The entrance was jammed with cyclo-pousse drivers, curled up in their passenger seats, smoking or asleep. An officer of the Royal Lao Army collected Murray’s card and showed him across an unswept cement floor to the folding doors into the ballroom. The Ambassador and his wife greeted him with rigid smiles, welcoming him aboard the bandwagon of international diplomacy. For while the Cold War might be fought out across the world with propaganda, trade embargos, troop movements, threats and blackmail, here in Laos, under a pair of triple-tiered chandeliers — not all of whose bulbs worked — the conflict was joined over stiff drinks, the bitter ideological platitudes dissolved in preposterous offstage buffoonery. Murray had heard many stories of these diplomatic gatherings in Laos, which rarely ended without some incident. An impeccable Indian member of the Control Commission had once slapped a Pole’s face after an argument about seats on the ICC plane to Hanoi; and after one particularly boisterous do at the Danish Legation a distinguished member of the British Embassy had spent the night on the Chinese Communist chargé-d’affaires’ sofa.
There were about fifty people in the room, half of them in uniform, standing in neat groups according to nationality and rank. Murray calculated that they must be only on their second round of drinks, served tirelessly by tiny men in white mess-jackets and embroidered slippers. It would take at least another hour before international protocol began to collapse. He was on nodding acquaintance with perhaps half a dozen faces; but for the first time in many days he at last felt no need to hurry. The man he had come to meet would make himself known to him in good time.
He helped himself to a drink and began to circulate. The Indians were there in a tight circle — surprisingly large, Sandhurst-built men in white-laundered uniforms, talking solemnly over whiskies and soda. In another corner were the Poles, conspicuous this time for their ungainliness: squat pale men with wide nostrils and slack mouths, their dove-grey uniforms with shelves of épaulettes and silver eagles hanging awkwardly on them, as though fashioned for a more gallant generation.
A resident French journalist, who had attached himself to Murray, began to explain, in the side-of-the-mouth tones of the well-informed, that since the Czechoslovakian crisis the old Polish delegation had been withdrawn, and replaced mostly by Russians or Russian-born Poles. It was not a detail that Murray paid much attention to at the time. He was looking at a predominant group of Americans in the centre of the room. Among them was the girl he had met that afternoon in the Bar des Amis — Mrs Jacqueline Conquest. He recognised her only at a second glance; the floppy camouflage jacket and trousers were replaced with a sheath of tight-fitting deep blue silk, tracing a profile of long legs, high hips, large fine breasts; her hair scooped up from the nape of the neck, making her face seem more slender, her eyes larger, darker, even across half the length of the room.
He began to move towards them. He knew at least one of the men in the group — a pleasant gangling young man called Luke Williams who was in charge of the U.S. Information Bureau — and Murray’s present occupation as an author and freelance journalist afforded him the excuse to introduce himself.
Luke Williams already knew him by reputation, and the build-up he gave him was almost embarrassing. The two other men in the group nodded gravely; but the girl stood by with the same unsmiling calm she had displayed in the bar that afternoon, and something warned Murray that it would be unwise to let on that they had already met. One of the other two was her husband: a slim tight-faced man with a buttoned-down shirt, buttoned-down mouth, and grey arrow-shaped eyes. Murray distrusted him on sight. He noticed that neither he nor his wife were drinking.
The other man was the new head of USAID in Laos, Colonel Buchbinder — muscular and close-cropped with the handshake of a stevedore and horn-rimmed eyes that never shifted nor blinked as he spoke: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Wilde! Sorry I wasn’t here on your last visit but we’re gonna make up for it this time, I’m sure, giving you plenty of opportunity to see our economic assistance programme in action at all levels of national life, getting things really moving in this country —’
The girl’s gaze had fixed on a point somewhere above their heads, beyond the shabby damp-blotched walls — a gaze of total boredom.
‘Luke here will fit you up with our information kit,’ Colonel Buchbinder went on, ‘every detail of our aid effort right up to date. And for any other details you want to know’ — he swivelled his owl’s stare on the tall smiling boy on his left — ‘Luke’s your man!’
Luke Williams beamed back at Murray: ‘Anything I can do to be of help, sir. You know my office, opposite the main Embassy compound?’
Murray thanked him, while
