‘No, Cy. OK, I’m sorry I slapped you.’
‘Our first fight,’ he said. ‘Making up’s going to be fun.’
‘It’s over, Cy. Over, over, over. Understand that. Understand too, that I’m resigning as a trustee. With Fin standing I cannot possibly vote for you.’
‘You can.’ Slowly he tore up the letter.
‘Are you mad?’
‘No,’ he said reaching into his inside pocket. ‘You showed me yours. I’ll show you mine.’ He handed Mary a buff business envelope. She took it from him, saw it had already been opened and flashed him one quick anxious glance. ‘Go ahead,’ he said encouragingly.
She drew from the brown envelope a pack of photographs wrapped in a bill. The bill read: Received from Mrs Mary Page Butler, two hundred dollars for massage services. Mary fanned open the photographs. Of herself, Mary Page Butler, writhing naked on a bed with an equally naked Vietnamese girl doing indescribable things to her.
‘The sunlamp was a camera, of course,’ Cy said jovially. ‘Keep the pictures, Mary. The negatives are all I need.’ She faced him too shocked to move. ‘It’s a matter of principle,’ Cy said. ‘You tell everybody you feel so strongly about the way I see things that you even have to vote against your husband, dear old Fin.’
‘I’ll buy the negatives from you,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘You’re buying them now, Mary darling, even as we speak.’ He leaned forward and pressed the torn pieces of the resignation letter into her hand.
Chapter Thirty-One
Four-thirty in the afternoon was a down-time for the Palermo Luncheonette a few dozen yards from the corner of Belmont Avenue and 187th Street. Its marbled pink plastic tables were empty. Two young men sat at the end of the long matching pink counter. A young Vietnamese woman, carefully made up, stood flirting openly with them.
As Nan took a place in the centre of the pink bar the Vietnamese girl glanced up at her, registered a mild, fleeting interest in their common race and turned back towards the young men.
From behind a large Gaggia coffee machine a woman’s voice with a strong Italian accent said. ‘You going serve this customer, Mai? Or you want I do as well as make the lasagne and clean tables and sweep floors?’
Mai Su turned, hands on hips, a parody of Hollywood in the fifties. ‘What can I get you?’ she said to Nan with a toss of her head.
‘Cappucino. And maybe a slice of that pastry.’
Nan watched the Vietnamese girl saunter towards the Gaggia and fill and fit the metal cup. She could see now the Italian woman, sixty or seventy years old, short, dumpy, grey-haired.
‘Remember what Julio say,’ the old lady hissed. ‘The customer come first.’
Mai Su Bassano treated her mother-in-law to an exhausted sigh. ‘The boys are customers,’ she said. ‘They’re in here every day.’
‘What they come in here for they get for free,’ the old woman said fiercely looking Mai up and down. ‘Remember who you are. You’re Julio’s wife.’
‘I’m not likely to forget it, am I?’ The Vietnamese girl ran the steam into the milk and slopped it into the coffee.
She came back down the counter and Nan leaned forward to see that the old lady had pulled back somewhere into the room behind. ‘When did you leave Saigon?’ she asked Mai in Vietnamese.
Mai handed her the coffee. ‘I speak English,’ she said. ‘All that other stuff I’ve forgotten, so long I’ve been here.’
‘You’re Mai Su Bassano, am I right?’ Nan said.
‘How d’you know who I am?’
‘I’m trying to contact one of my family. Her name was Louise Hyn before her marriage.’
‘I don’t know any Louise.’
The two boys got up from their corner seat and sauntered along the bar. ‘Keep well, Mai. Be in tomorrow,’ one of them said. Mai Su drew herself up to smile.
‘Louise Hyn,’ Nan said. ‘
The Vietnamese girl’s head turned back to her. Something in her customer’s tone spoke authority. Or the authorities. ‘I told you I don’t know any Louise Hyn.’
‘You drive her to work some days in a black Ford convertible.’ The electric wall clock with the Mickey Mouse face pinged four-forty-five. ‘Hey, my break,’ Mai Su said. ‘Mama’ll take the money. I don’t answer questions on my own time.’
As the Vietnamese girl disappeared the Italian woman shuffled forward. She jerked a flour covered thumb to the sound of her daughter-in-law’s high heels clacking up the stairs. ‘My son Julio’s in hospital. Automobile accident. Every night this one goes out.’
‘With Louise Hyn?’
‘No. Louise is a good person. Married to a cop.’
‘Why won’t Mai Su admit she knows her?’
‘Because she’s afraid.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Of any questions about the past.’ The old woman threw her arms in the air. ‘Why ask questions about her past? What you see in the present tells you all you want to know. Did she give you the pastry?’
Nan shook her head. ‘Coffee’s fine. Do you know where Louise lives?’
‘No.’
‘Her married name?’
‘Just Louise to me. They’re not really friends. Louise is a decent girl.’
‘Where does Mai Su take her to?’
‘Eh… eh,’ the old woman slapped her own cheek, transferring flour. ‘Mai Su ran her into work a few times a while back when Louise was without no car. The project. The Vietnamese Project down around 152nd Street. Masterman Pope, they call it. Don’t tell Mai Su,’ the old woman said. ‘She’ll scream at me for a week.’
Under London’s dark December skies, Bert Ottenshaw, bulky in a dark raglan topcoat, his hands deep in his pockets, passed the Park Lane Hilton and turned up Curzon Street. He had a clear two hours before his train took him north, to the three unmarried sisters to whom he was the admired younger brother, policing exotic and dangerous corners of the world.
A week or two of this admiration round the tea-table was all Ottenshaw could stand. The rest of his leave he usually took in Amsterdam where a Chinese girl in the red-light district would spend a week with him for a thousand US dollars. He insisted she spoke only in Chinese, although he spoke very little himself, but the language and her light movements round the hotel room enabled him to lie in bed and imagine he was still married to Ping.
The thought of Ping was strong with him today. Amazing that she had remembered this was his last home leave before he left Hong Kong for ever. Amazing she should have sent that note. An offer of the job as manager of her three bars in Singapore. Good salary. And with his pension. Ottenshaw smiled. The letter had transformed his life. With a job like this he could stay in the East. In a way, he told himself, you could say Ping had come up trumps in the end.
He turned under the arch from Curzon Street into Shepherd Market, then continued on through one of the narrow alleys to the south side. The pub was just ahead of him. He would do what he had to do then walk along Piccadilly to Gerard Street and get himself a Chinese dinner in Wong’s.
He entered the pub. Max Benning was standing at the bar. They shook hands. Ottenshaw ordered a pint.
‘I don’t quite know how to say this, Benning,’ Ottenshaw stood awkwardly at the bar, ‘but I’ve had a sort of change of mind since I last saw you. Not unconnected with a rather pleasant gesture my ex-wife just made, I’ll admit.’
‘Has something come up?’ Max pressed him. It was the morning of his mother’s funeral. He wore a black overcoat and black tie. ‘Have you got news of Nan Luc?’
‘I shouldn’t have done it. I know that now. You can’t play God, can you?’ Ottenshaw said. ‘None of us can.’
Max handed him his pint of bitter. ‘Shouldn’t have done what? I haven’t got much time, inspector.’