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.
_
CONVERSE WAS, BY PROFESSION, AN AUTHOR. TEN YEARS before he had written a play about the Marine Corps which had been performed and admired. Since the production of his play, the only professional good fortune attending him had been the result of his marriage to the daughter of an editor and publisher.
Elmer Bender, Converse’s father-in-law, edited and published imitations of other magazines. The name of each Bender publication was designed to give its preoccupied and overstimulated purchasers the impression that they were buying the more popular magazine it imitated. If there were, for example, a magazine called Collier’s, Elmer would edit and publish a magazine called Shmollier’s.
“Mine are better,” Elmer would say. He was a veteran of New Masses and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
For seven years of his marriage to Marge, Elmer had employed Converse as principal writer on Nightbeat, which his lawyers described as A Weekly Tabloid With a Heavy Emphasis on Sex. He supervised a staff of two — Douglas Dalton, who was an elderly newspaper alcoholic with beautiful manners, and a Chinese Communist named Mike Woo, who had once attempted an explication of the theory of surplus value in the weekly horoscope. “Don’t be afraid to ask for a raise, Sagittarius. Your boss always pays you less than your work is actually worth!”