Saigon (52 page)

A moment later he was being dragged up the sap into the daylight by the jostling crowd of enemy troops, but Ngo Van Dong didn’t go with them. Seizing a young French lieutenant by the shoulder, he made him wait at gunpoint until the other members of the special assault squad were out of earshot. 

“Where is Chief of Staff Devraux?” he Snapped. “Which are his quarters?” 

The apprehensive lieutenant pointed wordlessly along the communications sap, arid immediately Dong drew a grenade from a pouch on his belt and dashed away. 

Inside his bunker Paul was standing unsteadily by the smashed radio, fighting another wave of dizziness, when he heard a noise in the doorway behind him. Turning slowly he found he could see only a blurred, indistinct outline of an Asian face and a flat bamboo helmet bearing a red star emblem. In his turn, Dong stared uncertainly for a moment at the obviously sick and exhausted French officer who wore a filthy bandage round his head; then he stepped closer, still holding the grenade in his left hand, and recognized him. Despite the two-day growth of stubble on his chin, Paul bore a strong resemblance in maturity to his father, arid Dong drew in his breath sharply. 

“Devraux, you’re a captive of the Democratic People’s Army of Vietnam,” he breathed. “You must obey my orders now.” 

Paul screwed up his eyes and with an effort brought the Viet Minh soldier’s face into focus. When recognition dawned on him, he shook his head slowly in confusion. “Who sent you here, Dong?” 

The features of the Vietnamese tightened convulsively. “My dead mother, my dead father — and my dead brother, Hoc. Get down on your knees! I’m going to kill you!” 

Outside the bunker silence had fallen suddenly over Dien Bien Phu for the first time in more than two months, and Paul wondered through his haze of pain if what he was seeing was a hallucination. He felt himself begin to sway again, and he had to clutch at one of the wooden roof supports to prevent himself from falling. “You’ve won the battle, Dong. You deserve your victory. Isn’t that enough for you?” 

“It isn’t enough for my dead family. Get down on your knees!” 

Paul shifted away from the post and began to move unsteadily towards the Vietnamese, holding his empty hands loose at his sides. “The killing’s finished, Dong. Now we’ve all got to start picking up the pieces. I’m your prisoner — but I’m going to join the other prisoners.” 

Although Dong’s face began to work nervously, at the last moment he stepped aside, and Paul continued walking slowly past him towards the door of the dugout. As he reached out a hand to push the sacking aside, the Vietnamese called desperately once more for him to stop; but still Paul ignored the command, and Dong opened fire. With his face cont9rted in an agonized expression, the Vietnamese held his finger curled tight round the trigger of the submachine gun for several seconds, and the French officer, after collapsing against the wall, fell face down in the mud without a sound and didn’t move again. 

On the morning of the first Friday in July, Joseph sat down to breakfast in the paved inner courtyard of the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon, trying hard not to look at his wristwatch. Normally he found the fragrant flowering shrubs and the elegant statues amidst which the tables were set soothing and refreshing, but after a restless night in one of the high-ceilinged Continental bedrooms, he had fallen asleep properly for the first time only at dawn, and as a result had woken unaccustomedly late, feeling anxious and on edge. When the waiter approached his table, he ordered strawberries with his rolls and coffee as usual, but as soon as the little dish of crimson Dalat fruit was set before him, a mental picture of the neatly tilled terraces of the Lang-Biang plateau, where the berries had been grown, flashed in his mind, and he found he couldn’t eat even one of them. 

Suddenly it seemed. much longer than three months since he and Lan had spent those few poignant hours together in Dalat, and because the agonizing weeks of waiting were almost over, he wondered for the first time, with a stab of alarm, how he would come to terms with life without her if, against all his expectations, she decided not to marry him. By mutual agreement they had decided to avoid meeting again while the battle raged at Dien Bien Phu, and Joseph had let a whole month go by before contacting her after the news came out that Paul had been killed on the day that Dien Bien Phu had fallen. He knew that she would have to observe the proper Vietnamese interval of mourning if she were to marry again, but she had told him that she would give him her decision at least at the beginning of July. He had flown into Tan Son Nhut from Hong Kong the previous evening, leaving Tempe white-faced but determinedly calm, making preparations to pack her belongings and return to Baltimore; although visibly shaken by his abrupt request that she give him a divorce, Tempe had won the battle to retain her self-control, and her very calmness, instead of making it easier to leave, had somehow heightened the feelings of guilt and anguish that had haunted him constantly since his last departure from Dien Bien Phu. During the many sleepless nights that followed his last visit to the crumbling valley fortress, he had been unable to dismiss from his mind the memory of Paul standing outside his bunker as the last. Red Cross Dakota lifted him into the monsoon clouds, and when a few days after the garrison fell, Paul’s name appeared on the Red Cross list of those who had died, the intensity of the grief Joseph felt had made him physically ill for a day or two. During the next few weeks he drank frequently and with unaccustomed heaviness and didn’t allow himself to think of the future. But when his grief began to lessen, the Conviction that perhaps fate all along had determined that he should marry Lan had revived in him. Somehow at last it all seemed to have been destined and he became convinced that taking Lan and Tuyet away from Saigon was the only way of putting the terrible tragedies of the past behind them. On his arrival at the Continental Palace the night before, he’d found a note from Lan awaiting him, promising that she would meet him on the hotel terrace next morning at eleven o’clock, and as soon as he awoke he’d begun peering impatiently at the hands of his watch every few minutes. 

