‘No. Only American generals are members these days. Why the Cercle?’
‘It’s agreeable, isn’t it?’
‘It’s about the last place here that is. You’re a member, I suppose?’
‘Bien sûr. If I’m late, I’ll leave a message at the gate for them to let you in. All right?’
‘All right.’ The line clicked dead. He looked at his watch. Nearly ten to five. Just time to catch the Five o’Clock Follies, the daily Press conference held just across the square in the reinforced, sandbagged JUSPAO building.
He took a quick shower, savouring with mixed feelings the separate attentions of Mr and Mrs Conquest. The husband probably meant bad news; as for the Cercle, ancient enclave of the Empire French whose select membership had shifted from colons and opium pirates to the American military elite, there were certainly worse spots in Saigon in which to continue the adulterous fieldwork of sleeping his way by proxy towards General Virgil Greene’s Red Alert button.
He went out into the high corridor, past the rows of dark-stained teak doors to the cage-lift with its wrought-iron gates that clanked down the well of a stone staircase. One of the last of the old Saigon hotels to resist the antiseptic onslaught of the New World. Even in the downstairs terraced bar, where fans churned the thick sweet air among the potted palms and marble tables, there were not even any anti-grenade screens because it was thought impossible that the Viet Cong would commit an outrage against a French hotel.
Just outside the lift a voice whispered close to Murray’s ear: ‘M’sieur Wilde?’ He was a thin crooked-cheeked man in a grey shirt and faded blue trousers standing in the shadow of the stairs. Murray recognised one of the hotel boys — the mongrel French word applying in this case to a middle-aged Vietnamese with one blind eye, milky-white like a burnt-out flashbulb, who was usually to be seen lurking about the passages offering to change piastres on the black market. He had solicited Murray on a number of occasions and had always been refused.
Murray said briskly, in French, ‘What do you want?’
‘Someone was asking for you today, M’sieur Wilde. He came twice.’
‘Who was it?’
‘He was an American.’
‘He spoke to you?’
‘Only to reception. He left no message.’ The man stood quite still, fixing Murray with his one narrow black eye; and there was something in his manner, usually so obsequious, that was now assured and faintly sinister.
Murray said: ‘What has this to do with you?’
The man inclined his head a fraction, and even in the poor light Murray thought he detected the gleam of a smile in that one good eye. ‘I notice things, m’sieur. Many things. The American was from the police.’
Murray did not move. He had never thought the Vietnamese — even the humblest of them — a stupid or unsophisticated race; but there was an unexpected authority here that was very unsettling. This man was no friend of Murray’s, and certainly owed him no favours. ‘Why do you tell me this?’
The boy inclined his head a little further, with a tiny shrug — more a movement of the wrists than of the shoulders. ‘I believed it would interest you, M’sieur Wilde.’
‘Thank you.’ For a moment he considered tipping him fifty piastres, but at once thought better of it: the role of common hotel-tout had been dropped entirely, and Murray decided to play along with him. The man’s French had been remarkably good, he reflected, as he crossed the noisy dust-choked square to the JUSPAO building — Joint US Public Affairs Office, set up in what had once been a cinema, its pale stucco walls now covered with a new hide of breeze block, the pavement outside ringed off with drums of solid concrete guarded by helmeted U.S. Marines, their rifles with fixed bayonets resting on their thighs like flagpoles. He flashed his MACV Press card to the Marine at the desk inside, and wound his way through the old cinema foyer which had been divided up into a maze of hardboard partitions, fresh and cold, full of short sleeved men in drip-dry slacks sitting over telephones and the mutter of electric typewriters. He was at the nerve-centre of the Vietnam Public Relations war machine. He shivered a little from the air-conditioning.
The Five o’Clock Follies had already begun and about half the four hundred-odd seats were taken. On the stage stood four maps mounted on blackboards showing the military Corps areas of Vietnam, each with red arrows stuck on to mark the latest offensives, black bombs to mark air-strikes. Today the maps were relatively bare. Any one of those plastic cut-outs could represent tragedy for perhaps hundreds of people — people in some jungle hamlet, Mid-West town, tenement in Watts, a WASP family in Calvary, Georgia. Otherwise it looked like a dull day.
Murray collected the stapled Xerox handout, listing all operations conducted during the last twenty-four hours in the Republic of South Vietnam, and took his seat near the back, while an elderly bespectacled colonel ran through the items. Below him sat a stenographer and a young Negro working a tape-recorder for posterity.
The colonel was giving details of Operation Openhand, a Civic Action effort to assist the Montagnard tribesmen in the Central Highlands with the problems of hygiene and medicare. ‘U.S. interpreters have been dispatched into the area to facilitate co-ordination with the local PAT’s — Pacification Action Teams,’ the colonel intoned, as a hand shot up from one of the front rows of reporters and an adenoid voice cried: ‘Hey Chuck, are these interpreters bilingual?’
The colonel paused. ‘I’ll check that out, Jo,’ he said, beginning to turn to the wings of the stage, then frowning as laughter rippled down the hall. ‘They are qualified interpreters, Jo,’ he said steadily, referring back to the Xerox sheet in his hand.
A moment later another hand went up. ‘Chuck,
