The Point Team Page 12

  Bob Murphy had persuaded them to stay overnight with him in order to meet an English acquaintance who had fought in Malaysia with him. Bob thought he would be the right man for the job. Verdoux had argued against this, out of Bob’s hearing.

  “Andre, you were the one who was against me seeing unknowns who answered ads. Now you don’t want me to see someone with a personal recommendation.”

  The Frenchman snorted. “I would not call a recommendation from this Australian as something to take seriously.”

  “Perhaps not. But let’s take a look. If you’d seen those two creeps I had to interview on Long Island yesterday, you’d know why I want to wrap this thing up any way I can. I’m sure one of them was a cop. When he saw I wasn’t going to hire him, he thought about trying to bust me on the spot. I’ve seen enough of these guys. Besides, I don’t feel like a five-hour drive back to New York this evening.”

  They had been surprised at the severe grandeur of Bob’s residence. Somehow the restrained, traditional New England architecture and furnishings did not reflect Bob’s personality. They understood when they met Eunice, whom they both liked. Needless to say, not a word was breathed to her concerning the forthcoming mission.

  “What do you do, Mr. Campbell?” Eunice asked at the dinner table.

  “I’m retired from the army,” Mike replied.

  “They’re bird-watchers,” Bob told his wife.

  “Really?” She looked at them with interest. “I’m sure you’d prefer to be called ornithologists. Did you spot anything interesting today?”

  Mike was not sure how to field this question. “Well, I live in Arizona. Desert birds are my specialty. I guess everything up here is new to me.”

  She turned to Andre. “And you, Mr. Verdoux. How does the avian wildlife here compare with that in France?”

  Andre shot a look of hatred in Bob’s direction before answering her. “Very different, I can assure you.”

  “Did you see a robin?” she asked.

  “Ah yes, of course. With the red breast, no?” Andre said vaguely.

  “What do you think of our American robin compared to the French robin?” she asked brightly. “Ours is huge in comparison, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, indeed. Big. Much bigger. Everything in America is much bigger.” With cold fury Andre looked down the table at Bob, who was leering at him openly. Andre asked Bob, “What is that you call your Australian kingfisher?”

  “Laughing jackass,” Bob answered.

  “Exactly.” The Frenchman folded his napkin before him with satisfaction.

  Chapter 11

  “VAN HO Ven, get up!”

  Eric Vanderhoven received a light kick on the thigh as he slept on a pile of rice straw, half covered with more of the same.

  The next kick was a bit harder, so he opened his eyes and sat up.

  “I’ll wake the others,” he said and struggled to his feet.

  “This evening, after your work, we will discuss the burdens placed upon small countries by the great colonialist powers,” the party cadre told him. “I want you to make a statement in front of the others.”

  “I’ll remember to mention Russia as the biggest present-day colonial power,” Eric said enthusiastically.

  “Why? Why?” the cadre shouted. Then the cadaverously thin man in his thirties wrung his hands and lowered his voice so as not to wake the others. “Don’t do this, Van Ho Ven. They will keep you here when I report it. I don’t want you here. I want you to go away. You have been warned over and over. If you make this accusation of Russia, you will make me look like a failure. When I report it, they will punish you.”

  “Then don’t report it,” Eric suggested calmly. “Tell them I’m reeducated.”

  “I would if you could hold your tongue,” the cadre said desperately.

  “Let me see the papers you are putting through recommending our return to Ho Chi Minh City, and I’ll keep quiet. So long as you don’t ask my opinion at one of your dumb meetings.”

  The cadre thought for a moment, obviously tempted. Finally he shook his head regretfully. “No. The other cadres would know, and at least one of them would inform on me. I could be thrown out of the party.”

  “And have to go back to working again,” Eric said sarcastically.

  “Yes, indeed,” the cadre answered with great feeling, “that could happen.”

