Highways to a War (58 page)

It was in that time that I began to notice the change in Langford. Before, his secret life had been peripheral; something on the edges of his personality. Now, it seemed to me to be taking over.

 

 

I first grew concerned about him through a conversation I had with young Roger Clayton.

I met Clayton by chance outside the Telecommunications Building, near Post Office Square. It was around four o‘clock on a Monday afternoon: the end of siesta, and the city still drowsy in the heat. This was my first day back in the country after something like a month away, and I’d been putting a story through to ABS in Sydney on the radio-telephone circuit. Clayton and I walked towards the square together, comparing notes.

The square was half deserted: the scarlet flame trees by the white French post office burning intolerably in the sun; a couple of cyclo boys creaking by in slow motion. As we crossed the road a Cambodian Army truck roared past, and Clayton grimaced.

“There they go,” he said. “They’re press-ganging boys off the streets now. And there’s no point at all, Harvey, is there? The Yank airlift won’t save them. Nothing will.”

He squinted at me: not as fresh and eager as he’d been two years earlier. There were lines of strain on his plain, sweating face, and I guessed that he was about burned out, as a lot of the press here were.

“Some of the Yank military brass are still claiming in interviews that the Government can hold the towns,” he said. “Christ. Are they kidding themselves, or just us?” Without waiting for an answer, he asked suddenly: “Have you seen Mike Langford lately? ”

I said I was seeing him that evening.

We were passing the curbside tables in front of la Taverne, where some French embassy people and a few foreign journalists were sitting over coffees and cognacs. Hands in pockets, Clayton glanced sideways at me, his expression a curious one: the disapproving, almost prim look of someone about to pass on news of human deviousness or corruption.

“Langford’s someone who won’t seem to accept the end here,” he said. “It’s weird. A bit of a bloody worry, in fact.”

Mike’s got a lot invested emotionally, I said. He regards it as his home.

Clayton shook his head. It wasn’t that simple, his look told me. He seemed determined to talk about it, and I remembered how much he’d admired Langford, and guessed now that I was going to have to listen to some sort of analysis of his idol’s flaws. Roger’s uncritical youthful fervency was lately giving way to a judgmental earnestness I found unattractive: it afflicts a lot of journalists.

“Mike knows bloody well that Lon Nol’s finished,” he said. “But he seems to be involved with this group around his mate Chandara—who’s been promoted to Colonel. I gather it’s the old Free Khmer revamped, getting ready to come again when Lon Nol loses. Against the Khmer Rouge! Talk about tilting at windmills: Jesus. But surely you’ve heard these rumors about Langford?”

Mike was a friend, I said. I didn’t listen to rumors.

But Clayton ignored my tone. “You know I regard him as a friend too,” he said, “and a great war photographer. Nothing will change that. But mate, he’s losing his professionalism.” He looked around him now as though we might be overheard. “You must have heard,” he said. “They reckon that out in the field, he’s picking up the gun. He’s not always covering; he’s bloody
fighting,
mate.”

I stopped, and faced him. I don’t believe that, I told him; and I didn’t.

“Look, it’s coming from quite a few sources,” Clayton said. “A
NewYork Times
correspondent came on him with a platoon of Lon Nol soldiers down near Takhmau, on Highway 1, where the Government’s still holding out. They’d just come out of a firefight, and Mike was carrying an M-16: he seemed to be in charge. ‘Jesus,’ said the
Times
guy, ‘what are you doing with that rifle?’ And Langford said: ‘We got cut off, and their captain was killed. Somebody had to take over.’ ”

I laughed, in spite of the concern that Clayton had succeeded in creating in me. Any other journalist would have laughed at that story too, serious though its implications were: but not Clayton. His stare asked that I come to my senses.

He probably had to fight his way out, I said. It happens; you know that. It’s happened to plenty of other cameramen. You defend yourself or you die.

“There are too many other stories,” Clayton said. “And Langford doesn’t hide his involvement with this bloody outfit. All he ever talks about is how Cambodia’s been betrayed, and how it’s got to be saved. He’s losing his objectivity, Harvey.”

Maybe he thinks now there are more important things in life than journalism, I said.

Clayton looked affronted, like a Bible teacher listening to blasphemy, and I patted him on the shoulder.

I’ll give Mike your regards, I said, and hailed a cyclo.

