"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

THREE. A Splendid Little War

Saigon, November 1965

The late-afternoon sun cast a molten light on the street, lacquered the sidewalk, the doors, tables, and chairs of restaurants, the rickety stands of cigarettes, film, and books, all in a golden patina, even giving the rusted, motionless cyclos and the gaunt faces of the sleeping drivers the bucolic quality found in antique photos. The people, some stretched out on cots on the sidewalks, lazily read newspapers or toyed with sleep, waiting for the relief of evening to fall. This part of the city belonged to the Westerners, and the Vietnamese here were in the business of making money off them-either by feeding them in the restaurants, selling them the items from the rickety stands, driving them about the city in the rusted cyclos, having sex with them, spying on them, or some combination of the above.

The dusty military jeep came to a rubber-burning stop in front of the Continental Hotel, scattering pedestrians and cyclos like shot, and a barrel-chested officer jumped out of the back to hand Helen down from the passenger seat.

“What service,” she said, laughing. “How much of a tip should I give?”

“Just promise you’ll have drinks with us.”

“Promise.”

“We’re only stationed here a few more days.”

“I will,” she said, and started up the steps of the hotel.

“Remember we know where you live, Helen of Saigon,” the soldiers shouted, laughing, peeling away from the curb with a blaring of the jeep’s horn that caused pedestrians to flinch, to stop and turn. The Americans at the terrace tables closest to the sidewalk grinned and shook their heads, but the Vietnamese out on the street simply stared, expressions impossible to read.

Linh shared a table with Mr. Bao. They both watched the scene unfolding on the street in silence, saw the tall blond woman in high spirits dusting her hands off on her pants, patting her hair back into its ponytail, the crowd parting as she moved up the sidewalk, skipping up the stairs of the hotel.

Mr. Bao shook his head, turned and spat a reddish brown puddle on the floor to the chagrin of the busboy, who hurried for a rag. “They think this is their playground.”

Already tired of the meeting with Mr. Bao, how the old man spoke right into his face, warm puffs of breath assaulting him, stale as day-old fish, Linh signaled for another bottle of mineral water. “Another whiskey, too,” Bao said. For a professed proletarian, Mr. Bao certainly seemed comfortable using the Continental as his personal lounge.

“Add a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to my shopping list.”

Linh had been working for Darrow for a year, had finally moved into his own apartment in Saigon and begun to have some normalcy in his life, when Mr. Bao showed up one night at the café he frequented. Although he didn’t make clear which department he worked in, what was clear was that he had an offer from the North impossible to refuse. “Tran Bau Linh, we almost didn’t recognize you. It does us good to see how you’ve prospered in the world since your untimely departure from the party,” he said. He had the square, blunt face of a peasant. As well, he had the unthinking allegiance to the party line. Linh was surprised that they hadn’t already killed him.

“We have big plans for you,” he said. “You will do your fatherland proud after all.”

The job was fairly innocuous. A couple times a month, he would report to Bao on where Darrow and he had been. Any frequent newspaper and magazine reader would know as much. The idea was to know the enemy. Linh made sure to bore Mr. Bao in minutiae to the point that he buried anything that could be of value. Most of their meals were spent talking of the food. If Linh chose not to cooperate, Mr. Bao made it clear that he would never hear the bullet that killed him. “You are lucky that you have a use, otherwise you would not still be here talking with me.”

The sky had turned a darker gold by the time the woman came back down into the lobby wearing a blue silk dress the color of the ocean at dusk. Her heels made a delicate clicking sound on the floor as she crossed to the bar where her date for the evening, Robert Boudreau, was standing. Linh imagined the air turned cooler where she had passed. “I have to leave now,” he said, getting up.

The bar was packed, standing room only, almost all men, but Helen spotted Robert in the corner.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My ride back from the hospital didn’t come through. I had to bum a ride from some army officers passing by.”

Robert turned with his drink and looked at her. “You clean up pretty well. I’ve got the prettiest girl in Saigon. That’s worth the wait right there.” Robert was on staff at one of the wires and had been wasting time in the front office when she came in looking for freelance work. Sensing that she was entirely overwhelmed, he quickly made himself indispensable.

He had a squat build, beefed shoulders, and a muscular chest that caused him to move with a thick, heavy grace, like an ex-athlete. Too, like an ex-athlete, there was the sense that his best days were behind him. A little too neat in dress, a little too Southern and patriotic in politics, he didn’t fit in with the younger journalist crowd beginning to filter into the city. Helen was the kind of girl he dreamed about showing off back home, but coming across her in Saigon seemed on the edge of a miracle. The coup he was devising that afternoon was sweeping her off her feet, romancing her until his assignment was up, returning home with her on his arm, a salve and a cover to an unspectacular foreign career.

