Saigon: A Novel Part 23

Joseph stared at her in puzzlement. "Told me what?"

She dropped her gaze and began twisting the coverlet abstractedly between her fingers. After a moment he noticed that the corners of her mouth were trembling.

"Told me what, Lan?" he prompted gently.

"That I had borne your child."

For a whole minute he sat and stared numbly at her, unable to speak. Then he reached out and gently touched the back of her hand with his fingertips. "Lan, if only you had written to me She shook her head quickly without looking at him. "It would have made things worse then if you had known."

Joseph closed his eyes for a moment. "Was it a girl or a boy?"

"She was a beautiful little girl. I called her Tuyet - the name means 'snow.' " When at last she raised her gaze to his, her eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears. "n.o.body knew of her birth. I went away. A year later I married Paul Devraux to please my father. We have son of our own."

"But where's Tuyet now?"

"She was brought up as the daughter of one of our house servants - the girl who showed you to the gate the day you left."

"Then she's here in Saigon?" asked Joseph eagerly.

Lan shook her head quickly and looked out of the window. "No. My mother insisted that they be sent away. They went to live in the village in northern Annam where my mother was born. The servant girl married there later and had other children of her own."

Joseph stood up and paced back and forth agitatedly in the confined s.p.a.ce of the small room, struggling to come to terms with the enormity of the news. Then he stopped and sat down again. "Have you seen Tuyet since her birth?"

Lan bit her lip and nodded. 'Yes, I persuaded my mother to make a journey to the north once a year with me, at first under the pretext of visiting the birthplace of her ancestors. She went reluctantly .- it was my idea, you see, that Tuyet should be sent there so that I might know something of her upbringing. But we saw her for only a day or two each time."

"Is she still living there?"

Lan looked distressed. "I'm not sure. For the past five years, since the j.a.panese came, it's been impossible to travel."

"Tuyet Joseph repeated the name to himself in an awed whisper, looking wonderingly at Lan. Then a wave of tenderness swept over him and he reached out and took her hand. "I'm truly sorry, Lan. If I'd .known, I would have come back. You know I wanted to marry you. I never dreamed anything like this had happened."

Her hand tightened in his for an instant, and tears trickled down her cheeks. "If I hadn't dreamed of you I would have said nothing."

"But, Lan, what can we do?"

"There's nothing to be done, Joseph," she said quietly. "And there's nothing more to say." She freed her hand from his and brushed the tears from her cheeks, "You must go now. Please don't try to visit me again."

"But Lan," he began desperately, "we can't just pretend it never happened He broke off and drew away from her on hearing a commotion of hurrying footsteps in the corridor, and a moment later a tall, shabbily dressed European burst into the room. It was a second or two before Joseph recognized Paul Devraux; all badges of rank and other insignia had been ripped from the ragged battle dress he'd been forced to wear during his six months as a prisoner of the j.a.panese, and his face was gray and haggard. Joseph stood up immediately and moved away from the bed, and with scarcely a glance in his direction the French officer knelt and seized his wife's hand.

"Lan, are you all right?" His eyes searched her face as he pressed her hand fervently to his lips.."I've been to your parents' house. They told me you were hurt in the riots."

"I'm almost recovered. It wasn't serious." She spoke in a scarcely audible whisper, her demeanor obviously restrained, and Paul reached out to touch her cheek in a tender gesture of affection.

"I'm so glad." His haggard features relaxed into a broad smile and he remained on his knees looking fondly at her. "I was very worried about you."

Pained by the sight of their reunion and seeing that his presence was acutely embarra.s.sing to Lan, Joseph began to move quietly out of the room, but Paul stood up suddenly and whirled round, grinning from ear to ear.

"Joseph, my old friend, don't go! Lan's mother told me the 'Amorous American' had come back to Saigon as an OSS captain." He gripped Joseph's hand fiercely, the flung both arms around him in an emotional greeting. "But she didn't tell me you were trying to steal my wife while I was in prison."

Joseph looked back at him uncertainly, but the Frenchman, exhilarated by his return to freedom, laughed uproariously at what was to him clearly an outrageous jest. "1 came to see if I could be of any help," he said, avoiding Paul's gaze. "Things look pretty bad in Saigon."

"Don't worry, Joseph. Everything's going to be all right now!" Paul slapped the American delightedly on the shoulder again. "The British have just released my regiment. Between us, we'll have things under control again in no time at all, you'll see."

