Night Never Falls by Edwin Shrake

Author:Edwin Shrake [Shrake, Bud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83018-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Harry did that speech from King Lear frequently at The Pig and Whistle. Domi studied him with Buddhist placidity; to a Buddhist this speech was nonsense.

Jimmy Roma hung up the phone. “That was a friend who deals objects from Tonkin. This week he sat on a mountain in the jungle where he’s digging out a temple. He watched the French prisoners stagger past on the trail below.”

“Prisoners from Dien Bien?”

“My friend hears there were ten thousand prisoners captured at Dien Bien Phu. The French won’t like it that there were so many, but they’re dying fast on the road. Men with amputated legs dragging themselves along, blind men, men with chest wounds. He saw a Moroccan who’d wrapped his turban around his stomach to hold his guts in. It’s a death march.”

“Like the Japanese did to the U.S. prisoners at Bataan,” Harry said. Like the Reds forced their American prisoners in Korea to make a death march into Manchuria, he thought, automatically turning the information into a column idea.

“The Japanese marched the Americans only seventy miles,” said Jimmy. “My friend says the Reds are marching their prisoners three hundred and sixty miles to a camp on the Chinese frontier. The Reds are whipping and kicking the Vietnamese prisoners on the trail, killing them; the French, they die if they fall. The lucky Frenchman gets a little water and tea and half an ounce of rice per day, but the Vietnamese prisoners get nothing to eat or drink. My friend says no Vietnamese prisoners will survive to the prison camp.”

“Did he see any officers?”

“My friend saw officers in a truck with their hands tied behind their backs with telephone wire. He thinks he saw de Castries in a red beret and red scarf with blood oozing from his wrists.”

“Hey, Domi,” Harry said.

“Yis sah?”

“Pull up a typewriter. This is your story.”

“Oh, but, sah, I am not the great writer.”

“You ever had a byline?”

“No sah!”

“Type your byline at the top of the page.” Harry looked at Jimmy Roma. “Okay with you, Jimmy? It’s your bureau.”

“Don’t sweat it, baby,” Jimmy Roma said.

“Good. Now, Domi, type in a dateline. Put Chiang Mai on it.”

“Why?”

“The foreign desk in New York doesn’t know where Chiang Mai is. It gives your story a ring of authority.”

“I see.” Domi typed a moment. “Now what?”

“You heard what Jimmy told us. Write ten paragraphs about it, put it on the wire to New York, and hit six bells. Come on, Jimmy, let’s go buy some silk.”

“But sah! How do I begin the paragraphs?”

“Well, use ‘Communists’ and ‘death march’ in the first sentence to wake them up in New York. After that, follow the formula: who, what, when, where, why and how. Answer those questions in ten paragraphs, and you’re a great writer. See you later, Domi. Good luck.”

They left Domi hunched over his typewriter, chewing on a pencil. The first word he had written was The.

“I put Domi’s byline on many stories he writes,” Jimmy said as he and Harry walked into Suriwong Road.

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