Читать книгу The Committed - Viet Thanh Nguyen - Страница 10

CHAPTER 1

I may no longer be a spy or a sleeper, but I am most definitely a spook. How can I not be, with two holes in my head from which leaks the black ink in which I am writing these words. What a peculiar condition, being dead yet penning these lines in my little room in Paradise. This must make me a ghostwriter, and as such, it is a simple, if spooky, matter to dip my pen into the ink flowing from my twin holes, one drilled by myself, the other by Bon, my best friend and blood brother. Put your gun down, Bon. You can only kill me once.

Or maybe not. I am also still a man of two faces and two minds, one of which might perhaps yet still be intact. With two minds, I am able to see any issue from both sides, and while I once flattered myself that this was a talent, now I understand it to be a curse. What was a man with two minds except a mutant? Perhaps even a monster. Yes, I admit it! I am not just one but two. Not just I but you. Not just me but we.

You ask me what we should be called, having been nameless for so long. I hesitate to give you a straight answer, as that has never been my habit. I am a man of bad habits, and every time I have been broken of one—never having given up such a thing willingly—I have always gone back to it, whimpering and dewy-eyed.

Take these words, for example. I am writing them, and writing is the worst of habits. While most people squeeze what they can from their lives, suffering for their paychecks, absorbing vitamin D as they enjoy the sunshine, hunting for another member of the species with whom to procreate or just to rut, and refusing to think about death, I pass my time with pen and paper in my corner of Paradise, growing ever whiter and thinner, frustration steaming from my head, the sweat of sorrow sticking to me.

I could tell you the name I have in my passport, VO DANH. I assumed this name in anticipation of coming here to Paris, or, as our French masters taught us to call it, the City of Light. We, Bon and I, arrived in the airport at night on a flight from Jakarta. Stepping out of the airplane, we were gripped by a sense of relief, for we had reached asylum, the fever dream of all refugees, especially those rendered refugees not just once or twice but three times: 1954, nine years after I was born; 1975, when I was young and reasonably handsome; and 1979, just two years ago. Was the third time the charm, as the Americans liked to say? Bon sighed before he pulled his airline-provided sleeping mask over his eyes. Let’s just hope France is better than America.

That hope was ill-advised if one judged countries by their border officials. The one who inspected my passport wore the blank mask of all security guards as he studied my photograph and then me. His pale face seemed displeased that someone had granted me access to his beloved country, this man who lacked both an upper lip and a mustache to disguise his lack. You’re Vietnamese, this white man said, the first words ever uttered to me on visiting my father’s homeland for the first time.

Yes! I am Vo Danh! Along with my best French accent, I gave the border policeman my most fawning smile, ingratiating to the point of being grating. But my father is French. Maybe I am also French?

His bureaucratic brain processed this statement, and when he finally smiled, I thought, Ah! I have made my first joke in French! But what he said was: No . . . you . . . are . . . definitely . . . not . . . French. Not . . . with . . . a . . . name . . . like . . . this. Then he stamped my passport with my date of entry, 18/07/81, and flicked it across the counter, already looking over my shoulder at the next supplicant.

I met Bon on the other side of passport control. We had at last stepped foot on la Gaule, as my father had taught me to call France in his parish school. It was fitting, then, that the airport was named after Charles de Gaulle, the greatest of great Frenchmen in recent memory. The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese. Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily. No matter our nationality, we all become accustomed to the aroma of our own contradictions.

What’s wrong? he said. Are you crying again?

I’m not crying, I sobbed. I’m just so overcome to be home at last.

By now Bon was used to my unpredictable bursts of tears. He sighed and took me by the hand. In his other hand, he carried only one bag, a cheap cloth duffel, a gift of the United Nations. His bag was nowhere near as fashionable as my leather one, presented to me by my old mentor Claude when I graduated from Occidental College in Southern California. My old man gave me one just like it when I left Phillips Exeter and went to Yale, Claude had told me, his eyes misting. Although he was a CIA agent who saw interrogation and assassination as his trade, he could be sentimental about some things, such as our friendship and high-quality men’s furnishings. I held on to the leather bag for this same nostalgic reason. Even though it was not very large, the bag, like Bon’s, was not full. Like most refugees we barely had any material belongings, even if our bags were packed with dreams and fantasies, trauma and pain, sorrow and loss, and, of course, ghosts. Since ghosts were weightless, we could carry an infinite number of them.

