The Avatari (22 page)

‘Forget it,’ she told him.

When they left the hotel the next day, they were happy that it was bright and sunny. Leh Palace sat on top of a hill, offering a panoramic view of the town, the Indus River with its green banks and the snow-clad Ladakh and Zanskar ranges. They climbed up the steep steps and were out of breath by the time they reached the top.

The palace had been modelled on Lhasa’s famed Potala Palace. Nine storeys high, its upper levels housed the royal family, while accommodation for the servants was located below, along with the stables. Clumsy efforts at restoration work were in progress, the new patches of limestone and cement glaringly evident against the faded yellow of the old façade. The group explored the palace for three hours, passing through its narrow passages and climbing steep steps till they had reached the very top.

‘Nothing I can make out, definitely nothing that remotely resembles a dog,’ Susan declared with irritation, sitting down on the steps with the rest of the group. ‘In fact, nothing at all from that period seems to have survived. If anything of the kind had been here, it’s probably been destroyed or covered in lime mortar.’

‘Maybe it’s another palace?’ Ashton suggested. ‘There’s one at Stok, about thirty miles from here along the Indus.’

‘That’s possible,’ Susan conceded, though somewhat doubtfully, ‘but the palace at Stok was built after this one had been ceded to the Maharaja of Kashmir in the seventeenth century.’

It was as if everything was going against them. The weather turned foul again. They spent the next five days exploring all the other palaces before starting on the monasteries, including the cave monastery at Thiksey, forty kilometres up the river, and the stupa at Limayaru, seventy kilometres down the river. Asking the locals and the monks at the various monasteries for information didn’t help. They drew a blank with the ‘dogs’ reference as well, the locals apparently clueless as to what they were alluding to. By the sixth day, Susan was looking gaunt and drawn. She had stopped speaking to the others. She pecked at her food during meals and was smoking more than she usually did.

That night, Peter came up to Ashton’s room, looking worried.

‘Colonel, I don’t know if I’m out of line here, but just how well do you know Susan?’ he asked.

‘Not that well. Why?’

‘I don’t think she’s very, um, stable,’ Peter said, tapping his forefinger against his temple to indicate just what he meant.

Ashton gave him an understanding smile. Susan had been irritable and angry for the last two days, snapping at the slightest provocation.

‘I know, Peter,’ he agreed. ‘She’s under a lot of strain. Somehow, she’s taking this personally. Don’t worry, I’ll have a word with her tomorrow.’

‘Well, sir, I just tried to do that. Only, she’s in no mood to listen. She was lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. I tried asking her what it was all about. She said David – that’s her
dead
boyfriend – had told her something in a dream the previous night. She was trying to remember what it was.’ He paused, then said before adding, ‘She’s started wearing a ring. I didn’t ask, but I have a hunch it’s his – David’s.’

‘What!’ Ashton exclaimed, now looking genuinely worried.

‘That’s what I thought. Spooked me, Colonel.’ Peter paused, then said. ‘I think she’s running a fever too.’

‘We’ll have to call this off,’ Ashton said after a long silence.

Peter nodded in agreement.

Susan didn’t turn up for breakfast the next morning. The three men sat at the table, eating silently. When they had finished, Duggy turned to Peter.

‘I’d like a word with the colonel in private, Captain,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ Peter replied, surprised, but he picked up his bag and sauntered off.

‘What’s the matter, Duggy?’ Ashton asked, as surprised and curious as Peter had been.

‘Are you planning to call it off?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Surely you would agree that we have given it our best shot? I don’t think pushing Susan any further would do much good.’

‘That’s because so far,
you
have done precious little,’ Duggy said pointedly.

Ashton stared at him. ‘How can you say that, Sergeant?’ he retorted indignantly. ‘I dropped everything back home and assembled this team, as you well know. And it should be obvious to you by now how much effort we have all put in.’ His tone was vehement. Angrily, he shook out a cigarette from the pack he had placed on the table. He lit it and inhaled deeply.

After blowing out a plume of smoke, he continued, his voice calmer, trying to make Duggy see reason. ‘I know this is disappointing for you, Duggy. It is for all of us, but we’ve got to face it some time – sooner or later.’

