Tree of Smoke (58 page)

“Us who?”

“We. Us. The outfit.”

“I’m with the Regional Security Center.”

“Stationed here?”

“Visiting. A visitor to your charming planet.”

“First time in-country?”

Crodelle blinked and stared. “I’ve been in the region off and on since ’59. I’m pre-Kennedy.”

“Wow. You look younger.”

“I looked in on Cao Phuc once or twice. How’s the scene there these days?”

“A lot quieter. Quiet.”

“Have they broken down that relocation facility?”

“I don’t know the official status of that endeavor.”

“But what do you see?”

“It’s hard to tell what stage they’ve reached”—Sands looked up and around as if seeking their waiter—“whether they’re breaking it down or if it’s just been more or less abandoned. But I’d say the Buddhist temple is pretty much the center of things again.”

“Are the VC moving in?”

“I haven’t been bothered.”

“What have they got you doing over there?”

“Collecting stories. Folktales.”

“Gimme a break! Rick, here, thought you’d left the country.”

“I’m in and out.”

“So the base is broken down?”

“We didn’t call it a base. Landing zone.” Sands seemed inexplicably content.

“Did you ever get over to the Purple Bar once in a while?”

Skip laughed. “Only at the legitimate cocktail hour.”

“You know what, Skip? I’m glad we finally meet.”

“Hey, you guys,” Voss said, and excused himself.

He went to the restroom and found its urinal filled with ice cubes, a fascinating extravagance.

Voss wished Crodelle had stayed away from lunch longer. Maybe some straight talk after all, he and Sands—who can you talk to but a man on the way out? He’d worked in intelligence for only six years, but he would have liked to crawl out of its waters and into a cave and confess to some giant mollusk. Absurd, yes. But it had the right elements. Air and drowning. Darkness, damp.

What a monstrous stupid fucking mess.

One of the army officers joined him in the bathroom, hawk-faced, crew-cut, major’s bars on his shoulders and the yellow sleeve patch of the Fifth Cavalry, a man without secrets, a man who relieved himself in front of others. While the major pissed meditatively down onto the piled ice, Voss washed his hands and dried them on one of the cloth napkins stacked beside the sink and tossed the napkin into a wicker basket. This place had class. Above the cloudy yellowish mirror that gave his face back as if he were the victim of some viny invasion of hepatitis were painted in a precise, feminine, nunlike script the words:

Bon appétit!

When Voss returned to the table they were already on the subject Crodelle wanted to raise, at least to begin with—the colonel’s insane article—and Crodelle was showing off. He managed to seem blithely expert on any area that strayed into his conversational grasp. Voss didn’t mind it so much, but he minded that at this moment he was bullying Sands. This business of tracking “command influence,” Crodelle wanted to know—had the colonel considered how tricky the whole idea was? Hadn’t the Mayo brothers written of Dr. Gorgas, “Men who achieve greatness do not work more complexly than the average man, but more simply?” Wasn’t the problem with trying to show “command influence” through experiments just that almost all such experiments, those Crodelle knew of anyway, had been carried out to determine the impact of an intervention, a treatment, a new drug, rather than to prove the presence or absence of a causative factor?—like Lind’s eighteenth century tests with treatments for scurvy, or, a more recent instance, the Salk vaccine trials? On the other hand…was Sands maybe familiar with the nineteenth century Yellow Fever Commission and the then-new science of bacteriology?—with the efforts of Walter Reed and James Carroll? Maybe trials could be run, but what would serve as the experimental “marker” for “command influence”? And the struggle against malaria and typhoid and yellow fever, hadn’t that been as much a war as this one?—hadn’t Jesse Lazear died a martyr’s death in a sick ward in Havana, cut down by the disease he was helping to conquer? Wars demanded new ideas; and maybe the colonel had landed one: could we maybe, just maybe, inject the elements we think would provoke “command influence” into preselected information channels? Crodelle’s curiosity overpowered him, an earnest wish to communicate charged his features, he held up his hands before his face, fingers splayed, head forward, taking careful and passionate aim, as if each of his concepts were a basketball—but, come on, who was the colonel in all this, Walter Reed the careful investigator, or Guiseppe Sanarelli, the guy with the quick answer to the wrong question? The colonel needed an Aristides Agramonte to get in there and dig into the corpses. Did Skip know the work of Agramonte? Did Skip know, come to think, that with that mustache and high forehead he resembled Agramonte?

