Tsing-Boum (17 page)

‘Hallo,' shyly.

‘Like witchdoctory, isn't it – think, I'm in Marseilles. Don't
let Arlette overeat, but give her my best love. What will I bring you back?'

‘I don't know but you mustn't forget the goose.'

‘Leave it to me. I'll be back in a couple of days. Weather's vile; pity the poor policeman.'

‘Why don't you have a cape like French ones?'

‘Yes, that is an idea, I'll have to look. Bonne nuit, ma fille.'

‘Bonne nuit, darling,' said Arlette fiddling with the blankets in the female rite known as ‘tucking them in'.

‘Bonne nuit, m'an.'

Arlette did not know whether to be happy or miserable, and went downstairs for some cherry brandy, which would serve either way.

DST's transport was not especially impressive; a beat-up Simca Mille with no room for long legs, but the acceleration was impressive. So was that of the aeroplane, though there he had no room either – a jet trainer adapted for an extra passenger. The pilot was a nice round-faced boy who chewed gum with frenzy, and said things like ‘Grab your gut and lean on the toboggan'. And at four that afternoon, just as the man promised, he was in the Rue Saint-Dominique, being intimidated by tall courtly doors and forbidding concierges.

‘The Brigadier-General?' as though he had said something blasphemous. ‘Well, I suppose there's nothing to stop you filling in a form if you really want to.'

‘Bet you ten to one in francs I'm in behind the curtain inside ten minutes.'

‘Tuesday fortnight, my lord – if at all.'

‘Can you see it's delivered straight away?'

‘Of course I can,' indignantly. He put it in a shell, and pressed the shell into a metal tube. ‘I take your bet – only because I'm curious. Curious is all. And because you have an honest face.'

‘But I give you the money just the same – bribing the concierge went out with the Third Republic.'

‘I'd hope that a bribe would be rather bigger, myself.' But the ten-franc note went into his pocket just the way Chandler once described it – ‘with a noise like two caterpillars fighting'. The two of them smoked a cigarette, lounging but a bit stiff, like two gunmen in the same saloon. The pneumatic tube went ffss suddenly and the shell clonked in its metal basket. The concierge shook his head sadly, read the piece of paper, made a horrid noise with his teeth like wind among the rocks of the Khyber Pass, took a franc out of his pocket, wrapped the piece
of paper round it, and passed both to Van der Valk, who looked with some curiosity. ‘Admit' it said with military brevity.

The concierge was laboriously filling in a green card. Where it said ‘Bureau No.' He wrote ‘The General' in longhand. He date-stamped it at the bottom with a fierce metallic crunch that went right through and could not be faked. ‘Show that to the sentry – and don't lose it, even if you're taking the general out to a party – I'll want it back.'

On the terrace across the courtyard was a soldier in combat uniform carrying a machine-gun, who looked at the green pass, said nothing, and motioned up the steps. In the hall was a porter, who took the pass, looked at it carefully, invited him to enter a little vertical coffin which photographed him and would let out shrill screams if he had any guns, cameras or concealed microphones, smiled politely, and said, ‘First floor, to the left. You may use the staircase of honour if you wish.' It sounded a great privilege, and indeed it was a very beautiful staircase, marble smoother than a girl's skin and a great deal whiter.

On the first floor he had only to follow his nose, for a soldier beckoned to him, looked him over politely but with a tendency towards unarmed combat in his eye, and stepped softly towards a door a few paces away. This soldier was in parade dress, with white leggings, but seemed an ordinary soldier, not a Zouave or a Senegalese, so that Van der Valk felt obscurely cheated. The soldier smiled very slightly and held the door open.

A brightly furnished, brightly painted office. A young man in his early thirties, very slim and dapper in captain's uniform of exquisite cut – cavalry no doubt – and two young bits of crumpet, one dark, in burgundy red, the other blonde and in buttercup yellow, but both long-haired, long-legged, painty-eyed and delicious-smelling. No need of flowers with them in the office. Military princes were coming back into style, and perhaps this was the new look, thought Van der Valk greatly amused. Paratroop senior officers had gone through a Templar stage of religious austerity: hair shirts and no servants, together with remarks like ‘This is not a drawing-room' and ‘Soldiers are not lackeys'. Now, apparently, there was a swing
back to the flamboyance of De Lattre's day – but, alas, with no Spahi uniforms. Uniforms by Hubert de Givenchy, more likely!

