Going After Cacciato (15 page)

“A toast,” he said. “To peace and domestic tranquillity. To companionship and good memories. To Eddie and Oscar and Stink Harris. To Harold Murphy, who deserted us. To all the memories, may they rest in peace.”

They drank, and the waiter refilled the glasses, and Doc toasted the old days, the times of trouble, the bad times. Then he proposed a toast to the lieutenant. “To a man with twenty-five solid years of service. A man now leading his men on a mission of the greatest daring. And … and to the lovely young refugee, and to Oscar Johnson, and to Pederson and Buff and Billy Boy Watkins. To all those fuckers.”

“To Cacciato,” Paul Berlin said.

Doc shrugged. “Why not? Sure—to Cacciato.”

They finished the toast and paid the bill.

“One last question,” Eddie said. “What if we find him? What then?”

The men were quiet. They looked at one another, then finally
at the old lieutenant. He sat stiffly. Dark spots carved at the cheekbones. His eyes, which in the old days had always glowed bright blue, were now as dull and dry as two stones.

“What then, sir?” Eddie asked. “What if we find the dude?”

Lieutenant Corson made a vague, dismissive gesture with his hand.

Then they began the search.

   It became a routine. Roaming the powdered streets until midnight, then back to the Hotel Minneapolis for sleep, then searching through the hot afternoons.

For Paul Berlin, it was a puzzle. Where would Cacciato have hung his big hat? What was he after? What drove him away and what kept him going, and which way, and for how long, and why? Paul Berlin searched for detail. With Sarkin Aung Wan beside him, he searched the tea shops and taverns and a hundred flophouses, tested the restaurants, played the horses under floodlights at a track outside the city. Violet evenings were the best time. He liked watching night flow down from the Shan Plateau, the purply shades growing on one another. He liked moving through crowds, the street-corner talk, the hum of traffic. Yes, the search was for detail. What, in all that passed, was Cacciato interested in, and what would have drawn him here? He searched for clues. He remembered Cacciato fishing in World’s Greatest Lake Country. He remembered how the kid used to carry a tattered photo album at the bottom of his pack. The album was covered by gray plastic. On the front cover, in red, it said VUES OF VIETNAM. And inside, arranged in strict chronological order, were more than a hundred pictures that somehow stuck better to memory than Cacciato himself. On the first page, like a preface, the kid stood with four solemn people identified below as MY FAMILY. Posed before an aluminum Christmas tree. A gray-faced father, a worried man. A salesman of some sort, or maybe an actuary. Twin sisters, both pretty. A pretty mother, too, slim and hipless and well dressed,
dressed for XMAS EVE, printed below the snapshots in red ink. Deeper into the album were pictures of a stucco house with yellow trim, a blunt-nosed 1956 Olds, a cat curled in someone’s lap, Cacciato smiling and shoveling snow, Cacciato with his head shaved white, Cacciato in fatigues, Cacciato home on leave, Cacciato and Vaught posing with machine guns, Cacciato and Billy Boy, Cacciato and Oscar, Cacciato squatting beside the corpse of a shot-dead VC in green pajamas, Cacciato holding up the dead boy’s head by a shock of brilliant black hair, Cacciato smiling.

But who was he? Tender-complected, plump, large slanted eyes and flesh like paste. The images were fuzzy. Paul Berlin remembered separate things that refused to blend together. Whistling on ambush. Always chewing gum. The smiling. Fat, slow, going bald, young. Rapt, willing to do the hard stuff. And dumb. Dumb as milk. A case of gross tomfoolery.

   Then he spotted Cacciato.

“That’s him,” he said. A bit of pastry clogged his throat. He looked again, swallowed—“That’s him!”

Sarkin Aung Wan smiled. An outdoor café along the Street of Jewels, a calm violet evening. “That’s who?”

“Him.” Paul Berlin pointed. “Right there. That’s him.”

The girl turned, looked about in a puzzled sort of way, then smiled again. Cacciato passed directly behind her. Six feet away. She could have touched him with a cane.

“Where?”

“There. Right
there.
”

She turned again and squinted and shook her head.

“
There!
”

He was dressed as a monk. A long brown robe gave him the look of Friar Tuck, the same round-faced piety. His hands were folded. He was smiling. Four other monks surrounded him like disciples, all dressed in the same tattered robes, all bald, all smiling Cacciato’s vacuous smile.

