The Man From Saigon (20 page)

Suddenly, there was gunfire; he and Locke ran backwards, the camera still pointed toward the girl. The commotion continued. Locke tried to keep the camera up to film as a group
of students, newly determined by the sight of the injured girl, fought off a line of police. The students could only hold their ground for a few seconds before being set upon by another group of police and forced back; in this way they surged and withdrew, forward and back like a receding tide, dropping their banners and signs. The girl was there, then gone, then there again. Marc held the recording equipment up and away from him, exposing his chest. It forced him into a vulnerable position but he had no choice. Locke lifted the camera high above the reaching arms of the police in the same manner. They had minutes of good footage, enough for a story.

Then the police hit Locke’s arm so that he dropped the camera on to the street. Marc jumped for it, grabbed it, then was kicked, his arm stepped upon so that for a moment he let go the camera. Somebody booted him across the shoulder, trying to turn him over now that he’d tucked the camera beneath him. But he rose up through the blows, bent over, the camera at his belly, shielding it with his body. The girl was gone and in her place, he saw now, was a fan of smeared blood. He would have loved footage of that, too, but the camera was huge, unwieldy, and he kept getting pushed back, down on to the street again. He got up, turning as he did so. The police were pulling at the camera, prying it away from him. He held on; running, trying to run. His feet didn’t seem to make any progress; it all happened in a compressed moment of time in which he felt trapped, overpowered. He looked over his shoulder and saw another journalist being hit in the face. The man fell down and was kicked. He saw it and stopped, held the camera up, trying to film. The journalist was dragged back, smacked in the ear with a boot. Then someone dropped a gun—he saw this—dropped a gun right next to the journalist’s hand. By then he was being pushed back hard in a rush of people. The recording equipment wagged on his hip, the camera was harder and harder to protect. He could film nothing. He looked wildly
around for Locke, but could not see him. He saw the gun inches from the journalist’s elbow. He wished he could yell to the journalist,
Don’t pick up the gun.
He ran forward, colliding into people; he heard the journalist crying out. There were sirens everywhere, shouting, gunshots, CS cans rolling down the street spewing their pummels of smoke.
There are always stray bullets, Mr. Davis.
He thought what might happen if the journalist picked up the gun that had been planted there, how easy it would be then to shoot him, to justify it, even to insist on the necessity of yet another assassination. The police hovered over him until tear gas drove them back. He couldn’t see the gun any more. Either it was obscured by the gas or the policeman who dropped it there had picked it up once more. Someone had gotten the journalist to his feet and he saw now who it was: Brian Murray. His eye was swollen; he had blood over one side of his head. He was ducking his head one way then another as though fending off blows that were no longer coming. Though Marc did not manage to get that on film, he watched it, and the sight of Murray protecting his face from assailants who were gone, had scattered, fled, became so embedded in his mind that for many years he believed he’d seen the footage, that he’d filmed it and that it had been shown on the news.

Locke grabbed his elbow and spun him around. Already their eyes were streaming and stinging from the tear gas.
Let’s go!
Locke said. Marc handed Locke the camera.
Get Murray
, he said. He meant get him out of here, but Locke thought he meant film him.

We’ve already got enough!

No, I mean, go get him!

Murray had lost his eyeglasses. He was trying to find them, patting the ground, his hands filtering through papers, coins, cards, keys, shards of broken glass, other bits of debris, but he couldn’t see with his swollen brow, the tear gas overwhelming him, the glasses undoubtedly smashed to pieces
anyway. Locke and Marc reached him, yelling already for him to stand up.

Move!
Locke yelled.
Stand up, for fucksake!
They took him by the elbows, hoisted him up. He rose with enormous resistance, shoulders first, making a squealing sound, then stopped suddenly and vomited on their shoes. Locke yelled,
Run! Run, you sonofabitch!
At that point Murray finally registered that it was them, Locke and Davis, and opened his mouth in surprise. They ran down the road, escaping the tear gas, the riot, Murray clinging to them, Marc hoping the guy wasn’t seriously wounded, that they weren’t leaving a trail of blood. He hadn’t checked; there had been no time. He had the sudden, awful thought that Murray had been shot, or had been hit so hard in the head that his brain was swelling.

