The Staked Goat Read online

  “Thanks, J.T.”

  “See you at fourteen-hundred.”

  I hung up and looked again at my watch. Time for a couple of quick drinks but I decided against it. I was about to do something that two drinks—two dozen drinks—wouldn’t ease for me. Something I never thought I’d do. Ever.

  I was going back to Vietnam.

  My escort was a young MP, slim, female, and black. She had smiled when her counterpart at the barrier had checked my ID and confirmed me to her. She introduced herself as PFC Waller, and off we went.

  Waller threaded us through seemingly endless hallways, small pockets of humanity appearing in various civilian and military uniforms. We took half-left turns at indistinguishable corridors and subcorridors. In less than three minutes, I was hopelessly lost.

  “Should I be dropping a trail of pebbles?” I said, then dodged a Navy officer whose head was buried in a file he was carrying, choirboy style.

  Waller laughed graciously. “You get used to it after a while, sir.”

  “How long have you been in?”

  “A little over a year now.”

  “Planning on making it a career?”

  She gave me a cautious sidelong glance to be sure I was serious. “Probably not, sir. I’m more interested in data processing.”

  “I see.” Whenever someone brings up computers, I tend to acknowledge the topic and then cease all conversation. My reticence was covered by her abrupt stop at a door bearing only a room number. She knobbed it open.

  We entered a small suite of offices. A woman, probably my telephone partner, barely glanced at us as we walked past her toward a desk occupied by a youngish, male staff sergeant who looked tall sitting down. He had reddish brown hair, close-cropped. As we approached, he rose. And rose.

  I seemed to recall a six-foot-six maximum height, with a waiver for up to two additional inches. I guessed he needed the waiver. His name tag said “Casey.” “The Colonel will see you, Mr. Cuddy.” He winked at Waller. “Thank you, Private.”

  Waller nodded, said “Sir” to me as a good-bye, and left us.

  Casey knocked on an office door to his left. He waited for an affirmation from inside before he opened it. “Sir, Mr. Cuddy.”

  “John! Good to see you!” I entered the room. J.T. sprang up and came forward as though we were brothers reunited after twenty years of separation. “Thank you, Sergeant,” said J.T.

  “Yessir.” Casey backed out and closed the door as J.T. pumped my hand a few times for effect and then motioned to one of several steel, green-cushioned government office chairs in front of his desk. We sat.

  “Well,” he said. “This hasn’t been easy.”

  “Especially on such short notice.”

  “Right. I had to pull strings and call in favors.” J.T. looked a bit distracted, checked a desk calendar. “I have a meeting at fifteen-hundred across the District, so I’ve got to rush. I have all the files from a month before Al and I got to Saigon to a month after he left. That’s roughly September ’67 to December ’68. The files are chronological.”

  “I remember.”

  J.T. frowned and sank a little lower.

  “I suppose you wondered how come I didn’t make the funeral.”

  I shook my head. “Actually, no, not until you told me you’d read about it. I just assumed it wouldn’t be enough publicized for you to be aware of it.”

  “We’ve been busy, John. Pressure-cooker busy down here. I just didn’t have time to come, or even return your calls.”

  I held up my hand. “You don’t owe me any explanations. Or apologies.”

  “But I owe … owed Al. Like you said. Everybody did. He was a great guy.”

  “Yeah, that he was.”

  There was an awkward silence as J.T. stared past me.

  “Your meeting?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your crosstown meeting. At three o’clock?”

  “Oh, damn! Yes, thanks.” He tapped a buzzer on his phone, and Casey’s head was in the partially opened door before the buzzer sound had died away.

  “Sir?”

  “I’ll get Mr. Cuddy set up next door. You get the car and pull ’round to Bravo Seven. I’ll see you there in five minutes.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And Case?”

  “Yessir?”

  “Get Ricker to relieve you on the desk.”

  “Yessir.” Casey’s head was gone.

  J.T. got up and moved toward the door. I did likewise.

  He said, “Everything’s in the next room, kind of a conference room. You can take notes, but no photocopying, understood?”

