Tree of Smoke (52 page)

W
hen the three Americans appeared at the front door of his home to take him to the Armed Forces Language School, Hao felt uncertain as to the nature of the encounter. The only one of them who spoke, a black man, did so politely, introducing himself as Kenneth Johnson from the American Embassy. They drove downtown in a closed, air-conditioned Ford with diplomatic plates, Hao in the back with one of the two younger men.

At their destination the two younger men both got out, and each opened one of the doors for the passengers. Hao and Kenneth Johnson proceeded alone past the concrete barricades toward the fine new building. Its predecessor had been wrecked in the Tet attacks the previous year. Two or three thousand members of the Vietnam military studied English here. The interior smelled of fresh paint and sawn wood.

As far as he knew, the building housed no prisoners.

Johnson led him down a stairwell to the building’s basement, where a uniformed marine fell in with them. The students thronged the upper stories and their footfalls vibrated in the ceiling overhead, but in this basement hallway Johnson, Hao, and the marine walked alone. At the corridor’s end they came to a door with something like a small adding machine fixed to the wall beside it, four or five buttons of which Johnson now pressed expertly, and the door lock hummed and clacked.

Johnson said, “Thank you, Sergeant Ogden,” and he and Hao entered a hallway lined with closed doors. Here it was quiet, air-conditioned. Johnson led him through the only open door into a small lounge furnished like any parlor with a couch and padded chairs, also a large electric-run cooler, red, with the words “Coca-Cola” on it. The room had no windows. This basement must be far underground.

“You want a Coke?”

Johnson lifted the cooler’s heavy lid, took out a dripping bottle, and, levering off its cap on an opener attached to the cooler’s side, handed the drink to his guest. It was very cold.

Feeling obligated, he took a sip. He pursed his lips and sluiced it down the right side of his mouth and swallowed. He had a bad tooth, a left molar. The colonel had spoken of a dentist.

“Have a seat,” Johnson said, and Hao sat himself on the edge of the couch’s cushion with his feet poised under him like a runner’s.

Johnson remained standing. He was small for an American, with big stains in the armpits of his white shirt. Hao had never before conversed with a Negro.

They’d taken him an hour or so after Kim had left for the market. That meant they hadn’t wanted her to see. That they cared to keep this visit a secret. That no one knew where he was.

Johnson sat down comfortably in the chair across from him and offered him a cigarette. Hao accepted it, though in fact he possessed a pack of Marlboros, and lit it with his own lighter and dragged deep and blew smoke out through his nostrils. Nonfilter. Delicately he spat out a shred of leaf. The fact that this man’s forebears had been a race of slaves embarrassed him.

Mr. Johnson returned his cigarettes to his shirt pocket without taking one for himself, and stood up. “Mr. Nguyen, will you excuse me a minute?” While Hao tried to make sense of the question, the black man went out without shutting the door and left him alone with his thoughts, which weren’t happy ones. He dropped the last of his cigarette into the bottle and it hissed, floated, darkened, sank halfway to the bottom.

Through the open doorway Hao saw his wife Kim, accompanied by another American, passing along the hall. A fissure opened in his soul. She watched her feet as if negotiating a rocky path. Apparently she didn’t notice him.

The black man came back. “Mr. Nguyen? Let’s relocate the discussion, do you mind?” Johnson hadn’t sat down. Hao understood that he didn’t intend to, that he himself must stand up. He let himself be guided only a few steps along the hallway to a second windowless room in which sat a thin, angular, youthful man with reading glasses far down on his nose, one ankle crossed over his knee, looking down and to the left at the contents of a manila folder opened on the table beside him. He smiled at Hao, saying, “Mr. Nguyen, come on in, I want to show you this thing,” and Hao searched for hope in his almost sociable tone of voice. On the table were arranged devices and wires like an elaborate radio system.

“I’m Terry Crodelle. Everybody calls me Crodelle, and I hope you will too. Okay if I call you Mr. Hao?”

“Okay. Yes.”

“Sit, sit, please.”