Passing the baggage carousels, we were the only passengers not pulling suitcases or pushing trolleys burdened with luggage and touristic expectation. We were not tourists, or expatriates, or returnees, or diplomats, or businessmen, or any class of dignified traveler. No, we were refugees, and our experience in a time machine called an international jetliner was not enough to dispel the year we had languished in a reeducation camp or the two years we had passed in a refugee camp on an Indonesian island called Galang. The stainless steel and glass and tile and bright lighting of the airport disoriented us after the bamboo and thatch and mud and candles of the camps, and we walked slowly and haphazardly, bumping against other passengers as we sought the exit. Eventually we came to it and the doors slid open, and we emerged under the vast ceiling of the international arrivals area, where a crowd of expectant faces inspected us.

A woman called out my name. It was my aunt, or, to put it more accurately, the woman who I pretended was my aunt. During my years in the United States as a communist spy inserted into the shabby ranks of the exiled South Vietnamese army, I had written her periodic letters, ostensibly regarding my personal travails as a refugee, but really encoded with secret messages in invisible ink about the machinations of some elements of this army who hoped to take back our homeland from communist rule. We had used Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction as our common cipher, and it was her task to pass on my messages to Man, blood brother to me and to Bon. I greeted her with relief and trepidation, for she knew what Bon did not and could not ever know, that Man was a spy, as I had been. He was my handler, and if eventually he became my torturer in that reeducation camp, didn’t that suit me, a man with two minds? And if my aunt was not really my aunt, wasn’t that perfect for a man with two faces?

She was really Man’s aunt, and she looked exactly as she had described herself in her last letter: tall, thin, with jet-black hair. There ended the resemblance to what I had imagined of her: someone middle-aged with a back permanently bent from working as a seamstress, humbled by her devotion to the revolution. Instead, this woman’s closest relative was a cigarette, judging from the shape of her body and what she held in one hand. She exuded smoke and confidence, and with her aggressive high heels she equaled me in height, although she looked taller, given her slimness, her formfitting gray knit dress, and her hair styled into a peak, a uniform that she would wear every day. Although I knew she was likely in her fifties, she could have passed for someone in her late thirties, blessed as she was by both French style and a half share of Asian genes that rendered her ageless.

My God! She seized me by the shoulders and made kissing sounds as she touched first one cheek and then the other to mine in that charming French manner of greeting, which had never been extended to me by the French in my homeland, including my French father. You two need new clothes. And haircuts!

Yes, she was definitely French.

I introduced her to Bon in French, but he responded in Vietnamese. He had a lycée education, like me, but he hated the French and was here only for my sake. It was true that the French had given him a scholarship, but he had otherwise never benefitted from them in any way, except for traveling on the roads that they had designed, which were hard to be grateful for given that the slave labor of peasants like Bon’s family had built them. My aunt switched to Vietnamese as she led us to the taxi queue, inquiring about our travels and our travails in the purest, most classical version of our language, spoken by Hanoi’s intellectuals. Bon was silent. His own dialect blended the rural north, where our families originated from, and the rural south outside of Saigon. His parents had settled there after our Catholic exodus from the north in ’54, the first of our three refugee experiences. It was either shame for his dialect that kept him quiet or, more likely, seething rage. Anything from Hanoi might be communist, and anything that might be communist was undoubtedly communist, at least to someone as maniacally anticommunist as he was. He wasn’t even thankful for the only gift our communist captors ever gave him, the lesson that what does not kill you makes you stronger. That must mean Bon and I were now supermen.

What do you do? he finally said once we were in the taxi, my aunt between us in the back seat.

My aunt looked at me with great reproach and said, I see my nephew has said nothing about me. I’m an editor.

Editor? I almost said it out loud but stopped myself, for I was supposed to know who my aunt was. In seeking a sponsor for our departure from the refugee camp, I had written to her—not in code this time—because she was the only one I knew who was not an American. She would likely inform Man of my arrival, but I preferred that certainty over returning to America, where I had committed crimes of which I had never been convicted but of which I was not proud.

