Dog Soldiers

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THERE WAS ONLY ONE BENCH IN THE SHADE AND CONVERSE went for it, although it was already occupied. He inspected the stone surface for unpleasant substances, found none, and sat down. Beside him he placed the oversized briefcase he had been carrying; its handle shone with the sweat of his palm. He sat facing Tu Do Street, resting one hand across the case and raising the other to his fore head to check the progress of his fever. It was Converse’s nature to worry about his health.

The other occupant of the bench was an American lady of middling age.

It was siesta hour and there was no one else in the park. The children who usually played soccer on the lawns were across the street, sleeping in the shade of their mothers’ street stalls. The Tu Do hustlers had withdrawn into the arcade of Eden Passage where they lounged sleepy-eyed, rousing themselves now and then to hiss after the passing of a sweating American. It was three o’clock and the sky was almost cloudless. The rain was late. There was no wind, and the palm crowns and poinciana blossoms of the park trees hung motionless.

Converse glanced secretly at the lady beside him. She was wearing a green print dress and a canvas hat with a sun visor. She had offered him a weary smile upon his sitting down; he wondered if there would be compatrial conversation. Her face was as smooth as a young girl’s but gray and colorless so that it was difficult to tell whether she was youthfully preserved or prematurely aged. Her waxen coloring was like an opium smoker’s but she did not seem at all the sort. She was reading The Citadel by A. J. Cronin.

The lady looked up suddenly from her book, surprising Converse in mid-appraisal. She was certainly not an opium smoker. Her eyes were dear and warm brown. Converse, whose tastes were eccentric, found her attractive.

“Well,” he said in his hearty, imitation-Army accent, “we’ll have some weather pretty soon.”

Out of politeness, she looked at the sky.

“It’s certainly going to rain,” she assured him. “But not for a while.”

“Guess not,” Converse said thoughtfully. When he looked away, she returned to her book.

Converse had come to the park to catch the cool breeze that always came before the rain and to read his mail. He was killing time before his appointment, trying to steady his nerve. He did not wish to appear on the terrasse of the Continental at such an early hour.

He took a small stack of letters from his case and looked them over. There was one from a Dutch underground paper which published in English, asking him for a Saigon piece. There were two checks, one from his father-in-law and one from a newspaper in Ireland. There was also a letter from his wife in Berkeley. He took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and began to read.

“Well, I went to New York after all,” his wife had written, “spent nineteen days there. Took Janey with me and she wasn’t really much trouble. I’m back at the theater now in time for a brand new beaver special which is the most depressing flick this place has put on yet Everybody here says hello and take care of yourself.

“New York was pretty scary. Forty-second Street is in credible now. It makes Three Street feel nice and homely. You’ll find it a lot less pleasant the next time you go buy a hot dog at that place on Broadway you used to go to. I went there out of spite anyway — shit like that doesn’t bother me as much as it does you. Also I rode on the subway which I bet you wouldn’t do.

“Took Janey up to Croton for a visit with Uncle Jay and his Hudson River Bolsheviks. We went to a National Guardian party and that really took me back, with all the folk singers and the tame spades. We ate somebody’s idea of Mex food and there were mariachis from the Puerto Rican Alps and people telling stories about how Sequeiros was their buddy. No spicy stories for you this time because I didn’t make it with anybody. If Gallagher was there I might have made it with him but he wasn’t. Everybody’s pissed at him up there.”

Looking up, Converse saw a street photographer in a Hawaiian shirt advancing toward his bench. He put up his hand in a gesture of refusal and the man turned back to ward Eden Passage. The Tu Do Street cowboys had come out from wherever they spent their siestas and were revving up their Hondas. There was still no breeze.

