The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (11 page)

"You have time to get out of this, you know," Darrow said. He still did not understand that the worst had already happened to Linh.

"So can you."

But that was not true. Darrow knew they were both caught.

THREE
A Splendid Little War

Saigon, November 1965

The late-afternoon sun
cast a molten light on the street, lacquered the sidewalk, the doors, tables, and chairs of restaurants, the rickety stands of cigarettes, film, and books, all in a golden patina, even giving the rusted, motionless cyclos and the gaunt faces of the sleeping drivers the bucolic quality found in antique photos. The people, some stretched out on cots on the sidewalks, lazily read newspapers or toyed with sleep, waiting for the relief of evening to fall. This part of the city belonged to the Westerners, and the Vietnamese here were in the business of making money off them--either by feeding them in the restaurants, selling them the items from the rickety stands, driving them about the city in the rusted cyclos, having sex with them, spying on them, or some combination of the above.

The dusty military jeep came to a rubber-burning stop in front of the Continental Hotel, scattering pedestrians and cyclos like shot, and a barrel-chested officer jumped out of the back to hand Helen down from the passenger seat.

"What service," she said, laughing. "How much of a tip should I give?"

"Just promise you'll have drinks with us."

"Promise."

"We're only stationed here a few more days."

"I will," she said, and started up the steps of the hotel.

"Remember we know where you live, Helen of Saigon," the soldiers shouted, laughing, peeling away from the curb with a blaring of the jeep's horn that caused pedestrians to flinch, to stop and turn. The Americans at the terrace tables closest to the sidewalk grinned and shook their heads, but the Vietnamese out on the street simply stared, expressions impossible to read.

Linh shared a table with Mr. Bao. They both watched the scene unfolding on the street in silence, saw the tall blond woman in high spirits dusting her hands off on her pants, patting her hair back into its ponytail, the crowd parting as she moved up the sidewalk, skipping up the stairs of the hotel.

Mr. Bao shook his head, turned and spat a reddish brown puddle on the floor to the chagrin of the busboy, who hurried for a rag. "They think this is their playground."

Already tired of the meeting with Mr. Bao, how the old man spoke right into his face, warm puffs of breath assaulting him, stale as day-old fish, Linh signaled for another bottle of mineral water. "Another whiskey, too," Bao said. For a professed proletarian, Mr. Bao certainly seemed comfortable using the Continental as his personal lounge.

"Add a bottle of Jack Daniel's to my shopping list."

Linh had been working for Darrow for a year, had finally moved into his own apartment in Saigon and begun to have some normalcy in his life, when Mr. Bao showed up one night at the cafe he frequented. Although he didn't make clear which department he worked in, what was clear was that he had an offer from the North impossible to refuse. "Tran Bau Linh, we almost didn't recognize you. It does us good to see how you've prospered in the world since your untimely departure from the party," he said. He had the square, blunt face of a peasant. As well, he had the unthinking allegiance to the party line. Linh was surprised that they hadn't already killed him.

"We have big plans for you," he said. "You will do your fatherland proud after all."

The job was fairly innocuous. A couple times a month, he would report to Bao on where Darrow and he had been. Any frequent newspaper and magazine reader would know as much. The idea was to know the enemy. Linh made sure to bore Mr. Bao in minutiae to the point that he buried anything that could be of value. Most of their meals were spent talking of the food. If Linh chose not to cooperate, Mr. Bao made it clear that he would never hear the bullet that killed him. "You are lucky that you have a use, otherwise you would not still be here talking with me."

The sky had turned a darker gold by the time the woman came back down into the lobby wearing a blue silk dress the color of the ocean at dusk. Her heels made a delicate clicking sound on the floor as she crossed to the bar where her date for the evening, Robert Boudreau, was standing. Linh imagined the air turned cooler where she had passed. "I have to leave now," he said, getting up.

The bar was packed
, standing room only, almost all men, but Helen spotted Robert in the corner.

"I'm sorry," she said. "My ride back from the hospital didn't come through. I had to bum a ride from some army officers passing by."

