Tree of Smoke (67 page)

That was the right window. He had the right man.

Suppose tomorrow night the man went out for supper and died as soon as he returned, rather than at two in the morning? Suppose the body lay in the room for several hours, rather than sixty minutes? Rigor mortis might present a problem for the disposal team, but Fest doubted it. The trade-off in assurance of completion made the change well worth-while—the difference between entering a pitch-black room in which anything could be going on, or waiting in a pitch-black room for a man who thought it was empty.

At this time tomorrow he’d come again. If the man went out, Fest would greet him when he returned.

T
rung Than sat on the bed finishing a warm Coca-Cola. Without a clock or a watch he knew only that it was later than 3:00 p.m., not by much. A full two hours before the dusk came and released him.

He tried sitting straight-backed on the bed and attending only to his breath, only to his breath.

Holding still, when I want to act, and letting my impatience be crushed, is a thrill that feels almost illicit because of the slight nausea it includes. Like stolen brandy. When Hao stole the bottle from the old man’s hooch. The old man hid it in the ashes of the stove because his wife was dead and he never cooked for himself. Almost half of it left in the bottle, and we drank it all without even rinsing away the soot, and with black hands and black faces we walked on a cloud, singing wonderful songs. The master laughed. He always called me the Monk. The master thought I’d stay.

In those days he’d known how to sit still. He’d learned to live a good part of each day in the silence under the world. Now the world lived in his mind, it colonized his solitude like a virus, thoughts crawled, shot, rained through his meditation, and every one pierced him.

He tried meditating on his knees on the floor, but that only slowed the passage of time. It was still light, still well before 5:00 p.m., when he heard feet on the stairs and a knock at the door and unlocked and opened it to find the sharp-faced, feline American sergeant standing before him.

“Double-oh-seven! Remember me?”

He moved forward as he spoke, and Trung stepped aside but didn’t shut the door until the American gestured that he should.

“How goes it, brother? Still laughing?”

Trung recalled his name was Mr. Jimmy.

“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Jimmy said, “it’s like jumping into a shit-pile of diseased spiders and I love it.”

Embarrassment caused Trung to smile.

“Where’s Hao?” The American looked at his watch. “The fucker’s not here, is that the message for today?” Mr. Jimmy strode four paces to the window, put his hands on the sill, and stuck his head out to look down the narrow space toward the bit of street visible to him. He turned to Trung. “Well, I hate to inject a negative strain. I’m not gonna say it yet. But I’m gonna say it: that little fucker isn’t coming. Which means we are either partially fucked or completely fucked. You got another Coke?”

“No, thank you.”

Mr. Jimmy crossed the room again and sat beside the door with his back against the wall and one leg straight and one knee raised. Apparently he meant to stay. “You smoke?”

“I like cigarette.”

He went into his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette and tossed Trung the pack and the lighter.

“Marlboro.”

“Yeah. I’m trying to think. So let’s shut up.”

Trung got up and locked the door and sat on the bed smoking, dipping his ash down the neck of his empty Coke bottle.

“When I take the last drag on this mother, that’s it. I get the fuck out, or I’m here for the duration.” The sergeant drew deeply on his cigarette. “Fuck it. I’m here for the duration.”

They finished their cigarettes in silence and Trung dropped his into the bottle while the sergeant placed his own under his heel and ground it into the floor. At that point Trung realized he hadn’t offered him the ashtray, or used it himself.

“Listen, guy. Is Hao your friend?”

“Hao is my friend.”

“Good friend?”

“Good friend.”

“True friend?” Mr. Jimmy clasped his hands together tightly. “True like right down the line and all the way to hell?”

Trung felt he perhaps comprehended the question. He jutted his lips and held out his palms and shrugged his shoulders, the way he’d seen Frenchmen do.

The sergeant leapt up, but he wasn’t leaving. He came to Trung with the cigarette pack outstretched and the disease of terror in his eyes. “Double agent? What a fucking joke. In the shit-bucket of South Vietnam, every living thing is double.”

Trung accepted another cigarette but raised his palm and shook his head at the sergeant’s lighter. He set the cigarette on the table.

“You probably figure I snapped my twig. I’m with you there. I have to agree. But I’m still listening to my own shit, comrade, because it’s the only thing happening.”

