Saigon (15 page)

Dao Van Lat studied his naked body in the long mirror and was seized afresh with an exhilaration of awe. For an instant, too, a detached sense of pity welled up inside him at the body’s seeming frailty in the face of its task; could the slight, sloping shoulders carry the heavy burdens of leadership, the thin arms arid bony wrists hold a long steady course? Would the sharp-jutting pelvis, the spindly, narrow-thighed legs support all the endeavors of the rest? His amber skin was suffused with the roseate glow of a red Tet lantern hanging from the ceiling, and because it cast shadow across the dark valley of his groin he brushed his hand quickly down the funnel of his lower belly as though seeking reassurance of his completeness. 

Poetic wishes for longevity and health written in Chinese calligraphy on blood-red streamers decorated the walls of the shabby room adjoining the printing shop of the Hanoi newspaper for which he worked. On the little altar to his ancestors beside the mirror, lighted candles stood amidst tiny dishes of fruits, pork, fish and rice, and behind him incense burners and small brass pans of aloe wood set on a low lacquered table sent perfumed smoke drifting in gentle spirals towards the ceiling. 

When he raised his gaze to inspect his face, Lat found his eyes agleam with the intensity of his fervor. Round, high-cheeked, boyish but with a scholar’s high brow, it was the face of a man of twenty-seven years of age nerving himself for an extreme deed, a supreme effort of will. It was a face that Joseph and Flavia Sherman would have recognized instantly from their encounter with the Annamese journalist in the palace of Khai Dinh at Tet exactly five years earlier because it had changed little, if at all, in the interval of time. 

Eat searched his own eyes and saw reflected there the mingled emotions that haunted his mind. He was proud that the invisible spirit animating the slight frame had dared to conceive the intended deed as his duty; but he was afraid at the same time that he would lack the courage to endure the pain and carry it through. 

“Our hearts are like iron and stone; they will never tremble!” 

Between clenched teeth he quoted the words of the nineteenth century poet Phan Van Tri. Written nearly eighty years before as marauding French forces seized their first tracts of territory in Cochin-China, they reflected his own deep conviction, derived from a totally different experience, in the ultimate supremacy of the spirit of man. Hadn’t he studied in France and seen the men of this supposedly superior civilization living amid their mighty machines and their great institutions? Hadn’t he read the philosophers of France, of Germany and of other European nations? Didn’t they all agree with Phan Van Tri that the seeds of victory were to be found only in the spirit of man? And wasn’t the disciplined, self-denying spirit of Nietzsche’s Superman the finest expression of this high ideal? After all, hadn’t the insuperable iron ships, the powerful weapons, the all-conquering engines of the colonialists been born first in the determined spirit of Western man? If Western nations could produce the philosophical Superman of Nietzsche, why not Asian nations too? The time had come at last for Confucius to bow to the sages of the modern world! 

He nodded avidly in affirmation of his train of thought and turned so that the light fell directly on the front of his body. Again he ran his gaze down his reflection from shoulder to loins. The physical manifestation of his manhood, as always in repose, appeared a shrunken, insignificant part of him. He wondered anew that the great and glorious power of life could flow so fiercely and endlessly through such a shriveled and unbeautiful fountainhead. It hardly seemed possible that powerful, destructive passions could spring unendingly from such an unpromising source! He shook his head in a little motion of disbelief but he knew there could be no turning back. If he was to rise above the constant lure of carnal lusts that distracted him daily, if he was to dedicate and devote his life to freeing his country from the monstrous rule of France, there could be no choice! He clenched his fists at his sides to strengthen his resolve. If he was to become the Asian Superman of Nietzsche’s teachings, he must cast aside all thought of pleasure and sensual gratification and concentrate only on the task before him! 

Closing his eyes, he forced himself to think of his hatred for the colonial French. Behind his back they called him a “jaune” — a “yellow” with its unmistakable implication of cowardice; if feeling more tactful they called him an “Annamite” — but wasn’t that only in truth a man of China’s ancient colony, the “Pacified South”? True, they had been vassals of China for nine long centuries but hadn’t their hearts “like iron and stone” enabled them at last to throw off the Chinese yoke when the Tang dynasty crumbled? Hadn’t they hurled back the Mongols from their frontiers and defeated the invasion forces of the Sung and Ming emperors? And when their great Emperor Gia Long finally rose from the Mekong delta a century ago to unify all the peoples from Saigon to Hanoi, hadn’t he triumphantly renamed his new empire “Viet Nam’? That was what they must keep in mind! The arrival of the French colonizers a few decades later had merely given them another chance to demonstrate their indomitable spirit. The white foreigners may have partitioned and ruled their land for seventy years, but that didn’t make him and his countrymen “yellows,” “Annamites” or “Annamese.” They were men of “Viet Nam”! They were Vietnamese! And in their spirit lay the dormant power that could make them proud, free men again! That power must be released, allowed to gush forth. Yes, and he must lead them and inspire his companions by his example! 

