Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Hao and Minh took chairs at the border between parlor and office, not quite in nor out of the gathering. The colonel stopped talking to Skip in order to interrupt himself, saying, “It’s two families helping each other. In the end it’s all about family. Do you have family, Mr. Trung?”

Trung looked confused, and Hao translated. Trung told Hao, “I have a sister in Ben Tre. My mother died a long time ago. You remember.” Hao spoke Vietnamese: “The colonel’s sister-in-law just died a few days ago. The mother of his nephew here.”

“This man with us now?”

Hao nodded once.

“Sounds like he’s got family,” the colonel said.

Hao told him Trung had one sister whom he hadn’t seen for several years.

The colonel caressed Trung’s shoulder. “This guy’s the goods. He’s been on board since ‘46. Twenty-plus years.”

Mr. Jimmy hadn’t said a word. Hao disliked the way he stared.

Trung said, “This young man’s mother just died?”

“His uncle brought the message this morning.”

“Please tell him I’m sorry.”

But the colonel was addressing Skip: “What I want you to apprehend above all is that you’re not running this man. In a sense you’re not even collecting data. Definitely not interrogating. Definitely not. Just serve as a sponge.”

“I understand, sir.” “If you regard yourself as learning, just getting his story in general,

we’ll all be much better off.” “All right.” “And I don’t want you sweating under any elaborate fiction, either.

Whatever he asks you, I want you to be completely honest with him —

long as you’re sure he’s not digging for product.” “All right.” “But, I mean, if he asks about your background, your family, your

life—everything, tell him all of it.” “Very good.” “What is he saying?” Trung asked Hao. “He’s giving instructions. He told his nephew to be honest with you.” “Will you say for me that I’m grateful?” Hao wanted to shout: I’m lying to all of you. “You two, you’ll have to work out your commo,” the colonel told

Skip. Skip said, “We’ll get along.”

Going back to Saigon, Minh rode in the backseat with Jimmy Storm. Minh didn’t know why he’d been asked along on this outing. Because they were two families helping each other, he understood this, but still, he played no role. As short as a month ago he’d have resented the time out of his furlough, but Miss Cam, his girlfriend—her father had turned cold toward Minh, the house was closed to him, and she refused to meet him secretly. Apparently the father had depended on marrying his family to Uncle Hao’s wealth. He must have learned there wasn’t any.

His uncle’s problems had crushed the good sense from his head. The preoccupation with the house on the Mekong and the rental he surely knew he’d never see, and the suggestion Minh murder the whole bunch, it was all too silly. Meanwhile, Hao hadn’t even mentioned the colonel, particularly not the change in him. The colonel was pale, breathing was work, all morning he’d sipped his Bushmills rather than gulping it, and he’d held the glass with his fingertips rather than in his fist. And Jimmy Storm had kept unusually silent, unaware, or pretending to be, of the colonel’s deepened loneliness.

Minh himself had seen little of the colonel since his C&C chopper had gone back to the Viet Nam Air Force, and Minh with it, still its pilot. Except for the.30-caliber machine gun his uncle was so anxious to have him turn on his own family, the craft carried no assault equipment; he was spared combat and remained an aerial taxi driver, now for General Phan. The general had given him an unprecedented week’s furlough. He felt grateful, but saw the leniency as part of a new pattern. The military’s attitude had changed. He didn’t like it. The fire had died.

“Hao,” the colonel said, “stop the car.” They’d reached Route Twenty-two by now. Hao pulled to the side of it and the colonel got out, in order to relieve himself, Minh presumed.

But he only stood beside the vehicle, fixing his attention, it seemed, on a solitary cloud in the sky ahead of them like a small, wispy moon perhaps many dozens of kilometers distant, perhaps poised over the China Sea, which was invisible to them. The colonel moved toward the front of the car, knuckles of one hand resting on its hood, right hand on his hip, and waited in the brown landscape of dirt, once thick jungle and paddies, now poisoned rubble, nothing but jags and skeletons, and glowered at the cloud as if trying to influence its activity, staring down this thing of nature until its drift had taken it some ways southward out of their path.

He got back in the car. “Okay. Roll on.”

No one else spoke. Even from the sergeant there came only silence. Minh had once felt himself acquainted with the rhythms of these two comrades. He sensed a blank space where Storm should have made a dry comment, or one of his jokes.

Ski p realized he’d overprepared. What had been left to him these past two years but to memorize the labyrinths of doubt and J. P. Dimmer’s “Observations on the Double Agent”?

“Experience suggests,” Dimmer warned his readership, that some people who take to the double agent role—perhaps a majority of willing ones, in fact—have a number of traits in common … Psychiatrists describe such persons as sociopaths.

• They are unusually calm and stable under stress but cannot tolerate routine or boredom.

• They do not form lasting and adult emotional relationships with other people because their attitude toward others is exploitative.

• They have above-average intelligence. They are good verbalizers —sometimes in two or more languages.

• They are skeptical and even cynical about the motives and abilities of others but have exaggerated notions about their own competence.

• Their reliability as agents is largely determined by the extent to which the case officer’s instructions coincide with what they consider their own best interests.

• They are ambitious only in a short-range sense: they want much and they want it now. They do not have the patience to plod toward a distant reward.

• They are naturally clandestine and enjoy secrecy and deception for its own sake.

The double who’d never encountered J. P. Dimmer said to Sands, “Your tea is delicious. I like it strong.”

Skip carried a pair of dictionaries from his study and laid them on the coffee table. He assumed this man waited for instructions he couldn’t give him, while he, Skip, the officer-on-site, wanted what? To stop waiting. To serve. To make himself indispensable in putting this man to use against his own people. To know this man, and his uncle was right, you won’t map a traitor’s mind with thirty yes-or-no answers and three lines traveling a polygram. Better the floundering and backtracking and getting lost, bilingual dictionaries and mismatched goals. And even with these difficulties and with his bridges on fire behind him, this Trung savored his tea, allowed himself to be completely caught up in Mrs. Diu’s shortbread pastries, and enjoyed his introduction to M. Bouquet and recommended roasting the dog on a spit rather than boiling him in pieces. No slippery gaze, no tenseness about the knuckles, nothing like that.

Where was Judas? Skip began to wonder if this wasn’t perhaps some off-course neighbor of Hao’s, here by some ludicrous miscommunication. The double had only a little English, and Skip’s Vietnamese was simply inadequate. Both spoke French with slightly less than true facility. In all three languages they might make zigzag progress toward crossed purposes.

“In the United States we don’t eat dogs. Dogs are our friends.”

“But you are not in the United States now. This is Vietnam. You’re far from home, and this is a sad day. Mr. Skip, I’m very sad for you. I wish I came on another day.”