Joseph stared into the grinning face and felt a genuine surge of affection and sympathy for the courageous French officer, who had obviously suffered at the hands of his j.a.panese captors. In his mind he was still struggling to come to grips with Lan's momentous revelation, and the significance of what Paul had said sank in only slowly. "Do you mean that you and the British are going to break up the Viet Minh government by force of arms?"

Paul nodded. "It's putting it a bit high, Joseph, to call it a government."

"But the people are behind 'the Viet Minh," said the American earnestly. "I've been in the north with their leaders. If you'd seen what I've seen, you'd feel differently. They want to negotiate - but they'll fight back with everything they've got if you attack them."

Paul seated himself on the bed beside Lan and took her hand again. "This is no time for a political debate, Joseph. I think you know how I feel about this country. I've spent more of my life here than I have in France. The Viet Minh Committee for the South are mostly Communists loyal to Moscow as far as I can see. I want the people here to get their independence one day as much as you do - but not this way."

"I'm sorry, Paul, forgive me! I'm intruding here. I'm d.a.m.ned glad your ordeal is over and you've come through in such good spirits." Joseph shook the French officer warmly by the hand once more and smiled quickly at Lan. "Let's hope we can all get together sometime when things improve."

Back behind the wheel of his jeep, Joseph drove in a daze, and at first he didn't register the groups of newly released French prisoners of the Eleventh Infanterie Coloniale roaming the shuttered streets. Seeing Lan again after so long and discovering that she'd borne his child had filled him at first with a wild exhilaration, but the sudden entry of Paul in his prison garb had come as a shock; the obvious privation the French officer had suffered in prison heightened Joseph's feeling of wretchedness at having to conceal the truth from him, and for a time these conflicting emotions filled his mind to the exclusion of all else.

He'd been driving through the streets of the city center for two or three minutes without thought for where he was going before he began to focus his attention properly on the freed French prisoners. Like Paul, they were dressed in the same worn and badgeless uniforms that had become their prison clothes, and when the noise of a scuffle drew his attention to a particular group, he noticed that they were carrying new British .303 rifles. At first sight the troops appeared to be sparring high-spiritedly among themselves, then with a shock Joseph saw a Vietnamese in their midst and realized they were attacking pa.s.sersby at random. Suddenly he remembered that for the past month since the j.a.panese surrender, most of the French prisoners had been under the guard of Viet Minh jailers, and now in the first heady moments of freedom they were las.h.i.+ng out at anyone who resembled their most recent tormentors. In the Rue Catinat he saw half-a-dozen French soldiers tear down the "Paris Commune" signs, then use it to bludgeon a startled Vietnamese youth to the ground; by the time he arrived back at OSS headquarters he had seen a dozen or more Vietnamese civilians being brutalized by the newly freed troops with their rifle b.u.t.ts. As darkness fell on the city, French civilians began coming cautiously into the streets again and they, too, released from weeks of fear, began to join the troops in abusing any Vietnamese unfortunate enough to cross their paths.

17.

Just before daybreak on Sunday, September 23, 1945, Major Paul Devraux whispered an urgent command to the troops in his detachment to follow him, then set off at a run eastward beneath the camphor laurels bordering the Boulevard Luro. His men were in full battle order, and their faces, like his, were blackened with camouflage paint. In his right hand he clutched a loaded service revolver at the ready and he moved stealthily in a running crouch, taking advantage of the deeper shadows beneath the trees. He was heading towards the Hotel de Ville. the headquarters of the Viet Minh Committee for the South, and simultaneously, all over Saigon, other detachments of a hastily a.s.sembled French force of fifteen hundred men were beginning to converge in the predawn darkness on police stations, the post office, the treasury and the former Surete Generale headquarters.

The force was under the overall command of Colonel Jean Cedile, General de Gaulle's "High Commissioner" who had parachuted into the paddy fields outside Saigon at the end of August, and their objective was to seize back control of southern Vietnam from the Viet Minh in a lightning coup d'etat. Among the men loping silently behind Paul in rubber-soled combat boots were a hundred battle-toughened paratroopers who had jumped in with Cedile; all of them had been promptly interned by the j.a.panese on landing, but they had finally been freed twelve hours earlier by the British along with the fourteen hundred men of the Eleventh Regiment Infanterie Coloniale. Because they had been caged like animals for six months, first by the j.a.panese then by the Vietnamese, all the French soldiers, Paul knew, were keyed up and spoiling for a fight. For that reason at their a.s.sembly point under the walls of the city's old Vauban fortress he had lectured his group severely against any vengeful bloodletting; like Joseph he had been horrified the previous evening by the sight of French soldiers and civilians attacking innocent Vietnamese on the streets, but although he had threatened his unit with courts martial if they disobeyed his orders, he had sensed that they listened unwillingly and still felt keenly the humiliation of their long imprisonment.

