15
Siege Town
When you leave Hong Kong, it ceases to exist. When you have passed the last Chinese policeman in British ammunition boots and puttees, and held your breath as you race sixty feet above the roofs of the grey slums, when the out-islands have dwindled into the blue mist, you know that the curtain has been rung down, the props cleared away, and the life you lived there was all illusion. But this time for once, Jerry couldn’t rise to that feeling: he carried the memory of the dead Frost and the live girl with him, and they were still beside him as he reached Bangkok.
As usual it took him all day to find what he was looking for; as usual he was about to give up. In Bangkok, in Jerry’s view, that happened to everyone: a tourist looking for a wat, a journalist for a story—or Jerry for Ricardo’s friend and partner Charlie Marshall—your prize sits down the far end of some damned alley, jammed between a silted klong and a pile of concrete trash, and it costs you five dollars U.S. more than you expected. Also, though this was theoretically Bangkok’s dry season, Jerry could not remember ever being here except in rain, which cascaded in unheralded bursts from the polluted, burning sky. Afterwards people always told him he got the one wet day. He started at the airport, because he was already there and because he reasoned that in the South East no one can fly for long without flying through Bangkok. Charlie wasn’t around any more, they said; someone even assured him Charlie had stopped being a pilot after Ric died. Someone else said he was in jail, someone else again that he was most likely in “one of the dens.” A ravishing Air Vietnam hostess said with a giggle that he was making freight hops to Saigon; she only ever saw him in Saigon.
“Out of where?” Jerry asked.
“Maybe Phnom Penh, maybe Vientiane,” she said—but Charlie’s destination, she insisted, was always Saigon and he never hit Bangkok. Jerry checked the telephone directory and there was no Indocharter listed. On an off chance he looked up Marshall too, discovered one—even a Marshall, C.—called him, but found himself talking not to the son of a Kuomintang war-lord who had christened himself with high military rank but to a puzzled Scottish trader who kept saying, “Listen, but do come round.”
He went to the jail where the farangs are locked up when they can’t pay or have been rude to a general, and checked the record. He walked along the balconies and peered through the cage doors and spoke to a couple of crazed hippies. But while they had a good deal to say about being locked up, they hadn’t seen Charlie Marshall and they hadn’t heard of him, and to put it delicately they didn’t care about him either. In a black mood he drove to the so-called sanatorium where addicts enjoy their cold turkey, and there was great excitement because a man in a strait-jacket had succeeded in putting his own eyes out with his fingers, but it wasn’t Charlie Marshall, and no, they had no pilots, no Corsicans, no Corsican Chinese, and certainly no son of a Kuomintang general.
So Jerry started on the hotels where pilots might hang out in transit. He didn’t like the work, because it was deadening and, more particularly, he knew that Ko had a big outfit here. He had no serious doubt that Frost had blown him; he knew that most rich overseas Chinese legitimately run several passports and the Swatownese more than several; he knew that Ko had a Thai passport in his pocket and probably a couple of Thai generals as well. And he knew that when they were cross the Thais killed a great deal sooner and more thoroughly than almost everyone else, even though when they condemned a man to the firing-squad, they shot him through a stretched bed sheet in order not to offend the laws of the Lord Buddha. For that reason among a good few others, Jerry felt less than comfortable shouting Charlie Marshall’s name all over the big hotels.
He tried the Erawan, the Hyatt, the Miramar, and the Oriental and about thirty others, and at the Erawan he trod specially lightly, remembering that China Airsea had a suite there and Craw said Ko used it often. He formed a picture of Lizzie with her blond hair, playing hostess for him or stretched out at the poolside sunning her long body while the tycoons sipped their Scotches and wondered how much would buy an hour of her time.
While he rode round, a sudden rainstorm pelted fat drops so foul with soot that they blackened the gold of the street temples. The taxi-driver aquaplaned on the flooded roads, missing the water-buffaloes by inches, the garish buses jingled and charged at them, blood-stained Kung Fu posters screamed at them; but Marshall—Charlie Marshall—Captain Marshall—was not a name to anyone, though Jerry dispensed coffee money liberally. Charlie’s got a girl, thought Jerry. He’s got a girl and uses her place, just as I would.
