“You got to have one,” said Ike, although from the sound of Walter’s voice he certainly sensed there might be no response from his friend. Not on this one.
Walter said, “I can’t do it. I can’t.”
“Leave the man alone,” Helen ordered. She had been standing there all along, unnoticed. “Let him be.”
Billy grumbled and Ike may have said something too, under his breath, but whatever it was Walter couldn’t make it out.
“I’m writing it up. I don’t give a shit,” Billy proclaimed. He looked to Ike for approval or encouragement or something. The old man, his upper body now completely covered in smoke that drifted with the changing breeze in a new direction, off into the square, nodded affirmatively. That was all Billy needed. He grabbed the chunk of blue chalk next to the register and scribbled on the blackboard: 1937/Right Now/None.
“ None,” he scoffed.
“I vote for ‘Right Now,’ ” said Helen, giving Billy a pat on his ass as she made her way back to the kitchen, singing, “It’s a man’s world…”
Sadie Fagan had told him. It took awhile to connect the dots, but now he knew. She told him. Walter had always worked deliberately, not in haste, but fast enough to suit him. He liked to get all the information he could, then it was his preference to return to St. John, sit out on his deck and follow the shafts of sunlight streaking down between the clouds blowing in over St. Thomas, watching as sun and sea danced together. His gaze followed the sailboats plying the narrow channels between the empty, off-shore islands. Alone on his deck, in a wicker chair at the covered table, usually with a cold drink in his hands, he would fit the pieces of the puzzle together. The solution, the picture to be laid out before his eyes, would tell him where to go next. It always had.
Sadie said it. “He’ll come right here. Home.” Walter had asked her, straight out, after she’d been talking about her nephew for a half-hour or more. “Where would he go,” he asked, “if he was really in trouble?” Home is what she told him, without hesitation. Walter knew what she had told him was important. He had only to figure out why. For Harry Levine, home was out of the question.
While eating breakfast the following day, Walter found himself asking-where was it that Harry Levine could go to get closest to Roswell, Georgia? The closest, without actually going home? And then he remembered. Sadie Fagan had told him. In her detailed, often charming history of her family’s life in the suburbs of Atlanta, she mentioned that Roswell, Georgia, had, like so many small towns and cities in America, adopted a sister city in Europe. Since Walter never took notes, he had nothing to refresh his memory. But he didn’t need any help. He remembered the name, partly because that’s what he did-he remembered things-but mostly because it was unique, interesting, quite literally unforgettable- Bergen op Zoom. He wasn’t sure what it meant, and made a mental note to look into it. Bergen op Zoom was another piece of information. Perhaps it fit. Perhaps it didn’t. He checked it out as he did everything else he judged might be important. For this, he called his old friend, Aat van de Steen, in Amsterdam. Aat and Walter went back a long way-to Vientiane, 1971. To the Yao.
Vientiane was not a party town. That was Walter’s first impression. It was nothing like Saigon. The capital city of Laos, unlike the capital of Vietnam, was not filled with tens of thousands of twenty-year-old Americans- thirsty, horny, heavily armed and scared shitless. Walter’s Saigon was a city electric in its madness, a plastic conceit of glitzy bright lights and sparkling colors, gold and blue, yellow and blood red. Saigon was all about sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and death. Violence was the universal language. People got killed there every day. Many American soldiers came to Saigon, moved out to fight in the steamy jungles filled with thatched-roof huts, grouped together in tiny villages, and they never came back. New meat arrived. Saigon carried on. Vientiane, however, was quiet, reserved, an ancient city, a place where people were comfortable with intermittent water and power and almost no telephones at all. Traffic consisted of an occasional car or bus. People walked and never seemed to be in a hurry. It was a city of dark colors, all greens and maroons, purple and black. While all roads in Vietnam led to Saigon, there were no roads in Laos.
