“Yes,” said the old man. “A long time since, I have lost it.”
Suddenly, as sudden as the smile, Lopez wanted to be rid of him, to get the blue eyes off his uniform, to push the old man away. “Go on in then, passports is on the left but you ask at the desk.”
“May I enter, please?” the voice came back, rising a note on the scale of the wind chimes.
“It’s a free country, man,” Lopez said.
Again the old man smiled and again, Lopez felt annoyance. He knew the smile of the Anglos, the mocking smile, he knocked that goddam smile off their faces for them. And then he saw the gentle line of the lips, the open expression formed by the eyes, the white, even teeth. No, this was not the mocking smile. This was something else, like Tío’s smile had been when he was a child.
“You got troubles, pardner?”
“A Marine,” the old man said, the smile lingering as though relishing a nostalgic moment. “Never to change, the uniform. It has been so long.”
Lopez thought the old man spoke like someone who had forgotten a language and was struggling to recall it.
“You go in there, pard, right through there, there’s a desk there, you tell them who you are, what you want.” He pointed to the door of the embassy, which was embossed with the Great Seal of the United States, portraying a triumphant, angry eagle holding arrows in its claws, its wings spread wide.
The old man bowed in a graceful, Oriental way, and Lopez, his nature made gentle by the smile, saw that he was just skin and bones. Maybe they could fatten him up, maybe he had been a planter in Cam, maybe he had just escaped. The old man shuffled into the compound and to the door and disappeared inside and Lopez turned back to face the street. But it was empty for the moment and there was no one else to watch and so he thought of the old man for a minute longer.
Inside the embassy, the old man shuffled to a desk where a young man with horn-rimmed glasses sat writing in a notebook. When he looked up, the young man had automatically set his face into the universal look of the bored official interrupted by a member of the public. The look hardened perceptibly as he regarded the ragged state of the visitor.
“Something for you?”
“I beg your pardon, please?”
“Something? You want something?” He said the words slowly and distinctly, the way a person will speak to a young child or to an idiot.
“Please, I would like to see the Ambassador.” The words came slowly and oddly.
“You would? Really?” The official at the desk tried a smile that was not well-meaning. “Who are you?”
“My name is Leo Tunney.”
Because it made him happy to do so, the young man wrote the name down in his notebook. There was no reason to do this but it was what he always did first. “And business? Your business with him?”
Leo Tunney gazed at the young man for a moment. “I don’t know him. But…” He stopped, apparently confused for a moment. “But he will see me. He will want to see me. Yes.” He paused again. “Yes, please.” The whole of the statement seemed to have tired the old man and he now rested one bony hand on the polished cherrywood desk and smudged the oily finish. The young man instinctively leaned back in his chair, as though the old man might be about to faint and fall across the table. And then he said, “Would you please take your hands off the desk, you’re smudging it.”
The old man looked up, looked at his hand, and then gazed again at the young official. His eyes seemed sad. He pushed himself erect with the help of the hand on the desk and removed it. “Please,” he said. “I’m sorry.” The voice was dull and gentle and the official felt a rare sting of regret at his rudeness.
“Now, what can we do for you?”
“I want to see the Ambassador. No, that’s not right.” The old man uttered three words in a sort of rough Cambodian and then closed his eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose with his one hand. “No,” he said. “The Marine. He said he was not here. I would see the man who is head man, please?”
“I have to know what this is about.” Spoken gently this time, as though something vulnerable in the old man had come out to soften the hard shell of the official’s everyday voice.
“My name is Leo Tunney,” he repeated. “I want to go home. It is time for me to go home.”
All rightie, the official thought with satisfaction. He understood this, this was straightforward business. “You lost your passport, is that it?”
The old man stared at him, just as he had stared at the Marine at the gate.
“Passports,” concluded the official without further confirmation. Something about the old man unsettled him; he wanted to get rid of him. “Go down to the room at the end of this hall, that’s visas and passports, they can help you out down there. You have some proof? Of your citizenship, I mean? Well, they can sort it out in any case, right down there, that’s room one fifteen.”
Again, a look of immense sadness crossed the blue eyes and then passed. The thin shoulders were straightened again with effort, the body made a slight Oriental gesture of acquiescence and without a word, Leo Tunney proceeded along the waxed corridor, his shuffling feet leaving marks on the shiny tiles.
So, for the first hour of his return, no one could help him.
It was partly a matter of the problem of his speech. At times, his words were nearly incomprehensible, the English becoming tangled in a thicket of awkward syntax. At other times, the speech would emerge clearly but without inflection, as though spoken by a computer. The words were obscure and clear by turns, like the sound of a shortwave radio station picked up half a world away. A woman took down his name and asked him to sit on a bench and wait. He waited and others came up to speak to him, to listen to him. Some made notes and some did not. If it had not been for the accidental intervention of Victor Taubman, the return of Leo Tunney might have been delayed for hours or even days longer.
Unlike the Ambassador, Victor Taubman was a career diplomat in the Department of State. He had gone into State from Harvard in 1946 and for thirty years, he had been in Asia. He was one of the few old China hands not destroyed in the witch-hunt days of McCarthy and the Truman Administration in the early 1950s, days when men who told the truth about the East and what would happen there were called communists.
Victor Taubman was now coming to the end of a long career that had been neither distinguished nor banal; it was absurd, but he was about to play his greatest role—“the man who discovered Leo Tunney” is the way Time magazine would later phrase it.
The accidental intervention came about because the Ambassador was in Washington and because Taubman was in nominal charge of the embassy during the absence and because Taubman was puzzling over a serious problem — the matter of the missing passports.
Nine passports were missing from the safe box and presumably they had been stolen and were now in the dark stream of the black market. The theft meant that someone in the embassy itself had arranged to steal the documents. How had it happened and who had done it? Taubman had devoted the morning to the tedious problem and now he was in the visa and passports section when he noticed the slight, stooped figure sitting on the wooden bench in the foyer.
Who was he? Taubman asked the Visa Secretary, who said he did not know. He had wandered in that morning from the street and no one could quite make out what he wanted or who he was and they just didn’t have time at this moment to deal with him.
“An American?” asked Victor Taubman, who was somewhat old-fashioned in his ideas of service to his fellow countrymen abroad.
“I don’t really know. I mean, he claims he is but he doesn’t talk like an American.” Usually, the Visa Secretary was faintly supercilious when talking to Victor Taubman — Taubman was an old hack, he was getting ready to pack it in, Taubman thought everything should run like it did in ’49—but the matter of the nine missing passports had struck at his self-confidence this morning. He was willing to answer all of Taubman’s questions in a helpful way.