Page 52 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)

FOR THE NEXT WEEKS, the war did not exist for Tom Reece and Ella DuBois.

The first day, while Ella was at work, Tom went shopping and purchased new jeans, an assortment of T-shirts, Fred Perry polos, olive green and tan safari shirts popular with the journalism crowd, a pair of flip-flops, and a pair of Sperry Top-Siders.

That night they met at the nearby Hotel Majestic for drinks and then walked to the Chalet restaurant for a long dinner.

She showed him the Pont des Trois bridge—the three arches bridge—that had somehow survived Tet before suggesting they retire to the Continental.

No matter how long they made love into the early-morning hours, Ella was always up at first light.

Tom would sometimes awake to the click of the hotel room door shutting behind her as she left for work.

When he did roll out of bed, he would make thick Vietnamese coffee in his room with a tin French press.

He had taken Serrano’s advice on lightening it up with honey and a dash of cream.

He needed to remember to drop the habit when he got back to Phu Bai, or he would never live it down.

On the third evening, instead of meeting him for drinks, she arrived at his room with a bellman who was carrying a present.

He brought it inside and leaned the tall, thin bundle wrapped in newspapers and secured with twine against the wall.

Ella tipped him on his way out. Tom unwrapped it to find a painting that Ella explained was created with gouache and pigments on silk.

Primarily varying shades of browns and greens with touches of red, it depicted two ducks on a pond floating amongst lotus flowers.

“They are circling each other,” Ella said.

“Are they getting ready to fight?”

She laughed.

“No. It’s a courtship ritual.”

Tom twisted the painting trying to get a better perspective.

“Mandarin ducks stay together for life,” she said. “They are a traditional representation of commitment and harmony. If one dies, the other remains alone.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“What?”

“That ducks mate for life.”

“Well, that’s how the legend goes.”

“I’ll go with it. Who am I to mess with a legend?”

“I purchased it to put over that hideous painting above the bed. I feel like that strange-looking woman is watching us.”

Tom set down the painting and pulled the abstract woman off the wall. The gecko had found its way back and once again darted for the open doors of the balcony.

“I’ve taken to calling him ‘Drags,’ ” Tom said. “Short for ‘Dragon.’ ”

“They eat mosquitos, you know.”

“I’ve heard that.”

He set the abstract against the wall next to the wardrobe, facing the wall, and then hung the Mandarin duck painting in its place.

“Now the ducks can watch us,” Tom said. “That’s much better.”

“Oh stop. I got you something else.”

“Ella, you don’t need to get me anything.”

“Oh yes, I do. Your fashion sense is clearly wanting, but at least with your new clothes you look more like a journalist than a soldier just out of the field. You will fit in perfectly around here, except for that watch.”

“Really?”

“Well, the watch is fine, but that strap and leather cover scream ‘military.’ Here,” she said, handing him a small green box from her purse.

“What’s this?”

“Just a little something to help you blend in.”

Tom opened the box and removed a stainless-steel watch bracelet.

“I can’t accept this.”

“You can and you will. We will get a jeweler to swap it out.”

“Once again, who am I to argue?”

Their first weekend together, Ella did not go to work.

They stayed in bed and ordered room service.

In the late afternoon, they stood on the balcony eating fresh mangoes and dragon fruit, watching the storm clouds gather, taking in the sweet smell of impending rain.

Tom held her as the deluge soaked them both to the bone, passing over and moving in a sheet across the city.

It was like the winds and rain washed away the war.

For a moment, it was peaceful, even though they knew weather was fleeting, while wars were not. Wars were the constant.

She showed him her city, the hidden haunts and temples, the coffee and tea shops, the antique art dealers, the restaurants, cafés, and record shops.

Ella was an admirer of French cinema, and Saigon was home to more than a few movie theaters showing French films. Tom wondered if this was something she had done with the boyfriend she mentioned in Paris.

After an early dinner at the popular My Canh floating restaurant on the Saigon River, she took him to a double feature of Le Samoura? and Les Aventuriers, both starring Alain Delon.

Tom had a hard time concentrating on the films, knowing that the Viet Cong had detonated two bombs at My Canh three years earlier, resulting in over thirty dead, most of whom were Vietnamese civilians.

A photo of a U.S. Army major carrying a wounded child from the restaurant had made headlines.

The girl became known as the “My Canh Child.” He could not help but note what a prime target the movie theater would be, a thought that kept him on edge for most of the evening, scanning the crowd rather than enjoying the films.

He let his guard down once they were back sipping drinks at the Continental Shelf.

“Couldn’t they find someone better-looking than Delon?” Tom joked. “Are there any French films he’s not in?”

She laughed. “I find co-productions like these fascinating,” she said.

“Le Samoura? and Les Aventuriers are French-Italian. I saw The Peking Medallion last year. That’s a German-French-Italian co-production.

Can you imagine? Just over twenty years ago they were all killing each other.

Gives me hope for Vietnam. Maybe one day we will see a Vietnamese French or Vietnamese American co-production. ”

“Maybe,” Tom said, though he did not sound hopeful.

The next afternoon, she had a car and driver from her father’s company waiting for them in front of the hotel.

“I want to show you something,” she said.

The car drove them to a rundown area on the edge of Saigon, creeping past demolished buildings, where they were forced to stop at multiple ARVN and U.S. checkpoints.

“There might have been a VC saboteur or two in these houses,” she pointed out. “They may have even been killed. Was killing them worth it?”

The car pulled to a stop.

“Where are we?” Tom asked.

“A clinic, run by Catholics. My father donates vast sums to keep it running along with the facility next door for old men and women who, before the war, used to be cared for by their families.”

An Italian doctor met them in what amounted to a lobby. He looked harried and overworked.

“We will not keep you long,” Ella told him.

