The Vietnamese crossed to the head of the stairs and peered down, his hand lifted, enjoining silence. Then, clutching the money, he came back and opened the door to the room. ‘Please, monsieur…’ he said, gesturing for Max to enter.
Max went in. Two women were grilling fish over the floor stove. The teenage girl still held the child. Another child was asleep on a mat in the corner.
The door closed behind him. The Vietnamese inclined his head. ‘Duong Tran Tron,’ he said. ‘This is my family.’
‘Can you help me find Nan Luc?’ Max looked into the hard, weatherbeaten face.
‘Perhaps,’ Duong said.
‘How long have you and your family had this room?’
‘We moved here last week.’
‘And Nan Luc?’
‘She is no longer here,’ Duong said. ‘She left after the trial of the provincial administrator Quatch.’
‘She went to Saigon?’
The Vietnamese hung his head. ‘Her father was American,’ he said at length. ‘Perhaps she went to America.’
A turmoil of feeling combined with the heavy smells of cooking in the room to make his stomach heave. ‘She became a refugee?’ Again the man’s head hung and Max realised he was expressing his shame. ‘She bought a fishing boat from one of the villages up the coast,’ he said. ‘She left with other refugees by night.’
‘You’re sure of this.’
The small face nodded slowly. ‘She had an American face,’ he said, seeking an explanation which would satisfy him. ‘Perhaps she left to look for her father.’
Through the split crust of faded posters the double doors of the Eros Bar still showed a dusty red. The wide windows, past which a generation of GIs had drifted, staring at the girls and good times within, were now crudely boarded up and layered with their own thick coat of government announcements.
For a few moments Max stood before the building and tried to conjure a picture of the Eros as it had once been, throbbing with rock music, alive with the shouts of GIs and the giggling laughter of the bar girls.
When the woman’s voice spoke from the balcony above, Max stepped back, startled. ‘One moment, monsieur,’ the voice repeated in French, ‘I’ll come down and let you in.’
He could hear her voice as she descended the stairs, urging him not to go away. Then the door opened and a grey head of hair was thrust out. ‘You men are all such romantics,’ Bernadette said. ‘But then when I was young, men would have crossed the seas for me too.’ She pulled the door wide. ‘Come upstairs. I’ll give you tea.’
She moved with agility across the broken glass which still littered the floor and began to mount the winding staircase. Following her, Max breathed in the dank smells of the abandoned bar room. A few broken metal chairs were all that was left of the furnishings. Curtains had been torn down, glasses and bottles smashed or carried away, the bar itself splintered and torn out for firewood.
The room above was different, small, neatly kept. There was no cupboard or box. On a wooden board Bernadette’s possessions were for all to see: a pile of carefully folded clothes of rough linen; a few cooking pans; an old French primus stove; a teapot and bowls.
She waved her hand. ‘How are the mighty fallen, you’re saying to yourself.’
Max shook his head. ‘Have you lived here since the trial?’
‘Van Khoa allows me. He is not a vindictive man. And of course he’s still in love with Nan Luc. It’s better than a labour camp, but I’ve no future beyond this room. Thanks to Quatch.’
‘You seem to know me,’ Max said.
‘Of course. I saw you at the trial. Afterwards, briefly, I spoke to Nan Luc about you. You’ve come to look for her and she’s already gone.’
‘I know that.’
‘It’s a dangerous journey, monsieur. Sit down while I make tea.’
‘Where would she head for?’ Max asked as Bernadette pumped the stove and lit it.
‘If they left from Cahn Roc, mostly to Thailand. If they left further south, perhaps even to Hong Kong. Mostly it would be chance. Winds, storms, the charts they were able to procure, the quantity of gasoline…’ He was silent, watching her. ‘I notice,’ she said, ‘that you haven’t asked me why she decided to leave.’
‘No.’ Max sat down on a bent metal chair rescued from the bar downstairs. ‘I’ve no need to ask you that.’
She smiled, filtered a few tea leaves through her fingers into the teapot and poured in a tiny amount of boiling water. ‘Why then, I wonder, did you accept my invitation to drink tea?’
Max paused for a moment, watching her add water to the brew. ‘My father was murdered in your apartment in Paris.’
She nodded a casual assent and smiled at his angry intake of breath. ‘You can’t be surprised still at the way we Vietnamese look on death. What can it mean to you, the death of a father you had never even seen?’
‘He was a husband too.’
She pouted dismissively. ‘His love was Vietnam.’
‘Do you know how he died?’
She placed a bowl of tea on the board next to him. ‘Of course. He had traced many of the pieces of the great Hue screen which Quatch had had broken up to sell separately. He was about to denounce us to our government. A young man was selected. A few francs. Unfortunately the hothead did it in my apartment.’
Max looked at her unbelievingly. ‘That’s all? Unfortunately the hothead did it in your apartment! That’s all you have to say?’
‘You want me to say I’m sorry? Drink your tea, monsieur, it’s you who’s the hypocrite. Not me.’
‘Later, when Nan Luc went to Paris herself, did she know you were involved?’
‘Of course not. And in fact I was barely involved.’
‘An accessory.’
‘If you like. I knew it was to happen, but it was Monsieur Quatch of course who organised it. We suffered a few days of worry, but by then our forces were marching into Saigon and the French government had no wish to be gratuitously unfriendly.’
Max stood up. ‘I’ll go now. I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have come up.’
‘You haven’t drunk your tea, monsieur. More hypocrisy.’ She paused. ‘And so you believe she undertook this highly dangerous passage to the West to find you?’ The old woman emitted a sudden shriek of laughter. A chill struck him. Bernadette lifted her bowl of tea and sipped. ‘Van Khoa was jealous,’ she said softly. ‘Of you, of America… He believed she could never be his while she remained poised between East and West. He believed her dreams of America had led her away from him. To you.’ She sucked tea from the bowl and set it down on the board. ‘He told me this just before he released me from custody. He regrets what he did. He felt powerless, you see, unable to combat these dreams of America, an American family, an American father.’
‘Go on…’
‘But, you see, he knew about her father. And he knew that what she had heard in the trial she refused to believe. So Van Khoa came to a decision. To tell her everything about her father. By the harsh method he chose, he forced the truth upon her.’
‘You’re telling me she left to find her father?’
She grinned triumphantly. ‘To find her father – to find vengeance!’
Chapter Twenty-Four
After three weeks at sea Nan Luc had only her sense of outrage to sustain her. Thoughts of Max were thoughts of another time in her life, too warm, too disturbing, too creative of a sense of irreparable loss.
It was easier to think of her father, to nurse the hate, to let his ultimate betrayal fester inside her. She knew with a total certainty that her father’s betrayal had to be avenged. She knew also that she was the only one who could do it.