They got a taxi to the radio station ten blocks away, Murray holding the front of his head, patting the wound there. It did not look so bad once you could see where the injury began and ended, a broad scraping that had taken off the skin across his forehead. Locke pushed a bloody handkerchief against the back of his own head where he had been kicked. That wound was of a different kind. It had a caved-in look that made Marc nervous. He was inclined to tell the taxi driver to keep driving, to pass the radio station altogether and head out to the dispensary by the airport to have the gash seen to. But Murray was half mad with fear and it took both him and Locke to keep him calm. No change of instructions was given, about a dispensary or anything else, and so the taxi stopped duly outside the radio station.

They all piled out. Murray recovered himself enough to curse the whole of the Saigon police department, particularly the Commissioner and a few other high-ranking officers. The blood on his head wasn’t too bad, but his hands were a mess. Standing on the sidewalk, Murray stretched his fingers out and back again, or tried to, checking if they were broken. One of his wrists had a purple bruise that seemed to grow by the minute.

Let’s go
, said Marc, and they charged into the radio station, climbing the stairs to the cloakroom, where they washed under the disapproving glare of Madam Ngô, who ran the place, and who began to yell when they took turns ducking their heads under the faucet, trying to get off the traces of gas and blood. Murray couldn’t work the taps; his hands were too swollen.
They must have stood on you
, Locke said. Marc turned the taps for the guy, brought him some paper towels. At the adjacent sink the blood from Locke’s head wound mixed with water and filled the bowl. Marc told him he really should go get some treatment. Murray finished at the sink and set off downstairs once more, saying he was getting a taxi to the dispensary. He was worried about his fingers, one of which was blackening at the tip.
Go with him
, Marc said.

Locke frowned down into the sink, then spit.
We’ll do the spot first.

Madame Ngô clucked and stomped around them.
What you do my floor!
she said.
My towel! Why you take all my towel?
They dripped water over the tiled floor along with flecks of blood. Locke made a compress of paper towels, pressing them against his swelling skull. Madame Ngô pointed to these infractions, shouting at them as they piled back down the stairs to the studio. By apologizing profusely and promising to send someone to clean it all up, they convinced her to connect them to San Francisco, then get a patch through to New York. She made it clear she found them boorish and demanding, impossible even, worse than disrespectful children. If she could have spanked them, she would have. Marc did a one-minute spot on a New York station while Madame Ngô pouted and stamped on the other side of the studio’s soundproof glass, berating Locke, who had the bad manners to continue to bleed despite all her ravings, marking the green linoleum of the radio station’s floor. Marc stepped out into the area where Locke was leaning against the metal shelving that held cables and production
equipment, all the mysterious black boxes and wiring and reels of tape, ignoring the woman who bent at his feet, scraping spots of blood with wads of tissue paper from a roll she held tightly near her person, lest the enormous American man above her try to use that, too, for the problem with his scalp.

They got a taxi to the bureau. Locke went through the sequence of pictures, first this, then that, guessing at how much time he’d got on each set of images, as Marc typed out the words for the voice-over. He read it through once more, then wrote out the changes in longhand, editing where he could. What he wrote did not entirely capture the drama of the event. It did not include the warning from the CIA man, the attack of the journalist, Murray, the last fan of blood left by the dying girl. But it was a sound, accurate report that he was glad to conclude. It had been a misery, the afternoon; in the end, they had to ride out to the dispensary because the blood was still seeping from Locke’s skull.

What a pain in the ass
, Locke said.

It’s no big deal
, said Marc.
Might as well have it checked out.

Marc felt all right. He thought he was all right. He’d been in Khe San only a month before when North Vietnamese gunners were firing three hundred rounds a day. This little student protest didn’t even figure by comparison. Even so, in the taxi on the way back from the dispensary, Locke’s wound neatly joined now by a line of new butterfly bandages, he didn’t feel entirely all right. He’d had a coffee with cognac. He’d had half a joint in the stall at the dispensary while they tended to Locke.
Fuck if I’m doing any more work tonight
, said Locke afterwards.
I’m getting sufficiently stoned and that’s it. Goodnight.

