Part 43 (1/2)

The dying man nodded, gazing back at him with the one rheumy eye. ”You were always different from Chuck and Guy.

More sensitive, I guess . . . mole like your mother. . . You always seemed far away from me.” The cold hand twitched weakly in Joseph's grasp. ”But you're strong in other ways. You're the only one who's survived. Chuck and Guy are dead.

Joseph saw his chance and leaned closer suddenly. ”Has the burden of Chuck's death been hard for you to bear all these years?”

The good eye fell closed, and for a moment the senator's ragged breathing was the only sound in the room. ”I tried to save him. ... I did everything I could. The eyelid fluttered and the exposed eye gazed blearily at him. ”You know that, Joseph, don't you?”

Joseph gazed back at his father in disbelief; then after a moment he turned his face away towards the uncurtained window. ”Chuck had what it takes He was strong. . . so d.a.m.ned strong and determined . . . he had the will to succeed - that's why his death was such a terrible loss. Never forget that, Joseph, will you? I guess he was a little headstrong . . . Like his old father Like his brother Guy. . . But that's not the worst fault a man can have, I don't reckon.”

His voice was rambling, rising and falling on each painful breath, and Joseph, feeling the anger in him reach a new peak, let go of his father's hand and stood up. ”You're wrong to compare Chuck with Guy,” he said in a whisper so fierce that it caused the dying face to turn quickly towards him. ”You're more wrong than you've ever known.”

The solitary eye regarded Joseph directly for a moment, then seemed to cloud over. ”I know . . . I know .. . You don't have to tell me that, Joseph.. . there was never anybody to touch Chuck, was there? n.o.body at all!”

A grimace of pain contorted his face suddenly and his head began rolling back and forth on the pillow. As he watched his father suffering his death agonies, Joseph felt the anger rush out of him like air from a deflated balloon, and the urge to wound was replaced in the same instant by an intense feeling of pity Nathaniel Sherman had misled others lot so long about his role in the death of his favorite son that in the end he might even have come to believe his own lies. Perhaps he'd had to do that to make his grief bearable, thought Joseph, hut either way he remained impregnable behind the walls of his own illusions, as lonely and isolated as he lay dying as he had been all his life in the midst of his own family.

As he stood watching life fade from the stricken body, another thought struck Joseph with sickening force: he was not so different himself from the man he had been at odds with all his life. He had imagined himself wronged and misunderstood as a boy by a blind, insensitive father who had continued to see life simply through the eyes of ancestors who had tamed the raw, wild lands of America by unrelenting physical determination. He had always imagined that his own more sensitive nature was superior, yet he too in his turn had set his own sons and his bi-other Guy against himself; his owrfoo1ish romantic idealism had led him to believe that nothing was impossible if a man responded honestly to the innermost urgings of his soul, if he set his love of truth above all things - hut these beliefs had brought disaster on himself in his own life that had exceeded even the scale of his father's.

Saddened more by these thoughts than by his father's imminent death, Joseph turned his back on the bed suddenly and walked across the room to the window. For a long time he stood looking out over the darkened boxwood lawns towards the river; the night was moonless but light from the uncurtained window on the ground floor cast a faint glow into the garden, and as his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness he fancied he saw someone moving among the trees. But although he stared hard into the shadows, he couldn't be certain the light hadn't played a trick on him.

Standing there, he remembered how only two or three hours before he had stood beside another bed in Georgetown looking down at the face of his only surviving son who was as lost and remote from him now as his dying father, and he s.h.i.+vered involuntarily; dimly he became aware that in the four-poster behind him, the pa.s.sage of air in and out of his father's lungs was becoming more noisy and labored, but something prevented him from turning around. Then a long, harsh, high-pitched scream split the darkness of the garden outside and Joseph recoiled instinctively as a dark shape rose from the blackness of the box- woods and soared upwards, pa.s.sing close across the face of the window. The peac.o.c.k screamed again as it settled on the chimney stack above the room, and its repeated cries rang eerily in the flue that rose from the big fireplace beside the bed. A shower of soot tumbled noisily into the hearth, and Joseph heard clearly the dry rattling sound of the peac.o.c.k spreading the spines of its tail on the chimney top.

A moment later the rhythm of his father's breathing was interrupted suddenly; a long choking cough racked him and his breath gurgled loudly in his throat like water. Joseph rushed to the bedside, fell to his knees and seized the old man's hand again; the desire to utter some final words of consolation welled up in him with such force that tears started to his eyes - but he gazed in vain into the face that was now clenched and contorted in agony. Clearly beyond hearing or seeing, the senator's whole frame was trembling; then abruptly all movement ceased and the spent, white body seemed to sink and melt into the snowy pillows.

