Tucker's Last Stand (26 page)

What kind of project, or did Tucker not want to talk about it?

He smiled, and kissed her on the lips. “I wouldn't mind talking about it, but it's too complicated for a mere linguist like you to understand. All I can say is that it is designed to—to stop the killing, to diminish unruly … yes, unruly appetites, like Ho Chi Minh's, and the people in the world he admires, Mao Tse-tung, Khrushchev, the whole gang.” Wasn't that the most important thing, he asked her, to control unruly appetites? Lao Dai said that of course that was correct, though the subject was indeed complicated. Tucker said that it wasn't fair for her to bring up complicated questions since he, Tucker, had already spoken of his complicated mission. But that since they were both struggling with definitions, what was this about an unruly appetite, and what was so bad about unruly appetites?

He sipped his glass of cognac, and suggested that they take their complications to bed, unravel them there, and meditate on what appetites were unruly, what others were—he lifted her up from the couch, cradled her in his arms, and walked toward the bed—beautiful … ennobling … inspiring!

Later he said to her that she was the most ardent partner he had ever—“communed” with; he liked that, in fact he found himself reciting to himself a Hail Mary before closing in on her, a little obeisance … was it really sacrilegious, or was superstitious the better word? After all, he was unmarried, Lao Dai was truly a widow, a grieving widow; could their liaison really be wrong, as Fr. Enrique had taught the boys back there in San Antonio? Surely two people who love so passionately mustn't deny themselves the comfort they get from each other? He leaned over on strong arms and as he entered her he experienced the perfume he had given her before dinner, now transformed on her skin, overpowering. He expressed his love and excitement with a punishing yet loving vigor and she in turn, in little exclamations, pronounced him unique; his passion, she tried to say, made it all so much so much so much more
more
unique. They were lost in long moments of an irrepressible yet expressive rapture, soon driving to an abandoned, voluptuarian high—except that through it all, deep inside her mind, she felt the ticking sound, however faintly, never closing it off.

Le Duc Sy had given the final act of love, his life for his country. Now she truly was a widow. Was there a drumbeat at the base of her mind? Not a nagging Catholic conscience, like Tucker Montana's, which had brought on the almost silent hasty little prayer to his own God, but insistent, subordinated only in that her passion was genuine and even had she wished to do so, she could not have controlled it. But although she surrendered, she had not capitulated. She felt that her joy, requited, was, finally, a reminder of a transcendent mission. She kept that mission in mind, guarding against any temptation to thrust it out of the way, if only for these holy moments. As she rose toward him again, she harnessed her thinking with merciless determination, even now as the climax was at hand: She was doing this—this sublime thing, for something more sublime, more important, for which her Le Duc Sy had died so heroically.

25

September 11, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

Through room service, Tucker had ordered, indeed invented—the hotel had never had exactly such a request—an American breakfast. A Texas-American breakfast of rolls and orange juice and jam and scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and corn cakes, the nearest he could get to the hominy grits he had unsuccessfully attempted to describe to the chef. Tucker was disappointed that Lao Dai had taken to eat only the roll, with a little jam, and coffee. “
Petit déjeuner, simple
,” she smiled at him, expressing admiration over the cornucopia he had ordered and was proceeding, with such wholesome pleasure, to devour. He was wearing shorts, nothing more, and she told him, as he stuffed a corn cake into his mouth, that even when he was being
disgustingly
greedy, he was very beautiful, and where had he got that scar; she pointed to a line just to the right of his navel, drawing down his shorts a few inches to inspect the length of it.

“In the Philippines?”

He had told her of his experience there with the Huks. “Now,” he smiled, reaching over to draw down her negligée, “do
you
have any scars? Let me examine you.…” He did so, and she laughed, escaping.

“You have not told me,” she insisted. “Where
did
you get that scar?”

