The Return: A Novel (37 page)

Then there floated into his memory a story he’d read as a boy. He recalled in detail the book it came from, a green-colored hardback he’d bought for a dime in a used bookstore on Fourth Avenue in New York. It was a Jack London novel about a man held captive by an evil warden, condemned to lie in a straitjacket in a black room for weeks on end to make him submit. But he would not submit, and the story told how he had passed through madness into a world of fantastic adventure that was more real than the cell and so survived his torment.

Marder recalled the book, its brittle yellowed pages, its old book smell, and the dense dusty smell of the old bookstores and how wonderful it was to travel to Union Square on the subway with his mother. It was a special thing they did together, cruising through the bookstores and coming home with piles of used books in shopping bags. And her smell, the sharp odor of the cologne she used, and also the smell of the army, tent canvas, and gun oil, and burnt gunpowder, and sweat, and latrines. Skelly had a peculiar smell too, when you were close to him. Marder took a deep breath, but all he could get now was the smell of the burlap bag, damp from his breath. They said you couldn’t remember smells as you could sounds and sights; the wiring wasn’t there, apparently. He’d edited a book about that too, one of many on the mysteries of the brain. But he could recall the fact of experiencing a smell, and he supposed everyone who’d had that experience remembered it, although it didn’t often show up in accounts of war: what a human body smelled like when it was eviscerated by high explosives.

And on this olfactory stream Marder was now borne away, out of darkness and confinement, into the past, to the first time he’d had that singular experience.

*   *   *

Marder was awake when it started, and he would’ve been killed with the rest of the men in the command bunker had he not gone out for a piss at a little after four in the morning of September 18, 1969. The command post was in a longhouse, and below it was a bunker where you could go for shelter during an attack, but there had been no warning at all, because the PAVN had packed in big 107-mm mortars with the range to hit the command post from beyond the wire. And they knew just where it was too; they must’ve had a perfectly accurate map of the village and the Special Forces base, and also more than their fair share of the fortune of war, because the first salvo of mortar bombs was right on target. That first concussion knocked Marder off his feet and over the buried piss barrel, and when he staggered upright again, bleeding from a dozen shrapnel wounds in his back and buttocks, he found that the command hooch had collapsed into a mass of shattered timbers.

Marder stumbled toward this smoking heap, which was visible only by the glow of its own small fires and by the streaks of tracer incoming and outgoing, green and red, and the ghastly intermittent light of the illumination rounds flying above the perimeter. His foot slipped, and he fell and discovered that what had tripped him up was a mass of entrails. It was vaguely attached to shredded limbs and a head he refused to recognize. The head had its eyes open, and every time an illumination round appeared in the black sky, these dead eyes shone with an obscene parody of life. Marder was puking his guts out, helpless, repeating childhood prayers, when he was grabbed by the arm and hauled to his feet.

“Everyone’s dead,” he told the grabber, and it was more than a moment before he realized that the man was Skelly. By then Marder had been pushed into action, loaded down with a bag of grenades and two boxes of machine-gun ammunition, with extra belts draped around his neck. Skelly should have been in the command hooch and dead, but here he was, running, screaming orders to the men who drifted out of the dark. The Hmong and the Vietnamese Rangers had been trained for such attacks, but the destruction of the command and the local radio net had unnerved them. Skelly had spontaneously reverted to a preindustrial mode of command, using Hmong kids as messengers and leading by shoving, cursing, and example.

He set up the M60 in a prepared position, commanded two men to operate it, and moved on, dragging Marder and a couple of squads of montagnards with him. It was obvious, even in the dark, where the PAVN sappers had broken through the wire. Claymores were exploding, flares were going up, tracer sparks were flying back and forth all along the northern edge of the village. Marder had picked up an AR and a bandolier of magazines for it and had assigned himself the duty of following Skelly, on the principle that in combat you wanted to stick as close as possible to anyone who knew what the fuck they were doing, which in this case was Skelly. Ordinary command had disappeared in the ruins of the HQ hooch; Skelly was clearly in charge of the battle and was leading from in front.

