Snap Shot Read online

  He had to wait an hour to be evacuated. It was the same crew who had flown him in. He sat in the back among the plastic bags containing the dead, half wishing he was one of them. The pilots had said nothing - just looked at his face. It did not happen often but they had seen other correspondents and photographers who could not face the reality of war.

  So it was over, his last chance represented by the rolls of unused film in a nearby drawer. He had not bothered developing the single roll. With the heaviest engagement for months going on half a mile away, all he had shot was a couple of burnt-out choppers.

  It was over and he felt a stab of irritation at the soft tap on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called.

  ‘Letter for you,’ came the muffled answer.

  ‘Push it under the door.’

  Another hour passed while he contemplated the fan. Then he swung his feet off the bed and headed for the bathroom and saw the yellow envelope on the floor. He picked it up and ripped it open. Small strips of contact prints and negatives fell out onto the carpet, and a single sheet of paper. He squatted down and read the handwritten words:

  I don’t know how you did today but I got more snaps than I need. Use the enclosed if you wish. It will be between you, me and the gatepost.

  If you’re looking for a reason, the fact that you attacked the mirror instead of me is good enough.

  DM.

  He held the piece of paper for a long time then dropped it to the carpet and picked up the prints. There were ten of them in two strips. The first strip was a sequence showing two black-clad Vietcong charging the camera, Kalashnikovs at their hips. By the third print one of them was twisting away, his Kalashnikov spinning out of his hands. In the fourth the other was very close, his face contorted with effort and hatred. In the fifth he was on his knees, his face a mask of blood.

  The second strip depicted a G.I. firing a light machine gun. It was a close-up of his face peering through the sights. Eyes narrowed under the helmet. Chin unshaven and thrust forward. On the helmet were chalked the words ‘Hell Rider’. The fifth print showed him lying on his back, arched over his gun. His eyes were wide open and staring sightlessly. The helmet lay inverted in the dirt beside him.

  Duff drew a deep breath. The snaps were gems. Clear, sharp and screaming in their immediacy. Slowly he laid them down beside the paper, straightened up, walked into the bathroom and urinated into the toilet bowl. Then he lowered the seat and sat down and stayed there for a long time. He always did his best thinking sitting on the toilet.

  After an eternity he reached his decision - and he pulled the chain.

  There was no way that he could explain that decision to Ruth. Or even explain anything about the twenty-four hours that had marked a crossroads in his life.

  He listened now at the clatter of dishes through the open door as she cleaned up in the kitchen. No, she would never understand. Not about the mirror, nor Wei Fong, nor the opium, but above all how he could have left his room that night, gone down and wired someone else’s photographs under his byline. Curiously it had never troubled him. He had not tried to rationalise it even by the thought that his actions had been justified by helping to establish his ‘cover’ as a spy. He had only seen Munger once since that night. It was in the crowded bar of the Ton San Nut airport. They had been separated by a dozen people and it was several minutes before Duff had caught his eye in the mirror behind. He had merely nodded and Munger had nodded back and the message had been sent and received.

  It had been the turning point; His editor had sent an ecstatic cable of congratulations. Two days later Duff had gone out with a Marine patrol in the Delta and his photographs had later been described as among the most electric of the entire war. He had also been slightly but honourably wounded in the leg by a piece of shrapnel. The jokes and the bantering had terminated. He had taken Munger’s advice and never tried to find a reason for his generosity. But now there was a link between them. He desperately wanted to know why Munger was selling off his gear and if there was anything at all Munger needed.

  He pushed back his chair and stood and stretched and went into the kitchen. Ruth was at the sink wearing long, pink, rubber gloves as she washed the dishes. He moved in close behind and kissed the back of her neck and patted her bottom.

  ‘I’m off.’

  She turned and kissed him on the mouth and asked:

  ‘Will you be late?’

  ‘No more than a couple of hours. When you’ve finished, why don’t you ring the Mandarin and book that table for Thursday night?’

