Tree of Smoke (66 page)

“How are you feeling, Skipper? Like shit, I hope.”

“Jimmy.”

“Yeah.”

“Is Rick Voss dead?”

“Very very much so.”

“Did you…You killed Rick Voss?”

“No, fucker. The VC killed Rick Voss. Somebody shot down his helicopter. They think. Anyway, it went down.”

“Rick Voss is dead?”

“Everybody aboard. Poof.”

“What was he doing in a helicopter?”

“Diddling around like a dick, like always.”

“Jesus Christ. He had a wife and kids.”

“Well, he don’t no more, Jack. Pretty soon some other guy’ll have ’em. That’s how the shit goes.”

Voss had a little girl, Skip remembered. He leaned forward and retrieved his coconut drink from the table and held the cold glass against his pounding cheekbone.

“So, little Skippy. Where were you last Thursday?”

“Saigon.”

“Where else?”

“Taking a polygraph.”

“Yeah. You sure were.”

Sands leaned forward in his chair. He kept his .25-caliber Beretta in a dresser drawer upstairs and had an impulse, momentary but almost irresistible, to go up and get it and shoot Jimmy Storm in his face. When the wave had washed over he felt weak to the point of paralysis. He put his face in his hands. “Listen. Are you leaving, or not?”

“Yeah, I’m going. I just came to let you know karma turned your good buddy to soup.”

“Jesus Christ. Poor Voss.”

“Yeah, Poor Voss. I wish I could be the one to tell his wife. I hope he had beautiful little kiddies. I hope he thought about them while he was going down.”

Suddenly Sands clutched up some ice cubes from his drink and flung them at his face. “Aah, shit,” Jimmy said. “I’m sorry. Come on, throw some more.” His eyes cried out for it, for punishment. “The first time I saw you I thought, This guy is looking fucking sketchy. Sifting through ashtrays for a snipe. He’s got that how-do-I-get-your-wallet look. He’s here on a kiddie-cruise. He’s here to play Spooks and Gooks. You came here to troll the drag and show off your fucking hot rod.”

“If you’re all done stomping me, I’d like you to leave.”

“Stomping? Fuck you. Right now the colonel is being tortured. Right now they’re breaking every one of his bones.”

“Jimmy. Goddamn. Come on.”

“You remember how he ditched the Japs in World War Two, man?—he played fucking dead.”

“Good for you. Keep the legend alive.”

“I’m not the motherfucking voice of reason. I soak shit up, I process it, I feel the facts. It’s visceral. There’s not enough of that going on around here.”

“Jimmy, the colonel died. And everything fell apart.”

“What did he say? What did he say a thousand times? ‘How do we get bogus product credibly into the hands of the enemy? Specifically into Uncle Ho’s hands?’ Scenario one: through a double who so-called steals phony documents. Number two: use a real live American, a plant who gets himself captured. But his favorite idea was using both. Coming from separate sources, you enhance the credibility level.”

“Jimmy. Focus.”

“No, man, this makes too much sense. It’s just too lined up and laid out. He faked this shit, and he didn’t tell us. He’s on a mission, and we’re fucked. We can’t help him. Something cold is happening, extremely cold. And we’re the niggers.”

“Why would he pull a ruse without letting us in on it?”

“Why? Because you’re a fink. And a pogue. And a queer. I should screw you in the ass.”

“Focus, will you focus? Who told you they picked me up?”

“I know things.”

“Hao told you.”

“Fuck you.”

“Storm—it’s Hao. It’s Hao.”

“What about him?”

“The rat. The fink. It’s Hao.”

“Fuck you. Nice try.”

“Jimmy, it’s Hao.”

“Watch your karma. Behold your karma. Observe while it eats you slow-motion from the toes up, fucker.”

“They polyed me at the Language School. Hao was there.”

“Bull—shit.” Storm took a second to consider the assertion. “Right at the party?”

“No, but I saw him in the hallway.”

“Maybe he’s taking classes.”

“They’ve got a store in the basement. RSC or somebody. Hao walked past the door while I was sitting there. They wanted me to see him.”

