by Jeff Wallace
Abrams registered no emotion until I related the deaths of the two American soldiers at the hilltop LZ in Cambodia. Hearing how I’d left their bodies behind, he glowered, and in his expression I saw the bitterness of the long war.
When I finished, he said, “Be sure your report specifies the locations of the two KIAs. We’ll bring them out.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He asked, “Where is the Frenchwoman, Simone Nogaret?”
“I don’t know. Neither does my Saigon police contact. He guesses that she’s left Vietnam.”
“Do you believe that she had anything to do with the NVAs you ran into at her Cambodia mansion?”
“She probably had an arrangement of some kind with the NVA. Their proximity may just have been a coincidence.”
Abrams grunted. Apparently he too hated coincidences.
He turned to one of the staff officers and instructed him to telex the Pentagon to request a formal investigation of the extraordinary circumstances of General Cobris’s death. A minute later, the officer tapped me on the shoulder. The session was over.
I treaded across the Army-blue carpet.
* * *
Still reeling from accusations that the Army had covered up the 1968 My Lai massacre, the Pentagon immediately appointed a special investigator, a brigadier general. The new acting Provost Marshal phoned me at the French Fort with brusque instructions: I was to do nothing more on my own; my sole responsibility was to stand by to give a formal statement to the special investigator when he arrived.
When I hung up, I knew my career was over. I’d delivered an embarrassing tale to the press, an unpardonable offense in the Army’s culture.
Other careers were ending too. Stobe offered to resign his commission. MACV turned him down, relieved him from command, and confined him to quarters pending an Article 32 hearing and likely court martial. Vangleman was loading files into his staff car in the VIP parking lot when the MPs surrounded him. They confiscated the files and led him to a room on the MACV compound for what amounted to house arrest. Colonel Crowley, having barely arrived in CONUS, received two phone calls. The first notified him of the cancellation of his assignment. The second summoned him to Washington. For the term of the special investigation, he would serve in a nominal capacity with no authority. It was the kind of purgatory where you became the subject of whispers and rumors, and you prayed they’d let you return to the real Army, knowing that it probably wouldn’t happen.
An examination of airline manifests revealed that Marie Dobier, Simone’s assistante de gestion, had left Saigon aboard a flight for Paris. No record was found of Simone’s departure, but she must be gone too, perhaps under a false identity, or her own with the name left off the passenger list. Such omissions could be arranged.
I spent a few hours at the French Fort going through the paperwork to turn over to MACV. I worked alone—the Vietnamization reaper finally had bladed Sergeant Lopez. Duffel packed, he now waited to board a Freedom Bird at the departure-transfer station. He’d left a note for me under a coffee cup on my desk:
Sir,
They DEROS’ed my ass before I could say goodbye.
‘Nam is finally over for me.
You need to get out too, before the shit hits the fan.
Lopez
DEROS meant Date of Expected Return from Overseas. Mine wouldn’t be far behind.
I received a last update. On the outskirts of Vung Tau, local farmers had been hearing helicopter noises emanating from a wooded compound. The farmers informed a joint MP patrol, which located a landing pad, workshop, and tools. On the pad, a helicopter. It proved to be the chopper that had flown Simone on her final trip to Cambodia. Still strapped in his seat, the pilot had a bullet hole behind his right ear.
Forensics indicated a small-caliber handgun.
* * *
With the assistance of General Abrams’s staff, I moved Tuy to Tan Son Nhut airbase, into a barracks under construction in a row of identical, plywood-sided structures. Meant to house forty persons, the barracks now sheltered two.
She glanced around, her expression empty. Somebody had swept up the sawdust and the discarded nails. The place nonetheless smelled like a lumberyard. I thought she must feel like the inhabitant of a strategic hamlet, plucked out of her old village and resettled behind barbed wire.
A quartermaster sergeant stopped by to ask if we needed anything.
“How about some drapes for the windows,” I said.
He came back to report that the PX was out of curtains. He substituted white sheets that he tacked to the interior window frames.
Tuy said she liked the effect.
At a folding table, we ate dinner from cartons I’d picked up from the PX take-out. We sat away from the walls that radiated heat from the sun, now steeping into the paddies to the west. After, we carried our bottles of Michelob to the steps whose rails hadn’t yet been installed. For a long time we sat without speaking, until she leaned her head against my shoulder and said, “You know, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Maybe always.”
“Me too, I think. I couldn’t admit it to myself.”
She took a sip of her beer, and when she lowered the bottle I saw how the red sky picked out the lighter streaks in her hair. The sadness crushed me, and I couldn’t speak for a while. Finally I asked, “Where will you go?”
“To my mother’s, at first. She lives in a safe neighborhood.”
Safe. No such thing.
But maybe there was.
“When?”
“Tomorrow, in the morning.”
Thus a man finds his horizon. I’d once seen a helicopter whose tail rotor clipped a tree and sheared off. Spinning wildly, the chopper thumped atop a thatch hut, smashing it flat. South Vietnam was a new country overlaid on an old culture. America was a foreign power set on top, making for an unwieldy stack, the helicopter and the hut.
Had Tuy gone with me, it might have been a metaphor for us.
