The Five O'Clock Follies, page 22
“What the hell are you talking about?” Nick asked, impatience in his voice, as he turned and signaled the waiter with two fingers for two cups of coffee.
“It crashed. It wasn't shot down. It was just little pings of small arms,” she said, struggling to keep her voice low and to control the hyperventilating that dogged her, marked her in her own eyes as too emotional for her job. “Those things are as big as a house, and armor-plated. You can't bring them down with a rifle.”
“Did you mention this to Ford?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Nick demanded. She could hear his impatience again. He was still upset and angry because she’d almost gotten killed. Or more likely, because she’d been with Ford when it happened. “Shit,” he’d said, when she’d gone looking for him this afternoon as soon as they were back from Chu Lai, “nice to know you’re still alive. I hung around there for hours till I knew you’d gotten out. Your hotshot boyfriend sure knows how to pick ‘em.”
“Quit being angry with me for almost dying. I . . .”
The elderly Chinese waiter interrupted, setting down two cups of coffee, two spoons, cream, he made quite a ritual. “Thing more?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Nick. “Give me a shot of that whiskey you keep stashed behind the bar.” The waiter shuffled off.
“I don't know why I didn’t tell him,” Angela said. “I just didn't. We’re already starting to squabble a bit about my work. And he was the one who got us there in the first place with that stupid Kevin telling him I should see pacification at first-hand instead of running around writing ‘peacenik’ stories. Peacenik, shit. Like how understaffed our field hospitals are?”
“OK, OK. Get off Kevin and get on with it.” He put the urgency of his words to Angela into a hurry-up motion directed at the waiter, “Where’s that drink?”
Then turning back to Angela, he picked up his thread. “You said Ford got an up-close dose of what disinformation is all about.”
“Did he ever. He was in a rage with Bob Komer and Kevin. He acted like they personally were trying to get me dismembered. He couldn't seem to decide which was worse, the thought of some disfigurement to my gorgeous body or to the First Amendment.”
“Which won the race?”
“Probably my gorgeous bod. We know which of their heads ultimately rule men, don't we, sweetie?”
“Jesus, you can be crude,” Nick said, shaking his head, and pouring a shot into his coffee cup from the bottle the waiter had placed on the table.
“Just realistic, to quote you,” she replied with a grin. “Angela with a black eye-patch or a stump below the knee would definitely lose some of her adornment value.”
“Adornment value? You're sick!”
He held out the whiskey bottle. “Want a taste?”
When she shook her head, he said, “Then just get on with the chopper story.”
“There's another part. Remember Mac Wheeler, the pilot who took me from Da Nang to Phu Bai?”
“No,” Nick replied, with more sarcasm in his voice. “I don't remember Mac Wheeler. You never bothered to tell me much more about your capture than what you wrote for Life magazine.”
“Well, Mac bought me a hamburger in the officers club before he took me out to my infamous bus ride that landed me in the soup instead of in Hue. There were several other pilots sitting with us and one of them was bitching about those Chinooks. Something wrong with them. The other pilots shushed him, but I think it was only because I was there. It clearly wasn’t a new topic for any of them, but they didn’t want him talking about it in front of me.”
“Maybe their small heads just wanted to talk to you – they didn’t want to bother talking shop,” Nick said, not letting go of his sarcastic tone.
“Now who's crude? Will you please calm down and listen? I may really be on to something big here. I’m talking about a major mechanical fault with the Chinooks.”
“Every time you turn around, there's another man hanging over you.”
“You knew it wasn’t a woman who helped me out after that damned lading sergeant wouldn’t let me on a flight, even though he was finding space for male correspondents as fast as they showed up. The chopper jock was from Texas, he was good looking, six-foot six and his name was Mac Wheeler. Anything else you want to know?”
“Speaking of boyfriends,” Nick said, nodding with a slight move of his head toward the sidewalk, “here comes Ford down the street with that scrawny chicken colonel.”