He opened his eyes and glanced at the clock beside his bed. In five hours time it would be midnight. The first day of the first month in the Year of the Horse was at hand. In the Western calendar a new decade had just begun — it was the right time for a new beginning! 

The intensity of the emotions evoked by his train of thought quickened his breathing and he rushed across the room to the bookshelves in the shadows beside the ancestral altar. He ran his fingers along the spines of the books he’d brought back from the other side of the world; books owned illegally since the French not only censored newspapers but decreed which books he and his fellow countrymen might lawfully read. There were the works of Flaubert, Kant, Plato, Nietzche.... He plucked the little blue leather-bound volume of Nietzche’s Thus Sprach Zarathustra from the shelf and held it towards the light of one of the flickering candles on the altar. 

The well-thumbed book fell open at the single page headed “Of Chastity” and his lips moved as he recited a passage to himself in a hushed whisper. 

‘And behold these men! Their eyes confesseth it — they know naught better on earth than to lie with a woman. 

The ground of their soul is filth. Alas if there be yet mind in their filth! * 

Would at least ye were perfect, as are the beasts. But to the beast belongeth innocence. 

Do I counsel you to slay your senses? I counsel you innocence of the senses!” 

Lat let the book fall closed in his hands and looked up at the altar. It consisted of three lacquered tables of different heights. Elaborate carved figures of clouds, dragons and trees intertwined endlessly across their surfaces and on the highest table stood a box lacquered in red and gold which contained a list of the names of his ancestors, stretching back over several centuries. His gaze fixed itself on the box with great intensity, as though he were willing the spirits of his forebears to understand alien thoughts. Then he closed his eyes. “Thus Spake Zarathustra!” he whispered fiercely, and as he did so tears squeezed out from beneath his closed lids and rolled down his cheeks. 

He stood unmoving for several minutes and then opened his eyes and inhaled deeply until he had regained his composure. With something approaching reverence he replaced the book on the shelf and went into the kitchen and opened a drawer. The long knife that he withdrew glinted dully in the light from the altar candles and after gazing at it for a moment he took a whetstone from the same drawer and began caressing the already razor- sharp blade with it. 

Less than a mile from the shabby little room where Dao Van Lat was contemplating his act of self-sacrifice on the eve of Tet, 1930, Jacques Devraux was working late at his new desk in the Hanoi headquarters of the French Süreté Générale. Lines of anxiety furrowed his brow as he sifted through yet another batch of infuriatingly sketchy agents’ reports. A new cache of crude native arms had been found in the Red River valley that day — cement grenades and homemade sabers again; that brought the total to six in the past fortnight. Plotting for a widespread uprising was obviously well advanced, but still no coherent plan was discernible from the Süreté’s intelligence. 

Devraux swung around thoughtfully in his swivel chair to stare at the map of Tongking on the wall behind him. He had flagged the locations of the previous arms caches with red markers but they were scattered over a large area ranging from the lower delta near Haiphong to the limestone mountains of Upper Tongking. He got up arid pushed a new flag into the map, then resumed his seat to study the result. 

Newly installed as a full-time inspector three months earlier at the suggestion of the governor general, Jacques Devraux was not the only Süreté officer working late on the eve of the Annamese holiday. Because increasing evidence of unrest was surfacing throughout the north, lights still burned in many of the other offices, and in the top security archive in the basement below his feet half-a-dozen clerks were busy updating the twenty thousand secret dossiers and the fifty thousand related cross-reference cards that Süreté agents in Asia and Europe had painstakingly compiled over the past decade on those Annamese suspected of posing a threat to French rule in Indochina. 

When the door of Devraux’s office opened to admit the top- ranking officer of the Süreté Générale in Indochina, the special commissioner for political affairs, the former hunting guide noticed immediately that the bulkiest file in the whole archive was coutched beneath his arm. Its “Secret d’Etat” designation — “State Secret” — was clearly visible stamped in big red letters on the cover and the commissioner dropped it on Devraux’s blotter with an audible sigh of exasperation. 

“Your wily adversary has given our Canton people the slip again, Jacques,” he said irritably, perching himself on the corner of Devraux’s desk. “Disappeared from his haunts yesterday.” A lifetime of secret police work had given a permanently watchful, narrow-eyed cast to the commissioner’s gaunt features, and through the smoke of his meerschaum he subjected Devraux to as -careful a scrutiny as he ever gave any suspect. 

