A man on a bicycle, passing through the square, paused, his face turned upwards. Then in ones and twos the bus passengers began to shuffle away, aware that none of their number had the courage to approach the courthouse door.
Part Two – Via Gulanga
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘I have telephoned Cahn Roc,’ said the guide in the lobby of Ho Chi Minh City’s Independence Hotel, ‘and there is no such person working in the People’s Court at Cahn Roc.’ She smiled a mouth full of teeth as if to a child dismissing nonsense fears of ghosts.
Max Benning faced the uniformed Vietnamese girl across the counter. ‘When did she leave?’ He was trying hard to control the desperation rising inside him.
‘There is no such woman,’ the guide repeated.
‘There was such a woman. I met her two months ago,’ Max said.
The guide shook her head authoritatively. ‘Some other woman,’ she said. ‘You have made a mistake, Mr Benning. It sometimes happens,’ she added generously.
‘No.’ Max placed his hands flat on the table between them. ‘Nan Luc Hyn was senior investigating clerk at the People’s Court in Cahn Roc.’
The guide shook her head, smiling toothily. ‘Not so.’
Max stared at her until her smile faded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘If you say so.’ He turned to go, then swung back towards her. ‘This morning’s tour,’ he said, ‘is to Prahat?’
She nodded happily, her point won. ‘Prahat and the Mekong temples,’ she said.
‘I’ll take it.’ He walked across the lobby and took the elevator to his floor. Leaving the lift he checked that he had both Vietnamese money and dollars then walked on past his room to the emergency stairs.
It was only three flights down and he could see the tour bus in the forecourt from the landing windows. At the bottom of the concrete staircase a swing door led out into a small courtyard where an old woman was pushing a trolley of bedsheets. Beyond the first courtyard was another, a parking lot for vans supplying the hotel.
He crossed quickly, ducking behind the vehicles so that the attendant on the rear gate could not see him. In the street behind the hotel he walked towards the Cathedral Square. Yesterday, with the sort of wrench that left him breathless, he had seen a lorry bus stopping there with Cahn Roc painted on its side.
In the streets of Saigon a Western face no longer excited any great interest. Tours were encouraged by a Vietnamese government desperately short of hard currency and, on his earlier trip, Max had seen the first American veterans making organised visits to the areas in which they had served.
But on the back of a lorry bus to Cahn Roc the tall young man in the safari jacket, already sweat-stained above the pockets, was an object of anxious curiosity to the twenty or so peasant men and women travelling with him. They took his offered cigarettes and sat back to whisper tensely among themselves. Max spoke nothing but phrasebook Vietnamese; the peasants spoke neither English nor French.
He had no real plan beyond seeing Nan Luc again. He had found that he had missed her unendurably in the two months they had been separated. Even so, there were times he wondered if he wasn’t crazy, pursuing the sort of dream that is best left where it ended.
Max sat on the slatted bench, his back jolting against the side of the truck, and let the persistent excitement of Nan Luc’s aura wash over him. He was not a fool. He knew the dangers of constantly exposing himself to his memories of Nan Luc but every day, every night since he had been parted from her, he had struggled to recreate that extraordinary femininity, the softness and the strength, the East and West in everything she did, the way she walked, stood, laughed.
He had told his mother in the London clinic that he was going back to Vietnam and she had waved her now emaciated hand in the air, a gesture of contemptuous dismissal. ‘Like father…’ she had said, then dropped her hand, too weak to finish the line.
‘I’ll be back inside a fortnight,’ he said. ‘That’s all my visa allows.’
‘Let’s hope my visa runs a little past that,’ she said without self-pity. ‘It’s a woman of course.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah. And your father, the scholar adventurer, did he have a girl?’
‘I don’t know.’ He pressed his mother’s wrist. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,’ he had said.
It was dark when the lorry bus bucked and rattled into the square at Cahn Roc. Most of the peasants had got off at villages or road crossings on the way. An old man and his wife slept intermittently opposite Max; a young soldier, perhaps home on leave, was stretched out the length of the tailgate drunk on Lua Moi.
As the old US Army truck came to a halt Max jumped off the back and walked quickly across the square past the People’s Court towards the hospital. He had wondered if the guide at the hotel in Saigon might phone ahead, suspecting he was making for Cahn Roc. But then he had realised that that is not the way the mind, schooled in a closed system, works. She would have reported his absence from the tour of Prahat, that’s all. Anything more would be to assume too much involvement and thus responsibility for what was happening.
On the hospital side of the square he turned into the Rue du Vieux Port. In the narrow street, lights chinked through shuttered windows and the high Vietnamese voices and cooking smells floated in the night. He could see the gulf now, a shimmering stretch of blackness broken by the faint lights of fishing boats, like stars in a black firmament.
The harbour tower stood a lighter coloured stone than the building around it. Two or three oil lamps glowed at the windows. Nan Luc’s room, he remembered, was up on the top floor. He walked on past the arched entrance and looked up. He was flooded with relief to see a shadow cast by an oil lamp moving across the window and retraced his steps quickly to the entrance to the tower.
He had time, standing in the strangely vaulted lobby, to register that his breathing was shallow and fast, almost as if he were trembling after some physical effort. As he climbed the stone steps the longing to see her, the need to touch her and talk to her and lie beside her drained energy from him.
On the top landing her door burst open. A tiny Vietnamese boy, naked, fat-bellied, ran for the stairs pursued by an elder sister. Scooping the child up and hugging him the teenage girl suddenly became aware of Max standing in the shadows. Her mouth dropped open and the child came close to sliding out of her arms. She ran for the open door and slammed it behind her.
He stood sickened by the glimpse he had through the open door. In place of the rolled sleeping mat, the travelling chest, the neatly piled books, he saw a family’s quarters, a jumble of pots around a small floor stove, a string of washing from wall to wall and people, four or five Vietnamese, looking at him in astonishment.
The door opened slowly. A middle-aged man wearing a jungle green T-shirt and jean shorts stood in the doorway. There was no welcome on his creased, tanned face.
‘What do you want here?’ he said in French.
‘I’m looking for Nan Luc Hyn. She used to live here.’ The man’s expression did not change. ‘Do you know her?’ The Vietnamese shook his head briefly and began to close the door. ‘An investigating clerk at the People’s Court here at Cahn Roc.’ Max had moved his foot to stop the door closing. The man gave two brief shakes of his head and looked down at Max’s shoe.
‘You took over the room from her,’ Max said, digging into his pocket. He pulled out a wad of Vietnamese notes and thrust them into the startled man’s hand. ‘Tell me what happened to her,’ Max said. ‘Is she still at the People’s Court?’