Play the Red Queen

by Juris Jurjevics

  “Quite.”

  Her slightly snooty vowels went nicely with her bare-shouldered summer dress, held up by the thinnest straps. Gone tropical, I noticed with a thrill. No bra. What a coincidence, I wanted to say, suddenly reminded that I wasn’t wearing underwear either.

  Chapter Five

  “Ellsworth Miser,” I said, and put out my hand.

  “Delighted.” We shook.

  “ICC, eh?” I said. The International Control Commission was the referee for the various Geneva Accords that spelled out every country’s proper behavior in partitioned Viet Nam, rules paid plenty of lip service all around but obeyed by no one.

  She nodded and knocked back her second vodka. Impressed, the barman set up another iced glass. The electricity failed; the lights and music died. The barman pulled extra candles from beneath the bar and lit them. Across the river, a chandelier flare split apart a mile or two out. As each blazing section floated down, the trembling white light made the terrain dance.

  “That happen much?” Nadja said, indicating the flare.

  “Not this side of the river.” I told her how the roof terrace had been my front-row seat last year for the attempted coup that had destroyed the old presidential palace. “Two South Vietnamese bombers swooped in, low and slow,” I said, tracing their flight path with a finger drawn across the dark sky behind us. “Twin-engine Skyraiders, red devils painted on their tails, wing guns blazing. First bomb landed in President Diem’s bedroom.”

  “I say. That must have been a bit of a wake-up.”

  “Would’ve been if it had gone off. Diem got lucky. He’d gotten up early and was reading in his study. Hightailed it to his bomb shelter as soon as he saw what was happening.”

  “And you witnessed the whole attack from here?” Nadja said.

  “Yes, ma’am. The second fighter sprayed the palace with its wing guns. For days afterward, kids at the Cercle Sportif were diving to the bottom of the pool to bring up expended shell casings. The pilots came back around to rocket the place. One of the rockets overshot and took out the dining room of the Lycée principal’s house. Then the palace itself caught fire.”

  “It must have been terrifying,” Nadja said. “I mean, inside the palace. Was anyone killed?”

  “The Nhus’ Chinese governess got crushed by a falling beam. And a reporter who’d climbed out on a roof to see the action fell to his death. Diem’s brother—the archbishop—and the Nhus and their kids all made it safely to shelter with Diem in the basement. Madame Nhu got pretty banged up when the floor caved in under her and she fell two stories. They lost everything, including Madame Nhu’s treasured stack of highland tiger pelts, all personally shot by her husband.”

  Nadja’s eyes widened. “And yet the coup fizzled,” she said.

  “Definitely not Diem’s first reveille. Just one of a long list of attempts that’ve tanked, yeah. But I doubt they’re done trying.”

  Less than a decade ago, after the Saigonese voted their absentee emperor Bao Dai off the throne, Diem had installed himself as the new republic’s first president. The Saigonese had cast two hundred thousand more votes for Diem than there were voters. But eight years later, especially after six bloody months of vicious attacks on the Buddhists, not many Diem loyalists were left.

  I ordered us another round. “Where exactly are you from?” I said, wondering about the accent underneath the British I still couldn’t place.

  “Vorsaw.”

  “Poland?”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “That Vorsaw.”

  “And what’s your job at ICC?”

  “I am the new appointments secretary and general dogsbody for the first deputy to the Polish commissioner.” She pointed over her shoulder. “My lovely friend there, she works for the Indian commissioner, who is the ICC chairman at the moment.”

  I glanced at her pal. The junior banker was gone and the brunette was flirting with the Der Stern photographer from 316. “What brings you to my part of town?” I said.

  “Trying to secure better lodging than the pantry closet I’m currently in. Unfortunately, according to the manager, all forty-four of the Majestic’s rooms are currently occupied.”

  “Actually, I happen to know there’s a guy leaving in the morning.”

  “A vacancy? Really?”

  “Yup. On the fourth floor. Facing the river.”

  “So the room stays cool?”

