Word of Honor (33 page)

Monsieur Bournard had leaned across the marble table. "This was a nice manageable little war until you arrived. " The Frenchman made it sound personal. As Tyson considered pointing out that he hadn't come here by choice, the Frenchman made a sudden sound of exasperation and muttered,

"Les Antgricains, " as though this said it all.

Tyson had risen from his chair. "Thank you for the tennis and the beer."

256 * NELSON DEMILLE

The Frenchman looked up, but did not stand. "Pardon. You are my guest.

But I saw too many of my countrymen die here. In the end the Asians will have their way."

"With you too."

"Non. Me, I am like a little cork bobbing on a raging yellow sea. You and your Arrny are . . . well, like the Titanic. " Monsieur Bournard turned his attention back to his beer.

As Tyson walked away he heard the Frenchman call out, "Take care of yourself, my friend. I can't think of a worse cause to die for."

Tyson had then gone into the changing room, showered, and returned his borrowed white tennis clothes. He received in exchange his combat fatigues, freshly laundered, and his boots, polished. The Vietnamese attendant had presented him with his holstered .45 automatic in the way a porter in an English club might give a gentleman his walking stick. To say that Le Cercle Sportif was an anachronism was to understate the extent of the establishment's improbable existence. Yet it existed the way his own club back home existed: as a bastion of cultivated lunacy surrounded by a justifiably hostile and suspicious world.

Riding now in another borrowed jeep from the MAC-V compound, Tyson recalled that incident of a month earlier and reflected on what Monsieur Boumard had said. He concluded that it was Monsieur Bournard who was naive in the extreme. Neither Monsieur Bournard nor his caf6 nor his club would survive this war. The communists represented something new under the sun, and those like Monsieur Bournard and his sporting friends who thought they could accommodate those grim puritans had obviously not learned anything from life, history, or the daily news.

But in one respect, the Frenchman had been correct: The Asians would have their way. Tyson saw no possible victory in this war, and like the WORD OF HONOR 9 257

other half million Americans in the country, he was beginning to concentrate on the only victory that made sense: victory over death.

Tyson drove slowly through the busy tree-lined streets of the South Side, crowded with threewheeled Lambrettas, Peugeots, cyclo-cabs, and motorbikes of every make and color. Military traffic was light. The late afternoon air was suffused with pungent and exotic smells. A line of pretty high school girls crossed the street, dressed in their flowing silk ao dai. They stole glances at him, giggled, and chattered. Their teacher, a sternlooking old nun, reprimanded them. The procession passed, and Tyson drove on.

It was Christmas week, and so long as he saw no signs of Christmas in this tropical city, he was neither nostalgic nor homesick. But here in the mostly European and Vietnamese Catholic quarter, he saw little reminders: a Christmas tree in a window, a boy carrying a wrapped present, and from the shuttered loggia of a villa, he heard a piano playing -0 Holy Night."

Tyson drove through the square in front of the Phu Cam Cathedral. On the north side of the square was a sandbagged machine-gun emplacement. A few ARVN soldiers were strolling, holding hands as was the custom of Vietnamese men. But otherwise, there was no sign that Hue was at war. Quang Tri to the north and Phu Bai to the south were desecrated by barbed wire, gun emplace-ments, and green vinyl sandbags. Hue remained unspoiled, a hauntingly attractive illusion, as Monsieur Bournard had suggested, its energy and charm heightened by the realities of the terror beyond its useless walls.

Tyson turned down a narrow lane and stopped in front of a fenced courtyard.

He jumped down from the jeep, slung his rifle, then reached in the rear and lifted out a heavy box wrapped in PX Christmas paper.

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He looked up and down the lane, then opened a rotting wooden gate and walked through the courtyard garden choked with hibiscus and poinsettia.

Tyson pulled at a bell rope, and a minute later the mahogany door was opened by an old servant woman. Tyson said, "Allo. Toi trung-uy Tyson.

Soeur Tgrese, s'il vous plaft."

The old woman smiled, flashing an uneven set of teeth dyed reddish brown with betel nut. She motioned him into the dark foyer, then led him to a sitting room.