Converse read on:

“The heaviest thing that happened while we were in New York was we went to a parade which was for the War. Three of us — me, looking relatively straight, and Don and Cathy looking modified freaky. We weren’t too well received. You had to see that action to believe it. There were eight million flags and round little Polish priests goose-stepping around with their Boy Bugle Corps, Ukrainians with sabers and fur hats, German Veterans of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle, the Brotherhood of Former Concentration Camp Guards, the Sons of Mussolini, the Baboons Union. Incredible. My flash was that these people are freakier than we ever could be. One tends to think of them as straight but when you see them they’re unreal. I had this snoutface meatyard accost me — ‘The rats are coming out of their holes,’ he said. I told him, ‘Listen mother, my husband is in Vietnam.’”

Converse looked up from the letter again and found himself staring vacantly at the lady beside him.

The lady smiled.

“Letter from home?”

“Yes,” Converse said.

“When I was up in Croton, Jay asked me if I knew what was going on. With everything. He said he didn’t understand anything that was going on at all. He said maybe he should take drugs. Sarcastically. I told him he was damn right he should. He said that drugs condition the intellect to fascism and came on about C. Manson and said he would rather die than surrender his intellect. He also said he didn’t need dope which is a laugh because if there was ever one man who needed it bad it’s him. I told him that if he’d turned on he’d never have been a Stalinist. He brings out the sadist in me. Which is weird because he’s really such a nice man. Our argument reminded me of when I was a kid me and Dodie were walking with him when we passed an integrated black and white couple. Jay dug the shit out of that naturally because it was so progressive, and he wants to show us kids. ‘Isn’t that nice?’ he says. Dodie, who couldn’t have been more than ten, says ‘I think it’s disgusting.’ Dodie could always play him like a pinball machine.”

Converse folded the letter and looked at his watch. The lady beside him had set down her A. J. Cronin.

“Everything fine with your folks?”

“Oh yes,” Converse said, “fine. Family visits and things.”

“It’s easier for you fellas to do your jobs when you know everything’s all right back home.”

“I find that’s true,” Converse said.

“You’re not with AID, are you?”

“No.” He sought for a word. “Bao chi.”

Bao chi was what the Vietnamese call journalists. Converse was a journalist of sorts.

“Oh yes,” the lady said. “Been here long?”

“Eighteen months. And you. Have you been here long?”

“Fourteen years.”

Converse was unable to conceal his horror.

There were faded freckles in the gray skin under the

lady’s eyes. She seemed to be laughing at him.

“Don’t you like this country?”

“Yes,” Converse answered truthfully. “I do.”

“Where I make my home,” she told Converse, “it’s not nearly so hot as it is here. We’ve got pine trees. People say it’s like northern California, but I’ve never been there.”

“That must be up around Kontum.”

“South of there. Ngoc Linh Province.”

Converse had never been to Ngoc Linh Province; he knew very few people who had. He had flown over it, and from the air it looked thoroughly frightening, a deep green maze of iron-spine mountains. The clouds were full of rocks. No one went there, not even to bomb it, since the Green Berets had left.

“We call it God’s country,” the lady said. “It’s sort of a joke.”

“Aha.” Converse wondered if all the flesh of her body were the same dingy gray as the skin of her face and if there were any more faded freckles in it. “What do you do up there?”

“Well,” the lady said, “there are five different languages spoken by tribespeople up around us. We’ve been doing language studies.”

Converse looked into her mild eyes.

Of course.

“You’re a missionary.”

“We don’t call ourselves that way. I suppose some people would.”

He nodded in sympathy. They never like the term. It suggested imperialism and being eaten. “It must be…” Converse tried to think of what it must be…“very satisfying.”

“We’re never satisfied,” the lady said gaily. “We always want to do more. I think our work’s been blessed though we’ve certainly had our trials.”

“That’s part of it, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” the lady said, “it’s all part of it.”

“I’ve been to northern California,” Converse told her, “but I’ve never been to Ngoc Linh.”

“Some people don’t like it there. We always loved it. I’ve only been away for a day and I’m already missing it so.”

“Going to the States?”

“Yes,” she said. “For only three weeks. It’ll be my first time back.” Her smile was mild but resolute. “My husband was back last year, just before he was taken from us. He said it was all so odd. He said people wore wide colorful neckties.”

