Naked in Saigon (3 page)

MAGDALENA

The moment I stepped out of the plane I almost reeled back from the wall of heat and the stench of gasoline and rotting fruit. Within seconds my crisp white blouse was soaked in sweat.

A fighter screamed overhead and climbed into a baking sky. I gripped Connor’s hand tight as we hurried across the apron, between the camouflaged fighters and the huge troop transports. A tank rumbled out of the belly of one, guided by a shirtless ground crew holding large orange paddles.

Tan Son Nhut was bedlam. Heavily armed soldiers patrolled the terminal in bottle green uniforms, their knuckles white around the stocks of their M-16s. Vietnamese shoved in front of us, screaming at each other as we made our way between the barriers. Thankfully the hotel had sent a driver for us, and he hustled us through the crowds and into a waiting car.

We drove into the city past sandbagged checkpoints and towering billboards of blonde American girls holding bottles of Pepsi Cola. A man with no legs scuttled along the pavement, pushing himself along on a child’s trolley. The air was sulphurous and there was garbage everywhere.

The traffic was chaotic, a choking, rancorous tangle of army trucks, ancient Renault taxi cabs and rickety
siclos
, driven by the same kind of skeletal Vietnamese who had run the rickshaws in the days of the French.

As we got closer to the city it slowed to a crawl, these French provincial boulevards had been designed for bicycles, not the juggernauts of the American military and the Pontiacs and Chevrolets of American officialdom, each of them the size of a sampan. Our car was trapped behind an ARVN lorry loaded with Vietnamese conscripts, some of them barely taller than their M-16s. Black diesel fumes coughed from the exhaust.

Sputtering two-stroke motorcycles were weaving in and out of this chaos, some of them with families or even whole farmyards balanced on the back. Many of the younger men had a girlfriend perched daintily on the back, nearly all of them in a beautiful silk
ao dai
with a mandarin collar, a flowing silk scarf wrapped around their faces to counteract the choking engine fumes.

The car had no air conditioning, just a little plastic fan attached to the dashboard next to some day-glo stickers of the Buddha. It did no good as far as I could see except give off an annoying buzzing sound.

“Are you all right?” Connor asked me.

I nodded. After all, I didn’t have to come. I could have stayed home in Manhattan with a cat and a pile of manuscripts. I had complained of being bored; I would clearly not be bored here in Saigon with Connor.

He looked as excited as a small boy on his first road trip. He asked the driver endless questions about everything we saw. I just stared, both fascinated and horrified, at the savage and incomprehensible world around me.

I saw a child push a packet of white powder into the pockets of a soldier outside a cafe. The soldier whirled around, thinking someone was trying to steal his wallet, and then felt in his pocket and found the powder. He smiled and raised his hand in acknowledgment to the kid, who was already running off down the street after another GI.

“Did you see that?” she said to Connor. “What was that?”

“Heroin,” Connor said. “The guy just got a free sample. Back home they call it marketing.”

Despite the shock of heat and violence and poverty, there was something about this city that I immediately recognized. This was what Havana had felt like in those last few months before Fidel took over. Everyone here had the same look of desperation on their faces, the half-panicked expressions of people who knew that time was running out.

It was like a giant hand had clawed out a piece of Las Vegas and dropped it in the middle of a fever swamp. We passed strips of girlie bars with local women in outrageous electric pink and green miniskirts lined up outside smoking cigarettes, aping every bad blue movie ever made.

I compared them to the girls on the backs of the Vespas and Hondas, in their white silk trousers, their long mauve jackets fluttering as gracefully as butterfly wings. What would it take to make one of them swap their gossamer for cherry red lipstick and a mini skirt?

A scooter pulled up next to our car and for a moment I found myself staring at a beautiful doe-eyed creature with beautiful almond eyes and a heart-shaped mouth.
Look what you have done to us
, her expression seemed to say.

There was something eerily familiar about all this; Vietnam led the news every night back home. It seemed like the war here had gone on forever.

Hard rock pumped into the street from every one of the bars even though it was still early in the afternoon: The Stones, Hendrix, the Doors. From somewhere I heard a snatch of the Four Tops, “All in the Game.” It immediately took me back to Havana and the first time I met Reyes.

I had tried to find him when I got back to Los Angeles after the Kennedy assassination but he had disappeared. Someone else had leased his house on Mulholland, and no one knew where he had gone. Someone told me he was in Africa, doing God knows what.

I supposed he wouldn’t have wanted to see me anyway. If he did, he could have told Jean-Luc, or written a number, an address, in his very last letter. I thought he’d made his intentions clear enough.

We passed a burned-out bar, the neon sign - ‘Nevada’ - presiding over the blackened timbers and sinister dark stains on the footpath. “Viet Cong,” their driver said. “Throw hand grenade in bar. Kill American.”

Connor turned to me. “Isn’t that what happened your father’s club in Havana?” he asked.

“Only it wasn’t a hand grenade,” I said, thinking about Inocencia. “It wasn’t even supposed to be a war.”

“Many VC in Saigon,” the driver said ominously. “Not go in bar with soldier, just stay in hotel. More better.”

