“Was that a grenade?” he asked with excitement and hope.
“Most likely the exhaust of a car,” I said, and was suddenly sorry for his disappointment. One forgets so quickly one’s own youth: once I was interested myself in what for want of a better term they call news. But grenades had staled on me; they were something listed on the back page of the local paper-so many last night in Saigon, so many in Cholon: they never made the European Press. .Up the street came the lovely fiat figures-the white silk trousers, the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh: I watched them -with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I had left these regions forever. “They are lovely, aren’t they?” I said over my beer, and Pyle cast them a cursory glance as they went on up the rue Catinat.
“Oh, sure,” he said indifferently: he was a serious type. “The Minister’s very concerned about these grenades. It would be very awkward, he says, if there was an incident- with one of us I mean.”
“With one of you? Yes, I suppose that would be serious. Congress wouldn’t like it.” Why does one want to tease the innocent? Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston his arms full of the books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said: he was absorbed already in the dilemma’s of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West: he was determined-I learnt that very soon-to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.
“Is he in the mortuary?” I asked Vigot. “How did you know he was dead?” It was a foolish policeman’s question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife. YOU cannot love without intuition.
“Not guilty,” I said. I told myself that it was true. Didn’t Pyle always go his own way? I looked for any feeling in myself, even resentment at a policeman’s suspicion, but I could find none. No one but Pyle was responsible. Aren’t we all better dead? the opium reasoned within me. But I looked cautiously at Phuong, for it was hard on her. She must have loved him in her way: hadn’t she been fond of me and hadn’t she left me for Pyle? She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair. She sat there looking at the two of us and I thought she had not yet understood. Perhaps it would be a good thing if I could get her away before the fact got home I was ready to answer any questions if I could bring the interview quickly and still ambiguously to. an end, so that I might tell her later, in private, away from a policeman’s eye and the hard office-chairs and the bare globe where the moths circled. I said to Vigot, “What hours are you interested in?”
“Between six and ten.”
“I had a drink at the Continental at six. The waiters will remember. At six forty-five I walked down to the quay to watch the American planes unloaded. I saw Wilkins of the Associated News by the door of the Majestic. Then I went into the cinema next door. They’ll probably remember they had to get me change. From there I took a trishaw to the Vieux Moulin—I suppose I arrived about eight thirty-and had dinner by myself. Granger was there-you can ask him. Then I took a trishaw back about a quarter to ten. You could probably find the driver. I was expecting Pyle at ten, but he didn’t turn up.” “Why were you expecting him?” “He telephoned me. He said he had to see me about something important.” “Have you any idea what?” “No. Everything was important to Pyle.”
“And this girl of his?-do you know where she was?” “She was waiting for him outside at midnight. She was anxious. She knows nothing. Why, can’t you see she’s waiting for him still?” “Yes,” he said.
“And you can’t really believe I killed him for jealousy -or she for what?-he was going to marry her.” “Yes.”
“Where did you find him?” “He was in the water under the bridge to Dakow.”
The Vieux Moulin stood beside the bridge. There were armed police on the bridge and the restaurant had an iron grille to keep out grenades. It wasn’t safe to cross the bridge at night, for all the far side of the river was in the hands of the Vietminh after dark. I must have dined within fifty yards of his body.
“The trouble was,” I said, “he got mixed up.” “To speak plainly,” Vigot said, “I am not altogether sorry. He was doing a lot of harm.”
“God save us always,” I said, “from the innocent and the good.” “The good?”
“Yes, good. In his way. You’re a Roman Catholic. You wouldn’t recognise his way. And anyway, he was a damned Yankee.”
“Would you mind identifying him? I’m sorry. It’s a routine, not a very nice routine.”
I didn’t bother to ask him why he didn’t wait for someone from the American Legation, for I knew the reason. French methods are a little old-fashioned by our cold standards: they believe in the conscience, the sense of guilt. a criminal should be confronted with his crime, for he may break down and betray himself. I told myself again I was innocent, while he went down the stone stairs to where the refrigerating plant hummed in the basement.
They pulled him out like a tray of ice-cubes, and I looked at him. The wounds were frozen into placidity. I said, “You see, they don’t re-open in my presence.” “Comment?”
