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.
An old pick-up truck belonging to the Bronx & Bronx Garage Company swept past her. Two more cars ignored her as she frantically flagged them down. The fourth car stopped. The window wheeled down and a small bald head was stuck out into the rain. ‘You want a lift?’ His eyes twinkled lasciviously.
The Mercedes was out of sight beyond the top of the ramp. She shook her head and turned back, climbed the rail and slid and scrambled down the slope.
Her hair was wet and the knees of her jeans were stained with mud from sliding down the steep bank, as his had been when he made his way to the motel.
Returning to the hire car Nan Luc poured herself a cup of black coffee from the flask and sat, the car door half open, looking towards the Jeep Wagoneer still parked on the crown of the sloping lot. She could not be sure why she was shaking. The sight of her father? That was the easy explanation. But was it fear, anger, hatred or memory that made the paper cup in her hand spill black drops of coffee at her lips to run warm down her chin?
What to do now? She could go into the motel and confront Louise. But why would she tell her anything more than she had told her this morning. To follow her now would be pointless. The man, Stevenson, her father, had gone. Louise would be leaving for home.
The extraordinary acuity of her emotion at seeing her father had muddled her thoughts. But she knew that if Louise were to lead her to him it would have to be another day.
For a last time she looked towards the motel lights sparkling in the thin rain. Feeling sick at her failure, she slammed the car door closed, started the engine and cruised past the lot and the silent Jeep Wagoneer.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Nan Luc sat in a yellow bathrobe in her room in the Greenwich village apartment Kim Hoang had lent her. Across the room she could see herself in the long mirror, her bare legs stretched out before her, her hair tumbled across her shoulders.
Although she could not see it in the reflection across a room lit only by city lights outside, she willed that there was something else visible in that mirror.
She wanted it to be hate.
She stood up quickly, unable to bear the thought that other things showed in her face. Doubt. The doubt that Louise had sown with her story of the five thousand dollars. Was it possible he was not her father? Was it possible she was wrong? She shook off the idea angrily and crossed the room and in the half darkness poured herself some mineral water. Dropping ice and lime into the glass she walked barefoot back to stand in front of the window.