The Other Shore

Chapter 1

Vientiane, Wattay airfield. Saturday, 6 October 1962, shortly after six in the morning.

The rainy season was drawing to a close, but the grey blanket of the past few weeks still hung over the Mekong, and on the apron the C-46 for Udorn stood in the haze with its cargo hatch open. It bore no national markings.

Hollis Garrity counted the men in the queue. Twenty-three Americans in civilian clothes, kitbags at their feet, the faces of men who had rehearsed a farewell for too long. A sergeant had stuffed the last of his Laotian money into his shoes, a bundle of kip notes, because no one had been able to tell him whether he was allowed to take it out of the country. He shifted from one foot to the other like a man standing on a coin collection. At the folding table in front of the boarding steps sat an Indian major from the Control Commission, a slender man in an immaculate uniform, with a Canadian beside him who had a notebook and a Pole who did not. Together they formed the commission whose mandate the Geneva agreement of that summer had renewed. By the following day all foreign troops and military advisers were to have left Laos, Americans and North Vietnamese alike. Today the last Americans were flying out, and these three men were to bear witness.

Behind Garrity stood Lieutenant Colonel Dunne, the mission’s last duty officer, holding the American copy of the list against his chest like a hymn book. They had rewritten that list four times in the past week. Each time a name had been added or removed, one man with a leave pass, another with malaria, and each time the commission had accepted the new version with the courtesy of a bailiff who knows that, in the end, he will seize the property anyway.

“Name?”

“Garrity, Hollis J.”

“Unit?”

“MAAG Laos.”

The major made a tick without looking up. Behind the acronym lay a military mission that should never have existed under the Geneva ban on advisers of 1954, first under another name, then under this one, and that morning it was being wound down piece by piece. Garrity had signed something like this once before, in the summer of 1941, when he left the Army to fly in China with Chennault’s volunteer squadron, later known as the Flying Tigers: a piece of paper that struck him from his country’s books. Back then they had called it adventure. The procedure had remained the same: you disappeared in accordance with regulations.

A hundred metres away, at the edge of the apron, North Vietnamese men in grey shirts had been lined up, freshly combed, cardboard suitcases in their hands. Forty, the Canadian had said yesterday. The commission had counted them, as the protocol required, and Hanoi had thereby withdrawn its troops from Laos in accordance with Geneva.

Garrity knew the other figure: seven and a half thousand, the estimate in the report he himself had helped to write. Both figures were true, and only one would go on record.

He knew how the commission had arrived at its figure. It had been supplied to them, man by man, by officers who in turn knew what was at stake. The treaty required witnesses to the departure, not to those who stayed, and anyone who wanted to prove anything in this country had to stand at its edges, at airfields, ferries and border barriers, where people passed a table one at a time and someone read out their names. Everything else, the roads in the east, the valleys beyond the Plain of Jars, the villages where men in civilian clothes ate rice and received orders, lay outside the paperwork.

“Twenty-four names,” the major said, raising the list a little. “I count twenty-three men, Mr Garrity.”

Garrity did not turn round. He did not need to look for the missing name: Dwight Pruitt, the paymaster, last seen the previous evening on the bank of the Mekong with a suitcase that did not belong to him.

The driver had told him at three in the morning, on the veranda outside Garrity’s house in Silver City, the American settlement on the edge of town, his cap held in both hands. He had dropped Mr Dwight off at eight in the evening on the riverside road, behind the wat, the temple, where the fishermen tied their boats to the posts. Mr Dwight had not said where he was going, only that the car need not wait. And the suitcase? It was the heavy brown case with the iron corners that had stood beneath the wall shelf in the pay office for years, the one everyone in the mission knew belonged not to Pruitt but to the government of the United States. Mr Dwight had carried it in both arms, not by the handle. That, the driver said, was how you carried a child who had fallen asleep.

Garrity had searched until five in the morning. He had driven through the streets behind the market, down the alley of money changers, shuttered at that hour behind iron grilles, as far as the house in the That Dam quarter, which stood in darkness. The housemaid had been behind a shutter; he had seen her shadow, but she had not opened the door. At that hour he had not dared do more than look through the windows. An American rattling at strangers’ doors on the night before the deadline was a rumour that spread itself.

“He’s staying,” Garrity said.

The major raised his head. For the first time that morning he looked at Garrity, not at his papers. “Who is staying?”

“Pruitt. Dwight Pruitt. He isn’t leaving because he doesn’t have to. He’s transferring to the aid mission, to the accounts department for the school-building programmes. The papers are on their way.”

It was remarkable how easily a sentence came out when, a second earlier, you had not known it existed.

“The protocol,” the major said, “also covers civilians engaged in the procurement and storage of war matériel.”

“A man who signs off invoices for school desks.”

“Then the embassy will send me a letter stating that.” The major wrote something in the margin of the list, carefully, in the schoolroom handwriting of a man who still believed in forms. “With a stamp.”

“By when?”

“The commission is not impatient.” He glanced at the Canadian, who inclined his head. “Monday, twelve noon.”

The Canadian wrote the time in his notebook and underlined it. The Pole wrote nothing. His hands were folded on the table, and his gaze moved from the list to Garrity’s face and back to the place in the margin where the major had written. The Americans called him Crow, because his name meant a crow in his own language, and because, like a crow, he never seemed to want anything until it was lying on the ground.

Garrity thanked him. He could hear how polite he sounded.

On the boarding steps Dunne caught him by the sleeve. “Where the hell is Pruitt?”

“I’ll explain in Udorn.”

“I put him on the list. With my name underneath.”

“Then your name is underneath a truth that hasn’t arrived yet.” Garrity took the lieutenant colonel’s hand from his sleeve, gently, as though holding something he ought to return. “Monday, twelve noon, Dunne. It’ll be here by then.”

He climbed the steps, through the smell of petrol and wet canvas, and took the last seat by a scratched window that showed a landscape of haze. The men stowed their kitbags. Someone laughed too loudly. The seat beside him remained empty, as though reserved for someone who might still arrive.

As the aircraft taxied, he saw the river wall, the fishing boats, the ferry that did not run at this hour. The Mekong still carried the water of the rainy season, brown and broad and entirely unimpressed by the documents signed on its banks. Somewhere down there, among the posts and sleeping huts, a man with a suitcase was lying or standing or sitting, and no one was counting him.

He looked for the forty men with their cardboard suitcases. But the haze had already swallowed them, and with them the others whom no one had counted.