“Who is he?” Angela asked.
“Name's Andre. Most of the guys say he's pretty dependable as a source.”
“Could he help with this?”
“Get real," growled Nick. “The military's not going to admit they're crashing their own choppers.”
“I think that's what they're doing. I think the blades of the fore and aft rotors banged into each other!”
Nick just blinked at her, stunned, as though he hadn’t heard.
“Are you sure?” he finally asked.
“No, of course not, you idiot. How could I be sure? I just think it. But I’ve been going over and over that crash in my mind. The chopper was lifting off fine behind us as we were running away from it. Then there was an enormous thud and it suddenly went crazy.”
“Yeah, but anything could have hit it,” Nick said skeptically, even though he slowly took a pen and notebook out of his breast pocket.
“You’re right. But I don’t think anything did. It didn't act that way. I’ve kept trying to remember what it sounded like. Those two overhead rotors whirl at some gigantic speed. It’d probably be worse than two cars crashing head on at a hundred miles an hour, or something.”
“That’s one hell of a story, if it’s true,” Nick said. “But you could never prove it.”
“Not with Mac Wheeler, that’s for sure. He was singing that old World War II song, ‘Praise the Lord, we’re on a mighty mission’ when we were flying into Phu Bai. He believes in his mission, Nick, but his friend didn’t. The guy wanted to tell me something was wrong, but the others wouldn't let him. He was a gentle guy with a milky white complexion and a perpetual sunburn, a sweet smile. He just wasn't a cowboy like his pals. It was hard to think of him as a chopper jock.”
“What did he say?”
“Something like, ‘Just because they said they fixed the '47's pylons doesn't mean they did. The rotor gear boxes are still fucked up.’”
“Goddamned cowboys,” Nick said softly. “They’d rather get killed than admit anything’s wrong with this war.”
~~~~~~
Chapter 41
Late for Dinner
It was at about this time that the gossip revved up a notch about Angela and Curtis. He had one of those colonial pastel villas out on Cong Ly, and word started sifting down to some of the correspondents that he had begun having little dinner parties for high-level Embassy and military personnel. Angela always seemed to be at these little soirees and acted as hostess. Reports were also sifting back that the villa’s décor was taking on a decidedly “feminine” touch.
This phase ended rather abruptly one night when Angela got tied up in Da Nang, trying to find Mac Wheeler's pilot friend who had blabbed about rotor problems on the Chinooks. She didn't make it back in time for what Ford seemed to view as her “own” dinner party.
Even though there had been only four people at Ford’s, most of the guys in the press corps heard a number of conflicting versions the next day about how the infamous dinner degenerated into domestic slapstick. And Nick and several others had grandstand seats for a fight after the party that took place in a pedicab in front of the Continental.
The next day, Nick tried to piece together the sequence of events as best he could.
There were a few things from all the versions that everyone seemed to agree on. As dessert was being served, Angela had shown up dirty and tired, dragging her pack and steel helmet and tracked red clay from her jungle boots across a white oriental rug she and Ford had bought only the week before. Ford was light and controlled. “The back door's not a bad idea, my dear, if you're going to be tromping around in working boots.”
“Damn,” said Angela, when she saw what she had done. “My beautiful carpet. How will I ever get that clay out?”
“Sorry to be such a mess,” she said to the guests, whom she didn't know. “Just give me a minute and I’ll clean up.”
“What kept you?” Ford asked.
“It was ... uh, a chopper crash,” Angela stammered. “I ... it was important.”
“What could possibly be so fascinating about a chopper crash in this place?” Ford delivered the line with a wink in his voice, as though he were attempting the role of straight man to a comic’s routine.
But one thing led to another. The guests, persons of some position at the Embassy, were subjected to an unremarkable domestic squabble: no redeeming characteristics, no clever repartee, no zinging one-liners. The gentleman guest recalled it as mildly amusing, or so he said in recounting the tale to a friend of his from Time magazine. But his wife was said to have been scandalized, and didn't mind saying so to the Embassy wives who heard her indignant version over bridge.
