Tree of Smoke (56 page)

“Do you have the ID materials for me?”

The young man lurched downward to rummage in his leather briefcase, clasping it between his shoes. “We have two versions for you.” He handed over a manila envelope. “While on assignment you use the one with the predated entry visa. Destroy it before you leave. For your exit use the one with the postdated visa.”

“How long is determined for this assignment?”

“You mean according to the visas? The postdated one says you entered on—what does it say? February eleventh, I think. So you’ll have to stay in-country till then, at least. But the visa’s good for six months.”

He didn’t like the sound of six months. But the purpose of a visa post-dated by two weeks was to say he’d entered after the period of the assignment. He took it, therefore, that they’d planned for no more than two weeks’ duration.

Fest laid the envelope across his lap, pinched together the clasps, opened the flap, and raised its open end to peek within. Two German passports—he took one out and read the bearer’s name—Claude Gunter Reinhardt.

“Interesting. My son is named Claude.” After the old man. And my dead heroic brother.

“Whatever’s on top of the stack.”

“Of course. A coincidence.”

The face was his own. He’d always looked somewhat like a spoiled boy, but the beard covered the softness and made him look, he believed, a little like Sigmund Freud or Ernest Hemingway. In clothing, perhaps, he appeared portly, but he felt solid. Even in the States they’d kept him taking courses, including physically challenging operational training. But he was thirty-six and two months. This couldn’t go on. In fact he’d thought it was over with the American posting.

“You enter on your own passport. Whatever you’re traveling with now.”

“Of course.”

As the man paid for their rolls and coffee and rose to go, he assumed an insufferable casualness and mentioned, as if in afterthought, the pass-signs and the time and place arranged for Fest’s briefing in Saigon.

Fest distrusted Hong Kong’s drivers now. He skipped lunch and left for the airport two hours early and arrived without trouble and sat watching his fellow passengers assemble for their journey home, cheery affluent Asians returning from holidays in Hong Kong or Bangkok or Manila with pastel shopping bags, smiles, even laughter. He didn’t know what he’d expected—the beleaguered members of a ravaged populace, hunched shoulders, tight faces—he hadn’t thought much about this war, had never expected to come to it, had been sent, he was sure, ill-advisedly, like everybody else. The stewardess gave him a purple Vietnam Airlines traveling bag and he held it empty in his lap looking down at the clouds and nodded off until late afternoon, when the same stewardess touched his shoulder to tell him they were descending toward Tan Son Nhut.

In a deteriorating terminal crowded with soldiers both American and Asian, the floor piled with boxes and baggage, he found his man, a Negro holding up a small sign saying
MEEKER IMPORTS
. “Mr. Reinhardt,” the man said. “I’m Kenneth Johnson. Anybody else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. But we’ll take all comers.” A man of good cheer. There was nobody else.

“How was the flight?”

“All flights end on the ground.”

“That’s what the ducks say. Jesus,” he said, “who thinks up these pass-signs?”

“I don’t know,” Fest said, and added nothing, though he understood this was probably the moment for a joke.

They came out through the front entrance to a line of taxis whose drivers leapt up waving, and Johnson said, “You’re all set up under the name of Reinhardt at a place called the Quan Pho Xa. You’re papered for Reinhardt, right?”

“Correct.”

“All right. Off you go, Mr. Reinhardt.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is as far as I go. I’m just verifying arrival.”

“I see.”

“You’ll get a glimpse of me tomorrow. Just a glimpse.”

“At the briefing?”

“Yes. Just a glimpse.”

“Will I use the same pass-sign?”

“No. I’ll be there to introduce you.”

They shook hands, and Kenneth Johnson put him in a cab and spoke to the driver briefly and was gone.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes, sir. Little bit.”

“Do you know where my hotel is?”

“Yes, sir. Hotel Quan Pho Xa.”

“What does it mean?”

