Tree of Smoke (23 page)

“You’re in Operations, am I right?”

“Right,” Skip said. “Officially. But I seem to work for Plans.”

“Well, I’m in Plans, but I seem to work for State.”

“What brings you to the base?”

“A free ride back to the war at twenty hundred hours. The clock’s running out for me, son. Last chance for a San Miguel. Wish I could take a keg with me.”

“Do they sell San Miguel by the keg?”

“Come to think of it, I’m not sure. But they sell it by the bottle at the Officers’ Club. Let’s go.”

“I’m all grimy. Should I meet you?”

“Should I wait?—Or what about going into town?”

“Well,” Skip said, “if you’re leaving at twenty hundred—”

“Or we could swing by the Teen Club, find out what the officers’ kids are up to.”

Skip said, “What?”

“Say, that reminds me—I mean, speaking of officers’ kids. Aren’t you related to the colonel himself?”

“Which colonel, now?”

“Aren’t you close to the colonel? The colonel Francis Xavier?”

“I’m one of his favorite people, if we’re talking about the same guy.”

“There ain’t but one Colonel.”

“I guess not.”

“I took that Psy Ops course of his. He’s a man with a message.”

“He’s got vision, all right.”

“You took it too? He titled it wrong. ‘Reminiscing and Theorizing’ would be more like it.”

“That’s the colonel.”

“He’s put some of his thoughts in an article for the journal. Have you read it?”

“In the journal? You mean in
Studies
?”

“Yowza.”

They referred to the Agency’s in-house organ,
Studies in Intelligence.
The colonel’s thoughts in the journal? What to say to this? Nothing.

He gulped his beer and wiped it from his mustache. He’d gone through the bushy Kennedy phase. Now they were all back to crew cuts again, flattops—proving they weren’t the Beatles. But Skip had kept his mustache. It was luxuriant.

“Do you read the journal much, Skip?”

“I catch up in Manila. We didn’t have it in the boonies. I was up in San Marcos.”

“Oh, yeah—the Del Monte place.”

“Ever been there?”

“No. You haven’t read his piece?”

“I can’t believe he’d get anything into shape for actual publication.”

“It hasn’t been published. It’s just a draft.”

“How did you happen to see it?”

“I wondered if you’d seen it in a rough form.”

“Man, I didn’t know he ever put a pen to the page. How’d you get hold of it? Are you with the journal?”

“So you haven’t seen it.”

Skip now felt his heart coming to a halt. “No,” he said, “like I said.”

“Well, I’ll be open with you. The piece is a little puzzling. One explanation is it’s meant to be satire. But if he’s submitting satire to the house organ, that’s puzzling in itself. That’s troubling too; that in itself is puzzling.”

“I see,” Skip said. “Look, obviously I remember you, but I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Voss.”

“Rick, right?”

“C’est moi.”

“The face was familiar, but—”

“I’m getting porky.”

“If you say so.”

“I got married. We had a kid. I got fat.”

“Boy or girl?”

“A little girl. Celeste.”

“Nice name.”

“She’s eighteen months.”

“That makes it hard, huh? Traveling and all.”

“I’m glad I travel. I’m like the moon, I come and go. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I could take it day after day. Women and children frighten me. I don’t understand them. I’d rather be somewhere else.” He’d been sitting on the bed; he got up and sat on one of the footlockers. “And whose gear is this here?”

“I’m just delivering it.”

“Who’s W. F. Benét?”

“The recipient, I guess.”

“Or maybe the sender,” said Voss.

“I’m actually not familiar with the name.”

“What’s the
W
for? William?”

“Beats me,” Skip said.

“And what about the
F
? What’s his full name?”

“Rick…I’m just a blind courier on this one.”

Voss said, “Wanna arm-wrestle?”

“Uh, no,” said Skip.

“If we arm-wrestled, do you know who’d win?”

Skip shrugged.

“Do you care?”

“No, I don’t,” said Skip.

“Neither do I,” said Voss. “We don’t need muscles. We’ve got a private army now. These Green Berets are like human tanks. They’re death machines. One of them could tear the two of us to shreds, huh? And they work for the Agency. Well, the point is, from here on out we’re gonna keep the tough guys in uniform. They don’t graduate from the field, they don’t get behind a desk and start running things. This ain’t the OSS. That war is history.”

