Tree of Smoke (70 page)

“Trung killed the German?”

“Your unauthorized double.”

“So where is he now?”

“Who.”

“Trung Than, goddammit.”

“Wandering the earth.”

“Alive.”

“That’s the assumption.”

“Jesus. A man without a country. How must he feel?”

“You tell me. About like you do.”

“And going after Trung was your affair? Your responsibility? Who ran the operation?”

“That will never be known. All that will ever be known is—you caused it.”

“Where did the authorization come from?”

“Authorization is a concept. Not always concrete.”

“So it’s about renegade ops after all. Yours and mine and everybody’s.”

“We all messed this thing up. But you’re the one looking at prison. Prison and disgrace. Have no doubt of that, Sands. When somebody starts an investigation, you’re the one guy we’re all willing to point to. So how’s this for an idea?—go away.”

From behind the house there came the sound of an animal yelping. Sands tried to ignore it and get the situation in his grasp by jabbing the gun in Crodelle’s direction, but he felt helpless. “Are you bastards going to get me out?”

“No. You have a passport. I give you the cash. Hop a plane.”

“Jesus Christ! A plane where?”

“The money’s in my briefcase.”

The yelping out back had become a screech, drawing nearer. Through the frame of the screen door Père Patrice came into view dragging the dog Docteur Bouquet by the ear and calling out above the dog’s protests. “Skip! Your dog! Your dog, please!” He opened the door and dragged the animal inside with him.

“Give him to Tho.”

“Tho says to put him in the house.” Taking in the kitchen festooned with streamers of white gauze and the two Americans, one gripping a pistol, the priest took a deep breath. “Tho says to put him inside the house.” He let the dog loose and it ran off and scrabbled up the stairs. The little priest had not released his breath. He reached backward as if to push open the screen door behind him, but his hand didn’t actually contact its object, and he stood holding his arm out as if it provided him balance. “He is not a problem, but he might attack my chickens there. It’s better to keep him here.” Perhaps because his voice seemed to have stopped the progress of a tragedy, he continued. “I had a dream about you, Skip. You were not in the dream, but it was a dream about the President of the United States. Usually the French, the Americans, the Communists—they don’t come to the world of dreams. They go there, but they don’t believe in it so they are just only ghosts.” A form of hysteria seemed to rise in him as he spoke. “I will tell you what happened to a man of my home village named Chinh. He left our village when his father died and creditors took his land. Chinh became poor at that time, he became destitute. He had to go away to travel on the coastline and if possible learn to fish. It was a desperate journey because he had no money. He slept in the bush as he traveled. One night Chinh had a dream telling him to sleep in the Catholic churchyard of a certain town. The French were there. The outpost commander found him and turned him out. But Chinh says, I am asleep here because a dream told me to come. You are a fool believing in a dream, this is what the French commander says, don’t you know we all dream each night? Last night a dream told me in fact that seven pieces of gold are buried beneath the biggest banyan along the river—do you think I went digging? Don’t make me laugh. And he drove Chinh from the town. On his way down-river Chinh found the biggest banyan, dug all day around the base of it, and found seven gold coins exactly. He returned to my village and lived prosperously. This is a true story. I told it to a French priest. He said it was a lie. He said Chinh stole the money and explained it with a dream. But, however, I pointed out that Chinh lived long and prospered. A thief who lies and steals cannot prosper from the money he stole. The story is quite true. A few years ago Chinh died, incidentally. Sick people come to his grave to be healed, especially people with some malaria.”

“Thong Nhat.”

“Yes.”

“Stop.”

There came a silence, the first the room had enjoyed since the priest had entered.

“Skip,” the priest said as if touching on a matter of explosive delicacy, “something is wrong.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Crodelle said, and began to laugh.

“I’m sorry about the excitement, Nhat. Will you do me a favor?”

The priest seemed unwilling to answer.

“There’s a briefcase on the coffee table in there. Will you bring it to me, please?”

