Part 36 (2/2)
Joseph sat forward in his chair, staring at the Vietnamese in horror. ”1 can't believe it.”
”As I said, there's no real evidence that 'Tuyet Luong' is your daughter,” added Tam hastily. ”It's only hearsay. 'Tuyet,' after all, isn't an uncommon name in Vietnam. But the rumors did suggest she was of mixed race.”
Joseph sank back in his seat and absorbed in a stunned silence the implications of what Tam had said. Then he rose and began pacing agitatedly back and forth along the terrace. ”When did you hear these rumors, Tam?”
”In the early sixties.”
”And has anything been heard of 'Tuyet Luong' since then?”
Tam shook his head. ”She seemed to disappear suddenly from the scene in the delta around about 1963.”
”So she could have been killed!” Joseph stared at the Vietnamese in dismay.
”It is possible of course,” replied Tam, avoiding Joseph's eyes. ”But as I said, our family has not been anxious to inquire too closely. It's possible the Liberation Front leaders.h.i.+p ordered her to undertake some less glamorous task. The Communists demand conformity and discipline above all else. A beautiful young woman roaming around wearing American pistols on her hips like a western gunslinger hardly fits that mold. Perhaps, she was becoming too famous.”
Joseph stopped pacing and refilled their gla.s.ses, and for a long time the two men sipped their drinks without speaking; then Joseph turned towards Tam once more, his expression thoughtful. 'Is it possible, do you think, that 'Tuyet Luong' might have been a.s.signed to Da Nang in some kind of intelligence role?”
”To spy on the American flyers when they go out on the town, you mean?'
Joseph nodded eagerly, ”Exactly!”
”It's possible. Why do you ask?”
”Because my youngest son, Mark, joined the air force and flew from Da Nang until he went missing on a mission over the North two years ago. We don't know whether he survived the crash, but one of his last letters to his mother contained a mysterious reference to a Vietnamese girl in the town who he thought called herself 'Tuyet.' It was all very unclear in the letter, but it seems 'Tuyet,' whoever she was, had learned his name and pa.s.sed a vague message to him through another girl about 'her father in America.' Mark wrote about this very casually and obviously didn't understand what it was about.”
”Didn't he know he had a half sister?”
Joseph shook his head quickly and looked away. ”No. Neither of my sons has been told about Tuyet. To my deep regret I've had very little to do with either of them since they've grown up.”
”And have you been to Da Nang yet?”
Joseph nodded. ”I flew up there almost as soon as I arrived.”
”And what did you discover?”
Joseph let out his breath slowly. ”Nothing - nothing at all. I couldn't find any trace of her. But then I had so little to go on.”
A. sad little smile of sympathy appeared suddenly on Tam's face. ”If 'Tuyet Luong' is your daughter, it must be very painful for you, Joseph, to think that she has sided with the enemy. But perhaps it helps you to understand our unfortunate country a little better. We have something in common now - we both have people of our own flesh and blood fighting against us on the other side in this terrible war.”
”I'm sorry Tam,” said Joseph quietly. ”I was thinking only of myself. I'd forgotten your brother, Kim.”
”Don't apologize. It's very rare for an American to find himself in this situation -. but for a Vietnamese it isn't at all uncommon.”
”We had our own civil war not so long ago,” said Joseph dully, ”so I suppose we should understand better. What contact have you had with Kim over the years?”
Tam shrugged and turned his face away once more. ”What contact could a leading member of the Hanoi Politburo have with a minor government minister in Saigon?”
”But it's not unknown, is it, for Viet Cong guerrillas to sneak home to their families to celebrate Tet even though they're in the opposing camp.”
”That's possible only for minor functionaries. For my brother nothing less than leading the revolution was ever good enough, and the day he dishonored my Father I swore never to speak with him again until he begged forgiveness on his bended knees.” He let out a bitter, mirthless laugh. ”Can you imagine Kim coming to kneel before me in Saigon now after all the blood that's been spilled? My mother concealed her broken heart for many years before she died but she never knew happiness again after Kim insulted my father and all our ancestors so deeply.” He shrugged his shoulders once more in a gesture of helplessness.” But even though so much divides us, even though Kim is a Communist above all else, he's still my brother.”
”Yes, and Tuyet, wherever she is and whatever she's doing, is still my daughter,” said Joseph resignedly.
They had lapsed into silence again after that, and to break the melancholy of their mood, Joseph had eventually suggested a stroll through the nighttime streets of the capital. They walked side by side but separately, wrapped in their own thoughts, and slowly the intimacy that had grown up between them in the garden had evaporated. Struck by a sudden thought, Joseph had asked Tam what had become of Lan's Son; shaking his head sadly, the Vietnamese told him that the boy had been killed in battle only a few months after graduating from the Dalat military academy. This news served to depress their mood further, and conversation between them ceased altogether.
In the heart of the city, noisy crowds of GIs were still lurching in and out of the bars, and in Quach Thi Trang Square around the central market some of the homeless refugees who had swollen Saigon's population to around three million people were already settling down for another night in doorways and on the pavements. Instinctively Joseph and Tarn quickened their pace to put behind them sights which reminded them all too forcibly of what the war was doing to the Saigon they had both known in more tranquil, dignified days, and when they reached the cathedral square they shook hands, bade one another good night and went their separate ways.