She grinned. Back home, she had been considered on the plain side, but here the attention of being a rarity was unlike anything she was used to.

“Have a sip of rum for the road.” He gave her his glass, a heavy, square one with a solid crystal bottom that made her hand dip from its surprising weight.

“Hmmm,” she said. “I needed that.”

“You should come home to New Orleans with me. Plenty of the good stuff down there. I’ll put you in one of those big ol’ houses in the Garden District, and we can fill it with kids.”

“Robert, honey,” she said, batting her eyes and using a phony, thick Southern accent, “I came to Saigon to escape all that.”

“Let’s go. Everyone’s already left for the restaurant.”

They stood on the sidewalk while Robert haggled over the fare to Cholon with two cyclo drivers. Dark, lead-colored clouds had moved in and now begged against the tops of buildings, the humidity and heat so intense Helen felt as if she were walking fully clothed into a sauna. A shimmer in the air. She pushed past Robert and the drivers, ducking under the umbrella covering of one of the cyclos just as a sheet of rain crashed down. The city changed from gold sepia hues to shades of silver; the air, rinsed of its smells, recalled the closeness of the namesake river. Water beaded on the bunched flowers standing in buckets along the side of the road.

“Pay the fare, Robert,” she shouted, laughing, as he climbed in the second cyclo behind her, dripping wet.

The suddenness of the rains still seemed magical to her. Not like back home, where a few drops gave warning and then slowly increased. With the blink of an eye, a sudden Niagara. The monsoon had the tug of the ocean as if it were trying to reclaim the land.

Especially in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon, the shower didn’t slow the heavy pace of business. People simply covered themselves with an umbrella, a piece of plastic, what ever was on hand, and continued on. Both of the drivers were soon drenched but didn’t bother with rain gear, their shirts and shorts soaked and clinging to their stringy frames, water squelching out from their rubber sandals, as they serenely pedaled on. When they stopped in traffic, Helen turned to see her driver close his eyes and lift his face to the sky. When the other cyclo pulled next to her, she leaned across and whispered to Robert, “He doesn’t seem to mind the wet.”

“Probably the only bath he gets every day,” Robert said. He had been stationed in more than five countries since he started reporting, and he took pride in the fact that he remained immune and separate from each of them. He looked forward to the time when all the thrill of the exotic drained away for Helen, too.

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“He can’t understand me, honey.”

“I don’t care. It’s not nice.”

“You’re right. He’s probably a cyclo driver by day, a VC operative by night. Unless he’s a homeless refugee whose village we destroyed. By all means, I want to be nice for Helen.”

She glared at him. “Maybe he’s just a cyclo driver trying to make a living.” She reached over and pinched Robert’s arm.

“Ouch! That hurt!”

She giggled, not as naive as Robert thought she was but playing the part. “Stop making fun of me.” The truth was Saigon was dirty and sad and tawdry, and the catastrophic poverty of the people made her weak with homesickness. She found the Vietnamese people’s acceptance and struggle to survive terrifying, and she wondered again what the United States wanted with such a backward country.

“Helen, nothing is ever simple here.” He guessed she was shrewder than she played, but he appreciated her tact. He was tired of the hard-eyed local women who tallied their company by the half hour.

A few blocks away from the restaurant, the traffic bottled to a stop. A snarl of cars, trucks, carts, motorcycles, and bicycles. Standing still, the air turned an exhaust-tinted blue around them. The delay caused by an overturned cart ahead. Its load of fowl-ducks, geese, swallows-spread across the street in various stages of agony. Loose, downy feathers floated into the puddles until, waterlogged, they sank underneath, creating a cloudy soup. A group of Chinese men argued in loud voices. The birds inside the bamboo cages had toppled into the street. They quacked and honked in fright. Many of the birds had been trussed and hung upside down on the sides of the cart, left alive for freshness. Now many of these were half-crushed but still alive, flapping broken wings or struggling with snapped legs and backs. The owner of the cart pulled out a half-moon hatchet and began to lop their heads off. Dirty, orange-beaked heads were thrown into a burlap sack. A thin ribbon of bright red joined the muddy river of water running down the middle of the street. The cyclo drivers looked on, no intention of moving till the road was cleared.

“I can’t watch this,” Helen said. Since she arrived a few weeks ago she had made an effort to avoid the ugliness in the city and now it was unavoidable, blocking her path.