“Mr. Jimmy. Please speak slowly.”

“Do you speak English?”

“A little bit. Number ten.”

“We are not getting through to each other. No commo, savvy? I don’t have the names for the entities in your language. You have all the names. You got it concerning your basic whereabouts. What you don’t understand is how it all floats in a region that’s completely basically dislocated from natural laws. That is, all the
laws
do apply
inside
Vietnam. But from the rest of planet Earth, those laws don’t apply
to
Vietnam. We are surrounded by a zone or a state of dislocation, and you kind of graduate up from knowing the names around here to being able to
suck up
from that zone. You
suck up
from that zone around us and
they cannot touch you
.”

Trung listened closely, trying to feel the man. He sensed panic and anger. “What, please?”

“Who can’t touch you?”

“What?”

“Everything that’s got its shitty fingerprints which I can see smeared all over you and glowing like a motherfucking, Bozo-the-Clown goddamn
target
. Every bad fucking thing. So suck up from the zone, Agent 99. Shit’s about to rain.”

He sensed fear and bravado.

“And—the colonel—the process, okay, dig—you’re a participant. You’re a contributor. This is a thing. We’re part of it. The colonel, man. The colonel.”

“Colonel Sand.”

“Very much boo-coo Colonel-san. He’s jerking the strings, and we are dancing like one-legged women.”

“Okay,” Trung said hopelessly.

The sergeant made his hand resemble a mouth opening and closing rapidly. He placed it to his ear. “Hao told me. Hao. A man will kill Trung. Un homme. Assassiner.”

If Hao said it, it could be trusted. “Tonight?”

The sergeant stood and thrust his wrist at Trung’s face and pointed at the dials of his watch. “Two a.m.”

“Two o’clock.”

“Oh two hundred.”

“Two o’clock morning.”

“Unless the little double-fucker’s set us both up to get DX’d by a whole team or something. But I’m not gonna run around nowhere like a squirrel on a wheel about it—or—fuck yes, yes, I am, let’s not bullshit each other. But I’m not leaving. I do not intend to boogie. What comes is the coming thing. I just look on it like whatever madness takes a dump on me, it must be a lesson, man, a lesson some random-ass sadistic Hitler-God wants me to learn. That’s why I don’t like it. Because I don’t like learning, I don’t like school, I don’t like lessons. The idea of discipline scares the crap out of me and pisses me the fuck off. But Hao said he’d meet me here at four p.m. with money, and Hao lied in his teeth. Hao is one absent motherfucker. Hao is nobody’s friend. That little Gook is a straight-out demon. I would’ve snapped his neck and fucked his corpse if his wife hadn’t been home. And he knew it. But it was a semi-public situation. Fuck, I should’ve done her too…Yeah. So this is a weapon.”

He lifted the hem of his shirt and took an automatic pistol from his belt. “Special delivery for Señor Mister Trung.”

Trung stepped back and raised his hands slightly.

“No, man, no. Fuck! Learn English, will you?” He held the weapon out sideways, turning it this way and that. A Vz 50, of Eastern European make.

He went to stick his head out the window again. He jammed the gun in his belt and lit another cigarette and tossed the match over the sill. “All right, fuck, yes, okay,” the sergeant said, “look. I’d like to ambush this fucker down in the street, but I don’t know who the fuck he is. We don’t know shit till he knocks on the door. We’re dealing through the dark. Situation normal.” He smoked and looked around the room at nothing in particular. “No fucking pillow. I envisioned a pillow. Fuck! Don’t you have any pillows?”

“Mr. Jimmy. Please speak slowly.”

“We have to make this thing quiet. Pillows. Quiet.” He mimed the gun jerking in his hands while he placed a finger to his lips and made a sound: “Ssshhhh.”

A knife, then. Trung clenched a fist and thrust it at him.

“Where’s your dagger, man? Show me your stuff.”

Trung shrugged.

The sergeant dug in his pocket to produce a clasp knife. “This is maybe a three-inch blade.” He opened it. “It’s got a spoon and fork too, man. Afterward we can eat him.”

Trung held out his hand for it.

Trung laid the open knife beside him on the mattress. He held out his hand. “Weapon.”

