The Glass Forest

  Lisa Lieberman

  Books by Lisa Lieberman

  Cara Walden Mysteries

  The Glass Forest

  Burning Cold

  All the Wrong Places

  History

  Apologizing for Vietnam

  Stalin’s Boots: In the Footsteps of the

  Failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution

  Dirty War: Terror and Torture in French Algeria

  Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide

  Translations

  Simone de Beauvoir, An Eye for an Eye

  Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris Under the Occupation

  Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Lieberman

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The epigraph comes from Hieu Minh Nguyen, Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018). Graham Greene references are from the 2004 Penguin edition of The Quiet American unless otherwise noted. The line from “The Tale of Kiêu” comes from the Yale Review translation published in a bilingual edition in 1983 by Yale University Press.

  Book design and conversion by Eddie Vincent/Encircle Publications

  Cover design by Deirdre Wait/Encircle Publications

  Passport Press logo design by Timothy Lang

  Author Photo by Sharona Jacobs

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Lieberman, Lisa, author.

  Title: The Glass forest / Lisa Lieberman.

  Series: A Cara Walden Mystery

  Description: Amherst, MA: Passport Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019911002 | ISBN 978-0-9989837-3-8 (pbk.) |

  978-0-9989837-4-5 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH Greene, Graham, 1904-1991. The Quiet American--

  Fiction. | Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)--History--Fiction. | Vietnam (Republic)

  --History--20th century--Fiction. | Vietnam--History--1945-1975--Fiction. | Families--Fiction. | Brothers and sisters - Fiction. | Gay men--Fiction. |

  Mystery and detective stories. | Suspense fiction. | BISAC FICTION /

  Mystery & Detective / Historical | FICTION /Mystery & Detective /

  International Crime | FICTION / Noir

  Classification: LCC PS3612.I3347 G53 2019 | DDC 813.6--dc23

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Books by Lisa Lieberman

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE: Continental Palace Hotel

  CHAPTER TWO: Tây Ninh

  CHAPTER THREE: The Imperial City

  CHAPTER FOUR: Tourane

  CHAPTER FIVE: Grands Magasins Charner

  CHAPTER SIX: The Cimarron Kid

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Biên Hòa

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Rainbow

  CHAPTER NINE: En Route to Cái Sắn

  CHAPTER TEN: Ta Philippe

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Phú Nhuận District

  CHAPTER TWELVE: The Croix de Sud

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Disaster Sequence

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Singin’ in the Rain

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: La Marseillaise

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Notre-Dame Cathedral

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Ben, Carey, and Hannah

  CHAPTER ONE

  Continental Palace Hotel, Saigon

  March 9, 1957

  Let me be clear: any love I find will be treason.

  Hieu Minh Nguyen

  Although it was not yet dark, the restaurant staff were setting the tables for dinner, laying white cloths, cutlery, wineglasses, crystal vases with sprigs of frangipani—and still Tam hadn’t come. Jakub and I were having an apéritif on the terrace with my brother Gray and ordinarily this would have been our signal to finish up. The Continental’s French cuisine was so heavy, cream sauces and braised meats unpalatable in the humid climate. We much preferred the Chinese food at the Rainbow. Tam considered the Rainbow a tourist trap, overpriced and too westernized for his liking, but that didn’t prevent him from patronizing the upstairs nightclub, where cool jazz could be heard any night of the week.

  “I think I’ll head over now, if the two of you don’t mind,” said Gray. “He’s probably in the bar, hounding Murphy for an autograph.” His lover’s disapproval of Western cultural influences did not extend to movie Westerns either. They’d met in the air-conditioned Majestic Cinema at a late matinee of The Cimarron Kid, where my brother (no fan of Audie Murphy) had gone to escape the heat. Tam was watching the picture for the second time, and might have stayed for the seven o’clock showing had the usher not insisted he purchase a new ticket.

  Jakub shook his head. “Murphy’s gone. Mankiewicz gave him permission to leave after they ran the rushes of the disaster scene. Most of the stars cleared out on Thursday.”

  “Before the wrap party?” My brother stroked his chin, a lingering habit from when he wore a goatee.

  “That was just for the crew.”

  Too late I perceived the flaw in the story I’d concocted to cover his absence. Tam couldn’t have been chaperoning the cast around Saigon’s lesser-known shopping districts if they were already en route to Rome. But Gray had no reason to suspect that I knew more than he did regarding his lover’s whereabouts. So successfully had he distanced himself from the production of The Quiet American that he’d lost track of the actors’ comings and goings.

  My husband was more astute. In the short time we’d been sitting outside, I’d smoked four cigarettes, my vermouth cassis untouched on the table between us. Of course he’d noticed. The pedicab bearing Gray to the Rainbow had barely pulled away from the curb when Jakub reached for my hand.

  “Najdroższa,” he said, employing the Polish endearment he always used in place of my name. “What’s going on?” I saw the concern in his dark brown eyes and wondered how long I could keep the truth from him. I didn’t used to be good at lying and a part of me wanted to be caught.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I suggested.

