The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy (20 page)

* * *

The hallway was in the damp basement of the South
Vietnamese National Police substation three blocks from our
headquarters. To the basement were brought confirmed or suspected VC
(Viet Cong). The hall was dim, one 25-watt bulb on a wire about
halfway down the corridor. The place stank more from disinfectant
than puke, urine, or feces, but not by much. The atmosphere of
successful interrogation, National Police style. Rumored but not
seen. Well, not often seen.

Sometimes they did it with switches of split bamboo,
swacking the stick against a prisoner's bare feet or palms until the
screaming gave way to the short-lived relief of unconsciousness. A
little slapping about the face, and the questioning proceeded. A slow
mode and strenuous.

A second method was cigarettes. No, not as bribes.
Lit ones. Applied to earlobes, lips, eyelids. Like the killer had
done with Al. Some noise and smell, agony extreme but intermittent.
Effective and less strenuous, but still time-consuming.

For quickest results, a crank telephone box and a
couple of wires were employed. The interrogator's aide would crank
the box, the current thus produced transmitted by the wires connected
to the prisoner's a genitalia, male or female. The aide's muscle tone
and endurance weren't much limitation on the pace and the duration of
the questioning here.

I was to be present at an interrogation because the
prisoner, doubly damned as VC as well as black marketeer, supposedly
spoke good English. He therefore would be able to give me names of
American servicemen providing products from the PXs, either through
the front door (by discount purchase) or through the back door (the
ultimate discount). My National Police guide escorted me down into
the basement to the interrogation section.

You've heard sitcom laughtracks? Well, if the
producers of a horror movie ever wanted a screamtrack, they really
missed their chance back then. Name your scream and the NP would
provide it, on cue. A seventy-year-old woman's long, piercing wail. A
thirty-five-year-old father's gasping outbursts of anguish as he
realized he would be fathering no more. Perhaps a sixteen-year-old
girl for whom permanent disfigurement must have seemed a vague and
distant concern compared to the cause of her shrieking and gagging
hoarseness.

"This room," said my escort, smiling
brightly.

"Please?"

He swung open the door. The smell of disinfectant was
very strong. There were three NP men in the room. One was seated at a
table taking down machine-gum sentences in Vietnamese. The speaker
was a fiftyish man in dark red prisoner pajamas who sat across from
him. The pajamas seemed three sizes too large. The prisoner was
speaking so fast the seated NP could not transcribe it. The NP
standing next to the prisoner clouted him on the cheek with a
backhand and spat a Vietnamese word. The prisoner slowed down.

The third NP spoke to my escort quickly in
Vietnamese, then addressed me in English. My escort fetched a chair.

"Welcome. I am Captain Ngo." He inclined
his head. "You will please to sit?"

"Thank you," I said, sitting and tugging a
pad and ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket. "I'm Lieutenant
Cuddy. I understand this man speaks English?"

"Oh, yes. We will . . ."

He shot a terse question in Vietnamese to my escort.

"Su-pend," said my escort.

"Ah, yes. We will suspend now and you will
question him. The traitor's name is Can Gai Trinh. He has much to
tell you."

Captain Ngo, barked something at Trinh and the guard
who was about to clock him again. I heard a scrabbling sound from the
room next door. I hoped it was a rat. If not, it was probably a
child.

Trinh stopped talking to the NP transcriber and
looked at me.

"Yessir," he said.

"Your full name and address," I asked.

He told me.

"How long have you been here?"

"Whole life."

I shook my head. "No," I said. The guard
took this as a request to strike Trinh.

I looked at Ngo. "Tel1 him to stop hitting the
prisoner.”

Ngo spoke, and the guard backed off a step.

"I mean, how long have you been in this
building?"

"Oh, maybe full day."

"How old are you?"

"T'irty-one."

