A Dangerous Friend (12 page)

Rostok's voice had fallen to a whisper, and then died away. Sydney waited for more but Rostok had said what he had to say and now was silent. He imagined his friend's nightstand filled with wild jottings, descriptions of Ho at the pastry table, patiently counting swans while he imagined the revolution to come. Probably he thought of the birds as so many expendable infantrymen, fragile as meringue.

They walked on, Rostok lost in thought. Mist was rising from the forest, wispy vapors that seemed to take one shape, then another, vanishing and gathering again in the heavy air. The village was behind them now. Rostok said softly, Tell me what you can about the Armands. What did you learn?

Sydney hesitated, then explained about Missy and her apartment in the rue du Louvre, the long trip south from Paris, the stone house and the Roman wall, the heavy meal and the raw wine, and the four Armand brothers, one in France, two in Africa, one in Indochina. He related the conversation as best he could recollect it, Missy translating, the old man belligerently staring across the table, his heavy arms across his chest. Suspicious old bastard, wouldn't give an inch. He thinks it's dangerous for his brother to meet with Americans. Meet with Americans, share information with Americans, that might mean you're choosing sides. Plus, we've been bombing his rubber trees.

So you didn't get the letter, Rostok said.

I got the back of his hand, Sydney said.

Nice place they have?

Stone house in the mountains. Second-century Roman wall in the back yard.

Rostok stopped to light a cigarette, blowing a smoke ring that hung stubbornly in the mist. Did you tell him that you could do something about the rubber trees? That Claude's rubber trees were under your supervision? That you had authority and could do something about the bombing?

I did. He didn't buy.

Rostok kicked at a stone in the road and muttered something.

He thought I was too dangerous for his brother.

People are going to have to choose sides. Even French people.

They think they know more about it than we do.

Everybody thinks they know more about it than we do. But that's not the point. Cooperation's the point. Choosing sides is the point.

They don't forget their experience any more than we forget ours, Sydney said. We think we're back in the European theater in War Two. We want to bomb. We think if we turn Haiphong into Hamburg we'll break the spirit of the population. We think there's a Rhine somewhere, and if we can find it we can cross it and occupy the enemy's heartland, and then old Ho will retire to his bunker with his mistress and commit suicide. And the French don't want to fight at all. Why would they? Where did fighting ever get them? In this century it's one catastrophe after another, from Verdun to the Maginot Line to Dien Bien Phu. So I don't think we ought to count on them, Ros. It's really only us here on the ground. And that's what we've wanted all along, isn't it? We've wanted to be the sentry on the bridge. And now we are.

There are ways and means, Rostok said vaguely.

Did you know Claude's wife is American?

Rostok muttered something noncommittal.

She worked for the embassy. She was Cultural Affairs. What do you suppose she did in Cultural Affairs? Bring jazz bands to Danang?
West Side Story
to the opera house in Saigon? Maybe university professors to lecture on myth in William Faulkner. What do you suppose she did as cultural attaché?

I think she ran the USIA library.

I saw her picture, a good-looking woman.

That's what they say, Rostok said.

There must have been people who knew her, embassy people. Our people. She must've had women friends, people she went to lunch with. She must have had a roommate before she married Claude. They're the ones who ought to make this approach, if you want to go ahead with it. Seems useless to me.

It was a while ago she worked for the embassy, Rostok said. Anyone who knew her has been rotated home. And when she married Armand she disappeared into Xuan Loc, and that's an insecure sector, has been for years. She even stopped going to the Cercle Sportif. Last time anyone saw her was when she showed up to have her passport renewed. That was routine, no one thought anything about it. She was in and out in thirty minutes and the moron on duty didn't have the sense to check her out and get a message upstairs. He did notice that she had nice legs and freckles. At that time we thought we had things in hand and no one cared about an American living on a rubber plantation, unless she was in danger; and if she was, she didn't say so. None of our people have even met Claude Armand. Two of the lads went out to the plantation a few times, made the courtesy call, anything we can do for you, Dede, and by the way, how's the security situation in your sector? But no one was at home and the servants weren't talking. And then they realized they were at the wrong plantation. So everyone forgot about them. Except me.

