Play the Red Queen

by Juris Jurjevics

  We sat down on the bare floor, our backs against the wall. Blue sat between us, doing the play-by-play. A striking male assistant circulating through the audience asked who we wished to contact.

  “His grandmother,” I said on impulse, indicating Robeson. Blue interpreted. “Does the medium speak English?”

  The minion smiled his apologies. “Speak French, no English.”

  Huyen looked nervous as hell. Was he concerned about the gods and ghosts from the underworld who would soon be sharing his body and soul? Maybe the Red Queen’s bird dog just wasn’t keen on having Americans snooping on his business.

  An assistant announced that Master Huyen was a follower of Princess Liễu Hạnh, the Supreme Goddess, mother of all things, who empowered his second sight. The medium took a seat on a sea-blue cushion propped on a low platform, closed his made-up eyes, and smoked.

  Blue quietly said, “Tình cảm,” and something else to Robeson I didn’t catch. Robeson leaned around her and explained. “Mister Ghost Guy has a ‘sentiment for men.’”

  I nodded. Common enough among mediums in Viet Nam.

  “Did ya catch that assistant?” Robeson asked. “The young stud?”

  “Which one?” I said. “They’re all young studs.”

  “The busybody that was hassling the guy with the camera. He looks a lot like the spotter on the Vespa playing tag with Lodge’s security convoy.” He tried to find the kid again to point him out to me but he was gone.

  The string quartet struck up another song. Huyen stood up, smiling, and joined in. His bright red lips parted in a laugh. I started. His teeth and gums were fucking black, the pink tongue a shock.

  Gongs sounded. Assistants brought forward a beautiful set of long oars so Huyen could stand in the stern of an imaginary boat and punt while the musicians played. He and the audience crooned something that sounded sentimental. Joss sticks burned, turning the air dusky. Huyen’s eyes closed again, his face growing blissful. Assistants stepped forward and bundles of crisp new piaster notes replaced the oars. Huyen spread the notes in his hands like playing cards and turned his back to the audience seated on the floor. Still singing, he held the bills aloft and tossed them high over his head. They dispersed in the air, fluttering down on the people, who squealed with delight, happy that it was raining dough, excited that they’d soon hear from their loved ones.

  Huyen resumed his seat on the cushion; the band played on. Assistants covered his head with a long red veil and invited the ranks of otherworldly beings to appear: sun goddess, moon goddess, the Goddesses of the Four Palaces, the Thirty-Six Spirits, and some goddess who shored up heaven with stones, Missy said. A gong sounded.

  The master, Blue whispered, was praying for somebody’s protection from spirits, for another’s prosperity, for a woman’s recovery from illness and good health for her daughter. Huyen moaned slightly, sinking deeper into trance.

  Something rose under the red mesh. The veil opened to reveal a catlike woman, a summoned goddess who called for the souls of the dead to approach. The departed spirits could hear but had no voices in this world. They borrowed the medium’s to speak to the relatives seated lotus-style before her.

  A young man in the audience said he didn’t want to be haunted any longer by the unhappy ghost of his father. The goddess conveyed the list of gifts the son was offering and bargained with the patriarch to leave his son in peace. It wasn’t clear whether the ghost took the deal.

  The red veil closed. Gongs clanged. The attendants chanted and helped Huyen settle. The veil peeled back again and another female spirit appeared. This one was older and a little dotty. She carried a heartfelt message from a mother to her grown son in the crowd. Tears and emotion flowed from her kneeling child, granted a few precious moments before his mom’s soul departed forever. Their talk went too fast for Blue to translate. The veil fell shut. Gongs clanged once more.

  When the veil parted the third time a higher being sat before us, basking in her goodness. An angel without wings. More messages flowed: family news and apologies, warnings and laments. People seated near us wept, laughed, implored, thanked. The final exchange brought a widower to tears. The red curtain closed and reopened quickly.

  At my request, Blue loudly announced in Vietnamese that I wanted to speak to a fallen soldier—an American major who had died days earlier in Saigon with a diviner squatting at his feet. This didn’t so much as raise a flutter in the master lost in the mists. Huyen was someone else, somewhere else. The goddess addressed me in singsong Vietnamese. Blue looked pale and puzzled.

