The Quiet American, Page 2

  ‘You had better ask him the questions.’

  He turned to Phuong and interrogated her sharply in French. ‘How long have you lived with Monsieur Pyle?’

  ‘A month—I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘How much has he paid you?’

  ‘You’ve no right to ask her that,’ I said. ‘She’s not for sale.’

  ‘She used to live with you, didn’t she?’ he asked abruptly. ‘For two years.’

  ‘I’m a correspondent who’s supposed to report your war—when you let him. Don’t ask me to contribute to your scandal sheet as well.’

  ‘What do you know about Pyle? Please answer my questions, Monsieur Fowler. I don’t want to ask them. But this is serious. Please believe me it is very serious.’

  ‘I’m not an informer. You know all I can tell you about Pyle. Age thirty-two, employed in the Economic Aid Mission, nationality American.’

  ‘You sound like a friend of his,’ Vigot said, looking past me at Phuong. A native policeman came in with three cups of black coffee.

  ‘Or would you rather have tea?’ Vigot asked.

  ‘I am a friend,’ I said. ‘Why not? I shall be going home one day, won’t I? I can’t take her with me. She’ll be all right with him. It’s a reasonable arrangement. And he’s going to marry her, he says. He might, you know. He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard,’ ‘a white elephant.’

  Vigot said, ‘Yes.’ He seemed to be looking for words on his desk with which to convey his meaning as precisely as I had done. ‘A very quiet American.’ He sat there in the little hot office waiting for one of us to speak. A mosquito droned to the attack and I watched Phuong. Opium makes you quick-witted—perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important. Phuong, I thought, had not caught his tone, melancholy and final, and her English was very bad. While she sat there on the hard office-chair, she was still waiting patiently for Pyle. I had at that moment given up waiting, and I could see Vigot taking those two facts in.

  ‘How did you meet him first?’ Vigot asked me.

  Why should I explain to him that it was Pyle who had met me? I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm. The tables on the street were most of them full. ‘Do you mind?’ he had asked with serious courtesy. ‘My name’s Pyle. I’m new here,’ and he had folded himself around a chair and ordered a beer. Then he looked quickly up into the hard noon glare.

  “Was that a grenade?’ he asked with excitement and hope.

  ‘Most likely the exhaust of a car,’ I said, and was suddenly sorry for his disappointment. One forgets so quickly one’s own youth: once I was interested myself in what for want of a better term they call news. But grenades had staled on me; they were something listed on the back page of the local paper—so many last night in Saigon, so many in Cholon: they never made the European press. Up the street came the lovely flat figures—the white silk trousers, the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh. I watched them with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I had left these regions for ever. ‘They are lovely, aren’t they?’ I said over my beer, and Pyle cast them a cursory glance as they went up the rue Catinat.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ he said indifferently: he was a serious type. ‘The Minister’s very concerned about these grenades. It would be very awkward, he says, if there was an incident—with one of us, I mean.’

  ‘With one of you? Yes, I suppose that would be serious. Congress wouldn’t like it.’ Why does one want to tease the innocent? Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of the books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined—I learnt that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.

  ‘Is he in the mortuary?’ I asked Vigot.

  ‘How did you know he was dead?’ It was a foolish policeman’s question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife. You cannot love without intuition.

  ‘Not guilty,’ I said. I told myself that it was true. Didn’t Pyle always go his own way? I looked for any feeling in myself, even resentment at a policeman’s suspicion, but I could find none. No one but Pyle was responsible. Aren’t we all better dead? the opium reasoned within me. But I looked cautiously at Phuong, for it was hard on her. She must have loved him in her way: hadn’t she been fond of me and hadn’t she left me for Pyle? She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair. She sat there looking at the two of us and I thought she had not yet understood. Perhaps it would be a good thing if I could get her away before the fact got home. I was ready to answer any questions if I could bring the interview quickly and ambiguously to an end, so that I might tell her later, in private, away from a policeman’s eye and the hard office chairs and the bare globe where the moths circled.

  I said to Vigot, ‘What hours are you interested in?’

  ‘Between six and ten.’

  ‘I had a drink at the Continental at six. The waiters will remember. At six forty-five I walked down to the quay to watch the American planes unloaded. I saw Wilkins of the Associated News by the door of the Majestic. Then I went into the cinema next door. They’ll probably remember—they had to get me change. From there I took a trishaw to the Vieux Moulin—I suppose I arrived about eight thirty—and had dinner by myself. Granger was there—you can ask him. Then I took a trishaw back about a quarter to ten. You could probably find the driver. I was expecting Pyle at ten, but he didn’t turn up.’

