White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

‘Jesus God!’

  He forgot all about making a favourable impression, about gaining Dinh’s esteem. He jettisoned backwards, his terror overwhelming. He was unable to turn around in the narrow tunnel, unable to move fast, fast, fast enough, and there was a gurgling animal sound coming from his throat as he tried to put distance between himself and the creatures of nightmare in front of him.

  ‘They cannot harm you, Comrade,’ Dinh said, chuckling. ‘They are tethered by the neck.’

  Gavin did not care. He continued to scramble backwards, throwing the Vietnamese who had been accompanying them on their tour into noisy retreat. Not until he was again in one of the large chambers, the red clay walls civilizingly covered in looted US parachute nylon, did he come to a sweat-soaked, shivering halt.

  ‘You were right to give our unpleasant friends a wide berth,’ Dinh said to him when he rejoined him. ‘They have been infected with bubonic plague. If anyone should discover that particular entrance, a trapdoor can be lowered, sealing that part of the tunnel from the rest of the complex. The leash tethering the rats can be severed from this side of the trapdoor, and the rats let loose. Once greeted in such a manner, we do not expect to be troubled further.’

  Gavin tried to say that he was certain they would never be troubled, ever again, but he was still incapable of speech.

  ‘We will eat now,’ Dinh said, saving him from disgracing himself further. ‘And then I will tell you what it is that we want from you.’

  All six of them ate together, the two Vietnamese who had initially escorted him through the tunnels, and the two middle-aged but exceedingly tough-looking North Vietnamese officers who had been closeted with Dinh when he had first arrived. From the lack of comment about the food, Gavin assumed that it must be their normal fare: cold rice supplemented by the merest sliver of chicken, and accompanied by water in tin mugs.

  Gavin had never been so thirsty in his life, and his initial instinct was to gulp the water down. Then it occurred to him that there was no way that the water would have been boiled. He crossed his fingers. He had to drink, and he had to hope for the best.

  When the food had been eaten, Dinh settled himself on a rough wooden chair behind the desk. ‘Perhaps you have heard of a journalist by the name of Wilfred Burchett, Comrade?’

  Gavin nodded. Wilfred Burchett was world-famous as being the journalist who, in the days of Dien Bien Phu, had interviewed and become a friend of Ho Chi Minh. He was Australian, no longer young, and because of his fiercely held political sympathies, was regarded by fellow journalists as something of a maverick.

  ‘There are very few foreign journalists of the calibre of Mr Burchett,’ Dinh was saying. ‘Journalists who report to the West the truth of what is happening in our country. Too many of them are misled by the false proclamations of victory coming from the American imperialists and their Saigon puppets.’

  He paused, and Gavin felt a tingle run down his spine. Was Dinh going to ask him to assume the role of Burchett to his Ho Chi Minh? And if so, how could he possibly accept? He wasn’t a freelance journalist able to write what he liked, when he liked. He was a news agency reporter. Whatever he wrote, even if it passed Paul Dulles’s critical eye, it would be edited again in the Paris head office. When it reached the newspaper offices it was destined for, it would be edited again by a subeditor, who would put a headline on the story, place it in the paper, and cut it to fit. And the interference with the original story didn’t end there. With agency stories it was customary for editors to merge the story with one on the same subject by their own correspondent.

  To write stories covering Viet Cong activities, and to expect that they would be published in a form acceptable to the North Vietnamese, would be impossible for anyone but a freelance journalist with an established reputation.

  ‘The Hanoi government has requested that you stay with us as our guest, Comrade,’ Dinh said, confirming his suspicions. ‘Like Mr Burchett, you will record our fight for freedom, and you will record the crimes of the American imperialists.’

  Adrenaline began to pump along Gavin’s veins. If he understood Dinh correctly, he was being offered the chance to go out on active operations with the Viet Cong. It was the kind of scoop that any journalist would sell his soul for. If the bureau refused to accept the story, on the grounds that there was no corroboration of it from any other source, then he would resign as a member of the staff and chance his luck as a freelancer.