At the junction where the Boulevard Luro joined Rue de Ia Grandiere, Paul halted his force in the shelter of a high wall while he checked to make sure that the route ahead was clear. He glanced briefly towards the Hopital Militaire, and the sight of the complex of verandahed medical buildings made him wonder briefly if his wife was still asleep in her room there. Then he waved his men quickly across the wide street and ran on, aware suddenly just how precariously his own personal emotions were balanced in the conflict that had so unexpectedly ensnared him.

Now that the moment of confrontation with the Viet Minh was near, the a.s.surance he had felt the day before was hedged around with twinges of doubt; he remembered Joseph's earnest expression when speaking of the ma.s.sive popular demonstrations of support for the Viet Minh he'd seen in the north, and he wondered if perhaps he might now be betraying all his earlier instincts. Seeing how his father's generation had embittered contacts between his country and the Annamese had made him determined above all else not to repeat those mistakes; right up until his father's violent death at the hands of Annamese a.s.sa.s.sins, these feelings had made their relations.h.i.+p strained. Perhaps his anxiety to compensate for the insensitivity of his father's generation towards the Annamese had even played a subconscious part in his decision to marry Lan; he couldn't be sure. Although he was effusive in his love for her and their son, he was aware that there had always been a hint of reserve on her side, and occasionally he'd wondered in the back of his mind whether he had made an impossible choice. Now, in the aftermath of the war, the people of her country had out of the blue taken control of their own destiny for the first time in a century, and he was about to help break their fragile grip on freedom arid return them once more to a state of colonial bondage. Didn't that make nonsense of everything he'd believed in the past?

In the distance the pillared facade of the Hotel de Vile came into view at the end of the Boulevard Charner, and when he caught sight of the ragged Viet Minh guerrillas on sentry duty outside its lighted windows, he braced himself inwardly. Surely this wasn't the way it should happen! For the sake of the many Annamese who were loyal to France, wasn't it the duty of all honorable Frenchmen to give their backward country a better start than this, to guide them more slowly towards a truly democratic freedom? With the Viet Minh in control, wouldn't French tutelage be replaced by something much worse domination by Moscow through the Comintern? Suddenly the confidence in the rightness of his choice returned with a rush and, waving his men into a narrow side-turning that lead to the rear of the Viet Minh headquarters, he concentrated his mind again on the task of leading them unseen towards their target.

Unknown to the French attacking force, almost all the members of the Viet Minh Committee for the South had already fled from the Hotel de Ville. They had been virtually living in the former city hall since General Gracey ordered them out of the palace of the governor of Cochin-China where they had set up their original administration; but the previous evening their alert intelligence network had learned of the intended French attack, and all but one of the committee's members had slipped away quietly into the night with their families, Only Ngo Van Loc, who had no close relatives in Saigon, volunteered to remain, to forestall any French claim that their administration had deserted and abdicated its rule, and as dawn approached, he lay dozing on a camp bed in an empty attic beneath the clock-tower belfry that crowned the ornate, turn-of-the-century building. On the floor beside the bed lay a stolen j.a.panese machine pistol, and a young Viet Minh guard cradled a similar weapon in his arms as he dozed in a chair by the door.

Both of them woke with a start when the Street outside was filled suddenly with the roar of gunfire; the Viet Minh sentries before the doors were scythed down without warning by a sustained burst from the paratroopers' automatic weapons, and moments later they heard the sound of shots and running feet coming from the lower floors. Ngo Van Loc listened for a moment then ordered the young guard to conceal himself in a cupboard at the back of the room. When he'd closed the door, Loc stationed himself with his back against it, holding his own machine pistol in front of him. Slowly the noise made by the French troops grew louder as they mounted the stairs to the upper floors, and he could clearly bear their shouts of anger as they discovered that the building was virtually empty. The crash of filing cabinets being overturned and ransacked reached his ears, then he heard the rush of feet in the corridor leading to the attic.

