But something must be done, the Ambassador had said, and so he was on his way to Washington again. The Ambassador had changed in his three years in Thailand: His face was burned black by the sun yet there was still a quality both pale and fragile in the haunted blue eyes; his hands shook; he drank too much, for the climate and for his age. He had trouble at night sleeping alone in the darkness of his air-conditioned room on the second floor of the embassy. Sometimes at meals he would fall into a sort of reverie, staring across the table at his companions but not seeing them, looking beyond the present to some middle distance of past or future, forming words silently on his lips. The others would be embarrassed at these moments and look away and pretend not to notice, though all conversation would cease until the Ambassador came back to them.
He had stood at the top of the ramp and waved to the two of them from the embassy before boarding the whining 747, and the Assistant Press Officer had returned the wave. Then the APO had said to his companion: “There is a man who cares too much.” The remark was intended to be profound and sophisticated because the APO believed himself to possess these qualities in abundance.
The remark was answered and agreed to by the Visa Secretary, who added that there was nothing that could be done and that was the pity of the matter. Both of them were sensible young men of the world and they saw the world for what it really was. The Ambassador was a good man, surely, but he was old, and indignation of an old-fashioned nature had clouded his eyes.
The APO had driven the Visa Secretary back to the embassy and along the way raised the point that perhaps the Ambassador was becoming a nuisance to the President. Certainly, he had made an enemy of the National Security Adviser. The President had his own problems with his domestic program, more complex and more politically serious than the plight of people seen only on the evening news. The APO wondered aloud if the fall from favor of the Ambassador might mean a shakeup in the permanent embassy personnel. The APO longed for a London posting.
On the following morning, October 2, when the Ambassador was still in a restless, drugged sleep in his own home in Fairfax, Virginia, the matter began half a world away from him.
Corporal Rafael Lopez, United States Marine Corps, stood at the outer gate of the embassy in the late morning sunlight and watched the figure hobbling up the street. The man did not walk with a cane but he appeared to need one; he shuffled along, his feet barely raising themselves above the pavement. The shuffle of his lower extremities did not match the rigid posture of his body. He walked with his arms straight down at his sides like a prisoner, his thin shoulders thrown back in a parody of a military man on parade.
Corporal Lopez of Amarillo, Texas, watched the man for a long time because the street at this point afforded a long view and because there was nothing else to watch. The pretty Thai women were gone from the street for the morning, were in their offices or homes or in the markets. Lopez had his own woman, of course; it was the first thing he had acquired after his transfer to Bangkok for embassy duty, and she pleased him as much as she could, but Corporal Lopez wondered at times if she were pretty enough or if he were missing something by not finding another woman.
At the moment, however, it was the man who interested him. He guessed that he was old, though he might have been young but have gone through some ordeal. His hair was absolutely white, which was not usual in the Orient and yet, because it was thick and unkempt, he might be young. Age was a difficult guessing match in the East.
Lopez began a mental game: The feet were old; the back was straight like a young man’s. Perhaps he had been a soldier? Perhaps he was victim of the jungle rot that ate at the flesh of the feet first?
Left, right, left, right. There you go, thought Lopez. Hup, two, three, four. Hup. Yer hup. Swing it along, mister.
But the mental cadence he counted for the old man was too slow and he lost interest in that game. Of course, he had to be a gringo. You couldn’t mistake the features, even under the layers of burned skin. He should have seen it at once from the eyes, blue eyes like the Ambassador’s, but the old man had been too far away.
Blue eyes. A goddam blue-eyed gringo sonofabitch in black pajamas just like a fucking Cong.
Hup, hup, hup two three four.
Lopez was thirty-one years old and he would acknowledge that he had seen nearly everything in his brief life, including a tour in Nam. Once he had even been busted in rank but he had come back. He had deserved the demotion for trying to kill some bastard in a bar off base instead of waiting until the prick came out into the alley to piss. But Lopez had been younger then and not so patient and he had been caught and done his time, hard time in the Corps, man. Still, the service was not a bad life and, like the swabbies said, you got to see the world.
The old man stopped on the sidewalk ten feet from Lopez, and Lopez felt his body stiffen involuntarily, the way it did when he had been a recruit in North Carolina, when the D.I. would come up to you with his lean, mean face and stare at you, looking for goddam flyspecks on your nose or something. The blue eyes of the old man were watching him. Smart marine, in his smart uniform, rifle at ease: What the fuck are you looking at, old man? You never seen a goddam United States fucking Marine before?
“Is this the American embassy? Please?”
He spoke English. Lopez let his lazy eyes open wide but he didn’t move. English but it sounded like a slope talking English, it had that peculiar inflection, an Asian singsong that accented the words evenly and in the wrong places. Lopez stared at the black pajama trousers streaked with ancient red dirt and at the sandals fashioned from old tires. The old man wore a white, loose blouse without a collar. The face was black from the sun and clean-shaven, all bones and hollows.
Lopez thought he could have been a bastard, maybe a mulatto out of a Thai mother with an English or French daddy. He was too old to be of American stock, but the colonials had been in Asia for a long time. The American bastards were still too young.
“Is this the embassy of the United States, please?”
God, he hated the way they talked, the slopes, even his own woman, whining all the time, their little voices like wind chimes. Was this the fucking embassy? What do I look like, a fucking slope? Lopez realized that his curiosity in the old man had turned to annoyance.
“You got it, pardner,” Lopez said at last.
“The American ambassador I would like to see, please?” The voice of the old man was still slight, gentle, humble, and its singsong quality had definitely gotten on Lopez’s nerves. So that was it: Some bum wants a free ride back home, back to Big Sam. Lost his green, lost his ready, wants a freebie.
“He ain’t around, pardner,” Lopez said, a slow smile breaking across the brown face like a stain. “He’s gone back to the States.”
“Then whoever is here, please? In charge, please?” The old man stopped and frowned, as though searching his memory for the right English words.
Lopez gazed at him while he considered. Lopez was there strictly for show; anyone could go inside. Christ, even after Tehran, they still didn’t give him bullets for the fucking rifle. But the old man offended him.
“I told you the Ambassador, he’s a big man, he ain’t around, didn’t I? You out of bread, man, is that it? You American?”
The old man seemed to consider this question gravely. After a long pause, he said, “Yes. American. Yes, I am.”
“Well, you lost your passport then or what?”
The old man smiled suddenly, a dazzling smile that cracked the darkened face, and Lopez was annoyed by that as well. He wasn’t going to be patronized by a goddam gringo fucker looks like a Cong.