Palace Council (32 page)

CHAPTER
45

Water View

(I)

T
WO MONTHS LATER,
in July of 1967, the magazine published an exposé, authored by the great Edward T. Wesley, novelist-turned-war-correspondent, of a Central Intelligence Agency program carrying the code name of
PHOENIX
, under which cash bounties were offered to South Vietnamese nationals who turned in informers or leaders for the Viet Cong. Too often, wrote Eddie, especially in the demonstration phase of the program out in Long An Province, those who were turned in, turned up dead, or worse. Moreover, there was an incentive to make up stories to get that bounty, or to get your enemies taken care of, or both. Intentionally or not, Eddie wrote, America was sponsoring a wholesale campaign of torture and murder, in the guise of pacifying the countryside. The article cautiously named no names, but cited “intelligence sources.” Military spokesmen ridiculed the story. Back home, even some leaders of the antiwar movement distanced themselves. Much later, when a fuller account came out in the mainstream press—Congress would not hold its first hearings on
PHOENIX
until nearly three years later—Eddie Wesley would be tarred for getting some significant facts wrong, although, in essence, his account turned out to be true. Already there were circles in which he was considered a hero, and, for Eddie of the late sixties at least, those were the circles that mattered.

In Ithaca, Aurelia fielded a telephone call from a furious Richard Nixon, the man she had contacted to try to get Eddie out of Vietnam when she thought his life was in danger.

“Do a man a favor and this is how he pays me back? Let me make something clear, Aurelia. A thick skin doesn't make a man an idiot. All right, terrible things happen in war. I've been in a war, so I know. But you don't bite the hand that feeds you. Everything we've done for him, and look at this mess.”

“I'm sure he's just doing what he thinks is right,” Aurie murmured.

“Good for him. Back in my day, a man disclosed classified information, he went to prison. Do you have any idea how this could harm the war effort?”

He finally calmed down, but by this time Aurelia had divined his true purpose. She promised him, unasked, that she would never mention to a soul the favors he had performed over the years for the notorious Eddie Wesley.

Later that afternoon, Megan Hadley, Tristan's wife, popped in, waving the clippings and telling Aurelia how sensational her Eddie was. She was so glad, she said, that he had wound up on the right side. Eddie and his sister both, she added. Aurelia was relieved to see her friend in such a good mood. Recently she had been morose. Megan had confided to Aurelia the cause of her unhappiness: she thought her husband was having an affair.

“With somebody on campus,” she had said, as Aurie cringed.

At the end of January of 1968, North Vietnamese troops launched a surprise attack on Saigon, even gaining brief access to the exterior grounds of the heavily barricaded United States Embassy, after its police guards were unexpectedly withdrawn. The assault was driven off and carried no tactical or strategic significance, but American reporters, many of them caught in a pitched battle for the first time in their lives, wrote, inaccurately, that the Tet Offensive represented a powerful show of force by the other side. Back home, people began to consider the possibility that America might actually lose the war. That those…savages…might prevail. Surveys continued to show strong public support, but there was at the same time a sense of stasis, people saying yes out of habit but looking for signs that perhaps the tide had turned. Whispers began that Lyndon Johnson might actually not be re-elected. In March, the rumors came true. After a surprisingly strong showing by Senator Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson, despite having finished a comfortable first, dropped out of the presidential race. He would spend his remaining months in office, said Johnson, working for peace. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. But the left saw him as Johnson's man and, therefore, the war candidate. Senator Robert Kennedy entered the race, and in the sleepy capital of a Midwestern farm state, a first-term Democratic Senator named Lanning Frost called together his backers and began to consider moving up his own run for President.

Too soon, said the wisest, including his father-in-law, a political pro recently retired from the Washington wars: The Democratic Party is going to implode. Concentrate on your own Senate re-election campaign. The rest can wait until 1972.

After certain consultations, his wife, Margot, agreed.

