Part 45 (1/2)

Once Naomi had left for Vietnam to cover the spectacular southward advance of Hanoi's eighteen divisions, Joseph retreated sixty miles south of London to their country house in West Suss.e.x. There, surrounded by the green, rolling hills of the South Downs, he tried to settle to his writing; but as the days pa.s.sed he found himself increasingly distracted by the news from Saigon. Only forty-eight hours after Naomi had left, the Communist forces smashed into Qui Nhon, Nha Trang and Dalat, encountering little resistance from the dispirited government forces, and as he listened to the radio news roll call of cities falling one after the other to the North Vietnamese onslaught, Joseph's mind was flooded with memories; he recalled the desperate journey he had made with Lan beside him in the OSS jeep in 1945, driving nonstop northwards along the old Mandarin Way above the beautiful white beaches and azure seas of Nha Trang and Qui Nhon. The fall of Dalat on April 2 plunged him into a new bitter-sweet bout of reminiscence as he recalled the exhilaration they'd shared at the Lang-Biang Palace in 1954, and this in turn stirred stark recollections of her awful death before his eyes in Saigon only a few weeks later. Eventually these thoughts became oppressive, inducing in him a dark sense of foreboding about Naomi's safe return, and he found himself waiting with increasing anxiety for her telephone calls. She rang him two or three times a week from the Continental Palace, but the calls were - invariably subject to frustrating delays and over the crackling line she was able to say little of what she'd seen of the fighting. In the end she confined herself to repeated a.s.surances that she was safe and keeping out of danger, but as time p.i.s.sed these stilted conversations, instead of setting his fears at rest, made Joseph more uneasy.

By the end of the first week in April, the Communists were tightening a military noose around Saigon. Less than a hundred thousand battle-ready government troops faced some three hundred thousand North Vietnamese, whose spearhead had moved to within forty miles of the capital at Xuan Loc, and as far as Joseph could see the only hope seemed to lie in the possibility that Hanoi might prefer to negotiate and have their troops appear in the streets as liberators rather than military conquerors. From Was.h.i.+ngton he listened anxiously to reports that President Ford was trying to persuade Congress that a fresh 750-million-dollar dose of military aid might save Saigon -but as the days slipped by the legislators on Capitol Hill remained adamant, fiercely protective of their new power in the wake of Richard Nixon's ”imperial presidency.”

Listening to news of this calamitous train of events hour by hour on his shortwave radio amidst the hills of southern England, Joseph became too distracted to work. He began rising before dawn and driving the few miles to the ancient cathedral city of Chichester to buy extra newspapers as soon as they arrived at the railway station. Ill-at-ease, he wandered restlessly through the paddocks and formal gardens of the eighteenth-century manor house between news broadcasts and telephone calls from Naomi, and after President Thieu's resignation on April 21 had signaled the end was near, he began to take longer walks outside the grounds, tramping blindly across the surrounding hills, oblivious to the green shoots of spring speckling the branches of the trees above his head and the ground around his feet. A frown of anxiety became a permanent expression on his suntanned face, and he walked with hunched shoulders and the jerky, uncoordinated stride of a man abstracted by events beyond his control.

Unknown to Joseph, in those same days many thousands of miles away in Hanoi, the brother of the girl who had first made his spirit a hostage to Vietnam's fortunes four decades before was suffering similar symptoms of anxiety. While Joseph strode daily through the South Downs, Tran Van Kim was pacing anxiously back and forth across the uncarpeted floor of one of the austere offices set aside for the use of Politburo members in the Party Headquarters of the Lao Dong. His fears, however, although shaped by the same events, were for his own safety.

The realization that his career and possibly his life were in jeopardy had come to him only gradually. The frantic day and night round of meetings and consultations that had followed the unexpected success of the He) Chi Minh offensive in late March and early April had proved exhausting and at first he had been too tired to read the warning signals. He had taken a full part in the early discussions, and with experience born of long observation of his old mentor Ho Chi Minh, who had died in September 1969, he had been careful not to commit himself fully to either of the two extreme views which had quickly polarized the Politburo. One faction wanted to hazard everything at once in an all-out drive on Saigon, while the remaining members advocated caution and restraint, and seeing that opinion was equally divided, he had managed to praise and criticize both points of view equally. Because he was so confident that he was pursuing the wisest course, he didn't take it amiss that he was never called on to make an unequivocal statement of his views, and it was some days before he realized that he was no longer being asked to voice any opinion at all.