Robert turned with his drink and looked at her. "You clean up pretty well. I've got the prettiest girl in Saigon. That's worth the wait right there." Robert was on staff at one of the wires and had been wasting time in the front office when she came in looking for freelance work. Sensing that she was entirely overwhelmed, he quickly made himself indispensable.

He had a squat build, beefed shoulders, and a muscular chest that caused him to move with a thick, heavy grace, like an ex-athlete. Too, like an ex-athlete, there was the sense that his best days were behind him. A little too neat in dress, a little too Southern and patriotic in politics, he didn't fit in with the younger journalist crowd beginning to filter into the city. Helen was the kind of girl he dreamed about showing off back home, but coming across her in Saigon seemed on the edge of a miracle. The coup he was devising that afternoon was sweeping her off her feet, romancing her until his assignment was up, returning home with her on his arm, a salve and a cover to an unspectacular foreign career.

She grinned. Back home, she had been considered on the plain side, but here the attention of being a rarity was unlike anything she was used to.

"Have a sip of rum for the road." He gave her his glass, a heavy, square one with a solid crystal bottom that made her hand dip from its surprising weight.

"Hmmm," she said. "I needed that."

"You should come home to New Orleans with me. Plenty of the good stuff down there. I'll put you in one of those big ol' houses in the Garden District, and we can fill it with kids."

"Robert, honey," she said, batting her eyes and using a phony, thick Southern accent, "I came to Saigon to escape all that."

"Let's go. Everyone's already left for the restaurant."

They stood on the sidewalk while Robert haggled over the fare to Cholon with two cyclo drivers. Dark, lead-colored clouds had moved in and now begged against the tops of buildings, the humidity and heat so intense Helen felt as if she were walking fully clothed into a sauna. A shimmer in the air. She pushed past Robert and the drivers, ducking under the umbrella covering of one of the cyclos just as a sheet of rain crashed down. The city changed from gold sepia hues to shades of silver; the air, rinsed of its smells, recalled the closeness of the namesake river. Water beaded on the bunched flowers standing in buckets along the side of the road.

"Pay the fare, Robert," she shouted, laughing, as he climbed in the second cyclo behind her, dripping wet.

The suddenness of the rains still seemed magical to her. Not like back home, where a few drops gave warning and then slowly increased. With the blink of an eye, a sudden Niagara. The monsoon had the tug of the ocean as if it were trying to reclaim the land.

Especially in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon, the shower didn't slow the heavy pace of business. People simply covered themselves with an umbrella, a piece of plastic, what ever was on hand, and continued on. Both of the drivers were soon drenched but didn't bother with rain gear, their shirts and shorts soaked and clinging to their stringy frames, water squelching out from their rubber sandals, as they serenely pedaled on. When they stopped in traffic, Helen turned to see her driver close his eyes and lift his face to the sky. When the other cyclo pulled next to her, she leaned across and whispered to Robert, "He doesn't seem to mind the wet."

"Probably the only bath he gets every day," Robert said. He had been stationed in more than five countries since he started reporting, and he took pride in the fact that he remained immune and separate from each of them. He looked forward to the time when all the thrill of the exotic drained away for Helen, too.

"Don't talk so loud."

"He can't understand me, honey."

"I don't care. It's not nice."

"You're right. He's probably a cyclo driver by day, a VC operative by night. Unless he's a homeless refugee whose village we destroyed. By all means, I want to be nice for Helen."

She glared at him. "Maybe he's just a cyclo driver trying to make a living." She reached over and pinched Robert's arm.

"Ouch! That hurt!"

She giggled, not as naive as Robert thought she was but playing the part. "Stop making fun of me." The truth was Saigon was dirty and sad and tawdry, and the catastrophic poverty of the people made her weak with homesickness. She found the Vietnamese people's acceptance and struggle to survive terrifying, and she wondered again what the United States wanted with such a backward country.

"Helen, nothing is ever simple here." He guessed she was shrewder than she played, but he appreciated her tact. He was tired of the hard-eyed local women who tallied their company by the half hour.

