The Corsican (37 page)

“The room was designed for this purpose, then.”

“Not at all. It was owned by a strange French gentleman, of a somewhat questionable background. No one seems to know why he built it. But it intrigued me, and I modified it for my own purposes.”

“It is intriguing. For any purpose,” Peter said, looking about the room again.

“You must try it sometime,” Molly said.

He turned back to her. The small smile of something known but unspoken was back on his lips. “Perhaps I shall, one day,” he said.

“Good,” Molly said. “We have many interesting women, who would be pleased to entertain someone young and handsome.”

Peter smiled openly at the rebuff, which he had expected. “I have …” He paused. “I have a busy schedule the next few days. But when I return I'd like very much to invite you to have dinner with me.”

Molly led him into the hall and closed the double doors. “I seldom dine out,” she said. “But I'd be pleased to have you join me here.” She looked up at him, her green eyes cool, holding the same knowing expression his smile had offered earlier. “You'll find Viet Nam interesting, Peter. But be careful. It can be a dangerous place.”

She started down the hall, her voice businesslike again. “You'll find the bar is the second door to the right, off the courtyard. The restaurant is just beyond. If you're interested in membership, you may give Ba Hai the annual fee of five hundred dollars on your next visit. It, of course, may be paid in military payment certificates, piasters, or gold.”

“I don't believe I'm allowed to deal in gold,” Peter said. The smile that spoke of some secret was back.

“You'll find here in Saigon that people deal in many things that are not allowed, Peter. Here, in this house, we find it inappropriate to question anyone else's morality.”

She returned to her office, and watched Peter descend the stairs before closing the door. She hesitated a moment, running her index finger along the line of her cheek. There was a faint smile on her lips. Slowly, she walked to her desk, seated herself in the carved teak desk chair, then reached beneath the desk's center drawer and pressed a concealed button.

A side door to the office opened almost immediately, and a short, stocky man dressed in a black silk suit entered. He had a square head, accented by a military crew cut and a flat, expressionless face.

Molly took a strand of her straight, silky black hair and toyed with it. Her face also was expressionless now, almost hard. There was a sense of command in her eyes when she looked up at the man.

“Po, the gentleman who just left, Captain Bently. I want you to find out everything you can about him. And I want him watched. But do it very quietly.”

The stocky man's eyes narrowed into slits, and he gave one curt nod of his head. He turned, almost as though pivoted by an unseen rod set in the floor, then left as he had entered.

Molly leaned back in the chair, still toying with the strand of shiny black hair. The smile slowly returned to her lips.

Chapter 20

Peter was still amused by Molly's parting words as he bounced uncomfortably in the jeep as it raced toward Bien Hoa Airbase, northeast of Saigon. Insulting Vassar woman, running an exotic bordello in Saigon. It was a bit more than he had been prepared to deal with. He smiled to himself. You just found a woman you don't know
how
to deal with, he told himself. At least not initially. He glanced across the jeep. The driver Wallace had assigned him, an aging, fat sergeant named Walsh, sat behind the wheel, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting the road and surrounding forest. War American-style, he told himself. Naiveté with a touch of Hollywood. The ultimate in conflicts.

Peter stared at the passing vegetation, all of it so familiar, yet not familiar at all. Like the woman, Molly Bloom. A mixture of the American and the oriental. Someone who knew more than she should, and yet made no attempt to hide it. Perhaps that was why he had found her so difficult to deal with. He shook the thoughts from his mind and settled back for what he felt would be a long trip, longer than the sixty-kilometer jaunt to Bien Hoa.

The jeep arced its way around a sharp curve and suddenly came upon a row of shacks, the exteriors of which seemed to be constructed solely of flattened beer cans.

“Interesting architecture, eh, captain?” the sergeant said. “Just some ol' bam-de-bam stands, selling 33 beer and food that tastes even worse than that horse piss.”

Peter glanced at his Rolex. It was only 0830 and the stands were already open for business. Several had GIs sitting at overturned wooden cable spools that were set out as tables, like ramshackle outdoor cafes. A half mile later they passed another tin shack, this one with two young women and a young boy seated outside on folding chairs.

