Saigon (85 page)

Once Naomi had left for Vietnam to cover the spectacular southward advance of Hanoi’s eighteen divisions, Joseph retreated sixty miles south of London to their country house in West Sussex. There, surrounded by the green, rolling hills of the South Downs, he tried to settle to his writing; but as the days passed he found himself increasingly distracted by the news from Saigon. Only forty-eight hours after Naomi had left, the Communist forces smashed into Qui Nhon, Nha Trang and Dalat, encountering little resistance from the dispirited government forces, and as he listened to the radio news roll call of cities falling one after the other to the North Vietnamese onslaught, Joseph’s mind was flooded with memories; he recalled the desperate journey he had made with Lan beside him in the OSS jeep in 1945, driving nonstop northwards along the old Mandarin Way above the beautiful white beaches and azure seas of Nha Trang and Qui Nhon. The fall of Dalat on April 2 plunged him into a new bitter-sweet bout of reminiscence as he recalled the exhilaration they’d shared at the Lang-Biang Palace in 1954, and this in turn stirred stark recollections of her awful death before his eyes in Saigon only a few weeks later. Eventually these thoughts became oppressive, inducing in him a dark sense of foreboding about Naomi’s safe return, and he found himself waiting with increasing anxiety for her telephone calls. She rang him two or three times a week from the Continental Palace, but the calls were 

- invariably subject to frustrating delays and over the crackling line she was able to say little of what she’d seen of the fighting. In the end she confined herself to repeated assurances that she was safe and keeping out of danger, but as time pissed these stilted conversations, instead of setting his fears at rest, made Joseph more uneasy. 

By the end of the first week in April, the Communists were tightening a military noose around Saigon. Less than a hundred thousand battle-ready government troops faced some three hundred thousand North Vietnamese, whose spearhead had moved to within forty miles of the capital at Xuan Loc, and as far as Joseph could see the only hope seemed to lie in the possibility that Hanoi might prefer to negotiate and have their troops appear in the streets as liberators rather than military conquerors. From Washington he listened anxiously to reports that President Ford was trying to persuade Congress that a fresh 750-million-dollar dose of military aid might save Saigon —but as the days slipped by the legislators on Capitol Hill remained adamant, fiercely protective of their new power in the wake of Richard Nixon’s “imperial presidency.” 

Listening to news of this calamitous train of events hour by hour on his shortwave radio amidst the hills of southern England, Joseph became too distracted to work. He began rising before dawn and driving the few miles to the ancient cathedral city of Chichester to buy extra newspapers as soon as they arrived at the railway station. Ill-at-ease, he wandered restlessly through the paddocks and formal gardens of the eighteenth-century manor house between news broadcasts and telephone calls from Naomi, and after President Thieu’s resignation on April 21 had signaled the end was near, he began to take longer walks outside the grounds, tramping blindly across the surrounding hills, oblivious to the green shoots of spring speckling the branches of the trees above his head and the ground around his feet. A frown of anxiety became a permanent expression on his suntanned face, and he walked with hunched shoulders and the jerky, uncoordinated stride of a man abstracted by events beyond his control. 

Unknown to Joseph, in those same days many thousands of miles away in Hanoi, the brother of the girl who had first made his spirit a hostage to Vietnam’s fortunes four decades before was suffering similar symptoms of anxiety. While Joseph strode daily through the South Downs, Tran Van Kim was pacing anxiously back and forth across the uncarpeted floor of one of the austere offices set aside for the use of Politburo members in the Party Headquarters of the Lao Dong. His fears, however, although shaped by the same events, were for his own safety. 

