The Quiet American (21 page)

Mr. Heng himself came cordially forward and ushered me into a little inner room lined with the black carved uncomfortable chairs you find in every Chinese ante-room, unused, unwelcoming. But I had the sense that on this occasion the chairs had been employed, for there were five little tea-cups on the table, and two were not empty. “I have interrupted a meeting,” I said.

“A matter of business,” Mr. Heng said evasively, “of no importance. I am always glad to see you, Mr. Fowlair.” “I’ve come from the Place Gamier,” I said. “I thought that was it.” “You’ve heard.. “

“Someone telephoned to me. It was thought best that I keep away from Mr. Chou’s for a while. The police will be very active today.” “But you had nothing to do with it.” “It is the business of the police to find a culprit.” “It was Pyle again,” I said. “Yes.”

“It was a terrible thing to do.”

“General The is not a very controlled character.” “And plastic isn’t for boys from Boston. Who is Pyle’s chief, Heng?”

“I have the impression that Mr. Pyle is very much his own master.” “What is he? O.S.S.?” “The initial letters are not very important.” “What can I do, Heng? He’s got to be stopped.” “You can publish the truth. Or perhaps you cannot?” “My paper’s not interested in General The. They are only interested in your people, Heng.” “You really want Mr. Pyle stopped, Mr. Fowlair?” “If you’d -see him, Heng. He stood there and said it was all a sad mistake, there should have been a parade. He said he’d have to get his shoes cleaned before he saw the Minister.”

“Of course, you could tell what you know to the police.” “They aren’t interested in The either. And do you think they would dare to touch an American? He has diplomatic privileges. He’s a graduate of Harvard. The Minister’s very fond of Pyle. Heng, there was a woman there whose baby- she kept it covered under her straw hat. I can’t get it out of my head. And there was another in Phat Diem.” “You must try to be calm, Mr. Fowlair.” “What’ll he do next, Heng? How many bombs and dead children can you get out of a drum of Diolacton?” “Would you be prepared to help us, Mr. Fowlair?” “He comes blundering in and people have to die for his mistakes. I wish your people had got him on the river from Nam Dinh. It would have made a lot of difference to a lot of lives”

“I agree with you, Mr. Fowlair. He has to be restrained. I have a suggestion to make.” Somebody coughed delicately behind the door, then noisily spat. He said, “If you would invite him to dinner tonight at the Vieux Moulin. Between eight-thirty and nine-thirty.” “What good...?”

“We would talk to him on the way,”’ Heng said. “He may be engaged.”

“Perhaps it would be better if you asked him to call on you-at six-thirty. He will be free then: he will certainly come. If he is able to have dinner with you, take a book to your window as though you want to catch the light.” “Why the Vieux Moulin?”

“It is by the bridge to Dakow-I think we shall be able to find a spot and talk undisturbed.” “What will you do?”

“You do not want to know that, Mr. Fowlair. But I promise you we will act as gently as the situation allows.”

The unseen friends of Heng shifted like rats behind the wall. “Will you do this for us, Mr. Fowlair?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.” “Sooner or later,” Heng said, and I was reminded of

Captain Trouin speaking in the opium-house, “one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

I left a note at the Legation asking Pyle to come and then I went up the street to the Continental for a drink. The wreckage was ail cleared away; the fire-brigade had hosed the square. I had no idea then how the time and the place would become important. I even thought of sitting there throughout the evening and breaking my appointment. Then I thought that perhaps I could frighten Pyle into inactivity by warning him of his danger-whatever his danger was, and so I finished my beer and went home, and when I reached home I began to hope that Pyle would not come. I tried to read, but there was nothing on my shelves to hold the attention. Perhaps I should have smoked, but there was no one to prepare my pipe. I listened unwillingly for footsteps and at last they came. Somebody knocked. I opened the door, but it was only Dominguez. I said, “What do you want, Dominguez?” He looked at me with an air of surprise. “Want?” He looked at his watch. “This is the time I always come. Have you any cables?” “I’m sorry-I’d forgotten. No.”

“But a follow-up on the bomb? Don’t you want something filed?”

“Oh, work one out for me, Dominguez. I don’t know how it is-being there on the spot, perhaps I got a bit shocked. I can’t think of the thing in terms of a cable.” I hit out at a mosquito which came droning at my ear and saw Dominguez wince instinctively at my blow. “It’s all right, Dominguez, I missed it.” He grinned miserably. He could not justify this reluctance to take life: after all he was a Christian—one of those who had learnt from Nero how to make human bodies into candles.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked. He didn’t drink, he didn’t eat meat, he didn’t kill-I envied him the gentleness of his mind.

“No, Dominguez. Just leave me alone tonight.” I watched him from the window, going away across the rue Catinat. A trishaw-driver had parked beside the pavement opposite my window: Dominguez tried to engage him but the man shook his head. Presumably he was waiting for a client in one of the shops, for this was not a parking place for trishaws. When I looked at my watch it was strange to see that I had been waiting for little more than ten minutes, and, when Pyle knocked, I hadn’t even heard his step.

“Come in.” But as usual it was the dog that came in first.

“I was glad to get your note, Thomas. This morning I thought you were mad at me.” “Perhaps I was. It wasn’t a pretty sight.” “You know so much now, it won’t hurt to tell you a bit more. I saw The this afternoon.”

“Saw him? Is he in Saigon? I suppose he came to see how his bomb worked.”

“That’s in confidence, Thomas. I dealt with him very severely.” He spoke like the captain of a school-team who has found one of his boys breaking his training. All the same I asked him with a certain hope, “Have you thrown him over?”

