Saigon (73 page)

By the time his Vietnamese bep arrived to begin his duties, Joseph was already showered and shaved, and he asked him to serve breakfast on the verandah. Halfway through the meal, the bell outside the courtyard gate rang, and when the cook opened it, to Joseph’s astonishment Guy was standing on the sidewalk holding a briefcase. The smiling Vietnamese led him to the breakfast table, and the two brothers sat in silence until fresh coffee and croissants had been brought. For a long time Guy toyed with his knife, obviously ill at ease, and when at last he spoke he kept his eyes fixed on his plate. “I guess I’d like to hear something from you about my real father, Joseph. What was he like?” 

Joseph was seized by a strong feeling of compassion for his brother and he felt a lump come into his throat. “His name was Jacques Devraux,” he said quietly when he had recovered his composure. “I was fifteen at the time of that hunting trip and I was deeply impressed by him. He was a crack shot, knew everything there was to know about the jungle and wild animals and seemed totally fearless. He was a man of few words and he held himself very straight — he reminded me of one of the old Greek warrior heroes in my history books 

They talked for half an hour, and throughout the conversation Guy’s manner remained subdued and free of hostility. He asked questions in an embarrassed voice but Joseph answered them patiently, trying always to emphasize the positive aspects of Jacques Devraux’s character. He spoke too of Paul and their long friendship and told Guy that he had noticed in him the same kind of eagerness and a tendency to strong enthusiasms which he had admired so much in Paul. When the subject seemed to have been exhausted they lapsed into an uneasy silence; then as Joseph rose from the table and began preparing to leave for his office, Guy pulled a manila envelope from his briefcase and placed it on the table. 

“I think you’ll be interested in that, Joseph,” he said quietly. 

“What is it?” 

“A confirmed trace that came in late last night. I checked the computer and followed up an old lead. Tuyet Luong’s living in Hue.” 

Joseph snatched up the envelope and began opening it with shaking hands. “Have you got an address for her?” 

Guy nodded. “It’s all in there. There’s an Air Vietnam flight from Tan Son Nhut at four o’clock. I’ve already booked a seat on it in your name. You’ll find a ticket in there too.” 

“Guy, I’m more grateful to you than I can say. After last night I hardly expected any help from you.” 

Guy waved an impatient hand to silence him. “Maybe we can just move onwards and upwards now — let’s discuss it some other time.” He hesitated, looking searchingly at his elder brother. “But there’s one more important thing I have to tell you. As soon as we ask for confirmation on a trace report, an operation is put in hand automatically by our South Vietnamese security friends. And they always bring the suspect in without further instructions if the trace turns out to be positive.” 

“So Tuyet’s going to be arrested?” 

Guy shrugged. “That depend on you. I can’t stop it — but I do have authority to stall the order for twenty-four hours. That’s standard procedure to give us a chance to coordinate any necessary movements of our own agents. I’ve just issued the hold order. They won’t move against her until this time tomorrow. If you get there before they do Guy shrugged again and let his voice trail oft. 

Joseph finished opening the envelope and read the notes inside then looked quizzically at his brother again. “Guy, what brought about this sudden change of heart?” 

“There must be a reason -— but don’t ask me for it now.” The CIA man turned away, and they walked side by side to the gate. On the way Joseph checked his watch; it was eight-fifteen on the morning of Tuesday, January 30, the first full day of the Tet holiday — the dawning of the Year of the Monkey. Normally at that time on a Tuesday, Saigon’s early rush hour was in full swing, filling the city with a torrent of noise, hut because of the holiday and the traditional Tet truce, the Street outside the villa still lay eerily quiet when Joseph opened the gate. He walked to the curbside with Guy and at the car offered him his hand. Guy shook it wordlessly, then slipped behind the wheel. Before he started the engine he leaned out of the window and gestured towards the envelope Joseph was holding. “Just in case it should come as a shock when you get there, I ought to warn you; the address I’ve given isn’t a private house — it’s Hue’s biggest brothel.” 

Without another word Guy started the motor and eased the car away from the curb, and Joseph stood watching it until it had disappeared from view along the deserted boulevard. 