Joseph remained motionless on his knees beside the bed for a minute or two, holding the limp lifeless hand; then he rose and walked quietly to the door. On the landing outside he found Tempe waiting with one hand pressed to her mouth.

”What was that awful noise, Joseph?” she asked in a horrified whisper.

”Just one of the peac.o.c.ks flying up to the chimney.” He reached out and took her hand, relieved to find it warm to his touch. ”There's nothing to worry about - he's gone.”

PART EIGHT.

Victory and Defeat.

1972-1975.

Richard Nixon won the presidential election of November 1968 largely on the strength of his campaign pledge to ”end the war and win the peace” in Vietnam. This promise seemed highly attractive to an American nation that had been deeply shocked by the scale of the Tet Offensive the previous February; the Communist offensive, because it exploded the myth that the war was being won, left President Johnson's Vietnam policies in ruins and contributed directly to his decision not to run again for the presidency, but during the four years of his first term, President Nixon used his ambiguous campaign pledge to spread and escalate the war against Communism in Indochina. He ordered brief invasions of Cambodia and Laos, bombed those two countries over a longer period, resumed the bombing of North Vietnam halted by President Johnson, and eventually mined the approaches to the harbor of Haiphong in an attempt to stop seaborne supplies from the Soviet Union reaching North Vietnam. To pacify public opinion while intensifying the war in these new directions, he scaled down the country's direct involvement by gradually withdrawing American ground troops from Vietnam and arming, supplying and training a greatly expanded South Vietnamese army - a policy he called ”Vietnamization.” Contrived to satisfy both ”doves” and ”hawks” alike, this policy gradually cooled the pa.s.sions of the most fervent antiwar protesters - those students who feared they would be drafted to Vietnam if the war continued until their deferments expired. In March 1969, some 540,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam, but this peak figure was reduced by stages until only 27,000 ”advisers” remained at the end of 1972. The policy of ”Vietnamization” expanded President Thieu's army to a strength of more than a million men and increased the flood of American money and war materials into Saigon, but this did nothing to solve the chronic political and social problems that made South Vietnam so vulnerable to a Communist takeover; the new enlarged army was seen by the largely peasant population as a bigger and better force for terror and oppression, and the increased flow of aid led to greater corruption among the country's military rulers. The invasions of Cambodia and Laos in 1970 and 1971 by mixed American and South Vietnamese forces were designed to strike at Communist bases and supply routes, but neither met with much success; the large-scale bombing of these two countries bordering Vietnam also had tragic results, killing unknown numbers of their peasants, turning millions into refugees and ultimately hastening their fall to Communism in 1975. Although President Nixon succeeded in extracting American ground forces from the conflict step by step, 20,000 American fighting men were killed in Vietnam while he was commander in chief, and in the first two years of his presidency he dropped more bombs on Indochina than the United States had dropped in Europe and the Pacific in World War II. By May 1972 some three thousand tons of bombs were falling each day on Indochina at a daily cost of $20 million - but still the war dragged on. By then the remaining American troops fought only with great reluctance; drug-taking became rife in the ranks, and officers were frequently attacked by enlisted men with fragmentation grenades. The soldiers' att.i.tudes were conditioned by the growing mood of disenchantment with the war at home which had been heightened dramatically by two separate events - the revelation in November 1969 that three hundred Vietnamese civilians had been ma.s.sacred eighteen months earlier by American troops at the village of My Lai, and the publication in the summer of 1971 of leaked secret doc.u.ments which became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers were a detailed government study of American involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1968, and they revealed most dramatically the extent of President Kennedy's intervention in the plot to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem, and the dubious background to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which, it became clear, had been prepared in advance of the North Vietnamese attacks of August 1964 to give President Johnson a free hand to make war in Vietnam without a formal war declaration. Above all, the Pentagon Papers were a staggering catalogue of how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had deliberately deceived the American people over Vietnam and they turned public attention increasingly to the long-drawn-out peace talks which had begun in Paris in May 1968. Elaborate and infinitely complex, the negotiations, which were to last five years, were often used by both sides for propaganda purposes, but they always centered around one issue: who should govern in Saigon. What began as talks between American and North Vietnamese diplomats were expanded later to include representatives of President Thieu's government and the National Liberation Front but something akin to a permanent stalemate was quickly reached; Hanoi and the Liberation Front demanded as their price for peace a complete American withdrawal and representation for the Front in a coalition government in South Vietnam, but President Thieu refused to countenance the idea of a coalition. As the talking continued inconclusively in Paris, the war went on, and in the spring of 1972, General Vo Nguyen Giap pushed three of North Vietnam's best divisions into South Vietnam supported by tanks and artillery. In response to this new offensive, President Nixon ordered giant American B-52 bombers to attack the regions around Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time since 1968 and he also seeded the Gulf of Tongking with mines to blockade Haiphong Harbor. The Communist thrust into South Vietnam lost momentum as a result and eventually the renewed American bombing and the mining of Haiphong forced the Communist leaders.h.i.+p in Hanoi to modify their peace demands. In early October 1972 they dropped their insistence that the National Liberation Front be included immediately in a coalition government in Saigon; instead, in return for a cease-fire and an American withdrawal, they proposed that the government of President Thieu should continue temporarily in office while a joint ”Council of National Reconciliation” discussed the problems of cooperation in the South. With the American presidential election due in November, President Nixon and his National Security Adviser. Dr. Henry Kissinger, were anxious to clinch an early agreement but President Thieu denounced the new proposals as a 'disguised coalition” and refused to cooperate. Despite this setback, a partial bombing halt was observed by the United States in response and Dr. Kissinger ringingly declared that peace was ”at hand” during a dramatic press conference in Was.h.i.+ngton on October 26. Two weeks later, on a wave of peace optimism, President Nixon was reelected for a second term by a landslide majority, but when the talks in Paris were resumed shortly after the election, they foundered again without any clear explanation being given as to what was holding up an agreement. President Nixon's critics promptly accused him of exploiting the peace talks for his own electoral advantage, and when the delegates began rea.s.sembling once more at the beginning of December in the anonymous villas in the suburbs of Paris where they had met over the years, there was an unprecedented mood of tension and expectation among the journalists waiting in the wintry streets outside. Their thoughts, like those of the delegates, were turned to peace, and with Christmas approaching, few of them antic.i.p.ated the b.l.o.o.d.y act of wholesale destruction that would be carried out before American forces finally bowed out of Vietnam.