She named a publishing house I had not heard of. I make my living in books, she said. Mostly fiction and philosophy.

The noise in Bon’s throat indicated how he was not the kind that read, except for the army field manual, tabloid newspapers, and the notes that I stuck on the refrigerator door. He would have been more comfortable with my aunt if she were actually a seamstress, and I was thankful that I had told Bon nothing about her.

I want to hear about everything you’ve been through, my aunt said. The reeducation and then the refugee camp. You are the first ones I’ve met who went through reeducation!

Perhaps not tonight, dear aunt, I said. I did not tell her of the confession I had written under great duress in reeducation, hidden in my leather duffel’s false bottom, along with a disintegrating copy of Hedd’s book, its pages yellowing. I was not even sure why I bothered to hide my confession, for the last person who should read it, Bon, showed no interest in its existence at all. Like me, he had been tortured into writing his own confession many times in the reeducation camp; unlike me, he did not know that it was Man, his blood brother, who was the commissar of the camp. How could he, when the commissar did not have a face? What Bon did know, he said, was that a confession extracted under torture was nothing but lies. Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth. Like my father, the priest, I was the kind who believed quite the opposite.

My aunt’s apartment was in the 11th arrondissement, abutting the Bastille, where the French Revolution started. A spire that we drove by in the darkness marked the Bastille’s place in history. If I was once a communist and a revolutionary, then I, too, was a descendant of this event that decapitated aristocracy with the finality of a guillotine. Off the highway and into the city, I now felt truly in France, or, even better, Paris, with its narrow streets and its buildings of uniform height and design, not to mention the charming lettering over the storefronts, instantly recognizable from postcards and movies like Irma la Douce, which I had seen in an American movie theater soon after I arrived in Los Angeles as a foreign student. Everything about Paris was charming, as I would eventually discover, even its prostitutes and even on Sundays, in the early morning, after lunch, and in August, when everything was closed.

Over the next few weeks, I would never exhaust myself of that word: “charming”! Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue. But it is not charming, not like freshly brewed dark coffee served in a thimble-sized cup on a miniature plate with a doll’s spoon, delivered by a waiter as assured in the value of his profession as a banker or an art collector.

The Americans owned Hollywood with its loudness and swagger, its generous brassieres and cowboy hats, but the French waged the charm campaign. It was evident in the details, as if Yves Saint-Laurent had designed all of France, from how our taxi driver actually wore a beret, to the name of my aunt’s street, rue Richard Lenoir, to the peeling blue paint on the steel door of my aunt’s apartment building, no. 37, to the echoing darkness of the hallway with its malfunctioning light, to the narrow wooden steps that led, four stories up, to my aunt’s apartment.

The fact that none of this besides the beret was intrinsically charming indicates how the French had an enormously unfair advantage in their charm offensive, at least for those like me who had been, despite our best efforts, nearly completely colonized. I say nearly because even as I was charmed huffing up those stairs, some small, reptilian part of my brain—the savage native in me—resisted the charm long enough to recognize it for what it was: the seduction of subjugation. It was that feeling that made me all but swoon at the shapely baguette that graced my aunt’s dining table. Oh, baguette! Symbol of France, and hence symbol of French colonization! So spoke one side of me. But the other side said, at the same time, Ah, baguette! Symbol of how we Vietnamese have made French culture our own! For we were good bakers of the baguette, and the banh mi we created with baguettes were far tastier and more imaginative than the sandwiches the French fashioned from them. That dialectical baguette, along with a cucumber salad in a rice wine vinaigrette, a pot of chicken curry with potatoes and carrots, a bottle of red wine, and, eventually, a caramel flan in a dark brown puddle of caramelized sugar, was the repast prepared by my aunt. How I had longed for these dishes or anything like them! Fantasies of food had beckoned to me during the endless months spent in the reeducation camp, located somewhere in Hell’s inner circle, and then in the refugee camp in Hell’s outer fringes, where the best that could be said about our diet was that it was insufficient and the worst that it was rancid.

My father taught me how to cook Vietnamese food, my aunt said as she spooned the curry into our bowls. My father was a soldier like the two of you, but a forgotten one.

