‘Early next morning I started to walk, heading north until daylight. Always I walked at night and slept in the day. It did not take me long to reach Siem Reap. But there were many soldiers there, so I circled the town and went by Angkor Wat. I had never before seen the temples and I wept at the sight of them.’
He paused for a few moments and brushed a fly carelessly from his lips. ‘There is not much more to tell. I kept myself alive foraging for food in the forest, walking, walking, always north and then west. I saw many patrols, and once or twice I was nearly caught. But I was lucky. Eventually I reached the border with Thailand.’ He dropped his head a little then looked directly at Elliot. ‘I cannot say I am free. I cannot say I am alive. I wish I had died by the bayonet with my wife, so that our blood should have run together in the soil of my country.’ There was no emotion in his voice, or his eyes, and Elliot understood what he had meant when he said he was not alive.
‘You finished?’ Ferguson asked. The man nodded.
Elliot turned to McCue. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Outside they blinked in the sunlight, flies in their hair, on their clothes, in their faces. Ferguson went off shouting at a group of children. ‘I never had a reason for killing before,’ McCue said quietly.
Elliot looked at him. ‘The only reason you need is the money that’s going to buy your boy a better life.’ There was an edge to his voice that made McCue turn his head. Elliot stared back with cold, hard, blue eyes. McCue held the look for some moments then shrugged and walked away towards the hut where Slattery was still drinking beer with Van Saren.
Chapter Fourteen
I
Lotus sat repairing a shirt by the light of an oil lamp. It saved electricity. Old habits died hard. Billy had gone out the night before without telling her where. He had returned late and left early again in the morning. He had said nothing of the men who came two nights ago and talked with him for several hours. She had not needed to ask who they were. She knew. She knew by their eyes, for she’d seen that look in Billy’s eyes, too. In the early days, when he had first come from Vietnam.
In the back room the baby gave a little cry. She turned her head and listened. The child shifted restlessly for some moments and then was silent. Asleep still. Dreaming. She wondered what he dreamed. His dreams would not be like hers. She dreamt very little now. Her waking dreams had long since faded. Dreams of America, of an escape from poverty and squalor, from endless nights in darkened bars where every groping GI made promises of freedom, promises that were never fulfilled. Sex had been mechanical, a living earned with a false smile and a soft caress, rewarded by money and brutality, void of emotion, empty of hope.
Billy had been different, quiet and gentle. At first he bought her things, took her places during the day. They never spoke much, just sat in cafés, walked by the river. But, bit by bit, she had told him everything about herself: her family in the north, the paddy fields and the poverty. The brothers and sisters her father could not feed. She had been only fifteen when they sent her to the city to sit behind a mirrored screen, a number pinned to her blouse, alongside eighty or a hundred other girls all with the same story to tell. The doctor came to examine them once a week, like a butcher checking the freshness of the meat.
Billy had told her nothing about himself. Then one day he had said that he no longer wanted her to work the bars. She had protested. How was she to live? She needed to work. For a while he had said no more about it. He had been morose and cold. Then nothing. He just disappeared. Two weeks, maybe three, and she had thought she would never see him again. It happened. A man took a fancy to you, lavished you with money and gifts, told you he loved you and wanted to take you away from it all. Then he would be sent back home and know that he could not take you with him. A brief illusion. A candle that burned too bright to be real. Then Billy turned up at the club one night, took her by the hand and pulled her out into the street.
‘You’re quitting. Now,’ he said. She had pulled herself free and told him he was mad, and he’d said quite simply, ‘I want to marry you.’
He had looked her straight in the eye, and she knew that he meant it. He had never told her he loved her, or promised her anything, but it was all there in his dark tragic eyes. She had wondered what America would be like. Reality, she knew, could never be like the dream. But she was never to know. He had bought them a house on the klongs. He was never going home, he said.
But it had been an escape of a sorts. She had not loved him, not then, had not known what love was. But they had found peace together, a kind of happiness she had not experienced since childhood. He had never told her where the money came from, though sometimes he had been away for weeks on end. But they had never wanted for anything and so she never asked.
She had found herself returning to the ways of her mother, and her mother before her. All the values she had rejected, the heritage she had wished to trade for the dream that had been America. She was Thai, and she was happy in the knowledge of who she was.
But Billy had changed since their child was born. The inner peace they had found together was gone, like the still surface of a pond broken by the monsoon rains. And the trouble in his heart was reflected in his eyes, like mirrors of his soul.
She finished with the shirt, and was padding through to check the mosquito net around the baby’s sleeping mat when she heard the bump of a small boat against the landing stage and Billy’s step on the stairs. Something had happened, she knew. It was in those eyes that spoke to her more eloquently than the words he used so seldom and so sparingly.
‘When will you be going?’ she asked.
He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. ‘A week.’
‘And when will you be back?’ She felt the tension in him.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘when I get back we’re going home.’
‘This is my home. I thought it was your home too.’
He glanced through to the room where the baby slept. ‘There’s more chance for him in America.’ She squatted on the floor and examined the shirt she had mended. He lit a cigarette. He had been smoking more these past two days. ‘If — if I don’t come back...’ She looked up. ‘If I don’t come back, I want you to take him anyway. There’ll be plenty of money and my folks’ll look after you.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t want money, or America. I want a husband, and a father for my child.’
He stood for a moment, then turned and went out on to the terrace. She heard the creak of his old rocking chair. After some minutes she rose slowly from the floor and went out beside him. The sky was thick with stars, like the eyes of Heaven gazing down upon the affairs of men. She didn’t even look at him. ‘Don’t go, Billy,’ she said. ‘I love you.’
He looked up and felt the sting of tears in his eyes. She had never told him that before. No one had.
II
‘There’s a gentleman been waiting to see you,’ the receptionist told Elliot when he got back to the hotel. She nodded towards a man sitting on one of the large sofas dotted around the reception lounge. Elliot and Slattery turned to look.