Immediately he realized the injustice of this. Wasn’t she taking him to a hiding place and wasn’t she returning Wade’s car? Without her he would be in a hell of a fix.
He put his hand down on hers and patted it.
“Relax, kid. It’ll work out all right. In a couple of months when we are in Hong Kong, we’ll be laughing about it.”
“Oh no! We’ll never laugh about it. Never!”
He shrugged his shoulders. She was probably right, he thought but he wished she didn’t sound as if the end of the world was at hand.
“There’s one important thing you have to watch out for, Nhan. When the news breaks, Blackie will remember you spent this night with me. He’ll probably question you. There’s just a chance even the police will question you. You are to say I drove you to the river and talked to you for a couple of hours. You know that place where we go sometimes: where that old sunken junk is? That’s where we went. I drove you home around eleven and left you. Will you remember that? It’s a story they can’t check.”
She nodded. She was twisting a rag of a handkerchief in her fingers, and glancing at her, Jaffe thought despairingly: she will make a hopeless liar. No one will believe her.
“For God’s sake, Nhan, don’t let them trap you into telling them where I shall be hiding,” he said roughly.
“I’ll never tell anyone! Never!” She stiffened and spoke fiercely. “No one will ever make me tell!”
“And another thing; you mustn’t tell anyone about the diamonds; not even your grandfather. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure your grandfather will help me?”
“He is wise and kind and he would never do anything to make me unhappy,” she said proudly. “When I tell him we love each other, he will help you.”
Jaffe thought irritably: if he’s all that wise, he’ll guess you’re my mistress and he’ll probably hate my guts and run to the police.
As if reading his thoughts, she said quietly, “It will be necessary to explain to him that shortly we are going to be married. When we arrive in Hong Kong, it is better for us to be married, don’t you think, Steve?”
This rather jarred Jaffe. He had never seriously thought of marriage after his first unhappy experience. He had been perfectly content to have Nhan as a mistress, but it had never occurred to him to marry her. Once he had sold the diamonds, he would be rich and he would be returning to America; a Vietnamese taxi dancer could be a hell of a hindrance in America, especially if she were his wife, but there was time to think about that: damn it! He wasn’t in Hong Kong yet! He hadn’t sold the diamonds yet!
But he realized it might be fatal to his plans if her grandfather wasn’t told they were going to be married so he said lightly, “That’s right, Nhan. You tell him that, but I want to explain to him personally the trouble I’m in. You just tell him I want shelter. I’ll explain why. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” She leaned against him, resting her small head on his shoulder. “I’m not so frightened now. Perhaps after all it will be all right.”
She remained silent as if lost in a dream while Jaffe uneasy with his conscience, drove along the winding road where the rice fields, the odd thatched farmhouse on stilts and the occasional buffalo wallowing in swamp mud appeared and disappeared in the fast moving headlights of the Chrysler.
2
Four days previous to Jaffe’s discovery of the diamonds, three peasants, dressed in their working black with grimy rags tied around their heads as protection against the sun, squatted in a semi-circle before a little brown man, wearing khaki shorts and shirt who sat on the stump of a tree and talked earnestly to them.
This man had come silently out of the forest and had entered the screened patch of ground where the young rice seedlings were sheltered from the wind. The three peasants who were working there had joined him immediately with a mixture of fear and excitement. They had seen him several times before. He was the leader of a guerrilla band of Viet Minh communists whose work was to spread alarm and despondency among the Vietnam farming community. Whenever he appeared, these three peasants, Ho Chi Minh sympathizers and indoctrined with a hatred for the Vietnam regime, knew he had a job for them.
The little brown man told them it had been decided to stage a demonstration of power as close to the Vietnam capital as possible. No undue risks were to be taken and as few lives as possible should be lost. This was a demonstration, not an operation, but it was necessary to shake the authorities in Saigon out of their complacency, and this could only be done if the demonstration was staged alarmingly close to the capital. The farm of the three peasants was situated in a rice field a half mile from the Saigon-Bien Hoa highway. The little brown man reminded them that they were conveniently placed to make an attack on the police post at the Bien Hoa - Thudaumot road junction.
This police post was to be destroyed and with it the three policemen who guarded the post. The demonstration was to take place on Sunday night at fifteen minutes past twelve. The day and time had been selected to ensure no passers-by nor vehicles would suffer.
The three peasants, he went on, must work out for themselves how the job was to be done. It was a perfectly simple demonstration, but they were to remember the timing was important.
When he had disappeared once more into the forest, after eating a bowl of rice with them, he left behind him a string bag containing six hand grenades.
It so happened that Jaffe, driving the Chrysler, approached the police post a few minutes before the attack was due to take place.
The three peasants lying in a ditch within fifteen yards of the police post saw his approaching headlights and looked blankly at each other: uncertain what to do. They had been lying in the damp ditch for over half an hour, and this was the first car they had seen on the road.
The three policemen, playing a form of Fan Tan with matches, also saw the approaching headlights and immediately got to their feet. While one of them swept up the matches, the other two snatched up their rifles.
The senior member of the three stepped into the road and began to flash a torch fitted with a red lamp.
Seeing the red light flashing some two hundred yards ahead of him, Jaffe slowed down, cursing under his breath. He hadn’t expected to be stopped. He had hoped he would have been able to drive past the police post, the C.D. plates giving him immunity, but it now looked as if he would have to stop.
Questions would be asked if the police saw he had had a Vietnamese passenger and to avoid complications, he told Nhan to squat on the floor.
He reached over the back seat and pulled his holdall on top of her, screening her from sight. He was rattled, and without considering the consequences, he took the gun from the holdall and pushed it under his thigh nearest the door.
By now, the car was barely moving. The powerful headlights lit up the policeman who was pointing his rifle at the car.
As Jaffe pulled up, the luminous hands of the cheap watch being studied by one of the hidden peasants showed exactly fifteen minutes past twelve…
The other two policemen came out of the post and separated: one standing at the head of the car, the other at the tail. Both of them levelled their rifles at Jaffe who could feel the sweat running down his face and hear the heavy thud of his heartbeats.
As the policeman with the torch began to move towards Jaffe, one of the hidden peasants with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders, pulled the pin from the grenade he was holding and lobbed it through the open window of the police post.
He had been told to make the attack at exactly twelve-fifteen, and no one now could accuse him of disobeying an order.
The grenade dropped on to the table at which the three policemen had been gambling and exploded. It went off with a blinding flash and a bang that woke many of the farm workers, sleeping in their thatched huts in the neighbourhood.