‘Right. I only bet that much on surefire certainties.’
Ryan hesitated. ‘A hundred bucks I get to kiss her.’
‘I have to see it,’ Prescott said.
‘You’re on,’ Ryan said, and ran straight back out of the door, leaping over Cochrane, who was still prone on the floor, shouting for someone to come and rescue him.
Crosby winked at Webb. ‘How about a little bet on the side? Ten bucks he makes it.’
* * *
A wall of traffic, ancient blue and white Peugeot taxis and whining two-stroke Honda motorcycles turning the air a sulphurous grey. Ryan signalled to a siclo driver in the heart of this chaos who nonchalantly turned in front of an ARVN jeep to make sure he got his fare.
Ryan heard laughter from the balcony above him. ‘Follow that siclo!’ Prescott shouted.
‘Ignore them,’ Ryan said, jumping onto the cracked leather seat. ‘Just pedal.’ He pointed to the road. ‘Di, di mau!’
The siclo driver, whose name was Dinh, stood on the pedals and pulled back into the traffic. Ryan heard a screech of brakes, someone punching a car horn. He flinched but kept his eyes on the road ahead. No plan suggested itself. On what pretext could he persuade the girl to return to the Hashish Hilton with him? Perhaps tell her someone had left a baby on their doorstep? Perhaps she might know of an orphanage where the child would be well cared for? She would be suspicious, of course, but he knew what Catholics were like; couldn’t help themselves, these god botherers. When they got back to the villa, a quick wave to ensure Prescott was watching, a peck on her unsuspecting cheek, then inside to collect his money. Another glorious episode in the legend of Sean Ryan.
First he had to catch up with her.
He caught a glimpse of a white habit as a siclo turned at the traffic lights on Hai Ba Trung. In front of them trucks and taxis were snarled for a hundred metres.
Ryan turned around in his seat. ‘Di mau!' he repeated, and Dinh bobbed his head, grinning from under his pith helmet, not understanding. Another crazy American.
The left side of the boulevard was clear, the oncoming traffic stopped by the upraised hand of a traffic cop.
Ryan jumped out. ‘Get in the front!’ he shouted. He pulled Dinh off his seat and pushed him into the passenger seat. ‘I’ll drive. Get in!’
* * *
Dinh giggled, embarrassed by this reversal of the natural order. He hoped he would still get his fare and said so. Ryan pushed a handful of notes at him and climbed on the bicycle seat. Dinh sat down in the cab to count his money.
Ryan stood on the pedals, pulled on to the other side of the boulevard and raced towards the intersection. People on the sidewalk stopped and stared.
There was a solid wall of traffic heading straight for him.
Holy Christ.
Dinh started screaming.
‘Hold on!’ Ryan shouted.
Ten yards to the intersection.
They were on collision course with a green ARVN truck. Ryan pedaled harder. It didn’t look like they were going to make it.
The siclo did not have handlebars; there was a chrome-plated bar behind the passenger cab that controlled the steering. Ryan heaved it to the left as hard as he could. The machine mounted the kerb and bounced. Dinh decided it was time to bail out. As he jumped, Ryan lost control completely and the siclo skidded into a plane tree.
Ryan found himself lying on his back, staring at the sky.
A crowd had gathered. Amahs in their black tunics, other siclo drivers, some crewcut American servicemen. Dinh was shouting at Ryan in Vietnamese and pointing at his machine, which now lay on its side on the footpath, one wheel buckled, the footrest mangled. Two White Mice - Vietnamese military police - were on their way over.
‘Look what this big stupid monkey has done to my siclo!’ Dinh shouted at the crowd. ‘This is my rice bowl, my livelihood!’
Ryan got to his feet. He was bleeding. Not for the first time in this flaming country, he thought. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a roll of banknotes.
‘Why did you let the khi dot - the big monkey - drive your siclo?’ someone said. ‘It’s your fault.’
Ryan offered Dinh a handful of banknotes. ‘Here, take this. Is this enough?’
Dinh took the money. More than enough. But then he pretended to cry. Ryan pushed some more paper money into his shirt.