This last question seemed other than rhetorical. Crodelle stopped. He waited.

Voss couldn’t tell whether Sands was a fool, or the Buddha himself. From where came this poised, shiny-eyed amusement?

Sands said, “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty wild.”

“What is your interest in all this, Terry?”

“Purely academic. Disease control was a passion of mine in college—premed. Then I dropped out and wandered into our world, and I never thought I’d see anything from
that
field that applied to
our
field, the field of intelligence.”

“It’s just a draft. He’ll never finish it.”

“What you need to do is prove the existence of ‘command influence.’ What you need to do is isolate these different channels running up the chain of command, and randomly inject information among these channels to see how much they get distorted. How do you, so to speak, ‘clean’ a channel? You need channels you affect and channels you keep unaffected. This isn’t new. Yellow fever again, polio, et cetera. What you’d really need is two or more unconnected intelligence organizations—get some of our allies to participate. It would be interesting. It might get us somewhere. It might bring on a revolution. But do we need to start one until we
need
to start one?”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“It’s just remarkable he’s opened the whole question. The colonel. I mean, is it possible to create markers, intelligence markers, and follow them up and down the chain of command and out through the lines of commo, and draw conclusions about the way we do things? It’s pretty wild, man. Your uncle’s a wild revolutionary.”

“Have you met him?”

“Once or twice. I enjoy the colonel. He’s a sizable personality. I mean, Cao Phuc—case in point. As far as we can trace things he talked someone, some drunken commander of one of the helicopter assault groups, into securing a landing zone on that mountain in ’64, then when the Twenty-fifth Infantry arrived he sort of borrowed a platoon and kept them out there twenty-four months, on one pretext after another, and had the Twenty-fifth serving that LZ as if it were a base. Then he sold the ville as the world’s best place for a relocation camp. At the peak he had half a dozen platoons running up and down that mountain, and his very own helicopter. That is one impressively large personality, man. Unfortunata
men
te, during the Tet thing he took casualties and lost a whole platoon we can only hope are POWs now, and folks started asking what in tarnation is going
on
in Cao
Phuc
. If it wasn’t for last Tet, by now he’d probably have his own brigade. And he’s not in any way connected to the military!—except as liaison to Psy Ops, hardly any of whom have actually personally encountered the guy, ever. He did it all on his personal authority. I mean, man, he did it all on balls and bullshit. Can you believe it?”

“You seem to know more about him than I do.”

“There’s a lot to admire there. He’s a warrior—”

“A genuine war hero, Terry.”

“Of course, let’s say a hero, he’s got medals up the ass, okay—but he’s not a spook, he’s not that type. He
suspects
everybody’s against him, but he
acts
like he hasn’t got an enemy in the world. You know what a guy once told me about the colonel? ‘His enemies are only friends he hasn’t defeated yet.’”

“John Brewster, right?”

“Who?”

“You heard me.”

“Matter of fact, it might have been John. I don’t remember. Look. Come on. Look…your uncle has something to teach us, which is: Trust the locals. He’s never separated himself from them. He works with them, he’s joined to them. But in doing that, he separates himself from us, his people.”

Skip said, “I think you’re misinterpreting the facts, and then exaggerating your own misinterpretation. Or at least you’re just allowing your interpretation to enlarge itself.”

“Have you read
The Quiet American
?”

Skip said: “Boo-coo fuck you.”

Voss said, “Boy, this is quick. I thought we’d shoot the shit awhile.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Crodelle blinked. Nothing more. “He was living at the Continental when he wrote it.”

“Graham Greene. Next door to the colonel.”

“Skip…a man outgrows his mentors. It’s inevitable.”

“Look,” Skip said, “I get it.”

