Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

‘A few months. After I left the orphanage I did a semester at Hue University before being posted to Paris.’

‘You were one of the lucky ones.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said with the first touch of coldness he had felt coming from her.

‘Have you been to the Louvre or the Beaubourg?’ She shook her head. ‘Have you had an aperitif at the Deux Magots or dinner at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne?’ She was silent, looking down at the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to hassle you. It’s just bad luck you’re not able to do things like that.’

He knew that he meant his bad luck. ‘Would you like to hear what I got from the French police?’

‘Yes,’ she said cautiously. ‘I would.’

‘I talked on the phone to the Commissaire of Police in charge of the case. Retired now. A man named Borel. First he agrees your grandmother has a complete alibi. She was somewhere else at the time of my father’s death. From there on he seems to have a completely different version of events.’

‘How different?’

‘Borel doesn’t see my father as a casual victim of the CIA. Or just a tourist looking for a good time. He says his enquiries revealed my father and Quatch had been seen together twice in the previous week at a cafe near Quatch’s office.’

‘Did he say why they were meeting, your father and Quatch?’

‘No. I don’t think he knows for sure. But he has ideas. He’s agreed to meet me tomorrow morning. Talk a little more about it.’

Nan Luc was silent. After a moment she said, ‘Will you believe me if I say I have no interest in covering up any responsibility Monsieur Quatch might have for your father’s death?’

‘And does that hold for your grandmother, too?’

‘My grandmother had an alibi, you said.’

‘She could still know much more than she told the French police.’

‘Yes.’

They sat in silence while the waiter served them choucroute and Toulouse sausages.

‘Normally someone else would have dealt with your enquiry,’ Nan Luc said. ‘When my colleague saw my grandmother was involved, he brought it to me.’ She paused. ‘I’ll help all I can.’

‘Why?’

‘I believe you have a right to know the circumstances of your father’s death.’

‘You’re not just here to protect your grandmother’s part in this affair, then?’

‘Here?’

‘Here in the restaurant, having lunch with me.’

She thought for a moment. ‘I’m here because I want to be,’ she said. ‘Is that good enough for just now?’

‘That’s good enough.’ They drank, first touching glasses. He felt a powerful need to know as much about her as he could in the short time they had. A need to ply her with questions. ‘Tell me what life’s like in Vietnam today?’ he said.

‘Hard.’

‘But hopeful?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Do you have a man back home? Boyfriend, husband?’

She held him with an amused glance. ‘No…’ Then the half smile faded. ‘You’ve never been there?’

He shook his head. ‘I was too young for the draft.’

‘We Vietnamese…’ She paused. ‘The Vietnamese people,’ she seemed to be correcting herself, ‘believe in race. Ambitious young men in the administration prefer not to be seen with girls who too obviously have American fathers.’

‘Tell me about your father.’

‘I wish I could,’ she said. ‘Beyond the fact that he was an American, I know nothing. Not even his name.’

‘Was he a soldier?’

‘If he was, it was not an R and R romance.’

‘That’s not what I was trying to say.’

She shrugged. ‘There were thousands, tens of thousands. But this was different. When I was born he gave me a bracelet.’ She touched her wrist. He looked down and saw a gold band lengthened with a thin strip of base metal. ‘If ever… whenever, I get to America, I’ll look for him.’ Those clear green eyes held his. ‘It’s important to know our fathers. That’s what you’re doing too, isn’t it? Looking for your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did your mother tell you he died just after you were born?’

Max shrugged. ‘My mother’s lifeblood is a sort of chilly pride. She couldn’t bear the idea my father wouldn’t live with her any more. She found it easier to pretend he was dead.’

‘Did he never try to see you?’

‘He never knew I was born. Never knew I existed. She was too proud to tell him she was pregnant.’

For a few minutes they ate in silence.

‘When she told me all this,’ he said slowly, ‘I was surprised how much I felt involved with the life of someone I’d never even seen. How much I wanted to know what happened to him between the time he and my mother split up and whatever happened here, in Paris.’

Her eyes met his. ‘I always believed we felt differently, East and West, about such things.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps someday you’ll tell me how it is with you.’

‘It’s simple. To find my father, to get to know him, is the most important thing in my life.’ Embarrassed, she glanced down quickly at her watch. ‘I must go now,’ she said.

‘Are we going to get a chance to meet again?’

She drank some wine. ‘It’s not easy.’

‘I know that.’

She thought for some moments. ‘Tomorrow night I have to attend a lecture on European Community Aid Policy,’ she said. ‘Their press office issues a resume.’

‘You mean maybe you could play hookey.’

She laughed, suddenly delighted. ‘I’ve never been in school in America but I know that phrase, Mr Benning. Yes, maybe for an hour or two I could play hookey.’

Marc Borel was nearing seventy, short, powerfully built, a monk’s fringe of black hair semi-circling a tanned, bald dome. ‘My doctor has told me my liver must not be seen within ten metres of a bar,’ he said. ‘Since, so far at least, my liver and I are inseparable, I don’t sit in cafes any longer. I hope you don’t mind a walk in the Parc Monceau, Monsieur Benning.’

‘Not at all,’ Max said, falling in beside him. ‘I’m sorry about the liver.’

Borel shrugged. ‘I suppose you’ve already made up your mind that your father was murdered. You’re a journalist. You have a feel for these things.’

‘This is not my kind of journalism. I write about eco-disasters rather than individual tragedies, but I know enough to guess this isn’t the story of a john knifed by a pimp when he wouldn’t pay for favours received.’

‘No.’ Borel felt about in the misshapen pockets of his old houndstooth jacket and found a pipe and an oiled tobacco pouch. Early April sun lightened the bare gravel alleys. ‘Do you know what your father did for a living, monsieur?’

‘No. I know he left Germany as a very young man shortly after the war. I know that he was in the French Foreign Legion when he married my mother.’

‘Then you also know he served the French in what was then known as Indo-China.’

Max nodded. ‘Captured. Released a few years later. After that it’s a blank. What did he do?’

‘Most importantly, your father was a scholar, my friend,’ Borel said.

‘A scholar? I saw him as a businessman, maybe. But not as an ex-paratrooper turned scholar.’

‘There have been many great soldier-scholars, monsieur. Your father was a leading authority in many areas of Imperial Vietnamese art and culture. When I was investigating his death I came to admire him considerably.’ They stopped while Borel completed the filling of his pipe. ‘Almost alone,’ Borel continued, ‘he was responsible for saving many valuable items of Indo-Chinese antiquity from the ravages of the war. While the fighting was raging round Hue, Peter Benning rescued centuries old manuscripts from the old Imperial library. Much survives today in the museums of Vietnam entirely thanks to him. Today’s Vietnam has reason to be grateful. You have reason to be proud.’