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.”