“You see what a drum of Diolacton can do,” I said, “in the wrong hands.” I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, “This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children-it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?” He said weakly, “There was to have been a parade.” “And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.” “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know!” I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. “You ought to be better informed.”
“I was out of town,” he said, looking down at his shoes. “They should have called it off.”
“And missed the fun?” I asked him. “Do you expect General The to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s press. You’ve put General The on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic deed-there are a few dozen less of her country people to worry about.”
A small fat priest scampered by, carrying something on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been silent a long while, and I had nothing more to say. Indeed I had said too much. He looked white and beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, ‘What’s the good? he’ll always he innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. Ail you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’
He said, “The wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists...”
He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance, I left him standing in the square and went on up the rue Catinat to where the hideous pink Cathedral blocked the way. Already people were flocking in: it must have been a comfort to them to be able to pray for the dead to the dead.
Unlike them, I had reason for thankfulness, for wasn’t Phuong alive? Hadn’t Phuong been ‘warned’? But what I remembered was the torso in the square, the baby on its mother’s lap. They had not been warned: they had not been sufficiently important. And if the parade had taken place would they not have been there just the same, out of curiosity, to see the soldiers, and hear the speakers, and throw, the flowers? A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw-driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front? I stopped a motor-trishaw and told the driver to take me to the Quai Mytho.
I had given Phuong money to take her sister to the cinema so that she would be safely out of the way. I went out to dinner myself with Dominguez and was back in my room waiting when Vigot called sharp on ten. He apologised for not taking a drink-he said he was too tired and a drink might send him to sleep. It had been a very long day.
“Murder and sudden death?”
“No. Petty thefts. And a few suicides. These people love to gamble and when they have lost everything they kill themselves. Perhaps I would not have become a policeman if I had known how much time I would have to spend in mortuaries. I do not like the smell of ammonia. Perhaps after all I will have a beer.” “I haven’t a refrigerator, I’m afraid.” “Unlike the mortuary. A little English whisky, then?” I remembered the night I had gone down to the mortuary with him and they had slid out Pyle’s body like a tray of ice-cubes.
“So you are not going home?” he asked. “You’ve been checking up?” “Yes.”
I held the whisky out to him, so that he could see how calm my nerves were. “Vigot, I wish you’d tell me why you think I was concerned in Pyle’s death. Is it a question of motive? That I wanted Phuong back? Or do you imagine it was revenge for losing her?”
“No. I’m not so stupid. One doesn’t take one’s enemy’s book as a souvenir. There it is on your shelf. The Role of the West. Who is this York Harding?”
“He’s the man you are looking for, Vigot. He killed Pyle-at long range.” “I don’t understand.”
“He’s a superior sort of journalist-they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea. Pyle came out here full of York Harding’s idea. Harding had been here once for a week on his way from Bangkok to Tokyo. Pyle made the mistake of putting his idea into practice. Harding wrote about a Third Force. Pyle formed one-a shoddy little bandit with two thousand men and a couple of tame tigers. He got mixed up.” “You never do, do you?” “I’ve tried not to be.”
“But you failed. Fowlair.” For some reason I thought of Captain Trouin and that night which seemed to have happened years ago in the Haiphong opium-house. What was it he had said? something about all of us getting involved sooner or later in a moment of emotion. I said, “You would have made a good priest, Vigot. What is it about you that would make it so easy to confess-if there were anything to confess?” “I have never wanted any confessions.”
“But you’ve received them?” “From time to time.”
“Is it because like a priest it’s your job not to be shocked, but to be sympathetic? ‘M. Flic, I must tell you exactly why I battered in the old lady’s skull.’ ‘Yes, Gustave, take your time and tell me why it was.’ “
“You have a whimsical imagination. Aren’t you drinking, Fowlair?”
“Surely it’s unwise for a criminal to drink with a police officer?”
“I have never said you were a criminal.” “But suppose the drink unlocked even in me the desire to confess? There are no secrets of the confessional in your profession.”
“Secrecy is seldom important to a man who confesses: even when it’s to a priest. He has other motives.” “To cleanse himself?”
“Not always. Sometimes he only wants to see himself clearly as he is. Sometimes he is just weary of deception. You are not a criminal. Fowlair, but I would like to know why you lied to me. You saw Pyle the night he died.” “What gives you that idea?”
“I don’t for a moment think you killed him. You would hardly have used a rusty bayonet.” “Rusty?”
“Those are the kind of details we get from an autopsy. I told you, though, that was not the cause of death. Dakow mud.” He held out his glass for another whisky. “Let me see now. You had a drink at the Continental at six ten?” “Yes.”
“And at six forty-five you were talking to another journalist at the door of the Majestic?”
“Yes, Wilkins. I told you all this, Vigot, before. That night.”
“Yes. I’ve checked up since then. It’s wonderful how you carry such petty details in your head.” “I’m a reporter, Vigot.”
