“Nation shall speak unto nation,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The BBC. Is that not your corporation’s motto?”
“Yes, of course.”
In mid-afternoon, two French reporters landed in a Dakota, and that evening Charlie dined with them and the major in the officers’ mess. The cheese course was interrupted by the sound of shells landing on the airfield outside the window, and the Frenchmen, who knew the situation well, went to investigate this unsuspected enemy firepower. Twenty minutes later they were brought back into the mess by stretcher-bearers. One was dead and one was missing his right foot. Charlie asked the major if he had seen Frank, but apparently he had made off somewhere in Huguette with an Algerian driver he had befriended.
The next day Dien Bien Phu came under attack on all sides, and in the evening came the news that Béatrice was already on the point of falling. The reinforced bunkers, the trenches, the dugouts and the little tin-roofed buildings had collapsed one after another beneath a bombardment that exceeded the direst intelligence estimates. The Vietminh infantry had poured through the rudimentary trench defense system, up the hill and onto the heights. The French commander was dead; almost all the senior officers were dead; it was believed that the handful of men left were commanded by master sergeants.
Charlie was denied his request to be shown another defensive strongpoint; the major, whose joie de vivre was evaporating, told him to stay in the depot, where he sat up during the night, thinking of Rigaud and wondering how the news would be broken to his young wife in her modest apartment. He pictured her as a thin, severe woman with dark hair dragged back into a bun; he imagined her living in a modest flat in Neuilly, bare apart from a few colored toys for the baby boy.
The duty Charlie had least enjoyed during his own war was writing to the families of men who had been killed. It was necessary to be straight and simple, to talk of country and duty, then briefly to conjure some individual detail, if he could, about the dead man. It was the replies that he dreaded. They varied in their degree of literacy and their length, but almost all had the same modesty: a submissive stoicism that placed the will of a formless providence above the most fiercely valued, deeply loved possession that they had ever had. “We would have kept him,” one had said, “but God knew best.”
The letters made it impossible for him to waver; as his battalion worked its way up Italy, he thought of the addresses from which the letters had come—the houses, lanes, the terraced streets of industrial towns—and pushed himself through the swirling blood of the River Rapido and on through the early rains of winter up into the hills, where his company was supplied by sodden mules. After four months of shell-fire, some close at hand yet making little noise, some distant but making him leap in fear, he had eventually come to think himself immune. He did not hear the one that hit him, though he was aware some time later of gentle hands removing his helmet and of shocked voices commenting on what they saw within.
He was nursed in a hospital in Florence. The shell fragment had pierced his helmet and his skull, but as far as the doctors could see it had caused no damage to the brain itself. The condition of his twenty-four-year-old body, fatless, undamaged by alcohol, conditioned by continuous physical endeavor, had enabled him to survive. When he was able to know what was going on, he was told that his company had been cut off in heavy fighting: some had been killed, some taken prisoner, and the survivors were being reassigned to other units. His own company had ceased to exist.
As he gradually regained his strength, Charlie went for walks about Florence, to the churches and to such of the museums as were open. He was susceptible to headaches and amnesia, but what he could never forget were the letters of condolence that he should have written. He presumed that his second-in-command would have taken on the task, but later he learned that he had been killed. He could not bear to think of the modest houses where they would pull the curtains early and feel the bitterness of loss because the parents or the wife had not received the words of comfort that were his to write.
Florence in winter was dark with the chill of the Middle Ages, and Charlie felt himself flood with its coldness as he walked by the river or dined alone in an understocked restaurant lit by candles. While his company had existed, it had been possible to believe in something beyond the foul-mouthed humans who constituted it; he had been able, if not quite to share, at least to be inspired by the sentiments of the dead men’s families. Now everything seemed reduced to its essential parts; the frescoes and statuary of the city that had once seemed to transcend their origins to reach a universal eloquence had come to look like nothing more than assertions of existence, limited by the prevailing ignorance of their time.
