The Girl from Perfume River

By DS Holmes

It began when a newspaper editor assigned an investigative piece to an Asian-American reporter and became, with the discovery of her aunt's carefully typed memoir, a journey back in time to the final days of French colonial rule in Indochina where a young Vietnamese woman must choose between love and duty. When a priceless artifact is stolen from a Saigon museum, she searches for the valuable item without help from the police. Threatened by a crime organization, she and an American correspondent (who have fallen in love) flee Saigon, pursued by hired killers. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Holmes
• Release date: Feb 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386759522

Book preview

Prologue

THE EDITOR WANTS TO see you, an intern said, and walked away from the cubicle.

Susan saved the article she was working on, closed the program and went down the hall to a glassed-in office. You wanted to see me, Phil?

Have a seat, Susan, her editor said. Rain tapped on the windows behind him.

She rested her hands on her cotton slacks. "If this is about making the deadline—’’

Your piece on the Seattle Art Museum is fine as it is. Phil picked up a pencil, tapped the eraser end on his desk. That story you wrote on the Asian sculpture exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum...the editor-in-chief was very impressed.

Susan sat up straight. Thank you.

"Really, it was that good. Maybe another Pulitzer for the Seattle Times. In fact, he liked it so much he’s sending you on special assignment. You’re Vietnamese, aren’t you?"

I’m an American.

Susan Minh. Born in Vietnam, studied art history at UC Berkeley, her editor recited. Seems the Boss has chosen you for an investigative series on artifacts taken out of Vietnam during the American period, from 1954 to the fall of Saigon in ’75.

Susan frowned.  Where would I start on such a wide-ranging assignment?

Isn’t it obvious? You start in Vietnam.

I was just a kid when my family left. Remember 1979, the boat people?

You speak the language, right?

I don’t have any contacts there, Phil. The only person I’ve kept in touch with is an aunt in Hue.

You’ve worked here seven years and never taken a break, her editor said, so think of this as an expense-paid vacation. See your aunt, have some fun, do a little work on the side and come back to Seattle with a great story, okay?

Susan sighed. When do I leave?

Your flight leaves tomorrow. Take the rest of the day off to pack.

She stood up, went to the door. Whose idea was this?

It came up in an editorial meeting. Someone asked how a museum researches the provenance of items before displaying them. For example, that elephant sculpture in the catalog for the new Southeast Asian Art Museum’s opening exhibit.

The Black Elephant?

Hey, even the experts are fooled sometimes. The Nazi’s theft of European art is still a problem. Phil smiled. Have a great trip, Susan. Send me a postcard.

After her plane landed in Saigon, she took a local flight to Da Nang and rode the train over the Hai Van Pass into Hue, the former royal city of Vietnam. She handed the taxi driver the return address torn from one of the envelopes she had received from her Aunt Phuong. The short drive upriver followed the Song Huong, the River of Perfumes, away from the Imperial Citadel toward the tombs of the emperors of the Nguyen dynasty. Named for the fragrance given off by flowering trees that lined its banks, the river flowed eastward from the highlands to its mouth near Hue, and into the South China Sea.

Her aunt was old-fashioned and did not have an internet hook-up or even a cell phone, relying on the post to send and receive messages, so Susan had sent a telegram. Still, it might turn out to be a surprise visit, she told herself, and paid the taxi driver. She took her carry-on bag and laptop and walked down a weathered brick path to a simple two-story house. The brickwork needed a fresh coat of whitewash, while the timbers under the roof showed signs of rot in the damp, humid climate. In the compound, the vegetation looked untended, wild and overgrown. Papayas hung heavy, clusters of bananas unpicked. Black clouds rolled in from the Gulf of Tonkin, threatening rain, and a sudden gust of wind blew red dirt and debris across the yard. 

A young woman in a white ao dai appeared in the doorway. Hello, you must be Ms. Susan Minh, the girl said in good English.

Is my aunt at home?

The girl shook her head. My mother asked me to wait here for you. I am Pham Thuy Kieu. Your aunt was my teacher, private English lessons. Please, come in.

You speak the language well, Susan said, and placed her bag and laptop on a wooden table. "You said she was your teacher. She doesn’t give lessons anymore?"

I am sorry, Ms. Minh. The girl lowered her gaze. You didn’t know?

Fear gripped Susan then and she looked around the room, now empty and dark and musty. Where is she?  Where is my Aunt Phuong?

Thuy Kieu swallowed hard. She died a week ago. I wrote you a letter.

Susan found a chair, sat down. The mail can take seven days, sometimes eight, she said absently.

I just made tea. Let me get you a cup.

