by Mark Dapin
Nashville patted Moreau lightly on the shoulder. Moreau almost winced.
‘And you know the best part?’ asked Nashville. ‘As soon as Moreau remembered, Tâm remembered too!’
Nashville beckoned Tâm back to his side and kissed her, so he was touching Shorty, Moreau and Tâm, all at the same time.
‘Of course, Tâm’s problem wasn’t opium,’ said Nashville, ‘it’s just that she sees so many men, it takes a lot to make one guy stand out – and, of course, we all look the same. But once Moreau fed her some details – dragged out of God knows which corner of his drug-fucked brain – the whole thing came back to her: me staggering to her room, caked in blood, her washing my wounds, the sex, the cigarettes, the long, deep morning kiss . . .
‘Up until then,’ said Nashville, ‘she’d thought she’d spent the night blowing a platoon of fucking GIs, so you can imagine how happy she was when she found out she’d actually been in bed with the man she loves. What a relief for all of us!’
Nashville let go of Shorty, and Tâm hid her face in Nashville’s chest.
‘Get Shorty a chair,’ ordered Nashville.
Tâm moved, but Nashville hauled her back on to his lap.
‘No,’ he said, ‘Moreau.’
Moreau rose slowly and pulled up a seat for Shorty.
‘And you know the best of it?’ said Nashville. ‘Moreau got in just as the good ol’ boys were about to kill me. Oh, not before they’d beaten the shit out of me and put thirty-seven stitches in my head. Not before they’d kicked me into seeing double and pissing blood. Not before they’d pushed my face into a fire I’d lit myself. But shit, at least it was before they lynched me.’
Nashville grinned. ‘And that’s what the cavalry do, ain’t it?’ he said to Moreau. ‘They always turn up at the last moment. Do they have cavalry in the legion, mon ami? Ah, it ain’t fair to ask you, is it? Because how the fuck would you know?’
Moreau shook his head. ‘I was a legionnaire,’ he insisted. ‘I was at Dien Bien Phu. My war was real.’
Nashville turned back to Shorty. ‘So there I was again,’ he said, ‘all chained up in hospital, where the guard pistol-whips me whenever the nurses leave the ward, and promises there’s guys coming to pull out my IV in the night and smother me with my own pillow, when in come Seamus and Blacksmith – the taint squad, no less – with the good news that I’m a free man, and did I have any complaints I’d like to lay about Long Binh. Any fucking complaints. I told them the food tasted of piss.’
Nashville emptied his glass of burgundy onto the floor.
‘Champagne,’ he said to Moreau. ‘Your very best – which, by the way, is shit. On the house.’
Moreau called for a girl, but there were none in the bar.
‘You’re running out of staff, buddy,’ said Nashville. ‘Maybe you’ll have to do it yourself.’
‘Bien sûr,’ said Moreau. He rose to go to the cellar.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Nashville, waving him down. ‘Remember my buddy Bucky?’ Nashville asked Shorty. ‘Well, I ain’t seen him around since I got back, and that hurts me. I love that little guy, and I miss him badly – but here’s some more good news: Moreau can do his job for him. Listen to this . . .’
Nashville addressed Moreau. ‘What is the name of the highway that runs from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida?’ Nashville asked him.
‘Number one,’ replied Moreau, quietly.
‘No, no, no,’ said Nashville, laughing. ‘You know that ain’t right. Say it like a retard.’
‘Nambawan,’ mumbled Moreau.
‘Louder!’ Nashville ordered.
‘Nambawan!’ shouted Moreau.
‘Très bien,’ said Nashville, and allowed Moreau to leave for the cellar.
Nashville nodded to Tâm to stub out his cigar. ‘Not in the ashtray,’ he said. ‘On the floor.’
Shorty felt the storm building in the bar, as surely as if he were outside under the clouds.
Nashville smiled at Tâm and kissed her neck.
Moreau climbed out of the cellar, with a bottle of Moët in an ice bucket, and three champagne flutes.
‘You won’t need yours,’ said Nashville to Moreau. He snatched Moreau’s glass and threw it across the room. It smashed against the bar. ‘Yee-haw!’ he shouted.
The gramophone was playing Léo Ferré’s ‘Avec Le Temps ’.
‘I don’t understand this shit,’ said Nashville. ‘Let’s hear the fucking Rolling Stones.’
Moreau put the disc carefully in its sleeve, and replaced it on the turntable with ‘Get Off of My Cloud’. Nashville drank champagne from the bottle, then passed it to Shorty for a swig.
