Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

Louise stood with her back to the French doors, her hands deep in the pockets of her short coat. She detested the seediness of the room, the obviousness of it. The green candlewick was stained in three or four places. She knew the stiff stain of semen. She had seen it too many times in her life.

Her fury at Nan Luc rose. It was her doing. It was Nan Luc who was responsible for her being here. Waiting in a seamy motel off Sawmill River Parkway, determined to protect the happiness she had had in the last twenty years, determined to protect her family, her American family, Ben and the boys, from the truth about her past. Just as suddenly the anger flowed out of her. Was Nan Luc right? In the Eros there were rumours that Cy Stevenson was into all sorts of things. Was it possible?

The door opened and Cy came into the room. He nodded to her and closed the door behind him. His eyes wandered round from curtains to bed. ‘Pretty crummy place,’ he said. She nodded. ‘I didn’t realise. I should have suggested a bar somewhere.’

‘This is better,’ she said. ‘Cops visit bars. I wouldn’t want to be seen by friends of my husband.’

‘No.’ He was trembling. He sat on the edge of the bed. Excitement overwhelmed him. He found it hard not to laugh. If Nan Luc presented herself at Meyerick, he was lost. The laughter rose in him again, drunken hysteria. He rubbed hard at his face and looked up at Louise, controlling himself. ‘I brought the money.’ He reached into his inside pocket. His hand froze as he saw the expression on her face.

‘She doesn’t want the money,’ Louise said. ‘She won’t take it.’

‘Ten thousand dollars. You told her I owe it to her?’

‘She doesn’t believe it.’

‘Jesus.’

‘She knows Pham wasn’t a bar-girl. She knows her father wasn’t a passing lay.’

‘What else?’ he asked carefully.

Louise looked at him with that strange indifferent loathing he had seen on so many Vietnamese women’s faces. ‘What else? She believes you’re responsible for her mother’s death.’ He went pale. ‘She still thinks you’re her father.’

Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. ‘What can she do?’

‘If she finds you, she’ll kill you, Mr Stevenson,’ Louise said. ‘You have to understand. She’s here to kill you.’

He was brought up short. ‘The bitch, she will,’ he said.

He looked up at Louise. Her face was impassive, not like a real face. He stood up. She seemed as small as a child beside him. Like a doll, the soldiers always said about Vietnamese girls.

The whisky he had drunk thumped in his head. The sweat rolled and broke on his eyebrows. ‘Tell me,’ he said, swallowing to control his nausea. ‘When Nan Luc came to see you at the Project…’ His mouth was dry with fear.

‘Yes?’

‘How did she find you?’

‘By chance. Someone had seen me driving in to work.’

It all seemed so long ago. He was a kid then, barely older than the boy soldiers the US had sent to fight the Vietcong. He sat, looking down at the gold carpet, thinking of the Eros and the noise and the girls wrapped around soldiers they had met five minutes before. Vietnamese were different. He had seen so many of them die. So many of them suffer with that mute acceptance that drove Americans crazy. He had seen what they did to other Vietnamese too. He had seen split bellies and heads thrown like footballs into the village bamboo thicket. Torture, maiming. Every sort of sexual abuse. They were past masters. They had taught a lot of Americans the game.

He looked at the woman opposite him. Denim skirt, sling-back heels. Cloth coat. A civilised veneer. Underneath she was just another Indo-Chinese. Running for her life, from the day she was born.

‘What the hell we going to do?’ he muttered to himself.

She made no attempt to answer. In the heavy silence, beneath his gaze, she shifted uncomfortably. Through the curtained windows he could hear the roar of the trucks on the highway.

From the car Nan Luc watched the motel front. A light rain began to fall and the thrumming of the vehicles on the highway took on a softer swishing sound. The red neon flashed like a slow pulse beat. There was no sign of Louise.

She had followed Louise from the Palermo diner to the motel. She knew that people under stress do things, sometimes stupid things, to relieve the pressure. It looked to Nan Luc as if Louise was doing just that.

She had pulled up across the road when Louise had turned her Jeep Wagoneer into the motel parking lot. She had watched Louise get out and go into the lobby. And minutes later walk down the side of the building until she disappeared through the lighted archway. She knew it was only a matter of minutes before he arrived.

Five, ten minutes later she had seen a tall light-haired man appear, walking from round the bend in the road. He had passed in front of her and turned to cross the hotel parking lot. She had been surprised at the obvious mud stains on the knees of his well-cut suit.

Looking at him she had felt her throat tighten. A man still young, fitting the image of those earlier dreams, when she had believed in him. Young enough to have been on the prow of a boatful of partying people. The commanding figure in a board-room, maybe. The father watching his children run with the sleek dogs across the lawn. Any of these men. Any of the men plucked out of a lifetime of fantasy. A fantasy which had changed one evening in Cahn Roc.

As his face caught the light she swept Louise’s story behind her; she watched in the absolute certainty it was her father. She watched in the grip of hatred which threatened to strangle her. She had imagined the moment a thousand times in the last months. As a moment of burning, stifling anger. Now she was unprepared for the coldness of her feelings. Unprepared even after all her carefully nurtured resolution, for the determination she now felt to end his life.

Less than half an hour had passed. It was raining more heavily now, the drops drumming on the roof of the hire car and merging to flow down the windshield.

Nan Luc sat upright in her seat and switched on the windshield wipers. The man emerging from the lighted archway opposite stood for a moment in the rain. She saw no more than fifty yards away, close enough to see his wet hair plastered across his forehead. When he moved it was forward, it was not back towards the motel check-in but down the grassy slope.

Alarm gripped her. She turned on the engine. He had broken into a run across the parking lot and towards the dark scrub and bushes on the far side.

Moving the car up towards the bend in the road she could see the man running down the road away from her. Then suddenly he turned towards the bushes beside him. Perhaps, she thought, he had turned in response to someone calling but the drumming of the rain on the roof of the car prevented her from hearing anything at that distance. Or perhaps he had realised he was being followed.

As the man disappeared into the bushes Nan Luc braked and flung open the driver’s door. Jumping out she raced across the road and through a gap in the broken shrubs. She could see a car now on the ramp leading on to the highway and she could see the man stumble and slip as he mounted the slope. By the time she had reached the foot of the slope a car door had slammed closed above her head. In a second, headlights were sweeping across the top of the bushes lining the ramp.

She scrambled out of the bushes and jumped the steel retaining rail on to the ramp. A dark Mercedes, black, royal blue even, was pulling away fast. She stood for a second in furious desperation. Then, suddenly aware that she was picked out in the headlights of a vehicle coming up the ramp behind her, she swung round and waved her arms, a few feet from the driver’s face.