‘There’s enough there for a new television,’ someone said.
‘See if the big monkey will give you the rest of his money,’ an old amah said.
The crowd were pressing in, everyone screaming now, the Vietnamese police watching, their thumbs tucked into their belts. ‘Bugger it, take the lot,’ he said, and threw the rest of his money at Dinh and walked away.
‘No wonder they can’t beat the Viet Cong,’ Dinh said to the crowd. ‘They can’t even drive a siclo!’
* * *
Crosby looked up. ‘Jesus. What happened to you?’
‘You’re bleeding,’ Prescott said.
Ryan stepped over Cochrane and examined his reflection in the shaving mirror beside the bed. His face was streaked with dried blood, and so were all the pineapples on his Hawaiian shirt. His Rolex Oyster Perpetual was cracked and there was a lot of skin missing off his left arm.
‘What happened to you?’ O’Leary said.
‘Her husband came home,’ Ryan said. He noticed Webb for the first time, and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Sean Ryan,’ he said, holding out his hand.
‘Hugh Webb.’
‘You must be the fresh meat. Welcome to Saigon, mate. Land of wars, whores and PX stores.’
A trickle of blood made its way down Ryan’s cheek. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘I’ll be okay. But let this be a lesson to you, mate. Never mess around with a bride of Christ. God keeps score.’
* * *
The Mini Moke belonged to Crosby. It had five bullet holes in the coachwork from the battle of Saigon two years before. Ryan commandeered it whenever Crosby was in-country, an arrangement that Crosby went along with on the understanding that he could use Ryan’s air-conditioned top-floor room whenever he was out of town.
Ryan turned off the Tran Hung Dao into the cluttered back streets of Cholon. The air smelled of ripe fruit, incense, sewage and diesel. He braked to avoid an old woman chasing a duck and a knot of high-school girls in white silk ao dai.
He maneuvered the Moke down a narrow alleyway and stopped outside a high wall topped with razor wire. He grabbed two large cardboard boxes from the back seat. There was a rotting mahogany door set in the wall. He hammered three times with his fist.
The young woman who opened the door was Eurasian. She wore a white habit and a silver crucifix. A rosary hung from her belt. She was exquisitely beautiful.
Ryan stared. It was the novice he had been chasing the day before. Here was a stroke of luck. But where was Soeur Marie, the old Vietnamese who usually attended the door?
‘Oui, monsieur?’ she said softly.
‘I brought some presents for the children.’
‘Entrez.’
He followed her across the courtyard, watching the sway of her hips beneath the ao dai. The Virgin watched frowning from an alcove in the orphanage wall.
He heard a piano playing from a shuttered loggia window and children’s voices singing: ‘Good King Wenceslas’.
Where a snow lay roun’ abou, dee’ and cris' and even . ..
She led him into a sitting room. It was dark inside, and cooler, and smelled of must. A broken fan laboured overhead.
He placed the two boxes on a low mahogany table.
‘S’il vous plait,’ she said, and indicated two threadbare armchairs. He sat down. She remained standing.
‘The name’s Sean.’
‘Oui, je sais. The ... canonesse … tell me of you. Je m’appelle Soeur Odile.’
There was an awkward silence. He realized she was waiting for him to open the boxes. He took the Swiss army knife from his belt and cut thr
ough the string. Odile reached in: Carnation milk, Colgate toothpaste, some tinned fruit, a single packet of Park Lane filtered cigarettes.
‘The smokes are for your boss,’ he said.
She looked shocked.
‘La canonesse?’
‘We all have our vices. As the bishop said to the ...’ His voice trailed off.
Soeur Odile returned the cigarettes to the box and he tore open the second container.
‘Medicines in there. Stole them from the hospital at Long Binh.’
‘You steal?’
‘Borrowed.’
‘Vous êtes un voleur? It is … sin to steal. ’
‘The Americans have got plenty of everything and these kids don’t have much of anything.’
She picked up a tin of pears. ‘You steal …?’
‘No, that’s bought and paid for at the PX.’
‘Soeur Marie … she say you come . . . every week. Vous êtes très gentil.’