I looked at him. He flitted his eyes around the room,
fearful he'd sparked more retribution. He still looked fiftyish. The
pajamas covered everything but his head, weak hands, and bare feet.
There were no marks on those parts. Probably used the crank box.
"Tell me the GIs who work with you in the black market. Names,
outfits."

I got a stream of people. Twelve or thirteen, from
PFCs to a master sergeant.

I took it all down, got some functional details and
some future dates to mark.

I looked up at Captain Ngo. "Who knows he's
here?"

"Nobody. We catch him clean. Behind a building.
Nobody see."

I inclined my head toward the prisoner. "I may
need him at the trial of the bad Americans," I said. Trinh's
face lit up, the hope, however, tempered by experience.

I locked Ngo with my best stare. "Will he be
alive then?"

Ngo frowned, disappointed. "If you like,"
he relented.

I shook off the interrogation memory and waded
through about twenty more reports. Names, faces, places. The
absurdities of a big city at the edge of an unnatural war. I went
through December of '67 into January of '68. I dreaded reaching the
end of that month, so I got up and took a stretch-break. My interlude
with the muggers was taking its toll in stiffness and soreness. I
finished the ice water and I took the pitcher to the door. I opened
it.

The receptionist was gone, but a master sergeant
swiveled around in the seat Casey had occupied hours ago. He stood up
and smiled.

"Help you, sir?"

"Yes. Are you Sergeant Ricker?"

"'I`hat's right, sir. What can I do for you?"

He was about six feet tall. Maybe one-eighty in
shape, two hundred with his pot. I was tired, and he had that vaguely
familiar look of many middle-aged noncoms. Bald, forty-five or so,
with a Southwest twang in his voice.

"Just some cold water, if you can."

I extended the pitcher as he said, "Sure thing,
sir."

I looked up at the clock. It said 16:45. He noticed
me and shook the pitcher at me.

"Now, don't you worry none about that clock,
sir. Casey, Sergeant Casey, he told me you was here on something
important, and I already called the missus. I'll be here jest as long
as you need. I got me a book and everything?

There was a Louis L'Amour novel spread open face down
on his desk.

"Thanks, Sergeant. I really appreciate it."

"Would you like some coffee, sir? It's no
trouble."

"No, thanks."

"Jest be a minute."

He was gone perhaps thirty seconds.

"Here you are, sir."

"Thanks, Sergeant."

"You jest take your time." He smiled.
"There ain't nothing goin' on over in the old D. of C. on a cold
Monday night in March anyways."

I went back in, closed the door and sat back down.
Mid-January 1968 became January 20, then January 25, then finally
January 30. The dawn of the Year of the Monkey, the lunar New Year
holiday all of Vietnam celebrated.

They called it "Tet."

Some military historians trace the strategic
beginning of the Tet Offensive back to September 1967, in terms of
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong planning and stockpiling in and around
the cities of South Vietnam. Tet was really the first time the cities
were hit, the VC up till then being a nearly invisible enemy,
indistinguishable citizens by day, raiders in rural villages and an
occasional town by dark. One North Vietnamese general suggested much
later that since the offensive did not result in widespread,
spontaneous uprisings by the people of South Vietnam, it was, in
effect, a military defeat for Charlie. Americans who were there that
night might disagree with him.

The Viet Cong caught the whole country sleeping. They
attacked air bases, corps headquarters, National Police substations,
even our Embassy, which squatted like a concrete sewage plant in a
neighborhood of French villas on Thong Nhut. Al and I were sacked out
in our BOO when the first explosions awakened us. We got dressed and
raced downstairs, the pop and crack of small-arms fire filling the
air between the louder blasts of rockets and sappers' satchel
charges.

We leaped with eight or ten others into a
deuce-and-a-half-ton truck that barreled the mile or so to our
headquarters.

