Highways to a War (17 page)

One of them slid off her stool now and came around to Langford : she’d probably noticed he was new. She was a model of bar girl elegance: emerald green blouse; black miniskirt of fake leather.

“If you buy me Saigon Tea, I can stay and talk,” she said; and she gave him her seductive smile.

“Not tonight, thanks,” Langford told her. “Maybe some other time.” He was pleasant and politely regretful, his voice soft.

Her own smile switched off immediately, and she changed to a big pout. “You fucking cheap Charlie,” she said, and sauntered back to her friends, swinging her little handbag.

Jim and I laughed; it was one of their standard bits of repartee. Langford stood looking after her, not laughing. His face was always placid, and it stayed that way now; but I caught a fleeting expression I found arresting and at the same time puzzling. I couldn’t really read it; but when I got to know him, I’d understand it in retrospect. I’m sure he already saw the bar girls as damsels in distress, whom he had to do something about—in the same way as he’d decide to do something about the street kids who hung around the Continental Palace, and the crippled girl who sold flowers. It began on that very first night.

But then I forgot about it, as Jim and I began to fill him in on business here.

Dmitri Volkov was due in soon, and Volkov needed a little preparing for—particularly since he was opposition. He was working for American CBS, and he and Jim Feng scooped each other whenever they could, with no love lost; but they were the best of friends off-duty. That was how it was with most cameramen.

For Jim though—and for me too, when I scripted the pieces we did together for ABS—it was a pretty unequal contest with the Americans. The American networks had given their cameramen advantages in Saigon that Telenews and ABS simply couldn’t match. CBS and NBC had headquarters in the city with lavish facilities, making Telenews look rudimentary. CBS had taken over half a floor of the Caravelle, the modern high-rise hotel opposite the old Continental—and they’d been known to charter every aircraft in Saigon in order to beat the opposition out with their film. They even had U.S. military cooperation to get their film out to Tokyo and Bangkok with the wounded, on medevac flights. We were resigned to this now: it was a fact of life like taxation or the weather, and we explained it to Mike.

“So the Yanks can scoop us any time,” he said. He was looking thoughtful.

“Don’t worry,” Jim told him. “The good news is that we come out on top when we get the crumbs the Yanks miss.”

At about this point, Volkov came in.

He was still in dirty combat fatigues, and looked dead beat: he’d obviously come straight here from Tan Son Nhut, stopping only to drop off his film and his gear at the CBS office. He took a stool between Mike and Jim Feng, and he had to look up slightly at Langford as they shook hands, being a smaller man. This, and the fact that Mike was a competitor, seemed to get Dmitri edgy: his face went entirely deadpan.

Told where Mike came from, he said: “Tasmania? Jesus, do they have
people
there?”

Langford said nothing. He just smiled amiably, looking at Volkov with that sleepy stare he had, as though waiting for something; and Volkov stared back. They were sniffing each other out like dogs, those two.

“Come on, Count,” Jim said. “Get a drink into you and get friendly with the opposition.” And he signaled to the barman.

Volkov didn’t much like being called “Count.” But he’d once let slip that his grandfather, who’d brought the family out of Russia to Paris after the Bolshevik revolution, had been Count Volkov, and we assumed that Dmitri’s father would have succeeded to the title, had history not intervened. So we decided that Dmitri would ultimately have succeeded to it too. Counts were a penny a dozen in czarist Russia, I understand, and I’m not sure that in fact it
was
a hereditary title there; but we liked the idea, and liked getting a rise out of Dmitri, and the nickname stuck. And he did look like our idea of a Russian aristocrat: thin, blond, and rather small-boned, with light blue Tartar eyes and a small military mustache. Despite his slightness, he was pretty strong, as most combat cameramen had to be in those days, when the gear they handled was punishingly heavy. But you’ll have seen pictures of him.

He’d got his whiskey now, and propped one elbow on the bar; then he began to shoot questions at Langford as though to put him through some test. What background did he have in news photography? What papers had he worked for? What did he think of the current television coverage of the war? Dmitri’s English—learned in post-War Paris in his adolescence—was good but erratic. The definite article was inclined to appear in strange places, and to disappear from other places where it should have been. He carried a French passport, but he was sometimes taken for an American, because of his accent. He’d added the American component to it when he worked on a paper in New York.