Ryan stood up. ‘Better shoot through, I suppose.’
‘You would like … some tea?’
He thought about Prescott and the three hundred dollars. ‘Yeah, all right. That’d be good.’
She smiled at him for the first time. In another place, from another kind of woman, he would have interpreted it differently. ‘Wait ... please.’
She went out. Ryan looked around. A pale lizard, the color of alabaster, watched him from the wall, then darted for cover into an alcove, behind another statue of the Virgin. Ryan felt uncomfortable. It reminded of his local church in Brisbane. He had been an altar boy then and he and a friend, Choko, had got drunk on the holy wine. The priest threw them out and he hadn’t been back in a church since.
The blessed Virgin was watching him. ‘What are you doing in here, Ryan?’
‘Just having a cup of tea, Mother.’
‘If you think you’re going to seduce one of my nuns, you can just forget it right now.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Pardon, monsieur?'
He looked around. She was standing in the doorway holding a tray with two china teacups and a silver teapot. ‘Just singing to myself,’ he said. ‘A hymn.’
She set the tray down on the table and knelt to prepare the tea. She poured it black, adding a slice of lemon, and handed it to him.
‘Thanks.’
She poured tea for herself and sat in the room’s only other armchair. A silverfish darted for cover between the cushions. ‘Vous êtes Americain?’
‘Christ, no! Australian.’
‘Australia,’ she repeated slowly, as if it were the name of an exotic fruit. ‘You are journalist?’
‘Photographer.’
There was a silence.
‘Your English is very good,’ he said.
‘My English is terrible. I am bad student.’
‘You’re not … Vietnamese?’
‘Ma mêre … my mother … is from Dalat. My father is French soldier. He is killed at Dien Bien Phu.’
‘I see.’
‘I do not see my family very long time. My mother … tu comprends … she cannot go back …’
He noted she had switched from ‘vous’ to ‘tu.’ Well, that was progress.
‘Where is your mother now?’ he asked her.
‘Elle est mort. Rocket.’
Ryan sipped his tea. He did not want to know whether the rocket was North Vietnamese or American.
‘What happen?’ she said, pointing at the plaster on his forehead and the grazes down his arm, now painted with mercurochrome. ‘Tu est blessé … taking photograph?’
Ryan nodded. ‘Viet Cong,’ he said. ‘My mate was wounded and I had to run out into the open to get him and drag him to safety.’ It had been a long time since he had felt nervous with a woman, not since he was fourteen. But then this wasn’t a woman, this was a nun. He had been schooled by nuns; all he remembered was rosaries and raps across the knuckles with a ruler.
None of the nuns had looked like this. If they had, perhaps he’d still go to church. Perhaps.
‘When your old mum died … is that why you became a nun?’
She blushed and looked away.
‘It’s just that... well ... you’re very beautiful.’
Soeur Odile put her teacup on the table. It rattled in its saucer.
Ryan felt the blesséd Virgin staring at him. Her expression was not pleasant.
‘You must not … say like this, monsieur.’
‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.’
She touched the crucifix at her breast, murmured something in French. A prayer perhaps. Deliver us from evil.
‘I’d better go,’ he said. He put his teacup on the table and stood up. Soeur Odile sat quite still, staring at her hands. ‘Next time you better send Souer Marie to open the door,’ he said. ‘Then I can’t get into any trouble.’
He hesitated at the door. He wished he had his camera, to capture her then: the diaphanous shimmer of white, a chevron of light through the window, dust drifting, her almond eyes, the glint of silver on the crucifix, the soft parting of her lips, the Madonna in her alcove. He said goodbye and shut the door, and the moment was gone.
* * *
‘If you’re going to get hit, don’t get hit in the gut,’ Ryan was telling Webb. ‘I’ve seen guys with belly wounds and it’s not pretty.’
‘Second to belly wounds is chest wounds,’ Cochrane said. ‘Chest wounds suck.’
They all smiled at that, except Webb, who didn’t get it.
‘Remember,’ Crosby said, ‘you can never live as long as one day in Vietnam. A hundred years isn’t as long as one night in the boonies.’
