Saigon (88 page)

It was while he was pacing back and forth across the dazzling room, fighting down his growing despair that Lat spoke for the first time. He didn’t raise his head or change the attitude of his hunched body and he uttered the words so softly that Joseph wondered at first whether he had imagined hearing them. 

“Even if Tuyet Luong was your daughter, why should I help you?” 

At the sound of his voice, Joseph rushed to squat at Lat’s side. For a long moment he gazed at him, at a loss for words, then he gripped his arm gently. “I was brought here to identify you seven years ago, Lat, don’t you remember? I recognized you at once and you recognized me. But because the paths of our lives had crossed long ago I found I couldn’t speak. You saved me when my plane crashed, and my OSS medic was able to save the life of Ho Chi Minh — we’d been comrades-in-arms together for a while and it’s hard to forget that.” Joseph tightened his grip on the scrawny arm of the silent prisoner. “But that’s all behind us now. Soon you’ll be free, your cause has triumphed. Saigon will be yours within a few hours and I’ve got no way of forcing you to help me. But, Lat, I’m asking you for the sake of a young girl’s life. Trinh’s the daughter of my daughter, Tuyet — and she’s your flesh and blood too!” 

To Joseph’s astonishment the eyes of the Vietnamese moistened and looking directly into Joseph’s face for the first time, he spoke in a racked voice. “Is what you say really true? Are the forces of the people really on the verge of victory today?” 

Joseph nodded anxiously. “Yes, Lat, what I’m telling you is the truth.” 

The ravaged face of the Vietnamese relaxed suddenly and as he turned away again, his mouth opened wide to reveal toothless gums. He sat like this for a long time before Joseph recognized the expression as a smile, but he said nothing more, and in desperation Joseph grabbed his arm again and shook it. “Lat, who can help me find Trinh? You must tell me now!” 

The fixed, half-demented smile did not waver. “Go to 15 Phong Phu, Cholon. There is a Chinese merchant who calls himself Wang. Say there that you’ve spoken with Nguoi Hiem Doc Ran — the Serpent Who Strikes Silently. Say that I command him to help you find my great-niece Dang Thi Trinh.” 

Joseph seized one of Lat’s skeletal hands and held it fast in his own for a moment. Then he rose and ran from the cell. Even after Joseph’s departure Lat continued sitting motionless on the stool, the features of his skull-like head frozen in the same unchanging grimace of triumph. 

The drive to Cholon, although it was only four miles, took Joseph nearly an hour. The evening monsoon storm flooded the streets as he set out, slowing all traffic to a crawl, and the growing number of barbed-wire barricades forced him to halt and turn constantly. The helicopters carrying fleeing Americans Out to the navy armada off the coast were still clattering through the murk overhead, but already the houses and apartments that had belonged to United States personnel were being looted by yelling mobs of Vietnamese. Smashed crockery and furniture thrown from upstairs windows littered the streets through which Joseph drove and he had to swerve frequently to avoid groups of ragged children hauling home stolen refrigerators, washing machines and air-conditioning units; he saw men running from the broken doors of American apartments with armfuls of whisky and champagne while women staggered under the weight of gauze- wrapped sides of meat that they had obviously snatched from abandoned deep-freeze cabinets. Joseph was driving the battered Pontiac that Naomi had rented to transport her camera crew, and several times he had to turn and reverse quickly when police fired in his direction without warning. Some South Vietnamese soldiers were stripping off their uniforms openly in the streets, tossing their rifles aside and running anonymously through the storm in their underpants in search of a hiding place, and he saw others stopping cars and siphoning gasoline from .their tanks while they held the drivers at gunpoint. 

It was dark when Joseph finally located Phong Phu, a narrow unpaved alley that the rain had turned into a sea of mud, and because the strain of the past few days had brought him to the brink of exhaustion he stumbled frequently in the gloom. It took him some time to discover that number 15 was a dingy, two-story villa from which the stucco was peeling, but his knock was answered immediately by a scowling Vietnamese youth who led him wordlessly into a shadowy, candlelit room where the air was heavy with the scent of burning joss sticks. He was left alone there for several minutes before an unsmiling, white-haired Chinese appeared in the doorway. Joseph launched immediately into his story and his listener heard him out impassively, betraying no sign of surprise that he brought instructions from a commander of the Liberation Front who had been held prisoner in solitary confinement for the past eight years. 

“My informant inside the central police station had already advised me of your meeting with the Serpent Who Strikes Silently before your arrival,” the Chinese said in an uninterested voice when Joseph had finished. “I’ve been expecting your visit.” 

“Then you can help me find Dang Thi Trinh?” asked Joseph. 

A mirthless smile parted the lips of the Chinese and he shook his head slowly, as though astounded at Joseph’s stupidity. “Mr. Sherman, you seem to think that Comrade Trinh is the only cadre from Hanoi who’s been infiltrated into Saigon in the past two weeks. I can assure you we’ve brought in many thousands of cadres and civilian commandos during that time.” 

