On Green Dolphin Street (23 page)

Nowhere could a war zone have been more torpid, Frank thought, as he walked down the dusty streets with their Second Empire façades and backyard chicken runs. America was there and not there in this humid and beautiful backwater; the wishes of the Dulles brothers, the tense edicts of Langley and Foggy Bottom, the phrases such as “line of dominoes” were discounted and absorbed by the air in which they were uttered, with the smoke of opium and the steam of noodle soup from the open-backed kitchens. It was a lazy town, unwilling to confront the world; it reminded Frank a little of New Orleans, and it seemed to him a natural home for people on the run from their responsibilities.

He had not pictured himself as such a person, yet he felt liberated by the life he led. Chicago and its icy winters, the offices and streets of the Loop, seemed to have been experienced by someone from another generation, unrelated to himself. He believed he had shed the memory of the streets where he had grown up, that the war, then college had cleared his mind. Yet perhaps these things were still in him; perhaps even his attitude to Tilly, frictionless as it seemed, was influenced by the circumstances of his youth. Did she represent the rejection of a Catholic upbringing whereby he was meant to marry an Italian, or did she show that he still
had a need to grab something wherever he went, something to show he was not just another self-invented man with no belongings in the world? He believed neither of these things, yet Saigon was certainly solving something; and how could you feel relieved unless you had been in pain?

The city made him feel he could be many people, that in his middle thirties he was nowhere near the finished version of himself, and that even if he ever got there, that too might turn out to be provisional—not a stable compound of temperament and experience, but a bundle of momentary inclinations.

Frank crumbled his roll onto the table and sipped the ice water. Kennedy’s speech in Minneapolis had a little more Democratic self-congratulation than usual for the sake of his Jefferson-Jackson Day audience, but otherwise varied little from the set routine. Alcohol was not served, and when Frank returned to his hotel he went to the bar.

After two whiskey sours he felt better, and was thinking of going up to his room; he was returning to New York the following morning and had arranged to see Mary in the evening. From the reception area he heard an English voice.

“Can you tell me where the downtown is?”

“What exactly are you looking for, sir?” said the desk clerk.

“Anything. Some sign of life.”

The voice, though neither raised nor slurred, was recognizably Charlie van der Linden’s.

“What do you mean there’s no downtown? There must be.” Charlie’s manner was playful rather than abusive. Frank found a smile twitching at his lips, but made no move from his seat.

It was inevitable, he thought, that Charlie, thwarted in his search for action, would resort to the hotel bar, and a few moments later he was aware of a tall presence and an English voice muttering amiably beneath its breath a few feet away.

Frank turned to him in the cocktail gloom. “Welcome to Minneapolis, pal.”

Charlie peered for a minute, partly because it was so dark, partly, Frank thought, because he was trying to remember his name. “Frank!” he said triumphantly. “Christ, it’s nice to see you.”

Frank had never before come face-to-face with a man with whose wife he was sleeping, but the tone of Charlie’s voice was familiar enough: it was that of a lonely traveler whose problems have suddenly been solved.

“Have a drink,” Charlie said. “God, what a place.”

Frank thought any sign of reserve might seem suspicious, so he accepted the drink and the prospect of a long evening. It was the last Kennedy event Charlie was required to attend before the convention, and he was clearly relieved that the end was in sight.

“You heading back to Washington?”

“You bet. Even the tedium of the Embassy’s preferable to … this.” Charlie made a gesture that included hotels, travel, politics, teetotal dinners and all of Minnesota.

But your wife won’t be there, thought Frank. She’ll be naked in my bed.

Charlie looked at him and smiled. Frank looked back into Charlie’s face. Its handsome lines were starting to break up; the cheeks were badly shaved, there were gathering pouches on the jaw and fleshy rings developing beneath the eyes. Frank smiled back candidly.

He drank quickly, to quell his misgivings and to catch up with Charlie. He started to grow used to the strange nature of his situation; the guilt began to ebb. It reminded him of what he had told Roxanne about killing a man. After a while it feels like everything you do: it feels like nothing at all.

