Free The Quiet American by Graham Greene Page B

“No”
    Granger had got his news: he began to write. “I am sorry,” the colonel said, “that is not for printing: that is for background.”
    “But, colonel,” Granger protested, “that’s news. We can help you there.” “No, it is a matter for the diplomats.” “What harm can it do?”
    The French correspondents were at a loss: they could speak very little English. The colonel had broken the rules. They muttered angrily together.
    “I am no judge,” the colonel said. “Perhaps the American newspapers would say, ‘Oh, the French are always complaining, always begging.’ And in Paris the Communists would accuse, ‘The French are spilling their blood for America and America will not even send a second-hand helicopter.’ It does no good. At the end of it we should still have HO helicopters, and the enemy would still be there, fifty miles from Hanoi.”
    “At least I can print that, can’t I, that you need helicopters bad?”
    “You can say,” the colonel said, “that six months ago we had three helicopters and now we have one. One,” he repeated with a kind of amazed bitterness. “You can say that if a man is wounded in this fighting, not seriously wounded, just wounded, he knows that he is probably a dead man. Twelve hours, twenty-four hours perhaps, on a stretcher to the ambulance, then bad tracks, a breakdown, perhaps an ambush, gangrene. It is better to be killed outright.” The French correspondents leant forward, trying to understand. “You can write that,” he said, looking all the more venomous for his physical beauty. “Interpretez,” he ordered, and walked out of the room, leaving the captain the unfamiliar task of translating from English into French.
    “Got him on the raw,” said Granger with satisfaction, and he went into a Corner by the bar to write his telegram. Mine didn’t take long: there was nothing I could write from Phat Diem that the censors would pass. If the story had seemed good enough I could have flown to Hong Kong and sent it from there, but was any news good enough to risk expulsion? I doubted it. Expulsion meant the end of a whole life: it meant the victory of Pyle, and there, when I returned to my hotel, waiting in my pigeon-hole, was in fact his victory, the end-the congratulatory telegram of promotion. Dante never thought up that turn of the screw for his condemned lovers. Paolo was never promoted to the Purgatorio
    I went upstairs to my bare room and the dripping cold-water tap (there was no hot water in Hanoi) and sat on the edge of my bed with the bundle of the mosquito-net like a swollen cloud overhead. I was to be the new foreign editor, arriving every afternoon at half past three, at that grim Victorian building near Blackfriars station with a plaque of Lord Salisbury by the lift. They had sent the good news on from Saigon, and I wondered whether it had already reached Phuong’s ears. I was to be a reporter no longer: I was to have opinions, and in return for that empty privilege I was- deprived of my last hope in the contest with Pyle. I had experience to match his virginity, age was as good a card to play in the sexual game as youth, but now I hadn’t even the limited future of twelve more months to offer, and a future was trumps. I envied the most homesick officer condemned to the chance of death. I would have liked to weep, but the ducts were as dry as the hot-water pipes. Oh, they could have home-I only wanted my room in the rue Catinat.
    It was cold after dark in Hanoi and the lights were lower than those of Saigon, more suited to the darker clothes of the women and the fact of war. I walked up the rue Gambetta to the Paix Bar-I didn’t want to drink in the Metropole with the senior French officers, their wives and their girls, and as I reached the bar I was aware of the distant drumming of the guns out towards Hoa Binh. In the day they were drowned in traffic-noises, but everything was quiet now except for the tring of ‘bicycle-bells where the