There wasn’t a thing I could say that would make Black crack a smile.

“But to answer your question,” I continued. “I have been visiting your martial arts recommendation. Son Chen’s got me doing sit-ups and push-ups and he taught me that it is only a fool who believes they can overcome any foe by direct conflict.”

Christmas smiled at that phrase, which I was sure the eighty-two-year-old Chen had taught him when he was a younger man.

“Larker’s a fuckup,” the government bona fide killer of men, women, and children said. “He drank before missions and stole from the PX.”

“He says that you gave him my name in order to help one of his friends.”

The major looked up at a point somewhere above my head. I took this as a glimpse at something in the past. And, because there was a hint of distaste at the corner of his mouth, I supposed he didn’t like what he was seeing.

This reverie went on for some seconds before he said, “Corporal Larker was in my squad in ’Nam. That was nine years ago, at the beginning of the American intervention. I was going to have him transferred at the first of the next month. We were on furlough for two weeks so I didn’t have to worry about him causing shit in the field.

“But then Lieutenant General Reeves got the report that there was a VC weapons depot that had been set up only twenty miles outside Saigon. They didn’t have an exact location, so an airstrike was out of the question. If Reeves sent out a regiment, the news would travel and the timing for whatever strike had been planned could have been sped up. So . . .”

I was wondering how Black’s account was going to bring me back to a straight-haired black man named Alonzo who might or might not be dead.

“. . . I told my little squad to pack up and we went out on a seek-and-destroy.” There was little joy in Christmas. “I made Larker the radioman.” He looked directly at me for the first time since the tale began. “I mean how much trouble could he cause on a radio no VC could hear?”

I hunched my shoulders.

“We were air-dropped at twenty-four hundred hours and by three hundred we’d located the nest,” Christmas continued. “We had the munitions to take ’em out. All we needed to do was get close enough. You could tell this was the start of a major offensive because they had maybe a hundred men spread out, ready to repulse any attack. But they didn’t reckon on a small group of well-armed men coming in down the middle of the Ben Hai River.