“Car wash,” the sergeant said. He turned to Peter with a leering grin. “Actually a whorehouse, Viet Nam style. See, prostitution's illegal here. So you pay the boy to wash your car, or truck, or tank, and then his sister, being a polite young lady, offers you tea. Well, bein' a poor country girl, she just gets seduced a lot by us bad-assed soldier types. That way, the only thing that's been paid for is gettin' a vehicle washed. I'll tell you one thing, though. They got them car washes on every damned highway in this country. An' this here army's got the cleanest goddam vehicles that anybody ever saw.”

“Also the highest rate of clap,” Peter added, bored with the banality of the man.

“Can't expect
everything
to be clean, sir,” the sergeant said.

Peter stared off into the forest. A row of thirty-foot rose-apple trees slid past, the bright-crimson pear-shaped fruit adding a splash of color to the surrounding hues of green. The natives called the fruit
bo-dao
, and he remembered eating it as a child, the crisp, juicy, sweet taste, with a slight hint of rose flavor.

Farther along the road they passed a stand of breadfruit trees, the branches tipped with huge spiraled clusters of ribbonlike leaves.
Dua lop
, he recalled, was the Vietnamese name. Then came nipa palms—
dua nuoc
—a form of vegetation, he knew, that usually grew wild in brackish water, or at the mouths of rivers. Odd to see it here, inland, although it was often planted out of its element. But here, he thought, along a highway threatened by guerrillas, it didn't make sense. The reclining trunk and large feathery leaves rising fifteen to thirty feet would provide too much cover. He shook his head. The man returning home after so long a time, tainted by military training, he thought. He wondered if he would ever again look at things without thinking of ways they could be used to kill.

The sergeant was concentrating on the road, whistling softly through his teeth. Peter leaned toward him.

“Walsh. If prostitution's illegal here, how does the Room of a Thousand Mirrors operate in such an elaborate manner?” he asked.

“Right clientele,” Walsh said. “But even there, members don't pay the ladies, or so I'm told. It's a club with a membership fee. Members pay for drinks, dinner. And it's limited to officers, Americans, allies and high-ranking RVN. An' nobody wants to bother them.” Walsh gave him a knowing look. “The white mice—that's the local police—they satisfy the law by locking up the occasional streetwalker or bar girl. But they don't even do that too much. Not since Diem got knocked off.”

When the jungle finally gave way to the gouged-out section of earth that was Bien Hoa, the jeep veered to the right and headed toward the small interrogation center five miles to the east. As they moved away from Bien Hoa, the mixture of tile-roofed houses and military tents seemed to evaporate into the bush, the drab olive green, the white walls and red roofs changing into the dark chocolate color of rice paddies with the bright green of the rice pushing through. Not far from each chain of paddies, mud huts seemed to grow out of the earth like mushrooms, and near each there were water buffalo tended by farmers, who stared skyward at the sound of planes landing and taking off from Bien Hoa airfield. Along the dikes that rimmed the paddies, small boys tended ducks with long cane poles, each stopping to wave the poles as a plane roared past. They reminded Peter of a boy he had seen in Saigon, walking along the street, a large dragonfly flying above him, tethered to a string tied to his wrist. When he tired of the game, Peter knew, the boy would eat the insect as a snack.

“What's our agenda, Walsh?” Peter asked.

The aging sergeant shrugged. “Usual stuff. We gotta check in with the CO and go through all the formal crap. Then if they've got any new VC prisoners, you get a shot at interrogating them. They'll like it that you speak the lingo so good—the local intelligence boys will, I mean. Most of them have to use interpreters who can't really be trusted. Our guys mostly only talk pidgin slope. You know what I mean. ‘You VC. You talk, or you go Yellow Springs, quick, quick.'”

Peter smiled. Yellow Springs, the land of death. He hadn't heard the term since he was a boy. He would mention it then every time he wanted to play on the unnatural fear it produced in Luc. The supernatural land of the dead. The older men revered it; the young were frightened by the very words.

“They usually have prisoners?”