By the time the barman said he would like to close up, all that Frank felt toward Charlie was a sentimental warmth, a desire to put his arm around him in a sincere embrace. When Charlie mentioned the supply of scotch in his room, Frank accepted with vehement gratitude. By two in the morning, he was even drunker than Charlie; he was sitting on the edge of the bed, haranguing him about the FBI.

“This beautiful country … Such a time in its life. But those bastards,
you know, they killed my best friend … They almost finished my career. They’re in everything. A mist you can’t see.”

“I know,” said Charlie, blinking at Frank’s passion. “There was someone I met in Vietnam—”

“Yeah, what the hell were you doing in Vietnam? I meant to ask you.”

“We were in Tokyo at the time. The Ambassador was getting leant on by the Foreign Office in the usual way. Eden was getting an earful from Dulles about why didn’t Britain join in. And we’d just finished in Malaya, given up India, we didn’t want to get involved in a French problem, particularly when they’d been so useless in the war.”

“Sure. But how’d you get up to Dien Bien Phu?”

Charlie was leaning against a warehouse off the boulevard de la Somme, overlooking the Saigon River, where American planes were being unloaded from transport ships by the light of flares. He had been taken to dinner at a restaurant on the boulevard Charner and afterward felt the need to see something for himself, without Barrett and Walther interpreting everything for him through the lens of American interest. He had asked if they could organize for him to go up to Dien Bien Phu, where the French were preparing for a decisive head-on conflict with the Vietminh, but they seemed unwilling. He thought that perhaps they had scented a gestating disaster, which made him more curious, but without the help of an authorized agency he could not make the trip. His British colleagues had been correct but uncooperative, and he had just arrived at the stage in his life when he was becoming reckless.

He was mildly drunk on French wine and had his fortune told with cards on top of an upturned crate in front of a warehouse. “You will be a rich man,” the fortune-teller told him in his almost incomprehensible French-Vietnamese. “You will be rich in love. You will not live to old age. Many dangers lie ahead.” Seldom could a greasy jack of clubs have been so eloquent, Charlie thought, as he produced some coins from his pocket and moved off.

There was still activity on the boulevard de la Somme, with barbers shaving customers by torchlight beneath the trees and stalls selling noodle soup or rice with fermented fish sauce. On the waterfront, Charlie kept a distance from the ships, whose unloading was performed under armed guard. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the doorway. His thoughts turned to home and to Mary, whom he pictured reading alone in the bare sitting room of their Tokyo apartment, her ear tuned to any sound that might come from the children’s room, where two-year-old Richard lightly slept. Mary had her self-balancing temperament, her inner gyroscope; Louisa had her quietly intense interests; he himself still had the capacity for exhilaration; but Richard had something none of the others did: a riotous passion for each day and a delight in its details. His demands were irresistible; his candor disarmed rebuke. He had become seigneurial in his attitude to their discreet Japanese lodging; when he returned from his walk in the park, he would go into the living room, throw open the door onto the terrace and, standing on the threshold with his rosy genitals resting on the ledge of his half-mast pants, micturate resoundingly onto the gravel.

At the thought of his small son, Charlie was smiling a little in the gloom when a voice made him start. “Pardon me. You got a light?”

In the glow of the match, Charlie saw a young man with an unmistakably American crew cut. “My name’s Moone. Buy you a beer?”

Charlie’s instinctive recoil was lost to his reflex affirmative. In a brightly lit café over cheap half liters of beer, Charlie told Moone he was a salesman for electrical goods.

“Sure,” said Moone.

They talked about the war. “The French are doing a pretty good job up there,” said Moone.

“I hear they’re surrounded.”

“You want to go take a look? I could fix it for you.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

Moone shrugged. “Just thought you might be interested. There’s been a flow of visitors for weeks. Reporters go up all the time. I know people who could fix it. Soon the rains’ll come and it’ll be too late. Know how
much rain they’ll be getting in the next three months? Five feet. You hear that? Five feet. So now’s the time to go. But not if you’re not interested.”

“No, I’m not.”

After two more beers, Moone made another suggestion. “You ever smoke opium?”

Charlie smiled at the tidy young man with his sky-blue seersucker jacket and cleanly shaved face with its coins of topical acne. “I suppose you can fix that too,” he said.