After the victory of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the resignation of Nguyen Van Thieu, the tempo of the meetings had increased dramatically. The corridors of the Party Headquarters were filled at all hours of the day and night with bustling functionaries in high-collared tunics who rushed frantically from one meeting to another bearing sheafs of top-secret papers. It was then, when his own schedule of meetings slackened abruptly, that he had felt the first stab of sickening fear; he was being excluded completely from all top-level counsels about future policy in the South - and that could mean only one thing!

Left idle in his room for hours on end, he began frantically to search his memory for some unconscious transgression. His relations.h.i.+p with Ho Chi Minh had been personal and intimate for more than thirty years and he had always known that he owed his place in the Politburo to this fact above all else. He had antic.i.p.ated a gradual diminution of his influence in the years following Ho's death, but he had always felt confident that the prestige and intimate knowledge of party affairs he had gained during three decades as the leader's close confidant would guarantee his position. He had been aware that the amount of time he had spent with Ho had been a cause of envy among other Politburo members, and General Vo Nguyen Giap in particular, in the later years of Ho's life, had begun to treat him with a cold reserve. As he paced his office at the beginning of the last week in April 1975, Kim concluded that the direct threat would almost certainly come from the defense minister who was supervising the overall strategy for the offensive; he tried obliquely to approach one or two members of the party's ruling body who had been most friendly to him in the past in an effort to discover if he was being linked with others in some large-scale purge; but all cold- shouldered him, confirming his worst apprehensions - he was alone, suddenly and inexplicably a political outcast!

Barely able to sleep or eat, it came almost as a relief on the morning of Tuesday, April 21, when he received a summons to the office of the head of the party's Control Commission who was responsible for internal party discipline. The thin-faced cadre, who had always shown him great deference while Ho Chi Minh was alive, didn't rise when he entered his office or invite him to be seated; instead he addressed him in a curt voice without looking up from his papers.

”Your fellow members of the Politburo of the great and glorious Lao Dong Party have instructed me to make certain things known to you, comrade,” said the cadre. ”As you know, the party is on the brink of an historic victory which will bring our southern brethren under our control for the first time. This is a period when the highest self-discipline will be required of all comrades at all levels. Many difficulties and hazards lie ahead, and it will not be an easy task to change the capitalist ways of the southern people and bring them into line with the discipline of our own socialist society. It has been agreed unanimously that anybody who lacks total dedication to the cause cannot be tolerated in the highest echelons of our party at a time like this. It has been further agreed that anybody who is likely to betray our goals in the South because of misguided personal loyalties is not to be trusted and must be discarded at once!”

Kim stared at the bowed head of the cadre, who was reading everything he said in a toneless voice from a typewritten sheet on the desk before him. He knew he was being invited to condemn himself from his own mouth, but he couldn't understand why. ”I've dedicated my whole life to the party,” he said in an injured tone. ”Of what am I accused?”

Without replying, the cadre pushed across the desk a typewritten report to which two photographs were fastened. Kim picked them up, but at first the Paris apartment building at the corner of Avenue Leopold II and Rue La Fontaine shown in the top one meant nothing to him. Then in the second picture he recognized the back view of himself stepping into the doorway to be greeted by his brother Tam, and with his heart hammering at his ribs he turned to the report and read the agent's account of how he had been followed to the Sixteenth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt.

”It was nothing more than a personal meeting,” he said in a barely audible whisper as he let the report fall onto the desk top. ”There was no discussion whatsoever of political matters.

The cadre looked blankly back at him. ”It has been decided that you will present yourself at the Party Interrogation Center at Phuc Yen at four o'clock this afternoon for further examination of the facts. A car will be provided for your convenience but no driver will be available. You must drive yourself - take the northern route. That is all.”

Kim returned slowly to his own office, moving along the gloomy corridors like a somnambulist. Whether the evidence shown to him was the real reason for his fall from favor, he didn't know; perhaps it was being used to cover some personal spite or other, some lingering envy of his past prominence. Bitter feuds at the top party level, he knew from experience, were often rooted in personal dislikes, and he cursed himself for his foolishness in giving potential enemies sufficient ammunition to condemn him. For half an hour he sat hunched at his desk, staring dully at his empty wooden doc.u.ment trays; then gathering himself, he glanced at his watch and found it was already two o'clock. After a moment's thought, he drew two sheets of blank paper from a drawer and began writing rapidly. When he had covered both pages in closely s.p.a.ced scrawl, he sealed them in an envelope and used a telephone to summon a junior aide from an adjoining office.