  Eric pointed a finger at the cadre. “You do a deal with me on getting us out of this reeducation camp, and I’ll keep my part of the bargain. But so long as I have to slop shit all day, I’m not keeping my mouth shut and there’s fuck-all anyone can do about it except shoot me.”

  “They will,” the cadre promised. “Now you are still a child, but when you turn sixteen, if you are then saying the things you say now, they will shoot you.”

  “I’ll never see the age of sixteen in this goddamn piss-hole of a country. That’s three years away,” Eric said with a thirteen-year-old’s awe of such a vast tract of time. “I’ll be dead by then or gone out of Vietnam.”

  “You keep this up and you’ll still be working here in this camp,” the cadre muttered darkly. “I’ll be the one who is dead or gone from Vietnam.”

  The skinny man exited through the door of bamboo canes. The walls of the hut were constructed of bamboo canes also, and the roof was thatched rice straw. The floor was bare earth beneath a covering of straw. Eric smiled to himself after the man was gone. He could see the gray streaks of dawn spreading in the east. There would be a struggle of wills at the ideology meeting tonight after work about whether he would be asked to speak. Eric guessed he might be, if only the cadre and the Amerasian kids were present. If other cadres or local peasants came to the meeting, Eric knew he would not be asked.

  Eric’s threat of becoming a blot on a bureaucrat’s otherwise perfect record was his sole power. There could be no failure permitted in this new workers’ paradise—and thus if Eric, a child of thirteen, could not be reeducated, it was because the cadre’s approach to him was incorrect. The least hint of “incorrectness” in a cadre would be a calamity to his immediate progress within the party and could prove to be a taint difficult to lose in the future. Eric Vanderhoven was the kind of problem a party worker did not solve, but one whose responsibility he tried to shift elsewhere as soon as possible.

  Eric woke up the eleven other Amerasian boys in the hut, using the cadre’s light kick on the thigh followed by a somewhat harder one. Then he went outside and lit a fire, went to the well with two wooden buckets on a yoke across his shoulders, heaved a black cast iron pot upon the fire and partly filled it with water. When the water was boiling, he poured rice into it.

  The other eleven youths, all twelve or thirteen years old, appeared in ones and twos. The first had a songbird he had killed the previous night with a stick. He poured some boiling water from the pot on it to make it easier to pluck. Others were foraging for edible herbs. One boy had some shredded pork left over from the cadres’ dinner the night before. Another had a mouse that he had smothered with a shirt in the hut during the night. He disemboweled and skinned it and added its piteously small carcass to that of the tiny plucked and cleaned bird. They fried the meat in a skillet, deboned it, and chopped it into exceedingly fine morsels. They stir-fried the edible plants and chopped those up also. When the rice was cooked and drained, they mixed the meat and vegetables into it and then divided the whole into twelve equal portions. By the time they had wolfed the food with their fingers from wooden bowls, the sun stood clear of the eastern horizon and had burnt some of the mist from above the jungle trees.

  The twelve Amerasian boys headed for the rice fields with the other workers. They kept apart from the others on the way in order to talk English among themselves. When Eric had first arrived at the camp, three of the Amerasian youths did not know a word of English. In only a few months they now had built up a limited vocabulary—what they could say, they said colloquially and naturally. The other boys, who had a basic knowledge of English, improved th
eir skills rapidly under the strict standards and unforgiving attitude of Eric Vanderhoven.

  “The cadres said yesterday they know we talk English out here,” one boy told Eric.

  “So let them come out to the rice fields and see for themselves,” Eric said unconcernedly. “You’ll never find a party member anywhere near where there’s hard work to be done. It’s the one place we don’t have to listen to their crap.”

  “Yeah, but the informers tell them everything,” the boy argued.

  “The other people here are the same as us. Their word counts for nothing. Relax. We’re Americans. We talk English.” He raised his voice to a shout. “Fuck the commies.”

  Several of the workers looked over at him and quickly averted their heads. They did not understand what he said, but the tone of his voice had been clear, and he had spoken in English.