At the Oriental he tipped the porter and arranged to collect messages and use the telephone, and best of all he obtained a receipt for two nights’ lodging with which to taunt Stubbs. But his trail round the hotels had scared him, he felt exposed and at risk, so to sleep, for a dollar a night, he took a prepaid room in a nameless backstreet doss-house where the formalities of registration were dispensed with: a place like a row of beach huts, with all the room doors opening straight on to the pavement in order to make fornication easier, and open garages with plastic curtains that screened the number of your car.
By the evening he was reduced to stomping the air-freight agencies, asking about a firm called Indocharter, though he wasn’t too keen to do that either, and he was seriously wondering whether to believe the Air Vietnam hostess and take up the trail in Saigon, when a Chinese girl in one of the agencies said, “Indocharter? That’s Captain Marshall’s line.”
She directed him to a bookshop where Charlie Marshall bought his literature and collected his mail whenever he was in town. The shop was also run by Chinese, and when Jerry mentioned Marshall the old proprietor burst out laughing and said Charlie hadn’t been in for months. The old man was very small, with false teeth that grimaced.
“He owe you money? Charlie Marshall owe you money, clash a plane for you?” He once more hooted with laughter and Jerry joined in.
“Super. Great. Listen, what do you do with all the mail when he doesn’t come here? Do you send it on?”
Charlie Marshall, he didn’t get no mail, the old man said.
“Ah, but, sport, if a letter comes tomorrow, where will you send it?”
To Phnom Penh, the old man said, pocketing his five dollars, and fished a scrap of paper from his desk so that Jerry could copy down the address.
“Maybe I should buy him a book,” said Jerry, looking round. “What does he like?”
“Flench,” the old man said automatically and, taking Jerry upstairs, showed him his sanctum for round-eye culture: for the English, pornography printed in Brussels; for the French, row after row of tattered classics—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hugo. Jerry bought a copy of Candide and slipped it into his pocket. Visitors to this room were ex officio celebrities apparently, for the old man produced a visitor’s book and Jerry signed it: “J. Westerby, newshound.” The comments column was played for laughs, so he wrote, “A most distinguished emporium.”
Then he looked back through the pages and asked, “Charlie Marshall sign here too, sport?”
The old man showed him Charlie Marshall’s signature a couple of times—“Address: here,” he had written.
“How about his friend?”
“Flend?”
“Captain Ricardo.”
At this the old man grew very solemn and gently took away the book.
He went round to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club at the Oriental, and it was empty except for a troop of Japanese who had just returned from Cambodia. They told him the state of play there as of yesterday, and he got a little drunk. And as he was leaving, to his momentary horror, the dwarf appeared, in town for consultation with the local bureau. He had a Thai boy in tow, which made him particularly pert. “Why, Westerby! But how’s the Secret Service today?” He played this joke on pretty well everyone, but it didn’t improve Jerry’s peace of mind.
At the doss-house he drank a lot more Scotch but the exertions of his fellow guests kept him awake. Finally, in self-defence he wen
t out and found himself a girl, a soft little creature from a bar up the road, but when he lay alone his thoughts once more homed on Lizzie: like it or not, she was his bed companion.
How much was she consciously involved with them? he wondered. Did she know what she was playing with when she set Jerry up for Tiu? Did she know what Drake’s boys had done to Frost? Did she know they might do it to Jerry? It even entered his mind that she had been there while they did it, and that thought appalled him. No question: Frost’s body was still very fresh in his memory. It was one of the worst.
By two in the morning he decided he was going to have a bout of fever, he was sweating and turning so much. Once, he heard sounds of soft footsteps inside the room and flung himself into a corner, clutching a teak table-lamp ripped from its socket. At four he was woken by that amazing Asian hubbub: pig-like hawking sounds, bells, cries of old men in extremis, the crowing of a thousand roosters echoing in the tile and concrete corridors. He fought with the broken plumbing and began the laborious business of getting clean from a thin trickle of cold water. At five the radio was turned on full blast to get him out of bed, and a whine of Asian music announced that the day had begun in earnest. By then he had shaved as if it were his wedding day, and at eight he cabled his plans to the comic for the Circus to intercept.