  Jakub signed for our drinks and we were soon ambling along rue Catinat, the graceful French boulevard that nobody called by its new Vietnamese name, heading away from the river toward Paris Square and the red towers of Notre-Dame. It had rained earlier in the afternoon, a sudden shower that left the air blurry with vapor, tiny prisms glinting in the sun-pierced mist. Such sights had delighted me when we arrived. Everything about Saigon felt new and exotic: live crabs being sold out of bowls filled with water, right on the sidewalk. Tiny shrines the size of dollhouses in unexpected places throughout the city. There was one in front of the bank a few steps from our hotel and customers would pause and bow before entering, to safeguard themselves against the malice of wandering souls. The mounds of dragon fruit in the market, with their green scales and leathery pink skin. Slice one in half and inside you’d find translucent white flesh polka-dotted with black seeds. I’d expected them to taste tangy, like pineapple, but the fruit was nearly flavorless, with a mushy feel in the mouth. Nothing here was what it seemed.

  In two days we’d be on an Air France jet to Rome. They’d be shooting the interior scenes at Cinecittà, but thankfully our involvement with The Quiet American would be over. I say “our involvement,” but only Jakub was still tied to the production, although Gray continued to draw a salary from Figaro. He’d been brought in to doctor the script, but there was no saving it.

  Mankiewicz won’t hear of changing a single word, Gray had written to us in Paris. He’s making a piece of lousy propaganda, a travesty of the Graham Greene novel. I was just hired as window dressing. Fascinating place, Saigon. He’d begged us to come out and keep him company, luring us with the promise of jobs on the set of The Quiet American. Jakub, who was fluent in four languages, was put to work immediately translating for the Polish, French, and Italian members of the crew. Sadly, I was fired on my first day as an extra, after getting on the wrong side of the local fixer.

  Jakub said: “Tam’s made up his mind. He’s joined the insurgency, hasn’t he?” No point in asking how he knew. My husband had served as a courier in the French underground during the war. A music student at the Paris Conservatoire whose family back in Poland had been consigned to the Warsaw Ghetto, he’d had no choice but to take up with the Communist Resistance after the French police began rounding up foreign-born Jews and deporting them. He had been twenty years old, friendless, and the Party gave him a purpose, as well as a sense of belonging.

  “They left him no choice,” I confirmed. There would be no turning back for him now.

  We’d reached our destination, a tree-lined square with the Catholic church smack in the center. As we waited to cross the street, a man wearing a conical bamboo hat pedaled by on a bicycle laden with vegetables from the ma
rket. But for him, and the cluster of schoolgirls in white ao dais gossiping on the corner, we might have been on any broad boulevard in Paris at the end of the working day. I so longed to be back there.

  “Ready, Cara? Let’s go!” Jakub took my arm and together we plunged into the traffic. There are very few stoplights in Saigon, no lanes, no rules of the road that I could discern other than sauve qui peut: every man for himself. The trick to getting across an intersection is to keep moving in a straight line and at a steady pace. Miraculously, the cars and scooters would calculate your trajectory and steer around you.

  A man was dead because of me, his body left not a mile from where we were standing. I’d expected the story to be front-page news, the murder of an American businessman in Saigon’s tourist district, but the crime was being hushed up. If I told Jakub how I learned about Tam’s decision to cast his lot with the Communists, I’d end up confessing the part I’d played in the American’s murder. The desire to unburden myself of the terrible secret I’d been carrying around was so strong, but would it help? My husband might absolve me, but I would never forgive myself for setting the train of events in motion.

  When we left Vietnam, I’d be leaving something important behind. My innocence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tây Ninh, Vietnam

  February 9, 1957

  “Ladies, please. You too much in frame.” Mr. Quang indicated a bubblegum pink pillar festooned with writhing plaster dragons and bade us stand behind it—myself, the script girl, and the production manager’s secretary. You can’t tell the pillar is bubblegum pink since the picture was filmed in black and white—a good thing because the interior of the Cao Dai Temple was far more distracting than we were, “a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor,” in the words of Graham Greene. Michael Redgrave recites Greene’s description in a voiceover, omitting the Technicolor bit, as his journalist character, Fowler, enters the nave. He walks right by our pillar, but the take they used of the temple scene was shot from a high angle and from such a distance that you can’t see us.

  Honestly, I don’t mind. The day was a disaster from start to finish, although Michael was charming, making small talk with us “ladies” between takes. He’d only recently arrived in Vietnam and was having a dreadful time adjusting to the humidity. I’d had a week to get used to it and wasn’t faring much better. Inside the temple it was ten degrees cooler and I remember him joking about muffing the scene on purpose, to have an excuse to stay out of the sun.