A friend of Nick’s who worked in the Embassy told him she heard the reason the wife became so indignant was that as Angela and Ford got deeper into their fight, Angela hadn’t even bothered to hide that she was bored by these little intimate dinner parties with people who weren’t even her friends.
Nick’s contact also described the Embassy wife as “an aging blonde cheerleader-type without a hair out of place.” Nick chuckled to himself on hearing this. He could imagine Angela’s reaction to the woman.
So, the tale went on, Angela’s stance had been that the houseboy could cook, they’d all been fed, so “what the hell difference does it make whether I’m late or not?”
“My God, you can't fly in the face of every civilized convention like some hippie,” Ford sputtered his cheeks spotting crimson.
“There is nothing uncivilized about having a job and doing it. That is a higher priority than killing time with pointless socializing.”
“You certainly bore easily. You’re the only living human who found it dull being a prisoner of war,” he snapped back.
“I didn’t say I was bored, for Christ sake, Ford, don’t twist everything around.”
“What did you say, then?”
“That the days were uneventful and that I eventually got over being scared.”
“And you wonder why I worry about you!” Ford’s anger suddenly seemed to dissipate, this last expelled in a puff, no more than a whisper.
“First I'm uncivilized, then a fool. You certainly can turn on the charm when you set your mind to it.”
Angela grabbed up the duffel bag she had tossed on a low Japanese stool only moments before, turned to the Embassy couple who were both ashen with embarrassment, and said, “I’m truly sorry, but there’s no way we could sit here smiling and chatting as though nothing has happened,” and she stomped toward the door.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Ford yelled.
“To find Nick and get drunk,” she said as she slammed the door behind her.
“The hell you are,” Ford said, following her out.
The next thing the Embassy couple heard was the engine of their own car starting up in the courtyard outside. As they ran to look out, they saw Ford roaring away in hot pursuit of Angela who was at the wheel of Ford’s car, speeding down Cong Ly toward town. The couple’s Vietnamese driver stood bewildered in the spot where their Mercedes had been the moment before.
~~~~~~
Chapter 42
Pedicab Fight
Ford, chasing after Angela down Cong Ly, shifted the unfamiliar little Mercedes into low feeling like some teenaged drag racer. What the hell am I doing, he asked himself? Had he completely lost his mind? He had walked off and left guests in his home; the gossip, he knew, would be all over Saigon. He saw with relief that traffic was light this far out from downtown, but still heavy enough that Angela probably wouldn’t notice him following her. He felt that he would be able to keep his little white Peugot in sight, at least for the moment.
Angela was rude, he thought, absolutely rude to Jim’s wife, whatever her name was. She’s always like that. Says she has nothing in common with the wives, would rather talk politics or battle strategies with their husbands. How can you have a life with a woman like that? No sense of propriety. No order. You'd certainly never see Berenice standing up her own guests, then arrive wearing men’s clothes and wreck a rug of such fine quality that it should be handed down to the children.
That’s the problem, he decided, swerving to avoid a bicycle loaded so high with what looked like kindling that from the back he couldn’t see the rider. Order and form mean nothing to Angela. For Berenice, with her European background, they are everything. Angela is all color and texture and rhythm, and Berenice is form.
He slammed on the brakes as a couple on a motor scooter shot out from their parking place on the sidewalk. “Damn kids,” he spat out to his empty car. But he could see that Angela was stopped, too, at a red light.
My God, he thought, I’m turning into a nut over this woman. I’ll probably be arrested for driving a stolen car. What a stupid end to a distinguished career – rotting for the rest of my life in a Vietnamese jail. That’s a little melodramatic, he laughed at himself, but I’ll certainly lose my job if word gets back that I’ve gone berserk. Why don’t I just drive back to my house now, maybe I can catch Jim before they’ve called a cab, or worse, the police.
