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and walked off.
     

     

CHAPTER THREE

    A fter my meeting with Karl, I had a few drinks by myself at home, then sent an e-mail to Cynthia. You should never drink when you have access to any form of communication—e-mail, cell phone, telephone, or fax machine. I printed out my message to her and put it in my overnight bag, intending to re-read it in the morning to see how drunk I’d been. I erased the message on my computer, in case CID Internal Security were the next people to go into my computer.
    There was an e-mail from Karl with my airport rendezvous instructions, as he’d promised. His short message ended with “Thanks again. Good luck. See you later.”
    I noticed he didn’t invite either a phone call or a reply to his e-mail. In fact, there was nothing left to say. I deleted his message.
    I left a note for my housekeeper, informing her I’d be away for about three weeks and to look after things. In fact, I tidied up a bit, in case the CID arrived before the housekeeper to look for sensitive materials that may have been left behind by the deceased. I always tidy up; I want to be remembered as a man who didn’t leave his dirty underwear on the floor.
     

     
    A t 7 A.M. the next morning, I checked my e-mail, but there was no reply from Cynthia to last night’s message. Maybe she hadn’t accessed her mail yet.
    A horn honked outside, and I gathered my small suitcase and overnight
bag and went out into the cold, dark morning, sans overcoat, as instructed by Karl. In Saigon, it was eighty-one degrees and sunny, according to the efficient Herr Hellmann.
    I got into the waiting taxi, exchanged greetings with the driver, and off we went to Dulles Airport, a half-hour drive at this time of the morning. Normally, I would drive myself to Dulles, but long-term airport parking might not be long enough for this trip.
    It was a gloomy morning, which may have accounted for my morbid thoughts.
    I recalled a similar dawn trip to the airport, many years ago. The airport was Boston’s Logan, and the driver was my father in his ’56 Chevy, which has since become a classic, but which was then a jalopy.
    My thirty-day pre-Vietnam leave had come to an end, and it was time to fly to San Francisco, and points west.
    We’d left Mom at home, crying, too upset to even scramble eggs. My brothers were sleeping.
    Pop was pretty quiet during the trip, and it was only years later that I thought about what he must have been thinking. I wondered how his own father had seen him off to war.
    We had arrived at the airport, parked, and went into the terminal together. There were a lot of guys in uniforms with duffel bags and overnight bags, a lot of mothers and fathers, wives or maybe girlfriends, and even kids, probably siblings.
    Sharply dressed military police strode in pairs through the terminal, an unusual sight just a year before. The homefront during wartime is a study of extreme contrasts: sorrow and joy, partings and reunions, patriotism and cynicism, parades and funerals.
    I was flying American Airlines to San Francisco, and I got in the appropriate line, which was comprised of mostly soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, and some civilians, who looked uncomfortable being in the same line.
    My father wanted to wait, but it looked like most of the families had left, so I talked him out of it. He took my hand and said, “Come home, son.”
    For a moment, I thought he was ordering me to leave with him and forget this idiocy. Then I realized he meant come home alive. I looked him in the eye and said, “I will. Take care of Mom.”
    “Yup. Good luck, Paul.” And he was gone. A few minutes later, I caught
a glimpse of him through the glass doors, watching me. We made eye contact, he turned, and was again gone.
    I checked in at the ticket counter and went to the gate, where I discovered that this was where most of the families had disappeared to. You could go right to the gate in those days to see people off. I thought maybe my father