The Last Supper (38 page)

Rosie began to dance. As she swayed to a Hawaiian song, her hair parted like a hula skirt and cheers rose. There was a curious innocence about her frail body. The breasts were hardly more than
swollen nipples. The faint shadow between her thighs might have been makeup.

The men began throwing packages of cigarettes onto the stage. Rosie caught a box of Winstons, extracted a cigarette, and danced to the edge of the stage to beg a light. She caught another
package and lit another cigarette. The crowd cheered and peppered her with cigarette packages. Swaying and smiling, Rosie danced gracefully out of the way. Someone handed her a lighted cigarette.
With a pretty gesture, she put it into her mouth. Now she was smoking two burning cigarettes and holding two others.

Her hair hung down her back, so that her doll’s body was in full view. More lighted cigarettes were handed to her. She held four cigarettes in each hand and three in her mouth. Dancing all
the while, whirling her magnificent hair, she transferred the burning cigarettes deftly from her fingers to her mouth, puffing rapidly to keep them all alight. There was something deeply perverse
about the sight of this nude adolescent blowing clouds of smoke out of her nose and mouth. Excited hands reached over the edge of the stage, offering more lighted cigarettes. Rosie coquettishly
refused them.

Finally Rosie accepted another cigarette. She had no place to put it; her hands and her mouth were full. She pouted and smiled and listened to the shouts of the men. She lifted one slender round
leg and placed the foot on her other knee.

With a kittenish smile, she inserted a cigarette into her vagina. She moved the muscles in her stomach. The cigarette glowed. She inserted another cigarette, and another. The tips of the
cigarettes glowed red as her stomach muscles contracted. Rosie did a full back bend, hands flat on the floor. The pilots, laughing and howling and slapping one another on the shoulders, watched as
Rosie smoked six, then seven, then eight cigarettes at a time, the ends glowing between her splayed childish legs.

Gus touched Christopher’s arm. “This is the right moment to slip away,” he said. They moved through the crowd to the door.

“Rosie’s a marvel, isn’t she?” he said, when they were outside. “But I wouldn’t touch her with a barge pole. Clap is bad enough, but cancer?”

— 9 —

Gus’s small plane flew down the Mekong estuary, yawing and plunging as it crossed and recrossed water and land. “You cross seams in the air, flying over land and
water this way,” Gus said. The plane plummeted and Gus trimmed the nose. “See?” he said. It was a remarkably clear night. The river was bathed in moonlight, and from the plane
Christopher saw the shadows of masts and rigging, trembling on the sluggish river water.

“It’s the ocean route for us,” Gus shouted. “Too much moon to fly over the jungle. Crawling with V.C. cockroaches with anti-aircraft guns, the jungle is.”

Gus muttered into the radio, then twirled the dials on his radio navigation system. The plane had reached altitude. Unfolding a soiled aviation map, Gus pointed to the bulge of the Vietnamese
coast.

“What we’re going to do,” he said, “is fly northeast until we’re beyond the coast, then due north over salt water. It’s farther, but there’re no
cockroaches in the South China Sea. Okay?”

To the west, like a fringed eyelid closed in sleep, lay the dark forested coast of Vietnam. The dappled water stretched to the horizon on all other sides. Christopher saw the phosphorescent wake
of an American destroyer, on station off the mouth of the Mekong.

Gus took his hands off the controls. “George is flying the aircraft—automatic pilot,” he said. “Are you going to stay awake?”

Christopher nodded. Gus pulled the beak of his baseball cap over his eyes. “Shake me up if you hear strange voices,” he said, and went peacefully to sleep, chin on his chest, arms
folded for warmth.

The monotonous noise of the engines rose and fell as the propellers bit into the thin air above the sea. The heater sent torrents of scorched air into the cabin. Christopher felt slightly ill,
as he always did in airplanes. Gus slept for more than three hours. When he woke, he drank water from an army canteen and offered it to Christopher. Then, yawning, he crawled into the backseat and
rummaged in a canvas duffel bag, placing a Kulspruta submachine gun, identical to the one Horace had offered to Christopher, on the seat while he searched in the depths of the bag. He found what he
wanted and got back into the pilot’s seat, leaving the weapon in full view.