While the girl busied herself with cups and saucers, Susan rose and went about the house, fingering objects. This was the house Phuong’s father had built before the war with the Japanese. That it was well-built explained how it had survived for so long in the tropics. Even the red clay roof tiles were probably the originals, she decided. The furniture was made of carved teakwood, dark and very solid. Clay pots and cast iron pans hung from hooks in the kitchen ceiling, a black manual typewriter sat in an open roll-top desk.

Out the back windows she saw covered sampans motoring upriver past the Temple of Confucius, bringing tourists to the royal tombs. Other sampans floated downriver toward Hue, carrying fresh vegetables, poultry or bamboo to the central market. Her aunt had written to her often of the simple elegance of life on the River of Perfumes and how it had shaped her family. The girl set porcelain cups of tea on the table.

Do you mind if I ask how old you are? Susan said.

I am seventeen.

Add twenty years and that is me, Susan confessed. Now, Thuy Kieu, I must know everything, not just how she passed away. Tell me, what was her daily life...what did she do during the day besides teaching?

The girl brought her hands together.  Your aunt was a great lady. She always had time for others. She taught me for free, can you imagine that?

Yes, but what else did she do, in addition to giving tuition?

The girl pushed aside her cup, slid off the chair and went to a cabinet with a screen door. She worked on this every evening, by kerosene lamp, Thuy Kieu said, and brought out a lacquerware box, filled with loose typing paper. Setting the box on the table she returned to the cabinet and came back with a framed black & white photograph. The glass over the picture was cracked. She kept this beside her while she wrote.

May I see it?

The girl set it on the table by the box. It was a picture of a young, slender man with fine features and light-colored hair. Susan slipped the photo out of the dark wooden frame and turned it over. Written in faded blue ink, the words Jon Mark Holly to my dear friend, Phuong. May, 1954.

Who is Jon Holly? she asked the girl.

I brought in her mail the day before she died, Thuy Kieu said, and took an envelope from the box. Forgive me for reading it.

Susan opened the airmail envelope. Inside was a neatly typed letter from Jon Holly’s sister in San Francisco, informing Phuong that her brother had recently passed away. He had been in declining health and had never married, she noted, so she was handling his final affairs. She maintained that her brother had come back from Indochina a changed man. A foreign correspondent, he had written often of the opportunity for friendship with the Vietnamese people and the danger of repeating a failed French policy. But no one had wanted to hear that and, eventually, he turned to a life of teaching. Finally, below her signature, his sister had added, Though Jon Mark seldom spoke of you by name, it was obvious that you were always on his mind. A woman can tell, can’t she?

Thuy Kieu said, I have to go home now. Will you be all right here, Ms. Minh?

Yes, thank you. But, Susan said quietly, what did my aunt die of?

The girl hesitated. When I came for my lesson, she did not answer the door.  I let myself in and found her slumped over the table. Her head was resting on the photo. My mother called your aunt’s doctor.  He said that her heart had simply stopped.

When the girl had gone, Susan poured herself another cup of tea and sat at the table. She took the first page off the top of the thick pile. The margins contained notes in her aunt’s handwriting. Quickly she realized that it was the story of Phuong’s life and began to read.

Chapter 1

Indochina, May 1954

IN SAIGON, TAMARIND trees line the wide boulevards. The French dine at sidewalk cafés on the rue Catinat. Taxis and trishaws and bicycles fill the Place du Theatre.

Tran focused his camera on a black-and-maroon Citroen. There’s a blonde in his car.

No pictures, Jon Holly said, pictures make him nervous.

Tran lowered the camera. What is Victor Chong doing with Frenchwoman?

Holly shrugged. He’s a businessman.

Making deals in parked car?

In America people do everything in their cars.

Where is Phuong? Tran asked.

Behind you, buying cigarettes for me.

Tran sniffed. Some job for interpreter.

From the doorway of the tobacconist’s shop, I smiled. Jon Holly’s driver and photographer had a point. Still, the work paid well enough. I glanced in the plate glass window and a young woman with delicate features, wearing a light blue ao dai over loose white silk trousers, stared back. Long raven hair rested on her breasts.

Actually, it looks like he’s arguing with her, Holly said. The main thing is, he’s got something for me.

Okay, Mr. Holly. He replaced the lens cap on his Swedish-made Hasselblad.

Tran, I’ve told you before—call me Jon.

Americans...so informal, not like French.

Another sultry day. I left the shop’s doorway and crossed the sidewalk to a news kiosk. The headline on the morning’s edition of Vietnam-Matin proclaimed, French Army under siege at Dien Bien Phu! Vietminh forces had over 10,000 colonial troops bottled up in a remote valley in northwestern Vietnam. Last year, the French colonial administration had turned over home rule to nationalists in Laos and Cambodia, but Vietnam remained a colony, France’s last in Indochina. My political sympathies were a well-kept secret.

