“Looky here,” he said, whistling softly.
With the tip of the screwdriver he brushed the webbing from the envelope before reaching in and lifting it out. The envelope was a piece of hotel stationery, yellowed along the edges and bulging.
“Here,” he said with a nod of satisfaction, handing me the envelope.
The envelope had a row of 10¢ stamps along the top—immediately dating it for me—and was addressed in a compact masculine hand, in black ink. Obviously posted after the final mail pickup, in the closing days of the Hotel Rigel—on the very day, in fact, that the hotel permanently shut its doors—it was addressed to:
Miss Mala Revell
c/o Combat Nursing Corps, 2nd Division
U.S. Navy Pacific Command
Honolulu, Hawaii
There was no return address, and at the bottom of the envelope was printed the odd instruction, Please Hold / Forward When Possible. But there had been no occasion for holding or forwarding; I knew that the hotel had closed in the fall of 1971, which meant for eight years that mailbox had effectively become a dead-letter box. That’s what that envelope contained: a dead letter.
Red was staring at me with a faint smile.
“Have that mailbox carried out,” I ordered him, slipping the envelope into my briefcase. “And get out of here yourself now.” It took two men to load the mailbox onto the truck at curbside containing the chandeliers, clocks, and other items that would escape being buried beneath a mountain of rubble.
This was to be the fate of every other remaining object in the Hotel Rigel, for at 3:06 P.M., after the foreman took his head count and sounded a two-minute evacuation warning with a siren, I signalled the explosives man to set off the charges by remote control. The police had cordoned off the surrounding streets and a large crowd, many with cameras and binoculars, had gathered behind the barricades. There were news crews from two television stations. And in the blistering heat a hot dog vendor and an ice cream truck were doing a brisk business. I was standing beside one of our trucks with the foreman and some of the men, our eyes glued to the Hotel Rigel in its final seconds as a solid entity in this world, as the explosives man punched out the activation code on his remote control bar. I could visualize the twelve three-gallon nitro cannisters in the basement—in the corners and below the reinforced concrete piles—as I began counting under my breath 1 … 2 … 3.… On 4 the charges set off the nitro with a quickening roar and twelve plumes of smoke and dust merged into one expanding gray cloud. The building shook violently and collapsed in on itself, for an instant resembling a grotesque, square white cake whose center had evaporated. Midway down, the rest of the square followed, and out of the crashing chaotic mass of rubble a swirling black cloud, twice the height of the former hotel, rose rapidly into the sky. As the roar ebbed, I heard the rattle of a tambourine and a stick pounding rhythmically on the pavement a few feet to my right. When I turned, however, the shaman was nowhere in sight.
That evening, back at my hotel, I pulled off my boots and ordered up from room service—tostadas, rice and beans, and a fifth of El Toro 5-Star mescal, a green worm tumbling at its base—before switching on the television. The lead news story on the local stations was the demolition of the Hotel Rigel. It had even bumped the murders du jour—a bookie shot in his car and a beautician found on the roof of a warehouse—from the top slot, a rarity during the crime wave. At the hotel, the television crews had operated side by side, so the footage looked almost identical as I switched back and forth with the remote control: the building intact, the simultaneous explosions, and the toppling mass beneath the billowing dust cloud. Then, briefly, there was footage of my foreman and crew, and for a few seconds I even saw myself in wraparound sunglasses and the khaki pants and white shirt I was still wearing. Hard hat pushed back on my head, I was surveying the smoking remains of the hotel. I had never before seen myself on television, but what startled me out of my chair at that moment was the image of the shaman on the flickering screen, just to my right, shaking his tambourine and pounding his stick, exorcising the angry spirits that might be released by the collapsing building. I saw myself glance in his direction with a surprised look, but no one else in the news footage even registered his presence. Could we all somehow have missed him in the glare of sunlight?