The file before Devraux bore the title “Nguyen Al Quoc” with its translation in brackets beneath — “Nguyen the Patriot.” A list of half-a-dozen other Annamese’ and Chinese aliases known to have been used by the subject during twenty years of undercover revolutionary activity in Asia, Russia and Western Europe were also listed on the cover. Devraux knew them all as well as his own name; many of the reports that made the file SO bulky, he reflected as he drew it towards him, were his own. He opened the dossier and glanced at the photograph pinned inside the front cover; it showed a thin-faced Annamese with intent, heavy-lidded eyes that had a curiously compelling quality. He had spent many days and nights watching for that face; he had tracked Nguyen the Patriot when he had gone shaven-headed and disguised in the robes of a Buddhist monk in Bangkok, had watched undercover while the Annamese sold matches all day on a street corner in Singapore, seen him mingle with Chinese peasants in Canton, humping a swing plow on his shoulder. All these disguises had been assumed by the Comintern agent in the course of his efforts to build Communist groups throughout the Far East, and Devraux’s skill in dogging his footsteps accounted largely for what little was known of his activities to that date. Other Süreté agents had not been so successful, and Devraux shook his head in exasperation as he ran his eye quickly over the newly decoded telegram from Canton on top of the file. It stated simply that Nguyen the Patriot could no longer be traced at his address there. “Interrogation of another Annamese Communist in Canton,” the telegram added, “suggests he has departed for Hong Kong. He is believed to be under Comintern orders from Moscow to try to unite the warring factions of the Annamese Communist movement and form a cohesive Indochina Communist Party.” 

“I thought of sending you to Hong Kong, Jacques, to try to pick up his trail,” said the commissioner slowly when Devraux finally glanced up at him. “You know his habits better than anyone. But I think it’s clear enough that the Communists are too busy fighting among themselves just now to do us much damage. Perhaps you could just send our Hong Kong people a guidance brief. The need for you is far greater here.” He glanced round at the little clusters of flags on the wall map. “Another Quoc Dan Dang arms dump has been uncovered today, yes? Do we have any clearer idea of how and where they mean to strike?” 

Devraux shook his head quickly. “No. I thought this morning we might have a lead. We arrested a new suspect — a young girl, a teacher from a village just outside the city. I’ve questioned her myself, but so far she won’t even admit she’s a member of the party.” He let out a long sigh of frustration. “Another informant has told us there’s to be an important cell meeting tonight ‘somewhere in Hanoi’—but the location isn’t known.” 

The commissioner puffed on his pipe in silence, studying the ceiling above his head minutely. Then he glanced down at Devraux again, his eyes suddenly hard and calculating. “We’re very glad, Jacques. you agreed to give up your hunting and come to us full time,” he said quietly. “We’re going to need every good man we can lay our hands on in the next few months. Things look bad — much worse than I’ve ever seen them.” He paused and puffed fiercely on the pipe again. “We can’t afford to treat the ‘yellows’ with kid gloves any longer. I’ve never seen anything like these arms dumps before. They’re obviously out for blood this time, and we’ve got to get the ringleaders before they strike. Otherwise the whole thing might spread very quickly. It’s no good being squeamish or worrying what we might do, or not do, elsewhere. French lives are at stake. It could be your head — or mine — that gets chopped off if we fail.” The commissioner ceased looking at Devraux and puffed hard on the pipe again. “I know from your fine military record and everything else you’ve done, Jacques, that you’re not just a strong man — you temper your strength with a respect for justice. But sometimes in this line of work you have to turn a blind eye.” 

Devraux, unsure of his superior’s meaning, leaned back in his chair looking at him with a little frown of puzzlement on his face. 

“What I’m getting at,” the commissioner continued, avoiding his subordinate’s gaze, “is that we can’t afford not to make the most of every suspect we bring in. They have vital information — we need it badly. I’ve just had a special interrogator brought here from the police commissariat in Cholon a big métis. He’s got a fearsome reputation — they say in Cholon he can get a corpse to talk. I’ll have him sent up.” He blew a long spiral of smoke towards the ceiling, then rose from the desk and walked towards the door. “Use him, Jacques — he’ll get the girl to tell you what you want to know.” The commissioner opened the door, then paused as he was about to step into the corridor. “There’s no need of course for you to be involved yourself,” he said quietly. “You understand that, don’t you?” Without waiting for a reply he turned and hurried away towards his own room, the smoke of his pipe slip-streaming over his shoulder behind him. 

A few minutes later there was a respectful knock at the door and one of Devraux’s French aides ushered in a heavily built French Annamese métis who was holding in one hand what appeared to be a large carrying case for a French horn. His Eurasian features were heavily fleshed and he stood silently before the desk, his head tipped forward towards the Süreté inspector in an attitude of guarded deference. 

“This is special interrogator Lung, Sir, who’s just come in from Cholon.” The aide made the introduction in a flat voice without looking at the métis, as if he was anxious to disassociate himself from him, and withdrew immediately. 

