Going After Cacciato (30 page)

Eddie sang sea chanties.

Then a last line of hills bulged up. They crossed the hills, and coming down they saw the sea.

They skimmed down from the hills. They passed across acres of flat white sand. Old olive trees stood in neat rows along the road, and sprinklers turned in the sun, and the countryside was brilliant with all the colors.

Paul Berlin drove fast. There were no speed limits. They were beyond the law. Soon they came down to the first low buildings of the city, white stone and white plaster, cool-looking.

He drove straight to the harbor.

He parked on a side street. Oscar paid two boys to watch the car, then they hurried down to the water.

It was exactly as he imagined it.

Tubs of iced fish and vegetables lay in rows along the wharves. Boats and tugs and sailing ships, whitewashed buildings close in against the water, the smell of fish, the salt smell.

They walked to the edge of the longest pier. They shook hands all around. Oscar was grinning, even Oscar, and Eddie and Doc and Stink were laughing like kids, teary, and Sarkin Aung Wan kissed them, and the lieutenant sang
Blow the Man Down
. The sea stretched to the horizon.

“It can be done,” Paul Berlin said. He pointed west to where the sky touched the sea.

“Yeah,” Doc smiled. “Maybe so.”

“It can be. By God, yes it
can
be done.”

W
hat Paul Berlin knew best was the land. He did not know the people who lived on the land, but the land itself he knew well. He knew Quang Ngai the way a hunter sometimes knows his favorite forest, or the way a farmer knows his own acreage. He knew the dangerous places and he knew the safe places. Digging his holes in preparation for night, turning a spadeful of earth and letting it fall, he sometimes felt fear, or suspicion, but mostly he was struck with a powerful wonderment about the physical place, the texture of the soil, the colors and shadings, the slopes of countryside in relation to grander slopes and higher angles of vision.

Quang Ngai was farm country. There was some fishing along the coast—shrimps and red snapper and squid—and far to the west there were mountains with rubber and fruit, but otherwise it was all farming.

Village-owned and village-run, the farms were worked not as private enterprise but as the enterprise of community; the land was
planted and tended by the people who lived in the villages, and the harvest was placed in huge clay jugs, some of which were buried, some of which were taken to market in larger villages. But he did not know the economics. What he knew was the land. He knew that the villages, at the center of the land, were part of the land. He knew that the commodity was rice, and that the rice was grown in paddies.

The paddies gave depth to the land. Depth that he’d never known before, not in Fort Dodge, where the land was smooth with corn in August, not in cities, where the land was concrete. In Quang Ngai the land was deep. He knew from long days on the march that there was nothing loathsome about the smell of the paddies. The smell was alive: bacteria, fungus, and algae, compounds that made and sustained life. It was not a pretty smell, but it was no more evil or rank than the smell of sweat. Sometimes, when there was no choice, he had slept in the paddies. He knew the softness and warmth, later the chill. He had spent whole nights that way, his back against a dike and his feet and legs and lap deep in the paddies. Once, on the very hottest day at the war, he had even taken a drink of paddy water, and he knew the taste. He’d swirled the water in his hands, letting the biggest chunks of filth settle, then, because his thirst had been greater than the fear of disease, he’d swallowed. He had done this knowing it was dangerous. “Don’t never pee in a paddy,” he was once told by a helpful PFC stateside. “You do, you’ll get this sickness called elephantiasis. Real bad shit. The viruses live in the paddies, see, so when you pee, the little buggers’ll swim right up your urine stream, right up into your prick.” But Paul Berlin peed when he had to pee, and sometimes he had to pee in paddies: standing knee-deep in the slime, imagining a billion brave viruses paddling hard in search of unpolluted waters.

