Bennett huddled tighter inside his jacket. “I went back and sat with Li for a while in the new hootch. We made love for the first time. For her, it was the first time ever. I could feel the power going out of me, and into her, then coming back. She was mine. Awhile later, I heard a chopper lift off, and I knew what they were gonna do to him. Somehow, Li knew. She was crying. I couldn’t fucking take it, Chuck. I left her there, went to the Officer’s Club and drank half a bottle of Scotch in about half an hour.
“The guys came back a few minutes later. Two of them were laughing. No Lam. They said he wouldn’t admit a thing. He kept saying he was fucking innocent. The Cong were tough, Chuck. I saw a guy go for almost an hour strapped to a table with electrodes on his balls, and all he said was ‘No VC, no VC.’ He just died there, trying to chew off his own lips.” Bennett sighed. “Sudden Deceleration Trauma was what we called it. The joke was: It isn’t the fall that kills you, it’s the stop.”
They were quiet all the way back to the dock. Frye climbed out and tied down to a cleat. He ran the fuel out of the carburetor and stowed the cushions under the benches.
“Why don’t you just give up, Benny? The war’s over.”
Rain slanted through the dock lights, splattered the stanchions, tapped the sand. Frye walked slowly beside his brother.
“You feel something for Tuy Nha, don’t you?”
“Well, sure—”
“Then you have a little of what I have. I married it, Chuck. It’s part of me now. I love the way they love. The way they fight. The way they suffer and still fight. I love the way they look. When I woke up after the mine got me, she was the first thing I wanted to see. She was there for me, and she just plain wouldn’t let me die, Chuck. And she still wanted me when I came out of that hospital more gone than ever. What I hate most is the fact we lost when we could have won. We were almost there. Maybe someday, we will win.”
Bennett smiled through the rain. “When it comes down like this, it’s just like over there. It takes me back. I love it. I hate it.”
They moved across the small beach, Bennett laboring in the sand. Then up the lawn, a perfect green slope in the darkness. The yard lamps cast drizzly light toward the grass. “You go in one way and come out another, Chuck. You hope things’ll balance someday. What you want to be able to do is look your own eyes in the mirror and not be totally ashamed of all the shit they’ve seen.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll never get it, because you weren’t there.” They approached the back door of the house. Bennett stopped on the porch. “Now Thach’s people are fucking with my head. It’s textbook PSYOPS. I got a plastic helicopter in the mail two days ago. After that, they left a GI Joe doll on my porch, with its head cut off. Three bottles of fucking champagne. Thach is ten thousand miles away, looking at a file on me, putting on his own electrodes. They called me again this morning. It was the same man who talked to me before they put Li on. They said to put two million dollars in two suitcases.”
“That was all?”
“Further instructions to come.”
“You tell Wiggins?”
“They know. I’ll have the cash tomorrow.”
“Why not call off the hit? Call off the Secret Army. It’s what everybody wants. Maybe they’ll let her go. Maybe they’ll let our POWs go.”
Bennett smiled. “There won’t be any hit tomorrow night. We’re going to take him alive at kilometer twenty-one. Hell either tell his men to let Li go, or they’ll kill him. His life for hers. By nine P.M. tomorrow Li will either be free, or they’ll both be dead.”
Chapter 24
The storm ended as quickly as it had begun. He parked at home and walked down to the festival grounds, where the Pageant of the Masters had been delayed. The city smelled of wet eucalyptus and ocean spray. As Cristobel said it would be, Frye’s ticket was waiting for him at will-call.
He found his seat, a minor chill moving through him under his still-wet clothes. The tableau on stage before him was called “The Four Muses,” said the program, and showed four gold-painted women posing in recreation of a sixteenth-century French statuette. The women were suspended mid-air — even from the third row Frye could not see how — giving them a precarious, otherworldly quality. Breathing stopped, a low murmur rose from the crowd, breeze jiggled the rain-slick trees around the amphitheater.
Then the stage went dark, and the announcer’s resonant baritone came through the speakers. Frye could see the golden bodies floating offstage in the darkness. Where do goddesses go when their workday is done?
“The Pageant of the Masters would like to take just a moment,” said the announcer, “to pass along the good news to anyone who has not heard it yet. The MIA Committee, based in our own Laguna Beach, will be negotiating with Hanoi for American soldiers still remaining in Vietnam. The pageant extends Its warmest congratulations to Lucia Parsons and her committee.” There was a round of applause, cheers from the crowd. “Our next piece is based upon...”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and issued a vague prayer heavenward that they could get Li back. Benny’s falling apart, he thought. What if his plan caves in? She was his purpose, and Benny always needed a purpose. Without that, he’s just a storm of impulse, not containable by skin alone. What was it that Benny had said after he’d come out of the hospital in Maryland, back to California with his new wife, his new body, his new life? She got me through this, brother. She’s not just a woman. She’s my god.
His muse. The stage lights came on slowly, and he found himself staring at a life-size Remington bronze, the cowboy galloping his horse across some timeless plain, reins in one hand, lasso in the other, hat brim flipped up by speed. Frye could almost hear hoofbeats. The crowd’s inhale was palpable.
Momentarily transported by this illusion, Frye crossed his arms, sank down a bit in his seat, and tried his best to think nothing except whether this cowboy was going to catch his cow.
It was impossible to think of anything but Li. What are your chances, Benny, of pulling this off? Not very goddamned good. But what would work better? No wonder the FBI is keeping wraps on the Thach story, with the POWs on the line. Hanoi sends over a terrorist squad and — just in time — happens to discover American soldiers still alive. Some diplomacy.
The next thing Frye knew, the announcer was telling the apocryphal story of Susanna, wife of a prominent Jewish merchant, who went to her garden to bathe. Left alone by her servants, she was viewed by two elders, who approached and demanded her submission. If not, he explained, the elders would claim to have seen her in adultery with a young man — a charge which could get her stoned. Susanna refused, the elders barked their story to the local tribunal and she got the death penalty. Only the cleverness of Daniel, cross-examining the elders and finding two differing accounts, saved her from death. Susanna’s virtue was triumphant. The tableau was a re-creation of a painting of Susanna at her bath, under the eyes of the scheming elders.
When the lights went on, Frye caught his breath and felt his heart dissolve in one instant. Cristobel stood at the garden pool, about to step from her robe, her head cocked slightly as if she’d just heard a rustle from the two men spying on her from the trees. It was the angle of her head that caught him, the long gentle plane from ear to shoulder, white in the light and set off by the blue water of the pool. Her hair was tied up loosely, a strand or two escaping down and across her face, almost hiding the eyes that looked to the ground, both innocent and suspecting at once. Something in the angle of her head caught Susanna’s indecision and doubt. Her arms were already lowering the robe, her neck and shoulders already bare. Frye considered the sculpted roundness of her limbs, the uninterrupted perfection of her back, and a leg, barely visible where the loose white material gave way with Cristobel’s step to the water. He barely noted the lurking men, the trees, the bench beside her on which rested three small vessels and a folded towel, or the two servant girls disappearing in the background toward a house. The breeze moved her robe, just slightly, and Frye saw her hair brush her cheek. The lady beside him whispered something, but he ignored her. He hated the sniveling, cretinous elders, though he felt like a third. Any chance you’d like to go to bed with me? He shifted in his seat. What odd compulsion had brought Cristobel to this tableau and its shadows of seduction, rape, betrayal? What’s going through her mind right now, with a thousand elders’ eyes fixed on her body?