‘Stand back,’ he said. ‘Everybody here has friends.’
He stood on one side to let a priest through, and I tried to follow the priest, but he pulled me back. I said, ‘I am the Press,’ and searched in vain for the wallet in which I had my card, but I couldn’t find it: had I come out that day without it? I said, ‘At least tell me what happened to the milk-bar’: the smoke was clearing and I tried to see, but the crowd between was too great. He said something I didn’t catch.
‘What did you say?’
He repeated, ‘I don’t know. Stand back. You are blocking the stretchers.’
Could I have dropped my wallet in the Pavillon? I turned to go back and there was Pyle. He exclaimed, ‘Thomas.’
‘Pyle,’ I said, ‘for Christ’s sake, where’s your Legation pass? We’ve got to get across. Phuong’s in the milk-bar.’
‘No, no,’ he said.
‘Pyle, she is. She always goes there. At eleven thirty. We’ve got to find her.’
‘She isn’t there, Thomas.’
‘How do you know? Where’s your card?’
‘I warned her not to go.’
I turned back to the policeman, meaning to throw him to one side and make a run for it across the square: he might shoot: I didn’t care—and then the word ‘warn’ reached my consciousness. I took Pyle by the arm. ‘Warn?’ I said. ‘What do you mean “warn”?’
‘I told her to keep away this morning.’
The pieces fell together in my mind. ‘And Warren?’ I said. ‘Who’s Warren? He warned those girls too.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There mustn’t be any American casualties, must there?’ An ambulance forced its way up the rue Catinat into the square and the policeman who had stopped me moved to one side to let it through. The policeman beside him was engaged in an argument. I pushed Pyle forward and ahead of me into the square before we could be stopped.
We were among a congregation of mourners. The police could prevent others entering the square; they were powerless to clear the square of the survivors and the first-comers. The doctors were too busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left to their owners, for one can own the dead as one owns a chair. A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat. She was still and silent, and what struck me most in the square was the silence. It was like a church I had once visited during Mass—the only sounds came from those who served, except where here and there the Europeans wept and implored and fell silent again as though shamed by the modesty, patience and propriety of the East. The legless torso at the edge of the garden still twitched, like a chicken which has lost its head. From the man’s shirt, he had probably been a trishaw driver.
Pyle said, ‘It’s awful.’ He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, ‘What’s that?’
‘Blood,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’
He said, ‘I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.’ I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time: he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers didn’t count.
I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, ‘This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children—it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?’
He said weakly, ‘There was to have been a parade.’
‘And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t know!’ I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. ‘You ought to be better informed.’
‘I was out of town,’ he said, looking down at his shoes. ‘They should have called it off.’
‘And missed the fun?’ I asked him. ‘Do you expect General Thé to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s Press. You’ve put General Thé on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic dead—there are a few dozen less of her people to worry about.’
A small fat priest scampered by, carrying something on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been silent a long while, and I had nothing more to say. Indeed I had said too much already. He looked white and beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, ‘What’s the good? he’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’
He said, ‘Thé wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists . . .’
He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance. I left him standing in the square and went on up the rue Catinat to where the hideous pink Cathedral blocked the way. Already people were flocking in; it must have been a comfort to them to be able to pray for the dead to the dead.
Unlike them, I had reason for thankfulness, for wasn’t Phuong alive? Hadn’t Phuong been ‘warned’? But what I remembered was the torso in the square, the baby on its mother’s lap. They had not been warned: they had not been sufficiently important. And if the parade had taken place would they not have been there just the same, out of curiosity, to see the soldiers, and hear the speakers, and throw the flowers? A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front? I stopped a motor-trishaw and told the driver to take me to the Quai Mytho.
PART FOUR
1
I had given Phuong money to take her sister to the cinema so that she would be safely out of the way. I went out to dinner myself with Dominguez and was back in my room waiting when Vigot called sharp on ten. He apologized for not taking a drink—he said he was too tired and a drink might send him to sleep. It had been a very long day.
‘Murder and sudden death?’
‘No. Petty thefts. And a few suicides. These people love to gamble and when they have lost everything they kill themselves. Perhaps I would not have become a policeman if I had known how much time I would have to spend in mortuaries. I do not like the smell of ammonia. Perhaps after all I will have a beer.’
‘I haven’t a refrigerator, I’m afraid.’
‘Unlike the mortuary. A little English whisky, then?’
I remembered the night I had gone down to the mortuary with him and they had slid out Pyle’s body like a tray of ice-cubes.
‘So you are not going home?’ he asked.
‘You’ve been checking up?’
‘Yes.’
I held the whisky out to him, so that he could see how calm my nerves were. ‘Vigot, I wish you’d tell me why you think I was concerned in Pyle’s death. Is it a question of motive? That I wanted Phuong back? Or do you imagine it was revenge for losing her?’