The light was beginning to fade as Joseph crossed one of the little humpbacked bridges of ornamental stone spanning the moat of the Hue Citadel. An evening breeze was blowing gently from the south, stirring the cream and crimson lotus flowers clustered on its stagnant surface, and looking down over the parapet, Joseph saw the image of the Imperial City’s ramparts reflected in the waters change color suddenly; a bright, fiery red in the glow of the setting sun, the high walls had in an instant become burgundy, the color of blood. He turned in time to see the rim of the sun dip behind the purple peaks of the Annamite Cordillera to the west, and its dying rays illuminated for him the broad, shadowy sweep of the Huong Giang, the River of Perfumes, lying tranquil and empty of movement in the softening light. He could hear the bank side willows and reeds rustling in the wind, and he stood for a long moment drinking in the sight, lost in a reverie of his last visit; then he gathered himself and hurried on into the Citadel. 

it was the first time he had been in Hue since 1936, and although he knew well enough that the old, fortified city of the Emperor Gia Long had become the headquarters of the First Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, he was still taken aback by the incongruous sight of a modern fighting force encamped within its historic walls. Jeeps made in America and diminutive, green-clad South Vietnamese infantrymen carrying American arms were scurrying among the gold-roofed palaces where he had last seen silk-robed courtiers and wizened, bearded mandarins; at key points, the ugly bulk of camouflaged tanks had taken guard where once patient elephants decked in dazzling cloths of imperial yellow had stood as sentinels, but even the presence of the South Vietnamese army in the old Citadel had not destroyed the city’s unique atmosphere. 

Despite the ravages of war in the rest of the country, along the banks of the serenely flowing River of Perfumes, the history and traditions of the Vietnamese nation still appeared to Joseph to be preserved in harmony with the gentle beauty of the landscape. He gazed up with a tangible sense of pleasure at the snarling porcelain dragons on the curved roofs of the palaces, and as he walked among the shrubs and miniature trees of the formal gardens, he detected the beguiling scent of jasmine; in the distance he could hear the gentle cadences of a pagoda bell tolling, and he found himself hoping fervently that all these symbols of a peaceful past might turn out to be omens of good luck for him in his quest to find his daughter. 

As soon as his taxi pulled away from Phu Bai airport after the five-hundred-mile flight from Saigon, he had felt himself transported into the past. Phu Bai was ten miles south of the old Annamese capital, and the rough, narrow road wound through low green hills that appeared untouched by the war. Smiling children dressed in their bright new Tet clothes had rushed from the bamboo thickets surrounding their villages to wave delightedly at the car, several times the taxi had been forced to halt at the narrow wooden bridges to allow a slow, plodding buffalo to cross ahead of them, and frequently during the half-hour drive he had caught glimpses of ornate temples hidden amidst groves of banyan or tamarind. All this and the timeless peace of the open rice fields and the scattered hamlets of thatch and bamboo had reminded him forcibly of how his country had corrupted and Americanized Saigon and the other major cities in the course of the effort to save the country from Communism, and he had felt a fierce nostalgia for his youth when Vietnam had still seemed undisturbed by the present. 

His first glimpse of Hue’s broad boulevards and the placid river flowing quietly beneath the walls of the Citadel had brought to his mind again one of the first remarks that Lan had ever made to him “If you listen carefully, Joseph,” she had said, those ,many years before, “you can hear the heart of Annam beating in Hue.” But, as the taxi headed along Le Loi Boulevard on the river’s southern bank, the only heartbeat he had heard was his own. The address Guy had provided, his Vietnamese taxi driver had told him, was situated in Gia Hoi, an old, densely populated quarter of the city outside the walls of the Citadel on the north bank; its narrow streets converged on a sprawling marketplace not far from the end of the Clemenceau Bridge, since renamed Truong Tien, and Joseph, his anxiety rising, had directed the taxi to take him straight across the bridge to the address without stopping to check in at the Imperial Hotel where he had reserved a room. 