”Take this to my niece, Trinh, at the munitions factory,” he told the youth sharply. ”Deliver it in person without fail at once. Tell her it's most urgent.”

”Yes, Comrade Kim.” The youth acknowledged the order in an anxious voice and made to leave, but at the door he halted and turned to look uncertainly at his superior. ”Is anything wrong, Comrade Kim? You look unwell.”

Kim stared at him hopelessly for a moment. ”Go quickly. And when you've delivered the note don't come back here. Go somewhere you won't be found!”

The youth's face turned pale. ”Why, Comrade Kim? Why?”

”Because I've been ordered to Phuc Yen for interrogation. Now go before it's too late.”

Half an hour later Kim walked down to the motor compound at the rear of the building and stepped into a Russian-made Moskwa saloon that had been brought to the door for him by an overalled mechanic. He drove the car carefully through the city and across the Red River Bridge, heading for Phuc Yen which lay thirty miles northwest of Hanoi on the slopes of the Red River valley. As he drove alongside the Lake of the Restored Sword, he wondered briefly whether he would ever see the twin paG.o.das on their little islands again then he noticed in his rearview mirror another Moskwa with three plainclothes security men following him openly. All along the winding highway that climbed steeply up the valley, they remained at an even distance behind him, making no effort at all to conceal their presence, and his hands began to tremble on the wheel. As he drove he kept a constant watch in his rearview mirror - but the trail of oil dripping from the puncture made in the Moskwa's hydraulic system by the overalled mechanic was too fine to detect, and he remained unaware that his brakes had been rendered useless.

Because of the long gradient, he didn't try to slow the car until he was running down a long steep slope on the far side of the first big hill outside the city. The road swung sharply away from a high cliff, and he applied his foot to the brake for the first time as the Moskwa sped down towards the bend. To his horror, the unresisting pedal went right down to the floorboards without altering his speed, and the car raced on towards a yawning gap in the retaining fence that he could see, from the freshly broken wood, had been made very recently. In the instant before the vehicle hurtled out over the cliff edge, Kim remembered the last words his father had spoken to him on that night long ago in Saigon when he had flung the ten-piastre note contemptuously in his face. ”. . . In the end, Kim, if Bolshevism succeeds you'll bring down ruination on your country, your family - and yourself. .

The car spun in the air and fell a hundred feet before it struck a projecting spur of rock and exploded. It bounced against the cliff face again lower down then sprang outwards, showering debris and burning petrol in all directions before the turbulent waters of the Red River finally swallowed it up and quenched the angry flames.

Three days later at the old manor house in a fold of the South Downs, Joseph was woken from a troubled sleep at three AM, by the ringing of his bedside telephone. When he lifted the receiver he recognized Naomi's excited voice at once but had difficulty understanding her on the poor line.

”Darling, there's ... been.. . a. . . purge.. . in.. . the. . . Lao Dong . .. Politburo,” she said, pausing deliberately after each word because of the crackling line. ”A French journalist in Hanoi has been given the story by a very unusual source.”

Joseph rubbed his bleary eyes and sat up in bed. ”Very interesting,” he shouted back. ”But why wake me in the middle of the night to tell me this?”

”Please listen, Joseph! This is very important. It's Tran Van Kim who's been purged - he may even be dead. The journalist got the story from a distraught Vietnamese girl who came to his office. She asked him privately to contact you. She said her name was Trinh and she's traveling south to Saigon in three days' time. She said she needs your help.”

Joseph sat bolt upright suddenly as the significance of Naomi's words sank in. ”Trinh, did you say? Tuyet's daughter?”

”Yes,” shouted Naomi, ”it seems so. What do you want me to do I'll do anything you say.”

Joseph's knuckles whitened on the telephone receiver. ”Don't 'do anything,” he shouted. ”Nothing at all.”

”Why not?” asked Naomi in a puzzled voice. ”Why on earth not?”

”Because I'm coming to Saigon myself!”

