Loving Monsters (22 page)

One of the true measures of that kind of wealth and prestige has to do with temperature. In his presence you are awkwardly hot at first until you adjust to the cool of the air-conditioned room, which will allow you eventually to sit beside the gas log fire even as you know the tropical night outside is pressing up against the picture window like a poultice. For the moment, standing at the window beside your host (for he has followed you with the courteous affectation of having never before noticed the incredible view), you can feel on your face the heat conducted from the outside even through double glazing. The glass is hot to the touch. And beyond it lies the jewelled city as though seen from an aircraft: those exact sweltering canyons through which your taxi was crawling only ten minutes ago, earthbound and choking. Height and silence render the hectic seethe of ground-level activity remote. Lights and lights and lights of all colours; some winking, some moving, some revolving, all of them pouring up their throbbing activity in glacial silence. An
ailing moon bandaged in yellow hangs overhead. Of the firmament visible from a coral-chip beach in the provinces there is no trace. The neons of this single city occlude whole galaxies.

You talk a bit about the ex-dictator, your host’s friend since university days, his fraternity brother connected by marriage as well as by shared political deeds. Just a comment or two to touch base, nothing as vulgar as direct questions yet. This is a preliminary sounding-out. I have to convince him that I am worth his while to talk to and maybe worthy of a careful admission here and there. He has to convince me that he has something worth my listening to which I haven’t already read in a hundred newspaper articles. The charm offensive begins over dinner, for which we are joined by his wife Luz and the younger of his two sons, Henry, who has just finished at Harvard Law School and is supposed to have a mind like a rat trap. It is Henry who was opposed to my interviewing his father. I wonder what deal they have made. The dining-table is circular, Chinese-style, with a raised section in the middle that revolves on bearings to the touch, allowing the diners to choose dishes from the selection laid out.

‘When I was a kid‚’ says Henry, ‘I always had a secret desire to spin this thing really fast so all the food and sauce would shoot off into everybody’s lap. I can’t think why I never did it. Lack of nerve, I guess.’

‘If only you had lacked the nerve for some of your other, equally antisocial escapades,’ says his father with an indulgent smile. ‘One thinks of the lizards in your sister’s bed, the firecrackers at Choo-Choo’s wedding, the antlers in the graduation picture, the –’

‘Dad!’ protests his son. ‘Unfair. Tales out of school. I’m sure your guest doesn’t want to listen while you air the family’s dirty laundry.’

Think again, Henry, I say to myself (as we all laugh at this just-us-folks-at-home way of putting a potentially awkward guest at ease). Though I want to examine much dirtier linen than that and it belongs to Dad, not Junior.

Luz then puts her oar in. She is a petite lady whom I know to be nearly sixty while looking fifteen years younger. Despite her size she can undoubtedly do the matriarch role but tonight she has decided to be down-home while flying a little flag for the arts (out of deference to me in this otherwise too masculine, too materialist household). She asks about the province I have just left which none of her family has ever set foot in. ‘Sadly. It’s scandalous how untravelled we are in our own country,’ she says, and her son nods like the American citizen he now practically is. ‘I’ve heard such good things about your writing. It’s a real honour for us that you’re here. I’m ashamed to say that my boys aren’t very bookish where literature’s concerned, although I do my best to keep up. Tell me, how do you rate Dean Koontz?’

It goes on affably. They are pleasant, civilised company in their way. The food, unobtrusively replenished by two neat girls, is excellent. At the end of the meal, slightly to my surprise, Luz retires with some excuse about having to supervise domestic arrangements. We have obviously reached nut-cutting time when things will turn a bit political. Still, this lady is herself no political virgin, having been mayor of a notoriously tough city until three years ago. Maybe she’s just sick of it all and wishes to retreat into the image of herself she has been projecting all evening, that of a housewife and mother who reads a bit and is on the board of several leading charities. More likely, though, she knows her husband and her newly qualified lawyer son can more than take care of this pipsqueak British writer. The range of sanctions at their disposal is so huge it’s a joke. The disgrace of a dozen years ago hardly matters now. The networks built up during the previous regime are still there, just less visible. Old loyalties still operate, now further cemented by intermarriage and business alliances, to say nothing of the tacit mutual blackmail posited on knowledge of dark deeds and skeletons, always with the assumed threat of incriminating documents stashed away in a Swiss vault (the Far Eastern version of Jayjay’s pact with Mansur). Add to this prodigious wealth, and the degree of potential overkill is truly absurd.
(The pipsqueak British writer, wearing his only decent pair of trousers, has gone to the window for another brief glance out before accepting a cup of coffee. He regrets that he doesn’t even have the option of putting on the armour of God. Not that the armour of God is a patch on Kevlar. Game, set and match to earthly powers, as always.)

