War Baby (8 page)

Odile was in a
siclo
on Le Loi Boulevard, returning from the Central Market, when she saw him. He was sitting on the terrace, in one of those execrable Hawaiian shirts that he loved, smoking a cigarette. He was with some other journalists, in their tailor-made green safari jackets, laughing at some joke. She twisted around in the cracked leather seat and got just a glimpse of him before she lost him among the traffic and the mid-morning crowds.

She put her arm around her little daughter; a
bui doi
, just like her, with the same terrible choices to make one day.

She had always thought she still loved him, but she didn’t. What she felt in that moment was hate. She hated him as she had never hated anyone, for his deceit, for his cruelty and for his betrayal.

When she got back to the apartment she settled Phuong on the floor with a plastic bottle of water and the wooden blocks Webb had bought for her. Then she took the wooden-handled paring knife that he used to cut fruit, hid it in her purse and walked out of the door.

* * *

She waited for him in the Givral across the square from the Continental. She ordered a
café au lait
and sat down.

He was still there; hard to miss him in that shirt.

Perhaps I should have told him about the child, she thought. But she had been too ashamed; if he did not love her, then she did not want his money or his pity. She felt so used, and so humiliated.

The
canonesse
had tried to warn her; she should have listened.

He left his companions, sauntered alone across Lam Son Square towards the Caravelle. She left money on the table for the coffee and rushed out of the door.

He was mobbed outside the Caravelle by hordes of street children, shoeshine boys and cigarette vendors and flower girls. He laughed and reached into his pockets to give them his small change. They thrust packets of Embassy and handmade flower garlands at him even though he shook his head and said he didn’t want them, just take the money. It was one of the things she had loved most about him, this easy-going generosity. Hard to imagine that there was another side to the man; that was what had fooled her.

She followed him into the foyer of the Caravelle.

A sixth sense must have made him stop and turn around. There was a moment of astonishment and then he came towards her, laughing: ‘Odile!’

He kissed her cheek.

She felt the point of the knife in her leather purse. In the chest, in the stomach? How do you kill someone this way? And should I do it here in the lobby, in front of everyone? Or in secret, and then try to escape?

If I am caught, what will happen to Phuong?

‘You look fantastic,’ he said, smiling.

She couldn’t get her breath. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be.

‘Are you okay?’

‘When do you come back to Saigon?’

‘Couple of days ago.’ The grin fell away. ‘Guess you’re mad at me, huh?’

She opened her purse, felt for the handle of the knife.

‘You’ve been following me,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I saw you ... on the terrace.’

‘You must think I’m a real bastard.’

She stared at him, dumbfounded to hear her anguish so easily circumscribed.

‘Look, I’m sorry. I should have written.’ He shrugged his shoulders as if that explained everything. ‘It’s not done you any harm. You look great.’

She couldn’t kill him until he understood the enormity of what he had done. She had to make him sorry first. ‘There’s something I have to show you,’ she said.

She turned and walked back through the doors. He ran after her. She found a
siclo
and jumped in. It was not far to the apartment but she didn’t trust her legs.

As Ryan climbed in beside her she gave the
siclo
driver her address.

‘Where are we going?’ he said.

‘You have somewhere else to go?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I guess not.’

She turned her face away, one arm gripping the edge of the canopy. The sun was fierce. ‘You hurt me very much,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. I honestly tried. Us, I mean. I didn’t set out to lie to you. It just .. . wasn’t working for me. Then when I got to Phnom Penh ... I guess I thought it was better that way.’

‘Easier, at least.’

He had no answer for that.

‘I give up everything for you.’

‘You’re better off: You were never meant to be a nun.’

I was never meant to be a prostitute either.

He touched her knee. ‘Odile ...’

She pushed his hand away. ‘Please ... don’t do that.’

They turned off the Tu Do into a side street and stopped outside Webb’s apartment. Ryan looked puzzled but said nothing. He followed her inside, up the wrought-iron staircase.

She opened the door.

Phuong lay on her back on the floor, drinking from a bottle.

‘Christ,’ Ryan said.

