Tsing-Boum (8 page)

He went and looked in the cupboard and found that there was a bottle of whisky. Bravo Arlette – twice. He poured out a large glass and went for a hunt in the bookshelves. The plastic binding of
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu
was broken, and large blocks of brownish cheap print were falling out, covered with annotations in Arlette's handwriting. Tucked in were a lot of newspaper clippings and photographs. On the flyleaf was Arlette's maiden name. He understood – it had not been the woman married to a Dutch police officer who had read this book. It had been the little girl from Toulon.

A sad tale, this tale of political hedging, of halfhearted indecision and compromise. Of military vanity and obstinacy. Who had spoken for the world? Not Eisenhower or Congress. Not Churchill. Giap had had the last word; nothing new under the sun.

Yet the tale had nobility too, that of sacrifice and beauty and catastrophe. The suffering on the hillocks named Huguette and Eliane balanced the suffering on the hills, where the People's Army had hauled artillery by manpower.

Halfway through he could read no further, even helped by whisky. He glanced at the photographs; there were all the star actors, so vividly contrasted – Giap and Navarre. And the colonels – the courtly mannered Castries and those two harsh-handed, hard-mouthed peasant noblemen, Langlais and Bigeard.

Arlette had fallen asleep with the light still on, a thing only a woman can do. A man could never fall asleep with the light on; wryly he realised that his own light was turned on: so be it, he would not sleep. He got his jacket, and a beret; he was limping from fatigue and he got his stick, and hobbled out on to the silent streets of two in the morning in a provincial town. One hundred thousand persons, an area for which a paratroop lieutenant with under a hundred men would be responsible.

It had stopped raining but the wind still tore harsh and
implacable through streets overhung by inky ragged cloud which parted now and again to show a livid moon, three-quarters full, waning. This was Holland, not the jungle. He was not a paratroop lieutenant, but a colonel, an administrator. He limped and carried a stick, like Castries. The commission of inquiry held to inquire into the catastrophe had been flabbergasted to learn that Langlais, a mere lieutenant-colonel with no field training, had been the sole responsible field commander of the French garrison, and that Bigeard, a lowly major commanding a parachute battalion, had been his ‘operations' second.

‘What was then the function of Colonel de Castries?' asked a puzzled general.

‘He transmitted our messages to Hanoi,' replied Langlais, simply.

Van der Valk had better be careful. He had been parachuted into a wasps' nest, a
merdier
, and he must be as careful of his career as of his skin! Avoid massacre, boy. Perhaps he was like Gilles, the paratroop general who was the first commander of Dien Bien Phu, Papa Gilles of the bad heart and the glass eye, who made his first jump at forty and who had seen what was waiting, wise old man, and grumbled to Cogny ‘Get me out of here – I have lived long enough like a rat'. It would be wiser to be Gilles than to be Castries the cavalryman, swaggering
sabreur
, champion at jumping horses, bedding the girls and charging the enemy, who left his career for ever as the transmitter of messages to Hanoi.

So Esther was mixed up with this legend, this traumatic disaster that had bewitched the course of events in Algeria as well as in Vietnam, whose echoes had not ceased rumbling round the world. They had lost Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie and Dominique with hardly a fight, and it had been too late for the incredible courage shown on Huguette and the Elianes. Van der Valk walked steadily through the harsh streets. Like all great catastrophes this one was encrusted with myth, that nobody could now disentangle. Tenacious, however stupid. The myth, for example, that the
pitons
of Dien Bien Phu had been named after Colonel de Castries's mistresses. Why, the original dropping zones for the first paratroop strike
had had girls' names, long before Castries took over. Bigeard and Gilles had landed on Natasha. He – he had landed on Esther! A Dutch peasant, son of an Amsterdam carpenter. Well, Langlais had been a Breton peasant, Bigeard son of a Toul railwayman, and the nobleman had been Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries, a family of dukes, great seigneurs, Marshals of France. No; he had been parachuted in, and he would stand and fight, and if he lost his career there was the little cottage waiting, in the forest, in France.

