Rain Fall (21 page)

I took two deep breaths. “Tell me to stop, or I’m going to keep going.”

Midori was silent.

“The village was called Cu Lai. We herded all the people together, maybe forty or fifty people, including women and children. We burned their homes down right in front of them. We shot all their farm animals, massacred the pigs and cows. Effigy, you know? Catharsis. But it wasn’t cathartic enough.

“Now what are we supposed to do with these people? I used the radio, even though you’re not supposed to because the enemy can triangulate, they can find your position. But what were we supposed to do with these people? We had just destroyed their village.

“The guy on the other end of the radio, I still don’t know who, says, ‘Waste ’em.’ This was the way we described killing back then—so and so got wasted, we wasted ten V.C.

“I’m quiet, and the guy says again, ‘Waste ’em.’ Now this is unnerving. It’s one thing to be on the brink of hot-blooded murder. It’s another to have the impulse coolly sanctioned higher up the chain of
command. Suddenly I’m scared, realizing how close we had been. I say, ‘Waste who?’ He says, ‘All of ’em. Everybody.’ I say, ‘We’re talking about forty, fifty people here, some women and children, too. Do you understand that?’ The guy says again, ‘Just waste ’em.’ ‘Can I have your name and rank?’ I say, because suddenly I’m not going to kill all these people just because a voice over the radio tells me to. ‘Son,’ the voice says, ‘I assure you if I told you my rank you’d shit your pants for me. You are in a declared free-fire zone. Now do as I say.’

“I told him I wouldn’t do it without being able to verify his authority. Then two more people, who claimed to be this guy’s superiors, got on the radio. One of them says, ‘You have been given a direct order under the authority of the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Obey this order or suffer the consequences.’

“So I went back to the rest of the unit to talk this over. They were guarding the villagers. I told them what I had just heard. For most of the guys, it had the same effect it had on me: it cooled them down, scared them. But some of them it excited. ‘No fucking way,’ they were saying. ‘They’re
telling
us to waste ’em? Far out.’ Still, everyone was hesitating.

“I had a friend, Jimmy Calhoun, who everyone called Crazy Jake. He hadn’t been contributing much to the conversation. All of a sudden he says, ‘Fucking pussies. Waste ’em means waste ’em.’ He starts yelling at the villagers in Vietnamese. ‘Get down, everybody on the ground!
Num suyn!’
And the villagers complied. We were fascinated, wondering
what he was going to do. Jimmy doesn’t even slow down, he just steps back, shoulders his rifle, then
ka-pop! ka-pop!
he starts shooting them. It was weird; no one tried to run away. Then one of the other guys yells ‘Crazy fuckin’ Jake!’ and shoulders his rifle, too. The next thing I knew we were all unloading our clips into these people, just blowing them apart. Clip runs out, press, slide, click, you put in a new clip and fire some more.”

My voice was still steady, my eyes fixed straight ahead, remembering. “If I could go back in time, I would try to stop it. I really would. I wouldn’t participate. And the memories dog me. I’ve been running for twenty-five years, but in the end, it’s like trying to lose a shadow.”

There was a protracted silence, and I imagined her thinking,
I slept with a monster.

“I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said, confirming my suspicions.

I shrugged, feeling empty. “Maybe it’s better that you know.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s an upsetting story. Upsetting to hear what you’ve been through. I never thought of war as so . . . personal.”

“Oh, it was personal. On both sides. There were special medals for NVA—North Vietnamese Army soldiers—who killed an American. A severed head was the proof. If it was a SOG man you killed, you’d get an extra ten thousand piastres—several months’ pay.”

She touched my face again, and I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes. “You were right. You’ve been through horrors. I didn’t know.”

I took her hands and gently moved them away. “Hey, I didn’t even tell you the best part. The intel on the village being a V.C. stronghold? Bogus. No tunnel networks, no rice or weapons caches.”

“Sonna, sonna koto. . . ,”
she said. “You mean . . . but, John, you didn’t know.”

I shrugged. “Not even any telltale tire tracks, which, c’mon, we could have taken a second to check for before we started slaughtering people.”

“But you were so young. You must have been out of your minds with fear, with anger.”

I could feel her looking at me. It was okay. After all this time, the words sounded dead to me, just sounds without content.

“Is that what you meant that first night?” she asked. “About not being a forgiving person?”

I remembered saying it to her, remembered her looking like she was going to ask me about it, then seeming to decide not to. “It’s not what I meant, actually. I was thinking of other people, not of myself. But I guess it applies to me, also.”

She nodded slowly, then said, “I have a friend from Chiba named Mika. When I was in New York, she had a car accident. She hit a little girl who was playing in the street. Mika was driving at forty-five kilometers per hour, the speed limit, and the little girl drove her bicycle out right in front of the car. There was nothing she could do. It was bad luck. It would have happened to anyone who was driving the car right there and right then.”

On a certain level, I understood what she was getting at. I’d known it all along, even before the psych
evaluation they made me take at one point to see how I was handling the special stress of SOG. The shrink they made me talk to had said the same thing: “How can you blame yourself for circumstances that were beyond your control?”

I remember that conversation. I remember listening to his bullshit, half angry, half amused at his attempts to draw me out. Finally, I just said to him, “Have you ever killed anyone, Doc?” When he didn’t answer, I walked out. I don’t know what kind of evaluation he gave me. But they didn’t turn me loose from SOG. That came later.

“Do you still work with these people?” she asked.

“There are connections,” I responded.

