Honourable Schoolboy (52 page)

The boy handed him a key and a note and silently accepted his tip. Jerry struck his lighter and read the note. ‘Darling, I’m in room twenty-eight and lonely. Come and see me. L.’

What the hell? he thought: maybe it’ll put the bits back together again. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, forgetting her terrible banality, thinking only of her long legs and her tilting rump as she negotiated the ruts along the river bank; her cornflower eyes and her regular all-American gravity as she lay in the leopard spot; thinking only of his own yearning for human touch. Who gives a damn about Keller? he thought. To hold someone is to exist. Perhaps she’s frightened too. He knocked on the door, waited, gave it a shove.

‘Lorraine? It’s me. Westerby,’

Nothing happened. He lurched toward the bed, conscious of the absence of any female smell, even face powder or deodorant. On his way there he saw by the same moonlight the dreadfully familiar sight of blue jeans, heavy beanboots and a tattered Olivetti portable not unlike his own.

‘Come one step nearer and it’s statutory rape,’ said Luke, uncorking the bottle on his bedside table.

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He crept out before light, having slept on Luke’s floor. He took his typewriter and shoulder bag though he expected to use neither. He left a note for Keller asking him to wire Stubbs that he was following the siege story out to the provinces. His back ached from the floor and his head from the bottle.

Luke had come for the bang-bangs, he said: bureau was giving him a rest from Big Moo. Also Jake Chiu, his irate landlord, had finally thrown him out of his apartment.

‘I’m destitute, Westerby!’ he had cried, and began wailing round the room, ‘destitute’, till Jerry, to buy himself some sleep and stop the neighbours’ banging, slipped his spare-key off its ring and flung it at him.

‘Until I get back,’ he warned. ‘Then out. Understood?’

Jerry asked about the Frost thing. Luke had forgotten all about it and had to be reminded. Ah him, he said. Him. Yeah, well there were stories he’d been cheeky to the Triads and maybe in a hundred years they would all come true, but meanwhile who gave a damn?

But sleep hadn’t come so easy, even then. They discussed today’s arrangements. Luke had proposed to do whatever Jerry was doing. Dying alone was a bore, he had insisted. Better they got drunk and found some whores. Jerry had replied that Luke would have to wait a while before the two of them went into the sunset together, because he was going fishing for the day, and he was going alone.

‘Fishing for what, for hell’s sakes? If there’s a story, share it. Who gave you Frost for free? Where can you go that is not more beautiful for Brother Lukie’s presence?’

Pretty well anywhere, Jerry had said unkindly, and managed to leave without waking him.

He made first for the market and sipped a soupe chinoise, studying the stalls and shop fronts. He selected a young Indian who was offering nothing but plastic buckets, water bottles and brooms, yet looking very prosperous on the profits.

‘What else do you sell, sport?’

‘Sir, I sell all things to all gentlemen.’

They foxed around. No, said Jerry, it was nothing to smoke that he wanted, and nothing to swallow, nothing to sniff and nothing for the wrists either. And no, thank you, with all respect to the many beautiful sisters, cousins and young men of his circle, Jerry’s other needs were also taken care of.

‘Then, oh gladness, sir, you are a most happy man.’

‘I was really looking for something for a friend,’ said Jerry.

The Indian boy looked sharply up and down the street and he wasn’t foxing any more.

‘A friendly friend, sir?’

‘Not very.’

They shared a cyclo. The Indian had an uncle who sold Buddhas in the silver market, and the uncle had a back room, with locks and bolts on the door. For thirty American dollars Jerry bought a neat brown Walther automatic with twenty rounds of ammunition. The Sarratt bearleaders, he reckoned as he climbed back into the cyclo, would have fallen into a deep swoon. First, for what they called improper dressing, a crime of crimes. Second because they preached the hardy nonsense that small guns gave more trouble than use. But they’d have had a bigger fit still if he’d carted his Hong Kong Webley through customs to Bangkok and thence to Phnom Penh, so in Jerry’s view they could count themselves lucky, because he wasn’t walking into this one naked whatever their doctrine of the week. At the airport there was no plane to Battambang, but there was never a plane to anywhere. There were the all-silver rice jets howling on and off the landing strip, and there were new revêtements being built after a fresh fall of rockets in the night. Jerry watched the earth arriving in lorryloads, and the coolies filling ammunition boxes frantically. In another life, he decided, I’ll go into the sand business and flog it to besieged cities.