  ‘Why were you expecting him?’

  ‘He telephoned me. He said he had to see me about something important.’

  ‘Have you any idea what?’

  ‘No. Everything was important to Pyle.’

  ‘And this girl of his?—do you know where she was?’

  ‘She was waiting for him outside at midnight. She was anxious. She knows nothing. Why, can’t you see she’s waiting for him still?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And you can’t really believe I killed him for jealousy—or she for what? He was going to marry her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘He was in the water under the bridge to Dakow.’

  The Vieux Moulin stood beside the bridge. There were armed police on the bridge and the restaurant had an iron grille to keep out grenades. It wasn’t safe to cross the bridge at night, for all the far side of the river was in the hands of the Vietminh after dark. I must have dined within fifty yards of his body.

  ‘The trouble was,’ I said, ‘he got mixed up.’

  ‘To speak plainly,’ Vigot said, ‘I am not altogether sorry. He was doing a lot of harm.’

  ‘God save us always,’ I said, ‘from the innocent and the good.’

  ‘The good?’

  ‘Yes, good. In his way. You’re a Roman Catholic. You wouldn’t recognize his way. And anyway, he was a damned Yankee.’

  ‘Would you mind identifying him? I’m sorry. It’s a routine, not a very nice routine.’

  I didn’t bother to ask him why he didn’t wait for someone from the American Legation, for I knew the reason. French methods are a little old-fashioned by our cold standards: they believe in the conscience, the sense of guilt, a criminal should be confronted with his crime, for he may break down and betray himself. I told myself again I was innocent, while he went down the stone stairs to where the refriger
ating plant hummed in the basement.

  They pulled him out like a tray of ice-cubes, and I looked at him. The wounds were frozen into placidity. I said, ‘You see, they don’t re-open in my presence.’

  ‘Comment?’

  ‘Isn’t that one of the objects? Ordeal by something or other? But you’ve frozen him stiff. They didn’t have deep freezes in the Middle Ages.’

  ‘You recognize him?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He looked more than ever out of place: he should have stayed at home. I saw him in a family snapshot album, riding on a dude ranch, bathing on Long Island, photographed with his colleagues in some apartment on the twenty-third floor. He belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and chicken sandwiches on the Merchant Limited.

  ‘He wasn’t dead from this,’ Vigot said, pointing at a wound in the chest. ‘He was drowned in the mud. We found the mud in his lungs.’

  ‘You work quickly.’

  ‘One has to in this climate.’

  They pushed the tray back and closed the door. The rubber padded.

  ‘You can’t help us at all?’ Vigot asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  I walked back with Phuong towards my flat. I was no longer on my dignity. Death takes away vanity—even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t show his pain. She was still unaware of what it was about, and I had no technique for telling her slowly and gently. I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines. ‘American official murdered in Saigon.’ Working on a newspaper one does not learn the way to break bad news, and even now I had to think of my paper and to ask her, ‘Do you mind stopping at the cable office?’ I left her in the street and sent my wire and came back to her. It was only a gesture: I knew too well that the French correspondents would already be informed, or if Vigot had played fair (which was possible), then the censors would hold my telegram till the French had filed theirs. My paper would get the news first under a Paris date-line. Not that Pyle was very important. It wouldn’t have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths, for it would have damaged Anglo-American relations, the Minister would have been upset. The Minister had a great respect for Pyle—Pyle had taken a good degree in—well, one of those subjects Americans can take degrees in: perhaps public relations or theatrecraft, perhaps even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books).

  ‘Where is Pyle?’ Phuong asked. ‘What did they want?’

  ‘Come home,’ I said.

  ‘Will Pyle come?’

  ‘He’s as likely to come there as anywhere else.’

  The old women were still gossiping on the landing, in the relative cool. When I opened my door I could tell my room had been searched: everything was tidier than I ever left it.

  ‘Another pipe?’ Phuong asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  I took off my tie and my shoes; the interlude was over; the night was nearly the same as it had been. Phuong crouched at the end of the bed and lit the lamp. Mon enfant, ma soeur—skin the colour of amber. Sa douce langue natale.

  ‘Phuong,’ I said. She was kneading the opium on the bowl. ‘Il est mort, Phuong.’ She held the needle in her hand and looked up at me like a child trying to concentrate, frowning. ‘Tu dis?’

  ‘Pyle est mort. Assassiné.’

  She put the needle down and sat back on her heels, looking at me. There was no scene, no tears, just thought—the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.

  ‘You had better stay here tonight,’ I said.