A few blocks away
from the restaurant, the traffic bottled to a stop. A snarl of cars, trucks, carts, motorcycles, and bicycles. Standing still, the air turned an exhaust-tinted blue around them. The delay caused by an overturned cart ahead. Its load of fowl--ducks, geese, swallows--spread across the street in various stages of agony. Loose, downy feathers floated into the puddles until, waterlogged, they sank underneath, creating a cloudy soup. A group of Chinese men argued in loud voices. The birds inside the bamboo cages had toppled into the street. They quacked and honked in fright. Many of the birds had been trussed and hung upside down on the sides of the cart, left alive for freshness. Now many of these were half-crushed but still alive, flapping broken wings or struggling with snapped legs and backs. The owner of the cart pulled out a half-moon hatchet and began to lop their heads off. Dirty, orange-beaked heads were thrown into a burlap sack. A thin ribbon of bright red joined the muddy river of water running down the middle of the street. The cyclo drivers looked on, no intention of moving till the road was cleared.

"I can't watch this," Helen said. Since she arrived a few weeks ago she had made an effort to avoid the ugliness in the city and now it was unavoidable, blocking her path.

"Okay, we can make a run for it. The restaurant is only a street away." The rain lightened to a heavy drizzle, and Helen stood in the road looking at the mess of wet feathers and blood, shivering, waiting as Robert paid the fare. A dog watched from an alley and made a sudden run past Helen, swooping down and grabbing a duck. Helen saw the white underside of its belly in his mouth as the dog sped past with his prize, an old man in pursuit with a broom. Splashing up water and mud, the dog paid with one wallop to his rear end before he disappeared around the corner with his prize. The man who caused the cart to overturn agreed to buy all the birds, and the final detail of the price was being negotiated. The uninjured ducks in the cages quacked madly as the owner made a grab for them, dashed their heads on the ground, and used the hatchet, tossing the bodies into a box.

Helen ran over and motioned with her hand not to kill them. She pulled dollars out of her purse and handed them to the old man, who grinned at her and bobbed his head.

Robert came up to her. "What're you doing?"

"I want him to set them free."

"What do you think the odds are for a freed duck in Vietnam?" The ridiculousness of the situation made him feel protective of her. Maybe he could love such a woman. She would never last here long.

"He understood me. He'll take them to the country or something."

Suddenly the rain started full force again. Robert grabbed her hand, and they ran, laughing.

"One of those ducks will probably be on your plate by the time we order," he said.

_______

They arrived at the
restaurant and were forced to stand in the doorway by a grim-faced maitre d' who demanded towels be brought from the kitchen for them to dry off. He stood in front of them, arms folded across his chest, tapping his foot as they waited. Helen looked down and saw he wore women's shiny black patent-leather shoes.

Robert took Helen's elbow and led her to a large table of reporters at the far end of the room. When the men at the table saw Helen, conversation stopped. Helen's wet hair fell in stringy strands; her dress had turned the dark blue of midnight. Some of the faces looked stony, others outright hostile. A few were bemused. The lack of welcome was palpable.

"You look like a goddess risen from the sea," Gary said.

"Did you swim here from the States?"

"Everyone, this is Helen Adams. She's a freelancer just arrived a week ago," Robert said.

"So now the girls are coming. Can't be much of a war after all." "Quick work, Robert. What do you do? Wait for all the pretty ones to deplane at Tan Son Nhut?"

"Funny." Robert made introductions around the table. "And that's Nguyen Pran Linh down there. He's the poor bastard who has to help that scruffy-looking guy at the end, the famous Sam Darrow. More commonly known as Mr. Vietnam. Either the bravest man here or the most nearsighted."

The table broke up in laughter and catcalls. The awkwardness lingered.

"Don't you usually bring nurses, Robert?"

Darrow rose from the end of the table, unfolding his long legs from under the low-set table. His skin was tanned, his graying brown hair curling long around his ears. His hands smoothed out the rumpled shirt he wore. The furrow between his eyes, though, was not dislike. He just couldn't stand the sight of another shiny, young, innocent face landing in the war, especially a female one, and he was irritated with Robert for bringing her. Still, she looked pitiful and wet, already tumbled by the war, and he wasn't going to let the boys go after her. He gave a short bow, his assessing, hawklike eyes behind his glasses making her self-conscious.