I didn’t know what she was asking—my first thought was that she had meant to shoot at me, that she had been part of the assassination plot, and was disconcerted to find she had shot her partner. Before I could frame any kind of a question, or any idea of any kind that might take me in the direction of making sense of all of this, a squad of uniformed Cochin-Chinese National Police rushed through the air curtain, grabbed the gun from the table, handcuffed Helen, and dragged me to my feet.
The Cochin-Chinese National Police have a middling reputation among the police forces of the world. They are not the gentle sorts that Enzy, Finnish, or Irish cops are reputed to be, but they aren’t any kind of Gestapo, either. They tend to be mildly corrupt, but not enough so that you would want to take a chance on bribing one if you didn’t know him. It seemed like the best thing to do was to cooperate and to keep repeating the truth—that I had no idea what was going on or why.
They commenced a thorough but not brutal search of us and the corpse. The pistol on the table drew some exclamations— none of them had ever seen any weapon of that make before. Searching Helen, they found she was carrying other weapons: a garter derringer, a switchblade in her purse, and a throwing knife in a quick-draw sheath in the back of her underwear. In a low-backed dress like that, I suppose it would have been easy enough to reach in and get it, and might even serve as a diversion in the right situation. How had Helen concealed all that from me while she was dressing? And more importantly, how had she concealed what was apparently a pretty big part of her life from me during five years of courting?
The manager of the Curious Monkey had gotten into the argument, now, too. At least he made sense; he wanted all this crap out of his restaurant in a hurry, and he wanted the addresses of everyone involved so that he could send all of us bills for the damages.
He got part of his wish right away. A plainclothes inspector showed up, had a whispered conference with the manager in Japanese and French, and a short rapid-fire dialogue in Vietnamese with the uniformed sergeant, and barked a few short sentences. They dragged Helen, who wasn’t resisting and seemed to be in some kind of shock, over to one unmarked car and pushed her in. They dragged me to another one and did the same. All the high-level officers got into the car with Helen, so either they had already figured out which of us was really dangerous, or more likely they all wanted to claim a share in arresting the murderer rather than her accomplice.
No one in the car I was in spoke a word of English, French, or German, so although they seemed polite and nice enough, I couldn’t ask basic questions like whether or not I was under arrest or if perhaps this horrible dream might be over with soon.
The people and robots of Saigon apparently had acquired a healthy respect, though probably not any admiration, for the way that police cars drive, because everything and everyone scattered out of the way as we roared through the streets, siren wailing and red lights flashing. Pedicabs went up over the curbs, pedestrians pressed themselves off the narrow sidewalks and up against walls, and the few cars on the street abruptly remembered business elsewhere and made a quick left or right turn. The car slammed over potholes and through the dust of the side streets, roaring by small stands and the wide-open eyes and mouths of people who popped out of their front doors to see what all the fuss was about. It might have been interesting if I hadn’t been sitting in the backseat, hugging myself as tightly as the cuffs would permit, and now and then sobbing with fear.
At the police station, a detective who spoke English explained that Helen was over in women’s incarceration, and that they would need to take a number of statements and record a great deal of information, but fortunately this was not a busy Friday night and chances were good that we could be released within a few hours, especially since virtually all the witnesses from the Curious Monkey were in agreement that Helen had fired only in self-defense.
Fortunately for us, Cochin-China is one of those places that take a sensible attitude about self-defense. In Enzy there would have been a spirited discussion about whether people who try to kill you ipso facto ought to be killed before you have heard and carefully considered their reasons. I was so relieved at being treated reasonably that if I had not been handcuffed I’d gladly have dropped to my knees and kissed their hands.
They put me into a cell with half a dozen quiet drunks and opium addicts; I seemed to be the only person in the cell who was not inebriated. It did smell of urine and puke, but of old urine and puke—and of much more recent soap. I was mildly exasperated, of course, to be in here, with two wooden benches and seven men, not exactly of the sort I usually associated with, when I was also paying for a room at the Royal Saigon.
I was very glad to be alive and almost as glad to be in the hands of a relatively patient and sympathetic police force; they would question me and they probably wouldn’t believe my story, but they wouldn’t torture me into giving them a story they liked. They might, of course, keep me until I was a fungus-covered corpse, but there were probably no rubber hoses or testicle clamps in my immediate future.
Why would someone try to kill me? I couldn’t imagine what I had done. The only explanation I had was one that merely transferred the senselessness of it all one step backward—perhaps someone wanted me to be dead for the same reason that Billie Beard had wanted me to be frightened. Maybe Iphwin was up to something that had deeply infuriated, or even frightened, the German Reich itself—that would explain my first assailant’s being a member of Political Offenses and this dead man’s being obviously German. Or was that what I was supposed to think?
I had no idea even how to begin sorting out the possibilities; this was beyond anything I had ever had to think about.
Since Helen had done the shooting, no doubt they were talking to her first. And yet—after that cool, competent call to the local police—she had seemed pretty bewildered herself, as if she didn’t know what was going on either. Where could she have acquired the skills she had displayed tonight—let alone the hardware?
Just who or what had I just become engaged to?
That gave me plenty to think about, and the night was still young, so I can’t really say I was bored. After a while the door opened and they brought in another prisoner, who took the only open seat, next to me. His black pajamas reeked of several kinds of smoke, and he appeared to be extremely drunk. He sang the same little song over and over.
I had never conducted my life in any way that could possibly have led to this kind of circumstance. I could not even think of any friends or acquaintances—other than perhaps Helen or Iphwin—who had any connection to the kind of world where things like this happened.
I retraced my life, three times, all the way from my earliest memories of my parents, up till I sat down and read an ordinary, dull newspaper earlier that day, and in all of it I could find no hint that anything like this could happen to me. Meanwhile, I figured out that the fellow beside me was singing in heavily accented French, and that it was a translation of an English song I had learned from my mother while I was smalclass="underline"
He sang that single verse over and over with a strange determination, as if he knew he would get it right, one of these times, but he hadn’t yet, and each experiment brought him some infinitesimal step closer to the magical moment when the song, or at least that verse of it, would be as perfect as he could make it. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t dawdle; he worked with concentration but not with anxiety. Sooner or later the definitive Viet-accented a cappella French version of “I Was Drunk Last Night” would emerge, and meanwhile, the rest of the world could listen, or not. He would succeed, given time enough.