Honourable Schoolboy (58 page)

In search of Stubbsie’s people not prophecies, he went down to the American Embassy where ten thousand-odd Vietnamese were beating at the doors in an effort to prove their American citizenship. As he watched, a South Vietnamese officer rode up in a jeep, leapt out and began yelling at the women, calling them whores and traitors picking, as it happened, a group of bona fide US wives to bear the brunt.

Again Jerry filed, and again Stubbs threw his story out, which no doubt added to his depression.

A few days later the Circus planners lost their nerve. As the rout continued, and worsened, they signalled Jerry to fly at once to Vientiane and keep his head down till ordered otherwise by a Cousins’ postman. So he went, and took a room at the Constellation, where Lizzie had liked to hang out, and he drank at the bar where Lizzie had liked to drink, and he occasionally chatted to Maurice the proprietor, and he waited. The bar was of concrete, two foot deep, so that if need arose it could do duty as a bomb shelter or firing position. Each night, in the mournful dining room attached to it, one old colon ate and drank fastidiously, a napkin tucked into his collar. Jerry sat reading at another table. They were the only diners, ever, and they never spoke. In the streets, the Pathet Lao - not long down from the hills - walked righteously in pairs, wearing Maoist caps and tunics, and avoiding the glances of the girls. They had commandeered the corner villas, and the villas along the road to the airport. They had camped in immaculate tents which peeked over the walls of overgrown gardens.

‘Will the coalition hold?’ Jerry asked Maurice once.

Maurice was not a political man.

‘It’s the way it is,’ he replied in a stage French accent, and in silence handed Jerry a ballpoint pen as a consolation. It had Lowenbräu written on it: Maurice owned the concession for the whole of Laos, selling - it was said - several bottles a year. Jerry avoided absolutely the street which housed the Indocharter offices, just as he restrained himself from taking a look, out of curiosity, at the flea-hut on the edge of town which, on Charlie Marshall’s testimony, had housed their ménàge à trois. When asked, Maurice said there were very few Chinese left in town these days. ‘Chinese do not like,’ he said with another smile, tilting his head at the Pathet Lao on the pavement outside.

There remains the mystery of the telephone transcripts. Did Jerry ring Lizzie from the Constellation, or not? And if he did ring her, did he mean to talk to her, or only to listen to her voice? And if he intended to talk to her, then what did he propose to say? Or was the very act of making the phone call - like the act of booking airline passages in Saigon - in itself sufficient catharsis to hold him back from the reality?

What is certain is that nobody, neither Smiley nor Connie nor anyone else who read the crucial transcripts, can be seriously accused of failing in their duty, for the entry was at best ambivalent:

‘0055 hrs HK time. Incoming overseas call, personal for subject. Operator on the line. Subject accepts call, says hullo several times.

Operator: Speak up please, caller!

Subject: Hullo? Hullo?

Operator: Can you hear me, caller? Speak up, please!

Subject: Hullo? Liese Worth here. Who’s calling, please? Call disconnected from caller’s end.’

The transcript nowhere mentions Vientiane as the place of origin and it is even doubtful whether Smiley saw it, since his cryptonym does not appear in the signing panel. Anyway, whether it was Jerry who made the call or someone else, the next day a pair of Cousins, not one, brought him his marching orders, and at long, long last the welcome relief of action. The bloody inertia, however many interminable weeks of it, had ended finally - and as it happened for good.

He spent the afternoon fixing himself visas and transport, and next morning at dawn he crossed the Mekong into North East Thailand, carrying his shoulder bag and his typewriter. The long wooden ferryboat was crammed with peasants and shrieking pigs. At the shack which controlled the crossing point he pledged himself to return to Laos by the same route. Documentation would otherwise be impossible, the officials warned him severely. If I return at all, he thought. Looking back to the receding shores of Laos, he saw an American car parked on the towpath, and beside it two slender stationary figures watching. The Cousins we have always with us.

