As the meter taxi neared the center of the city, Condley saw a succession of familiar red banners strung above the streets, dozens of them, going on for block after block, with yellow letters proclaiming the anniversary of some obscure event in the history of the revolution that few remembered other than the government officials who had ordered the painting and the hanging of the signs. Billboards had been erected along favorite street corners, showing shadowed images of Ho Chi Minh and other communist heroes, splattered with hammers and sickles and red stars, all blending in the figure of a fighting soldier with a fist high in the air, the signs announcing in bold letters filled with exclamation points that nothing was more beautiful or more precious than the nation’s independence and freedom.

Independence and freedom. Doc lap va tu do. Ho Chi Minh’s rallying cry, pasted on billboards in the town that bore his name, most of whose citizens had wished with all their hearts to be liberated from him, not by him. Yes, thought Condley, millions had died with that slogan on their lips. And how painfully predictable that most of the progress gained since their victory had come from the efforts of those who learned to work around Uncle Ho’s system rather than through it. Yes, he thought, the people of Sai Gon were still stronger than the sloganeers.

No matter. Coming back to Sai Gon was always like coming home, and a part of him rejoiced as he watched the hazy, fecund center of District One unfold before him. The chaotic madness of the traffic, horns beeping and motorbikes whining. The old, mostly French landmarks, chapels and fountains and government buildings amid the ugly, reaching new construction, their peeling paint and mildewed corners marking the city’s and thus the nation’s historic journey. The street-side vendors with their postcard stands and cigarette boxes and little trays of food, sitting in lawn chairs behind their stalls as their children slept next to them on the sidewalks or played along the street. The odors, up from the street, in from the buildings, windblown from the river, all mixing together. The music, whining from the windows. The beggars and the hustlers, their eyes adrenalized, ever searching. The cyclo drivers, lazing in their cabs at every street corner, always waiting.

They reached the Rex Hotel, dropping off an exhausted Hanson Muir, who had decided to remain in Sai Gon while Condley went to Moscow, rather than returning to Hawaii. As the Rex’s bellboys unloaded Muir’s baggage, Condley waved to several familiar faces among the cyclo drivers in the park across the street, an unspoken signal to let Dzung know he had returned. The meter taxi then dropped him off at the Vien Dong Hotel, where he checked back into his room, collected and read his mail, then showered and put on a change of clothes.