  She nodded and taking up the needle again began to heat the opium. That night I woke from one of those short deep opium sleeps, ten minutes long, that seem a whole night’s rest, and found my hand where it had always lain at night, between her legs. She was asleep and I could hardly hear her breathing. Once again after so many months I was not alone, and yet I thought suddenly with anger, remembering Vigot and his eye-shade in the police station and the quiet corridors of the Legation with no one about and the soft hairless skin under my hand, ‘Am I the only one who really cared for Pyle?’

  2

  I

  The morning Pyle arrived in the square by the Continental I had seen enough of my American colleagues of the Press, big, noisy, boyish and middle-aged, full of sour cracks against the French, who were, when all was said, fighting this war. Periodically, after an engagement had been tidily finished and the casualties removed from the scene, they would be summoned to Hanoi, nearly four hours’ flight away, addressed by the Commander-in-Chief, lodged for one night in a Press Camp where they boasted that the barman was the best in Indo-China, flown over the late battlefield at a height of 3,000 feet (the limit of a heavy machine-gun’s range) and then delivered safely and noisily back, like a school-treat, to the Continental Hotel in Saigon.

  Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest, sometimes that first day I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. And he was very, very serious. Several times he seemed to shrink up within himself at the noise of the American Press on the terrace above—the terrace which was popularly believed to be safer from hand-grenades. But he criticized nobody.

  ‘Have you read York Harding?’ he asked.

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so. What did he write?’

  He gazed at a milk-bar across the street and said dreamily, ‘That looks like a soda-fountain.’ I wondered what depth of homesickness lay behind his odd choice of what to observe in a scene so unfamiliar. But hadn’t I on my first walk up the rue Catinat noticed first the shop with the Guerlain perfume and comforted myself with the thought that, after all, Europe was only distant thirty hours? He looked reluctantly away from the milk-bar and said, ‘York wrote a book called The Advance of Red China. It’s a very profound book.’

  ‘I haven’t read it. Do you know him?’

  He nodded solemnly and lapsed into silence. But he broke it again a moment later to modify the impression he had given. ‘I don’t know him well,’ he said. ‘I guess I only met him twice.’ I liked him for that—to consider it was boasting to claim acquaintance with—what was his name?—York Harding. I was to learn later that he had an enormous respect for what he called serious writers. That term excluded novelists, poets and dramatists unless they had what he called a contemporary theme, and even then it was better to read the straight stuff as you got it from York.

  I said, ‘You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.’

  ‘Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say,’ he replied guardedly.

  ‘And then check it with York?’

  ‘Yes.’ Perhaps he had noticed the irony, because he added with his habitual politeness, ‘I’d take it as a very great privilege if you could find time to brief me on the main points. You see, York was here more than two years ago.’

  I liked his loyalty to Harding—whoever Harding was. It was a change from the denigrations of the Pressmen and their immature cynicism. I said, ‘Have another bottle of beer and I’ll try to give you an idea of things.’

  I began, while he watched me intently like a prize pupil, by explaining the situation in the north, in Tonkin, where the French in those days were hanging on to the delta of the Red River, which contained Hanoi and the only northern port, Haiphong. Here most of the rice was grown, and when the harvest was ready the annual battle for the rice always began.

  ‘That’s the north,’ I said. ‘The French may hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don’t come to help the Vietminh. A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress. But you can rot comfortably in the damp in Hanoi. They don’t throw bombs there. God knows why. You could call it a regular war.’

  ‘And here in the south?’

  ‘The French control the main roads until seven in the evening: they control the watch towers after that, and the towns—part
of them. That doesn’t mean you are safe, or there wouldn’t be iron grilles in front of the restaurants.’

  How often I had explained all this before. I was a record always turned on for the benefit of newcomers—the visiting Member of Parliament, the new British Minister. Sometimes I would wake up in the night saying, ‘Take the case of the Caodaists.’ Or the Hoa-Haos or the Binh Xuyen, all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge. Strangers found them picturesque, but there is nothing picturesque in treachery and distrust.

  ‘And now,’ I said, ‘there’s General Thé. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists . . .’

  ‘York,’ Pyle said, ‘wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force.’ Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realized the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with arid bones of background and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fishers’ fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes. When I first came I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term; I thought I was tied to what was left of a Bloomsbury square and the 73 bus passing the portico of Euston and springtime in the local in Torrington Place. Now the bulbs would be out in the square garden, and I didn’t care a damn. I wanted a day punctuated by those quick reports that might be car-exhausts or might be grenades, I wanted to keep the sight of those silk-trousered figures moving with grace through the humid noon, I wanted Phuong, and my home had shifted its ground eight thousand miles.