“But you must know where Trinh has been assigned,” protested Joseph, his voice tight with tension. 

There was a flash of gold teeth in the candlelight as the face of the Chinese relaxed into another pitying smile. “Full lists of individual cadres are kept only by local commanders, Mr. Sherman.” 

“Can’t they be contacted to check?” 

The Chinese studied Joseph’s anxious face in silence. “The forces of the National Liberation Army and our northern brothers are on the brink of an historic victory, Mr. Sherman, after thirty years of bloody struggle. The fate of a single female cadre is of little consequence on a night like this 

Joseph gazed helplessly at the Chinese. “But Hiem Doc Ran commanded you to trace her for me.” 

“Hiem Doc Ran can give his command easily — but it can’t easily be carried out. And maybe it can’t be carried out at all before the battle begins.” The Chinese continued to regard Joseph with unblinking eyes, then he nodded. “But I will see what can be done. Wait here please.” 

He left the room as silently as he had entered and descended a long flight of steps at the rear of the building into a cellar. Opening a soundproofed door leading into a tunnel, he passed beneath Phong Phu into a brightly lit underground communications center where half-a-dozen Vietnamese wearing headphones crouched over powerful Russian-made two-way radios, transmitting and receiving a constant stream of messages. The Chinese spoke with the Vietnamese supervising the radio operators for a minute or two, then returned to his own house and mounted the stairs again to the candlelit room where Joseph waited. 

“All unit commanders will be contacted, Mr. Sherman,” he said quietly. “It will take several hours. There are many more important messages to be transmitted and received. Return to your hotel and wait there — you’ll be contacted.” 

“But if it takes several hours it may be too late!” 

“That’s the best that can be done.” The note of finality in the voice of the Chinese made it clear there was no point in putting further questions, and when the scowling youth reappeared a moment later, Joseph followed him out without protest. 

The rain had stopped when Joseph stepped wearily into the muddy lane once more but the noise of rocket and mortar lire was growing louder all around the city. He could see the glow of flames spreading across the sky to the northwest above the airport and the roar of the big evacuation helicopters and their American jet fighter escorts filled the night. As he turned the nose of the Pontiac back towards the Continental, a small Air America helicopter passed overhead unseen, carrying the emaciated prisoner from the cellars of the old French Süreté headquarters whom he had first met almost exactly fifty years before in the gilded throne room of the Emperor Khai Dinh in the Palace of Perfect Concord. Crouched on the floor of the bucking aircraft, Dao Van Lat’s wrists were still manacled and he still wore the same ragged pair of shorts. The hawk-faced security guard who had shown Joseph into the white cell two hours earlier was seated opposite him, dressed now in the anonymous short- sleeved shirt and dark trousers of a Vietnamese civilian, and his lips twisted in a smile as he addressed a second South Vietnamese security man hunched on one of the aircraft’s small seats. “I don’t think our silent prisoner can believe his good fortune,” he said sarcastically. “He can’t believe he’s really being flown to freedom.” 

Lat stared out into the rushing void beyond the open door of the helicopter and said nothing. His eyes were wary and apprehensive and there was no sign of the exultant expression which had lit his ravaged features a few hours before when he learned the war was ending. Shortly after Joseph left the white room, the order to release all three hundred political prisoners in the cells had come through, but Lat’s name had not been among them and he had been taken under close guard to another cell adjoining the rear courtyard. The other prisoners were free without him, and when the evacuation helicopter fluttered down into the courtyard half an hour later his head had been covered with a blanket to prevent recognition and he’d been hustled aboard a moment before it took off again. 

As the aircraft rose above the rooftops, the hawk-faced guard had smiled sourly at him. “There’s no need to worry, comrade,” he said in a mocking tone. “The American CIA provided your special accommodation for the past eight years and they’ve given special instructions about how your imprisonment shall end. Just relax.” 

The night had grown fully dark by the time the helicopter passed over the coast, heading for the brightly lit ships of the Seventh Fleet, and as they came in sight, the guard prodded Lat’s bony shoulder once more and urged him to look out of the open door. “There are the ships, comrade, that will take us to a new life in America. And there below is the South China Sea — the great, wide, free spaces of the sea! That’s much better than the terrible white cell where you’ve lived for eight long years, isn’t it? Won’t you break your silence now and talk to us tell us what you think of all this?” 

The only light inside the helicopter was the pale glow from the instrument panel, but it was sufficient or the guard to see Lat turn his hate-filled gaze on him. From his expression it was clear that he understood what his final fate was to be. 

“I think you’ve guessed what’s coming, comrade, haven’t you?” said the guard softly. “And you’ve probably guessed why. You may not have given anything away, but our American friends have decided you know too much. Many Vietnamese who’ve worked secretly for America are being left behind — and because you know who they are, you must be given the freedom of the seas!” 

