Magic Terror

N moved down the fence toward the auberge. Big windows displayed the usual elderly men in berets playing cards, a local family dining with the grandparents, one young couple flirting, flames jittering and weaving over the hearth. A solid old woman carried a steaming platter to the family’s table. The Japanese golfers had not returned, and all the other tables were empty. On her way back to the kitchen, the old woman sat down with the card players and laughed at a remark from an old boy missing most of his teeth. No one in the dining room would be leaving for at least an hour. N’s stomach audibly complained of being so close to food without being fed, and he moved back into the relative darkness to wait for the second half of his night’s work.

And then he stepped forward again, for headlights had come beaming upward from below the lot. N moved into the gauzy light and once again experienced the true old excitement, that of opening himself to unpredictability, of standing at the intersection of infinite variables. A Peugeot identical to his in year, model, and color followed its own headlights into the wide parking lot. N walked toward the car, and the two men in the front seats took him in with wary, expressionless faces. The Peugeot moved alongside him, and the window cranked down. A lifeless, pockmarked face regarded him with a cold, threatening neutrality. N liked that – it told him everything he needed to know.

‘Monsieur Temple? Monsieur Law?’

Without any actual change in expression, the driver’s face deepened, intensified into itself in a way that made the man seem both more brutal and more human, almost pitiable. N saw an entire history of rage, disappointment, and meager satisfactions in his response. The driver hesitated, looked into N’s eyes, then slowly nodded.

‘There’s been a problem,’ N said. ‘Please, do not be alarmed, but Monsieur Hubert cannot join you tonight. He has been in a serious automobile accident.’

The man in the passenger seat spoke a couple of sentences in Arabic. His hands were curled around the grip of a fat black attaché case. The driver answered in monosyllables before turning back to N. ‘We have heard nothing of an accident.’ His French was stiff but correct, and his accent was barbaric. ‘Who are you supposed to be?’

‘Marc-Antoine Labouret. I work for Monsieur Hubert. The accident happened late this afternoon. I think he spoke to you before that?’

The man nodded, and another joyous flare of adrenaline flooded into N’s bloodstream.

‘A tour bus went out of control near Montory and ran into his Mercedes. Fortunately, he suffered no more than a broken leg and a severe concussion, but his companion, a young woman, was killed. He goes in and out of consciousness, and of course he is very distressed about his friend, but when I left him at the hospital Monsieur Hubert emphasized his regrets at this inconvenience.’ N drew in another liter of transcendent air. ‘He insisted that I communicate in person his profound apologies and continuing respect. He also wishes you to know that after no more than a small delay matters will go forward as arranged.’

‘Hubert never mentioned an assistant,’ the driver said. The other man said something in Arabic. ‘Monsieur Law and I wonder what is meant by this term, “a small delay”.’

‘A matter of days,’ N said. ‘I have the details in my computer.’

Their laughter sounded like branches snapping, like an automobile landing on trees and rocks. ‘Our friend Hubert adores the computer,’ said the driver.

M. Law leaned forward to look at N. He had a thick mustache and a high, intelligent forehead, and his dark eyes were clear and penetrating. ‘What was the name of the dead woman?’ His accent was much worse than the driver’s.

‘Martine is all I know,’ N said. ‘The bitch turned up out of nowhere.’

M. Law’s eyes creased in a smile. ‘We will continue our discussion inside.’

‘I wish I could join you, but I have to get back to the hospital.’ He waved the satchel at the far side of the lot. ‘Why don’t we go over there? It’ll take five minutes to show you what I have on the computer, and you could talk about it over dinner.’