“Breakfast?” He offered Christopher one of the two thick chocolate bars he had got out of the duffel bag. The chocolate bars had melted and solidified again, so that they were hard
brown puddles in their foil wrappers.

Gus, chewing, checked his instruments. “Coming up on the moment of truth,” he said. “We’ve flown right up the 109th meridian, and in a minute or two we’ll have to
make a left turn for Da Nang, if that’s where we’re going. But that’s not where we’re going, right?”

“We’re going to Hue.”

Gus stopped chewing his chocolate. His face twisted in disbelief.

“Hue? All this mystery over bloody
Hue?
I thought at least we’d be landing in Laos to pick up a load of opium. Hue!”

“What’s the charge for Hue?” Christopher asked.

“No bleeding charge for Hue. But I’ve got to have an extra two hundred to compensate for the disappointment. I had you figured for a real soldier of fortune.”

Gus, working with his instruments, changed course. Hue, the royal capital of old Vietnam, lay about a hundred miles to the northwest of Da Nang. He sorted through the charts, then threw them in
the backseat.

“No bloody chart for bloody Hue,” Gus said. “I don’t know if I can find the airport. You should’ve told me Hue. Have you ever landed in Hue?”

“No.”

“It’ll be the blind leading the blind, then. Neither have I.”

Gus completed a long turn, leveled the wings, and put the controls back on automatic pilot. He folded his arms, pulled down his cap, and went back to sleep.

The moon, still large and bright, had moved to the western horizon. Christopher had not slept since he left Paris. He closed his eyes and dreamed of his childhood again. His mother gave him her
brilliant slow smile; they were riding in the Tiergarten; she was looking down from a tall horse at Paul on his pony. She wore polished oxblood boots. She offered him chocolate. He could smell
chocolate and boot polish in his dream. He realized that he was grown up and his mother had come back. Hubbard had been right: she had lived, nothing could make her die against her will. “Now
it’s all right to say good-bye,” she said. “But remember, they cannot
order
us to say good-bye. What right do they have to look at our faces when we say good-bye?”
She held up Zaentz’s drawing of the Gestapo dandy; five policemen tore it out of her hands and beat it to shreds with their truncheons. Paul picked up the Gestapo dandy’s severed hand
and took Lori’s passport from its grasping fingers. “Say good-bye
now
,” Lori said; “I’m going straight to Paulus, don’t worry.” She galloped away.
Paul could not utter the word. Molly was beside Lori on another horse. “Good-bye, good-bye,” the women cried, galloping away with their sun-shot hair flying like pennons.

In a loud voice, Gus said, “Bloody hell!”

Over the nose of the plane, Christopher saw a coastline. The moon had set. The first bleached hues of the Asian sunrise touched the low-sailing clouds.

“Overbloodyslept,” Gus said. “I thought you were going to stay awake.”

“What’s that coast?”

“Scenic Vietnam, of course, but where?” Gus said. “Look at the time. We flew through our destination.”

Gus turned on the power for the radio. He switched bands and listened. The blurred chatter of pilots talking in English and Vietnamese, and in a language that wasn’t Vietnamese, faded in
and out behind the static. Gus switched off the automatic pilot and began a wide turn, slapping the nose trim control with his open hand to lose altitude. He craned his head, looking for
landmarks.

“I’m going to be truthful with you,” he said. “I don’t know
where
the bloody hell we are. But I’m making a left turn here and that ought to bring us
into Hue. I’m going to descend.”

They flew a few feet above the treetops. “This is one way to find out if you’re in cockroach country,” Gus said. “Not recommended for the faint of heart. If we were,
they’d be shooting at our arses.”

He pointed forward. A complex of runways appeared a mile or two ahead.

“I think that’s Hue,” Gus said. “Anyway, we’ll land and empty our bladders and tell ’em we got lost.”

Gus spoke into the radio. The tower didn’t answer. He overflew the field, still talking. There was no response to his radio call and no sign of life on the ground.