“Of course. But I’m worried about you today.”

“Where am I?” Crodelle said. “Where in God’s name am I?”

“Nhat, will you get me that briefcase?”

Skip watched the priest move cautiously into the parlor to stand before the coffee table touching his hands together at the level of his breast and wondered if he was praying.

Crodelle, still laughing, spat on the floor again.

“Are you all right?”

“Minimally banged up, just minimally.”

“Tell me something. If you’re willing. How did you get down the stairs without breaking your neck?”

“I hopped and hula-ed as far as the staircase and fell over sideways and slid down. Sort of.”

“And not a bruise. No Purple Heart.”

“I believe my right shoulder was briefly dislocated.”

“Good.”

“I need to be sure you understand this business about the BND man’s murder. Do you get it?”

“Sure. I’m the fall guy.”

“You’re Lee Harvey Oswald, baby.”

Père Patrice had found his strength. He stood beside Skip holding out the briefcase with both hands. Skip set it on the counter and thumbed the button, and the brass clasp snapped open with a shudder.

“Whose briefcase is this?”

“All yours. Complimentary.”

The briefcase held only an empty manila folder and a sheaf of U.S. currency circled by a red rubber band.

Doubt and fear possessed him suddenly.

“So you, what—stuck your hand in your pocket and out comes a wad of getaway money just like that?”

“Yes, indeed. Chop-chop. We’re very efficient.”

“Not too often, Crodelle. Mostly you’re incredibly inept. And stupid. Why didn’t you just come in and say, Here’s the situation, and hand me the cash?”

“Well, you seemed completely in love with this idea that your silly files are the reason for everybody’s breakfast. I kind of hoped we could let it go at that.”

Sands held his hand out. “Give me your car keys.”

“Never happen, son. You don’t get a vehicle. I’ll take you.”

Leaning toward Crodelle close enough to breathe in his face, Skip placed the gun’s muzzle against Crodelle’s knee. “Three—two—one—”

Crodelle slapped his pants. “Right here.”

“Let’s have them.”

Crodelle turned over a single ignition key wired to a paper tag from the embassy motor pool.

With his free hand Sands reached into the briefcase and pinched a half dozen twenties and shook them loose from the stack and laid them on the counter. “This is for Tho and Mrs. Diu,” he told the priest. To Crodelle he said, “I’m going out the door. If I even think you’re moving around in here before I’m down the road, I’ll come back and shoot you. Happily. I mean it, Crodelle. It would make me happy.”

He left by the back door as Crodelle called after him, “I don’t care about your fucking happiness.”

As he started the ignition, Père Patrice came out by the front way. Sands reached his left hand out the window and the priest took it and said, “It’s too late for traveling. Near the Route Twenty-two it’s a critical area. You know this.”

“Thon Nhat, it’s been good knowing you.”

“Will you come back?”

“No.”

“Yes. Perhaps. Nobody knows.”

“All right, nobody knows.”

“Mr. Skip, until I see you again, I’m going to pray for you each day.”

“I appreciate it. You’ve been a wonderful friend.”

He engaged the clutch and set off bumping over the rutted road. In the rearview mirror he saw Crodelle join the priest to stand out front of the villa’s gate with his arms crossed on his chest and his legs in the at-ease position, projecting an air of defiance and nonchalance.

Beside him on the seat he found Crodelle’s yellow cardigan sweater. He threw it out of the car, rolled up the windows, and turned on the air conditioner.

W
orld Children’s Services had rules, procedures, requirements, including a bimonthly visit to Saigon for Reports and Recommendations. In the hostel on Dong Du Street if the frolic of the later hours didn’t wake her then the moaning of dawn prayers from the mosque would manage. Tonight the horns and go-go music turned her out of bed.

In these damp nights the temperature of human breath she felt a moldering and sleepy grief born, she was convinced, of self-infatuation—a slow, hot, tropical self-pity. She needed to turn outward, to find others, she needed her duties in the countryside. Or she’d sink. Rot in the underneath. Be devoured by this land. Flower up as new violence and despair.