“Isn’t that one of the objects? Ordeal by something or other? But you’ve frozen him stiff. They didn’t have deep freezes in the Middle Ages.” “You recognise him?” “Oh yes”
He looked more than ever out of place: he should have stayed at home. I saw him in a family snapshot album, riding on a dude ranch, bathing on Long Island, photographed with his colleagues in some apartment on the twenty-third floor. He belonged to the sky-scraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream, and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and chicken sandwiches on the Merchant Limited.
“He wasn’t dead from this,” Vigot said, pointing at a wound in the chest. “He was drowned in the mud. We found the mud in his lungs.” “You work quickly.” “One has to in this climate.”
They pushed the tray back and closed the door. The rubber padded.
“You can’t help us at all?” Vigot asked. “Not at all.”
I walked back with Phuong towards my flat: I was no longer on my dignity. Death takes away vanity-even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t show his pain. She was still unaware of what it was about, and I had no technique for telling her slowly and gently. I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines. “American official murdered in Saigon.” Working on a newspaper one does not learn the way to break bad news, and even now I had to think of my paper and to ask her. “Do you mind stopping at the cable office?” I left her in the street and sent my wire and came back to her. It was only a gesture: I knew too well that the French correspondents would already be informed, or if Vigot had played fair (which was possible), then the censors would hold my telegram till the French had filed theirs. My paper would get the news first under a Paris date line. Not that Pyle was very important. It wouldn’t have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths, for it would have damaged Anglo-American relations, the Minister would have been upset. The Minister had a great respect for Pyle-Pyle had taken a good degree in-well. One of those subjects Americans can take degrees in: perhaps public relations or theatre craft, perhaps even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books). “Where is Pyle?” Phuong asked. “What did they want?” “Come home,” I asked. “Will Pyle come?”
“He’s as likely to come there as anywhere else.” The old women were still gossiping on the landing, in the relative cool. When I opened my door I could tell my room had been searched: everything was tidier than I ever left it.
“Another pipe?” Phuong asked. “Yes.”
I took off my tie and my shoes; the interlude was over: the night was nearly the same as it had been. Phuong crouched at the end of the bed and lit the lamp. Mon enfant, ma soeur-skin the colour of amber. Sa douce langue natale.
“Phuong,” I said. She was kneading the opium on the bowl. “II est mort, Phuong.” She held the needle in her hand and looked up at me like a-child trying to concentrate, frowning. “Tudis?” “Pyle est mort. Assassine.”
She put the needle down and sat back on her heels, looking at me. There was no scene, no tears, just thought- the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.
“You had better stay here tonight,” I said. She nodded and taking up the needle began again to heat the opium. That night I woke from one of those short deep opium sleeps, ten minutes long, that seem a whole night’s rest, and found my hand where it had always lain t night, between her legs. She was asleep and I could hardly hear her breathing. Once again after so many months I was not alone, and yet I thought suddenly with anger, remembering Vigot with his eye-shade in the police station and the quiet corridors of the Legation with no one about lad the soft hairless skin under my hand. Am I the only one who really cared for Pyle?
The morning Pyle arrived in the square by the Contitteritall had seen enough of my American colleagues of the Press, big, noisy, boyish and middle-aged, full of sour Slacks against the French, who were, when all was said, fighting this war. Periodically, after an engagement had been tidily finished and the casualties removed from the gfeerie they would be summoned to Hanoi, nearly four fears’ flight away, addressed by the Commander-in-Chief, lodged for one night in a Press camp where they boasted that the barman was the best in Indo-China, flown over the battlefield at a height of 3,000 feet (the limit of a heavy machine-gun’s range) and then delivered safely and easily back, like a school-treat, to the Continental Hotel in Saigon.
Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest, sometimes that first day I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. And he was very, very serious. Several times he seemed to shrink up within himself at the noise of the American
Press on the terrace above-the terrace which was popularly believed to be safer from hand-grenades. But he criticised nobody.