  “You’ll be reported,” the boy said fearfully.

  “Let me take care of that,” Eric reassured him. “Quit worrying all the time. I’m looking out for us all.”

  Eric had this kind of talk—building up the morale and courage of the nervous—several times a day. Mitch and Red had been sent to the reeducation camp with him. Although the other nine Amerasian boys had been strangers to him, he had become their unopposed leader within hours of his arrival at the camp.

  As another boy approached, Eric realized that this morning he was having to deal with two extremes—the fearful and now the reckless.

  “Pete. I’ve been thinking about Pete,” the boy said. “They never caught him. Right now I bet he’s walking the streets of Danang. He just walked out of here.”

  Eric sighed. “You suggesting we head south down the road and walk a few hundred miles to Ho Chi Minh City?”

  “I am,” the boy said steadfastly.

  Eric pointed at the steaming, thick jungle bordering the rice fields. “If I walk anywhere, I’d prefer to take my chances in that direction, across Laos, into Thailand and real freedom.”

  “Over the mountains?” the nervous boy said aghast.

  The reckless one said, “You go, I’ll go with you. Right now.”

  “You think I haven’t thought about all this before?” Eric said irritably. “Look, why do you think they don’t bother to put guards on this reeducation camp? Simple. We don’t have to run anywhere. If we want to get out of here all that bad, all we’ve got to do is become reeducated. Learn some of Ho Chi Minh’s poems and quote a bit of Lenin, smile at the cadres, and we’d be out of here in a couple of weeks—after we’ve got the rice planted.”

  The others laughed at the accuracy of this observation. There were two rice harvests a year, and although work was continuous throughout the seasons, it was especially heavy during planting and harvesting. During these periods, no one was released from the camp, no matter how reeducated they had become.

  Eric went on, “They don’t care if we run off into the jungle. If the snakes or animals don’t get us, if we don’t die of fever, if the hill tribesmen don’t cut us in pieces, if we don’t lose our way … hey, you know at least one of those things is going to happen to us. If we could get a few rifles and ammunition, it would be different. We could steal enough rice here to see us through and cook it before we left.”

  Eric was unaware that he had started out putting down this escape route and had ended up kind of half-planning to use it.

  Each of the youths was assigned a bundle of sprouted rice plants.

  Eric commented in Vietnamese to the man who handed them out. “We shouldn’t have to bother with this. The Americans have discovered you can plant the rice directly in the fields and it grows like any other grain crop. That’s the way they do it in the States.”

  The man handing over the seedlings gave him a frightened smile and said nothing, but another adult spoke angrily. “The Americans are wasteful. They spatter rice seed all over and then have to thin the plants because they are growing too thickly. Vietnamese make every grain of rice count. That is our way.”

  Eric did not know what to reply to this, so he scowled and walked away.

  The Vietnamese sentenced to the reeducation camp avoided the Amerasian youths in off-work hours for different reasons according to their backgrounds. The Viets disliked them because they were not pure Viets, just like they disliked the hill tribesmen and those of Chinese ethnic background. The ethnic Chinese, who had thrived as merchants under the various regimes prior to communism, had a double suspicion to live under—their bourgeois tendencies and possible sympathies with Vietnam’s new enemy, communist China. The last thing they wished for was association with an outcast group like Amerasians.

  On top of these conflicts lay the mutual dislike for each other of city and country people thrown together in the camp. City people sent to labor in the countryside looked down on their tasks as demeaning to them and fit only for brutal, stupid peasants. The peasants sent to the camp were familiar with the work, hardened to it, easily made their quotas, and looked down on the smart-talking city people who did not know even the most basic rules of survival and self-sufficiency—they often joked that people from the cities thought rice grew on trees. Further, they identified communism and its communal farms, land seizures, forced labor and compulsory moves away from traditional villages and their ancestors’ graves as being the work of city people. Amerasian youths were one of the few groups upon which they could vent their frustration and anger.

