A Catskill Eagle

CHAPTER 34

KY LOOKED SORT OF LIKE A PLEASANT SNAKE. He was slender and easy in his movements, and his thin face was smooth and without lines. He smiled often, but there was about him a sense of contained deadliness. He wore only a pair of black loose-fitting pants as he squatted beside the fire under the tarp, and as he moved, the skeletal muscles moved languidly, but strong, under his skin. His black hair was long, nearly to his shoulders, and he had a drooping black mustache. Around us there were twenty or thirty Vietnamese men gathered, many of them in shadow at the edge of the firelight, squatting motionless. Ky spoke to Hawk in a clutter of French, Vietnamese, and pidgin. Hawk nodded and answered him in the same.

The summer night was warm, but the fire was kept up. There was a cookpot set at the edge of the ashes. The smell of the workers’ compound was not an American smell. It was a smell of different herbs and different food eaten in a different land. It was a smell of foreignness and difference. I wondered if the rest of the installation smelled that way to them.

“He say they recruited out of refugee camps in Thailand. Say if they make trouble they get shipped back to Vietnam.”

“Tell him that’s not so,” I said.

“Told him that,” Hawk said. “He doesn’t think I know.”

“And he thinks I do?”

“You white.”

“Ahh,” I said.

“Says he knows chocolate soldiers got no power. Wants to hear it from you.”

“What would happen if they did get shipped back to Vietnam?”

“Ky was working with us in counterinsurgency,” Hawk said. “Special task force. Root out the Commie vipers and kill ‘em. All of a sudden the Commie vipers in charge, and we fighting each other for a spot in the helicopters. Say the Commie vipers be inclined to kill him with bamboo slivers. Says most of the workers got that kind of problem.”

I nodded. “What color was the guy that signed him up to counterinsurgency?”

Hawk grinned. He spoke to Ky. Ky answered and looked at me and nodded and grinned. Hawk said, “Some honkie major signed him up. Said it would be to his advantage once us Yanks had rooted them Commie vipers out. Said he could count on us Yanks.”

I nodded. “So much for trusting honkies,” I said. Hawk relayed it. Ky replied.

“It lose a little in the translation,” Hawk said, “but he say he got the idea.”

“He’s got to trust me and you, or not trust me and you. There’s no way we can assure him that we won’t bolt, and leave him holding the ass end of a tiger. In fact we will.”

Hawk nodded. “Good point,” he said.

He talked some more with Ky. Ky nodded and made a short reply and Hawk spoke some more and Ky still nodded and then sat quietly and looked at me. No one else around us said a word. Nobody moved. All of them smoked cigarettes.

“I told him what we’re up to,” Hawk said. “I told him that we had some influence with the feds. I told him that we wanted them to tear this place up as a diversion so we could get at Susan.”

“What did he say?”

“He say the Vietnamese equivalent of un huh.” I looked around the bright circle that the fire made, at the semi-shadowed faces of these distant foreign men. Uprooted for decades, used in the service of other people’s goals. One of the things I noticed was that the way they sat shielded us from the sight of the Transpan security types.

“Here’s what I think,” I said, talking directly to Ky. Every few sentences I paused and Hawk translated for me. “I think that you are probably illegal aliens and run the risk of being deported if you get caught, as you are likely to if you leave here. But I think the deportation, if it happens, will be back to the refugee camp. I don’t think there’s any danger of getting deported to Vietnam.” I was getting very cramped squatting on my haunches. “We will speak to Ives about you, and he will assure us that you won’t be deported, and he might mean it or he might not. And if he does mean it, he might be able to deliver, or he might not.”

I waited while Hawk spoke.

“But,” I said, “what I would almost guarantee, is that when Transpan no longer needs you, you’re going to get worse than we’re offering.”

When Hawk spoke again, Ky nodded and looked at me steadily. Then he spoke.

“He wants to know what about you,” Hawk said. “I’m going to try and get Susan away, and if I succeed I’ll split,” I said. “Hawk too.” I was looking directly back at Ky. “You’ll be on your own.”

Hawk spoke it to him. Ky nodded some more. And was quiet, looking at me, smoking his cigarette in slow deep drags, holding the smoke in his lungs a long time before he exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he spoke.

“He wants to know how come you going to all this trouble. Whyn’t you just call up the immigration people and report a bunch of illegal aliens.”

“Because I need chaos. Immigration comes down, it will be legal and orderly and Russell will be long gone with Susan.”

Hawk translated, Ky nodded.

“I can try to get some kind of contact set up for them,” I said. “I can talk to Ives and see if there’s some Vietnamese underground they could disappear into.”

Hawk told him. Ky shrugged.

“But I can’t promise,” I said. “And I can’t trust what Ives will say.”

Hawk translated. Ky nodded and smiled. Hawk said “He like that, you don’t trust anyone, and he don’t trust you.”

“Calls for a lot of negative capability,” I said.

“They used to it,” Hawk said.

Ky said something to the men around us. There were murmurs, and one fast staccato of Vietnamese. I looked at Hawk. He shrugged.

“Too fast for me,” he said. “I don’t know what they saying.”

Ky turned back to me and looked at me while he dug a package of Camels out of the waistband of his pants and lit one from the butt of the old one and dragged in a lot of smoke and held it. And held it. And looked at me. And then the smoke slowly trickled out through his nostrils.

He made a sharp nod of his head. “Yes,” he said in English.

“Good,” I said. “We’ll need some planning.”

“We done some of that,” Hawk said, “already.”

“We get the arms room for them,” I said.

“Yeah. And they got some gasoline. Been stealing it a quart at a time and storing it.”

“This isn’t a new idea for them,” I said.

“Nope.”

My legs got a lot more cramped before we were through, Ky talking, Hawk translating, me replying. But before dawn we knew what we were going to do. And when.