  ‘I am very honoured to accept your invitation,’ he said, wondering how long he was going to be their guest, and if, now that he had accepted their invitation, he would be allowed to communicate with Paul.

  ‘That is very good, Comrade,’ Dinh said unexpressively. ‘The people of Vietnam are waiting for a historic moment, a moment when the whole nation will rise up in revolt. The revolutionary forces of Vietnam will very soon show the rest of the world what they can do, and you will have the great privilege of being with them when they are victorious.’

  Gavin frowned slightly. They had been speaking sometimes in French, sometimes in Vietnamese, and though Dinh spoke in the same regional accent as Vanh, obviously he had misunderstood something. However optimistic the North Vietnamese were of eventually attaining their aims, no one could imagine that those aims were going to be attained in the next few days or weeks.

  ‘When I return here, will I be met and brought by car in the same manner as I was this morning?’ he asked, assuming that his assignment was to be an ongoing one.

  ‘I am afraid you have not quite comprehended, Comrade,’

  Dinh said, a note of genuine regret in his voice. ‘You will not be returning here because you will not be leaving here, at least you will not be leaving here for Saigon. My mission in the South is completed, and in five days’ time I shall begin the journey north, up the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When I do so, you will accompany me.’

  Gavin stared at him. Of course. He should have known from the beginning. He hadn’t been blindfolded on his journey to Cu Chi. Secrets that the Americans would have given a ransom for had been carelessly revealed to him. And they had been so because all along his hosts had known that he would never be able to communicate what he had seen, not unless they wanted him to communicate it. He wasn’t their guest. For reasons that he still didn’t fully comprehend, he was their prisoner.

  ‘Can I choose to change my mind and refuse your invitation?’ he asked quietly.

  Dinh shook his head. ‘No, Comrade. You have no choice. You have had no choice ever since the moment when you stepped into the car outside the bureau office.’

  He wondered if Nhu had known Dinh’s intentions, and was sure that she had not. His only consolation was that she did at least know who it was he had gone to meet, and she would be able to tell Gabrielle.

  Gabrielle. He closed his eyes, knowing with dreadful certainty that he was not going to see her again for a very long time, that he was not going to see her again for years.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was two-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon when the official-looking black sedan drove up and stopped outside Abbra’s home. She had spent the morning writing, and her chapter was going well. At twelve o’clock she had taken a coffee break and had decided to go for a short walk before resuming work. She had driven across to Golden Gate Park and had strolled by the edge of the lake, mentally plotting out the end of her chapter. Satisfied that all she now had to do was to transfer the words in her head on to paper, she had driven back home, not thinking about Lewis, thinking only of the imaginary world that had become so real to her. And then, as she turned into the driveway, she saw the sedan.

  The occupants didn’t wait for her to turn off the Oldsmobile’s engine before they stepped from the car, slamming the doors behind them. She froze, her hands tight on the wheel. Both men were in army uniform. Both were officers. And one of them was a chaplain.

  They returned, beginning to walk towards her, and the instant she saw the expression on their faces she knew that Lewis was either dead
or captured.

  ‘Mrs Ellis?’ the unordained officer asked her as she forced her hands numbly from the wheel and clumsily opened her car door.

  She stumbled out on to the drive, facing him. ‘Yes. I’m Mrs Ellis.’ The sun, which only a few minutes before had been so pleasurable, was now sickeningly hot, so searingly bright that she had difficulty in focusing on the man’s face.

  ‘Could we speak to you inside for a few minutes, Mrs Ellis?’

  She nodded, her throat dry, her heart pounding. Please don’t let him be dead! she was screaming silently. Please, dear God, don’t let Lewis be dead! Don’t let him be dead!

