added to Janson’s sense that Bewick had become a mannequin of Demarest’s.
Bewick strode over to the first of the prisoners, withdrew a large knife, and
started sawing through the restraints that kept their arms to their sides.
“They need to get comfortable,” Demarest explained.
It soon became clear that comfort was not precisely Bewick’s objective. The XO
fashioned a sling of nylon cord, tightly knotted it around the prisoners’ wrists
and ankles, and then snaked it around the central beams of each hooch. They were
splayed, spread-eagled, their limbs extended outward by the taut rope. They were
utterly defenseless, and knew it. That realization of their defenselessness
would have psychological effects.
Janson’s stomach furled. “Sir?” he began.
“Don’t speak,” Demarest replied. “Just watch. Watch and learn. It’s the old
rule: See one, do one, teach one.”
Now Demarest approached the prisoner who rested on the ground nearest him. He
ran a caressing hand over the young man’s cheeks, and said, “Toi men ban.” He
tapped himself on his heart and repeated the words: “I like you.”
The two men seemed bewildered.
“Do you speak English? It doesn’t matter if you do, because I speak Vietnamese.”
The first one spoke, at last. “Yes.” His voice was tight.
Demarest rewarded him with a smile. “I thought you did.” He ran his index finger
down the man’s forehead, over his nose, and stopped at his lips. “I like you.
You people inspire me. Because you really care. That matters to me. You have
your ideals, and you’re going to fight until the bitter end. How many nguoi My
have you killed, do you think? How many Americans?”
The second man burst out, “We no kill!”
“No, because you’re farmers, right?” Demarest’s tones were honeyed.
“We farm.”
“You’re not VC at all, are you? Just honest, ordinary hardworking fishermen,
right?”
“Dúng.” Right.
“Or did you say you were farmers?”
The two looked confused. “No VC,” the first man said pleadingly.
“He’s not your army comrade?” Demarest indicated his bound companion.
“Just friend.”
“Oh, he’s your friend.”
“Yes.”
“He likes you. You help each other.”
“Help each other.”
“You people have suffered a lot, haven’t you?”
“Much suffering.”
“Like our savior, Jesus Christ. Do you know that he died for our sins? Do you
want to know how he died? Yes? Well, why didn’t you say so! Let me tell you. No,
better idea: let me show you.”
“Please?” The word came out like plis.
Demarest turned to Bewick. “Bewick, it’s downright uncivil to leave these poor
young men on the ground.”
Bewick nodded, allowing a grin to flicker on his wooden features. Then, rotating
a wooden stick twice, he winched the rope tighter. The tension of the rope
lifted the prisoners off the ground; the weight of their bodies was supported by
their tightly bound wrists and ankles. Each emitted a loud, panicked gasp.
“Xin loi,” Demarest said gently. Sorry about that.
They were in agony, their limbs hyperextended, their arms straining at their
sockets. The torsion of the position made breathing extraordinarily difficult,
requiring a tremendous exertion to arch their chests and extend their
diaphragms—an exertion that only increased the torque on their extremities.
Janson flushed. “Sir,” he said sharply. “May I have a word with you, alone?
Sir?”
Demarest walked over to Janson. “What you’re watching may take some getting used
to,” he said quietly. “But I will not have you interfering with the exercise of
executive discretion.”
“You’re torturing them,” Janson said, his face tight.
“You think that’s torture?” Demarest shook his head disgustedly. “Lieutenant
First Class Bewick, Lieutenant Second Class Janson is upset right now. For his
own protection, I need you to restrain him—by any means necessary. Any problems
with that?”
“None, sir,” Bewick replied. He leveled his combat pistol at Janson’s head.
Demarest walked over to the nearby jeep and pressed the play button on his
portable tape cassette. Choral music spilled from small, tinny speakers.
