The Quiet American by Graham Greene

trishaw-drivers plied for hire. Pietri sat in his usual place. He had an odd elongated skull which sat on his shoulders like a pear on a dish; he was a Surete officer and was married to a pretty Tonkinese who owned the Paix Bar. He was another man who had no particular desire to go home. He was a Corsican, but he preferred Marseilles, and to Marseilles he preferred any day his seat on the pavement in the rue Gambetta. I wondered whether he already knew the contents of my telegram. “Quatre Vingt-et-un?” he asked. “Why not?”
    We began to throw and it seemed impossible to me that I could ever have a life again, away from the rue Gambetta and the rue Catinat, the flat taste of vermouth cassis, the homely click of dice, and the gunfire travelling like a clock-hand around the horizon. I said, “I’m going back.”
    “Home?” Pietri asked, throwing a four-two-one. “No. England.”
     
     

PART TWO

CHAPTER I
     
    Pyle had invited himself for what he called a drink, but siftoew very well he didn’t really drink. After the passage of weeks that fantastic meeting in Phat Diem seemed hardly believable: even the details of the conversation were less clear. They were like the missing letters on a Roman tomb and I the archaeologist filling in the gaps according to the bias of my scholarship. It even occurred to me that he had been pulling my leg, and that the conversation had been an elalaborate and humorous disguise for his real purpose, for it .was already the gossip of Saigon that he was engaged in one of those services so ineptly called secret. Perhaps he was arranging American arms for a Third Force-the Bishop’s brass band, all that was left of his young scared unpaid levies. The telegram that had awaited me in Hanoi I kept in my pocket. There was no point in telling Phuong, for that would be to poison the few months we had left with tears and quarrels. I wouldn’t even go for my exit-permit till the last moment in case she had a relation in the immigration-office. I told her, “Pyle’s coming at six.”
    “I will go and see lay sister,” she said. “I expect he’d like to see you.”
    “He does not like me or my family. When you were away he did not come once to my sister, although she had invited him. She was very hurt.” “You needn’t go out.”
    “If he wanted to see me, he would have asked us to the Majestic. He wants to talk to you privately-about business.” “What is his business?”
    “People say he imports a great many things.” “What things?” “Drugs, medicines...”
    “Those are for the trachoma teams in the north.” “Perhaps. The Customs must not open them. They are diplomatic parcels. But once there was a mistake-the man was discharged. The First Secretary threatened to stop all imports.” “What was in the case?” “Plastic.”
    I said idly, “What did they want plastic for?” When Phuong had gone, I wrote home. A man from Renter’s was leaving for Hong Kong in a few days and he could mail my letter from there. I knew my appeal was hopeless, but I was not going to reproach myself later for not taking every possible measure. I wrote to the Managing Editor that this was the wrong moment to change their correspondent. General de Lattre was dying in Paris: the French were about to withdraw altogether from Hoa Binh: the north had never been in greater danger. I wasn’t suitable, I told him, for a foreign editor-I was a reporter, I had no real opinions about anything. On the last page I even appealed to him on personal grounds, although it was unlikely that any human sympathy could survive under the strip light, among the green eye-shades and the stereotyped phrases- “the good of the paper,” “the situation demands...”
    I wrote: “For private reasons I am very unhappy at being moved from Vietnam. I don’t think I can do my best work in England, where there will be not only financial but family strains. Indeed, if I could afford it I would resign rather than return to