Saigon Read online

  Saito bounded into view from behind the screen. Madame La Farge waved him toward her, her mind flying. There was so much to do.

  At last.

  He Got His Job Through The Vietnam Times

  "Who was he, my lady?"

  "Andre Moreau. I had not seen him in more than ten years. Who is working near the house, who could have seen him come?"

  For all that the Madame trusted her plantation staff, she knew that at least one or two gave their loyalties to the Viet Cong. They could not be blamed for believing what they had been so carefully taught.

  Saito shook his head. "No one, my lady. All are working in the eastern fields. And he would not have come so far if he had been seen." Saito bent down, and his big hands turned the twisted body with incredible gentleness. "He was murdered, my lady. Slowly, by torture. They must have wanted something from him very badly."

  She nodded grimly, her lovely face set with a purpose it had not known for years. "We will have to dispose of his body without going to the authorities. Because his enemies are our enemies. And they must not know that he came to us."

  Saito straightened up and folded his massive arms. "It will be done. The fields will serve. There is much fallow earth. It will be put to good use."

  "Yes, but later. We will have to take him into the house now and wait for darkness before burying him. I shall have to leave that to you. For now, there is more pressing work to do."

  "Speak and tell me."

  "Moreau was with French Intelligence. While La Petite Fleur was alive this was always a place of sanctuary. That must be why Moreau came here, and he trusted me. That means I must try to get to Saigon and contact whoever remains in French Intelligence. There must still be somebody there who…"

  "No, my lady." It was unlike Saito to interrupt her. The hard set of his expression was also unlike him.

  "No? What do you mean?" she demanded. "I am quite sure that the French Government still has agents in Saigon, and I am equally sure that La Petite Fleur would have wanted me to contact them."

  Saito managed to shake his head and nod at the same time. "I know nothing of French Intelligence but without doubt my lady is right about their presence in Saigon. But I beg to say that the Master would not have wished you to go into Saigon at this time. It is always dangerous. Now it is impossible. You will recall that the General…"

  "The General!" Madame tossed her head impatiently. "He is a fat fool, unimportant. His threats are nothing to me. He will most certainly not stop me going into Saigon. Come, now, Saito, let us put this unfortunate being in the house and make our plans for going. You will see me as far as the border and then I…"

  "No, Madame." Saito stood like a rock in front of her. "You will not be going. If someone must go to Saigon, then I shall go. The Master gave me orders many years ago. They still stand. I will not permit you to endanger yourself. With respect, my lady, I cannot let you go."

  She stared at him, her eyes flashing angrily. He was implacable. But she had to go.

  "If you must presume to argue with me," she said coldly, "at least you can wait until we have attended to the dead."

  She saw the hurt in his eyes and turned her own away.

  Within minutes the body of Andre Moreau was stored in the cavernous wine cellars of the La Farge house to await the night when the hills would be dark and an excellent cover for grave-digging.

  Afterwards, Madame and Saito talked again. She had never seen him more determined; she had seldom been so angry. But at last she made herself realize that he would not let her go even if he had to hold her back by force. He would be gentle, but he would use force. The thought of making Saito go to such extremes made her give way at last. He would win in the end, and she would have gained nothing but a dreadful constraint between them.

  "Very well, then. Let us forget these last few moments and be about our business."

  Saito's slitted eyes looked wisely from his smooth, strong face. If he showed any expression at all, it was one of relief. "Command me, my lady."

  "You will make your way to the city with the utmost care and go to the offices of The Times of Vietnam." Saito raised his narrow eyebrows expectantly. "You will place an advertisement in the newspaper. It will say to whoever can read its message that La Petite Fleur has risen from his grave with a call to arms. Now prepare yourself."

  Saito bowed and withdrew.

  The Madame gazed out through the great French doors at the measured roadway between the lawns fronting her property. The Royal Roadster should have been standing there, polished and waiting, ready to take the lady of the house wherever she wanted to go. But it wasn't. The richest woman in North Vietnam could not cross an artificial border and drive south to Saigon. Suddenly her luxurious prison had become more oppressive than before — and yet more of a challenge. With Paul dead, it had not mattered much. Until now.

