Tree of Smoke (54 page)

Hao spoke Vietnamese: “The colonel’s sister-in-law just died a few days ago. The mother of his nephew here.”

“This man with us now?”

Hao nodded once.

“Sounds like he’s got family,” the colonel said.

Hao told him Trung had one sister whom he hadn’t seen for several years.

The colonel caressed Trung’s shoulder. “This guy’s the goods. He’s been on board since ’46. Twenty-plus years.”

Mr. Jimmy hadn’t said a word. Hao disliked the way he stared.

Trung said, “This young man’s mother just died?”

“His uncle brought the message this morning.”

“Please tell him I’m sorry.”

But the colonel was addressing Skip: “What I want you to apprehend above all is that you’re not running this man. In a sense you’re not even collecting data. Definitely not interrogating. Definitely not. Just serve as a sponge.”

“I understand, sir.”

“If you regard yourself as learning, just getting his story in general, we’ll all be much better off.”

“All right.”

“And I don’t want you sweating under any elaborate fiction, either. Whatever he asks you, I want you to be completely honest with him—long as you’re sure he’s not digging for product.”

“All right.”

“But, I mean, if he asks about your background, your family, your life—everything, tell him all of it.”

“Very good.”

“What is he saying?” Trung asked Hao.

“He’s giving instructions. He told his nephew to be honest with you.”

“Will you say for me that I’m grateful?”

Hao wanted to shout: I’m lying to all of you.

“You two, you’ll have to work out your commo,” the colonel told Skip.

Skip said, “We’ll get along.”

G
oing back to Saigon, Minh rode in the backseat with Jimmy Storm. Minh didn’t know why he’d been asked along on this outing. Because they were two families helping each other, he understood this, but still, he played no role. As short as a month ago he’d have resented the time out of his furlough, but Miss Cam, his girlfriend—her father had turned cold toward Minh, the house was closed to him, and she refused to meet him secretly. Apparently the father had depended on marrying his family to Uncle Hao’s wealth. He must have learned there wasn’t any.

His uncle’s problems had crushed the good sense from his head. The preoccupation with the house on the Mekong and the rental he surely knew he’d never see, and the suggestion Minh murder the whole bunch, it was all too silly. Meanwhile, Hao hadn’t even mentioned the colonel, particularly not the change in him. The colonel was pale, breathing was work, all morning he’d sipped his Bushmills rather than gulping it, and he’d held the glass with his fingertips rather than in his fist. And Jimmy Storm had kept unusually silent, unaware, or pretending to be, of the colonel’s deepened loneliness.

Minh himself had seen little of the colonel since his C&C chopper had gone back to the Viet Nam Air Force, and Minh with it, still its pilot. Except for the .30-caliber machine gun his uncle was so anxious to have him turn on his own family, the craft carried no assault equipment; he was spared combat and remained an aerial taxi driver, now for General Phan. The general had given him an unprecedented week’s furlough. He felt grateful, but saw the leniency as part of a new pattern. The military’s attitude had changed. He didn’t like it. The fire had died.

“Hao,” the colonel said, “stop the car.”

They’d reached Route Twenty-two by now. Hao pulled to the side of it and the colonel got out, in order to relieve himself, Minh presumed.

But he only stood beside the vehicle, fixing his attention, it seemed, on a solitary cloud in the sky ahead of them like a small, wispy moon perhaps many dozens of kilometers distant, perhaps poised over the China Sea, which was invisible to them. The colonel moved toward the front of the car, knuckles of one hand resting on its hood, right hand on his hip, and waited in the brown landscape of dirt, once thick jungle and paddies, now poisoned rubble, nothing but jags and skeletons, and glowered at the cloud as if trying to influence its activity, staring down this thing of nature until its drift had taken it some ways southward out of their path.

He got back in the car. “Okay. Roll on.”

No one else spoke. Even from the sergeant there came only silence. Minh had once felt himself acquainted with the rhythms of these two comrades. He sensed a blank space where Storm should have made a dry comment, or one of his jokes.

S
kip realized he’d overprepared. What had been left to him these past two years but to memorize the labyrinths of doubt and J. P. Dimmer’s “Observations on the Double Agent”?