He sat in the hard wooden chair beside Crodelle’s. A third chair waited, but Mr. Johnson remained at attention. Here were two very different American types, both dressed the same in their somber slacks, their brilliant shoes, white short-sleeved shirts: Johnson standing, extraneous, mildly uncomfortable, brown-skinned and black-headed, Crodelle relaxed and in charge, with pale, freckled skin, and hair the color of straw.

Mr. Johnson said, “Do you want Sammy?” Crodelle gave no answer.

“Mr. Hao,” Crodelle said, “we’re going to keep this short, never fear.”

“That’s good.”

“You’ll be back home within the hour.”

“Today we’ll plant a tree for the Tet.”

“Do you understand my English?”

Hao said, “Sometimes I don’t understand many things.” He still held his half bottle of Coke with its drifting cigarette butt. Gently Crodelle took the beverage from his grip and placed it on the table.

“Another drink?”

“No, thank you. But it’s quite good.”

Crodelle put his glasses in the pocket of his shirt and leaned in to contact Hao’s gaze without hostility or guile, but studiously. He had stubby eyelashes the color of his hair, and irises a pale blue. “I don’t want an interpreter in here. Can we talk without an interpreter?”

“Yes. My English is not good to speak, but I understand better.”

“Good enough,” Crodelle said.

And Johnson said, “Good enough,” and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

“Do you know what this contraption is?”

“Maybe a radio.”

“It’s a machine that can tell who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. Or so they claim.”

Did the machine transmit this news about himself now?

“How can it work?”

“It’s not my area. We won’t be using it today.”

Hao said, “I am searching true peace. I cannot wait for you to make the peace. I cannot wait for you guys.”

Crodelle smiled.

“War is not peace.”

Crodelle rose and went to the door and opened it. “Ken?” he called, and then said, “Excuse me, Mr. Hao.”

It was Johnson who appeared.

“We need a translator.”

Johnson left the door ajar. Crodelle arranged the third chair, saying, “Just someone to help us get things across.”

He sat down and again crossed his ankle over his knee.

Hao wondered if they’d let him smoke in here.

“When was the last time you saw the colonel?”

Hao patted the Marlboros in his shirt. Crodelle produced a lighter and held out the flame while Hao steered the tip of his cigarette into it and puffed, reflecting that life in this city of feints and reversals called for nimble steps and a long view, and he lacked this combination. He found himself unable, for instance, to cope with his wife’s brother, who owed him money, who had lived in Hao’s father’s house since the old man’s death, when it became Hao’s property, but who refused to acknowledge his debt. Relatives and business: he’d failed to navigate between them. And since his father’s death he’d run the family’s enterprises into the ground. He couldn’t handle the day-to-day of simple commerce; much less whatever these people had in mind for him now. He inhaled delicious smoke and said, “Not for a long time.”

“One month? Two months?”

“I think maybe two months.”

Johnson had returned. “Here’s Sammy,” he said, and a very young Vietnamese man dressed in slacks and shirt just like the Americans’ sat in the third wooden chair while Johnson left again and Crodelle spoke rapidly, looking at Hao.

“Mr. Hao,” the boy translated, “we’ve invited you here instead of arranging an apparently chance encounter in a public space. I will tell you the reason.”

“Tell me,” Hao said in Vietnamese.

“Because we want you to understand that this inquiry has the weight of the United States government behind it.”

In English Hao said, “I’m a friend for the United States.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?”

Hao asked the interpreter, “What does he mean by such a question?”

“I’m not sure. Do you want me to ask him to explain?”

“Why did they bring me here? Why do they ask if I have a lot of friends?”

“That’s not my business.”

“Sammy,” Crodelle said, “just ask him the questions. I talk to you, you talk to him. He talks to you, you talk to me. You two don’t sit back chatting.”

“It’s best just to speak to him, and not to me,” the boy suggested to Hao.

Hao held his cigarette almost vertically so as not to lose the two-inch-long ash and put his lips under it to get a puff. Crodelle said, “I forgot the ashtrays. I don’t actually smoke myself.”

Sammy said, “Can I get one?”

“An ashtray? Please, if you don’t mind.”

Now he was alone with pale Crodelle again. A lot of friends? Not a lot. Perhaps the wrong ones. He’d clung to the colonel as to a mighty tree, expecting it to carry him from the tempest. But a tree isn’t going anywhere.