  She walked across the drive and slipped her key into the lock. She couldn’t ask. If she asked, and if he were dead, there would be no going back. Every second that they didn’t speak was a second longer of hope, a second longer of being able to pretend that everything was still all right, that perhaps it was a welfare visit. That perhaps Lewis had been injured and was being flown home, that perhaps …

  ‘Your husband has been taken prisoner, Mrs Ellis,’ the chaplain was saying to her gently.

  They were in the living-room. Lewis’s photograph was in a small silver frame on one of the side tables. She had planned to write to him that evening. It would have been one of her last letters, for in another four weeks he would be coming home to her.

  ‘He and his companions were ambushed on one of the canals after they had searched a village for North Vietnamese forces.’ It was the other officer speaking now. He was mature and grizzle-haired and his voice was full of regret. ‘One of your husband’s fellow officers managed to escape. He saw your husband taken prisoner. As he was captured in the South, it may be impossible to receive official confirmation for some time—’

  ‘Was he hurt?’ she interrupted harshly. Her hands were balled into fists. He was alive. He was alive and that had to mean that he would come home to her again eventually.

  ‘It is the opinion of the officer who witnessed the incident that he was not seriously injured.’

  ‘Thank God.’ She was crying. The tears were streaming down her face. She tried to stop them. She tried to be as courageous and as dignified as she knew Lewis would want her to be, as befitted an army wife, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t stop the tears.

  ‘You will receive an official telegram tomorrow, Mrs Ellis,’ the middle-aged and fatherly officer was saying to her, ‘and if there is anything that the army can do …’

  He handed her a card. She didn’t even look down at the piece of paper. There was only one thing she wanted the army to do. ‘Just bring my husband back to me,’ she said, her tears splashing on to her dress and the card in her hand. ‘Just bring Lewis home.’

  They wanted to stay with her until her parents returned home from the art exhibition they were visiting, or until a friend or a neighbour could be telephoned to come and sit with her. She vehemently refused all such offers.

  ‘No. I want to be alone for a while.’ It was the truth. She didn’t want solicitous comfort. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts of Lewis.

  Reluctantly, sensing that it might be best, they took their leave. Slowly she crossed the sun-filled room, picking up his photograph from the table.

  ‘Where are you?’ she whispered brokenly, and then, to her horror, she was drowned by another emotion as well as grief. She was overcome with anger, anger that he should have promised her he would be home within a few short weeks, and now wouldn’t be home with her for perhaps years and years, anger at the awful, terrible loneliness that she knew lay ahead.

  ‘Oh, Lewis!’ she howled in agony to the empty room. ‘Where are you? When are you going to come back to me?’

  By the time her parents returned, her face was still wet and streaked with tears, but her voice was steady.

  ‘If he’s a prisoner of war, then you’ll be able to write to him, communicate with him,’ her father said gruffly when he had recovered from the worst of the shock.

  ‘But I thought only pilots who were shot down over the North were prisoners of war?’ her mother asked bewildered. ‘Lewis was in the South, wasn’t he? How could he possibly have been captured by North Vietnamese forces? It doesn’t make any kind of sense. We are winning the war, aren’t we.…’

  ‘It isn’t as cut and dried as you seem to think,’ Abbra’s father responded sombrely. ‘It isn’t a game between the Rams and the Redskins. It’s far more complicated than that.’

  When her father mentioned the Rams, Abbra said quietly, ‘The army will break the news to Lewis’s father, but they won’t contact Scott. I’ll have to do that.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ her mother retorted despite her distress. As far as she knew, for the last month mere had been no contact between Abbra and Scott Ellis, and she didn’t want contact to be resumed. ‘His father will telephone him. There’s absolutely no reason for you to do so. You are far too upset.’

  ‘No. Abbra is right,’ her husband interrupted. ‘Abbra should call him. It would be awful if he heard about it on the news or read it in the papers.’

  ‘Colonel Ellis will contact him!’ her mother insisted.

  ‘I’d rather he heard the news from me,’ Abbra said in a quiet, inflexible voice, and as her mother broke out into further protests she walked out of the room. The telephone in the hall was too public, and she went past it, crossing the hall and entering her father’s study, closing the door behind her.

