Tree of Smoke (59 page)

“In-country, yeah. I’m in and out. Mostly out. I keep some stuff there.”

“Well, you spend a lot of time there. You’re bound to have some stuff. When we say you keep some stuff there, we’re including some of the colonel’s stuff, right? His footlockers and such.”

“Footlockers?”

“You know, here’s the crux of it all. I think these guys we admire so much, I believe that every one of them has fallen away from the faith, each in his own way. We fight Communism, but we ourselves exist in a commune. We exist in a hive.”

“You think they don’t believe in freedom anymore?”

“I think they’ve just gotten numb.”

Silence.

Crodelle said, “What do you think, Skip?”

“I think it’s too complicated for discussion.”

Crodelle said: “What’s in the footlockers?”

Skip kept his peace.

“Why the silence?”

“Am I supposed to answer suddenly just because you ask suddenly?”

“Three of them, three footlockers. You had them at Clark Field on December thirty-first, 1966, and they arrived with you at the CIA villa right over here on Chi Lang Street on New Year’s Day.”

Sands hadn’t once touched his teacup. His focus was amazing.

“I’d like to ask what you’re doing in Cao Phuc,” Crodelle said.

“Well, I don’t think you should even be wanting to know.”

Crodelle stared. “Gosh-darn it.”

Sands stared back.

“You’re in business. You’re running something. Something or somebody.”

“Who, exactly, are you?”

“All right. Let’s get ourselves identified. I’m Terrence Crodelle, Regional Security Officer.”

“Congratulations.”

“Your turn. The Saigon base has two branches, designated Liaison Operations and Internal Operations. Which are you, Skip?”

“I Ops, working mainly with military Psy Ops.”

Crodelle sat back and sighed. “I Ops with Psy Ops,” he said, and Voss thought: I believe you’re on the ropes.

With an actual mounting nausea, Voss forced his own face into the muck: “You remember the footlockers? Those three footlockers? Sure you do. I don’t think you would’ve forgotten those footlockers. Do you remember the name on those footlockers?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Can I ask what name you’re here under?”

“My name is William Michael Sands.”

“What’s the name on your passport?”

“That is the name on my passport.”

Crodelle said, “Where’s the colonel’s hideaway?”

“He’s got a room at the Continental, last I knew.”

“I understand he has some associates on the Mekong Delta. One in particular. A female.”

“That’s news to me.”

“Near Binh Dai.”

“Further news.”

A vehicle stopped outside. Skip rose, went to the patio’s edge, and spoke through the vines: “Hold that cab for me, please.”

He still had his napkin tucked into his belt. It was the only off move Voss had seen him make all day.

He came back and laid his napkin on the table and said, “Lunch is on you guys,” and walked out.

C
ertain that he was spending too much, that the GIs and local businessmen got lower prices, Fest passed the afternoon with the young woman whose hair smelled of vanilla, who charged him thirty dollars for four hours in his air-conditioned room. She huddled under the blankets, she insisted on using the phone many times, though he didn’t think she knew anyone to call and was only pretending to have conversations, she plucked at his beard and the curls on his chest, and tried to squeeze the blackheads on his nose—in fact she played constantly with his nose—delighted with its European dimensions, and in general behaved like the stupid harlot she was. Just as Fest was a stupid customer. He ordered champagne for the room and she refused it—chattering, giggling, fearful—as she might the offer of a particularly nasty bedroom game. Fest drank it all himself. She wouldn’t eat. He showered while she fraudulently telephoned. His greatest hope for this hotel had been extinguished—that its phones reached Berlin, and news of his father. Cables were no good. He had to keep his whereabouts to himself. Apparently it was possible to call Berlin, but not from the hotel. The concierge had promised to arrange it, to take him somewhere personally. Meanwhile, the old man would die. Perhaps already. Perhaps yesterday while I bought the maps. Right now he’s dead while I shower in tepid, diseased water and a whore stinks in my bed. People die when you’re thinking of something else. That’s the way of it. Claude had done so; shot in the throat by a sniper of the French Resistance. Their father had been a strong man, a patriotic German, an acquaintance of Heinrich Himmler. His older brother had been an officer of the Waffen-SS. These were facts. They were not to be disputed, covered over, or despised. And Claude had given his life for the Nazis, another fact. But Claude was more than a fact: the family legend, constantly on his father’s lips; dead, yet throughout Fest’s youth more alive to their father than Fest himself. He gave the girl some Vietnamese money, he didn’t care how much, and sent her away.

