Oh, poor crapulent major! That night, at home, I watched Bon clean and oil the .38 Special on the coffee table, then load it with six copper bullets and lay it on a little throw pillow that came with our sofa, a tawdry, stained red velour cushion on which the pistol rested like a gift to deposed royalty. I’ll shoot him through the pillow, Bon said, cracking open a beer. Reduced noise. Great, I said. Richard Hedd was being interviewed on television about the situation in Cambodia, his English accent a stark contrast to the interviewer’s Bostonian one. After a minute of watching this, I said, What if he’s not a spy? We’ll be killing the wrong man. Then it would be murder. Bon sipped his beer. First, he said, the General knows stuff we don’t. Second, we’re not killing. This is an assassination. Your guys did this all the time. Third, this is war. Innocent people get killed. It’s only murder if you know they’re innocent. Even so, that’s a tragedy, not a crime.
You were happy when the General asked you to do this, weren’t you?
Is that bad? he said. He put the beer down and picked up the .38. As some men were born to handle a paintbrush or a pen, he was born to wield a gun. It looked natural in his hand, a tool of which a man could be proud, like a wrench. A man needs a purpose, he said, contemplating the gun. Before I met Linh, I had purpose. I wanted revenge for my father. Then I fell in love, and Linh became more important than my father or revenge. I hadn’t cried since he died, but after my marriage I cried at his grave because I had betrayed him where it mattered the most, in my heart. I didn’t get over that until Duc was born. At first he was just this strange, ugly little thing. I wondered what was wrong with me, why I didn’t love my own son. But slowly he grew and grew, and one night I noticed how his fingers and toes, his hands and feet, were perfectly made, miniature versions of mine. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be struck by wonder. Even falling in love was not like that feeling, and I knew that this was how my father must have looked at me. He had created me, and I had created Duc. It was nature, the universe, God, flowing through us. That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he’d feel the exact same thing. And it was then I knew I hadn’t betrayed my father. I cried again, holding my boy, because I’d finally become a man. What I’m saying, why I’m telling you all this, is that my life once had meaning. It had a purpose. Now it has none. I was a son and a husband and a father and a soldier, and now I’m none of that. I’m not a man, and when a man isn’t a man he’s nobody. And the only way not to be nobody is to do something. So I can either kill myself or kill someone else. Get it?
I not only got it, I was astonished. It was the longest speech I had ever heard from him, his sorrow and rage and despair not only cracking open his heart but loosening his vocal cords. Those words even succeeded in making him less ugly than he objectively was, if not handsome, emotion softening the harsh features of his face. He was the only man I had ever met who seemed moved, deeply, not only by love but also by the prospect of killing. While he was an expert by necessity, I was a novice by choice, despite having had my opportunities. In our country, killing a man—or a woman, or a child—was as easy as turning a page of the morning paper. One only needed an excuse and an instrument, and too many on all sides possessed both. What I did not have was the desire or the various uniforms of justification a man dons as camouflage—the need to defend God, country, honor, ideology, or comrades—even if, in the last instance, all he really is protecting is that most tender part of himself, the hidden, wrinkled purse carried by every man. These off-the-rack excuses fit some people well, but not me.
I wanted to persuade the General that the crapulent major was no spy, but it would hardly do to disinfect him of the idea with which I had infected him in the first place. More than this, I knew I had to prove to the General that I could correct my ostensible mistake, and that I could be a man of action. Not doing something was not an option, as the General’s demeanor made clear to me at our next meeting the following week. He deserves it, the General said, disagreeably obsessed with the indelible stain of guilt he saw stamped on the major’s forehead, that tiny handprint of the major’s doomed mortality left there by me. But take your time. I’m in no rush. Operations should be performed patiently and painstakingly. He affirmed this in a storeroom that channeled the dispassionate atmosphere of a war room, the walls newly decorated with maps showing our sinuous, narrow-waisted homeland in all its splendor or its parts, each suffocating behind plastic sheeting, red markers dangling on strings next to them. Better to do it well and slowly than quickly and poorly, he said. Yes, sir, I said. What I had in mind was—
No need to bore me with details. Just let me know when it’s done.
So the major’s demise was written. Nothing was left me but to create a believable story where his death was neither my fault nor the General’s. I did not have to think very hard before the most obvious story came to me. What we had here was your usual American tragedy, only this time starring a hapless refugee.
Professor Hammer invited me to dinner the next Saturday night at his house, the occasion being Claude’s imminent return to Washington. The only other guest was the professor’s boyfriend, Stan, a doctoral student my own age at UCLA, writing his dissertation on the American literary expatriates of Paris. He had the white teeth and blond hair of a model in a toothpaste ad, where his role would be the young father of toothsome cherubs. The professor’s homosexuality had been mentioned to me by Claude before I matriculated at the college in ’63, because, Claude said, I just didn’t want you to be surprised. Never having known a homosexual, I had been curious to see how one behaved in his natural environment, which is to say the West, as the East apparently had no homosexuals. Much to my disappointment, Professor Hammer seemed no different from anyone else, aside from his acute intelligence and impeccable taste in all things, extending to Stan and the culinary arts.
