A River in May Read online

  ‘Is there some kind of court-martial procedure?’

  ‘Fuck no. They’ll give him a lie detector test – which he’ll fail – then an intravenous injection with enough barbiturate to drop a charging rhino, to keep him quiet during the boat trip. They always deep-six these guys, just wrap them up in ninety feet of half-inch chain and put them in a canvas sack. The last one woke up in the bag and started squirming around just before they threw him over. It was a stormy wet night, they were out of sight of land and everyone was seasick. The S2, a very kind fellow, felt around the sack to find the condemned’s head and put him back to sleep with a couple of 9mm rounds. Not as easy as you’d think in a tossing boat on a pitch-black night. The Group Medical Officer was so impressed by the S2’s humane intervention that he wrote out a death certificate describing the double agent’s death as the worst case of suicide he’d ever seen. The S2 framed it to keep it on his desk.’

  ‘Is there anyone else you have to keep an eye on?’

  ‘Only you, Lopez, only you. Everyone knows you Ivy League guys are a bunch of pinkos. But maybe you’re different.’ Lopez could almost feel Redhorn staring.

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  Redhorn took the file and fished out one more report. ‘You’ll love Mister Kim. We call the CIDG unit commanders “Mister”, like the British do their junior officers. Everyone loves Kim, he ought to be called Saint Nguyen Van Kim.’

  Lopez looked at the photo. It showed a handsome man with fine ascetic features and the pale skin of someone who had spent little time toiling in a rice paddy. He looked educated.

  ‘Kim was born in the North. He comes from a family of Catholic mandarins who sent him away to become a priest. He must have realized that seminaries are not particularly good places for pussy, so he ran away. I don’t blame him. Then his story becomes a bit muddled: Kim claims he worked as a railway clerk and married a girl with a nice dowry. Says he got pissed off because they wouldn’t promote him because he had a bourgeois background. Bullshit – so does Ho Chi Minh. In any case, eventually Kim and his wife fled to the South in a leaky boat. They were given the usual post-defection interrogation by the Quan Canh and gave the usual answers: “We were victimized, sob, sob, threatened because of our bourgeois background and our religion, blah, blah.” And all the rest of that refugee crap.’ Redhorn put the report back and re-bound the folder. ‘But you’ll love Kim: he commands the Combat Reconnaissance Platoon and his men all adore him. We certainly can’t get rid of Mister Kim – there’s no one else who can control those guys. Funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The best people at killing Communists are other Communists. How’re we ever going to catch up? Look at Uncle Joe Stalin – his body count was millions.’

  Lopez knew that it was going to be like this. All the camps were riddled with infiltrators. It was having to watch their backs all the time that caused a lot of Special Forces troops to crack up or pull the trigger. Many of them ended up with a pathological hatred of the Vietnamese.

  ‘Remember,’ said Redhorn, ‘don’t trust these fuckers; they’re just sleepers. Sure, as long as they’re undercover, they’ll smile in your face and kill VC and NVA like avenging angels. But when they get the wake-up call – tonight, next month, five years from now – Dieu and his fucking friends are going to booby trap our ammunition bunkers, sabotage our radio transmitters and frag us while we’re still asleep. We know that one day, they’re going to kill us – so we have to kill them first.’

  ONE WEEK LATER the mountain mist wrapped itself around the camp like a shroud. The Vietnamese whispered that the mist was the icy breath of the unburied dead. They all believed in ghosts. Lopez took over the duty watch at two in the morning, when the mist was at its worst. Dusty Storm, the NCO who had the previous watch, was still decoding a message when Lopez arrived in the com bunker. Dusty’s name was an alias: Storm was a Russian who joined the American army as a shortcut to getting US nationality. There were a lot of people like him in Special Forces – Hungarians, Cubans, Poles, East Germans, even one officer who claimed to have been a ski instructor in the Waffen SS – the deracinated professional traitors of the Cold War. Travis claimed they all had shifty eyes and a penchant for buggery.