With some part of his mind, Marder was observing Skelly in action even as he fired his weapon and tried to stay alive. He saw that Skelly was trying to keep the PAVN sappers out of the village and at the same time sweep them into the fields of fire of the machine guns he had just emplaced. Marder assumed naturally the responsibility of watching Skelly’s back and flanks and of shooting anyone who was shooting at Skelly while Skelly dealt out efficient slaughter, moving and firing with an almost balletic grace, knocking the PAVNs down like fairground targets as they emerged from the shadows. Despite his terror, Marder could not help but be full of admiration; it was like something out of Homer, he thought later, the brilliant Achilles among the Trojans, divinely protected, unbeatable.

The savage little firefight did not last long. When all the intruders were dead or captive (and, if captive, soon dead as well), Skelly and Marder walked to the perimeter, counting casualties and preparing for what Skelly was sure would be another assault. Aside from that first devastating blow, they had suffered surprisingly few casualties, and none of the civilians had been hurt. But although they repaired their wire and stayed alert all that night, no further attack came. Skelly kept saying that they had to come now, that the whole point of spotting and destroying the base’s radio contact with the outside world was so that they could wipe out the SOG encampment without having to worry about assault from the air or reinforcements. In fact, every such encampment was an open invitation for the PAVN to do just that, laying out American meat as bait and waiting for an attack that would garner the body counts on which the high command doted.

In the morning, they cleaned up and placed body parts in poncho liners. Skelly and the three surviving SOGs frankly wept as they did this, and they alone were allowed to do it. Marder understood that when SOG didn’t get a morning radio check from their outpost, they’d send out a plane, and with this expectation, Skelly had caused a huge “R” to be constructed by charring the character into the short grass on the field where helicopters and light planes usually landed, to indicate that they had no radio working that could reach the SOG net.

Skelly remained obsessed with the notion that something was wrong, that the attack as it had gone down did not make sense: they cut us off, they destroy our command structure, they penetrate our perimeter, and then give up? He threw out patrols to the north and east, the two obvious routes of attack, and he himself led a patrol to the south, where Yeng Mountain formed an almost impassable barrier. Almost, but there were trails up there: maybe they were moving people up to the heights. Marder was left in Moon River so that he could try to assemble a working radio from the hulks of those caught in the barrage. It was while he was doing this that he discovered what the clever enemy was actually doing, by which time it was too late.

*   *   *

The truck stopped and Marder came out of his waking dream. Someone pulled the hood off his head and clipped his handcuffs off. They were in a shed of some kind that smelled of fodder and horse and nose-prickling dust, obviously a former stable. The men led them wordlessly through a door into a low-ceilinged adobe house and down a narrow hallway to a room. There they were left. The door was not locked. In the room were two old-fashioned steel beds, with bedding, crisp and white; there was a pine bureau and a large wardrobe with cast-iron hinges, a sturdy table, and a couple of heavy chairs of local manufacture. Marder went to the single small-paned window. Through it he could see the edge of an orchard—some kind of citrus, he supposed—and part of a large long windowless building.

“Well, this is very nice,” said Skelly, throwing himself on one of the beds and propping his head on the pillow. “It’s a lot nicer than the last time I was kidnapped. Have you got any idea where we are?”

“Up in the
tierra caliente
, I think, in one of the old
ranchos
. This area used to be a pretty lush agricultural district fifty years ago—citrus, avocados, all kinds of produce. Then the government fucked it up somehow—I don’t recall the details—and everything went bust.” He opened the window and sniffed: warm dust and that horsey ranch smell and something else, harsh and phenolic. “The narcos use these little
ranchos
to cook up meth, which is what I think is going on in that building. It probably used to be a packing shed.” Marder left the window open and sat on the other bed. He was exhausted but still too wired to collapse. Unlike his friend, he could not sleep at will.

“When were you kidnapped?” Marder asked.

“It’s a long story.”