1.

Joseph Sherman turned up the collar of his overcoat against the chill December wind blowing along the Avenue de General Leclerc in Gif-sur-Yvette and stamped his feet to warm them. With thirty other journalists and photographers of many different nationalities, he was awaiting the arrival of Henry Kissinger, and as he stood there, shoulders hunched against the cold, he reflected that the setting for the final confrontation between the United States and its Vietnamese enemies was as surprising and bizarre as everything else had been during the baffling war that had spanned an entire decade. The whitewashed artist's cottage with its orange-tiled roof and green shutters, outside which the journalists had gathered, was an anonymous little dwelling standing behind stucco walls on the edge of the sleepy suburban town fifteen miles from the center of Paris; its address was io8 Avenue de General Leclerc and it had first been chosen as a venue for peace talks late in 1969 when Dr. Kissinger and Hanoi's chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho, began holding secret meetings away from the public gaze focused on the formal peace negotiations taking place in the grandiose French government conference chamber on the Avenue Kleber. Originally owned by a left-wing French artist, Fernand Leger, the cottage had been bequeathed on his death to the French Communist Party which Ho Chi Minh had helped to found in the 192os. Most prominent Vietnamese Communists of the older generation had cut their revolutionary teeth in Paris in the 'twenties and 'thirties and bonds of friends.h.i.+p developed then with French Communists still held in the 197os; so the party had willingly loaned the painter's cottage to Hanoi as a diplomatic hideaway, and during the closing months of 1972, it had become the most frequently used of three North Vietnamese houses in and around Paris.

From conversations with acquaintances in the State Department, Joseph knew that framed cubist abstracts by Fernand Leger still hung on the walls of the long main room where a rectangular green baize table had been set up, and the American delegation always found little bottles of French mineral water and gla.s.ses set out in front of their half-dozen chairs whenever they arrived. In the days when the venue was still secret, Kissinger had often stepped across the threshold breathless after a 100 m.p.h. dash through suburban Paris to throw off pursuing reporters, but since its location was now known, he had become accustomed to arriving more grandly in a white rented Mercedes, flanked by French police motorcycle outriders.

At that same green baize table on October 8, Kissinger had listened with barely suppressed excitement as Le Duc Tho abruptly reversed four long years of stubborn intransigence and told him that his government was ready at last to agree to a cessation of hostilities. Hanoi would release its American prisoners, he had said, in return for an undertaking that President Nixon would withdraw all remaining U.S. troops and allow South Vietnam to work out its own political future. This amounted to a virtual acceptance of earlier American proposals, and the absence of the habitual Communist demand for the National Liberation Front to be admitted into a coalition government in Saigon had electrified the Americans present. They realized that the North Vietnamese had their eyes fixed firmly on the date for the American presidential election, then one month away, and obviously expected to be able to pressure President Nixon into settling quickly so as to gain maximum advantage at the polls - but otherwise the sincerity of the Hanoi delegates seemed beyond doubt.

