The Son

by Marc Santailler

  ‘And you, Paul? How are you getting on? You seem a bit quiet.’

  ‘I’m fine. Just a bit of work on my mind.’

  Cathy and I had always been close, but I’d never been good at explaining myself, even to her. Ironic, for a man who’d lived by prying out other people’s secrets. That had been one of my problems with Sandy – we hadn’t communicated enough. Cathy understood me most by signs and implications, after the event.

  ‘Why do you work so hard? You’ve got enough money, you could afford to ease up, or do something else.’

  ‘I think of it sometimes.’

  ‘Ever think of remarrying?’

  ‘Sometimes. But I haven’t found anyone I really care enough about.’

  Until now, I thought, as Hao’s face suddenly swept into my mind. Stop it! I told myself sharply. You’re getting carried away like a teenager. You’ve just met the woman, you hardly know anything about her, for all you know she has another man in her life, or else she’s still grieving for her late husband. You’ll help her sort out her problem, and give her adopted son a hand, and then she’ll go home and that will be the last you’ll see of her. But I couldn’t get the look of those eyes out of my mind, nor that lithe figure, and those legs. Cathy looked at me curiously, but said nothing.

  In the early evening I drove back to Sydney, after the festivities and the hugs and the fresh country air had cleared the last of the champagne fumes. Through Cessnock, Kearsley, the old mining towns changeless over the decades, the pubs and the banks still the dominant buildings, a little neater nowadays and more self-conscious with the coming of the tourists to the wineries. Hobby farmers splitting up the old dairy farms. Brunkerville with its name like an American Civil War battlefield. Pretty country still, mostly unspoiled. Over the Heaton Pass and down the toboggan run to Freeman’s Waterhole and the freeway junction.

  Two days before I saw Hao again, a week until I had another chance to talk to Eric, if he hadn’t taken fright. Time going by, before long she’d be back in Britain.

  I’d better not waste any of it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nghiem was the first person I went to. He was a gentle, frog-faced man I’d first met in Saigon in the last weeks of the ancien régime, and recontacted later in Sydney in the early eighties, when he’d resettled there and I was trying to set up some access to the Vietnamese target. An engineer by training, and a former Colombo Plan student in Australia, he had been one the first to be allowed in after the fall. Nghiem had looked askance at my attempts to draw him into the net – not everyone welcomes an approach from a spy – but we had remained friends, though I hadn’t seen him for years. I guessed he’d retired.

  I still had his number and rang him the next morning in Lindfield, where he lived with his Australian wife Ann and the youngest of their four children. He sounded glad enough and didn’t object when I invited myself round after work.

  ‘I’m doing some consultancy work and I need your advice.’

  A cover works best mixed with the truth. I thought it best not to reveal my true purpose at this stage.

  ‘It’s about the Vietnamese community,’ I explained that evening in his sitting room. Ann had offered me a peck on the cheek and a cup of tea and discreetly withdrawn. I wondered how much Nghiem had told her of my past approach.

  ‘I have a client who wants to do business in Vietnam, and needs to recruit some talent locally. People he can trust, whose heart is in Australia even if they were born in Vietnam. But I’ve lost touch, and I don’t know where to start. Can you give me a few clues? Who to talk to, who to avoid, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I don’t have much to do with them any more,’ Nghiem said.

  ‘Maybe some basic information, for a start. What’s the community these days? A hundred thousand?’

  ‘In Sydney? Oh less than that. Eighty at most, if you include the Chinese from Vietnam as well. Maybe he should look at those, if he’s interested in business.’

  ‘Maybe. But not counting them? Just ethnic Vietnamese?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe fifty thousand.’

  ‘Where are they mainly? In Cabramatta?’

  ‘There, and Fairfield. They’re mostly southerners there, and Buddhist, and a lot of the Sino-Vietnamese have settled there too. The northerners and the Catholics congregate more around Marrickville, and you’ve got Bankstown as well, which is a bit of a mixture.’ Nghiem paused to think. ‘I’d say Cabramatta’s your best bet. That’s where there’s the most business activity. Have you been there lately? It’s amazing how the place has grown.’