At midnight I took out the dead letter that had been recovered from the hotel mailbox. For a long time I just sat with it in my lap and sipped some mescal. It was so quiet I could hear the cold whisper of the air-conditioning vent. When I finally brought myself to open the letter, I felt it had somehow been intended for me all along, through all those years it had lain beneath the spiders spinning their webs. Why else, I asked myself, sipping mescal, had it been placed in my hands at such a critical moment, seconds away from certain destruction? Even so, I was completely unprepared for the contents of that letter, which, to my amazement, would not only be populated with people out of my own life, including Samax and Ivy, but would fill in some of the crucial gaps in my history, revealing things I had thought lost forever in the mists of time—the fate of my grandmother Stella, the activities of my mother Bel at the end of her life—and, most amazing of all, things I had no idea were even a part of my history, such as my true relationship to Vitale Cassiel. That these revelations were made in passing, in the larger context of the writer’s life, rendered them all the more heart-stopping for me. Part love letter, wound around a story of the Vietnam War, and part confessional, the letter was divided into four parts. I read and reread it that night before falling into a fitful sleep. And early the next morning I read it again. Parts of it I would reread many times over the ensuing months.
The letter was thirty-seven pages in all, also on hotel stationery, the same concise, even handwriting as the address, covering both sides of each sheet. I had to smooth it out carefully, for it had been folded over twice and tightly packed for all those years. Composed over the course of five days in the fall of 1971, the four parts of the letter were dated the 13th, 14th, 16th, and 17th of October. The writer was an Air Force major named Geza Cassiel, and, discovering at the beginning of the letter that he had injured his leg in the war, I realized with a jolt that I had actually crossed paths with him on October 13, 1971. This happened to be a moment in my own life that I remembered very clearly, for it was the day after I lost my virginity with Dalia—on Columbus Day—when Calzas and I had been en route to Acoma in a jeep. We had stopped at a gas station outside of Albuquerque where I had seen a rental car with a U.S. Air Force jacket draped over the seat. The name tag on the jacket read CASSIEL. An officer with a limp had emerged from the washroom, and for several seconds, as I recalled with a cold thrill, he and I had stared at each other across the steaming asphalt before he drove off toward Albuquerque. Little did I know that eight years later I would be privy to his thoughts at that moment, for on that very night he began writing this long letter in Room 1216 of the Hotel Rigel, one of the 178 rooms whose destruction I would personally oversee.
Whether that officer was still alive, or like the hotel was already a ghost, by the time I was halfway through that fateful letter, pouring myself a stiffer glass of mescal, I realized that, no matter what else happened in my life, I had to find the woman to whom the letter was addressed. Whoever and wherever she was—assuming she was still alive, too—she was my only link to Major Geza Cassiel. A link that had taken on immense importance in the previous hour when, under a wave of vertigo—so many of my assumptions about my life collapsing before my eyes with the same finality as the Hotel Rigel—I had discovered that Major Cassiel was not only the son of Vitale Cassiel, but was also my real father.
16
Dead Letter
13 October 1971
Dear Mala:
Where to begin.
How about 1,500 miles due west of Luzon Air Field, on the 15th parallel, flying up the Mekong River at 10,000 feet. Into Laos. January 18, 1969. 2 A.M. The night of the new moon. Four days after I left you at the Hôtel Alnilam in Man
ila.
I have never been a letter writer. Never had anyone to write to. Outside of official Air Force correspondence, I haven’t written a letter in ten years. I’ve started this one over four times now, and then torn it up. Now I’m not going to read it over, not even when I finish it. I don’t know when it will reach you. Maybe I’ll find you first.
For four months I’ve been looking. In Honolulu, Manila, even on Okinawa where I’d heard that many Navy nurses leaving the war zone were restationed. A nurse at the Admiral Perry Hospital in Honolulu told me she knew you. Thought you had gone to Tokyo. Or maybe Bangkok, to work for the Red Cross. I went to Tokyo. And searching for you blind, lost myself. Went to Bangkok, too, but the Red Cross had never heard of you.
Now I’m in the desert, back where I came from. But just passing through. Not looking for you here, in the place where at one time I thought I had lost everything. I never dreamed I’d be back after losing everything all over again. After losing you.