He slammed down the telephone, dressed quickly and ran to the study where he kept his pa.s.sport. Without waiting to pack a bag or turn out the lights of the house, he hurried outside to the garage. Within ten minutes of receiving Naomi's call, he was driving fast through the country lanes of Suss.e.x heading for London to catch the First available flight to the Far East. The dawn of Friday, April 25, 1975, was breaking over the western reaches of the capital as he took off four hours later from Heathrow Airport on the first leg of his journey to the beleaguered city of Saigon that had only five days left to live.

7.

Three days later on the afternoon of Monday, April 28, 1975, a heavy pall of saturated air blanketed the capital of South Vietnam. The ominously dark clouds that heralded the first monsoon downpour of the new wet season had been growing blacker hour by hour since dawn, but although it seemed constantly to be on the point of explosion, the gathering storm stubbornly refused to break. As a result, an electric tension descended on the streets, and in the luminous, gray light three and a half million people caught fast in the tightening circle of Communist armor were able to see clearly the telltale lines of fear etched deep into one another's faces. Hurrying on foot through the heart of the city towards Doc Lap Palace, Joseph could hear the distant rumble of an artillery barrage being laid down on the main South Vietnamese airbase of Bien Hoa, eighteen miles away. The noise of the barrage was interspersed from time to time with sounds of thunder that grew gradually louder, and Joseph noticed that the people he pa.s.sed gazed up constantly at the sky, obviously wondering when the bombardment of the capital would begin.

After weeks of growing apprehension the people trapped in Saigon had become openly fearful because they knew that with twenty-one Communist divisions ringing the city, the single remaining division of disciplined ARVN troops would have no hope of defending them. Faced with this hopeless military situation, South Vietnam's tottering government was preparing to swear in its second new president in the s.p.a.ce of six days in the hope that he might prove more acceptable to the Communists; but rumors of the move had already spread through the streets and few who'd heard it held out much hope that this last desperate political gamble would succeed in saving the city. Hanoi's leaders had augmented their forces and maneuvered them into position with slow deliberation during the second half of April so as to give themselves time to destroy South Vietnam's political leaders.h.i.+p beyond repair; to ensure that President Thieu didn't flee abroad and set up a government in exile which might compromise their eventual control of the South, they had given hints through their Camp Davis representatives at Tan Son Nhut that they might accept a negotiated settlement if he stepped down formally from the presidency. But after tricking Was.h.i.+ngton into forcing him to resign, they had immediately made new demands: they insisted that the vice-president who succeeded Thieu should in turn be replaced by the neutralist figure General Duong Van Minh, and because this seemed to offer a slender hope of preventing the total destruction of Saigon, the South Vietnamese had hastily agreed.

The swearing-in ceremony for Big Minh had been set for the late afternoon, and Joseph reached Doc Lap Palace just after five o'clock in time to watch the ineffectual Buddhist general, who had played a leading role in the American-inspired overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, march sad-faced into the main reception hall. The brocade and plush chamber hung with huge crystal chandeliers was already filled with an audience of two hundred Vietnamese army officers and politicians who had records of opposition to the Thieu regime, and they watched with silent apprehension as President Minh stepped onto a podium decorated with his own personal crest - a representation of Yin and Yang, the symbolic harmonious opposites of Asian philosophy that emphasized his wish for reconciliation with his Communist enemies. Joseph pushed his way through the crowd of a hundred or so journalists at the back of the hall to where Naomi stood tense beside her camera crew, directing the filming of the proceedings. A steel helmet dangled from her left hand, and she still wore an olive green flak jacket like most of the other correspondents who were das.h.i.+ng to and from the front lines of a war that had moved to within a few minutes' drive of their city center hotels. Together they listened to Big Minh in an agony of concentration, trying to a.s.sess whether this last-ditch change of leaders.h.i.+p would give Joseph a few extra hours to find Trinh.