  Toward evening the hot rain began to fall again. It made the burial more unpleasant, yet easier. Claire La Farge stood on the dark hillside with her drenched clothes clinging to her body. Poor Moreau. Brave Moreau. A battered corpse, lying like a dog in the Vietnam hills. Whatever it was that he had given his life for must not be tossed carelessly away. If it was worth his life, it was worth hers. Again she cursed her immobility. She should be the one to go into Saigon. But since she could not, she would keep Moreau's message until the right man came to find it.

  Saito was ready for his hazardous trip through two armies to reach the city. He stood tall and proud in his costume of long trousers, cloth jacket and coolie hat. He also carried a gun, as most men do in Vietnam these days, and could present himself as farmer, laborer or guerrilla, depending on the moment.

  Madame gave him funds and brief instructions. "Go now, Saito. Tell no one what has happened until someone contacts you. Then say only what I have told you to say. Let yourself be seen in Saigon. But be very, very careful. I shall keep the message here and guard it with my life."

  He bowed. "Rather, guard your own life, my lady, knowing that I will die if evil should befall you."

  She held out her hand for him to kiss. Then he was gone, a great panther of a man gliding through the rain-steamed night.

  Madame Claire La Farge held her head erect and her firm shoulders back. She felt powerful and alive again. The code name La Petite Fleur rang like a salvo of guns in her head. It was almost as if agent Paul La Farge had come back to life to rule her universe once more.

  * * *

  Three days later the ten-thirty edition of The Times of Vietnam bore a rather ordinary item in its Personal Column. An item no more poignant, no less provocative than dozens of other such entries which ran daily on those pages:

  I must see you immediately. La Petite Fleur.

  Nearly everybody in Saigon reads The Times. There are forty newspapers and no one can possibly read them all, so nearly everybody reads the Times. Monsieur Raoul Dupré was one reader. Dr. Nicholas Carter was another.

  Raoul Dupré had been living in Saigon for more than twenty years. Nick Carter had been absorbing the chaos and contradictory beauty of it for six days, almost as long as he had been a Doctor.

  No one in Saigon seemed to give a damn why he was there, or even that he was there. His story of being an advance member of a team of the World Health Organization's medical observers seemed to have been swallowed like choice bait, and even the most important of the South Vietnamese authorities received him cordially between riots, flying bullets and sudden job changes. Even if they had suspected he was a spy they probably wouldn't have cared. Nearly everyone in Saigon — besides being a reader of The Times — is spying for somebody, has spied, will spy, or counts spies amongst his closest friends. There are so many entrants in the cloak-and-dagger field that they tend to cancel each other out, thus saving the authorities no end of trouble and permitting them to attend to the serious business of trying to keep the beleaguered nation from exploding.

  Nick Carter, therefore, was able to spy away to his heart's content. On this
sultry August morning he sat at a sidewalk cafe glancing at the newspaper and watching the people of Saigon go by. His last trip to the Vietnamese capital had been three years before. Superficially, it was unchanged. Much of it still looked like downtown Paris; the rest still looked like downtown Orient. Parisian shops and restaurants lined broad boulevards fringed with luxuriant trees that should have been baked brown by the torrid heat but somehow succeeded in giving off cool, green shade. The people were their usual mixture of smooth-faced priest, Parisian beauty, slant-eyed seductress, workworn laborer, stylish French face, overlaid on Oriental heart. But now they were tense and hurried, their glances furtive and their voices strident.

  He skimmed the pages of The Times, seeing in print the tragedies and confusions he had seen for himself during these last few days. His mission in Saigon was simply to see for himself, and report to Hawk, what was going on in that complicated, strife-torn city, and whether or not there was something that AXE could do to assist the American efforts in Vietnam. Hawk, the wizardly old battle-axe who headed America's super-secret intelligence agency, had given him few instructions. "Keep your eyes open. Contact such undercover organizations as you can. Get to know the Government officials through your U.N. contacts. Try to find out who's on whose side. Follow up anything that strikes you as offbeat."