At eleven he caught the plane to Phnom Penh. As he climbed aboard the Air Cambodge Caravelle, the ground hostess turned her lovely face to him and, in her best lilting English, melodiously wished him a “nice fright.”
“Thanks. Yes. Super,” he said, and chose the seat over the wing where you stood the best chance. As they slowly took off, he saw a group of fat Thais playing lousy golf on perfect links just beside the runway.
There were eight names on the flight manifest when Jerry read it at the check-in, but only one other passenger boarded the plane, a black-clad American boy with a brief-case. The rest was cargo, stacked aft in brown gunny bags and rush boxes. A siege plane, Jerry thought automatically. You fly in with the goods, you fly out with the lucky. The stewardess offered him an old Jours de France and a barley sugar. He read the Jours de France to put some French back into his mind, then remembered Candide and read that. He had brought the book-bag, and in the book-bag he had Conrad. In Phnom Penh he always read Conrad; it tickled him to remind himself he was sitting in the last of the true Conrad river ports.
To land, they flew in high, then pancaked in a tight uneasy spiral to avoid random small-arms fire from the jungle. There was no ground control, but Jerry hadn’t expected any. The stewardess didn’t know how close the Khmer Rouge were to the town, but the Japanese had said fifteen kilometres on all fronts and less where there were no roads. The Japanese had said the airport was under fire but only from rockets and sporadically. No 105s. Not yet, but there’s always a beginning, thought Jerry.
Then olive earth leapt at them and Jerry saw bomb craters spattered like egg-spots, and the yellow lines from the tyre tracks of the convoys. As they landed feather-light on the pitted runway, the inevitable naked brown children splashed contentedly in a mud-filled crater.
He stepped on to the tarmac and as the heat hit him with a slap, so did the roar of transport planes taking off and landing. Yet for all that, he had the illusion of arriving on a calm summer’s day: for in Phnom Penh, like nowhere else Jerry had ever been, war took place in an atmosphere of peace. He remembered the last time he was here, before the bombing halt. A group of Air France passengers bound for Tokyo had been dawdling curiously on the apron, not realising they had landed in a battle. No one told them to take cover, no one was with them. F-4s and 111s were screaming over the airfield, there was shooting from the perimeter, Air America choppers were landing the dead in nets like frightful catches from some red sea, and a Boeing 707, in order to take off, had to crawl across the entire airfield, running the gauntlet in slow motion. Spellbound, Jerry had watched her lollop out of range of the ground fire, and all the way he had waited for the thump that would tell him she had been hit in the tail. But she had kept going as if the innocent were immune, and disappeared into the untroubled horizon.
Now ironically, with the end so close, he noticed that the accent was on the cargo of survival. On the farther side of the airfield huge chartered all-silver American transport planes, 707s and four-engined turbo-prop C-130s marked “Trans World,” “Bird Airways,” or not marked at all, were landing and taking off in a clumsy, dangerous shuttle as they brought the ammunition and rice in from Thailand and Saigon. On his hasty walk to the terminal Jerry saw two landings, and each time held his breath waiting for the late back-charge of the jets as they fought and shivered to a halt inside the revêtement of earth-filled ammunition boxes at the soft end of the landing-strip. Even before they stopped, flight handlers in flack-jackets and helmets had converged like unarmed platoons to wrest their precious sacks from the holds.
Yet even these bad omens could not destroy his pleasure at being back.
“Vous restez combien de temps, Monsieur?” the immigration officer enquired.
“Toujours, sport,” said Jerry. “Long as you’ll have me. Longer.” He thought of asking after Charlie Marshall then and there, but the airport was stiff with police and spooks of every sort, and as long as he didn’t know what he was up against it seemed wise not to advertise his interest. There was a colourful array of old aircraft with new insignia, but he couldn’t see any belonging to Indocharter, whose registered markings, Craw had told him at the valedictory briefing just before he left Hong Kong, were believed to be Ko’s racing colours: sea grey and sky blue.
