Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

‘You don’t.’ Nan stiffened. ‘Stevenson asked me to meet you. He’s prepared to pay you the five thousand dollars Pham gave him. And another five on top. He recognises that he never earned the money.’

The door swung open with a blast of cold air. A group of four or five young girls came in and clattered on high heels up to the counter. For a moment their laughter and greetings to Mai Bassano filled the long narrow room.

‘He recognises,’ Nan Luc said slowly, ‘that he never earned the money. Is that really so?’

‘Don’t be a fool, Nan Luc,’ Louise said, picking up on her tone. ‘Ten grand is a lot of money. No way you could force him to return it, and he’s doing it without being asked.’

‘I want to know where to find him, Louise. Tell me that.’

‘For Christ’s sake, ten thousand dollars he’s offering you.’

‘His address,’ Nan Luc said. ‘That’s all I want.’

Louise stood up. ‘You’re crazy, Nan Luc. I’m having nothing to do with this. You’re off your head. What other Vietnamese girl can come to New York and get offered this kind of money? Just tell me what to tell him. You take the money or not?’

‘You tell him I want to meet him.’

‘The life there makes people crazy,’ Louise said. ‘Always did. What d’you want to meet him for? He’s not your father. I see why he doesn’t want anything to do with you. He’s got a wife. Kids maybe.’

‘He’s afraid, Louise.’

‘Like me.’

‘Not like you, Louise,’ Nan Luc said quietly. ‘Do you know how my mother died?’ she asked after a moment.

‘She had nothing to live for, I guess that’s what she felt. Plenty of South Vietnamese did in those days. She killed herself.’

‘Or to put it another way,’ Nan Luc said harshly. ‘Stevenson killed her.’ Louise stared at her wildly. ‘With his pornographic movies, Stevenson killed her. This is the man you’re defending, Louise.’

‘It’s myself I’m defending,’ Louise said. ‘I don’t know what Stevenson did. I don’t want to know. It may be wicked but I don’t care anymore. He’s not your father, Nan. Put the past behind you, for God’s sake. It was full of horrors. But we survived. That’s all we have left. That’s all that matters now.’ Her voice rose desperately. ‘Leave me alone, Nan Luc. You’ve got money. I can see how you’re dressed. You’ve survived.’

‘Is that all it’s about?’

‘The past is dead, Nan. Don’t become another victim of it after all this time.’

Nan Luc nodded slowly. ‘You’re asking me to forget what he did? The answer’s no, Louise. By me it will never be forgotten. Or forgiven.’ She paused. ‘Tell him that.’

As the afternoon Lufthansa flight to Kennedy lifted over London’s far western suburbs and headed out across the Midlands to leave the coast of the British Isles north of Glasgow, Max settled back with a glass of wine, his mind lulled by the low throb of the engines, his thoughts on Nan Luc.

He opened his briefcase and looked down at the papers he had scooped quickly from his mother’s desk. Some, he saw, went back to his father’s childhood in Germany. Photographs of a family picnic beside a river in the 1920s; of family holidays in Italy. Medical certificates from Heidelberg belonging to his grandfather, Doctor Rolf Lutz Benning. Pictures of a blonde-haired, middle-aged woman, his grandmother, sketching in the mountains with a small boy, Max’s father, posed intently watching beside her. The few remaining traces of a family his mother had always claimed to know absolutely nothing about.

She had never really relented. Even on her deathbed she had given him only the barest facts. He thought for a moment of how much she must have hated his father. Or loved him.

He opened a grey cardboard fold with a French Police Judiciaire stamp on the front cover. A letter addressed to his mother said, without further explanation, that, at the conclusion of police investigations, the writer was forwarding the enclosed material to her as the next of kin of Peter Lutz Benning.

Photographs. Of his father holding up a large ivory statue as a fisherman might proudly display a fish. Of his father and a Vietnamese woman in uniform… The powerful current of dismay passed through him like an electric shock.

‘Is anything wrong?’ the flight attendant was asking.

He shook his head and looked back down at the photograph. He was looking at the smiling face of the woman and the small Amerasian girl, slightly out of focus, but unmistakably Nan Luc, running towards his father’s outstretched arms.

Chapter Thirty-Five

In San Diego it was a cold, brilliantly sunny afternoon. Edward Brompton had invited his sister and brother-in-law and their family over. The descent of his sister Susan and the Garrat family for lunch was always something he dreaded in anticipation and enjoyed when the time came round. Four children under twelve years old were never likely to provide a quiet afternoon.

By the time he had arrived back from the dockyard Susan and her family were already in occupation. Children ran screaming along the terraces and through the house. As Ed got out of his car he had to remind himself that this was his own place.

But now lunch in the long terrace room was going well. The children, Edward reflected, were at last reaching a tolerable age, or a tolerable level of exhaustion.

His sister could never long conceal her curiosity about Nan Luc. Before the Vietnamese maid had cleared the first course, Susan had steered the conversation in the direction of her always intriguing sister-in-law. ‘So tell us about Nan Luc,’ she said. ‘What’s she doing in New York?’

Edward surrendered his plate to the maid. ‘You know her obsession with finding her father. She’s in New York to see if there’s more to be found out there.’

‘Even though she’s no memories of him as a child?’ Garrat said.

‘The Vietnamese don’t have that same casual view of ancestry most of the West has today,’ Edward said. ‘Knowledge of your ancestors, particularly honour of your father is part of your birthright.’

‘She feels it’s been taken away from her. That seems reasonable,’ Susan Garrat said, ‘given the premise.’

‘I suppose so,’ Edward said. ‘I’m just sorry it takes up so much of her time.’

Susan sat up straight. ‘Talking of Nan Luc,’ she said, ‘someone called for her before you got back.’

‘Who was that?’

‘A young man named Max Benning.’

Edward placed his knife and fork carefully on his plate. ‘Was he calling from here, San Diego?’

‘New York City. I wrote down the number of his hotel on the pad. I said you’d pass it on to Nan next time you called her.’

‘Thank you.’ He reached forward and poured Garrat some wine. ‘What did he sound like, this young man?’ he asked feeling sick with apprehension.

‘Very charming. Very anxious to get hold of Nan Luc. He’d met her in Vietnam, apparently.’ She paused. ‘He seemed to think you were her American guarantor.’

Ed nodded. ‘I was, of course.’

‘I mean,’ Susan said patiently, ‘that he didn’t seem aware you were also her husband.’

‘Did you tell him?’

‘No. Should I have? Nor did I tell him Garrat is my husband, that I have four impossible but talented children and that, though of mature years, I’m still capable of creating a sensation in the La Scala lobby. Or would be if ever I got there.’

‘Do you know him?’ Garrat asked Ed. ‘This young man who called?’

Edward shook his head. ‘Never met him of course. Nan Luc mentioned him once or twice, that’s all.’

The room was green and gold: the walls a drab ivy green, the carpet a worn nylon gold. The curtains, bedcover and lampshades were also either green or gold. In the room next door a man and woman could be heard. The deeper rumbling of his voice was punctuated every now and again with a shriek of her laughter.