Once a Warrior (24 page)

Now she took heart from the idea that, for the right price, that same person could probably buy the most precious commodity of all—information.

Before she went shopping, though, she was going to cool off. She hadn’t been outside even five minutes yet and already her hair was wilting, her makeup was melting, and sweat was pouring down her back and pooling between her breasts. Even the sleeveless mint-green skimmer that she’d put on only a couple of hours ago was wrinkled now from neck to hem.

Hang convention, she decided as she limped up Tu Do Street, a half-mile long avenue of carnal pleasures ranging from gaudy bars featuring blaring rock music to head shops to doorways full of Vietnamese prostitutes in mini-skirts and white go-go boots hustling young American GIs in their filthy jungle fatigues or ill-fitting “civvies.”  It was too damned hot for pantyhose. And she had a pair of Capezio sandals in one her of her suitcases that—

“Mrs. Brown?”

Cat was standing at the intersection, waiting for the traffic to clear so she could cross Le Loi Boulevard, when she thought she heard someone call her name. It was impossible to tell over the chain-saw buzz of the cyclo cabs and the gritty strains of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” blasting out of one of the open-doored bars. Not to mention the clatter of those Huey helicopters overhead and the roar of that jet taking off from Tan Son Nhut Airport just a few miles away.

Her ears were probably playing tricks on her, she mused as she glanced first to her right, and then to her left. Either that or the ruthless rays of the sun had finally fried her brain.

“Mrs. Brown!”

There was no mistaking it this time. Someone really was calling her. Turning, she saw a petite Vietnamese woman running to catch up with her. While she looked vaguely familiar, Cat couldn’t place her to save her soul.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Brown.”  The pretty young woman spoke in both staccato gasps and perfect English tinged with a slight French accent. “But I wanted to talk to you, and I couldn’t do it in the office.”

“Who are you?” Cat asked when she paused to catch her breath.

“My name is Nguyen Kim Chi.”  She pronounced her first name
new-yen
. “And I am—”

“Colonel Howard’s secretary,” Cat said in a burst of recognition.

The smile that curved the girl’s lips revealed teeth as tiny and shiny white as the pearls at her ears. Her long, loose hair was black and silky-looking and her pale complexion was flawless. But it was her almond-shaped eyes, so dark and yet so sincere, that made Cat believe she could be trusted.

“As I was saying, Mrs. Brown—”

“My friends call me Cat.”

“And my American friends call me Kim.”  She glanced around them warily, as if afraid someone might be eavesdropping, then grabbed Cat’s arm in a surprisingly strong grip for someone of her size and pulled her back from the sun-drenched curb and into the shade of a building.

She rose up on tiptoe then and whispered, “I know where Cain is.” 

Cat gaped at her. “Where?”

“He was in Hanoi over Tet—”

“But that’s the capital of North Vietnam!”

“Please believe me when I say that Cain is an honorable man. He helped me get my job, although Colonel Howard doesn’t know that. More important, he asked nothing of me in return.”  The way Kim leaped to Cain’s defense, combined with the look in her eyes, made Cat wonder if there wasn’t more than just gratitude in the girl’s heart.

Which was none of her business, she reminded herself firmly. “Where is he now?”

“He was wounded while he was in Hanoi—”

Cat’s stomach clenched. “Is he all right?”

Kim nodded. “He’s recuperating in Cholon.”

“Cholon?”

“The Chinese quarter of Saigon.”

Pulling the returned envelope out of her purse, Cat showed it to Kim. “So is this his address or not?”

“His old one.”

Cat’s fingers closed around a ballpoint pen. “And his new one?”

Now Kim shook her head, causing her long hair to swirl about her narrow shoulders. “I promised him I wouldn’t give it to anyone.”

“I won’t tell—”

“But my oldest brother, Loc, drives a staff car for the American Embassy. Cain helped him find employment too, after his jewelry store was bombed during Tet.”

A question flowered, full-bloom, in Cat’s head. If Cain was as bad as Colonel Howard claimed, how was he able to get these people such good jobs?  She was still trying to come up with a plausible answer when she realized that Kim was looking at her expectantly.