M. Temple glanced at M. Law. M. Law raised and lowered an index finger and settled back. The Peugeot ground over pebbles and pulled up at the fence. The taillights died, and the two men got out. M. Law was about six feet tall and lean, M. Temple a few inches shorter and thick in the chest and waist. Both men wore nice-looking dark suits and gleaming white shirts. Walking toward them, N watched them straighten their clothes. M. Temple carried a large weapon in a shoulder holster, M. Law something smaller in a holster clipped to his belt. They felt superior, even a bit contemptuous toward M. Labouret – the antiques dealer’s flunky, as wed to his computer as an infant to the breast. N came up beside M. Temple, smiled, and ducked through the fence. ‘Better if they don’t see the screen,’ he told their scowling faces. ‘The people in the restaurant.’

Already impatient with this folly, M. Law nodded at M. Temple. ‘Go on, do it.’ He added something in Arabic.

M. Temple grinned, yanked down the front of his suit jacket, bent down, clamped his right arm across his chest, and steadied himself with the other as he thrust his trunk through the three-foot gap. N moved sideways and held the satchel upright on the top of the fence. M. Temple swung one leg over the white board and hesitated, deciding between raising his right leg before or behind. Leaning left, he bent his right knee and swiveled. A tasseled loafer rapped against the board. N took another step along the fence, pulling the satchel to his chest as if protecting it. M. Temple skipped sideways and pulled his leg through. Embarrassed, he frowned and yanked again at his jacket.

N knelt down with the satchel before him. M. Law gripped the board and passed his head through the gap. When he stepped over the board, N eased out the pistol and fired upward into the center of his intelligent forehead. The bullet tore through the back of M. Law’s skull and, guided by the laws of physics and sheer good luck, smacked into M. Temple’s chest as blood and gray pulp spattered his shirt. M. Temple staggered back and hit the ground, groaning. N felt like a golfer scoring a hole in one during a farewell tournament. He bounced up and moved alongside M. Temple. Grimacing and blowing red froth from his lips, the Arab was still gamely trying to yank his gun from the shoulder holster. The bullet had passed through a lung, or maybe just roamed around inside it before stopping. N settled the muzzle of the silencer behind a fleshy ear, and M. Temple’s right eye, large as a cow’s, swiveled toward him.

Light spilled from the auberge’s windows onto the row of cars and spread across the gravel. M. Law lay sprawled out on the board, his arms and legs dangling on either side. Blood dripped onto the grass beneath his head.

‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’ N said. Whatever unpleasantness M. Temple offered in return was cut short by the fall of the nine millimeter’s hammer.

N grabbed M. Law’s collar and belt and slid him off the board. Then he grasped his wrists and pulled him through the grass to the edge of the gorge and went back for M. Temple. He took their wallets from their hip pockets and removed the money, altogether about a thousand dollars in francs. He folded the bills into his jacket pocket and threw the wallets into the gorge. Taking care to avoid getting blood on his hands or clothes, N shoved M. Temple closer to the edge and rolled him over the precipice. The body dropped out of view almost instantly. He pushed M. Law after him, and this time thought he heard a faint sound of impact from far down in the darkness. Smiling, he walked back to the fence and ducked through it.

N opened the driver’s door of the Arabs’ Peugeot, took the keys from the ignition, and pushed the seat forward to lean in for the attaché case. From its weight, it might have been filled with books. He closed the door softly and tossed the keys over the fence. So buoyant he could not keep from breaking into quiet laughter, he moved across the gravel and walked down the hill to his car with the satchel beneath his left elbow, the case swinging from his right hand.

When he got behind the wheel, he shoved the case onto the passenger seat and turned on the roof light. For a couple of seconds he could do nothing but look at the smooth black leather, the stitching, the brass catches. His breath caught in his throat. N leaned toward the case and brought his hands to the catches and their sliding releases. He closed his eyes and thumbed the releases sideways. There came a substantial, almost resonant sound as the catches flew open. He pushed the top of the case a few inches up and opened his eyes upon banded rows of thousand-dollar bills lined edge to edge and stacked three deep. ‘One for the Gipper,’ he whispered. For a couple of seconds, he was content to breathe in and out, feeling all the muscles in his body relax and breathe with him. Then he started the car and sailed down the mountain.