“A lot of people do,” Converse said. Taken? “Especially in the big cities.”

He had begun to sense a formidable strength in the lady’s bearing. She was quite literally keeping her chin up. Softness in the eyes, but what depths? What prairie fires?

“In what sense,” he asked, “was your husband taken?”

“In the sense that he’s dead.” Clear-voiced, dear-eyed.

“They’d left us pretty much alone. One night they came into our village and took Bill and a fine young fella named Jim Hatley and just tied their hands and took them away and killed them.”

“God. I’m sorry.”

Converse recalled a story he had been told about Ngoc Linh Province. They had come into a montagnard hootch one night and taken a missionary out and tied him up in a mountain shelter. To his head they fixed a cage in which a rat had been imprisoned. As the rat starved, it began to eat its way into the missionary’s brains.

“He was a happy man all his life. No matter how great your loss is, you have to accept God’s will with adoration.”

“God in the whirlwind,” Converse said.

She looked at him blankly for a moment, puzzled. Then her eyes came alight. “Land, yes,” she said. “God in the whirlwind. Job Thirty-seven. You know your Bible.”

“Not really,” Converse said.

“Time’s short.” The languor was leaving her voice and manner, but for all the rising animation no color came into her face. “We’re in the last days now. If you do know your Bible, you’ll realize that all the signs in Revelations have been fulfilled. The rise of Communism, the return of Israel…”

“I guess it looks like that sometimes.” He felt eager to please her.

“It’s now or never,” she said. “That’s why I hate to give up three weeks, even to Bill’s parents. God’s promised us deliverance from evil if we believe in His gospel. He wants us all to know His word.”

Converse discovered that he had moved toward her on the bench. A small rush of admiration, desire, and apocalyptic religion was subverting his common sense. He felt at the point of inviting her… inviting her for what? A gin and tonic? A joint? It must be partly the fever too, he thought, raising a hand to his forehead.

“Deliverance from evil would be nice.”

It seemed to Converse that she was leaning toward him.

“Yes,” she said smiling, “it certainly would. And we have God’s promise.” Converse took his handkerchief out and cleared his eyes again. “What sort of religion do they have up in Ngoc Linh? The tribespeople, I mean.”

She seemed angry.

“It’s not a religion,” she said. “They worship Satan.”

Converse smiled and shook his head.

“You don’t believe in Satan?” She did not seem surprised.

Converse, still eager to please, thought about it.

“No.”

“It’s always surprised me,” she said softly, “things being what they are and all, that people find it so difficult to believe in Satan.”

“I suppose,” Converse said, “that people would rather not. I mean it’s so awful. It’s too spooky for people.”

“People are in for an unpleasant surprise.” She said it without spite as though she were really sorry.

A breeze came from the river carrying the smell of rain, stirring the fronds and blossoms and the dead air. Con verse and the lady beside him relaxed and received the wind like a cooling drink. Monsoon clouds closed off the sky. Converse looked at his watch and stood up.

“I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” he said. “I’ve got to move on now.”

The lady looked up at him, holding him with her will.

“God has told us,” she said evenly, “that if we believe in Him we can have life eternal.”

He felt himself shiver. His fever was a bit alarming. He was also aware of a throbbing under his right rib. There was a lot of hepatitis around. Several of his friends had come down with it.

“I wonder,” he said, clearing his throat, “if you’ll be in town tomorrow would you care to join me for dinner?”

Her astonishment was a bit unsettling. It would have been better, he considered, if she had blushed. Probably she couldn’t blush. Circulation.

“It’s tonight I’m leaving. And I really don’t think I’d be the sort of company you’d enjoy. I suppose you must be very lonely. But I think I’m really a lot older than you are.”

Converse blinked. A spark from the Wrath.

“It would be interesting, don’t you think?”

“We don’t need interesting things,” the lady said. “That’s not what we need.”