They stood there, in the doorway, for a long time. Ryan sagged against the lintel, his jaw slack with astonishment.

‘Her name is Phuong,’ Odile said, finally.

He appeared not to have heard. But then he surprised her; he bent down and picked the child up in his arms, very gently. Phuong continued to drink from the bottle and stared back at Ryan with huge brown eyes.

‘Well,’ he said.

She had expected him to protest, to shake his head and say: ‘She’s not mine.’ But he didn’t. He did not even ask her assurance. Instead he sat down and bounced the little girl on his knee. Phuong gave a short hiccough of a laugh.

‘You should have told me,’ Ryan said. He looked around the room. He must recognize Webb’s photographs on the walls, she thought, but he just said: ‘You’ve got another guy?’

‘He is very kind to me.’

He looked at the room’s only bed and bit his lip, thinking. ‘How did you get by?’ he said.

She did not answer him. Enough shame, for now.

‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he said.

In the
siclo
she had told herself that she would show him the child, and then she would tell him:
This is what you did to me, this is what I had to do for us to survive
, and then she would push the knife into his heart. But it was a fantasy, not a plan. Where was all that hate now? Just dissolved, gone. Now there was just the sadness; the sadness and the shame.

‘How old?’ Ryan asked.

‘Sixteen months.’

‘She’s beautiful.’

‘She’s too fat. She eats too much and her nose is too big.’

‘No, she’s wonderful.’

She realized she was crying. It was what she had always wanted to hear. She had waited sixteen months for him to tell her she had given him a beautiful baby.

He stood up, holding Phuong under one arm, and tried to put the other around her. She tried to push him away, remind herself that she hated him. But instead she found herself clinging to him, drinking in his never-forgotten warm smell. He kissed her forehead, and then lifted her face with his fingertips and kissed her in the special, intimate way he had once told her was purely French.

She dropped the purse.

He pulled at the buttons of her
ao dai
, slipped his hand inside the silk and cupped her breast in his palm, rubbing her nipple with his thumb and kissed so hard she could not catch her breath. This is just another stupid, reckless mistake.

But I don’t care.

He put Phuong gently on the floor and carried her to the bed.

It was like a drug. She just ached to have him love her again.

* * *

When Webb walked into the apartment they were both asleep. Odile had one arm around Ryan’s broad, bare back, the fingers of her other hand entangled in his dark curls. His head lay on her breast. The narrow bed was a crumpled mess.

Phuong looked up at him from the floor and grinned with her four baby teeth, two top and two bottom.

Webb sagged back against the wall like he’d been king-hit. ‘Jesus,’ he said aloud.

Odile’s eyes blinked wide. She fumbled for the edge of the sheet.

‘Well I’m glad that’s all sorted,’ he said to her and went out, slamming the door.

The Cigale had curved iron bars on the windows and a boy on the door, whose job was to watch for any unwelcome parcels the Viet Cong might think to toss through the door. Crosby and two correspondents from the AP were sitting on bar stools, drinking brandies, watching the cowboys roaring up and down the Tu Do on their Hondas.

Webb heard them laughing from the street, but as he walked in there was a stiff silence. Ryan was with them. Webb guessed the others knew what had happened. Gossip travelled fast in Saigon.

Ryan grinned and waved a hand. ‘Drink, Spider?’

‘Sure.’

He shouted for another round. Webb sat down.

‘We were just talking about the afternoon’s Follies. Croz heard there’s something big going on up at Que Trang.’

Que Trang sat astride the Ho Chi Minh trail, a bermed fort manned by a Special Forces A-Team and four hundred Sedang Strikers. The press officer at the Follies said the fort had been coming under artillery bombardment and a company of ARVN had been sent on a search and destroy mission.

‘I was talking to a Green Beret colonel yesterday,’ Crosby said. ‘He told me the base is surrounded and two nights ago they were almost overrun. We’re going up tomorrow to take a look. Interested?’

‘Sure he’ll come,’ Ryan said. ‘You’ll do anything for a story. Won’t you, Spider?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’

The next morning Crosby, Ryan and Webb jumped on a C-130 at Tan Son Nhut and flew up to Danang. From there they hitched a ride on a Chinook flying out to an LZ ten miles east of the Que Trang camp in the Highlands.

