I staggered until the backs of my knees pressed against the familiar, rounded edge of the bathtub. I dropped the grenade behind me, heard it clatter in the basin, tipped my knees, still pushing the knife hand away, and the cowboy went over on top of the grenade.
He released his grip, the knife flew, his hands flailed. I slapped mine against my ears.
* * *
Time loses its consistency.
Like a stone catapulted straight up, I ascend toward the ceiling.
Aloft, I notice the window exploding outward, glass fragments and rusted screen rushing into gray sky. The hanging light fixture lies horizontal against the ceiling plaster, its bulb gone. The wire arcs in reverse, and I fall...
Face up on the floor, I am not yet aware of pain.
I detect movement.
The cowboy who damped the explosion with his body is not moving, of this I am certain, for I observe his head on the floor, a sculpted bust whose open eyes express surprise.
By the door, the first cowboy, the one who jabbed the needle into my neck, rises unsteadily. The tub’s contours routed the blast upward, and he caught little of it save for the plaster dust. He shakes his head and a powdery cloud erupts. From his smashed nose, blood streaks along a white mime’s mask.
He scans the floor. Steps, stumbles, rights himself. Abstractly, with no sense of alarm, it dawns on me that he is looking for the knife. He finds something. Not the knife. The syringe. Examining it, his face shows pique. The vial is cracked, some of the milky solution has leaked.
He finds me. I lift an arm, but I’m in shock. I cannot summon the strength to resist.
He is still on the hunt. For what? A neck vein. He rams in the needle. It hurts like hell.
This time he is able to depress the plunger.
Lurching, he vanishes out the door.
The dangling light cord oscillates. I count six swings before I no longer perceive anything.
* * *
A horn blares at the Tan Son Nhut airbase gate.
An American voice. “Easy, man.”
Four hands tug me from the taxi and drag me to a cement bench by the guard house. Set upright upon it, I flop to the ground.
A military police sergeant grays over me, stooping to peer at my face. Alongside him, another MP says, “The cabby said an ARVN passer-by in Cholon noticed him crawling down the fucking sidewalk stoned out of his head. He stashed him in the taxi and sent him to the gate.”
“Must have had a helluva night. Lucky bastard.”
“Looks like somebody beat the shit out of him, there’s blood all over his uniform.”
“We get all the losers.”
“Check out the insignia. He’s an MP officer.”
“What a fucking disgrace.”
“If we report him like this, the motherfucker’s career is over. Get a load of his pupils--they’re so dilated they look like buckeyes.”