Tree of Smoke (65 page)

The hotel’s entry matched every other wooden door on the block. Next door at street level the owner ran his business in a glass-windowed office and kept charge of the rooms upstairs. Major Keng had referred to this man as “a trouble agent.” Alone, smoking a cigarette with an air of tender introspection, the trouble agent sat between two electric fans positioned on the counter expertly so as not to disturb his papers. Fest could only guess at his profession—broker, lawyer, lender—identified as it was only by Chinese characters painted on his windows. While Fest stood across the street watching, a man arrived clutching a pasteboard portfolio under his arm and sat in a chair before the counter with his knees pressed together and his package in his lap, handing over documents one by one.

After ten minutes Fest felt conspicuous and left the neighborhood.

By their fourth meeting Fest had determined that communication with the Americans ran in only one direction. Possibly all commo had ceased. In any case Major Keng had no method of getting back to the Americans with Fest’s concerns. Either that or Keng simply didn’t care about the operation.

“I do not like our scenario. It has too many contingencies.”

“There are always problems.”

“I went to view the location. It’s difficult. I’m not able to keep an eye. There is no café on the street and no rooms for rent where I can take up an outpost. I can’t be sure of my ground.”

The major frowned. “Mr. Reinhardt. Parlez-vous Français?”

“No.”

“Your English is not so clear to me.”

“When I enter the room, I must be sure he’s alone.”

“He’s alone.” The major was smiling. “He is unarmed. He was brought to the location by a contact he trusts. He’s not going to stir from it until he is told. This contact has given us the keys. One to the street door, one to the room.”

“Then give me the keys, please.”

“It’s better if I give them four days from now.”

“Do you have the keys?”

“I will have the keys four days from now.”

“When is the time for completion?”

“One week from now.”

“Can you put some people to watch the location? We must be sure of our ground.”

“What do you mean? He can’t go out. It’s the only safe place for him. That is his belief. You can be confident.”

Little brown clown. You tell me to walk through a closed door with a gun in my hand and be confident.

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Of course, Mr. Reinhardt.”

“Let me take him outdoors, away from his room.”

“Take him? Do you intend to kidnap?”

“Call him to a meeting in a location we can monitor. Perhaps his contact can arrange it. We’ll monitor in advance of the meeting. Then the ground is ours.”

The major pursed his lips as if considering the angles. “It makes cleanup perhaps difficult.”

“The site must be cleaned?”

“Not by you, Mr. Reinhardt! That’s all in place. Everything is in place, Mr. Reinhardt.”

“You’re saying it’s too late to change the plan.”

“We shall go forward with confidence.”

On the way back to his room he stopped at a stall in the square and, without bargaining over the price, bought a large English dictionary of some two thousand pages. At the Continental’s desk he asked for his valuables from the safe, and the clerk brought his Vietnam Air Lines flight bag. Upstairs he took the equipment from the bag and turned the room’s radio up loud. It was 2:00 p.m.; the U.S. military station delivered the news of an imminent journey to the moon. He affixed the silencer to the pistol, placed the dictionary in his bathtub, and fired four shots into it from a distance of one meter.

The first unblemished page was numbered 1833. As he’d expected, at close range the weapon would produce an exit wound. More nonsense. I ask for a twenty-two, and you bring me a howitzer. I can’t call Berlin, while astronauts aim at the moon.

The phones worked, he’d gotten through, his father was dead.

Two years he’d waited to hear it, yet the news had absolutely stunned him. The old man had won his way forward breath by breath through so many ailments it hadn’t seemed possible he’d ever be stopped. Nothing in particular had beaten him. He’d died in his hospital room while napping after breakfast. On the phone his mother had sounded tired but otherwise unaffected.

He’d called Dora as well, and he’d broken down weeping as he told her of his father’s death. “I’ll call again soon. The phones are working.” It must have sounded as if the good news about the telephones had broken his heart.

B
ecause a Chinese travel broker ran this four-room hotel, Trung assumed Chinese businessmen used the establishment.

