Saigon Red

by Gregory C. Randall

  As Alex was drying her hair, a piercing scream came from down the hallway. She wrapped a towel around herself and ran toward the yelling. It continued in quick panicked bursts. Reaching the end of the hallway, she almost knocked her father over. Her mother stood in the utility room, a look of terror on her face. The heel of her father’s boot twisted on the floor.

  “What the hell happened?” Alex asked.

  “Nothing much,” her father said with a laugh. “Just this.” He raised his shoe. Crushed on the linoleum floor were the remains of the largest scorpion Alex had ever seen.

  “That thing fell out of your bag,” her mother said. “It could have killed me.”

  “Not that poor fellow,” Alex said. “They were everywhere in Texas. Maybe a sting, but it wouldn’t kill you. Sorry, Mom. I’ll shake out the rest of the clothes just to make sure.”

  “You might put some clothes on first,” her dad said.

  Later, after Alex took a nap, there was a tap on her door.

  “You decent?” her father asked.

  “Come in.”

  He pushed the door open and leaned against the frame. Alex sat on the edge of her old bed, tying her jogging shoes.

  “Going for a run? It’s a beautiful day out.”

  “I can be easily discouraged.”

  “That thing gave your mother a fright.”

  “She okay?”

  “Yeah, she went out shopping. She said that if you’re spending more than a week at the house, you’ll need some things.” He paused and then rubbed his hands together. “I saw some scorpions in Vietnam that were as big as my hand. Mean suckers.”

  “You trying to convince me that I shouldn’t go?”

  “Not at all—I know you can handle yourself. Better than I did. I was young and naive. I’m amazed I survived.” He walked into her room and pulled out the chair at her old school desk. “Do you have a few minutes? I don’t want to stop your run. Do you need to get to the house?”

  “No, I’m good. What’s up?”

  He removed a folded envelope from his pocket and set it on the desk. “You don’t know the whole story about Vietnam. And now that you’re going to Saigon, I think you need to know.”

  “You don’t have to, Dad.”

  “There are things you need to know—and understand.” He cleared his throat and took a breath. “Your mother and I never had secrets. There are things we kept to ourselves, away from you kids. And for the first few years of our marriage, there were things that happened in Vietnam I didn’t tell your mother. When I finally did, it was as if a dark cloud had been finally brushed away. It helped me get through the bad times. She was my rock.”

  “I understand.”

  “You never asked me about any of it, but I knew that you knew something was going on. For the first few years after I came back, I was suffering, real bad. I hated the nights—my dreams kept coming back. She was there to help me through them. They call it post-traumatic stress disorder now. Back then they didn’t know what to call it.”

  “Yes, even the CPD has therapists to help us get through the tough days after a shooting. Some try to tough it out. Usually it doesn’t work. Even I have talked to the police shrink, so I think I understand.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I tried to keep you and Mom away from it.”

  Her father took another deep breath and slowly let it out. “I was stationed in Germany, a good posting. I was handling shipping and receiving—pretty good at it. Almost a year. As close to a regular job as you could get. Every month, though, somebody was reassigned to Vietnam. Everyone was looking over their shoulder. We’d been fighting there for five or six years then. Nixon was now sending everyone home; the war would soon be over.

  “I got my reassignment papers in December 1970. I went directly from Germany to Vietnam, with only a two-day Christmas pass to see your grandparents. The army wanted my butt in Saigon so fast even I was shocked at how quickly the army could process me. I landed on February the fifth, 1971, the first day of Tet, the Vietnamese holiday. For the Vietnamese, Tet is like Christmas and New Year’s all rolled into one. But since the 1968 Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong, three years earlier, everyone was on edge when the holiday arrived. My command at the port handled everything for the troops, and I mean everything. The US was pulling out of the war. A lot of what we were doing then was collecting equipment and supplies and sending it back to the States. Some of it was transferred to the ARVN—that’s the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. For us the war was over, or so we thought. There were still fifty or sixty thousand of us Americans in the areas around Saigon and maybe another hundred thousand in country. It was far more than the available housing could hold on the base. So, some of us had billets in town; I shared a place with maybe a dozen other guys.”