“Experience suggests,” Dimmer warned his readership, that some people who take to the double agent role—perhaps a majority of willing ones, in fact—have a number of traits in common…Psychiatrists describe such persons as sociopaths.

• They are unusually calm and stable under stress but cannot tolerate routine or boredom.
  
• They do not form lasting and adult emotional relationships with other people because their attitude toward others is exploitative.
  
• They have above-average intelligence. They are good verbalizers—sometimes in two or more languages.
  
• They are skeptical and even cynical about the motives and abilities of others but have exaggerated notions about their own competence.
  
• Their reliability as agents is largely determined by the extent to which the case officer’s instructions coincide with what they consider their own best interests.
  
• They are ambitious only in a short-range sense: they want much and they want it now. They do not have the patience to plod toward a distant reward.
  
• They are naturally clandestine and enjoy secrecy and deception for its own sake.
  

The double who’d never encountered J. P. Dimmer said to Sands, “Your tea is delicious. I like it strong.”

Skip carried a pair of dictionaries from his study and laid them on the coffee table. He assumed this man waited for instructions he couldn’t give him, while he, Skip, the officer-on-site, wanted what? To stop waiting. To serve. To make himself indispensable in putting this man to use against his own people. To know this man, and his uncle was right, you won’t map a traitor’s mind with thirty yes-or-no answers and three lines traveling a polygram. Better the floundering and backtracking and getting lost, bilingual dictionaries and mismatched goals. And even with these difficulties and with his bridges on fire behind him, this Trung savored his tea, allowed himself to be completely caught up in Mrs. Diu’s shortbread pastries, and enjoyed his introduction to M. Bouquet and recommended roasting the dog on a spit rather than boiling him in pieces. No slippery gaze, no tenseness about the knuckles, nothing like that. Where was Judas? Skip began to wonder if this wasn’t perhaps some off-course neighbor of Hao’s, here by some ludicrous miscommunication. The double had only a little English, and Skip’s Vietnamese was simply inadequate. Both spoke French with slightly less than true facility. In all three languages they might make zigzag progress toward crossed purposes.

“In the United States we don’t eat dogs. Dogs are our friends.”

“But you are not in the United States now. This is Vietnam. You’re far from home, and this is a sad day. Mr. Skip, I’m very sad for you. I wish I came on another day.”

“You understood my mother passed on?”

“My friend Hao explained it. I’m very sad for you.”

“Thank you.”

“What was your mother’s age?”

“Fifty-two.”

“I came back from the North in 1964. After ten years in that place. The march home was very hard. All the way I thought about my mother, and my love for her came to life again strongly. I remembered many things about her that I didn’t know I remembered. I was very sad to think she’d be an older person when I returned to her. I wanted my mother to be young again. But when I reached Ben Tre she was dead for six months. She lived to be almost sixty. Her name was Dao, which is a kind of blossom. So I cut the dao blossom for her monument.”

“Do you have a wife? Children?”

“No. Nobody.”

“And your father?”

“He died when I was a small child. Killed by the French.”

“Mine too. Killed by the Japanese.”

“Any wife for you? Some children?”

“Not yet.”

“So it’s very hard. I see it. Very hard when the second one goes away. How did your mother die?”

“I’m not sure. Some surgery that went wrong. How about yours?”

“An illness. My sister said it lasted for almost four months. Our mother died while I myself was very sick and I had to stop along the way down from the North. A fever came over me. Not like malaria. Something different. I lay in a hammock for two weeks. Other sick comrades came and strung their hammocks in the same place and we lay there without anyone to help us. After a few days some of the hammocks held corpses. I survived my illness and waited to feel my mother’s arms around me again. I was very sad to find she’d died, but in those days I had strength, and my passion for the cause was much bigger than my sadness. I was sent to Cao Phuc, where one of my first orders was to assassinate your uncle. But I didn’t kill him. My explosive failed. Aren’t you glad?”

“Very glad.”

“If it had functioned, my friend Hao also would have died. But the cause meant more than Hao. I’d already lost many comrades. You bury a friend—that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result—to deafen you against your own voice when it wants to ask questions.”

“And you began to ask questions. Is that what brings you to us?”

“I had questions from the beginning. I didn’t have ears to hear them.”