Ah, there she is, Tran said.

I handed my employer the pack of Gauloises. Jon Holly wore a tailored beige linen suit with a red tie and a snap-brim fedora.  Inside the Traction Avant—a four-door Citroen with a long hood, sweeping front fenders and freestanding, bug-eyed headlights—Victor’s hands were gesturing wildly. He was obviously upset about something.

Holly said, The readers of American newspapers want more stories of the French Foreign Legion in action. Nobody wants to know the effect of the fighting on civilians.

You care too much, Tran said. "News is business, pictures make story. Life magazine photographer told me last week."

I brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes and watched a group of schoolgirls dressed in white ao dais—the traditional knee-length gowns with high collars—as they rode by on black bicycles. Probably students at the French Catholic institution on the rue Mayer, I thought.

Jon Holly glanced back at me, pointed to his wristwatch. After this we’ll stop at the GPO and run my telegram past the censor. Fortunately, Jean-Paul is on duty today. He’s in love again, a taxi girl at the Moulin Rouge in Cholon. So he’ll be in a generous mood. He added quietly, I’m talking front page news, Phuong. The French liaison officer to the U.S. military aid program has ties to the black market. Victor’s got a picture of him dining at the Palais de Jade with a member of a criminal society.

The Binh Xuyen? Tran moved closer, blotted his face with a handkerchief. Mr. Chong took photo?

Not sure, Jon said. He’s not a real hands-on type.

While Holly and Tran waited for the drama in the car to conclude, I retreated to the shade offered by a tamarind’s leafy canopy. Suddenly my father’s words came to mind. Phuong, never forget where you are from, he had told me. It will help you to remember who you are. My thoughts drifted back to our home in Hue, not far from the Imperial Screen Mountain, where Father was an honored teacher at the Quoc Hoc Academy, the country’s finest secondary school. He lived in a world of books and studied constantly to improve his knowledge of Mandarin and French. He had insisted that I, his eldest daughter, learn English and sent me to the home of an American missionary for lessons.

But it was not all studies. I loved to play on the Perfume River, poling my sampan against the current past the pagodas and tombs. Then there was the Royal Citadel, a walled compound by the river, which I roamed through for hours. Once, my father took me to the Imperial Palace and I imagined myself a beautiful princess. But when I got home I was still the daughter of a poorly-paid schoolteacher, with two younger sisters, a brother, and an ailing mother.

Then the Japanese Imperial Army came and my childhood ended. Life was very difficult. There was never enough to eat. Father bartered lessons for food, usually small bony fish that the Japanese supply officers had rejected. In time, father was reduced to trading his beloved books for provisions. Other families were worse off, I was told.

In 1944, father was questioned by the Kempeitai. The military police suspected him of maintaining contact with former students who had fled to the Annamite Mountains, the hiding place of the resistance. With the prospect of arrest and torture looming, he, too, left Hue to join the guerrillas. I saw him only one more time, shortly before he was taken prisoner. A few weeks later we were informed that he had been executed, the body buried in an unmarked grave.

After his death, mother took to her bed with fever. When she had recovered sufficiently from the shock of losing her husband, she tried her best to take care of the family. But even after the Japanese were driven out, life was still marked by food shortages and not enough medicine. The next six years took a toll on her health and she fell ill again. For months an invalid, she lingered on, sometimes feverish, sometimes delirious. She died in the season of the monsoon.

So, leaving school, and with a recommendation from a Chinese businessman in Hue, I took the train south to Saigon and found employment in Mr. Chong’s house as tutor to his children. With a gift for languages—fluency in French, English and Cantonese, besides my mother tongue—I was able to supplement my pay by giving tuition to other children in Cholon. Each month I sent money to an uncle who had taken in my sisters and brother.

The noisy exhaust of a late-model Hudson Commodore broke my reverie. The big American sedan pulled alongside the 1939 Citroen, its V8 engine rumbling with untapped power. The long-haired driver moved over to the passenger-side window and handed a shoebox size package to Victor Chong. How many Hudson’s in Saigon? I wondered.

Tran, get pictures of the American car! Jon said, and started toward the Citroen.

Uncharacteristically, I ran after him and grabbed his coat from behind. Don’t go any closer, Mr. Holly. Something is not right, I said breathlessly.

He looked at me then. What is it, Phuong? What do you see?