Skip clinked his bottle against Voss’s. Both bottles were empty. “If we were halfway through a case of this stuff,” he said, “I’d just figure we were having a bull session. If it was four a.m. and we were half sloshed.”

“But we’re not.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“When are we gonna get those beers?” Skip said.

“Well, how about right now?”

They both stood up.

Skip said, “Oh, drat. Wait a minute.”

“What.”

Skip said, “My watch is stopped. What time is it?”

“Fifteen-twenty.”

“Darn, I’ve got a little briefing in forty minutes. I’d better get my gear in order.”

“Then what? Right to Saigon?”

“As far as I know.”

“I’ll probably see you there.”

“All right,” said Skip, “and then we can have those beers. What do they drink in Saigon?”

“Tiger Beer. Then they puke.”

“Good enough,” Skip said.

Voss stared at the floor and concentrated before raising his gaze, preparing to speak.

“You’ll be heading off, then,” Skip reminded him.

Voss stood up. “Rain check,” he said, and as he departed Skip sent him half a salute.

The colonel had always said: When you hit the wall, take a shower and change your clothes.

Skip did both, and then he took the day’s apparel downstairs to the laundry room with the intention of traveling to his new post completely clean. For over an hour he sat on a plastic chair among the thudding machines—hiding, essentially, evading scrutiny—in a rising tide of confusion and dread. He climbed out of it momentarily to fold his clothes and was dragged back down. He sat upright in his chair, back straight, hands in his lap. He remembered that his life was nothing. He focused on that point on the horizon, the solid, the fixed, the prominent goal: the defeat of Communism. The panic subsided.

Soon he stood out front of the BOQ under a dark but rainless sky. Shuttles came four per hour. He boarded the next one and traveled at the base limit of “15
MPH
/24
KPH
” through this town of green buildings with identical corrugated roofs, out to the last stop just inside the gate, and then in a taxi into the town of Angeles, a main street of asphalt, tangled dirt lanes, bars and brothels and shanties. “Would you like to meet some ladies?” the cabbie asked. “No, thanks.” “Then will you go to the carnival?” Yes, why not, he’d go to the carnival, what had he come to town for anyway? Two acres of dirt was all this carnival needed for its mildewed brown tents with shuddering frayed hemp ropes, its half dozen rides, its loudspeakers playing the local radio station, its grand, faded murals raised up in front of the sideshows. As he paid his driver, pleading children boxed him in, and angry vendors chased them away. He bought peanuts wrapped in a page from a magazine. Liked the look of the Mermaid of Sulu on a mural and went in to see. He was the only patron. She had long black hair tied back with plastic flowers. Her small breasts were cupped, clasped, by a bikini top. Of what material the tail? He couldn’t see, some kind of cloth. It didn’t swing like a fish’s. With her arms she shoved herself back and forth in a glass tank about four feet high and eight feet long, set on a platform three feet above the earth. She came up for air, went down, back and forth, back and forth. Broke the surface again and reached for a white towel hung on the tank’s rim, dried her hands and face, took cigarettes and lighter from their perch beside the towel, lit a Marlboro skillfully with damp fingers, smoked a minute, waved her hand at him to leave, to go away, and turned her back. He left and made for another tent—the Five Dwarfs of Bohol. Where was Bohol? Somewhere in these islands, he assumed, he’d look at a map sometime. For now he’d only meet some of its citizens, the small, jolly, bearded men depicted on a huge banner stretched above the entrance, two of them working their gold mine with their glinty-pointed picks, the other three hauling a barrow heaped with winking nuggets—Franco, Carlo, Paulo, Santo, Marco, odd names, magical men. But inside were not these men. In five large bassinets the dwarfs lay in dirty diapers, blind, spastic, comatose, with their names, ages, and weights displayed on cards. Between seventeen and twenty-four years old. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-three pounds…Not beards, but long filaments of peach fuzz never trimmed. Their limbs jerked, their milky eyes shivered in their heads…Flies landing on them…Sands limped outside and boarded the roller coaster, nothing too impressive, the kind of thing disassembled and trucked from town to town, and yet what it lacked in height and depth it made up for in speed and torque, and as the cars swooped down an incline or rammed into a bend, as the whole structure lurched and swayed, death stopped his throat, for who oversaw the assembly, who looked after this ride, who vouched for its safety?—No one. Expect a tragedy. Good and dizzy, he descended from this amusement and stood once more in front of the tent of the mermaid, the wet prisoner. Sunset now. New Year’s Eve. Throughout the afternoon, fireworks had sounded sporadically, now more and more. Not whistles and bangs. A peripheral crepitation, pops and bursts from off somewhere. On the tall poster the mermaid smiled and didn’t seem the type to smoke Marlboros. He had an impulse to go in again and further oppress himself.