Tyson stood his fifle against a credenza and sat in a musty armchair, its threadbare fabric home to a few darting silverfish. The chair, indeed all the furniture, looked to be European, pre-World War 11 vintage. A lizard climbed up a dingy white stucco wall and disappeared behind a cheap print of the Blessed Virgin. The mortar between the red terra-cotta floor tile was green-black with mildew, though the floor seemed to be freshly scrubbed. The tropics, he thought, were not hospitable to man's creations. That, added to forty years of war, made it a wonder anything still stood or functioned in this wretched country.

Tyson didn't hear her come into the room but saw her shadow pass along the wall. He stood and turned. She wore a white cotton ao dai with a high mandarin collar. The floor-length dress had slits up to the thighs, but she also wore the traditional silk pantaloons beneath the dress. She seemed, he thought, somewhat embarrassed that he'd called at the convent.

Thinking about it, Tyson was embarrassed also. War was justification for much that was uncivilized, but a man calling on a woman ought to have a good reason for doing so. He said, "Je suis en train de venir . . . d MAC-V . . . ... He thought that "just passing through" sounded as trite in French as in English. "Comment allez-vous?"

She inclined her head. "Bien. Et vous?"

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"Bien." He hesitated, then lifted the box from the floor and set it on the credenza. "Pour vous . . . et pour les autres soeurs. Bon Noil."

She looked at the box but said nothing.

Tyson vacillated between leaving and pressing on with his unexpected visit.

He knew that if his heart were pure, suffused with Christian charity and the spirit of Christmas, he would not be acting so awkwardly. But the fact was he had other things on his mind.

Sister Teresa took a step forward and laid her long fingers on the box.

Tyson drew his K-bar knife from its scabbard and sliced open the gift-wrapped box, then pulled the corrugated lid open, revealing a potpourri of PX treasures: soap, stationery, tinned fruit, medicated talc, a bottle of California wine, and other consumer products whose nature and usefulness would probably have to be explained.

Sister Teresa hesitated, then reached into the box and withdrew a bar of Dial soap wrapped in gold foil. She studied the foil and the clock on the wrapper, then sniffed it, and an involuntary smile passed across her lips.

Tyson said, "Pour tout le monde, " attempting to further depersonalize the gift. "Pour les enJants, pour le dispensaire. Une donation."

She nodded. "Merci beaucoup." She placed the soap back in the box. "Bon No4~1. "

They stood in silence awhile, then Tyson said, 'Ve vais maintenant. "

She said, "Could you . . . take me . . . a ride?"

He smiled at the unexpected English. "Where?"

"Le dispensaire.

"Certainly. "

Tyson slung his rifle, and she led him to the door.

He followed her out through the garden and helped her into the jeep. He did a walk-around to see if any parts had been appropriated, or worse, if anything lethal had been added. Satisfied but

260 * NELSON DEMILLE

not positive, he climbed in, unlocked the ignition, and pushed the starter button. The jeep didn't explode, and the gas gauge still read half full.

The ubiquitous VC and local slicky boys were sleeping on the job. He decided it wasn't such a bad country after all.

They drove in silence along the Phu Cam Canal, crossed the An Cuu Bridge, and headed north on Duy Tan Street, a section of Highway One. The buildings here were mostly two-story wooden clusters, with narrow fronts, wooden sidewalks, and alleyways between them. Tyson was reminded of an Old West town.

Here on the South Side of the river were the university, the Central Hospital, and the sports stadium, as well as the treasury, the post office building, and the French-style provincial capitol. None of these institutions or services had existed in the imperial walled city, but the French had grafted them neatly onto the South Bank while the emperors reigned in splendid isolation within the Citadel. But neither the emperor nor the French ruled here any longer. In fact, no one ruled here any longer. Instead the city was a collection of fiefdoms: the military, the civil government, the Catholic and Buddhist hierarchies, the students, and the Europeans. The Americans had found the place too perplexing, and Hue was the only city in Vietnam where no American combat forces were committed. The small MAC-V compound was like the Emperor's Forbidden Palace, secluded and forlorn. And everywhere, in every quarter of the city, in every government building, every school and pagoda, on every block, was the invisible presence of the communist cadres, Hueborn and educated, mingling easily in the caf6s, lunching with Monsieur Bournard one day, the National Police commander another, and all the while waiting. Waiting.