Two nerve-wracking months, however, had pa.s.sed since that day. President Nixon had been reelected, but President Thieu had refused to give his approval to the deal, and when the negotiations resumed in mid-November, according to Joseph's informants, the Americans had found that the Communists had returned inexplicably to their old stubborn uncooperative ways. The American delegation had tried to persuade the Communists to meet some of President Thieu's objections but had made no headway at all, and Joseph was told that there had been no alternative but to break off the talks. Since the resumption on December 4, the new session had dragged on for ten days, and in their contacts with the journalists since then, the baffled American negotiators had admitted that they were becoming increasingly frustrated by the rude and sometimes contemptuous time-wasting tactics of the Communists.

The journalists had erected their own scaffold in the street opposite the cottage so that they could see over the wall into the garden around it, and occasionally in breaks between the talks they had caught glimpses of Kissinger or Le Duc Tho strolling and chatting with aides beneath the bare trees. Atmospheric pictures had been taken of them with telephoto lenses, but the windows of the cottage had always remained draped with frilled net curtains which successfully concealed those inside from the journalists' gaze covering the talks in this way was a frustrating a.s.signment, but because hopes for a settlement were high, Joseph, like the others, had stuck doggedly to the task for the past ten days.

Flurries of sleet were beginning to dance in the cold wind on that afternoon of December 13 when the Kissinger entourage finally drove up the avenue and swung into the cottage garden past solid steel gates that were immediately slammed shut behind their cars. A dumpy figure in a white raincoat and heavy-rimmed spectacles, Henry Kissinger strode stern-faced to the front door of the cottage without acknowledging the appeals from the journalists on their scaffold to stop and pose for a photograph. Joseph, like all the other correspondents, was watching intently to see if the austere, white-haired figure of Le Duc Tho would appear to greet Kissinger at the door, and because his attention was fully absorbed, he didn't notice the curtains at an upper window s.h.i.+ft briefly. In the event, Le Duc Tho made no appearance, and a buzz of disappointed comment rose from all round the viewing platform as gloomy predictions were exchanged about the early announcement of a cease-fire.

As he watched the journalists conversing from his place beside the window in one of the upstairs rooms, Tran Van Kim suddenly snapped his fingers at an aide standing behind him and called for a pair of binoculars. Kim wore the same kind of dark, high-necked tunic as Le Duc Tho, his manner towards the junior members of the North Vietnamese delegation was similarly distant and formal, and when his aide returned with the binoculars, he took them from him impatiently. He adjusted the lenses with care until the group of journalists on the scaffold came sharply into focus, then he stared hard at one of the faces.

”Fetch a list of the correspondents covering the talks,” he said quietly to his aide at last without turning round. ”Check particularly to see if there is an American named 'Sherman' among them. And hurry!”

The aide hastened from the room and returned a few minutes later bearing a sheaf of papers. ”Yes, Comrade Kim,” he said breathlessly, ”there is a 'Joseph Sherman' among the listed Americans.” He held out a telephoto close-up of Joseph taken by one of the delegation's intelligence operatives, and Kim eagerly took it from him. As Kim studied the picture, the aide began reading dutifully from Joseph's dossier.

”Professor of Asian studies at Cornell University, 1954 to 1967; senior adviser to the U.S. Joint Public Affairs Office in Saigon for three months, January to March 1968; thereafter resigned and wrote a book ent.i.tled The American Betrayal criticizing United States policy in Vietnam.

”Yes, yes,” broke in Kim testily, ”the book's well known. But what's he doing now?”

The aide consulted his list again. ”Because of the fame his book has brought him, Joseph Sherman, who is married to a British television journalist and lives in London, has currently been commissioned by The Times of London to write a series of special a.n.a.lytical articles on the peace negotiations and the war. So far two have been published.” The aide handed over two press clippings attached to another sheet of paper. ”At present he's staying at the Intercontinental Hotel at the corner of Rue de Rivoli and the Rue de Castiglione alongside the Tuileries Gardens. His room number is 4567.”