On the Thai bank, everything was immediately impossible. Jerry’s visa was not enough, his photographs bore no likeness, the whole area was forbidden to farangs. Ten dollars secured a revised opinion. After the visa, the car. Jerry had insisted on an English-speaking driver and the rate had been fixed accordingly, but the old man who waited for him spoke nothing but Thai and little of that. By bawling English phrases into the nearby rice shop, Jerry finally hooked a fat supine boy who had some English and said he could drive. A laborious contract was drawn up. The old man’s insurance did not cover another driver and anyway it was out of date. An exhausted travel clerk issued a new policy while the boy went home to make his arrangements. The car was a clapped-out red Ford with bald tyres. Of all the ways Jerry didn’t intend to die in the next day or two, this was one of them. They haggled, Jerry put up another twenty dollars. At a garage full of chickens he watched every move of the mechanics till the new tyres were in place.

Having thus wasted an hour they set out at a breakneck speed south-eastward over flat farm country. The boy played ‘The lights are always out in Massachusetts’ five times before Jerry asked for silence.

The road was tarmac but deserted. Occasionally a yellow bus came sidewinding down the hill toward them and at once the driver accelerated and stayed on the crown till the bus had yielded a foot and thundered past. Once, while he was dozing, Jerry was startled by the crunch of bamboo fencing and woke in time to see a fountain of splinters lift into the sunlight just ahead of him, and a pick-up truck rolling into the ditch in slow motion. He saw the door float upward like a leaf and the flailing driver follow it through the fence and into the high grass. The boy hadn’t even slowed down, though his laughter made them swerve an over the road. Jerry shouted ‘Stop!’ but the boy would have none of it.

‘You want to get blood on your suit? You leave that to the doctors,’ he advised sternly. ‘I look after you, okay? This very bad country here. Lot of Commies.’

‘What’s your name?’ said Jerry resignedly.

It was unpronounceable, so they settled on Mickey.

It was two more hours before they hit the first barrier. Jerry dozed again, rehearsing his lines. There’s always one more door you have to put your foot in, he thought. He wondered whether a day would come - for the Circus - for the comic - when the old entertainer would not be able to pull the gags any more, when just the sheer energy of bare-arsing his way over the threshold would defeat him, and he would stand there flaccid, sporting his friendly salesman’s grin, while the words died in his throat. Not this time, he thought hastily. Dear God, not this time, please.

They stopped, and a young monk scurried out of the trees carrying a wat bowl and Jerry dropped a few baht into it. Mickey opened the boot. A police sentry peered inside, then ordered Jerry out and led him over to a captain who sat in a shaded hut all his own. The captain took a long while to notice Jerry at all.

‘He ask you American?’ said Mickey.

Jerry produced his papers.

On the other side of the barrier, the perfect tarmac road ran straight as a pencil over the flat scrubland.

‘He says what you want here?’ Mickey said.

‘Business with the colonel.’

Driving on, they passed a village and a cinema. Even the latest films up here are silents, Jerry recalled. He had once done a story about them. Local actors made the voices, and invented whatever plots came into their heads. He remembered John Wayne with a squeaky Thai voice, and the audience ecstatic, and the interpreter explaining to him that they were hearing an imitation of the local mayor who was a famous queen. They were passing forest but the shoulders of the road had been cleared fifty yards on either side to cut the risk of ambush. Occasionally, they came on sharp white lines which had nothing to do with earthbound traffic. The road had been laid by the Americans with an eye to auxiliary landing strips.

‘You know this colonel guy?’ Mickey asked.

‘No,’ said Jerry.

Mickey laughed in delight. ‘Why you want?’

Jerry didn’t bother to answer.

The second roadblock came twenty miles later, in the centre of a small village given over to police. A cluster of grey trucks stood in the courtyard of the wat, four jeeps were parked beside the roadblock. The village lay at a junction. At right-angles to their road, a yellow dust-path crossed the plain and snaked into the hills to either side. This time Jerry took the initiative, leaping from the car immediately with a merry cry of ‘Take me to your leader!’ Their leader turned out to be a nervous young captain with the anxious frown of a man trying to keep abreast of matters beyond his learning. He sat in the police station with his pistol on the desk. The police station was temporary, Jerry noticed. Out of the window, he saw the bombed ruins of what he took to be the last one.

‘My colonel is a busy man,’ the captain said, through Mickey the driver.

‘He is also a very brave man,’ Jerry said.

There was dumb show till they had established ‘brave’.