  Mankiewicz generally avoided filming at midday because the strong light made everything flat. You notice it in the religious procession, the opening sequence that establishes Fowler’s presence in Tây Ninh, the Rome of the Cao Dai faith. The cardinals look washed out in their white robes as they march through the streets of the town, but it’s a key event in the novel, the annual pageant in the Cao Dai Holy See. Filming it on location, as opposed to staging it at Cinecittà, gave the picture an authentic, travelogue feel. That and Michael’s performance are the best that can be said for it, if you want my opinion.

  The Cao Dai pageant had been going on since the religion was founded, back in the 1920s, but the French didn’t bother attending until the Cao Dai pope recruited his own militia after World War II, when the Communists began massacring his adherents. The colonial authorities wanted to be sure the private army would not be used against them, and so began courting the movement’s leaders. It was time-consuming, not to mention risky, driving out from Saigon through territory controlled by the Việt Minh. Members of the Diplomatic Corps, according to Greene, “would send a few second secretaries with their wives and girls” instead of making the journey themselves.

  That’s who we were supposed to be, but I didn’t look matronly enough to be convincing as a diplomat’s wife. With my pixie cut, and wearing only a trace of lipstick, I appeared a good deal younger than my twenty-three years, more like someone’s girlfriend (although Greene used the word “girl” as shorthand for Vietnamese mistress). Both the script girl and the production manager’s secretary, I observed, were wearing blouses buttoned all the way up, and tailored skirts. Work clothes. In comparison, I looked as if I were heading off to the beach in my sleeveless shift and low-heeled sandals. What was I thinking?

  “Too much shoulders.” Mr. Quang snapped his fingers to summon the wardrobe mistress, and all work stopped until she was found. I wanted to disappear, I was so embarrassed. At least Jakub was up with the technical crew in the balcony, setting up lights, running sound checks and whatnot. The sanctuary was quite vast and I doubted he was aware of what was going on in our corner down below.

  “He treats everyone like that,” said the wardrobe mistress consolingly, draping a shawl around my shoulders. “Don’t let it bother you, hon. It’ll soon be forgotten.”

  I wished I could believe her. Mr. Quang struck me as the meticulous sort who never forgot anything, not that I blamed him. The honorific “mister” notwithstanding, he was little more than a glorified dogsbody on the production, albeit one with privileges. Rumor had it that he auditioned “girls” (in Greene’s sense) to keep Mankiewicz company in his hotel room at night, and his standards were said to be very exacting. Growing up in Hollywood, I knew all about the shenanigans that went on behind the scenes, starlets exchanging sexual favors in exchange for a role. Auditions on the casting couch. Men set the price of admission and women paid, each one hoping that she’d be the exception: the one who made it and became a star, finding true love along the way. It bothered me because my own mother, Vivien, had been one of those exceptions, and it hadn’t made her happy at all.

  Mankiewicz’s girls, like Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in The Quiet American, were easily disposed of, once they’d served their purpose. I was afraid that Mr. Quang put me in the same category and I thought it prudent to stay out of his way from that point onwards. When they finished the scene, I lingered in the temple instead of following the others outdoors. Since childhood, I was accustomed to entertaining myself on the set of whichever picture Father happened to be directing. Nobody paid attention as I poked around, inventing magical adventures for myself among the props and scenery, so long as I kept away from where they were actually filming. The set in this case was certainly magical. Whose idea was it to paint clouds on the sky blue ceiling? And what was the meaning of the giant globe with an eye painted on it that stood where the altar would be positioned in a Christian church? I’d have to read up on the religion when we were back in Saigon.

  Worshipers were returning to the sanctuary to pray. I kept the shawl on, to avoid offending the devout with my bare shoulders. It was quite garish, the shawl, a floral pattern in pinks and oranges that matched the inside of the temple. I guess the Cao Dai liked bright colors. A pair of elderly monks in yellow robes nodded approvingly in my direction as they made their way to the altar.

  “. . . les bannières. Les avez-vous vu?” I caught a snippet of their whispered conversation: the banners. Did you see them?

  It surprised me, how many Vietnamese spoke French in public. They seemed content to continue using the language, even after they’d kicked the colonizers out. I’d been taught French in boarding school—enough to order from a menu in a posh restaurant, as my friends and I used to say, to make polite conversation with French people on social occasions, or to parse the labels beneath the paintings in the Louvre. It was that kind of boarding school. The two monks spoke the language far more colloquially than I did, and the rest of their conversation was lost to me. I wasn’t even sure I’d understood the bit I heard. Banners?

  I found out later what they were talking about. We’d returned from Tây Ninh at the end of the afternoon and were unwinding in the rooftop bar of the Majestic Hotel. Most of the cast and crew were staying there, including Gray; Jakub and I were at the Continental because by the time we’d arrived they’d run out of room at the Majestic.

  The bar overlooked the Saigon River and from its balcony you could watch the big ships navigating along it for miles. Small fishing vessels darted around them. As the sun went down, the fishermen hung lanterns in the bow and stern, to make themselves visible to the behemoths. It was mesmerizing, the lights of the little boats dancing like dragonflies above the surface of the water, flickering against the glow of the red-streaked horizon.