She blinked and blew her drooping hair out of her eyes. Her tongue, when she ran it across her lips, told her that they’d long since lost the “Peach Petal” frost she’d applied that morning. And judging by how damp and sticky her underarms were, her Secret deodorant was turning tattletale on her.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “The heat must be getting to me. Did you say something?”

“I asked you where you’re staying.”

“Oh, the Continental.”  Her father had made her reservation on his old reserve commander’s recommendation. It was the hotel of choice for many of the American correspondents who were covering the war. It was also supposed to be one of the more secure buildings in Saigon.

“Loc finishes work at six o’clock, so he’ll meet you in the lobby at six-fifteen.”

Before Cat could ask Kim how she would recognize her brother or thank her for helping, the girl turned on her spiky high heel and ran back the way she had come.

* * * *

Her “cool” shower had consisted of little more than a tepid dribble of water, her ceiling fan barely stirred the muggy air, and she didn’t have any ice for the grape Kool-Aid in her glass.

And yet, being half-French, Cat was wholly intrigued by the almost seamless blend of East and West in the city that had once been touted as the “Paris of the Orient.”

From the balcony off her hotel room, she could see the red-bricked twin spires of Nôtre Dame Cathedral. Johnny had mentioned attending Mass there in one of his tapes, and she planned to do the same if she was still here on Sunday. In the opposite direction, the phoenix-shaped roof of a Buddhist temple rose out of the surrounding rubble of the Tet Offensive.

Her room was high enough that she could, if she chose, watch the fire-and-light show of war in the distant hills. She chose instead to watch a huge freighter sailing upriver from the sea, toward the Port of Saigon. In its wake, junks and house barges bobbed and a fisherman angled for shrimp from a small sampan with a red eye painted on its bow to protect him from demons.

Closer to home, the lowering sun dimly penetrated the polluting haze of diesel smoke that hung thickly in the air and the heat that radiated off the shell-pocked pavement. But come the dark, Cat knew diners would crowd around tables at the outdoor cafés or into the tiny noodle shops that lined the boulevards and crammed the alleyways. The rooftop restaurants that specialized in venison steaks and French fries and front row seats on the ever-present violence in the streets would attract their share of patrons as well. And the neon lights would wink on along Tu Do Street as those Vietnamese bargirls smiled their enticing smiles at American GIs whose own smiles didn’t quite reach their eyes.

A cacophony of screeching brakes and honking horns drew her attention to the street below.

Motor scooters whizzed in and out of the traffic to shouted curses and shaking fists. Jeeps and Army trucks claimed the right of way, drawing resentful looks from the automobile drivers who ceded it. At the corner, a Mercedes bus with screens bolted over its windows to keep out hand grenades wheezed to a stop, disgorging a blue-gray haze of exhaust smoke along with a knot of passengers.

The sidewalks were as busy as the streets. A woman carrying leafy produce in a net bag scolded a man toting a live pig under his arm. Shopkeepers stood in front of their stores, alternately smiling at passersby and scowling at the Vietnamese war casualties who sat on their haunches, hands outstretched, like a living version of the Stations of the Cross. Children wearing blue-and-white school uniforms wove their bicycles in and around the foot traffic as children the world over are wont to do.

“
Song voi
,” Johnny had called it, just shortly after he’d dropped the bombshell that he’d volunteered for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. “It means ‘fast tempo’.”

Then, Cat had been too dazed by his news to fully absorb his description of the city’s frenetic pace. She’d sunk down on the wicker sofa she’d slip-covered in an avocado, rust and gold print for his homecoming and listened to him rattle on and on about the exotic place and the foreign people she’d only read about in magazines and newspapers or seen on a television screen. To hear him tell it, war-buffeted Saigon was a veritable Shangri-La.

“You sound like a man in love,” she’d said when she finally found her voice.

Johnny had hesitated just long enough to make her wonder if he was hiding something, then had brushed off her remark by taking her in his arms and murmuring, “I
am
in love. With you.”

Unfortunately, the memory of his tender lovemaking that night didn’t alleviate her lingering guilt over their ugly fight the next morning. Or the fights that followed it. All it did was strengthen her resolve to meet Cain. And to ask him when, where, why and how he’d met Johnny.  