She didn’t let it happen.
Day 20
__________
In the morning I went to the PX snack bar to buy breakfast. When I returned, she was dressed to go, her meager bag packed and by her feet.
“I’m leaving now,” she said.
“Can I give you a ride?”
She shook her head. No doubt it horrified her, the notion of riding in a U.S. jeep to her mother’s neighborhood.
I drove her to the taxi stand by the gate, where I stayed with her waiting for a blue and yellow Renault to show up. She asked, “When will you leave?”
“A few days. A week.”
Something in my tone must have stirred her perfect intuition. She peered at me, her eyes narrowing. “You’re going downtown?”
“Later today.”
“To see Trong?”
I nodded.
“I thought he stopped helping you.”
“He’s still my friend.”
“But why go?”
“Last evening, you asked me if I knew. Now, I ask you.”
Her eyes revealed the intensity of her concentration, and I was happy to see that look of hers, my brilliant Tuy. “She’s still here?”
“Yes. Trong got a message to me.”
“She’s not your problem anymore. Why not leave it to others?”
“She is my problem. My hundredth problem.”
“Hundredth?”
“It was Cobris’s definition—the one you can’t solve, so you pass it on.”
She stared, not comprehending. A taxi engine growled, and her eyes drifted.
* * *
In violation of the order that I do nothing, I went downtown, to do something.
By late afternoon, I was where I wanted to be.
For all I knew, General Huang had posted his watchers along the quiet street only two over from Hipolite’s, but I saw neither watchers nor guards as I walked along the bougainvillea-covered walls to the metal gate whos
e oiled hinges made no sound swinging open. Recessed from the street, occulted in leaves, the villa was a fugitive’s paradise. I used the keys to the front door and entered a foyer of polished marble. Immediately I knew I’d come to the right house—against the walls leaned oil portraits like the ones I’d seen in Simone’s Cambodia mansion.
I perused the fine villa. Its architectural twin probably could be found in the streets off the Champs-Élysées. In the muraled ceiling, the faces of pink cherubs. The floors gleamed. Whoever had built the house must have been thinking of the Pearl of the Far East, for what is a pearl other than a treasure in a hidden space?
The rear wall featured tall, glass-paneled doors, and through them I noticed a girl working in an enclosed garden. She squatted with her knees level with her shoulders, her black hair smoothing along her spine almost to her waist. Between the flowering oleanders she carved irrigation furrows, and somehow she managed to stay clean, even the fingers she occasionally raised to brush back her hair. Like the flowers, she lent tranquility to the space around her. I’d thought that Saigon had lost all charm for me. Now I felt it one last time.
A curving staircase led me to the second floor.
Simone stood in front of a copper-tinted mirror, in a room with an oriental carpet whose edges ran nearly to the walls. Natural light through glass-paneled balcony doors like the ones downstairs illuminated her back toward me, her ebony dress unzipped. In the mirror she noticed me leaning against the door frame, and the only sign she gave was a momentary halt in the movement of her hands as she fastened a clip in her hair the shade of dried bamboo.
She said, “Do you often enter a woman’s bedroom uninvited?”
No questions of how I’d learned where she was or how I’d entered the house. She would have deduced very quickly that someone had given her up, and it was not important who, rather what to do in this moment. Her steadiness while she decided should not be mistaken for hesitation, I reminded myself. Across the room, finished with her hair, she proceeded with the ordinary movements of applying her makeup.
I found a chair, a gilded replica of a Louis XIV with a lozenge-green silk pad, and sat lightly so as not to break it. The .45 rested in my lap, cocked, the safety off. I said, “You think you’ll charm your way out?”
“Of course.”
“What happened to Kim Thi?”
Simone’s mouth curved into a slight smile, revealing the edges of her teeth. “Is that why you came?”
“Among other reasons.”
“Such as?”
“Nobody else was going to kill you.”
“So you took it upon yourself?” Her laughter rang like the notes of a song. “Why should I be surprised? Isn’t violence always the recourse of a weak man against a strong woman?”
“If you say so.”
“You are extraordinary, Tanner, so persistent, like an overly attentive lover. I should have known what you were. Cobris thought so dismissively of you, it influenced me for a while. A mistake.”
As she manipulated the lipstick tube, I watched her hands. Cobris, trusting her, never had a chance. I had a sense for how she’d move, but it is one thing to see it coming and another to get out of the way.
I repeated, “What happened to Kim Thi?”
“I am not inclined to know such details.”
“She never revealed anything about you.”
“She would have, eventually.”
I thought of what they must have done to the dancer, her terror when they’d slipped the bag over her head. Whatever had happened, Simone had ordered it, yet my stereotypes of a lifetime refused to evolve, my mind could not reconcile the beautiful woman as she put on her makeup with what she really was, a murderer, a supreme imperialist who considered other people her property, subservient and disposable.
Simone, whose eyes never left me, knew her advantage. She was the snake that mesmerized its prey.
“Your place in Cambodia is infested with the NVA,” I said. “They nearly chased me to death.”
“Very pragmatic fellows, the NVA. Their liaison is necessary. One has to stay in business.”