“Then explain it.”

“You explain it.”

“I’ve
been
explaining it. If the colonel wants to make empirical sense out of his theories, then let him propose a random-assignment study using two systems—a control, and a system into which he introduces some agent or catalyst whose effect he can measure against the control system
without
the agent. Think back: the old proposals for the cause of polio, the days when they were just banging away with any idea that came into their heads—dog feces, for Christ’s sake; injecting polio patients with their own urine. That’s the colonel, man. Shooting piss into the intelligence apparatus. I mean,” Crodelle said, “even in Washington he was legendary for his three-hour hydraulic lunches.”

Sands turned to Voss. “Fuck you too, Voss.” He stood up. “Speaking of shooting piss. I gotta whiz.”

“Melt yourself some ice,” Voss said.

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

He left, and Crodelle watched him until he’d gone inside the restaurant.

“Gee, Terry. What took you so long?”

“Rick? Do you know your role?”

Voss didn’t answer. He watched Crodelle sip from his martini.

“Is there a window in there?”

“He’s not going out the window.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s having too much fun.”

“Are you?”

Voss thought of ordering another drink, but felt the remark about hydraulic lunches had rendered such a thing inadvisable.

“If he pushes, I’m gonna push back. Just to keep the balance in my favor, okay? And things are gonna speed up.”

“They certainly are.”

“Fine with me. And you do have a role to play. When the balance tips too far, you jump on the teeter-totter—on my side, incidentally.”

“I’m clear on that.”

“On the way here I picked up something at the shop.”

“What shop?”

Crodelle convulsed into life again. “Will you look at this?” He took from his breast pocket what looked like a large cigarette lighter. Holding it in his palm, he pressed its side with his thumb. “Open it up, and—zow.” Two tiny reels within. “The tape is—you see it? That little wire? That is one one-thousandth of an inch in diameter, man.”

People from Manila’s Regional Security Center showed up in town regularly and Voss thought he knew them all; Crodelle wasn’t one of them. He’d set up a shop in the Language School’s basement, and Internal Ops had been told to give him what he needed, and today he needed a twenty-first-century recording device.

“You guys have all the nifty stuff.”

“These things have been around for a dozen years.”

Sands was back. He sat down, and Crodelle held out the recorder, its face still open. “Behold.”

“Where’s the tape?”

“The light has to be right. See?”

Voss said, “One one-thousandth of an inch.”

“Is it on?”

“Why the hell not?” Crodelle said, and shut its lid and left it between them on the green linen tablecloth. “Let’s give it a whirl. We’re here at the Aragon Ballroom with bandleader extraordinaire Skipper Sands…Sands. German? English.”

“No. Irish.”

“Irish?”

“My great-grandfather came from the Shaughnesseys. Apparently he started calling himself Sands on the ship over.”

“A bit of a turncoat.”

“I never met him. I wouldn’t know.”

“Was he in trouble?”

“No. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Am I?”

“The Aragon Ballroom is a place of music and frolic. No one’s in trouble here.”

“Hell. Why not polygraph me?”

“That’s not out of the question.”

“I mean right now, Crodelle.”

“No, Skip. Not right now. We’ll need to prepare you if we want to end up with a decently conclusive polygram.”

“Any old time.”

“Sure. Noted.”

“What about Crodelle? C’est Français?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, French. It may be a misspelling of ‘Cordelle.’—Where’s Uncle Francis, Skip?”

“I don’t know. Right here in town, I assume.”

“Do you know he was recalled to Langley seven weeks ago, eight weeks ago—anyway, early last November?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No, because he never went.”

“He goes where he wants to.”

“Yeah. And when he wants to, he’ll just whip out a pistol and shoot a bound prisoner.”

“Really, now.”

“Didn’t he execute a prisoner at Cao Phuc during Big Tet?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“Well, it’s known you know something about it. We know you know.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re confusing a story from World War Two.”

“He executed prisoners back then too? We’ll have to look into that. But you’re located at Cao Phuc right now, right? And last Tet too? Is Cao Phuc your station, more or less?”