Devraux studied the new arrival in silence. Loose-limbed, heavy browed and hunched at the shoulder, he held himself awkwardly as though uncomfortable inside his big, hybrid body. As he waited for his orders his eyes flicked uneasily from the Frenchman’s face to the toes of his boots. To conceal the distaste he felt at his presence, Devraux half turned to face the map on the wall. “Lung, how much do you know about the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang?” he asked tersely. 

“Only that it’s one of the many secret societies dreaming of making a revolution.” The métis spoke his French in a dull, sibilant monotone that only increased Devraux’s irritation. 

“Maybe that’s how it looks from Saigon,” he said testily. “Here in the north the Quoc Dan Dang is something more than a crazy secret society.” He paused and gestured towards the map. “We’ve uncovered half-a-dozen arms dumps in the past two weeks in the provinces of the Red River delta. They are plotting some kind of bloody rebellion. We think the party may have possibly fifteen hundred members scattered through the region. They’re organized in little cells of fifteen or twenty members that are hard to track down. And time is running out. Do you understand?” Devraux looked around sharply at the métis, who shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny then nodded. 

“We believe a crucial cell meeting is being held somewhere in Hanoi later tonight — but we don’t know where. We arrested a suspected member of the party this morning but so far we haven’t obtained the information we require.” 

For the first time a spark of interest lit the dull gaze of the métis. “Is the suspect a man or a woman?” 

“A girl — a village schoolteacher of nineteen.” 

A sudden smile loosened the heavy features of the métis and he moistened his lips quickly with his tongue. “Then it will be easy. I will soon make her talk for you.” 

Devraux eyed the man before him with open distaste. He still held the big bulbous case tightly in his hand although it was obviously heavy. “What methods do you use?” he asked quietly, looking away and shuffling some of his papers together on his desk. 

The noise of the locks snapping open surprised Devraux and he looked up again to find the métis kneeling beside his open case. “I always carry my own instruments. I know how they feel in my hands, you see, and I’m confident then, because they’ve always worked for me in the past.” 

The voice of the métis had become suddenly animated, and Devraux saw then why he used the old French horn case; several long bull-hide whips were wound carefully around the inside of its large bowl and an assortment of other instruments were attached by hooks and fastenings to the velvet interior. As Devraux watched, the métis unhooked one of the whips and held it up so that he could see that it was bound around its entire length with fine copper wire. 

“This is for stubborn suspects,” he said, running his hand slowly along the tapering lash. “It can be connected to the mains and the electric current doubles the pain.” He paused to check Devraux’s reaction and found the Frenchman gazing expressionlessly into the case. Mistaking his uneasy silence for approval, he turned and laid a hand on a long steel corkscrew. “if this is inserted slowly into the male penis and withdrawn with sudden force, a confession is usually not difficult to obtain. And these tongs” — he indicated with one finger a pair of large metal pincers — “can be applied to the temples to give a suspect the impression his eyes are being squeezed from his head. Or these is this black box in which I carry an ant nest. If the arms and feet of a female suspect are securely tied, the nest of ants can be introduced into the vagina 

“That’s enough! Close it up!” Devraux’s sudden shout startled the métis, and he looked up in alarm. 

For a moment there was a strained silence in the room, then the telephone at Devraux’s elbow jangled. He picked up the instrument angrily without taking his eyes from the face of the torturer and unhooked the bell-shaped earpiece. 

“Have you got anything new yet, Jacques, on that meeting tonight?” The voice of the special commissioner was curt. “Time’s slipping away.” 

For a second or two Devraux continued gazing at the stooped figure of the métis as he refastened his case of tools; then his jaw tightened suddenly. “I hope to have something shortly,” he said in a low voice and replaced the earpiece in its holder with unnecessary care. Motioning to the métis to follow him, he led the way out of the room, his face composed in grim lines. 

They descended to the cellars of the building and an Annamese warder carrying a ring of keys led them along an echoing whitewashed corridor to the interrogation cells. Behind the door he unlocked they found a diminutive female figure crouched on the plain plank bed. She didn’t rise as they entered but looked up at them with eyes that were both frightened and defiant. 

The métis cast a practiced eye around the cell without looking at her, then returned to the corridor, walking along with his instrument case until he found an electricity supply point. He unreeled a cable until it reached back to the cell and without a word pulled the frightened girl to her feet to secure her wrists with handcuffs. Pushing her face-down on the plank bed, he wrenched off her cheap cotton trousers and underclothing, manacled her ankles and rolled her effortlessly onto her back. 

The girl’s eyes widened in terror as he uncoiled several loops of copper wire and fastened one terminal with clips to her bare upper arm. She let out a startled squeal of pain as he pushed the other end of the wire roughly between her thighs. Still without looking at her, he picked from his case a “hell box” that resembled in miniature a dynamite detonator, connected it to the wires and turned to look inquiringly at Devraux.