  She smiled at the reminder of their coming anniversary. ‘I’ll do that - and tell them to have plenty of champagne on ice.’

  He shook his head in mock exasperation. ‘It’s the greatest myth ever put about that two can live as cheaply as one!’

  She grinned at him and kissed the tip of his nose and turned back to the dishes. As she heard the door close she wondered if he had bought the bracelet yet. It was supposed to be a surprise, of course, but they both knew. Twice in the past week she had steered him past the jewellery window in Lane Crawfords and just ever so casually drawn his attention to the jade and gold bracelet. She knew that it cost seven thousand Hong Kong dollars and that it was extravagant but she also knew that he had just received his first bonus and they had that much and just a bit more in the bank.

  Chapter 2

  Walter Blum watched them coming. He had been sitting at his usual table in the corner for the past hour, and as usual a silver ice bucket lay on the table in front of him. It contained a now half empty bottle of Montrachet. He liked watching people. It was both his profession and his sport. Certainly he was unsuited for anything more active, for he weighed something over three hundred pounds and he was not a tall man. His appearance was a parody of the very rich, very fat man with vulgar tastes. He wore a shiny, light grey mohair suit and a maroon tie fastened to a light blue silk shirt by a diamond-studded gold tie pin. Over-large rings glittered on pudgy fingers as he raised and puffed at his fat cigar. The caricature was completed by a monocle hanging from his neck by a thin, black silk cord. No one had ever seen him use it. He came into the Foreign Correspondents’ Club almost every night at 7.30, having been deposited at the entrance to Sutherland House by his white Rolls Royce. Even the slight exertion of walking the twenty paces to the lifts would leave him panting and perspiring slightly as he stepped out into the air conditioned foyer on the fourteenth floor. He would make his way to his table nodding benignly to staff and acquaintances. The chilled bottle of wine and four glasses would already, be waiting; Three of the glasses were there in case he invited anyone to join him. Such invitations were eagerly awaited, for even at Club prices a good bottle of Montrachet cost a fortune. He would rise at 9.45 and on his way to the foyer would stop at the bar and exchange a few words with Chang the bartender. By 10 o’clock he would be at his comer table in the Grill Room of the Mandarin Hotel. He preferred to dine alone - it was a serious business.

  He had been following this routine for many years. No one knew why he enjoyed the F.C.C. It was not a rich man’s club and lacked the opulence that would have more suited his appearance. But the reason was simple. He liked to observe people - a broad spectrum of people and of all the clubs of Hong Kong the F.C.C. was the prime place to do that.

  The venerable Hong Kong Club attracted merely the British business and government community, with just a sprinkling of outsiders who had been allowed to join so as to discourage anticolonial criticism. The American Club was . . . well, too American, and the Country Club at Deep Water Bay the preserve of the nouveau riche. Despite his appearance Walter Blum would have shuddered to hear himself so described.

  In essence the F.C.C. was cosmopolitan. Only a fraction of its members were genuine correspondents, but it attracted a diverse cross section of the community. There were, of course, the representatives of the local media: editors and reporters from the British and Chinese press, cameramen and commentators from the local televisi
on stations, even disc jockeys from the radio station. As they were ‘local’ and media ‘professionals’, they tended to adopt a slightly superior attitude to lesser members, such as advertising account executives, commercial artists, insurance brokers and the like. They were only subdued in the presence of the ‘aristocracy’ - those members for whom the Club had been created: the bureau chiefs, correspondents and photographers who disseminated the region’s happenings to the world’s media.

  Walter Blum had no trouble in differentiating between them. The aristocracy were few. They spent much of their time travelling on the job. They did not dress to a pattern and they tended to talk quietly.

  The second strata - the local media men - usually wore the ‘uniform’. This was an all-purpose epauletted safari suit overburdened with pockets and special slots for ballpoints. Several Indian tailors in Nathan Road had prospered beyond their dreams in churning them out.

  The third strata - the insurance and ship brokers, the travel agents and traders - seemed to be in perpetual expectation of an exciting or scandalous event. They were often rewarded for the mélange of members could, at times, have an explosive effect.