While celebrants out in the square produced the music and explosions of warfare, defeat, and victory combined, he took dinner in his room and prepared to turn in early. He had a drop point, a point of rendezvous, and a point of last resort. As of this moment, no one could find him, in particular not his local handlers. The champagne left him with a headache that kept him awake. He sat at the writing desk of Room 214 and broke apart and examined his equipment. The gun had been ramped and throated, he saw. It wouldn’t jam. He reassembled it. Both clips went into it smoothly and the bullets cycled through it almost without sound as he worked the slide backward and forward. Both the silencer and the barrel to accommodate it were factory-made. Somebody was paying attention. But the pointless meeting in Hong Kong, his quick treatment at the hands of Kenneth Johnson, the sense he was being passed from cousin to cousin, always farther from the source…And that he was being used at all. Not that work for other services was unprecedented. Nine or ten years ago an Algerian in Madrid; and a man on a yacht in Como, Italy, whom Fest thought might have been Mafia. And the Philippines, the American priest. Not one of them an enemy of his homeland. Eleven operations in all, counting this one. Showalter had described it as “a hurry-up,” and yet Showalter had entertained them for a couple of weeks before ever mentioning an assignment, and next not another word until a month ago, and even then no discussion of scenarios, and now the gun was in his hands…And would they even have picked me if I’d taken the family to Berlin on our summer leave, if I hadn’t avoided, like a coward, another look at my father’s deathbed, if I hadn’t spent my leave showing New England to young Claude and Dora from the small windows of a rented caravan? In Cape Cod they’d parked behind Showalter’s summer place. Both families knew each other well, considered themselves friends, in fact, but he’d never been associated with Charles Showalter on any kind of operation. He was a superior, that’s all. Showalter displayed no illusions, none tainted him, that’s why they liked each other. That’s why Fest trusted him. Stay another week, stay another day—of course they’d stay, he was a superior. Meg too—even after two weeks with cords going out the window from her kitchen outlets, three guests running down the hot water and wetting all her towels, Dora complaining about Langley, holding forth in her fluent English about American idiots, young Claude nibbling out of her fridge, talking about school and sports because Meg was beautiful and because she listened—Meg too: Stay a while, we love it, it’s rather lonely here in the sandy woods. Two weeks along, Meg’s smiles turned brittle, mixed with invisible perspiration. The stress brought out her strength and grace, and seemed to underscore her intelligence. Charles took Fest to the cape’s Atlantic edge, only the two of them, to show him a beach house he thought of purchasing. Fest praised it but wouldn’t have lived there. The panes rattled in a relentless wind and the surf ate at the shore only yards from the supporting posts. Showalter stood on his future balcony before his future Atlantic, his gray locks snatched up in all directions like a poet’s. “There’s some business in Saigon. I’d like to put you on it. It’s a hurry-up job.”

“In Saigon?”

“Or the environs.”

The Philippines, and now this. And why send him across the world on a single operation when whole armies crawl over the region?

“It’s ten thousand miles to there,” Fest said.

“That’s nearly accurate.”

“Are you assigning me to the Phoenix Program?”

“It’s not Phoenix, and it’s not ICE-X. We don’t want our people to know about this.”

“It’s quite a sensitive target, perhaps.”

“I guess,” Showalter said in a way that meant he thought it, perhaps, not so much a sensitive target as a senseless operation. “He’s been promised our protection.”

“I see. How much more can you tell me?”

“Nothing. We’ll talk more in Langley. When we’re back on the clock.”

“Will I hear from my people first?”

“Consider that you’re hearing from them now.”

“No need to check about that.”

“No need. And—Dirk.”

“Yes, Charles.”

“It’s a war. Go ahead and use a gun.”

He now possessed a .380 automatic, a very American and warlike weapon. With it he could probably put together three-inch groups at forty feet. Beyond that range he found it unpredictable. Not quite as good as the sumpit, the blowgun. But how would he know until he aimed and fired?