“Okay, we can make a run for it. The restaurant is only a street away.” The rain lightened to a heavy drizzle, and Helen stood in the road looking at the mess of wet feathers and blood, shivering, waiting as Robert paid the fare. A dog watched from an alley and made a sudden run past Helen, swooping down and grabbing a duck. Helen saw the white underside of its belly in his mouth as the dog sped past with his prize, an old man in pursuit with a broom. Splashing up water and mud, the dog paid with one wallop to his rear end before he disappeared around the corner with his prize. The man who caused the cart to overturn agreed to buy all the birds, and the final detail of the price was being negotiated. The uninjured ducks in the cages quacked madly as the owner made a grab for them, dashed their heads on the ground, and used the hatchet, tossing the bodies into a box.

Helen ran over and motioned with her hand not to kill them. She pulled dollars out of her purse and handed them to the old man, who grinned at her and bobbed his head.

Robert came up to her. “What’re you doing?”

“I want him to set them free.”

“What do you think the odds are for a freed duck in Vietnam?” The ridiculousness of the situation made him feel protective of her. Maybe he could love such a woman. She would never last here long.

“He understood me. He’ll take them to the country or something.”

Suddenly the rain started full force again. Robert grabbed her hand, and they ran, laughing.

“One of those ducks will probably be on your plate by the time we order,” he said.

They arrived at the restaurant and were forced to stand in the doorway by a grim-faced maître d’ who demanded towels be brought from the kitchen for them to dry off. He stood in front of them, arms folded across his chest, tapping his foot as they waited. Helen looked down and saw he wore women’s shiny black patent-leather shoes.

Robert took Helen’s elbow and led her to a large table of reporters at the far end of the room. When the men at the table saw Helen, conversation stopped. Helen’s wet hair fell in stringy strands; her dress had turned the dark blue of midnight. Some of the faces looked stony, others outright hostile. A few were bemused. The lack of welcome was palpable.

“You look like a goddess risen from the sea,” Gary said.

“Did you swim here from the States?”

“Everyone, this is Helen Adams. She’s a freelancer just arrived a week ago,” Robert said.

“So now the girls are coming. Can’t be much of a war after all.” “Quick work, Robert. What do you do? Wait for all the pretty ones to deplane at Tan Son Nhut?”

“Funny.” Robert made introductions around the table. “And that’s Nguyen Pran Linh down there. He’s the poor bastard who has to help that scruffy-looking guy at the end, the famous Sam Darrow. More commonly known as Mr. Vietnam. Either the bravest man here or the most nearsighted.”

The table broke up in laughter and catcalls. The awkwardness lingered.

“Don’t you usually bring nurses, Robert?”

Darrow rose from the end of the table, unfolding his long legs from under the low-set table. His skin was tanned, his graying brown hair curling long around his ears. His hands smoothed out the rumpled shirt he wore. The furrow between his eyes, though, was not dislike. He just couldn’t stand the sight of another shiny, young, innocent face landing in the war, especially a female one, and he was irritated with Robert for bringing her. Still, she looked pitiful and wet, already tumbled by the war, and he wasn’t going to let the boys go after her. He gave a short bow, his assessing, hawklike eyes behind his glasses making her self-conscious.

“Excuse the poor welcome,” Darrow said. He looked down at the table and picked at his napkin, then continued. “Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships.”

“Watch out, Robert. Incoming.”

Gary laughed too loud and turned away. “Where are my lobster dumplings? Get the waiter.”

“I propose a toast to the newcomer,” Darrow said. “Welcome to our splendid little war.”

“Getting less splendid and little by the day,” Robert said. He sensed his mistake in bringing her there.

Darrow raised his hand to push his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and Helen noticed a long burled scar running from his wrist up to his elbow, the raised tissue lighter than the rest of his arm. He lifted his glass and spoke in a mock oratory:

“And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts,

They murmured one to another, gentle, winged words:

‘Who on earth could blame them?’ ”

“My God,” Ed, a straw-haired man with a large nose, said. “Do you have crib notes in your egg rolls or what?”

“Now he’s showing off. Making us all look like illiterates.”

“Fellows,” Darrow said, “most of you are illiterates.”

Everyone laughed, the tension broke, and Helen sat down. Darrow had okayed her presence. Gary passed a shot of scotch to her to join the toast. She picked up the glass and emptied it in one gulp. The table erupted in cheers.

“You flatter me,” she said. “But I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong Helen.” She knew he had taken pity on her, but she wouldn’t accept it.

The white-coated waiter brought a platter of dumplings, filling her plate.

