A River in May
Page 28
The lycée was a large stucco building on Quang Trung Street, with red roof tiles and surrounded by high walls. When Lopez walked in there was a lot of giggling, but the amused ones vanished before he saw them. The corridor tiles were dark and highly polished, the ambience was as Spartan and clean as a barracks. Against one wall was a statue of the Virgin Mary with silver rays beaming from her fingers and a serpent being crushed under her bare foot. On either side were plaques naming in gold lettering all the head girls since 1902. Until 1940, all the names were French ones. Lopez found a door engraved Mèe Supérieure, knocked and was told to ‘Entrez!’
The Mother Superior was a small dark nun of about sixty dressed in a white habit, who looked and sounded more Cambodian than Vietnamese. She asked Lopez to sit down and continued to speak in rapid French which he had difficulty in following. She offered him a drink – the choice was mineral water or beer. Lopez said beer and a servant was summoned to bring two chilled bottles of ‘33’. The Mother Superior had been expecting him and said that Co Nhung would arrive ‘bientôt’. While Lopez waited, she told him about herself: she had been born in Phnom Penh, but educated at Ste. Fleur in the Auvergne and then at university in Aix-en-Provence. She was very fond of Aix: she especially loved the tree-lined boulevards where she had strolled, arm-in-arm and singing, with her fellow students.
When Nhung arrived the Mother Superior shook his hand and left them alone. Nhung had chalk dust on her nose. Lopez brushed off the dust and kissed her.
‘I wasn’t certain that you were going to come,’ she said.
‘Listen, Nhung. I will never lie to you. To everyone else, but never to you. I must tell you the truth: I’m frightened, I don’t want to die. And I’m not sure that I want to kill others.’
Nhung froze for a long moment and looked at the floor. For a second, she looked almost angry, disappointed. Then she began to speak, slowly and deliberately. ‘You’ve been brought up in a society that teaches people to be afraid of death. It’s a fear that you can unlearn.’
The hard steel in her voice unsettled Lopez. ‘Are you,’ he said, ‘ever afraid?’
‘Not of death.’
‘Of what then?’
‘Of losing love.’ Nhung turned away. ‘The explosives are in this book cupboard.’ She undid a latch and slid up the roll-top cover, to reveal shelves with sets of texts for Géographie, Lettres Françaises, Sciences Sociales and Instruction Réligieuse. In the bottom of the cabinet was a cardboard box with the explosives. She picked it up and handed it to Lopez. The explosives were heavy.
He said, ‘Will we ever meet again?’
‘I would disappoint you.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘Yes, I would. You don’t know everything about me.’ He wanted to hold her, to kiss away the silliness of her self-deprecation, but his arms were full of explosives.
‘I have to go back to my class. It’s very difficult teaching them tenses. You see, we don’t have them in Vietnamese.’
‘Of course, I know that. I love your language. Why don’t you ever speak Vietnamese to me?’
‘Because my English is far better than your Vietnamese.’
‘Anh yeu em gio lam. Did you understand that?’
She kissed him. ‘Em yeu anh gio lam.’
He put down the explosives and held her close. He felt the fine silk of her hair against his face. He whispered the final words of the Vietnamese love pledge – ‘All the days, all the nights and all the years.’
She walked with him to the entrance porch. Lopez carried the explosives to the jeep and looked back, but Nhung was already gone.
Lopez lay on his bed in the beach house and listened to the sound of the sea. There were two hours to wait before the helicopter to Nui Hoa Den. He got up and opened the shutters. The weather was hot and sticky, even the breakers looked low and lazy. Lopez looked at the box of explosives once again. They had been wrapped to look like bottles of whiskey and were mixed in with real bottles of whiskey. He couldn’t stop looking at the box and touching it. It was like when, as a boy of eleven, he had caught a twenty-pound striped bass while casting along the weed beds on Love Point. It was five times the size of any fish he’d caught before. As he rowed back to Rideout’s Landing he kept stroking it and looking at it. The fish was so magnificent that he couldn’t believe it was his. It fed the family for a week. The box of rigged explosives wouldn’t feed anyone, but it might help end a war.