The sergeant drew the gun from his belt and handed it over with a certain air of relief. Trung ejected the clip, cleared the chamber, and thumbed out the bullets onto his mattress: nine 7.65-millimeter rounds, counting the one from the chamber.

“That’s a reliable Communist weapon. VC-type weapon. Boo-coo bucks.”

Did he indicate he wanted money for it? Trung determined any statement less than clear was best ignored. Sitting on the bed, he reloaded and inserted the magazine, cocked a round into the chamber, and depressed the safety. When the hammer fell, the little sergeant jumped and said, “Fuck me!”—apparently he didn’t know about a decocker safety. The gun, therefore, didn’t belong to him.

Trung ejected the magazine and placed the gun, magazine, and chamber round on the table.

“Excellent. The secrets of the machine.”

“Quiet,” Trung said, and tried French: “Silence.”

“You got it. We’re fucking bilingual here.”

He handed the sergeant the empty Coke bottle.

“That’s not the kind of deal I make. Way too lopsided.”

Trung laid the gun on the mattress and picked up the knife and ripped a half-meter-long gash in the mattress. Setting the knife aside, he plucked tufts of kapok from the tear and pushed them down the Coke bottle’s neck with his fingers while the sergeant held it. “Silence.”

They spent forty-five minutes rigging a muffler for the pistol, attaching the stuffed bottle to the muzzle of the gun using four small bamboo splints from the bedstead and strips of bedsheet and mosquito netting. The young sergeant sweated a great deal. He removed his flower-print shirt. A large incredible tattooed illustration of a woman in a grass skirt covered his bare chest.

They laid the muffled weapon on the mattress. It resembled a great cocoon from which emerged, backward, a small pistol rather than a moth.

Trung tried in many ways to get the idea across: “One silence. One. Seulement. Only one.”

“I get it.”

Trung determined how he’d deploy the weapon, supporting the muffler by one hand mittened with his own T-shirt.

He would have to do this left-handed. He positioned himself to the left of the door with his back to the wall and practiced his movements.

“You are a nasty little fucker. Jesus Christ.” Mr. Jimmy seemed excited and happy. Trung knew the feeling, had experienced it strongly before operations in the early days. Even at this moment a little of it sparked in him.

Trung stood to the left of the door with his back against the wall and his left hand raised and its forefinger pointing. “I. Me.” He stepped forward, brought the finger down to the level where the man’s head should be, jerked it once, and stepped back three paces. He repeated the motions, pointing at his feet and making particularly sure the sergeant understood exactly where his movements would take him.

“You. Mr. Jimmy.” Trung moved to stand with his back to the wall at the right of the door, reached out with his left hand, and pulled it open, stepping once to his right in the process; then stood frozen: “Arrêtez. Stop.”

He put the sergeant against the wall in the same position and had him go through the movements to open the door wide and get out of the way of fire and stop cold.

“Gah-damn,” the sergeant said. “I’m gonna need to get fucked-up drunk after this shit.”

Trung shrugged.

“I’m a thinker, man. I’m not an assassin.”

Before Trung began the drilling in tandem, he made sure one more time:

“I…” He put a fingertip to his temple. “La tête. One.”

“Yeah. La tête. One shot.”

“You…” He opened the door.

“C’est si bon.”

It seemed possible to Trung that if they crosscut the head of the bullet it might not exit the skull and make a lot of mess. Did the sergeant want no trace afterward? The question was too complicated to ask in grunts and signs. If their fortunes permitted, they’d deal with the mess when the time came.

Can I depend on this man?

At bottom, Trung doubted the sergeant. If he failed to control his movements, there was no small chance Trung might put a bullet in the man who’d come here to save him. He made certain the sergeant knew he must take one step when opening the door and move no more.

They went through it together. Storm opening the door, stepping well out of the way, and standing absolutely still. Trung stepping forward, pulling the trigger, taking three steps back.

They heard the street door open downstairs. Mr. Jimmy’s mouth also opened. Trung attempted to smile reassuringly and stepped into the hall.

At the bottom of the stairwell the travel broker who owned the building stood reaching his hand to the wall switch. The hall lights came on fitfully. Trung said, “Good evening,” and the man raised his hand both in greeting and farewell and stepped out and shut the door.