Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

Nan Luc’s eyes widened. ‘You’re free to leave Vietnam whenever you wish?’ Bernadette smiled. ‘Why not use your passport before you’re arrested too?’

‘Simple, cherie. Because Quatch acquired the passport for me. It still rests in its original wrapping on the top shelf of his safe.’

‘He refuses to give it to you?’

‘Of course. There is nothing altruistic about Quatch. He has never performed a service without the thought of reward, however distant.’

‘Then why is his position so desperate?’ Even as she spoke Nan Luc knew she was only putting off some evil moment. ‘He must have many friends in the government.’

‘Rats are said to leave sinking ships. He is now alone. Since he came back from Hanoi he sits in the apartment on Avenue Giap listening to Berlioz in a haze of opium smoke…’

‘Why have you come here?’ Nan Luc said suddenly, in desperation.

Bernadette looked haggard, old, in a shaft of sunlight. ‘I must have my passport. I cannot sink with him.’

‘But he won’t give it to you…’

‘He likes to tease me. He goes to the safe and dials the first three numbers. He tells me what they are. But there are three more.’

‘And in return for those three numbers?’

‘He wants you .’

Quatch saw himself as a victim of the War of Independence, as no more or less a victim than a woman with a womb shrivelled by agent orange; or a man missing a leg or a hand. He considered his war, his part in the struggle, had been equally dangerous.

As a young man he had, like many sons of the Vietnamese middle-class, studied in Paris. Small, plump and studious he had gravitated naturally towards the seriousness of the Sorbonne’s Marxist clubs. He had met a girl, a French girl, short, plump and studious like himself. With her encouragement he began to attend meetings claiming independence from colonial rule. One night, after police broke up a meeting in the Billiard Hall at Montmartre, he found himself sharing an overnight cell with the guest speaker, a thin, balding drystick of a man in an ill-fitting suit.

Among the revolutionary leadership the story of that night in a cell spent talking with Ho Chi Minh would be recounted and exaggerated over the years. It was soon believed that Quatch had been acting as Ho Chi Minh’s private secretary at the time of their arrest, that on matters of youth policy and political education for the youth of Vietnam Ho Chi Minh relied extensively on the advice of his young assistant.

Not surprisingly Quatch had made no great effort to deny these stories. He was arrested and questioned several times. In the revolutionary underground his reputation grew. When the time came to return home the movement found the money to bribe someone to remove his dossier from the files of the French police.

Back in Vietnam, as the war between the Viet Minh and the French Colonial Army intensified, Quatch had lived as a prosperous businessman in Saigon. In fact, on his return from France, he had been appointed political officer of the city’s clandestine Viet Minh battalion.

He had lived on his nerves. But although he thought he knew all the weapons ranged against the Vietcong, he did not. He never understood that the weapon that was turned against all of them, French soldiers, American advisers, clandestine political officers, members of the government of South Vietnam alike, was the same secret, unheeded weapon: Saigon’s unique ability to draw a man into a net of decadence; to destroy the morals and then the morale of soldiers on both sides; to confuse aim and ambition, mission and motive. In Saigon you could die of pleasure. No corner of the imagination, however frightful, went unsatisfied in the bars and clubs of the narrow alleys off the Rue Catinat. But only the strongest could survive, only the strongest could keep separate purpose from possibility. There were strong spirits on all sides, of course. But Quatch was not among them.

In Saigon he had begun trading: antiquities to the Americans who were arriving in increasing numbers. In Paris, when he was assigned as a propaganda official, he had greatly expanded his business. Using his old connections in Saigon he had sent out men to loot the unguarded temples in the forest. Diplomatic privileges had made transport easy; and the dealers of Europe had grasped the opportunity with both hands.

Peter Benning had been his only problem. The almost monkish, scholarly figure of Benning had pursued him from the beginning, breaking up his forest looting parties, threatening his organisation in Saigon. And when, in the days of approaching victory, Quatch had been posted back to Paris, openly now, as North Vietnamese representative, Benning had followed him there. Followed him, hounded him and threatened to expose him.

It had been no great problem to have him killed. It had cost Quatch no more than a $1,000 mixed bag of drugs to a Vietnamese student. Even the fact that the fool had killed Benning in Bernadette’s apartment had been no more than a short-term problem. The French government had seen to that. The French government and the North Vietnamese Army which had just marched into Saigon. As the now official Vietnamese charge d’affaires in Paris, Quatch was left strictly alone.

When he heard that he was to be promoted to a post back home in Vietnam Quatch collapsed with frustration. He saw himself as a Westerner, a Parisian, a victim of the degeneracy he had been called upon to live and work in.

Once back in Vietnam he had felt the world close round him in the grim, pitiless city that victory had made of Saigon. Too dangerous now to experiment with his pleasures he had begun to search the dream world of opium. Sometimes he would emerge from it, purged and lusty as a youth. But less often now. Except when he thought of Nan Luc.

Quatch had often found it curious, the effect the girl had upon him. It was, he had no doubt, the mix of East and West, the luminous olive skin, the chestnut hair and the clear green eyes of another continent. Genes, he reflected, married in curious ways. This girl had been immensely lucky. Her mother’s beauty might easily have been lost. And yet this girl had all this. And the fullness of figure of a young American girl allied to the lithe slenderness of Vietnam.

But most of all was the challenge. She was polite, she smiled, she inclined her head gently, but beneath it all you were aware of a powerful sense of self, the self-protective aura of her will.

Which he would break.

He realised of course that, for himself, escape was now impossible. Since Van Khoa’s investigation had begun opium had been his escape. More opium and more, only emerging, like now, from that soft brown world at the thought of Nan Luc and the drama he had planned for her to take the leading role in tonight.

He had bathed and dressed in a new pressed white suit. He had walked into the salon and, without calling a servant, had mixed a little mineral water with grenadine. He had sat, for an hour, his almost unblinking eyes watching through the glass doors into the hall and to the main door itself.

And now there was a sound on the stairs.

Nan Luc knocked on the apartment door and trembled at what she was about to do. She had found herself unable to refuse.

‘For just an hour in a man’s bed,’ her grandmother had pleaded. ‘My liberty, my life even, for just one hour in his bed. You can’t refuse me, Nan Luc. In a re-education camp I would be dead within a year. Carrying stones, clearing roads… please, cherie, for one hour in his bed!’

She had thought of appealing to Van Khoa, then realising the absurdity of asking him to help her grandmother escape. She had thought of begging Quatch for the passport, then realised this was equally absurd. She was trapped. One hour in a man’s bed for her grandmother’s liberty, her life even!