If only, Lopez thought – if only, the saddest and most futile of all words. It was so odd, he thought, that a spy could face the death penalty for betraying his country, but walk free as a glorious May morning if he betrayed the person who loved him.
He turned the gold hair-clip that Chou had insisted on buying for him in China Beach over and over in his fingers. It was of modest unaffected design, but crafted from the purest Vietnamese gold, probably from the mine at Bong Mieu. He had no idea how old it was, only that it was old, and he tried to imagine the many women who might have worn it – beloved wives, abused concubines, maybe a French planter’s daughter who died of fever, a guerrilla fighter’s wife, the imaginary dark-haired girl from the Auvergne … A few hours later he woke up, wrote a short letter, wrapped the hair clip in a neat package, and addressed it.
‘You seem mighty anxious to get me away from the camp. What are you up to? If you’re gonna kill Boca, you still have to get eight other witnesses out of the way. And for fuck’s sake, I’m one of the guys who would lie for you. You should send Mendy instead – that guy really hates you.’
Lopez had convinced Dusty to take an R&R to Hong Kong. He was supposed to be leaving the next day, but still seemed reluctant.
‘You’d be a fool not to go. You’ll have a good time and make at least a thousand dollars’ profit on the watches.’
Dusty still looked suspicious. ‘If it’s such a good deal, Trung Uy Lopez, why don’t you do it yourself?’
‘I’m going to, next month. I want you to go first and recon the best jewelers. Try Kowloon first, Hong Kong island itself will be a lot pricier. But don’t mess around with fakes; we need certificates, the real stuff.’
Lopez had set up a deal with Dai Uy Ky and some other Vietnamese officers which involved smuggling gold Rolex watches from Hong Kong to Vietnam. Gold Rolexes had become a form of hard currency. The Vietnamese officers could either sell them for double their purchase price on the black market, or use them as an emergency reserve to flee the country when the time came. The deal was a genuine one, but also a cover story devised by Lopez to save Dusty’s life by getting him out of the camp.
‘And by the way, there’s something else.’ He handed Dusty the small package with the enclosed letter and the gold hair-clip. ‘Could you post this?’
Dusty looked at the address: Judge Grey, father of First Lieutenant Quentin Grey USMC, care of State Attorney’s Office, Richmond, Virginia. ‘Shouldn’t there be a street name or something?’
‘Don’t worry, it’ll get there.’
Lopez liked playing God; it was exhilarating. There were two other team members he intended to spare: Jackson and the medic who had replaced Bobby, a Puerto Rican named Fernando Castro. Castro was young and a little nave, but something about him struck Lopez as kind and thoughtful. It had been easy to rig the patrol rota so that Jackson and Castro would be far away from the camp on the night of the attack. Jackson was a natural born survivor who would look after the young medic. Unless their luck was very bad, they’d get picked up by a rescue helicopter.
Before going to bed Lopez wrote to Rosie and Tom. He didn’t even hint at what he was going to do, but he told them that he loved them. He knew that by the time they received the letter he would already have been reported as dead or missing in action. He hoped that the letter would somehow explain something beyond its words. He picked up Tom’s last letter to him and read it yet again.
Rideout’s Landing Home for Old Crocks
May 4th, 1968
Dear Francis,
You asked about my involvement in the ’54 Geneva Accords. Well, I advised Ike to accept them, though at the time – being a Roosevelt era antique – it was not easy for me to see the President. As you know, the accords called for Vietnam’s general elections to take place in July 56. It was, however, obvious that Ho Chi Minh would have carried the day with an overwhelming mandate (80 percent) in favor of reunification under the Communists. So what did we do? We used our UN veto to prevent the elections from taking place. Allan Dulles, the whole NSC, the CIA, the JCS, all supported the veto – mine was the only dissenting voice.