The effect of her arrival over, the conversation resumed its jagged course. “So I’m out in Tay Ninh,” Jack, an Irishman from Boston said. “And I have my interpreter ask the village elder how he thinks the new leader is doing. He says Diem is very good.” Grunts and half-hearted chuckles around the table.

“Oh man, looks like we’re winning the hearts and minds, huh?” Ed said.

“So I tell him Diem was a bad man and was overthrown two years ago,” Jack continued. “He asks very cautiously who the new leader is.”

“You should have said Uncle Ho.”

“Only name anyone recognizes anymore.”

“So I said to him Ky was in power,” Jack said.

“What does he say?”

“ ‘Ky very good.’ ”

Guffaws and groans. “So much for the domino theory. The people don’t care which way it goes. No one cares except the Americans.”

“The French would make a deal with Ho himself as long as they could keep their plantations and their cocktail hour. Just go off and be collective somewhere else, s’il vous plait.”

Helen stopped eating. She wanted simply to observe and hold her tongue, but she couldn’t. “I don’t agree.”

“What’s that, sweetheart?” Ed said, eyes narrowing.

“That the people don’t care. They cared in Korea. Everyone wants to be free.”

“What do you think, Linh? Our mysterious conduit to the north.”

Linh looked up from his plate. “I think this rice is very good.” The table burst out in laughter and when it died down, he continued as if he had not noticed the interruption. “Many people in this country haven’t had such good rice in years.”

“Our Marxist Confucian mascot. ‘Let them eat rice,’ ” Jack said.

“I’m sorry, but what do you know about Korea?” Darrow asked. “You’re just a baby now. You could have been prom queen last year in high school.”

Maybe, after all, she would not escape the night unscathed. “My father died there. Nineteen fifty Chosin. My brother was in Special Forces. He died in the Plain of Reeds last year.”

Darrow refused to offer sympathy. “Half of this table is probably here out of curiosity,” Darrow said. “The other half out of ambition. Of course it’s not the excitement that draws us. We’re in the business of war. The cool thing for us is that when this one’s done, there’s always another one-Middle East, Africa, Cambodia, Laos, Suez, Congo, Lebanon, Algeria. The war doesn’t ever have to end for us.”

“You’re just a starry-eyed mercenary, huh, Darrow?”

A long silence followed, time enough for plates to be cleared and drinks poured, while Helen and Darrow stared at each other, then looked away, then looked back. The most arrogant man she had ever met; her face burned with anger.

“Wrong. I was prom queen four years ago.”

Chortles and some hand claps. “Here, here.”

“Where you from?”

“Raised in Southern California.”

Robert coughed, wanting to divert what ever was happening across the table. “What do you all think of the army’s estimate that the war will be over in a year?”

Darrow sipped at yet another drink. “It’ll be over if we quit. Isn’t anyone reading Uncle Ho and Uncle Giap? ‘We’ll keep on fighting if it takes a hundred years.’ ”

“You don’t believe that? No one fights a hundred years.”

“I absolutely believe that. You would, too, Ed, if you ever left your air-conditioned hotel room and slogged out in the jungle with us.”

“I’ll leave the heroics for you. Framed your Pulitzer over your desk yet?”

Darrow smirked, a shamed, lopsided smile. “Actually it was sent to my wife, so I’ve never seen it. I believe she hung it up in the john. She feels the check was the best part of the deal. Making up for my piddling salary.”

Chuckles around the table. “Cry me a river, Darrow.”

As curfew approached, the restaurant emptied; people hurried away with full glasses and bottles, promising to return them in the morning. The waiters pointedly stripped off tablecloths, turned over chairs. A bucket and a mop were propped at the door to the kitchen.

Jack turned to Helen. “So, should we have come here in the first place, lass?”

“To this restaurant?” She smiled. Laughter. “In the briefing today they said eighteen hundred men have died so far. Eighteen hundred, including my brother.”

“It’s never too late, Prom Queen. Get out while the gettin’s good,” Darrow said.

“So what about a country’s manifest destiny? What woulda happened if America had never come?” Jack said.

“We might all end up speaking Vietnamese someday?” Robert said. Laughter.

“ Vietnam ’s destiny has not been her own for a long time. What about the French?” Ed asked.

“The French were on their way out,” Robert said.

“Only because Ho found something stronger than them,” Darrow said. “If the French had never been in Vietnam, maybe he wouldn’t have needed to unleash the genie from the bottle.”

“And what a genie she is.”

“Well, geniuses, we’ve figured out world politics for one night. I say we adjourn.”