When he turned into the walled lot, the bright windows framed what appeared to be a celebration. Candles glowed on the lively tables, and people dodged up and down the aisles, turning this way and that in the buzz and hum of conversation floating toward him. This happy crowd seemed to have claimed every parking spot not preempted by the Comet truck, parked in front of the kitchen at an angle that eliminated three spaces. N trolled past the dirty Renault belonging to the drunken Basques, the Japanese tourists’ tall red van, the Germans’ Saab, and other vehicles familiar and unfamiliar. There was a narrow space in front of the trellis beside the entrance. He slid into the opening, gathered his cases, and, holding his breath and sucking in his waist, managed to squeeze out of the car. Beyond the kitchen doors, the Comet man in the blue work suit occupied a chair with the bored patience of a museum guard while the women bustled back and forth with laden trays and stacks of dishes. N wondered what was so important that it was delivered after dark on Sunday and then saw a bright flash of blue that was Albertine, facing a sink with her back to him. Only a few inches from her hip, the innkeeper was leaning against the sink, arms crossed over his chest and speaking from the side of his mouth with an almost conspiratorial air. The intimacy of their communication, her close attention to his words, informed N that they were father and daughter. What Daddy doesn’t know won’t hurt him, he thought. The man’s gaze shifted outside and met N’s eyes. N smiled at his host and pushed the glass door open with his shoulder.

On his way to the counter he saw that his own elation had imbued an ordinary Sunday dinner with the atmosphere of a party. The Japanese men, the German family, French tourists, and groups of local Basques ate and drank at their separate tables. Albertine would not be free for hours. He had enough time to arrange the flights, pack his things, enjoy a long bath, even take a nap. As his adrenaline subsided, he could feel his body demand rest. The hunger he had experienced earlier had disappeared, another sign that he should get some sleep. N took his key from the board and lugged the increasingly heavy attaché case up the stairs, turning on the lights as he went.

He locked his door and sat on the bed to open the case. Twenty-five bills in each packet, six rows across, three stacks high. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars: no million, but a pretty decent golden handshake. He closed the case, slid it onto the closet shelf, and picked up the telephone. In twenty minutes he had secured for a fictitious gentleman named Kimball O’Hara a four a.m. charter from Pau to Toulouse and a five o’clock connecting flight to Marseilles. His employers’ concern would not reach the stage of serious worry until he was on his way to Toulouse, and he would be on a plane to Italy before they had completely advanced into outright panic. The bodies could go undiscovered for days. N folded and packed his clothes into his carry-on bag and set it beside the door, leaving out what he would wear later that night. Kim went on the bedside table. He would push the satchel down a drain somewhere in Oloron.

Hot water pounded into the fiberglass tub while he shaved for the second time that day. The bath lulled him into drowsiness. He wrapped a towel around his waist and stretched out on the bed. Before he dropped into sleep, the last image in his mind was that of a rigid, magnificent female leg encased in sheer black nylon.

Soft but insistent raps at the door awakened him. N looked at his watch: eleven-thirty, earlier than he had expected. ‘I’ll be right there.’ He stood up, stretched, refastened the towel around his waist. A mist of sickeningly floral perfume enveloped him when he unlocked the door. Wearing a raincoat over her nightgown, Albertine slipped into the room. N kissed her neck and grazed at her avid mouth, smiling as she moved him toward the bed.

She closed the door behind her, and the three men in the corridor stepped forward in unison, like soldiers. The one on the right jerked open a refuse bag and extended it toward her. She shoved the bloody cleaver and the ruined nightgown into the depths of the bag. The man quizzed her with a look. ‘You can go in,’ she said, grateful he had not exercised his abominable French. All three of them bowed. Despite her promises to herself, she was unable to keep from bowing back. Humiliated, she straightened up again, feeling their eyes moving over her face, hands, feet, ankles, hair, and whatever they detected of her body through the raincoat. Albertine moved aside, and they filed through the door to begin their work.