Duggy was unconvinced.

‘Let me put it this way, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Someone who could send a monk with a message from Laos to Yorkshire and put £200,000 in your bank account could also have hired professionals to decipher this code. They didn’t; they chose
you
. It’s not your enterprise or logistics they are asking for. You have to help by giving
yourself
, Colonel.’

‘And what am
I
supposed to do?’ Ashton asked angrily, his voice rising in agitation.

‘I don’t know. That is a question you will have to answer yourself, but might I suggest this?’ Duggy reached for the bag he had placed on the floor and took out a large candle, which he placed on the table. ‘When you came back from Vietnam that first year,’ he reminded Ashton, ‘you used to meditate with these. When I asked you about it, you had said it helped you to find answers.’ Duggy paused, then asked, his voice almost imploring in its tone, ‘You could, perhaps, try that again now, couldn’t you?’

Ashton looked from Duggy to the candle and back again. ‘That was more than twenty years ago, Duggy,’ he said, narrowing his eyes against the cigarette smoke.

After Malaya and Hilda. Saigon and Laos.
Another world
, he thought.

CHAPTER 13

Saigon

1963

It was while Arthur Besley, the colonel of Ashton’s regiment, was visiting him at the hospital in London that he had talked him into accepting the assignment. Henry Ashton was subsequently posted at the Embassy in Saigon as its military attaché. There were not too many options available to him. He could have resigned and moved to the house in the village, but Ashton knew he wouldn’t be able to stand that for very long. He needed to get out. Run away, really. Getting out of England would be a start.

The Embassy was quartered in a French colonial-style mansion. Apart from the two sentries – helmeted, with their assault weapons slung over the shoulder – at the gate, you wouldn’t have imagined there was a war going on. The war hadn’t yet come to Saigon, though everyone said it was just a matter of time. The sentries were a whim of the ambassador for whom the expression, ‘abundant caution’, was second nature.

It was a small set-up, consisting of the ambassador, a first secretary and a second secretary, who also doubled as head of chancery, and other members of the staff, half of them Vietnamese. The latter spoke a version of English with mellifluous French accents. Since Ashton’s predecessor had already moved out, all three diplomats handed his brief over to him, in parts. It was two days after landing in Saigon that Ashton had been allowed to present himself to the ambassador, Harold Wilton, in the latter’s office. The delay in completing this formality had been caused by the first secretary, a shiny, pink-faced man called Thomas Pinnet who had insisted that the new military attaché go through his own briefing first, a session that turned out to be long-winded, with Pinnet coming across as a little too eager and self-effacing. There was also a strong hint that Ashton should first ‘go through’ the first secretary on any issue he wished to brief the ambassador about.

Harold Wilton was a tall, thin man, with his head perpetually cocked to one side. Ashton got the distinct feeling that this career diplomat believed he was being wasted in Indo-China.

‘So to sum up, the situation is quite delicate,’ the ambassador told him, fiddling with a paperweight on his desk. ‘We need to, er, wait and watch.’

Ashton had finished his tea and took this as a cue from the man seated across the desk to get up. There wasn’t much he had got from the ambassador which he didn’t already know. As Ashton turned to go, Wilton coughed, indicating that there was something more.

‘Colonel.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘General Besley had a word with me. About your, er, medical problem.’

‘Alcohol dependency,’ Ashton said without flinching, looking straight into Wilton’s eyes. ‘It’s under control and I’m no longer on medication.’

‘Good.’

The ambassador stared into his eyes a moment longer, then picked up the newspaper on his desk and glanced at the headlines.

‘We’ll try to keep it that way, shall we?’ he murmured.

Ashton didn’t reply.

The second secretary, Dennis Langley, was a more amiable man, big without being fat. He was from Southampton and had been a schoolteacher before joining the diplomatic corps. He had also played professional rugby for a season. It was in him that Ashton found a friend and, more importantly, someone who would put him through the ropes in a set-up he was quite unfamiliar with.

‘Bugger’s muddle,’ Dennis said. ‘That’s what it is. But then, what do you expect when a situation, badly handled by the French, is taken over by the Yanks?’