“Fine.”

“Sounds good. Sports Club or the Pink?”

Outside on the sidewalk, the men formed a large, boisterous circle, but Linh stood off to the side. He said his good nights and walked away alone. Helen watched his slight, solitary figure move away. No matter how they patted him on the back and bought him drinks, he would always be on the outside of this good-old-boys’ club.

Robert turned to Helen. “I need to go to the office. Is it all right if Jack takes you back to the hotel? I’ll meet you back there in an hour or so for a nightcap?”

“Sure,” Helen said, disappointed the night for her was already over, conscious that she, too, was now being excluded from the boys’ club.

“I’ll take her,” Darrow said. He walked up and stood next to Robert, hands dug in his pockets, head hung down studying something on the sidewalk.

“No, it’s out of your way, I’m sure,” Robert said.

“Actually, I was… going that way.”

Robert looked straight at him, his usual deference blown. “Where?” he said. “You don’t even know where she’s staying.”

Darrow smiled. Everyone waited. “Everyone new stays at the Continental.”

“Jack said he would take her,” Robert said.

“I have a room there, too. Remember?”

“I’ll go with Sam,” Helen said. She gave Robert a shrugging, apologetic look, as if the choice were out of her control. “Maybe I can win a few arguments by the time we reach the hotel.”

The men, entertained, realized the sparring match was over with a clear winner. Ed grabbed at his heart in mock agony and staggered on the sidewalk. Robert bit his lips together; his face reddened. Jack clapped him on the back. “Come on, we’ll drop you off, laddie.”

Two jeeps with drivers pulled up, and they piled in like frat boys going out on the town.

“You two be careful now. The streets can be dangerous late at night.” From inside one jeep, they heard, “Easy come, easy go, huh, Robert?” Laughter as the jeeps sped off.

“Well, I’ve put us in the middle of a little scandal, I’m afraid,” Darrow said.

“We haven’t done anything.”

“But we will.”

“We won’t.” Helen stood in front of the restaurant and looked up into his face. A paper lantern behind her cast a gold light on the edge of his high cheekbone, on his glasses so she couldn’t see his eyes. “That was sudden,” she said.

“That’s one of the keys to life here. Sudden and sublime. Sudden and awful. Everything distilled to its most intense. That’s why we’re all hooked.”

“You don’t scare me. Tell me, does the great Sam Darrow always get the girl?”

“He never got the girl. Why would he be here otherwise? The boy who can’t talk learns to take pictures. Did you know you have blood on your dress?”

Helen looked down and saw the spatters along the hem that hadn’t been visible when the fabric was wet. Her face tightened at the memory. “The ducks… and a dog running by with a body in his mouth.”

Darrow bent and wiped at the fabric with a handkerchief but the blood had dried. “Can you walk in those things?” he said, pointing to her heels.

“Sure.”

“I’d like to show you something. It isn’t far.”

“I don’t know… we should be getting back.” She didn’t feel nearly as bold alone with him as she had in front of the group. She was too lonely and homesick to trust herself being attracted to someone.

“Come on. I don’t bite.”

They walked down the narrow, crooked streets. Storekeepers had pulled down signs, mostly ones in French, a few in Vietnamese, and were replacing them with ones written in English. Skirting around vendors on the sidewalk, Helen and Darrow occasionally brushed shoulders.

She didn’t know if she liked him, but she saw a passion for the work and for the country that was missing in the others. “My presence wasn’t appreciated to night,” she said.

“The boys?” Darrow said. “They’re okay.”

“They don’t want women here.”

“Wrong. They think you’re a novelty. A fun toy. Wait and see what they act like when they consider you a threat.”

She felt his hand at the small of her back as she stepped around some packing crates. He hesitated, then asked what had happened to her brother.

“The letter said he died a hero in a firefight. Sacrificed himself for his buddies. I loved my brother, but that doesn’t sound like him.”

“That would be enough reason for most to stay away,” Darrow said.

“I took care of Michael while my mother worked. After Dad died. When he broke a toy, I’d glue it. Whenever he got in fights with the other boys, I’d defend him.” She laughed. “I even gave him advice about the girl he had a crush on in junior high. I told him whenever he needed me, I’d always be there. And, of course, I wasn’t. For the most important thing, I was nowhere near.”

Helen looked down at the bloody marks on her dress, frowning. “How could I bear to live out this small life of mine back home?”

“You came too late. The good old days are all over.”