Langford answered all his questions good-humoredly. But Dmitri’s Tartar stare remained unimpressed.

“Well, good luck, Bud,” he said. “You’re going to need it, as a matter of fact, working for Brits on their lousy budget. My outfit doesn’t care what it costs to get stuff out first.”

Langford cocked his head. He surveyed the Count now from head to foot, adopting an expression of simplemindled awe. “Jesus, mate, I can see I should start worrying,” he said. ‘‘And how will I ever scoop a bloke who looks like Errol Flynn?“

He glanced aside at Jim and me and winked. It was the rural Australian style of put-down, and done without malice; but I could see that Volkov didn’t know how to take it, and I decided to divert his attention. Dmitri’s moods always went up and down a lot—the famous Russian temperament—but high spirits usually prevailed, and I’d begun to realize that somethiing was wrong tonight. I knew he’d been in the Central Highlands for the past few days, so I asked him how it had gone.

He shook his head, lighting a cigarette and grimacing to expel smoke through his teeth. “Not very jolly, Harvey,” he said.

I asked him where he’d been.

“Route 19,” Volkov said. “There has been an ambush in the Mang Yang Pass, between Qui Nhon and Pleiku. VC have managed to destroy a whole Special Forces convoy there.”

“You were
there,
Count?” Jim Feng had turned sideways, suddenly alert; even in the half-dark, I could see his gaze get hungry.

“Not when it happened, baby, or I would not be here now,” Volkov said. “I have been up coast at Qui Nhon. Hitched a ride on a Huey to the new A-Team fort at An Khe, near the Pass. They had just got the news. So I went on a Jeep to scene of disaster.” He drew on the cigarette, staring unseningly at the bar girls. “A real butcher’s shop, James. Two Americans dead, and many Montagnards. The Charles has amused himself with sniper fire at us all the way back.”

Fresh whiskeys arrived, and Volkov pushed one into Langford‘s hand without looking at him, the action neither friendly nor unfriendly.

“Lucky. You always were lucky, Count,” Jim Feng said. “So what’s wrong? Didn’t you get the film?”

“I got good film, James. But it doesn’t amuse me to contemplate deceased gentlemen from Green Berets with their balls stuffed into their mouths.”

There was a short silence, during which I noticed that Volkov was being listened to by a British correspondent who’d moved alongside us: a
Manchester Guardian
man I’d run into a few times before, but whom the others didn’t know. Trevor Griffiths was Welsh, and his appearance, like his temperament, was dark Celtic. He had the build of the former Rugby player, and his dead white, unhealthy-looking complexion went strangely with this vigorous appearance: it made Trevor appear to be suffering from some secret illness, and it also caused him to have a five o‘clock shadow like Richard Nixon’s—a similarity I enjoyed drawing his attention to, since he was a man of dedicated left-wing views.

“Sounds like a nasty scene for our friends in the Special Forces,” he said. He had a measured, strong voice, and something of a BBC accent: very little Welsh in it.

Volkov looked at him. “Nasty would be one way of putting it, Bud.”

“But somewhat appropriate, I should have thought,” Griffiths said.

“What?” Volkov said.

“Appropriate,” Griffiths repeated. He swayed; he was slightly drunk, and his voice grew more resonant. “Just the sort of fate to make those cowboys understand what they’re meddling in.”

“And what is that, exactly?” Volkov asked.

“A war of liberation that’s none of their business,” Griffiths said. “One that John Wayne can’t win.”

Volkov smiled. He had a strange smile sometimes: open mouth stretched as though through an act of will; light eyes empty. “You know what is wrong with you, Limey?”

“No, Yank. What’s wrong with me?”

“You lost your bloody Empire. That’s why you hate Americans who have replaced you. But that is none of my business; your shitty politics don’t interest me. What interests me is that you have no pity for men whose bodies have been mutilated. Maybe
your
balls should be stuffed in mouth.”

He slid off his stool, hands open, palms outwards.

Griffiths took a step backwards, frowning at him in disbelief, and some nearby GIs had begun to turn around, sensing a fight. But Jim Feng put a hand on Volkov’s shoulder.

“Come on, Count, you can’t deck him in here. There isn’t the room.” He leaned towards Griffiths and said softly: “I would go, if I were you. He’s a little strung out.”