Tyson picked up speed, checking the side and rearview mirrors, staying to the center of the road,

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and keeping a close watch on the motorbikes that passed him. He found Hue more unnerving than the jungle. He glanced at Sister Teresa, sitting placidly with her hands in her lap. He said, "Do the VC bother you? At the school?"

She remained staring straight ahead. "They leave us alone."

"Why?"

She shrugged. "In Hue everyone leaves everyone alone."

"They say there are many VC and sympathizers in Hue."

"There are many intellectuals in Hue."

"They also say Hue is very anti-American."

"The Europeans in Hue are sometimes antiAmerican. "

Tyson smiled. "Hue is very antiwar."

"All the world is antiwar."

"Hue reminds me of Greenwich Village. Even the people dress the same."

She looked at him. "Where is that?"

"In America."

She nodded. "There are riots in America."

"So they tell me." Tyson sometimes felt adrift between a once-familiar world that had become increasingly alien the last time he'd seen it and a true alien world that was becoming uncomfortably understandable. They said that if a day came when you completely understood the Orient, you should seek professional help.

The jeep approached the Joan of Arc Church, a yellowish stucco building with a colonnaded front and an impressive steeple. There was a school close by, and a small dispensary building marked with a red cross. Sister Teresa said, "I will walk from here.' ,

Tyson pulled to the side of the busy street. Sister Teresa remained sitting in the seat beside him, then said, "When do you leave?"

Tyson glanced at her. "Vietnam? I'm leaving on 17 April. If not sooner. No later."

262 0 NELSON DEMILLE

She nodded slowly.

"Why do you ask?"

She shrugged, a very Gallic shrug, he thought. He wondered which parent was French. He said, "Do you have family in Hue?"

"Oui. The family of my mother. My father, he is un para."

"A French soldier. A paratrooper?"

"Oui. Un para."

"In France?"

She shrugged again. "I never knew him."

"Have you ever been to France?"

"No. I have been only to Da Nang. To the convent school."

"You speak French well. You are educated, a nun, you are half French. Why don't you leave here? Go to France."

She looked at him. "Why?"

Tyson thought he should tell her there was a war going on, that eventually, as Monsieur Bournard said, the communists would win, that she was a beautiful woman, and that she would do well anywhere. Instead he changed the subject. "Why did you become a nun?"

"My mother wished it. My father was Catholic. "

"How old are you?"

She seemed somewhat surprised at the question but replied, "Twenty and three."

He nodded. She would have been born in 1945, the year the Second World War ended, the year the Japanese surrendered Vietnam and the French and the communists began their war to determine who was going to be in charge here. He looked at her, hesitated, then asked, "Don't you find it difficult? Not being able to ... marry?"

She looked away from him.

He said quickly, "That was not a proper question. "

She replied, "I am content. There are many of WORD OF HONOR 0 263

us of mixed blood in Hue, and we are ... how do you say? ... Les paria.

"Outcasts. "

"Oui. Outcasts to our people. The Europeans treat us well, but we are not as good as them. We find peace in the Church."

Tyson realized her view of the world was rather limited. He had a dislike for men who played Svengati or Professor Higgins with women of other cultures or lesser stations in life, so he dropped the subject for a more immediate one. "When can I see you again?"

She turned toward him and looked him fully in the face for the first time.

He met her eyes and held them. Seconds ticked by. Finally, she said,

"Tomorrow if you wish. There is a-une soirge pour les enfants. A l'icole.

Pour Le Noil. . . . Do you . . . ?" She made a fluttering motion with her fingers. "Le piano."

"Oh . . . sure. Un peu.

"Bien. Les chansons de NoN?"

"That's about all I can play. Except for 'Moon River. ' "

"Bien. A onze heures. A 1'ecole. " She pointed.

"I'll try to be there."

She smiled. "Good. " She put her legs over the side of the jeep and looked back. "Merci, Lieutenant. "

"A demain, Tjr~se.-

She seemed surprised at being addressed that way, then said, "A demain . .

. Benjamin." She slid down from the jeep and walked toward the dispensary in the church compound.

Tyson watched her. She looked back, smiled shyly, then hurried on.