I think they're unimportant, Sydney said. They're two people holed up on a rubber plantation, and who cares?

Let me tell you something, Syd. Hard to succeed in this business. You've got to have something that no one else has. MACV has the army, the navy, the air force, and the marines. The spooks have the money and the confidence of the people who count. The embassy has the State Department, and their teletypes connect to Highest Levels. What do we have? We have a few smart guys and an ambitious charter. They're hoping Llewellyn Group can make some difference but they have no idea what that difference might be. So our great task is to have something that no one else has, and when we get it we'll be listened to, and if we don't get it they'll collapse us like a tin can. What that thing is right now is knowledge. We've got to know things that the rest of them don't know from a source of information they can't figure out. If they do figure it out, they'll steal it, especially CAS. Then we're out in the cold. We want a source of information that's ours and ours alone. They'll have to admit, Rostok has that information. He's the only one who has it and he's holding it tight, because he's a son of a bitch. So ask him nicely and give him something in return.

Rostok paused, suddenly alert. Then he lowered his voice.

And then Llewellyn Group will count for something. Not before. It's information we're after and I'm not even certain what information, what it is that I need to know. I don't even know what I don't know. But I intend to find out. And I have an idea that Monsieur Armand and his American wife will be able to help me. I'm highly confident, Syd. And I have confidence in you, too. It all fits in.

Then he was quiet, listening.

Shut up now, Syd.

They moved, crouching, into the shadows of a sandalwood tree. Rostok dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. It was so quiet Sydney could hear the ticking of his wristwatch; then he realized it was not his wristwatch but something else, a mechanical click-click of something in the road ahead, and mixed in with it a strenuous vibration, the pulse of bodies moving. When they came out of the mist they were elevated and as clumsy as camels, their heads forward, bodies swaying, humpbacked, moving in a single-file caravan. They were slow. The bicycles lurched this way and that, avoiding the ruts in the road. The men did not speak and glided like ghosts in the swirling mist. Three feet separated each bicyclist. Sydney counted six, and six more, then stopped counting because Rostok was breathing so heavily he thought the troop would surely hear them. Each man carried a slung carbine, a backpack, and a long black sock that looked like a bandolier but was filled with rice. Their uniforms were black and their faces camouflaged. They came on and on, never speaking, as much a part of the night as the dead air that surrounded them. Rostok had begun to tremble and when one of the guerrillas turned to look at them, Sydney held his breath. The Vietnamese wore little wire-rimmed glasses that had slipped to the end of his nose. His expression was blank. In his exhaustion and myopia he saw nothing and in a moment was gone; and then they were all gone, leaving Sydney and Rostok in a state of silent terror. When Sydney put his hand on Rostok's back it came away wet with sweat. Rostok stank. His face seemed to glow in the dark. And then they were talking at once.

God almighty.

Did you see that one look at us?
Right at us.

Ugly little bastard, blind as a bat. That's as close as we'll ever come, Syd. God almighty.

Did you see the bikes? They looked fifty years old.

God almighty, Rostok said, and began walking.

Five minutes later they were in the driveway of Group House. Rostok opened the door to his Scout and heaved himself inside. He took a revolver from the glove compartment and laid it on the seat beside him. He sat for a moment, thinking, his hands at two and ten on the steering wheel. He was gripping it so tightly his knuckles were white. He started the engine, the racket shattering the evening stillness. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift away out the window.