The very mention of a father caused my heart to pause. I was in the land of my father, the patriarch who had rejected me. Would my life have been different if he had recognized me as his son and claimed my mother as his mistress, if not his wife? Part of me yearned for his love, and the other part of me hated myself for feeling anything for him besides scorn.

The French drafted my father to fight in the Great War, my aunt went on. Both Bon and I sat on the edges of our chairs, waiting for her to pick up her spoon or tear into the baguette, the signal to attack the meal lying so provocatively before us. Eighteen years old and swept from tropical Indochina to the metropole, along with tens of thousands of others. Not that he saw Paris until well after war’s end. And he never returned home. His ashes sit in my bedroom, on top of my bureau.

There’s nothing sadder than exile, poor Bon said, fingers trembling on the tablecloth. For most of his life, he would never have said anything remotely philosophical, but his own exile and the tragic loss of his wife and son had made him increasingly ruminative. Bring the ashes home, he continued. Only then will your father’s spirit truly know peace.

You would think such talk might blunt our appetites, but Bon and I were desperate to eat anything besides the subsistence rations of a nongovernmental organization tasked with keeping refugees alive but nothing more. Besides, the French and the Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand. The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.

So we talked and ate, but just as important, we drank and smoked and thought freely, indulging three of my bad habits, all of which reeducation had denied me. To satisfy those habits, my aunt not only opened successive bottles of red wine but also uncapped a Moroccan canister on her dining table that held two kinds of cigarettes, with and without hashish. Even “hashish” sounds charming, or at least exotic, in comparison to “marijuana,” America’s drug of choice, despite how both come from the same plant. Marijuana was what hippies and teenagers smoked, its symbol the terminally unfashionable band called the Grateful Dead, whom Yves Saint-Laurent would have lined up and shot for popularizing tie-dyed T-shirts. Hashish evoked the Levant and the souk, the strange and the exciting, the decadent and the aristocratic. One might try marijuana in Asia, but in the Orient, one smoked hashish.

Even Bon shared one of the potent cigarettes, and it was then, hunger sated, bodies and minds relaxed, feeling more than a touch French in our smug post-supper bliss, which was for refugees nearly as pleasurable as postcoital bliss, that Bon noticed one of the framed pictures on the mantel.

Is that—he stood up abruptly, staggered, caught his balance, and then walked across the fringes of a Persian rug to the fireplace. It’s—he pointed a finger at the face—it’s him.

When I said to my aunt that it seemed that they knew someone in common, she said, I can’t imagine who.

Bon turned from the mantel, red with rage. I’ll tell you who. The devil.

I leaped to my feet. If the devil was here, I wanted to meet him! But on closer inspection . . . That’s not the devil, I said, looking at a colorized photo of a man in his prime, white-haired and goateed, a halo of soft light around his head. It’s Ho Chi Minh.

Once I had been a dedicated communist like him, my mission continuing even in America, where I had worked to support the revolution at home by doing my best to scupper the counterrevolution abroad. I had kept this secret from nearly everyone, especially Bon. The only ones who knew my communist sympathies were my aunt and her nephew, Man. He, Bon, and I were blood brothers, the Three Musketeers, or perhaps, as history may judge us, the Three Stooges. Man and I were spies, secretly working against the anticommunist cause that Bon held so dear, the subterfuge squeezing us into all manner of difficult situations, our method of escape usually involving someone’s death. Even now Bon believed Man to be dead and me to be as anticommunist as he was, for he had seen how the communists had scarred me in reeducation, something he thought they would only do unto their enemies. I was not an enemy to communism, merely someone with a near-fatal weakness in being able to sympathize with communism’s actual enemies, including Americans. What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance. Sympathy for the enemy might as well be sympathy for the devil, tantamount to betrayal. Bon, devout Catholic, fervent anticommunist, certainly believed this. He had killed more communists than anyone I knew, and while he realized that some of those he had killed were perhaps only mistaken for communists, he had faith that both History and God would forgive him.

Now he aimed his finger at my aunt and said, You’re a communist, aren’t you? I grabbed his hand out of reflex, knowing that if his finger were on a trigger, then my aunt might be dead in a moment. Bon slapped my hand away, and my aunt raised an eyebrow and lit a cigarette of the unlaced kind.