(II)

E
DDIE WAS NOT IN
S
AIGON
at the time of the Tet attack. As a matter of fact, he planned to leave Southeast Asia a few weeks later, taking a circuitous route ending in England, where, during the fall of 1968, aged just forty-one, he would hold a visiting chair in American studies at Oxford. Back home, the ground was shifting, but Eddie paid scant attention. Instead, rapt, he sat in his Hong Kong flat reading one account after another of the Tet Offensive. Everything George Collier had predicted had come true. The attack had been beaten, and nobody in America seemed to notice, or care.

Very strange.

Meanwhile, Eddie's desk was piled high with letters and telegrams forwarded by the magazine and his publisher, many of them from journalists considerably larger than Eddie himself. A breathless note from Aurelia contained both congratulations and gratitude for his safety. Eddie was rather grateful himself. While working on the
PHOENIX
story, he had managed to intercept Ambassador William Colby at a Saigon restaurant. Colby had told him nothing, and left quickly, ignoring Eddie's shouted questions. One of his minions had lingered, to warn Eddie off, whether officially or not: “This is war,” the man said. “In war, people get hurt. All kinds of people.” According to a dismissive Pratt, lower-level Agency people said things like that all the time. Nobody took them seriously.

Still, Eddie had returned to Hong Kong as swiftly as possible.

Now, leafing through the messages, he found himself wondering if Junie had seen the story, and what she thought of her brother. He realized that he wanted to make her proud. Pinned to the wall above his desk was the photo of her law-school class, with her note to the professor on the back.

I can't stop them. You'll have to do it.

Whenever his gaze fell on the photo, he was besieged by the same questions that plagued his sleep: Were they working together? Had Mellor known where she was? Had he told before they killed him?

Perry Mount might have the answer, but Eddie could not find him. Perry turned out to have a house in Hong Kong, just as poor Teri had said. Eddie had no trouble finding the place, over in Kowloon, on a narrow side street off Prince Edward Road, near Flower Market Road. There were very few privately owned homes in Hong Kong, but Perry had somehow managed to get title to one of them: a tiny cottage squeezed among tiny cottages, across the street from a small English church, where the burial ground around the side had headstones large enough to crouch behind. Eddie knew because he had crouched there a lot, at various hours of day and night, watching the door, but nobody had gone in or out except the Filipino amah, who claimed, in excellent English, not to speak any.

In Kowloon, a lot of the houses had names. The plaque in front of Perry's cottage read
PANDEMONIUM
.

Eddie asked around, but none of the neighbors knew a thing.

And so he sat in his flat and stared at the photo. The apartment had been found for him by David Yee, who now covered Southeast Asia for the
Times.
It was small but serviceable, on a high floor in one of several identical towers on a hillside, excitingly new because the units had individual bathrooms, which was not, said David dryly, the invariable custom.

But neither was it the invariable custom to have married professors father children by their students and then to have both parties act as if nothing had happened. Something wasn't right.

In early April, Eddie stopped by Perry's house in Kowloon, as he did at least twice a week. He found the sign gone, and the house occupied by an elderly Swiss trader who insisted that he come in for tea. The trader had very strong views about the war, but, alas, lacked any knowledge of the prior occupant.

The golden boy was gone. It was time for Eddie to go, too.

A few days before his departure for India, Eddie dined with Lieutenant Cox. The two had stayed in touch since their chance meeting in Saigon after Quang Tri. Then the lieutenant had been angry and tense. Tonight he was relaxed. Eddie asked what he thought of the theory behind the war, the idea that the Communist advance had to be stopped in Vietnam, lest the other countries of the region fall like dominoes.

Cox thought this one over. “I'm an officer in the armed forces of a democracy,” he finally said. “It's my job to go where they tell me, Mr. Wesley. The day I decide I have a different job, that it's up to me to figure out whether I like the theory of the war, is the day we stop being a democracy. Know why? Because that's the day the military takes over.”

Eddie found the answer so troubling that he walked the streets for an hour trying to sort things out. It struck him that what Benjamin Mellor called the Palace Council must have exactly the opposite theory: they had no patience with democracy, and would be more than happy to take over.