He had locked the flimsy door, but the paratroopers kicked it down and even before they caught sight of him, two of them opened fire simultaneously. Loc threw himself to the floor to avoid the hap-hazard fusillade, dropping his own weapon in the process, and the paratroopers forced the door back on its hinges before stepping into the room with the muzzles of their guns trained on him. Like the major who followed them in, their faces looked grotesque in the half-light, smeared with black face paint, and he tried in vain to move aside as the first paratrooper aimed a vicious kick at his face. The toe of the French soldier's boot caught his temple, stunning him, and only hazily did he hear Paul Devraux's angry shout as he ordered his men to stand back.

When he dropped to his knees beside Loc, Paul recognized his father's old hunting camp "boy" at once. "Loc, it's me- Paul!" he said quickly. Bending over him, he slipped an arm beneath Loc's narrow shoulders and lifted him into a sitting position. He called loudly for a medical orderly, and when the medic panted up the stairs, he took his satchel' from him and pressed a gauze pad soaked in surgical spirit against the b.l.o.o.d.y gash that the paratrooper's boot had opened up across Loc's cheek. When he had staunched the blood, he laid the gauze aside with a m.u.f.fled sigh. "I'm sorry, Loc, that it's come to this."

Loc glowered at him, saying nothing, his face a mask of loathing. He took a deep breath and seemed to gather himself to speak, but without warning, he changed his mind and spat deliberately in Paul's face.

The French officer sat back on his heels and wiped his cheek slowly with his sleeve. "You shouldn't blame all Frenchmen for the actions of a few, Loc," he said wearily. "You'll be granted independence one day- hut it'll take time."

Loc glared ferociously round at the two paratroopers who still held their automatic weapons pointing at his head; then he swung back to face Paul. "Our hatred for France knows no bounds. We'll fight for our freedom with our last drop of blood."

Appalled by the depth of hatred in the eyes of the Vietnamese, Paul hauled himself slowly to his feet; inside he felt a growing sense of despair, and he had begun to turn away when he heard Loc scream a frantic order from the floor in his own language.

"Giet! Giet! - Kill the officer!"

Glancing over his shoulder, Paul saw the door of the cupboard at the back of the room fly open, and an instant later the young guard's machine pistol spat flame. He felt the bullets strike him high in the back and their impact spun him around and flung him across the room. Halfway through the burst the guns of the paratroopers opened up and riddled the scrawny body of the young Vietnamese with more than a dozen bullets. Then they turned their weapons on Loc, and shot him again and again in the chest and head until his limbs finally stopped twitching and he lay still in a spreading pool of his own blood.

18.

Lieutenant David Hawke spun the wheel of the OSS jeep right, then left, and slammed the accelerator pedal flat against the floorboards to send the little vehicle careering through a broken roadblock on the Avenue Gallieni. The crash of mortars and the sudden stutter of heavy machine-gun fire only fifty yards from where they had emerged onto the boulevard told Hawke and Joseph they had almost fallen into another running fight between a platoon of the First Gurkha Rifles and a large force of Viet Minh guerrillas. The swarthy little Nepalese soldiers were trying to clear and hold the Avenue Gallieni that ran south beyond the railway station towards Cholon, but as fast as they drove the guerrillas out of one section, they were reappearing at another point and throwing up new barricades. In the distance Joseph could hear the deep boom of twenty-five-pounders, and from time to time single- engined Spitfires and Mosquitoes bearing the red, white and blue roundels of the British Royal Air Force roared low overhead to strafe a Viet Minh strongpoint.

It was September 27, and for the fourth day running the Vietnamese were making frenzied attacks on the center of Saigon from all directions, infiltrating sabotage squads towards the city's vital installations and trying to mount lightning raids on the British and French headquarters. The three thousand British troops were hard pressed to contain the attacks, and although j.a.panese units had been thrown into the battle, the guerrillas were already proving themselves a resourceful and elusive enemy.

When a new volley of shots rang out from an unseen group of guerrillas, pitting the wall of a building ten yards ahead of them, Joseph tugged his helmet low over his eyes and ducked, cursing, below the level of the dashboard.

"May the devil take Gracey's b.a.l.l.s for s.h.i.+sh-kebabs," muttered Hawke angrily as he swung the bucking vehicle out of the line of fire and beaded across the square in front of the railway station. "Who does he think he is? 'Only the British commanding officer's limousine will fly a flag of any kind'! If we could fly the Stars and Stripes from this d.a.m.ned jeep, the trigger-happy natives might stop shooting at us. Shall I get us a flag?"