  “Understood.”

  We walked out his door and into the next room. “I’ll be gone the rest of the day with Casey and,” he dropped his voice, “the receptionist is an airhead. But if you have any questions, Sergeant Ricker can field them. Be sure Ricker leads you out when you’re finished.”

  “How late can I stay?”

  “Eighteen-hundred. I’m sorry, but no later.”

  “I appreciate it, J.T.”

  “Yeah.” He gave me a quick smile and handshake. “Just keep the door closed, O.K.?”

  “O.K. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Right.” He sighed and swung his head around the room. “I hope it’s here,” he said and left.

  I closed the door behind him. I tugged off my suit jacket, undid my collar button, and pulled down my tie.

  The room measured about ten by fifteen. There was a slate-green rectangular table with a half dozen pencils, two pads, and some ice water and paper cups. There were five chairs. The space for a sixth chair was occupied by an olive-drab file cabinet with five drawers. It would contain fifteen months of operational paperwork for our MP unit in Saigon. Somewhere in there was Al’s killer.

  Maybe.

  I rolled up my sleeves and yanked open the top drawer. The files were packed in tightly. I levered ten out and sat down with them. I poured and drank one cup of ice water. Then I opened the first file and stepped back fourteen years and as many thousand miles.

  Sixteen

  AT FIRST IT WAS almost as if I weren’t reading the reports but translating them from Army jargon and abbreviations to real English. I went slowly through the first files, refreshing myself with designations and geography. Then, like the return of a foreign language, it came back to me in the clear, my brain automatically decoding the cryptic report texts.

  I riffled through the simpler, ordinary stuff of traffic accidents, drug overdoses, fights, and petty thefts that happened just before Al got to Saigon. I lingered over two reports.

  In the first, a quartermaster staff sergeant named Kevearson was killed shooting it out with MPs raiding a heroin refinery. He turned out to be the entrepreneur. The MP in charge was a Captain David L. Bonner. I remembered Al mentioning him once. I wrote down Kevearson, Ronald B., then Bonner’s name.

  In the second report, an MP sergeant named DeLong had siphoned seized heroin from an evidence locker, replacing it with flour. Al later testified at the court-martial, but I couldn’t recall why. DeLong, Alvin B.

  I reached the point chronologically when Al and J.T. had hit Saigon. There were dozens of major crimes in the files for the eight weeks before I arrived. Several had Al’s name on them.

  One was the shooting of a paratrooper named Brewer by a bar girl. He apparently wanted things a bit kinkier than she tolerated. The report suggested he had lived. Brewer, Delvin J. I remembered his name for some reason, so I wrote it down.

  J.T. and Al both covered a second lieutenant in the infantry who went AWOL. Brought him in from the boonies, living with a Vietnamese woman outside a formerly French plantation. How the hell he had avoided being killed by Charlie in his three nights out there was beyond me. There was a photo in the file of the lieutenant. He looked miserable. Court-martialed, imprisoned back in the States. Named Raiser, Lionel P. Write it down. A guy who would risk living in the bush was capable of anything.

  A s
taff sergeant named Crowley, Matthew M., got his head blown off by a Eurasian drug merchant named Rene Bouvier. There was a photo in the file of a short, black-haired sergeant with two or three other staff-looking noncoms around him. Everyone was smiling, and the flip side of the photo said the short guy was Crowley. The Eurasian was never found. Al and a technician CID named Clay Belker investigated the killing, Belker signing on the body’s fingerprints. Belker I remembered, a gangly, surly white guy from Alabama. Al always thought that Belker was O.K., God knows why.

  I reached November 1967, when I arrived in Saigon. The next file involved Al directly.

  An MP was knifed and died when he stumbled on two GIs buying heroin from a Vietnamese. On his way down, the MP winged one GI named Curtis D. Chandler, who was caught six blocks away, bleeding freely. Al interrogated Chandler, who refused to give up the name of his partner. I wrote down the full name of Chandler and the word “partner?” There was no further mention of partner except that “further interrogation proved unsuccessful.” Involuntarily, a picture of a different kind of interrogation came to mind and decided to stay awhile.