The driver slid back behind the steering wheel of the blue automobile and drove slowly around the Citroen onto the Boulevard Bonnard. In the Traction Avant, the blonde took the brown-paper parcel from Victor’s hands, shook it and set it on the rear seat. Leaning toward him, she kissed him on the cheek, then opened her door and extended her right leg. A scarlet dragon tattoo on her ankle caught my eye.

There was a blinding flash and an explosion that knocked me off my feet. After the shock wave passed over, I looked over and saw Jon lying prone on the brick sidewalk, covered with bits of glass. Suddenly a second, and louder, blast rocked the street. The Citroen was now a shapeless blur of orange flames and black smoke. Paint blistered and peeled and the tires burned, sending up toxic fumes in a thick brown cloud of superheated gases that swirled crazily upward and over the rue Catinat, raining down sooty particles onto the Continental Hotel at the corner of the Place du Theatre.

I got to my feet and lurched toward Victor’s car but was instantly repelled by the intense heat. I recalled a story from the missionary’s house, a tale from the Book of Daniel about three young men cast into a fiery furnace in Babylon and kept alive by an angel—saved by their faithfulness to the God of Israel. But Victor had served only himself and his family and his gods were idols.

I couldn’t rescue him. No one could.

Chapter 2

A NAVY BLUE HIGH HEEL shoe lay on the sidewalk beside the burning car, the only visible remains of the occupants. I brushed glass off Jon’s hair and coat as he rose to a knee. Then he shook his head to, as the saying goes, clear the cobwebs. I knew the feeling, a sensation of one’s skull filled with cotton wool, the sounds of the world filtered through a straw mattress.

You all right?  Jon asked.

"I think so.’’

Where’s Tran? he asked, and dropped back against the white-painted trunk of a tall, leafy tamarind tree.

I looked into a nearby café. Tables and chairs were overturned, a shattered mirror lay in pieces on top of the bar. Dazed and bleeding, a French sailor staggered from the wreckage and an unbroken bottle of Dubonnet rolled past injured patrons and landed at my side.

Tran stumbled over to us, camera in hand. The tips of his fingers were dripping blood. Pictures of damage, that’s important, he said.

You are hurt, I told him.

Fell down. Now okay.

Holly said, Go on, get some shots from the Continental.

One man’s bad luck, my opportunity, Tran said, and crossed the avenue.

With a foot, I nudged the bottle within Jon’s reach. He opened it, took a long drink of the fortified wine and held out the bottle to me.

I don’t drink.

Then I heard the bells of the fire engines and knew that my eardrums had recovered from the pressure. Behind us, wheels scraped on the curb, a siren went silent and a car door slammed shut. The stubby shadow of a man fell across my legs.

Monsieur Holly, such an exciting life you lead, the man said loudly. Who needs a dispatcher when I can simply follow you around Saigon?

Ducret. Jon swallowed more wine. I was waiting for a friend.

Yes, I see how it is. Aren’t you going to introduce me?

Jon looked up at the policeman. Phuong. Her name is Phuong and she works as my interpreter.

Lucky American. Who was in the car?

Oh, some unlucky soul.

Ducret allowed a smile. Answer the question, Holly.

You’re the investigator, Jon said tactfully.

Roger Ducret was in his mid-thirties, a stocky ex-Resistance fighter from Strasbourg and a veteran of the postwar years in Indochina. He took the bottle from Jon’s hand and emptied it in the gutter. Why should I investigate? You are a well-paid correspondent with sources only dollars can buy.

Probably better than yours, Jon conceded.

Your expense account is bigger, Ducret said, and ran a hand through his thinning hair.

After water from the fire hoses had extinguished the blaze, a heavy pall of smoke and vapor hung over the rue Catinat. Meanwhile, gendarmes in tropical whites and stiff-brimmed kepis patrolled the avenue and the front of the hotel where the force of the blast had blown metal fragments and shards of glass. Ambulances lined the square.

Shall we talk in my office at Sûreté headquarters?

Air-conditioned?

Ducret laughed. We are on a tight budget, the war and all.

What do you want from me? Jon placed his hat on his head, got to his feet and helped me up.

Confirmation. The policeman lit a Gitanes. The car belonged to Victor Chong?

You knew him?

Alas, many people knew poor Victor.

Then you don’t need me, Inspector. Jon removed his suit jacket, shook off black specks of soot and put it back on. Oh, there was also a lady in the car. Long blonde hair.

Ducret gave a Gallic shrug. Our pathologist will identify her.

I thought you knew everyone in Saigon.

Only the living. The policeman took a long drag on his cigarette. How long have you worked in Indochina?

Less than a month.

My point exactly.

What’s that supposed to mean?

You don’t know the game here.

An unsmiling gendarme shoved Tran onto the sidewalk. Here he is, Inspector. He was taking photos of the scene.