In the waiting room, Jerry found a group of stewardesses drinking coffee and laughing, and in his breezy way he joined them. A tall girl who spoke English made a doubtful face and disappeared with his passport and five dollars.

‘C’est impossible,’ they all assured him, while they waited for her. ‘C’est tout occupé.’

The girl returned smiling. ‘The pilot is very susceptible,’ she said. ‘If he don’t like you, he don’t take you. But I show him your photograph and he has agreed to surcharger. He is allowed to take only thirty-one personnes but he take you, he don’t care, he do it for friendship if you give him one thousand five hundred riels.’

The plane was two-thirds empty, and the bullet holes in the wings wept dew like undressed wounds.

At that time, Battambang was the safest town left in Lon Nol’s dwindling archipelago, and Phnom Penh’s last farm. For an hour, they lumbered over supposedly Khmer Rouge-infested territory without a soul in sight. As they circled, someone shot lazily from the paddies and the pilot pulled a couple of token turns to avoid being hit, but Jerry was more concerned to mark the ground layout before they touched down: the parkbays; which runways were civil and which were military; the wired-off enclave which contained the freight huts. They landed in an air of pastoral affluence. Flowers grew round the gun emplacements, fat brown chickens scurried in the shell holes, water and electricity abounded, though a telegram to Phnom Penh already took a week.

Jerry trod very carefully now. His instinct for cover was stronger than ever. The Honourable Gerald Westerby, the distinguished hack, reports on the siege economy. When you’re my size, sport, you have to have a hell of a good reason for whatever you’re doing. So he put out smoke, as the jargon goes. At the enquiry desk, watched by several quiet men, he asked for the names of the best hotels in town and wrote down a couple while he continued to study the groupings of planes and buildings. Meandering from one office to another he asked what facilities existed to airfreight news copy to Phnom Penh and no one had the least idea. Continuing his discreet reconnaissance he waved his cablecard around and enquired how to get to the governor’s palace, implying that he might have business with the great man personally. By now he was the most distinguished reporter who had ever been to Battambang. Meanwhile, he noted the doors marked ‘crew’ and the doors marked ‘private’, and the position of the men’s rooms, so that later, when he was clear, he could make himself a sketch plan of the entire concourse, with emphasis on the exits to the wired-off part of the airfield. Finally he asked who was in town just now among the pilots. He was friendly with several, he said, so his simplest plan - should it become necessary - was probably to ask one of them to take his copy in his flightbag. A stewardess gave names from a list and while she did this Jerry gently turned the list round and read off the rest. The Indocharter flight was listed but no pilot was mentioned.

‘Captain Andreas still flying for Indocharter?’ he enquired.

‘Le Capitaine qui, monsieur?’

‘Andreas. We used to call him André. Little fellow, always wore dark glasses. Did the Kampong Cham run.’

She shook her head. Only Captain Marshall and Captain Ricardo, she said, flew for Indocharter, but le Capitaine Ric had immolated himself in an accident. Jerry affected no interest, but established in passing that Captain Marshall’s Carvair was due to take off in the afternoon, as forecast in last night’s signal, but there was no freight space available, everything was taken, Indocharter was always fully contracted.

‘Know where I can reach him?’

‘Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, monsieur.’

He took a cab into town. The best hotel was a flea-bitten dugout in the main street. The street itself was narrow, stinking and deafening, an Asian boomtown in the making, pounded by the din of Hondas and crammed with the frustrated Mercedes of the quick rich. Keeping his cover going, he took a room and paid for it in advance, to include ’special service’ which meant nothing more exotic than clean sheets as opposed to those which still bore the marks of other bodies. He told his driver to return in an hour. By force of habit he secured an inflated receipt. He showered, changed and listened courteously while the houseboy showed him where to climb in after curfew, then he went out to find breakfast because it was still only nine in the morning.