“They always got what they call prisoners. Most of 'em's a bunch of farmers tryin' to keep both sides from shootin' their fuckin' buffalo. They do what we tell 'em and they do what the VC tell 'em. But you never know. I've seen bodies of twelve-year-olds with grenades stuffed in their pajamas. Out here everybody's so scared shitless they think everybody's VC. But when you come across a real one, one of those hardcore cadre types, there ain't no doubt. They are hard little motherfuckers.”

“What do they do with them?” Peter asked.

“They interrogate the shit out of them, then turn 'em over to ARVN,” Walsh said.

“And ARVN?”

“They claim they rehabilitate them. But I've seen the bodies. They squeeze 'em a little drier, then they pork 'em. One shot behind the ear.”

Peter shrugged.

“That's the way I feel about it, sir. Charlie doesn't exactly take prisoners of war himself. Besides, according to Westmoreland, we're fightin' a war of attrition here. So the way I see it, we attrite as many of them as we can. Funny thing is we never seem to run out of them.”

“They all have brothers and sisters, Walsh. And the sense of vendetta, especially among tribal people, can last for centuries.”

“You make them sound like the Mafia, sir.”

“The Mafia didn't invent vendetta, any more than they invented spaghetti.” Peter hesitated, watching Walsh for a moment. “My mother was Corsican,” he said finally, altering his family history to fit the one created for him years ago. “She talked about vendettas that went on through generations.”

“You Corsican? How about that?” Walsh seemed suddenly impressed. “They got a lot of Corsicans around here, sir. Strange dudes. Don't see them much. You just hear about them from time to time. Some of them are supposed to be so bad they're supposed to make the wiseguys back home look like pussy cats.”

Peter laughed quietly, thinking of his own family. His grandfather, Auguste, Benito. And now a new generation, just arrived.

Chapter 21

The mud-walled hut was an old schoolhouse that sat on the outskirts of First Cav Headquarters at Bien Hoa. Like everything else in the camp, it had been painted an olive drab and had a camouflage net stretched above it. Inside, it was one large room, electrified by a generator that groaned outside. At one end of the room was a table with several chairs, with large floodlights set on metal stands to either side. The only other furniture was a single chair placed in the center of the room. In it a small, slender VC suspect, slightly younger than Peter, sat stripped to the waist.

“Says his name's Loc Binh, captain,” the lieutenant in charge said. “But his papers are as phony as shit. Claims he doesn't speak English, or French. Just sits there repeating
Toi kheong biet
, over and over.”

“Maybe he
doesn't
understand,” Peter said. “Maybe he doesn't want to. But he sure as hell understands Vietnamese.”

Peter walked out in front of the lights, feeling the intense heat they produced against the back of the jungle fatigues he was wearing. He squatted before the man and pushed his helmet back on his head.

“Loc Binh,” he said.

“
Toi kheong biet
,” Binh said, stopping him.

Peter smiled. “You don't understand your name?” he said in English. His eyes hardened. “
Xin ong nghe toi
”—Please listen to me.

The prisoner kept his eyes on the floor, trying to appear like a frightened peasant. Peter studied him in the light. The teeth were too even, too well cared for; the body absent of any of the abnormalities caused by poor diet. Peter knew the man was not from a poor outcountry village struggling to raise enough rice to live. He had seen too many of these people as a child. Again he asked his name in Vietnamese.

“
Toi kheong biet
,” Binh repeated.

Peter shook his head slowly. “Your sister sleeps with snakes,” he whispered in English, using a peasant curse considered vile to Vietnamese.

Binh's jaw tightened; his nostrils flared almost imperceptibly.

Peter grinned at him. “You understood that, didn't you, my friend? Even in English?”

The man's eyes clouded, then hardened. “Go fuck self, GI,” he snapped.

Peter laughed softly. “Goodness, Binh. You certainly do pick up a language quickly.”

“
Toi kheong biet
,” Binh said.

Peter shook his head. “Now you don't understand again.
Bat ca hai toy
,” he said, using the old Vietnamese proverb, “Catch fish with both hands.” “I'm afraid you have to decide which way you want to have it, Binh.”