An air force jeep pulled up quite near, driven by an airman. Voss was the passenger. He disembarked and they stood together before the gigantic discolored illustration. “Was this your appointment?”

“Yes.”

“Your briefing?”

“Right.” Feeling frightened, hilarious. “Do you want to go in?”

“Actually, I was here a couple of days ago. You go ahead.”

“I’ve already been,” Skip said sadly.

“Let’s talk a little more.”

“Sure.”

The two Americans sat at a vendor’s linoleum table, each with a bottle of San Miguel. Looking most out of place. Voss wore a pin-striped shirt, brown slacks, brown wing-tip shoes. He looked like a Bible salesman. So did Skip.

Skip said, “So this isn’t a coincidence.”

“Surely you understand I have a purpose here.”

“Yeah. I just said so.”

“I’m here to shake you up.”

“You haven’t succeeded.”

“Good enough,” Voss said. “I just hope I’ve been heard.”

“All I’ve heard is a lot of ungrateful nonsense.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look, I agree there’s such a thing as evolution. Things are changing, we’re a new generation, but—what have you got against the old guard?”

“Nothing at all. They’re running the show. But not the colonel, right? The colonel’s a show unto himself.”

“Do you know him at all? Aside from the course of his you took?”

“I know him. I worked for him.”

“Really?”

“All last summer and fall. Old F.X. He kidnapped me. Had me doing research.”

“Research on what?”

“Anything and everything. He called me his clerk. I think his idea was if he had to be a prisoner in Langley, he’d better take a prisoner of his own, you know? But I owe the guy. I’ve gone up two grades since then.”

“Wow.”

“Since June.”

“That’s fast.”

“Like lightning.”

“He did that for you?”

“Skip, no. It wasn’t the colonel who got me promoted. But after I’d been with him, folks took an interest.”

“Good. That’s great.”

“No, no, no. You’re not picking this up fast enough.”

“What. Tell me.”

“Folks took an interest in me because folks have taken an interest in the colonel.”

Here was a moment for staying still, betraying nothing. “…An interest?”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“I mean, when you say he was ‘a prisoner’ in Langley…”

“Now he gets it.”

The next question would have to be whether the colonel had landed in real trouble, fate-provoking, career-wrecking difficulty. But the question to follow that one was whether the colonel still had trouble, and then, after that: Who else has trouble? Am I, for instance, in trouble?

Therefore he swallowed all questions.

And Voss was spitting them out now.

“What happened in Mindanao fourteen months ago?”

“I guess you must have seen the report.”

“I read it. I did the decode. I was sitting right by the telex when it came in ‘Eyes Only.’”

“Well, if it came in Eyes Only, why did you decode it?”

“Eyes Only is not a legal classification, I’m sure you know. It’s out of James Bond.”

“Well, still—as a courtesy.”

“As a courtesy to whom?”

“As a courtesy to me, and to the recipient.”

“We look at everything directed to the colonel. Or from the colonel.”

“Then you know how things went down there.”

“Yeah. The colonel botched it.”

“That’s not what my report says, Rick. Read it again.”

“Can you tell me why he’s wasting valuable time and resources trying to run down newsreel footage of a ball game?”

“No, I can’t. Baseball?”

“Football. A football game. He tried to commission a transpacific flight for some cans of film. Does he think he’s the president?”

“The colonel has his reasons for whatever he does.” His blood roared. He was ready to hit Voss with a bottle. “What football game?”

“Notre Dame versus Michigan State. The one last month.”

“I have no idea.”

“The colonel’s collecting more intelligence on the Notre Dame–Michigan State game than he is on the enemy.” Voss looked at his watch, signaled the airman.