“Why?” she asked after a moment. “Why stay attached to things that give you nightmares?”

I glanced over at the window. The moon had moved higher in the sky, its light slowly ebbing from the room. “It’s a hard thing to explain,” I said slowly. I watched her hair glistening in the pale light, like a vertical sheet of water. I ran my fingers through it, gathered it in my hand and let it fall free. “Some of what I was part of in Vietnam didn’t sit well with me when I got back to the States. Some things belong only in a war zone, but then they want to follow you when you leave. After the war, I found I couldn’t go back to the life I’d left behind. I wanted to come back to Asia, because Asia was where my ghosts were least restless, but it was more than just geography. All the things I’d done made sense in war, they were justified by war, I couldn’t live with them outside of war. So I needed to stay at war.”

Her eyes were pools of darkness. “But you can’t stay at war forever, John.”

I gave her a wan smile. “A shark can’t stop swimming, or it dies.”

“You’re not a shark.”

“I don’t know what I am.” I rubbed my temples with my fingers, trying to work through the images, past and present, that were colliding in my brain. “I don’t know.”

We were quiet for a while, and I felt a pleasant drowsiness descend. I was going to regret all this. Some lucid part of my mind saw that clearly. But sleep seemed so much more urgent, and anyway what was done was already done.

I slept, but the pain in my back kept the sleep fitful, and in those moments where consciousness briefly crested I would have doubted everything that had happened if she hadn’t been lying next to me. Then I would slide down into sleep again, there to struggle with ghosts even more personal, more terrible, than those of which I could tell Midori.

When your sword meets that of your enemy, you can never waver, but must instead attack with the complete resolution of your whole body . . .

 

—M
IYAMOTO
M
USASHI
,
A Book of Five Rings

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I was sitting with my back to the wall at my favorite vantage point in Las Chicas, waiting for Franklin Bulfinch to show himself.

It was a crisp, sunny morning, and between the bright light streaming through the windows and the overall hip atmosphere on which Las Chicas prides itself, I felt comfortable in my light-disguise knockoff Oakley shades, which I had picked up en route.

Midori was safely ensconced in the music section of the nearby Spiral Building on Aoyama-dori, close enough to meet Bulfinch quickly if necessary but far enough to be safe if things got hairy. She had called Bulfinch less than an hour earlier to arrange things. Most likely he was a legitimate reporter and would come to the meeting alone, but I saw no advantage in giving him time to deploy additional forces if I was mistaken.

Bulfinch was easy to spot as he approached the restaurant, the same tall, thin guy in wireless glasses I had seen on the train. He had a long stride and an erect, confident posture, and again struck me as
having an aristocratic air. He was wearing jeans and tennis shoes, dressed up with a blue blazer. He crossed the patio and stepped inside the restaurant proper, pausing to look right, then left, searching for Midori. His eyes passed over me without recognition.

He wandered back in the direction of the rest room, presumably checking the separate dining space in the back of the building. I knew he’d be back in a moment, and used the time to watch the street a little longer. He’d been followed at Alfie, and it was possible that he was being followed now.

The street was still empty when Bulfinch returned to the front of the restaurant a minute later. His eyes swept the space again. When they were pointed in my direction, I said quietly, “Mr. Bulfinch.”

He looked at me for a second before saying, “Do I know you?”

“I’m a friend of Midori Kawamura. She asked me to come in her stead.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in some danger right now. She needs to take care in her movements.”

“Is she coming here?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether I decide that it’s safe.”

“Who are you?”

“As I said, a friend, interested in the same thing you are.”

“Which is?”

I looked at him through my shades. “The disk.”

He paused before saying, “I don’t know about a disk.”

Right.
“You were expecting Midori’s father to deliver you a disk when he died on the Yamanote three weeks ago. He didn’t have it with him, so you followed up with Midori after her performance at Alfie the following Friday. You met her in the Starbucks on Gaienhigashi-dori, near Almond in Roppongi. That’s where you told her about the disk, because you hoped she might have it. You wouldn’t tell her what’s on the disk because you were afraid doing so would compromise her. Although you had already compromised her by showing up at Alfie, because you were followed. All of which will be sufficient, I hope, to establish my bona fides.”

He made no move to sit. “You could have learned most of that without Midori telling you, and filled in the gaps by educated guessing—especially if you were the one following me.”

I shrugged. “And then I imitated her voice and called you an hour ago?”

He hesitated, then walked over and sat, his back straight and his hands on the table. “All right. What can you tell me?”

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“Look, I’m a reporter. I write stories. Do you have information for me?”

“I need to know what’s on that disk.”

“You keep talking about a disk.”

“Mr. Bulfinch,” I said, focusing for an instant on the street, which was still empty, “the people who want that disk think that Midori has it, and they are more than willing to kill her to retrieve it. Your meeting her at Alfie while you were being watched is probably
what put her in the danger she’s in. So let’s stop fucking around, okay?”

He took off his glasses and sighed. “Assuming for a moment there is a disk, I don’t see how knowledge of what’s on it would help Midori.”

“You’re a reporter. I assume you would be interested in publishing the hypothetical disk’s contents?”

“You could assume that, yes.”

“And I would also assume that certain people would want to prevent that publication?”

“That would also be a safe assumption.”

“Okay, then. It’s the threat of publication that’s making these people target Midori. Once the contents of the disk are published, Midori would no longer be a threat, is that right?”

“What you’re saying makes sense.”

“Then it seems we want the same thing. We both want the contents of the disk published.”