  After Dusty had explained to Lopez how to finish the decoding, he got up to go to bed. Lopez noticed he was wearing what appeared to be a Montagnard amulet on a silver chain around his neck: it looked like half of a dried peach. He asked Dusty what it was. ‘Just a little souvenir,’ he grinned. ‘Something I picked up at Dak To.’

  Lopez took it in his hand and examined it more closely. ‘This is a human ear.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. It is neither metaphor nor symbol, but the thing itself. One needs a third ear. The medic at Pleiku had a gallon jar full of them, pickled in formaldehyde.’

  Before he could say anything else, Dusty unclasped the ear from the chain and tossed it to Lopez. ‘I can tell, sir, that you don’t approve. Keep it.’

  After Dusty had gone to bed Lopez studied the ear more closely: it really did look like a dried peach and even had the same texture. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he put it in his pocket.

  Lopez finished decoding the message: it gave the grid coordinates and dates of a Program Phoenix operation. Phoenix was a secret unit who dressed up in Viet Cong uniforms and traveled around the countryside executing enemies of the Saigon regime. The fake VC uniforms didn’t fool anyone; they were a device to wipe US fingerprints off the murder weapons. There were other covert units wearing skull and crossbones insignia waging private wars in places that weren’t even on the map. There didn’t appear to be anyone in control. Lopez had heard that Phoenix reported directly to the White House. At least they reported to someone.

  The Vietnamese commanding officer, Dai Uy Ky, came in and asked Lopez to accompany him on an inspection tour of the camp perimeter. The Dai Uy was in his mid-forties and wore a neat moustache and a blue silk cravat. All his uniforms were splendidly cut and tailored.

  Redhorn claimed that Ky was a coward and a crook, even though the Dai Uy had been wounded three times. He was certainly a crook; he had to be. His expenses far exceeded his derisory pay as a Vietnamese captain – there were a wife, two teenage daughters, a widowed father and parents-in-law to look after. Ky’s main problem was the landlord who kept raising the rent of his Saigon villa. Whenever he complained the landlord shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I can get twice your rent from an American.’ And the daughters were expensive too, requiring silk ao dais and mopeds as well as the lycée fees.

  All the CIDG had to pay a percentage of their own paltry salaries to Ky. Dai Uy Ky in turn had to pay a percentage to his commanding officer and so on. The most macabre thing about Ky’s business was the phantom soldiers: when CIDG were killed, their names were kept on the camp roll and their pay was collected, via an impersonator, by Dai Uy Ky. There was already an entire platoon of ghosts.

  It took half an hour to inspect the defenses. There was a raised sentry post every twenty meters. Ky spoke French to Lopez and complained about his financial problems. ‘For Vietnamese people,’ he said, ‘it is necessary to provide dowries for one’s daughters. In America, you do not have this custom?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And yet your country is so rich. But still no dowries. Doesn’t that strike you as being rather odd?’ Before Lopez could answer, Dai Uy Ky halted and put his hand on his arm. ‘Shhh.’

  Lopez strained to listen to the night: the sound of measured breathing and snoring was coming from the direction of the next sentry post. He watched Ky tiptoe to the post. The guard’s rifle was draped across his knees; his chin was resting on his chest. The Dai Uy reached up, grasped the muzzle of the rifle with both hands and wrenched it from the sleeping soldier’s grip. The sentry woke with a start. His first reaction was to hang on to his rifle, but he lost his balance and landed at Dai Uy Ky’s feet. Ky kicked the rifle out of reach, and then began to kick the soldier. The kicks l
anded without discrimination, but tended to favor the guard’s face and thighs. The soldier took the beating in silence. After an espèce de con and an espèce de cretin, the only sound in the balmy night was the thump of boot against flesh. When Ky had finished, he told the soldier to report to the LLDB Sergeant-major in the morning.

  ‘I apologize for that little unpleasantness, Trung Uy. I hope you do not think that I am a brutal man.’

  Lopez didn’t say anything.

  ‘The French,’ Dai Uy Ky went on a little coolly, ‘would have had him shot, but that’s another story.’