  “Sounds crowded.”

  “You have no idea. The apartment building was a few blocks from the church the French built. Notre-Dame Cathedral it was called. I must have gone to Mass there a hundred times. Looking back, I think it was all that kept me sane. We had help keeping the apartment up—a cook came in, two housekeepers. I can’t remember the one girl’s name, but the other was Yvette. She was knock-down gorgeous, and as a naive and culturally ignorant kid from Cleveland, I was taken in—exotic oriental girl and all that.

  “Yvette lived near us and would come every day. I started walking her home, to keep her safe. Thinking back, I guess I was making her a target, walking with a GI. But she didn’t mind. She spoke English and French. I learned a little French from her. In time, I asked her to marry me.”

  Alex stiffened and stared at her father. “Marry?”

  He smiled. “Yes, marry. I had just turned twenty-one. I was headstrong, full of myself, and to be honest, somewhat good-looking. I wanted to get her out of Vietnam. I could see that there was not going to be a good end to this war, particularly for the Vietnamese that had anything to do with us Americans. So, I decided to marry her and take her with me. Well, the army had other ideas and dragged out my request for months.”

  “Did they approve it?”

  “I never knew. Yvette asked me to take her to her village and help bring her mother into Saigon to stay with her. It was about fifty miles north of the city. Their story was like hundreds of thousands of others. The Vietnamese had been fighting somebody for almost fifty years—the French, then the Japanese during the big war, and then, after they threw the French out, America. Many of their relatives died during those wars. Four years earlier the Viet Cong murdered her father, the mayor of the village. One night they just took him away. Two nights later they dropped his body in the village center. They had tortured him before cutting his head off. A note pinned to the body said that the village must leave him where they left him. If anyone touched the body, the same thing would happen to them. Yvette and her mother ignored the order and took the body to the cemetery and buried him. From then on, she would have nothing to do with the Viet Cong or any of the South Vietnamese politicians either. She hated all of them for what they were doing to her country. She asked me to help move her mother into the city so she could take care of her.”

  Tears formed in his eyes. Alex smiled at her father.

  “I borrowed a jeep from the motor pool. Someone there owed me a favor. It would take less than a day, up and back. We headed north on Highway 13. We passed thousands that were fleeing the highlands, all trying to get to Saigon. It was chaos, and there were no police or army troops providing any type of security. About twenty miles outside Saigon, we ran into a barricade put up by South Vietnamese soldiers. I could tell they were all deserters. They had that vacant stare of fear and defeat. Two of them came up to the jeep and stuck a rifle in my face. They demanded money. I gave them the few dollars I had, but it was not enough. One of the soldiers was ogling Yvette, talking to her in Vietnamese. She slapped him. The man grabbed her arm and tried to pull her from the jeep. I reached for my pistol, but before I could do anything, somebody shot me.”

&nb
sp; “My God,” Alex said.

  “The next thing I remember, an American GI is sticking his nose in my face and asking what the hell happened. I couldn’t recall a thing, nothing—why I was there, where the jeep was. I couldn’t even remember Yvette. The bullet just missed my skull—left a scar, though. Knocked off my helmet, which was still on the ground next to me. My pistol was gone. Everything was gone. I found out later it was traumatic amnesia.”

  Her father lifted the thick, dark-gray hair on the left side of his head, revealing a thin white strip of skin. “This is the scar. I was taken back into Saigon, and over the next few days I tried to remember what happened. That’s a feeling I don’t ever want to have again. When the guy from the motor pool came in asking about his jeep, I began to piece together the story. My bunkmates helped, and it slowly came back. I never saw Yvette again. She never came back to the apartment. The wound was serious enough that I was evacuated through Okinawa. By winter 1971, I was home. I sent messages to my bunkmates in Saigon, asked if they’d heard anything from Yvette—nothing. I was at your grandparents’, a total basket case. Physically, I was good. My head—that was a whole different story.”

