‘Ah!’ He spoke with the towel still wrapped across his face like a mummy. ‘Yet another indiscreet question, my dear Murray! When the hostess comes round, we’ll have a bottle of champagne.’
PART 7: DATE AT THE ‘CERCLE’
CHAPTER 1
Murray lay on the bed behind closed shutters, feeling the draught from the fan flutter against his body every three seconds, regular as a metronome. He lay with nerves taut, alert to every sound from outside: roar and jangle of the square, jeeps, trucks, baby-taxis, bicycle bells, rasping whine of motor scooters, boom of ships from the crowded river.
A quiet afternoon in a city at war. The other sounds — the sudden swish of Soviet 122-millimetre rockets from across the river, falling with a crack and shudder of air, followed by the panting of ambulance sirens; or sometimes the dull flashes and steady trembling of the earth as the eight-engined B-52’s released their loads on the jungle north of the city — these sounds would come later, usually with the dark. They would come in time for the cocktail hour when newcomers to Saigon, along with the more boisterous of the foreign Press corps, could watch the display from the bar at the Caravelle Hotel where the windows were taped across to protect them from flying glass and the Tonkinese waiter teased up the martinis with just the right chill and twist of lemon.
God what an awful war, thought Murray. Drab, dirty, dishonest, pitiless ringside war-without-end: a PR man’s war fed on cooked statistics, braced with spurious dogma and monstrous gadgets — all the beastly realities of the field compounded into sterilised logistics, the applied socio-psychology of the Madison Avenue boardroom. Murray hated the war, not out of any moral revulsion, or even intellectual judgment, but because it bored him. It bored him because he could see no respectable conclusion to it. He knew all the arguments, for and against: hawks, doves, hard-nosed pragmatists, soft-bellied liberals, bomb-happy pin-heads who wanted to take out Hanoi and tell world opinion go fly a kite; the anaemic experts who argued a middle course, a phased withdrawal, dissecting the anatomy of Marxism versus Nationalist Communism versus Maoism while the planes whined low and machineguns flicked and flesh was roasted and shredded and the platoon sergeants went in to tot up the ‘body-count’ — taking all the hands and feet and dividing by four, as the wags joked in the Caravelle bar.
But worst of all, the world was now bored with the war. It had become smug with self-righteous indignation, with the tedious long-range censure of international pundits, of little men with big jobs and puppet minds who sat in the United Nations, sounding off against U.S. aggression while they borrowed American money and squandered it; and those respected, comfortable intellectuals — men of letters, poets, professors, leader-writers, stars of stage and screen, mummers and celluloid-snippers who led demos, waving paper Viet Cong flags and braving Mace — who had now wearied of the whole bloody business and moved on to other pastures of protest. Even Uncle Ho’s wispy features had been superseded, as the middle-class revolutionary pin-up, by those of Che Guevara.
The war was not even a bonus any longer for those who covered it. The Press briefings told of new offensives, so many hundred KIA, VC infrastructure penetrated, hamlets secured and re-motivated: all reduced to perhaps two paragraphs of agency reports. For as the war escalated, its news value shrank. The real thing — the blood and mud and grief and trails of homeless people trying to rescue their ducks and rusted bicycles from some ravaged village while their children scrounged peanut butter and cream-crackers from perplexed GI’s — this story had been done, and done again, and news editors were bored too and wanted other angles. The fact that a small medieval country with a peasant economy and an ancient, fragile culture was being pounded and perverted by the richest nation on earth had been thoroughly reported, and accepted, and it had made many people very angry. But those many people were not angry or imaginative enough to realise that this was only part of the story. Murray had also seen some of the mass graves of civilians in Huế — after the Viet Cong had discovered that not all the Vietnamese felt quite as much in sympathy with the Communist cause as the flag-waving, Mace-groggy demonstrators in the world outside. And the Viet Cong had murdered these civilians with their hands behind their backs, burying them in great shallow pits by the River of Perfume. But this had provoked no demonstrations. It was not the Vietnam the world cared to hear about.
Murray had once written a story on the Saigon Zoo where there was a horse in a cage, which was a great attraction with the children. That was the other Vietnam. Like the business of British tracker-dogs that had caused such an outcry back in the House of Commons because Britain was contributing to the wicked Vietnam war effort by selling six hundred Alsatians to the Americans, who had paid gratefully for them and then given them to the Vietnamese Army who had promptly eaten them.
He sat up quickly. The telephone was purring by the bed. A woman’s voice, crisp and American, said, ‘Mr Murray Wilde, Hotel Continental Palace? Tiger exchange here — one moment please. Your party’s on the line.’
Jacqueline Conquest’s voice cut in: ‘Murray — c’est toi?’
‘When did you get here?’
‘Yesterday. We came back suddenly. Maxwell’s been looking for you since last night. Where were you?’
‘Up in Biên Hòa looking at corpses. What does he want?’
‘I don’t know. I want to see you too. Hello! You’re still there?’
‘I’m still here,’ he said, hauling his legs off the bed. ‘Any time?’
‘Tomorrow at 12.30. At the Cercle Sportif — the bar by the swimming pool. Are
