‘I understand.’
Leroy squeezed his shoulder. ‘Always remember the old saying — a man who kills once will kill again.’ His monkey mouth widened, the crows’ feet stretched white round his eyes. ‘And anyway, we’d like to hear something about Cambodia. I hear Sihanouk’s just completed his sixth feature film out there?’
‘That’s right. He plays two parts — hero and villain. The hero’s himself and the villain’s employed by the CIA.’
Leroy chuckled, his manner easy and infectious. ‘Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t get him on our side — maybe teach us to keep the Communists out the gentle way. Well, good luck, Mr Wilde.’
Murray left the chilly JUSPAO building, puzzled and thoughtful. Perhaps Conquest and the civilised Sy Leroy were not the only ones who had reason to be troubled by Pol.
He wondered what Conquest would be doing tomorrow at 12.30.
CHAPTER 2
At just past noon Murray stepped out of the cage-lift, freshly shaved and wearing a tie, crossing the terraced bar to the front steps where a figure insinuated itself beside him: ‘Cyclo-pousse, M’sieur Wilde?’ Murray found himself staring at that dead white eye at his elbow. He nodded, and almost at once a solar-topeed rider had slid to a stop at the pavement.
‘Où allez-vous, m’sieur?’ blind eye whispered behind him.
‘Cercle Sportif,’ Murray said, climbing in under the sun-hood. The sky was a hard blue and the heat fierce, exhausting. He heard the boy chattering in Vietnamese, and this time Murray passed him a 50-piastre note under the hood.
They began to wobble across the square, round the Palladian facade of the defunct State Opera House, up bustling Le Loi Boulevard with the steel shutters coming down for lunch and siesta; past the sandbagged railings of the half-finished Presidential Palace — a great husk of naked concrete and fluted columns standing back behind heavy trees. The blue shade of a French boulevard with the rumble of traffic growing muffled; áo dàis flitting like moths among the shadows. Murray closed his eyes, half-dozing as the knobbly brown legs behind peddled him along, into patches of blinding light, swerving, rocking to a halt for some diesel-belching Army truck.
He wondered how he would greet her, wine her, lunch her, talk her round in circles and lie to her. Because that was the only way unless he confided in her, and whatever else she might say, she was still married to Maxwell Conquest who was good and truly dedicated — who might blink at a million dollars but would not necessarily accept them. Or would he? And would she? Would she believe him? Believe him after the third drink, in bed for the second time? For he knew that the second time, the disavowal of the common hasty one-night stand, was usually a critical manoeuvre. Or had she come to warn him — like Hamish Napper, the one-eyed boy, Conquest himself? he thought, as he shook himself awake, coughing with dust.
They were tearing down the old Saigon, replacing the soft yellow houses with modern blocks of concrete cells where the plumbing was nearly impeccable, but the children lay crammed in bundles down the corridors while tipsy GI’s picked their way over them to be pleasured by their elder sisters who preened themselves in miniskirts and washed themselves in cheap scent.
He looked up and saw it was a quarter to one. The street was low and mean. No sign of trucks, jeeps, those reassuring M.P.’s with their Southern voices and machine-pistols snapped on to automatic. He struggled up and shouted at the driver: ‘Cercle Sportif!’ But the words sounded so hopelessly alien — they carried no meaning. He shouted ‘Stop! Halt!’ — jabbing one leg out of the cab, with the memory of those four journalists who had been gunned down brutally, stupidly while riding in a Mini Moke in just such a meagre little outlying street. He realised that he was also nowhere near the Cercle Sportif. The driver pulled up at last and began jabbering something unintelligible. Murray was trying his best Vietnamese, from Huế, which is rarely understood by the lower classes of Saigon, when the explosion came.
There were two thuds and the shockwaves touched him a moment later with a ripple of air. The driver and the few other people in the street were staring back towards the city centre. A third sound — a strange crumbling growl — reached them now like the rumble of an avalanche. Murray was shouting at the driver: ‘Hotel! Hotel Continental — vite!’
This time the man in the solar topee seemed to pedal very slowly, as though exhausted by the long crawl out of the centre. After a couple more streets Murray gave up. The ambulance sirens were converging in a great animal howl just ahead near the Presidential Palace. American and Vietnamese M.P.’s were flagging down traffic, driving the cyclo-pousses and pedestrians back, as Murray scrambled out and gave the man 500-piastres — the going black market rate for the dollar — but the man still tried to whine and haggle. (Had Murray known then what he was to learn later he would gladly have paid double.) As it was, he called back a Vietnamese obscenity and began running in the general direction of the crowd.
Several Vietnamese police patrols had been set up, their jeeps stuck diagonally across the street,
