As he went back to where the Percys were, four men wearing rubber gauntlets came carrying large aluminum cans. When they reached the wreckage, they upturned the cans and scattered white powder over it.
“What is it?” Converse asked Ian.
“Chloride of lime.”
Jill Percy stood with her shoulders hunched, arms folded.
“If you get run over in the street,” she said, “they’ll come and string barbed wire around you. If you don’t get up fast enough they’ll sprinkle you with chloride of lime.”
They walked down the street a few yards until they stood before the glassless windows of a Toyota agency. In the glare of the lights, they could see the office inside with its charts and wall calendars and tiny electric fans on each desk. Reams of paper were scattered over the floor; because of the angle of the windows, the office had absorbed a great deal of the concussion. One of the interior walls was dappled with blood that looked as though it had been flung from a brush. Converse stopped for a moment to look at it.
“What?” Jill Percy asked.
“Nothing. I was trying to think of a moral.”
He could not think of a moral. It reminded him of the lizards smashed on his hotel wall.
In his office just off the tiny lobby of the Hotel Coligny, Monsieur Colletti was watching “Bonanza” on the Armed Forces Television Network. Monsieur Colletti had taken eight pipes of opium during the afternoon; he had taken eight pipes of opium every afternoon for forty years. When Converse entered, he turned from the set with a welcoming smile. He was the most courteous of men. Con verse and Monsieur Colletti watched “Bonanza” for a while.
On the screen, two cowboys were exchanging rifle fire at a distance of thirty meters or so. They were fighting among enormous rounded boulders, and as far as one could tell each was trying to move as close to the other as possible. One cowboy was handsome, the other ugly. There was music. At length, the handsome cowboy surprised the ugly one loading his weapon. The ugly cowboy threw his rifle down and attempted to draw a sidearm. The handsome one blew him away.
Monsieur Colletti, who spoke no English, brought his palms together silently. “Hoopla,” he said.
“It’s the same in Saigon,” Converse ventured. Monsieur Colletti always seemed to understand his French.
Monsieur Colletti shrugged.
“Here, sure. Everywhere it’s the same now.” Monsieur Colletti had been everywhere. “Everywhere it’s Chicago.”
He said it Sheeka-go.
“There was a bomb tonight,” Converse said. “At the office of taxes. It’s all ruined there.”
Monsieur Colletti made his eyes grow larger in an expression of surprise that was purely formal. It was not easy to bring him news of Saigon.
“But no,” he protested mildly. “Any dead?”
“Some, certainly. Outside.”
“Ah,” the patron said, “it’s cruel. They’re bastards.”
“You think it was the Front?”
“These days,” Colletti said, “it could be anybody.”
When “Bonanza” was over, they shook hands and Con
verse went upstairs. Back inside his room, he turned on the overhead fan and the air conditioner. The air conditioner did not work very well but it provided a busy and, to the American ear, vaguely reassuring noise which drowned out the sounds from the street. The sounds from the street were not reassuring to anyone’s ear.
He switched on the lamp on his writing desk to provide his room with the most agreeable cast of light. Small tricks, picked up all over. He took a bottle of PX Johnnie Walker Black Label from a locked suitcase and drank two large swallows.
There it is, he said to himself. That was what everyone said — GIs, reporters, even Arvins and bar girls. There it is. It would have been good not to have had a bomb that night. To get stoned with the Percys and then sleep. Because of the bomb he felt numb and stupid, and although there were situations in which stupidity would do almost as well as anything else, he was not in one of them.
And getting drunk wouldn’t do. Nor would smoking more grass. Better to have stayed downstairs and watched more Westerns with Monsieur Colletti.
In his own despite, he took another swallow of whiskey, lit a Park Lane, and began to walk up and down the length of the room. In the next room, the Dutch flower-lover was playing “Highway 61” on his tape recorder. After a few tokes, he decided that he was experiencing no more than a vague dissatisfaction.
Nothing serious. See them all the time. Side effect of low-grade fever.
After a while, he stopped pacing and went across the air shaft to the bathroom to squat over the hole. The hole had treaded foot grips beside it to put your feet on; it was a vestige of the Mission Civilatrice. Unlike some American guests, Converse did not object to using the hole. Often, especially if he was high, using it made him feel as though he were entering into communion with the tight-lipped dun of vanished France Ultra-Mer — the pilots of Saint-Exupery, General Salan, Malraux. Sometimes he whistled “Non, J’ne regret rien” as he left the toilet.
Straining, trembling with the fever stirred in his intestines, Converse took his wife’s letter from his trouser pocket and began to reread it.
“Re Cosa Nostra — why the hell not? I’m prepared to take chances at this point and I don’t respond to the moral objections. The way things are set up the people concerned have nothing good coming to them and we’ll just be occupying a place that someone else will fill fast enough if they get the chance. I can’t think of a way of us getting money where the money would be harder earned and I think that makes us entitled.”
Perhaps, Converse thought, as he managed the business of the banknote-sized toilet paper and washed his hands, perhaps the vague dissatisfaction was a moral objection.
Back across the air shaft, he secured the rusty double locks and took another swallow of Scotch. When Converse wrote thoughtful pieces for the small European publications which employed him, he was always careful to assume a standpoint from which moral objections could be inferred. He knew the sort of people he was addressing and he knew the sort of moral objections they found most satisfying. Since his journey to Cambodia, he had experienced a certain difficulty in responding to moral objections but it seemed to him that he knew a good deal about them.
There were moral objections to children being blown out of sleep to death on a filthy street. And to their being burned to death by jellied petroleum. There were moral objections to house lizards being senselessly butchered by madmen. And moral objections to people spending their lives shooting scag.
He stood facing the wall where the lizard stains were, rubbing the back of his neck.
Everyone felt these things. Everyone must, or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline.
Converse had once accompanied Ian Percy to a color film made by the U.N. soil conservation people about the eradication of termites. In a country that looked something like Nam, where there was elephant grass and red earth and palm trees, the local soldiery drove over the grasslands with bulldozers, destroying immense conical termite colonies. There was a reason, as he remembered; the mounds caused erosion or the termites ate crops or people’s houses. The termites were doing something bad. When the colonial mounds were overturned, termites came burrowing up from the ruins in frantic tens of thousands, flourishing their pincers in futile motions of defense. Soldiers with flame throwers came behind the bulldozers scorching the earth and burning the termites and their eggs to black cinders.