Her father stood up from his desk behind the counter when she descended into the darkened lobby. Beneath the long table, Gaston, the black-and-white dog, stirred in his sleep. ‘Did it go well?’ her father asked. He, too, inspected her for bloodstains.

‘How do you think it went?’ she said. ‘He was almost asleep. By the time he knew what was happening, his chest was wide open.’

The lock on the front door responded to the keypad and clicked open. The two permanent Americans eyed her as they came through the arch. Gaston raised his head, sighed, and went back to sleep. She said, ‘Those idiots in the berets are up there now. How long have you been using Japanese, anyhow?’

‘Maybe six months.’ The one in the tweed jacket spoke in English because he knew English annoyed her, and annoyance was how he flirted. ‘Hey, we love those wild and crazy guys, they’re our little samurai brothers.’

‘Don’t let your stupid brothers miss the briefcase in the closet,’ she said. The ugly one in the running suit leered at her. ‘That man had good clothes. You could try wearing some nice clothes, for a change.’

‘His stuff goes straight into the fire,’ the ugly one said. ‘We don’t even look at it. You know, we’re talking about a real character. Kind of a legend. I heard lots of amazing stories about him.’

‘Thank you, Albertine,’ said her father. He did not want her to hear the amazing stories.

‘You ought to thank me,’ she said. ‘The old rooster made me take a bath. On top of that, I wasted my perfume because he wanted me to smell like a girl in Bora Bora.’

Both of the Americans stared at the floor.

‘What does it mean to say,’ she asked, and in her heavily accented English said, ‘I wish I had that swing in my backyard?’

The permanent Americans glanced at each other. The one in the tweed jacket clapped his hands over his eyes. The ugly one said, ‘Albertine, you’re the ideal woman. Everybody worships you.’

‘Good, then I should get more money.’ She wheeled around to go downstairs, and the ugly one sang out, ‘Izz-unt it roman-tic?’ Beneath his sweet false tremulous tenor came the rumble of the disposal truck as it backed toward the entrance.

The Ghost Village

1

In Vietnam I knew a man who went quietly and purposefully crazy because his wife wrote him that his son had been sexually abused – ‘messed with’ – by the leader of their church choir. This man was a black six-foot-six grunt named Leonard Hamnet, from a small town in Tennessee named Archibald. Before writing, his wife had waited until she had endured the entire business of going to the police, talking to other parents, returning to the police with another accusation, and finally succeeding in having the man charged. He was up for trial in two months. Leonard Hamnet was no happier about that than he was about the original injury.

‘I got to murder him, you know, but I’m seriously thinking on murdering her too,’ he said. He still held the letter in his hands, and he was speaking to Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Conor Linklater, SP4 Cotton, Calvin Hill, Tina Pumo, the magnificent M. O. Dengler, and myself. ‘All this is going on, my boy needs help, this here Mr Brewster needs to be dismantled, needs to be racked and stacked, and she don’t tell me! Makes me want to put her down, man. Take her damn head off and put it up on a stake in the yard, man. With a sign saying: Here is one stupid woman.’

We were in the unofficial part of Camp Crandall known as No Man’s Land, located between the wire perimeter and a shack, also unofficial, where a cunning little weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor. No Man’s Land, so called because the CO pretended it did not exist, contained a mound of old tires, a piss tube, and a lot of dusty red ground. Leonard Hamnet gave the letter in his hand a dispirited look, folded it into the pocket of his fatigues, and began to roam around the heap of tires, aiming kicks at the ones that stuck out farthest. ‘One stupid woman,’ he repeated. Dust exploded up from a burst, worn-down wheel of rubber.

I wanted to make sure Hamnet knew he was angry with Mr Brewster, not his wife, and said, ‘She was trying –’

Hamnet’s great glistening bull’s head turned toward me.