  The hallway was in the damp basement of the South Vietnamese National Police substation three blocks from our headquarters. To the basement were brought confirmed or suspected VC (Viet Cong). The hall was dim, one 25-watt bulb on a wire about halfway down the corridor. The place stank more from disinfectant than puke, urine, or feces, but not by much. The atmosphere of successful interrogation, National Police style. Rumored but not seen.

  Well, not often seen.

  Sometimes they did it with switches of split bamboo, swacking the stick against a prisoner’s bare feet or palms until the screaming gave way to the short-lived relief of unconsciousness. A little slapping about the face, and the questioning proceeded. A slow mode and strenuous.

  A second method was cigarettes. No, not as bribes. Lit ones. Applied to earlobes, lips, eyelids. Like the killer had done with Al. Some noise and smell, agony extreme but intermittent. Effective and less strenuous, but still time-consuming.

  For quickest results, a crank telephone box and a couple of wires were employed. The interrogator’s aide would crank the box, the current thus produced transmitted by the wires connected to the prisoner’s genitalia, male or female. The aide’s muscle tone and endurance weren’t much limitation on the pace and the duration of the questioning here.

  I was to be present at an interrogation because the prisoner, doubly damned as VC as well as black marketeer, supposedly spoke good English. He therefore would be able to give me names of American servicemen providing products from the PX’s, either through the front door (by discount purchase) or through the back door (the ultimate discount). My National Police guide escorted me down into the basement and to the interrogation section.

  You’ve heard sitcom laughtracks? Well, if the producers of a horror movie ever wanted a screamtrack, they really missed their chance back then. Name your scream and the NP would provide it, on cue. A seventy-year-old woman’s long, piercing wail. A thirty-five-year-old father’s gasping outbursts of anguish as he realized he would be fathering no more. Perhaps a sixteen-year-old girl for whom permanent disfigurement must have seemed a vague and distant concern compared to the cause of her shrieking and gagging hoarseness.

  “This room,” said my escort, smiling brightly. “Please?”

  He swung open the door. The smell of disinfectant was very strong. There were three NP men in the room. One was seated at a table taking down machine-gun sentences in Vietnamese. The speaker was a fiftyish man in dark red prisoner pajamas who sat across from him. The pajamas seemed three sizes too large. The prisoner was speaking so fast the seated NP could not transcribe it. The NP standing next to the prisoner clouted him on the cheek with a backhand and spat a Vietnamese word. The prisoner slowed down.

  The third NP spoke to my escort quickly in Vietnamese, then addressed me in English. My escort fetched a chair.

  “Welcome. I am Captain Ngo.” He inclined his head. “You will please to sit?”

  “Thank you,” I said, sitting and tugging a pad and ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket. “I’m Lieutenant Cuddy. I understand this man speaks English?”

  “Oh, yes. We will …”

  He shot a terse question in Vietnamese to my escort.

  “Sus-pend,” said my escort.

  “Ah, yes. We will sus-pend now and you will question him. The traitor’s name is Can Gai Trinh. He has much to tell you.”

  Captain Ngo barked something at Trinh and the guard who was about to clock him again. I heard a scrabbling sound from the room next door. I hoped it was a rat. If not, it was probably a child.

  Trinh stopped talking to the NP transcriber and looked at me.

  “Yessir?” he said.

  “Your full name and address,” I asked.

  He told me.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Whole life.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. The guard took this as a request to strike Trinh.

  I looked at Ngo. “Tell him to stop hitting the prisoner.”

  Ngo spoke, and the guard backed off a step.

  “I mean, how long have you been in this building?”

  “Oh, maybe full day.”

  “How old are you?”

  “T’irty-one.”

  I looked at him. He flitted his eyes around the room, fearful he’d sparked more retribution. He still looked fiftyish. The pajamas covered everything but his head, weak hands, and bare feet. There were no marks on those parts. Probably used the crank box.

  “Tell me the GIs who work with you in the black market. Names, outfits.”