“It was a very evil man who did that to me,” he said solemnly. “He approached me with a sharp knife. I was knocked out, unconscious, but somehow I saw him. He came at me with that knife. My hands were tied down and I could not see the expression on what I suspected was a sadistic face, and I thought, well, this is the end, tortured to death. I became then fully unconscious, and woke up I don't know how many hours later.”

Lao Dai was tense. “Tell me.”

“Well, I saw that man again, only now his mask was gone and he was—grinning at me, staring down at my lower stomach.” He paused. “Dr. Stringfellow had taken out my appendix.”

She reached for the cushion on the chair by her and smashed it down over Tucker's head. “You—
you
are the sadist.” She laughed, and Tucker laughed, and he told her he had not completed his physical examination, that he could not do so until she was completely unclothed, lying down in their bed, to which he lifted her in his arms, and there completed his examination, leaving no part of her unexplored.

Driving to Bien Hoa an hour later he asked her, had she ever traveled away from Vietnam? Yes, she said, and lowered her voice.

“Where?”

“To Japan.”

“To Japan? A Vietnamese girl traveling to the nation that—that occupied your whole country? Whose soldiers, I have to guess, occupied you … too?”

“Yes,” Lao Dai said. “Both are—in a sense—true. Though it wasn't me, but my mother, that the Japanese ‘occupied.' I was three years old when the Japanese were defeated, but for two years my mother was placed in a Japanese-run brothel. And that, in a way, is why I went to Japan.”

“Explain,” Tucker said, slowing down the Army jeep he had commandeered, to dodge the potholes as best he could.

“It was four years ago, I was eighteen. The Japanese consul sponsored a ‘cultural exchange.' For the first time, a Vietnamese delegation would travel to Japan, and at the expense of the Friendship Association of the emperor, so that we could see how the … new Japan was so different from the Japan of our nightmares.

“Our president refused to go. He said he had too many memories of the occupation to make it possible to guarantee ‘civil behavior.' So the mayor of Saigon was deputized, and said he would take with him six young people who had not themselves suffered from the occupation, but whose parents were the victims of it—Mother committed suicide one year after the Japanese left. I don't know what the process was of selection, but at the finishing school I was attending, studying English and oriental history, I was told I would be one of the lucky travelers; so I was prepared, and was given a very luxurious wardrobe, three dresses, one of them suitable for very formal occasions: we would have an audience with the emperor.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. A wonderful, austere, removed man, Emperor Hirohito. You would not have thought that he had anything at all to do with the Japan that led my mother into a brothel that drove her mad.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He recited one of his own poems. We—the two other girls, and the three boys—did not know what it was all about, but we took the signal and applauded.”

“And then, besides the emperor?”

“Oh, the usual things. And one unusual thing. One unique thing, I hope.” She hesitated.

“What?”

“Hiroshima.”

Tucker stiffened, and now he looked only straight ahead at the road. He said nothing.

“If you only
knew
. Have you ever been there?”

“Not exactly,” Tucker said.

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly'?”

Tucker Montana snapped, “If you don't know idiomatic English enough to know what ‘not exactly' means, then you should go back to your finishing school.”

She was transparently hurt. She said nothing until, finally, he broke the silence. “All right. Tell me. What did you see … in Hiroshima?”

She closed her eyes and said, “I went to the museum. The museum of August 6, 1945. And there I saw the actual table—one of I don't know how many thousands that were
not
preserved in museums—the dining room table of a couple with two children. I do not know how it was accomplished, but the mother and the father and the boy and the girl were still sitting upright at that table. There were no facial features visible, only charred flesh. We knew which was the mother, which the father, only from the swelling at the breast level. There were four plates on the table and a large pot. They were all … char. And then there were the photographs, a dozen, a hundred, it seemed like a million of them. After five minutes, I just closed my eyes, but every now and then I open them, and I think: Are we moving in that direction? Toward Hiroshima? In the direction of a global, nuclear war?”

“Why in the hell should we?” Tucker spoke severely.