  Tonight there was already an air of great expectancy. No morbid curiosity such as would have been normal before an auction, but a rippling of excitement. The prelude to the unexpected. The place was packed for the word had been quickly passed. From the vantage point of his corner table Walter Blum could see the whole of the restaurant, most of the oval bar, and the foyer with the lifts beyond. Once in a while he would nod his head in acknowledgement to one who rated an acknowledgement. There was a group of four at the end of the bar which he found interesting. It comprised Howard Talbot, a First Secretary of the U.S. Consulate; the beautiful Janine Lesage, Far East correspondent of L’Universe; Sami Asaf of the Middle East News Bureau of Beirut, and Klaus Kinkel, the local head of the Goethe Institute. Yes, they were a most interesting group, for Walter Blum knew that among others in that crowded room they were, apart from their obvious credentials, also intelligence agents or, as he much preferred to call them: spies.

  Talbot was number two of the local C.I.A. station. Lesage worked for Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre Espionage, or in short the French S.D.E.C.E. Asaf was the sole representative and therefore head of the Iraqi Mukhabarat in the Far East, and Kinkel was a rising star in the B.N.D. - Bundesnachrichtendienst, of West Germany. According to Walter’s information, he was here on a six-month posting to obtain Far East experience prior to a major promotion. He wondered if any of them knew that the others were spies, or indeed that Chang the bartender, who was polishing glasses and listening to their conversation, worked both for the communist Chinese Secret Service and that of the Kuomintang. The thought amused Walter and he took a sip of his Montrachet and brushed cigar ash from the lapel of his mohair suit. Then his attention was drawn to the lift. Duff Paget emerged wearing light blue slacks, a cream shirt, and an expression of suppressed curiosity. Before entering the main room he stopped, as everyone always did, at the curved panel that separated the foyer from the bar. On it was pasted a variety of photographs taken by the more eminent of the F.C.C.’s members. They ranged from candid portraits of various heads of state to; combat shots that had received worldwide acclaim. No one could study that panel for a few minutes without being affected. There was Eddie Adam’s shot of the Saigon Police Chief in the act of blowing the brains out of a defenceless Vietcong prisoner; a young Buddhist Nun sitting cross-legged and frozen in flame as she ritually burned herself to death in front of the Presidential Palace; Larry Burrow’s moving shot of a black sergeant holding and comforting a frightened white G.I.: the face of a shell-shocked Marine photographed by Don McCullin, a face that told more of the war than ten million words. Then the face of Richard Nixon grinning inanely at the camera.

  But Walter knew that Duff Paget’s attention would be drawn to the two photographs that had only recently been added. One showed a U.S. Army Chaplain, incongruous in uniform and dog collar, looking at a passing G.I. on the back of whose flak jacket was chalked the now hackneyed phrase:

  ‘Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I shall fear no evil, because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley!’

  The Chaplain’s expression spoke volumes. The other photograph showed, in close-up, a girl with almond eyes in an oval face and ebony hair piled high and contrasting vividly with the background of what appeared to be white netting. It was a face of transcendental innocence.

  Walter knew that Paget would concentrate on those two because he had taken them, and the fact that the Committee had included them on the panel was his passport to the Club’s aristocracy.

  Paget paused for a long moment and then passed into the bar and joined the group of spies at the end. Walter wondered about that. Was he also one of them? His interest was more than passing curiosity, for this gaudy, vulgar glutton was himself a spy, and one with an enviable reputation in his own service.

  He had come to it late in his life and by a curious channel. He was a Jewish white Russian, whose family had fled to Shanghai after the Revolution. His father had begun importing and then manufacturing textiles for the vast Chinese market. The company was named Walen Trading, an amalgamation of the names of his two children Walter and Ellen. The latter had died of pleurisy shortly after the family’s resettlement and so Walter had become the sole heir.

