Night Never Falls

by Edwin Shrake

Genres: Historical Fiction; War & Military; Suspense

Synopsis

Harry Sparrow, an American journalist determined to win a Pulitzer, travels to Dien Bien Phu and becomes involved with an ex-Nazi legionnaire and his girlfriend, Claudette Frontenac, in the midst of a confrontation between the French Army and a Communist force.

Release date: March 6, 2013

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 272

Sample

1
 
He first saw them in the bar at the Hôtel Métropole in Hanoi. Louis, the manager, whose brother Meurice ran the George V in Paris, pointed the two out with a discreet lift of scar tissue in an eyebrow: the lanky, bearded wolfhound of a man in the bush jacket and emerald green beret, and the dark-haired, pretty girl in the uniform of a Red Cross air nurse. They sat with their elbows on a bamboo table beneath a ceiling fan that chirped like frogs on the shore of Little Lake. Each was leaning forward as if curious about the other’s ideas. Harry was surprised to notice they were playing chess—the unmasterable game. Harry looked at the girl with aroused interest. The game of chess is beyond the scope of the human mind. Harry had never known a pretty girl who saw anything useful in chess.
 
“Louis, the deal I made is for me only. The nurse, sure. I can’t complain about her. But not Rasputin. I don’t want him on my plane,” Harry said.
 
“He’s a Legionnaire. Wounded at Dien Bien two or three months ago. He’s going back to his unit, that’s all,” said Louis.
 
“Why doesn’t he parachute in with the replacements? I gave you forty thousand piastres to arrange this plane for me, Louis. Loading my plane with fresh blood and morphine and coffin wood and carrying an air nurse, I accept all of that. But the guy who looks like a mad monk? No. Absolutely not. He doesn’t ride on my plane.”
 
“It’s not your plane. It’s a Red Cross plane. You’re only a passenger. Do you think you could buy your own plane for a puny forty thousand piastres?”
 
Louis was a curly-haired ex-boxer with a broken nose who once hustled smuggled suede jackets to tourists on the sidewalk in Knightsbridge. He struggled to be charming, but couldn’t hide his contempt for anyone who would do business with a man like himself.
 
“It’s against the rules for a soldier to ride on a Red Cross plane unless he’s dead or wounded and on his way out, not in,” Harry said.
 
“Then you tell him,” said Louis.
 
Harry glanced at the familiar faces in the bar. There was old Phibbs from the London Daily Mail, Brigitte Friang from Indochine Sud-Est Asiatique, Crichton of The New York Times, Wingo of the Extrême-Orient, Henshaw of The Times of London, the wire service reporters from United Press, The Associated Press, the International News Service and Reuters, several Scandinavians, a couple of Germans, the usual lineup of Japanese, maybe two dozen French. Fifty-odd journalists in all, reporting on the battle for some place called Dien Bien Phu, which was being fought 180 miles to the west, up in a valley in the highlands.
 
It was not, in most cases, any lack of courage that kept the journalists in the bar and out of the field. Tucking her cosmetics and a vial of Dior perfume inside her combat pack, Brigitte Friang had jumped into the valley in November with the first French Union Forces—FUF—paratroopers. They caught a Vietminh headquarters and a battalion of infantry having lunch. After a savage fight, the paratroopers chased out the Communists. French Union Forces began to rebuild an old Japanese airstrip and transform the broad, green valley, rich with rice and vegetables, into a land-air base for 17,000 soldiers.
 
All through January and February of 1954 there were junkets of journalists, politicians and military commanders into the valley. Reporters wrote that the valley, with its vast spreads of tents lined up in rows so thick they seemed all jumbled about, had taken on the look of a huge Boy Scout jamboree. Graham Greene had been escorted on a tour of the barbed wire, artillery and machine gun emplacements, and the novelist was told that they were guaranteed to withstand any Communist assault, that the Vietminh had no air power. Vice President Richard Nixon had rolled up his sleeves on the hot steel-mesh airstrip, unbuttoned his collar and exhorted the troops not to flinch at the gleam of Communist bayonets. Even old Phibbs had spent a few days in the valley of Dien Bien Phu after New Year’s, and now, in the last week of March, the London Daily Mail still headlined all Phibbs’s dispatches OUR MAN AT DIEN BIEN PHU—though Phibbs seldom left the Hôtel Métropole Bar, except for official briefings at the governor’s palace across the street. After these he would rush back to his shabby room, dictate a story by phone to London, then set off on a solitary journey through the whorehouses near Little Lake, always winding up back at the bar for his grand-final nightcap, then his final grand-final nightcap, followed by the nightcap Phibbs called el último.
 