”You must have realized that the situation is very critical,” Minh began, speaking in a voice that cracked frequently with emotion. ”Tragic things are occurring minute by minute, second by second in our country, and we're paying dearly for our mistakes with our blood, I'm deeply distressed by these events and I feel a responsibility now to seek a cease-fire and bring peace on the basis of the Paris Agreements The coming days will be very difficult. I cannot promise you much Joseph shook his head in frustration and Naomi, glancing around, saw that his face was gray with fatigue. During the forty-eight hours since his arrival in Saigon, he had barely slept. Day and night he had roamed the city, searching out the haunts of old Viet Minh and Viet Cong contacts among the maze of back alleys and shanty slums lining the ca.n.a.ls. He had begun by offering substantial bribes to the venal waiters and doormen at the Continental Palace, the Caravelle and other big hotels; these men, he knew, were Viet Cong informers of long standing, and he promised them more money if they could tell him how he could contact Dang Thi Trinh, an important new cadre of the Provisional Revolutionary Government who had left Hanoi five days ago to come south to take up special duties in Saigon. He had slipped hundred-dollar bills un.o.btrusively into their hands and sometimes discreetly showed them copies of his old OSS photographs taken with Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap in 1945. In his desperation to find Trinh, he lied blatantly without any sense of shame. He was a writer sympathetic to the Communist cause, he said, and he had reason to believe that Comrade Trinh bore important confidential information that the leaders.h.i.+p of the Lao Dong in Hanoi wished him to receive; it was of vital importance to the party that she contact him the moment she arrived from the north.

The waiters had watched and listened with suspicious eyes, then after holding out for further bribes, had supplied names and addresses that took him with agonizing slowness along secret chains of command that led through the muddy lanes and into the reeking boat dwellings of the city slums. Wary eyes and monosyllabic grunts had greeted his inquiries everywhere in the dark and dingy meeting places. Careless of his own safety he even went at night into villages beyond the city limits when contacts were arranged there, certain he was moving higher up the secret Viet Cong hierarchy; but frustratingly he came to a halt on the second night at what he judged was the middle level of command - and none of the contacts admitted to any knowledge of Trinh's existence.

On Sunday he had ostentatiously attended all the services at Saigon Cathedral, where over the years Viet Cong go-betweens had made surrept.i.tious contacts with foreign journalists whenever it suited them; but not once had he been approached. On Monday morning, growing ever more desperate, he had driven out to Tan Son Nhut airport and visited Camp Davis, the fortified compound where as a result of the 1973 Paris Agreements a representational contingent of two hundred troops of the People's Army of North Vietnam was stationed along with a smaller group of Viet Cong officials of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. In theory they were there to supervise the 1973 cease-fire, but it was common knowledge that the North Vietnamese officers were disguised political cadres from Hanoi, and for two years they had given bizarre press conferences every Sat.u.r.day morning to promote Hanoi's propaganda line. On his way there Joseph saw for the first time the growing crowds of Vietnamese waiting for evacuation flights on big U.S. Air Force C-I3os that were lifting off the run*ay at regular intervals. The gymnasium of the American Defense Attache's Office had been turned into a refugee processing center, and the sight of anxious men, women and children clutching bags of possessions as they waited to leave the country had heightened Joseph's own feelings of alarm. On an impulse he had decided to reveal the real nature of his interest in Trinh to the Hanoi colonel who commanded Camp Davis, and he sent in a short note with his OSS photograph giving Trinh's full name and his reasons for wis.h.i.+ng to find her. The narrow- eyed officer who received him half an hour later had listened impa.s.sively to his story, then shaken his head. ”I have no knowledge of any of these things of which you speak,” he told him coldly, then summoned an aide to show him out.

The ranks of refugees lining up to leave had been swollen considerably by the time Joseph left Tan Son Nhut, and the small contingent of United States Marines that had been flown in a week before to police the evacuation was having difficulty persuading panicky Vietnamese not to block the approaches to the airport with their abandoned vehicles. On his way back into Saigon, Joseph had become trapped in an impenetrable traffic jam of army trucks and other military vehicles and had parked his rented car and begun to walk. Before long he found himself in Bui Phat, one of the areas where Communist rockets had struck the city at dawn that day, leveling a whole street of huddled tin roof shanties; smoke was still rising from ruins which had been swept by swathes of fire, and dead bodies and the mutilated living were still being unearthed from the wrecked homes. Small groups of sobbing relatives and stunned onlookers stood watching, and as he approached the corner of the ruined street, Joseph saw one badly burned victim of the raid being dragged from beneath the shattered remains of a corrugated lean-to hut.