As a result time hung heavy on him, and in an effort to calm himself Joseph picked up from beside his plate the French language Journal de Saigon, which every visiting foreign correspondent turned to on arrival to catch up on events in Vietnam. The main story on its front page purported to give details of the sweeping land redistribution program being carried out all over the northern half of Vietnam by the Communist cadres of President Ho Chi Minh’s renamed Lao Dong Party — the Workers’ Party; according to the newspaper, assassination and terror tactics were already being employed on a massive scale against members of the landowning classes, and tens of thousands of deaths had already been reported. Although the Geneva Conference of world leaders on Indochina had still not produced any formal agreement after two months of discussions, General Giap’s victory at Dien Bien Phu had virtually forced France to begin seeking an armistice the day after its garrison was defeated, and in the north particularly, unashamedly Communist policies were rapidly being put into force in the vast areas under Viet Minh control. A separate story on the Journal’s front page also related how even in the Mekong delta in the south, the Viet Minh were becoming daily more confident of their strength; a clandestine radio broadcast the previous night had announced that a stage-by-stage campaign was being launched immediately to eradicate big landholders there too, although the Geneva Conference seemed likely to end with Vietnam being divided into two zones, with the Communists holding the north and non-Communists the south. 

Joseph ran his eye over all these news items, but found himself unable to concentrate on the details; he’d come to Saigon ostensibly to prepare a dispatch on the mood of the colonists in the wake of the humiliation suffered at Dien Bien Phu, but because of his inner preoccupations, he rose distractedly from his breakfast table after a few minutes’ scrutiny of the newspaper and strolled out into the Rue Catinat, promising himself that he’d get down to work properly that afternoon. 

For half an hour he wandered aimlessly, lost most of that time in his own thoughts, but even in his abstracted mood he couldn’t help noticing how palpably the city he’d known for nearly thirty years was changing before his eyes. During the long eight-year war the thirty thousand French colons who had reestablished themselves in the city after the Second World War had affected a pose of studied unconcern; it came to be regarded as “bad form” to peer about nervously searching for bombs or grenades while sipping an aperitif on a café terrace, and discussion of the Viet Minh had always to be light, dismissive and dégagé, as though the anti-French movement were a trifling irrelevance to life in the city. But with the advent of Dien Bien Phu, all that had changed. Some ten thousand colons had already left the city, and now the usually genial. and flamboyant proprietor of the Continental Palace no longer greeted coffee hour guests on his terrasse with his customary flourishes; instead Joseph saw him frowning deeply as he bent close to a grim-faced French financier Joseph knew by sight. In the Pagoda Tea Room, the Café de Ia Paix, where the veteran colons gathered, and in the Bodega, patrons and waiters who were normally expansive and relaxed conversed now in small anxious groups, their eyes furtive and alert. Usually the Süreté Générale headquarters with its heavily barred windows at the top of the Rue Catinat was aswarm with activity, but as Joseph passed, it seemed to stand unnaturally quiet; few French or Vietnamese were entering, and this uncharacteristic calm gave Joseph the impression that the dark and secret struggles it had for so long conducted were on the point of being abandoned. In the bearing of every Frenchman he passed there was at least a hint of apprehension, and Joseph realized that the increasingly visible groups of Americans from the U.S. Embassy and other government agencies walked by contrast with an easy, free-swinging confidence; without being aware of it, by their relaxed laughter and their self-assured smiles they betrayed their smug belief that the French h2d only themselves to blame for their failure in a backward country like Vietnam. If they, the Americans, had been fighting the war, their attitudes seemed to say, the result would have been vastly different. 

As he strolled on through the growing heat of the day, Joseph began to wonder how far this dangerously simple line of reasoning might be taken by his own country. Although the French Union Forces were still holding in place in the Red River delta, the central highlands and the south while the Geneva Conference dragged on, it was clear that the will of France to continue the war had been broken psychologically at Dien Bien Phu. Not only had more than five thousand men been killed or wounded there, but the Russian news film of ten thousand more mud-covered skeletons being marched off to prison camps by their Viet Minh guards had shocked France and the world. The French people at home had always been indifferent to the faraway war in Indochina, and popular revulsion at the outcome of the battle in the valley in northwestern Tongking had ensured that France would at long last be forced to give up the remnants of its colonial rule there. But although the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, Britain, China and France were discussing Indochina’s future at Geneva, the fervently anti-Communist American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had pointedly absented himself from the proceedings early on, leaving a deputy holding a watching brief; by this gesture he had given notice that the United States would not willingly acquiesce in the concession of territory to the Communists in Indochina and by means of a growing presence of Americans in Saigon, Joseph realized, he was already signaling Washington’s intention to continue the battle where France left off. 

