by Jeff Wallace
“Cobris left you intact because he’s vulnerable. He concealed his own involvement and abused his authority.”
He spiked on the cigarette. “Even if you’re right, he must have had his reasons. The world is like a wrinkled blanket, Tanner. Every wrinkle is a doubt. You can pull the damn thing tight as a drum, but a taut blanket doesn’t last for very long. So you live with things the way they are.”
I didn’t say anything. The chair clumped and he left.
At the airfield, jets whined toward the active runway. The Cambodian incursion must still be underway; the jet noises went on and on.
I felt it then. The craving. I pictured the white pus in the cracked hypodermic. Ugly stuff.
My veins licked their lips for the fix that would put me out.
* * *
Replacing the sun streaks through the Venetian blinds, wan smudges from the airfield lights. The wall clock read twenty-one hundred hours. I drifted in and out of sleep until I heard heels tapping on the linoleum and a figure descend onto the chair.
Across the bed rail, Vangleman’s voice. “Hello, Tanner.” A match whooshed and glowed red through my eyelids. Mentholated cigarette smoke blended into the ceiling fan’s wash.
“The general is sorry it didn’t work out for the dancer. Everything was arranged. If you’d have shown up, as we’d agreed, we would have had her safe. Too bad.” He spoke as if he were talking about a golf ball he’d lost in the rough. “He understands that what happened wasn’t your fault. He made a promise to you, and although the circumstances have changed, he still believes he can be of assistance. If you want, he can get your girlfriend Tuyet out, to some cozy stateside post like Fort Polk, Louisiana. Some place with warm weather—I hear Viet women don’t like the cold.”
“Where is André Nogaret?”
“Missing. Or so we hear. Nobody has seen him for three days. Lucky for him.” Lounging in the chair, he inhaled deeply, and the cigarette glow rouged his face. “You have to let go, Tanner. No more trips to Saigon to consult your contacts. No more climbing trees and digging through supply records. Bring your girlfriend onto Tan Son Nhut base until permission can be obtained for her to travel. In about a week, both of you can be gone and safe. Considering the events that have transpired since you met with the general, it’s generous beyond any conceivable measure.”
Vangleman was a pimp and deserved scorn. But the time for self indulgence was over. What he said was true. It was a sweet deal, an exit for Tuy and me.
Turning away, I stared at the Venetian blinds. “All right.”
I heard him rise. “Don’t contact General Cobris. I’ll leave an envelope for you at the main gate about the accommodations.”
He waited another minute, perhaps for me to reply, then his footsteps resounded. In the ashtray, the red cigarette ashes lived a few seconds before they became nothing.
Day 15
__________
At my request, Lopez had fetched a clean uniform from my BOQ. Now I stood, smartly dressed, release form in hand, while Doctor Wilcott argued that I needed another forty-eight hours for observation. “Where do you think you are, Tanner? This is a fucking hospital. You’re with us for a reason—you suffered severe physical and mental trauma. You almost died.”
“Let me ask you, doctor, where do you think you are? This is fucking Vietnam. It’s a barrel of shit begging to be burned.”
Standing there, Lopez nodded.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Wilcott. He grabbed the form out of my hand, scrawled his name at the bottom.
Outside Lopez had a jeep, and he drove me into Saigon. His only stop was at a swarm of urchins where I bought two packs of black-market American cigarettes. By a roadside kiosk on Cong Tuy Street, I transferred to Trong’s car, the same paint-chipped Fiat in which Giang had taken me to the shanty hideout.
“Any idea when you’ll be back?” Lopez asked.
“No.”
Trong spoke neither of Giang and Kim Thi, who were dead, nor of Tuy, who was alive. In his fingers over the steering wheel, he held a cigarette and weaved northward. With his cop’s savvy for backstreets, he punched a shortcut across town, veering at the outskirts onto Highway 13. The landscape no longer resembled the French quarter downtown or the shabby refugee villes. Cinderblock or hewn-plank huts roofed with palm thatch crouched by fields in many shades of green. The stalks of men and women appeared in sunlight and vanished in cloud shadow. Trong needed gas, so he detoured into a roadside town. When we slowed, people gawked at the bizarre apparition I presented in the window. They recognized me as a white man, but the purple bruises and raccoon eyes threw them. Was I in costume for a foreign holiday?
