‘Who the hell lives there?’ Max asked her.
She seemed to flinch. ‘It was once the summer pavilion of Vo Tran Quatch,’ she said. ‘Before his arrest.’
He reached out and put his arm round her shoulders, turning her from the pavilion. After a few steps he felt her hesitate, then she wriggled her right arm free and placed it round his waist. ‘No two lives run parallel,’ she said as they walked slowly, leaning on each other. ‘But at some points ours almost touch.’
As the sun began to go down behind the giant trees they left the village and bicycled back along the dusty track to Cahn Roc. The river was tidal for the first few miles and it was not possible, Nan Luc explained, to punt a sampan against the tide down to Cahn Roc. When the tide changed the villagers had agreed to return the boat, a service included in the few coins which was the price of lunch.
From time to time they met another cyclist or a walker going in the opposite direction and each time bicycles were stopped and elaborate greetings were exchanged. Riding along the narrow roads behind the girl in the pale dress it was, to Max Benning, as if he were playing a role in an idyll where no time existed, in an incredible landscape of giant trees and sudden breathtaking vistas of the river.
Chapter Sixteen
She had said no, standing there on the terrace. No to lunch in Woodstock. No to a hotel room afterwards. No.
She had left well before seven and driven her white Range Rover along the side roads back towards Page Corner. It was a drive she loved in the early summer when cowslips carpeted the rolling meadows and poppies lined the hedgerows. Through the open window she drew in the smells of a countryside she loved.
She had slowed almost to a halt when she realised Cy’s Mercedes was following her. With a touch of acceleration he overtook her and braked, forcing her to a stop.
Perhaps her real mistake had been to get out of the car as he walked towards her.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘At the club I couldn’t tell you how sexy you look in a tennis skirt.’
She found herself immensely flattered. ‘I’m your very grownup sister-in-law,’ she rebuked him.
‘And I’m just a kid off the Detroit assembly line,’ he said.
‘Detroit?’ She frowned.
He took her hand. ‘Over lunch I could tell you the story of my life. The real story. The one not even Sunny knows.’ With his free hand he ran his fingers up the inside of her arm until he pressed gently but deep into her armpit.
She stepped back, away from him. Her back rested against the side of the Range Rover. He moved forward until they were inches apart. ‘I want you, Mary,’ he said, matter of factly, ‘and I think you want me.’ She swallowed hard. Her eyes widened but she found it impossible to speak.
He reached and slid his arms round her. She found she was kissing him and struggling at the same time. As his hand passed up her bare thigh, she melted.
She had arrived home later that evening in a state of shock. She had taken a shower and gulped down a brandy and she was still trembling. What in God’s name had happened to her? Had she taken leave of her senses? Had she totally forgotten who she was? She had allowed Cy Stevenson to have sex with her on a grass bank by the roadside like any highway trucker’s harlot. Mary Page Butler had allowed that!
At just before noon on Monday, two days after the trial of Quatch had been suddenly concluded, Cy Stevenson received a telephone call from New York. A gentleman from Ho Chi Minh City named Van Khoa (the girl had carefully spelt out the name) would like to meet Mr Stevenson at the Swiss consulate at two o’clock. If necessary he would wait.
Not Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City.
Cy drove badly, his arms affected by a loose, slow trembling. One hand on the wheel he found was not enough. He was unable to light a cigarette without pulling to the side of the road. His imagination ran a constant newsreel of his past. Of the years growing up in Detroit, of the grandmother who had been as brutal as her frailty allowed. Of the day, aged fifteen, he had hit her. Had she died? He never knew. He had moved neighbourhoods, worked on an assembly line, attracted more trouble because trouble seemed to stick to him. Moved on again. East.
He was a good-looking young man, Steven Wokalski. He lived with a woman in a quiet suburb of Boston in an apartment overlooking the Charles River. But the woman was over sixty. Before he moved on she gave him money for a new identity. In Roxbury he had met a man. He supplied everything, a new name, a background, burial details of parents, recollections of high school friends. The complete service. Steve Wokalski walked through one door and young Cy Stevenson emerged through another. Thirteen thousand dollars and English great-grandparents thrown in. The right, give or take a generation, to wear a Greenjacket tie.
A few stumbling steps. Then, through a woman again, a job as a news reporter. And his first trip to Vietnam and the girls and booze and booze and girls. Stronger than any drug. That feeling in Saigon in the late sixties that you could do anything.
Home flew the hero. More or less a hero and to no real home. But with enough dollars to rent an apartment in Meyerick, sixty miles from New York, and look at what the future might bring. And a few weeks later Sunny Page is what it brought. At a party in the same apartment block. A contrived meeting. Cy was good at that sort of thing. Unable to join the party because of an engagement in New York. Just stay long enough for one drink and your telephone number.
Sunny Page’s elder sister was like a mother. Nearly twenty years older, intelligent, cautious, a fairly amiable snob. Cy knew she could be serious opposition. Charm didn’t work on her. From the day he married Sunny he had known that he might have to find out if anything else did.
Against Mary’s opposition, implied rather than stated, he married Sunny and one half of the Page inheritance. The need for a gentleman’s pursuit led him in the direction of the Meyerick-Vietnam Fund, headless since its founder, Philip Rose, had died a few years before.
The world was treating Cy Stevenson well but he was aware that his sister-in-law’s eyes continued to follow him across the room, speculative, yes, but also distrustful, uncertain, permanently suspicious. And interested?
That evening in Geneva had looked as if it was going to shatter his dream-life. A reception at God knows what charity organisation. Heads of a lot of Western charity funds. Drinks, excellent food, the promise of some girls later. But also some Vietnamese ‘meeting friends of new Vietnam’. Quatch. Unmistakable in a perfectly cut pearl-grey suit. Yellow eyes like boiled sweets. Bull’s-eyes the kids called them on Soden Avenue. Quatch smiling, Quatch remembering.
His price for silence was at first not unmanageable. Fifty thousand dollars to be paid into a Swiss numbered account. The next year the figure rose.
In the waiting room of the Swiss Consulate a slender man with a shock of black hair falling over his forehead stood up as Stevenson entered and proffered his left hand. The right, Cy saw, was not much more than a scarred stump.
They walked into a private office and the Vietnamese indicated a chair. ‘I’m sure you understand why I’m here, Mr Stevenson,’
Van Khoa said in an English, well enough pronounced, but bereft of its normal intonation.
‘No,’ Cy said. ‘No, I don’t, Mr Van Khoa.’
‘Yet you drove in to New York immediately you got my message.’
‘I was coming in anyway,’ Cy said casually. ‘Mondays I often leave it late. New York morning traffic tails right back to nowhere.’
‘I am the officer responsible for the trial of a man named Quatch, former chief administrator of the province of Cahn Roc.’