I sat in a chair and watched a gecko crawl up the wall. I ran some stuff through my mind as I watched the gecko and waited for Susan.
Susan Weber. Probably she was what she said she was: an American expat businesswoman. But there were signs that she had a second job. In a country where our intelligence assets were limited, but our needs were big and getting bigger, it was common practice to recruit friends in the American business or expat community to do a little something for Uncle Sam on the side.
There were at least three agencies who did this kind of recruiting overseas — State Department Intelligence, Military Intelligence, or the Central Intelligence Agency.
And then there was American-Asian itself. The whole operation looked legit, but it also had all the bells and whistles of a CIA front.
The other question was Susan Weber’s fondness for Paul Brenner. You can fake a lot of things in life — women fake orgasms, and men fake whole relationships — but unless I was really losing my ability to read people, Susan was honestly taken with me. It wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened, which was why intelligence agencies instinctively distrusted their human employees and loved their spy satellites.
In any case, Susan Weber and Paul Brenner were on the brink of a sexual liaison that wasn’t part of the original script and could only lead to disaster.
There was a knock on the door, and I called out, “It’s open.”
Susan came in, and I stood.
She was wearing the Nha Trang T-shirt I bought her—tell the dears at home—and it came down to her knees. She had on sandals and was carrying her new tote.
She smiled and said, “Love your sandals.” She took a plastic cup out of her tote, filled with white powder. She said, “This is boric acid. You sprinkle it around your bed and luggage.”
“Then what? Pray for rain?”
“It keeps the bugs away. Specifically, cockroaches.”
I put the cup on my night table and we left the room. On the way down the stairs, I said, “I have all my valuables in this plastic bag. Can I trust these with the front desk?”
“Sure. I’ll take care of it.”
We got down to the lobby, and Susan spoke to the desk clerk. The deal was that we had to inventory everything, including Susan’s money and passport as well as my own stuff. As all this was going on, I said to her, “Mind if I snoop through your passport?”
She hesitated a second, then said, “No. Terrible photo.”
I looked at her photo, which, of course, was not that terrible, and I noticed that the passport had been issued from the General Passport Office a little over three years before, which was consistent with her arrival here. I looked at her photo and saw that her hair was much shorter then, and there was something very sad and innocent about her expression — but maybe I was just projecting because of what she’d told me. In any case, the woman standing beside me looked a lot more confident and assured than the woman in the passport photo.
I flipped the pages and saw that she had three entry stamps for the U.S., two for New York and one for Washington. That was not totally consistent with her claim that she’d never been to Washington — but it could have just been an entry point for a connecting flight to somewhere else, like Boston.
Her Viet visa stamp was different from mine, and was probably a work visa rather than a tourist visa. It had been renewed once, a year ago, and I pictured her at Section C of the Ministry for Public Security, two years into her tour, and giving everyone a hard time.
She’d also been to Hong Kong, Sydney, Bangkok, and Tokyo, which was either for R&R or business. Nothing tricky there. But the Washington thing stuck out.
I put the passport back on the counter, and the clerk gave us the handwritten receipt, which we all had to sign, and Susan gave him a dollar.
We walked across the road, and the beach was fairly empty. We picked two chaise lounges, and a hundred kids descended on us, carrying everything in the world we’d ever need. We took two chaise mattresses and towels, two peeled pineapples on sticks, and two Cokes. Susan passed out dong and chased off the kids.
I pulled off my gym shirt and Susan removed her T-shirt. She was wearing a skimpy two-piece, flesh-colored number, and she had an absolutely voluptuous body, all tanned and nicely toned.
She noticed I was glancing at her — staring, actually. I looked at the water. “Nice beach.”
We sat at the edge of our lounges and ate the pineapple on a stick.
As we ate, vendors came by, selling food, beverages, maps, silk paintings, Viet Cong flags, beach hats, and things I couldn’t identify. I bought a tourist map of Nha Trang.
We went down to the water, and Susan left her tote on the chaise lounge, which she said would be safe.
We waded out until we were standing up to our necks, and I could see brilliant tropical fish in the clear water. I said, “I remember big jellyfish all along the coast. Portuguese man-of-war.”
“Same at Vung Tau. You have to keep an eye out. They can paralyze you.”
“We used to throw concussion grenades in the water. It stunned the jellyfish, and hundreds of other fish would float to the surface. The kids would gather them up. They’d eat the squids alive. We thought it was gross. Now I pay twenty bucks in a sushi restaurant for raw squid.”
She thought about that and said, “Concussion grenades?”
“Yeah. They’re not fragmentation grenades. You throw them in bunkers or any confined space, like tunnels. Causes concussion. Somebody figured out that you can fish with them. They cost Uncle Sam about twenty bucks apiece. But it was one of the perks of the job.” I added, “Feeding people through high explosives.”
“What if you needed the grenades later?”
“You order more. Munitions is one thing we never ran out of. We ran out of will.”
We swam. Susan was a good, strong swimmer, and so am I, so we stayed out about an hour, and it felt great.
Back on the chaise lounge, as we dried off, the vendors returned. They could pester the hell out of you, but they didn’t steal anything because within a short time, they had all your money anyway.
Several young ladies approached with bottles of oil and hand towels. Susan said to me, “You haven’t had a massage since the Rex Hotel. Let me treat.”
“Thanks.”
We both got massages on the beach. I was feeling more like James Bond again.
We lay there on the chaise lounges; Susan read a business magazine with her sunglasses on, and I contemplated the sea and the sky.
I thought, someday I should come back here without any government involvement. Maybe Cynthia would like to join me, and we’d take a month and explore the country. But that presupposed that when I got out of here, I was not persona non grata, or persona in a box.
I looked over at Susan and watched her reading. She sensed me looking at her and turned to me. She said, “Isn’t this nice?”
“It really is.”
“Are you glad I came along?”
“I am.”
“I can stay a few more days.”
I replied, “If you go back to Saigon tomorrow, I think you can smooth it over with Bill.”
“Who?”
“Let me ask you a personal question. Why did you get involved with him if you think so little of him?”
She put down her magazine. “Good question. Obviously, the pickings are a little slim in Saigon. A lot of the guys are married, the rest are fucking their brains out with Vietnamese women. Bill, at least, was faithful. No mistress, no prostitutes, no drugs, no bad habits — except me.”
In retrospect, Bill Stanley didn’t seem to me, in my brief meeting with him, to be quite such a Boy Scout. There was more to Bill Stanley, and I needed to keep that in mind.