Storm regarded him for some seconds. The human polygraph. “What did I tell you? This is a rocknroll war. Motherfuckers do not understand that shit.” He stood up and wiped his face with the hem of his shirt, exposing the reddish legs and green skirt of a hula dancer tattooed on his chest. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Leave Hao alone. He’s just staying alive.”

“Yeah. Fuck. This place is Disneyland on acid. Have you taken that shit yet? Acid?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Stay away from it, Skipper. You’re too flaky.”

H
e had a location. He had access to it in the form of two keys. He had a weapon, a timetable, and a point of last resort. He lacked what he needed most.

He had no team. Too much had been left to him. He had to watch the drop point because he didn’t trust his own handlers, and he had to do what he could to monitor the site. Even if there were three of him, his cursory training in surveillance probably wouldn’t serve. He was, in plain American, only a “triggerman.” He operated the weapon.

The target had spent almost a week at this location. Fest surmised that unless the target had his meals delivered he would sooner or later have to go out for food, and probably in the dark. In any case, nightfall was the only time for observation. A shadow among shadows. Nothing last night, at least not before ten or so, when Fest had given up his post. He came a bit earlier this evening, at sunset, and walked around the block waiting for darkness that would hide a stationary figure.

Duskfall had little effect on the life of the alleys. If anything the children howled more loudly, and the men, sullen or noncommittal, back from wherever they spent the daytimes, seemed by their presence to make the women even more shrill. Fest missed his comparatively quiet family. Dora talked too much and Claude perhaps talked foolishly, but not in tones that rivaled the noise of city traffic. Fest missed his family altogether. Why not?—the old man’s death had made him mawkish and philosophical. At first the news had rocked him, but he’d quickly adjusted to a loss so long expected. A few days later sorrow attacked him again as he realized the old man was still dead. As if some part of him had believed his father could die and later one could visit him and talk about it.

He’d determined not to regard this operation as some sort of sentimental monument to his father’s anti-Communism. An operation so unprofessionally structured and unnecessarily hazardous would stand as a ludicrous memorial to a man who’d seen his duty clearly and lived by it.

As he circuited the block a fourth time and came around the corner he saw a man leaving the rooming house by the street door.

This had to be the one. Others he’d seen coming out had worn dress slacks and shirts or, in the case of a couple of old men, the long shift and loose pantaloons of comic-book Chinamen, and more importantly they’d moved where they wanted, crossed the street, if that’s what they wanted, immediately on coming out of the place. This one wore jeans and a T-shirt and kept close to the walls, in the shadows, until he reached the end of the block. As he crossed at the corner, Fest began walking. The target continued up the perpendicular block and Fest turned the corner in time to see him turn right at its end. Fest broke into a trot, keeping close to the walls himself. As he took the same right, he slowed to a walk. The man was only twenty yards ahead. Now they traveled on a street parallel to the one the man lived on. He turned into a lighted entrance. Fest continued past it and saw him sitting at a table in a café talking to the papasan. When Fest reached the next cross street he turned around and walked by the café again. The man sat inside with a bowl and chopsticks and a teapot.

Fest walked briskly to the corner, turned left, and broke into a trot again. He had the keys in his pocket.

At the end of the block he crossed the street, stood in a shadow, and observed the windows along the second story of the rooming house. None on this side were lighted. In the distant sky beyond, the orange tracers streaked upward. The show came nightly, a kind of parody of the aurora borealis. The noise of helicopters and jet engines came and went. The general din of the city floated over from busier streets. A couple of cyclos passed, and pedestrians, but the block, except at the lurid alleyways, was quieter than most of Saigon this time of night.

He took out the gun from the belly holster under his shirt and the silencer from his trouser pocket and fitted them together. He needed no weapon now, but tomorrow night he would have it in his hand from this point forward. He perspired heavily. Tomorrow night he’d bring two handkerchiefs and thoroughly dry his palms before handling the equipment.