Mala, I should have started out by telling you how much I love you. Again. And again. More than ever. And how I didn’t foresee that this could have happened to us. But I should have, knowing the war. Knowing the war, it seems inevitable now. It’s true, I should have started this letter differently, but I’m not going to tear it up and start over. It was hard enough to get this far. Know that I love you, across time and space. How much time and how much space I don’t know. When it’s really important, we rarely seem to know. I’d give anything to see you now. To touch you.
I’m in a hotel called the Rigel. The place is nearly empty, going out of business, about to close down. There is no one else on the twelfth floor with me. The clerk told me I may be the last guest, depending on when I check out. The only other one I’ve seen is an old gangster—a real Vegas type—who plays solitaire all day in the bar. My room has soundproof windows. And up this high, I can’t hear any traffic. It’s like a decompression chamber, or an isolation room—and maybe I could use a little of both.
I’m drinking tea by the quart. I brought my own, a green, mountain tea I discovered in Bangkok. The Thais say it clears the bloodstream, promoting clear thought. Maybe that’s why I crave it.
Two blocks away, there’s a small park where I go for walks. With a cane, like an old guy myself. I was wounded again, in the left leg, three inches above the knee—and no Mala to find the shrapnel! Two bullets, actually. One that fragmented. They cleaned out everything but one sliver, which is lodged a couple of millimeters from the bone. I can feel it when I extend the knee. They had to cut through a lot of muscle, so I’m rehabilitating. Walking two miles daily. That’s the prescription. The Air Force doctors told me that in six months I won’t be limping. In a year I’ll be able to run again.
Aside from these walks, I hardly leave the hotel. I take my meals here. I don’t want to go out. I know this place too well. Bone-white, bone-dry, the only moisture you feel is what beads on your neck or drips off your brow. Right now, after so many months in the jungle, in the closed-in, compressed atmosphere, I don’t want to be venturing into the tricky light of the open spaces. The even trickier, outsized shadows. The vastness and the roads that never end.
I know all about this place. You leave things here, when you come back they look the same, but they’ve changed. The opposite of the tropics, where everything looks different after you haven’t seen it for a while, but nothing’s changed.
My leg is only sore at night. In this climate, it should be easier, but it’s been sorest here. I saved the bullet they got out whole. Maybe you’ll want to add it to your bracelet. The gift of an NVA sniper in Laos. Chinese bullets from a Russian rifle—it’s amazing that they fired. They operated on me at the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Phu Bai. Accommodations not nearly as nice as the Repose. My last bit of surgery in Vietnam, though, no matter what.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
On January 18, 1969, on that run up the Mekong River, my plane, a two-seat, two-engine OV-10, was shot down over Laos. The pilot never made it. I parachuted and landed without a scratch. Then I was captured by a band of Pathet Lao irregulars working with the VC.
This happened east of Xepone, at 106°40’, 16°50’—coordinates I’ll never forget—110 miles north of the point where Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand meet. You could call that point Three Corners, if you had a perverse sense of humor, but it doesn’t have a monument, like Four Corners here in New Mexico, just border guards on all sides with shoot-to-kill orders and no questions asked. North, along the river, the jungle is dense as a wall. East, where I came down, the yellow plains end abruptly after many miles in another wall of jungle, and then a green mountain range. The plains are so dry that grass fires start up on their own and burn for days.
As you well know, I left Manila making preparations to be transferred out of Indochina. Instead they sent me right into the burning belly. That’s what the CIA guys call that zone in southern Laos. The place that vomits fire. And fire is what I thought I was going to get.
First the Pathet Lao trussed my hands behind my back and threw a noose around my neck. Yanking me by a long rope, they doused me with gasoline and started lighting matches and tossing them by me. One of them—he was about sixteen—had a Zippo off a dead GI which he flicked inches from my face. They kept this up for an hour, leading me into the jungle. I thought the payoff would be to turn me into a human torch. But finally they just blindfolded me and every so often prodded me with their rifles or kicked me in the shins. Later I would learn that the gasoline-and-matches routine was a standard welcoming technique for prisoners. The first of their psych-out games.