The moment the helicopter touched the ground, ARVN soldiers raced towards them with their wounded, crouching low under the propellers. The remnants of the company - the men the press officer at the Follies had assured them would relieve the shelling at Que Trang - were sitting on the edge of the LZ, on half-tracks and ammunition boxes, heads bowed. The black panther shoulder flashes indicated they were from the elite Hue Bao battalion. Their faces were etched with the familiar hard stares of men who had just come from a long and bitter battle.

They found a captain sitting on a sandbag, his right arm strapped with a wound dressing. He was smoking a cigarette. Ryan went over, introduced himself as a reporter with Time.

‘What happened here?’ he said.

‘What you think happened?’ the captain said, nodding towards the rows of body bags next.

‘You got through to Que Trang?’

‘We walked into an NVA ambush, so we called in air support. Your air put their first strike right on top of us. I just lost half my company dead or wounded.’

All three of them were scribbling as fast as they could.

‘What’s the situation at Que Trang, Captain?’ Crosby asked.

‘The camp is totally encircled.’ He drew on his cigarette. His hands were still shaking. ‘There’s three NVA battalions around Que Trang and the men inside are taking three hundred rounds a day.’

Webb looked at Ryan and Crosby. This was a different picture to the one they had had from JUSPAO, but that wasn’t new. What the captain was describing was a Special Forces team and two companies of Montagnard mercenaries cut off and a company of ARVN regulars decimated by friendly fire. Crosby was eager to get it on the wire.

As they walked away he turned to Ryan. ‘I’m going back to Da Nang and file.’

‘We don’t have the full story yet.’

‘My deadline’s tighter than yours. Besides, he says they’re taking three hundred rounds a day.’

‘Did we see the three hundred rounds?’ Ryan asked him. ‘Anyone been up there to count them?’

‘Shit, you still want to go to Que Trang after what he just said?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘I’ve got my story.’

Ryan looked at Webb. Webb wanted to walk away from this too, but he didn’t have as good a reason as Crosby. He asked himself again, as he had asked himself countless times before, why he was fooling with his life this way.

Two Hueys were warming up on the LZ. A Marine colonel and two Vietnamese staff officers loped towards them, crouched down under the rotors. Ryan saw them and intercepted them.

‘Colonel, my name’s Ryan, I’m a correspondent with Time,’ he shouted over the roar of the Huey’s engine, his face screwed up against the dust storm. ‘Can you tell me what’s happening at Que Trang, sir?’

The colonel looked irritated by the delay. ‘The men in the fort are temporarily isolated by enemy movement. They’ll be relieved in the next twenty-four hours.’

He tried to break away, but Ryan clung to his sleeve.

‘Can we get transport to Que Trang?’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. I can offer you a ride to Mae Son on my chaser if you want.’

He gave Ryan a pat on the shoulder and leaped into the Huey.

‘Fuck him!’ Ryan swore.

‘Let’s get on the chaser,’ Crosby said.

The ‘chaser’ was a second helicopter that followed VIP politicians and military in case they were shot down; in this case it was an ancient CH-34.

Crosby jumped in, and settled on the floor next to the door gunner. Webb and Ryan slid in beside him. Webb felt a curious mixture of disappointment and relief; if they didn’t get to Que Trang he had no good pictures he could use, but at least he was alive. For Crosby it was different; he could file this as hot news.

Ryan grabbed Webb’s shoulder. ‘All we’ve got is a snap of a few blokes sitting on sandbags.’

Webb shrugged: ‘If they won’t let us in, there’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘Bullshit.’ Ryan scrambled towards the door. He jumped. Webb reacted without thinking, and leaped after him. The helicopter was already four feet off the ground and he landed rolling in the dirt.

He looked up and saw Crosby’s startled face at the gun door before the chopper rose and tilted away.

Ryan was already on his feet and running. Then Webb saw why; there was a medevac coming in from the north. It would be loaded with the wounded from Que Trang. And if he had made it out, he sure as hell would be going back to get others.