Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

She stepped forward and at that same moment her wrist was struck with something of metallic hardness. Her reactions were automatic, instilled in her by service training classes. She dropped her hand under the force of the blow and struck out instinctively with her left. Cy Stevenson felt the taut flat of her hand hit his upper lip. In shock, the fingers holding the gun relaxed. From his hand the gun jumped and skidded, spinning across the polished wood floor.

When she turned she saw a face different from anything she had expected, drawn with a savage intensity, a thick smudge of blood across the upper lip, a face very different from the relaxed portrait in the club. It was a moment she had always known was bound to come. A moment when she would be forced to decide. Was this man with his crude, heavy features, his blue eyes made mean with fear, the man her mother had chosen to father her child?

She stood inside the door to his office, all her questions about this man refined into a numbness in the mind, and a chill that flickered like electricity up her spine.

He was backing across the room. Away from the gun she still held. ‘So full of hate,’ he said, ‘say something, for God’s sake.’ She watched him, without speaking. ‘Jesus, say something, will you?’ She moved towards him, the gun held forward. ‘You crazy woman,’ he exploded, his face flushing, then draining quickly to its uncertain pallor. ‘You’ve pursued someone halfway round the world for ritual vengeance and you’ve got the wrong man. I’m not your father.’

‘You still have to pay.’

‘You know how my name got on that birth certificate.’

‘I’m talking about Louise,’ she said. He sucked air through his clenched teeth. ‘And I’m talking about my mother.’

‘I hardly even knew your mother, for Christ’s sake. She was in the bamboo. As far as I know she was still there when I got out of Saigon.’

‘She came back the night the US embassy was evacuated. The night you left.’ Nan walked into the middle of the room, kicking the door closed behind her. ‘My mother came back to the Eros to a note from Louise, saying I was safely on my way to America. With you. She also came back to a bar room full of North Vietnam soldiers treating themselves to a film show. Using all your old equipment and all the old movies you had left behind. Including the last film you made at the request of Monsieur Quatch.’ He was breathing heavily, watching the gun. ‘My mother never knew the orphanage had taken me. She believed she had delivered her daughter into the hands of a child pornographer. That same night she killed herself.’

Suddenly his face seemed to regain a flood of colour. Something close to a smile shaped his lips. ‘You came to New York to kill a father. But you’ve been cheated out of that. You know I’m just a guy who was there when somebody was handing out five thousand dollars. You could have had any name on that birth certificate. You know I’m not your father.’

‘But you know who is.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know who is. I’m the only man alive who does know.’ She watched him, waiting. He took a handful of Kleenex from his desk and wiped the blood from his face. ‘The way I see it that piece of information could be worth a lot.’

‘Tell me,’ she said.

Tentatively he pressed the flesh of his upper lip. ‘I’ll tell you so far, no further. Then we’ll talk about that gun in your hand.’

‘Just tell me.’ He leaned back against the desk. ‘You were to take me back to America.’

‘To Los Angeles.’

‘And then what?’

‘We were to be met at Los Angeles International.’

‘By my father?’

He nodded. ‘That was the deal.’

‘I want his name.’

‘Not yet. There’s a trade to be made here. Just got to work out terms.’

‘When you arrived at Los Angeles, what happened?’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Your Daddy couldn’t make it.’

‘He wasn’t there?’

‘Couldn’t make it. On account of the fact he was dead.’

She swayed unsteadily. ‘He’s dead?’

‘That much was free. The rest you pay for.’

‘Where did he die?’

‘I’ve got to move along. Put up that gun.’

‘In Paris. Did my father die in Paris?’

‘First put up the gun.’

Nan Luc’s face was set. ‘Yesterday all I wanted was to see you dead. Today you’ve got a chance to face a court. But first I have to have that name. Understand me, Mr Stevenson. You have two minutes. Without that name you will not walk out of here alive.’

‘That’s no deal,’ he said uncertainly.

‘It’s all you’re going to get,’ she said. ‘Two minutes.’

‘You wouldn’t do it.’ He reached over to pick up the duffel bag on the desk. His arm outstretched, he stopped, his head cocked, looking half behind him, his eyes opening in a sudden access of fear.

‘You crazy woman,’ he said. ‘What the hell have you done?’ He turned to a door at the back of the office and wrenched it open. Smoke plumed into the room. ‘You’ve set the goddam place on fire!’ he screamed. ‘Jesus Christ, you’re going to kill us both.’ Fear galvanised him. He swung the duffel bag through the air and swept the gun from her hand. As blue smoke crept and eddied along the polished plank floor they faced each other.

He was fit, and stronger. He charged forward in confidence.

He never saw the blow that exploded on the side of his head. Something inside his skull, his eardrum perhaps, seemed to whine at high pitch like a maddened police siren. He reeled back, dropping the bag.

He had been a streetfighter in his youth. He knew how to swing and butt and bring up his knee and kick and elbow and gouge and he found now every move was necessary. He found now as blows rained across his head, as his nose poured blood, that he needed every ounce of strength, every barely remembered skill.

He threw himself at her, bawling as loud as he could force his voice. He knew that skill could be combated with sheer aggression. As the blows from the flat of her hands rained on him he seized her round the waist, butting and kneeing her, hearing her gasp and cry out until he threw her against the wall.

He was much more formidable than she had imagined, much quicker, with a readier cunning than she had thought possible. But there was some satisfaction in that for her too. At long last all the adrenalin of hate which had infected her since the day she had watched the film could be burnt off in the fury with which she faced him now.

Sweat poured down his face, soaking his shirt. He was breathing heavily now, coughing, gasping in hot drafts of smoke-laden air. ‘For God’s sake,’ he croaked, ‘I can’t breathe. Let me past.’

She stood in the doorway, her breathing fast and shallow, but still regular. ‘Unless you want to die in here,’ she said, ‘give me my father’s name.’

He knew he was on the edge of defeat. Then as he took the next step back, away from her, his shoe struck the gun. In a second his hand covered it. He raised it and fired twice. The sheer volume of sound shocked him. He sucked in air, the smoke made sharper by the sting of cordite. A short cough barked from his throat. Then another. Through streaming eyes he looked towards Nan Luc. She was moving across the space towards him. A drowning panic seized him. Each breath choked down quantities of smoke. He fired again, but wildly, stumbling backwards. The gun fell as he struck about him like a madman, trying to keep the smoke from his lungs.

In that moment, as he fell across the desk, Nan Luc had time to register what her senses had been keeping at bay. A fantail of flame was pouring under the door. Beyond the office she could hear a dull roar like a crowd’s long acclamation. The panels of the door were cracking now and smoke plunged through in an unrelenting stream, isolating each wall light and desk lamp as a point of brightness in a dense grey fog. At her feet Cy Stevenson rolled in pain, retching himself into stillness. Then he lifted his head. In a final effort he pushed himself up to his knees and began to gasp and choke in the thickness of the smoke. ‘Please,’ he croaked. ‘Get me out of here.’