“Don’t mock me in daylight with the things I say in the dark,” she said. “One day I’m going to leave you alone in bed, Paul, and tell you nothing when I return except that I love you. You’ll find the reassurance means quite a lot.”
SIX
1
The girl led him down one final dark street. This quarter of Saigon was all but silent, but Christopher knew it by day, and its clamor persisted in the heavy air, like rifle shots in the hours after a skirmish. He met the girl in a bar on Tu Do Street. He thought she might be seventeen. She spoke no French; her languages were Cochinese dialect and soldier English.
“My name is Honey,” she told Christopher. “It rhymes with money.”
She led him up an outside staircase, tapping his arm so that he would see the boy sleeping on the landing outside her door and step over the curled body.
When Christopher told her what he wanted, she did not ask his reasons. “You’re not a bad man?” she said. Christopher said that he was not, and she believed him at once, as if no one had ever lied to her.
Christopher gave her money and she turned around modestly and tucked it away somewhere under her dress. As frail as a child’s wrist, she sat on the bed and wove her hair into a long black braid.
“Maybe I can go visit my mother while you stay here,” she said, speaking as quickly as the thought crossed her face.
“No,” Christopher said, “I want you to be here, so that you can say I’m with you and deal with the people-I speak no Vietnamese.”
Honey finished her braid and pulled her dress over her head. She wore narrow pants printed with bright northern flowers, daisies or black-eyed susans; her skin was almost the color of the dyed blossoms.
Christopher smiled at her, and she drew in her breath to make her breasts larger. “You change your mind?” she asked.
“No,” Christopher said, “I just want you to be my sister for a few days, and not bring anyone else to this room.”
She pulled a mat from under the bed and unrolled it on the floor. “Then I better sleep down here, brother,” she said. She lay down on her back, drew her braid over her shoulder, and grasping it in both small hands, went to sleep.
Christopher covered her with a sheet and lay down on the bed. Honey had lighted a joss stick; its scent mingled with the stench that poured through the window like dust with sunlight. She made no noise as she slept. Christopher turned on his side and closed his eyes.
The girl had no papers, she had told him; therefore she had no existence, and if he came and went in the dark, they should both be safe enough. Heat, as palpable as the odors in the room, closed around his body.
2
Before it was light, Christopher started walking through the city again. He lost himself twice in cluttered dead-end streets, but he found Luong’s house before the sun had wakened anyone.
Luong’s wife, wearing a Western bathrobe that was too big for her, answered his knock. She did not know him, and fright showed in her eyes.
“Tell Luong that Crawford is here,” Christopher said in French.
“Craww-ford?” she said.
Christopher repeated the name. “We’re friends,” he said.
She left the door ajar and Christopher stepped inside the house. A very young child sat up on a mat in the next room and stared silently at him. Christopher winked at the child; he could not tell its sex. Luong’s wife, fully clothed, came and gathered it up; Christopher heard her speaking softly in another room, and in a moment saw her go by the window, with all three of her children following behind her. Her hair was loose, and as she walked she reached behind her with both hands and fastened it with a clip.
“How did you find my house?” Luong asked.
Christopher handed him an envelope. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you in Bangkok. You’ll need this.”
“I waited three days,” Luong said. “When I thought it was useless, I came back.” He did not ask for an explanation; he was trained.
As they drank tea, sunlight filled the room. Luong had been much abroad. His parlor was furnished with Western sofas and chairs, and alpine scenes hung on the walls. The shrine of his ancestors, visible in a corner of an adjoining room, was crowded with cheap colored glasses filled with wax in which small flames burned on bits of cotton wick.
“Do you know anything of a person called Lê Thu?” Christopher asked.
Luong searched his mind. “Is Lê the family name or a given name?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought it might be a family name. I assumed it was a woman’s name.”
“The Lê were kings of this part of Vietnam before the Nguyen,” Luong said. “It’s a common family name, both in the North and the South.”
“This Lê Thu has some connection, I don’t know what, with the Ngo family.”
“The Ngos are not very accessible these days. They’re in mourning, you understand. And they’re learning to be careful again, like everyone else.”
“Can you find out the connection? But ask with care, Luong-it may be that opium is involved.”
“I’ll try. It may not be the sort of thing you can pay for.”
“I need to know who this person is, and where, and what is the connection to the Ngo family.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I’ll come here tomorrow, just before dawn. If you want me before then, write the time and the English word airborne above the urinal at the Pussycat Night Club on Tu Do Street. Do you know it?”
Luong smiled. “I know it. Be careful what you sleep with from that place-they’re all country girls and they don’t know about precautions.”
“We speak a great deal about precautions to each other, Luong.”
“Well, it’s a time to be careful. Why are you still asking about the Ngos? The important ones are dead, or gone away.”
“This is a different matter. They still exist, as a family.”
“Oh, yes,” Luong said. “Everywhere. They buried a lot of money-and a lot of democratic elements too.”
Luong’s remark was not meant as a joke. On his home ground, when he was working, he was a serious man. That was what had earned him the Thai girl Christopher had bought for him in Bangkok, and his house in Saigon, on a street where flowers grew beside the dirt walks.
“What are people saying about the Ngos since Diem and Nhu died?”
“That their luck ran out. In Vietnam, that’s always the explanation. We have no political analysts, only superstitions and fortune-tellers.”
“And killers.”
“Yes, we’ve always had a good cheap supply of those.”
“Do you think you have some sort of personal luck that keeps you alive, Luong?”
“Of course. Everyone believes that. Even some foreigners believe it, but not you yourself. I saw that in you from the first -you believe in nothing except the force of human intelligence. Isn’t that so?”
“I doubt even that.”
“I thought so. But there are other forces. One waits, and a force moves; it’s like water, soft and yielding, but also possessing great power.” Luong smiled.
“Lao-tzu,” Christopher said. “What’s your lucky number, Luong?”
Luong hesitated. “Eleven.”
“Has it come up lately?”
“Yes. Nhu wanted to kill me, you know. There were men waiting here for me while I was with you in Bangkok. But Diem and Nhu died while I was away, on November 1-the first day of the eleventh month, an eleven and a one, three elevens if you read from front and back.”
“What was Diem’s number?”
“That’s well known. Seven, double seven. He came to power on July 7, as you may know, too.”
“Does the number go on working after death?”
“I suppose so,” Luong said. “Any combination of sevens would be good for Diem’s spirit.”
“Would it make sense to honor his memory on a day seven days after his death, or fourteen days, or twenty-one?”