As they left the main thoroughfares, they turned left, then right, then left again. They doubled back and went forward, circled, until it seemed they had gone a very long way but not traveled far at all. Darrow leading her until she was so disoriented that her only compass was his arm in front of her. A new world, or an old world hidden, only half the stores lit by electricity, and then usually no more than a bare lightbulb swinging high on the ceiling, the rest dimly illuminated by kerosene lamps that flickered and made the rooms look alive. Many of the stores barely larger than closets, a mystery to figure out what they put up for sale in their crowded interiors. One sold paper-newspaper, writing paper, butcher paper. Another store sold twine. Still another, only scissors and knives. Food vendors crowded in portable stalls. The smells of spices she could not name blended with the sweet incense burning in the stores, all of it cloying the smell of diesel and sewage and the ever-present river.

They came to the moon-shaped entrance of an alley that was flooded across from the rain. It narrowed to the dark throat of a path.

“The streets are known by the guilds on them-noodle street, sail street, cotton street, coffin street. So if you want a driver to bring you here, say you want to go to the meeting place of silk street and lacquered bowl street.”

“Why would I want to come here?”

“It’s this way,” he said, ignoring her.

Helen looked down at the oily, pitch-black water doubtfully as Darrow stepped into it. It covered his ankles.

“They don’t get around to fixing the dips and the potholes very often.”

“Maybe we should do this another time. Curfew is only an hour away,” she said.

Without warning he scooped her up in his arms and carried her through the puddle. Chinese and Vietnamese crowded the wide mouth of the alley, the women giggling and pointing. Helen heard men barking out comments she couldn’t understand. On the other side of the puddle, Darrow kept holding her.

“Put me down now,” she said. “This is stupid.”

He kept holding her.

“Put me down,” she said. He slowly lowered her but kept her tight against his body. When her feet touched the ground, she was still in the cage of his arms.

“If you don’t stop this, I’m going to leave.”

“How? Now I have a moat holding you back. You’ll ruin your lovely shoes.”

She sighed. “I’ll take off my shoes and carry them as I run through your moat. Believe me.”

“I believe you.”

They entered the alley, the buildings now close together, and the lights within the storefronts dim. The darkness and closeness enveloped them; they walked shoulder to shoulder, Darrow holding her hand, and in the velvety pitch of the alley she did not let go. Not a person passed them, but there was no feeling of solitude in the night. Instead the passageway felt teeming, even crowded; it seemed to her that if she reached out her hand she would touch a body, someone pressing against the wall, holding still and waiting until the two of them passed by. For a moment, the image of the Vietnamese man, Linh, came into her mind, how he stood away from the group and went off by himself. Was he standing somewhere close, watching them now, holding his breath?

They walked in silence and came to a two-story, yellow stucco colonial building that leaned to the left as if it were gossiping with its neighbor. The facade wore faded, long ocher streaks from the rains and humidity, the patina like that of the moldering buildings in Venice. The roof and the entrance portico were tiled in a cobalt blue Chinese ceramic, the corners curved upward into points like the upturned corners of a sly mouth. An unsettling mix of cultures that created a strange beauty. The front door of the building was made of lacquered wood. On it were painted squares depicting the various scenes of Buddha’s enlightenment.

“Beautiful,” Helen said, tracing her hand along the panels.

“A lacquer artist lived here. When he couldn’t pay his rent, the landlord demanded he make something of equal value.”

Helen looked at peacocks perched atop rocks, elephants striding through bamboo, tigers crouched in palms, the great spreading of a bodhi tree, and pools of lotus blossom.

“It should be in a museum.”

“That’s part of what I love here. Everything isn’t locked away behind glass and key, you live with history as part of your life and not just on a field trip. The legend is that he worked on it a year. And when it was done, he ran away and was never heard from again.”

“Why?”

“It was during the war with the French. He couldn’t make a living and marry his girl, so she married a soldier. I don’t know if it’s true or a folktale. But the door is real. A friend of mine lived here. I still keep the place.”

“I thought you had a room at the Continental.”

“That’s the room that Life pays for. My official residence. This is my real life.” Darrow opened the door and waited for her to move inside.

They walked up the shadowy stairs that leaned to the right for a few steps, then to the left, as if nailed together by someone who felt ocean swells under his feet. The wood felt light and hollow like balsa, the middle of the struts bending under the weight of each footfall with a small groan.

“Are you sure these are safe?”

“This is a very old building. They’ve held so far.”

In front of a thin, scuffed door, Darrow pulled out an old-fashioned brass skeleton key and turned the lock. “This key only opens this door and a few thousand others in Cholon.”