  “She say angry soldier come. Not American. Warn you, leave Việt Nam.”

  “Angry soldier” was vague enough to mean anybody. I figured the crafty medium was just trying to scare me off his patch and off the Red Queen’s trail, but Blue seemed certain the vision and warning were real.

  A jaunty goddess appeared next, bearing a message from an elderly woman, who spoke directly to Clovis: “Don’t suspicion that fine young thang. You seek huh’ out and beg fo’giveness, y’hea?” Robeson just about jumped out of his skin on hearing the voice of his dead granny coming out of the medium’s mouth, berating him about some girl he’d wronged back home. From the look on his face, he knew exactly who she was talking about.

  The veil closed and Huyen slumped, head bowed. The quartet kicked in with loud, twangy music and nasal singing. The audience of Vietnamese leapt to their feet, chattering excitedly. Friar Boy held his Leica high over their heads, trying to get a picture as they milled around him. We three pushed through the crowd toward Huyen. The red veil lay atop an empty cushion. He was gone.

  Robeson and I raced downstairs to the street. Huyen had disappeared, if he had come that way at all. Missy Blue came down with Friar Boy and reported that the assistants had vanished almost as quickly as their boss.

  “Fantastique, non?” the friar said to Miss Blue in schoolboy French. He wanted to take a group picture with us, using the camera’s timer automatique, he said.

  “Get fucked,” Robeson muttered, craning to see up the road, still rattled by the surprise visit from his gran. Friar Boy clutched his camera to his chest.

  Blue gave him a broad Western-style smile, with teeth, and he relaxed. The smile vanished and she growled, “Need photo,” leaving him confused but intrigued. In exchange for Blue’s accepting his invitation to lunch, he rewound the film and handed over the cartridge.

  “You wait,” Blue said to the friar. She turned to us, hand raised toward the stairs. “You come.”

  We followed her back to the apartment where not a soul remained, living or dead. She led us through the kitchen to Huyen’s small quarters, furnished with a slatted wooden bed, a stepstool, a modest Chinese cabinet and not much else. The cabinet contained no playing cards with skeleton ladies, only some red veils like the one that had draped him in the séance. I held one to my face. Gardenia.

  A narrow armoire behind the door held completely ordinary pants and shirts. Small piles of underwear rested on the bottom. Next to them lay some piaster notes folded in quarters—something Vietnamese commonly did with money they carried—and a dozen postcards with different views of the outside and inside of Gia Long Palace, including Diem’s personal suite.

  An eight-by-ten manila envelope held a contact sheet with four rows of small black-and-white frames edged by sprocket holes. The scene in all twenty shots was a clay tennis court and two tall opponents: General Big Minh and Ambassador Lodge. At the net, I could make out the frog-faced General Xuan and the lethal Captain Nhung. In the last few frames, I could see myself in Robeson’s ill-fitting seersucker jacket. Two large prints showed the ambassador in the street surrounded by an adoring crowd. The exposures on a second contact sheet showed Cabot Lodge swimming, walking, conversing with diplomats at a reception, and a few frames of the ambassador’s empty residence.

  We got Friar Boy’s film developed in a hurry at t
he information office in the embassy and had them run off multiple prints of Huyen decked out in his regalia. Robeson hand-delivered prints to the embassy’s security staff and Marine detachment.

  We didn’t have the manpower to track Huyen on our own. I took a bunch of the snaps upstairs to share with Donald CIA, along with Huyen’s address, although I doubted the medium would go back there anytime soon.

  “Hard to tell what he looks like under all that getup,” Donald said, squinting at the elaborate costume, the black gums and teeth. He asked if he should pass the photo to the Vietnamese plainclothes police.

  “Not yet,” I said. “If they pick him up, we’ll never get to question him. But it’s likely he’s been her spotter at every killing and that he’ll try to get close to Lodge soon. We found these in his rooms, too,” I said, and turned over the contact sheets.

  Donald whistled and said he’d pull out all the stops. “I understand you’ve been inquiring about a Mai Nguyen. May I ask who that is?”