The realization that his career and possibly his life were in jeopardy had come to him only gradually. The frantic day and night round of meetings and consultations that had followed the unexpected success of the He) Chi Minh offensive in late March and early April had proved exhausting and at first he had been too tired to read the warning signals. He had taken a full part in the early discussions, and with experience born of long observation of his old mentor Ho Chi Minh, who had died in September 1969, he had been careful not to commit himself fully to either of the two extreme views which had quickly polarized the Politburo. One faction wanted to hazard everything at once in an all-out drive on Saigon, while the remaining members advocated caution and restraint, and seeing that opinion was equally divided, he had managed to praise and criticize both points of view equally. Because he was so confident that he was pursuing the wisest course, he didn’t take it amiss that he was never called on to make an unequivocal statement of his views, and it was some days before he realized that he was no longer being asked to voice any opinion at all. 

After the victory of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the resignation of Nguyen Van Thieu, the tempo of the meetings had increased dramatically. The corridors of the Party Headquarters were filled at all hours of the day and night with bustling functionaries in high-collared tunics who rushed frantically from one meeting to another bearing sheafs of top-secret papers. It was then, when his own schedule of meetings slackened abruptly, that he had felt the first stab of sickening fear; he was being excluded completely from all top-level counsels about future policy in the South — and that could mean only one thing! 

Left idle in his room for hours on end, he began frantically to search his memory for some unconscious transgression. His relationship with Ho Chi Minh had been personal and intimate for more than thirty years and he had always known that he owed his place in the Politburo to this fact above all else. He had anticipated a gradual diminution of his influence in the years following Ho’s death, but he had always felt confident that the prestige and intimate knowledge of party affairs he had gained during three decades as the leader’s close confidant would guarantee his position. He had been aware that the amount of time he had spent with Ho had been a cause of envy among other Politburo members, and General Vo Nguyen Giap in particular, in the later years of Ho’s life, had begun to treat him with a cold reserve. As he paced his office at the beginning of the last week in April 1975, Kim concluded that the direct threat would almost certainly come from the defense minister who was supervising the overall strategy for the offensive; he tried obliquely to approach one or two members of the party’s ruling body who had been most friendly to him in the past in an effort to discover if he was being linked with others in some large-scale purge; but all cold- shouldered him, confirming his worst apprehensions — he was alone, suddenly and inexplicably a political outcast! 

Barely able to sleep or eat, it came almost as a relief on the morning of Tuesday, April 21, when he received a summons to the office of the head of the party’s Control Commission who was responsible for internal party discipline. The thin-faced cadre, who had always shown him great deference while Ho Chi Minh was alive, didn’t rise when he entered his office or invite him to be seated; instead he addressed him in a curt voice without looking up from his papers. 

“Your fellow members of the Politburo of the great and glorious Lao Dong Party have instructed me to make certain things known to you, comrade,” said the cadre. “As you know, the party is on the brink of an historic victory which will bring our southern brethren under our control for the first time. This is a period when the highest self-discipline will be required of all comrades at all levels. Many difficulties and hazards lie ahead, and it will not be an easy task to change the capitalist ways of the southern people and bring them into line with the discipline of our own socialist society. It has been agreed unanimously that anybody who lacks total dedication to the cause cannot be tolerated in the highest echelons of our party at a time like this. It has been further agreed that anybody who is likely to betray our goals in the South because of misguided personal loyalties is not to be trusted and must be discarded at once!” 

Kim stared at the bowed head of the cadre, who was reading everything he said in a toneless voice from a typewritten sheet on the desk before him. He knew he was being invited to condemn himself from his own mouth, but he couldn’t understand why. “I’ve dedicated my whole life to the party,” he said in an injured tone. “Of what am I accused?” 

Without replying, the cadre pushed across the desk a typewritten report to which two photographs were fastened. Kim picked them up, but at first the Paris apartment building at the corner of Avenue Leopold II and Rue La Fontaine shown in the top one meant nothing to him. Then in the second picture he recognized the back view of himself stepping into the doorway to be greeted by his brother Tam, and with his heart hammering at his ribs he turned to the report and read the agent’s account of how he had been followed to the Sixteenth Arrondissement. 

“It was nothing more than a personal meeting,” he said in a barely audible whisper as he let the report fall onto the desk top. “There was no discussion whatsoever of political matters. 