“I told him that if he made another uncontrolled demonstration we would have no more to do with him.”

“But haven’t you finished with him already Pyle?” I pushed impatiently at his dog which was nosing around my ankles. “I can’t. (Sit down. Duke.) In the long run he’s the only hope we have. If he came to power with our help, we could rely on him. . .”

“How many people have to die before you realise...?” But I could tell that it was a hopeless argument. “Realise what, Thomas?”

“That there’s no such thing as gratitude in politics.” “At least they won’t hate us like they hate the French.” “Are you sure? Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.”

“You talk like a European, Thomas. These people aren’t complicated.”

“Is that what you’ve learned in a few months? You’ll be calling them childlike next.” “Well in away.”

“Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” But what good was it to talk to him? There was an unreality in both our arguments. I was becoming a leader-writer before my time. I got up and went to the bookshelf.

“What are you looking for, Thomas?” “Oh, just a passage i used to be fond of. Can you have dinner with me, Pyle?”

“I’d love to, Thomas, I’m so glad you aren’t mad any longer, I know you disagree with me, but we can disagree, can’t we, and be friends?” “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“After all, Phuong was much more important than this.”

“Do you really believe that, Pyle?”

“Why, she’s the most important thing there is. To me. And to you, Thomas.” “Not to me any longer.” “It was a terrible shock today. Thomas, but in a week, you’ll see, we’ll have forgotten it. We are looking after the relatives too.’ “We?”

“We’ve wired to Washington. We’ll get permission to use some of our funds.”

I interrupted him. “The Vieux Moulin? Between nine and nine-thirty?”

“Where you like, Thomas.” I went to the window. The sun had sunk below the roofs. The trishaw-driver still waited for his fare. I looked down at him and he raised his face to me.

“Are you waiting for someone, Thomas?” “No. There was just a piece I was looking for.” To cover my action I read, holding the book up to the last light:

“I drive through the streets and I care not a damn, The people they stare, and they ask who I am; And if I should chance to run over a cad, I can pay for the damage if ever so bad. So pleasant it is to have money, height ho! So pleasant it is to have money.”

“That’s a funny kind of poem,” Pyle said with a note of disapproval.

“He was an adult poet in the nineteenth century. There weren’t so many of them.” I looked down into the street again. The trishaw-driver had moved away. “Have you run out of drink? Pyle asked. “No, but I thought you didn’t.”

“Perhaps I’m beginning to loosen up,” Pyle said. “Your influence. I guess you’re good for me, Thomas.”

I got the bottle and glasses-I forgot one of them the first journey and then I had to go back for water. Everything that I did that evening took a long time. He said, “You know, I’ve got a wonderful family, but maybe they were a bit on the strict side. We have one of those old houses in Chestnut Street, as you go up the hill on the right-hand side. My mother collects glass, and my father-when he’s not eroding his old cliffs-picks up all the Darwin manuscripts and association-copies he can. You see, they live in the past. Maybe that’s why York made such an impression on me. He seemed kind of open to modern conditions. My father’s an isolationist.”

“Perhaps I would like your father,” I said. “I’m an isolationist too.”

For a quiet man Pyle that night was in a talking mood. I didn’t hear all that he said, for my mind was elsewhere. I tried to persuade myself that Mr. Heng had other means at his disposal but the crude and obvious one. But in a war like this, I knew, there is no time to hesitate: one uses the weapon to hand-the French the napalm bomb, Mr. Heng the bullet or the knife. I told myself too late that I wasn’t made to be a judge-I would let Pyle talk awhile and then I would warn him. He could spend the night at my house. They would hardly break in there. I think he was speaking of the old nurse he had had-“She really meant more to me than my mother, and the blueberry pies she used to make!” when I interrupted him. “Do you carry a gun now - since that night?” “No. We have orders in the Legation.. .” “But you’re on special duties?”

“It wouldn’t do any good-if they wanted to get me, they always could. Anyway I’m as blind as a coot. At college they called me Bat - because I could see in the dark as well as they could. Once when we were fooling around...” He was off again. I returned to the window.

A trishaw-driver waited opposite. I wasn’t sure—they look so much alike, but I thought he was a different one. Perhaps he really had a client. It occurred to me that Pyle would be safest at the Legation. They must have laid plans, since my signal, for later in the evening: something that involved the Dakow bridge. I couldn’t understand why or how: surely he would not be so foolish as to drive through Dakow after sunset and our side of the bridge was always guarded by armed police.

“I’m doing all the talking,” Pyle said. “I don’t know how it is, but somehow this evening. . .”

“Go on,” I said, “I’m in a quiet mood, that’s all. Perhaps we’d better cancel that dinner.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ve felt cut off from you, since well...”

“Since you saved my life,” I said and couldn’t disguise the bitterness of my self-inflicted wound.

“No, I didn’t mean that. All the same how we talked, didn’t we, that night? As if it was going to be our last. I learned a lot about you, Thomas. I don’t agree with you, mind, but for you maybe it’s right-not being involved. You kept it up all right, even after your leg was smashed you stayed neutral.”

“There’s always a point of change,” I said. “Some moment of emotion...”

“You haven’t reached it yet. I doubt if you ever will. And I’m not likely to change either-except with death,” he added merrily.

“Not even with this morning? Mightn’t change a man’s views?”

“They were only war casualties,” he said. “It was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause.”

“Would you have said the same if it had been your old nurse with her blueberry pie?”

He ignored my facile point. “In a way you could say they died for Democracy,” lie said-
           
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