Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

A smiling young maidservant met them at the door. She took as many of their cases as she could manage and led them into the living room.

The house was new but tasteful and pleasant in a severe colonial style. The tiles looked as though they might have come from Spain, the oak beams were weathered and supported at their moldings by metal studs. Oak beams were not just for fun in Tecan — the number and mortality of her earthquakes was appalling.

It was a small house, by no means sumptuous, with a homely American smell.

Marie argued the maid out of making them dinner and sent her back to her quarters to watch television. The television was in the maid’s room and her opportunity to watch the dubbed soap operas had made her the foremost storyteller in her barrio.

“Well, we can go out or I can make us up something simple. Like ham and eggs.”

“There’s a big production of a place, La Finca, a few blocks from here,” Tom Zecca said. “Steak in the local style. Muy Auténtico. Lots of music and red bandanas flapping.”

“Speaking just for me,” Holliwell said, “I’m not very hungry. But I’ll go along with anything.”

“Well, I’m not too hungry myself,” Zecca said. “Don’t know why.”

“Maybe no one’s hungry,” Marie said.

“Looks like no one is,” Tom said. “But I think everyone would like a drink.” Holliwell nodded gratefully.

They took margaritas in a small garden, closely bound by vine-covered walls and banana trees. There was barely room in it for the green metal table and the chairs that had been set around it. Marie put out glasses and two large blenders full of margaritas.

“Someday,” she told Holliwell, pouring the drinks into the frosted glasses, “I’ll tell you about the day I was sitting out here and an iguana fell in my lap.”

Tom took his drink. “And me — goddamn it — I missed it. I was at the office. I have to reconstruct the whole scene in my imagination.”

“As I remember it,” Marie said, “the cops came. People poured into the street, crossing themselves.”

They drank and after a moment Tom said: “What about that Cole guy? Now there’s a questionable character.” It struck Holliwell as odd that Captain Zecca would raise the matter of Cole’s question-ability with him. He looked across the table and saw that Marie was shaking her head sadly. Perhaps they were just relaxing.

“I suppose the question about Cole,” Holliwell said, “is who he thinks he is and what he thinks he’s doing.”

“Do you mean does he think he’s Régis Debray?”

“No,” Holliwell said, “I mean beyond that.”

“Beyond that?” Zecca asked. “Beyond that isn’t necessarily my business. Beyond that he’s a Vietnam burn-out. A pilgrim.”

“There’s a lot of us,” Holliwell said.

“You see yourself as a burn-out?” Marie asked. She turned to her husband. “I wouldn’t have described him that way.”

“Maybe just badly seared,” Holliwell said.

“Everyone that ever saw that place is a little fucked up,” Tom said, leaning his stocking feet on the delicate table. It was easy to picture him at the Diplomat Hotel or some BOQ bar, a younger man, harder case, second-generation tough, hungry. “It was the dumbest damn thing we ever did as a country, no question about it.”

“Well, we told them so at the time,” Marie said. “Nobody listened until it was too late.”

“No,” Holliwell said, “we told them and they didn’t listen.”

“AID?” Zecca asked. “That was your cover?”

Holliwell became afraid. It was a misunderstanding.

“It wasn’t a cover,” he insisted. “I wasn’t an intelligence specialist or even a contract employee. I mean, you know how it is.” He was staring at his drink. The Zeccas watched him. “They come to you. Someone has a girlfriend in Saigon, he wants to stay there, so he has to make work for himself, he has to make up a report to file. So what an anthropologist knows — family relationships, the relationship of an uncle to a nephew, a younger cousin to an older cousin — it all goes into the hopper. Nobody gives a shit about it — maybe nobody ever looks at it. But it ends up — pardon the expression — intelligence.”

“We know exactly what you mean,” Marie Zecca said.

“Did you learn the language?” Tom asked him.

“I picked up a certain residue. No,” he said. “I never really did. I depended on a few local people and we spoke mainly in French.”

The thought came to Holliwell that he had spent much of his life depending on a few local people, speaking some lingua franca, hovering insect-like about the edge of some complex ancient society which he could never hope to really penetrate. That was his relationship with the world. And he himself — more and more losing touch with the family he had made, a bastard of no family origin, no blood or folk. A man from another planet forever inquiring of helpful strangers the nature of their bonds with one another.

“I don’t know how I got into family structures,” he heard himself tell the Zeccas. Tequila. Insidious. “It was archaeology I liked. The ruins, the traces, you know. I would have liked, I think, to dive. To dive for galleons.”

“Maybe you will yet,” Marie said.

“The family,” Holliwell said. “It’s so strange, you know. I never had a family of my own to speak of. And the one I’ve raised I don’t believe I understand at all. As far as other people’s families go — I’m absolutely ignorant.”

“Christ,” Tom Zecca said. He was relaxed now, merry with the end of the drive. “With guys like you in the shop no wonder we lost the goddamn war in Nam.”

They all laughed.

“No,” Zecca said, touching his arm to reassure him. “I’m kidding you, bro. You’re O.K. You’re a straight shooter.”

“I hope our friend Cole comes down O.K. He worries me a little.”

“How about it, Holliwell?” Captain Zecca asked. “You think he’s a spook?”

“You’d probably know more about that than I would,” Holliwell said warily.

“I’ll tell you something, Doc Holliwell … I don’t know much until I read my mail — that’s the situation we’ve got working here. Maybe there’s a line on him in the pouch tomorrow.”

And maybe, Holliwell thought, a line on me.

“Well,” Marie said, “he’ll be up there tomorrow wandering about among all those disgruntled macheteros. Feel for him, guys.”

“We do,” Holliwell said.

“Poor useless bastard,” Zecca said, pouring out his creamy margarita. “He doesn’t know who he works for and he doesn’t know what side he’s on. Even if he’s ours, he’s not a hundred percent sure. You take a dude like that and the next thing you know you’ve got a double agent, the most dangerous goddamn creature walking.”

“They have short life spans,” Marie said, “that’s one thing about them.”

“That’s the only good thing,” Zecca said.

Marie moved the second blender into position.

“But damnit, those people up there are screwed. They’re getting dumped on in the most incredible fashion.”

“You better believe it,” the captain said. “For untold fucking generations they’ve been living on beans and lizards to grow coffee for the bastards that run this country. Now we’ve found copper up there and the idiot greedhead generals who own it are throwing them off the land — sending them down here to beg or starve. Nah,” Zecca said, “who am I to knock Cole? It’s no wonder they’re righting back.”

“Are they?” Holliwell asked him.

“Are they seriously fighting back? I wish I knew. I’m supposed to. I can’t depend on dip-shits like Cole. One of these days I’m going to have to exercise my ass and go find out. I go up there in a chopper and they’ve got the weaponry, I’ll know in a big hurry.”