The fear Webb had woken to that morning had now settled like cold fat in his stomach. He had tried to hide it from the others, but they knew. Cochrane was the first to remark on it. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said. ‘That’s the difference between us and a grunt. We can go home any time we want.’
‘What it comes down to, is being scared is better than being bored,’ Ryan said. ‘It can get addictive. Fear, I mean. It’s like smoking. You know it’s no good for you but once you’re hooked you can’t stop.’
It was six thirty in the morning and they were eating breakfast - croissants, café au lait - at the Shelf, as residents referred to the terrace of the Continental Hotel in downtown Saigon. The Shelf was the place to see and be seen; it overlooked the main square, the former opera house - now the National Assembly - and the War Memorial, a grotesque cement statue that some cynics said looked like an American soldier pushing a South Vietnamese into battle. The terrace was separated from the footpath and the phalanx of bicycles and mopeds in the square by long cement flower boxes littered with cigarette butts.
There were four of them: Webb, Ryan, Cochrane and Crosby, all dressed in green combat fatigues, their flak jackets and steel helmets under their seats. They each coveted their personal style, but they didn’t take non-conformity into battle. If you looked different from the soldiers they went in-country with, Crosby said, you risked being targeted by the VC - or shot at by the Americans themselves.
They often went on assignments together, Ryan added, it was insurance: if something went wrong, you needed a buddy to make sure you got back again. Today he was going out on patrol in War Zone D with the 173rd Airborne. He invited Webb along ‘for the ride’. It would be Webb’s first time in the boonies.
He now had his press accreditation from the US Military Assistance Command Vietnam - MacVee. All that was required for that was letters from two organizations saying they would buy his dispatches. Webb had one a newspaper in Surrey where he had worked as a cadet, and O’Leary had arranged another from AP - the agency would give anyone a letter, along with a camera, film and a light meter and fifteen for any shot they used. Vietnam was a war anyone could join.
Ryan helped him buy his ‘Saigon jacket’ from the Indian tailors on Tu Do. It had a white label with his name, and Bao Chi - ‘journalist’ - sewn to the left b
reast. He also showed him how to paint the chrome on his M-3 Leica camera with green army paint so the metal would not reflect the sunlight and create a target for snipers. He took him to the American press briefings at the Rex Theatre at five o’clock each afternoon - the ‘Five O’clock Follies’, the Jive at Five. ‘An “enemy base camp in an inhabited area” - that’s a village. “Enemy troop concentration.” That’s two or more VC suspects running through a rice paddy. You’ll soon pick it up, son.’
Transport around the battlefields and even field rations were free, courtesy of the US Army, and if he was willing to gamble his legs or his life he could be famous, if not rich, overnight. Vietnam was the fast track, if you could stay alive.
If.
Webb was terrified, but he had gone too far to pull out now.
Cochrane finished his coffee. ‘Do you want your roll?’ he asked Webb.
‘I’m not that hungry.’
Cochrane snatched the croissant and started to butter it. ‘First we check the word on the street, make sure there’s nothing we want to miss, like another Tet or an army coup, something like that. Then we get a taxi out to Tan Son Nhut. Me and Dave are heading down the Delta - there’s been some action at Can Tho. From there we’ll leave you in the capable hands of Deathwish here.’
‘Deathwish?’ Webb said.
Ryan shrugged. ‘Everyone has to have a nickname.’
Crosby grinned and pointed to the MacVee ID tag around Webb’s neck. ‘Guard that well, boy,’ he said. ‘It’s your passport to hell.’
Chapter 3
War Zone ‘D’
Webb was embarrassed about his boots.
Everyone else’s were caked with dirt and dried red mud. He felt like a fraud. His right leg was shaking and he could do nothing to stop it. He was aware of the rank stink of his own sweat.
The chopper went into a combat dive, a gut-sucking spiral towards the ground. He heard the crew chief’s gravel voice close to his ear. ‘You feel something furry in the back of your throat, boy, you swallow hard, man. It’s your ass.’
War Baby Page 2