  And there was something in the Personal notices of today's newspaper that struck AXE's top agent as very offbeat indeed.

  I must see you immediately. La Petite Fleur.

  Nick had been involved with the various forms and practitioners of espionage since the early days of the OSS. He had known of a famous French agent who had gone under the name of La Petite Fleur. And he knew that La Petite Fleur had been dead for many years. Nick's tanned, regular features drew into a frown. There was no reason why this simple ad should have any meaning for him; anybody could use the pseudonym La Petite Fleur. But he had learned to distrust coincidences of this sort.

  He folded up his newspaper and took a pedicab back to his middle-priced room at the middle-priced Saigon palace hotel. Once there, he locked himself in and opened up a very expensive bag containing an even more expensive piece of equipment known as Oscar Johnson. Oscar was a shortwave radio accustomed to transmitting in code.

  The message that reached Hawk's Washington headquarters some time later included a quotation from The Vietnam Times and a request for more information regarding La Petite Fleur.

  The reply, Nick knew, would be some time in coming, and it would not come via Oscar. There was not much he could do in the meantime but go on with his undirected snooping and perhaps pursue his fragile contact with Antoinette Dupré. Maybe it was time he got to know her father just a little better. For Raoul Dupré was the one man Hawk had told him he must meet.

  * * *

  Raoul Dupré — gentleman, tea-plantation owner, and wealthy French expatriate — was known and respected as all three in the Little Paris section of Saigon. On the surface, the Saigon of Dupré bore many traces of Mother Paris; the streets and supper clubs rang with the patois, customs and sophisticated rhythms of the City of Light, and the bon vivants of the epicurean world were no different from those in the European homeland. It is a saying that when you are French you take France with you wherever you go. Saigon is proof positive of the axiom. The majority of its inhabitants, of Vietnamese or other Asiatic stock, have somehow been powerless to prevent the metropolitan area of Saigon from becoming a Paris in microcosm. Despite the war raging so close to its outskirts, Saigon saw the daily airplane flights of Airvietnam unload tourists by the score, come to sample Parisian Saigon with its European-style hotels, department stores and nightclubs. There was a museum and a zoo and numerous cafes, and even the Thong Naut Theatre which showcased plays, revues and folk singers in the approved metropolitan manner. You could eat Chinese, drink French, live Vietnamese, and dance all night in any language. For movies, you could watch Richard Burton make love to Elizabeth Taylor in dubbed French or with Vietnamese subtitles. Afterwards you could go to the Folies Vietnamese.

  This was the small, sophisticated world of Raoul Dupré, eminent social leader of Saigon. But Monsieur Dupré had two secrets.

  Either of them, intermingled as they were, could have cost him his life to the Viet Cong or their bosses among the Red Chinese. The agents of the Communist Vietminh, or "People's Republic of North Vietnam," would have burned his small intestines in blazing oil if they had known that he was one of the key men in the French Intelligence system which covered the entire territory with a fine line of espionage. He probably would not have been able to convince them that the line was very fine and thin indeed, and that he himself was now almost powerless as an active agent. Nevertheless he did have knowledge that was eagerly sought.

  His other secret, one not so well-kept as he imagined, was the wild and loose love-life of his only daughter, Antoinette. For a dynamic man of forty-five engaged in life-or-death work, a nineteen-year-old sexpot offspring who fancied that all her life was dedicated to la dolce vita and la vie de bohéme could be a greater handicap than being blind in one eye and lame in one leg. Toni was a trial, an incredibly beautiful and exasperating trial. Since the day when her native mother had died giving birth to her, Raoul had responded to her every cry and indulged every whim. Like doting male parents the world over, he attributed Antoinette's shortcomings to her motherless youth and "growing pains." Once in a while, though, he was not so sure.