Vientiane lay along the Mekong River in a valley of sweet-smelling flowers, cooling rains and warm breezes, blessed for centuries with solitude and isolation. Free and peaceful Thailand, once the hated warrior kingdom of Siam, was on the far bank of the river. Nearly two centuries ago, a Siamese army crossed the river and turned Vientiane to rubble. The city was burned to the ground. Laotians were slow to forgive and forget. They still viewed Thailand with suspicion. In the twentieth century, Vientiane received plenty of foreigners. They were almost all French, mostly middle-aged, most of them fluent in Lao and one or more of the various other languages spoken in that exotic part of Southeast Asia. A far cry from the Americans in Vietnam. They were unwelcome visitors, crude, cruel temporary conquerors. The French lived in Indochina. If they were not quite the equal of the British, born and raised in India in the nineteenth century-never having set foot on English soil-they were close enough. Many of the Indochinese French, especially after a few glasses of wine from the home country, fancied themselves more Asian than European. After all, they owned Laos-or thought they did. Walter liked Vientiane from the moment he arrived there in the spring of 1971.
The airport at Vientiane was not the worst Walter had ever seen but it was near the top of any such list. The tower, such as it was, identified his Southern Air flight as one coming in from Burma. Actually, it had been a quick and easy trip from Saigon. He left at 06:30 and was in his hotel in Vientiane in time for breakfast. His passport and other papers said he was Fred Russo, an American engineer from Chicago. Quite an irony, he thought. Freddy Russo.
His mission in Laos was simple. Weren’t they all? This time he was to find a Dutchman named Aat van de Steen. They didn’t tell him why. Just find him, they said, and bring back any message the Dutchman wished to transmit-whatever the hell that meant. Van de Steen could be found, they told Walter, with the Yao. The problem, of course, was no one had any idea where the Yao were. “They’re in Laos,” the Colonel said. “Somewhere in fucking Laos.” Walter had three days to prepare. The Colonel said, “We’ll put you in wherever you want. Just tell us where.” On the second day Walter told him. “Get me into Vientiane,” he said.
There were inhabitants in Laos as early as the fourth century, or so Walter had read. The modern history of the small nation began somewhere between 1349 and 1353, depending on who you believed, when the Emperor Fa Ngum founded the landlocked kingdom he called Lang Xang- Land of a Million Elephants. Walter could not wait to see them-the elephants. The Yao had come to Laos some time later, drifting south, migrating from China, desperately looking for some place to live safely. They eventually found their happiness in the Laotian highlands. They settled in and were still there more than half a millennium later. They brought with them a peaceful culture of literacy, scholarship, agriculture and religious intellect. It was a way of life they protected and nourished in their new land. They spoke an almost unknown language, Mian, but the material Walter read about them said they also spoke Lao, Khum and Hmong Njua, the three most common languages of Laos. They were an educated people. Walter hoped some of them also spoke English. When they first arrived, the Yao were few in number. As the centuries passed, they showed no evident desire to expand the size of their tribe. In fact, they did their best to prevent growth. They felt there was safety in numbers-small numbers-and they taught their children accordingly. Among the peoples of Laos-the Lao Loum, Lao Theung and the Yao-the Yao were the tiniest minority.
Walter figured that’s why nobody at Headquarters Company had any idea where they might be. It was clear to him, even in the limited time he had to prepare for this mission, that the ancient Yao had been right. For a mountain people, the fewer of them there were, the more effective was their defense. Their Chinese persecutors did not follow them to Laos. New enemies found them elusive and soon turned to other pursuits, easier prey. The Yao stayed to themselves. Farmers mostly, they were a proud and stable people, firmly rooted in the central highlands for six centuries. Unfortunately for their would-be handlers in the CIA and the U.S. Army, they were damn hard to find.
By 1970, the Central Intelligence Agency had more than thirty case officers actively engaged in Laos. Back in Washington the joke was they had an unlimited budget and had already overspent it. The central tenet of the American CIA was that everybody had a price-no exceptions. Anyone could be bought, even an ancient people like the Yao. Somewhere within that tribe someone in authority would be tempted by the assorted pleasures available in and from the most modern, most powerful civilization on Earth, the United States of America. They were sure this was so because it was true everywhere else in the world. The CIA circled the globe carrying bags of money. The list of their collaborators seemed endless. Had they any doubt at all about the Yao, they had only to look at their success with the Hmong, Laos’ largest ethnic tribal group. To the folks at Langley, the Hmong appeared every bit as backward as the Yao and far more numerous. Their economy centered around opium, and while the Hmong were more sellers and refiners than growers, their fortunes rose and fell with the poppy. To enlist the Hmong in the American battle with North Vietnam, part of the epic struggle to defeat worldwide communist expansion, the CIA