Our lads caught a couple of youngsters last week, he said thoughtfully. Infantrymen from the Something regiment that operates around Tay Ninh. They were just peasant boys from the North. The interrogator had a bright idea. Instead of asking them the usual questions about troop strength, operations, and so forth—which he knew he wouldn't get answers to anyway, until he went to the screws and the water pail—he asked them questions you might ask in a high school history exam. Turned out they didn't know the simplest things. They had only the vaguest idea who we were and where we came from. They did not know we occupied a continent half the world away. They did not know the simplest facts about the twentieth century, Hitler and the Second World War. Eisenhower and the D-day landing. They did know about Stalin and they knew about the Bomb. They had never heard of Roosevelt or Truman. Drew a blank on Winston Churchill. They did not know where Australia was. Of their own revolution they were similarly ignorant, except that it had to be done and it would succeed, thanks to Ho and General Giap and the example of Dien Bien Phu. Think about that, Sydney.

Sydney grunted. His mind was back somewhere on the road with the silent bicycle soldiers.

Nothing to fear from them, Rostok said. Knowledge is power and they're ignorant, so in the last analysis they're powerless. Nothing to fear from the Armands, either. They're marginal people. They won't last. They've been in Vietnam for so long they can't imagine the shape of the modern world, its conscience and direction. They're not stupid people. They're people who are unaware. They're people who have been left behind. The world has moved on but they have not moved on with it. So they're incomplete. They choose to be incomplete, so the hell with them.

Sydney tapped the hood of the Scout. Bye-bye, Ros.

When you find Claude Armand, let me know at once.

Rostok gunned the engine, then turned it off and got out of the Scout. On second thought, he would not attempt the drive back to Saigon. He was tired. He reached through the window to fetch the revolver. If Sydney's spare bedroom was free, he'd take it.

F
OUR MONTHS IN-COUNTRY
, dreamless at night, Sydney Parade was the happiest he'd been. In the mornings he spread the huge map of Vietnam on his desk and memorized the villages in his sector; some of them inaccessible by road. The army provided a helicopter for a reconnaissance by ait; but that was useless because the landmarks were unfamiliar and distances seemed not to correspond to the map. Yet he believed he had entered into the modern world at last, the one that floated unmoored on the surface of a vast windless mirrored ocean, the horizon forever out of reach. The journey mattered more than the destination, which remained undefined. Whatever it was, they were making progress toward it.

Llewellyn Group lived in flux, the days changing and dissolving, marked only by the accumulation of facts, data assembled from a thousand collection points—rice distributed, vaccinations administered, dikes repaired, roads and bridges built, schools refitted, reports filed. Numbers were fundamental to the estimate of the situation. They tried to build a narrative from the numbers, numbers doing the work of verbs and predicates, numbers supported by instinct, instinct supported by numbers. These were the facts of the matter. As Rostok said, It all adds up.

In his letters home, Sydney attempted to put a human face on the statistics—the resigned look of schoolchildren as they stood in line waiting for polio vaccine, the patience of farmers as they listened to an agronomist explain the miracle of pesticides, the surprise and pleasure on the faces of the local militia when an army unit arrived with a Rome plow to build a soccer field. He imagined himself undergoing a kind of conversion, from apostate—though he had never had great faith, so there had been precious little to renounce—to believer. If these small actions could be duplicated in the countryside every day, would not the Vietnamese people rally to the cause of the government? The revolution offered only hardship and danger; of living like a hunted animal without adequate provisions and with no furloughs, ever, only funerals in absentia. What sort of life was that? Meanwhile, the American arsenal grew and the infantry divisions kept coming.

And the revolution did not hesitate. It grew along with the American arsenal, and the raids and subversion and sabotage grew as well. None of this activity was justified by the statistics, so painstakingly assembled.

The country team was drawn to extreme analogies in attempting to explain the flux of the facts. Preparing for bed in the thick heat, elated at his own good fortune, Sydney began to think of them as believers in the occult, the veneration of the Virgin or of the Cabala or of ordinal numbers or strange beasts, unicorns or Chimeras, invoking the spirits of the dead or the white magic of theurgists. Often he thought of Ho Chi Minh's pastry swans afloat on a silver platter, decorated with confectioners' sugar dust and angels' hair; how disconnected from the revolutionary world the kitchen at the Hotel Carlton must have seemed to the young revolutionary, and how tyrannical old Escoffier in his toque and white apron stained with the blood of young lamb.