“It’s not difficult,” said Moone. “There’s a dozen places in this block. I know the best. You know how it feels when you drink a big dry martini before lunch? Feel like you’re king of the heap? It’s a lot better.”

He led Charlie to another café, then up two flights of stairs to a dark landing, where he told him to wait. Eventually, a young Annamite woman came out and led Charlie into a dark sitting room with low couches round the walls. Moone, who was already sitting down, grinned at him encouragingly as the woman set to work, heating a bubbling lump of brown opium over a flame.

“When she gives it to you, suck it all down in one go,” he said.

The woman looked bored by the procedure, though her hands moved dexterously. The pipe was made of bamboo, unadorned, with a bowl cut into it where the woman kneaded the gum on a pin. When it was ready, she plunged it into the bowl and reversed the pipe over the flame, so the opium drew smoothly as she held the pipe out to Charlie. She helped keep it steady as he sucked in the smoke and held it in his lungs. As soon as he had exhaled and released the pipe, she began the process again with a weary efficiency; it made Charlie think of a waggish landlord in a village pub with his regular tankards and china beer handles.

After his third pipe, he felt no alteration in himself or his body, but what he could only describe as a philosophical shift of gravity. The world had shed a skin and revealed its magnificence. Charlie could see that he had previously been deceived into thinking that there was something bitter, tense and self-defeating about the brief human passage through an existence devoid of meaning. Now he could see that the world was not like that at all, but an intricate mechanism of boundless yet quite lucid
beauty which was entirely comprehensible to the regal power of his intellect. There was no fear, no doubt, no death; the idea of calamity or grief was absurd. He could perhaps imagine unhappiness, but only as an hypothesis that had no real existence. The truth of bliss, meanwhile, was everlasting and was underwritten by the calm and powerful reality of the revealed world.

Some hours later, Moone drove him back to the Hotel Continental and saw him up to his room. When Charlie awoke, it was almost eleven and he found a note with Moone’s telephone number, saying, “Call me if you change your mind about the trip north.”

The thought that transcendence could be achieved for so little trouble was a poignant one to Charlie, who was finding that moments of contentment had begun to grow elusive. From his hotel he cabled Tokyo about the possibility of a trip to Dien Bien Phu. It was ill-advised to go without knowing who his sponsor was, but he felt confident, in the residual elation of the opium, that all would be well; it would, at the very least, be interesting. The head of his section replied that a major action was thought to be imminent, but told him to trust his own judgment after he had consulted his colleagues in Saigon. Charlie followed the first part of the advice but not the second because he was too impatient with the prudence of bureaucracy. He took the risk. He telephoned Moone and was instructed to report to the military air base in forty-eight hours’ time. Moone left some press accreditation for him at the reception desk at the Continental, stating that he worked for the BBC; Charlie winced at the deception but thought that he had reached a point from which he could not turn back. His fellow passengers were mostly journalists, though there were a couple of overalled mechanics and one or two others Charlie did not care to ask about. They flew for almost four hours in an American Dakota to Hanoi, then refueled for the flight west to Dien Bien Phu.

As they began their approach, Charlie noticed that the French camp was in the bottom of the valley; it was a cul-de-sac, from which the only exit was the airstrip itself. It looked like a vast prehistoric village whose inhabitants, not having discovered how to build, were sheltering in various holes in the ground. They saw regular red flashes of Vietminh artillery
fire from the intense jungle on the hills; the sound followed a few moments later, then the upward trickling smoke. To have allowed the enemy to take the high ground above a position from which you had no guaranteed means of escape struck Charlie as, to say the least, unorthodox. The second thing he noticed as they came in was that they were under fire; and the third, as they touched down, was that the temporary runway, made of pierced steel plates, was holed by artillery shells. Beside the strip, abandoned, were the still-smoldering remains of an American Flying Boxcar transport and a Cricket reconnaissance aircraft. Red dust was blown through the steel plates of the runway by the propellers as the plane taxied down into a bunker at the end of the strip. They climbed out and went inside a depot where they were given tea by a Senegalese corporal. Charlie spoke as little as possible to the others for fear of giving away his ignorance of journalism. Eventually a French major came in and introduced himself.