The Vietminh assault on Dien Bien Phu had taken on sudden fury two weeks ago. Official briefings had been optimistic, but rumors said the French were taking a beating. Two French journalists who hitched a ride into the valley on a Curtis Commando to report on the fighting were flown out again within six hours. One had been killed, and the other had lost a foot to the same mortar barrage. The French High Command ordered journalists to keep out, allowing only official army photographers on the scene. The latest Ordre de circulation, the official limits issued by the High Command to the press, placed Dien Bien Phu on the Entrée interdite list, along with Luang Prabang and Hue. Harry had paid the forty-thousand-piastre bribe to be smuggled into Dien Bien Phu aboard a plane. He was feeling very edgy about it, now the time had come—the feeling every journalist looks for, the sense that abrupt weirdness will occur.
 
“Greetings, Harry, old boy,” Phibbs shouted from the far end of the bar. “Come knock back a few see-throughs with us. We’ll play a game of matches if you dare.”
 
“Later, Reggie. Got to get checked in first,” Harry said.
 
Phibbs waved and drained another gin martini, which he called “see-throughs.” He could drink twenty of them regularly during standup marathon match-game sessions at The Pig and Whistle pub on Fleet Street in London.
 
Picking up the Daily Mail in London and seeing PHIBBS: OUR MAN AT DIEN BIEN PHU had annoyed Harry Sparrow for weeks. Phibbs made the looming battle sound loaded with significance for the Western alliance. He bragged outrageously about being on the scene. “As I crouched in the battlements, peering at Commie positions a few hundred meters away …” Phibbs would dictate from the phone at the Métropole. Harry read each Phibbs piece with growing anger and threw them in the trash basket. One evening, sitting at the desk in his study at No. 5 Cheyne Place, looking out at the lanterns on the tugboats moving down the Thames, Harry had been groping for an inspiration. His job was doing feature pieces, columns and the occasional major news story for The New York Dispatch, its subsidiary, The Paris Dispatch, and 750 other newspapers around the world that subscribed to the Dispatch Syndicate. Harry considered himself a syndicated man. He was devoted to his work, to beating the opposition to the story and to staying ahead. During his eight years as a professional journalist Harry had never ceased to be thrilled at the sight of his byline on a front page under a black banner of type. His invisible worldwide readership held him like a lover he wanted to dazzle with prizes.
 
But that night Harry was especially anxious to find a story. Much better, it should be a series of stories. Harry needed to get out of London for a few weeks. He wanted to be far enough from Lady Cadbury that her temper couldn’t reach him.
 
The willowy Lady Gwendoline Cadbury, tall and blond and rich, exuding languid sexual promises that brought aristocrats panting for her like dogs, had outraged her parents and stunned her social playmates when she began living with Harry. To her crowd she might as well have moved in with a tattoo artist as with a journalist. She loved Harry and stayed with him, despite harassment from family and friends, much longer than anyone expected. After she and Harry finally broke up, she punished him in ingenious ways. The previous Sunday she had ordered a load of sand dumped on the porch of his building—a reference to her cry that Harry would rather be blasting sand shots out of a bunker on the golf course at Royal Bowling Brook than doing “sips and dins” with her chums in Mayfair.
 
Harry ran a finger along the keys of his L. C. Smith typewriter. He stared at his burnished walnut humidor. His eye fell upon PHIBBS in the trash basket, and the inspiration he had been searching for struck him. The Pulitzer Prize is waiting in Indochina, he thought. It’s right under the nose of The New York Times, but they won’t get it because The Times doesn’t understand the situation as well as Phibbs does. Harry wanted a Pulitizer; since high school he had wanted a Pulitzer. The words of Joseph Pulitzer, engraved in the lobby of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had inspired Harry toward a life of journalism. Harry’s best chance this year to win the prize and the standing among his peers that goes with it was not in London, where not much was happening, but in Indochina. Phibbs was right. Dien Bien Phu was a big story.
 
Harry could imagine Phibbs’s whiskey-red cheeks, the stringy hair that always tufted onto his collar leaving sprinkles of dandruff, the leer of satisfaction Phibbs always had when he was on to something important—and Harry wasn’t in on it. Harry picked up the phone and called Gruber. The managing editor of The Paris Dispatch was far more likely to respond to Harry’s requests than was Calvin Epps, chief of the foreign desk in New York. Gruber fished for salmon two weeks every summer on the Alta River in Norway. The rest of the year he was either at his desk or at the racetrack. He would listen. Gruber was a pro, not a politician.