  “No,” I said, “but the godawful smell off the river at low tide helps you forget the heat. And the wall lizards do a pretty good job of tamping down the insects.”

  “Sounds promising.” Nadja smiled, her perfect teeth like pearls. She ordered us each another shot of vodka. “Is there someone upon whom I should bestow my . . . gratitude to obtain this room?”

  “No bribe, no. You just need to win someone over, someone with juice.”

  “Juice?”

  “Clout. Pull.”

  “Ah, influence. Who would you suggest?”

  “Mathieu Franchini, the owner. Local legend. Arrived in Viet Nam a cabin boy, retired to Paris a wealthy man. A shady guy gone sort of legit.”

  “Mr. Franchini. Italian?”

  “Corsican. Restaurants, bars—most everything here in District One is owned by Corsicans. Franchini leased the Majestic from the government after the war. His son Philippe runs it for him now.”

  “So it’s young Philippe I ask for this juice?”

  I shook my head. “Dad’s in town for a visit. Every day, before lunch, the Corsicans get together at the sidewalk terrace café of the Continental Hotel—the ‘Continental Shelf.’ I’m sure you’ll find him there tomorrow. Sought out by a beautiful redhead in distress while jawing with a platoon of his cronies? He’ll be in heaven.”

  “Very well.” She beamed. “I’ll have a go.”

  “No need to, ah, mention my name, though.”

  She looked at me, amused. “I shan’t, then.” She rested a sleek elbow on the bar and cupped her porcelain chin. “May I trouble you for a tad more advice?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You weren’t wrong when you guessed I was a reporter. I’m actually hoping to write a human-interest piece, a feature of sorts. For a magazine.”

  “No kidding.” I tried to appear impressed.

  “If I could land an exclusive interview with a Viet Cong guerilla fighter, a British mag might well pick it up. Or better yet, a huge German newsweekly.” She tipped her head in the direction of the Stern photographer. “Truth be told”—she made a face—“I’m hesitant about venturing into the countryside. There’s all the expense: driver, interpreter, car, camera, portable recorder.”

  Undertaker, casket, shipping costs home, I thought, and nodded, real polite.

  “Are you acquainted with any proper journalists you might introduce me to?”

  Wishing like hell I could oblige, I shook my head. “The print reporters mostly come on short assignments, happy to cover the action from their barstools. Apart from the wire services, the New York Times is the only big American paper with a correspondent here full time. But the likes of me and them don’t fraternize.”

  “You being . . . ?”

  “An army cop.”

  “Really?” she said, “how exciting.” But she didn’t sound the least bit excited.

  I was interested in keeping her interested, so I fed her secondhand gossip about the young newshounds, how covering the Diem regime had grown steadily riskier since May, when the huge Buddhist protests had broken out. For years, Diem’s fellow Catholics had enjoyed favoritism in everything. Resentment over the bald-faced discrimination had finally boiled over, setting off huge demonstrations, which were put down with lethal force only to spring up again, along with a wave of fiery suicides protesting the prejudiced treatment. In August, with the old American ambassador on his way home and the new American ambassado
r not yet arrived, Nhu and Diem saw their chance to crush the resisters, especially the monks, and ordered their Special Forces—trained and paid directly by Uncle Sam—to raid the temples. The Red Berets arrived with rifles, grenades, tear gas, fixed bayonets. The Buddhists got beat bad, trashed just like protesting Negroes back in the States. Some of the Buddhists got killed. Thousands got arrested.

  “To justify the raids, the government planted arms and VC leaflets, then claimed the Buddhist pagodas were housing bordellos. They said they’d found stashes of women’s underwear, pornography, love letters. That the monks were getting it on with virgins.”

  “Did anyone believe that tripe?” she asked.