   Whenever he thought of the land, he thought first of the paddies. But next, almost in the same thought, he thought of the hedgerows. They were not the hedges found in museum gardens or
on the front lawns of old Iowa houses. They were thick, unclipped, untended tangles. Twice the height of a tall man, the hedgerows served the function that fences serve in richer countries: They held some things in and other things out. But more than that, the hedges were a kind of clothing for the villages. From far off a village was not a village. From a distance, even seen through binoculars, a village was a thicket of vines and shrubs, and only behind the hedges did you see the true village. Guarding, but mostly concealing, the hedgerows in Quang Ngai sometimes seemed like a kind of smoked glass forever hiding whatever it was that was not meant to be seen. Like curtains, or like walls. Like camouflage. So where the paddies represented ripeness and age and depth, the hedgerows expressed the land’s secret qualities: cut up, twisting, covert, chopped and mangled, blind corners leading to dead ends, short horizons always changing. It was only a feeling. A feeling of marching through a great maze; a sense of entrapment mixed with mystery. The hedgerows were like walls in old mansions: secret panels and trapdoors and portraits with moving eyes. That was the feeling the hedges always gave him, just a feeling.

   The earth was red. He saw it first from the air, on the day he joined the war. A coral pink, brighter in some spots than in others, but always there. Later, as he looked closer, he saw it like film on the men’s weapons and clothing and boots, under Stink’s fingernails, on Vaught’s sallow skin, clouding Doc Peret’s glasses. The red, Doc explained, most likely came from a high iron content in the soil, and from an oxidizing process, but for Paul Berlin the origins were unimportant.

   The war was fought with the feet and legs, so he knew the trails. Dusty paths connecting one village to the next, or the pressed mud along paddy dikes, or the beaten-down grass of soldiers who had passed that way before. Sometimes the trails were
roads, though never tar or concrete: The roads were called roads if they showed marks of cart traffic or the wear of wheeled artillery. It was best, of course, to stay off the trails. But often, when the men were tired or lazy or in a hurry, they used the trails despite the dangers. The trails, like the land, were red. They were narrow. They were often dark, or shaded, and they mostly wound through the low places, following the contours of the land, and for this reason they sometimes flooded out during the rainy season. They were dangerous. No one was ever killed by a land mine or booby trap unless it was along a trail. Exposed, always watched, the trails were the obvious spots for ambush. Still, there were many times when it was better to face these dangers than to face the wet of a paddy or the itch of deep brush. There were times when a fast march along a trail, however perilous, was preferable to a slow march through tangled, hostile country. There were times when mission required the use of trails. And there were times when it simply stopped mattering.

   Small, unprofound things. The land’s peculiar heaviness. The slowness with which things moved—days and nights, bullocks in the paddies, the Song Tra Bong. The squatness of the trees, the way foliage seemed to grow outward rather than upward. Few birds: It was one of those details that Paul Berlin noticed but never understood. “Where have the birds gone?” he asked Eddie Lazzutti one evening.

Eddie stopped and listened. “What birds?” he said.

   He had seen it in the movies. He had read about poverty in magazines and newspapers, seen pictures of it on television. So when he saw the villages of Quang Ngai, he had seen it all before. He had seen, before seeing, hideous skin diseases, hunger, rotting animals, huts without furniture or plumbing or light. He had seen the shit-fields where villagers squatted. He had seen chickens
roosting on babies. Misery and want, bloated bellies, scabs and pus-wounds, even death. All of it, he’d seen it before. So when he
saw
it—when he first entered a village south of Chu Lai—he felt a kind of mild surprise, fleeting compassion, but not amazement. He knew what he would see and he saw it. He was not stricken by it; he was not outraged or made to grieve. He felt no great horror. He felt some guilt, but that passed quickly, because he had seen it all before seeing it.

   Quang Ngai started at the sea. The beaches were clean, white, beautiful. It was the sea that Paul Berlin liked best. Beyond the sea was paddy land. Beyond the paddies, going inland, was another kind of country altogether, meadows and uncut brush that climbed into foothills with few villages or people. Beyond the foothills were the mountains. Beyond the mountains, and beyond Quang Ngai, was Paris. He did not think beyond Paris.

F
rom Izmir they booked a three-day passage to Athens. Oscar Johnson made the arrangements in a series of shady tavern dealings, and on a mild Sunday morning in March they boarded the
Andros
, an old freighter repainted and made over to accommodate thirty paying passengers. The decks were simple sheet steel. Rust covered the chain rigging and rails. Below, the passengers’ quarters were cramped, dim lighting flickering in the companionways, but still it was a smooth and restful crossing. A true tourist feeling. Oscar and Eddie organized a shuffleboard tournament, Doc spent time reading, and Paul Berlin staked claim to a rattan recliner near the ship’s bow. Sitting there through the warm afternoon hours, he watched the islands slide by like pictures in a travel magazine. He had a sense of immense calm. Pale Mediterranean waters, the sun’s heat, mixed smells of oil and machinery and brine and fish.