Griffiths put his glass on the bar, lips tight, looking whiter. “I can see that,” he said. “I’ll leave him in your charge. I don’t drink with psychopaths.”

Watching him go, Volkov began to laugh. He climbed back on his stool, wiping one of his eyes with the back of his hand. “Buy me a whiskey,” he told Jim. “Now you’ve cheated me out of a fight, James, this is least you can do.”

 

 

We were all rather drunk now, and for some reason the bar began to appear sinister to me. Saigon could have that effect.

A barman was staring at us. He had one of those unreadable Sino-Vietnamese faces, and kept looking at his wristwatch while he picked his teeth. This was making me paranoid; I decided he knew something, and that if he suddenly left, we must leave too.

I should perhaps explain that we were all more jumpy than usual in that month. Viet Cong agents were everywhere in the city: they were impossible to identify, and could be standing next to you. And down at this end of Tu Do Street, near the river, a number of restaurants had recently been wrecked by parcel bombs. There had also been the big explosion at the American embassy a month or so ago, which had killed or injured over two hundred people. This had tended to bring home the fact that the Americans weren’t even able to safeguard their own embassy, let alone the city of Saigon. One began to worry.

So when the thin Vietnamese with the parcel came in, our reaction was immediate. It was Volkov who spotted him first.

“We have a character with parcel,” he said.

He jerked his head, and I was hit by a jarring chill. The man was the sort of small wheeler-dealer you saw everywhere in the streets, peddling goods stolen from the American PX stores, or various forms of sad commercial sex: thin as a stick, with long hair, a crafty face and a pencil mustache, wearing a baseball cap. He slid into one of the banquettes down at the other end, near the door to the street. It was occupied by two bar girls; the three of them exchanged smiles and greetings, and he put the parcel carefully on the table between them. It was about the size of a box of chocolates, and wrapped in brown paper. No one else in the bar seemed to have noticed, although parcels were usually suspect. It was like one of those situations in sleep where you can’t run, although you badly want to.

But then I saw Volkov relax. “It’s OK,” he said. “He doesn’t go through to the john, and girls are looking happy. It’s just a parcel.”

We understood. The standard technique, when a VC booby-trapped a bar, was to move straight through to the toilets before the parcel went off, and escape out the back. So we picked up our drinks and relaxed.

But then Jim Feng tapped me on the shoulder. “We have spoken too soon,” he said.

The man in the baseball cap was moving through the crowd towards us. He passed by and vanished through a bead-curtained doorway that led to the Happy Bar’s Augean toilets. The parcel still lay on the table, and both girls had stood up.

I stood up too. I was pouring with sweat, and my head was spinning. It wasn’t the whiskey: I knew I was going to die. The bomb was between us and the exit; it would probably blow in a moment, and wreck the whole bar. I’d never seen this happen, but I’d been told about it often enough. Still no one had registered the parcel’s existence except our group; only seconds had gone by, and now I heard Volkov shout, and saw him pointing at the banquette.

“Bomb! Everybody out!”

All around us, servicemen and civilians began throwing themselves flat on the floor. Down in the area by the fatal table, they began to lurch through the exit, shouting warnings. Bar girls were screaming, and trying to fight their way past us. Trying to run myself, I saw that Langford had charged ahead of the three of us, heading towards the door.

He wove through the crowd very fast, shouldering and elbowing people aside, graceful as a professional footballer—which I believe he once was. And in that moment, terrified as I was myself, I had a flash of disappointment at seeing what I assumed to be fear driving him so hard. Then he reached the banquette, and without a pause, scooped up the parcel in his right hand and raced on. This and his next movement also reminded me of football. He plunged through the open door and pitched the parcel over the heads of the crowd into the middle of the road. But there was no explosion.

Out in the warm dark on the pavement, surrounded by American servicemen and a crowd of curious Vietnamese, we found Langford staring at the traffic: cyclos, motor scooters, and an old, rickety bus from the country, painted in carnival colors. The GIs were saying things like:
“Fuckin’ bomb.” “Guy threw it.” “Hey buddy, where’s the fuckin’ bomb?”
Then the old bus had gone by, and we all saw the burst parcel in the middle of the road. The wrappings had come off: it was a shattered transistor radio.