The houses bordering the narrow streets of the old quarter, when they reached it, were decked with blood-red paper streamers bearing felicitous Tet slogans in Chinese characters, and before the doors Joseph noticed the same kind of bamboo poles tufted with leaves and charms to ward off evil spirits that had stood outside the throne room of the Emperor Khai Dinh during his first visit to Hue as a boy of fifteen. The solemn ceremonies to mark the annual visitation of the spirits of their ancestors had already been celebrated in Hue and elsewhere during the previous night, and relaxed and laughing crowds now thronged the streets; new detonations of celebratory firecrackers to mark the New Year’s Day itself were also beginning to break out again with the approach of dusk, and through the open doors of the tiny houses as the taxi passed, Joseph could see candles flickering on altars still decked high with fruit and Flowers. Crowds of excited men and boys squatted on the pavements outside, giggling and arguing over dice and other gambling games, and because they were unused to seeing Americans in that part of the city, the strolling Vietnamese often stopped in groups to peer in through the windows of the taxi at him. 

As a result of these festivities, their progress through the crowds was unusually slow, and this heightened the feeling of tension that was growing in Joseph. The prospect of seeing Tuyet again would have filled him with unease under any circumstances, but her imminent arrest and a possible later charge of murder had added a new dimension to his agitation. Because he’d dreamed in vain for so long of seeing her again, he had begun to fear that something must go wrong at the last moment. Perhaps Guy’s delaying order would not he observed, perhaps it would turn out to be a case of mistaken identity and she wouldn’t be there at all, perhaps the address had been wrongly given; these and many other irrational fears flitted through his mind as the taxi crawled on, but they were not his only cause for alarm. A vaguer apprehension had also been growing in the back of his mind since that morning: reports of fresh fighting had begun trickling into Saigon at about the time Joseph and Guy were breakfasting together at his villa in Cong Ly, and he had monitored the details during the hours he had spent in his JUSPAO office. 

During the night Viet Cong units had carried out a rash of surprise attacks on seven cities north of Saigon in violation of the Tet cease-fire, and the American commander, General William Westmoreland, had decided to cancel the Tet truce and declare a state of maximum alert for U.S. forces throughout Vietnam. President Thieu had followed suit and put the South Vietnamese forces on a similar alert that morning, hut by then half of his army were on leave for the holiday period. The centers that had come under assault — Da Nang, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, Pleiku, Hoi An, Kontum and Ban Me Thuot — were either on the coast or in the highlands north of Saigon, and the attacks, launched as the first Tet firecrackers were exploding, seemed to be a strategic innovation for Communist forces that hitherto had invariably operated deep in the jungles and hills. But although fighting had continued beyond dawn in the seven cities, the American and Vietnamese military commands up to the time of Joseph’s departure from Saigon had remained skeptical about the prospect of any wider offensive. There had been countless “maximum alerts” before, senior officers had told him with a shrug, and nothing had happened; the attacks were very likely nothing more than standard Communist truce violations. 

During Joseph’s flight north, the Air Vietnam DC-4 had stayed above the clouds, and although he had peered often towards the ground he had not been able to detect any evidence of the reported fighting. After the drive from Phu Bai through the seemingly peaceful countryside, finding the historic Annamese capital still basking in its unruffled aura of the past had helped allay his fears, and he had felt more confident then that the official Saigon reaction was the right one. It was not until he heard the firecrackers begin exploding again in the streets of Gia Hoi that he remembered the famous Tet Surprise victory won by an Annamese emperor in the eighteenth century; a force of one hundred thousand troops then had marched into Hanoi to massacre their Chinese enemies in the midst of the New Year revelries, and this sudden recollection brought all Joseph’s apprehensions flooding back again. He leaned forward on his seat to urge the driver to try to push on faster through the crowded lanes, and the Vietnamese began sounding his horn continuously. When the taxi at last freed itself of the crowds thronging the market area, it headed along a dirt road close to the edge of the city, and Joseph stared out in dismay at the tumbledown shacks covered with roofs of corrugated tin. 

“The soldiers call this ‘The Street of the Emperor’s Concubines.,’” said the wizened driver in French, waving his hand vaguely towards the ramshackle dwellings of what was obviously the red light district. “Very convenient, you see, for the headquarters of the First Division.” 

Peering out through the window, Joseph caught a distant glimpse of the tower at the northeast corner of the red-walled fortress. 