Daytimes the street outside was noisy, and after 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. fairly quiet—distant traffic, distant jet fighters, helicopters much closer, over the city itself. He’d never before stayed in a rented city room. He had possession of a key to the street entrance and a key to his own door, both attached by a string to a scrap of wood with the numeral 1 scratched into it.

The door on the street opened onto a narrow stairwell leading up into a narrow hall with high ceilings and plaster walls and two rooms on each side and a bathroom at the end of it—a sink; a tub; a toilet that flushed when he pulled a chain. In the mornings he heard feet stomping along the hall and his neighbors running the water and hocking and spitting in the bathroom and at night he heard the man next door coughing and treading from his bed to the window to spit down into the alley.

The place was wired for electricity. At the top of the stairwell and also in the ceiling above the bathroom hung fluorescent tubes that burned all night, but his room had none. He had a butane lantern, a thin mattress on a bamboo frame, a circular, domed bed net, and a small square table on which rested the lantern, a box of wooden matches, and a large clamshell for an ashtray.

Each night he took his supper at a café one street over and bought food to last him through the following day. Hao had given him money and told him to stay indoors as much as possible until the Americans, probably within a week or so, accomplished their arrangements. But he had to make this outing every day. He wouldn’t deprive himself. He’d been in Saigon four days.

He didn’t have to be told to keep out of sight. If anybody recognized him it was over. The cadres understood him to be visiting family in Ben Tre for the Tet celebrations, for only a few days; he’d been out of touch now almost two months. No explaining such an absence, no lie would spare him a “workout”—hours of group discussion, until more than anybody else in the room you yourself believed you’d crossed the line, and you demanded to be punished. He’d make sure the Americans understood this problem. Maybe the Americans knew other turncoat VC who could devise a story—he couldn’t imagine what, a bout of illness, or a wound—and vouch for his whereabouts during his absence.

I won’t have rice again today. Noodles, if they still have the hoisin sauce. They had it yesterday, but I used the last.

These past few weeks, first in the room above the café on the Mekong, now in the room above the travel broker’s, had been a form of incarceration, but under conditions happily very different from what he’d learned to think of as prison. In the cell in Con Dau he’d slept on a stone floor with a dozen other men, sometimes on a concrete slab to which his ankles had been shackled. The guards patrolled on catwalks crisscrossing overhead—pissing down on them sometimes, or tossing offal from a bucket. The cell itself had been not quite long enough for two men end to end, about half that in width. The prisoners had all looked out for each other, nothing but death could separate them from the cause. Then the end of the French, liberation, the journey north by ship, and the kolkhoz, the communal farm—the citizens of the Collective Future, generally tense, sometimes erupting, always desperate, living in stupidity, anger, and submission. The citizens of the future had found little to say to him. He was older and had come in by all Three Gates—prison, blood, self-denial—each a stage deeper into the lie that trapped them all. And the last gate, the one that didn’t get a number: renouncing friends and relatives, the gate to true imprisonment. Once you mix in your blood, your strength, and your days, then you belong to the cause. But betrayal is the main thing.

The happiest days of his life had been those spent coming down out of the Truong Son Mountains, ambling homeward in good weather after the weeks of climbing through rain on the uphill northern side, after the plague that had nearly killed him, after the camps of deserters all shivering with fever, after the grave mounds of piled boulders bristling with sticks of incense or dug up and scattered and the corpses chewed to pieces by hungry tigers, and now the easy downhill journey toward Ben Tre, the breath of the south in his lungs, the sunshine falling in shafts through the jungle’s canopy, and the flowers with his mother’s name. But I entered a land where my mother was dead and all the others pretended not to be. My legs carried me over the mountain, but I never got home.

Betrayal had fueled the trip out. Betrayal would bring him back.

I
n his olive bathing trunks, bare-chested, Sands sat in the wicker chair on the small back porch taking the breeze from the creek and drinking something made with sugar and coconut milk and things he probably didn’t want to know about. All this trash smoke, the creek’s stench wrung his stomach, the bugs were driving him crazy. Screeching cicadas. Tiny winged creatures flailing at his face.

