Дональд Джеймс: The House of Eros

The girl stood motionless in the band of deep moonshadow between the edge of the forest and the silvered sand. Waiting, she faced towards the open sea, taller than most Vietnamese women, her gleaming features an elusive mixture of East and West.

As she watched the changing shadows on the surface of the water she hummed softly to herself, olive arms clasped before her, her weight on one hip, a knee braced forward between the curtain folds of her long cotton skirt.

What tune was it? A favourite of the American days. Somebody had told her that. She tried for a few moments to stretch her memory. But she was too young. It was over fifteen years since the Americans had left. For her there were few memories there to stretch.

In response to something seen or heard she stopped humming. Standing quietly, she picked up her sandals and walked barefoot to the edge of the shadow. She could see now, where the moonlight shimmered on the sea, a dark shape moving east to west across her front, perhaps five hundred yards from the beach. As the boat came closer she frowned as she made her decision. The sail was the right shape, the black untidy rhomboid of the Cahn Roc fishing villages. The stern was low in the water, the prow high and curving. She looked at her watch, a heavy military watch. The time was right too. More or less.

Her jaws clamped together, her lips drew back over slowly revealed white teeth. It was her boat. Their boat.

Her gaze swept the horizon. To her left the faint glow of the city the world still called Saigon; then a dark, warm stretch of ocean until on the furthest horizon, the searchlights of the state police launches wavered and flashed like a storm at sea. She stood for a moment staring at the horizon, assessing the risk. Then she turned and walked back into the shadow.

A small pile of leaves and twigs lay in the hole scooped in the sand. ‘Light the fire,’ the girl said in the cultured Vietnamese accents of the city, ‘they’re here.’

A shadow moved. A young boy came forward, fifteen or sixteen, a wraith with a Zippo lighter. He dropped to one knee, clicked the lighter and applied the flame to the leaves and twigs. The tall girl stood over him, watching the fire play at the rim of the shallow pit. She looked once more at her watch, clumsy on her slender wrist, then she turned towards the sea as the flames leapt, umbering the sculpted lines of her face.

Almost immediately a light winked from the fishing boat and the black sail moved to turn the high prow towards the beach.

‘They’ve seen us,’ the tall girl said. ‘Put out the fire.’

Handfuls of sand rattled on the unburnt leaves. The girl walked forward into the moonlight, barefoot, erect, suppressing her fear. On the horizon the searchlights still swept the rim of sea and sky.

Very slowly the fishing boat moved towards the beach, trailing a brightly incandescent wake. Spider fish leapt from the water; behind her night jars shrieked in the forest. She stood on the edge of the water now, her bare feet lapped by the tide.

A man’s voice called across the water. She thought in her half-Western way that passwords should have been devised and answering patterns of flashlamps. But nothing like that had been agreed upon. The man called. She answered.

The boat pulled and drifted on its anchor rope. A dark figure leaned across the prow. ‘Ola,’ the figure said. ‘Where are the others?’

The girl turned her head, a thumb and finger to her teeth and whistled a strangely melodious triple note. Creatures from the forest took up the call. On high rocks which rose from the sand six or seven figures appeared and stood like sentinels.

‘Come aboard,’ the man in the prow called to the girl. ‘You don’t expect me to do our talking on the beach.’

Again the girl hesitated. She had no way of knowing if things had gone wrong. Only instinct and small inconclusive indications. The fishing boat was right. The time was right. The man’s voice carried the accent of the south-west Mekong. Of course he could have been put aboard by the government. Of course the fishing boat might be full of government coastguards. And if none of these things had happened the man might still plan to collect the money, murder them all and sail away, still in possession of his boat.

‘Come aboard,’ the man stood in the prow. He wore shorts and a T-shirt. At thirty yards she could not be sure of his age. She lifted the folds of her skirt and tied them round her hips. Then she walked forward across the ribbed sand and plunged into the warm sea. She swam with a facile overarm stroke, not directly towards the boat, a little to one side, then stopped, treading water.

Her imagination had been so much nourished by stories of a distant American lifestyle that she saw herself for a second, even now, at this moment of acute danger, as just a girl swimming off the coast of California, treading water beside a boatful of partying friends. In her mind’s eye she saw a man standing on the deck, in the centre of a group of friends, a man dressed in white shorts and a white shirt, faceless, because she could not remember her American father’s face. She shook her head, bringing herself back into the ugly, dangerous present.

The captain threw down a rope. He wasn’t old, not much more than forty but his face was ravaged and his front teeth were missing. The girl caught the rope and pulled herself closer to the splintered gunwhale of the boat. He stood above her, his shorts a pair of cutdown jeans, his T-shirt torn at the armpits and frayed around the neckline.

She made no attempt to climb aboard. ‘My name is Nan Luc,’ she said. He nodded and made that throwaway gesture of the hand by which Vietnamese indicate they know, they are aware, they are unsurprised. ‘How many crew?’ she said, turning her face towards the raised deck and the reek of fish.

‘How many men?’ the captain countered, pointing towards the men standing sentinel on the rocks. ‘They carry weapons,’ he said. ‘Our agreement was no weapons.’

The girl let her long legs float up to the surface. Lying on her back, one hand holding the rope, she pointed with her free hand towards the long knife in a leather sheath on the captain’s belt. ‘A knife is also a weapon.’

‘A gutting knife,’ he said. ‘For fish.’

‘Bring your crew out.’ She kicked her legs so that she was upright in the water and hauled herself up on to the deck. The man’s eyes were on her white briefs as she untied the skirt and let it fall around her legs.

When she stood before him the captain turned and hammered on the thin timbers of the deck house. ‘Out here,’ he said. ‘All of you. Bring everything you want to take ashore.’

The men shuffled out on to the deck, a dozen or more of them, mostly in shorts, their eyes cast down as if in guilt at the array of weapons they carried, knives, an ancient seaman’s cutlass, an old rifle or two.

Nan Luc walked towards the prow of the boat and signalled to the men standing on the rocks. Low voices carried across the water, hoarse whispered shouts, the higher tones of women. She turned back to the captain. ‘Get your men on to the beach,’ she said. ‘I’ll look at the boat.’

He smiled, his tongue jutting through the great gap in his front teeth. ‘We’ll smoke,’ he said. ‘To seal the agreement.’

She shook her head. Her heart was jumping. She shivered and rubbed at her wet bare arms. ‘Put your men on the shoreline under the big rock,’ she said. ‘When I know the boat’s empty I’ll get the money.’

The captain’s tongue leapt out like a lizard’s. She was sure now that he had had no intention of keeping to the deal. Only what he saw as the armed men on the line of rocks had persuaded him. But she knew the rifles were roughly carved lengths of wood; the machine pistols tucked under their arms, no more than branches, snapped from the forest.