Ashton, who was not normally given to vulgar jingoisms, had to agree with Dennis, at least in this particular case.

Vietnam was a poorly administered French colony. In marked contrast to that of most of the Commonwealth colonies, the Vietnamese struggle for freedom had been a bloody one. The Vietminh had thrown in their lot with communist China and defeated the French decisively in the battle for Dien Bien Phu in 1953. The French would manage to partly salvage what they had lost on the battlefield through negotiations, citing the terms of the Geneva Agreement whereby the Vietminh were granted the north, while the south remained under French control until a countrywide general election, due to be held in 1956, facilitated a smooth transfer of power. Yet to recover from the ravages of the Second World War, the French had neither the ability nor the stomach to hold on to a colony of debatable value in the Far East. Moreover, they were distracted by the trouble brewing closer home – in Algiers. But before the French eventually withdrew from Vietnam, they had succeeded in getting in the Americans, who believed that the country was a testing ground of sorts for the ‘free world’ and the communist bloc. The promised election was never held and the country was divided along the 17th Parallel between the Vietminh, backed by the communists in the north and a ‘democracy’ of sorts in the south, held together entirely through American aid and an increasing military presence.

‘It’s the domino theory,’ Dennis remarked to Ashton a week later, as he sat sipping an elephantine Scotch in his own room. ‘If Vietnam falls, they will be fighting commies on the beaches of Waikiki.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘It’s not me who counts, mate.’

Ashton learnt quickly enough how the bureaucracy functioned. He also discovered what ‘diplomatese’ was all about and it dismayed him. He observed that even in their small offices, hierarchy reigned supreme and much time was spent drafting memos and preparing minutes for the discussions they had. His assistant, the matronly Jane Saunders, had rapped him on the knuckles when he picked up a letter and walked up to the first secretary’s office.

‘That won’t do at all here,’ she had chided him. ‘They’ve asked us in writing and we have to reply in the same way, sir.’

The Americans had brought in Ngo Diem and set him up as President, supporting him with a massive influx of military and economic aid. It was a recurring pattern in US government policy to prop up an inept and corrupt leader, whose own dubious support base ensured unquestioning loyalty to his foreign mentors. Confrontation appeared inevitable, but few people were aware at the time of its magnitude.

‘What do we do here?’ Ashton asked Dennis one evening, as he switched off the BBC news bulletin on the radio.

‘Didn’t Julius tell you?’ his colleague retorted with characteristic irreverence.

The ambassador’s patrician features and grandiose ways had earned him his regal Roman nickname.

‘I mean, getting around, you know, meeting people,’ Ashton elaborated.

He was already well acquainted with what they did here in the Embassy: write arcane briefs, based on snippets picked up over the week, which would be padded and vectored to suit the party line.

‘Oh that. The Japanese have called us on Tuesday. A couple of days later, it’s the Russians. Plenty of vodka and Miss Ivanova for company,’ Dennis said, winking.

He had already talked quite a bit about the Russian second secretary who, according to Dennis, was quite something in the chest department.

‘These diplomatic parties are such a bore,’ Ashton said frankly.

He had already attended a few. These social gatherings were little more than an extension of life at the office, the difference being the presence of the wives who either wore their respective husbands’ ranks with an insufferable air of superiority or proceeded to get drunk on Embassy Scotch with speed and determination.

‘And you’re only a week old!’ Dennis exclaimed with mock horror. ‘Stamina and endurance are what you need, old chap. You’ll discover, by and by, that they’re not all that bad. And some, I promise, are really wild.’

He looked at Ashton as he spoke and then it dawned on him what his colleague was getting at.

‘You want to meet the locals, is that it?’

Ashton nodded.

Dennis smiled. ‘Fraternizing with the natives is strictly a no-no. But then, there’s nothing sweeter than forbidden fruit, is there?’ He tossed off his Scotch. ‘You’ve come to the right person too. Are you sure you’re okay with just that?’ He waved the bottle in the direction of Ashton’s glass.

Ashton nodded and timed himself so that the one glass of Guinness he allowed himself would last the entire evening.