William F. Buckley Jr. (25 page)

“You caught up with him?”

“Oh yes,” Lieutenant Tu said, drawing deeply on his cigarette. “Yes, I crawled up to within firing range, made out his profile and fired a bullet into the back of his head. We searched him, no papers; usual thing. He was maybe nineteen years old.”

“Mission completed?”

“Well, Mr.… Chafee?”

Henry nodded, Yes, that was his name.

“Yes,
that
mission was completed, and I went back and joined my unit, and exactly five days later we had radio word from the chief here: another sniper. Exactly the same fucking thing. So the captain sent me back, not with three men, but six men. Our mission now was not to kill him on the spot, but to track him back to the village or the military unit he came from.

“So we did. Just after daybreak the sniper headed back; walked from the edge of the field, coming out of the forest, across the field, into Khe Sanh, several kilometers to the east. He was wearing black pajamas. We were on his tail.

“How would you like the assignment, Mr. Chafee, of isolating one twenty-year-old Vietnamese from a band of thirty or forty of about the same age? Most of them wearing pajamas? Exactly. So, what we did was plant one of our men in the village, to try to ferret out the Vietcong insider.”

“Any luck?” Henry was writing swiftly.

“If you want to call it that. Our man reported after a month that he figured the Vietcong cadre had maybe four people in it.”

“So you arrested them all?”

“Hell, we shot them all. The trouble was that two months later the sniper fire resumed. So this time the captain sends a full platoon with orders to go through the four villages that surround Lang Miet, offer rewards, make threats, that whole business. We’ve been doing that for over four weeks.”

“Successful?”

“Well, we’ve lined up a lot of suspects, shot a bunch of them, sent some of the kids to a prisoner camp. But as of a week ago—the sniper firing again. So we have no alternative. We’ve got to keep men here and go after the snipers, one by one.”

“Will you permit me to go with one of your sentries?”

“Risky business, Mr. Chafee.”

Henry did not comment. Instead he asked, “Will any of tonight’s sentries speak French?”

Tu paused for a moment, his mind going down the duty roster. “No.”

Than Koo spoke. “I will accompany you, Mr. Chafee.”

“No, Koo. As they say in the States, this is beyond the call of duty.”

Koo smiled. “If you do not take me along, I will follow you fifty meters behind. That would be more dangerous for me, and I would not be very useful to you as a translator.”

Henry turned to Tu. “Okay?”

He cocked his head up, snuffed out his cigarette. “That’s up to you.”

Shortly before dark Henry and Than Koo applied the blackface, beginning at the hairline down to below the neck, and then on their hands. They were each handed a carbine. Henry had his own binoculars. The duty soldier was a corporal, Vo Dung. Lieutenant Tu briefed the three stalkers, indicating the positions they should take while awaiting sniper fire.

They filed out at dusk, gratefully feeling the relief of a fallen sun. They made their way through the field, then into the wood, climbing up the gentle hill, headed for the hollow dug up over a year earlier behind the far end of the forest. They carried three days’ supply of food. One sentinel stood watch, the other two lay in the hollow. The silence was total.

Henry, on watch at midnight, stared at the stars. He wondered, might he—
conceivably
—succeed in identifying the Arno star? The star that, twenty years ago, had guided him and Danny in the assault against the Nazis? At Hué, he calculated, their position was approximately twenty degrees north latitude. Twenty years earlier when he and Danny had fixed their eye on a star to guide them, the north latitude was more like fifty. Henry had never paused to study the star cycles, but he had a good eye for configurations, and, yes, he thought he spotted it! Just there, under
Cassiopeia and to the right. What were those twenty years in the lifetime of a star? So brief as not to be susceptible to measure. For Henry those twenty years, he hoped, had worked a decisive change in him. It was inconceivable to him that his courage, if tested, would now fail him.

Those years had certainly changed Danny. Though he wondered, Was Danny, after all, the same person now that he had always been? Henry remembered his agony on learning that Danny had put him up for a decoration. At the time, he succeeded in putting the episode behind him, as nothing more than an act of misdirected playfulness—pulling the tail of history. He was no longer so certain. There was a trace of cruelty in what Danny had done—after saving him first from a court-martial, then from dying of a self-inflicted wound.