  “Not for a minute. People just got angrier. The protests got bigger, the cops nastier.” I didn’t add that it hadn’t made us Americans so popular, either, when hundreds of teenage protestors had been hauled off to detention camps in trucks painted with USAID’s clasped-hands logo. A clear message that we were working hand in hand with the Buddhist-beaters. “The reporters who tried to cover the raids and protests got seriously roughed up. Their stories got censored—you couldn’t say ‘raids.’ It had to be ‘searches.’ The situation couldn’t be ‘dramatic’ or the country ‘troubled.’ Violators got flat-out blocked. The main post office ‘misplaced’ their wire transmissions. Journalists who somehow managed to file articles critical of the regime found themselves on Madame Nhu’s ‘I’d-be-delighted-if-they-died’ blacklist, accused of being pinko fellow-travelers or outright Communists.”

  “Well, in my case . . .” she said, laughing. She insisted she still wanted to try reporting. That she wouldn’t be fazed by the current atmosphere. I wasn’t sure she understood how bad things had gotten. Even senior newshounds were getting hassled.

  “Newsweek’s man got expelled from the country for taking a bite out of President Diem’s live-in sister-in-law.”

  “The shrew who acts like she’s his wife.”

  “The very one. Acting First Lady for her bachelor brother-in-law. Rides roughshod over Diem and her husband both. Diem’s got a sign outside his office forbidding women to enter. But that doesn’t keep the Dragon Lady out. The second he shows the slightest sign of letting up on the Buddhists, she yells, throws a tureen of soup at him, calls him a jellyfish and a coward.”

  “Arrogance personified,” Nadja said.

  “She’s a hellion, all ninety pounds of her. Picks candidates for the National Assembly like she’s buying accessories. If they don’t vote exactly as she instructs, she threatens them with exile. She once actually slapped the vice president in public.”

  Nadja winced. “I’ve heard Madame Nhu says power is wonderful and total power is totally wonderful.”

  “When the Pope dared to question the treatment of the Buddhists, she questioned the infallibility of the Pope. Her advice on how to handle the protestors? ‘Beat them three times harder.’ The woman makes people want to bring down the government around her beautiful ears.”

  “My boss says when Madame Nhu was growing up she had her own rickshaw and coolie to carry her to school, and twenty servants waiting on her at home. Back when her cousin Bao Dai was emperor.” She licked the vodka from her lips. “Did you know she and Nhu met while he was having an affair with her mother? She was fifteen, Nhu was thirty.”

  Nadja said perhaps she would try writing a feature about the Nhus. I made noises like I was listening, but the features that most interested me were hers. She was a seriously gorgeous University of Warsaw grad with two semesters at the London School of Economics. Nadja Kowalska of the flaming hair claimed she could trace her mother’s family back to grand rabbis in the Middle Ages. I boasted I could trace my immediate ancestors to Shunk Street in South Philly and a Saturday night dance chaperoned by the Norbertine Fathers at St. Monica’s.

  Nadja spoke Polish, Russian, French, and English fluently, and several more languages passably. I bragged that I could speak American without a Philadelphia accent and occasionally made my gestures understood by Vietnamese waiters, even when drunk. I could also make her laugh. She looked great when she did, and she did it a lot.

  Red was a happy, gold-tipped-cigarette-smoking Communist. Go figure. Most of ’em were deadpan stiffs. She had been allowed to study abroad and travel outside her sealed Communist homeland—the officially trusted daughter and granddaughter of rabidly anti–Nazi Party members who had spent the war years in Moscow and returned to Poland to rise in a society not so friendly to Jews.

  Folks that tough had to be smart, I thought. I needed to be likewise. Partying with a daughter of the Party wasn’t the best idea. If my major got wind of it, I could kiss my clearances and job goodbye. Retreat now, I told myself. But her beautiful eyes flashed, her perfectly corrected teeth sparkled. She was a privileged child of the proletariat who shopped at hard-currency stores and saw Western-trained dentists. I regretted my own crooked canines as she talked. Though I had a few years on this kid and was nothing to write home about, a sudden longing settled in my gut.

  She sipped and licked her lips again. “I’m also considering writing an article about the first monk who immolated himself last June,” she said.

  “You mean Venerable Quang Duc.”

  “Yes. Did you see it?”

