‘Just one,’ the girl said. ‘A Mrs Louise Cartwright.’
Cy poured himself a Scotch and sat at his desk. Things were looking good. Lazily he thought back a few months to the appalling worries of Quatch’s arrest and trial. He had been lucky. Very, very lucky. And that last vote at the fund had been close. But Mary had come through. Without pressure. Or at least without too much. He still had the Christmas vote to handle, but Mary would be back by then and he calculated things would have quietened down enough for him to be able to hold on to his core support: Fin, Hector, Ollie Digweed, Mary.
All in all he had come through. Again.
He concluded his brief review of life as it was for Cy Stevenson with a cursory thought for Sunny. His wife seemed to be in a strange mood lately. Strangely on edge. Was it possible she was having an affair? But who with? Fitz, the gardener? He drank his Scotch. No, Sunny was too straitlaced. Her family upbringing didn’t allow for affairs. But then a few months ago he would have said the same about Mary. He drew on his cigar, smiling. It had worked: she had felt bad about it maybe. She had known in her heart why she voted for him. But she had voted.
It was just before five o’clock. The Vietnamese girl would be here in a few minutes. Time for another drink. He took the bottle of Scotch and poured a liberal inch. The Vietnamese. He wondered what she would look like. Even now, fifteen years later, he had not got over his obsession with Vietnamese women.
His secretary rang the bell. He put down his untouched Scotch and crossed to open the door.
Cy Stevenson and the woman he had known in the Eros Bar as Louise Hyn looked at each other in undisguised horror.
For a moment he thought the Vietnamese woman was about to turn and run. He leaned forward and took her clumsily by the forearm. ‘Come in, come in,’ he muttered, drawing her into the room. ‘Come in.’ He swung the door closed with a bang. For a moment they stood facing each other. ‘What are you doing here, for God’s sake?’ he said.
‘I’m looking for funds… a donation.’
He looked at her suspiciously. ‘What is this? What sort of donation?’
‘Please,’ the Vietnamese woman said desperately, ‘the past is the past.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I mean that I’m no more anxious than you are to relive Saigon.’
His suspicion began to ebb. ‘You really are from the Masterman Pope Project?’
‘Of course. You don’t think I knew who I was coming to see?’
He picked up his drink and took a mouthful. ‘Your English is a lot better,’ he said.
‘In fifteen years, what would you expect?’
He shrugged. ‘A drink?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll stay for a moment or two then go. It will look strange if I leave straight away.’
‘Sure.’ He stood staring at her for a moment as if recovering a memory of many years ago. ‘You got out of Saigon before the roof fell in. A few weeks before if I remember?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Did you marry your MP?’
‘Yes. He’s still a cop. In NYPD now.’
He was silent trying to phrase what he wanted to say. ‘The past’s dead and gone then.’
‘They were terrible days, Mr Stevenson. Nobody wants to think about Saigon anymore.’
‘Yuh. We did some crazy things,’ Cy said cautiously.
‘I’m married to a good man. A man who knows nothing of what happened at the Eros Bar. I’m not here to stir up the past. I plan to keep it buried.’
‘Me too. I’ve become a solid citizen. A pillar of the community. I like it.’
For a long time she looked down at the floor. ‘And my sister’s child, she stayed in Saigon?’
He looked at the black glossy head she presented him, willing her to bring her face up so that he could see her expression. ‘Yuh. There was nothing I could do. Those last days were chaos.’ He walked back to his desk. ‘You never heard anything of her?’ She shook her head, looking up at him now. ‘You can guess what it was like in those days,’ he said. ‘Once I’d lost touch there was nothing I could do.’
‘No.’
He felt a weight lift from him. She was moving towards the door. ‘I owe you,’ he said.
She shook her head vigorously. ‘Not me.’
‘For you it must be a lot of money.’
‘I want nothing to do with it.’
‘OK. I’ll pitch it in as a donation. How about that?’ She shrugged. ‘Leave the details with my secretary. We’ll arrange a donation,’ he said.
She nodded, running her tongue across her lower lip. ‘They were bad, bad times, Mr Stevenson. We did many bad things.’
‘We’re going to forget all that, Louise. If ever I meet you again you’re going to be Mrs Cartwright of the Masterman Pope. I didn’t even know Louise the bar-girl.’
He could see her agitation in the trembling hand that reached for the door. ‘And you didn’t know me either. OK?’ he said. ‘Except now, as a trustee of the Meyerick Fund.’
She nodded, turning the door handle.
‘Still got a very pretty ass there, Louise,’ he whispered as she stood, her hand shaking on the door handle. Her mouth tightened. Cy grinned. ‘Just kidding.’ His voice rose from the whisper. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Cartwright. Nice meeting you. I’ll have my secretary look into the details and let you know.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Fear is a distorting mirror.
It was the first time Nan Luc had been in New York and the city, at this end of Manhattan Island, was neon signs and rubbish in battered shop doorways; grafitti and Hispanic voices; sauntering black youths in parti-coloured anoraks and white trainers; lights and music on wide, run-down boulevards and empty demolition lots in the dark streets behind.
And fear. Fear that she might be unable to fight back, as she had been unable to fight back against Quatch. Fear brought to the surface that she was, in the last resort, too timorous, that she lacked the savagery to avenge her family.
The taxi had dropped her too soon. She knew that, at least, by the street numbers. She had asked directions from a man who had stumbled past without answering and a pale-faced girl who seemed to think she was here buying crack.
She turned at the next intersection. Cars cruised along it but there were, quite suddenly, no people. She moved on quickly, checking until she saw with despair the number she wanted was a burnt out bakery. She stopped. A cold blast of wind rattled dark windows above her head. Snow, like salt, was driven through the pools of light below the streetlights.
She walked on quickly. Her heels clicked echoingly between the tattered shop fronts. She knew how totally female a sound was that. She took a left and then a right down a short narrow street between high buildings decorated with fire escapes. Under a street lamp a human bundle lay on a doorstep, defended by a rampart of old cloth bags. Steam rose through the street lights.
Nan Luc stopped. The old woman was awake, smiling. ‘Excuse me, do you know a restaurant near here called Saigon-Hue?’
‘A restaurant?’ The old woman puckered her grimy brows.
‘A Vietnamese restaurant.’
‘There’s a diner a block away. You can get sum’un to eat there.’
‘No, I’m looking for one special restaurant,’ Nan Luc said carefully. ‘The Saigon-Hue on Dixon Street.’
‘Dixon Street?’
‘You know it?’ The old lady shook her head. ‘Do you know where I can get a taxi?’ Nan Luc said urgently.
‘A taxi,’ the old woman cackled. She raised herself on her elbow. ‘There’s a subway down there.’
Nan Luc shook her head. ‘I’m lost. I need a taxi. I need to get back to Lennox Avenue to find a taxi.’