  By the time they got back Lopez’s watch replacement was waiting to take over. Lopez briefed him and went back to bed. As he undressed he found the ear in his pocket. He put it on his desk and decided to begin a letter to Rosie and Tom before turning in. Lopez found himself staring at the ear and wondering about the human head it had been sliced from and what thoughts had gone through that head in its last hours. The ear seemed to rehydrate like a dried mushroom left to soak. And then there was a pair of eyes – not human ones, but rat’s eyes – that were watching from the shadows. The eyes were furtive and looking at him from the edge of the desk, as if calculating and measuring distances. When it happened the movement, if there was a movement, was so unexpected and swift that Lopez wouldn’t have been able to stop it in any case. Perhaps it happened while he blinked, but both rat and ear were gone.

  IT WAS ONE OF THOSE HOT LATE JULY AFTERNOONS when everything is quiet and still, as if stunned by the too-brightness of the sun. It was a perfect dry clear heat – so rare for a Chesapeake Bay summer. Tom was snoring on the porch, and everyone except them seemed asleep. They put a halter on Rosie’s mare and took her down to the river. Ianthe rode her into the water while he backstroked over to the point. When the mare was out of her depth she began to snort like a sea monster, head arched back, teeth bared, nostrils flared, looking ferocious and dangerous. Ianthe clung to her neck, looking like a Rhinemaiden in a rainbow of spray. The mare was so close behind that Lopez could feel her breath hot and sticky on the soles of his feet. When they reached the firm sand of the shallows, the horse emerged dripping and tossing her head like a mythical beast from a lost Atlantis.

  Lopez led the way into the beech wood where he’d built dens as a child and sometimes spent the night. It was always cool there. He looked behind and saw horse and maiden dappled with leaf shade and sunlight. ‘Jump down,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch you.’ Ianthe swung her leg over the horse’s head so that she was seated sideways on the animal’s broad back. The river, brilliant with the midday sun, shone through the curtain of her damp hair and dazzled her eyes. Beads of water wreathed everything with rainbows. Ianthe balanced on the horse like a circus acrobat, her arms extended and palpating the air like wings. She felt the horse paw the ground and shudder beneath her bare thighs.

  He was a barefoot apparition, sleek and dark in the shadow. ‘Jump,’ he said again. ‘Trust me. I’ll catch you.’ His arms were open and his body flexed to receive her weight. She closed her eyes and let herself go, the horse’s flank wet and glossy beneath her, like sliding down mossy rock in a waterfall.

  She hurt him. Her forehead banged hard against his lower lip and split it open. He was bruised and dripping blood, but was only aware of her breasts, compact and hard as apples pressing against his naked chest, and their wet thighs touching. They were the same height and their bodies molded into each other. He felt her nipples turn rigid against the wet cotton of her blouse. For what seemed a long time they didn’t do anything: they just stood there holding each other and listening to the other’s breathing. Finally, she felt the blood dripping on her neck. ‘Your mouth,’ she said, ‘is bleeding.’ He held her closer and could feel her heart pounding. She began to kiss the blood away and then he felt her tongue against his tongue and the salty urgency of all that blood. They then pulled away from each other, ashamed at what they had felt, and never mentioned it. It began with blood – and ended with blood.

  Lopez forced his brain back to Vietnam.

  He lay on his bunk, fantasizing about showing her around Nui Hoa Den. ‘This is where I live now. Do you like it?’ He imagined her in her grown-up prissy mood. She would be wearing her white party dress, the one with the flounces and ribbons. He could see her twitching her nose at the latrines as he conducted her around the trenches, making a face as she bent over to rub a spot of mud off her stocking. How she would hate it – and how she would hate him for being here.

  THE FUNNY THING ABOUT KILLING A MAN, the odd thing, the thing that really frightened Lopez, was that he hadn’t felt anything. Just emptiness. At first he thought that there must be a delayed reaction, that the horror would eventually hit him. But it never did.

  It was a typical patrol: a company of a hundred CIDG accompanied by two Americans. Their job was to do a reconnaissance in force in the mountains to the northwest of the camp. It was the same area where Redhorn won his second Bronze Star the previous May. He had managed to lure an NVA battalion into attacking his company: the North Vietnamese were then slaughtered by pre-arranged air strikes. Redhorn said it reminded him of Christmas because the surviving trees had been decorated with bodies and body parts tossed high into the branches by the 500-pound bombs. In the end about four hundred NVA were killed: Redhorn lost only one CIDG dead and six wounded.

