“That was true until Thieu got into the game in 68. Then it was local sales, you know, within Viet Nam.”
How did you find that out?”
“Mike told me.”
“Do you believe everything he tells you? Doesn’t seem prudent.”
“I just believe what I can triangulate and I can triangulate that from what I learned when I got back to San Francisco in 68.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“We worked together up country in I corps – ’66 – ’67.”
“So that was you?! Back in the Saigon days he told me he worked with the SEALs.”
“Yeah, I was one of ’em. We blew up bridges.”
“Small world. If the doesn’t have a regular job how can he have an expense account?”
“Oh he has a job, he just doesn’t have an official employer these days. He’s a carpet dealer. A rug merchant. You know that oriental carpet store up the street from the 4700? He owns some of those carpets on consignment. He imports them. Some are very valuable antiques. In a lot of places you can’t take money out of the country”
“Yeah, I learned all about that.”
“But you can export stuff, like antique rugs, race cars, vintage motorcycles, stuff like that. He just makes deals. It’s not like he sits in a regular office, he does deals out of the 4700. Of course he travels; sometimes to places where they make rugs.”
I braked hard for the turn at the Y and pulled off to the side to let Gene’s sports car pass. I let the engine idle and pulled on the parking brake.
“How do you know all this about him? He can’t have been hanging out in the U district for that long.”
“No, but I started seeing him around not too long after I got back from the bay area in ’71.”
“That’s not what he told me. He said he left Saigon when the pullout started. That would’ve been sometime in ’73.”
“Well, I don’t know. What’s a year or two. He hangs out in the 4700 for a while then travels somewhere and comes back.”
“But how do you know about the carpets?”
“Cesar, who runs the carpet store told me.”
“How do you know him?”
“My soon to be ex’s sister is his wife.”
In The Belly Of the Beast 