Henry put it out of his mind and forced himself to listen attentively for any sound of rifle fire. For any sound at all, for that matter.

It came toward the end of the watch, a single rifle shot. It appeared to have been fired by someone directly ahead of them, somewhere between their own position and the hamlet. If the sniper was in the forest, he might have needed to climb up a tree to get the desired angle. Either that, or he might have been prepared merely to fire up into the air, satisfied that the bullet would fall down into the compound, even as a rocket would come down. It would be almost as lethal brought down by gravity as at the end of a bullet’s life, fired horizontally.

He looked to the corporal, instantly awake, instantly in charge.

Vo Dung said nothing, not a word; there was only the incessant sound of the crickets. Vo simply moved up out of the hollow and began to make his way forward, traveling at a snail’s pace, body bent over, his torso horizontal to the ground. Above all, sound was the enemy. Henry waited until the distance between him and the corporal was about twenty meters. Before moving forward, following Vo, he turned his head and whispered to Than Koo, “
Keep same distance.
”

At this rate, Henry thought, it would be an hour or more before Vo Dung reached the middle of the forest, two hours
before he got to the end of it, where the field outside the village began. The night was dark but not black; visibility extended the distance between him and Vo. Looking up at the trees, most of them dense with foliage, he could see only up to where the branches began. He was sweating now and it seemed almost as though the surrounding trees were weeping into him. If the sniper was perched on a tree branch it would be impossible to spot him until he was directly overhead.

Henry began to conclude that this was a mad, suicidal mission, but then remembered that Lieutenant Tu had twice apprehended a sniper. They had to hope that the sniper would be incautious. At least they knew this, that he would eventually have to crawl away in order to return to his own village. Maybe that was the witching hour.

When would it be? Nearer to dawn? But that of course would depend on how frequently the sniper would fire his rifle. The conventional pattern had been a half-dozen shots in the course of the night, though the psychological impact of the earlier shots greatly exceeded the later ones when the villagers, except for the guards at the gate, were asleep. Henry felt the full, raw taste of terror. It was so much easier to do that—to
feel
the danger—in the dark. Especially when crawling, a few inches at a time, in total silence, the ear blocking out the crickets’ monotonic chirp.

A shot rang out again. The man in front of him rose and began to run. Vo must have spotted the sniper and elected to charge him. Henry stood up and turned his head back to alert Than Koo. But he did not see him. He turned and walked back a few paces. Still no Than Koo. He began to jog back, even as the exchange of fire ahead began. He was carrying his carbine. Sheltered by such noisy cover, Henry could afford to call out. It was an audible husky whisper. “Koo! Koo!” He stumbled over a body. He threw himself down.

“Koo.
Koo!
” He shook Koo’s head, slapped him on the cheeks. He knew suddenly the presence of the killer. He yelled a strident savage yell, swung the butt of his carbine with a boxer’s swiftness at the human frame in front of him, felt the heavy thud, righted the automatic and fired three rounds. He reached now into his
pocket and yanked out the flashlight. The pajama-clad young man lay gasping for air, his right hand clutching a large knife. Henry fired into his mouth. Then he shined the light on Than Koo and saw the blood on a throat slashed ear to ear. Koo’s lips were parted, framing a disoriented smile, one eye peering to one side, the other eye in the other direction. When Corporal Vo arrived on the scene Henry was on his knees, his hand on Than Koo’s chest, sobbing quietly, his flashlight still lit.

D
R. LILA O’HARA hadn’t ever met Giuseppe Martino. Never mind, said Dr. Lawrence Callard, the director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. “I still think it would be a good idea for you to attend his funeral.”

“Why? There’s no relative, according to the
New York Times
, except an old lady who lives in Phoenix. Whatever Martino has left us in his will, he’s left us.”

“Yes, I know, I know. But he gave us fifty thousand each year for the past four years; that’s a lot of money, and of course we hope to hit it big in the will. There’ll be some press there, and your brother is a central figure in Martino Enterprises—yes, Lila, you must go.”