On the third morning in Dien Bien Phu, he was ordered to leave the camp. A place had been found for him on a press plane. It belonged to an American journalist who had gone missing, and they were anxious to evacuate all civilians—“while it’s still possible” were the words the major did not utter, but which clearly lay behind his urgency.
In the afternoon the French artillery laid its largest barrage so far toward the western hills, while such planes as had been able to take off attacked the eastern Vietminh positions. Under this defensive cover, the French engineers with their American technicians went out onto the runway to remove the damaged steel plates and cobble together a usable surface with replacements.
Charlie watched from inside the depot with the major, whose demeanor was that of a man who has been appallingly deceived. To take his mind off what was going on, Charlie talked to him about France, the places he had visited and the writers he had enjoyed.
“Rigaud is dead,” said the major. “I’ve just heard.”
Toward dusk Charlie was told to go to the bunker at the end of the runway, where two Dakotas full of wounded men were turning their engines over. Torchlight messages were shot from the darkness of the runway ahead, as the French barrage momentarily stopped and the Vietminh guns began to find the range of the airstrip again.
Inside the bunker the pilot revved the engines until the noise sounded as though it would not only burst the airframe but bring down the concrete shelter itself. Eventually the lightless plane shot forward onto the holed steel of the runway, bouncing and roaring as the shells lit up the jungle on both sides. The nose lifted and Charlie saw the pilot’s hands shaking as he tried to hold the plane steady. As they rose above the camp, they saw the boiling orange of tracer fire coming up toward them from the antiaircraft batteries concealed in the trees, but the propellers kept on churning up the humid air as the aircraft steeply rose, then banked, and headed east, toward the haven of Hanoi.
In the hotel room in Minneapolis, Charlie rotated the empty glass in his fingers for a moment before leaning across where Frank was sitting on the edge of the bed to reach for the bottle.
“What did you do in Hanoi?” said Frank.
“Had a pastis at the Métropole. Then caught a flight back to Saigon. There was a message for me at the hotel from this character Moone asking me to call to fix a rendezvous. I never went. I reported back to the Embassy in Tokyo. I didn’t tell them I’d been up north, I just said that on no account should we get mixed up in this fiasco. I think they’d already worked that one out. When did you get out of the camp?”
“A few days later. In a helicopter ambulance. I’d missed my place on the plane.”
“Maybe that was the one I took. Maybe you saved my life.”
“I don’t think so,” Frank said quickly. He did not want some entanglement of gratitude. “When the French surrendered I finally managed to get a piece in the paper. Not the front page, though. Page three. The front page was still McCarthy. We never could get American readers interested in that place.”
“Just too far away to seem real, I suppose.”
“Sure. Where did you go next?”
“London. That’s what you do as a rule, you alternate a stint abroad with a spell at home.” Charlie had some difficulty with t
he sibilants. “I’d done Moscow and Tokyo so I was due some paperwork. I was meant to go to Paris next, but then they decided they’d send me over here. Soon after we’d arrived in Washington I got a call from someone who said he wanted to meet. He seemed to know a lot about me. I met him for a drink in a hotel and he dragged up a lot of stuff out of my past.”
“Like what?”
Charlie sighed. “Well, Moscow for a start. That had been my first posting. I was on my own there most of the time because Mary was looking after Louisa in London. This man seemed interested in who I’d known there. Also about Tokyo. There … there was a girl in Tokyo. Her name was Hiroko. It was just an innocent thing, a flirtation really.”
“Did Mary know?” The name was awkward in Frank’s mouth.
“God, no. We hadn’t been married long. I mean the children were, whatever, two and four or something. And Mary was a different matter anyway. She was the woman I was going to spend my life with. She’s an extraordinary person. There’s no one else like her.”
Charlie stopped and looked at Frank, as though the rhythm of the exchange required him to say something, and he nodded politely. “Sure.”
