Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“Eddie,” the colonel said, taking the major’s hand in both his own, moving the left hand up and gripping him above his elbow, massaging the biceps, “let’s get drunk.”

“Too early!”

“Too early? Darn—and too late for me to change course!”

“Too early! Just tea, please,” Eddie told the houseboy, and Skip asked for the same. The colonel looked with curiosity at the package under Skip’s arm. “Fish for dinner?” “Show him!” Eddie said, and Skip laid the Ml on the brass coffee table, nested in its open wrapping.

The colonel sat down and held the rifle across his knees just as Skip had done in the car moments ago, reading its intricate engravings with his fingers. “Fantastic work.” He smiled. But he looked at no one when he smiled. He reached beside him to the floor and handed Skip a brown paper grocery bag. “Trade you.”

“No, thanks,” Skip said. “What’s in the sack?” Eddie asked. “Courier pack from the ambassador,” the colonel said. “Ah! Mysterious!” As ever, the colonel drank from two glasses at once. He waved his

empty chaser at the houseboy. “Sebastian, are you all out of Bushmills?” “Bushmills Irish whiskey coming up!” the young man said. Pitchfork said, “The servants seem to know you.” “I’m not a frequent visitor.” “I think they’re in awe of you.” “Maybe I’m a big tipper.” The colonel rose and went to the bucket on

the sideboard to scoop ice into his glass with his fingers and stood looking out at the grounds with the air of somebody about to share a thought. They waited, but instead he sipped his drink.

Pitchfork said, “Colonel, are you a golfer?” Eddie laughed. “If you tempt our colonel out there, he’ll decimate the landscape.”

“I stay out of the tropical sun,” the colonel said. He stared lovingly at the rear end of a maidservant as she set out the tea service on the low brass table. When the others all held something in their hands, he raised his glass: “To the last Huk. May he soon fill his grave.”

“The last Huk!” the others cried. The colonel drank deeply, gasped, and said, “May the enemy be wor

thy of us.” Pitchfork said, “Hear, hear!” Skip carried the paper sack and the beautiful gun to his quarters and

laid both on his bed, relieved to take a minute alone. The maid had opened the room to the day. Skip cranked shut the louvered windows and turned on his air conditioner.

He poured out the contents of the sack onto the bed: one dozen eight-ounce jars of rubber cement. Such was the stuff of his existence.

The colonel’s entire card catalog system, over nineteen thousand entries ordered from the oldest to the latest, rested on four collapsible tables shoved against the wall either side of Skip’s bathroom door, over nineteen thousand three-by-five cards in a dozen narrow wooden drawers fashioned, the colonel had told him, in the physical plant facilities at the government’s Seafront compound in Manila. On the floor beneath the tables waited seven thirty-pound boxes of blank cards and two boxes full of thousands of eight-by-eleven photocopies, the same nineteen-thousand-card system in duplicate, four cards to a page. Skip’s main job, his basic task at this phase of his life, his purpose here in this big bedroom beside the tiny golf course, was to create a second catalog arranged by categories the colonel had devised, and then cross-reference the two. Sands had no secretary, no help—this was the colonel’s private intelligence library, his cache, his hidey-hole. He claimed to have accomplished all the photocopying by himself, claimed Skip was the only other person to have touched these mysteries.

The large guillotine-like paper cutter and the long, long ranks of the jars of glue. And the dozen card drawers, sturdy three-foot-long troughs like those in libraries, each with four digits stenciled across its face —

2242

—the colonel’s lucky number: February 2, 1942, the date of his escape from the hands of the Japanese.

He heard the colonel telling a story. His roar carried through the house while the others laughed. Sands felt in his uncle’s presence a shameful and girlish despair. How would he evolve into anyone as clear, as emphatic, as Colonel Francis Sands? Quite early on he’d recognized himself as weak and impressionable and had determined to find good heroes. John

F. Kennedy had been one. Lincoln, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius … The colonel’s smile as he’d examined the gun—had the colonel known beforehand Skip was to receive this weapon? Sometimes the colonel had a way of smiling—irritating to Skip—a knowing play of his lips.

Long before he’d followed his uncle into intelligence —in fact, before the existence of the CIA—as a child, Skip had made of Francis Sands a personal legend. Francis lifted weights, he boxed, played football. A flier, a warrior, a spy.

In Bloomington that day nine years ago, the recruiter had asked, “Why do you want to join the Agency?”

“Because my uncle says he wants me as a colleague.”

The recruiter didn’t blink. As if he’d expected the response. “And

who’s your uncle?”

“Francis Sands.”

Now the man blinked. “Not the colonel?”

‘Tes. In the war he was a colonel.”

The second man said, “Once a colonel, always a colonel.”

He’d been a freshman then, eighteen years old. This move to Indiana University had been his first relocation since 1942, when, following his father’s death on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, his newly widowed mother had brought him from San Diego, California, back to the plains of her beginnings, to Clements, Kansas, to spend the rest of his childhood with her in the quiet house, in the sadness that didn’t know what it was. She’d brought him home to Clements in early February, in precisely the month that her brother-in-law Francis Xavier, the captured Flying Tiger, made his escape over the side of a Japanese prisoner-of-war ship and into the China Sea.

On graduation Skip had accepted employment with the CIA, but even before training was returned to school to get a master’s in comparative literature at George Washington University, where he helped Nationalist Chinese exiles with their translations of essays, stories, and verse from the Communist mainland. The handful of journals publishing such pieces were funded almost entirely by the CIA. He got a monthly stipend from the World Literature Foundation, a CIA front.

At the mention of his uncle that day in 1955, both recruiters had smiled, and Skip smiled too, but only because they smiled. The second man said, “If you’re interested in a career with us, I think we can accommodate you.”

They’d certainly done so. And here before him stretched that career: nineteen thousand notes from interviews, almost none of them comprehensible to him —

Duval, Jacques (?), owner 4 fishing boats (helios, souvenir,

devinette, renard). [Da Nang Gulf], wife [Tran Lu (Luu??)] inf st

boats poss criminal/intel use. Make no profit fishing. CXR

—the last three letters designating the interrogator who’d made the entry. Skip had taken to adding notes of his own, quotations from his heroes — “Ask not what your country can do for you …” — on cards marked JFK, LINC, SOC, the thickest batch from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, messages the old Roman emperor, besieged and lonely at the edges of his empire, had written to himself in the second century after Christ:

Nothing can be good for a man unless it helps to make him just,

self-disciplined, courageous, and independent; and nothing bad

unless it has the contrary effect. MAM

As Skip approached the dining room, Pitchfork seemed to be hollering, “Hear, hear!”

They’d already been served a course of fish and rice. Skip took his place before an empty plate at the colonel’s left elbow, and the houseboy brought him his portion. They ate by the dim light from candelabras. When the power failed it hardly changed the atmosphere. The hum of air conditioners ceased in the wings, the fan in the parlor ceiling stopped its muttering and revolving.