“Have you read York Harding?” he asked. “No. No, I don’t think so. What did he write?” He gazed at a milkbar across the street arid said dreamily, “That looks like a good soda-fountain.” I wondered what depth of homesickness lay behind his odd choice of what to observe in a scene so unfamiliar. But hadn’t I on my first walk up the rue Catinat noticed first the shop with the Guerlain perfume and comforted myself with the thought that, after all, Europe was only distant thirty hours? He looked reluctantly away from the milk-bar and said, “York wrote a book called The Advance of Red China. It’s a very profound book.” “I haven’t read it. Do you know him?” He nodded solemnly and lapsed into silence. But he broke it again a moment later to modify the impression he had given. “I don’t know him well,” he said. “I guess only met him twice.” I liked him for that-to consider it was boasting to claim acquaintance with-what was his name? --York Harding. I was to learn later that he had an enormous respect for what he called serious writers. That term excluded novelists, poets and dramatists unless they had what he called a contemporary theme, and even then it was better to read the straight stuff as you got it from York.
I said, “You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.”
“Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say,” he replied guardedly. “And then cheek it with York?”
“Yes.” Perhaps he had noticed the irony, because he added with his habitual politeness, “I’d take it as a very great privilege if you could find time to brief me on the main points. You see, York was here more than two years ago.” I liked his loyalty to Harding-whoever Harding was. It was a change from the denigrations of the Pressmen and their immature cynicism. I said, “Have another bottle of heCr and I’ll try to give you an idea of things.” I began, while he watched me intently like a prize pupil, by explaining the situation in the North, in Tonkin, where the French in those days were hanging on to the delta of the Red River, which contained Hanoi and the only northern port, Haiphong. Here most of the rice was grown, and when the harvest was ready the annual battle for the rice always began
“That’s the North” I said. “The French may hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don’t come to help the Vietminh. A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress. . . . But you can rot comfortably in the damp in Hanoi. They don’t throw bombs there. God knows why. You could call it a regular war.” ‘”And here in the South?”
“The French control the main roads until seven in the evening: they control the watch towers after that, and the cities-part of them. That doesn’t mean you are safe, or there wouldn’t be iron grilles in front of the restaurants.”
How often I had explained all this before. I was a record always turned on for the benefit of newcomers-the visiting Member of Parliament, the new British Minister. Sometimes I would wake up in the night saying, “Take the case of the Caodaists.” Or the Hoa-Haos or the Binh Xuyen, all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge. Strangers found them picturesque, but there is looking picturesque in treachery-and distrust.
“And now,” I said, “there’s General The. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . .”
“York,” Pyle said, “wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force .”Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with the arid bones of background and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fisher’s fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes. When I first came I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term; I thought I was tied to what was left of a Bloomsbury square and the 73 bus passing the portico of Euston and springtime in the local in Torrington Place. Now the bulbs would be out in the square garden, and I didn’t care a damn. I wanted a day punctuated by those quick reports that might be car-exhausts or might be grenades, I wanted to keep the sight of those silk-trousered figures moving with grace through the humid noon, I wanted Phuong and my home had shifted its ground eight thousand miles. I turned at the High Commissioner’s house, where the Foreign Legion stood on guard in their white kepis and their scarlet epaulettes, crossed by the Cathedral and came back by the dreary wall of the Vietnamese Surete that seemed to smell of urine and injustice. And yet that too was
part of home, like the dark passages on upper floors one avoided in childhood. The new dirty magazines were out on the bookstalls near the quay-Tabu and Illusion and the sailors were drinking beer on the pavement, an ey mark for a home-made bomb. I thought of Phuong, who would be haggling over the price of fish in the third street down on the left before going for her elevenses to the milk-bar (I always knew where she was in those days), and Pyle ran easily and naturally out of my mind. I didn’t even mention him to Phuong, when we sat down to lunch together in our room over the rue Catinat and she wore her best flowered silk robe because it was two years to a day we had met in the Grand Monde in Cholon.
Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death. Phuong had risen before I was properly awake and had our tea ready. One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.
“Will you stay tonight?” I asked Phuong over the croissants as casually as I could. “I will have to fetch my box.”
“The police may be there,” I said. “I had better come with you.” It was the nearest we came that day to speaking of Pyle.
Pyle had a flat in a new villa near the rue Duranton, off one of those main streets which the French continually subdivided in honour of their generals-so that the rue de
Gaulle became after the third intersection the rue Leclerc, and that again sooner or later would probably turn abruptly into the rue de Lattre. Somebody important must have been arriving from Europe by air, for there was a policeman facing the pavement every twenty yards along the route to the High Commissioner’s Residence.