I’m a fellow traveler rather than a communist, she said. I have enough humility to know that I’m not a real revolutionary. Just a sympathizer. She was as nonchalant about her politics as only the French could be, a people so cool that they had almost no use for the air-conditioning that Americans demanded. Like my father, I’m more Trotskyist than Stalinist. I believe in power for the people and international revolution, not a party running the show for its own country. I believe in the rights of man and equality for all, not collectivism and the revolution of the proletariat.

Then why have a picture of the devil in your home?

Because he’s not the devil but the greatest of patriots. When he lived in Paris he even called himself Nguyen the Patriot. He believed in the independence of our homeland, as do you and I, as did my father. Shouldn’t we celebrate what we have in common?

She spoke calmly and with reason. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language to Bon. You’re a communist, Bon said conclusively. When he turned to me, he had the wild and frantic look of a wounded tomcat backed into a corner. I can’t stay here.

I knew then that my aunt’s life was safe. In Bon’s rigid honor code, repaying hospitality with murder was immoral. But it was nearly midnight and we had nowhere else to go.

Sleep here tonight, I said. Tomorrow we’ll find the Boss. His address was in my wallet, written down in the Pulau Galang camp before the magicians in charge of the camp’s departures had teleported the Boss to Paris a year ago. The mention of the Boss calmed Bon down, for the Boss owed him his life and had promised to take care of us if we ever made it here.

All right, he said, hashish, wine, and exhaustion blunting his murderous instincts. He looked again at my aunt with something like regret, the closest he might ever come to actual regret. It’s not personal.

Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.

My aunt retired to her bedroom, leaving us in the living room with a sofa and a pile of bedding on the Persian rug.

You never told me she was a communist, Bon said from the sofa, his eyes bloodshot.

Because you never would have agreed to stay here, I said, sitting down next to him. And blood’s more important than belief, isn’t it? I raised my hand to him, the one with the red scar on the palm, the mark of our blood brotherhood, sworn back in Saigon one night in a grove on the grounds of our lycée. We had sliced our palms and gripped each other’s hands, mingling our blood then and forever.

Now, a century or two after our adolescence—or so it felt after all we had suffered—in the land of our Gallic ancestors, Bon raised his scarred hand and said, So who’s sleeping on the sofa?

While lying on the floor I heard Bon on the sofa whispering the prayers he uttered every night, addressed to God and to Linh and Duc, his dead wife and son. They had died on the tarmac of the Saigon airport as we sprinted to board the last airplane out of the city in April 1975, the second of our refugee experiences. An uncaring bullet lanced them both, fired by an unknown gunman in the chaos. Sometimes he heard their mournful ghosts calling, occasionally pleading with him to join them, other times urging him to stay alive. But his hands, so adept at killing others, would not turn against himself, for committing suicide was a sin against God. Taking another’s life, however, was sometimes permissible, for God oftentimes needed the faithful to be His instrument of justice, or so Bon explained to me. He was at peace with being a devout Catholic and a calm killer, but what worried me more than how Bon contradicted himself, and how I surely contradicted myself, was that one day we might contradict each other. On that day when he learned of my secret, Bon would render justice on me, regardless of the blood we shared.

Before we left the next morning, we presented my aunt with a gift from Indonesia, a package of kopi luwak, one of four in Bon’s duffel. We had been inspired by one of the Boss’s henchmen, who had approached us the day before our departure with three packages of kopi luwak as gifts for his patron. The Boss loves this coffee, the henchman said. His quivering nose, scraggly whiskers, and black pupils made him resemble the weasellike creature on the packages, or so I had thought at the time. Boss asked for it special, the henchman said. Bon and I scraped together our money at the airport and bought the fourth package of kopi luwak my aunt now held, choosing the same brand. When I explained that the luwak, the civet cat, ate the raw beans and excreted them, its intestines supposedly fermenting the beans in a gastronomic way, she burst out laughing, which rather hurt. Kopi luwak was very expensive, especially for refugees like us, and if there was anything that the French should love, it should have been civet-percolated coffee. Given their gastronomic peculiarities for eating brains, guts, snails, and the like, the French were honorary Asians in their heroic determination to eat every kind and part of an animal.

Oh, the poor farmer! she said, wrinkling her nose. What a way to make a living. But aware now of her faux pas, she quickly added, I’m sure this is delicious. Tomorrow morning I’ll brew us a cup—or at least, I’ll make one for you and me.

