“You know something of Lê Thu, do you not?”
“I?” Yu Lung said. “It’s a common Vietnamese name, quite a sad one-they might give it to a second child if the first had died, in order to discourage the bad spirits from taking this child as well.”
“I was also a friend of Vuong Van Luong,” Christopher said. “I believe you spoke to him a couple of nights ago.”
“Luong. Yes, he came here.”
“And asked about Lê Thu.”
“I could tell him nothing of importance.”
“He was shot dead after he left you,” Christopher said.
“Not for that name, I think,” Yu Lung said. He had a habit of widening his eyes when he lied. He held Christopher’s money in his hands, counting it over and over again.
“What are the ethics of your profession?” Christopher asked. “Your consultations are secret, I suppose.”
“Oh, yes, absolutely. These are intimate matters.”
“Do you keep records?”
“Of course. Clients come back. One keeps a complete profile of the case. Principles are fixed, but conditions change. One wants to see how forces have behaved in the past, so as to apply their logic to the future.”
Christopher smiled at the man. “What is the maximum period of time over which a horoscope may be kept?”
“It’s quite indefinite, but of course one can compute in terms of an adult lifetime. Thirty years. Say ten thousand days -that has a certain ring to it.”
“I should think five thousand days would give one a complete picture.”
“Fairly complete. Not all, but enough.”
Christopher put a thick envelope on Yu Lung’s desk. The fortune-teller kept his eye away from it. He drew one of the horoscope sheets toward him. With a red pencil he drew circles around groups of ideograms that ran down the edge of the paper. “The system I use is uniform,” he said. “The top group is the date, place, time of birth. The next group is the name of the individual, if I have it. All the Chinese characters below are the description of the individual’s fate. Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Yu Lung straightened the pages, squaring their edges by tapping them on the glass top of his desk. He went to his file cabinet, unlocked it, and inserted the papers in a file so that a corner protruded from the top. Christopher’s envelope still lay on the desk top.
“And now,” Yu Lung said, “I must insist that you take a glass of scotch with me. It’s quite an extraordinary bottle of Chivas Regal. I had it from a foreigner. I’ll fetch it, if you’ll be so kind as to wait.”
Yu Lung left the room. Christopher took the file folder from the open drawer of the steel cabinet and opened it. There were seven sheets of drawing paper in addition to the ones Yu Lung had prepared for him. Christopher used Yu Lung’s scissors to clip the ideograms from the edges of all the sheets. He put the long strips of rice paper, covered with Yu Lung’s flowing calligraphy, in his inside pocket, with Molly’s photograph. He closed the file and pushed in the lock.
Yu Lung, when he returned with the whiskey, did not glance at the file cabinet. He handed Christopher his glass before he poured whiskey into it, and smiled when Christopher held the empty tumbler up to the light.
“Will you spoil it with ice?” he asked.
Christopher shook his head. They touched glasses.
“You’ve spent a good deal of time in the East,” Yu Lung said. “You’ve learned our manners-you don’t make sudden noises or laugh in that peculiar way Europeans have. They guffaw and stare at one, expecting that one will put on an expression that exactly matches their own. One is not, after all, a mirror.”
“Living in Saigon has not made you into a Vietnamese, Yu Lung.”
“No,” Yu Lung said, “though I was born here, like my father. We Chinese who live abroad call ourselves hua-chiao. The words mean ‘sojourning Chinese.’ A sojourn is by definition temporary. One of our poets said we are like migrating birds with our souls flying ahead of us to China; we take no interest in our landing places or even in our journey-we beat our wings violently, in pursuit of our souls. Vietnam is where I live, my dear fellow-but it is not my world.”
Yu Lung widened his eyes in self-mockery. “I think one glass of scotch is quite enough for me,” he said.
Christopher’s envelope, containing fifty one-hundred-dollar bills, still lay untouched on the desk. Yu Lung had not acknowledged its existence. Christopher walked along the hallway behind Yu Lung. Outside Yu Lung’s bright modern office, they were back in China. When Yu Lung drew close to shake hands, he gave off the bitter unused smell of an old man.
2
Pong was late. Christopher crossed the street and stood with his back against the wall of a tin shack. Cyclists and pedestrians moved over the beaten earth of the street. No one turned a face in Christopher’s direction; he might have been as invisible as one of the spirits Yu Lung had spoken about. A new moon shone beyond the mist of Saigon’s lights.
Pong came into the street driving too fast, blinking the lights to clear people away from the car. As he reached Christopher, he threw open the front door and slowed only enough to let him scramble into the seat beside him. Pong’s eyes were fixed on the rear-view mirror.
“That gray Simca picked me up after I left you,” Pong said. “I lost them for a while, but you can’t hide this big car.”
“Do you think they’re still on you?”
“They were five minutes ago. They’ve got yellow headlights.”
Christopher looked out the rear window. “Go out to the quais and head west,” he said. “Let them find us.”
“We should go back to the house.”
“They’d be outside when we came out again. Let them follow.”
Pong turned the car toward the canals. The two-way radio crackled. Christopher switched it off. “Turn off the dashlights,” he said. “You may have to drive in the dark after a while.”
As they made the long curve where the Doi Canal turned south, yellowish light flashed from the mirror onto Pong’s face. “There they are,” he said.
“Keep going,” Christopher said. “When we get into the paddy, turn off the lights and drive fast. They can’t keep up.”
They were still within the city limits, but the car was racing through the swamps and paddy of the rural Seventh District, on the southwestern edge of Saigon.
“You know there are VC all over the Seventh District at night, don’t you?” Pong asked. He pulled his revolver from its holster and laid it gently on the seat between them.
“I know. How far to the first big curve, so you can stop without their seeing your brake lights?”
“Maybe two kilometers,” Pong said. “Just before the Cho Dem ferry.”
Pong switched off the headlights and trod on the accelerator. The car pulled itself into the darkness, swaying on its soft springs over the uneven roadbed. Pong cursed as a wheel ran off the pavement and threw a burst of clods against the inside of the fender.
“Barney says driving this car is like screwing a fat woman -you don’t know exactly where you are,” Pong said.
Christopher pulled the submachine gun off the dashboard and worked the action. “This is what we’re going to do,” he said. “Listen, because I only have time to tell you once.”
Pong listened. “Barney said no shooting,” he said.
“Barney’s not here,” Christopher said.
Midway through a long curve, Pong pulled the automatic transmission into low gear and turned off the key. The car bucked and ran down to a stop, Pong touching the brakes lightly only twice.
Christopher got out while the car was still moving. He lay down on the slimy earth between the road and the paddy; the Simca had turned off its lights, but he could hear its motor far back and see flashes of red as the driver braked to keep it on the road.