Joan Didion - Democracy

In case.

Inez should note “in case.”

“In case” was proof the inmates were running the bin.

Because the various agencies had been unable to agree on the count each agency was drawing up its own list. Some people said the lists would add up to a hundred-fifty-thousand priority evacuees, others said ten times that number. Nobody seemed in any rush to make it definite. They were talking about evacuating twenty years of American contacts, not to mention their own fat American asses, but they were still talking as if they had another twenty years to do it. Twenty years and the applause of the local population. An inter-agency task force had been appointed. To shake this down. The task force had met for dinner at the residence, met for goddamn dinner at the goddamn residence, add a little more lard to those asses, and by the time the cigars were passed they did not yet know whether they had a hundred-fifty-thousand priority evacuees or ten times that number but they did know what they needed.

They needed a wall map.

They needed a wall map of what they kept calling Metro Saigon.

This wall map had been requisitioned.

Through General Services.

They were getting their wall map any day now, and what they would do when they got it was this: they would make a population density plot. In other words they would plot, with little colored pins, the locations of a few types of people they might want to invite to the final extraction.

In case.

Strictly in case.

“Types” of people, right.

A little green pin for every holder of an embassy ration card.

A little yellow pin for every holder of a DAO liquor ration card.

A little red pin for every current member of the Cercle Sportif. Note “current.” Behind on the dues, forget it.

The little white pins were the real stroke. Follow this. There was going to be an analysis of all taxi dispatch records for the period between the first of January and the first of April. Then there would be a little white pin placed on the map showing every location in Metro Saigon to which a taxi had been dispatched. Too bad for the guys who drove their own cars. Around Metro Saigon. Taken a cab, they’d be on the map. This map was going to be a genuine work of art. Anybody down there had any feeling for posterity, they’d get this map out and put it under glass at the State Department.

Pins intact.

Memento mori Metro Saigon .

By the time he stopped talking the room was light.

Inez sat on the edge of the bed and began brushing her hair.

“So what do you think,” Jack Lovett said.

“I don’t know.”

Through the half-closed shutters Inez could see the early light on the water. It occurred to her for the first time that this was the same sea she had looked on with Jessie, the day there had been no baby cobras in the borrowed garden and Harry had been at the situation briefing in Saigon. Now there was about to be no more situation and Jessie was in Saigon and Jack Lovett was going back down to Saigon but Jack Lovett might not find her before it happened.

Nobody even knew what “it” was.

That was what he was telling her.

She brushed her hair harder. “I don’t know how an evacuation is run.”

“Not this way.”

“She’s not on anybody’s list, is she.” Inez found that she could not say Jessie’s name. “She’s not on the map.”

Jack Lovett got up and opened the shutters wide. For a while the rain had stopped but now it was falling hard again, falling through the patchy sunlight, glistening on the palms outside the window and flooding the broken fountain in front of the hotel.

“Not unless she happened to join the Cercle Sportif,” Jack Lovett said. “No.” He closed the shutters again and turned back toward Inez. “Put down the hairbrush and look at me,” he said. “Do you think I’d leave her there?”

“You might not find her.”

“I always found you,” Jack Lovett said. “I guess I can find your daughter.”

IN fact Jack Lovett did find Inez Victor’s daughter.

In fact Jack Lovett found Inez Victor’s daughter that very day, found her by what he called dumb luck, just got on the regular Air Vietnam flight from Hong Kong to Saigon and landed at Tan Son Nhut and half an hour later he was looking at Jessie Victor.

Jack Lovett called this dumb luck but you or I might not have had the same dumb luck.

You or I for example might not have struck up the connection with the helicopter maintenance instructor who happened to be one of the other two passengers on the Air Vietnam 707 to Saigon that day.

Jack Lovett did.

Jack Lovett struck up a connection with this helicopter maintenance instructor the same way he had struck up connections with all those embassy drivers and oil riggers and airline stewardesses and assistant professors of English literature traveling on Fulbright fellowships and tropical agronomists traveling under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation and desk clerks and ticket agents and salesmen of rice converters and coco dryers and Dutch pesticides and German pharmaceuticals.

By reflex.

The helicopter maintenance instructor who happened to be one of the two other passengers on the Air Vietnam 707 that day had last been in Saigon in 1973, when his contract was terminated. He had been in Los Angeles working for Hughes but now he was coming back to look for the wife and little girl he had left in 1973. The wife had been with her family in Pleiku and he had gotten a call from her saying that the little girl had been blinded on a C-130 during the evacuation south when a leaking hydraulic line overhead sprayed liquid into her face. The wife said Saigon was still safe but he thought it was time to come find her. He had the address she had given him but according to a buddy he had contacted this address did not check out. The helicopter maintenance instructor had seemed cheerful at the beginning of the flight but after two Seagram Sevens his mood had darkened.

What had she done to get on the C-130 in the first place?

Didn’t everybody else walk out of Pleiku?

What about the fucking address?

Jack Lovett had offered him a ride into Saigon and the helicopter maintenance instructor had wanted to make one stop, to check the address with a bartender he used to know at the Legion club.

Which was where Jack Lovett found Jessie Victor.

Serving drinks and French fries at the American Legion club on the main road between Tan Son Nhut and Saigon.

Still wearing her tennis visor.

An ao dai and her tennis visor.

“Hey, no sweat, I’m staying,” Jessie had said to Jack Lovett when he told her to sign off her shift and get in the car. “This dude who comes in has a friend at the embassy, he’ll get the word when they pull the plug.”

Jessie had insisted she was staying but Jack Lovett had said a few words to the bartender.

The words Jack Lovett said were Harry goddamn Victor’s daughter.

“You know this plug you were talking about,” Jack Lovett said then to Jessie. “I just pulled it.”

“YOU’RE looking for a guy in the woodwork, the Legion club is where you’d look,” Jack Lovett said when he finally got through to Inez in Hong Kong. “Christ almighty. The Legion club. I covered Mimi’s, I don’t know how I missed the Legion club.”

He was calling from the Due.

He had left Jessie for the night at the apartment of a woman he referred to only as “B.J.,” an intelligence analyst at the Defense Attaché Office.

B.J. would put Jessie up until he could get her out.

B.J. would take fine care of Jessie.

B.J. was even that night sounding out the air lift supervisor at Tiger Ops about the possibility of placing Jessie on a flight to Travis as an orphan escort. These orphans all had escorts, sure they did, that was the trick, the trick was to melt out as many nonessentials as possible without calling it an evacuation. They might or might not be orphans, these orphans, but they sure as hell had escorts. The whole goddamn DAO was trying to melt out with the orphans.