Inside, he flipped on a small lamp with a red silk shade with beaded fringe that gently swished against his hand. The room smelled dusty and unused, like the stacks of an old library. He sneezed and walked to the window and opened it. The room was threadbare, furnished with only an old iron bed, an armoire, two wooden chairs, and a table. The only ornate decorations in the room were a large mirror in a scrolling gilt frame and the lamp.

“That’s a very feminine touch,” Helen said, nodding at the red glow of the shade.

“Henry, the guy who rented this place, was involved with a Vietnamese girl. It looks like it’s her taste. I let her take what she wanted, but she left this behind.”

“Where is Henry? Did he go home?”

“He was home. He was American, but he loved Vietnam. The war tore him up. I’ll show you some of his work-he was on his way to becoming a hell of a photographer.”

“Where is he?”

“Died two years ago covering an operation in the delta. Henry was reckless. I refused to go out with him on assignments. But he knew the dangers. That’s one lesson of etiquette you need to learn here-never ask what happened to someone. The answer is usually bad.”

“Not a very lucky apartment for its owners.”

“Not a very lucky country. Henry gave me a key. It’s the one place I could escape when I needed.”

Helen went to the open window and leaned on the sill. She smelled dust and rain, heard people walking down the alley, the tinny sound of Vietnamese pop music from a transistor radio. “Are you escaping now?” she asked.

“Trapped now is more like it.” And then, as if in answer, the room went dark. “Great Electric of Saigon at it again.” Darrow groped his way to the table and lit a candle.

Up and down the dark street, the slow pulse of flames like fireflies appeared.

“Why did you bring me here?”

Darrow stood next to her, reticent, and stared out the window as if he were waiting for something to happen. He did not want to say it was because she had appeared scared shitless to night, woefully inadequate for what she had come to do. Neither did he want to admit he found her beautiful.

“You see the tree in front of the building? It’s bare now, but in the spring it blooms large red flowers. Henry and his girl used to have parties each spring to celebrate the tree blooming. Very Tale of Genji, very Asian.” Darrow chuckled to himself. “Henry loved all that shit. Swore he’d never go back to the States. Said America scared him more than any war could.”

“What happened to the girl of the red lampshade?”

Darrow shrugged. “I don’t know. Disappeared. Found someone else. The local women don’t have much choice once they start taking up with white men.” Darrow justified his own actions with the native women that if not him, they would offer themselves to someone else. He treated them kindly and then promptly forgot them. The grand, futile gestures of renunciation, fidelity, bored him; he had become a practical bourgeois in war time. “There’s something lovely here, yet even as we look, even as we have contact with it, we change it. So why are you going out with that blowhard, Robert?”

“How rude. We’re friends.”

He poured two glasses of scotch from the armoire and handed her one. The glass was heavy, square, with a solid crystal bottom.

“Aren’t these from the hotel bar?”

He grinned. “Keep forgetting to return them.”

She sipped her drink in silence, listening to the outside sounds, the heaviness of the warm air moving through the room. He refilled their glasses and sat across from her.

“I like it here,” she said finally. What she didn’t add was that it was the first time she’d felt safe since she’d arrived in-country.

“This is the real Vietnam. When I come here, my mind slows down… I can imagine what is good about the place, what the people want to keep. The Continental and the Caravelle, the air-conditioning and room boys and ice cubes, make you forget where you are. The war groupies starting to descend. Restaurants and nightclubs booming, parties every night. Saigon is their Casablanca or Berlin. It’s the scene now. All these daughters of the country-club set descending with their copy of Graham Greene under their arm… sorry for the speechifying, I’m drunk.”

Helen set down her glass on the floor. “You’re saying I shouldn’t be here.”

“Should you?” His eyes took her in, coolly assessing. “Don’t ever believe that staying here won’t change you.”

“Tell me what you really think.”

“I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“I had Robert take me to the dinner to night because I knew you would be there.”

Darrow raised his eyebrows. “Should I be flattered?”

“All they’ve let me do so far is human-interest features-widows, orphans, wounded soldiers. I need someone to get me out in the field.”

He blinked, not wanting to admit his hurt feelings at how unromantic her reasons were. Usually the battle-weary reporter spiel worked. “Only a handful of women are covering the war. None doing combat. It’s too dangerous, too spooky out there. The men don’t like it, either. It’s hard work. It’s hard for me. I’m forty years old, I look fifty, I feel sixty.”