Still brooding, Eddie wound up at a jazz club in Lan Kwai Fong, soaking up atmosphere and music. He returned to his flat close to midnight and, if not for the rather pleasant buzz fogging his brain, might have sensed something amiss even before he opened the door, and certainly right after, because they had removed the overhead bulb, causing him to stumble into the room, hands out in front, searching for the table lamp beside the sofa, so that when they grabbed him he was briefly too disoriented to fight back, and briefly was all they needed. Three minutes later, gray duct tape over his eyes and mouth and around the wrists secured too tightly behind his back, Eddie was bundled into the service elevator. Struggling, he felt the floors dropping away. A flurry of well-placed punches reduced his feistiness. They dragged him off the loading dock and threw him into a truck that went jouncing off, one of them sitting atop him just in case. The ride seemed like hours but probably was just minutes, because time stretches when you are terrified. All he could think of was Benjamin Mellor. Whatever had happened to the professor was about to happen to Eddie.

The truck juddered to a halt. Nobody had spoken a word, and Eddie, mouth taped, could hardly ask any questions. When they lifted him to the ground, he kicked out hard behind him and made satisfying contact, even being rewarded with an exhalation of pain and a rich curse in what sounded more Hakka than Cantonese: Chinese is not an inflected language, which is why it sounds singsongy to unsophisticated Western ears, but hang around Hong Kong long enough and you begin to catch the different intonations. He felt a thrilling stab of pain in his kidneys and thought it was a knife, but some people's fists will do that. A clout on the back of the neck laid him flat. They carried him up a flight of stairs and down a flight of stairs and tied something around his ankles. He heard the slosh of liquid, very near. They ripped off his shirt and lifted him onto some kind of platform, and then, before he could gain any sort of orientation, just let go, dropping him, headfirst, into a tank of freezing-cold water.

And left him there.

The rope held his feet. Only his head and upper body were beneath the surface, but that was enough to make him panic. He could not twist up. He could not break free. He could not breathe. He thrashed. The iciness eased into his head, and into his bones. He was dizzy with fear but also with nearing asphyxiation. His lungs pounded. If only he could see, he might be able to think, but the tape on his mouth and eyes made pain and panic worse. If he screamed he would drown. If he breathed he would drown. Then he was up again, out of the water, dangling from the rope, struggling for breath through his nose.

A voice, Chinese but speaking English with that same uninflected accent: “Where is she?”

Before Eddie could process the question, he was down in the tank again, head and shoulders beneath the icy water, needing to gasp for air but not daring to. His chest seemed to constrict. His heart jumped and shuddered. The blood pounding in his ears was impossibly loud. His thoughts refused to coalesce. He was going to drown.

Out again.

“Where is she?”

But for the tape he would have tried to answer, just to stay out of the water, except that nobody seemed to care about his answer. In again, this time all the way to his waist, and now in the midst of his mind-stealing terror he realized that he had forgotten to inhale during his brief period above the water. Air exploded from his lungs, into his covered mouth, and up through his nose. Water burned its way in. Everything ached. He felt as if his brain was congealing, but probably it was just trying to die.

Out again, suspended, shivering, gasping not only through his nose, from which water and blood alike freely flowed, but also through his mouth, because the tape had loosened a bit. Never had he been so grateful for the simple existence of air.

“Where is she?”

Eddie knew he could never survive another dunking, and tried to signal that there was nothing he would not do or say to stay out of the vat, but he lacked any means to signal them, and, besides, he was already in again. He kicked and struggled with what strength he had left, but the amount was zero. He felt his life force fluttering weakly away. His skin was numb. His brain was numb. His lungs were numb. His heart was numb. They had to understand. He would do anything. Anything. It was not a matter of courage versus its opposite. Courage was a myth, a fantasy, an imaginary trait dreamed up by those who had never been blindfolded, gagged, and trussed upside down under the water.