“Anyway,” said Charlie, “there was this girl, Hiroko. It was happening to diplomats all the time. They were being set up with girls, compromised, then blackmailed. But I wasn’t set up, it was my initiative. And it was usually by the Russians. I mean, this creep in Washington was American. And there was other stuff. They mentioned opium. It was as though he was trying to make out I was some kind of drug dealer.”
“What did you say?” said Frank.
“I told him to fuck off. But I kept getting calls. They seemed to be searching for something they could latch onto.”
“Did you tell your boss?”
“I couldn’t. I’d lost a lot of money in Tokyo, dealing in shares. And … It was difficult. It was complicated. I hadn’t quite played by the rules, financially, but I desperately needed the cash.”
“But these problems started in Saigon?” said Frank.
“I think so.”
“Sounds like this guy Moone was on the case, doesn’t it? I remember him, the little piece of shit. A kind of informers’ informer. No real affiliation, he’d take it up the ass from anyone.”
“The odd thing was,” said Charlie, “that at the end of the war, I’d been posted to army Intelligence in Berlin. It was fascinating work, and when I was demobilized in ’46 they sent me for an interview with someone from an anonymous department of the Foreign Office. He said I was the kind of man they were looking for … linguist, patriotic, whatever. He wanted me to go and train at some place in Portsmouth. I knew what he was suggesting, but I wasn’t interested. I looked under the desk and I noticed he was wearing sandals.”
“In London?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s what decided you?”
“Pretty much. He had maroon socks underneath.” Charlie smiled briefly. “I could see the way Europe was shaping up, I could see what scope there was going to be for this kind of thing. But I was idealistic. I thought the war had been worth fighting and I didn’t want to go off and start recruiting Nazis to work for us against the Russians. So I applied to the Diplomatic Service and took the exam.”
“You went in the front door.”
“Yes. And that’s the way it’s been. But about every six weeks I had to go and see this man called O’Brien in a hotel in Arlington. There’s some other monkey in a mac with him. I got so worn down by it. In the end I called on Duncan Trench. He’s supposed to have a job in Chancery, but everyone knows what he does.”
“I think I met him at your party,” said Frank. “Guy with a face like a blowfish?”
“That’s him. He says he can get them off my back. In return I just have to ‘keep in touch’ as he calls it.”
“Doesn’t sound too good.”
“The trouble is, I’m in a bad state. I can’t even get on a plane without taking a truckload of sedatives. And, you know, I go to see this analyst, and that’s all complicated because they bring that up, too, O’Brien and the other gorilla, as though they’ve read the file and discovered some big secret I’ve confided to the shrink. Christ, if only. We’re both in the complete bloody dark.”
Frank pulled the last cigarette from his pack on the table. He could already feel his hangover beginning, the liver cringing, the brain expanding hard against the skull.
Charlie stood up, slowly, and went over to the window, where he pulled back the curtain. He breathed in very deeply, though Frank heard the constricted emotion in his chest as he did so.
“Isn’t that a pretty sight?” Charlie said. “Sunrise over Minnesota.”
He turned round and stood with his back to the window, where the gray light filtered through. “I tell you what,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Mary, I’d just finish it. I had a life and it interested me, but I lost it and I don’t know when. Florence, maybe, or Saigon. Somewhere. Somewhere I lost it.”
Frank said nothing.
Charlie said, “I have to help Mary. I think she’s having some kind of breakdown because of the children. My analyst told me it happens to women at that time. The children disappear and they wonder what their life’s supposed to be. I’d have the children back, but I can’t afford it. So she has this book she thinks she’s writing in New York. I have to let her go and do it. I suppose she’ll come through it. But if it wasn’t for her, I’d just … finish. Give up.”
Frank looked down. “What about the kids? Surely they’re worth—”
“No,” said Charlie. “Just Mary. She is my child. It’s through her I feel anything that’s left on earth for me to feel.”