  However, at work no one could be an outcast since that would affect the work production of all, and their food and treatment depended on their production in the fields. They had all heard stories of times when there had been trouble and soldiers were brought in. Some of the dissidents were killed, all were beaten continually even after they had stopped their protests, and many claimed that after having been supposedly released from the camp, they all disappeared. Although no one knew how true these stories were, no one wanted to test them.

  The workers waded into the brown waters dammed in the rice fields.

  “Hell, we got the lower fields to work today,” Eric grumbled. “I bet we get assigned to plant in a whirlpool.”

  He was not far wrong. The upper fields were easier to work in because the depth of the water was rarely above the boys’ knees. The water levels were deeper in the lower fields, and to reduce the level to permit work, water was released through sluice gates. The country people moved rapidly in to take the best positions in the fields—places with the easiest working conditions. The twelve youths were ordered to plant their rice seedlings where the muddy water was deepest and a current tugged at their legs as the water swept toward the sluices. The water came up to the chests of two of the youths who were pint-sized, and they had to struggle to maintain their footing on the slippery mud bottom.

  “We’ll have to wait for the water to go down,” Eric yelled to them. “Come over here till it gets shallow enough.”

  They waded back from their assigned area.

  “At least we can’t get flukes when we have to work in these damn currents,” Eric cheered up the others.

  Two of the boys had been attacked by flukes, tiny invisible creatures that swam in the still water and entered the human bloodstream through the skin. The flukes caused abscesses and burst vessels in the gut, where they laid their eggs. All the boys had been already infected by malaria from mosquito bites, but none had a very serious infection, and the pills they were given kept them able to work. One boy had died in their first month at the camp. The party medical worker had not been able to figure out what was wrong with him, and no doctor was available.

  The youths followed Eric out of the deeper, fast-moving water whose currents became swifter as more sluice gates were opened to speed up the lowering of the water level.

  “Where’s Harry?” one boy asked.

  Harry was one of the smallest of the youths. He spoke not a word of English and had only a Vietnamese name when Eric arrived. Now Harry was Harry, because that was what Eric and therefore all the others called him.
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  They turned around to look, and at that instant saw Harry come to the surface where the brown water was swirling toward a sluice gate. Eric dropped his seedlings and splashed across a shallow area toward the deeper channel. He dived in, swam about trying to locate Harry, who had disappeared again beneath the surface. One of the boys pointed, and Eric saw a glimpse of Harry’s shirt ten feet away in the murky water.

  Eric half-ran with the current, half-swam under water, till he bumped into Harry and clutched at his clothes. He felt Harry’s hands grasp and cling to him, and he turned and made his way against the flow of water back to the shallows as the panic-stricken smaller boy held onto him with the crazed energy of a giant wood tick.

  Eric threw Harry face down on a mud embankment and knelt hard with both knees on the small of his back. A couple of quarts of water were forced out of Harry’s mouth. When Eric released him, he began to vomit, taking huge, gasping intakes of air between convulsive spewings-up of water.

  “Who’s got my seedlings?” Eric asked.

  No one had.

  They spotted them floating half-submerged a little distance away, and three of the boys ran to fetch them. One of the peasants who functioned as a kind of overseer brought a huge double armful of rice shoots and dumped them on the embankment beside Harry. He left without a word. This extra work was punishment for what had happened—the seedlings had to be planted along with their regular allotments. Eric said nothing, because the peasant was respected by the other workers since he had proved he was not an informer. This did not mean he liked big-city Amerasians.

  A bony, wizened old man joined the youths and helped them plant their extra seedlings, after motioning to Harry to stay where he was resting on the embankment. The old man reminded Eric of the gaunt monks he used to see begging outside the temples before the communists took over. He thought this man might be a monk and, not knowing what else to say to him, he asked him if he was.

  The old man laughed and did not pause in his work as he answered, “Have you ever seen a monk plant rice? You think I learned to work like this in a monastery?”