On the highway he picked up speed. We skirted empty settlements, the relics of projects meant to win hearts and minds, lost instead to the expedient of evacuation. Fifteen kilometers later, sluicing through the dung-thick air, we passed a sign that read An Loc, 30 kilometers. Rice shoots swayed above the paddies, the water slurped at the base of earthen dikes and, closer in, reeds bearded the elevated road. Where the embankment thrust five meters above the surrounding wetlands, he pulled off. To the right, something had drawn a cluster of Vietnamese military police, their heads like seed pods among the swaying reeds.
“Go, have a look,” Trong said.
Slowly, my legs none too steady, I descended the embankment. In the reeds I divined the contours of a Citroën DS, or the central part of it. The hood had peeled up, crumpled in waves; the roof was crushed on one side. Closer, I saw a body in the driver’s seat, the toothy skull torched black. The ground squashed underfoot, miring my boots that made sucking sounds with each lifted heel. The Vietnamese military police eyed my much-punished face and stepped aside.
Burnt flesh smells worse than anything save an unearthed grave. I tried to keep upwind, but the fickle breeze kept shifting. Forearm over my mouth and nose, I stepped back to breathe, forward to view the roasted face, see-sawing from various angles. An image flashed of the self-immolated monk Thich Quang Duc. The sun poked around the edge of a cloud and illuminated the chin and teeth and the few surviving strands of sandy hair, and it was as if somebody had filled in a connect-the-dots sketch.
I recognized André Nogaret now.
For five minutes I examined the wreck. The soldiers grimaced when I thrust my head under the curled-back hood. The engine compartment resembled the inside of a fire pit, the rubber melted, the metal distended.
I tramped to the elevated road and breathed gratefully, letting the breeze take away the smell.
Trong said, “The car went undiscovered for three days. At first light today, a military patrol spied it in the reeds. They radioed the license number, and we traced it to him.”
Walking the crest, we searched for the spot where the Citroën had left the pavement. The surface was concrete in good condition, an American project. We found nothing north of the crash and treaded back, traversing thirty meters before I eyed a ricebowl-sized pockmark and, beyond it, a gouge in the shoulder. In the grass off the road, a shaving of twisted metal amid so many windshield shards that the ground might have been seeded with diamonds. I toed a chrome chip on the opposite embankment. “Debris on both sides. An explosion right here.”
“A bomb inside?”
“I found a penetration in the grill. Everything was blown inward.”
“So a bomb hit the car?”
“A 2.75-inch rocket, shot from the north.” I scanned for the place an ambusher might have set up. Attacks still occurred on these roads, though they were rare this close to Saigon, especially against a civilian vehicle. The nearest treeline painted a hazy stripe three hundred meters away, out of effective rocket range against a moving car. Around stretched fields of scruff and reeds.
On Tuesday, André had told me he’d be meeting Simone at the Tay Ninh plantation. When he’d set out on his drive north, somebody watching him had transmitted a message to a third party.
Fickle sunlight skimmed the fields. The haze flared silver, span
ning from the reeds to the cobalt sky, too bright for my drug-dilated eyes to cope with. Squinting at the horizon, I understood what had happened.
The helicopter had hovered, rockets ready, the pilot watching for the car to enter a kill zone he’d have scouted in advance. Not until André crested the bridge would he have spotted the hovering demon. Whooshing at near supersonic speed, the rockets had spat their molten loads into his windshield and grill. He was probably dead before the Citroën tumbled and burned. If we searched the field to the southeast, we’d find the scars of rockets that had missed.
From here I could make out the torched death’s head. I thought of André’s wife Simone. Making the rounds at the poolside dinner, she’d known that her husband was to be killed the next day.
Cobris had known too. I recalled the pilot’s wings on his dress-white uniform.
Some revelations overwhelm a man’s belief mechanism.