‘Look at what the woman did. She nailed that bastard. She got other people to admit that he messed with their kids too. That must be almost impossible. And she had the guy arrested. He’s going to be put away for a long time.’

‘I’ll put that bitch away, too,’ Hamnet said, and kicked an old gray tire hard enough to push it nearly a foot back into the heap. All the other tires shuddered and moved. For a second it seemed that the entire mound might collapse.

‘This is my boy I’m talking about here,’ Hamnet said. ‘This shit has gone far enough.’

‘The important thing,’ Dengler said, ‘is to take care of your boy. You have to see he gets help.’

‘How’m I gonna do that from here?’ Hamnet shouted.

‘Write him a letter,’ Dengler said. ‘Tell him you love him. Tell him he did right to go to his mother. Tell him you think about him all the time.’

Hamnet took the letter from his pocket and stared at it. It was already stained and wrinkled. I did not think it could survive many more of Hamnet’s readings. His face seemed to get heavier, no easy trick with a face like Hamnet’s. ‘I got to get home,’ he said. ‘I got to get back home and take care of these people.’

Hamnet began putting in requests for compassionate leave relentlessly – one request a day. When we were out on patrol, sometimes I saw him unfold the tattered sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket and read it two or three times, concentrating intensely. When the letter began to shred along the folds, Hamnet taped it together.

We were going out on four- and five-day patrols during that period, taking a lot of casualties. Hamnet performed well in the field, but he had retreated so far within himself that he spoke in monosyllables. He wore a dull, glazed look, and moved like a man who had just eaten a heavy dinner. I thought he looked like a man who had given up, and when people gave up they did not last long – they were already very close to death, and other people avoided them.

We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. We had to eat cold C rations because heating them with C-4 would have been like putting up billboards and arc lights. We couldn’t smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. Hamnet’s C rations consisted of an old can of Spam that dated from an earlier war and a can of peaches. He saw Spanky staring at the peaches and tossed him the can. Then he dropped the Spam between his legs. Death was almost visible around him. He fingered the note out of his pocket and tried to read it in the damp gray twilight.

At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the Lieutenant yelled ‘Shit!’ and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.

The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy named Tyrell Budd coughed and dropped down right beside him. The FO called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.

One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the damp but solid ground on the other side of the paddy. Here the trees were much sparser, and a little group of thatched huts was visible through them.

Then two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us – just one. One mortar, one round. That was the first thing. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth, and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. Whoever fired the mortar should have had an excellent idea of our location, and I experienced that endless moment of pure, terrifying helplessness – a moment in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to let go of it – until the shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us, and shell fragments whizzed through the air. One of the fragments sailed over us, sliced a hamburger-size wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage’s helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground, and a little smoke drifted up from it.

We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, except that he was breathing. Hamnet shouldered his pack and picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder. He saw me looking at him.

‘I gotta take care of these people,’ he said.

The other thing I did not understand – apart from why there had been only one mortar round – came when we entered the village.

Lieutenant Harry Beevers had yet to join us, and we were nearly a year away from the events at Ia Thuc, when everything, the world and ourselves within the world, went crazy. I have to explain what happened. Lieutenant Harry Beevers killed thirty children in a cave at Ia Thuc and their bodies disappeared, but Michael Poole and I went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened in there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands. A pitiful character named Victor Spitalny ran into the cave when he heard gunfire, and came pinwheeling out right away, screaming, covered with welts or hives that vanished almost as soon as he came out into the air. Poor Spitalny had touched it too. Because I was twenty and already writing books in my head, I thought that the cave was the place where the other Tom Sawyer ended, where Injun Joe raped Becky Thatcher and slit Tom’s throat.

When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of Ia Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong – it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The little huts, still inhabitable, were empty – something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again. It was a ghost village, in a country where people thought the earth was sanctified by their ancestors’ bodies.