‘It sure is good to be home,’ said Nashville, looking around Le Boudin with a wide grin. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘if I were Dr John H Watson of 221b Baker Street London, veteran of hundreds of investigations and also the British War in Afghanistan, I’d call this case “The Adventure of the Filthy Drug-Addicted Fake French Cunt, Who Sold Out His Buddy on a Murder Rap to Cover for the Retreat of the Real Killers, Whose Identity He Knew All-a-fucking-Long”.’
Moreau shook his head vigorously. ‘Non,’ he said, ‘ce n’est pas vrai. You are my friend, mon vieux. I knew you didn’t kill Caution or any other man. I knew there was no evidence. I knew you were safe. And if the guerrillas had not been shot, I would have reported to your captain anyway, once their operation was over.’
Shorty stared at the legionnaire. ‘How would you know about their operation?’ he asked.
Moreau gave a dry laugh. ‘Who do you believe allows the bars to stay open in Vung Tau, mon enfant?’ he asked. ‘Where does an opiomane get his opium? Whose country is this, Monsieur Marsupial?’
Nashville drained his champagne, belched and pushed Tâm off his lap. She landed on her hands, a temple cat. Nashville took his champagne bottle by the neck and turned it upside down, facing the belly of the bottle as if it were a glove puppet. He grabbed Moreau by the neck and hit him on the forehead. He had expected it to break, but it bounced off Moreau’s brow, cutting him only lightly across one eye.
Moreau moved to guard his head, but did not fight back. Nashville smashed the bottle on the bar, flooding the floor with broken glass. He watched Tâm flee the room and he knew he loved her. He turned over a table and a chair, jumped the bar and pulled a photograph of Alan Seeger down from the wall. He broke it over a figurine of a bare-breasted Marianne waving the flag of the republic.
He swept the bottles of coloured water from the shelf behind the bar. They crashed and rang. Shorty picked up a chair and cracked it on the bar top, then toured the bar with a chair-leg in each hand, clubbing every ornament, ashtray and cup.
They each took one leg of the pool table, but didn’t have the strength to turn it over. Nashville picked out the pool balls one by one and hurled them at the windows, or at Moreau scuttling across the bar. A bunch of GIs stopped by for a drink and saw the chance to join something better. They helped Shorty heave the pool table onto its side, and tore the nets out of the pockets.
Nashville picked up Moreau’s collection of French LPs, removed each from its sleeve, and carved his initials into the vinyl with a cheese knife. He broke the arm off the gramophone, tore the turntable off its mounting, and flung it through the air.
From the open door of the bar, the snakeman watched, and he understood.
THIRTY
Shorty and Nashville sat in their jeep with the radio turned off, watching the afternoon storm gather overhead. Shorty had lost his cherry, his fiancée and now Quyn. He no longer believed in God. He’d lost his religion, almost without noticing, the day he had seen Mickey’s headless corpse. Shorty was free to do whatever he liked. He’d enjoyed destroying Le Boudin, even though, strictly speaking, it was against the law. He still felt like he was at war, but now it was him and Nashville against everyone else. The war against the Viet Cong, he felt, was futile. The only good thing the Australians did in Vung Tau was build the orphans’ school.
Shorty told Nashville his only ambition now was to sleep with a white girl.
‘I dated a white girl once,’ said Nashville, ‘back in Troy, Tennessee. She was so white she was almost albino. Her name was Helen.’
‘Helen of Troy?’ asked Shorty.
‘I guess so,’ said Nashville. ‘I never thought of that.’
‘You know,’ said Shorty, ‘most people believe Troy was in Greece, but it was actually in Turkey.’
Nashville raised an eyebrow, partly for the simple satisfaction it gave him. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘You’ve taught me something new.’
Shorty grinned.
‘A turkey is a flightless bird,’ said Shorty. ‘It’s a member of the ratite family, like the ostrich.’
Nashville nodded. ‘Are you now going to tell me everything you fucking know?’ he asked.
‘It’s what you did to me,’ said Shorty.
Nashville tapped patient fingers on the dashboard. ‘I was trying to fucking educate you,’ he said, ‘in the ways of the world outside Bendigo, Victoria.’
‘I’ve been educated,’ said Shorty. ‘I left school at seventeen.’
‘I left school at fourteen,’ said Nashville.
‘When you’re fifteen,’ said Shorty, ‘you learn where Troy was.’