On the gravel drive to Pyle’s apartment were several motor-cycles and a Vietnamese policeman examined by press-card. He wouldn’t allow Phuong into the house, so I went in search of a French officer. In Pyle’s bathroom Vigot was washing his hands with Pyle’s soap and drying them on Pyle’s towel. His tropical suit had a stain of oil on the sleeve-Pyle’s oil, I supposed. “Any news?” I asked.
“We found his car in the garage. It’s empty of petrol. He must have gone off last night in a trishaw-or in somebody else’s car. Perhaps the petrol was drained away.”
“He might even have walked,” I said. “You know what Americans are.”
“Your car was burnt, wasn’t it?” he went thoughtfully on. “You haven’t a new one?” “No.”
“It’s not an important point.” “No.”
“Have you any views?” he asked. “Too many,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Well, he might have been murdered by the Vietminh. They have murdered plenty of people in Saigon. His body was found in the river by the bridge to Dakow-Vietminh territory when your police withdraw at night. Or he might have been killed by the Vietnamese Surete-it’s been known. Perhaps they did not like his friends. Perhaps he was killed by the Caodaists because he knew General The.”
“Did he?”
“They say so. Perhaps he was killed by General The because he knew the Caodaists. Perhaps he was killed by the Hoa-Haos for making passes at the General’s concubines. Perhaps he was just killed by someone who wanted his money.”
“Or a simple case of jealousy,” Vigot said. “Or perhaps by the French Surete,” I continued, “because they didn’t like his contacts. Are you really looking for the people who killed him?”
“No,” Vigot said. “I’m just making a report, that’s all. So long as it’s an act of war-well, there are thousands killed every year.”
“You can rule me out,” I said. “I’m not involved. Not involved,” I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw: I took no action-even an opinion is a kind of action. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come for Phuong’s belongings. Your police wouldn’t let her in.”
“Well, let us go and find them.” “It’s nice of you, Vigot.”
Pyle had two rooms, a kitchen and bathroom. We went to the bedroom. I knew where Phuong would keep her box-under the bed. We pulled it out together; it contained her picture books. I took her few spare clothes out of the wardrobe, her two good robes and her spare trousers. One had a sense that they had been hanging there for a few hours only and didn’t belong, they were in passage like a butterfly in a room. In a drawer I found her small triangular pants and her collection of scarves. There was really very little to put in the box, less than a week-end visitor’s at home.
In the sitting-room there was a photograph of herself and Pyle. They had been photographed in the botanical gardens beside a large stone dragon. She held Pyle’s dog on a leash-a black chow with a black tongue. A too black dog. I put the photograph in her box. “What’s happened to the dog?” I said.
“It isn’t here. He may have taken it with him.” “Perhaps it will return and you can analyse the earth on its paws.”
“I’m not Lecoq, or even Maigret, and there’s a war on.”
I went across to the bookcase and examined the two rows of books-Pyle’s library. The Advance of Red China, The Challenge to Democracy. The Role of the West-these, I suppose, were the complete works of York Harding. There were a lot of Congressional Reports, a Vietnamese phrase book, a history of the War in the Philippines, a Modern Library Shakespeare. On what did he relax? I found his light reading on another shelf: a portable Thomas Wolfe and a mysterious anthology called The Triumph of Life, and a selection of American poetry. There was also a book of chess problems. It didn’t seem much for the end of the working day, but, after all, he had had Phuong. Tucked away behind the anthology there was a paper-backed book called The Physiology of Marriage. Perhaps he was studying sex, as he had studied the East, on paper. And the keyword was marriage. Pyle believed in being involved.
His desk was quite bare. “You’ve made a clean sweep,” I said.
“Oh,” Vigot said. “I had to take charge of these on behalf of the American Legation. You know how quickly rumour spreads. There might have been looting. I had all his papers sealed up.” He said it seriously without even smiling. “Anything damaging?”
“We can’t afford to find anything damaging against an ally,” Vigot said.
“Would you mind if I took one of these books-as a keep-sake?” “I’ll look the other way.”
I chose York Harding’s The Role of the West and packed it in the box with Phuong’s clothes.
“As a friend,” Vigot said, “is there nothing you could tell me in confidence? My report’s all tied up. He was murdered by the Communists. Perhaps the beginning of a campaign against American aid. But between you and me- testen, it’s dry talking, what about a vermouth cassis round the corner?” “Too early.”