He opened the door. The Special Forces sergeant, wearing an identification bracelet with a delicate gold chain on his thick wrist, lay on his back with Honey in his arms. Her narrow body with its row of knobs along the spine rested easily on the sergeant’s chest; she had left her hair unbraided. They were breathing together softly. Luong’s killers must have used a silenced gun.
Christopher knelt beside Luong again and looked through his pockets. There was nothing for him there, or in the dead man’s clenched hands. He was not surprised; no agent had ever spoken a last message to Christopher before he died.
8
Christopher started the Citroen without checking it for bombs and wondered if the tension on his wrist when he turned the key might be the last sensation his brain would ever register. But the warm engine started normally, and he drove to the post office, where there were coin telephones. He called Wolkowicz and told him what had happened.
“Tell someone to get there fast, before the people in the neighborhood wake up and dump the body,” Christopher said.
“What difference does it make?” Wolkowicz said. “He was a politique-they won’t investigate, they’ll just close his file.”
“As long as they get the body. He has a wife.”
“All right, I’ll put out a call, but don’t expect any answers from the Vietnamese-if they went around solving murders in this town they’d never get anything else done.”
Christopher thanked him. “That’s okay,” Wolkowicz said. “Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? If he’d come back from Bangkok last month when he was supposed to, and they’d shot him then, his widow would’ve gotten a pension. But this sure doesn’t sound like death in line of duty.”
“It never does, after it happens,” Christopher said.
In the lobby of the Continental Palace half a dozen foreigners, Americans and Frenchmen, waited in two docile groups for the early minibus to the airport. Christopher had not slept for twenty-four hours or changed his clothes for forty-eight. The Frenchmen stared curiously at his rumpled suit and unshaven cheeks; he could tell by their clothes and the way in which perpetual impatience had twisted their faces that they lived in Vietnam. They were not used to seeing dirt on a white man, and it annoyed them.
The métis behind the reception desk, who had his father’s Norman nose and his mother’s small bones and almond eyes, spoke English to Christopher as a matter of course. He said he had no room. When Christopher replied in French, the métis pushed a registration card across the desk and took a key from the rack. “Pièce d’identité?” Christopher handed him his American passport, and the clerk gave back a resentful look- he had lost his first bribe of the day through trickery.
Christopher sent the bellboy for the suitcase he had left at the Alitalia office. He shaved and took a bath; the tepid water coughed from the tap, rusty and smelling faintly of the river. He sat down and wrote a letter to Patchen. Using the English section of a Collins French-English pocket dictionary, he converted the words he had written into groups of numbers corresponding to the page, line, and column where they were found in the book. It was not a satisfactory dictionary for use in a book code; heroin did not appear, and he had to render the word as “next-stage morphine derivative.” He might as well have been writing in German, he thought. Christopher burned the paper on which he had written his draft, and put the thin sheet covered with rows of numbers into an envelope with an American airmail stamp already affixed. He did not address the envelope.
Before he went to sleep, Christopher took no precautions apart from the useless one of locking the door. Precautions would serve no purpose. If Luong had been killed as a warning, Christopher himself would not be killed until whoever was running the assassins decided that Christopher had not taken the warning. The two men could have killed Christopher easily enough in the alley when they met him face to face. Or, if they wished to be artistic, they could have shot him after letting him discover Luong’s body. The killers had no distinguishing features, they looked like any other young Vietnamese sharing a motor scooter and looking for a way to make a little money out of the war.
Each time Christopher began to dream, he reached into that part of his mind and stopped the pictures. Nevertheless, he saw the man run down in Berlin again, and a youth in Algiers with a bullet coming out his back in a plume of blood as if he had thrown a glass of wine over his shoulder, and Luong’s photograph on a grave marker with a bright sacred heart glowing on his chest. While the Truong toe drank tea, Jean-Baptiste Ho showed Christopher pictures of all the Ngo dead, arranged among candles in the room in Siena where he had repeated to Molly that he loved her. Touching Christopher’s arm as if he were an old friend, the priest said, “It would be beautiful to die of disgust, but you will not.”
9
When Christopher awoke, he went to the American embassy and mailed his letter to Patchen, scribbling the false name and the post-office-box number in Washington across the envelope at the moment he dropped the envelope in the box. He knew it would reassure Patchen to see that the message had passed through the U.S. mail only. It was undecipherable without the book that was the key to the code, but ciphers are incriminating in themselves.
The crowd of foreigners on the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel reminded Christopher of travelers on the deck of a ship. Everything that interested them lay inside the rails; the Vietnamese, as alike as gulls, went by on the sidewalk, locked in a language that made no sense to white men. Christopher saw four Americans he knew, all of them journalists. He sat at the other end of the terrace with his back to their table and ordered a vermouth cassis. In the street, ordinary women in ao dai and trousers and bar girls in miniskirts that spoiled the grace of their slender bodies were out walking; a rawboned American girl carrying an armload of packages strode through the crowd, whistling a love song, her hair swinging.
Christopher waited. Dark had fallen, and most of the people on the terrace had gone inside to have dinner, when the girl came. She had changed out of her white gown into a linen suit, with a tangled necklace of pearls at her throat and her heavy hair coiled on her neck.
She paused in the doorway, saw Christopher, and walked straight to his table. She took the bamboo chair opposite Christopher, sitting on its edge with her spine straight. She wore a faint violet scent, and Christopher thought of Honey’s bikini printed with foreign flowers she had never seen. Christopher did not speak again, except to summon the waiter; he let the girl order her own Coca-Cola.
“It’s curious,” she said, “this was the very first place I looked for you. I’m glad you’re so easy to find.”
“There aren’t many places in Saigon to look for a foreigner,” Christopher said. “I’m a little surprised that the Truong toe sent you-I had an idea he’d send a male relative.”
The girl wrapped a paper napkin around the sweating glass the waiter had set before her. “I detest ice,” she said. “It makes one feel no cooler to swallow these freezing drinks.”
She smiled and lifted the glass; her gestures, like her face, were softer outside the Truong toe’s house. She had the fine features of the Vietnamese young; her fresh skin was lighter than Honey’s. She had had a better diet: the bones of her neck were covered with smooth flesh and her hair shone with health. Her small ears, pierced by the golden earrings of an engaged girl, were almost transparent.