Reaching out suddenly, the guard hauled Lat into a crouching position by the open doorway; grasping the waistband of Lat’s ragged shorts, he tore them off. “You won’t need such clothing for swimming, will you, comrade?” 

Lat’s shrunken body, mutilated by his own hand in a frenzy of patriotic fervor forty-five years earlier, teetered on the brink of the black void outside the speeding helicopter, and both guards watched his face intently, waiting for fear to show. But even in the final moments of his life Lat gazed at the darkness ten thousand feet above the ocean with the same blank, stubborn expression of resistance that he had always shown his captors, and when the hawk-faced guard lashed at him with his foot he still did not cry out. For a second or two his hands scrabbled at the door frame, trying instinctively to cling on, then his frail, fleshless body tumbled soundlessly into the black abyss of the night. Turning and twisting slowly like a sycamore leaf in the invisible air currents, he fell without uttering a sound, and the shock of his plunge from ten thousand feet killed him long before the black foaming sea smashed and swallowed his lifeless corpse. 

When he opened the door of his room on his return to the Continental Palace, Joseph had expected to find it empty and he was shocked to find her sitting there, pale and disheveled, waiting for him. As soon as she saw him she rose and flung herself into his arms. Outside the din of a new rocket barrage pulverizing Tan Son Nhut filled the night, and through the windows the crimson streaks of rocket trajectories intercrossed with tracers lit the sky like a fireworks display. 

“For God’s sake, why did you come back?” gasped Joseph, his arms tightening around her. 

“I just couldn’t leave without you.” Naomi buried her face in his shoulder and her voice became muffled. “I couldn’t bear to think .of losing you to Saigon, too. If something awful’s going to happen, I want to be with you.” They clung to one another without speaking, listening to the noise of the war rising to a crescendo outside. “The evacuation was awful,” said Naomi, her head still pressed against his chest. “ARVN soldiers started firing at our bus just down the street from here. They ran alongside banging on the windows and screaming for us to take them with us. The Marines guarding us had to fire over their heads.” She shuddered at the memory. “At Tan Son Nhut the gate guards opened fire at us. Luckily our driver was American. He just put his foot down and crashed through, but a lot of the Vietnamese drivers turned back. Then we had to wait two hours in one of those old American bunkers, and shells were raining down around us all the time. The Air America terminal went up in flames, and when the time came for us to make a dash for it, we had to throw away our bags and my crew lost their equipment and all our film. I got halfway to the helicopter ramp then stopped — I knew I couldn’t bear to arrive back in London without you. All the Vietnamese buses were turning back at the gate by this time because their own troops were firing at them and I ran out and jumped on one. They’re all trying to get into the embassy now.” 

Joseph closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Jesus! Why did it have to end like this?” 

Naomi pulled away from him and poured two glasses of whisky. “It’s the way it’s always been, I suppose, isn’t it? Muddle — well-meaning, well-intentioned muddle.” She shrugged hopelessly and sipped her drink. “Hundreds of Vietnamese employees of your agencies have been abandoned all over town. A lot of them have been waiting hours for helicopters or buses that never come. They’re just standing there, so trusting, looking up at the sky watching for the helicopters, clutching their children and those pathetic little bag 

Seeing her shoulders tremble, Joseph went to her and took her in his arms. 

“The embassy’s like a madhouse. I went there first looking for you. It took me a quarter of an hour to fight my way in. Somebody told me the White House and Kissinger are screaming for the ambassador to wind up the evacuation by midnight. But there are a thousand Vietnamese at least inside the compound and more keep slipping over the walls all the time. The Marines are herding them into groups of sixty and jamming them into the helicopters as fast as they get back from the ships. God only knows how many they’ll have to leave behind 

Her voice broke then, and Joseph held her in silence while they finished their drinks. Outside, the red glow of incendiary fires was lighting the horizon in an arc that he spread right around the city’s northern perimeter from east to west. The Communists were at that moment overrunning Bien Hoa and Long Binh where resistance had finally collapsed, and long columns of their tanks and trucks were beginning to head down Highway One towards the capital. It was just after ten o’clock and the North Vietnamese field commander of the Ho Chi Minh offensive, General Van Tien Dung, was studying the flow of reports with his staff officers in a dugout at Ben Cat thirty miles north of the Continental Palace Hotel. Within two hours he would issue his final order of the war to the fifteen attacking divisions and send them thundering in for the kill. 

“Have you had no news of Trinh at all?” asked Naomi when she had recovered her composure. 

“I’ve done everything I can. I hope to get a message here telling me where she is. I just have to wait.” Joseph’s face was haggard with strain but he tried to smile as he put his hands on her shoulders. “You’d better wait for me inside the embassy. I’ll take you there now. 

