“Go back to the room,” Hae Jong said to Mike, “I’ll look after the Madame.”
The two women went into Lin’s bedroom suite. After helping her to lie down on the bed, Hae Jong took a bottle of whiskey out of the liquor cabinet.
“Here, have a drink. Then sleep a little, and before you know it everything will be in order again.”
Lin finished the glass in a single gulp and then heaved a great sigh. “Another, please. Nobody knows how hard it was for me to make this club, and now it’s all gone. Now you see why I was so insistent about keeping Vietnamese out of this place.”
“Poor Frank! Did you see his body?”
“Horrible, I couldn’t bear to look. Mike, where’s Mike? He was with us in the shelter.”
Hae Jong handed her another scotch and soda. “He’s back in the same room as before.”
Drinking more slowly, Madame Lin gradually recovered her wits.
“Wait, Mike said something very important.”
“Yes, and believe me, I haven’t forgotten, either.”
“That the military currency will be changed. . isn’t that awfully important?”
“It is,” said Hae Jong. “You and I just grabbed a golden opportunity. We saved Mike’s life.”
“Mimi, what time is it now?” Lin asked, gazing about.
“A little after eleven.”
Lin sat up in bed. “It’s still early then, eh? We’ve got a lot to talk over with the captain.”
Hae Jong got up. “I’ll call him.”
“Hold on a minute. No rush. First, we need to figure out what sorts of things will happen when the old currency is swapped for new. Right away many people will go into a frenzy to exchange before the old currency is no good. You’ll be able to get a commission for changing it, and the commission will grow as time runs out. By the last day, you’ll be able to buy the old currency dirt cheap with piasters, like it was wastepaper.”
As the effect of the whiskey spread over her face, Lin was gradually being transformed back into the old, sly owner of the Sports Club.
“The best time will be right at the very end, after the deadline,” Hae Jong said. “Because we’ll be in no hurry. I mean, as long as we can count on Mike’s help. The lousy commissions are for the moneychanger or the little guys — as for us, we’ll just collect worthless military currency and cash it in for new money.”
“But Major Pham must have large amounts of military currency, don’t you think?” Lin asked. “We have quite a bit, too.”
“We’ve been changing it into greenbacks each month. Of course, we were planning to change them all into checks for remittance later, but. . Anyway, what military currency we have, we can always get Mike to handle that. The big question is, how much time can Mike give us after the deadline has passed?”
By this time Lin was wide-awake and sitting straight up in the bed. “We’ll propose that we collect the military currency and split the profit with him.”
“I’ll go bring him back here.”
When she came into the room, she found Mike sitting there with only his army pants on, drinking a Coke. He seemed to have recovered his composure a little. He must have had a shower, for he was wiping off his forehead with a towel draped around his neck. Hae Jong sat across from him and took out a Marlboro cigarette. Mike lit it with his lighter.
“Thanks, Mimi. They’re all dead, I mean, Frank and the colonel.”
Hae Jong reached out with her hand and ruffled Mike’s brown hair. “Don’t be a baby. You’re a soldier and this is a battlefield.”
“I have no overnight pass and I’m getting worried about getting back. It’s time. .”
Mike was looking at his bare wrist and then started searching around the bed for his watch.
“It’s not even twelve yet,” said Hae Jong. “You said you needed to be back at dawn. Before daybreak, Beck will take you back in his car. By the way, what you said earlier, is that true?”
“What did I say?”
Hae Jong took a deep puff on the cigarette and, exhaling smoke in Mike’s face, said in a cynical tone, “So, it’s supposed to be top secret, huh? You said they’ll change the military currency.”
Mike jumped up. “Did I say that? When? Who heard me? I’m in deep shit now.”
“You said it in this room to Madame Lin and me, nobody else. You don’t need to be so surprised. Mike, you know you almost stayed behind in that room with Frank and Colonel Cao. We were the ones who forced you out. Maybe we should have left you there with them and let you die. That way the secret would’ve been kept, all right.”
Mike raised his arms, as if in surrender. “It’s an order from headquarters in Saigon. From next Monday, the exchange period is one week.”
“Then after noon next Saturday, even the American soldiers won’t be able to use the old military currency at the PXs, right?” Hae Jong thought back to those little commotions in the campside villages. Suddenly, all the American soldiers vanish from the bars, the brothels, and the souvenir shops. A desolate night descends quietly on the campside village, which starts to seem like one of those Gold Rush boomtowns occupied only by ghosts after the mine is shut down. The colorful signs, the gaudy red lights, the whores with their hair dyed yellow and their nails painted red, black, or silver — this rainbow spectrum loses all of its color the moment the link to America is cut off. The specious carnival suddenly reveals its true self. Chocolate drops and candy bars in fancy wrappers, smooth soaps smelling of fragrant dreams, cigarettes adorned with silvery scripts and graceful logos, all sizes and shapes of liquor bottles; these PX goods all lose their magical powers and are degraded into isolated things as soon as the people who consume them have disappeared.
Mornings in the campside villages are always desolate, like the stage in a theater where daylight has intruded. When a rumor circulates that the GIs will change their money, the bar owners, the dry cleaners, the pimps and the whores, even the shoeshine boys all go crazy. All they talk about is dollars, and they vent their indignation at the betrayal by the GIs. When the last day comes, they resolutely burn the most omnipotent little picture-bearing papers on earth. Touched by flames, those oily little sheets turn dark and shrivel before disappearing. The whores do not cry as they peer at the flames. So-and-so lost this much, so-and-so got an advance warning and bought such-and-such goods, so-and-so wallpapered her room with worthless notes, and so on and so forth, all sorts of stories make the circuit through the grapevine until the American soldiers reappear on the scene.
When they come back, all the inhabitants of the campside village soon forget about the money consumed by the flames. They feel relieved that living things have regained their livelihoods with the mediation of the American military. The posts of the US Army are firmly linked to such relief, such anesthesia. Think of a shoeshine boy who instantly can be reconciled to his wretched fate because a Salem cigarette is glowing with a bluish light at the tip of his filthy fingers. This carnival can last only as long as the Americans stay. All the goods and all the ornaments with which the festival is festooned manage incessantly to reproduce, making a solid network among themselves lest anything leak out.
Dollars tossed onto that field of blood, the realm of Caesar, make a blood-red mold from which blossoms emerge — dollars are the money-medium of the world, an instrument of control. The dollar is the leading edge in the imperialist order and the American ID is the organizer. Blood-red flowers are blossoming as part of the aid that spreads military and political power ever more widely over the entire world, aid providing rich nutrition for American capital acting through its network of multinational enterprises, aid to replenish the supply of dollars used as an important medium of international settlements, a medium of savings and of trust, and the solvent that assures prosperity for the international banks.