Part 13 (1/2)

”If you had the father of Le Loi, I'm sure you would have advised him to 'respect' the Chinese invaders he so gloriously defeated in the fifteenth century,” said Kim, his voice now openly contemptuous. ”You teach me to respect the great heroes of our past - but forbid me to emulate them. I know in my heart that the only course for a true patriot today is to become a revolutionary!”

”And you will become the savior of our country singlehanded, I suppose.”

”The savior will not be one, but many,” replied Kim confidently. ”The Communist Party of Indochina supported by all the oppressed peoples of the world and led by Nguyen Ai Quoc will set us free. I hope that I'll be able to play my part in that way, yes, I will try to become my country's savior.”

”Nguyen the Patriot is dead,” said Tam flatly. ”It was reported in the Communist newspapers of Moscow and Paris.”

”They were wrong. He's alive and the party is recovering,” rejoined Kim.

”Then where is he now?”

”That's not important. What's important is that he won't be in Hue with you taking part in the futile charade of the Sacrifice to Heaven. He's still working with many other comrades to ensure that the modern theories of Marx and Lenin conquer the antiquated ideas of Confucius.”

Lan saw her father raise his head, his expression suddenly pained and sorrowful rather than angry. For a moment he looked at each of his Sons in turn. ”There's nothing more dangerous than to reject the past completely,” he said in a quiet voice. ”The emperor is still important today as a symbolic focus of our culture and our national character. If our nation is to survive, we must try to combine the best of our Confucian ideals with the best of the new scientific teachings from the West. We must harmonize old things with new things and let the past and the present meet as equals. You've been won over, Kim, by the wild rantings of your uncle Lat. He's obsessed by foreign ideas - but if we let our national sense become submerged in an ocean of foreign knowledge, we will lose the soul of the nation.” The mandarin employed the emotive Annamese term quoc hon with a sonorous gravity. ”We've always retained our traditions although we've often lost our independence - first to China and now to France. If you and Lat sacrifice our national soul to Bolshevism in return for independence, you'll find afterwards there's nothing left of the true nation to revive. During the Red Terror of 1931 your 'friends' committed many atrocities, butchered hundreds of their own countrymen. They've shown they will not hesitate to tear out our nation's vitals to 'save' it.”

Kim stared in silence for a moment, his expression uncertain, as though some small part of him still intuitively respected the wisdom of his father's words. Then his features contorted in a sudden grimace of irrational anger and he sprang forward and banged his fist violently on the writing-table. ”You and Tam are blind - or you won't see. The doctrines of Lenin alone can make our people free! Only Leninism can free us from the humiliation of kowtowing all our lives to the insufferable French!”

Tran Van Hieu looked expressionlessly at his son. ”You know well enough that the best Frenchmen - like Captain Devraux - have a deep affection for our country. Things are changing now. If we work quietly and methodically, the Emperor Bao Dai could become our first modern sovereign - advised by the French but governing with greater independent powers.”

Kim snorted derisively. ”The French will only ever use us, as we use the water buffalo. They love only the material riches they can wring from our soil.” His eyes blazed suddenly as he stared down at his father, then he thrust a hand into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out some crumpled banknotes. He smoothed out a ten-piastre bill between his fingers, then waved it in front of him. ”This is the only thing for which the French colons have a deep affection. And you have the same deep affection for it too. All else is hypocrisy!”

He turned the note in his hands and pointed to the engraved design portraying Mother France with her arms draped benevolently around the shoulders of two native Annamese. ”Do you know what that picture is meant to convey? It shows a mother dragging her Annamese b.a.s.t.a.r.d sons to market- to sell them as slaves! And I'm the son of one of the middlemen who has grown fat on the proceeds.” He paused and with a dramatic sweep of his arm flung the banknote in his father's face. ”You may not be prepared to stop selling our people to France for private gain, but I am - I will no longer be a party to such shameful deeds.”

Tran Van Hieu winced and closed his eyes as the banknote fluttered to rest on the table in front of him. When he opened them again his eyes fell directly on the engraving. For a long time he sat without moving. When he finally spoke, he kept his eyes averted from his son.

”You will leave my house immediately,” he said in a barely audible voice. ”And never return again as long as I live.” - From outside the window Lan clearly heard Kim's sharp intake of breath. Beside her father, Tam stood motionless, like a wax figure, his face drained of all color.

”The family and the nation should be one,” continued Tran Van Hieu in the same quiet voice. ”If the family is lost, the nation will be lost too. In the end, Kim, if Bolshevism succeeds you'll bring down ruination on your country, your family and yourself! Now go!”

Lan could not prevent a little sobbing cry escaping her lips, and when Kim rushed from the room, she hurried up the steps into the house. She met her brother in the shadowy hall but he pushed past her without acknowledging her presence. Sobbing openly, she ran into her father's study and found him hunched gray-faced in his chair. Kneeling beside him, she seized his hand and kissed it convulsively. In the doorway her mother appeared silently, having come from the back of the house where she had obviously been listening all the time. Tam went to her and she put her arms around him and drew him close; tears were already streaming down her cheeks too.