The question was, would he have the answers she was seeking?

Cat had wrapped herself in a seersucker robe after her shower. Now she glanced down at her watch and saw that it was six o’clock straight up. Time to get dressed. She turned back into her room, making sure to close the louvered doors behind her before draining the last of her lukewarm Kool-Aid and setting the empty glass on the bureau.

In deference to the heat, she’d tied her hair back into a ponytail with a scarf and decided against wearing any makeup. Getting ready to go then was simply a matter of pulling on a gauzy yellow sundress that was hemmed just above her knees and slipping her bare feet into her sandals. And of checking to be certain that her suitcases were locked.

After dinner at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant her first night here she had returned to her room to find the balcony doors ajar. Convinced that she had interrupted a burglary in process, she’d slammed the door and, eschewing the elevator, had run the four flights down to the lobby, screaming for the police all the way. A hotel security officer who had reminded her of a young Peter Lorre had accompanied her back upstairs and helped her search the room.

To her relief, nothing was missing. Nor was there anyone hiding in the closet, the bathroom or under the bed. But as he’d closed the louvered doors, the officer had cautioned her not to leave anything of value behind when she went out because the maids would probably come back while she was gone and steal it.

“The maids?”  She’d found it difficult to envision the tiny, work-worn woman who’d furnished her with an extra towel to dry her hair as a thief.

“Like everyone else in Saigon,” he’d said with a shrug, “they get by any way they can.”

Now, shuddering at the thought of strangers pawing through her personal things, Cat put the keys to her suitcase in her purse along with her visa, her money and those two letters before she left the room to meet Loc.

* * * *

“Mrs. Brown?” 

While the Vietnamese man who greeted her when she stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby spoke with the same French accent as his younger sister Kim, he looked nothing like her. His hair was gray and cropped close to the skull, his skin had been baked to a leathery brown by the sun, and his smile showed betel-nut-stained teeth. Instead of the uniform of an Embassy driver, he was wearing a bright orange T-shirt with
DOW SHALL NOT KILL
printed on the front, baggy black pants and flip-flops on his feet.

“You must be Loc,” she said.

He bowed his head, closing his eyes in a gesture of Oriental respect. “At your service, Mrs. Brown.”

“Call me Cat, please.”

Nodding, he moved his arm as if drawing aside a curtain. “Shall we go?”

“How far is it to Cholon?” she asked as she fell into step with him.

Loc’s head swiveled as if it were mounted on a turret. The reporters had already left for their briefing, but the lobby was crowded with guests. Four silk-clad Oriental women were playing mahjong at a rattan table. A middle-aged man, dapper in white linen, was sitting on a plump sofa sipping red wine from a crystal stem-glass. GIs in clean jungle fatigues were standing around in small groups, swapping stories of battles lost and beauties won.

“It’s best not to discuss our destination until we’re in the car,” he cautioned her under his breath.

“But why would anyone here care where we’re going?”  She lowered her own voice to a whisper, though, when she noticed a man sitting in a fan chair near the door. His face was hidden behind a newspaper, yet his cold weather attire—gray flannel suit and black wing-tipped shoes—made him stand out like a sore thumb in this tropical climate.

“People are not always who they seem in Saigon,” Loc replied in that same undertone.

It was the second such warning that Cat had received since her arrival two days ago. No, she thought, remembering how Kim had contradicted Colonel Howard’s vitriolic assessment of Cain, it was the third. All at once, she felt totally alone. And more than a little frightened. If what everyone was saying was true, she had no way to judge who were friends and who were enemies.

Loc led her out of the air-conditioned lobby and into the late-day heat. His ’67 black Pontiac Tempest was illegally parked in front of the hotel, but his diplomatic license plate apparently gave him immunity. Or else the policeman at the intersection had been paid to turn a blind eye.

Cat had just stepped down from the curb to follow him around to the passenger side when she felt a tug on the hem of her skirt. Startled, she turned and saw a little boy standing right behind her. Except for the conical straw hat that shaded his shiny black eyes and the rubber sandals that shod his tiny feet, he might have been one of her former students.