“My brother wrote me a letter before he was killed. He said no matter what happened he couldn’t regret coming. I needed to see for myself. And the only way to become famous is to cover combat, right? I dropped out of college because I was worried it would be over by the time I graduated.” Later, she would cringe at her crassness, but at the time it had seemed daring to reveal such an unflattering truth. How could she explain the years of being a tomboy, refusing dolls and dresses, always hanging out with the boys? Her father and Michael shared the idea of soldiering, and she had been left out. She cried when she had to stay in the kitchen with her mother, told to bake cookies. Michael’s taunts as they went out shooting-You can’t come, you can’t come.

Darrow knelt in front of her. He liked her a little less now, so it made it easier to seduce her.

“No one can say I didn’t try. Go out with me on patrol tomorrow. You’ll have your own bite of the apple. You’re going to get it anyway… right?”

“Right.”

This girl, filled with ambition and doubt and passion. Like himself. Utterly unlike his wife, who was cool, clear, and sharp-a constant obstacle to his doing what he loved. A mystery why she had married him just to make him guilty over what he did. Their arguments ran in circles like a dog chasing its tail: It’s the only thing I’m good at, he’d shouted, but the truth was it was the only thing that made him feel alive.

“Are we fine? I mean, things between you and me?”

Helen reached and gently pulled off his glasses. Despite her playacting, she was terrified by what she saw in the hospitals, and the idea of turning down a man she wanted to night seemed ridiculous. What if she were gone tomorrow, like Henry? She frowned. “Is there something between you and me?”

He put a hand on each side of her chair, and she noticed his hands shaking. That was good; neither was practiced at this seduction thing.

“Nerves. I’m steady in the field. Downtime fallout.”

She ran her fingers along the scar on his arm. “How’d that happen?”

He shrugged. “An angry husband.”

She laughed.

“I think it was Algeria. Hard to remember one from another. We should discuss this. Are we open about it, or do we try to keep it secret?”

“Cat’s a little out of the bag.”

“True. But are you prepared? A married man’s mistress?”

He folded the glasses into his shirt pocket. With his index finger he lightly traced her upper lip. Pressing harder, he went down her lower lip, pressing on the fleshy bottom till it spread into a dark flower. He kissed her.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

She was not beautiful, but she did not correct him. She let it go that she was beautiful enough for that moment.

“Tonight is just ours. Nothing to do with tomorrow, okay?” he said.

She nodded and pulled away from him, stood up, and walked across the room to the mirror. Back home time seemed to stand still; she was always impatient, restless. In Vietnam everything moved at a flash speed that had nothing to do with normal life. She tried to hold her breath and become as still as the room. “You didn’t ask why I came here to night.”

“I figured you’d tell me if you wanted to. I’ll find out soon enough.”

“Robert said you were one of the charmed. He said everyone tries to stick close to you because they think they will be safe.” As the words came from her mouth, she realized how foolish she sounded, like a child.

“Poor Robert still believes in the Tooth Fairy.”

“I already asked him to help me. He refused.”

“Well, good for him.”

“He said you have no morals. That you’ll do anything for a picture. That you would have no scruples about bedding a woman or letting her go out in the field.”

Darrow sat back on his heels a moment, winded. He got up and moved behind her, slowly unfastening the back of her dress, one button at a time. “But you came anyway. I didn’t finish the passage at the restaurant to night. Last time I was out on a mission, the only paperback I had was a battered copy of The Iliad. I would memorize passages:

A growl came from deep within the building, and the electricity struggled back on, first at half power, then all the way. Out of the darkness, plunged into light, she felt confused. Cheap, more like it. Dress half pulled off and her bra showing. Desire shrank. She pulled away, reached to refasten the buttons that had been undone. “We should be going. Robert will be at the hotel…”

“Really? Did you suddenly get frightened of yourself?” He watched her flushed face as she moved around the room, gathering her things. Not as easy as he had thought. Was he being played? Even so, she intrigued him. Perhaps at long last he had met his match in female form? “Why is it, you suppose, that the people who are supposed to love us the most are precisely the ones who try to stop us doing what we love? Did you leave anyone behind?”

“No. If there had been anyone that important, I wouldn’t have come. I wouldn’t have been so selfish.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

“How so?”

“Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you’re given. Don’t you think it’s a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?”

She walked past him and out the door. “I’m leaving… with you or without you.” Down the hallway, she refused to look back, not wanting to acknowledge that if he didn’t follow her by the time she reached the alley, she would most certainly be lost.

When she and Michael were kids, their favorite game was hide-and-seek. Helen would search for the most difficult hiding places possible, and time would turn into eternities; often she would fall into a daydream and forget she was playing a game. She would wait in the darkened cubby, desperately wanting to be found.