"For the factories?"

She laughed.

We wandered around the outdoor stalls for about an hour, and Susan picked up a scented candle, a bottle of rice wine, and a cheap vinyl tote to carry the junk. Women love to shop.

We went to the flower section, and Susan bought branches of Tet blossoms tied with twine. She said, "For your room. Chuc Mung Nam Moi."

We took cyclos back to the hotel, checked for messages, but there were none, then went to my room.

Susan tied the Tet blossoms to the mosquito net frame of my bed. She said, "This will bring you good luck and keep the evil spirits away."

"I like evil spirits."

She smiled, and we stood there a few seconds, looking at each other.

She asked me, "Do you want to go to the beach?"

"Sure."

She took my soap and shampoo out of her tote and gave them to me. "I'll knock on your door when I'm ready." She hesitated, then left.

I got into my bathing suit, pulled on a gym shirt, and slipped into my brand-new Ho Chi Minh sandals.

I put my wallet, pa.s.sport, visa, vouchers, and airline tickets in a plastic bag, wondering if the desk clerk would hold this stuff, or go to America with it.

I sat in a chair and watched a gecko crawl up the wall. I ran some stuff through my mind as I watched the gecko and waited for Susan.

Susan Weber. Probably she was what she said she was: an American expat businesswoman. But there were signs that she had a second job. In a country where our intelligence a.s.sets were limited, but our needs were big and getting bigger, it was common practice to recruit friends in the American business or expat community to do a little something for Uncle Sam on the side. Probably she was what she said she was: an American expat businesswoman. But there were signs that she had a second job. In a country where our intelligence a.s.sets were limited, but our needs were big and getting bigger, it was common practice to recruit friends in the American business or expat community to do a little something for Uncle Sam on the side.

There were at least three agencies who did this kind of recruiting overseas-State Department Intelligence, Military Intelligence, or the Central Intelligence Agency.

And then there was American-Asian itself. The whole operation looked legit, but it also had all the bells and whistles of a CIA front.

The other question was Susan Weber's fondness for Paul Brenner. You can fake a lot of things in life-women fake o.r.g.a.s.ms, and men fake whole relationships-but unless I was really losing my ability to read people, Susan was honestly taken with me. It wouldn't be the first time something like this happened, which was why intelligence agencies instinctively distrusted their human employees and loved their spy satellites.

In any case, Susan Weber and Paul Brenner were on the brink of a s.e.xual liaison that wasn't part of the original script and could only lead to disaster.

There was a knock on the door, and I called out, "It's open."

Susan came in, and I stood.

She was wearing the Nha Trang T-shirt I bought her-tell the dears at home home-and it came down to her knees. She had on sandals and was carrying her new tote.

She smiled and said, "Love your sandals." She took a plastic cup out of her tote, filled with white powder. She said, "This is boric acid. You sprinkle it around your bed and luggage."

"Then what? Pray for rain?"

"It keeps the bugs away. Specifically, c.o.c.kroaches."

I put the cup on my night table and we left the room. On the way down the stairs, I said, "I have all my valuables in this plastic bag. Can I trust these with the front desk?"

"Sure. I'll take care of it."

We got down to the lobby, and Susan spoke to the desk clerk. The deal was that we had to inventory everything, including Susan's money and pa.s.sport as well as my own stuff. As all this was going on, I said to her, "Mind if I snoop through your pa.s.sport?"

She hesitated a second, then said, "No. Terrible photo."

I looked at her photo, which, of course, was not that terrible, and I noticed that the pa.s.sport had been issued from the General Pa.s.sport Office a little over three years before, which was consistent with her arrival here. I looked at her photo and saw that her hair was much shorter then, and there was something very sad and innocent about her expression-but maybe I was just projecting because of what she'd told me. In any case, the woman standing beside me looked a lot more confident and a.s.sured than the woman in the pa.s.sport photo.

I flipped the pages and saw that she had three entry stamps for the U.S., two for New York and one for Washington. That was not totally consistent with her claim that she'd never been to Washington-but it could have just been an entry point for a connecting flight to somewhere else, like Boston.