Had Ruth's father been at Dien Bien Phu? There had been everything there – it was another legend (sedulously fostered by the Dutch) that the defenders had all been ex-Waffen SS Légionnaires of German blood. Well, of course there had been Legion units; they had occupied Beatrice and Isabelle. Now that he thought of it, the unit on Beatrice had been the Third Thirteenth – the very same that wore Ruth's badge. Did it have a meaning? There had been Germans of course – far too young, naturally, to have been in any SS – and Spaniards, and Jugoslavs! And French officers, and Russians, and lord-knew-who else …

One part of the crossword was solved. Esther had been involved with troops that had fought at Dien Bien Phu – those troops who formed a freemasonry. Whatever happened, even now years later, soldiers who had been at this Vietnamese Agincourt which they had not won – but neither had they lost – knew, recognized and supported one another. And he rather thought that his telephone call from France had less to do with the Secret Army than with that magic bond, the private solidarity of men who had crouched in the mud on Eliane and looked out on Giap's hills.

Once could not, of course, place too much trust in the badge. Esther had been a nurse, Esther had had many soldiers in her hands and in her arms.

Arlette had seen it all.

Van der Valk stopped dead. Had Esther herself been at Dien Bien Phu? Zomerlust's words echoed in his head.

‘Called ipsas or something – airborne nurse; she'd had parachute training.'

A nurse had won fame at the place – Geneviève de Galard, who had been unable to leave when the airstrip came under the direct fire of Giap's artillery. She had stayed throughout the siege, at Dr Grauwin's side. But she had been alone. What other woman had been there? Brigitte Friang, most celebrated of women war correspondents, who had been under fire more times than he had had hot cups of tea. But she had left before the siege, and had been forbidden to parachute into the camp once it had started. Paule Bourgeade, Castries's secretary, had been flown back to Hanoi on the second day of the siege, at Castries's express order.

There were to be sure the Ouled Naïl girls, but about them both legend and – unsurprisingly – official accounts were vague. Certainly there had been no nurses, apart from Geneviève de Galard, but nurses had continued to fly in and out as long as they could.

Why was the name of Dien Bien Phu a talisman that should surround the doings of Esther Marx, in France, with a feeling of embarrassment? More important, were these people who proposed to call on him tomorrow there to tell him the truth, or to tell him lies? Everything to do with Dien Bien Phu attracted lies, and there were still too many unanswered questions. Why this, why that, like the other list of strange fatalities that had lost Waterloo.

At home he put his stick away, with a secret message of sympathy for Colonel de Castries, in whom something had broken that first day when Beatrice fell and the first of his ‘mistresses' changed her lover.

Esther, did you too change your lover? Why were you shot down, so abruptly and efficiently?

Van der Valk, before he slept, tried to recall the little rhyme about the matador. The fickle public in the tribunes, as ready to scream coward as to acclaim a hero. ‘But there is only one who knows, and he's the one who plays the bull.'

He woke up bleary, result of all this juvenile promenading in the small hours. He had to forget any irritability; Arlette would accept it ordinarily as part of life, but this morning she would be alert to any signs – go and have a hot shower. He had the hot shower, reflecting that she must have found the book, which he had left lying, and understood that he had solved his clue.

It was agreeable how simply Ruth had found a place in the household – already she had her own place at the table and an old silver napkin-ring of Arlette's. She knew that dressing-gowns and uncombed hair were frowned on at breakfast, that it was not allowed to read the paper, and that the washing-up was done and not stacked.

‘I have a lot to do this morning, unfortunately. Perhaps you could see about Ruth's school? She mustn't lose any more days than she can help.' He looked at the little girl, eating toast with that quiet air of wisdom. Too quiet, too good; she had accepted the whole break with the Van Lennepweg without a murmur, obediently falling in with the new life as though she had made up her mind to forget Esther. Had Esther done something of the sort? Why had she married Zomerlust, and gone to live ten uneventful years in a municipal flat in provincial Holland?

‘Which do you like best – coffee or cocoa?'

‘Coffee.'

She called Arlette ‘Arlette' and him ‘Monsieur'.

‘Can't have coffee every day. But definitely on Sundays, birthdays, fêtes and the Fourteenth of July.'

‘Have you brushed your teeth? In that case get your coat,' said Arlette. ‘I'd like to catch the headmaster before school begins.'