“What changed for you, Trung?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps my mother’s death. For a man without children, that’s a big change. Then the time is ready for your own death. Any time it can come, even before your body is killed.”

“What exactly do you mean? I don’t think I understand.”

“Perhaps you don’t want to.”

During supper, when his lousy Vietnamese kept the talk to a minimum, Skip observed his environment anew—wondering what the visitor must see—fine old mahogany and rattan furniture, an imposing front door where normally in this region the home’s entire face would stand open to the air, protected at night by iron gatework; and plastered walls decorated with paintings on lacquered wood, brushstroke pastorals: studious, silent scenes with sawtoothed coconut palms in a world without a soul to be torn. Mrs. Diu served a beef-and-noodle soup, greens, steamed rice. This morning she’d placed small yet striking arrangements of blooms around the house. Skip realized she did it daily. He’d hardly noticed. She and Mr. Tho lived just upstream from the villa in a hooch surrounded by palm and frangipani trees with white blossoms…At one point the double covered his mouth with a hand and yawned.

“Are you sleepy?”

“Not yet. Where will I sleep?”

“I have a room ready upstairs.”

“Anywhere.”

“It’s not elegant.”

Trung then either asked for a pistol or declared he possessed one.

“Excuse me?”

He said it again, in French: “Do you have a pistol for me?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

The request called him back to the situation. He’d ceased thinking of this man as anyone in particular. A guest, someone deserving of hospitality, nothing more.

“For protection only.”

“You won’t need protection. You’re safe here.”

“All right. I believe you.”

For dessert Mrs. Diu served a delicate egg custard. Trung and Skip got out the dictionaries. “Sorry about my Vietnamese. I’ve studied, but I can hardly make out a word you say.”

“People tell me I picked up an accent from the North. But I didn’t pick up much else there. In the North we southerners stuck together. We have a style down here. It’s very different from up there.”

Skip said, “That’s true in our country too.”

“What are the southerners like in your country?”

“They’re known to be very gracious and slow of speech. Among their families and friends they’re very open with their affection. Whereas in the North we’re thought to be more restrained, more cautious, we give less of ourselves. That’s how we’re known. But there are exceptions. A person’s birthplace can’t tell you everything. And you know, we had a civil war too. The North against the South.”

“Yes, we know your history. We study your history, your novels, your poems.”

“It’s true?”

“Of course. Even before your military came to Vietnam, America was important in the world. The world’s major capitalist nation. I like Edgar Allan Poe very much.”

Next they talked of the mistake of the war, without mentioning whose mistake it was. “In Vietnam,” Trung said, “we have the Confucian mode for times of stability—for wisdom, social conduct, and so on. We have the Buddhist mode for times of tragedy and war—for acceptance of the facts, and for keeping the mind single.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that said.”

“The war will never stop.”

“But it has to.”

“I can’t expect to see the end. I want to go to the United States.”

“We understand that. And it can be arranged.” He pictured this man standing on a corner in San Francisco, waiting for a sign that said
WALK
. Some of Skip’s childhood schoolmates had come from immigrant parents, Scandinavian, most of them. He’d visited their stuffy homes, felt his lungs clutched by alien odors, looked at unimaginable bric-a-brac and cloudy photographs of military men with feathers jutting up behind the brimless caps of their uniforms, and heard the parents fumble the grammar and drop small words, thick-spoken and sincere, everything about them an affront to their sons, who endured the fathers in silence and rushed past their mothers’ offerings: “Yes, Ma—okay, Ma—I gotta
go
, Ma.” Naturally at his age Skip had overlooked these grown-ups, heroes of dogged risk, ocean-crossers, exiles. With their little questions they touched the walls of their children. On the other side, this child for whose sake they’d wagered their lives rolled his sleeves up tightly above his biceps, plastered back his hair with Wildroot Cream-Oil, lied about girls, performed surgery on firecrackers, golf balls, dead cats, propelled loogies of snot at lampposts, laughed like an American, cursed without an accent. But his best friend in the seventh grade, the Lithuanian Ricky Sash—probably from Szasz, come to think of it—said “please” and “thank you” as much as “fuck you,” and tied his shoes with a big double knot. Nothing else gave him away. Asians wouldn’t have it so easy. “Certainly,” Skip said, “we’ve wondered about your motives.”