"Better not, David," replied Joseph, keeping a wary eye on the road ahead. "The British are crazy enough right now to court- martial all of us for insubordination if we don't stick to orders."

Hawke nodded in reluctant agreement. During the four days that had pa.s.sed since the French coup, they had watched with a growing sense of anger and frustration as fighting engulfed the city. After being woken by the sound of continuous gunfire early on Sunday morning, they had driven into the center of the city to find the French tricolor already fluttering from flagstaffs on the Hotel de Ville, the governor general's palace and all other public buildings. As the day wore on they had witnessed the same kind of ugly scenes they'd first seen on a small scale the night before; finding the Hotel de Ville deserted, the French troops had begun to make house-to-house searches, and countless Vietnamese were beaten in the streets or marched off to prison with their hands tied as the long pent-up emotions of the soldiers and the French civilians exploded in an hysterical l.u.s.t for revenge.

Within twenty-four hours the outraged Vietnamese struck back, declaring a general strike and launching successful attacks on the power station and the water works; the central markets had been set ablate, and roadblocks were erected all around the city so that during the night Saigon became a burning, barricaded enclave without water or electricity. In those nightmarish conditions the Binh Xuyen had carried out a terrible ma.s.sacre of French civilian officials and their families in a quarter of Saigon that should have been guarded by j.a.panese troops; nearly two hundred men, women and children had been hacked to death and tortured in their beds during a night of barbaric atrocities, and two hundred more had been carried off as hostages. The next day Joseph and Hawke had watched thousands of French civilians flock to the Continental Palace Hotel, which was turned into a fortified strongpoint, and there the coiol2s and their families huddled on the floors of the corridors and public rooms as the fighting raged all around them in the city outside.

Horrified by the turn of events, General Gracey had confined the French troops to their barracks again, only twenty-four hours after freeing them, and he had arres1e&the4apa-nese-commander, Field Marshal Count Terauchi; after threatening to charge him with war crimes, the British general had ordered the j.a.panese officer to send his men immediately into the battle lines against the Vietnamese, and Joseph and Hawke had quickly become accustomed to the sight of fully armed j.a.panese soldiers rus.h.i.+ng into action alongside the British Gurkhas. The j.a.panese had helped kill more than a hundred Vietnamese in the first few days of fighting, and Joseph had listened in dismay to British officers praising the discipline and the spirit of the j.a.panese troops who had borne the brunt of the casualties.

Outside the railway station a company of the Imperial Nipponese Army was mounting up into trucks under the direction of a British officer, and on catching sight of them Joseph let out an exclamation of disgust. "G.o.dd.a.m.nit! How can they live with themselves when they're using enemies to fight our friends? How must those brave little Gurkha tribesmen who fought the j.a.panese to a standstill in Burma feel rus.h.i.+ng around with men who two months ago were killing their closest buddies?"

"Maybe you'll have the chance to ask them tonight," replied Hawke with a grim smile. "We're invited to dine with the British officers-you, me and the major.'

Joseph shook his head in disbelief.

"Takes more than a little colonial war, don't you know, to stop the British observing the niceties of mess rules and dining-in nights," added the Bostonian, aping a British accent. "We'll have to sit and hold our tongues with both hands instead of eating."

Joseph nodded, feeling a new surge of anger rising in him at their helplessness. Watching ineffectually from the sidelines as the city descended into chaos had been a harrowing experience - not least because his own emotions were so inextricably bound up in the turmoil. For several nights he'd slept only in s.n.a.t.c.hes in his uniform, and watching the brutal and shameful behavior of the French had saddened him deeply. At the same time his feelings for Lan had intensified after seeing her again, and the shock of learning that they had an eight-year-old daughter living in an obscure northern village had continued to haunt his mind day and night. He longed desperately to visit Lan again to hear more about little Tuyet, but the prospect of deceiving Paul further filled him with renewed feelings of guilt. As he watched the fighting spread, he felt a deepening sympathy too for the French officer who had committed so much of his life to the Annamese for unselfish reasons. He had been distraught to discover on visiting Colonel Cedile's headquarters early in the week that Paul had been wounded during the early hours of the coup and had been airlifted for treatment to a military hospital at Dalat. Knowing how deeply grieved Paul must have been by the fighting and the destruction had served to heighten Joseph's own feelings of distress anti resentment at the way the British had mishandled the crisis, and these thoughts were uppermost in his mind when he sat down to dinner that evening with the senior British officers at a table agleam with regimental silver, polished gla.s.s and linen napkins.