Her Viet visa stamp was different from mine, and was probably a work visa rather than a tourist visa. It had been renewed once, a year ago, and I pictured her at Section C of the Ministry for Public Security, two years into her tour, and giving everyone a hard time.

She'd also been to Hong Kong, Sydney, Bangkok, and Tokyo, which was either for R&R or business. Nothing tricky there. But the Washington thing stuck out.

I put the pa.s.sport back on the counter, and the clerk gave us the handwritten receipt, which we all had to sign, and Susan gave him a dollar.

We walked across the road, and the beach was fairly empty. We picked two chaise lounges, and a hundred kids descended on us, carrying everything in the world we'd ever need. We took two chaise mattresses and towels, two peeled pineapples on sticks, and two c.o.kes. Susan pa.s.sed out dong and chased off the kids.

I pulled off my gym shirt and Susan removed her T-shirt. She was wearing a skimpy two-piece, flesh-colored number, and she had an absolutely voluptuous body, all tanned and nicely toned.

She noticed I was glancing at her-staring, actually. I looked at the water. "Nice beach."

We sat at the edge of our lounges and ate the pineapple on a stick.

As we ate, vendors came by, selling food, beverages, maps, silk paintings, Viet Cong flags, beach hats, and things I couldn't identify. I bought a tourist map of Nha Trang.

We went down to the water, and Susan left her tote on the chaise lounge, which she said would be safe.

We waded out until we were standing up to our necks, and I could see brilliant tropical fish in the clear water. I said, "I remember big jellyfish all along the coast. Portuguese man-of-war."

"Same at Vung Tau. You have to keep an eye out. They can paralyze you."

"We used to throw concussion grenades in the water. It stunned the jellyfish, and hundreds of other fish would float to the surface. The kids would gather them up. They'd eat the squids alive. We thought it was gross. Now I pay twenty bucks in a sushi restaurant for raw squid."

She thought about that and said, "Concussion grenades?"

"Yeah. They're not fragmentation grenades. You throw them in bunkers or any confined s.p.a.ce, like tunnels. Causes concussion. Somebody figured out that you can fish with them. They cost Uncle Sam about twenty bucks apiece. But it was one of the perks of the job." I added, "Feeding people through high explosives."

"What if you needed the grenades later?"

"You order more. Munitions is one thing we never ran out of. We ran out of will."

We swam. Susan was a good, strong swimmer, and so am I, so we stayed out about an hour, and it felt great.

Back on the chaise lounge, as we dried off, the vendors returned. They could pester the h.e.l.l out of you, but they didn't steal anything because within a short time, they had all your money anyway.

Several young ladies approached with bottles of oil and hand towels. Susan said to me, "You haven't had a ma.s.sage since the Rex Hotel. Let me treat."

"Thanks."

We both got ma.s.sages on the beach. I was feeling more like James Bond again.

We lay there on the chaise lounges; Susan read a business magazine with her sungla.s.ses on, and I contemplated the sea and the sky.

I thought, someday I should come back here without any government involvement. Maybe Cynthia would like to join me, and we'd take a month and explore the country. But that presupposed that when I got out of here, I was not persona non grata, or persona in a box.

I looked over at Susan and watched her reading. She sensed me looking at her and turned to me. She said, "Isn't this nice?"

"It really is."

"Are you glad I came along?"

"I am."

"I can stay a few more days."

I replied, "If you go back to Saigon tomorrow, I think you can smooth it over with Bill."

"Who?"

"Let me ask you a personal question. Why did you get involved with him if you think so little of him?"

She put down her magazine. "Good question. Obviously, the pickings are a little slim in Saigon. A lot of the guys are married, the rest are f.u.c.king their brains out with Vietnamese women. Bill, at least, was faithful. No mistress, no prost.i.tutes, no drugs, no bad habits-except me."

In retrospect, Bill Stanley didn't seem to me, in my brief meeting with him, to be quite such a Boy Scout. There was more to Bill Stanley, and I needed to keep that in mind.

At 6 P.M. P.M., we packed it up.

