The Phantoms of Tonkin

Chapter 1

Saigon. Saturday, 14 December 1963.

He had bought the chrysanthemums the evening before in Bangkok, at the flower market by the river, from an old woman who wrapped them in wet newspaper and told him, first in Thai and then with her hands, that the stems should stand in water overnight and be cut at an angle in the morning. Garrity had brought them in a bucket in the cargo hold, lashed between two crates of helicopter spares, and the loadmaster in Udorn had looked at the bucket and said nothing. It was an ordinary day. At Tan Son Nhut no one consulted a ledger that no longer existed, and behind the glass sat a new man who looked at Garrity’s identification and wished him a pleasant stay.

Saigon had been a different city since November. You did not see it at once. The streets were the same, the rickshaws, the tamarind trees, the traffic outside Bến Thành market. But new posters clung to the walls, showing the faces of generals who did not look alike, and queues formed outside the cinemas because foreign films could be shown again, and young people sat outside the Givral laughing loudly. There was dancing in the nightclubs on Tự Do. On the way to Gia Định, without being asked, a taxi driver told Garrity that the generals were good men, they simply did not know what they wanted, and the Vietcong did.

The cemetery lay behind a white wall at the end of a dusty road where women sold wreaths of plastic flowers. The keeper, with a rosary round his wrist, sat in the shade by the gate and stood when he saw an American approaching with a bucket.

“Row fourteen,” Garrity said in French. “Grave thirty-one.”

The old man looked at him, looked at the flowers, and led him there.

* * *

There were flowers on the grave already. A small bunch of white lilies, no more than two days old, and beside them, weighted down with a stone, a sheet of paper rippled by the dew. Garrity bent down. It was a child’s drawing, in coloured pencil, of a house with a pointed roof covered in snow, a great deal of snow, thick and white, as much as a child in Saigon imagines when told that it snows in Chicago. A girl stood in front of the house. Below, in large, careful letters, was a French word. Bientôt. Soon.

“The Frenchwoman,” the keeper said behind him. “She comes every Friday. She brought the picture yesterday. It came in the post from Bangkok. The child sent it.”

Garrity placed the chrysanthemums beside the lilies, in the bucket because there was no vase, and put the stone back on the sheet. Then he stood there for a while. He did not know what you did at a grave where you had no right to mourn because you had not known the man, and where you stood all the same because you had played a part in his death, a small part, but not so small that you could forget it.

He heard footsteps on the gravel and did not turn round.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Zielinski said.

He wore a white shirt and a tie, which he loosened as he stopped beside Garrity. He looked better than he had in November. He had put on a little weight, and he held his head straight.

“You got the message,” Garrity said.

“Coming Saturday, ordinary day.” Zielinski did not quite smile. “The radio operators asked what an ordinary day was. I said a day when no one looks in the ledger. They didn’t understand. That was good.”

They stood side by side before the wooden cross. Phan Văn Lộc. Dịch giả.

“They’re flying in January,” Zielinski said after a while. “On the eighth, via Tokyo and Honolulu. The priest from St Hyacinth will meet them at the airport in Chicago. My mother is going with him. She’s bought a coat for the child, red, with a hood, and writes to me every week asking whether it will be big enough.”

“Will it?”

“My mother buys everything a size too large. She says children grow faster than you think, and coats don’t.”

Garrity nodded. He looked at the drawing beneath the stone, at all that snow.

“And your correction?”

“Duly noted.” Zielinski said it without bitterness. “It’s in a folder in Virginia. Someone will find it one day. Haverford says in twenty years. He says that about everything he doesn’t like.” He put his hands in his pockets. “There’s a new chief. He wants results. The generals want results. Everyone in Washington wants results. Next week the Secretary of Defense is coming, for the second time this autumn, and will discover there aren’t any. The strategic hamlets have been falling apart since the brother who devised them was killed. The Vietcong come and go in the villages. No one counts who lives where any more.”

“And you?”