Without hurry, they moved off into the dark.

“Him?” Sarkin Aung Wan said.

“No. That one. In the middle—
that
one.”

“That one?”

“Jesus, no.
That
one. The dumb one.”

Already Cacciato was nearly out of sight.

Quickly Paul Berlin paid the bill, took the girl’s hand, and hurried off in pursuit. They followed the street until it emptied into a large open park.

Sarkin Aung Wan stopped.

“
Cao Dai,
” she whispered.

“What?”

“Most sacred.
Cao Dai
—the evening prayers.” She pointed toward a crowd of monks gathered at the center of the park. Cacciato was just now joining the throng.

“Which one?” Sarkin Aung Wan said.

It was impossible to spot Cacciato in the growing herd. Another group of monks filed in from the east, several bearing lighted candles protected by glass. When the candles had been placed on a stone altar, and after a tramcar rattled by, the monks stopped milling and began to sway in rhythm, chanting softly in the purply light of evening.

More monks joined the crowd, hundreds of them now, and more coming, and the chanting grew fuller and deeper.

“I’m going after him,” Paul Berlin said. “Now, before—”

“No!”

Sarkin Aung Wan reached out but already he was moving.

He paused at the edge of the gathering. For an instant he caught a glimpse of Cacciato, or what might have been Cacciato. He took a breath, ducked his head, and plunged in.

The park was a jumble of bald skulls and empty smiles swaying under a calm seamless sky.

He pushed toward the center of the crowd. There was the smell of incense, the deep chanting, a rocking sensation. He pressed forward, using his elbows, but the crowd seemed to hold him back.
He heard muttering and snarls. Someone snatched him by the arm, and the shouting grew louder. The swaying ceased; he was being smothered. He twisted hard but two monks had him by the waist. Another grabbed his knees. As he fell, in the moment before collapse, he saw Cacciato’s round face before him like a lighted jack-o’-lantern.

He couldn’t breathe. He tried, but he couldn’t.

He felt himself sinking. Vaguely, through a rush in his ears, he heard them shrieking.

A dream: caught in an avalanche. A monk with gleaming green eyes was screaming and bending his arm double. Two others bounced on his chest. He couldn’t breathe. He kept trying, forcing it, but nothing came. Weight and incense and body sweat, pressure he’d never known before, a drowning feeling. Smothered, he thought. A dream crushed and broken in Mandalay.

When he came awake, the park was deserted.

Sarkin Aung Wan bent over him, gently licking his forehead.

“Alive,” he said.

He sat up, touched himself. His left arm wouldn’t straighten. His lungs were full of cement.

“I’m alive.”

She kept licking his forehead. In the dark he could see peonies in full bloom, a sky of amethyst, a single candle burning on a park bench. The monks were gone.

“What happened?” He tried to stand. “What was it?”

Sarkin Aung Wan stroked his face. “I tried to—”

“Tell me what happened.” He got to his knees. He still couldn’t straighten the arm.

“Such a hero,” she said. “A brave hero disturbing Cao Dai. Touching the untouchables. I tried to warn you, Spec Four, but, no, such a hero.” Shaking her head, she bent down to lick his forehead. “Such a brave Spec Four.”

He touched himself again. His ribs ached.

Then he felt the fear. He sat back in the grass. A fine evening in Mandalay. He sat for a long time, letting the girl lick his wounds,
and when the fear had passed, and the humiliation, he felt the first anger.

He got up, brushed himself off.

“Which way?”

“What?”

“Cacciato. Which way?”

It was real anger. It was Stink’s kind of anger, killing anger.

Sarkin Aung Wan stood back and gazed at him. Her earrings gave off a soft glow. She sighed. Turning, she pointed to a large dark structure beyond the park.

“That way,” she said gently. “He ran that way.”

Paul Berlin rubbed his eyes. It was a huge building. Stone and cement and steel. Taxis lined a long driveway leading to the front entrance.

“What is it?”

Sarkin Aung Wan smiled. “The way to Paris,” she said. “The railway station.”

T
hree o’clock, and Eddie’s homemade Jolly Roger fluttered at half-mast, blown now by a stiffening sea breeze. Amazing, how the nights turned cold. You could bake all day, fry, but then at night when you wanted heat you could never find it. Even the petty things never seemed quite right.