A pleasant, leisurely passage: The first night they docked at the island of Psara, then in the morning they cruised southward past
Khios and Ikaria, rounded the lower tip of Naxos and steamed straight west through the soft hours of late afternoon.

The lieutenant’s health improved. The sun gave his face color. He resumed command. On the second day of the crossing, he ordered Eddie and Stink to see about getting haircuts; that same evening he sat down with Doc Peret for a conference about possible routes north after disembarking at Piraeus. He ate well and drank moderately.

Mostly this was Sarkin Aung Wan’s doing. Like a daughter caring for an ailing father, she encouraged him to eat and exercise, coddled him, scolded him, gently coaxed him into showing some concern for his own welfare and that of his men. The lieutenant seemed deeply attached to her. It was an unspoken thing. They would sometimes spend whole days together, walking the decks or throwing darts or simply sitting in the sun. When the lieutenant showed signs of the old withdrawal, Sarkin Aung Wan would remind him of his responsibilities. “A leader must lead,” she would say. “Without leadership, a leader is nothing.” Then she would take the old man’s hand and press it between hers and begin talking of the lovely things they would see in Paris. Her own motives were secret. What did she want? Refuge, as sought by refugees, or escape, as sought by victims? It was impossible to tell. Softly, effortlessly, she guided the old man toward recovery, and toward Paris, and through him she guided all of them.

So as the
Andros
made its way past Sífnos and Sérifos and Kíthnos, Paul Berlin let himself relax in his rattan recliner at the bow. The sea was calm, the air was sweet. They’d done it. The war was over. Ahead was Paris. “Make it to Athens,” Cacciato had said, “and the rest is easy.”

   It was near midnight when they came in to Piraeus. Despite the late hour, the wharves were jammed with people milling in the light of torches and colored bulbs strung up along the piers and
loading docks. Another tour ship had docked within the hour, and a swarm of customs agents and police were moving through the crowd. Clearly it was more than a routine customs check. Male passengers were being led off to one side, where they were thoroughly searched by a dozen white-helmeted policemen; baggage was dumped open on the spot; a loudspeaker blared out warnings for order in three languages. Each policeman carried a large poster of the sort that is tacked to post office bulletin boards, and the officers seemed to be trying to match faces to whatever was on the posters.

The ship turned in slowly toward the lighted dock.

“Us?” Stink said.

The others were silent. Eddie slumped over the railing, gazing listlessly down at the columns of police. His face was drained. Behind him, Sarkin Aung Wan and the lieutenant sat at a small table roofed by a red and green umbrella.

“Screwed and skewered,” Oscar said. “Cops up the ass.”

Doc Peret shrugged. “We almost made it.”

“I can’t—”

“So close.” Doc sighed. “And yet so close.”

Stink Harris was fidgeting. His tongue flicked out to lick sweat from his upper lip. He leaned over the railing, looked down, then quickly moved over to the lieutenant.

“Well, come on,” he said, shaking the old man’s shoulder. “Let’s go. What’s the plan?”

“Nothing I can do.”

Stink’s teeth rapped together. Again he shook Lieutenant Corson’s shoulder, harder this time. The old man did not move. Stink hurried up to the bow, where the crew was making preparations for docking. He stood there a moment, his fingers jerking, then he turned on his heel and rushed back.

“Criminny!
Think
of something … What’s the plan?”

Nobody answered. Eddie gazed straight ahead. Doc sat down Indian-style and put his head in his hands. Looking down on the
wharves, Paul Berlin counted forty policemen before he gave it up. Hopeless. The odds had been poison from the start.

Stink was frantic. He grabbed Oscar’s arm.

“What we gonna do? Jeez, I never … Jump!. We could jump—make a swim for it!”

“It’s over, man.”

“Bullshit it is! Disguises … That’s it! Dress ourselves up like women or something. Couldn’t we? Get disguised and slip by like smoke. Easy!”