“I count.” Zielinski shrugged. “They’ve put me in a section that works with the military. Commando operations against the North, from the sea. I read the reports and write summaries. It’s a job in which you count a great deal and understand very little.” He looked towards the gate, where the keeper was sitting in the shade again. “I’m playing chess again on Saturdays. With Wrona. He’s found a new opponent, an American from Phu Bai, up near Huế. A linguist. He speaks better Vietnamese than any other American I know. Sometimes he beats Wrona.”

“And you?”

“I never beat Wrona. Sometimes I beat the linguist. There are three of us. Wrona says it’s the only arrangement in which Poles, Russians and Americans can get along in this country.” This time Zielinski did smile. “He means me when he says the Russian. I speak it better than he does.”

* * *

They walked to the gate together. The keeper stood and said something to Zielinski in Vietnamese, and Zielinski answered in three or four words, slowly, with an accent that even Garrity recognised as bad. The old man laughed, not unkindly, and said something else.

“What did he say?”

“That I choose the right words and sing them wrong.” Zielinski held the gate open for him. “Vietnamese has six tones. I manage three. The linguist says that isn’t bad for a Pole from Chicago. He says zero is normal for an American from Washington.”

At the gate Garrity gave the keeper a banknote, for the water in the bucket and for not throwing the flowers away before they wilted. The old man took it without thanking him and said in French that he never threw away anything brought for a dead person. He waited until the dead no longer wanted it themselves.

Zielinski drove him back to the airport in the aid mission’s grey Ford, which now had a dent in its wing. On the way, at a junction, stood a lorry full of soldiers eating mandarins and throwing the peel into the road, and one of them waved at the Ford. Garrity thought that in Saigon in December you saw more soldiers waving than in the summer, and that it meant nothing.

“Lamphoun can count to a hundred,” he said. “Sister Anne-Marie wrote to tell me. By Christmas, just as she’d said.”

“Will you write to Ruth Calloway?”

“Tonight.”

Zielinski nodded. He did not ask who Lamphoun was. He knew. Garrity had told him in October, on the floor of Vernier’s flat, among the newspapers.

* * *

A yellow form was waiting for him in the Air America office at the end of the apron. The clerk at the counter handed it over with an expression that said he had read it, and Garrity knew from that expression, before he read it himself, that the news was not good.

It came from Vientiane. Ortiz had sent it that morning at ten.

Sithone shot yesterday evening outside sister’s house. K. requests you come. Funeral Wednesday. Ortiz.

Garrity read it twice. Then he handed it to Zielinski, who stood beside him, read it and gave it back without a word.

“He was free,” Garrity said. “For ten days. An exchange. Two officers from the Right for him. The Capitaine told me on the telephone. He laughed, for the first time since I’ve known him. He said the man from the wat had kept his word, even though he had promised nothing.”

“Who?”

“Who shot him?” Garrity folded the form and slipped it into his breast pocket beside the letter from Sister Anne-Marie, which he had not yet answered. “In Vientiane you don’t ask that. You only ask who it’s supposed to have been.”

He went to the window. Outside on the apron they were loading the aircraft for the return flight: sacks of post, crates of tinned food, two Laotians in civilian clothes guarding the crates.

“I’m flying back today,” he said. “Not tomorrow.”

“I’ll come with you if you like.”

“No. You have something here you belong to, Zielinski. A chessboard. A linguist. A Pole. Hold on to it. In Vientiane he has no one left now except me and a man from the wat who brings cakes.”

He picked up his bag. At the door to the apron he turned once more.

“And write to Ruth Calloway that the child can count to a hundred. In case I don’t manage it tonight. The address is in my letter to you from October. 214 Putnam Street. She should know before Christmas.”

“I will,” Zielinski said.

Garrity took off at four. Haze lay over the delta and clouds over the highlands, and he flew beneath them, low, over a country that was green and brown in December and looked peaceful from above. He thought of Sithone, whom he had never met and about whom he knew so much that he sometimes believed he knew him: a man who played chess with his guard in prison and usually won.