‘Is there any more?' asked Van der Valk pushing his coffee-cup hopefully forward.

‘Yes, petit père, but you have to get it for yourself. Ruth and I will clear away when we get back.'

‘Petit père,' repeated the child giggling.

‘A phrase,' said Arlette.

‘I'm all for it,' he said behind the newspaper. ‘I propose to become a father in my old age. Ruth, you can keep the Monsieur for your new school. See you both at lunchtime.'

‘Yes, Meine Herrschaft,' said his wife. The door slammed, followed by the door of the deux-chevaux, followed by the wheezing noise of the starter, always unwilling in the early morning. He drank a cup of coldish coffee, said ‘Houp-là' to push himself, and struggled into his coat. There was really little point in bothering Ruth with her mother's funeral. Drizzle this morning, and car windscreens covered in a thin greasy mud.

There was only himself and Zomerlust; he detected a press photographer and sent him packing. But there were plenty of loud large floral tributes, from the neighbours of the Van Lennepweg, from the Army, from the sergeants' mess, from him. He had written a card saying ‘Ruth'. Zomerlust brought a large simple bunch of bronze chrysanthemums. ‘She liked them,' he said. You're a good man, thought Van der Valk again. The burial was brief and unceremonious.

‘Come and have a drink.'

Zomerlust looked dubious; was it the thing, after a burial?

‘I'm in uniform.'

‘I can't stand chatting in the rain; I've a bad leg.'

In deference to the bad leg he said he'd have a cup of coffee.

‘We're a bit further,' said Van der Valk, stretching a damp trouserleg towards the radiator. Zomerlust shrugged.

‘What good will it do? You're only doing your job, I realise. But all I ever want – all she ever wanted – was to be left in peace.'

‘She is, now. I go on from here. Tell me, did she ever say anything about Indochina?'

‘That's Vietnam? All that French mob had been there. I suppose she might have been too. I never took much notice.
I told you – we didn't see much of the French troops. They had their Algerian thing going on. No affair of ours. I don't pretend to know anything about it. I mean it's still going on, isn't it? – I mean the Americans are there now. But it's all politics, isn't it? I do remember I said something about it one day.' His voice trailed off as he recalled a live, vivid Esther.

‘About Vietnam?'

‘She told me pretty sharpish that I knew nothing about it. Well that was true enough. I suppose she might have been there.'

‘You've no interest in who killed her?' Zomerlust looked at him as though he had made a very stupid remark.

‘She's out there underground. She'd had a rough life and precious little luck. Now you've got to go routing about with her bones.'

‘She may have had a rough life,' mildly. ‘Which doesn't mean she was ready to die. Someone thought she was. I'd be interested to know who.'

Back at the bureau there was curiosity in the air.

‘Man to see you, chief. Says you're expecting him.'

‘'s right. Twenty minutes to read my reports. Give him my apologies and say I'll be at his disposal as soon as I can and I'm sorry to keep him waiting.' It raised eyebrows among the staff; he wasn't as a rule one to bother about keeping people waiting. As for him he was curious as hell, which was why he throttled his curiosity with a quarter of an hour's paperwork.

‘Sorry to be so slow. I had to go to the funeral this morning.' He hadn't had any idea what to expect, but there were no dirty raincoats – more like somebody from the Embassy. A slim young man looking no more than thirty, with a well-fitting dark-blue suit and a sober silk tie, protected from Dutch weather by a leather raincoat, it was true, but not police style: sportive, supple thing with a tie belt. His briefcase was black and expensive like the raincoat, and slim like him, and didn't look as if it had a gun it it, but doubtless it was more polite not to inquire. Fair hair cut short, greenish eyes trained not to be mobile, a candid look that – who knew? – might be genuine.
He looked – as far as that went – what he doubtless was: bright young French civil servant with a political science degree. He spoke fluent Dutch with little accent.

‘Sorry to be a trouble.'

‘I hope I won't be telling you the same.'

Soft smile, American cigarette, flick of a gold lighter, white intellectual's hand but a muscular face looking unafraid of fresh air: could be a judo tiger for all Van der Valk could guess.