He got no answer. The taxi entered the city proper, passed down an avenue crowded with buildings painted pink or blue or yellow, and slowed, stopped, moved a couple of car lengths, stopped. The driver told him it was the New Year. Everyone was going somewhere. “What is New Year this time?” Fest asked. “Year of Dog? Year of Goat?” The driver said he didn’t know. A buzzing tide of motorbikes flowed around the larger vehicles. One went past with a woman passenger seated sidesaddle, ankles crossed, reading a magazine. Engines coughing out exhaust. The palms looked none too healthy. He watched a foursome of street boys who lounged on the pavement playing cards for cigarettes.

Why had they stopped him in Hong Kong to pick up documents prepared in Saigon?

The traffic moved again. On gravestones in a tiny cemetery he saw emblems in a swastika shape, and swastikas carved on the door of its small temple. The sight shocked him. He’d never seen one except in photographs. Including two or three taken of his father. Fest watched for street signs and landmarks, trying to inscribe it all on his mind, to locate himself. He checked his watch. In nineteen hours he’d be briefed as to schedule and method. The brusque treatment at the hands of Kenneth Johnson told him much. His colleagues wanted him only at a distance. Possibly he’d been sent here after an American—even Kenneth Johnson himself.

It was raining lightly but felt no cooler when he got out of the cab at the hotel. A woman sat on her sandals outside the entrance. He guessed Americans didn’t stay here—she was its only protection.

While he checked in, the two girls downstairs in the lobby, the receptionist and her assistant or her friend, sang unintelligible lyrics along with their radio.

“What is your name?” he asked the clerk.

“Thuyet.”

“Thuyet, can I make an overseas telephone call?”

“No, sir. Only cable. Only the telegram.”

She wore a blue skirt and crisp white blouse. She interested him. Bizarre and delicate of face. No jewelry, no paint, but probably all of them were whores.

He showered and changed and went down to the street, wondering where he’d find an overseas telephone to call his mother. It was night now. In the distance above the city, helicopters tore up the air with their rotor blades, and tracer bullets streaked upward into the darker reaches. From over the horizon, bombs thundered. Down here, innumerable little horns and small engines. Radios playing silly local music.

Sandbags lined the curbs. He walked along the fractured sidewalk, picking his way among holes and people’s outstretched feet and parked motorbikes, chased by beggars and pimps and snide, sassy children who offered him “cigarette, grass, boom-boom, U-globe, opium.”

“Bread,” he said.

“No bread because of Happy New Year,” a vendor explained.

He gave up hope of a telephone and had dinner in a place with hostesses wearing fringed red miniskirts and small red cowboy hats and fancy plastic gun belts with empty holsters. The waitress said because of the New Year they had no bread today.

Fest had seen the signs and banners saying “Chuc Mung Nam Moy” and gathered they wished him a Happy New Year, though they could just as easily have meant The Plague Is Terrible.

He woke in the night, as he’d done the night before. He heard gun-fire outside. He fumbled with the bed net, and keeping low he crossed the room and chanced a look over the windowsill. A woman walked along in the glow of a paper lantern. Her hand, swinging the light by its wire haft, looked like a claw. Children chased past her in the street, setting off firecrackers. He heard music, and voices singing. He went back to bed. His pattern hadn’t changed yet, he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. He had two books and he’d read them both. The ceiling fan whirred at its top speed but didn’t cool him. Out the window the madness continued. It seemed to him absurd that people surrounded by warfare should entertain themselves by lighting off explosives.

He stayed in bed rereading Georges Simenon, fell asleep at dawn, and woke around ten in the morning.

Not long before his lunch date, he took a cab to Sung Phoo Maps and Charts, only, as the driver had assured him, a few blocks from the hotel, but hard to find. Inside, a brisk young man greeted him in English. When Fest explained he wanted the most current available map of the region, the young man led him up narrow stairs into a chamber full of women seated at drafting tables under circular white neon tubes, and very soon he stepped back into the Saigon morning with three scrolls wrapped together in brown paper and tied with twine: hand-colored, French-language maps: North Vietnam; South Vietnam; Saigon.

The day was sunny, clear, hot, bright, with black shadows on the pavements under the trees. He walked a block and hailed a taxi. The cabbie said because of the New Year he couldn’t turn the meter on and would have to be paid copiously. Disgusted, Fest got out and took a cyclo to his rendezvous and arrived, by his watch, four minutes early at the Green Parrot Restaurant, a very narrow establishment much like a locomotive’s dining car with tables for two—no more than two—along either wall, and an aisle between. No maître d’ greeted him, only a young man behind a cash register, who raised his eyebrows.