At the street door he held a key in his left hand and the gun in his right and gave the key a try. He’d chosen the right one. He placed it in his left back pocket and went inside. He left the door unlocked. Under a naked fluorescent tube dotted with insects a narrow stairwell led upward. He tried a switch on the wall to his left, produced a couple of seconds of total darkness, and raised the switch. The light flickered back to life. He took the second key from his front pocket and climbed the stairs without muffling his steps, like any patron, and inserted the key into the lock of the first door on the right. It opened inward and rightward. He pushed it wide and stepped back and sideways, holding the gun ready. The interior was dark, as he’d expected. He heard no sound from within. Across the room a single window faced the wall of the adjacent building.

He worked the door open and closed. As it passed about sixty degrees of arc its upper hinge whined. The door lock, too, could use some oil, but he hadn’t thought to bring any—didn’t they know he was only the triggerman?

Leaving the door open, he stepped inside. Without light from the hallway it would be impossibly dark, and yet in order to complete the operation he’d have to put out the hallway lights before entering. He felt the wall either side of the door for a switch and found nothing. He holstered the weapon and took his penlight from his shirt pocket to send its small circle about the room—no switch on the wall, no lamp in the ceiling.

A narrow bed with a mosquito net knotted above it, a table with a lantern and a large seashell resting on it. On the floor beside it, a folded pair of pants and a T-shirt, a knapsack too, which he rifled quickly—two books, a pair of boxer undershorts. He lifted the thin mattress and through widely spaced supporting boards ascertained the floor beneath the bed was bare. He lay on his side and shone his light on the under-sides of the boards and the small tabletop—nothing secured in either of those places. He got to his feet.

He went about the room with the penlight, feeling the plaster walls, studying the floorboards in particular, looking for any loose ones.

The pane of the single window was raised, the building outside so close he could touch it. God knew what lived in the narrow space between. He put his hand out and felt below the sill. Nothing affixed to the wall outside, no cache of any kind.

There was absolutely no other place to keep a weapon. Either the man carried one on his person, or he had none, as Keng, the major, had promised. As for something improvised—if the man woke he might use the table, or the seashell, which seemed to serve as an ashtray.

He’d been emphatically assured the man was unarmed. But anybody could buy a knife. Or carry a length of rope for a garrote.

By the glow of the penlight he made a careful examination of the mattress. Discolored at one end, probably where the head would rest.

The problem, as Fest saw it, was that a prudent man, and on top of that a man made sensitive by stress and strain, would wake at the slightest sound and rise from bed and ready himself for anything.

Insane simply to walk through a door. Assuming he could get up the stairs noiselessly, still too much depended on the man’s sleeping while Fest turned the key.

Why not take him now?

In ten or fifteen minutes the man would come through this door, having finished his supper. He could kill him and go directly to the Armed Forces Language School to explain he’d been forced to improvise. Adapt and improvise, the bywords of the trade.

But until forced, one sticks to the plan of operation, or its semblance, or its shreds. He’d always kept to the plan. And no plan had ever failed him.

Major Keng had stressed that it must come tomorrow night, precisely at 2:00 a.m. One hour later the site would be cleaned, the body disposed of. Apparently that part of it was fixed. He had to work around it. Fest resented that the scenario seemed to center on the cleanup operation rather than on the actual killing.

But suppose tonight the man ate quickly—suppose he’d already finished, suppose he came up the stairs, imagine right now he stands in the doorway—I’d kill him. And if I choose to wait here fifteen minutes, and that very thing happens? What difference whether the moment was selected by prudence or forced by circumstance?

Again he went over the walls and the floorboards, aware of taking longer than needed, inviting a change in plan, daring fate, the target’s fate. But the man took his time, apparently savoring his excursion—who wouldn’t?—and in five more minutes Fest closed and locked the door behind him and descended the stairs with the gun pressed against his right leg, as he would tomorrow night, and exited onto the street. He put away the gun and locked the door behind him without glancing around and walked directly across the street and waited in the shadow of the fabric dealer’s entrance.

He’d waited fifteen more minutes when the target returned along the opposite side and went through the building’s street door.

Fest recrossed the street and stood at the narrow space between the buildings to watch the windows above him. Less than a minute after the little man had entered, a small glow in the nearest window gave way to a brighter one as the man lit his lantern.