‘No. I’m not so stupid. One doesn’t take one’s enemy’s book as a souvenir. There it is on your shelf. The Rôle of the West. Who is this York Harding?’
‘He’s the man you are looking for, Vigot. He killed Pyle—at long range.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’s a superior sort of journalist—they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea. Pyle came out here full of York Harding’s idea. Harding had been here once for a week on his way from Bangkok to Tokyo. Pyle made the mistake of putting his idea into practice. Harding wrote about a Third Force. Pyle formed one—a shoddy little bandit with two thousand men and a couple of tame tigers. He got mixed up.’
‘You never do, do you?’
‘I’ve tried not to be.’
‘But you failed, Fowler.’ For some reason I thought of Captain Trouin and that night which seemed to have happened years ago
in the Haiphong opium house. What was it he had said? something about all of us getting involved sooner or later in a moment of emotion. I said, ‘You would have made a good priest, Vigot. What is it about you that would make it so easy to confess—if there were anything to confess?’
‘I have never wanted any confessions.’
‘But you’ve received them?’
‘From time to time.’
‘Is it because like a priest it’s your job not to be shocked, but to be sympathetic? “M. Flic, I must tell you exactly why I battered in the old lady’s skull.” “Yes, Gustave, take your time and tell me why it was.”’
‘You have a whimsical imagination. Aren’t you drinking, Fowler?’
‘Surely it’s unwise for a criminal to drink with a police officer?’
‘I have never said you were a criminal.’
‘But suppose the drink unlocked even in me the desire to confess? There are no secrets of the confessional in your profession.’
‘Secrecy is seldom important to a man who confesses: even when it’s to a priest. He has other motives.’
‘To cleanse himself?’
‘Not always. Sometimes he only wants to see himself clearly as he is. Sometimes he is just weary of deception. You are not a criminal, Fowler, but I would like to know why you lied to me. You saw Pyle the night he died.’
‘What gives you that idea?’
‘I don’t for a moment think you killed him. You would hardly have used a rusty bayonet.’
‘Rusty?’
‘Those are the kind of details we get from an autopsy. I told you, though, that was not the cause of death. Dakow mud.’ He held out his glass for another whisky. ‘Let me see now. You had a drink at the Continental at six ten?’
‘Yes.’
‘And at six forty-five you were talking to another journalist at the door of the Majestic?’
‘Yes, Wilkins. I told you all this, Vigot, before. That night.’
‘Yes. I’ve checked up since then. It’s wonderful how you carry such petty details in your head.’
‘I’m a reporter, Vigot.’
‘Perhaps the times are not quite accurate, but nobody could blame you, could they, if you were a quarter of an hour out here and ten minutes out there. You had no reason to think the times important. Indeed how suspicious it would be if you had been completely accurate.’
‘Haven’t I been?’
‘Not quite. It was at five to seven that you talked to Wilkins.’
‘Another ten minutes.’
‘Of course. As I said. And it had only just struck six when you arrived at the Continental.’
‘My watch is always a little fast,’ I said. ‘What time do you make it now?’
‘Ten eight.’
‘Ten eighteen by mine. You see.’
He didn’t bother to look. He said, ‘Then the time you said you talked to Wilkins was twenty-five minutes out—by your watch. That’s quite a mistake, isn’t it?’
‘Perhaps I readjusted the time in my mind. Perhaps I’d corrected my watch that day. I sometimes do.’
‘What interests me,’ Vigot said, ‘(could I have a little more soda?—you have made this rather strong) is that you are not at all angry with me. It is not very nice to be questioned as I am questioning you.’
‘I find it interesting, like a detective-story. And, after all, you know I didn’t kill Pyle—you’ve said so.’
Vigot said, ‘I know you were not present at his murder.’
‘I don’t know what you hope to prove by showing that I was ten minutes out here and five there.’
‘It gives a little space,’ Vigot said, ‘a little gap in time.’
‘Space for what?’
‘For Pyle to come and see you.’
‘Why do you want so much to prove that?’
‘Because of the dog,’ Vigot said.
‘And the mud between its toes?’
‘It wasn’t mud. It was cement. You see, somewhere that night, when it was following Pyle, it stepped into wet cement. I remembered that on the ground-floor of the apartment there are builders at work—they are still at work. I passed them tonight as I came in. They work long hours in this country.’
‘I wonder how many houses have builders in them—and wet cement. Did any of them remember the dog?’
‘Of course I asked them that. But if they had they would not have told me. I am the police.’ He stopped talking and leant back in his chair, staring at his glass. I had a sense that some analogy had struck him and he was miles away in thought. A fly crawled over the back of his hand and he did not brush it away—any more than Dominguez would have done. I had the feeling of some force immobile and profound. For all I knew, he might have been praying.