The three-course meal was prepared by the professor himself, a salad of mixed greens, duck confit with rosemary potatoes, and a flaky tarte Tatin, preceded by martinis, accompanied by pinot noir, and finished off with single malt scotch. All was served in the meticulously restored dining room of the professor’s Craftsman bungalow in Pasadena, everything from the double-hung windows, to the art deco chandelier, to the brass hardware of the built-in cabinetry either an original from the early twentieth century or a faithful reproduction. Every now and then the professor rose from the dining table and replaced the record on the turntable, choosing a new selection from his extensive jazz collection. Over dinner, we talked about bebop, the nineteenth-century novel, the Dodgers, and America’s upcoming bicentennial. Then we repaired with our scotch to the living room with its massive fireplace of river rock and its stately Mission furniture of angular wooden frames and leather cushions. Books of all heights, widths, and colors lined the walls in a democratic parade of individualism, arranged as haphazardly as they were on the walls of the professor’s campus office. Ensconced thus by letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, and tomes, the evening was a pleasant one, memorable for the exchange that took place after we assumed our seats. His nostalgia stimulated, perhaps, by the literature around him, the professor said, I still remember your thesis on The Quiet American. That was one of the best undergraduate theses I’ve ever read. I smiled demurely and said thanks while Claude, sitting beside me on the sofa, snorted. I didn’t care too much for that book. The Vietnamese girl, all she does is prepare opium, read picture books, and twitter like a bird. Have you ever met a Vietnamese girl like her? If so, please introduce me. All the ones I meet can’t keep their mouths shut in or out of bed.
Oh, Claude, the professor said.
Oh, Claude, nothing. No offense, Avery, but our American friend in that book also happens to look suspiciously like a latent homosexual.
It takes one to smell one, Stan said.
Who wrote that one for you? Noël Coward? His name is Pyle, for
God’s sake. How many jokes can you make with that name? It’s also a pro-communist book. Or at least anti-American. Same thing, anyway. Claude waved his hand at the books, the furniture, the living room, presumably the whole well-appointed home. Hard to believe he was once a communist, isn’t it?
Stan? I said.
No, not Stan. Were you, Stan? I thought not.
That left the professor, who shrugged his shoulders when I looked at him. I was your age, he said, putting his arm around Stan’s shoulders. I was impressionable, I was passionate, I wanted to change the world. Communism seduced me like so many others.
Now he’s the one doing the seducing, Stan said, squeezing the professor’s hand, a sight that made me squirm just a little. For me, the professor was a walking mind, and to see him as a body, or having a body, was still discomfiting.
Do you ever regret being a communist, Professor?
No, I do not. Only by making that mistake could I be what I am today.
What is that, sir?
He smiled. I suppose you could call me a born-again American. An irony, but if the bloody history of the past few decades has taught me anything, it’s that the defense of freedom demands the muscularity only America can provide. Even what we do at the college has its purpose. We teach you the best of what was thought and said not only to explain America to the world, as I have always encouraged you to do, but to defend it.
I sipped my scotch. It was smoky and smooth, tasting of peat and aged oak, underscored by licorice and the intangible essence of Scottish masculinity. I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth. Unfortunately, undiluted truth was as affordable as eighteen-year-old single malt scotch. What about those who have not learned the best of what was thought and said? I asked the professor. If we can’t teach them, or if they won’t be taught?
The professor contemplated the copper depths of his drink. I suppose you and Claude have seen more than your fair share of those types in your line of work. There’s no easy answer, except to say it has always been thus. Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it’s been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.
Nothing was more clear-cut than civilization versus barbarism, but what was the killing of the crapulent major? A simple act of barbarism or a complex one that advanced revolutionary civilization? It had to be the latter, a contradictory act that suited our age. We Marxists believe that capitalism generates contradictions and will fall apart from them, but only if men take action. But it was not just capitalism that was contradictory. As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, but I was right to kill him. Wasn’t I? When Claude and I left near midnight, I came as close as I could to broaching the subject of my conscience with him. As we smoked farewell cigarettes on the sidewalk, I asked the question that I imagined my mother asking of me: What if he’s innocent?
He blew a smoke ring, just to show he could. No one’s innocent. Especially in this business. You don’t think he might have some blood on his hands? He identified Viet Cong sympathizers. He might have gotten the wrong man. It’s happened before. Or if he himself is a sympathizer, then he definitely identified the wrong people. On purpose.
I don’t know any of that for sure.
Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn’t that what Original Sin is all about?