“Nice trip,” Converse said, and turned toward the street. Two moneychangers came out of Eden Passage and moved toward him. The lady was standing up. He saw her gesture with her hand toward the moneychangers and the arcade and the terrasse of the Continental Hotel. It was a Vietnamese gesture.

“Satan,” she called to him, “is very powerful here.”

“Yes,” Converse said. “He would be.”

He walked past the moneychangers and on to the oily sidewalk of Tu Do Street. Afternoon swarms of Hondas crowded in the narrow roadway, manned by ARVNs in red berets, mascaraed bar girls, saffron-robed monks, priests in stiff black soutanes. The early aperitif crowd was arriving on the terrasse; an ancient refugee woman displayed her cretinous son across the potted shrubbery to a party of red necked contractors at a table overlooking the street.

Across the square from the terrasse was the statue of two Vietnamese soldiers in combat stance which, from the positioning of the principal figures, was locally known as the National Buggery Monument. The National Buggery Monument, as Converse passed it, was surrounded by gray-uniformed National Policemen who were setting up barricades on a line between the statue and the National Assembly building beside it. They were expecting a demonstration. They had been expecting one for weeks.

Converse walked the several blocks to Pasteur Street and hailed a taxi, taking care not to signal with the Offending Gesture. As he was compressing himself into the ovenlike space of the little Citroen, the rain broke.

“Nguyen Thong,” he told the driver.

The monsoon battered them as they drove in the direction of Tansonhut; the rain darkened the ocher walls of the peeling villas and glistened on the bolls of barbed wire along the curbs. The Arvin sentries in front of the politicians’ houses ducked into their tarpaulin shelters.

It was a drive of about fifteen minutes to Nguyen Thong, and by the time they pulled up to the end of the alley where Charmian lived, the potholes were filled to overflowing.

Blinded by rain, Converse waded through the ruts until he stood struggling with the latch on Charmian’s gate. When he was inside he saw her sitting on the verandah watching him. The bleached white jellaba she wore, with her straight blond hair hanging back over the cowl, made her look like a figure of ceremony, as though she were there to be sacrificed or baptized. He was glad to see her smiling. When he came onto the porch, she stood up from her wicker chair and kissed him on the cheek. She had come from the shower; her body smelled of scented Chinese soap.

“Hi,” Converse said. “The man been here?”

“Sure enough,” she said. She led him into the enormous room where she slept and which she had filled with Buddhas and temple hangings and brass animals bought in Phnom Penh. Her house was half of a villa which had been

owned by a French brewer in colonial days. She was always finding old family photographs and novena cards in odd corners of the place.

“The man been,” she said. She lit a joss stick, waved it about and set it down in an ashtray. They could hear her washing lady singing along with the radio in the wash house across the back garden.

“You’re high,” Converse said.

“Just had a little hash with Tho. Want some?”

Converse shook his head.

“Weird time to get high.”

“John,” Charmian said, “you’re the world’s most frightened man. I don’t know how you live with yourself.”

She had walked to a metal cabinet against one wall and was kneeling down to open a combination lock on the bot tom drawer. When the drawer was open she took out a large square package wrapped in newspaper and held it out for him. The newspaper in which it was wrapped was the liberal Catholic one, identifiable by the strips of blank column which it carried to chafe the censors.

“How’s this for terrifying?”

She set it down on a desk beside the smoldering joss stick and folded back the newspaper. There were two snow-white cotton ditty bags inside with their tie strings done in dainty bows. Each was lined with several layers of black plastic U.S. Government burn bag and the plastic sealed with masking tape. Charmian peeled away the tape to show Converse that the bags were filled with heroin.

“Look at it down there,” she said, “burning with an evil glow.”

Converse looked at the heroin.

“It’s all caked.”

“So what? It’s the dampness.”

He gently put his finger into the powder and worked a tiny amount onto the nail. “Now let’s see if it’s really shit,” he said, sniffing at it.

She watched him amused. “Don’t think you won’t get off on that. This is nearly pure scag. Can you imagine?”