  “Gram and Gramps never said anything.”

  “I asked them not to. Hell, if I walked the street in my uniform, I was spit on and called a killer. Those were bad days here in America. I heard through some guys in the VA hospital that the ARVN and the Cong attacked the region where Yvette’s mother lived. After the battle of Loc Ninh in 1972, nothing remained. I gave up—I assumed she was dead.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dad.”

  “Then I met your mom. She helped me through the bad times, and finally, I put most of it behind me. The VA began to get a grip on what we were going through, but it was a shrink here in Cleveland that did the most good. He helped soldiers from World War II and Korea. I got lucky. My logistic work did have some benefits. I found my job with UPS. With your mother’s help, and with you on the way, I grew up and kept my head about me, and eventually it all faded away.”

  “Mom knows?”

  He smiled. “Yes, she knows everything. When you yell out the name of your Vietnamese girlfriend in the middle of the night, she kind of wants to know who it is.”

  “Yeah, I guess that would need an answer,” Alex said. “Is there anything I can do in Saigon?”

  “Like trying to find Yvette? Please don’t, sweetie. It was all so long ago. Nothing can come of it.”

  “Maybe give you some closure?”

  “I am a happy man with the usual pains of age. Please don’t. Call us often. Tell me about the city.” He handed her an envelope. “Inside are photos of the apartment I was staying in and one photo of Yvette. It’s the only one I have. At one point, I was told that someone put a bomb in the apartment building we lived in and blew it up. They killed four GIs. But if you can find the place, send me a picture. I’ve wondered what happened to it.”

  “It sounds like you do want me to try and find her, Dad.”

  Her father took in a deep breath and sighed. “No . . . but, if you have the time . . . I don’t know.”

  Alex placed her fingers on her father’s weathered hand. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 15

  That afternoon, Alex wished the long nightmare of the previous year, and all the crap that her ex-cop ex-husband had left in his perverted wake, would just disappear. The furniture in her house showed the scratches and damage that the cops—her own department, for God’s sake—had inflicted during the raid. Her closet was still a mess; she’d not had the ambition to clean it after the chaos.

  She hoped, deep in her soul, that Ralph was dead. If there was anyone that deserved to be dead, it was Ralph Daniel Cierzinski. She thought of the last email she’d received in Venice, where he called her Sandy, from the play Grease. That had been their thing, long ago—he’d call her Sandy, and she called him Danny, for the male lead, Danny Zuko. It was all a game to him, a game that had left at least a half dozen dead in his psycho wake. But while she hoped he was dead, she knew, in her detective’s heart, he was alive and still playing games. She knew she was the object of his desire and his taunts. The next time she saw him, she hoped to God that she had a gun.

  She put the bags of groceries and toiletries, the tray of mail, and a Barnes & Noble bag on the kitchen counter. After putting away the perishable groceries, she sorted the mail. She neatly stacked the travel guides and books on Vietnam and pushed them to the back of the counter before taking the rest of the mail into the study. There she organized the envelopes and began to pay the bills, including a small late penalty on half of them. The cash advance from Chris came in handy.

  Two hours later, she returned to the kitchen and put away the rest of the groceries in the pantry. It was no longer as empty as Ralph’s heart. She smiled.

  In the garage sat two cars and her motorcycle. The first was Ralph’s pride, a 1972 yellow Dodge Challenger. She hated the thing. Job one was to sell it. Next to it against the wall was her premarriage Harley-Davidson Sportster, one of the few personal things she’d kept from her days before Ralph. The most practical vehicle in the garage was the five-year-old black Ford Escape. It surprised her by starting on the first turn of the key.

  Ten minutes later she was sitting in a diner on Detroit Avenue sipping coffee and writing out a list of things she needed to do. It would be a busy week and a half.

  “Haven’t seen you in here for a while, honey,” the waitress said.

  “I’ve been traveling,” Alex replied.