“Maybe the cockroaches have taken over in the night,” Gus said. Into the microphone he said, “Wake up, you cockroaches.” Still there was no response. “They’re
all asleep,” he said. “No bloody radio, no bloody runway lights, no bloody anything.”

Suddenly the runway lights came on. “Hurrah, the bloody janitor’s turned on the lights,” Gus said. “Hold on.”

He made a tight turn, lined up with the runway lights, and made a fast, hard landing.

As the taxiing plane bumped along, propellers catching the colors of the sunrise, Gus grinned apologetically. He reached into his shirt pocket and returned Christopher’s two extra
hundred-dollar bills. “No charge for getting lost,” he said.

It was a long taxi to the terminal buildings. Gus peered into the half-light. Christopher had no idea what the airport buildings at Hue looked like. These were the standard square concrete
boxes, oozing with tropical lesions.

Men ran out of one of the buildings.

“Bloody hell,” Gus said. He slammed on the brakes and revved the engines, racing across the tarmac.

Some of the men had leaped into a vehicle and raced across the field with headlights blazing. The plane shuddered as Gus increased speed. Beneath the peak of his cap his narrow face was grim; as
he manipulated the controls, he ground his teeth.

Gus reached into the backseat with one hand and grabbed the submachine gun. He handed the weapon to Christopher. “If they try to get ahead of us in that truck, shoot the bastards,”
Gus shouted.

Christopher put his face against the Plexiglas window and looked back. He couldn’t see the truck. The plane rose from the ground and fell again with a jar. Gus, his neck corded, pulled
back on the control column, trying to get the plane to take off.

“Get up, you beast,” Gus said.

The wheels hit the ground again. Then there was another, shuddering crash and the plane went over onto its nose. As it began to cartwheel, Christopher realized that the truck had rammed them
from behind. Gus, hanging in his safety harness, frantically cut the engines and threw the switches to activate the fire extinguishers.

The machine landed right side up. “Out, out!” Gus cried. Christopher had dropped the submachine gun. Gus snatched it from the floor and kicked open the flimsy door of the plane.

Before Christopher could get his own door open, a rifle butt smashed through the Plexiglas; the edge of the plastic sheet opened a cut four inches long on Christopher’s forehead. He felt
nothing, but was blinded by the blood running into his eyes. He was pulled roughly out of the plane by at least two men and dragged away from the wreckage.

Christopher struggled free and wiped the blood out of his eyes. He could not see perfectly, but he could see well enough. Two young men wearing wrinkled mustard-colored uniforms threw
Christopher to the ground; he got a mouthful of powdery dirt and coughed as he inhaled it into his lungs.

Gus was running for the tree line, a hundred yards from the edge of the runway. Three men in mustard uniforms were chasing him. Gus had covered about twenty yards. His pursuers shouted at him to
stop. One of them fired a burst of automatic fire into the air. Gus lost his hat and Christopher thought he had been hit, but he kept running.

Gus whirled and fell to one knee. The muzzle of his submachine gun blinked very rapidly. Parabellum rounds ripped through the wrecked fuselage and kicked up dirt near Christopher. The men who
had been holding Christopher’s arms threw their bodies over his, as if to shield him from the bullets. He was still coughing uncontrollably, trying to expel the dust from his lungs.

Gasping, Christopher tried to raise his head. One of the men pushed his head down and lay on it. Christopher thought, I am going to choke to death in the middle of a firefight.

He squirmed until he could see. All three men pursuing Gus began to shoot. The noise of their weapons, firing on full automatic, sounded like a saw whirling through a log. The submachine gun
flew out of Gus’s hands.

Christopher thought afterward that he had seen parts of Gus’s body torn away by the high-velocity bullets; perhaps it was the noise like a saw that made him think that. Then it was
absolutely quiet except for the sound of men breathing very close at hand.

Still Christopher could not breathe. His arms were twisted behind him. These men, who were very young, did not smell like Vietnamese: their breath was clean, with no trace of the piercing fishy
odor of Vietnamese food.

Christopher heard a sob. Thinking that one of his boyish captors had been wounded, he looked into the flat features of the soldier who was twisting his arm. Christopher realized that he was in
China, and that the sobs were coming out of his own throat.