The cadre looked blankly back at him. “It has been decided that you will present yourself at the Party Interrogation Center at Phuc Yen at four o’clock this afternoon for further examination of the facts. A car will be provided for your convenience but no driver will be available. You must drive yourself — take the northern route. That is all.” 

Kim returned slowly to his own office, moving along the gloomy corridors like a somnambulist. Whether the evidence shown to him was the real reason for his fall from favor, he didn’t know; perhaps it was being used to cover some personal spite or other, some lingering envy of his past prominence. Bitter feuds at the top party level, he knew from experience, were often rooted in personal dislikes, and he cursed himself for his foolishness in giving potential enemies sufficient ammunition to condemn him. For half an hour he sat hunched at his desk, staring dully at his empty wooden document trays; then gathering himself, he glanced at his watch and found it was already two o’clock. After a moment’s thought, he drew two sheets of blank paper from a drawer and began writing rapidly. When he had covered both pages in closely spaced scrawl, he sealed them in an envelope and used a telephone to summon a junior aide from an adjoining office. 

“Take this to my niece, Trinh, at the munitions factory,” he told the youth sharply. “Deliver it in person without fail at once. Tell her it’s most urgent.” 

“Yes, Comrade Kim.” The youth acknowledged the order in an anxious voice and made to leave, but at the door he halted and turned to look uncertainly at his superior. “Is anything wrong, Comrade Kim? You look unwell.” 

Kim stared at him hopelessly for a moment. “Go quickly. And when you’ve delivered the note don’t come back here. Go somewhere you won’t be found!” 

The youth’s face turned pale. “Why, Comrade Kim? Why?” 

“Because I’ve been ordered to Phuc Yen for interrogation. Now go before it’s too late.” 

Half an hour later Kim walked down to the motor compound at the rear of the building and stepped into a Russian-made Moskwa saloon that had been brought to the door for him by an overalled mechanic. He drove the car carefully through the city and across the Red River Bridge, heading for Phuc Yen which lay thirty miles northwest of Hanoi on the slopes of the Red River valley. As he drove alongside the Lake of the Restored Sword, he wondered briefly whether he would ever see the twin pagodas on their little islands again then he noticed in his rearview mirror another Moskwa with three plainclothes security men following him openly. All along the winding highway that climbed steeply up the valley, they remained at an even distance behind him, making no effort at all to conceal their presence, and his hands began to tremble on the wheel. As he drove he kept a constant watch in his rearview mirror — but the trail of oil dripping from the puncture made in the Moskwa’s hydraulic system by the overalled mechanic was too fine to detect, and he remained unaware that his brakes had been rendered useless. 

Because of the long gradient, he didn’t try to slow the car until he was running down a long steep slope on the far side of the first big hill outside the city. The road swung sharply away from a high cliff, and he applied his foot to the brake for the first time as the Moskwa sped down towards the bend. To his horror, the unresisting pedal went right down to the floorboards without altering his speed, and the car raced on towards a yawning gap in the retaining fence that he could see, from the freshly broken wood, had been made very recently. In the instant before the vehicle hurtled out over the cliff edge, Kim remembered the last words his father had spoken to him on that night long ago in Saigon when he had flung the ten-piastre note contemptuously in his face. “. . . In the end, Kim, if Bolshevism succeeds you’ll bring down ruination on your country, your family — and yourself. . 

The car spun in the air and fell a hundred feet before it struck a projecting spur of rock and exploded. It bounced against the cliff face again lower down then sprang outwards, showering debris and burning petrol in all directions before the turbulent waters of the Red River finally swallowed it up and quenched the angry flames. 

Three days later at the old manor house in a fold of the South Downs, Joseph was woken from a troubled sleep at three AM, by the ringing of his bedside telephone. When he lifted the receiver he recognized Naomi’s excited voice at once but had difficulty understanding her on the poor line.