She was standing on tiptoe with her hands tucked into the folds of her white jellaba. Converse rubbed his nose and looked at her.

“I hope you’re not doing this crap.”

“My opiate,” Charmian said, “is opium. But I’ve been known to take a little Sunday sniff now and then same as anybody. Same as anybody. Same as you.”

“Not me,” Converse said. “No more Sunday sniffs.”

It seemed to him that he was able to feel a faint cold easing down from his sinuses, cooling the fever, numbing his fear. He sat down on a cushion and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

“Scag isn’t me,” Charmian said.

Charmian’s daddy was a judge in north Florida. A few years earlier she had been secretary and dear friend to a one-man ant army named Irvine Vibert, who had come crashing out of the Louisiana canebrake one morning — young, smarter than hell, and insane with greed. The newspapers described him as an influence peddler, sometimes as a “wheeler-dealer.” He had had many friends in government and all of his friends were nice to Charmian. They went on being nice to her after the inevitable scandal broke, and even after Vibert’s death in a curious flying accident. The farther away she kept from Washington, the nicer they were. For a while Charmian had worked for the United States Information Agency, now she was the nominal correspondent of an Atlanta-based broadcasting syndicate. She liked Saigon. It was a bit like Washington. People were nice.

Converse was suddenly aware that he had stopped sweating. He swallowed, mastering a small spasm of nausea.

“Christ, it’s merry little shit.”

“Tho says it’s fantastic.”

“How the hell would he know?”

Charmian retaped the bags and wrapped them up. Struggling a bit, she lifted the package and handed it over to Converse. He took it, supporting its weight with his forearms. It felt absurdly heavy. Three kilos.

“You’re gonna have to balance your weight right when you walk with that in the bag. Otherwise you’re gonna look comical.”

Converse put the package in the briefcase and zipped it up.

“You weigh it?” She went into the kitchen and took a bottle of purified water out of the refrigerator.

“‘Course I weighed it. Anyway, you don’t get burned with scag by getting short weight. You get it cut on you.”

“And this isn’t?”

“Uh-uh. No way. Like I know a lot more about scag than Tho does and he’d be scared to burn me first time out. I own a hydrometer.” Converse eased back on the cushion and rested his elbows on the tile floor, facing the whitewashed ceiling.

“Jesus,” he said.

“That’ll learn you, messing with the pure. Don’t get sick on my cushion.”

Converse sat up.

“Your friends can pick up from my wife on the twentieth in Berkeley. She’ll be home all day. If she’s not there, have them call the theater where she works. It’s called the Odeon — in the city off Mission. She’ll have a message for them.”

“She better be around.”

“We already talked about that.”

“Maybe there’s a side to her character you don’t know about.”

“In all modesty,” Converse said, “there isn’t.”

“She must be a pretty good kid. You ought to spend more time with her.” Charmian sat down beside him on the cushion and rubbed at a mosquito bite over her Achilles’ tendon.

“Maybe she’s keeping bad company in your absence. Maybe she’s hanging around with some far-out hippies or something who might encourage her to weirdness.”

“If you don’t trust us,” Converse said, “pay me off and move it through somebody else.”

She closed her eyes.

“I’m sorry, John. I can’t stop doin’ it.”

“I understand. I think it’s very professional of you. But stop anyway.”

“Damn,” she said, “I’d hate to make my living this way.” Charmian poured them out two glasses of the cold bottled water. “How much do you think your friends in the States will make?” Converse asked her.

“Depends on how much they cut it. It’s so good they can cut it down to ten percent. They could make a couple of hundred thou.”

“Who are they? I mean what sort of people are they?”

“Not the sort you might think.”

She stood up and shook the hood of her robe to free her hair. “What they make is no concern of mine. I don’t want their trouble.”

“No,” Converse said. She was watching him with country caution; her eyes held a measure of contempt, a measure of suspicion.

“What are you gonna do with your money, John? Such a dedicated non-swinger as you are.”

“I don’t know,” Converse said.

She laughed at him. Her laughter was something soft and satisfying, good to hear.