She nodded toward me, as by tomorrow morning, Bon should be with the Boss. Sober in the morning light, Bon made no mention of the devil that had divided them, a sign that the City of Light might already have enlightened him just a touch. Neither did she, instead offering directions to the metro station Voltaire, a block away, from where we made our way to the 13th arrondissement. This was the Asiatic Quarter, or Little Asia, of which we had heard many rumors and tales in the refugee camp.

Stop crying, Bon said. My God, you’re more emotional than a woman.

I could not help myself. These faces! The people around us reminded me of home. There were a good number of them, but nowhere near as many as one would find in the Chinatowns of San Francisco or Los Angeles, where almost everyone was Asian. But as I soon came to learn, more than a handful of people who were not white made the French nervous. Hence, Little Asia offered a notable if not overwhelming number of Asian faces, most of them ugly or unremarkable, but nevertheless reassuring to me. The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one’s own people was always comforting.

I wiped the tears from my eyes, the better to see our customs and practices, which might have been out of place here but nevertheless raised the temperature of our hearts. I speak of the shuffle that Asians preferred to longer steps, and how the men typically walked ahead of their long-suffering women, who carried all the shopping bags, and how one of these same examples of chivalry cleared his nose by closing one nostril with a finger and forcibly ejecting its contents through the other, the missile narrowly missing my two feet by a foot or two. Disgusting, perhaps, but easily washed away by the rain, which is more than can be said for a balled-up tissue.

Our destination was an import-export store that announced its intentions in French, Chinese, and Vietnamese, its services including the dispatch to our homeland of parcels, letters, and telegrams, which is to say the delivery of hope to a starving country. The clerk looked at us from where he was sitting on a stool behind the counter and grunted by way of greeting. I told him I was looking for the Boss.

He’s not in, the clerk said, just as the henchman told us he would say.

We’re the ones from Pulau Galang, Bon replied. He’s expecting us.

The clerk grunted again, eased himself off his stool with hemorrhoidal care, and disappeared down an aisle. A minute later he reappeared and said, He’s waiting for you.

Behind the counter, down an aisle, and through a door was the Boss’s office, scented with lavender air freshener, decked in linoleum, and adorned with pinup calendars featuring nubile Hong Kong models in exuberant poses and a wooden clock whose type I had seen before in the Los Angeles restaurant of my old commander of the Special Branch, the General, the man I had betrayed and who betrayed me in return. Admittedly I had fallen in love with his daughter, but who wouldn’t fall in love with Lana? I still longed for her the way we refugees longed for our homeland, which was the shape into which the clock was carved. Now our homeland was irrevocably altered, and so was the Boss. We almost did not recognize him when he stood up from behind his steel desk. In the refugee camp, he had been as emaciated and ragged as everyone else, hair shoddy, his one shirt stained brown under the pits and between the shoulder blades, his only footwear a pair of thin flip-flops.

Now he was clad in loafers, creased slacks, and a polo shirt, the casual wear of the urban, Western branch of Homo sapiens, his trimmed hair parted so neatly one could have laid a pencil in the groove. In our homeland, he had owned considerable interests in rice, soda pop, and petrochemicals, not to mention certain black-market commodities. After the revolution, the communists had relieved him of his excessive wealth, but these overeager plastic surgeons had sucked away too much fat from this cat. Threatened with death by starvation, he had fled here, needing only one year to become a businessman again and reassume the padded appearance of affluent humanity.

So, he said. You brought the goods.

We commenced our masculine social grooming ritual by embracing and slapping each other on the back, followed by Bon and myself assuming the position of the socially inferior simians by offering the alpha male our tribute: the three packages of kopi luwak. Then the fun began, which involved smoking French cigarettes and drinking Rémy Martin VSOP from snifters that fit in our hands like the most perfectly shaped breasts. For the last couple of years, I had drunk nothing more refined than moonshine rice whiskey, which could blind a man, and the reunion of my tongue with one of its truest loves, cognac, made me weepy. The Boss said nothing. He, like Bon, had seen me cry many times in the refugee camp. While some of the others had suffered from malaria, I had been shaken by unexpected bouts of blubbering, a fever from which I still had not fully recovered.

