The old lady thought hard. ‘I’m from New Jersey myself,’ she said finally. ‘South Amboy. You know it?’
Two men were approaching on the other side of the street. Their faces under the street light were dark, not black. One of them wore a wide brimmed hat, tipped back. It was their sauntering walk that made her afraid.
She knelt down quickly beside the old lady. ‘My folks was travellers,’ the old lady said. ‘But at the last, they said, you’ve got to settle. When we came to Jersey I stayed around a while then moved on.’
The men’s footsteps were close now, almost level with the doorway. She crouched lower. More than anything she was fearful that they would see her legs.
‘Hey, lady,’ one of the men called, stopping on the sidewalk opposite.
She stood up. The subway. She began walking rapidly in the direction the old lady had pointed. Only after a hundred yards or so, did she look round. The two men were behind her, approaching, their sauntering walk speeded. ‘Hey lady,’ she heard again.
The subway station was cast iron, boarded, unused. She circled it once looking for an entrance. The man in the wide hat played peek-a-boo round the side of it. ‘Hey lady,’ he said and pulled back out of sight, laughing. ‘The bag lady say you’re looking for the Saigon-Hue?’ He pointed. ‘Just across the street there, lady.’
On the street corner a flicker of neon stuttered Saigon-Hue. From a clutch of Chinese lanterns light shone from the one remaining bulb down on to the dark green and red painted entrance door.
Nan moved warily to pass him. The man in the wide brimmed hat stepped aside. ‘I like it Chinese, too,’ he whispered in her ear as she passed him.
Reaching the restaurant she pressed her face close to the glass pane. Through a bamboo screen on the window Nan Luc could see candle-lit tables, mostly unoccupied. She pushed open the door and a young Vietnamese in jeans and an expensive black silk shirt emerged from the shadows.
‘This is a private dub,’ he said in English. ‘You know someone here?’
‘Kim Hoang sent me. To see Kiet Vo Tron.’ The young man’s manner changed, relaxed. ‘I’m an old friend of Kim’s,’ Nan said. ‘Now he’s away on assignment, I’m borrowing his apartment.’
‘OK,’ the boy said. ‘You’re Nan Luc, right? We know all about you. He called this morning. He’s covering the election in Atlantic City. Will the Vietnamese vote for a black mayor? I could tell him now, no way.’ The boy reminded her of some of the Ricains in Independence Square, desperately aping a streetwise American style.
‘Is Mr Tron here?’ Nan asked.
‘Sure.’ He was leading the way towards a red painted, bolted iron staircase. ‘The way Kim Hoang told it,’ he clattered down the stairs, ‘I thought you’d be older. He said you led him and twenty or thirty others out of Vietnam.’ He had paused looking up at her from the angle of the red iron stair. ‘Right?’
‘I set it up.’ Nan followed him down. ‘But we all did it together.’
‘OK,’ he grinned over his shoulder as he jumped down the last steps. ‘Then you won’t be upset by this.’ He was pointing to a thick purple curtain which obscured the rest of the basement.
She frowned, aware, beyond the curtain, of a breathing silence broken by a sound like many pairs of chopsticks. The boy pulled the curtain. The basement was vast, dimly lit at the edges. Fifty, a hundred Vietnamese men crouched round one pool of light. An abacus clicked as dark figures came silently forward and placed bills in one of the two boxes.
The young man led Nan forward and stopped. She stood, looking over the shadowed heads to the area of light. Two red-combed cocks, the spurs of their yellow feet elongated by sharpened steel picks, circled each other with slow, deliberate paces. Nan watched in fascination as one of the cocks took the centre of the ring, threw back its head and crowed its challenge. The other cock, shuffling long black, green-sheened feathers, stood, its eyes on the challenger. Then in a cloud of dust and feather they were locked together, pecking and clawing, scattering blood over the front rows of no longer silent men.
‘It is an honour for Kiet Vo Tron to be of service to you.’ An old man in jeans and T-shirt and a sort of light bathrobe had moved silently to stand beside Nan Luc. ‘You have seen this sport before, of course.’
Nan shook her head. ‘At home it is no longer allowed,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you still find it in the villages but officially gambling is prohibited.’
The old man smiled, his tongue visible through broken teeth. ‘Come this way, Nan Luc. We have much to talk about.’
Seated in a small boarded room opposite the old man, Nan accepted tea and waited.
‘You’re young to be dealing in such things, Nan Luc.’
‘We are no longer at home,’ she said. ‘In America we must make our way as we must.’
‘You’re a journalist like my kinsman, Kim Hoang.’
‘No.’
‘You are not thinking of entering this evil trade yourself.’
‘No. I’m looking for someone of great importance to me.’
‘I read your eyes. You mean him ill.’
‘I have a duty to perform.’
He inclined his head. ‘Kim Hoang says I can trust you absolutely.’
‘You can.’
The old man shuffled in his seat. ‘I accept his word. And yours.’ He paused. ‘My business is only in the soft end, you understand. The boys and girls who work for me do it voluntarily. For the money.’ She nodded. ‘The men who buy, the clients, call themselves collectors. They are prepared to pay well for classic material.’ The old man waved his hand dismissively. ‘You’ve heard stories of items using big Hollywood stars when they were young and reckless. Garbo before she left Sweden. Monroe of course. There are more stories of her black pictures than there are of sunken treasure. No doubt some of these things exist. But mostly they exist only in the mind and greed of collectors. It’s chasing moonbeams, Nan Luc.’
‘I’m talking about classics,’ she said. ‘Classics that do exist.’
‘For instance?’
‘Eros Films, for instance.’
‘Ah,’ the old man’s eyes never left her. ‘Eros. Specialist interests. I have never seen any Eros material. I know it’s old. Goes back to the last days of Saigon. They say the prints are bad.’
‘Even so.’
‘It is a dangerous area to deal in, Nan Luc.’ Tron’s thin jowls wagged loose and yellow.
‘My thought was to trace the man Stevenson who made the Eros movies.’
Tron shook his head slowly. ‘I can be of no help there. I had not even known his name.’
Nan waited, her excitement rising. She watched Tron’s eyes roam the blank wall above her head. She had begun to suspect he knew something. It was characteristic of an older generation of Vietnamese to spend time building the problem before demonstrating the solution. ‘I see no easy answer,’ she said.
He shook his head, poking his tongue through his gapped teeth. ‘But because Kim Hoang asked me to do everything in my power…’ He let the sentence trail.
Nan lifted her teacup.
‘I have a family obligation to point you in a helpful direction,’ Tron said sombrely, but he was fighting a small smile of triumph. ‘I can give you a name. Formerly a stud.’ His hazy yellow eyes met hers. ‘You must go see my colleague, Charlie Mandrake.’
Chapter Thirty
In London’s Hyde Park it was a cold, clear December morning. The little girl, dressed in a pale blue anorak and red woollen hat, skipped along the edge of the lake and sang nursery rhymes oblivious of the amused glances she was attracting.
A few yards behind her mother, Monika, watched while she opened her bag of crusts and threw bread to the ducks, then turned to see the figure of her ex-husband walking quickly along the asphalt path towards them. The child, absorbed in the antics of the ducks had not seen him.