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no mistaking what was coming. The intelligence on the North Vietnamese elite clinched it."
    "What intelligence?"
    "That their local officials, their foreign minister, even the mayor of Hanoi—they were all sending their sons and daughters of military age out of the country."
    I banked the fire and unfolded the metal screen. The aroma of the fireplace mingled with her scent. I was wound up, mulling the lost crusade.
    "Well, Communism didn't win either," I said, sounding regretful. "The old corruption is eating the new Communist state alive." I raised my glass in a toast. "To each according to his greed."
    I slumped onto the couch. Even fatigued, she looked pink and delicate, her hazel eyes clear and penetrating, hair luxurious, cheeks perfect. Her teeth were rabbitty though, big, with a gap between the two in front. The imperfection seemed childlike and endearing.
    I asked if she wanted coffee; she said she did. I rose to make it, but she waved me back down. "Let me," she said.
    Celeste braided her hair while she waited for the water to boil. Been squatting in the woods too long, I thought. Horny at the proximity of a girl twenty-five years my junior. Or maybe apprehension was revving the hormones. Either way, my vision sparkled.
    She was efficient.
The café filtre
press was soon on the coffee table. She poured out our cups.
    "Your tour," she said, "when you served with my dad." She handed me a cup. "What happened in Cheo Reo?"
    I took a sip and didn't say anything.
    "If you're worried about sparing my feelings," she said, "don't."
    Had the time come for her to hear it?
    "I'm aware he was burned. Mom didn't listen to the warning not to open the coffin. My gran said it was two years before my mother slept through the night. What was the slang for it—crispy critter?"
    I stared into my coffee. "I'm sorry. Family shouldn't have to—"
    "Yes, we do. We do have to . . . even that." She pushed back her hair. "He was a husband, soon to be a father. How could he have been so cavalier?"
    "He wasn't," I said. "Your mother married a professional soldier. Your dad went back because that's where the war was. If she couldn't live with that . . ." I took a slug of java. "But honestly, I don't think I'm up to talking about—"
    She cut me off. "Out of fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-three casualties, do you know how many full colonels, like my father, died in Viet Nam?"
    I shook my head.
    "Eight. Pretty damn rare, wouldn't you say?"
    "Very."
    "Did you hurt a lot of people in the war, Erik?"
    "More than I wanted. Why?"
    "Do they haunt?"
    Something had shifted in her tone and my comfort level. Suddenly I felt like a hostile witness.
    "I'm not sure where you're going."
    "Some of your former comrades intimated my father didn't die as officially reported."
    "You mean—not in combat?"
    She froze, realizing what I might have let slip. "Are you suggesting he wasn't killed in action?"
    "Who did this intimating?" I said, evading the question.
    "It's not important. What's germane is they implied you were involved."
    I closed my eyes for a moment, tilting my head back.
    "Were you?" she said.
    "Was I what?"
    "Did you have any part in it?"
    "Not the way you seem to be thinking." I opened my eyes.
    "One person referred to you as Captain Sidney. Said you weren't who you appeared to be."
    "Maybe because I wasn't. Listen—" I held up a hand, stopping her as she was about to press me again. "If I tell you . . . you have to put it away and move on."
    "I'm not sure I can promise that."
    I went to my jacket hanging on the wall rack and slipped my wallet from the inside pocket. I took out the military scrip I'd carried since the sixties and unfolded the mauve and green "funny money" on the coffee table.
    "What's this?" she said, peering at the woman's profile printed in place of George Washington's on the military money.
    "You're a lawyer. It's a retainer."
    She let the peculiar-looking dollar sit on the low table between