  “No, I went on duty late that day. Traffic everywhere was at a standstill, Vietnamese standing all over the roadways weeping and pointing at the sky where they’d seen Buddha’s face appear in the clouds.” I tapped out a fresh cigarette. “Madame Nhu said she’d supply the gasoline for the next ‘barbecue’ and bring the matches herself—especially if American journalists would volunteer to roast themselves alongside the monks.”

  “Good Lord!” Nadja shuddered. Artillery flashed and thundered over the marshes.

  “Trống chiến,” said the barman. War drums.

  Tracers floated along the horizon and crisscrossed in the distance: ours red, theirs green. A slow stream of reds ricocheted and shot upward like sparklers.

  “Enchanting,” she said.

  “Yeah. Not so much when they’re comin’ at you.”

  “Exciting too, I imagine. Boys get to have all the fun.”

  I signaled the bartender for the tab and took out my wallet. The red scarf came with it.

  “Aha,” Nadja said with a sly grin. “You’re already seeing another.”

  “It ain’t like that,” I stammered.

  She lifted the scarf to her face. “Mmm. Lovely fragrance; gardenia,” she said, and handed it back. “It’s over between us,” she teased.

  The lights flickered momentarily. I invited her to my room to judge for herself if she’d like the accommodations and the view. We never made it to the balcony. Landed instead on the bed, panting. She was shameless and sensational, even more beautiful naked. We coupled like minks, flesh sliding against flesh. I felt myself caught by her hips, angled down expertly. She arched suddenly, making a sound like something wounded, and clamped me inside her.

  Sensation pulled the air from my lungs and plunged hard into the center of me. I’d been done before but not like this. After the third go-round, we lay bathed in sweat, gulping air, spent. I gave in to the softest sleep.

  When I snapped awake the geckos were silent but something shifted in the dark on the balcony. I reached for the small automatic resting in the fold of mosquito netting tucked under the mattress and squinted at the figure. Nadja, naked as a newborn, smoking a cigarette and absently scratching the underside of a beautiful breast as she peered through my notebook by the light of the moon and a lone flare.

  Chapter Six

  When Nadja heard me stir, she quickly slipped under the mosquito net, into bed. I pounced on her. Sex in the silky tropical night changed to gasps, groans. Nick Seftas knocked on the common wall to shut us up. “No more frolic and rollick,” Nadja murmured, her face flushed, and passed out.

  She was still fast asleep when I left f
or breakfast on the roof terrace. Too late I remembered Mama-san Kha would be arriving soon. I figured she would ignore Nadja the same way she ignored me and simply go about her business. I didn’t bother going back down.

  Up on the roof, I ran into Seftas decked out in gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and a perfectly creased khaki uniform, fresh as the morning. His black dress shoes gleamed, brass insignia shone like gold. Within the hour he’d be greeting junketing bigwigs dropping by our splendid little war. Their pale faces flushed pink, they’d stumble down a roll-up aluminum staircase onto the tarmac, drained by the bumpy six-hour flight from Manila and the merciless, thick, humid Saigon air that would make them struggle to catch their breath.

  The tide was coming in. Out on the river a rusty freighter reached the turning basin upstream and began the slow pivot to reverse direction before steaming back to dock on our side of the river. A blast of the freighter’s horn announced the maneuver. Small ferries and barges veered out of the way. The horn blared once more, stabbing my hungover brain.

  “Gee,” Seftas said, “sounds like you last night. You having Korea combat dreams or bedding a noisy broad?”

  “Noisy and nosey.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “That redhead from last night.”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah.” Seftas brushed a dead fly off the table. “Hair on fire. Great fuselage.”

  “Caught her going through my stuff.”

  “You got to stop fraternizing with those high-class all-night ladies.”

  “She wasn’t a pro. And she wasn’t thieving. More like snooping. Going through my case notes. I should report it.”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  “She’s a foreign national,” I said, “from an Iron Curtain country.”

  Seftas frowned. “Hey, we’re all foreign nationals in this place. Don’t go talking it up or you’ll get thrown to the counter-intel wolves. You don’t need that kind of grief.” He set down his napkin. “What could she want with your notes anyway?”