The Spy Quartet. Len Deighton

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      35

      I found it difficult to get to sleep after Byrd had gone and yet I was too comfortable to make a move. I listened to the articulated trucks speeding through the village: a crunch of changing gears as they reached the corner, a hiss of brakes at the crossroads, and an ascending note as they saw the road clear and accelerated. Lastly, there was a splash as they hit the puddle near the ‘Drive carefully because of our children’ sign. Every few minutes another came down the highway, a sinister alien force that never stopped and seemed not friendly towards the inhabitants. I looked at my watch. Five thirty. The hotel was still but the rain hit the window lightly. The wind seemed to have dropped but the fine rain continued relentlessly, like a long-distance runner just getting his second breath. I stayed awake for a long time thinking about them all. Suddenly I heard a soft footstep in the corridor. There was a pause and then I saw the door knob revolve silently. ‘Are you asleep?’ Kuang called softly. I wondered if my conversation with Byrd had awakened him, the walls were so thin. He came in.

      ‘I would like a cigarette. I can’t sleep. I have been downstairs but no one is about. There is no machine either.’ I gave him a pack of Players. He opened it and lit one. He seemed in no hurry to go. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he said. He sat down in the plastic-covered easy chair and watched the rain on the window. Across the shiny landscape nothing moved. We sat silent a long time, then I said, ‘How did you first meet Datt?’

      He seemed glad to talk. ‘Vietnam, 1954. Vietnam was a mess in those days. The French colons were still there but they’d begun to realize the inevitability of losing. No matter how much practice they get the French are not good at losing. You British are skilled at losing. In India you showed that you knew a thing or two about the realities of compromise that the French will never learn. They knew they were going and they got more and more vicious, more and more demented. They were determined to leave nothing; not a hospital blanket nor a kind word.

      ‘By the early ’fifties Vietnam was China’s Spain. The issues were clear, and for us party members it was an honour to go there. It meant that the party thought highly of us. I had grown up in Paris. I speak perfect French. I could move about freely. I was working for an old man named de Bois. He was pure Vietnamese. Most party members had acquired Vietnamese names no matter what their origins, but de Bois couldn’t bother with such niceties. That’s the sort of man he was. A member since he was a child. Communist party adviser; purely political, nothing to do with the military. I was his secretary – it was something of an honour; he used me as a messenger boy. I’m a scientist, I haven’t got the right sort of mind for soldiering, but it was an honour.

      ‘Datt was living in a small town. I was told to contact him. We wanted to make contact with the Buddhists in that region. They were well organized and we were told at that time that they were sympathetic to us. Later the war became more defined (the Vietcong versus the Americans’ puppets), but then the whole country was a mess of different factions, and we were trying to organize them. The only thing that they had in common was that they were anti-colonial – anti-French-colonial, that is: the French had done our work for us. Datt was a sort of soft-minded liberal, but he had influence with the Buddhists – he was something of a Buddhist scholar and they respected him for his learning – and more important, as far as we were concerned, he wasn’t a Catholic.

      ‘So I took my bicycle and cycled sixty kilometres to see Datt, but in the town it was not good to be seen with a rifle, so two miles from the town where Datt was to be found I stopped in a small village. It was so small, that village, that it had no name. Isn’t it extraordinary that a village can be so small as to be without a name? I stopped and deposited my rifle with one of the young men of the village. He was one of us: a Communist, in so far as a man who lives in a village without a name can be a Communist. His sister was with him. A short girl – her skin bronze, almost red – she smiled constantly and hid behind her brother, peering out from behind СКАЧАТЬ