Often while the French defenders were battling heroically at Dien Bien Phu to hold off the massed Viet Minh divisions, Joseph had recalled how he and a handful of OSS men had trained the nucleus of ragged guerrillas from which that massive force had sprung. He had often wondered, too, how differently things might have turned out if the American government had responded to the seemingly sincere overtures made by Ho Chi Minh then; perhaps the goodwill won by the OSS could have been expanded and built upon. What if President Truman had replied to any of the half dozen or SO letters Ho had written seeking support against French attempts to destroy his revolution — wouldn’t some kind of friendship have been possible? And when China fell to Communism in 1949, might it not have been possible to woo Ho Chi Minh and his followers away from the Russians and the Chinese as Tito had been in Europe? Conjecture was obviously futile because now there was a strong chance that Joseph’s own government was about to compound these earlier mistakes by seeking a more direct confrontation with Ho Chi Minh. President Ho had convinced Joseph during their brief friendship that he and the people he led were determined to right the very real injustices they’d suffered under the French; he had understood very clearly that their deep sense of historical grievance was the powerful engine of their strength, and to plunge heedlessly into such a complex political whirlpool in order to confront Russia and China, as the American secretary of state seemed determined to do, seemed to Joseph a venture doomed to failure. These gloomy memories that swirled through his mind as he walked only served to reaffirm his conviction that he must remove Lan and Tuyet as quickly as possible from the evident dangers that lay ahead, and oppressed suddenly by these reflections, he stopped in mid-stride and turned back towards the Continental. 

But when he got there, although it was already eleven o’clock, there was still no sign of Lan on the terrace, and after waiting impatiently for a quarter of an hour, he slipped into the hotel foyer and persuaded the concierge to let him use the telephone behind her guichet. He listened anxiously to the ringing tone for more than a minute before the receiver at Lan’s home was lifted; but to his intense disappointment, one of her house servants answered. 

Speaking sibilant, heavily accented French, the servant explained that Madam Devraux had left some time before to pay an urgent visit to her father; she offered her apologies but had said that if he called, he was to be told she hoped to arrive at the Continental within half an hour. 

Unable to face another long wait on the terrace, Joseph stepped out into the Rue Catinat and began walking once more, this time towards the docks and the Saigon River. At the foot of the boulevard he hurried past the garish little Corsican-run bars where loud music spilled out onto the pavements and crossed to the concrete quays beside the river. Hoping the activity of the waterfront would soothe him, he leaned against a bollard and watched the crowds of sampans working back and forth among the oceangoing freighters. But the seething bustle of the waterborne craft, instead of relaxing him, reminded him of Hong Kong, and against his will the image of Tempe’s strained, white face staring back at him against the backdrop of the harbor forced itself once more into his thoughts. 

She had been standing with her back to the window in their house on the Peak when he had dropped his bombshell. For a long time she had said absolutely nothing, but had let him stumble on until he had exhausted every flimsy justification he could think of for what he knew in his heart was shoddy recompense for the loyalty and love she had always shown him. When at last she spoke there had been more pity in her voice than anger. 

“So the wide-eyed boy in Khai Dinh’s throne room is still searching for another jeweled bonnet, is he. Joseph?” The words had come out in a tremulous whisper, and for a moment her face had threatened to crumple; then she had regained her composure. “You’ve always been dissatisfied with me, haven’t you? I’m too ordinary, aren’t I? You’ve always yearned for the exotic, for the unattainable. Perhaps you can’t help it. Perhaps it’s in your nature. Most boys give up trying to live out fairy tales long before they become grown men — but maybe your mother forgot to teach you that!” 

Because she was close to tears she had laughed then, making a strangled sound in her throat that by a strange coincidence reminded him of the curious noise that she invariably made at the climax of lovemaking; he had always, without fully realizing it, found the sound faintly irritating, and to counter the irrational surge of anger which it suddenly provoked in him he had turned away from her and stared down into the harbor, concentrating hard on the distant turmoil of junks and sampans. 

“You lied to me thirteen years ago, didn’t you, Joseph?” she said softly, moving up behind him. “On the train coming back from the ceremony in the new wing of the museum, do you remember? I asked if you had made love with your mandarin’s daughter, and you said in an outraged tone, ‘Oh no, Vietnamese families are very strict about that!’ And already she had borne your child, hadn’t she? Ever since, you’ve been living a lie. Maybe if you’d told me the truth then, it might have helped me to understand.”