“We have nothing but time. Or we could talk about what happened that night at Moon River. I was thinking about that on the ride up here. How they hit the command hooch on the first shot and what happened after. It just came into my mind after decades of not thinking about it. Strange, no? I always wondered how in hell they hit it on the first shot. Sheer bad luck?”

Skelly said, “It wasn’t luck,” and at that moment the door opened and El Gordo walked in. The big man sat on one of the chairs, which creaked under his weight. A Templo followed, carrying a tray on which sat four bottles of beer and two plates covered with napkins.

El Gordo said, “Gentlemen, I regret the present inconvenience, and I hope you will regard yourselves as my guests.”

The man left the tray on the table and went out.

“You have the freedom of the place, which I hope you will find comfortable enough. If Señor Skelly is true to his word, it should not be a matter of more than a day or so. If not…” He waved his hands in a small gesture indicating uncertainty. “If not, then we have a problem.”

“I take it you intend to keep us here until, so to speak, our ship comes in,” said Marder.

“Yes. Then we will all drive down to the port and find your shipping container and we will do our business.”

“Yes, but there’s another problem,” said Marder.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, his name is Warren Alsop. He’s got a couple of
federales
in his pocket, and I hear they’re working for La Familia.”

“So?”

“So Mr. Alsop has expressed a great deal of interest in why I’m down here in Playa Diamante. Everyone seems to be interested in that, of course, but Mr. Alsop’s in a position to do something about it. He told me he intends to watch me very closely from now on. He doesn’t know the
federales
meant to give me to La Familia and so he’s going to want to make sure that I’m back at my place, which I’m not. Then where am I? He’s going to wonder what I’m doing, and that’s not good for this operation. It’s important that I don’t lose my character as an innocent American retiree. What you don’t want is a lot of
federales
and DEA guys on the roads looking for me while you’re trying to transport a shipment of arms and heroin.”

“I take your point,” said El Gordo after a moment’s thought. “What do you suggest?”

“You should immediately transport me back to Isla de los Pájaros. I believe that I can convince Alsop that I’m of no interest to him.”

“How will you do that?”

“I have a distraction in mind,” said Marder, “one that will neutralize Alsop and probably his
federale
friends.”

“May I know its details?”

“You’ll have to trust me on that.”

“I will. I think you’re an honest man. But I’ll also keep your friend here. Until your ship comes in.” El Gordo smiled, rose ponderously from his chair, and left.

“That was neatly done, chief,” said Skelly. “May
I
know the details?”

“I was bluffing. But I’m sure I’ll think of something. Alsop had the look of a GS-11 dullard and shouldn’t be that hard to scam. What did you mean when you said it wasn’t luck at Moon River?”

“Oh, just that Charlie—you remember old Charlie, the LLDB?”

“Yeah, the one we used to rib about being VC.”

“He
was
VC, or actually PAVN military intelligence. He engineered the whole thing. He even put the idea in my mind that the next assault was coming from over the mountains.”

“Well. And he got away with it.”

“Not really. After we figured out it had to be him—this was long after you were out, late ’74—they sent me back in and I killed him. We killed a bunch of guys like that. It was like the Phoenix program but not as famous, and nearly unofficial, getting the guys who’d shafted us while posing as friendlies.”

“You were an assassin?”

“More or less. Not that it made any difference, but I enjoyed the work. I really dislike betrayal.”

*   *   *

Later that afternoon Marder was deposited at the gates of Casa Feliz, leaving Skelly at the secret
rancho
as security. Skelly made no objection, and Marder was not particularly worried about him, because this thing he had in mind was going to work, and if not, he had no doubt that Skelly could handle twenty or so heavily armed
malosos
.

He received a gratifyingly warm greeting at the
casa
. Everyone was happy to see the
patrón
back safely, as yet another indication of Marder’s vast protective powers. His daughter was not among the greeters, and when Marder asked where she was, Amparo told him that she had gone off somewhere, without guards. Lourdes was then quizzed, who answered that the señorita had gone off to meet a boyfriend, but she hadn’t said who or where.