Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

also, with the same name.” “I don’t know it. You mean the blue of the sky?” “Blue, like the sky.” “And ‘Trung’ means ‘loyalty,’ doesn’t it?” “Loyalty to the country. It’s humorous today that I have this name.” The study was lined with shelves, the shelves full of books. Tight net

ting covered the two windows, also the eaves in the main room and the ironwork on either side of the wooden door to the outside. Nevertheless small bugs attacked the butane lamp and died.

“You have a lot of books.” “They don’t belong to me.” “Who lives here?” “Just me and a ghost.” “Whose ghost?” “The previous owner. The man who built the house.” “I see. I thought perhaps you meant me.”

Mr. Skip emptied his glass and poured a little more whiskey over

what was left of his ice. He didn’t speak. “Perhaps I’m intruding.” “No. I appreciate the company.” The American finished his drink. “I thought you’d be Judas,” he said,

“but you’re more like the Christ.” “I hope that’s good.” “It is what it is. Do you want some more?” “I’ll finish mine slowly.” The American said in English, “You’ve gone there. You’re there,

aren’t you? What is it like to carry two souls in one body? It’s the truth, isn’t it. It’s who we really are. The rest of us are just half of what we should be. You’re there, you’re there, but you killed something to get there. You killed—what.” Trung couldn’t follow.

And the resignation to the truth, the final resignation, the despair that breaks into liberation, where was the word for that in all these books?

In silence the American poured another for himself and drank it slowly. Trung stayed, though it was clear the American didn’t want conversation.

Next morning his friend Hao came again. The woman served breakfast, and he and Skip and Hao sat down to eat, but Trung sensed some trouble.

Mr. Skip asked them about their days at the New Star Temple. They told him about the times they’d stolen brandy during the Tet celebrations, told of laughter and singing; all three conducting themselves like students in a foreign-language exercise called “Breakfast with an American.”

“Trung, the library’s all yours today. I have to go to Saigon on an er

rand. I’ll be back around noon tomorrow.” “I’ll stay by myself?” “If you don’t mind.” Trung walked them to the black car. He detained Hao a minute.

“What is it about?” “Only a quick meeting.” “Tell me.” “I can’t. I don’t know.” “Nothing serious?”

“I don’t think so.”

The American had heard them. Standing on the other side of the car, he spoke across the hot metal roof. “A friend has invited me to lunch. A colleague. I think I’d better see what he wants.”

“Perhaps there’s a safer place for me until you come back.”

“No, no, no. Nobody knows you’re here.”

“But they know that you are here.”

“That’s not a problem,” the American said. Trung disbelieved him.

Dietrich Fest of Department Five of West Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst boarded a night flight at the National Airport near Washington, DC, and for eighteen hours had nothing to do but read and nap and nothing to think about other than his father’s medical crises. Seven, eight months since the old man had seen the outside of a hospital. Gallbladder; liver; heart; a series of small strokes; hemorrhaging in the bowels with massive blood loss and transfusions; a feeding tube in his stomach; latest of all pneumonia. The old man refused to die. But he would. Perhaps already. Perhaps earlier while I dozed with a sagging head. Perhaps now while I look at a stupid mystery book. “Claude,” the old man had called him when he’d visited in October—wires and tubes exiting from him everywhere, blue eyes shining into space. “Look, it’s Claude,” he’d told the urine-smelling, otherwise empty room, and Fest had said, “No, it’s Dirk,” and his father’s eyes had closed.

At 3:00 p.m. local time Fest landed in Hong Kong. He gave his cabbie inaccurate instructions and was forced, some blocks short of his hotel, to get out of the taxi and continue on foot. Even this tiny vehicle was too large for these tiny streets. With his one bag Fest climbed a steep stairstepped alley jammed with doorless shops selling nothing but junk.

On a larger thoroughfare he hailed a pedicab and rode behind a stringy old man wearing a kind of diaper who pedaled him swiftly to his hotel, which was right there, looming three blocks straight ahead, as the old man might easily have told him. Two minutes after climbing aboard the strange conveyance, Fest had arrived. A printed notice posted just behind the bicycle’s handlebars listed the official rates, and for a journey of this small distance Fest owed four or five Hong Kong dollars; but the old man smacked fist on fist and shouted, “Tunty dollah! Tunty dollah!” Fest didn’t begrudge him. At his age, the old man deserved whatever he could get for such labor. But Fest believed in fair dealing in business. He refused. In seconds he was hemmed in by pedicabs and besieged by diapered drivers of all sizes, babbling, frothing. He thought he saw a knife. An angry bellboy came out and drove them all off with magical outward-chopping gestures of his hand. The old man remained. He’d rather die. Fest turned over the twenty dollars. He went upstairs and slept through the afternoon, woke at 2:00 a.m., and read a short novel—Georges Simenon, in English. He called the hotel’s operator and asked about overseas calls to Berlin, but his mother’s number was somewhere in his bag, and he let it go. He’d called her frequently of late, almost daily in recent weeks, while she dealt with his father’s failing health.

At eight he showered, dressed, and went downstairs to the lobby to meet his contact. They drank coffee, sitting across from one another in large uncomfortable mahogany chairs. The contact was an American, youthful, impressed with his assignment, a little pious about his role. At first he told Fest only where he was going. Of course he knew where he was going, he had the ticket in his pocket.

“Do you have the ID materials for me?”

The young man lurched downward to rummage in his leather briefcase, clasping it between his shoes. “We have two versions for you.” He handed over a manila envelope. “While on assignment you use the one with the predated entry visa. Destroy it before you leave. For your exit use the one with the postdated visa.”

“How long is determined for this assignment?”

“You mean according to the visas? The postdated one says you entered on—what does it say? February eleventh, I think. So you’ll have to stay in-country till then, at least. But the visa’s good for six months.”

He didn’t like the sound of six months. But the purpose of a visa postdated by two weeks was to say he’d entered after the period of the assignment. He took it, therefore, that they’d planned for no more than two weeks’ duration.

Fest laid the envelope across his lap, pinched together the clasps, opened the flap, and raised its open end to peek within. Two German passports—he took one out and read the bearer’s name—Claude Gunter Reinhardt.

“Interesting. My son is named Claude.” After the old man. And my dead heroic brother.

“Whatever’s on top of the stack.”

“Of course. A coincidence.”

The face was his own. He’d always looked somewhat like a spoiled boy, but the beard covered the softness and made him look, he believed, a little like Sigmund Freud or Ernest Hemingway. In clothing, perhaps, he appeared portly, but he felt solid. Even in the States they’d kept him taking courses, including physically challenging operational training. But he was thirty-six and two months. This couldn’t go on. In fact he’d thought it was over with the American posting.