Ike agreed to see me ‘for a few minutes’. In the event, he gave me half an hour. We talked about family and friends, and I remember he asked about the pigs. I had to cut in. I said, ‘Mr President, about the elections in Vietnam -’ The President leaned forward, touching my knee, and he said, ‘I don’t like doing this either, Tom. And I don’t like Ho Chi Minh quoting the American Declaration of Independence back in our faces.’
Now, I’d been a servant of the state for forty years even back then, and I have always believed that America’s national interest comes first, before morality, before democracy in other countries, even before human lives. ‘But this time, Mr President,’ I said, ‘I believe our national interest is on the side of the angels. Ho Chi Minh is not a Soviet style imperialist; he’s a Vietnamese nationalist.’ For the first time, Ike was really listening. I explained that Vietnam’s natural enemy was not the USA or the West, but China. Maoist or Taoist, China is always the great threat.
Ike chewed on his reading glasses and stared out of the window, and finally he said, ‘There’s another reason – a reason right here in the USA – why we have to veto those elections.’ He meant McCarthy.
I said, ‘Ike, he’s dead.’ He might be dead but, Ike said, he was buried in a shallow grave, and could rise again if we were to ‘let Vietnam go Communist.’ And that was not a chance the President was prepared to take with America’s constitution and democracy.
That was my last visit to the Oval Office. But I thought then of my first, twenty years earlier. At that time – back in the Thirties – I was looking after Ianthe’s great-uncle Sir Ronald Davison, who was briefing Roosevelt on dealing with mass unemployment and poverty. I remember FDR saying, ‘Congress is right behind me, but the problem is a reactionary cabal in the Supreme Court.’
‘Lloyd George,’ Ronald said, ‘had the same problem with the House of Lords, so he simply created more peers. Pity you can’t do that with your judges.’
FDR just threw back his head and laughed. ‘Oh, can’t I? Just you watch.’
FDR was a rogue, but a rogue with vision; he understood that 2,000 million brown and black people resented being ruled by a handful of white ones. I’m not sure we understand that even today, especially if it means ‘letting’ a country go Communist. Well, my generation created this mess, and now it’s up to yours to clean it up.
Francis, you must never think that you are anything less than our dearest, most precious son. We loved Arthur and Peter, and Ianthe, and losing them has broken our hearts so that they will never mend. But you and you alone are our shining hope, not because they are dead, but because you are you.
Rosie sends you her love, as I do.
Tom
PS. The raccoon had cubs last week.
Lopez wiped his tears and folded the letter into his breast pocket; he didn’t want to ever lose it. He wanted them to understand; he really did.
He checked the explosives box for the hundredth time. It was lying under his bunk, still looking like a cache of whiskey. If anyone snooped, they’d just think he’d developed an even more serious drink problem.
For some reason Boca had turned friendly and talkative. Lopez wondered if he had finally wised up to the fact that the ‘unauthorized’ evacuation of the Phu Gia civilians indicted him too. Or whether he had begun to discover a conscience, or – more likely – if he realized how much of a danger Lopez was to him, and that it might be best to humor him. One evening they had a long chat on top of the command bunker during Boca’s duty watch. Lopez remembered the saying about using a long spoon if you sup with the devil. He wondered if Boca was also using a long spoon.
‘You finish your tour next month, isn’t that right?’
Lopez nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘You got any plans, Lopez, ‘bout what you’re going to do next?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Might extend for six months or a year, but I’m thinking of a staff job in Da Nang. Or the Mobile Strike Force. Gets a bit boring out here when nothing’s happening. What about you?’
‘I’m gonna apply for a transfer to the hundred-and-first, or even a leg infantry division. Special Forces is just too small a unit. It’s no good for your career to spend too much time in places like this. And, you know, there’s a lot of top brass who’d like to get rid of SF altogether – too many snake-eating weirdos.’
Lopez asked about his family. He knew there were a son and a daughter, both still very young. Boca kept photos of the wife and kids on his desk – Mrs Boca was surprisingly good looking. ‘Do you want your boy to become a soldier?’