True enough, I said. I let him go with a handshake. The airing of moral doubts was as tiresome as the airing of domestic squabbles, no one really interested except for the ones directly involved. In this situation, I was clearly the only one involved, except for the crapulent major, and no one cared to hear his opinion. Claude, meanwhile, had offered me absolution, or at least an excuse, but I did not have the heart to tell him I could not use it. Original Sin was simply too unoriginal for someone like me, born from a father who spoke of it at every Mass.
The next evening I began reconnoitering the major. On that Sunday and the following five, from May until the end of June, I parked my car half a block from the gas station, waiting for eight o’clock when the crapulent major would leave, walking slowly home, lunch box in hand. When I saw him turn the corner, I started the car and drove it to the corner, where I waited and watched him walk down the first block. He lived three blocks away, a distance a thin, healthy man could walk briskly in five minutes. It took the crapulent major approximately eleven, with myself always at least a block behind. During six Sundays, he never varied his routine, faithful as a migratory mallard, his route taking him through a neighborhood of apartments that all seemed to be dying of boredom. The major’s own diminutive quadriplex was fronted by a carport with four slots, one vacant and three occupied by cars with the dented, drooping posteriors of elderly bus drivers. An overhanging second floor, its two sets of windows looking onto the street, shaded the cars. At 8:11 in the evening or so, the morose eyes of those bedroom windows were open but curtained, only one of them lit. On the first two Sundays, I parked at the corner and watched as he turned into the carport and vanished. On the third and fourth Sundays, I did not follow him from the gas station but waited for him half a block past his apartment. From there, I watched in my mirror as he entered the carport’s shadowed margin, a lane leading to the bottom apartments. As soon as he disappeared those first four Sundays, I went home, but on the fifth and sixth Sundays I waited. Not until ten o’clock did the car that parked in the vacant spot appear, as aged and dinged as the others, the driver a tired-looking Chinese man wearing a smeared chef’s smock and carrying a greasy paper bag.
On the Saturday before our appointment with the crapulent major, Bon and I drove to Chinatown. In an alley off Broadway lined with vendors selling wares from folding tables, we bought UCLA sweatshirts and baseball caps at prices that guaranteed they were not official merchandise. After a lunch of barbecued pork and noodles, we browsed one of the curio shops where all manner of Orientalia was sold, primarily to the non-Oriental. Chinese chess sets, wooden chopsticks, paper lanterns, soapstone Buddhas, miniature water fountains, elephant tusks with elaborate carvings of pastoral scenes, reproductions of Ming vases, coasters with images of the Forbidden City, rubber nunchaku bundled with posters of Bruce Lee, scrolls with watercolor paintings of cloud-draped mountain forests, tins of tea and ginseng, and, neither last nor least, red firecrackers. I bought two packets and, before we returned home, a mesh sack of oranges from a local market, their navels protruding indecently.
Later that evening, after dark, Bon and I ventured out one more time, each of us with a screwdriver. We toured the neighborhood until we reached an apartment with a carport like the crapulent major’s, the cars not visible from any neighboring windows. It took less than thirty seconds for Bon to remove the front license plate from one car, and myself the plate from the rear. Then we went home and watched television until bedtime. Bon fell asleep immediately, but I could not. Our visit to Chinatown reminded me of an incident that had taken place in Cholon years before with the crapulent major and myself. The occasion was the arrest of a Viet Cong suspect who had graduated from the top of our gray list to the bottom of our blacklist. Enough people had fingered this person as a Viet Cong for us to neutralize him, or so the major said, showing me the thick dossier he had compiled. Official occupation: rice wine merchant. Black market occupation: casino operator. Hobby: Viet Cong tax collector. We cordoned off the ward with roadblocks on all streets and foot patrols in the alleys. While the secondary units did ID checks in the neighborhood, fishing for draft dodgers, the major’s men entered the rice wine merchant’s shop, pushed past his wife to reach the storeroom, and found the lever that opened a secret door. Gamblers were shooting craps and playing cards, their rice wine and hot soup served for free by waitresses in outra
geous outfits. On seeing our policemen charging through the door, all the players and employees promptly dashed for the rear exit, only to find another squad of heavies waiting outside. The usual high jinks and hilarity ensued, involving much screaming, shrieking, billy clubs, and handcuffs, until, at last, it was only the crapulent major, myself, and our suspect, whom I was surprised to see. I had tipped off Man about the raid and fully expected the tax collector to be absent.
VC? the man cried, waving his hands in the air. No way! I’m a businessman!
A very good one, too, the major said, hefting a garbage bag filled with the casino’s cash.
So you got me there, the man said, miserable. He had an overbite and three long, lucky hairs sprouting from a mole the size of a marble on his cheek. Okay, take the money, it’s yours. I’m happy to contribute to the cause of the police.
That’s offensive, the major said, poking the man’s gut with his billy club. This is going to the government to pay your fines and back taxes, not to us. Right, Captain?
Right, I said, the straight man in this routine.
But as to future taxes, that’s a different matter. Right, Captain?