“Shit, you don’t know, do you? You know you want it though, don’t you?”

“I desire to serve God,” Converse said, laughing himself. “And to grow rich, like all men.” His laughter felt a little too loose in the jaw to suit him.

“Who said that? Some great hustler of the past?”

“I’m not sure,” Converse said. “I think it was Cortez. Maybe it was Pizarro.”

“Sounds a little like Irvine,” Charmian said. She poured out more water and they went outside on the verandah to drink it. The rain slackened for a few moments, then came harder. It was a savage, not a sustaining rain. The bright fleshy plants in the garden folded to endure it.

“How’s my Colonel Tho?” Converse asked.

“Pretty mellow today. He’s got another big deal set up. He’s dealing cinnamon now. Hey, you know a lot about tape recorders?”

“No,” Converse said. “Why?”

“Tho wants me to tell him what the best kind of tape recorder is. That’s his big thing now. He’s gonna find out what all the best things in the world are and he wants one of each.”

Two old women in ao dais ran delicately over the mud beyond the gate, sharing a single white umbrella.

“What do you think he wants to tape?” Converse asked.

“Who the hell knows? Me, I guess.”

“I’m glad somebody around here knows what they want.”

“Well, Tho knows all right. Then there’s Victor Charles. Victor Charles knows.”

“Maybe,” Converse said. “Absolutely,” Charmian said firmly. She had a respect bordering on reverence for the Viet Cong and she did not like to hear their sense of purpose questioned. “Like even Tho is kind of an idealist. He used to be a very gung ho soldier at one time.”

She leaned back in her chair and stretched out her long tanned legs to rest the backs of her ankles on the porch railing.

“He’s always saying how all the graft and double-dealing pisses him off. He told me once that what this country needs is a Hitler.”

“The Vietnamese have a terrific sense of humor,” Con verse said. “That’s what keeps them going.”

“He says that if somebody gave him a chance he’d like to serve his country like he was trained to do. He figures we corrupted him.”

“Tho always says idiotic things when he talks to Americans. He’s trying to make himself agreeable.”

Charmian shrugged. “People can be corrupted.”

Converse got out of his chair and went back inside the house. Charmian followed him in. He picked up the brief case and measured its weight.

“Just don’t get taken off,” Charmian said.

He opened the case, took out his plastic anorak and got into it. “I’m going. I’m having dinner with the Percys and I’ve got to get a flight down south for tomorrow.”

“Tell them hello. And don’t look so damn scared.” She came up to him as he stood in the doorway and affected to smooth the wrinkles on his plastic raincoat. “When we get this cleared we’ll get a bunch of us together and fly over to Phnom Penh and get stoned and have a massage.”

“That’ll be nice,” Converse said. He had not been to bed with her for months. The last time had been after his return from Cambodia; bad things had happened there and he had not had it together.

He saw to it that she did not kiss him goodbye. Walking up the alley to Nguyen Thong, he flexed his free arm to keep his back straight against the weight of the briefcase. So as not to look comical.

Because of the rain, it was a long time before he found a taxi.

“Every day in this place,” Sergeant Janeway said, “we entertain the weird, the strange, the unusual.”

They were sitting in the refrigerated offices of JUSPAO, the public affairs office. The walls were government gray; there were no windows. The briefcase rested beside Con verse’s chair; rainwater ran from it onto the plastic tiles like an incriminating effusion. Like blood.

“If I had anything to say,” the sergeant went on, “we’d really tighten up our accreditation procedure. We’ve got people around here with bao chi cards who are currency crooks, dope smugglers, God knows what. We’ve got hip pies coming in from Katmandu who depend on Mac-V for their next meal. Sometimes I feel like a social worker.”