Over a gla.s.s of sherry in the mess there had been some jocular discussion of the difficulty of pursuing the guerrillas when they melted into their jungle villages beyond the city borders, and as the soup arrived in plates bearing the crest of the Twentieth Indian Division, a portly major with a booming voice took up the subject again.

"I've told my men that when they find it difficult to distinguish friend from foe, they must always use the maximum force available to make sure all hostiles are wiped out- maximum force!" He rolled the phrase off his tongue with obvious relish, "If one uses too little, one might not live to tell the tale - but if one uses too much, no great harm is done. That's what I say - am I right?" He chuckled and sipped his gla.s.s of claret appreciatively, then looked around for approval.

Little murmurs of agreement rose from all round the table. "Quite so, I've even written it into my daily orders," said a ruddy- faced colonel with obvious pride, touching the corners of his drooping blond mustache with his linen napkin. "I tell my chaps it's perfectly legitimate to treat all locals found anywhere near the scene of shooting as hostiles - and d.a.m.ned treacherous ones at that. It seems to be getting the required results too, I must say."

The officer on Joseph's right hand, Colonel Sir Harold Boyce- Lewis, his intelligence counterpart, raised an amused eyebrow in Joseph's direction. "Seems your Viet Minh chums are getting more than they bargained for, captain, doesn't it?" he said dryly. "In that report you sent us they made a lot of noise about wanting to negotiate, but the way I read it they really wanted to trigger off a good old-fas.h.i.+oned shooting war to make their tin-pot revolution look a bit more realistic. Cedile a.s.sures me the vast majority of the Vietnamese support the French and want to see orderly French rule restored."

Joseph stared at Boyce-Lewis in disbelief. "You couldn't be more wrong, colonel. All hut a tiny minority of the Vietnamese loathe the French - and with good cause. They're deeply outraged that Britain has helped take away the first taste of freedom they've had for a hundred years. But the Viet Minh are realists - I know because I've talked to Ho Chi Minh in the north. He's a hardheaded political leader and he knows they still need France. The Viet Minh were desperate for some negotiated return of the French that would recognize their sovereignty."

"My dear fellow, recognition of a Vietnamese government would be a political act. We're only soldiers, remember." Boyce- Lewis smiled pityingly. "The manual of military law, as you should know, lays down that the commander of an occupying army must try to observe the existing laws of the country. We're here to maintain order. Their little revolution is disturbing good order. I think we're following the book pretty closely; France is the sovereign power, the laws are French, nothing could be simpler. Returning power to the French is restoring the status quo. Your Viet Minh haven't been elected by anybody."

"Did the people of this country elect the French to govern them?" asked Joseph, his voice growing loud with indignation. "France hasn't been the sovereign power here by any stretch of the imagination since 1941. If the British are going to go around the world restoring that status quo, they'll have their hands frill."

Boyce-Lewis bent his head towards his soup spoon and waved his free hand dismissively at Joseph. "Down here at least the Viet Minh's just a lunatic fringe and the other nationalists have been goaded into action by the j.a.ps who just want to make things sticky for us. That's why they gave their arms away to the likes of the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao."

Suddenly the disdainful tone of the British officer brought all the pent-up emotion inside Joseph to the boil and he stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over with a crash. "Listening to what's been said here tonight makes me wonder what we fought the war for," he said hotly, glaring down at Boyce-Lewis. "Remember the Atlantic Charter of 1941? Didn't Churchill and Roosevelt agree we'd respect the rights of all people to choose their own form of government? You were sent here to disarm and repatriate the defeated j.a.panese - but instead you're keeping their troops under arms to crush a little nation whose only sin is it wants to be free." A shocked hush had fallen over the table, and several of the British officers were gazing at Joseph open-mouthed. "Have you seen their hand grenades made out of old food tins - their poisoned arrows and bamboo spears? Crude weapons aren't they? But it shows how deeply they feel about getting rid of their foreign masters. We're supposed to have fought this war to defend freedom and democracy - but all you've done here is put the slave-driver's whip back in the hands of the French. That's not something you should be proud of - in fact it's a G.o.dd.a.m.ned betrayal of everything Western democracy is supposed to stand for!"