Nashville and Shorty knew the VC had killed Caution because Caution had killed Nguyễn Van Tran, but they couldn’t figure why the VC would care about the old man. There were rumours that his son had been a guerrilla fighter, but you could say that about any boy from the villages. The VC must have cut off Caution’s ears for revenge – ‘an ear for an ear’, said Nashville – but there were GIs all over Vietnam slicing bits off gooks, and very few stories about zipperheads dissecting grunts. It was as if the war were more furious, more personal in Vung Tau, so far from the front.
‘But why’d the VC murder Mickey?’ asked Shorty.
‘Nobody likes cops,’ said Nashville.
Nashville was tired of thinking about things he couldn’t change. He was alive and free, with both his ears – if none of his eyebrows – and half a tour of Vietnam ahead of him.
Shorty thought they ought to celebrate together. He would buy Nashville a woman.
‘Let’s find a couple of Natalie Susan Mitchells and have a party,’ said Shorty.
Nashville looked down at his fingers intertwined in his lap. ‘Natalie Susan Mitchell was a nice girl,’ he mumbled. ‘She would never do the things we make broads do here.’
He looked up at the clouds, as if Natalie Susan Mitchell might be floating in the air. ‘I drove her out to the lake after the game,’ said Nashville, ‘and you know what I did, when she wouldn’t put out? I left her there, alone, at ten o’clock at night, to walk three miles back into town.’
Nashville shook his head. ‘What kind of guy would do that?’ he asked.
His mouth crumpled and he gritted his teeth. ‘What kind of a man would live the way I do? I spend half the year catching a dose and the other half spreading it around. I fuck and I fight and I drink till I puke, when there’s boys out in the jungle dying every hour of the day.’
Shorty was surprised by Nashville’s mood. ‘They don’t even know what they’re dying for,’ said Shorty. ‘You once told me this war was just a gift to young men, our only chance to live our lives without rules.’
Nashville winced. ‘I ain’t entirely sure,’ he said, ‘if that was the right attitude for a law-enforcement officer.’
Nashville was a deep thinker who never thought about anything much. But in his hospital bed and his Conex cell, he’d spent time questioning himself, and the answers disturbed him.
‘The Vietnamese ain’t a joke,’ he said to Shorty. ‘There’s good people like Bucky who came to Vung Tau for our protection. And the refugees in town, they ran from the north because they worshipped God or spoke French or made their own money the American way, and all we do is run them down on their roads and chase their sisters into bed.’
Nashville despaired of himself, and the things that he’d done to the women of Vung Tau. ‘We’ve got to help them,’ he said. ‘Not fuck them.’ He set his jaw firmly. ‘So I don’t want to go anyplace tonight,’ he said. ‘I ain’t going to make anything worse.’
The snakeman had watched in the early morning as the cycloman had taken Baby Marie from Le Boudin and pedalled her out of town, hiding hunched beneath a blanket. She’d asked him to carry her to Ba Ria, where she had a cousin who’d conceal her and arrange a car to Saigon, but the cycloman took her instead to Long Tâm Thu.
They were waiting for her outside the headman’s hut, Quôc the Deserter and Truong, wearing black peasant smocks and captured steel helmets. Quôc, who had never deserted the Viet Minh, grabbed Baby Marie by the shoulder and slapped her across the face.
‘Whore,’ he said.
‘Whore-monger,’ she cursed him.
Storks hunted though the flooded paddies as the village assembled in a weary, resentful circle around Baby Marie – all the purple-toothed grandfathers and their consumed, depleted wives. Older boys held up the younger children to watch. Little Hai with the fat legs sat on the shoulders of a man he called Uncle, who had lost his mind fighting the French.
They waited silently through the sunrise as the young men and women came out from the trees, sap-stained and silent, in oddments of uniform and bandoliers, carrying plundered, antique rifles, but light submachine guns and Type 59 pistols. There were strangers among the sons and brothers, sisters and daughters, cousins and husbands, and some youths who’d been expected were missing. Their mothers held their tears inside.
The village headman no longer pretended authority. The meeting was under the control of the VC commander, an orphan educated for one year at the Australian school, who called himself Ginger Meggs.
‘You endangered us all,’ said Ginger Meggs, slowly and loudly. ‘You led the Americans to our village.’
Baby Marie bowed her head. ‘I didn’t know you were keeping the body parts here,’ she said. How could she know? It wasn’t her village.
‘But you told the soldiers to search the huts,’ said Ginger Meggs.