He watched with a growing sense of horror as two soldiers tugged at a pair of charred ankles and the rest of the body came free with a faintly audible groan. Convinced suddenly that the victim was a young girl, he ran forward with an involuntary cry; the trunk and limbs were black and blistered, all the hair had been burned from the head, and clear brown eyes, wide with agony, were rolling uncontrollably. The charred lips were moving without making any sounds, and Joseph grabbed a water bottle from one of the soldiers and made them lower their burden while he poured a few drops of liquid into the scorched throat. There was another faint moan of agony as a spasm of pain shook the body, and Joseph saw then that most of the victim's clothing had been burned to nothing in the all-consuming fire. What he had imagined were black trousers were in reality blistered skin, and he saw then that the dying Vietnamese was a male youth, and despite his deep feelings of horror, a flood of relief swept over him. A moment later the youth shuddered and moaned one last time before he died, and the two South Vietnamese soldiers, who had been waiting with expressions of impatient hostility on their faces, continued their gruesome task of disposing of the anonymous corpse.

Joseph stood for a long time among the ruins created by the rockets, as stunned suddenly 'as the local people all around him by the realization that the war was closing inexorably at last on the city that for most of the past thirty years had led a charmed existence amid the b.l.o.o.d.y battles being fought all around it. With the exception of the Tet Offensive seven years earlier and an isolated rocket attack in 1971, the capital of South Vietnam had always remained an island of relative peace in a restless sea of war, but as the day wore on and the monsoon clouds darkened over the city, the certainty that the end was near seemed to become something tangible in the air. The vision of that charred male corpse returned to haunt Joseph's memory hour by hour as he continued his search for Trinh, and it gradually became a recurring symbol of fear and dread. He began thinking of it again as he listened to Duong Van Minh's despairing speech because it was soon clear from what he said that the mind of South Vietnam's new president must also be filled with similar thoughts. Addressing the ”Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam” directly by its own declared name for the first time, he said that all the people now wanted ”reconciliation” above all else; but the tone of his voice suggested he held out little hope that he Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese would make many concessions now that outright military victory was within their grasp.

”Reconciliation requires that each element of the nation respect the other's right to live,” said Minh, struggling to inject conviction into his words. ”We should all sit down together and work out a solution. I propose from this podium that we stop all aggression against each other forthwith.” The burly general paused and drew a long breath without looking at his audience, well aware that he was speaking via the live television broadcast to many ears beyond the hall. ”I hope with all my heart that this suggestion will meet with approval At that moment the whole palace was shaken by an elemental explosion; brilliant Hashes lit the sky outside and curtained doors leading to the patios were blown open. A mighty rush of wind lashed rain into the chamber as the first monsoon storm broke with great violence, and when the doors had been secured again President Minh had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the continuing crash of thunder.

”In past days, fellow citizens,” he said, his face more stricken than before, ”you may have noticed that many people have been quietly leaving the country. Well, I want to remind all our citizens that this is our beloved land. Please be courageous; stay and accept the fate of G.o.d Thunder crashed and rolled deafeningly once again, and Minh had to wait until it died away; then he raised his eyes beseechingly to the audience once more. ”Please remain and stay together - rebuild South Vietnam! Build an independent Vietnam, democratic and prosperous, so Vietnamese will live with Vietnamese in brotherhood.” He paused one last time and gazed around the hail, a brave man fully aware that he was about to be engulfed by one of history's irresistible tides. ”Thank you very much,” he added quietly at last, but the words never reached the ears of his listeners because they were drowned in another thunderclap.

As the gathering began to break up, Naomi moved to Joseph's side and squeezed his arm consolingly; his face was drawn and he raised his shoulders in a resigned shrug. Many times since his arrival he had quizzed Naomi about the message she had received From the French journalist, and she had gone over it patiently again and again for him: a girl called Trinh had contacted the Agence France Presse representative in Hanoi to tell him of Kim's disappearance after his dismissal from the Politburo. In exchange for the information, she had asked that he contact Joseph Sherman in confidence and say that her great-uncle had arranged for her to be infiltrated to the South as a cadre of the Provisional Revolutionary Government; she feared for her future in the North, she had said, with Kim in disgrace. As the North Vietnamese army was likely to win victory in the South any day, she had felt she would have no future there either; that was why she wanted Joseph to help her get out of Vietnam. There had been no party announcement about Kim, but the French journalist had later learned from a reliable informant that he had died in a car crash.

”Please don't look so worried, Joseph,” said Naomi quietly. ”Perhaps Trinh's been delayed on the journey. It's probably chaos on the roads in the Communist areas too.”

Joseph didn't answer. He was staring over her shoulder at the crowd of National a.s.sembly delegates milling beneath the great chandeliers, discussing Minh's speech.