William F. Buckley Jr. (17 page)

He signaled to Florida. She rose and sat in the examination chair opposite Professor Amador. She was flustered, demoralized, having in a matter of minutes traveled from confidence that she would win to sure knowledge that she would not. But the examiner gave her the full fifteen minutes and even told her that he was impressed by her quite unusual handling of the language, that he had never examined any student who had done so well after only a single year’s application.

That was sweet music for Florida, but didn’t vitiate fully her resentment at Tracy Gulliver’s deceit; though she could not help but be awed by how he spoke, and what he had spoken about.

Professor Amador went through the ritual of retiring from the chapel to the sacristy adjoining, in effect, the jurors’ room. He came out a few minutes later, accompanied by the consul. He smiled at the contestants and, speaking in clear, melodious Spanish, complimented them all on their performances, expressed his wish that they would all visit Bologna sometime, and that they would continue their Spanish studies.

He then walked over to where Tracy was seated, extended his hand, and said, “I hope you will have a fruitful year at our university.” Everyone in the chapel applauded.

The consul’s wife invited them to take iced tea on the terrace.

Walking on the well-tended lawn toward the gazebo with the tea and cookies, Florida asked Mrs. Trevino, her hostess, if she might use the telephone for a local call?

Of course.

Professor Agrippo received his star student’s news and proceeded to say all the right things. “You can’t protect yourself against a senior who has been working on the language for six years. But remember, no one else who was there can compete again next year because the scholarship is open only to undergraduates.
You can—and if I know my Florry, you will overwhelm the judge next time, the way your Berkeley boy did this year. So I plan to just stow away the food and drink I had prepared for you—we’ll use them for the celebration next May.”

Florida, flush with pleasure, her self-confidence renewed, joined the party, and when Tracy asked, Had her telephone call succeeded in removing the obstacle? she had answered,
Sí
, and forty-five minutes later they thanked their hosts, Professor Amador, and their fellow competitors, and strode out to the street. Tracy hailed a taxi, after reminding Florry that out-of-town finalists had a generous travel allowance. “I am loaded with counterpart Spanish dollars, imported from France, and don’t ask me to explain how that’s possible.”

Florida had never eaten at a restaurant in Los Angeles, and Tracy took her to Romanoff’s. She was staggered by the luxury of the experience, the opulence of the surroundings, the glamour of the clientele. Tracy’s poise impressed her, and she grew giddy with excitement, giddy, too, from the wine, and infatuated by the lively conversation—at first they had spoken in Spanish, now he was talking animatedly in English, and she learned that his father was a vintner, and that not only had the one man he had spoken of coached him in Spanish, but so had several other grape tenders from Madeira, immigrants from the island’s devastated wine region. He was an only child. “My mother is dead. At the funeral they played a large part of Scarlatti’s Mass. She was very, very beautiful. She had a heart attack when I was sixteen.”

When he was sixteen! Florida was tempted to tell him about how
she
had left
her
mother when Florry was sixteen, but thought better of it. As the first hour, then the second, went by, she sensed what would now happen. She had wondered, often, when and under what circumstances she would submit to the initiation her mother’s lover had first attempted on her, then beaten her for resisting. When Tracy said that it would be a glorious end to a glorious day if they could spend another hour or two together in his hotel room she merely nodded, and when an hour later he gently guided her movements, and asserted his own, she felt she now knew ecstasy,
éxstasis.

• • • •

In the last week of the school year Professor Agrippo motioned to Florida Huerta to come to his office after class.

He was very pleased with the news he had for her. Florida had been trying to find summer work more demanding than the camp counselorship Sister Alicia had found for her, and Professor Agrippo had assigned himself the responsibility of looking around.

“Listen!” he said, speaking in Spanish. “The big hotels are in great competition for traveling businessmen from abroad. In Europe all the concierges are fluent in three, four, or five languages. Here our people know only their own language. I have gotten you a job as Spanish translator when there is a need. The balance of the time you will serve as an assistant receptionist. It is a very good hotel, one of the very best. The Trafalgar.”

Florida was very pleased, and very grateful.