No team, no discussion of scenarios, no drilling with the weapon.

Why couldn’t they have given him U.S. documents here in Saigon, official passports with genuine Vietnamese visas? Why stop in Hong Kong for German ones?

Because the documents were forgeries. The BND had no part in this. Yet Showalter had more than implied BND endorsement. Without the invisible stamp of the BND he was nothing more than a criminal.

There was a line. He’d crossed it. But the Communists had crossed it too. Criminals? In China, in the Ukraine, they’d done more killing than the criminal Adolph Hitler would have permitted himself even to contemplate. That couldn’t be said aloud, but it had to be remembered. Sometimes, perhaps—in order to grapple with such an enemy—one crossed to his side of the line.

His own cowardice revolted him; it hurt him physically, in his stomach. If he’d gone to Berlin in the summer instead of to New England…If he hadn’t avoided a last moment with his father, who didn’t love him…Just the same, I stand beside you. Old Father, you fought the Communists, and I fight them too.

S
kip Sands rode out of Saigon on Route One in a commercial van and caught a ride to Cao Quyen with a motorbike hauling a tiny trailer full of eight-foot boards, this latter leg taking nearly two hours.

Halfway along, he was surprised to see the colonel’s black Chevy coming the other direction, and he waved both his arms, nearly losing his perch behind the young cyclist. Too late. The Chevy went on. Sands recognized Hao but couldn’t see his passengers.

At the villa he found a white Ford sedan parked out front. The colonel waited inside, on the divan in the parlor, sipping from a coffee cup and looking at a book.

“Where’s Trung?”

“Gone,” the colonel said. “We had to get him out of here.”

He couldn’t understand his own crashing disappointment. Moving the double for a few days was what he would have suggested himself.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t believe I can tell you.”

“All right, I agree, as a temporary measure—”

“It’s not temporary. It’s over.”

“You’re shutting it down?”

“It’s over for you. As far as your participation.”

“But
why
?”

“Quit acting the fool.”

Skip had no response.

“Sit down, Skip. I have some things to say to you.”

Apparently the colonel had brought some mail: a couple of envelopes on the coffee table. “Is that my mail?”

“Take a seat, please.”

He sat in the facing chair. “What’s the book?”

His uncle turned up its face:
The Origins of Totalitarianism
. “Hannah Arendt.”

“The woman who reported from the Eichmann trial.”

“When I can’t sleep, I read. And I haven’t slept in an impressive interval, my man. Not a wink. Hold this book in my hands and watch the words go by.” He let the pages fall open and read aloud: ‘…in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives.’” He tossed the book onto the table. “There’s something to shrivel your balls on every page. These Jews are obsessed. As well they should be. Obsessed with their fate. But…they’re telling the truth about what we’re up against. Absolute evil.”

The colonel’s cup, he saw, held black coffee. He might be sober—Skip smelled no liquor—but he seemed quite drunk.

“Your Aunt Bridey wants a divorce from me.”

Skip said, “But she’s Catholic.”

“Nobody’s Catholic anymore. Not really. I haven’t been to Mass in years.”

“And so—have you lost your faith in God?”

“Yes, I have. Haven’t you?”

“Sure.”

The colonel drew a breath deeply, as if he would sigh, but he only stared at Skip. “Mr. Trung, I admire you,” he said.

Skip looked over his shoulder. They were alone.

“She wants a divorce? She actually said that?”

“She left McLean when I did. Last year. Year before last. The year before Tet. Do you remember how we used to mark time as since JFK’s assassination, and now it’s since Tet?”

“And she told you then?”

“She told me, but I didn’t believe her. Now I do. She’s engaged an attorney and instituted a suit for divorce. Good for her. I won’t contest the thing.”

“Did she give any reason?”

“God knows she has reasons enough.”

“But specifically?—or it’s none of my business.”

“She says I’m in this war to run from my failures in life. And she’s right about the running. I’m here because I won’t go back to my homeland. Go back to what? A bewildering place full of left-leaning feminine weirdos. What if I do go back? What then? Retire to North Carolina and die and get a forty-foot bridge over a creek named after me. Anyway, she’s right. A war with absolute evil is one hell of an excuse to turn your back on the rest of it. So she’s divorcing me.”