  She hadn’t seen or spoken to Scott for four weeks, ever since the day when she had last lunched with Patti Maine. Since then she had told the household help that if Scott telephoned, she was not at home.

  A week before she had received an affectionate letter from him. He was assuming she was away on another research trip, but as he hadn’t received so much as a postcard from her he was getting worried. Would she please telephone him the instant she returned home?

  She had put the letter to one side, not knowing how to reply. The more she had thought about what Patti had said, the more she had realized the kernel of truth behind it. She and Scott had been spending too much time together. People were beginning to speculate about the nature of their relationship. And Abbra had been too self-absorbed to notice. A tiny piece in a gossip column a week after her lunch with Patti showed her how very visible they had become as a couple.

  Rams star Scott Ellis attended a charity game at La Jolla High School on Wednesday evening, and was not accompanied by his sister-in-law, the pretty and vivacious Mrs. Lewis Ellis. Could this sudden rift in family relations stem from Scott’s involvements in antiwar demonstrations? His brother, Captain Lewis Ellis, is at present on a year’s tour of duty in ’Nam. It could be that sister-in-law Abbra isn’t the only one to have taken offence at Scott’s antiwar stance. His father, Colonel Thomas. Ellis, a highly decorated Second World War veteran, is also likely to be displeased.

  It was an unpleasant little piece, but Abbra knew that if she had read it before she had lunched with Patti, she would have focused on the references to a possible rift between Scott and his father. She certainly would have missed the sexual insinuations completely. But they were there. She could see that now. Even worse, she knew that there were seeds of truth in the insinuation. She admitted it. She was physically attracted to Scott. He was so magnificently Adonis-like, so tall and powerfully built and golden-haired, she didn’t see how any woman could fail to be. Yet until Patti had pointed it out to her, she had not realized how dangerous the situation was, how dependent she was on him emotionally, and how dependent he might be on her …

  She knew that she needed him now. Her parents could commiserate with her, her friends and neighbours would be sympathetic, but she didn’t need commiseration or sympathy. She needed someone who understood her, someone who would understand her anger as well as her grief. She needed someone who would realize just how monstrously obscene the prospect of not seeing Lewis again for years and years was.

  After she had dialled his number, the telephone in his apartment r
ang for so long that she thought he must be out. Just as she was about to hang up, he answered, and at the sound of his familiar, zest-filled voice, her hard-won composure abandoned her.

  ‘It’s Abbra,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘Oh, Scott! Lewis has been taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese!’

  There was a second’s stunned silence, and then he said, ‘Hang in there, sweetheart. I’m on my way.’

  She put the telephone back on its rest and leaned back against the wall, her eyes closed, her tears falling fast and free. It was what she had wanted to hear. He hadn’t asked any of the questions anyone else would have asked, questions which she could not possibly answer. He had simply said that he would come to her. And when he did, she knew that he would give her the strength to be able to face the next few days, and the days that would follow those.

  She didn’t want to talk to him in the house. Despite the dreadful circumstances, she knew that her mother’s attitude towards him had not changed. So as the time approached when she expected him, she waited in the hall, prepared to run out to his car the second she heard its engine.

  ‘Do you think you should leave the house?’ her father asked, a worried frown furrowing his brow. ‘What if there is a telephone call from the army? What if there is further news of Lewis?’

  ‘I have to talk to Scott, Daddy. And I have to do it away from the house.’

  He nodded unhappily, understanding her reasons. There would be plenty of time for her to sit waiting for the telephone to ring. Too much time. ‘I think I hear a car turning into the drive,’ he said gruffly, wondering how long it would be before they heard any further news, until they learned exactly where Lewis was being held. And under what conditions.

  She ran out of the house towards Scott’s approaching Chevrolet. He drew to a halt, leaning over and opening the door for her, and then, as she tumbled into the passenger seat, he turned the car around, driving back down the drive and out into the wide, tree-lined street.