D
ID IT EVER occur to you,” David Abshire asked Henry at the Metropole Bar where, in 1963, the foreign correspondents gathered, “that your nice Thank You—”

“Than Koo.”

“—that your omniscient, resourceful Than pause Koo might be a Vietcong?”

“Sure it ‘occurred’ to me, in the sense that one is supposed to play with such hypotheses about everybody here. Is it possible that Henry Cabot Lodge is on their side?”

“No reason to make a joke of my point.” David Abshire from the
Boston Globe
was very young, and perhaps for that reason sensitive to sarcastic thrusts from such veterans as Henry Chafee. “Your twenty-one-year-old boy-translator-informant happens to
be from Hué. On the other hand, Henry Cabot Lodge is from Boston.”

“These days, there are probably more pro-Vietcongers in Boston than in Hué.” Henry did not like criticisms of Than Koo. He did not hear many, but he treated none casually that he did hear.

“Okay, Henry, I give up. But I get more fucking rumors passed along from you, which you in turn get from Thank You—”

“Than Koo.”

“—and this one has got to be the best, that President Diem and Brother Nhu are thinking of assassinating the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam. As Anthony might have said to Brutus,
Cui bono?
”

“Koowee what?”

“Oh, sorry. I forgot you didn’t go to Harvard. That’s c-u-i.
Cui bono?
Who benefits? If Lodge is murdered by the government we are spending billions to protect, that would mean one thing for sure: a U.S. pullout from the scene. And that would mean Communist invasion from the north. End story, end silly rumor. Are you
quite
sure Thank You isn’t one of … them?”

At this point Henry had no alternative than to accept the thrust as humorous. Though the message was anything but humorous. There was already demoralization in South Vietnam, never mind any plots against our ambassador there. “We’ve pretty well got that breakdown in morale already,” Henry said, lighting a cheroot and acknowledging the bartender’s offer of another glass of white wine. “I personally don’t think an assassination would be attempted. But there isn’t any doubt that Lodge has gotten to hate Diem, and we have to suppose that Diem reciprocates the sentiment. And there isn’t any doubt that Lodge thinks it’s more than merely a street rumor.”

“Lodge
knows
about it?” David Abshire was genuinely surprised. “Why? Because you told him?”

“No. It’s true Than Koo passed the rumor on to me, but then I checked with—with a friend in the embassy. They had picked it up three days ago.”

David Abshire was now all professional. “Did your friend analyze the rumor? If so, what did he say?”

“It’s this simple, David. Everybody in town knows that Lodge has gone over to the Harriman wing in the White House. And what they want is Diem out. Out! They’ve been hoping for an army coup for two months. They’re not disposed to wait any longer. Diem could plausibly be calculating that if Lodge is bumped off, his own life and government might be saved.”

David looked thoughtfully at Henry. He would try one on him. “Have you run into the rumor of Brother Nhu dealing with Hanoi?”

“Yeah. That’s another one I don’t believe. Nhu wouldn’t deal with Ho Chi Minh except to get something from him. And all that Hanoi wants is the surrender of South Vietnam. This side of that, the North Vietnamese aren’t playing. At least that’s how I read it.”

“And how the readers of
Time
mag will read it, Henry. Well, let’s have something to eat.”

“I can’t join you, David. I’ve got an appointment.”

The two correspondents walked out of the bar, one into the hotel dining room, Henry to the hotel entrance. Than Koo would pick him up in the car at exactly 8:05.

Henry had met Than Koo in Hué. Minh Tong, the interpreter on whom Henry had relied in the spring and early summer, was a retired schoolteacher, a gaunt, ascetic member of the Vietnamese mandarinate. In July, while tending his little garden on Nguyen Trai Street in Cholon, on the outskirts of Saigon where he lived with his sister, Minh Tong fell gracefully to the ground, a three-step ballet of death: one more Vietnamese—the record keepers put the figure at 22,000—executed by the Vietcong for the capital sin of “consorting with the imperialists.” Henry had attended his funeral. The eulogy by the priest was in French; most of Tong’s friends spoke in French. Leaving the church, Henry tendered his condolences to Minh Tong’s sister. He paused outside to observe the mourners filing out of the little church and wondered how many of them had been condemned to death by the Vietcong. The American presence in Vietnam had reached 13,000, and a dozen correspondents were now doing
full-time duty. Americans soak up native help wherever they go, he reflected. About how many South Vietnamese might one say that, by midsummer 1963, they had in some way “consorted” with an American? Were we talking about one hundred thousand people, or maybe a million? He would reflect on that point in a future dispatch to
Time.

