Touch the Devil

He smiled wryly. ‘You could say that. I’d give you a cigarette, but I’ve lost my lighter.’

‘I’ve got one.’

He opened a tin of cigarettes, put two in his mouth and closed the tin carefully. She handed him the brass lighter. He lit the cigarettes, placed one between her lips and examined the lighter closely.

‘7.62mm Russian. Now that is interesting.’

‘My father’s. In August, ’44 he saved a German paratroop colonel who was about to be shot by partisans. The colonel gave him the lighter as a memento. He was killed in Algiers,’ she said. ‘My father. After surviving this place.’

‘There’s irony for you.’ He handed the lighter back to her. She shook her head and for some reason she couldn’t possibly explain, said, ‘No, keep it.’

‘As my memento?’

‘Memento mori,’ she said. ‘We’ll never get out of this place alive.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. That Cobra’s still on station. I’d say the cavalry should arrive within the next twenty minutes, just like Stage Six at MGM. In the nick of time. I’d better let them know they’re not wasting it.’

He took a flare pistol from a side pouch and fired a red flare high into the sky.

‘Couldn’t that be the Vietcong playing games again?’

‘Not really.’ He fired another red flare, then a green. ‘Colours of the day.’

Her leg was just starting to hurt. She said, ‘So now they know where we are, the Vietcong, I mean.’

‘They already did.’

‘And will they come?’

‘I should imagine so.’

He wiped the M16 clean with a rag and she raised the Nikon and focused it. As she discovered later, he was twenty-three and just under six feet in height with good shoulders, the dark hair held back by the sweatband giving him the look of some sixteenth century bravo. The skin was stretched tightly over Celtic cheekbones and a stubble of beard covered the hollow cheeks and strongly pointed chin. But it was the eyes which were the most remarkable feature, grey, like water over a stone, calm, expressionless, holding their own secrets.

‘What are you?’ she said.

‘Airborne Rangers. Sergeant Martin Brosnan.’

‘What happened here?’

‘A bad foul-up is what happened. Those clever little peasants, half our size, who we were supposed to walk all over, caught us very much as they caught you. We were on our way to Din To after being picked up from a routine patrol. Fourteen of us plus the crew. Now there’s only me for certain. Maybe a few out there still alive.’

She took several more pictures and he frowned. ‘You can’t stop, can you, just like the guy said in the article he wrote about you in Life last year. It’s obsessional. Christ, you were actually going to take a picture of that kid as he was about to shoot you.’

She lowered the Nikon. ‘You know who I am?’

He smiled. ‘How many women photographers have made the cover of Time magazine?’

He lit another cigarette and passed it to her. There was something about the voice which puzzled her.

‘Brosnan,’ she said. ‘I’m not familiar with that name.’

‘Irish,’ he said. ‘Well, County Kerry to be exact. You’ll seldom find it anywhere else in Ireland.’

‘Frankly, I thought you sounded English.’

He looked at her in mock horror, ‘My father would turn in his grave and my mother, God bless her, would forget she was a lady and spit in your eye. Good Irish-American, Boston variety. The Brosnans came over during the famine a long time ago, all Protestants, would you believe? My mother was born in Dublin herself. A good Catholic and could never forgive my father for not raising me the same.’

He was talking to keep her mind off the situation, she knew that and liked him for it. ‘And the accent?’ she said.

‘Oh, that’s part acquired by way of the right prep school, Andover in my case, and the right university, of course.’

‘Let me guess. Yale?’

‘My family have always gone there, but I decided to give Princeton a chance. It was good enough for Scott Fitzgerald and I’d pretensions to being a writer myself. Majored in English last year.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘What’s a spoiled preppy brat doing in Vietnam, serving in the ranks in the toughest outfit in the Army?’

‘I often ask myself that,’ Brosnan said. ‘I was going to carry straight on and do my doctorate and then I found Harry, our gardener, crying in the conservatory one day. When I asked him what was wrong, he apologised and said he’d just heard his son, Joe, had been killed in Nam.’ Brosnan wasn’t smiling now. ‘But the real trouble was that there’d been another son called Elie, killed in the Delta the year before.’

There was a heavy silence, the rain flooded down. ‘Then what?’

‘My mother had him in and gave him a thousand dollars. I remember it well because the cashmere and silk jacket I was wearing at the time had cost me eight hundred in Savile Row on a London trip the year before. And he was so damn grateful.’

He shook his head and Anne-Marie said softly, ‘So, you made the big gesture.’

‘He made me feel ashamed, and when I feel, I act. I’m a very existentialist person.’

He smiled again and she said, ‘And how have you found it?’

‘Nam?’ He shrugged. ‘Hell without a map.’

‘But you’ve enjoyed it? You have an aptitude for killing, I think.’ He had stopped smiling, the grey eyes watchful. She carried on, ‘You must excuse me, my friend, but faces you see, are my business.’

‘I’m not so sure about liking it,’ he said. ‘I’m damned good at it, I know that. Out here you have to be if the fellow coming at you has a gun in his hand and you want to get home for Christmas.’

There was silence, a long silence, and then he added, ‘I. know one thing, I’ve had enough. My time’s up in January and that can’t come soon enough for me. Remember what Eliot said about the passage we didn’t take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden? Well, from now on, I’m going to open every door in sight.’

The morphine was really working now. The pain had gone, but also her senses had lost their sharpness. ‘Then what?’ she said. ‘Back to Princeton for that doctorate?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. I’ve changed too much for that. I’m going to go to Dublin, Trinity College. Peace, tranquillity. Look up my roots. I speak a fair amount of Irish, something my mother drummed into me as a kid.’

‘And before that?’ she said. ‘No girl waiting back home?’

‘No more than eighteen or twenty, but I’d rather be sitting at one of those pavement cafes on the Champs Elysée sipping Pernod and you in one of those Paris frocks.’

‘And rain, my friend.’ Anne-Marie closed her eyes drowsily. ‘An absolute necessity. So that we may smell the damp chestnut trees,’ she explained. ‘An indispensable part of the Paris experience.’

‘If you say so,’ he said, and his hands tightened on the M16 as there was a stirring in the reeds close by.