‘He has shot many Communists,’ Jerry said. ‘My paper wishes to write about this brave Thai colonel.’

The captain spoke for quite a while and suddenly Mickey began hooting with laughter.

‘The captain say we don’t got no Commies! We only got Bangkok! Poor people up here don’t know nothing, because Bangkok don’t give them no schools so the Commies come talk to them in the night and the Commies tell them all their sons all go Moscow, learn be big doctors, so they blow up the police station.’

‘Where can I find the colonel?’

‘Captain say we stay here.’

‘Will he ask the colonel to come to us?’

‘Colonel very busy man.’

‘Where is the colonel?’

‘He next village.’

‘What is the name of the next village?’

The driver once more collapsed with laughter.

‘It don’t got no name. That village all dead.’

‘What was the village called before it died?’

Mickey said a name.

‘Is the road open as far as this dead village?’

‘Captain say military secret. That mean he don’t know.’

‘Will the captain let us through to take a look?’

A long exchange followed.

‘Sure,’ said Mickey finally. ‘He say we go.’

‘Will the captain radio the colonel and tell him we are coming?’

‘Colonel very busy man.’

‘Will he radio him?’

‘Sure,’ said the driver, as if only a hideous farang could have made a meal of such a patently obvious detail.

They climbed back into the car. The boom lifted and they continued along the perfect tarmac road with its cleared shoulders and occasional landing marks. For twenty minutes they drove without seeing another living thing but Jerry wasn’t consoled by the emptiness. He had heard that for every Communist guerrilla fighting with a gun in the hills, it took five in the plains to produce the rice, the ammunition and the infra-structure, and these were the plains. They came to a dust-path on their right, and the dust of it was smeared across the tarmac from recent use. Mickey swung down it, following the heavy tyre tracks, playing ‘The lights are always out in Massachusetts’ very loud, Jerry notwithstanding.

‘This way the Commies think we plenty people,’ he explained amid more laughter, thus making it impossible for him to object. To Jerry’s surprise he also produced a huge, long-barrelled.45 target pistol from the bag beneath his seat. Jerry ordered him sharply to shove it back where it came from. Minutes later, they smelt burning, then they drove through wood-smoke, then they reached what was left of the village: clusters of cowed people, a couple of acres of burnt teak trees like a petrified forest, three jeeps, twenty-odd police, and a stocky lieutenant-colonel at their centre. Villagers and police alike were gazing at a patch of smouldering ash sixty yards across, in which a few charred beams sketched the outline of the burned houses. The colonel watched them park and he watched them walk over. He was a fighting man. Jerry saw it immediately. He was squat and strong and he neither smiled nor scowled. He was swarthy and greying and he could have been Malay, except that he was thicker in the trunk. He wore parachute wings and flying wings and a couple of rows of medal ribbons. He wore battle drill and a regulation automatic in a leather holster on his right thigh, and the restraining straps hung open.

‘You the newsman?’ he asked Jerry, in flat, military American.

‘That’s right.’

The colonel’s eye turned to the driver. He said something, and Mickey walked hastily back to his car, got into it and stayed there.

‘What do you want?’

‘Anybody die here?’

‘Three people. I just shot them. We got thirty-eight million.’ His functional American-English, all but perfect, came as a growing surprise.

‘Why did you shoot them?’

‘At night the CTs held classes here. People come from all around to hear the CTs.’

Communist Terrorists, thought Jerry. He had an inkling it was originally a British phrase. A string of lorries was nosing down the dust-path. Seeing them, the villagers began picking up their bedrolls and children. The colonel gave an order and his men formed them into a rough file while the lorries turned round.

‘We find them a better place,’ the colonel said. ‘They start again.’

‘Who did you shoot?’

‘Last week two of my men got bombed. The CTs operated from this village.’ He picked out a sullen woman at that moment clambering on the lorry and called her back so that Jerry could take a look at her. She stood with her head bowed.

‘They stay in her house,’ he said. ‘This time I shoot her husband. Next time I shoot her.’

‘And the other two?’ Jerry asked.

He asked because to keep asking is to stay punching, but it was Jerry, not the colonel, who was under interrogation: The colonel’s brown eyes were hard and appraising and held a lot in reserve. They looked at Jerry enquiringly but without anxiety.