  I told him. We both knew it wasn’t much to go on in a country where half the population shared the surname Nguyen, but I sure enjoyed the look on his face when he realized us Army cops had come up with intel nobody else had.

  Back in my room at the Majestic, Robeson made straight for the balcony. The photographer had taken Blue to lunch at the floating Chinese restaurant moored on the river just south of the hotel. Robeson looked worried. Turned out Friar Boy was a Danish doctor with Lutheran Relief, not to mention very, very white. Robeson stared south for nearly an hour, leaning out from time to time to get a better view. Just as I was about to tell him not to “suspicion the fine young thang,” he bolted past me.

  “Blue’s coming back from her date with Aryan boy.”

  Robeson tossed himself on my bed and struck a nonchalant pose. The elevator cage crashed open and Blue appeared at my door.

  “Well, Sweetness,” Robeson drawled, “how’s the albino?”

  “Food good, kiss numbah ten,” she said, screwing up her face.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Enormous portraits of Diem festooned the fronts of buildings all over town, announcing Viet Nam’s Independence Day. The palace was celebrating without the public. Citizens weren’t allowed anywhere near the festivities. Even the troops that would parade past the president and his honored guests would carry empty rifles on their shoulders. Nhu and Colonel Tung were taking no chances.

  With Diem and Lodge safely on a reviewing stand surrounded by throngs of military, Robeson and I went to find Mama-san Kha. We followed directions from the front desk at the Majestic and drove past the north end of town. We knew Mama-san Kha lived alone. Her husband was long dead. She had already lost one son to the war; another was serving in I Corps somewhere near the Demilitarized Zone.

  Robeson steered with complete confidence along narrow, twisting dirt lanes that eventually turned off onto a bumpy track. He wrestled the jeep through the deep ruts past a huge garbage dump, where smoldering piles of trash sent up swarms of embers. It reminded me of the coal fields I’d seen as a kid in Pennsylvania, where every once in a while fires that had been burning underground for years would break through to the surface.

  We found ourselves stuck amid a pack of half-starved dogs wrestling over scraps. A gaggle of women and kids and hobbled men with sacks picked through the smoky refuse, squabbling over empty number ten cans. With their labels stripped off, the cans shone like bright steel. Since the VC could turn anything into a weapon or tool, scavenging was officially illegal, but the two lone Vietnamese guards smoking outside their crappy shack showed no interest in enforcing the regulations. There were too many pickers, too much garbage. Robeson craned his neck, looking for someplace to turn around.

  A pair of bored American MPs sat on the hood of their jeep, shooting at rats with their .45s. They hooted when they popped one, sending it flying across the smoking hill of filth. The other rats just continued about their business.

  The haze from the burning rubber and trash made my throat raw and stung my eyes. Another shot sounded. A mangy mutt yelped, mad with pain. The terrified dog dragged its useless back half in a circle, mewling and whimpering. The pack of wild dogs descended, snapping and baring their fangs at each other between tearing at the half-paralyzed mutt. The MPs whooped and broke out some C-rations.

  Robeson turned us around and drove us back out.

  Mama-san Kha’s shanty neighborhood had no yards, no open spaces, hardly even a path to walk along. No other vehicle had followed us, so we chained up the jeep and then spent almost an hour picking our way through makeshift shacks built from shipping crates and roofs made of “tinnies”—crushed soda cans. By dumb luck we came upon a kid who understood who we were looking for and brought us to an old man using a spent artillery shell for an anvil. He led us to her one-room hut, constructed from wooden pallets she’d bullied us into scrounging and roofed with corrugated metal we had cumshawed. Given how orderly she kept our rooms, I shouldn’t have been surprised that her place was neat as a pin, its hard dirt floor swept clean.

  Her raw wooden coffin sat in the middle of the room. The old man removed the bowl of rice and three incense sticks set on the lid to keep the corpse from rising. Her body lay wrapped in a blanket and a bamboo mat. Dead from a fall, the old man informed us nervously and left.

  “Poor Mama-san,” I said.