  Lopez had lain awake the night before the patrol worrying – not least about being unable to sleep. There were plenty of horror stories. Often the only people who failed to come back from a patrol were the two Americans. There were rumors that disaffected CIDG used the remote rain forests to assassinate Americans they didn’t like – and there were lots of reasons not to like them. And there was the enemy to cope with too. Lopez was scared – scared to nearly-vomiting sick. His vivid imagination and a clinical appreciation of what happened when bullets and shell fragments hit human bodies made his fear intense. He threw aside his sheet and picked up a torch. He shone it on his feet, ankles and legs: for the first time he realized the beauty of the veins which crossed his instep and the complex of fine bone and tendon beneath. What would an AK-47 bullet or a landmine do to them? Or his spine or his eyes or his penis and testicles? All of him felt so soft and delicate and infinitely vulnerable. Lopez knew, in perfect honesty, that he only cared about what happened to his own body. If a leg or arm must decorate a tree, he wanted it to be someone else’s.

  The patrol was just a sweaty hike in the hills until the afternoon of the second day. They had halted for a break near the top of a mountain ridge. Suddenly, a small black dog jumped out of the undergrowth and started barking at them. Lopez was perplexed; small yappy black dogs weren’t mentioned in the training manuals, and he didn’t know what to do. Meanwhile, Dusty reached out towards the dog and said, ‘Here, boy.’ He started flicking his neckerchief at the pooch, like it was a game. The dog sunk his teeth into the cloth and Dusty drew him closer. The pup thought he was playing; a second later the little dog was impaled on Dusty’s commando knife. Lopez thought it was a bad omen.

  They continued over the ridgeline and down into the far valley, following a trail, but one that was overgrown and hadn’t been used for some time. When Lopez heard the explosion, his first thought was that it must be a stray artillery round from an American battery – that was what he wanted to believe. They crouched and waited. It was half a minute before word was passed back that the front of the column had been ambushed by a Claymore mine. Lopez turned to Dusty and said, ‘You shouldn’t have killed that dog.’ He knew it was stupid thing to say, an irrational reaction, like Jackie Kennedy trying to put pieces of Jack’s brain back in his skull.

  Dusty only said, ‘We better go take a look.’ They brushed their way past the Vietnamese to the point of the column. One soldier was squatting beside the trail with his trousers down having a shit. He was smiling with embarrassment. The other faces were taut and drawn, the trail was muddy and the vegetation damp and sticky. Lopez’s heart was pounding with fear at what he
was going to have to see.

  One of the CIDG was dead; he was lying in a tangle of undergrowth and slender green tree branches which had been torn off by the force of the explosion. His eyes were open, his face was flecked with damp earth and his head lay loose on his shoulders as if his neck had gone slack. Lopez didn’t notice any wounds other than holes in his face the size of small coins. There was another casualty behind him, still living, but with serious head wounds.

  Lopez radioed a request for a medevac helicopter to evacuate the casualties while Dusty got the Vietnamese to make litters. The Forward Air Controller directed them to a bomb crater from where the casualties could be winched out. The most obvious places to land a medevac were booby trapped and targeted by anti-aircraft guns.

  They left the trail and crashed through thick foliage, half dragging, half carrying the casualties in ponchos slung beneath long staves cut from young saplings. When they slid out of the undergrowth down into the yellow mud of the bomb crater, Dusty suddenly dropped the end of the stave he was carrying and said, ‘What am I carrying this dead fuck for?’ Lopez watched the dead Vietnamese roll out of the poncho into the mud, his eyes still open and staring.

  Within minutes the medevac helicopter was hovering over the crater. Lopez could see the gunners staring intently into the jungle. At the end of the winch cable was a bullet-shaped device which unfolded into a seat, but it was jammed, so the wounded man had to be lashed awkwardly to the cable; he spun like a top as they winched him up. They did an even worse job with the dead man; he was winched up upside down with his head loose and gyrating.