The traffic coming out of the dispensary slowed, then stopped. They stood in the baking heat, Locke slumped against a door, asleep or close enough, the sun like a knife, the only slight shade at one edge of the seat, which was burning hot, as though the vinyl might melt altogether. Marc ran out of cigarettes. Normally,
he would have asked the driver to stop and get him some, never having to move from where he was sitting. You could do that in Saigon, sit and wait and have things brought to you. But the taxi hadn’t gone more than a mile in twenty minutes. They were flanked by every kind of vehicle, stalled by the sheer weight of traffic because (he learned later) a military convoy making its way slowly over a cross-section had experienced some type of mechanical problem. Meanwhile, he wanted a smoke. This fact and the way in which the sun was angling into the cab, searing them like meat, made him so crazy he banged the roof of the cab and howled at the driver, who quivered and was silent. Locke didn’t move from his stupor. He leaned his head on the half-open window, a neat pink line from the window’s edge dissecting his cheek. He was completely out of it. He didn’t care who yelled at who. The traffic was one long unmoving chain; Marc was thirsty as hell. No cigarettes. He flung himself upwards from his seat. The driver shrunk down as he roared.

What the fuck?
said Locke, then closed his eyes again.

Marc felt himself become suddenly aware of his own crazy anger; he felt the sweat beading on his lip, wished he’d shaved that morning. His face was hot. He rubbed his collar, wiped his palms on his shirt.

Sorry
, Marc told the driver, but it came out all wrong, as if he was issuing an order, as if he was expecting the driver to be sorry. He tried again.
Je suis desolé.
But it was too late. The driver had cloaked himself in the same invisible shield he’d seen in many of the Vietnamese. A shouting American, a Vietnamese taxi man. It was the same story all over the place. Who could blame the guy that he didn’t respond to the apology, that he appeared not even to have heard it?

Marc wanted to tell the driver that only hours before he’d had the back of his knee kicked out so that he went flying on to the street, that his arms had been stepped on when he
grabbed for his equipment, that he’d seen a colleague beaten and could do nothing.
Your goddamned police
, he wanted to say. And why? Why did he want to berate this man driving the cab?

He could not be alone. He needed a drink. That’s when he decided to find Susan. By the time he arrived at her door he’d reached a new place altogether, a leveled anxiety that pointed inward. His heart was pumping, the heat rose from him so that he felt his shirt sticking to him like a second skin. He was unable to relax, standing in the hall with a newly purchased pack of Camels, smoking one after another like he was going through a box of chocolates. When a maid came in with her bucket and rags, he fixed a glare on her that shooed her away. He felt like a bully. He hated himself. He pulled on the cigarette, blew the smoke up to the ceiling, used the floor as an ashtray, then marched downstairs and got a scotch. Susan still wasn’t back so he went outside to a newsagent. It began to rain, the sky opening just as he left with his newspaper, stabbing warm raindrops, then thicker ones that felt like someone were cracking eggs over his head. He ran back to the hotel, flew up the stairs. He stood impatiently outside her room door making the carpet wet. When Susan finally appeared, back from the five o’clock briefing, he greeted her as if she were expecting him. She was not. She wore a trenchcoat, loafers, some sort of ridiculous rain hat that floated around her head.

What’s this?
He touched the hat. It was transparent plastic with a brightly colored cord that tied beneath the chin. Something a child would wear. He seemed to recall that back home they sold such things in gumball machines for a quarter. He wondered how much she’d paid for it here in one of the Saigon market stalls. Some crazy price just for Americans, three dollars for a piece of plastic glued to nylon.
Looks like something you’d wrap a sandwich in.

Well, it’s an improvement on the plastic bag I wore last time
I got caught in a storm
, she said.
What you need in this place is a shower cap, really It’s like standing under a waterfall—what happens during monsoon season?