 

 

I’d arranged to meet Langford for a drink that night by the pool at the Hotel le Royal. I came down from my room at about eight o‘clock, and sat at a table to wait for him under one of the striped umbrellas, cognac and soda in hand.

The colored electric bulbs hung as always between the sugar palms, and the petrol lamps flickered on the tables like the fairground lights of childhood. In front of me, across the pool, rose the hotel’s ranks of shuttered windows. Beyond them was the drive, with its cyclos and taxis, and then the Phnom Penh dark: dense and profoundly’ unsafe. All was as usual here, yet not. The garden’s scented air suggested peace, but a peace in the process of mummifying: becoming as we sat here the peace of the past, masquerading as the present for a little while longer. I tried to imagine what would happen when the Khmer Rouge came up the drive.

The crowd around me was made up of embassy officials, Cambodian military officers and bureaucrats, Western correspondents, and a sprinkling of up-market Cambodian prostitutes in black silk sarongs. A small Cambodian orchestra on the café’s terrace was playing “Wonderland by Night.” My colleagues of the press, huddled over their table lamps, faces reflecting the flames of the lamps like those of nineteenth-century plotters, were the noisiest of the groups under the umbrellas. There was a note of hysteria in their laughter that night, and they were getting more drunk than usual. Outbursts of wild clowning alternated with emotional diatribes against the corrupt Lon Nol leaders—or simply the war itself.

One of these was being delivered at the next table by a British correspondent whose hair was held back by a red pirate’s scarf. I could pick up most of his thesis in snatches. Only the American hawks wanted to keep the war going now, and a Khmer Rouge victory would be the best outcome for the country, bringing peace and stability. They woulldn’t be the bogeys they were said to be: the wicked Khmer Rouge were a fiction created by right-wing war-lovers. They’d prove to be moderate Socialists, free from corruption and ready to rebuild a Cambodia at peace, with the exiled Prince Sihanouk back as head of state.

I’d heard this speech before, with minor variations. Meanwhile, in the markets, rumors of quite another kind were circulating, brought by the refugees from the countryside: horror stories about disembowelings, and heads being sawn off with the knife-edged leaf stems of sugar palms. You could take your pick: none of us really knew what the Others would be like.

There were very few correspondents that I knew here, this evening. I missed the Nurseryman, who was long gone; I missed Volkov. Jim Feng was in Saigon that week, Griffiths was back in the UK, and I expected Mike to come alone, or perhaps with Bill Wall. But when he appeared, walking down the steps from inside the hotel, I was startled to see him accompanied by Aubrey Hardwick.

Langford had introduced me to Hardwick in Saigon once, but we’d spoken very little; and that had been a number of years ago. Here in Phnom Penh, I’d seen the two of them together from a distance, at odd times—often having drinks or a meal at one of the little bars down near the Tonle Sap. They were usually alone, and I never attempted to join them. Sometimes they had Donald Mills with them, who was still Second Secretary at the Australian embassy in Saigon. Hardwick came and went, visiting our embassy here. He was said to be a military adviser, and his connection with Australia’s foreign mission was left somewhat vague—which should have fooled no one who knew about such things.

As they pulled up their chairs to the table, I studied him with some curiosity. He’s now quite old, as you probably know—a bachelor in his mid-sixties, belonging everywhere and nowhere. I’ve learned since that he has a flat here in Bangkok and a house in Melbourne; but he seems to stay nowhere for long. Like a lot of aging diplomats and Secret Intelligence people, he’s developed a veneer over the years that’s pretty well impenetrable. Aubrey’s veneer—old-school-tie and Melbourne Club—is a sort of self-caricature: fey and dated, pre—World War Two, with a touch of Noel Coward about it. But the veneer covers a quite different interior from that of a diplomat: there’s a hardness there that makes you metaphorically straighten yourself—and then feel annoyed with yourself for doing it.

Leaning back in his chair now, he looked like a military officer in mufti. Everything said it: the lean fitness; the hair—now quite white—cut to a Marine stubble; the clipped, quasi-British accent; the cotton shirt with patch pockets and the knife-edged tan slacks. He had the expected firm jaw, but the mouth was odd: pursed pink lips that were rather feminine: a fastidious elderly lady’s. One eyelid drooped slightly, in a frozen wink. There was no small talk: he wouldn’t allow any. As soon as he had a cognac in his hand, he turned his full attention on me, and proceeded to the only topic anyone here was talking about: the country’s death. He led into it with a dose of flattery.

