Tree of smoke by Denis Johnson

a goddamn liar. Any other questions?”
    “Yeah: Anders, what are these little dabs of mud on the walls?”
    “Beg pardon?”
    “These little pocks of mud? Do they have something do with insects? Aren’t you an entomologist?”
    Pitchfork, waking from his nap, took a meditative taste of his brandy. “I’m more about mosquitoes in particular.”
    “The deadlier pests,” the colonel said.
    “I’m rather more about draining swamps,” Pitchfork said.
    “Anders has been giving me a very good report on you. Positively bragging on you,” the colonel said.
    “He’s a good lad. He’s got the right kind of curiosity,” Pitchfork said.
    “Have any of our bunch in Manila contacted you?”
    “No. Unless you call Pitchfork basically living here a form of contact.”
    “Pitchfork isn’t with our bunch.”
    “Then what is he?”
    “I’m a poisoner,” Pitchfork said.
    “Anders is actually and honorably employed by the Del Monte Corporation. They contribute plenty to malaria eradication.”
    “I’m all about DDT and swamp recovery. But I don’t know what sort of organism might make the little mud dabs.”
    Colonel Francis Sands tipped back his head and poured half a snifter down his spout, blinked against the dark, coughed, and said, “Your own dad—my own brother—lost his life in that sleazy Jap run on Pearl Harbor. And who were our allies in that war?”
    “The Soviets.”
    “And who’s the enemy tonight?”
    Skip knew the script: “The Soviets. And who’s our ally? The sleazy Japs.”
    “And who,” said Pitchfork, “was I fighting in the Malay jungle in ’51 and ’52? The same Chinese guerrillas who helped us with the Burma business in ’40 and ’41.”
    The colonel said, “We’ve got to keep hold of our ideals while steering them though the maze. I should say through the obstacle course. An obstacle course of hard-as-hell realities.”
    Skip said, “Hear, hear!” He disliked it when his uncle dramatized the obvious.
    “Survival is the foundation of triumph,” Pitchfork said.
    “Who’s on first?” the colonel asked.
    “But in the end,” Pitchfork said, “it’s either liberty or death.”
    The colonel raised his empty glass to Pitchfork. “At Forty Kilo, Anders manned a little crystal radio set for seven months. To this day he won’t tell me where he kept it hid. There were at least a dozen little Jap sonsabitches in that camp did nothing but think how to locate that contraption day and night.” Forty Kilo had been the Burmese railroad outpost where their work gang had been interned by the Japanese in 1941. “We used coconut shells for rice bowls,” he said. “Everybody had his own coconut shell.” He reached out and clutched his nephew’s wrist.
    “Uh-oh,” said Skip, “am I losing you?”
    The colonel stared. “Uh.”
    He leapt to bring his uncle back: “Colonel, the file catalog goes back to Saigon at some point, am I right?”
    The colonel peered at him in the dark, moving slightly, making many tiny adjustments in his posture, as if balancing his head on his neck. Apparently as a kind of focal exercise he examined his cigar stub, trying it at various distances, and seemed to rally, and sat up straighter.
    Sands said, “I’ve been working on my French. Get me assigned to Vietnam.”
    “How’s your Vietnamese?”
    “I’d need to brush up.”
    “You don’t know a single word.”
    “I’ll learn. Send me to the language school in California.”
    “Nobody wants Saigon.”
    “I do. Set me up in an office over there. I’ll look after your card files. Appoint me your curator.”
    “Talk to my ass; my head aches.”
    “I’ll make every little datum accessible and retrievable—you’ll just comb through with these two fingers and zip-zip, sir, whatever you want pops up at you.”
    “Are you so in love with the files? Have you fallen under the spell of rubber cement?”
    “We’re going to beat them. I want to be there for that.”
    “Nobody wants to go to