The doorway to our station looked like the entrance
to an anthill. MPs were scurrying in and out, passing, tossing,
dropping equipment. Jeeps and deuce-and-a-halfs were pulling up and
pulling out with a lot of noise but little pattern. The harried
captain on duty split us up, A1 drawing a barricade reinforcement
north of the headquarters and me a recon by jeep toward the red-light
district on Tu Do Street. Al was wounded almost as soon as he left
the station, so I figured I would just skim the reports from the
start of the attack onward. There was no reason for me to relive my
memories. Still, the nightmare images from that night flashed back no
matter how quickly I flipped the pages.

Two MPs, a young blond PFC and an older black
sergeant, lying dead next to an overturned, burning jeep at a street
comer. Both still held their .45s, jacked open and empty. Nine Viet
Cong, some with automatic weapons, sprawled in a staggered attack
formation in front of them. An incredible stand. Four National Police
officers stopping a vegetable truck. They pulled the driver out and
shot him to death, rumor being that the VC had infiltrated their
weapons and explosives for Tet in such vehicles. A farmer, elderly
with arthritic, stained fingers and a few long strands of chin beard.
He wore a broad, peaked coolie hat and clutched a copy of Chinh Luun,
the Vietnamese-language newspaper. He was sitting motionless in a
corner of a blown-out building, staring at another corner. God knows
how he came to be there or what happened to him afterwards. A
red-haired trooper, who had spent the entire night of the attack with
a B-girl, being dragged between two MPs into the station. He looked
so young, a ninth-grader being taken to the principal's office for
detention.

Viet Cong prisoners, the men in cheap white dress
shirts, the women wearing white kerchiefs. All kneeling in gaggles of
five or six, arms bound behind them. The National Police would snug
the rope just above the elbows, tugging back so hard that the elbows
nearly touched, creating an image of supplicant, uni-sexual Venus de
Milos.

Two of my men, hit by an AK-47 in the hands of a
skinny Vietnamese hiding in a dark doorway. They went down all
akimbo, as if they were marionettes and someone had cut their
strings. I tired three rounds into the shooter, who spun and
belly-whopped on the pavement. A shadow in the next doorway moved,
and I fired three more times at it. The shadow slammed back against
the door, landing so that the feet were in the light. A child's feet.

An American nurse, blond and thin with terrible acne,
stroking the face of a head-bandaged sergeant and assuring him that
his eyes weren't gone forever. A GI, screaming in Spanish and shooing
a scrawny cat away from a dead body. The cat had been going after the
corpse's eyes. The GI started throwing up. A mother lying face down
in the street, her eyes open, snot and blood and broken teeth all
around her. Her daughter, maybe four years old, howling and beating
her fists bloody on the pavement while two National Policemen
stripped and looted the Viet Cong bodies in the alleyway.

Standing in a gutter, I look down and see an arm. A
black left arm. With a faded gold high school ring on the fourth
finger. A blue stone.

Two B-girls, still in their slit-sided hostess
dresses, crucified on a side wall of a Tu Do Street bar for
fraternizing with us, the enemy. They had been raped and slashed
repeatedly. One was still alive when my sergeant put a bullet through
her head. If you had seen her, you wouldn't be asking yourself that
question right now.

An explosion that ripped through a convent school.
Intentionally set, no mistaken bomb dropped randomly from above.
Thirty-nine girls, aged seven through eleven, blown into a thousand
once-human fragments.

Tet. The joyous lunar new
year. Auld lang syne.

* * *

I rubbed my eyes. I got up and opened the conference
room door. Ricker swiveled around and stood. It was 18:10. Christ,
where had the time gone?

"More water, sir?" he asked.

"No thanks, Sergeant. Just stretching."

"Yessir. Anything else I can get for you?"

"Yeah, a new set of memo1ies."

He laughed respectfully. I closed the door and went
back to my reading.

Al was in the hospital until mid-February. I slowed
down when I saw his name reappearing prominently. Al and a Sergeant
Keams brought in an acid freak named Farrell who had fragged his
platoon leader. Farrell swore he would get Al, swore to God, Timothy
Leary, and his mother. Farrell, Wiley N. I remembered him. One more
for the list.