“You took it a step further. You adulterated heroin and smuggled it to sell to American soldiers. The NVA did well by you. Who wouldn’t want his enemy hooked on drugs?”
She said nothing.
“You had a tidy alliance, you and the NVA. Not to mention you and General Huang; you and Cobris; before that, you and André. But all your liaisons are temporary, aren’t they?”
The makeup radiated artfully around her eyes, the black within, a reddish garnet without. A mistake with those colors and she might have looked ghoulish, but she knew what she was doing. Her gaze stayed on me, and she saw the gun in my lap.
“The Montagnards who tried to shoot Kim Thi and me on the steps of her building, I thought Huang had sent them, but they were yours. It was only when you lost them that you turned to Huang. He was quite a partner—he did your bidding without asking a lot of questions. He didn’t figure you were cheating him. But things change.”
She straightened the straps on her dress. “You spoke with him?”
“Just today, actually.” Trong had told me how to contact the general.
She viewed the completed picture of herself in the mirror. Turning around, in her audacious way she managed to infuse desire into her eyes, the kind of look that must have left Cobris’s lean face hanging slack. Even the wisest man, offered such a visage, wants to believe it is real, done for him, not a woman’s subterfuge.
I was a bit past that now.
“My lovely George. How I could use a man like you. What has your army given you, except an unpromising career?”
“More unpromising than you think.”
She laughed. It is an odd sensation to know that your death cooks hot on another person’s mind. The important thing is not to be easy to kill.
“What gets me, Simone, is that I was ready to walk away, if you’d have let things rest. But to rest isn’t in your nature, is it?”
“You sell yourself short, George. You would not have walked away. Once you had your friends safe, you would have come after me. There is no rest in you either.”
Her eyes were magnificent. They held me, they were born to hold me, and so I let myself be held. Turning slightly, she raised a slim cigarette to her mouth, dropped her hand to reach for a lighter, brought it up quickly. Too quickly. A magician’s trick, mean to freeze my attention, for her other hand was moving, I knew it, but I was slow. She had the pistol leveled and the trigger pulled, and I was still staring at her eyes.
She’d done Cobris the same way. The difference was, she’d caught him from a few centimeters away, and I was three meters from the extension of her arm. Not far, but she wasn’t an expert pistol shot, and the bullet hit me high in the torso rather than center, and I was diving off the chair at the same time I was shooting, once, twice, and the difference between Simone and me was that I was a very good pistol shot. On a silhouette target they call it the stopping zone, an oval in the center torso that surrounds the heart. ‘Shoot here,’ my range instructor had remarked, ‘and the doctor can stay home.’
My two shots went there.
I lay on the floor, my cheek on the carpet, in the stickiness of the spreading blood, the only pain a dull pressure. An image flashed—the bubbly wound in the chest of the soldier at the hilltop LZ. Breathing out, I heard no bubbles. Pushed away the broken chair, tapped my shirt, saw the bloody palm come away. The coldness of shock mounted, the way a man in an open doorway feels the winter outside.
To stand upright, I braced against the table, staggered to her dresser, avoided looking at myself in her coppery mirror, no use feeding the shock. Saw the clump of ebony fabric on the floor. In her fingers, a chrome pistol. A fuzzy sense of caution dictated that I pry it loose and toss it. Her face was to the side, and I turned it skyward. Her neck was oddly compliant—you expect the person you have mortally shot to be resistive. Her eyes blinked once and focused on me, and I
beheld her in her final beauty, her perfume floating up like a spirit. For a brief moment, my fingers brushing her cheek, there was intimacy between us.
On the way out, I picked up her gold cigarette case.
* * *
It was a long way down the curving staircase, long in state as well as distance, for by the time I’d reached the marble foyer, I could neither stand straight nor see well. Staggering along the pathway to the gate, through it to the sidewalk, I went as far as I could, until, back against the gatepost, I slid to the ground. The bougainvillea rustled. I could still smell the wisps of Simone’s perfume, the scent between East and West.
Legs extended, I reposed.
In the villages, the people believed that the spirits of their ancestors watched over them. This wasn’t a village, this was the callous city of Saigon, and the people were so removed from the old ways that if the ancestors appeared, the reaction would be to try to sell them something. Now I understood that the French colony and its American successor and all their trappings were thin layers of rice paper over the realm of the ancestors, for the spirits arrived. Some I recognized: Simone, Giang, Kim Thi, André, Cobris. Here were the Montagnards, the scooter kid in his Bogart hat, the two soldiers from the squad, the young NVA officer. Gerard, fit and handsome, smiled like an invitation. There were other ghosts too, strangers who regarded me distantly, as if my pending entrance to their principality was a mundane event.
Nobody among the living noticed me sitting by the gate until a cyclo glided along, the driver having glanced over and spotted Simone’s gold cigarette case in my fingertips. The driver’s act of kindness was to put a cigarette in my mouth and light it with his own match. Then he stashed the case in his pocket and pedaled into the gathering dusk.
The End
About the author:
Jeff Wallace is a former US Army officer and the author of Rapidan, an historical suspense novel set in Virginia during the US Civil War. He lives with his family in southwest Virginia.