4.

The features of the ragged Annamese prisoners appeared uniformly gaunt and pallid as one by one they stepped onto the gangplank of the freighter that had brought them from Paulo Condore. Some carried a few sc.r.a.ps of clothing tied in a bundle, others nothing; all had the watchful, haunted look common to men who have been confined behind bars for a long time against their will. On the quayside Joseph Sherman studied the individual prisoners intently as the companionway sagged beneath their weight. He had retained a clear image in his mind of Ngo Van Loc's face in the jungle hunting camp, but as the first dozen or so men hobbled ash.o.r.e, he began to doubt his ability to recognize him. Eleven years before, Loc's habitual expression had been the servile, respectful half-smile of the domestic servant, but none of the grim, resentful prison faces seemed to bear any resemblance to that memory.

The small freighter, the second to arrive in Saigon with Communists released under the amnesty, carried about fifty prisoners, and there were almost as many uniformed French and Annamese gendarmes stationed ostentatiously on the quayside, monitoring their arrival. To make their job easier arc lamps had been rigged along the berth, and the prisoners blinked uncertainly in the bright pool of light they cast onto the nighttime quayside. Across the broad boulevard that ran beside the river, another mixed group of Frenchmen and Annamese dressed in civilian clothes watched more surrept.i.tiously from beneath the awnings of the Cafe de Ia Rotonde at the foot of the Rue Catinat. From time to time one of their number rose unhurriedly from his table and detached himself from the others to follow a particular prisoner or group of prisoners into the darkened streets of the city; always these agents of the Surete Generale took pains to keep a good distance between themselves and their quarry to ensure that they remained un.o.bserved.

As Joseph scrutinized each successive face, he felt his chest tightening with the same kind of breathless tension he'd first noticed in himself on his arrival in Saigon; again the night was hot and clammy and he tried to dismiss the feeling as a natural reaction in someone unused to the dense tropical heat. But at the same time he suspected that the events of the day and his impulsive decision to come to the dockside had tautened his nerves. The riot at the Cercle Sportif and the subsequent ride in the malabar with Lan had left him feeling strangely exhilarated; his appet.i.te had fled and he had not been able to face dinner alone at the hotel. Paul had telephoned to thank him for escorting Lan home and to report that the disturbance had been quelled without serious injury; because Paul was on duty that night, they had arranged to meet the next day for lunch, and it was while Joseph was sitting alone on the hotel terrace at sunset that he had seen a photograph in the evening paper of the first group of prisoners arriving from Paulo Condore. He had been peering closely at the blurred faces in the picture for some time before he realized with a start that he was unconsciously searching for Ngo Van Loc. At the end of the story the newspaper announced that a second group was expected to arrive some time that evening, and he had risen immediately from his table and hurried down to the quayside.

The next two hours had pa.s.sed with an agonizing slowness, and as he paced restlessly back and forth along the darkened waterfront watching s.h.i.+ps arrive and depart, conflicting impulses and emotions had warred endlessly with one another inside his head; one part of his mind, his most rational self, urged him repeatedly to leave before the prison s.h.i.+p docked. What good could be achieved by seeking out the former hunting camp 'boy”? The past was undeniably past - would anything more be achieved than the opening of old wounds? And would he, when it came to it, have the courage to fire painful questions at a man he barely knew and who had just been released from a harsh spell of imprisonment? He asked himself these questions a hundred times, but still he didn't leave the sweltering riverside.

During the long wait, the image of Loc's sobbing wife fleeing half-naked through the storm, and the sound of his own mother's faint cries returned to haunt his mind, and he remembered again with a disconcerting intensity the turmoil of shock and bewilderment that those events had caused him as a fifteen-year-old. Subconsciously the vague feeling of betrayal, instinctive in that jungle storm, had deepened as his knowledge of the adult world expanded, leaving him with a legacy of suspicion and wariness; but on that Saigon dockside he realized he had never entirely abandoned the hope that perhaps some explanation beyond his imagining might have existed for what had happened, an explanation that somehow would relieve the disquiet that those terrible moments in the storm had implanted in him. He was half aware that such a hope was a forlorn one, but it was this slender chance, he knew, that kept him there, striding back and forth along the wharves in the sticky darkness, his s.h.i.+rt plastered against his back with perspiration.

When the prison s.h.i.+p finally appeared Joseph had hurried to join the little crowd of Annamese relatives who had antic.i.p.ated its arrival, and it was then that the Surete agents across the boulevard noticed his presence for the first time. When he moved closer to the foot of the gangway to get a better look at the disembarking prisoners, the inspector directing the undercover operation from the back of the cafe gave quiet instructions to a heavily built Frenchman to put him under immediate surveillance.