Chapter 12
It was a bright July morning and Mary was reading the newspaper; she sat beneath the basketball hoop in the backyard at Number 1064 with the remains of breakfast still on the table before her. The headline on the main story had the two-sentence structure she liked: “Kennedy Heads for Los Angeles, Has Chance to Win on First Ballot.”
“The upcoming Democratic Convention is generating an unusual excitement,” wrote the editorial-page columnist, a violent drunk and philanderer, according to Frank, “even among those not politically minded. It was one thing for John Kennedy to have overcome Hubert Humphrey in the Badger State, where his father could ensure that every sheriff race was well funded in his favor. It was a greater achievement to have persuaded the Protestant voters of West Virginia that his religion was of no consequence. But Los Angeles will be quite a different task for the likeable young senator from Massachusetts. Here, without Pop’s help, he must sway the union bosses and the power brokers of Chicago and the South—in the convention hall, with the big contenders still waiting their moment to enter the race. It is no exaggeration to say that America holds its breath to see if the young man can pull it off.”
Mary put the paper down beside the coffee percolator. Excitement was intense in Number 1064 as well, even among those not politically minded. Charlie had suggested she accompany him to the convention and she had agreed to go, ostensibly both to keep him company and to visit Patricia Rosewell, a friend from London, who had been fruitlessly inviting the van der Lindens out west since marrying a Californian lawyer and settling in some remote canyon five years earlier. Patricia had sounded pleased at the prospect of seeing them and talked of putting on a dinner party for them. Was there anyone they would like her to ask?
Charlie was dreading the visit to Los Angeles, but knew that he could not decline or sidestep it. He had kept the extent of his problems largely hidden from his superiors; the loyalty of colleagues such as Edward Renshaw and his own adroit handling of two potentially awkward demands from London had diverted critical scrutiny. His closeness to the Kennedy campaign, however, had been much talked of in his department and the convention was the place where he had to demonstrate it.
After sleeping through most of the flight, he emerged from the airport building on Mary’s arm and went unsteadily toward the
taxi rank.
Patricia’s house was approached by a winding road flanked by hissing green grass where the sprinklers played in front of Mexican adobe façades, Gothic turrets and timbered Tudor bungalows rendered oddly homogeneous by the bland wash of sunshine in which they glowed. Patricia’s own dwelling was in the ranch style with a wooden veranda and views down to the Pacific, or at least to the turbulent haze that lay across it.
She took Mary and Charlie into the backyard and sat them beneath an orange tree, among white oleanders and strident purple bougainvillea, while she fetched iced tea.
Meanwhile, in his functional hotel room in Santa Monica, with white-wood table lamps and Formica surfaces, Frank laid out the Smith-Corona, pens and a notebook. He called room service for some beer and potato chips, then settled onto the bed to do some telephoning.
It was extraordinary how much journalism in the end came down to the same thing. In Saigon or Washington, Dallas or Seoul, it was a list of telephone numbers culled from friends and colleagues, a spiral-bound notebook, three pillows behind the back, and the telephone receiver lodged between shoulder and ear while the minutes to deadline ticked away on the bedside clock. Sometimes he never even had time to look out of the window.
He disliked the first moment of the call, when he had to introduce himself. He had heard one or two others in the newsroom—Headley Adams, for instance, with his Harvard manner—and noticed how they seemed at once to be taken into the confidence of the person they had called; within a few minutes Adams was laughing with his bench-made shoes up on the desk and inviting the stranger to lunch at his club. Billy Foy maintained there was a form of words with which they did it: a Masonic trick or incantation that was universally recognized. “Listen, Frank, it’s like when you pick up the phone. Someone asks for you by name, do you say, ‘Yep’ or do you say ‘This is he’? These guys say something, I can’t figure out what, and it means, ‘Can I kiss your ass for twenty minutes but I promise not to drop your name, or to screw your daughter, and I’ll vote Republican if that’s what you’d like.’ It’s a bond, it’s a brotherhood of classy guys. You with me?”
On Green Dolphin Street Page 19