A light knock at the door made him turn and he wrenched it open to find one of the Continental’s white-jacketed floor waiters grinning apologetically. “Excuse me, Mr. Sherman, but there’s a Vietnamese downstairs looking for an American 

Joseph rushed past him into the hail before he could finish and ran down the nearest staircase. When he reached the front lobby, however, it was empty, and he halted in bafflement. A moment later the little waiter who had followed him down, panted up behind him. 

“No, no, Mr. Sherman, outside.” He waved frantically towards the front doors and Joseph ran to the entrance. 

On the pavement a large Vietnamese family stood waiting, clutching bags and cases. The mother held a small baby and three other small children clung around her legs. An older boy and girl approached with their father, a thin, anxious-looking man wearing a sweat-stained shirt and baggy trousers. The father immediately seized Joseph’s arm, jabbering hysterically in broken English, and Joseph stared at him and the anonymous faces of his family in bewilderment. 

“You must help us, please ... Please help us. For fifteen years I’ve worked for your country! The Communists will kill us all 

Joseph turned to find the little waiter standing behind him on the steps. “You were mistaken,” he told him in a desperate voice. “I don’t know them.” 

The waiter shook his head violently. “No mistake, Mr. Sherman. They tell me they looking for an American — any American.” 

The mother had seized Joseph’s other arm and she began pleading with him too while the children stared up at him, round- eyed with fright. He tried to free himself but they clung to his clothes with desperate hands. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” gasped Joseph. “You must try the embassy.” he put his hand into his pocket, intending without thinking to give them some dollars. Then he checked himself and began trying to back away into the door of the hotel. The man let go of him suddenly and his expression changed in an instant from pleading to one of contempt. 

“We’ve tried to get into your embassy —- it’s impossible. We waited twelve hours to be collected — but the buses never came His head jerked suddenly and a stream of spittle stained Joseph’s jacket. 

The mother began weeping bitterly, and with one last hate- filled glance over his shoulder, the man shepherded the forlorn little group away from the hotel. Joseph stood watching them, and when Naomi came tip beside him to take his arm, she found him trembling and unable to speak. They stood in the doorway until the family finally disappeared from view around the corner of Lam Son Square. “We’d better get you to the embassy now,” said Joseph thickly, without looking at her. 

Before they left Joseph called the little waiter to him and thrust two one-hundred-dollar bills into his hand. “Go to my room now and wait there until I come back,” he said, speaking slowly and emphatically. “Don’t leave it even if a bomb falls on the hotel. Take down carefully any telephone message which comes for me.” 

The waiter stared in amazement at the banknotes, then nodded quickly and rushed towards the stairs. As they hurried across the cathedral square a hill in the rocket attack on Tan Son Nhut brought an eerie quiet to the city and the shouts of the crowd milling outside the United States Embassy reached them long before they arrived there. In the sky above the flat-roofed Chancery they could see the shadowy bulk of a Cobra helicopter gunship hovering like a basking shark, its machine guns that could fire six thousand rounds a minute trained constantly on the surrounding rooftops and the seething mob below. Occasionally an F-5 jet of the U.S. Navy or Air Force roared overhead, but otherwise Saigon seemed suddenly to be holding its breath in fearful anticipation of the war’s end. 

When they reached the embassy, they found that even on the outer edges of the crowd the mood of the Vietnamese was ugly. As they pushed their way towards the rear gate they were jostled and spat on, and Joseph had to put both arms around Naomi at times to ensure that they weren’t pulled apart. As they neared the high wall they saw that barbed-wire obstacles had been strung along the top and the younger men in the crowd were scrambling up lamp stanchions, trying to climb over the entanglements. One youth who had become caught fast by the front gate was dangling upside down, bleeding profusely, but other Vietnamese ignored him, stretching frantic hands up towards the Marines, waving letters from their American employers or telegrams from relatives abroad. Whenever persistent climbers reached the top of the wall, the Marines were stamping viciously on their fingers with their heavy boots or using the butts of their M-i6 rifles to send them tumbling back into the street, and each time this happened a new roar of anger rose from the crowd. 

A few yards short of the gate an hysterical Vietnamese youth suddenly flourished a long-bladed knife in front of Joseph and seized Naomi by the hair. “Take me with you,” he screamed, “or your wife won’t get in alive.” His eyes were rolling with fear, and Naomi cried out in pain. Gritting his teeth, Joseph jabbed his fist into the youth’s face, and to his relief he staggered and fell, dropping the knife. Breathing heavily from the exertion, Joseph pushed Naomi in front of him, and a Marine, who had been watching them approach, leaned down and dragged her up beside him. Clinging precariously to the top of the gate she turned and looked beseechingly at Joseph as he turned back into the crowd. “Please be careful,” she shouted, “and for God’s sake hurry back!”