The Quiet American Read Free Page A

Limited.
    “He wasn’t dead from this,” Vigot said, pointing at a wound in the chest. “He was drowned in the mud. We found the mud in his lungs.” “You work quickly.” “One has to in this climate.”
    They pushed the tray back and closed the door. The rubber padded.
    “You can’t help us at all?” Vigot asked. “Not at all.”
    I walked back with Phuong towards my flat: I was no longer on my dignity. Death takes away vanity-even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t show his pain. She was still unaware of what it was about, and I had no technique for telling her slowly and gently. I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines. “American official murdered in Saigon.” Working on a newspaper one does not learn the way to break bad news, and even now I had to think of my paper and to ask her. “Do you mind stopping at the cable office?” I left her in the street and sent my wire and came back to her. It was only a gesture: I knew too well that the French correspondents would already be informed, or if Vigot had played fair (which was possible), then the censors would hold my telegram till the French had filed theirs. My paper would get the news first under a Paris date line. Not that Pyle was very important. It wouldn’t have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths, for it would have damaged Anglo-American relations, the Minister would have been upset. The Minister had a great respect for Pyle-Pyle had taken a good degree in-well. One of those subjects Americans can take degrees in: perhaps public relations or theatre craft, perhaps even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books). “Where is Pyle?” Phuong asked. “What did they want?” “Come home,” I asked. “Will Pyle come?”
    “He’s as likely to come there as anywhere else.” The old women were still gossiping on the landing, in the relative cool. When I opened my door I could tell my room had been searched: everything was tidier than I ever left it.
    “Another pipe?” Phuong asked. “Yes.”
    I took off my tie and my shoes; the interlude was over: the night was nearly the same as it had been. Phuong crouched at the end of the bed and lit the lamp. Mon enfant, ma soeur-skin the colour of amber. Sa douce langue natale.
    “Phuong,” I said. She was kneading the opium on the bowl. “II est mort, Phuong.” She held the needle in her hand and looked up at me like a-child trying to concentrate, frowning. “Tudis?” “Pyle est mort. Assassine.”
    She put the needle down and sat back on her heels, looking at me. There was no scene, no tears, just thought- the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.
    “You had better stay here tonight,” I said. She nodded and taking up the needle began again to heat the opium. That night I woke from one of those short deep opium sleeps, ten minutes long, that seem a whole night’s rest, and found my hand where it had always lain t night, between her legs. She was asleep and I could hardly hear her breathing. Once again after so many months I was not alone, and yet I thought suddenly with anger, remembering Vigot with his eye-shade in the police station and the quiet corridors of the Legation with no one about lad the soft hairless skin under my hand. Am I the only one who really cared for Pyle?
     
     

CHAPTER II
     
    The morning Pyle arrived in the square by the Contitteritall had seen enough of my American colleagues of the Press, big, noisy, boyish and middle-aged, full of sour Slacks against the French, who were, when all was said, fighting this war. Periodically, after an engagement had been tidily finished and the casualties removed from the gfeerie they would be summoned to Hanoi, nearly four fears’ flight away, addressed by the Commander-in-Chief, lodged for one night in a Press camp where they boasted that the barman was the best in Indo-China, flown over the battlefield at