He carried his typewriter and shoulder bag with him. He saw no other roundeyes. He saw basket-makers, skin-sellers and fruit-sellers, and once again the inevitable bottles of stolen petrol laid along the pavement waiting for an attack to touch them off. In a mirror hung in a tree, he watched a dentist extract teeth from a patient tied in a high chair, and the red-tipped tooth being solemnly added to the thread which displayed the day’s catch. All of these things Jerry ostentatiously recorded in his notebook, as became a zealous reporter of the social scene. And from a pavement café, as he consumed cold beer and fresh fish, he watched the dingy half-glazed offices marked ‘Indocharter’ across the road, and waited for someone to come and unlock the door. No one did. Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, monsieur. At a chemist’s shop which specialised in children’s bicycles he bought a roll of sticking plaster and back in his room taped the Walther to his ribs rather than have it waving around in his waistband. Thus equipped, the intrepid journalist set forth to live some more cover - which sometimes, in the psychology of a fieldman, is no more than a gratuitous act of self-legitimisation as the heat begins to gather.

The governor lived on the edge of town, behind a verandah and French colonial portals, and a secretariat seventy strong. The vast concrete hall led to a waiting room never finished, and to much smaller offices behind, and in one of these, after a fifty-minute wait, Jerry was admitted to the diminutive presence of a tiny, very senior black-suited Cambodian sent by Phnom Penh to handle noisome correspondents. Word said he was the son of a general and managed the Battambang end of the family opium business. His desk was much too big for him. Several attendants lounged about and they all looked very severe. One wore uniform with a lot of medal ribbons. Jerry asked for deep background and made a list of several charming dreams: that the Communist enemy was all but beaten; that there was serious discussion about reopening the entire national road system; that tourism was the growth industry of the province. The general’s son spoke slow and beautiful French and it clearly gave him great pleasure to hear himself, for he kept his eyes half closed and smiled as he spoke, as if listening to beloved music.

‘I may conclude, monsieur, with a word of warning to your country. You are American?’

‘English,’

‘It is the same. Tell your government, sir. If you do not help us to continue the fight against the Communists, we shall go to the Russians and ask them to replace you in our struggle.’

Oh, mother, thought Jerry. Oh boy. Oh God.

‘I will give them that message,’ he promised, and made to go.

‘Un instant. monsieur,’ said the senior official sharply, and there was a stirring among his dozing courtiers. He opened a drawer and pulled out an imposing folder. Frost’s will, Jerry thought. My death warrant. Stamps for Cat.

‘You are a writer?’

‘Yes.’

Ko’s putting the arm on me. The pen tonight, and wake up with my throat cut tomorrow.

‘You were at the Sorbonne, monsieur?’ the official enquired.

‘Oxford.’

‘Oxford in London?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you have read the great French poets, monsieur?’

‘With intense pleasure,’ Jerry replied fervently. The courtiers were looking extremely grave.

‘Then perhaps monsieur will favour me with his opinion of the following few verses.’ In his dignified French, the little official began to read aloud, slowly conducting with his palm.

‘Deux amants assis sur la terre.

Regardaient la mer,’

he began, and continued for perhaps twenty excruciating lines while Jerry listened in mystification.

‘Voilà,’ said the official finally, and put the file aside. ‘Vous l’aimez?’ he enquired, severely fixing his eye upon a neutral part of the room.

‘Superbe,’ said Jerry with a gush of enthusiasm. ‘Merveilleux. The sensitivity.’

‘They are by whom would you think?’

Jerry grabbed a name at random. ‘By Lamartine?’

The senior official shook his head. The courtiers were observing Jerry even more closely.

‘Victor Hugo?’ Jerry ventured.

‘They are by me,’ said the official and with a sigh returned his poems to the drawer. The courtiers relaxed. ‘See that this literary person has every facility,’ he ordered.

Jerry returned to the airport to find it a milling, dangerous chaos. Mercedes raced up and down the approach as if someone had invaded their nest, the forecourt was a turmoil of beacons, motorcycles and sirens; and the hall, when he argued his way through the cordon, was jammed with scared people fighting to read noticeboards, yell at each other and hear the blaring loudspeakers all at the same time. Forcing a path to the information desk, Jerry found it closed. He leapt on the counter and saw the airfield through a hole in the anti-blast board. A squad of armed soldiers was jog-trotting down the empty runway toward a group of white poles where the national flags drooped in the windless air. They lowered two of the flags to half mast, and inside the hall the loudspeakers interrupted themselves to blare a few bars of the national anthem. Over the seething heads, Jerry searched for someone he might talk to. He selected a lank missionary with cropped yellow hair and glasses and a six-inch silver cross pinned to the pocket of his brown shirt. A pair of Cambodians in dog-collars stood miserably beside him.