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his pockets to find twenty piasters.
    Halfway up the street, midway between the market and Tu Do, there was always a legless man squatting in a door way. Each time Converse passed, he would drop twenty piasters in the man ’ s upturned pith helmet. He had been doing so for more than a year, so that whenever the man saw Converse approach he would smile. It was as though they were friends. Often, Converse was tormented by an impulse to withhold the twenty piasters to see what sort of a reaction there would be, but he had never had the courage.
    Having dropped the twenty P and exchanged smiles with his friend, Converse sauntered down Tu Do to the Crazy Horse. The Crazy Horse was one of the Tu Do bars in which, according to rumor, the knowledgeable patron might be served a bracing measure of heroin with — some even said in — his beer. As a result it was usually off limits, and on this evening Converse was the only customer. Facing him across the bar were fifteen uniformly beautiful Vietnamese girls in heavy makeup. He took a stool, smiled pleasantly, and ordered a Schlitz. The girl opposite him began to deal out a hand of cards.
    Beer in the Crazy Horse cost 250 piasters without heroin, and Converse was not in the mood for cards. He glanced down at the poker hand on the chrome before him as though it were a small, conventionally amusing animal, and affected to look over the girls with a worldly expression. In spite of the glacial air conditioning and his recent bath, his face was covered with sweat. The fifteen girls across the bar turned their eyes on him with identical expressions of bland, fathomless contempt.
    Converse drank his beer, his sinuses aching. He felt no resentment; he was a humanist and it was their country. They were war widows or refugee country girls or serving officers of the Viet Cong. And there he was, an American with a stupid expression and pockets stuffed with green money, and there was no way they could get it off him short of turning him upside down and shaking him. It must make them want to cry, he thought. He was sympathetic.
    He was searching his Vietnamese repertory for an ex pression of sympathy when Jill and Ian Percy arrived. Jill looked at the girls behind the bar with a wide white smile and sat down beside Converse. Ian came behind her, stooped and weary.
    “ Well, ” Jill Percy said. “ This looks like fun. ”
    A girl down the bar blew her nose and looked into her handkerchief. “ That ’ s what we ’ re here for, ” Converse said. The Percys order bottles of “ 33 ” beer; it was pronounced “ bami-bam ” and supposedly made with formaldehyde. Ian went over to the jukebox and played “ Let It Be. ”
    “ Staying through the summer? ” Jill asked Converse.
    “ I guess so. Till the elections. Maybe longer. You? ”
    “ We ’ ll be around forever. Right, Ian? ”
    “ We ’ ll be around all right, ” Ian said. Some “ 33 ” beer trickled from his mouth and into his sparse sandy beard. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “ We ’ re waiting around until we get an explanation. ”
    Ian Percy was an Australian agronomist. He was also an engag é , one of the few — other than Quakers — one saw around. He had been in the country for fifteen years — with UNRRA, with WHO, with everyone who would hire him, ending with the Vietnamese government, which had him on loan from the Australian Ministry of Agriculture. A province chief up north had gotten him fired, and he had taken accreditation with an Australian daily which was actually more of a racing form than a newspaper. As an engage ” he hated the Viet Cong. He also hated the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, Americans and particularly the civilians, Buddhist monks, Catholics, the Cao Dai, the French and particularly Corsicans, the foreign press corps, the Australian government, and his employers past — and, most especially — present. He was said to be fond of children, but the Percys had