Ford could see Angela pulling some kind of maneuver up ahead. Now what the hell was she up to, he wondered. She was cutting through the park, which was fine, made it easy to keep tabs on her. He was not going to let her escape. No matter what happened, he was not going to lose this woman from his life. But, hell, he thought, that would probably mean he would spend the rest of his life hanging out in smoke-filled bars talking about newspapering. Funny, that’s close to what Berenice had said to him: “I'm sick of dragging around and constantly having to recreate the order of my life while you preen and pamper your ego and your ‘career.’ You’re the ‘star,’ you’re in the spotlight, and I’m just a stagehand. Well, from now on it is my own life I’m living, not yours!”
As he sped through the dark park, his headlights played shadow finger games on the car’s hood with the sentinel trees lining both sides of the road. He was having no trouble keeping Angela in sight as she sped toward the central city, but he knew he could easily lose her once they got to the monument circle in front of the Independence Palace. If she’s determined to lose me, he thought, that would be the place to do it. I’d better make my move now.
He got close behind his own little white Peugot and tried to force Angela over to the curb several times, but only succeeded in what looked like a childish game of bumper tag. After he had banged into her from behind for the third time, she managed to get a car ahead of him in the increasing traffic as they approached the palace, and she took a left down Thong Nhat through the park that ended at Cathedral Square.
At the end of the park, she made a quick right at the cathedral. As Ford made the turn, he saw that she had abandoned the Peugot, parking it half up on the sidewalk of JFK square just behind the church. He saw her running, dodging through the clogged traffic, then she grabbed a pedicab heading in the direction of downtown. Ford wasn't far behind. He abandoned Jim’s Mercedes right in the street behind his own car, yelling, “Follow that cab!” at a startled coolie as he leaped into the gnarled fellow’s pedal-driven rickshaw and sent him pumping down the Tu Do, breathlessly trying to catch up to Angela.
As his fast-pedaling driver brought him abreast of Angela’s carriage, Ford leaped out running, grabbed the hood of her pedicab and climbed in, only to see her pull the same maneuver, going out the right hand side and catch another cab on the run.
****
Ray Corrigan was slouched down in one of the wicker chairs facing Nick across several empty Tiger beer bottles on the Continental terrace while Nick expounded his theory about secret incursions into Cambodia. “I tell you we can’t just sit by and . . .”
Corrigan was looking out at the street and suddenly burst out laughing.
“What's so goddamned funny?” Nick asked.
“Take a look over your shoulder,” Corrigan said.
Nick turned around in his chair in time to see what appeared to be two cyclo drivers in a dispute, both waving their arms, an open rickshaw pulled in front of a covered pedicab apparently blocking the second one’s path. “What the hell?” he said, turning back to Corrigan with the question.
“Look again,” said the burly Irishman, sputtering with laughter.
Nick swiveled back to see more than the usual snarl of traffic pulsating around the battling coolies with another pedicab added to the core of the gridlock. Ford was tugging on Angela’s arm as she tried to climb into the third cab.
****
“Jesus, Angela,” Ford screamed over the sounds of the traffic and the jabbering drivers, “let me pay these guys off or we're both going to land in jail. Be sensible. You told me yourself how brutal those White Mice can be.”
“Oh, for Christ sake, all right,” she snapped back. “We look like fools tying up traffic and fighting in the middle of the street. But hurry up, this is embarrassing.” Ford had thrown a wad of bills at the two disgruntled hackies and was back in the cab with Angela before she got the last words out of her mouth.
“What are you so afraid of?” Ford asked as he climbed in and said, “vite” to their new driver. “Couples have arguments, and we’ve had our first. And I’m sorry. I apologize. But you can’t run away every time we have a little quarrel.” He tried to put his arm around her, but she pulled away, and sat sideways in the cramped cab seat, as the hunched little coolie cycled down toward the river.
