Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

Siri’s fingertips tingled. “And did anyone catch her?”

Again, Giap glanced at his captain. “The colonel and his wife were very strict with her. Very possessive, the colonel was. He made it clear early on that he’d shoot any man who laid a hand on her. And he was scary when he got mad. He frightened me lots of times, I don’t mind admitting.”

“And do you believe he would actually have killed anyone who touched her?”

“How can you tell a thing like that, Doctor?” He turned and smiled at the captain, whose face remained blank.

“Right,” Siri said. “Of course. So, as far as you know, nobody made any official-I mean, appropriate-advances directly to the colonel?”

“I don’t think anyone dared, except for…”

“For whom?”

“Well, there were rumors. But Fm sure you aren’t interested in camp gossip, are you, sir?”

“I’ll take anything I can get right now.”

“All right. There was a time when the girl got very sick. I mean, very sick. Some woman’s thing, I heard it was, and they had her in the hospital for a couple of months. A Vietnamese doctor operated on her. The colonel wouldn’t let any of them foreign doctors anywhere near h-Oh, sorry. No offense to you, Doctor.”

“That’s all right. Not every day you get the chance to be called an alien in your own country. So, she was in the hospital at Kilometer 8?”

“Correct. And she pulled through, much to the relief of her parents. But she had to have-what do you call it?-convalescence. They couldn’t move her for quite a time. And while she was up there in the caves-and this is where the rumor starts-she got friendly with one of them interns. Cuban fellow he was. Don’t know whether he stuck his old fellow in her there in the hospital or-”

To his own amazement, Siri lunged across the table in the direction of the sergeant major and sent cups and plates flying. He seemed intent on striking the old soldier. Both soldiers jumped to their feet and stood looking down at the doctor in shock. It was no less a surprise to Siri.

“I… I’m terribly sorry,” he said, groping for an explanation.

“I… I have this nervous tic. It does that sometimes, please forgive me.” He began to gather the Bakelite cups from the floor.

The sergeant major laughed. “That’s all right. Frightened the life out of me, though. Thought you must be squeamish about sex or something.”

“Are you all right?” Vo asked.

“Just fine,” Siri told him, weaving his fingers together on his lap. Odon had to be controlled. “Please go on, Sergeant Major.”

“Right, then. Where was I? Oh, yeah. So, this ‘thing’ happened with the intern and I suppose the guy thinks all his birthdays have come at once. He meets a pretty Vietnamese girl, knows they make the best wives in the world, so he decides he wants her. He goes up to the colonel-had to have balls like coconuts to do that-and he asks for the colonel’s permission to go out with his daughter. The colonel couldn’t believe his ears.”

“Why not? It sounds like the correct thing to do.”

“Why not? I’ll tell you why not, Doctor. This intern was black, wasn’t he? Black as a monkey’s asshole”-Siri fought down his hands-”black as a…”

“Yes, I get it. He was black.”

“You know how it is. One of them fair-weather communists from the Caribbean. Natives that join whatever army pays best. And the way the story goes, the colonel laughed in his face. But the blackie just sat there. Colonel told him to get out but he didn’t budge. So the colonel took a switch of bamboo to him. He still couldn’t get the bastard out of his office. It took a dozen men with coshes in the end.”

Siri was developing a strong dislike for Giap and his tale. “And what happened?”

Giap hesitated. “I guess that was it. They took the girl away from the caves and put her in a place where the nurses were women and wouldn’t do any twiddling about while she was unconscious. I hear she got better.”

“And she didn’t see the Cuban again?”

“Don’t imagine so. If she had, he’d be dead by now.”

Siri wondered whether that might indeed be the case. “How did they communicate?”

“Say what?”

“The intern and the girl. What language did they use?”

“No idea, Doctor. But she was a smart girl. I know she understood Russian. She might have spoken African for all I know.”

The interview continued for another half hour. There were several other things the sergeant major was ignorant about. But, most important, he didn’t know what had happened to the mother and daughter after the colonel’s death. Siri began asking a series of mundane, unnecessary questions and waited for Vo to lose interest. But the only time Vo left them alone was when he paid a brief visit to the latrine. Then Siri pounced.

“Listen, brother. I promise you this information will never get back to your superiors. Please trust me. I need to know exactly what happened at the ambush. How did Colonel Ha Hung die?”

Giap looked at the tent flap, considered the question for a few seconds, then leaned across the table toward Siri. “He went instantaneously insane, Doctor. Really. We were there in a valley. Our outriders were butchered but we were in armored trucks. We could have held out for days. What usually happened was, the Hmong would pin a convoy down for a few hours, pick off whoever they could, then run off into the jungle to boast about it. The Yanks had deserted them by then so they didn’t have unlimited ammo to throw at us. We could have waited them out.”

“But?”

“But”-he lowered his voice-”something came over the colonel that I’d never seen in him before. He was always Colonel Cool in battle. Never saw him lose it. But this particular day he says something like, “You deserve this!’ A deep scary voice he used. He takes out his handgun and jumps down off the armored car. Just leaps out, like a cowboy. And he shouts ‘Charge!’ Now, I tell you, there wasn’t one of us dumb enough to charge in a situation like that. But he wasn’t really expecting us to. He headed off across the clearing by himself. He hadn’t gone but ten steps before they got him. He swatted off the first couple of hits but I bet them Hmong were singing up there in the trees. A uniformed officer? I bet that got ‘em some points. They peppered him.”

Siri was astounded. “So, in your professional opinion, that wasn’t the action of a man in control of his own faculties?”

“Every surviving man of us agreed the devil had got into him that day, Doctor. Every single man of us.”

Mr. Geung rejoined Route 13 at Kasi. He didn’t know it was the same road he’d left four days earlier. All roads looked alike. But the sun was prodding him south and he knew this road was now heading in the right direction.

In his hand he held a pointed stick. It was a weapon against wild beasts. It had been a much larger stick that killed the tiger, but that branch had been too heavy to carry. A stick was a stick. A dead tiger was a dead tiger.

It had been getting close to morning and he still hadn’t slept. The tiger was resting directly below him, waiting for him to tire, to drop from the tree like a ripe mango. Several times she’d tried to climb up after him and failed. On one occasion, Geung had kicked out at her. The impact of his boot against her teeth caused her to lose her balance and fall to the ground. He felt guilty about that. From then on, frustrated but ever patient, she slept with one ear pricked up. Whether she heard the crack before he felt the branch give way was something he pondered later. All he could be sure of was that he and the branch suddenly dropped, very quickly. There was a second crack and a thump that sent a bolt of pain from his bottom to his shoulder and back again several times. He was thrown into the thick grass where he lay hurting, waiting for the tiger to come and eat him. But she hadn’t come.