He heard a vehicle coming up the lane and recognized the sound as that of a military jeep.

Four days since his getaway, and no one had come until now. The gods ground slow. Or they realized he’d fled without a plan, without money, leapt from the window into the wild night, and what—loitered in the dark, waiting to be arrested.

When he heard the jeep’s brakes out front he got up and entered the house.

This time of day, with the heat, Skip hung mosquito netting over the front door and left it open. He watched through the open doorway as Jimmy Storm, in fatigues and a brown T-shirt, let himself through the low gate and walked up the steps.

Sands pulled the netting aside and let it drop closed behind his guest.

Storm clutched a bundle of mail against his chest. He did not say hello. “Voss is no longer a contributor.”

“Pardon?”

“He didn’t make the mission.”

“You’re saying he’s what, he’s—”

“Tagged and bagged. He fucked the monkey.”

With his free hand Storm hit Sands with an uppercut deep to the solar plexus. His lungs emptied, his diaphragm seized, nausea blinded him. He collapsed forward onto his knees, and then the side of his head smacked down onto the tiled floor.

He came to some form of consciousness, breathing again, as Storm prodded his ear with the toe of his canvas boot.

“I could kick my foot through your head now, you know?”

“I know,” Sands managed to say.

He tossed things down one at a time into Skip’s face, first reading each one: “Here’s your
Newsweek
. Here’s your
Time
. What’s this?—fucking
Sports Illustrated
.”

“Storm—”

“You’ve got us in a skinny little crack. You’ve got us in a real tight little fuck.”

“Storm—let’s talk.”

“What makes you think I’d talk to you? What makes you think I’d discuss the game with a pogue rolled up on the floor in a fetal ball?—Is that what they taught you in unarmed combat school?”

As a matter of fact, the student was advised when tackled by a gang to curl the skeleton around the vital organs and “pray for the cavalry.” Not, however, when downed by a lone attacker. A man solidly on the ground could find an advantage over a man balanced on one leg while kicking, so went the wisdom. Sands didn’t care to test it.

“And don’t say you did what you had to do. That’s bullshit. Just say you did what you did, man. Just say you did it.”

“I haven’t said anything,” Skip said, “about doing anything.”

“You and me have to talk on some other level, man, because you won’t get
down
. You won’t get
down
. This is what’s
happening
. So
fuck
.” He was kicking Sands in the head as he spoke.

“Are you done? I’d like you to be done.”

“Yeah. I’m done. No, I’m not done.” He kicked Sands twice in the ribs.

He turned to leave, got as far as the door, and came back.

“Do you think I really give a fuck? So we lose this war, so what? Will the little kiddies of America be going to Uncle Ho High School and memorizing the Gettysburg Address of fucking Lenin? Will Charlie be raping our women in the streets? Fuck no. The whole thing’s bullshit, man. Win or lose, we’re gonna be fine. But we’re here. You and me and these other assholes. It’s our shit to deal with. So why the fuck not? The all-important underlying reason is, ‘Fuck it, let’s just do it.’ Either you understand that or you don’t.”

“Yeah. That was more or less my uncle’s theory.”

“The colonel’s alive.”

“He is?”

“Isn’t he?”

“No.”

“Yes, fucker.”

“That’s just bullshit.”

“Yeah, it is. But you don’t get it. That’s exactly what runs the reactors. The fragrance of bullshit.”

“Are you going to let me get up?”

Storm sat on the divan, breathing hard.

“Fine, I’ll just lie here. I’m tired.”

“You put down what we’re doing. To you, Psy Ops is baby food. I’m telling you, man, this is where it’s won or lost. In the realm of bullshit. It doesn’t matter how bad we kick their asses on the battlefield or vice fucking versa.”

“The colonel’s dead.”

Storm said, “Yeah. You are a pogue. You just stay here all curled up like a piece of popcorn in your little womb. Your traitor-incubator.”

By painful stages Sands got himself standing and made his way to a chair and collapsed again.