Joseph turned and strode white-faced to the door without looking back, leaving Lieutenant Hawke and the OSS major embarra.s.sed and uneasy in their seats among the British staff officers. There was silence in the room for a moment or two, then Boyce-Lewis glanced towards the ranking officer present, a thin, sour-faced brigadier.

"Best way to deal with that angry young captain, I suggest, sir, might be to declare him persona non grata and have him s.h.i.+pped back to Calcutta p.r.o.nto, don't you think?"

The brigadier nodded slowly then picked up his winegla.s.s and twisted it reflectively between his thumb and forefinger. "Indeed I do, colonel. Indeed I do."

19.

As they approached the central Saigon market next morning, Hawke and Joseph saw that thick smoke was pouring out through the blackened dome above the covered halls again. The market had been set ablaze for the first time four days earlier, and the sporadic fighting in the surrounding streets had prevented any attempt to extinguish the fire. In a narrow Street running alongside the burning building, Hawke slowed the jeep to a crawl, Shaking his head in dismay. "If these markets stay closed and the guerrillas keep their food blockade intact around the city, I guess we'll start to see famine conditions down here in the south, too, before long."

While he was speaking, a ragged little Vietnamese boy toddled unexpectedly into their path from the mouth of a narrow alleyway, gazing awestruck at the pall of smoke, and Hawke had to stamp hurriedly on the brake. Springing from behind the wheel, the lieutenant swept the startled boy up in his arms; he was no more than three or four years old, and Joseph sat up in his seat suddenly, staring at the child. Within seconds the boy's distraught mother rushed from a house in the alleyway and s.n.a.t.c.hed him from the arms of the amused Bostonian, but when Hawke returned grin- fling to the jeep, he found Joseph staring at him strangely, his face contorted as though with pain.

"What is it, captain?" he asked anxiously.

"The famine!" said Joseph in an anguished whisper. "How in G.o.d's name could I forget the famine?" His face had drained of color and he was staring through Hawke as though he wasn't there.

"What are you talking about?" asked the lieutenant in a puzzled voice.

"The famine in the north!"Joseph closed his eyes for a moment. In all the confusion of the last few days his thoughts had returned constantly to the imaginary face of the eight-year-old daughter he had never seen; but until that moment he had not a.s.sociated the anonymous northern village where she had been sent to live with the terrible famine zone of lower Tongking and northern Annam.

"I don't follow you, captain," said Hawke, grinning in his bafflement.

"Just get in the jeep - fast." Joseph s.h.i.+fted quickly behind the steering wheel, his face set in resolute lines. Before Hawke was properly seated, he accelerated furiously away and drove at break neck speed to the Hopital Militaire. In the front courtyard he brought the jeep to a screeching halt and tore past the startled sentries, leaving Hawke to deal with identification procedures. He ran all the way through the echoing corridors to Lan's room, and when he arrived panting at the door, he brushed the duty nurse aside without offering any explanation for his presence. To his intense disappointment, however, the bed was empty and the room's impersonal cleanness no longer betrayed any sign that Lan had ever been there.

"She was discharged three days ago, captain," said the nurse sharply from the doorway. "She said she would be leaving Saigon immediately with her family."

Joseph ran all the way back to the jeep, took the wheel once more and drove with the same frantic urgency to the Imperial Delegate's residence. There he found the red-lacquered moon gate had been smashed from its hinges, and he clambered over it with a sinking heart. Even before he reached the front door, the scattered belongings on the steps told him the house had been looted. Inside, the family altar lay toppled on its side, and its gilded incense burners and statues were gone. The Louis XIV furniture lay smashed like matchwood, the Chinese and Annamese scroll paintings had been ripped from the walls, and in the room where the traditional teak mandarin's bed stood, an unsuccessful attempt had been made to start a fire. In another bedroom he found some of Lan's silken ao dai hanging untouched m a lacquered cabinet and he was seized suddenly with a feeling of black despair; the filmy garments still smelled faintly of her perfume, and taking one of them in his hands, he buried his face in it. It was several minutes before he could bring himself to leave the room and then he walked slowly and dejectedly back to the Street.

"Just what in h.e.l.l's name's going on, captain?" A mystified smile creased Hawke's face, and Joseph noticed he was sitting pointedly behind the wheel of the jeep. When Joseph made to move to the driver's side, the young lieutenant held up both hands in mock horror. "I'll take us back to base if you like. My nerves are in shreds and I'd like us to get there in one piece."