Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Skip looked up in surprise and said, “That’s true. I’ve felt just that

very thing.” “We all do. Remember last Tet?” “Yeah.” “You were here?” “I was around.” “Cao Phuc?” “Off and on.” “You’ve been getting mail pretty regularly at the embassy.” “Oh. You keep track of those things?” “Every little thing, somebody keeps track of it. But who’s keeping

track of who’s keeping track? So Cao Phuc. Yeah. You guys did some

nice work on Labyrinth.” “Yes, thanks —do you really mean that?” A cab stopped out front, and even through the viney lattice Voss

could see who it was.

“Well, Skip,” he admitted with sudden irritation, “no. Not really. What the heck do I know about Labyrinth? I’m just being—you know-generally and vaguely complimentary.”

“Okay. Generally and vaguely thanks. Look, Rick,” Sands said,

“maybe we can talk straight.” “Always. Always.” At this moment Crodelle made his appearance, moving directly toward their table as if he’d consulted a map and planned the route. Tall, angular—not tall enough for college basketball, but surely pressed into it in high school. Physically he looked the drowsy, slouching intellectual. A misapprehension. He had a redhead’s characteristic fire. Voss had led himself to believe that redheads outgrow their freckles with childhood, but Crodelle still sported several across his cheeks. Voss was aware that he considered these things too often, that they’d lodged as irritants in his thoughts—Crodelle’s height and type, his intellect, his freckles— because Crodelle frightened him.

“I want soup!” Sands said, “I’m not sure they have soup.” “Bizarre. No soup?” “Not for lunch.” “Terry Crodelle.” The two shook hands. Voss said, “Skip Sands.” Crodelle sat down and said, “Indeed,” and called across the room:

“Martini? And a salad”—he pointed a bony finger at Voss’s plate —

“comme ça.” “And some tea,” Sands said. “And tea, please.” Sands said, “Were we expecting you, Terry?” “I’m stuck this side of the river. Nothing on the other side but ban

ners and flags and firecrackers. So—you’re back in Cao Phuc? Or you were never gone.” Sands kept good control of his physical presence, but couldn’t hide

his surprise. “I assume you’re working with us.” “Us who?” “We. Us. The outfit.” “I’m with the Regional Security Center.” “Stationed here?” “Visiting. A visitor to your charming planet.” “First time in-country?” Crodelle blinked and stared. “I’ve been in the region off and on since

‘59. I’m pre-Kennedy.” “Wow. You look younger.” “I looked in on Cao Phuc once or twice. How’s the scene there these

days?”

“A lot quieter. Quiet.” “Have they broken down that relocation facility?” “I don’t know the official status of that endeavor.” “But what do you see?” “It’s hard to tell what stage they’ve reached”—Sands looked up and

around as if seeking their waiter—”whether they’re breaking it down or if it’s just been more or less abandoned. But I’d say the Buddhist temple is pretty much the center of things again.”

“Are the VC moving in?” “I haven’t been bothered.” “What have they got you doing over there?” “Collecting stories. Folktales.” “Gimme a break! Rick, here, thought you’d left the country.” “I’m in and out.” “So the base is broken down?” “We didn’t call it a base. Landing zone.” Sands seemed inexplicably

content. “Did you ever get over to the Purple Bar once in a while?” Skip laughed. “Only at the legitimate cocktail hour.” “You know what, Skip? I’m glad we finally meet.” “Hey, you guys,” Voss said, and excused himself. He went to the restroom and found its urinal filled with ice cubes, a

fascinating extravagance.

Voss wished Crodelle had stayed away from lunch longer. Maybe some straight talk after all, he and Sands—who can you talk to but a man on the way out? He’d worked in intelligence for only six years, but he would have liked to crawl out of its waters and into a cave and confess to some giant mollusk. Absurd, yes. But it had the right elements. Air and drowning. Darkness, damp.

What a monstrous stupid fucking mess.

One of the army officers joined him in the bathroom, hawk-faced, crew-cut, major’s bars on his shoulders and the yellow sleeve patch of the Fifth Cavalry, a man without secrets, a man who relieved himself in front of others. While the major pissed meditatively down onto the piled ice, Voss washed his hands and dried them on one of the cloth napkins stacked beside the sink and tossed the napkin into a wicker basket. This place had class. Above the cloudy yellowish mirror that gave his face back as if he were the victim of some viny invasion of hepatitis were painted in a precise, feminine, nunlike script the words:

Bon appétit!

When Voss returned to the table they were already on the subject Crodelle wanted to raise, at least to begin with—the colonels insane article—and Crodelle was showing off. He managed to seem blithely expert on any area that strayed into his conversational grasp. Voss didn’t mind it so much, but he minded that at this moment he was bullying Sands. This business of tracking “command influence,” Crodelle wanted to know— had the colonel considered how tricky the whole idea was? Hadn’t the Mayo brothers written of Dr. Gorgas, “Men who achieve greatness do not work more complexly than the average man, but more simply?” Wasn’t the problem with trying to show “command influence” through experiments just that almost all such experiments, those Crodelle knew of anyway, had been carried out to determine the impact of an intervention, a treatment, a new drug, rather than to prove the presence or absence of a causative factor?—like Lind’s eighteenth century tests with treatments for scurvy, or, a more recent instance, the Salk vaccine trials? On the other hand … was Sands maybe familiar with the nineteenth century Yellow Fever Commission and the then-new science of bacteriology?—with the efforts of Walter Reed and James Carroll? Maybe trials could be run, but what would serve as the experimental “marker” for “command influence”? And the struggle against malaria and typhoid and yellow fever, hadn’t that been as much a war as this one?—hadn’t Jesse Lazear died a martyr’s death in a sick ward in Havana, cut down by the disease he was helping to conquer? Wars demanded new ideas; and maybe the colonel had landed one: could we maybe, just maybe, inject the elements we think would provoke “command influence” into preselected information channels? Crodelle’s curiosity overpowered him, an earnest wish to communicate charged his features, he held up his hands before his face, fingers splayed, head forward, taking careful and passionate aim, as if each of his concepts were a basketball—but, come on, who was the colonel in all this, Walter Reed the careful investigator, or Guiseppe Sanarelli, the guy with the quick answer to the wrong question? The colonel needed an Aristides Agramonte to get in there and dig into the corpses. Did Skip

know the work of Agramonte? Did Skip know, come to think, that with that mustache and high forehead he resembled Agramonte? This last question seemed other than rhetorical. Crodelle stopped. He waited. Voss couldn’t tell whether Sands was a fool, or the Buddha himself. From where came this poised, shiny-eyed amusement?

Sands said, “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty wild.”

“What is your interest in all this, Terry?”

“Purely academic. Disease control was a passion of mine in college— premed. Then I dropped out and wandered into our world, and I never thought I’d see anything from that field that applied to our field, the field of intelligence.”