More than half the prisoners had left the s.h.i.+p before Joseph saw a man who bore a faint resemblance to Ngo Van Loc; like all the others, however, his features were blurred by the ashen pallor of long confinement, making recognition difficult. His threadbare black cotton tunic and trousers hung loose on his skeletal frame, and Joseph noticed that his left arm dangled uselessly at his side. At the moment of stepping ash.o.r.e the prisoner glanced incuriously into the American's face before turning away, and for a second Joseph decided he had been mistaken. Then on impulse he stepped towards the man and touched his shoulder.

”Excuse me, monsieur,” he said quietly in French, are you Ngo Van Loc?”

The released prisoner turned to look at him with a startled expression; fear and suspicion were mingled in his gaze, and he didn't reply. He glanced warily around at the faces of the uniformed gendarmes crowding the quayside, then back at Joseph again.

”Weren't you once the hunting camp 'boy' of Jacques Devraux?” asked Joseph desperately.

For a fleeting instant he fancied that the emaciated face of the Annamese registered surprise, but then he turned his back without speaking to catch up with another of the released prisoners. Joseph watched for a moment or two as they crossed the boulevard, then looked back again towards the s.h.i.+p. But none of the remaining faces aroused his interest, and making up his mind suddenly, he hurried across the quayside in the direction taken by the Annamese with the paralyzed arm.

The streets were crowded, and fearing he might lose track of the man, Joseph broke into a run. He caught sight of him and his companion as they turned into a street leading towards the central market, but the sound of his running feet caused the two Annamese to turn their heads, and to Joseph's dismay, on seeing themselves pursued, they began to run too. By one of the arched entrances to the vast covered market they turned and glanced frantically in his direction again, then disappeared inside. Joseph followed without hesitation, and although he could see nothing in the subterranean gloom, he clearly heard the scuff of running feet and the labored breathing of the two Annamese.

”Monsieur Loc, please wait,” he called frantically in French. ”I just want to talk to you.”

His voice echoed and re-echoed hollowly in the cavernous interior of the deserted market, but the men didn't stop, and Joseph plunged on in the direction of their footsteps. When he paused to listen again, to his surprise he could hear nothing except the sound of his own breathing, and he walked on more cautiously through the silent darkness that reeked of overripe fruit and rotten Fish. From time to time he called Loc's name, but still there was no response, and when an unseen arm encircled his neck from behind he was taken completely by surprise; in the same instant he felt the point of a knife pressed hard against the small of his back.

”Who are you?” whispered an Annamese voice in French, close to his ear. ”Why do you follow us?”

”My name's Joseph Sherman,” gasped the American, struggling to loosen the fierce arm lock clamped around his throat. ”Jacques Devraux once guided my family on a hunting trip when Ngo Van Loc worked with him.” He heard the two men mutter rapidly to one another in their own language, but the pressure on his windpipe didn't ease and the knife was jabbed harder into his back.

”And is Devraux living here in Saigon?”

”No, he's chief of the Surete Generale in Hue now. Are you Ngo Van Loc?”

”Yes!”

The headlights of a car pa.s.sing one of the market entrances penetrated the gloom briefly as the hold on his neck was released, and Joseph turned to see Loc still holding the knife warningly in his good hand; beside him the other Annamese stood in a half- crouch, ready to move against him again if necessary.

”How did you know where to find me? How did you know I was a prisoner?” Loc's voice, still threatening, betrayed his curiosity.

”I've talked with Paul Devraux,” replied Joseph, ma.s.saging his neck. ”He's in the army here. He told me he thought you were in Paulo Condore.” He hesitated and rubbed his neck again. ”He told me, too, the tragic news about your son, Hoc. I was very sorry to hear that he'd died.”

”He didn't 'die' - he was butchered by the French with their guillotine! Did he tell you that they murdered my wife too? And that I lost the use of my arm when their brave pilots bombed and machine-gunned defenseless peasants at Vinh? Did he tell you that the French killed ten thousand Annamese because we dared to defy their despotic rule?”

”Paul feels deeply sorry for all that's happened,” said Joseph desperately. ”He regarded you and your sons as his friends.”

The Annamese snorted in contempt. ”Did he send you himself to tell me these lies?”

”No. He doesn't know I've come.”

”Then what did you wish to talk to me about?”

Joseph suddenly found himself unable to summon up the words he wanted. ”It's a very personal matter, Loc,” he said hesitantly. ”I wanted to speak to you alone.”

The Annamese muttered a few rapid words in his own language, and Joseph waited until the shadowy figure of Loc's companion had moved away through the gloom and taken up guard inside the nearest archway.

”Loc, do you remember that night of the bad storm in the jungle camp at the start of my family's expedition?” Joseph's voice shook slightly as he spoke. ”Do you remember what happened?”