My host and his son welcome me to the fireside and we sit in our three easy chairs before the unconsumable blazing logs as though we had been invited back to the Senior Tutor’s rooms for a nightcap. ‘So tell us a bit about this book of yours’ seems consistent with the illusion.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’m starting from the premise that the previous regime, and particularly your man, have been seriously misrepresented by the Western media in several important ways, and I’d like to see if it’s possible to redress the balance. It probably isn’t.’

‘Apologetics?’ Henry asks acutely. ‘Or just plain revisionism?’

‘Certainly not apologetics. Revisionism in the strictly non-Marxist sense, and then only to the extent of re-interpreting facts rather than denying they occurred.’

‘They lied a lot about us,’ says my host with unexpected vehemence. For the first time he sounds ex-military. It may just be the gas flames, but his eyes seem to flicker with the bafflement shared by his angry fellow officers when they had begun to sense the tide of global public opinion turn against them. The mess-hall expostulations … Had they not always been on the side of the angels? Had they not been patriots, pro-democracy and anti-Communist? The trouble with the American public – civilians, of course – was that they were so lulled and insulated by their wealth and general pig-ignorance of the world they didn’t realise that saying they were committed to the crushing of global Communism was all fine and dandy, but at some level someone had to get their hands dirty in order to do the electorate’s bidding. And that meant the military. God knows, hadn’t we taken enough casualties of our own? Good men were
dying
in this crusade …

All this dead rhetoric I can read in my host’s eyes. It is not difficult because I’ve read the same grievance in the eyes
of so many other ex-officers over the years, betrayed by a sudden lurch in public opinion. It’s that lurch they can’t get their minds around. The obvious thing is to blame it on well-intentioned liberals who hadn’t realised their strings were being pulled by the international Communist conspiracy, that diabolically scheming dark power. The more intelligent officers saw at once that this explanation wouldn’t do because it quickly spiralled into a paranoia which accepted that Washington and the media were already in Communist hands (though what
about
I. F. Stone, huh?). Still, the grievance is real that one moment they were blue-eyed boys winning freedom’s war and the next they’d become murderers and torturers with potential atrocity charges hanging over them at The Hague.

‘What exactly do you mean by “re-interpreting facts”?’ Henry asks me.

‘I mean a re-interpretation using the notion of cultural difference. We are not in Europe or America here. We are in Asia. But the world’s media are dominated by Western technology and Western cultural assumptions, and largely Anglophone ones at that. To interpret highly complex historical, social and political upheavals in an Asian country using the yardsticks of distant nations with completely different histories and attitudes is pointless. Anthropology knows better than that; why shouldn’t the media?’

‘Sounds reasonable. So what are you going to write about my father?’

‘I can’t say yet. It depends on what he wants to tell me.’ We both look at the handsome man sipping seventy-year-old malt whisky.

‘Well,’ says the old fellow, who is barely eighteen months my senior and approximately eleven thousand times as rich. ‘I don’t think it will make any difference what I say, will it? Sure I’ll talk to you, James. I’ll be happy to. Partly because I think you’re a fair
person and I think your project also sounds fair, and partly because I believed in my friend, my President, and I still do and I’m damned if I’m going to be ashamed of it. I took an oath of loyalty and that means something to me. He has been seriously misunderstood and vilified, and if you’re giving me the chance to set the record a little straighter then I’ll take it. About my own reputation there’s probably nothing to be done.’

‘As Lord of the Tongs, you mean?’

Henry glares at me sharply.

‘Exactly,’ his father says imperturbably.