‘Good afternoon, Monsieur,' said the captain politely, standing up. The two secretaries looked at him expectantly under carefully negligent hair to see whether he smouldered but alas, he was slow that day on animal magnetism. He felt lumpish and sweaty, as no doubt he was meant to. The heavy-breathing provincial, a bit pink about the ears, felt absurdly ashamed of his shabby clothes and trodden-down shoes. Should have had a haircut and bought a bunch of sweet peas! He wanted to think of something witty and only said, ‘Good afternoon.'

‘The general will receive you at once.'

What have I got to be impressed about, he told himself angrily. Only a lousy brigadier-general, and staff at that! He could hear the voice of the brown man in Clermont-Ferrand, amused and malicious. ‘Not one of these bristly whisky-swilling ruffians in Pau. A Turenne, descended from the Marshal. He and Séguin-Pazzis are the intellectuals, highly sophisticated, apt to talk to you about structuralism and painters. You'd better go to charm school before you set foot there!'

The general stood up with the same princely courtesy as the captain, but the artificial feeling, of being in a literary drawing-room or an English country house, with echoes of the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld and the Cliveden Set, vanished immediately. True, the general's uniform was as fine in cut and cloth as art could make it. True, he was smoking a pipe and a tin of Three Nuns lay on a Louis Quinze map table, but Van der Valk recognized at once that this was a natural person, through a small and ludicrous detail. The hand that the general held out was long and fine-boned, with beautiful narrow nails – but the nails were chipped and decidedly dirty, and the two first fingers of the right hand had squalid bits of filthy sticking plaster wrapped round the middle joints. The general put his pipe between his teeth, followed Van de Valk's shocked blue eye with his own, laughed out loud and said, ‘Terrible thing to meet a policeman who sees through you at once.'

‘I didn't mean to be rude.'

‘But you're not rude. I was painting the boat – mending little things. Do sit down.' Every line spoke of breeding, of the flat in the Boulevard des Invalides and the Marshal as godfather, but he had no need at all to make capital out of such trivialities. The simplicity of a man who is brilliant, knows it – and knows how unimportant it is. Slim shoulders and thighs of steel – a slalom champion, who would efface himself before an obstacle the better to by-pass it. Wide mouth and formidable jaw muscles. Thin silver or platinum wedding-ring; the plainest of plain watches. Make no mistake about those feminine nails: a swifty.

‘Since you are Dutch may I have the pleasure of offering you a cigar?'

A good start: I know who you are, I know your errand; if you wish to fence you will find me a fencer. Van der Valk examined the terrain and his cigar together. One was slim, greenish, Cuban and good, the other was plain and elegant as its master. Silver vase of chrysanthemums, model 1915 aeroplane made by a jeweller, black morocco desk set, ivory crocodile whose tail became a paper cutter, and a solid gold fountain pen much scratched and dented. Van der Valk slowly opened the small blade of his knife; the general smiled and put the cigar-cutter back in the drawer, puffed at his pipe: the smile got more concentrated and brilliant; the eyes were dark sapphire under silky blue-black eyebrows.

‘There, we have settled the preliminaries. You have been having adventures, and you come to me now to learn about a man who was once a paratroop officer, and you are uneasy and a thought unhappy with the suspicion that you are about to be swathed in charm, twiddled till you are dizzy and thrust gently out stuttering excuses for having been misled. Error. I have decided that now is the time to operate upon an abcess that has paralysed far too many people for far too long.'

‘He was just a man.'

‘He was just a boy. He is a man, and cannot be obliterated. You wonder why we pretended he didn't exist and I am ready to tell you.'

‘You've spoken to the mafia and decided not to have me assassinated, I hope?'

‘I could have you strangled by my batman,' enjoying the notion, ‘but we are all respectable now – all generals. We were young then – almost boys. To be under forty seems pitifully young. And we were lowly. Even Castries was only a colonel. Langlais a lieutenant-colonel. Tourett – Bigeard – Clemençon – Thomas and Nicolas – majors. Pazzis and me – squadron-commanders: cavalry you know,' gaily. ‘Such nonsense has been talked about the paratroop mafia of Dien Bien Phu – but look at the photographs and you will see excited schoolboys, dedicated as scouts. Keep fit and sleep with your sword.