How did I come to be there? What was my mission—and why did I even have one? For starters, I was practically shanghaied. When I got to Luzon after leaving you at the hotel, I was called in to the CO’s office. I was pleasantly surprised, thinking my transfer had gone through at record speed.
The CO is a one-star general. Tall, with a gut. He has a crossbow hanging behind his desk. Pictures of himself fly-fishing. He sits me down. We drink coffee. He smokes a meerschaum pipe, brown with nicotine. Two other guys come into the room. A bug-eyed blank-faced lieutenant who has a skull above crossed swords tattooed on both forearms. He’s been flying Spookies—AC-47 gunships—over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, knocking out truck convoys. He’s my pilot, who won’t make it. The other guy is wearing a Nehru jacket, rope sandals, and black shades. He looks like a blind man. He barely says a word. Clearly he’s CIA.
The CO tells me what a hero I am. Shot out of the sky, pulling a crewman from the burning B-52, twenty-eight combat missions to my credit. You’ve done your part, Major, he says, knocking some ashes out of his pipe. Oh yes, you’ve been promoted, and there’s a Purple Heart and a Silver Star on the way. Maybe a Distinguished Flying Cross in the cards, too. Depending. On what? Well, you’ve got your transfer, it’s yours. But you have one more run to make. It’s been in the works since before you requested transfer. One more mission. Then you get your medals and you wake up on a NATO base in southern Europe. Aviano, Malta—you name it—a year of Mediterranean sun. But first.
First I have to go into the burning belly. Just once. After which I’ll be sipping wine with cheese and olives at sunset.
Someone’s told the CO I’m the best navigator out of Guam. That I can read the stars without a map—the way other men read a book. Also that I’m experienced in surveillance and night photography, from my days flying over Russia and Japan which I told you about. And cartography, too. In short, I exactly fit the bill for the mission: a navigator who can use a camera, know what he’s looking at, and map it. And here I am in Luzon, the right place at the right time.
I feel exactly the opposite: that I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t like any of it. Especially the part about fitting the bill so exactly. For what purpose?
My pilot and I are to be flown to Saigon at once. From there, in an OV-10 with extra fuel tanks, we’ll take off at 1 A.M. on the 18th of January and fly north over the
whole of Cambodia to the Laotian border at Khong Island. That’s about 300 miles. We’ll follow the river north another hundred miles, over a ridge of mountains that puts us within thirty miles of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Trail runs through Laos, the lifeline of the NVA in the south. I’m supposed to guide us to a very small wedge the CO has penciled onto a map he spreads out before me. A narrow valley between the river and the mountain highlands through which the South Vietnamese border runs. I’m to photograph and chart the means of access to this valley, which they think is two winding dirt roads. High-flying surveillance has not been able to detail the area enough. We’ll draw rocket fire, but the plane has a radar-blocker and under cover of the night we should be all right. As soon as I’m done, we’ll veer east out of Laos and fly south to a base near Da Nang.
What’s in this valley that’s so important? It’s top secret, the CO says, but they’re going to tell us—because we’re volunteering for the mission. Volunteering by this definition: if I don’t do it, medals or no medals, they’re going to make me finish out my tour back on Guam, navigating bombing runs on B-52s. This little trip into Laos is my ticket out of the war.
The top-secret item in the valley is an Air Force officer being held in a VC compound. They want him out badly. Why? Mr. CIA in his shades clears his throat to say that this is high-security clearance information. Then the CO informs us that the officer is a former Air America pilot who has in his head the locations of every secret landing strip and rendezvous point in Laos. The VC may not have a clue who he is; and it’s doubtful they could know that he knows so much. But working him over they’ll find out. Maybe in a month, maybe in six. So he has to come out. Special Forces commandos are poised to do it. But only after they have a detailed map and photos of the compound.