“Because great wars happen sometimes when little wars do not—give way. You read about Charles de Gaulle's press conference Friday?”

“What press conference?”

“He said that the war in Vietnam would not be settled by military force. That if the Americans insisted on using all of their resources, they would—as he put it—‘risk a general war.' So it isn't only little girls who went to the museum in Hiroshima who think of this … think of this possibility.”

Tucker drove into town and asked a passerby the direction of the restaurant Le Bon Laboureur. But he could not make out what he was being told, and so asked Lao Dai to take over. In Vietnamese she posed the same question and then translated the instructions for Tucker, who drove on, turning right at the indicated street. He pulled up at the restaurant and, wordlessly, opened the door and led her in. Throughout the meal his conversation was distracted, perfunctory. She would not take dessert, she said, or even tea. He went immediately to the counter to pay the bill rather than sit and wait for it to be brought in.

Tucker walked ahead of Lao Dai to the parked jeep. He helped her aboard and she could see that he was perspiring heavily.

“Are you all right, darling?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I'm all right, but I have a … every now and then I get a little … giddy. I mean: Would you mind driving?”

“I don't know how to drive.”

Tucker sat on the fender of the jeep and leaned down. “Sorry. Just trying to get some blood up into my head, that's usually all I need to do. But it will take a little—” He stopped talking.

“Take all the time you want, my darling.”

Tucker did not answer. He was immobile for ten minutes. Lao Dai turned away, to spare him embarrassment. At length he stood up again. “I'm all right now,” he said.

He drove back toward Saigon without speaking.

As they reached the outskirts of the city, Tucker said that on reflection he had to prepare for the afternoon conference, so it would not be feasible to return together to the Caravelle. Instead, he drove her to her little apartment on Henri Brevard. She leaned over—he had stayed in the driver's seat—and kissed him.

“Will we be meeting tonight?”

Tucker roused himself. He smiled up at her. “Of course, dear Lao. Of course. I will meet you at La Tambourine. At ten o'clock, unless there are problems, in which case I shall leave word with Toi.” He returned her kiss, absently, and drove off.

26

September 12, 1964

The Cabinet Room

The White House

Lyndon Baines Johnson was morose. He sat there in the Cabinet room with his closest aides—McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Rostow, and also Valenti and Moyers. They had all seen him in such condition, but rarely. When it happened, the vitriol reigned for the initial period, and then, eventually, he would focus his powerful mind on the vexation, the irritant, the goddamn son of a bitch
creating the problem
! His sense of maneuver would then awaken, and he would rise from despondency to a cathartic kind of torrential abuse—after which order imposed itself on his thinking. Then would come the planning. For the time being, all he could say was, “Surely de Gaulle
understands
? I mean, what was all that Cross of Lorraine shit if it didn't mean that
he
would fight until
he
won?”

“My guess,” Walt Rostow volunteered, “is that de Gaulle is scarred by his own experiences, more recent than those fighting the Germans to reconquer Paris. His country lost Indochina, and he lost Algeria.” Johnson turned to him, shaking his sad face ever so slightly, the effect of which was a kind of purring satisfaction: somebody else at the table was doing the talking, relieving him of the pain of doing so in his depressed state, and he hoped this would continue until his energy was reconstituted; meanwhile, who knows, conceivably what was being said would be worth listening to.

“We can't forget that, Mr. President. The defeat of the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu was a national devastation. De Gaulle was at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, waiting to be called to duty, a call that didn't come until four years later. He was very careful not to blame Dien Bien Phu on bad generalship in Vietnam—because he does not think of it as a national defeat. He thought the odds were, well, ontologically against France.”

“Onto-what?”

“Sorry, Mr. President—er, organically, beyond reach, structurally against France. So along comes the United States, ten years later, and decides to save not even the whole country, but half the country. He is bound to feel that if we bring it off people might ask. How come France couldn't bring it off? Not the kind of questions he wants to encourage.”