‘No; I am not trying to play it down. These men were freed very suddenly from the bonds of hierarchy. The place was full of colonels, of course – rear-échelon persons commanding typewriters and cans of vino-concentrate. And then – these youngsters found themselves free to conduct their battle as it pleased them, and they had all read Dumas. All for one – one for all, and their honour. Not the honour of France; that was too plainly compromised. Their own – and their men. There to fight but above all there to die. Hopped up – high on pot.' A high ringing laugh of pure enjoyment.

‘And they loved it. You see – Colonel de Castries …'

‘Transmitted your messages to Hanoi.'

‘Hm, yes, the phrase has made a career for itself. But can one forget the enjoyment – Langlais bellowing down the telephone at Sauvagnac in Hanoi – his superior officer … Now – it is important to remember – very junior officers indeed, mere boys, had loads in proportion thrust upon them. Platoon commanders – carrying the wreckage of a battalion scratched together from a dozen smashed-up units – Spanish anarchists and Moroccan bandits. Fox, Le Page, Pichelin – children! These children,' the pipe stabbed, ‘wrote a very brilliant page in our history, of which we can be exceptionally proud. Whooping up their French and Germans, Jugoslavs and Vietnamese – what a salad!

‘Not all those boys could be like Makowiak – you know the stories about Makowiak?'

‘No.'

‘He was a sub-lieutenant – the last man out of Na San, which was another fortified camp in the High Region – the
prelude and the precedent for Dien Bien Phu. A chopper picked him up and took him back to Hanoi. Where a reporter asked him what he would have done if the chopper
hadn't
picked him up – picture it, hundreds of kilometres of jungle, infested with Vietminh. “I would have walked,” the boy said. Well, that's just a phrase. Boy meant he had the
baraka
, Arab word, means aura of luck and invincibility. Came the surrender at Dien Bien Phu. All of us, hungry, head down, buggered, whipped. Hands tied behind us with phone wire. Makowiak just walked out. And walked back.'

The general smoked his pipe, Van der Valk his cigar.

‘Now nothing could bind these men together, coming from twenty different units, but faith – in one another – and truth, to themselves. Lots were killed, and lots died of wounds or fatigue or dysentery on the march to the camps. Some were overrun after burning the last of their ammo, in combat. Some, stunned by shell bursts, came back to life covered in blood and debris in Viet hands. None surrendered. None. One deserted – Laforêt. Poor boy, seeing it from today, what happened to him was the worst misfortune of all. He must have suffered a hell worse than any. You see, we had one another – and the Viet. He had nothing, not even himself.'

‘What exactly was it that happened to him?'

‘We didn't know ourselves – and he never told. But reconstructing it with hindsight – this. I have to make you a drawing – you're familiar perhaps with the general layout of the camp?'

‘Very roughly.'

‘Aha. Here is the central knot of the camp, a huddle of little hillocks. River running through the middle – the Nam Youm. Here to the left – the Huguettes. The other side to the right – the Elianes. Airstrip here in the middle. And Viet all round, closer every day. Now at the beginning, when it was thought that troops could manoeuvre, there were outlying fortified posts. A few kilometres off. Isabelle down south – cut off straight away and was never part of the camp proper. Up north-east, quite isolated on a hillock – Beatrice. The most lonely and vulnerable, so held by the Legion. Here to the north above the airstrip, on a ridge – Gabrielle.

‘Now Gabrielle was held by troops thought of as a bit shaky,
a bit substandard. So they were put in the strongest position of all – best natural formation, two complete rings of defences, covered throughout by artillery, and to get there a counterattack only had to rip straight out along the airstrip. Right?'

Van der Valk watched the hands, holding a piece of paper flat upon the morocco blotter and sketching upon it with a pencil. The sketch faced Van der Valk sitting across the desk, so that the hands demonstrated upside-down, which gave them no trouble. He could see these hands working on a small sailing boat with the same rapid deftness, disregarding a scratched palm or a crushed nail, sometimes maladroit from lack of practice, but never hesitant. The hands would unpin and throw a grenade with the same automatic ease with which they uncapped the gold fountain pen.