The ARVN MPs pulled the corpse from the car. Trong watched. How many victims had he witnessed over the years? The MPs folded open a body bag, laid André inside, and stared up at Trong. He gave the slightest nod, and they zippered it up. He said, “The pressure from General Huang has stopped.”
“You’re off the hook?”
“Why should Huang trouble himself over a small fish like me? Those he wanted dead are dead.”
* * *
Trong left us alone in the garden. Tuy wore perfume, a first for her in my experience. Having grown up in her uncle’s house, obliged to abide by his rules, perhaps she considered the perfume a polite gesture with Trong and his family, the expected accoutrement for the proper Saigonese woman.
Or maybe she thought it would calm me down.
She poured Scotch in my glass. I didn’t drink it. Instead I paced, while she sat on the step and watched me, her perfume mixing with the candle smoke. The garden’s walls and the eucalyptus tree trapped the air. The leaves scattered the moonlight into triangles like scraps of paper clipped by a child, and the patterns and the scents and the sheen on her hair collaborated to summon peace.
It wouldn’t settle.
A few hours ago, the ARVN military police had delivered André’s remains to the old French mortuary, the same place where they dumped dead derelicts and addicts. Not to miss an opportunity, the cops had declared him guilty for the contract on Kim Thi, for the Montagnards in the alley, and for the booby trap and the cowboy attack in Tuy’s apartment. No matter that the night before he died, thugs had wrecked his club. And who had murdered André? Naturally the Viet Cong. The authorities would mount neither a forensics examination of the car nor a tactical site study that would have ruled out a ground ambush. André was dead, his crimes were solved, and soon he’d be forgotten.
This was Saigon. He was forgotten already.
The candle smoke became a movie screen on which my mind projected Kim Thi. I saw her peaceful face in the cubby where I first met her; her terrified eyes in the taxi. She was dead because of me.
“No more thinking.” Tuy touched my forearm to comfort me, and it was pure kindness, for she needed comforting herself. She’d been at the shanty hideout.
When I hadn’t shown up, they’d waited. The hours had lapsed into the evening. The delay had brought no alarm—Tuy explained how I was often late. Giang had stayed to protect the women. It was long after nightfall when they’d decided to sleep. Tuy had curled up in her blanket when Giang rose, stepped to the door, pressed his ear against it. He’d heard a sound outside, a click discordant with the duck quacks, drips, and the rattle of the tin-can walls. He’d listened for a minute, then, brave skeleton, opened the door and got shot in the forehead, crumpling atop his own legs.
In the wrap of her blanket, Tuy had watched as they’d trussed up Kim Thi, whose last imploring look was through strands of hair before they slipped a burlap sack over her head.
Huang’s men were pros. They didn’t kill unnecessarily. They’d let Tuy live.
I should be grateful.
Weeping, she pressed her face into my hand.
Let it go, I told myself.
Not so easy. When a man reflects upon his life, its voices sing out, either an angelic choir or a thousand screaming protesters. Right now, the screamers had the street.
Within a few days, Vangleman would produce the paperwork for Tuy to accompany me to the States. U.S. entry permits for Vietnamese citizens had to work their way through the bureaucracy, and nothing happened on short notice unless you had connections. I had none, except through Cobris. If I strained at the leash, he’d cut them.
Let it go. And why not? I had what I wanted. Tuy could leave with me for the States. Pure rationality bade me to cooperate. If I didn’t, I had no way of winning; I could only lengthen the roll call of the dead.
In my mind I saw smoke rising among the squatters, the bodies of the Viet Cong lined up alongside a young woman in a white ao dai.
I’d told myself I was helping my friends, but I’d only managed to get them killed. André had been right. Saigon had a rhythm. I was an errant note, a dissonance, no different from the whole American undertaking in Vietnam, trying to help insofar as we had any clue what we were doing in this country that made our heads spin. Fighting an elusive enemy, we’d resorted to massive firepower; counted bodies to measure our success; created free-fire zones; uprooted hundreds of thousands of peasants whose hearts and minds were one with the land they’d tilled for generations, the land we poisoned with defoliants. They grew to hate and fear us. We hated and feared them back. On the political side, we’d never insisted that South Vietnam’s leaders uphold a real democracy that would have kept the people’s loyalty. Instead it was the same corrupt burlesque as in Diem’s Saigon.
