Above the low rumble of the sea she heard a door open and close somewhere in the building. For a moment she listened. Outside on the stone landing she heard a step.
‘This isn’t the end,’ Max had said.
The footsteps continued up the stone stairs. A flood of hope brought her scrambling from the sleeping mat. Then the door opened and Van Khoa stood shadowed in the doorway.
She stood before him without greeting him then stepped back to allow him in. ‘The American flew to Bangkok this afternoon,’ he said. She watched him, not speaking. ‘He is unharmed.’
‘You came to tell me that?’
‘I am returning to Ho Chi Minh City, tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I came to say goodbye.’
She turned away from him and lit the kerosene lamp. Now that she knew Max was safe she felt no fear of him. ‘So you were only here in Cahn Roc for the trial,’ she said. ‘To make sure the trial went as you wished.’
‘It’s over now.’
‘I know you are an important man,’ she said bitterly. ‘A senior officer in the Ministry of State Security. Why should we need you now that justice has been done in Cahn Roc?’
The warm yellow light spread across her face. Van Khoa moved round the table until he was again facing her. ‘Quatch is dead,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the justice you require?’
‘Dead?’
‘He was taken out to the forest this morning. He was shot by a firing squad.’
‘An innocent man,’ she taunted him.
‘May I sit down?’
She nodded towards a chair. ‘I will make tea.’ She filled and lit the US Army field cooker. Van Khoa sat staring down where the lamplight fell on his hands, one unmarked, one crippled. It was the first time he had come to her room.
She stood opposite him. ‘What sort of verdict was that?’ she asked him, emboldened by anger and grief.
‘Often there are political reasons,’ he said, ‘which we find hard to understand.’
‘How can there be such injustice in the republic you fought for? How do you allow it?’ He looked across to the window. She came forward. ‘Is this why thousands want to leave our country? Hundreds of thousands?’
‘Quatch is not representative of our revolution, Nan Luc,’ he said fiercely. ‘You know that.’
‘But he was guilty.’
‘Of many things.’
‘Of the murder of Peter Benning?’
‘Responsible, yes, I’ve no doubt.’
‘And guilty of corruption?’
‘Yes.’
Her anger made her reckless. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Did other provincial governors, as corrupt as Quatch, object to a verdict of guilty?’
He looked down at the bubbling field cooker. ‘There were reasons of state.’ He lapsed into silence. ‘I don’t approve,’ he said, ‘but I obey.’
She busied herself with the tea. Kneeling, with her back to him, she said: ‘The American, Quatch mentioned. Does he exist?’ She stood up and handed Van Khoa his tea. ‘Does he really exist?’
Van Khoa put down his tea. ‘You have a right to know,’ he said softly.
‘What right do I have more than any other Vietnamese?’
He had begun the long series of fumbling movements with his damaged hand which would draw a cigarette from a pack and light it. He brought the lighter up to the cigarette and squinted at the glowing tip. ‘There is no doubt of Quatch’s corruption,’ he said. ‘Of his degeneracy.’ She waited. ‘He was a collector of a certain type of literature, pornography of course. And movies. Pornographic movies. Films that reflected his own obscene interests. He was wealthy enough to write his own scenarios and to have them made here, in what was then Saigon.’
‘There were such studios in Saigon?’
‘Where better to make such films? During the war there were many women prepared to make such films. The results were distributed throughout the world.’ Van Khoa inhaled on his cigarette. He was watching her, as if considering how much more to say.
‘Who was the American who made the movies here in Saigon?’
‘Your grandmother tells me that you already know.’
She shook her head in panic. ‘I don’t believe it. There were thousands of Americans in Saigon, tens of thousands…’
He drew heavily on his cigarette. ‘Listen to me, Nan Luc. Years after Quatch bought pornography from the American, they met again at a conference in Geneva. By now the American was himself rich and had access to even greater riches. Quatch still had some of the films. He used them to blackmail the American.’
‘No.’
‘Believe me, Nan Luc. I am not telling you these things to pain you, but you must know the truth. You must stare it in the face. Your father is an evil man, a degenerate as bad or worse than Quatch.’
Nan Luc covered her face with her hands. ‘Go now, please go.’
He stood. ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘that I would still wish to marry you, Nan Luc. I can offer much. But I know there’s no chance of your agreement until you have finally turned your face against America. Against your father.’
For a long time she sat silently, the light from the kerosene lamp gleaming yellow on her dark hair. ‘The American’s name was Stevenson?’ she said at last.
‘Yes.’
‘How could my mother love a pornographer?’
‘That is not for me to explain.’
‘How could my mother love a pornographer?’ her voice rose. He reached into his pocket with his mangled hand and hooked a set of keys on his one good finger.
‘The keys to my office,’ he said. ‘And to the safe.’ He dropped them on the sleeping mat beside her. ‘In the safe is the evidence I never used. The evidence Quatch used to blackmail the American, your father.’
Leaving the harbourmaster’s tower Nan hurried up the steep Rue de Port, her mind in turmoil. Max was safe. No effort could make her accept that it was only this morning she had last seen him. The sheer misery of the intervening hours had agonisingly stretched every moment. It seemed to her that since she had regained the safety of her room, everything had slowed, even the rhythm of the sun’s progress across the sky, the lengthening of the shadows of dusk and the pace of nightfall itself.
What she now knew about her father only magnified the scale of her loss. And added to it an overwhelming sense of apprehension. For a moment she stopped on the steps of the People’s Court, grasping Van Khoa’s keys in her hand. The image, the single image, she had of her mother came vividly to mind. Something in her stirred, some unexplained chill passed up her spine. She knew she was terrified of the evidence she would find in Van Khoa’s safe.
Climbing the stairs past the courtroom she entered and let herself in to the prosecutor’s office. Documents stood in neat piles on the desk, blue evidence files, red prosecution folders.
The safe stood on a concrete block in a corner of the room. In it, it now seemed possible, was the answer to the questions which had tantalised and confused her as she had struggled to make sense of the fears and memories she had carried with her since childhood.
Outside in the square the lorry bus from Can Tho pulled in under the weak street lamps flanking the courthouse. There were few passengers: a pair of soldiers on demobilisation leave; a peasant or two with wooden hoes or sickles bartered for handfuls of rice in Can Tho market; a fisherman and his wife returning from a family funeral.
The lorry shuddered into silence as the engine was switched off and the passengers stood obediently waiting for the driver to lower the tailgate. A few moments later they all stood on the sidewalk about to take their leave of each other.
It was then, they would later recount to their families, that the woman’s screams came tearing from the courthouse. On the sidewalk the lorry bus passengers stood unmoving, staring up at the lighted window, listening while the screams ebbed into a distraught, heart-rending sobbing.