“Perhaps the times are not quite accurate, but nobody could blame you, could they, if you were a quarter of an hour out here and ten minutes out there. You had no reason to think the times important. Indeed how suspicious it would be if you had been completely accurate.” “Haven’t I been?”
“Not quite. It was at five to seven that you talked to Wilkins.” “Another ten minutes.”
“Of course. As I said. And it had only just struck six when you arrived at the Continental.”
“My watch is always a little fast,” I said. “What time do you make it now?” “Ten eight.”
“Ten eighteen by mine. You see.”
He didn’t bother to look. He said, “Then the time you said you talked to Wilkins was twenty-five minutes out-by your watch. That’s quite a mistake, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps I re-adjusted the time in my mind. Perhaps I’d corrected my watch that day. I sometimes do.”
“What interests me,” Vigot said, “(could I have a little more soda?-you have made this rather strong) is that you are not at all angry with me. It is not very nice to be questioned as I am questioning you.”
“I find it interesting, like a detective-story. And, after all, you know I didn’t kill Pyle-you’ve said so.” Vigot said, “I know you were not present at his murder.” “I don’t know what you hope to prove by showing that I was ten minutes out here and five there.” “It gives a little space,” Vigot said, “a little gap in time.” “Space for what?” “For Pyle to come and see you.”’ “Why do you want so much to prove that?” “Because of the dog,” Vigot said. “And the mud between its toes?”
“It wasn’t mud. It was cement. You see, somewhere that night, when it was following Pyle, it stepped into wet cement. I remembered that on the ground floor of the apartment there are builders at work-they are still at work. I passed them tonight as I came in. They work long hours in this country.”
“I wonder how many houses have builders in them- and wet cement. Did any of them remember the dog?”
“Of course I asked them that. But if they had they would not have told me. I am the police.” He stopped talking and leant back in his chair, staring at his glass. I had a sense that some analogy had struck him and he was miles away in thought. A fly crawled over the back of his hand and he did not brush it away-any more than Dominguez would have done. I had the feeling of some force immobile and profound. For all I knew, he might have been praying.
I rose and went through the curtains into the bedroom. There was nothing I wanted there, except to get away for a moment from that silence sitting in a chair. Phuong’s picture-books were back on the shelf. She had stuck a telegram for me up among the cosmetics-.some message or other from the London office. I wasn’t in the mood to open it. Everything was as it had been before Pyle came. Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.
I returned to the sitting-room and Vigot put the glass to his lips. I said, “I’ve got nothing to tell you. Nothing at all”
“Then I’ll be going,” he said. “I don’t suppose I’ll trouble you again.”
At the door he turned as though he were unwilling to abandon hope-his hope or mine. “That was a strange picture for you to go and see that night. I wouldn’t have thought you cared for costume drama. What was it? Robin Hood?”
“Scaramouche I think. I had to kill time. And I needed distraction.” “Distraction?”
“We all have our private worries, Vigot,” I carefully explained.
When Vigot was gone there was still an hour to wait for Phuong and living company. It was strange how disturbed I had been by Vigot’s visit. It was as though a poet had brought me his work to criticise and through some careless action I had destroyed it. I was a man without a vocation- one cannot seriously consider journalism as a vocation, but I could recognise a vocation in another. Now that Vigot was gone to close his uncompleted file, I wished I had the courage to call him back and say, “You are right. I did see Pyle the night he died.”
On the way to the Quai Mytho I passed several ambulances driving out of Cholon heading for the Place Gamier. One could almost reckon the pace of rumour from the expression of the faces in the street, which at first ‘turned on someone like myself coming from the direction of the place with looks of expectancy and speculation. By the time I entered Cholon I had outstripped the news: life was busy, normal, uninterrupted: nobody knew.
I found Mr. Chou’s godown and mounted to Mr. Chou’s house. Nothing had changed since my last visit. The cat and the dog moved from floor to cardboard box to suitcase, like a couple of chess knights who cannot get to grips. The baby crawled on the floor, and the two old men were still playing mah jongg. Only the young people were absent. As soon as I appeared in the doorway one of the women began to pour out tea. The old lady sat on the .bed and looked at her feet.
“M. Heng,” I asked. I shook my head at the tea: I wasn’t in the mood to begin another long course of that trivial bitter brew. “II faut absolument que je voie M. Heng.” It seemed impossible to convey to them the urgency of my request, but perhaps the very abruptness of my refusal of tea caused some disquiet. Or perhaps like Pyle I had blood on my shoes. Anyway after a short delay one of the women led me out and down the stairs, along two bustling bannered streets and left me before what they would have called I suppose in Pyle’s country a “funeral parlour”, full of stone jars in which the resurrected bones of the Chinese dead are eventually placed. “M. Heng,” I said to an old Chinese in the doorway. “M. Heng.” It seemed a suitable halting place on a day which had begun with the planter’s erotic collection and continued with the murdered bodies in the square. Somebody called from an inner room and the Chinese stepped aside and let me in.