They sat in a narrow courtyard. Under a bamboo awning bare-bulb lights threw shadows across their faces. An old woman served them two mugs of weak coffee.
He felt the sudden icy chill in her voice. ‘Perhaps you believe that all the charges against Quatch are fabricated for political reasons, Mr Benning?’
‘What the hell do I know?’ he said. ‘I just thought that guilt or innocence was a matter to be decided by trial.’
‘Listen,’ she said carefully. ‘Corruption has been part of Vietnamese life for centuries. The French took it over from the emperors, the Americans took it over from the French. Some people in this government, people like Van Khoa, believe it must be eradicated.’
‘However doubtful the means?’
‘Be more forgiving, Mr Benning. What you’ve just seen is a blunder of a primitive system of justice. But I can promise you, I know Van Khoa. He aims at justice.’
‘OK,’ he shrugged doubtfully.
‘Van Khoa is convinced Quatch is guilty of the charges against him.’
‘Are you?’
She met his eyes. ‘I believe Quatch capable of any crime you can imagine.’
‘Is that what your grandmother told you?’
‘No.’
He hesitated. ‘You mean you know that from your own experience?’
‘Yes.’
He looked into her wide eyes, knowing that she had entrusted him with a confidence which, however little understood, bound them together.
Chapter Eleven
In the heavy early morning rain the gleaming ancient green Paris single decker looked misleadingly new. It was more than half full of foreign journalists as Max got in outside the hotel. The Americans settled down to play cards at the back of the bus; Hunter and a British cameraman talked about cricket; the French discussed the dinner they had been subjected to the night before and Max sat alone in a front seat. The interpreters and the two men from the Vietnam Press Agency had left by separate bus an hour before.
The first part of the journey south-west, crossing the Mekong estuaries to Can Tho, perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometres in all, took ten hours. Though most of the narrow-laned highway was asphalted, they were obliged, for reasons no one even tried to explain, to take hour-long detours. Off the highway the slashing, incessant rain turned the single-track, boarded roads into quagmires as yellow mud was forced up between the split logs of the road surface by the weight of the bus. Slithering dangerously from side to side they drove between patchwork fields, or thin stunted woods, the blue black humps of the hills always to the north.
At midday when they were given sandwiches and a can of beer, Max looked up to see a broad-shouldered, middle-aged American reporter standing next to his seat.
‘Mind if I join you?’ the man said. ‘My name’s Bolson. Hal Bolson. You’re Max Benning, aren’t you?’
Max moved his bag aside. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
Bolson slumped into the seat and peered across Max out of the window. ‘Never really thought I’d be here again,’ he said.
For a few moments they talked in a desultory way about Saigon in the last violent glittering months of the war, the cafes, the hotels and bars the journalists used. ‘I came across your father a few times before the end,’ Bolson said. Max looked at him in surprise. ‘Nothing strange about it,’ Bolson said. ‘I didn’t know him well but we all used the same places, newsmen, hustlers, Vietcong agents. We were parasites, Max. Not your father. But the rest of us lived off each other.’
‘What was he like, my father?’
‘Big good-looking guy like you. But very, very tough. Not like you I’d guess.’
‘No,’ Max smiled, ‘not like me.’
‘He did crazy things. No wonder the Viets are giving him a monument. He pulled half their history out of the ruins.’
Max smiled. ‘I take it there’s a degree of exaggeration there.’
‘A degree,’ Bolson conceded. ‘I knew Quatch too,’ he added casually.
‘Do you think he killed my father?’
‘Probably. Your father pursued him to Paris, and that was the only way out for Quatch.’
‘Did you like him?’
‘Your father? He wasn’t an easy man, you understand. There was almost a religious sense of purpose about him. He could drink any of us under the table, but he’d still have an ear open for a clue to a manuscript or piece of statuary he was tracking.’ Bolson pushed himself up out of his seat. ‘We’ll be seeing more of each other, Max,’ he said and made his way back down the aisle.
At Can Tho they stayed the night in a long palm-thatched schoolroom on the outskirts of the town. Here US Army cots had been provided and clean sheets and blankets. Dinner in the teachers’ room met the qualified approval of even the French. There were a few bottles of wine and even some whisky. It was, altogether, a more comfortable night than the one before.
Dawn the next morning saw them climbing back into the bus under a cloudless sky. The road was now straight and asphalted and travelling west they reached the border of Cahn Roc province in less than two hours.
The night before, at dinner, Nan Luc had explained the geography of the region. Cahn Roc was a small, poor province on both sides of the Cahn Roc River. The road they would be following ran alongside the river through mango swamps until they reached higher ground. This was the most prosperous part of Cahn Roc, a plateau where mining and timber were the principal occupations. From this plateau they would be able to see, on the coast, the small port and provincial capital, Cahn Roc, and beyond it the Gulf of Thailand.
Arriving at the provincial capital they drove through the outskirts of the tiny town, mostly through narrow roads awash with floodwater from the days or months before. The houses were a shambles of small French administrators’ villas and more recent rusted tin structures. There seemed to be cultivated strips and patches between every building from which women with conical straw hats looked up, shielding their eyes from the rays of the setting sun.
They swung round on a cobbled road through the port with its mass of fishing boats being prepared for the night’s fishing and stopped in the main square of solid colonial buildings. Each was easily identifiable: an old Catholic convent or monastery, perhaps; the Palais de Justice, now the People’s Court; and along one side of the square a barracks, damaged by shellfire, windowless but with washing hanging from strings across the gaping holes. A gigantic puddle filled a large part of the centre of the paved square and the palm trees outside the courthouse looked bowed and battered by the rains.
The bus pulled up outside the hotel building which occupied the fourth side of the square. There had been no attempt to change the French name. It was still the Grand Hotel. Its yellow stucco walls were peeling in large patches, its balcony ironwork was red with rust. On a side wall a barely legible painted advertisement promoted the aperitif ‘Suze’.
‘Let’s ask them if they can get this trial through before the weekend,’ Hunter said, surveying the square with a horrified grimace. A sudden rain squall struck them and he dragged his duffel bag and equipment into the Grand Hotel with Max behind him.
‘Listen,’ one of the British newsmen was saying in the hotel lobby to Nan Luc, ‘I thought this trial was taking place in Saigon.’
‘Quatch was administrator in Cahn Roc,’ she told him. ‘It seemed more appropriate to hold it here.’
‘There’s not much going on in Cahn Roc at night?’