Kim read carefully through the clippings, still standing by the window, then he sat down at a desk and pulled a blank sheet of paper towards him. With a ball-point pen that he took from a breast pocket of his tunic, he wrote in French in his own hand: ”I have spotted you outside among the journalists. I will meet you at 7.30 AM. tomorrow inside the gate of the Tuileries at the foot of Rue de Castiglione. Perhaps you would be interested to hear some news of your daughter, Tuyet - and the inside story of the deceitful intrigues which Kissinger and the American negotiators are pursuing inside this house- Tran Van Kim.”

Kim sealed the note in an envelope and handed it to the aide. ”Call one of our journalists on his car radio and ask him to come to the back of the house immediately. Give him this letter to deliver to Sherman. Tell him I shall be watching from the window.”

When the leather-jacketed French Communist reporter, who was a stranger to Joseph, handed him the envelope on the scaffold, Tran Van Kim was able to see the frown of puzzlement that crossed the American's face. He watched him read the note but when Joseph raised his eyes to stare in surprise towards the cottage, Kim was careful to stand well back behind the net curtains so that he couldn't be seen. From the room below, the drone of Henry Kissinger's voice was clearly audible, speaking English with guttural German inflections; it rose and fell in blunt, irritated cadences as the National Security Adviser told an expressionless Le Duc Tho that because the North Vietnamese delegation was obviously now stalling and resorting to trickery for some ulterior motive, the United States was not prepared to continue the discussions and the negotiations were therefore suspended.

2.

Tran Van Kim waved an arm vaguely towards the hosts of stone warriors, G.o.ddesses and orators last becoming visible on the columned walls of the Palais du Louvre in the growing light. ”The French, Monsieur Sherman, are a cla.s.sic example of a people too clever for their own good,” he said contemptuously as he walked beside Joseph through the light powdering of snow that covered the Tuileries Gardens. ”I hope the same will not turn out to be true of the Americans.” He flashed a brittle smile at Joseph, then quickly turned his head away again. ”The French, you see, have never been able to contain the exuberance of their own conceit. Is it surprising that the poor people of Paris, confronted daily with these overlarge, over-decorated palaces, should have risen up in anger to cut off the heads of those insufferably arrogant aristocrats who built them? The very existence of such overpowering buildings in their midst was an intolerable provocation. But then the French have always lacked a sense of proportion - that's why they unfailingly exaggerate their own worth.”

Joseph dug his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets but didn't reply. The sky was still heavy with snow and the sculpted figures on the ma.s.sive baroque facades of the Louvre stood out like sentinels in the suffused glow of the dawn. From the Rue de Rivoli and the quays along the Seine the noise of the early morning traffic was only a distant hum, like the buzzing of flies dying with the onset of winter.

”See the angel with the outstretched wings and the clarion,” said Kim, pointing to a cornice silhouetted on the south wing. ”That is what the French are best at - blowing their own trumpet.” He smirked at his own wit and glanced at Joseph. ”You've seen the same ostentation on the front of the old Opera House in Saigon - and on the old palaces of the French governors. Their boastful architecture and their overbearing manner in Vietnam had the same effects on my countrymen as these palaces had on the poor people of France - they made us both revolutionaries.” The Vietnamese closed his eyes as he walked and sucked the cold air deep into his lungs. ”But just the same it's good to be back in Paris after all these years. We shouldn't forget that it was their arrogance and their desire- to show off before a humble people that led the French colons to bring our best minds here to be educated - and that here we first studied the teachings of Marx and Lenin.” He sighed again as he walked. ”But despite our differences we still had some things in common. The French and the Vietnamese are both unsentimental people.” He glanced quickly at Joseph once more. ”Unlike the Americans, of course.”

”Talking of being unsentimental, will you take the opportunity to visit your brother, Tam, while you're here?” asked Joseph suddenly. ”I'm sure you know he's just arrived to join the Saigon delegation. I talked to him yesterday - it must be over thirty years since you last met.” Joseph watched Kim's still deceptively youthful face, but it remained expressionless, and he didn't reply. Although in his late fifties, there was no trace of gray in his dark hair, and his round, almost cherubic, features still bore a strong resemblance to his brother's. ”If you do want to talk to Tam, lie's taken an apartment at number 3 Avenue Leopold II in the Sixteenth Arroridiss.e.m.e.nt,” added Joseph, still watching him carefully. ”He once told me that despite the differences between - you, he'd never be able to forget that you are his brother.”

Kim turned away to gaze across the gardens, and Joseph was unable to see his face. For a while they walked in silence, then Kim shook his head dismissively. ”I didn't come to Paris [or family reasons, Monsieur Sherman. Nor, as you might imagine, did I come to discuss philosophy and history. I asked you to meet me because I wanted to tell you the real reasons behind the breakdown of the negotiations at Gif-sur-Yvette.”