A black soldier lay on his back under a neon palm tree outside one of the clubs. A crowd had gathered around him. A syringe lay on the cracked pavement at his feet.

“Too much numbah four that one,” their driver said, matter-of-fact. “He die now.”

The Caravelle was all concrete and glass. Connor and I followed our driver up the polished stone steps into a gaudy Oriental foyer. The air-conditioned chill was a blessed relief after the street, and I felt the sweat freeze-dry my clothes. A uniformed bellboy hurried behind us with our luggage.

Connor was in heaven. He had been aching to come here for over a year, he was just bouncing to get back out of those doors and throw himself at Vietnam. He must have seen the look on my face. “You’ll be okay here, sweetheart. It’s safe here.”

We went up to our room. I showered and joined him at the window, looking down at the ragged sprawl in the street; burned-out girlie bars, soldiers, stink, danger. Connor O’Loughlin was in his element.

I put my arms around him and he kissed me back, without much enthusiasm. I didn’t care. I had given up on passion--these days I would just settle for nice.

Chapter 
5 

REYES

Reyes sat on the terrace of the Continental Hotel with a glass of Havana Club and a two-day-old copy of the
New York Times
. The few remaining tamarind trees along the Tu Do hung limp in the fierce heat. Even the two hideous green cement soldiers on the war monument in the middle of the square seemed ready to drop.

He was anticipating a long, leisurely lunch and perhaps a few more drinks. He looked up and swore under his breath, knowing that his pleasant afternoon was now a forlorn hope.

“Well here’s someone I never expected to see,” Angel said.

He was overdressed, as usual; a white linen suit, silk tie, a white Panama with a jaunty black silk band. The brim had been carefully worked in. Perhaps he had one of his minions do it.

When Walt told him Salvatore had been seen in Saigon, he knew Angel would blow into town one day. If you own a Rottweiler you know one day it will leave a dead rat by the front door. He just didn’t expect it to be so soon.

There had been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since they’d last seen each other in the bar at the Fontainebleau in Miami. Angel was not as pretty as he used to be; too many cigarettes and too much rich food. He had gained a lot of weight and lost his boyish looks.

There was a black Mercury parked in the foyer. Two men sat themselves down at one of the tables by the entrance--Angel’s minders.

“Can I join you?” Angel said and sat down.

Reyes sighed and folded up his newspaper.

“You don’t look surprised to see me.”

“I heard your family had connections here.”

“You heard that, huh?”

“Yeah, sorry. Loose lips sink ships. Can’t keep a secret in this town.”

Angel settled himself. The waiter scurried over but he sent him away with a casual flick of his hand. He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. “Life treating you well, Reyes?”

“Every day is a holiday.”

“You look well. Except for that hole in your head. That anything to do with the unfortunate incident in your bar?”

“What brings you to Saigon, Angel?”

“You know, business.”

“What kind of business would that be?”

Angel took out a silver cigarette case, selected an unfiltered Turkish cigarette and tapped it on the edge of the table. “You like living here?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Long way from home.”

“I wanted a change of pace.”

“From what? The place is full of fucking gooks.”

“They can’t help that, I guess. They were born here.”

“Me, I don’t want to be here longer than I can help it. You know what I mean?”

“I haven’t seen you in the hotel. When did you check in?”

“Check in here? I wouldn’t stay in this shithole. I been in better brothels.”

“Yeah, I guess you have.”

Angel let that one go. “We have friends in the government here. They laid on a villa, servants, pool, the whole deal, some place we can guarantee security.”

There was a loud bang from the street and Angel almost dove under the table. Even the two gorillas jumped in the air.

“Car exhaust,” Reyes said and smiled.

Angel flushed and eased back in his cane chair. He lit his cigarette, furious, all business now. “Here’s the deal, Garcia. We don’t like people stealing from us.”

“Who’s ‘we?””

“Don’t be a wiseass or I’ll put another hole in that fucking head. Do you hear me?”

Reyes leaned forward. “How about you just tell me what you fucking want?”

“I think you know.”

“I hate to disappoint you, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“There was a guy in your bar when the grenade went off. A staff sergeant, big motherfucking nigger, size of a linebacker. You remember him?”

“What is this? You planning a Klan lynching here in Saigon?”

“You know who I’m talking about.”

“I was paying no attention. We had a lot of customers that day.”

“This guy, you can’t miss. Believe me.”

“I don’t remember him, Angel.”

“Well I want you to try harder because we figure he had our property with him when that grenade went off.”

“Look, Angel, I’ll say this once and once only. Maybe you have never been inside a crowded enclosed space when a hand grenade explodes - though I hope one day you will - but let me break it down for you. Even if you walk out with all your body parts attached, you can’t hear a damn thing, your clothes are shredded off your body and you can’t even remember your own fucking name for hours afterwards. So maybe he was there, maybe he wasn’t. I sure as hell don’t remember.”

Angel leaned back. He looked to be of two minds. Finally he stood up. “You better be telling me the truth, Garcia. Bobbo is really pissed about this and his mood ain’t going to improve until he gets his property back. You think you’re in a war zone? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”