‘To frighten the old slut Quyn,’ said Baby Marie, ‘not to hinder the revolution.’
The village was tense, torn. It wanted contrition but hoped for all cruelty to end.
‘How could you be so stupid?’ asked Ginger Meggs.
Baby Marie felt as though she were already dead. She cried a little, mourning herself. ‘I am stupid,’ she admitted. ‘I am wrong. I am selfish and cowardly.’
It wasn’t enough. Ginger Meggs looked upon her unkindly. He knew she went with Americans.
‘How could you be so small,’ said Ginger Meggs, ‘to act upon jealousy among women when we are at war?’
His soldiers had been betrayed, and they looked to him for strength.
‘I am a traitor and a whore,’ said Baby Marie.
His fingers tapped the hilt of the hunting knife in his belt. ‘Many could have died,’ said Ginger Meggs.
She waited in the sun for his judgement.
Ginger Meggs looked to the villagers to measure their mood. He shouldn’t be a force outside them; he was the instrument of the people’s will.
On Ginger Meggs’s signal, Quôc the Deserter pulled Baby Marie’s arms behind her back. She screamed and Quôc put his hand over her mouth. The commander unsheathed his knife and held it over Baby Marie’s ear. He let the blade touch the spot where the cartilage fused with her scalp, then he seized her long black hair, and sliced it at the roots. She bit into Quôc’s fingers as Ginger Meggs tore at her head, pulling out great handfuls of hair. Her scalp bled as he tossed clumps of hair onto the ground.
A few villagers looked away. Many stared, interested by something they had never seen. When Baby Marie’s head was bald, and blood flowed into her eyes, the commander held out his hand to the headman’s wife, who brought him a cut lime in a bowl.
Ginger Meggs took the fruit and grimly rubbed
citrus into Baby Marie’s lacerations.
When he had finished, her skin was pink and raw, her mouth twisted and bawling, a bloody caul around her scalp.
The snakeman didn’t see this, but knew it had happened nonetheless.
At dusk, the snakeman watched Bucky struggle onto his rickety bicycle, with its spider-legged spokes and back wheel bent almost square, and set off on the road to the top of the cliffs that overlooked the South China Sea. Bucky’s body had only partly healed. Caution had damaged the sight in his left eye. His knees were weakened, the bones in one foot were still broken, his collarbone and ribs were girdled by bandages. But he laboured up the path to the mountains, gasping and wincing with the effort of pedalling.
Bucky stopped before the bomb-pocked, bullet-cratered face of an abandoned French mansion, with its columns and arches and high, shuttered windows. He unloaded a bag of croissants from his pannier, and climbed the steps to the dark wood door.
He wiped his brow with a kerchief flecked with blood, then rapped the doorknocker three times. Tâm came to the door, carrying an AK-47. He handed her the croissants. She let him into the house.
The walls in the musty entry were faded and bare. Quyn waited in the parlour with a tub of water and rolls of hot towels. Bucky shrugged off the rag that was his shirt. Tâm passed her weapon to Quyn, removed Bucky’s pants and helped him into the bath.
The two bar girls washed Bucky, then helped him into a bedroom, where some of the old style of the house remained. There was an oil painting of a castle on the Rhône, heavy curtains, and a soft mattress set on a four-poster canopy bed shrouded by a mosquito net.
As Bucky stretched out naked over the cool, white sheets, they rubbed oil into his belly and thighs. Quyn licked the grazes on his neck, and Tâm kissed his lips.
A dark brown hand tapped the mansion door. Another bar girl, armed like a guerrilla, admitted Ginger Meggs, who glanced around with a peasant’s curiosity. He had never been in a home so large. He imagined it in the future as a clinic, or a school.
Ginger Meggs had enjoyed no part of his last operations – except, perhaps, toying with the tall Australian. Militarily, the killing of the Vietnamese MP had been pointless, and the slaying of the American sergeant, half-conscious in the dirt, absurd. He had risked the safety of his people for no good purpose, and sickened himself cutting off the head of a man who posed no threat to them. And if not for that butchery, he would never have been placed in the position where he’d had to humiliate the girl. Ginger Meggs was no hired assassin. He had not joined the National Liberation Front to do favours for people like this. In time, he would see them hang. But he understood the importance of keeping the balance of power in this town, where revolutionaries were in the minority, at least for now. He waited in the hallway, anxious to get away. His men and women had half their guns trained on the highway, the rest on the house.