Sergeant Janeway was the most articulate enlisted man in the American Armed Forces and was thus regarded locally as a sort of idiot savant. He enjoyed the familiarity and condescension of the international press corps’s celebrities and was able to display toward them an ingratiating manner of extraordinary range. According to the taste of his interlocutor, he could project any manner of deference from the austere courtesy of a samurai to the prole-servility of an antique Cunard cabin steward. To the notables and the men of affairs, Sergeant Janeway was a picturesque menial at the vestibule of inside dope. Converse’s relations with him were rather different. From Converse’s point of view, Sergeant Janeway was in charge of the war.

“I don’t understand what you want down in My Lat. Nothing’s happening down there.”

“I happen to think there’s a story in the civilians,” Con verse said. “The merchant seamen and so forth.”

Sergeant Janeway sat on a corner of his desk, drumming on a wicker basket with a rolled-up copy of The Nation. His haircut, Converse thought, appeared to be the work of a theatrical barber shop.

“Sounds pretty dull to me,” the sergeant said. “But of course I’m not a journalist. Which one of your many employers do you think would go for that?”

“All of them, I hope,” Converse said. “Anyway, it’s none of your business. You’re not a journalist and you’re not a critic.”

Sergeant Janeway smiled.

“Know how I think of you, Mr. Converse, sir? With all due respect? As a letterhead. Perhaps you’re making a valuable contribution to an informed public, but I don’t see any evidence of that.”

“I had a piece in the Irish Messenger two weeks ago. If you want to find out what we’re up to, get your clipping service on the stick.”

He reached out and brought the briefcase a little closer to his chair. “I’m accredited to this command. My card is as good as Time’s and I’m entitled to the same courtesy.”

Sergeant Janeway picked up his telephone.

“I’m sorry you’re not satisfied with us,” the sergeant said. “Personally I’m not too satisfied with you. Since there’s all this dissatisfaction, maybe you and I should talk to the colonel about your accreditation.”

But the sergeant was not calling the colonel. He was calling Operations to get Converse on the morning run to My Lat. When he had booked the hop, he reminded Con verse to renew his membership in the officers’ club.

“They say the beach down there is very nice. I’m sure you’ll have a terrific time. You better bring some malaria pills though.”

“Christ,” Converse said. He had forgotten to sign for them at Tansonhut. He looked at his watch; it was after

four. The sick bays would be closed for the weekend and the duty corpsman would not issue pills without authorization from MACV.

Sergeant Janeway looked concerned. “I bet you went and forgot.” Sergeant Janeway kept a supply of the pills in his office to dispense as a courtesy to his celebrated clients.

“You better get some somewhere,” he told Converse. “They have all the nasty strains down there.”

As it grew dark, there was a time of small rain, a sprinkle between the afternoon’s and the night’s downpour. Con verse carried the briefcase through the hurrying evening crowds on Le Loi, walking as casually as he could. The weight of the case was causing him to sweat even more immoderately than usual and his shoulder ached from his effort to adjust his posture.

It was a city of close watchers. The hustlers sat in their open-fronted cafes checking him out, eyeing the briefcase. They did not bother to approach him now; his face had become familiar downtown. His cheap Japanese watch was known throughout the city and shoeshine boys unable to distinguish between round-eyed faces recognized him by its shiny tin band. It was Number Ten. Its lack of distinction sometimes caused him to be insulted in the street, but no one ever tried to grab it.

The watch was his talisman against street snatchers. In all the time he had been in Saigon he had been street-snatched only once, although he knew people who were street-snatched as often as twice a week. Almost a year before, he had lost a briefcase to a Korean in a passing jeep, and the Korean had thereby acquired the collected works of Saint-Exupéry and a Zap comic. In Converse’s view, the idea of a Korean soldier reading a Zap comic was worth the loss of the case.

Opposite the flower market he stepped into the maniacal Le Loi traffic, attempting languor and unconcern. It was necessary to appear as though innate good fortune made one invulnerable. History had made the Saigonnais great believers in luck. Unlucky-looking people made them un easy and even tempted some to assume the role of misfortune. It was as bad as looking comical.

