Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Why not take him now?

In ten or fifteen minutes the man would come through this door, having finished his supper. He could kill him and go directly to the Armed Forces Language School to explain he’d been forced to improvise. Adapt and improvise, the bywords of the trade.

But until forced, one sticks to the plan of operation, or its semblance, or its shreds. He’d always kept to the plan. And no plan had ever failed him.

Major Keng had stressed that it must come tomorrow night, precisely at 2:00 a.m. One hour later the site would be cleaned, the body disposed of. Apparently that part of it was fixed. He had to work around it. Fest resented that the scenario seemed to center on the cleanup operation rather than on the actual killing.

But suppose tonight the man ate quickly—suppose he’d already finished, suppose he came up the stairs, imagine right now he stands in the doorway—I’d kill him. And if I choose to wait here fifteen minutes, and that very thing happens? What difference whether the moment was selected by prudence or forced by circumstance?

Again he went over the walls and the floorboards, aware of taking longer than needed, inviting a change in plan, daring fate, the target’s fate. But the man took his time, apparentiy savoring his excursion—who wouldn’t?— and in five more minutes Fest closed and locked the door behind him and descended the stairs with the gun pressed against his right leg, as he would tomorrow night, and exited onto the street. He put away the gun and locked the door behind him without glancing around and walked directiy across the street and waited in the shadow of the fabric dealer’s entrance.

He’d waited fifteen more minutes when the target returned along the opposite side and went through the building’s street door.

Fest recrossed the street and stood at the narrow space between the buildings to watch the windows above him. Less than a minute after the little man had entered, a small glow in the nearest window gave way to a brighter one as the man lit his lantern.

That was the right window. He had the right man.

Suppose tomorrow night the man went out for supper and died as soon as he returned, rather than at two in the morning? Suppose the body lay in the room for several hours, rather than sixty minutes? Rigor mortis might present a problem for the disposal team, but Fest doubted it. The trade-off in assurance of completion made the change well worthwhile—the difference between entering a pitch-black room in which anything could be going on, or waiting in a pitch-black room for a man who thought it was empty.

At this time tomorrow he’d come again. If the man went out, Fest would greet him when he returned.

Trung Than sat on the bed finishing a warm Coca-Cola. Without a clock or a watch he knew only that it was later than 3:00 p.m., not by much. A full two hours before the dusk came and released him.

He tried sitting straight-backed on the bed and attending only to his breath, only to his breath.

Holding still, when I want to act, and letting my impatience be crushed, is a thrill that feels almost illicit because of the slight nausea it includes. Like stolen brandy. When Hao stole the bottle from the old man’s hooch. The old man hid it in the ashes of the stove because his wife was dead and he never cooked for himself. Almost half of it left in the bottle, and we drank it all without even rinsing away the soot, and with black hands and black faces we walked on a cloud, singing wonderful songs. The master laughed. He always called me the Monk. The master thought I’d stay.

In those days he’d known how to sit still. He’d learned to live a good part of each day in the silence under the world. Now the world lived in his mind, it colonized his solitude like a virus, thoughts crawled, shot, rained through his meditation, and every one pierced him.

He tried meditating on his knees on the floor, but that only slowed the passage of time. It was still light, still well before 5:00 p.m., when he heard feet on the stairs and a knock at the door and unlocked and opened it to find the sharp-faced, feline American sergeant standing before him.

“Double-oh-seven! Remember me?”

He moved forward as he spoke, and Trung stepped aside but didn’t shut the door until the American gestured that he should. “How goes it, brother? Still laughing?” Trung recalled his name was Mr. Jimmy. “Oh, yeah,” Mr. Jimmy said, “it’s like jumping into a shit-pile of diseased spiders and I love it.”

Embarrassment caused Trung to smile.

“Where’s Hao?” The American looked at his watch. “The fucker’s not here, is that the message for today?” Mr. Jimmy strode four paces to the window, put his hands on the sill, and stuck his head out to look down the narrow space toward the bit of street visible to him. He turned to Trung. “Well, I hate to inject a negative strain. I’m not gonna say it yet. But I’m gonna say it: that little fucker isn’t coming. Which means we are either partially fucked or completely fucked. You got another Coke?”

“No, thank you.”

Mr. Jimmy crossed the room again and sat beside the door with his back against the wall and one leg straight and one knee raised. Apparently he meant to stay. “You smoke?”

“I like cigarette.”

He went into his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette and tossed Trung the pack and the lighter. “Marlboro.” ‘Yeah. I’m trying to think. So let’s shut up.” Trung got up and locked the door and sat on the bed smoking, dipping his ash down the neck of his empty Coke bottle.

“When I take the last drag on this mother, that’s it. I get the fuck out, or I’m here for the duration.” The sergeant drew deeply on his cigarette. “Fuck it. Fm here for the duration.”

They finished their cigarettes in silence and Trung dropped his into the bottle while the sergeant placed his own under his heel and ground it into the floor. At that point Trung realized he hadn’t offered him the ashtray, or used it himself.

“Listen, guy. Is Hao your friend?”

“Hao is my friend.”

“Good friend?”

“Good friend.”

“True friend?” Mr. Jimmy clasped his hands together tightly. “True like right down the line and all the way to hell?”

Trung felt he perhaps comprehended the question. He jutted his lips and held out his palms and shrugged his shoulders, the way he’d seen Frenchmen do.

The sergeant leapt up, but he wasn’t leaving. He came to Trung with the cigarette pack outstretched and the disease of terror in his eyes. “Double agent? What a fucking joke. In the shit-bucket of South Vietnam, every living thing is double.”

Trung accepted another cigarette but raised his palm and shook his head at the sergeant’s lighter. He set the cigarette on the table.

“You probably figure I snapped my twig. I’m with you there. I have to agree. But I’m still listening to my own shit, comrade, because it’s the only thing happening.”

“Mr. Jimmy. Please speak slowly.”

“Do you speak English?”

“A little bit. Number ten.”

“We are not getting through to each other. No commo, savvy? I don’t have the names for the entities in your language. You have all the names. You got it concerning your basic whereabouts. What you don’t understand is how it all floats in a region that’s completely basically dislocated from natural laws. That is, all the laws do apply inside Vietnam. But from the rest of planet Earth, those laws don’t apply to Vietnam. We are surrounded by a zone or a state of dislocation, and you kind of graduate up from knowing the names around here to being able to suck up from that zone. You suck up from that zone around us and they cannot touch you.”

Trung listened closely, trying to feel the man. He sensed panic and