Hwang Sok-Yong - The Shadow of Arms

“Wait a minute, it’s eleven.”

Toi looked up at the clock and Yong Kyu said, “Go and check it out.”

“What if they get suspicious?”

“Don’t worry. Let’s get some fruit to eat.”

Toi did not agree. “Old man Hien, he’s a sly old fox. He already knows who I am.”

Yong Kyu squashed the empty beer can and got to his feet. “We’re making daily reports, so we can’t omit mentioning that load, can we? I’ll walk by and find out. Then I’ll meet you at the Chrysanthemum Pub. Wait about five minutes and then pass by as I do and we’ll see what you can find out.”

“All right.”

His hands in his pockets, Yong Kyu sauntered down the alley with an air of terminal boredom. Both sides of the alley were packed tight with hole-in-the-wall shops, carrying everything from candy and coffee to small but sturdy tools. Everything was US-made. Those tiny shops with nostril-sized doors should not be underestimated, for behind the miserable facades there might be a big warehouse in the basement, or the entire house itself might be a storage space. Yong Kyu repeated to himself the license plate number of the truck that was blocking the alley in front of the Puohung Company. The workers were busy unloading boxes from the covered bed of the truck and quickly moving them inside. A young American soldier who seemed to be the driver of the truck was watching the activity with a beer in his hand. Yong Kyu lingered for a few minutes, staring as if amazed by they way they worked. He recognized a fat American sergeant, with whom he had recently become familiar, sitting inside the warehouse with his back turned. Only the short-sleeved poplin shirt of old man Hien could be seen in the dark beside the sergeant.

“Get lost, gook.”

The American bastard shooed Yong Kyu away. Yong Kyu was tempted to cuss him out, but he was afraid that the old man would recognize him and so quickly turned away and left.

Once out of the alley, Yong Kyu turned right at the intersection and passed the new market headed for the bus terminal. The space in the middle of the street was barely wide enough for a single car to pass, and both sidewalks were spilling over into the street with different goods being hawked by peddlers. He shouldered his way briskly through the crowd toward the freight terminal lot. By then it was past the time when the outbound trucks normally pulled out of Da Nang for inland destinations.

He had been coming down and prowling the freight terminal at around midnight to check on the trucks set to leave at dawn the following morning. Some trucks were in the process of loading at that hour and others had only recently arrived at their warehouse docks. Since there was a nationwide curfew restricting night travel regardless of locale, the transports did all of their moving only in daylight hours and nights found them parked at rest.

There was no way to keep track of all the cargo loaded on the trucks. It didn’t much matter whether it appeared to be vegetables, grain, or handcrafts, nor was it feasible to make any accurate inventories. Even if guns and grenades were concealed inside big squashes and pumpkins, there was just no way to know without chopping them up one at a time. All Toi and Yong Kyu could do was record in their notebooks what they could find out about the routes of the various trucks that were making regular runs. Within a few months, this information might be useful in conjunction with other clues.

It was usually around lunchtime when the short-haul vehicles pulled in from the immediate vicinity of Da Nang. They were mostly three-quarter ton pickups or three-wheelers. Their main cargoes were agricultural or fish products brought in from the outskirts to be put on the tables of Da Nang residents: dried and salted fish, sprouts and sauces, ducks, chickens, cabbage, sesame seeds, beans, corn, or sometimes handcrafts made from bamboo or sedge and so forth. Yong Kyu jotted down in his palm-sized notebook as many details of the truck license numbers and their cargoes as he could. He would do a survey of a whole block, record as much as he could remember at one stretch, then put his pen and notebook away, get closer to confirm more details, and then jot more down.

When he reached the Chrysanthemum Pub, Yong Kyu pulled aside the cloth curtain and went inside. He took his usual seat next to a window with a bamboo screen for a curtain. From there he could see the bus terminal as well as the freight lots at one glance. The waiter came by and gave him a knowing look.

“ Lam on vo toi, cha .”

He had ordered tea by the time Toi got there.

“That American sergeant, what unit is he with?”

“We’ll find out when we confirm the vehicle’s license number.”

They cross-checked the license plate number each had memorized and then recorded it in their notebooks.

“What kind of goods were they?” Yong Kyu asked.

“Well, some of the crates said California vegetables. I’m guessing it was potatoes, onions, cabbages, and that sort of thing.”

“Not much change the last few days, it looks like. They’ve been handling vegetables and meats.”

Toi looked at his open notebook and slowly murmured, “Hasn’t been much fruit, has there?”

“Vietnam has too much local fruit — bananas, mangos, coconuts, papayas, big tangerines.”

“The fruit I mean is the kind they use at drinking places, like king-sized cherries, lemons, oranges, grapes, and most of all, apples from Washington. The apples are the big item.”

Yong Kyu nodded. “Right. Apples don’t grow here.”

“Let’s give a call to our Smarty. Make him earn his piasters.”

Toi got up and went over to make the telephone call. He was going to talk to the bookkeeper at Puohung Company to try and get some further information out of him. The waiter brought over a pot of green tea on a tray. Ahn Yong Kyu asked him something in Vietnamese, and after receiving the reply, held up three fingers.

Toi returned. “He said he’d be here soon.”

“I ordered duck for three. In Vietnamese.”

Toi chuckled. “Not bad. Your Vietnamese is getting much better.”

Ahn Yong Kyu asked, “Is Stapley doing all right?”

“Not really, no. The landlord says he’s been sleeping all day. And at night they can hear him pacing around.”

“Have you spoken with him?”

“He’s a real hippie now. He begged me so much I had to buy a handful of marijuana for him. If this were Saigon, he could come out and wander around with no problem. There’s not a trace of military left in him.”

“His beard must be getting long by now. The day’s fast approaching.”

“We don’t know the exact date yet.”

“Don’t say another word about it,” said Yong Kyu, pointing his finger at Toi. “We promised Leon so we have to send him off safely to Nha Trang. You’re concerned about the business, aren’t you?”

Toi jumped up, upset. “What the hell do you take me for? It’s not that, it’s that the landlord’s son is on a boat that has to stop at many ports before returning here. He said he received a letter from his son saying he’d be arriving home a little later.”

“Let’s go see him today.”

As he looked out through the screen on the window, Yong Kyu spotted Nguyen Thach in a white cotton shirt over at the truck terminal area. Toi grumbled that the way he wore that shirt buttoned all the way up made Thach look like he was trying to imitate an aristocrat of the old Hue Dynasty. If he had a robe as well, he’d pass for a scholar of the old days. Yong Kyu watched him shaking hands and chatting with the truck drivers.

“Don’t you find him rather mysterious?”

“Who? Nguyen Thach?”

“Yes. You’re the one who said that even if he’s not NLF himself, he’ll be profiting from that side.”