  ‘You read some alarming statistics in the press, all that unemployment.’

  ‘I know. That’s worrying.’ Nghiem’s kind face wrinkled in concern. ‘But that’s mainly the uneducated, the ones who came here without their families, the farmers and the fishermen. Some of them have a hard time assimilating, so they stick too much together.’

  Nghiem came from what used to be called the mandarin class: his father had been a senior official in the north, under the French, there were lawyers and doctors in the family. People like Hao. I remembered the refugees I’d met in the camps, queuing up to be interviewed by immigration and UN officials (and by more devious types like me, masquerading as humanitarian do-gooders). Many of them had been simple folk, straight from their villages, with little education and no concept of the outside world. And the youngsters, the draft-dodgers, ducking the new war which the communist Vietnamese were now waging in Cambodia, after driving the Khmer Rouge out in 1979, or who were simply sent out by themselves, as young as twelve or thirteen sometimes, to serve as spearhead, an anchor for a family to follow. You could see there the seeds of some long-term problems. Yet many of those had done well, some becoming millionaires, and not all the former mandarins had been so successful.

  ‘What about these gangs you read about? How serious are they, really.’

  ‘You know what the press is like,’ Nghiem said. ‘A lot of it’s exaggerated. There’s a problem there alright, but I don’t know much about them.’

  Like most of his kind Nghiem had little time for the rougher elements in the Vietnamese community.

  ‘One thing I am worried about is those extremists,’ I went on. ‘You know, all those ex-military types, who want to turn Ho Chi Minh City back into Saigon. They’re the last thing my client needs. Any sign of them to look out for?’Nghiem gave me a patient look. I remembered the way he’d shrunk back when I’d asked him years ago to introduce me to other Vietnamese.

  ‘Those you’ll know soon enough! But I wouldn’t worry too much about them. They’re not as strong as they used to be. A lot of Vietnamese go back to Vietnam on visits nowadays and that’s taken the wind out of their sails … sorry Paul, I wish I could be more helpful.’

  ‘No, thanks Nghiem, you’ve been a great help.’

  I took my leave of Ann, who looked secretly relieved.

  ‘If you really want to know more about those people,’ Nghiem said on the doorstep, ‘why don’t you ask Jack Lipton?’

  He was next on my list. But Jack and I were both busy the next day, and I had to wait until Wednesday to see him. Once again I was conscious of time flying past.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hao looked even prettier on the Tuesday evening when I picked her up at her cousins’ house – a mean little box with a concrete front yard where I got a hard stare from the inhabitants. She wore a dark brown knee-length dress of some soft material with a pattern of small dots and a refreshing lack of frills and flounces, and she had let her hair down at the back, held together by a ribbon. She also looked much less tense, as if our first meeting had taken a load off her mind. I felt eager as a teenager on his first date.

  ‘Thank you again for going to see Eric,’ she said as I drove towards the city. ‘I’m really grateful for what you’re doing.’

  ‘It’s still early days. Let’s see what happens on Sunday. I was mainly trying to establish my credentials.’

  I told her about o
ur meeting, leaving out Eric’s trip out of town. I needed to earn that boy’s trust, and one way was to show him I could keep my mouth shut.

  ‘I liked him, overall. He’s blunt, and direct, and there’s a lot of honesty in him. He warned me off in no uncertain terms if I don’t behave myself with you. I had to assure him my intentions were strictly honourable.’

  She gave a small incredulous laugh. ‘My goodness! You did have a frank discussion.’

  ‘When do you have to go back?’ I asked.

  ‘Soon. I’ve taken six weeks off, all my holidays, and I can take another two weeks if I want, but after that I’ll have to go back, or risk losing my job.’

  She told me she worked in a chemical plant near Leeds. She was personal assistant to the managing director.