The pun on ‘tongs’ in this journalist’s phrase hints at his Chinese ancestry, at an allegation of corruption, and at the electric curling tongs which were said to have been the instrument of choice of a close brotherhood of officer-interrogators whose existence was widely rumoured but never proved. The only small weapon I have in my otherwise empty armoury, too puny to deploy unless he backs up heavy denial with legal menaces, is a notarised deposition from a US army major. My host had been seconded to Operation Phoenix in 1970, had gone to the States for counter-insurgency training, then on to Vietnam. He had been a first-rate pupil. The ex-major I interviewed outside Baltimore gave chapter and verse for a series of interrogations conducted in a hangar on the perimeter of his base near the Cambodian border. The screams from that isolated building had been audible half a mile away to mechanics working on O-1E Bird Dog spotter planes. They had glanced at each other and turned up the country & western music on their transistor radios. Shades of Edward II. By the time my host’s curling tongs were cool enough to pack away in his jungle green canvas grip, the hangar’s big doors had been opened to let out the stink of burnt hair and roast meat.

‘I’ll talk,’ he says again. ‘But I won’t whine, you understand? I naturally won’t incriminate myself but I shan’t necessarily conceal everything we did. It was dog eat dog, never forget that. We were fighting a war out there and the same was happening to us guys when we fell into their hands. And that war was linked to what
was going on in the Emergency over here. I’m not going to cry crocodile tears over the past or massage my conscience in public. No, sir. What’s done is done. Certain things I regret, though not all, not by a long way. I shan’t pretend I lose sleep over it just to please your readers. I don’t.’

And this, too, requires an act of revisionism, though less cultural than temporal. One has to think one’s way back to those years when all parties to a grim war waged it with the age-old command ringing in their ears, Win At All Costs: the edict the Nuremburg trials had turned into Catch-22. Torture was like litter and pollution: one of the inseparable consequences of the hegemonic attitude. Dominant cultures did not attain or retain dominance for long without a constant level of dirty work well away from the public eye. The Oliver Norths and John Poindexters were simply the unlucky ones who made it to the witness stand, the iceberg’s tip.

We talked of other things, drank superb whisky, assessed the current President’s lamentable performance, swapped reminiscences, decided we could work with each other. When it was time for me to go my host said:

‘I hope you don’t mind if young Henry here sits in on our sessions? I have nothing to hide from my son and he’s a first-rate legal adviser. It might save you a lot of trouble later. I mean if he can spot potential libel right there, you and your publisher won’t have to worry about it at a later stage when things could get expensive.’ He smiles his easy smile. The deal.

He’s flinty at that moment but not sinister. I like and am surprised by his plain speaking. I had expected fudging and evasiveness. I had expected to be headed off by family gossip or long monologues about regional delicacies I ought to try. But no. He was more to the point than I had dared hope. The truth is I like that plain, military integrity when I meet it. It’s quite aware of all the counter-arguments but refuses to get bogged down in liberal muddiness just for the sake of sounding repentant. Actually, I’m sick of people wanting to look good. I warm to those who
don’t mind looking themselves. Best of all are the ones who refuse to disavow the past.

I go back to my lodgings in his bulletproof Land Cruiser, driven by an ex-sergeant who left the army to go on driving for him. It turns out the girls who waited at the dinner table are the sergeant’s own family. They come from the same provincial town as my host, so the household is cemented together by regional, military and blood loyalties. ‘He likes you,’ the ex-sergeant confides to me as we shoot a set of red lights in the thin traffic. ‘I can tell. He’s very suspicious of journalists. But he likes you.’

I turn things over as I try to sleep. Have I been seduced? Down here at nearly ground level the night outside is filled with ambient light and the muffled roaring of air conditioners. At two a.m. horns sound in the street, echoing off concrete walls. From somewhere at the bottom of this canyon comes the amateur wailing of karaoke bars. Exhausts blare, sweat runs into the pillow. How familiar these urban tropic nights are, unsleeping with coffee and dilemmas. Have I been talked around, softened up, compromised? Are Henry and his father still sitting in front of the gas logs, laughing at how easily they tamed the pipsqueak British writer? And should I care if they are? But they won’t be. There is no need for duplicity. My charming host is who he is and who he was, just as he admits. Someone who is straightforwardly a patriot, a paterfamilias and an interrogator, as well as many things besides. I am dramatising myself with these squeamish reflections about supping with a long spoon, about Nietzsche’s cautionary bon mot that when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. But of course. We
are
the abyss. I and Jayjay and everybody else.