Lawry Callard knew that from time to time it was necessary
quite simply to tell Lila what to do. And it was of course a little easier to handle her now that the grande dame was gone. It wasn’t that Lila had ever taken to going across the lawn to cry on the shoulders of Grandmama. At first Dr. Callard had been a little skeptical about taking on the staff a granddaughter of the President, but Lila’s credentials were excellent, and the request from her grandmother was pretty pointed. He really had no alternative. In such matters, one didn’t say no to Eleanor Roosevelt.

It had been difficult at first to acclimate to Lila’s officiousness. She was a hard and intelligent worker and no assignment was too tedious for her. On the other hand, any assignment given her became a Lila project, and the orientation was not always exactly as Lawry Callard had intended, though he would admit, if pressed, that Lila’s ideas were sometimes inventive and useful.

A few months ago Dr. Callard had had a query from a historian at Oxford. He wanted to know whether Colonel McCormick’s
Chicago Tribune
had ever hinted at a liaison between President Roosevelt and Marshal Pétain—he had addressed the query to the
Chicago Tribune
and got back a letter from the successor to Robert R. McCormick, who manifestly sought to keep the colonel’s spirit alive: “The files of the
Chicago Tribune
are not copious enough to record all the iniquities of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Perhaps you can apply to the Marshall Plan for aid in retaining a researcher.” Dr. Callard was amused, Lila not at all. But she went diligently to work, reading through every reference to President Roosevelt published in the
Chicago Tribune
, in the Hyde Park files, over a period of thirteen years. She found nothing that linked FDR to Pétain. She undertook, on her own, to write to the Oxford historian to ask what had been his lead in suggesting that there had been a back channels contact. She heard in turn that in one of his numerous appeals, Pétain had hinted that he had had an understanding with the American President.…

So: Lila would go to the funeral.

There weren’t many people at St. Agnes’s Church. Indeed everyone there was an employee of Martino Enterprises or a member of the family of an employee. Danny was afraid that someone,
he couldn’t quite figure out who, since he himself had made the funeral plans, would suggest that he should intone a eulogy. He was relieved to hear from Caroline that in a Catholic funeral service, eulogies are not generally given.

So the little assembly of fifty or sixty people sat through a sung mass, there was some conversation outside the church, and everyone went home. Henry joined the O’Haras—Danny, Caroline, and Lila—for lunch at Voisin restaurant, to which Giuseppe Martino had introduced Danny shortly after he came to work—an elegant, quiet, old-world restaurant in the Sixties, serving French cuisine. Danny ordered a Scotch on the rocks, Henry joined him, the others ordered coffee and juice.

After they had looked at the menu, Lila addressed her brother. “When are they going to make the will public?”

Danny looked up at his sister and noticed that Henry and Caroline were looking at him. “Oh well, I asked Lombardo Cellini. There are apparently some formalities to go through, but he said that probate would probably release the general contents of the will within a couple of weeks.”

Lila made plain her interest. “How much for Hyde Park, Danny? Any idea?”

“Well no, not exactly. I hope the entire estate will continue to give you people the fifty grand you’ve been getting.”

“Is that
all?
” Lila was clearly put out. “In one of the letters he sent to Grandmother a couple of years ago, enclosing the annual gift, Mr. Martino said something about how he would make a ‘significant’ bequest when he—I think he said—went ‘on to another world.’ Sound like him?”

“Eh, yes, Giuseppe was given to very sentimental formulations. But, Lila, you ask if that is a significant bequest? Fifty thousand dollars a year? At, say five percent, it takes a million dollars of capital to spin off that much money. A million dollars is still a significant amount of money, even if Grandfather did everything he could to diminish the value of the dollar.” He laughed. Much more robustly than Lila laughed, but her brother’s analysis satisfied her. Yes, a million dollars was a lot of money.

•    •    •    •

Lawrence Callard had taken to assigning Lila to answer letters addressed to the Library asking questions to which the response could be indicated by Dr. Callard in a word or two, leaving it to a subordinate to explicate. It struck Lila, now familiar with her grandfather’s modus operandi, that Dr. Callard was imitating her grandfather’s ways. On the other hand, she reasoned correctly, that probably was the way of all busy men—to indicate pithily what was to be replied, leaving it to someone else to fill in the language.