He found his poncho liner, wrapped himself in it, then lit another cigarette. The war had taught him to smoke. One of the lasting lessons.

Three o’clock, the darkest time. Two more hours till the first easterly pink. He decided not to rouse Stink for the next watch—tonight there would be no changing of the guard.

He moved to the north wall. The coast of the Batangan was a jagged silhouette that curved away until it swallowed itself. The moon was behind clouds. This was the dangerous time. He’d heard stories of how OPs were attacked: always during the darkest hours, whole squads blown away, men found days later without heads or arms. He tried to forget it. The trick was to concentrate on better
things. The trek to Paris. All the things seen and felt, all the happy things. Average things. Peace and quiet. It was all he’d ever wanted. Just to live a normal life, to live to an old age. To see Paris, and then to return home to live in a normal house in a normal town in a time of normalcy. Nothing grand, nothing spectacular. A modest niche. Maybe follow his father into the building business, or go back to school, or meet a pretty girl and get married and have children. Years later he could look back and tell them about the war. Wasn’t that normal? To tell a few war stories—Billy Boy and Pederson, the bad time in Lake Country, the tunnels. And how one day Cacciato walked away, and how they followed him, kept going, chased him all the way to Paris.

He smiled. It would make a fine war story. Oh, there would be some skeptics. He could already hear them: What about money? Money for hotels and food and train tickets? What about passports? All the practical things—visas and clothing and immunization cards? Desertion, wasn’t that what it boiled down to? Didn’t it end in jail, the stockade? What about the law? Illegal entry, no documents, no military orders, no permits for all the weaponry? What about police and customs agents?

He stared inland.

Sure, there were always the skeptics. But he would explain. Carefully, point by point, he would show how these were petty details. Trivial, beside the point. Money could be earned. Or stolen or begged or borrowed. Passports could be forged, lies could be told, cops could be bribed. A million possibilities. Means could be found. That was the crucial thing: Means could always be found. If pressed he could make up the solutions—good, convincing solutions. But his imagination worked faster than that. Speed, momentum. Since means could be found, since answers were possible, his imagination went racing toward more important matters: Cacciato, the feel of the journey, what was seen along the way, what was learned, colors and motion and people and finally Paris. It could be done. Wasn’t that the critical point? It could truly be done.

T
hey sat in two facing rows. Stink Harris kept clicking his teeth. Next to him, Eddie Lazzutti moved his neck on his shoulders as if loosening up for a race. Oscar Johnson was sweating. Rudy Chassler smiled. Vaught and Cacciato were sharing a Coke, and, down the aisle, Jim Pederson sat with his eyes closed, holding his stomach with both hands. Flying scared him more than the war.

There was a long floating feeling as the Chinook fell. It dropped a hundred feet, rose, bounced, and cold air shot through the open tail section. Private First Class Paul Berlin could not understand how it could be so cold. He didn’t like it. The smells were greasy and mechanical. On both sides of the ship, the door gunners sprayed down a drone of fire that blended with the chop of the rotor blades and engine, and whenever there was a slight change in the mix of sounds, the soldiers would jerk their heads and look for the source. Some of them grinned. Buff bit his nails, and Eddie Lazzutti coughed, but nobody said much. Mostly they watched their
weapons or their boots or the eyes of the men opposite. Oscar Johnson sweated silver and Stink’s teeth kept rapping together. Buff studied his right thumbnail. He would bite it, then look at it, then bite it again. Pederson, who hated noise and machines and heights, but who was otherwise a fine soldier, held tight to his stomach and pressed his thighs together. The others tried not to look at him. Cold air swept in as the ship dropped again, and Private First Class Paul Berlin hugged himself.

The door gunners squatted behind their guns and fired and fired.

They were not going down smoothly. The ship fell hard, braked, dropped again, bounced, and Paul Berlin shivered and held to the wall webbing, wondering how it could be so cold.

He tried to think better thoughts. He watched the door gunners do their steady work, hunched over their guns and swiveling and firing in long sweeping patterns, their mouths open, arms and shoulders jiggling with the rhythm, eyes dark under sunglasses and helmets. Spent shells clattered to the floor, rolling into piles as the Chinook banked and maneuvered down.