He took a taxi and rode in front, gently declining the driver’s courteous offers of girls, shows, clubs, boys. The flamboyants made a luscious arcade of orange against the slate monsoon sky. He stopped at a haberdasher to change money au cours flexible, a term he loved. The money-changers used to be Chinese, Jerry remembered. This one was Indian: the Chinese get out early, but the Indians stay to pick the carcass. Shanty towns lay left and right of the road. Refugees crouched everywhere, cooking, dozing in silent groups. A ring of small children sat passing round a cigarette.
“Nous sommes un village avec une population des millions,” said the driver in his schoolroom French.
An army convoy drove at them, headlights on, sticking to the centre of the road. The taxi-driver obediently pulled into the dirt. An ambulance brought up the rear, both doors open. The bodies were stacked feet outward, legs like pigs’ trotters, marbled and bruised. Dead or alive, it scarcely mattered. They passed a cluster of stilt houses smashed by rockets, and entered a provincial French square: a restaurant, an épicerie, a charcuterie, advertisements for Byrrh and Coca-Cola. On the curb, children squatted, watching over litre winebottles filled with stolen petrol. Jerry remembered that too: that was what had happened in the shellings. The shells touched off the petrol and the result was a blood-bath. It would happen again this time. Nobody learned anything, nothing changed, the offal was cleared away by morning.
“Stop!” said Jerry and on the spur of the moment handed the driver the piece of paper on which he had written down the Bangkok bookshop’s address for Charlie Marshall. He had imagined he should creep up on the place at dead of night, but in the sunlight there seemed no point any more.
“Y aller?” the driver asked, turning to look at him in surprise.
“That’s it, sport.”
“Vous connaissez cette maison?”
“Chum of mine.”
“A vous? Un ami à vous?”
“Press,” said Jerry, which explains any lunacy.
The driver shrugged and pointed the car down a long boulevard, past the French cathedral, into a mud road lined with courtyard villas which became quickly dingier as they approached the edge of town. Twice Jerry asked the driver what was special about the address, but the driver had lost his charm and shrugged away the questions. When they stopped, he insisted on being paid off, and drove away racing the gear changes in rebuke.
It was just another villa,
the lower half hidden behind a wall pierced with a wrought-iron gate. Jerry pushed the bell and heard nothing. When he tried to force the gate, it wouldn’t move. He heard a window slam and thought, as he looked quickly up, that he saw a brown face slip away behind the mosquito wire. Then the gate buzzed and yielded, and he walked up a few steps to a tiled verandah and another door, this one of solid teak with a tiny shaded grille for looking out but not in. He waited, then hammered heavily on the knocker, and heard the echoes bounding all over the house. The door was double, with a join at the centre. Pressing his face to the gap, he saw a strip of tiled floor and two steps, presumably the last two steps of a staircase. On the lower of these stood two smooth brown feet, naked, and two bare shins, but he saw no farther than the knees.
“Hullo!” he yelled, still at the gap. “Bonjour! Hullo!” And when the legs still did not move: “Je suis un ami de Charlie Marshall! Madame, Monsieur, je suis un ami anglais de Charlie Marshall! Je veux lui parler.”
He took out a five-dollar bill and shoved it through the gap but nothing happened, so he took it back and instead tore a piece of paper from his notebook. He headed his message “To Captain C. Marshall” and introduced himself by name as “a British journalist with a proposal to our mutual interest,” and gave the address of his hotel. Threading this note also through the gap, he looked for the brown legs again but they had vanished, so he walked till he found a cyclo, then rode in the cyclo till he found a cab: and no, thank you, no, thank you, he didn’t want a girl—except that, as usual, he did.
The hotel used to be the Royal. Now it was Le Phnom. A flag was flying from the mast-head, but its grandeur already looked desperate. Signing himself in, he saw living flesh basking round the courtyard pool and once more thought of Lizzie. For the girls, this was the hard school, and if she’d carried little packets for Ricardo, then ten to one she’d been through it. The prettiest belonged to the richest, and the richest were Phnom Penh’s Rotarian crooks: the gold and rubber smugglers, the police chiefs, the big-fisted Corsicans who made neat deals with the Khmer Rouge in mid-battle.
Karla Trilogy Digital Collection Featuring George Smiley : Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley###s People (9781101570852) Page 75