  I took her to Wolfie’s, on the waterfront at Circular Quay. It’s in the Rocks, the oldest part of Sydney, and one of the best places in Australia to take a beautiful woman to dinner. Nineteenth-century tenements, sandstone warehouses converted to loft apartments. We sat on the terrace out front, facing the Opera House, with the harbour in the background and the Bridge on our left. Hao let me choose the menu: octopus salad and grilled barramundi, with a light Semillon.

  ‘I think I met your father once,’ I said. ‘In early April, just after the fall of Hue and Da Nang. He told me the Americans were backing the wrong horse with Thieu, that Thieu should step down while it was still possible to negotiate with the communists.’

  ‘That sounds like him.’

  Nguyen van Thieu, South Vietnam’s president almost to the end, had resisted any thought of compromising with the communists.

  ‘What happened to him afterwards?’

  ‘He was arrested, and sent to re-education. He died later that year, in Bien Hoa.’

  I was appalled. Bien Hoa was a large prison on the outskirts of Saigon, which had been given a new lease of life by the communists, when they’d set up their vast programme of re-education for those who’d had the misfortune to be on the losing side.

  ‘Why?’ I cried. ‘He wasn’t on Thieu’s side. He wanted an end to the war, he was a neutralist.’

  ‘Not neutral enough, apparently.’ She gave a dry laugh. ‘Oh, I don’t mean they set out to kill him. They probably just wanted to teach him a lesson. He’d been too critical of the communists too in the past. But he was old, and he had a weak heart. He died of illness, and neglect.’

  ‘Why didn’t he get out with the Americans?’

  ‘He didn’t want to leave. Vietnam was his country. Right to the end he thought he could still play a role, help salvage something from the ruins.’

  She explained. Her father, although originally from the north, was a Buddhist, and had come south as a young man, in 1949. He didn’t know much about communism. The people who had been most anxious to flee in 1975 had been the northern Catholics, who had come south in 1954, at the time of partition, and they’d already had a taste of communism. Her mother was from My Tho, in the south.

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘In America, with my older brother Nhan. There were three of us, Nhan, myself and Hien. Nhan also went into re-education. They gave him a hard time. He’d been an officer in the army. Originally he was a student at the Faculty of Sciences. That’s how I met Khiem, my husband, he was teaching there and they became friends. After Nhan graduated he was drafted and sent to the military academy, and he joined the Rangers. He wasn’t like my father, he wanted to fight! He tried to escape after the fall of Saigon – his unit kept fighting for two days in the delta – but he was caught and sent north, up near the Chinese border. He was still in the camps when we got out. That’s why my mother didn’t come with us. She wanted to wait for him. He was lucky to survive. A lot of his friends died in the camps.’

  ‘How did he get out?’

  ‘He was brought back south when the Chinese attacked in the north, after the invasion of Cambodia in 79. They put him in a camp in the Central Highlands, but he escaped back to Saigon. We’d already left – a month earlier! After that Nhan went back to the highlands to join the resistance there, but he soon found that that was hopeless. So he went back to the delta and got out by boat. The Americans took him at once, with his record. Finally our mother was allowed to leave too. They live in San Diego. I went to see them once, not long before Khiem died.’

  They’d had a hard time in Saigon, during those lean years: selling off their furniture, doing odd jobs, sewing, a bit of teaching, working in the fields. Her father in prison, no news of Nhan, for a long time they thought he was dead.

  ‘I don’t know how we would have managed without Khiem. Fortunately they let him keep his job, he’d never been in the army.’ She shrugged. ‘But we survived, and some of us got out in the end. There aren’t many families in the south that haven’t lost someone because of the war. Or in the north for that matter.’

  I remembered the stories I’d heard in the refugee camps. The years spent in re-education, the hand to mouth existence of a society reduced to poverty, people thrown out of their jobs, their homes, their children denied university places, forced into new economic zones, persecuted and harassed. No wonder they wanted to escape. By the late 1970s the south had become a vast escape factory, there wasn’t a canal or stretch of river without its clandestine boat-yard, everything that could float was being turned into a boat, despite all the authorities’ attempts to stop them.