“Do you speak English?” he asked the cashier.

“Yes, please.”

“Do your facilities have a flushing device?”

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Plumbing with water.”

“I don’t know what you say.”

“Where is your bathroom?”

“Yes, sir. To the back.”

He took a seat. Almost everyone in the place was Vietnamese.

Only three tables away, alone, sat an American he recognized from the earlier assignment in the Philippine Islands, the nephew, he believed, of the bullish colonel who’d so enjoyed joking with Filipinos. His contact? A flush of warmth, familiar ground under his feet, a friend to work with, or anyway an acquaintance.

Basic craft required they not greet each other without a pass-sign. Fest headed for the men’s room, passing close to the American’s table as he made his way. He leaned his tubular parcel against the damp wall, washed his hands, and waited three minutes, until exactly twelve-thirty. When he went back out the American was gone and a different American waved to him from a different table—Johnson, who’d picked him up at the airfield yesterday and so quickly disappeared. A Vietnamese officer in uniform, wearing aviator’s sunglasses, sat facing the Negro; nothing before him on the table but a pack of cigarettes.

Johnson rose as Fest approached. “Mr. Reinhardt, meet Major Keng.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Keng said, and reached up to shake hands.

“Where can I sit?”

“Take my place,” Johnson said. “I’m running late. You’re in capable hands.”

“It’s local business?”

“What’s that there?”

“Maps of the area. I just bought them minutes ago.”

“Walk me to the door.”

At the entrance Johnson handed him a business card on which the name was Kenneth Johnson, of Meeker Imports. “In the event of something unforeseen, go to the basement of the Armed Forces Language School. I’ve written the street address on the back there. The basement, okay? You’ll be greeted by a U.S. marine, so hand him this card.”

“Many thanks.”

“That’s only as a last resort. Only and absolutely.”

“Yes. I understand you. A last resort.”

Once again the black man vanished like a fugitive.

Fest placed the card in his money clip, taking extra time for himself. Another native handler. That meant the same kind of business as in the Philippines. Over at the table the Vietnamese had removed his sunglasses to look at the bill of fare. His khaki uniform looked slept in, but his black boots shone brightly. Local business. Fest didn’t like it.

He took the seat across from his contact.

“Mr. Reinhardt, what will you eat?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Some tea?”

“Tea, all right. And bread, if possible.”

“Of course it’s possible. I’m having pho-ban, some beef soup with noodles. It’s very inexpensive here.”

Without the sunglasses Major Keng’s eyes seemed small and black and polished. As Fest looked at the faces around him they all had their differences, but all the faces, including this man’s, were identical to his recollection of, say, the face of the desk clerk Thuyet, or any others he’d seen in this city. Their language sounded impossible. Fest observed he was now the establishment’s only white patron.

He remained stubborn and had only bread and weak tea. The major asked him what he’d seen of the city, shoveled into his noodle soup a salad of greens and pallid sprouts, and slurped viciously at it, using enameled chopsticks for everything, including, somehow, the liquid, and spoke of his university days here in Saigon.

“Do you like your baguette?”

“Yes,” Fest said sincerely, “it’s wonderful.”

“Many things survive from the French.”

“I see. Of course.”

Keng pushed his empty bowl aside, took a cigarette from his pack, and brought a lighter from his tunic. “May I offer you a cigarette and also a light?”

“No, thank you.”

With a look Fest interpreted as one of light contempt, or disappointment, the major produced a flame. “It’s a Colibri of London. Butane.”

“Is this a good place to discuss business?”

“Of course. That’s why we’re here. I have some things for you.” He reached for the floor between his feet, almost laying his chin on the table’s surface, and sat back with a brown briefcase in his lap. “I have the goods.” It was a parcel wrapped in brown paper and string. “Now you have two packages. Did you say you have some maps there?”

“Yes.”

“I worried that perhaps a rifle.”

“No. Is this the pistol?”

“Yes. Use the silencer.”

“Is it as I requested?”