Joseph turned towards his villa on Cong Ly, then halted uncertainly after a few paces; although saddened by his evening with Tam and appalled by what Saigon was becoming, something of the fascination which the city and its people had once held for him still lingered indefinably in the streets. In the clammy heat he was aware suddenly that he still felt a strange, almost pleasurable, sense of disquiet, a kind of restless unease which tautened his senses to the verge of breathlessness, and after a moment's hesitation he turned back towards the Rue Catinat, which still clung unofficially to its original French name rather than ”Tu Do.” Crossing deliberately to the other side of the boulevard to avoid the sidewalk in front of the Continental terrace, he strolled into Le Loi Square. Beneath the ma.s.sive black statue of Vietnamese Marines in action a small crowd had gathered, and as he drew nearer he saw the bright glare of television camera lights above the heads of the watchers. One of the duties he was preparing to take over at JUSPAO was supervision of the daily press conference in the air-conditioned auditorium on Nguyen Hue Street; the increasingly skeptical crowd of American and foreign correspondents who appeared for the late afternoon briefings on the progress of the war already irreverently termed the sessions ”The Five O'clock Follies,” and one of his major tasks was to find a way to lend more conviction to the proceedings. Expecting to find a correspondent of one of the major American television networks recording a commentary, he moved closer out of professional curiosity to hear what was being said, but the sound of a female voice delivering a report to camera in what some Americans called ”Mayfair English” surprised him.
Craning his neck above the heads of the Vietnamese onlookers, he was able to see in the glow of the lights a tall, striking girl in combat boots and a crumpled safari suit of pale linen that suggested she and her camera team had just spent several days in the field filming the war. Her soundman was holding up prompt cards with brief script headings for her behind the camera, and Joseph guessed she was recording a final summary for a film already shot in the war zones. Once or twice as he listened, she fluffed a word because of tiredness and had to repeat the commentary, but the cadences of her voice indicated she had almost finished, and Joseph moved closer when she paused to allow the cameraman to zoom in for a final close-up.
”I first began reporting this war five years ago when only a few thousand American advisers were involved,” she said, speaking with slow deliberation. ”Now there are more than half a million American fighting men in Vietnam. But although official U.S. spokesmen constantly tell us that 'every quant.i.tative measurement' shows that the Communists are being beaten, victory, like smoke between the fingers, remains elusive and difficult to grasp.” She paused for a moment to give emphasis to her concluding words, then she added formally: ”This is Naomi Boyce Lewis reporting from Saigon.”
Joseph stared hard at the brightly lit face of the English reporter as her cameraman held the shot to provide some end-footage for their film editors in London, and for a few seconds his memory grappled unsuccessfully with the half-familiar name. Then in the instant that the camera was cut and the lights were switched off, 'he remembered. The silent crowd of Vietnamese who had been watching the recording being made drifted away with reluctance, and by the time he pushed through to the foot of the statue she was bending to help the crew pack their gear.
”I couldn't help hearing your pay-off line, Miss Boyce-Lewis,” he said quietly. ”Would you by any chance be related to a Colonel Sir Harold Boyce-Lewis who was with the British Army out here at the end of the Second World War?”
She turned at the sound of his voice and looked at him with a startled expression. ”Do you mean my father. . . ?”
The American's smile broadened and he held out his hand. ”I suppose I do. I'm Joseph Sherman. How is Sir Harold?
”My father was killed here in 1945, Mr. Sherman,” she said in a small voice. Then she looked at him more intently, her eyes brightening with interest. ”But if you knew him at all I would love to talk to you some time,”
4.
The baying of the Hanoi crowd reverberated in Mark Sherman's ears like the shrieks of tormented sols in h.e.l.l. They closed all around him, men, women and children, showering him with their spittle, striking him with their fists and feet, ripping handfuls of living hair from his head. Time and time again they drove him to the ground, kicking his face, trampling him against the tarmac road, tripping, stumbling and falling about him like stampeding cattle in their frenzy. Above the heads of the seething mob, the ominous black lenses of television cameras recording the public agony of the fifty shambling United States Air Force and Navy pilots seemed to stretch and elongate themselves until they too were abusing the officers, stabbing at them, knocking them viciously to the ground. The cameramen, Slavic Caucasians from Russia and Eastern Europe and narrow-eyed Chinese and Vietnamese, leered arid grinned gleefully from behind their lenses as they worked, the features of their faces stretching and distorting until, with mouths open wide, they too joined in the hysterical howling of the mob.
”Bow, Sherman! Bend your head in shame, you filthy Yankee motherf.u.c.ker!
The voices of their prison guards loping beside them rang out deafeningly through megaphones that they held clamped against their mouths; the American slang they used was distorted by their accents, but every time an American's name was called, the crowd immediately took up the chant in shrill imitation. The shrieking rose quickly to a crescendo, then Mark felt the sharp point of a bayonet slash his back and the rifle b.u.t.t of another guard thudded simultaneously into his solar plexus, forcing him to bend double in agonized response to the rising chants.
”Kowtow, Sherman! Kowtow! Bow your head! Kill the imperialist air pirates! Hang them for their inhuman crimes against the Vietnamese people!”
A flame of pain seared his groin as he went down again under a flurry of flying feet. He dragged himself upright only because his partner urged him on; otherwise he would have been content to lie on the ground until they kicked him insensible. At first the vast crowd watching from specially constructed grandstands on either side of the street had stared open-mouthed and in silence as the apprehensive Americans were unloaded from the truck that had brought them from their prisons to the center of Hanoi. They were handcuffed in pairs, and it wasn't until their blindfolds were removed that the muttering began, and then the crowd had started to spill out of their seats. With the aid of their megaphones, the guards had whipped the mob into a calculated frenzy before pus.h.i.+ng the manacled prisoners into their clutches, and the demented screaming had begun almost at once.
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