“But they’re all closed tonight — even imperial concubines must rest from their labors sometimes, n’est-ce pas?” The grinning driver stopped the car at a corner and gestured towards a big dilapidated building that looked like a converted rice warehouse with a crumbling wooden walkway running around the upper story. “But perhaps you are in luck. That’s the address you seek, and look, somebody has waited for you.” 

Joseph could see that there were rows of doors leading off the walkway, and strings of gray washing flapped in the breeze along its length. Discolored paint was peeling and flaking from bulging walls that appeared to be on the point of collapse, but at the top of the steps the bent figure of an aged woman clad in dark clothes leaned over the rail watching the taxi. 

“She may not be pretty, but she’ll certainly be cheap, monsieur,” said the taxi driver, leering around at him. 

“Wait here,” snapped Joseph angrily and flung himself out of the door without offering the driver any payment. As he ran up the steps two at a time, the crone on the balcony turned away and began hobbling towards a rickety door that stood ajar; but Joseph overtook her easily and seized her by the arm. He pulled from his pocket the photograph of his daughter that Guy had given him with her address and thrust it under the woman’s nose. 

“Chi Tuyet Luong co day khong?” he asked, speaking his Vietnamese, slowly and deliberately. “Is Tuyet Luong here?” 

The woman stared at the picture, then shook her head once without looking at him. She struggled with surprising vigor to free herself from his grip, and when reluctantly he released her, she shuffled away and slammed her door behind her. Joseph walked slowly back along the balcony, rattling the handles of the other flimsy doors until he found one he could wrench open. It led him into a shabby cubicle that smelled sour and musty, and he recognized immediately the stale fumes of the opium pipe. Nothing more than a ragged curtain separated the flimsy, plywood cubicle from an internal corridor, and Joseph walked the length of the upper story, drawing back each curtain in turn. A rough plank bed, sometimes covered with a soiled sheet, and a wooden chair were the only furnishings in the sordid cubicles, and Joseph shuddered at their implication. As he turned away from his inspection of the last one, he noticed the dark figure of the old woman watching him curiously from the end of the corridor. He hurried back to her, pressed five thousand piastres into her hand and pulled out the picture of Tuyet again. 

“I will come back at midnight,” he said, speaking slowly and deliberately in Vietnamese. “Tell Tuyet Luong she must meet me here. Tell her my name is Joseph Sherman. It’s very important — a matter of life and death.” 

The wizened face of the woman had puckered with uncertainty but she nevertheless clutched the money tight in both hands. She stared at him quizzically for a long moment, then shuffled away into the shadows without giving any indication of whether she had understood him or not. Joseph had made the taxi driver take him to his hotel then and kept him waiting while he took his overnight hag to his room. He had paid off the taxi finally after it dropped him by the little bridge just as the sun was setting, and he continued into the Citadel on foot to appreciate better the splendor of the old pavilions and their ornamental gardens. 

Out of respect for the imperial and Buddhist traditions of the historic city, the United States had always kept Hue off limits to its forces, apart from a handful of military advisers who occupied a compound south of the river. A small number of American civilians lived in the city to carry out consular and intelligence work and the main U.S. agencies also had representatives there; it was in accordance with Guy’s written advice that Joseph went to the Citadel to report his presence in Hue to the office of CORDS, the Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support agency which was then coordinating the American pacification program, and he found a female Vietnamese clerk staffing the CORDS office alone. 

He gave her his name and the address of his hotel, saying simply that he had come for a two-day break to look at the palaces, and she wrote the information down in a hook. One of the American staffers, an undercover CIA officer who had been warned by Guy to expect a senior JUSPAO man from Saigon, had left a telephone number and an invitation to join him for dinner, but Joseph felt in no mood for a social encounter and he returned alone on foot to his hotel. There he tried to eat some dinner in the restaurant overlooking the river, but the food remained virtually untouched on his plate and he spent an hour staring out through the window at the lantern-lit sampans clustered along the waterfront; to his increasing discomfort, fireworks continued to fill the darkness outside with unending volleys of noise, and he wandered out at last along the waterfront to kill time that was passing with such agonizing slowness.