  "Toni, ma petite," he would say. "Go slow, my child. You have plenty of time to live. Taste wine quietly, let it age slowly first. You will see how much better it is."

  "Papa," she would laugh him off with a toss of her gleaming dark hair, "I was meant for men and love. Let me love my way."

  Her way — although she never told him the truth of it — was to try three men one night on the sandy beach two hours drive beyond the city. By the light of a full moon, she allowed her abandoned body to be pleasured and punished by three strapping Indo-Chinese sailors. What could Raoul do but agree to the terrible abortion that kindly old Dr. Wong offered to perform? Toni had cried; she said she had been raped; she promised to be careful of the company she kept. But she learned no lessons. And Raoul himself learned no measure of wisdom. Neither was he able to render any. Toni became known as the easiest, richest wanton in all of Saigon. And Raoul endured the parties, the scandals, and the mad social whirls which enveloped his town house and plantation.

  Only his work for French Intelligence steadied the keel of his life while he tried to tell himself that Toni would some day grow up and become the woman who befitted the role of daughter to Raoul Dupré.

  On the morning that the ad appeared in The Times of Vietnam, Toni did not appear at the breakfast table until close to noon. Raoul had been too preoccupied with thoughts of her to study the paper according to his usual custom. He worried his meal of tea, toast and curried eggs, wondering why she was even later than usual, and somehow feeling too ashamed to send a servant to her room.

  Dupré had three cups of coffee and studied the bamboo curtains that closed off the southwestern patio. They were getting shabbily frayed. He sighed. If Toni were truly feminine, these things would have been tended to long ago. But she was only female, not feminine. She had no interest in her home. Instead of doing anything for herself, it was simpler to command fat Maru to go down to the Market Center and buy whatever was needed. The help would do it all, if she would only order. But she did not even order. She was not only a lazy, sensuous child about her body but about everything else as well…

  "Bonjour, Papa. And don't be cross. Not today. The sun is too glorious for your scowling face. Smile, please!"

  There she was at last, radiant with her morning-scrubbed face and her own peculiar costume. Wooden clogs, straw hat, striped bikini, young body glowing with the health she did not deserve. The frown on Raoul Dupré's face died aborning. Toni was lovely, fresh as morning dew, but a girl of Paris. A gamine magnifique, his own wondrous, vital daughter.

&nbs
p; "So? You hunger at last, Toni? What time did you get in last night?"

  "Papa!" She sat down in the cane chair opposite his and crossed her silky legs. The full surge of her woman's breasts was bursting beyond the confines of her halter. "So bourgeois! Four thirty, I think it was. Does it really matter?"

  He tried to look stern. "I had hoped you'd learned your lesson, Toni."

  She poured herself a cup of tea from the blue porcelain pot.

  "Perhaps I have, Papa. But what is bothering you this morning? I know you too well, and I can see that there is something."

  He touched his lips with the embossed napkin at his right, trying to assume the proper severity. But it was always so difficult to be hard on this adorable pixie with her little girl's face and woman's body.

  "I do not care for your latest admirer."

  She pretended to think. "Who do you mean? That Pierre, who is staying at the Caravelle?"

  "No."

  "That nice American, perhaps? The one who has something to do with the United Nations?"

  Raoul thought a moment and formed a hazy mental picture. "He? No, that one I should not mind."

  "So." Toni eyed him mischievously. "Not he. Perhaps it is my friend Michele you do not like?"

  "Your friend Michele!" he exploded. "That creature! Your admirer, girl? I should certainly hope not! But why must you have this wild young girl friend go on scouting expeditions to round up all available males for your parties? Mon Dieu! Remember you are the daughter of Raoul Dupré. Conduct yourself as such, please, without the help of these gay, giddy women who only serve to make you look laughable in the eyes of all Saigon. Pfui! Michele!"

  Toni grinned at him. "Shame on you for a Frenchman, Papa! Pfui, indeed! But what is bothering you, mon père? Now I know it is not Mickee of whom you speak."