“We’ll deal with that later.”
She looked at me and said, “They only have your home address… they’ve got a police file on me… every letter I’ve ever sent from here has the address recorded before it goes out…”
“But you used the company pouch to New York for mail. Correct?”
“I sent Christmas cards directly from the GPO…” She tried to smile. “I wanted a Vietnamese stamp on them… I knew I shouldn’t have done that…” She looked at me and asked, “Do you think he’d send those photos to people in the States?”
“Look, Susan, not to make light of it, but you were on a nude beach. Not a big deal. Okay? You weren’t photographed in a sexual act.”
She gave me an angry look. “Paul, I don’t want my family, friends, and co-workers to see pictures of me naked.”
“We’ll deal with it later. We need to get out of here. Out of Vietnam. Alive. Then you can worry about the pictures.”
She nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
We gathered our luggage and headed for the door. I said to the doorman, “We need a taxi for Hue”Phu Bai Airport.”
He motioned out at the darkness and said, “Airplane not go. No light Hue”Phu Bai. Sun. Airplane go.” He smiled. “You go have breakfast.”
“I don’t want breakfast, sport. I want a taxi. Bay gio. Maintenant. Now.”
Susan said something to him, and he smiled, nodded, and went outside.
She said to me, “I told him you were a compulsive, anal-retentive, worrywart.” She smiled.
I smiled in return. She was looking better. I said, “What’s the word for anal-retentive?”
“Asshole.”
The doorman came back and helped us with our bags. A taxi pulled up the circular driveway, we got in, and off we went.
The rain had turned into a light drizzle, and the road glistened. The taxi headed toward Hung Vuong Street, toward Highway One and the airport. She looked out the rear window and said, “I don’t see anyone behind us.”
“Good. Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I thought you knew.”
I put my arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. I said, “I love you.”
She smiled and replied, “So will about a hundred more men in a few days.”
“The mail here is slow.”
She took my hand and said, “Don’t you feel violated?”
“That’s what Mang wants us to feel. I’m not playing into that.”
“But you’re a guy. It’s not the same.”
I didn’t want to return to that subject, so I asked again, “Where are we going?”
“Close.”
We kept heading south on Hung Vuong Street, through the New City and toward Highway One. Susan said something to the driver, and he slowed down and made a U-turn on the nearly deserted street. As we headed back the way we’d come, I didn’t see any other vehicles doing the same thing.
We continued north, and Hung Vuong crossed the Perfume River at the Trang Tien Bridge, near the floating restaurant. I could see the Dong Ba market on the opposite bank, where Mr. Anh and I ate peanuts and talked.
The taxi stopped at a bus terminal that also said Dong Ba, and Susan and I got out, got our luggage, and I paid the driver.
I said, “Are we going by bus?”
“No. But the terminal is open now, and that’s what the driver will remember. We have to walk to Dong Ba market, which is also open at this hour.”
We put our backpacks on, and I wheeled my suitcase down the road. Susan carried my overnight bag. I said, “I’m going along with this because you had some training in these things at Langley, and you know this country. So of course you know what you’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
We were in the Dong Ba market within five minutes, and it was already open in the predawn darkness; people who were probably restauranteurs were haggling over the price of strange-looking fish and slabs of meat.
A man stood under a naked light bulb hanging from a wire and said in English, “You come see number one fruit.”
I ignored him, but Susan followed him around to the back of a big produce stall. I followed.
The man opened a rickety door in the back of the stall, and Susan entered. The man stood at the door and said to me, “Come. Quickly.”
I went through the door and he closed it. We were in a long narrow room, lit by a few light bulbs. The room smelled of fruit and damp earth.
Susan and the man spoke in Vietnamese, then Susan said to me, “Paul, you remember Mr. Uyen from dinner at the Pham house.”
Indeed I did. To show him I really remembered him, I said in Vietnamese, “Sat Cong.”
He smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Sat Cong. Sat Cong.”
I said to Susan, “The kiwis look good.”
She replied, “Mr. Uyen has offered to help us.”
I looked at Mr. Uyen and said, “Do you understand that we are under surveillance by the Ministry of Public Security, and they may have seen us talking to you and your family after mass, and that they may have followed us to your home? Do you understand all that?”
His English wasn’t so good, but he understood every last word. He nodded slowly and said to me, “I do not care if I die.”
“Well, Mr. Uyen, I care if I die.”
“I no care.”
I didn’t think he understood that I cared if I died. In any case, I said to him, “If police arrest me with motorcycle, they find you. License plate. Biet?”
He replied to Susan, who said to me, “The plate was taken from a motorcycle that was destroyed in an accident.”
I said to Susan, “Okay, but if they trace the motorcycle to him, tell him we’ll tell the police we stole it from him. Okay? And tell him we’ll drop it in a lake or something when we’re done with it.”
She told him, and he replied in Vietnamese to Susan, who said to me, “He says he hates the Communists, and he is willing to become one who suffers… a martyr… for his faith.”
I looked at Mr. Uyen and asked, “And your family?”
He replied, “All same.”
It’s hard arguing with people who are looking for martyrdom, but at least I tried.
It occurred to me, too, that Mr. Uyen was probably motivated not only by his faith, but also by his hatred for what happened in 1968 and since then. Mr. Anh, too, was not completely motivated by ideals, such as freedom and democracy; he was motivated by the same hate as Mr. Uyen— they’d both had family members murdered. You can forgive battlefield deaths, but you don’t forget cold-blooded murder.
I said, “Okay, as long as everybody here knows the consequences.”
In the dim light, I saw a large tarp draped over what must be the motorcycle.
Mr. Uyen saw me looking at it and walked to it, and tore off the tarp.
Sitting there on the earth floor of the narrow room was a huge black motorcycle of a make that I couldn’t identify.
I went over to it and put my hand on the big leather saddle. On the molded fiberglass fairing it said BMW and under that Paris-Dakar. I wasn’t going to either of those places, though Paris sounded good. I said to Mr. Uyen, “I’ve never seen this model.”
He said, “Good motorcycle. You go to mountain, to big… road…” He looked at Susan and tried it in Vietnamese.
She listened, then said to me, “It’s a BMW, Paris-Dakar model, probably named after the race of the same name—”
“Dakar is in West Africa. Does this thing float?”
“I don’t know, Paul. Listen. It’s got a 980cc engine, and it holds forty-five liters of fuel, and it has a two-liter reserve, and the range is about five hundred to five hundred and fifty kilometers. Mr. Uyen says it’s excellent for mud, cross-country, and the open road. That’s what it’s made for.”