Here in the city the empty striving compressed itself into a solid thing, and she longed to give herself up to a monstrous suffering, wanted to be torn by every pain.

She started across the street, stepped back for a little Honda pulling an eight-foot-long trailer heaped with cheerful fresh produce. In the city too many of them kept their headlamps switched off. Go-go music boomed from a doorway behind her. She needed a cold drink, but in there it was ten degrees hotter and full of twenty-year-old men on fire in their souls. She went inside anyway. The tavern stank of beer and sweat and bamboo. She clutched her purse tightly and swiveled toward the bar through the crowd of men.

A couple of women danced on a stage hardly bigger than two soap crates. “What’s yours?” a GI said to her at the bar. With the red light of the stage behind him he had no visible face. “You there—pretty lady.” A youngster’s voice, but the crown of his head was bald.

“Pardon?”

“What’s yours? Because I’m buying.”

“I wouldn’t mind a beer. How about a Tiger?”

“Coming at you. Don’t go away.” He moved sideways behind the men at the bar in pursuit of the Tiger. Kathy looked left to see a little harlot resting her elbow on the bamboo bar, her hip cocked, silver smoke rushing from between her lips. But—wasn’t it Lan? But it couldn’t be. But it was. “Lan,” Kathy called, but Lan couldn’t hear.

Kathy walked over. “Hi, Lan.”

Raising her cigarette to her face, Lan moved to a barstool just vacated. She’d assisted Kathy her first year or so in-country, at Sa Dec, then trouble had called her back home, the relocation of her village, and now she sat with a stare and a red mouth and her legs showing up to the crotch of her panties. “How are you, Lan? Do you remember me?”

The girl turned to speak softly to the bartender.

“What you want?” the bartender said. Kathy didn’t know how to answer. The girl—was it somebody else, not Lan?—swung around and leaned her elbows back on the bar and stared at the GIs who danced in the crimson glow with frail women, clutching them tightly to their chests and hardly moving.

Kathy’s own GI was back. “Honey, I’m getting the beers,” he said. “Don’t you believe in me?”

“I’ll be right back.” Holding on to her purse with both hands, she skirted the dancers and went outside. The damp stink of the street felt fresh now. She walked a few paces and entered a café and sat down. Drank two beers one after the other and turned her chair with its back to the wall and asked for a third. From her purse she took her notebook, flopped it down in the stains and grease, and found a pen. Sitting sideways at the table, one hand resting on the page, she wrote:

The mamasan slid over in her flip-flops and said, “You waiting for the bus?”

“There’s no bus this time of night.”

“No bus now tonight. You take a taxi.”

“Can’t I stay? May I have some tea, please?”

“Sure! Sure! Take a taxi later, okay?”

“Thanks.”

Opinions concerning America’s enlarged adrenal cortex and its sacramental lie. Dear Skip: You’d best be careful now of your human heart or you’re liable to break it permanently. Lending your efforts to the cruel mad devastation here.

—She’d gone to say goodbye to him as she headed off for Davao City and then Manila. From down the dirt lane she’d seen him come out of Freddy Castro’s three-story hotel, walking through the yard in zoris and checkered boxer shorts, carrying a white towel over his shoulder and a saucepan in his hand. She’d left him to his bath, had headed for the entrance of Castro’s to say goodbye to the family, but had heard the cheering voices of little children and gone after all into the small glen to see Skip Sands bathing before a crowd of urchins. The pipe came from a rock and spilled its water into a large natural basin and the children, perhaps three dozen, had arranged themselves around it as in a small stadium, in the arena of which the young American soaped himself and poured water from the saucepan over his head, chanting back and forth with his wild audience:

“WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SHOW!”

“THE SKEEP SANDS SHOW!”

“WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SHOW!”

“THE SKEEP SANDS SHOW!”