“Hildegard von Bingen,” he said to no one in particular. “Spent most of her life
in a convent she founded, in the twelfth century. One day when she was forty-two
years old she had a vision of God, and with that she became the greatest
composer of her age. Each time she sat down to create, it was always after she
had suffered the most excruciating pain—what she called the scourge of God. For
only when the pain brought her to the point of hallucination did her work pour
from her—the antiphons and plainsongs and religious treatises. Pain made Saint
Hildegard produce. Pain made her sing.” He turned to the second man, who was
starting to sweat profusely. The prisoner’s breath came in strangled yelps, like
a dying animal’s. “I thought it might relax you,” he said. He listened to a few
bars of the plainsong, pensively.
Sanctus es unguendo
periculose fractos:
sanctus es tergendo
fetida vulnera.
Then he stood over the second prisoner. “Look into my eyes,” Demarest said. He
pulled a small knife from a waist holster and made a small slice in the man’s
belly. The skin and the fascia beneath immediately sheared, pulled apart by the
tension of the ropes. “Pain will make you sing, too.” The man screamed.
“Now, that’s torture,” Demarest called to Janson. “What would you like me to
say? That it hurts me as much as it hurts them?” He returned to the screaming
man beneath him. “Do you think you’ll be a hero to your people by resisting me?
Not a chance. If you’re heroic, I can ensure that nobody ever learns of it. Your
bravery will be wasted. You see, I am a very bad man. You think Americans are
soft. You think you can wait us out.
You think you can watch while we ensnare ourselves with our silly bureaucratic
regulations, like a giant tripped up by his own shoelaces. But you think all
these things because you’ve never come across Alan Demarest. Of all Satan’s
forms of trickery and deceit, the very greatest was persuading man he did not
exist. Look into my eyes, my fisherman friend, I because I exist. A fisherman
like you. A fisherman of men’s souls.”
Alan Demarest was mad. No: it was worse than that. He was all too sane, too in
control of his actions and their controllable consequences. At the same time, he
was wholly devoid of the most elemental sense of conscience. He was a monster. A
brilliant, charismatic monster.
“Look into my eyes,” Demarest intoned, and leaned closer to the man’s face,
which was already stretched in agony, an agony beyond words. “Who’s your ARVN
contact? Which South Vietnamese do you deal with?”
“I farm!” the man whimpered, barely able to catch his breath. His eyes were red,
his cheeks wet. “No Viet Cong!”
Demarest pulled down the man’s pajama trousers, exposing his genitals.
“Prevarication will be punished,” he said in a bored tone. “Time for the juniper
cables.”
Janson heaved a few times, leaning forward, and a hot flow of vomit surged up
the back of his throat and splattered on the ground before him.
“Nothing to be ashamed of, my son. It’s like surgery,” Demarest said,
soothingly. “The first time you see it done, it’s a little rocky. But you’ll get
the hang of it in no time. It’s as Emerson tells us, when a great man ‘is
pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.’ ”
He turned to Bewick. “I’m just going to juice up the motor, make sure there’s
plenty of jump in the jumpers. We’ll give him every chance to talk. And if he
doesn’t, he’ll die the most painful death we can contrive.”
Demarest looked at Janson’s stricken face.
“But don’t worry,” he continued. “His companion will be kept alive. You see,
it’s important to leave somebody to spread the news among the VC: this is what
you get when you fuck with nguoi My.”
And, horrifyingly, he winked at Janson, as if to invite him into the debauchery.
How many other soldiers, burned out and callused by too much time in the combat
zone, had responded positively to that invitation, finding a club of genuine
zealots, losing their souls. An old refrain echoed in the dim recesses of his
mind. Where you going? Crazy—want to come along?
Want to come along?
Prinsengracht, perhaps the most gracious of the old canal streets of old
Amsterdam, was built in the early seventeenth century. The streetfront facades
had, at first glance, all the regularity of accordion-folded paper dolls. When
one looked more closely, one saw all the ways each tall, narrow brick house had
been painstakingly differentiated from its neighbors. The gables atop each house
had been carefully designed: step gables, zigzagging to a flat top, alternated
with the swooping curves of neck gables and spout gables. Because the staircases
within were narrow and steep, most of the houses had projecting ledges that
allowed furniture to be brought to higher floors by means of hoists. Many houses