I rose and went through the curtains into the bedroom. There was nothing I wanted there, except to get away for a moment from that silence sitting in a chair. Phuong’s picture books were back on the shelf. She had stuck a telegram for me up among the cosmetics—some message or other from the London office. I wasn’t in the mood to open it. Everything was as it had been before Pyle came. Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.
I returned to the sitting-room and Vigot put the glass to his lips. I said, ‘I’ve got nothing to tell you. Nothing at all.’
‘Then I’ll be going,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll trouble you again.’
At the door he turned as though he were unwilling to abandon hope—his hope or mine. ‘That was a strange picture for you to go and see that night. I wouldn’t have thought you cared for costume drama. What was it? Robin Hood?’
‘Scaramouche, I think. I had to kill time. And I needed distraction.’
‘Distraction?’
‘We all have our private worries, Vigot,’ I carefully explained.
When Vigot was gone there was still an hour to wait for Phuong and living company. It was strange how disturbed I had been by Vigot’s visit. It was as though a poet had brought me his work to criticize and through some careless action I had destroyed it. I was a man without a vocation—one cannot seriously consider journalism as a vocation, but I could recognize a vocation in another. Now that Vigot was gone to close his uncompleted file, I wished I had the courage to call him back and say, ‘You are right. I did see Pyle the night he died.’
2
I
On the way to the Quai Mytho I passed several ambulances driving out of Cholon heading for the Place Garnier. One could almost reckon the pace of rumour from the expression of the faces in the street, which at first turned on someone like myself coming from the direction of the Place with looks of expectancy and speculation. By the time I entered Cholon I had outstripped the news: life was busy, normal, uninterrupted: nobody knew.
I found Mr Chou’s godown and mounted to Mr Chou’s house. Nothing had changed since my last visit. The cat and the dog moved from floor to cardboard box to suitcase, like a couple of chess knights who cannot get to grips. The baby crawled on the floor, and the two old men were still playing mah jongg. Only the young people were absent. As soon as I appeared in the doorway one of the women began to pour out tea. The old lady sat on the bed and looked at her feet.
‘Monsieur Heng,’ I asked. I shook my head at the tea: I wasn’t in the mood to begin another long course of that trivial bitter brew. “Il faut absolument que je voie Monsieur Heng.’ It seemed impossible to convey to them the urgency of my request, but perhaps the very abruptness of my refusal of tea caused some disquiet. Or perhaps like Pyle I had blood on my shoes. Anyway after a short delay one of the women led me out and down the stairs, along two bustling bannered streets and left me before what they would have called I suppose in Pyle’s country a ‘funeral parlour,’ full of stone jars in which the resurrected bones of the Chinese dead are eventually placed. ‘Monsieur Heng,’ I said to an old Chinese in the doorway, ‘Monsieur Heng.’ It seemed a suitable halting place on a day which had begun with the planter’s erotic collect
ion and continued with the murdered bodies in the square. Somebody called from an inner room and the Chinese stepped aside and let me in.
Mr Heng himself came cordially forward and ushered me into a little inner room lined with the black carved uncomfortable chairs you find in every Chinese ante-room, unused, unwelcoming. But I had the sense that on this occasion the chairs had been employed, for there were five little tea-cups on the table, and two were not empty. ‘I have interrupted a meeting,’ I said.
‘A matter of business,’ Mr Heng said evasively, ‘of no importance. I am always glad to see you, Mr Fowler.’
‘I’ve come from the Place Garnier,’ I said.
‘I thought that was it.’
‘You’ve heard . . .’
‘Someone telephoned to me. It was thought best that I keep away from Mr Chou’s for a while. The police will be very active today.’
‘But you had nothing to do with it.’
‘It is the business of the police to find a culprit.’
‘It was Pyle again,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘It was a terrible thing to do.’
‘General Thé is not a very controlled character.’
‘And bombs aren’t for boys from Boston. Who is Pyle’s chief, Heng?’
‘I have the impression that Mr Pyle is very much his own master.’
‘What is he? O.S.S.?’
‘The initial letters are not very important. I think now they are different.’
‘What can I do, Heng? He’s got to be stopped.’
‘You can publish the truth. Or perhaps you cannot?’
‘My paper’s not interested in General Thé. They are only interested in your people, Heng.’
‘You really want Mr Pyle stopped, Mr Fowler?’
‘If you’d seen him, Heng. He stood there and said it was all a sad mistake, there should have been a parade. He said he’d have to get his shoes cleaned before he saw the Minister.’
‘Of course, you could tell what you know to the police.’
The Quiet American Page 17