When my tongue had recovered from contact with the voluptuous copper body of the cognac, I sniffed and said that I had never taken him for the type to appreciate coffee brewed from the beans defecated by a civet. He gave his best imitation of a smile, picked up a letter opener, slit open one of the packages, and shook out a gleaming brown bean onto his palm, where it glistened under the desk lamp.

I don’t drink coffee, he said. Tea, yeah, but coffee’s too strong.

We looked at the poor bean, the tip of the letter opener pressed against its belly. The Boss rolled the bean with his fingers until it ended up between his thumb and index, and then scraped it gently with the blade. The brown flaked off, revealing whiteness underneath.

It’s just vegetable dye, he said. Won’t hurt you, even when you snort it.

He opened the second bag, shook out another bean, and scratched off a portion of the coloring again to reveal the whiteness beneath.

Got to check the product, he said. Can’t always trust the henchmen. Matter of fact, rule of thumb: Never trust the henchmen.

He opened a drawer and casually took out a hammer, as if hammers were always to be found in drawers, and gently tapped the bean until it crumbled into a fine powder. He dabbed a finger in the white powder, tinged with the brown coloring, and licked it. The brief glimpse of his pink tongue made my big toe twitch.

Sniffing’s the best test. But I got people for that. Or you could do it. Want a try?

We shook our heads. He offered another facsimile of a smile and said, Good boys. This is a great remedy, but you don’t want to need the cure.

Then he slit open the third bag, shook out another bean, laid it on the desk, and tapped it with the hammer—once, twice, a third time. The bean did not crumble. He frowned and tapped it again a little harder. Then he smashed the bean with a blow that made the desk lamp jump in surprise, and when he lifted the head of the hammer from the table, we saw not fine white powder but a circle of debris, brown to the core.

Shit, Bon muttered.

No, coffee, the Boss said, gently laying the hammer down. He reclined in his chair, the corners of his lips crinkling just a little, an amused auditor discovering a cheat’s fatal error. Time must have frozen because I could see that the hands on the clock had not moved at all since we had come into the Boss’s office. Hey, guys, he said. I think we’ve got a problem.

And by “we,” he of course meant “you,” or “us.”

No one knew what the Boss’s name was, or if he did, no one dared utter it aloud. His passport had a name, but no one knew if it was real, and only the authorities had seen it. Presumably his father and mother knew his name, but he was an orphan, and perhaps they had not even given him a name before leaving him at the orphanage. An orphan was akin to a bastard, and this made me feel a certain amount of sympathy for the Boss, who had run away from his orphanage at twelve, no longer willing to tolerate the Catholic instruction, the repetitive diet of porridge with a few flakes of dried pork, the abuse from other orphans for being Chinese, the unending rejection of never being adopted. His experience among children meant that he had no desire to have children. The Boss had no need for a legacy outside of the one he made for himself, the only kind worth possessing. He focused on the two men before him—one of whom was me—and decided they were not a threat to his legacy, not dumb enough to risk their profitable relationship with him for half a kilogram of this remedy of the finest kind.

Tell you what. Come back tomorrow with the other kopi luwak. No big deal, right?

In chorus, they said yes. People who knew him always said yes, if that was what he wanted, or no, if that was what he wanted. As for people who did not know him, it was his task to let them know who he was and how they should respond. These two knew him and understood that if he could not trust them with half a kilo he could not trust them with anything. He drew a smile on his face and said, Honest mistake, I’m sure. Sorry to put you through the trouble. You say your aunt likes hashish? I’ll give her some. On me. Free of charge.

Then he wrote two addresses down for Bon on a piece of paper and said, Drop off your stuff, then get to the restaurant. You don’t want to be late for your first job.

They finished their cognac, shook his hand, and left him alone with the bottle of Rémy Martin, the packet of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, three empty snifters, the coffee beans, and the hammer. He brushed off the white powder and brown coffee smeared on the hammer’s head and, holding it in his hand, admired its weight, balance, and elegance. He had bought it in a hardware store soon after arriving in Paris, along with a box of nails. Wherever he went, one of the first things he liked to buy, if he didn’t already have it, was a hammer. A hammer was a simple tool, but it was the only thing he had ever needed, besides his mind, to change the world.