  Over the years Walen Trading had prospered and Walter’s father had opened branches and warehouses throughout the country, always managed by white Russian Jews. During the war and the Japanese occupation this prosperity had accelerated mainly because his major rivals, the British and French, had been interned. However, in spite of his commercial advantage, Walter’s father had been an honourable and courageous man and had used his freedom and his wealth to help the internees to the utmost of his ability, even bribing high Japanese officials to allow extra medicines and food into the camps and taking great personal risks. So, when the war ended, he had both enormous wealth and the eternal gratitude of his previous competitors and the British Government. He was even awarded an honorary M.B.E. and had planned to travel to London to receive it from the hand of King George VI himself. Unfortunately he had died of a massive coronary shortly before the ship was due to sail. As a result Walter, at the age of twenty, had suddenly found himself the owner of a thriving and widespread trading and manufacturing group. It was a lonely task, for his mother had died several years earlier and he had few close friends as he was already a fat and unattractive young man. He discovered, however, that he had not only a great talent for commerce, but also for gauging the political wind. As the Communists and Nationalists fought for control of China he estimated long before most that the Communists would be victorious. He began converting the holdings of Walen Trading into cash and moving that cash out of the country to invest elsewhere in a unique way. He had learned from his father that in trading the most valuable asset, apart from cash, was people. His father had been a superb judge of character and Walter had inherited this attribute and developed an almost unerring instinct for finding the right man for the right job. So he gathered to Shanghai all the senior management of Walen Trading and explained to them the new policy. Each would be resettled in a new country. Each would receive a capital of half a million U.S. dollars and a bank line of credit of one million. In 1948 that was a very comfortable amount. Each of the managers would own 25 per cent of companies they operated. He himself would relocate to Hong Kong, which would become the new base for the head office of Walen Trading.

  So, like a handful of seeds scattered on fertile ground, Walter had flung his managers and his wealth around the world. In those days of rigid foreign exchange controls there had been great difficulty in transferring money out of China but Walter had circumvented the problem with ingenuity. The order of Benedictine monks was widespread and influential in pre-war China. Unlike Walter they foresaw an eventual Nationalist victory and were determined to be prepared for
it. Most of their wealth was collected and invested in the U.S.A. and Walter had offered them a profitable deal. He would make money available to the order in China and they would credit his account in New York - less 10 per cent. This arrangement had continued right up to the Communist victory, and even beyond, for although the monks’ political and military prognosis had proved wrong, the Communists had, at first, encouraged them and many commercial firms to stay on.

  Walter had been about to make his final departure when the hammer fell. Apart from sharing a financial transaction with the Benedictine Abbot, he had also shared his mistress: a white Russian lady of volatile temperament. She had been instrumental in bringing Walter and the Abbot together and had acted as a go-between during their transactions. Naturally, before his departure, Walter settled on her what he thought was a generous amount of money. Unfortunately the lady had a different scale of values and, in a rage, had gone to the authorities and laid before them the facts of Walter’s exchange control violations. He and the Abbot had been thrown into jail.

  It was, Walter knew, only a temporary ripple. The Communists were pragmatic. They wanted money. The only question was how much. His main worry was that his loyal managers now overseas would offer too much. From jail he could not communicate with them, so he feigned appendicitis and demanded to be examined by his own doctor, who was also a white Russian and a trusted family friend. In due course he was summoned and during the examination Walter managed to convey the vital message. The Communists were suspicious however. If Walter were truly ill, something must be done. Hence Walter lost his entirely blameless appendix on the sacrificial altar of commercial expediency,

  In due course his New York company transferred the two million dollars he had suggested and after six more months of niggling argument he was released and allowed to leave for Hong Kong. He quickly replaced the weight he had lost during confinement but he had been left with two permanent legacies of that period. One was a scar on his fish-white belly and the other was a total knowledge of every word of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. It had been the only book he managed to borrow from the meagre prison library and over the months he had absorbed every line of every page. In this play he made what to him were earth shattering discoveries and in its language he found the expression for everything he had ever wanted to say but could not for lack of vocabulary or verbal lucidity.