On the far side of the street, a cyclo driver and an Army Spec One were engaged in some dispute. The Spec One was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together under the cyclo driver’s nose and cursing in Italian. The driver, eyes rolling, was demonstrating t’ai chi strokes, weaving and dancing on the pavement. He was a great success with the crowd. People laughed and applauded. The exercise he was performing in pantomime was the one called Repelling the Monkey.

The Hotel Coligny, where Converse lived, was just off the flower market, which enabled the more life-affirming of its guests to rush downstairs each morning and buy poinciana boughs and fresh roses to adorn their rooms. A Dutch correspondent in the room adjoining Converse’s did so regularly. The Dutchman was a stoned head, and so fond of flowers that he had once taken to wearing marigold chains in his long golden hair. One day some street cowboys threw an uncharged hand grenade at him for a joke. The flowers had made him look unlucky.

As Converse entered the small dark lobby, Madame Colletti, the patronesse, who was a young and exquisitely beautiful Vietnamese lady, regarded him with suspicion and loathing. She regarded everyone that way.

Converse naturally preferred to deal with Monsieur, but he did not take Madame’s attitude personally. Sauntering past the desk, he threw her a snappy “Bon soir.” The Sisters had taught Madame Colletti to abhor those who abused the language of clarity. She stared at him with an in comprehension that bordered on horror.

“Bon soir,” she said, as though his mouthings were human speech.

Converse rented a tin safe from the Collettis in which he kept his checks, notes, and such things as Zap comics and the works of Saint-Exupery. Acutely aware of the pa tronesses close attention, he stuffed the briefcase inside. There were merchant adventurers in Saigon who paid the Indian currency sharks to hold their contraband in strong boxes that were as secure as anything there could be. But Converse was frightened of Indian currency sharks; he had decided to risk the tin safe. The briefcase was an awkward fit, but it went in.

When he turned round, Madame was staring at the closed door of the safe. He went past her into the small bar that adjoined the lobby; she followed to sell him a bottle of pilfered PX Sprite from the pilfered PX cooler.

“Beaucoup de travail demain,” Converse said, attempting to convey zestful satisfaction in his profession.

Madame Colletti grimaced.

She never used the same expression twice, Converse thought. Conversation with her was a series of small unpleasant surprises.

Early in the spring, Converse had been away in the Delta, and Madame had rented Room Number Sixteen in his absence. The man who had taken it apparently had a thing about squashing lizards. Converse returned to find nearly a dozen of them mashed into the walls and the tiles of the floor. He had found it disturbing. Like most people he was rather fond of house lizards. They ate insects and were fun to watch when one was high.

The management had made a few gestures toward effacing the traces of carnage but there were still stains and remnants of tiny dinosaur skeleton. Murder haunted the room.

Whoever he was, he had spent hours stomping around his soiled gray hotel room wasting lizards with the framed tintype of Our Lady of Lourdes that stood on the night table.

Converse sat at his writing desk, drinking Sprite, looking at the lizard smears. It was just as well not to wonder why. There was never any satisfaction in that. Perhaps the man had thought they would bite him. Or perhaps they had kept him awake nights, whispering together. The man had also diligently crushed all his used batteries so that the hotel flunkies couldn’t recycle them through Thieves’ Market.

An extrovert.

On the desk beside him was a thermos bottle filled with cold water. It was supposed to be bottled water, but Con verse knew for a fact that the porter filled it from the tap. Every day he poured it into the shower drain. Every day the porter refilled it. From the tap. Every day Converse felt guiltier about not drinking it.

That was the liberal sensibility for you, he thought. It began to give in the face of such persistence. One day, perhaps, he would feel thoroughly obliged to drink it.

The thermos was somewhat original, an actual Vietnamese artifact, and Converse planned to take it with him when he left. Printed across it in bright colors was the picture of a wide-winged bat; on the bat’s breast was the brand name—lucky.

He stood up and went across the cement air shaft to the bathroom, carrying the thermos with him. When he had locked the door, he turned on the cold shower and poured the contents of the thermos into the drain.

Fuck it, he thought, why me?

There were plenty of other Americans around.