Too tricky for us, this place. We should have stayed the fuck out.
Too late now.
My gifts to my friends had been a bathtub, bars of soap, propane stoves, a portable radio, fashion magazines, and my time, brief as it was. What else had I brought?
Destruction, displacement, death.
Now, like the American Army, I was leaving.
With her tear-drenched eyes, Tuy stared up at me. She didn’t see my raccoon bruises, she peered beyond, to my roiling meditations. Standing up, she pulled me against her to smother them. “Stop,” she said. “Stand still.”
I obeyed. She blew out the candles. With her cat-sure senses, she found my Scotch glass and pressed it into my fingers. “Drink, it will help.”
I did.
She led me inside the house.
Day 16
__________
We slept in one of Trong’s rooms, a two-meter-square box with a screened window whose bamboo shade you opened with a rope through a ceiling pulley. The straw mat curled around us like a loose cigarette wrapper. Half asleep in the ambiance, I stared at a constellation of paint chips on the wall. The opiate still pulsed in my bloodstream, and I watched the chips reform into a dancer on a stage. She twirled to the music of the swishing trees and occasionally kicked a leg high.
Of all the ghosts of the marsh city, Kim Thi was the one who’d haunt me. Because I’d been stupid and slow, she was dead.
Deep in the night, watching the paint-chip dancer, I wasn’t entirely sure she was a hallucination. Narcotized minds are not places where ideas assemble neatly. Ages lapsed before my projections in the shadowy room let me seize the question, longer still before its significance struck.
In the morning, I wedged myself into the corner. My desk was the flower pot’s wooden base balanced on my knees. I wasn’t sure how to create the tone. It had to be chatty and informal, absent venom or petty threats. Simone had to take me seriously, therefore I had to sound like her confident equal, no less relentlessly committed. I wrote carefully, crossing out errant words, re-styling the sentences.
By the time Tuy stirred, I had a first draft.
“What are you writing?”
“Letters.”
Yawning, she sat up, stretched her arms, her torso a silhouette of sinewy curves. �
�Why?”
“This all started because two soldiers in a listening post saw a man walking toward them at night. They blew him up. It was what they had to do, because there was nobody else between them and their friends.”
She blinked. What was I talking about?
I said, “Last night I remembered something that Diu told you about Simone. It stayed with me because it saw it myself. A rare quality she has.”
“Her coldness?”
“Her decisiveness.”
Perhaps Tuy understood; she asked no more questions. In the corner, the lines swam under my hand.
* * *
Our room became a steam bath from the boiling water Tuy poured into the tin washtub. Smaller than our porcelain tub, it was sized for diminutive people, and to fit I had to fold like a fetus—a posture my state of mind helped me attain. I squatted docilely, keeping the stitched cuts on my thighs from submerging. She mewed at my mélange of bruises, washed me with a sponge, rubbed lotion on my back, kneaded the muscles like stiff dough while I elevated my forearms so the gauze wraps would stay dry. Out of the tub, I did my sprinter’s exercises. She inventoried my cuts and scrapes.
Reinstated to his job at the prefecture, Trong had resumed his old timings. He came home at midday and went to the garden where his wife served him soup and rice. Sometimes, after eating, like many Saigonese, he napped. Today, with guests in his house, he was politely awake when I approached him.
“You have an expectant look,” he said.
“Another favor to ask.” I held out one of the letters and explained what had to be done.
The detective took the envelope, which wasn’t sealed, he might have opened it and read the letter. Instead he held it in fingertips and slightly away from him, as if it were a dead mouse. A minute elapsed before he said, “A wise man does not resist the will of heaven.” A Catholic, he invoked a Confucian concept, his glare shivery as if he braced for rebuke. It was a breezy day, and the eddies within the garden walls swirled gently.