  I got a stream of people. Twelve or thirteen, from PFCs to a master-sergeant.

  I took it all down, got some functional details and some future dates to mark.

  I looked up at Captain Ngo. “Who knows he’s here?”

  “Nobody. We catch him clean. Behind a building. Nobody see.”

  I inclined my head toward the prisoner. “I may need him at the trial of the bad Americans,” I said. Trinh’s face lit up, the hope, however, tempered by experience.

  I locked Ngo with my best stare. “Will he be alive then?”

  Ngo frowned, disappointed. “If you like,” he relented.

  I shook off the interrogation memory and waded through about twenty more reports. Names, faces, places. The absurdities of a big city at the edge of an unnatural war. I went through December of ’67 into January of ’68. I dreaded reaching the end of that month, so I got up and took a stretch-break. My interlude with the muggers was taking its toll in stiffness and soreness. I finished the ice water and took the pitcher to the door. I opened it.

  The receptionist was gone, but a master-sergeant swiveled around in the seat Casey had occupied hours ago. He stood up and smiled.

  “Help you, sir?”

  “Yes. Are you Sergeant Ricker?”

  “That’s right, sir. What can I do for you?”

  He was about six feet tall. Maybe one-eighty in shape, two hundred with his pot. I was tired, and he had that vaguely familiar look of many middle-aged noncoms. Bald, forty-five or so, with a Southwest twang in his voice.

  “Just some cold water, if you can.”

  I extended the pitcher as he said, “Sure thing, sir.”

  I looked up at the clock. It said 16:45. He noticed me and shook the pitcher at me.

  “Now, don’t you worry none about that clock, sir. Casey, Sergeant Casey, he told me you was here on something important, and I already called the missus. I’ll be here jest as long as you need. I got me a book and everything.”

  There was a Louis L’Amour western novel spread open face down on his desk.

  “Thanks, Sergeant. I really appreciate it.”

  “Would you like some coffee, too, sir? It’s no trouble.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Jest be a minute.”

  He was gone perhaps thirty seconds.

  �
�Here you are, sir.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  “You jest take your time.” He smiled. “There ain’t nothing goin’ on over in the old D. of C. on a cold Monday night in March anyways.”

  I went back in, closed the door and sat back down. Mid-January 1968 became January 20, then January 25, then finally January 30. The dawn of the Year of the Monkey, the lunar New Year holiday all of Vietnam celebrated.

  They called it “Tet.”

  Some military historians trace the strategic beginning of the Tet Offensive back to September 1967, in terms of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong planning and stockpiling in and around the cities of South Vietnam. Tet was really the first time the cities were hit, the VC up ’til then being a nearly invisible enemy, indistinguishable citizens by day, raiders in rural villages and an occasional town by dark. One North Vietnamese general suggested much later that since the offensive did not result in widespread, spontaneous uprisings by the people of South Vietnam, it was, in effect, a military defeat for Charlie.

  Americans who were there that night might disagree with him.

  The Viet Cong caught the whole country sleeping. They attacked air bases, corps headquarters, National Police substations, even our Embassy, which squatted like a concrete sewage plant in a neighborhood of French villas on Thong Nhut. Al and I were sacked out in our BOQ when the first explosions awakened us. We got dressed and raced downstairs, the pop and crack of small-arms fire filling the air between the louder blasts of rockets and sappers’ satchel charges. We leaped with eight or ten others into a deuce-and-a-half-ton truck that barreled the mile or so to our headquarters.

  The doorway to our station looked like the entrance to an anthill. MPs were scurrying in and out, passing, tossing, dropping equipment. Jeeps and deuce-and-a-halfs were pulling up and pulling out with a lot of noise but little pattern. The harried captain on duty split us up, Al drawing a barricade reinforcement north of the headquarters and me a recon by jeep toward the red-light district on Tu Do Street. Al was wounded almost as soon as he left the station, so I figured I would just skim the reports from the start of the attack onward. There was no reason for me to relive my memories. Still, the nightmare images from that night flashed back no matter how quickly I flipped the pages.