“Most are orphans now,” the doctor explained, in Italian-accented French.

He led them through the ward packed with beds where children lay, Catholic nuns and nurses tending to the gauze wrapped around heads, arms, and amputated limbs, whispering to them and saying prayers.

The stale, heavy air smelled of iodine and the putrid odor of gangrene.

“This is the true cost of war,” Ella said.

That evening the car dropped them off just before dark at the Vieux Moulin restaurant. They sat outside, their table situated to give them views of the Da Kao Bridge, which spanned a canal of the old city.

“Why did you take me there?” Tom asked. “What was today really about?”

“The dinners, the drinks, the shopping, I was getting too caught up in it. I wanted to remind us both that there is a world removed from the splendor of Rue Catinat and Place Garnier.”

“Is that all?”

“And I wanted to gauge your reaction to what you saw today. I wanted to know who I am sleeping with.”

“Did I pass?”

“It was not pass or fail.”

“Sure it was. Do you blame me?”

“Blame you?”

“For those kids. For what is happening in Vietnam.”

“I can separate the man from the policies of his government. My father taught me to survive. Perhaps yours did the same? I do not blame you, Tom. If I did, I would certainly not be spending every possible moment with you.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“When I got back from university in Paris, I volunteered at a hospital here in Saigon. It is not lost on me that I come from privilege. I live with a guilt that I hide very well. There was a section of the hospital for people with mental disorders. I heard screaming from that wing on my rounds, so I followed the sounds into what was more of a prison than a hospital. The screams were coming from a boy chained to a bed. He was eight. A nurse told me that he had been there for six years. At two years old, he was in his mother’s arms when she was shot running from her village by a helicopter gunship.

He survived. No one claimed him in the hospital, and he slowly went insane.

Every time he heard a helicopter fly over, which was often, he would scream.

The nurse told me they think he screamed to drown out the sound of the machine that killed his mother.

Imagine the horrors we don’t know about. ”

“I am truly sorry for what is happening here.”

“I know. There is another reason my father is a benefactor to the clinic and orphanage you saw today. He knows how close he was to being raised in one. He was the result of a not so discreet liaison between his French father and one of his Vietnamese maids. He could easily have been cast out, but he was instead sent to school in France, all paid for by the generational wealth created off the backs of the cheap labor working the rubber plantation. They made it possible. That is why he treats his workers with such respect. The history of the rubber plantations here is a dark one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My father also knows that one day the plantations will revert to the Vietnamese, which was why he started the import/export business. He can move his rubber out of Vietnam and be prepared for the next phase in whatever you call this century for Indochina. War and exploitation are all we have known. Everything moves in cycles. This one can’t last forever. ”

“I suppose not.”

Tom leaned across the table and lit Ella’s cigarette before lighting a Marlboro for himself.

“When you are in the jungle what does it smell like?” she asked.

Tom took a moment to answer.

“Depends. Decay mostly.”

“That’s what I smell here, in Saigon. The alleys are black markets, the hotels are dens of ill repute, whorehouses, and in the clubs, you will find anything you need to numb you to the death of the killing fields—pot, opium, heroin.

Our women can be purchased for the price of a beer.

I smell the decay. It gives me the sense of impending death. ”

She shook her head.

“America is going to destroy this country in order to save it. Saigon is for sale, Tom. It won’t go to the side offering the highest price. It will go to the side willing to make the greatest sacrifice in the form of lives, of bodies. Ho Chi Minh is willing to sacrifice a generation. Is America?”

“Sometimes it feels that way.”

“Have you read Truyen Kieu?”

“No. What is it?”

“It is our national poem by Nguyen Du. I doubt any Americans have read it. They really should.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it gives insights into the national psyche. One stanza reads, ‘It is better that I should sacrifice myself alone, It matters little if a flower falls if the tree can keep its leaves green.’ Sacrifice and fate. The North will win this war, Tom.”

“Does that mean you will move your company to Bangkok as soon as you can?”

“My father is a wise man. He thinks strategically. This is his home. I am caught between East and West, just as he was, but he embraced Vietnam. I feel as much French as I do Vietnamese. My father wants to stay on the plantation as long as he can. When I am running the company, we will move to Thailand. I can run operations in Vietnam remotely so long as it makes financial sense.”

“When will you take over?”

“That, I don’t know. It could be months. It could be years. Whenever my time comes, I will be ready.”

“I can tell.”

“And you, Tom. Why have you not gone back north?”

“I don’t know. They have me on a hold here.”

“You would make a terrible spy.”

“I know.”

“Your honesty intrigues me.”

“I don’t know another way to be.”

“Then you would make a bad businessman in this part of the world.”

“Well, I won’t quit my day job.”

“Thank you for today, Tom.”

Her dark eyes had a soft glow from the candles that lit their table. She seemed to be studying him.

“You know,” she said cautiously. “If I were to die tonight, I think I’d die happy.”

“I’d rather live happy.”

“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?”

Even though he knew he should be scanning the street for threats, he couldn’t break away if he wanted to.

“Let’s go,” she said abruptly.

“Where does this evening take us next?”

“To your room.”

“That, I can do.”

The Vietnamese man who sold the papers didn’t like being out this late, but he had his orders. He had very little trouble keeping up on his agile scooter.

He sat on a bench at the edge of the Da Kao Bridge.

It gave him a perfect vantage point from which to observe the two targets in the Vieux Moulin restaurant.

When they got up to leave, he made a notation in the paper he had been pretending to read in the lights of the brightly lit bridge.

He couldn’t imagine they would go anywhere other than the Continental Palace, and as he followed behind their rickshaw, he soon saw that he was right.

As they disappeared from view into the ground-level bar, he made another notation in his newspaper, walked to his scooter, and rode home.