  “Honey, what they did to you was wrong. I just don’t understand it.”

  “Thanks, Laurie. I don’t either. But things are good. Actually, the best they’ve been in a few years.”

  “That’s good, honey. More coffee?”

  Alex nodded. “Thanks.” Laurie refilled her cup as Alex asked, “Still cooking breakfast?”

  “Twenty-four hours a day. The usual?”

  “Yes, thanks. Sausage and scramble, no toast, no hash browns, but fruit, please.”

  “Got it.”

  Her to-do list almost filled a whole page. The top item wasn’t to sell the Challenger after all—it was to find a Realtor. There was no way she was going to stay in the house if she wasn’t sure where she would be from one assignment to the next. Annie, John’s wife, said she would help to sell the place. The next to-do was finding an apartment, a studio, maybe something near the lake with a view. All this would take more than a week. Then the rest of the big things on the list: storage space, utilities, sell the Dodge. Then again, she hated everything that was connected to that asshole. The list continued with some toiletries, a few clothes, and underwear. She shook her head over all the things—even the simple stuff—that needed to be done to entirely change her life.

  She looked at her phone: her ex-partner was late. She’d asked him to late lunch. “Can’t,” had been his answer, but he said he could stop by for a couple of minutes. It wasn’t a strange answer. They had been partners for three years, and even though Bob Simmons was entirely on her side, she knew he needed to keep space between them. He needed to keep his job.

  The tinny bell over the diner door jingled. She looked up and waved to Simmons, who wove his way through the tables.

  “You’re looking good,” he said as he sat. “A little sun?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “and lots of fresh air. Does the soul and the head good. They treating you right?”

  “As good as I can expect. And yeah, a new partner. My last partner, the one who passed on the information about where you were to those DEA idiots chasing you in Venice, is riding a desk. Whether he keeps his job is up to IA. I hope they drop him in the river. What he did was so wrong. My new partner, though, she’s a rook, but she’s smart, top of her class. A ball-breaker too.”

  “A woman? Be careful—they can get you in trouble.”

  “Don’t I know.”

  “Katy and the family, they okay?”

  “All good. BJ’s getting
ready for Little League, and Joe got a dog—they’re inseparable. It’s good for him. It’s helping with his therapy. But it’s a long road, maybe an endless one.”

  “You and Katy will be fine—you make a great team. You can do anything, and Joe is tough. He will get through it.”

  “The tumor’s gone—that’s one thing to be grateful for. And he’s walking again. The doctors say that with time and growing up, it may all be a bad memory. We can hope. The bills, that’s another thing. A lot of costs weren’t covered. I’m taking on some security jobs just to add a few dollars to the bank. In some ways, I envy you.”

  “Stop right there. Never envy me. My life is crap. However, there’s a thin chance that it might just be turning around. Katy and those boys . . . I’m the one envying you. What’s your partner’s name?”

  “You’ll love it—Mary Beth Applegate. I kid you not.”

  “Not from the Cleveland Applegates?”

  “Don’t go there. She’s from Akron. A degree in criminal science, a black belt, blonde like you, and cute.”

  “I warned you, stop. This sounds like the devil’s work.”

  “And a lesbian.”

  “Well there’s that—just be careful.”

  Simmons looked at his watch. “Time to go. You staying in the area?”

  “Just through the next week. I have an assignment that will take me out of the country.”

  “With who?”

  “Can’t tell you, but it looks good. Good pay and bennies, but I may be gone for six months. John and Annie are taking care of the house. Selling it.”

  “Good, never liked that place. Didn’t suit you. And the Challenger?”

  “No, I’ll not saddle you with that. So, just get it out of your head.”

  “It was built before we were born—what’s not to like?”

  “It will cost you too much, and the boys will just cause you trouble when they want to drive that piece of shit.”

  “A boy can dream. My treat.” Bob threw a twenty on the table. “Call before you go.” He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “I wish you all the luck and success in the world—you deserve it.”