  Most likely they had leaned on her, trying to coerce her into cooperating, and she refused. Once she knew what they were after, they couldn’t risk her warning us.

  “Somebody put her down ’cause she wouldn’t participate in icing you.”

  I kneaded my forehead. “And there’s fuck-all we can do about it.”

  “Look,” Robeson said, his face screwed up as he sniffed at something in a plastic bag. “A foot of boa meat. She certainly didn’t spend no eight piasters on a snake dinner, come home and off herself.”

  “Congratulations. Suicide successfully ruled out.”

  A tiny ceramic Buddha sat on a shelf with no altar. In a tin can next to the makeshift stove in the corner, we found nuggets of C-4 explosive. Looked like she had burned pinches of it to boil water as we might’ve in the field.

  We undid the shroud and saw discoloration at her throat. Robeson lifted an eyelid.

  “Asphyxiation,” he said.

  Whoever had strangled her, the Saigon police wouldn’t be investigating her death. The poor died here every day without ceremony or attention. For that matter, a couple of long nose GIs getting shredded wouldn’t have stirred them either.

  I pointed to the gold chain around Robeson’s neck and beckoned for him to give it over.

  “How am I gonna keep my cross on?” he whined, even as he unhooked the chain. “I’m in serious need of protection at the moment. I wanna be wearing that whenever I flush my commode to make sure it don’t blow my ass off.”

  “She’s leaving town. She needs gold in her mouth so she’ll have some purchasing power when she gets wherever she’s going. I’ll get you another chain.”

  “Yeah, okay. Girl’s traveling light. She needs funds.”

  I lit a joss stick and held its smoking stem to my forehead like a respectful mourner. I stuck it beside a few others in the crappy vase and dropped the gold chain next to the Buddha. Robeson added some cigarettes and hundred-dong notes. I tossed on some more.

  Even with the boy’s help, it took some time to locate our jeep. Robeson undid the big lock, unchained the steering wheel, and swept the vehicle for explosives while I souvenired the kid a pack of cigarettes and three American greenbacks. He took off like one of the miniature deer the well-off in Saigon kept as lawn pets.

  Robeson started the engine. “Who’s gonna set the scales right for this?”

  I shook my head. The bitter joke around Saigon was that there was a street named ‘Cong Ly’—‘Justice’—but it only ran one way.

  Chapter Thirt
y-Six

  Robeson and me spent the night at the Brink Hotel. Sunday morning early I slipped away to the Lodge residence and escorted them to the airport. We got there before everyone except General Don, who had come to see his president off to Dalat. The general and Lodge huddled while I checked the interior of the presidential plane. Diem arrived. Son of an emperor’s grand chamberlain, the country’s first president waddled toward us in a double-breasted white suit. With his hair marcelled to his oversized head, he looked like a portly duck next to lanky Cabot Lodge.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” he said in English.

  “Monsieur le Président,” Lodge replied.

  An infantry captain in summer whites and gold sash called the presidential guards to attention. As we passed between the facing ranks of guards in palace white and gold, they rendered a rifle salute with scarce new AR-15s. Given their weathered faces and black berets, they were unmistakably Nungs, the hard-as-nails tribal mercenaries from up near the Chinese border. I’d never seen Nungs in such fancy uniforms. Basic black was their thing, not white duds with gold epaulettes and trim.

  Diem and the Lodges boarded first, followed by the scowling Mr. Vy and Mike Dunn. I brought up the rear. The flight took us over the mountains and across the plateaus of the Central Highlands. It should have taken an hour to reach the resort town of Dalat, but Diem insisted on a detour to Dao Nghia so he could show off a strategic hamlet, part of Brother Nhu’s bullshit strategy to deny local support to the Viet Cong. Diem wasn’t going to let Lodge take a pass on inspecting one of these new artificial villages, in reality a spiffed-up concentration camp where farmers, removed by force from their ancestral lands, were locked away behind barbed wire. The “villagers” had to show ID and get groped coming and going. Today they lined up to welcome us with smiles and little yellow silk Vietnamese flags on sticks, waving like happy robots. Treated like inmates, they’d sneak away first chance they got.