Back in the hotel, we got our stuff from the desk clerk, and we arranged to meet on the veranda at seven.

I went to my room, showered in cold water and orange soap, and took a little siesta in the raw. I woke myself up at quarter to seven, got dressed, and went down to the veranda. Susan wasn't there, but Lucy was, and she got me a cold beer.

Susan appeared a few minutes later, dressed in one of her new silk blouses, a pink one, with a little black skirt. I stood and said, "The blouse looks good on you."

She sat and said, "Well, thank you, sir. You look all tanned and rested."

"I'm on R&R."

"I'm glad this is the R&R part of your visit." She added, "I'm going to worry about you."

I didn't reply.

"I was thinking... I need to take a business trip to Hanoi. Maybe I can meet you there. Metropole. Sat.u.r.day after next. Right?"

"How did you know that?"

"I snooped through your papers while you were snooping through my pa.s.sport."

"You should forget what you saw."

"I will, except the Metropole, Sat.u.r.day after next."

"I'll only be there one night."

"That's okay. I just want to be there when you arrive."

This woman knew all the right words, and she was starting to get to me. I said, "Metropole, Hanoi, Sat.u.r.day after next."

"I'll be there."

We had a few beers until it got dark, then took cyclos into town.

We found a restaurant with a garden out back; a pretty hostess in an ao dai showed us to a table.

The air was fragrant with blossoms, and the cigarette smoke was carried away by a nice breeze.

We ordered fish because it was the only thing on the menu, and we talked about this and that. Susan brought up the subject of Colonel Mang, and I mentioned that I had reminded him that this was a new era of Vietnamese-American relations, and that he should get with the program.

Susan looked thoughtful, then said, "The last time we had an emba.s.sy in this country, it was in Saigon, and it was April 30, 1975. The U.S. Amba.s.sador was on the roof of the emba.s.sy, carrying the American flag home, and General Minh was in the palace, waiting to surrender South Vietnam to the Communists. Now we have a new amba.s.sador, this time in Hanoi, and we have some consulate staff in Saigon, including economic development people, looking for a nice building to set up shop when Hanoi gives us the go-ahead. This will be an important country for us again, and no one wants to see this new relationship screwed up. I'm talking billions of dollars in investments, oil, and raw materials. So, I don't know why you're here, or who actually sent you, but please tread lightly."

I looked at Susan Weber. She had a better grasp of geopolitics than she'd led me to believe. I said to her, "Well, I know who sent me, though I'm not sure why. But believe me when I say that it's not important enough, and I'm not important enough, to affect anything that's already been accomplished."

She replied, "Don't be so sure of that. There are lots of people in Hanoi and in Washington who don't want the two countries to have normal relations. Some of these are men of your generation, the veterans and the politicians on both sides, who will neither forgive nor forget. And many of these people are now in positions of power."

"Do you know something I don't?"

She looked at me and said, "No, but I sense something... we have a history here, and we've learned nothing from that history."

"I think we have. But that's not to say we're not going to make new mistakes."

She dropped the subject, and I didn't press it. It seemed to me that her concerns were those of a businessperson. But there was more to this than business; if it was just business, and an unsolved murder, then our new amba.s.sador in Hanoi would now be talking to the Vietnamese government asking their help in finding the witness to an American homicide case. So, this was about something else, and whatever it was, Washington wasn't telling Hanoi; they weren't even telling me.

After dinner, we took a stroll down to the beach and walked the beach back to the hotel. The subject of Vietnam did not come up again.

Upstairs, I walked Susan to her room and went in. There were no messages left on the floor, and no clear signals to me from Ms. Weber. I said, "I had a nice day."

"Me, too. I'm looking forward to tomorrow."

We arranged to meet again for breakfast at 8 A.M. A.M.

She said, "Don't forget boric acid and the hot water heater."

Back in my room, I sprinkled the boric acid around my bed and my luggage. A really first-rate hotel would do that for you.

The sun and sea had knocked me out, and I was half asleep as soon as I hit the bed.

My last thought was that I didn't recall seeing the snow globe on Susan's night table.