Sammy knocked and came back in with an ashtray as well as his own burning cigarette, put the tray on the table in front of Hao, dipped his own ash. “It’s all right?”

“Smoke away,” Crodelle said. “Smoke like Dresden, man,” and Hao brought his Marlboro gently above the ashtray and let fall the pendulous ash.

“American cigarette,” he said. “I like it better than Vietnam.” He stubbed it out and sat back.

“Who’s the friend who visits you? The VC.”

A simple enough question. But the route to the answer started some distance from it and passed through a thicket of irrelevant histories. He spoke of his training at the New Star Temple. Of how the tenets had seemed, in a way, cowardly excuses for old men to hide behind, but afterward, in middle age—now—had begun to reveal their importance. He spoke of the Five Hindrances—they did, indeed, hinder—and the Four Noble Truths—they were actually true. When he’d run out of things to say, the translator Sammy dragged from his cigarette and said: “Buddhist.”

Crodelle said, “To each his own. I’m not here in the name of any particular outfit except Five Corps. So your friend’s name is Trung, correct?”

“Trung. A very old friend. We went to school at the New Star Temple.”

“What name does he travel under now?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s Trung’s full name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You went to school with him, and you don’t know his full name?”

Hao said in English: “Wait one minute, please.”

“Mr. Hao, his name is Trung Than.”

“I think so.”

“When was the last time he came to your house?”

“Please wait one minute.”

—And Kim, in the hallway, her head down. Had they arranged it that way? Possibly. Probably. To what end? He didn’t want to think this out too far. He hoped he understood his position. He hoped he had a grip on his goals. He said, in English, “I want to go from here to a good place. To Singapore.”

“Singapore?”

“Yes. Maybe Singapore.”

“Just you?”

“My wife also, please.”

“You and your wife want to emigrate to Singapore.”

“’Zeckly.”

“Is that your first choice?”

“I want to go to the United States.”

“Then why did you say Singapore?”

“The colonel says I can go to Singapore.”

“Colonel Sands?”

“He’s my friend.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Malaysia’s a better bet.—That is, if we’re the ones helping you.”

Hao didn’t want their help. But the choice seemed help or harm.

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Do you understand the expression?”

“Sometimes I don’t understand.”

“We need to talk later about things like where we put you. Right now we need to become friends. Nothing more.”

“It’s bad stuff.”

“What’s bad stuff?”

“Now.”

“Now is bad stuff? Here and now?”

“Yes. Please. I am the colonel friend.”

“You have the wrong friends.”

“No. He is a good man.”

“Certainly. A good man. Yeah—you have to wonder how many operations have been code-named ‘Labyrinth.’” The boy didn’t translate. “Do you want another Coke?”

“No, thank you. Sorry. My tooth has a sore.”

“Hao, it’s not bad stuff. In fact, if I can’t pour another Coke down your gullet, I believe we’re finished for today. I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ve done that, and I really don’t have much else to say. Except I hope we can be friends. Once in a while I’ll contact you, bring you down. We can talk. Get further acquainted, have a Coke. That okay with you?”

“Yes. A Coke,” Hao said in English.

“Does Sammy need to translate what I just said?”

“No, it’s okay. I understand.”

“I guess we’ve lost the car. Let me give you some cab fare. You’re planting a tree for Tet?”

“Yes. Every year, each year.”

“Kumquat? With the orange fruit?”

“Kumquat.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Yes. That kind.”

“Like the ones you have now in your front yard.”

“Yes.”

“You plant one every year? How many have you got?”

“Ten.”

“And this one makes eleven.”

“Yes. Eleven.” Eleven years since my father died.

Crodelle seemed to study the lying device, which was made up of several components laid out on the tabletop. “Jesus, will you look at all these wires.” He’d said nothing about keeping this visit a secret from the colonel. It probably suited their purposes either way. Or they guessed he’d never mention it because it could only lead to questions, and he’d be grappled down by lies. But Trung—should he tell Trung?

Crodelle said, “What on earth is all this for?…This thing obviously attaches to your finger…”

He’d wait for the next time Trung sought him out, and at that time he’d decide how much to tell.