When the Arvin and his boy came around, Converse and Ian bought Saigon Heralds and set them aside without looking at them.
“I met a lady today,” Converse said, “who told me that Satan was very powerful here.”
“Check it out,” Ian said. “Don’t dismiss anything you hear out of hand.” Jill was trying to watch the American reporters unobserved. “They’d know,” she said, nodding toward their table. “We could ask them.”
Converse turned to look at the reporters; they were sun burned, they had impressive Mexican mustaches, they used their chopsticks well.
“They wouldn’t go for it,” he said. “Satan might be hot stuff to the montagnards, but he’s just another coconut monk to those guys.”
They finished off the beef and rice and called for more “33.” The waitress brought them some peanuts which were inhabited by tiny spiderlike insects.
“Satan?” Jill said. “What do you think she meant?”
“She was a missionary,” Converse said.
The Percys ate their peanuts one by one, patiently dislodging the insects. Converse did without.
“I wonder who Tho is,” Jill said after a while. “I wonder what’s in it for Charmian.”
“Fancy fucking,” Ian said.
Converse said nothing.
“An Arvin colonel.” Jill thoughtfully sucked on a peanut. “What can that be like, I wonder?”
“Exquisite,” Ian said. “Do you really think so?”
“Best fucking east of Suez,” Ian assured her. “I have it on good authority.”
“I have it on good authority,” Jill said, “that Kuwait has the best fucking east of Suez.”
“If you like Arabs. Some do, some don’t.”
“There’s an Arab blessing,” Converse informed them, “‘May the poetry of your love never turn to prose.’ “
“There you are,” Jill said, “Kuwait for me.”
“I know a Parsee in Karachi,” Converse said, “who knows the Sultan of Kuwait very well. He’s a caterer. When the Sultan goes falconing my friend the Parsee supplies his every need. He could fix you up.”
“Crikey,” Jill said. “We’d falcon under the merciless sky. And at night while I’m asleep — into my tent he’ll creep.”
“Exactly,” Converse said, “and you’ll tickle his prostate with an ostrich feather.”
Jill affected to sigh. “With a peacock’s wing.”
Ian had turned to watch the waitress bend over her hibachi. “This is sheer racism,” he said. “Well,” Converse said, “that’s fucking. East of Suez.” The shock came up at them from under the floor; Converse experienced a moment of dreadful recognition. When the noise ended, they looked, not at each other, but toward the street and saw that the glass window was gone and that they were looking directly on the metal grill that had stood in front of it. There was food in everyone’s lap.
“Incoming,” Jill Percy said. Someone in the kitchen cursed shrilly, scalded.
They knelt on the tea-stained mat, trying to find their shoes. The proprietor, who was a man of mild and scholarly appearance, was forcing his way toward the door in grim fury; people had begun to leave without paying. Through the space where the window had been, Converse could see a fine layer of dry white dust settling on the wet pavement.
The street outside was strangely quiet, as though the explosion had blown a pocket of silence in the din of the city, which was now only slowly drawing in the stricken cries and the police whistles.
Converse and the Percys walked toward the river; they could see the four American reporters at the corner ahead of them. Everyone seemed to know better than to run. Halfway to the corner they passed the Arvin newspaper seller and his rented little boy; the pair of them stood motionless on the sidewalk facing the street. The Arvin still had his glasses on; the boy watched them pass without expression, still holding the Arvin’s hand. On the corner itself was an old woman who held her hands pressed to her ears in the position of hearing no evil.
“The tax office,” Ian said. And when they turned the next corner they saw that it had indeed been the tax office. The street before it was in ruins; a whole section of the concrete pavement was blown away to show the black earth on which the city was built. Night-lights in the nearby buildings had been blown so it was a while before they could see anything clearly. By now there were plenty of sirens.
The tax office had been a Third Republic drollery, Babar the Elephant Colonial, and the bomb had made toothpicks of its wrought-iron fence.
One of the balconies was lying smashed in the forecourt, surrounded by shredded personifications of Rectitude and Civic Virtue and the Mission Civilatrice. As they stood watching, a jeep with four Arvin MPs shot past them and pulled up on the sidewalk.
In the light of the MPs’ torches, they could see that there were people sitting down in the street, trying to pick the concrete chips out of their flesh. It had been very crowded in the street because of the stalls. Families of refugees sold morsels of fish and noodles to the petitioners who stood all day outside the building, and at night they settled down to sleep among their wares. Since the building had been empty when the charge went, the street people had taken the casualties.
Converse and the Percys moved back against the metal shutters of a building across the way, as Arvin paratroopers arrived in canvas-covered trucks to seal off the street to traffic. The Arvins came picking their way through rubble, nervous as rats, poking people aside with the barrels of their M-16s.
After a few minutes, the barbed wire arrived. The emergency services in Vietnam always carried immense quantities of barbed wire for use in every conceivable situation. There was still no sign of an ambulance. They rolled the coils along the street to spread at each end of the block. Policemen were poking among the ruins by the fence, shining hurricane lamps. Now and then Converse could see marvelously bright gouts of blood.
When the ambulances came, fastidious men in white smocks got out and walked carefully toward the pile; when the wire caught their clothing they swatted at it with quick delicate gestures. Jill Percy followed them across the street and peered over their shoulders and over the shoulders of the National Policemen making a short patrol the length of their line. Converse tried to see her face in their lights.
From the way she recrossed the street, Converse and Ian could tell what she had seen. Her steps were slow and deliberate and she appeared confused. If one stayed in the country long enough one saw a great many people moving about in that manner.
“Crikey,” she said. She made a small fluttering gesture with her hands. “Kids and… all.”
Ian Percy had brought his beer bottle from the Tempura House; he let it fall from his hand to shatter on the street. The Vietnamese nearby turned quickly at the sound and stared at him without expression.
“Somebody ought to set a plastique at the London School of Economics,” he said. “Or in Greenwich Village. All those bastards who think the Front are such sweet thunder — let them have their kids’ guts blown out.”
“It could be anybody,” Converse said. “It could be an irate taxpayer. Anybody can make a plastique.”
“Are you going to say it’s the Front?” Jill asked her husband. “Because it probably wasn’t, you know.”
“No,” Ian said. “I’ll say it probably wasn’t. It could have been anybody.” He began to curse in Vietnamese. People moved away from him.
Converse went across the street and watched the ambulance people lug body bags over the rubble. Dead people and people who appeared to be dead had been laid out on the exposed earth where the cement had been blown away, and the blood and tissue were draining into the black soil. There were chopsticks, shards of pottery and ladles lying about and on close inspection Converse saw that at least some of what had appeared to be human fragments might be chicken or fish. Some of the bodies had boiled noodles all over them.