Part 23 (1/2)

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.