‘There’s nothing to answer, Mrs O’Keefe,’ Nan Luc said. ‘You’re making a mistake.’
‘You’re lying.’ Mrs O’Keefe’s voice rose. ‘It’s happening to all my friends with Viet maids. PX and promise we call it. Goes straight to the heart of every Vietnamese slut.’
Nan Luc turned away. At the kitchen door she stopped. ‘I’ll apply for another job,’ she said calmly. ‘The registry say they’re still short of English-speaking girls.’
‘You’ll do what I tell you to,’ Freda O’Keefe said. She came forward; in her high heels she was on a level with Nan’s eyes.
The Vietnamese girl shook her head. ‘No. I’ll go to the registry now,’ she said.
A wave of rage overtook the other woman. ‘I hire you, I fire you,’ she screamed at Nan Luc. ‘You come when I call. You go when I tell you. Understand?’
‘No, I don’t, Mrs O’Keefe. I’m going now.’
Nan Luc turned into an open palmed slap in the face. She stood there, her cheek stinging, her eyes watering.
‘I knew it from the day you started,’ the Australian woman said. ‘From the day he chose you.’ Freda O’Keefe reached out to grab her arms, shaking her until the shoulder of her cotton shirt came away with a sharp ripping sound. ‘Get to work,’ she hissed. ‘You work your ass off for me, not for him. D’you hear me?’ Her hand rose again.
Nan Luc hit her with the same open hand slap to the side of the cheek that Mrs O’Keefe was halfway towards delivering. But it was a blow struck with that lethal coolness that she had learnt in a childhood of self-defence lessons at the orphanage. It propelled Freda O’Keefe across the room and left her tumbled on the sofa, blood bubbling in one nostril.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
From his ship steaming towards its home port of San Diego, Ed Brompton wrote:
Dear Nan
I will not make this a long letter. I have made some enquiries in the last month and discovered that not only are you still at Gulanga but that on the stand-in-line system you are likely to be there for many months yet. In the present climate no one in the so called countries of final reception seems anxious to speed up the processes. The boat people have assumed the proportions of an ‘intractable problem’ which is just another way of saying our solutions are going to have to be devious.
In the light of all this I have come to a serious decision. I have been a widower for over ten years and my daughter, as you know, is now grown up and living in Europe. I know you are well aware of what I feel about you and I’m realist enough to know that it is not reciprocated in the same way.
Despite this I want to ask you to marry me. The first benefit to you is obvious enough. As the wife of a US citizen you can leave Gulanga immediately. Other benefits may follow. Who knows? But if you want a ‘marriage of convenience’, OK. If you want a divorce as soon as it can legally be obtained, so be it.
For my part I don’t need to tell you that I’ve missed you like hell.
In Hong Kong Inspector Bert Ottenshaw stood at his office window and watched the big jets taking off out across the ocean.
It was too early for a drink, too early to go home to his empty apartment with its empty view of sea and sky. Young Benning would soon be on one of those planes. Better in a way. These East-West marriages seldom worked out. His hadn’t.
Ottenshaw sat down at his computer and began to play variants of H-Y-N. There were Hyns and Hyn variants at all the camps but no one to fit the age, sex, date of arrival profile of Nan Luc. He tried Gulanga again because elements of the US fleet had been steaming in off their Peking Duck exercise over the last few weeks.
The screen flashed an immediate negative.
He was a man who tried to keep a strict eye on his drinking, knew he had to. His solution was to invest in the best malt whisky he knew. Swinging in his chair, he bent and took his bottle of Glenmorangie and a glass from the bottom drawer of his desk. Pouring himself a drink he sat, swinging from side to side, while the negative flashed at him from the screen. He lifted his glass. This was the modern epitaph for thousands of Vietnamese today. A flashing negative on a screen.
The malt whisky was like velvet. A different drink from the commercial blend he offered his visitors. He sat rocking back and forth. His wife, Ping, had been a Chinese refugee, one of those that didn’t die on the swim across. Ottenshaw had been the first to tap in her name. Pretty, quiet, unassuming, but what a bitch! Ran her own chain of restaurant bars now. But it was no secret that food wasn’t what the company made its money from.
He poured himself another carefully calculated Glenmorangie. To wrench his mind away from Ping he accessed the lists he would have to work on tomorrow. Under last month’s agreement, Hong Kong, or the British on Hong Kong’s behalf, had agreed to accept refugee felony categories from three UN camps.
Give me your starving millions! Ottenshaw sipped whisky and thought how much he hated politicians. Everybody round that negotiating table had known that Hong Kong couldn’t take any more boat people. Everybody knew that what it would finally come to was a nasty dawn repatriation of desperate refugees, screaming or silent in their grief or hopelessness. A $50 bill in their pocket to ease the conscience of the repatriators.
He glanced at category A felons. Serious crimes of murder or assault. A hundred or more that he’d have to find detention space for from Hong Kong alone. Two or three from each of the other camps.
He poured what would definitely be his last drink. Category B. Petty theft, prostitution. Of course it was rife in the camps, but middle-class morality couldn’t condone it, turn a blind eye even. Dozens of women, old, young, beautiful, ugly, HYN, NAN LUC. He thumped his glass down on the desk, HYN, NAN LUC, AGED TWENTY-FIVE, FORMER RECORDING CLERK, CAHN ROC PEOPLE’S COURT. ACCUSATION: MRS FREDA L. O’KEEFE. MRS JILL BOROTA.
Bert Ottenshaw looked up as a plane climbed in steep take-off across the island. He lifted the phone and asked to be connected to the information desk at the airport. The thoughts tumbled through his mind. Prostitution. Hell, it was second nature to some of these girls. Look at the way Ping made her millions. The trouble was, behind those smiles you could never really know what they were thinking. Nobody could. Not Bert Ottenshaw. Not young Benning.
The phone rang on his desk. Nobody could know what they were thinking. So clever some of them. So quick if it was in their own interest. So ready with the glib hard-luck story. No… with the best will in the world you just couldn’t really know what they were thinking.
Methodically, while the phone rang on, he put away the Glenmorangie and wiped the glass with his handkerchief. East is east and west is west… Kipling knew a bloody thing or two about these matters. He straightened up. Let his mind slip to his wife Ping in those first weeks he had known her. Gave one last glance at the phone as he put the glass away in the drawer.
As Inspector Ottenshaw took his uniform cap from the stand and walked out into the corridor the call from the information desk at Hong Kong Airport ceased ringing.
On the evening she received Ed Brompton’s letter Nan Luc walked up the headland where a stone monument had been erected in memory of Dutch and Australian soldiers of some distant war. Sitting on the stone step at the foot of the monument Nan Luc looked out to sea.
‘We are not a court of law,’ the Dutch administrator had said that morning. ‘But these are serious allegations, made by two responsible women. I have no choice but to place the accusation of prostitution on your file.’
Thus, casually, she had been handed a sentence to remain on Gulanga for ever. Or perhaps to be deported to a detention centre in Hong Kong. The Dutchman had said that she would naturally be informed at the earliest possible moment.