“Good to meet you again, Harvey. Never miss your television pieces when I’m at home in Melbourne. Constantly listen to your radio reports on the ABS overseas service as well. Excellent; they keep me abreast. And I notice your assessments are seldom wrong. So tell me: how long do you think we have, before welcoming the Red Khmer into town?”

I told him a couple of months at most.

But he shook his head, his eyes fixed on me without blinking: shrewd, unusually light eyes, arresting the attention like a glimpse of frozen water. And a little mad: the only thing in his appearance that gave him away. All spooks are a little mad; they have to be.

“Not months,” he said. “Weeks.”

I asked him if this was a guess, or whether he had privileged information. If he had, I said, perhaps he might care to share it.

I probably sounded a little brusque; and I saw Langford glance at me quickly. But I have something of a distaste for spooks—and as well, you have to understand that in that February, in the atmosphere of final catastrophe enclosing the city, no one felt like playing the cat-and-mouse games any more which usually provide journalists, public officials and politicians with their adrenaline rushes. We were past these games; discretion and indirectness were being dropped. It was rather like being on a sinking ship.

Aubrey wasn’t put out, or didn’t appear to be. But he took his time about answering, leaning above the table lamp’s glass shade to tight a small cigar at the flame, his tanned old face deeply shadowed. There was a good deal of the actor in him. Leaning back and blowing out a long stream of smoke in the classic manner, he gave me the unblinking gaze again.

“With pleasure,” he said. “In desperate times, we scavengers should share every scrap, no? I’ve been talking today to my friend John Gunther Dean. Also to my old and dear friend Lieutenant General Sutsakhan.”

My friend John Gunther Dean; my friend Sutsakhan. I didn’t doubt Aubrey’s close acquaintance with both the American ambassador and the commander-in-chief of the Cambodian Armed Forces. But I suddenly sensed something
passé
about him: something of yesterday’s man. Sensed, but wasn’t sure. He was pretty certainly a high-ranking ASIS operative, and close to the center of things; yet the atmosphere he gave out just now, under the bland and confident manner, was of a man trying to hold his place, and feeling the ground begin to shift. It’s an atmosphere an old journo becomes highly attuned to, and I wondered why I sniffed it out in Aubrey. I still wonder, since he now proceeded to deliver some hard information of a reasonably surprising nature.

“The Government will almost certainly remove Lon Nol shortly,” Aubrey said. “Sutsakhan will probably replace him as head of state. They will do this in a bid to win international approval, since Lon Nol’s corruption now brings them into such dreadful odor. And what they hope then, poor things, is to get U.S. Congress approval for the major military air support they’re being denied. But alas, no. It’s too
late.
The troops are deserting in thousands, and almost every brigade defending the perimeter of the city has already been knocked out; you know this. The Americans have plans to evacuate the Government, and John Gunther Dean is preparing to pull the embassy out. It will be soon, Harvey, very soon; I can’t say more. And the ambassador believes that what will follow will be what he refers to as a bloodbath.”

Yes, we’d heard that often enough, I told him. Dean was always talking to the press about the future Khmer Rouge bloodbath, when he had us around to the embassy for drinks.

“True,” Mike put in. “The journos have even made up a song about it. You’ll probably hear it sung before the night’s over, Aubrey. The ‘Khmer Rouge Bloodbath Song.’ ”

Aubrey chuckled. “John Gunther Dean’s a pessimist,” he said. “I often tell him that.” He turned to me again; he seemed bent on impressing me. “There won’t be any bloodbath, you know—it’s nonsense. It reminds one of that poem of Cavafy‘s—are you a Cavafy admirer, Harvey?—’Waiting for the Barbarians.‘ ” He quoted, his voice taking on a musical cadence. “ ’Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? These people were a kind of solution.‘ ” He gave a throaty laugh, his eyes searching mine like those of the teller of a suggestive joke. “The Americans tend to
need
monsters to frighten the children with, don’t they? I love them dearly, but they do.” He leaned towards me, lowering his voice slightly and checking the tables on either side: the sideways glance one grows all too familiar with, in political journalism. “The question is, Harvey, what happens
after
the defeat? That’s what I’ve been talking about with Michael, here.”