‘Hell, no. We just break things and blow them up. I want my kid to build things instead.’
Lopez was mildly abashed. ‘What would you like him to do?’
‘Well, he’s only young, but he already seems good at putting things together – like Meccano and Lego. I’d like to see him become an architect or engineer.’
‘And the girl?’
‘Bossy little chatterbox – she’ll run her brother’s business.’
For a while Lopez searched his soul for even a shred of compassion for Boca. He wanted to find something, the merest speck of human kinship, that would soften him and make him uneasy about killing Boca the husband and father. Lopez tried, but he couldn’t find anything to make him relent, nothing. Boca’s kids were going to grow up and be just fine, because Boca only napalmed little dark-haired kids in rice paddies. Boca was going to die.
Lopez knew that it was going to be his last patrol before his defection, but he still had to do it. His job was to check out the abandoned paddy fields and hamlets opposite Phu Gia. He wondered if Dieu had felt the same way about leading a double life. He also wondered if he was over-playing his false persona. Lopez was checking equipment and eagerly getting the CIDG organized for the patrol when Boca came over. ‘What’s gotten into you, Lopez? Why’re you so gung- ho all of a sudden?’
The river plain was flat until they got to the square imposing bulk of Hill 110 which blocked off the rest of the river valley. They swept through the hamlets and fields until they were in the shadow of Hill no’s sinister mass. They found nothing – not a bunker, an empty cartridge case or even a boot print – absolutely nothing. After the paddy ended, the land turned into grassy hillocks rising towards 110. They had to turn back, because to go further meant trouble.
Nothing happened until they reached a place where wild bamboo thicket and scrub had started to take over the abandoned paddy. Lopez found it a sad desolate place, the ruins of where people had once made their lives and grown their food. He was in a mood of twilight nothingness when they started receiving sniper fire from their rear. The CIDG started to run toward the cover of the bamboo. Lopez winced, but it was too late to stop them. He knew that if the enemy had put a machine-gun and a few riflemen in that bamboo thicket they would have been trapped and slaughtered in a classic crossfire. But they were lucky: there was no one there.
Lopez followed the CIDG, ducking and weaving like an extra in a B-movie, and, on
ce inside the thicket, hunkered down with the rest of them behind an old paddy dyke. The sniper was a good distance away – about seven hundred meters – and was probably firing from the grassy hillocks below 110. It wasn’t a big problem. Lopez got on the radio to call up some fire support. If the mortar shells didn’t kill the sniper, they should at least chase him away. While Lopez was giving the target grid coordinates, one of the CIDG slumped and went all floppy. He must have put his head up above the dyke to take a look. Lopez couldn’t even remember hearing the shot that killed him.
They were back in the camp a few hours later. Lopez showered and drank several cold beers – it was best to put it all away, just to forget that it happened and think about other things. It was part of the survival rhythm. Lopez hadn’t recognized the rhythm at first, but after a few months he had learned to beat the cadence without even thinking. Castro hadn’t been there long enough to learn it. He’d been on the same patrol and was brooding – it was the first time he had seen death in the field. For some reason, he felt he needed to apologize to Lopez. ‘I feel terribly guilty, sir.’
‘Why should you?’
‘I’m supposed to be a medic, but I was useless. I wasn’t able to do anything.’
‘There was nothing you could do. That guy was dead meat as soon as the round hit him. Clean kill. Look, it was my fault more than anyone’s for taking the patrol too near 110. Do I look guilty?’ The medic didn’t say anything. ‘In any case, chico…’ – it was the first time Lopez had ever called anyone that – ‘in any case, picking that guy off from that distance, out of that thicket, was five per cent skill and ninety-five per cent luck. Listen, you have to think that way about it, otherwise you’ll crack up.’ Lopez left it at that. He suspected that Fernando Castro probably thought that he was a cold unfeeling monster, just like the rest of them. Maybe he was right. Lopez finished his beer and went to have a look at the dead soldier.