Whatever the exact figure, that meant a lot of potential executions, any way you looked at it.

The taxi took them from Cholon to the airport. He was bound for Hué, the old South China capital of Annam, in the north. The road, now being expanded into a highway, was heavy with military traffic; indeed, the flight to Hué would be on a military plane. Someone in the pool would act as his translator. Aboard the plane he pecked away on his little Hermes typewriter.

“… 
few Americans are fluent in Vietnamese, and the graduate schools are only now offering the language to specialists. Accordingly, Americans in Vietnam rely on natives. But it is hazardous duty, especially resented by the Vietcong, who deem it intimate servility to the imperialists.…
” Henry would work that, or something like it, into his next dispatch to New York. And, as he had done now over the dozen years since he went to work for
Time
, he would slip into an envelope a copy of his dispatch and mail it to his sister Caroline. He would scrawl a word or two in the margins. That way he thought himself as always in touch, and of course there were the letters, back and forth. It didn’t much matter where he was, Henry reflected. Caroline was there, just around the corner.

Than Koo rang the bell at Henry’s suite at the Grand Hotel, the gilt from the French colonial period fraying, the ceiling high, the fan functioning. Henry opened the door. Than Koo bowed his head and introduced himself: He was prepared to serve as guide and translator.

Henry motioned to him to sit down. He had got used to adult Vietnamese who appeared to be much younger than they actually were. But Than Koo looked a mere seventeen or eighteen. Rather feminine, with high cheekbones, eyebrows that tilted up, white teeth and pink lips, the hair running just behind his ears.

“Do you speak English?”

Than replied in French that no, he did not. Was French satisfactory?

Henry nodded. After three years in Paris as a foreign correspondent he was as much at home speaking in French as in English. He rang for tea and started to dig in. He began by asking Than Koo about his schooling.

Than had graduated in June from the university, where he studied history and French literature. His mother worked as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital. His father had served the French as an infantry captain. He had been killed in the Indochina war.

Henry asked him a question he had already asked the major whose office had recommended Koo: What screening had he got from the Vietnam officials who had assigned him for duty?

Than asked if he might smoke a cigarette. Henry nodded, and lit one of his own little cigars. Than seemed reluctant to answer the question, but then closed his eyes and said, “Well, we are in a civil war, monsieur. And I felt I had to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Excuse me. Turn in my teacher.”

“Why did you turn him in?”

“Because I discovered that he was linked to the Vietcong.”

“He was your teacher of what?”

“He was a Balzac specialist—”

“Was?”

“He has been executed.”

“Was there a trial?”

“A military trial.”

“Were you a witness?”

Than looked down at the floor. “Yes. I told them what I had seen.”

“Which was?”

“A copy of his dean’s memorandum to Colonel Thuc. It gives the special qualifications of forty or fifty seniors who might be most useful in the war effort. It is a very confidential list, because in the hands of the enemy, it becomes a ‘hit list.’ ”

“Is your name on that list?”

“Of course.”

“Did you find it in time to keep it from the VC?”

“What happened was that Pen—another student—was looking in the briefcase of our professor to find out what grades he was giving out for the semester. He is a scholarship student and could not afford to get low grades. While going through the briefcase he found a list—he was puzzled by it, and showed it to me. I recognized it right away.”

“Why?”

“Because I typed it. I had been cleared to work with classified documents. That happened during my junior year. That’s how I knew how important the roster was.”

Henry puffed on his cheroot and scratched at his blond beard. “Well, as you say, it
is
a civil war. But as you know, Than—”