  Not everyone succeeded. Some made it in one hop to Pulau Bidong off the Malaysian coast, a night and a day in a sixteen-foot tub with two inches of freeboard, twenty or thirty people crammed knee to shoulder – hundreds on the bigger boats. Others drifted for days or weeks at sea, preyed on by pirates, their engines dead, half-dead themselves of thirst and hunger before they were picked up. Even those were the lucky ones. For all those who made it to safety there were countless others who failed, never managed to get out, or simply died at sea, like Hien.

  Our food came, cutting across these grim reminiscences. Hao gave me a speculative look.

  ‘What about you, Paul? What kind of life have you had over the past twenty years?’

  ‘Nothing as hard as yours. A couple more postings after Saigon, Colombo and Kuala Lumpur. That’s when I went to Hawkins Road, in ’81. I probably just missed you. I visited a few refugee camps when I was in KL. In between, long spells at home. I got married, to an Australian girl, Sandra. My daughter was born in Colombo. After KL I got tired of it and left to go into business. That was hard work. Don’t ever think money’s easy to make in business. My marriage broke up. But I stuck it out, ended up owning a couple of shops. About three years ago I sold out and went into my present business. I had a friend who wanted a partner. He quit soon after and since then I’ve been on my own, with Vivien.’

  ‘You sound very enterprising. Why haven’t you remarried?’

  ‘Once bitten …’

  She smiled. ‘No girlfriends?’ Vietnamese are persistent interrogators.

  ‘A few. None current.’

  What about you, I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Hardly the question to ask, so soon after her husband’s death. I poured her another glass.

  ‘It’s from the Hunter, where I was on Sunday. Near where my sister lives.’

  ‘Tell me about her. You know so much about me now, and I hardly know you.’

  So I told her more about myself. Not everything, nothing about my former occupation, but about Sandra, and Rachel, eighteen, in her final year at a private girls’ school in Melbourne, coming up to see me during the school holidays.

  After dinner we walked along the wharf. I would have liked to hold her hand, but thought better of it. Don’t rush things.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Forty-five. My birthday’s in February.’

  She did a quick calculation on her fingers, mumbling to herself in Vietnamese.

  ‘You’re a Tiger,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, In the f
orests of the night.* I’d always related to Blake’s tiger, though not I fear in the way he intended.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m a Horse. My birthday’s in August. I was born in 1954.’ Older than I’d first thought.

  ‘Is that a good or a bad thing?’ I asked. ‘Tigers and Horses.’

  She laughed. ‘It depends. If the Tiger’s a woman it doesn’t work very well. But when the Tiger’s a man and the Horse is a woman that can be a lucky combination.’

  ‘I’ll take that as an omen,’ I said, suddenly elated. ‘What about your name? Hảo, that’s rather unusual.’

  ‘It’s short for Minh-Hảo. Hòang thị Minh-Hảo, that was my maiden name.’ She said it in the northern accent. It sounded like a cat singing.

  ‘Minh means intelligent, I know, but Hảo?’

  ‘Oh. It means good, or beautiful.’

  ‘Intelligent and beautiful. Hmm.’ I made a play of inspecting her. ‘Your parents must have had second sight.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. They called my sister Hiền, which means gentle, and she was fierce as a wildcat when she got angry. We had some terrible fights when we were young …’

  She tailed away, as if the memories were still too painful, even after all that time. I changed the subject back to Eric.

  ‘I’ve started doing some research on the Vietnamese community,’ I said. I told her about my meeting with Nghiem. ‘I’m seeing another friend tomorrow night. Why don’t you come too?

  You’ll like them.’

  ‘If I’m not in the way.’

  When I drove her back to Marrickville I walked with her to the front door. I was tempted to kiss her, but stuck my hand out instead. We shook hands formally.

  ‘Thank you for such a pleasant evening,’ she said.

  ‘Do you really have to go back so soon?’