I looked at her with a curious expression as if we were caught in a farce. She whispered, ‘He’s already here. Thank god you’ve arrived, I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. He’s a bit strange.’
‘How do you mean, “strange”?’
She bent in closer and put her hand across her mouth to stop herself laughing, ‘He wanted me to keep the lights turned down, there’s something wrong with his eyes… and try not to look at his skin.’
She led the way down the tiled hallway, motioned me to the lounge and disappeared in the kitchen; she wanted as little to do with this as possible. With the lights dimmed on her Belle Epoque wall lights, the house looked faintly sepulchral.
A man sat beside the lit fire in one of her Chesterfield chairs, his fists draped over the rests the way a stone lion’s paws grip a plinth. The light and shade of the flames played upon his face like the flickering screen of a shadow theatre; half of it terribly scarred, as if he’d been dipped in lava. His head was covered in a shock of black hair, probably dyed. And he had on a pair of wraparound Ray Ban shades. Something about him instantly reminded me of those old guys in the Orient, popping Viagra and seeking out the ‘love you long time’ hostess bars. They wear Gap sports slacks, blousy white shirts that hide their paunches and their skin is leathery brown from sunning themselves like narcissistic Priapuses on the beaches of southern Thailand. Perverts in thongs.
‘Hi,’ I said extending my palm, ‘You must be Sammy.’
He turned his head slowly, stared at me a moment then broke into a grin. The room seemed to brighten with the presence of his smile. I was trying not to look at his face, the burnt side. What’s with the shades? I wondered.
‘It’s good to finally meet the boy of Jacques Deschamps.’ He stood up and held out a hand. I took it in mine and noticed its size as it closed around my knuckles. He was a big man - even with a stoop he was as tall as me, somewhere in the realm of six foot. I knew he’d be judging the steel of my character from our first handshake, perhaps comparing it to Dad’s. Like Mum wearing make-up for the first time in ages, I was aware I too wanted someone who’d known Dad to think well of me. It was a little pathetic.
I caught a gust of his breath and coughed, it stank of dried deer meat. ‘It’s good to meet you, unexpected but a pleasure all the same.’ I said.
My mother stood on the outer edge of her Moroccan carpet, umpiring the first exchange. ‘Can I get you another drink, Sammy?’ she said, steepling her hands.
‘Whiskey…please.’ he said coarsely, looking at the dinosaurs performing their slow revolutions. Perhaps it was the state of his skin that lent him an element of the theatrical or the fact I still hadn’t seen his eyes, but he fascinated me.
‘Please, sit back down Mr Casbaron.’ I said, assuming the alpha role in my mother’s house.
‘Sammy, call me Sammy.’ I noted the girth of his neck, like an aged wrestler’s, and not so much paunch after all.
‘I can’t believe how much you look like your old man.’ he said.
‘You think so?’ I was smiling, caught by his charm.
His gaze trained on Dad’s photo, the one I’d recovered from Nana’s flat, ‘Yup, peas in a pod. I’m, sorry to hear about your Grandmother, your Mom was telling me about it… that’s too bad, she sounded like a poppet.’
Each time he smiled I found myself watching his yellow teeth and then finally he lifted his glasses up, set them upon his mop of hair and squinted. His eyes were watery blue flecked with pink, like an albino but even stranger. They had no expression. It took him a couple of seconds to stop blinking. Then he seemed to think better of it and put the shades back on. He wore a polo shirt under a leather jacket, and creased slacks that finished in expensive-looking shoes with a gold buckle. Crocodile skin shoes.
‘Thank you. So, what brings you to London, Sammy?’
‘I had a little business to take care of, sloppy suppliers. Sometimes you can’t rely on emails and faxes. So here I am staying in London with nothing to do but watch the dirty channels and I figure I should pop in and say hello. I’ve not been to this country since... god it’s changed, not sure whether I like it quite so much. Too many cars and so many niggers on the streets, they’re like rats on every corner.’
I bristled, and not just with indignation at his racism, more that this stranger should presume to bring words like ‘niggers’ into our house as easy as he might have hung his jacket on the coat stand. ‘Wasn’t easy coming here, but I thought I should.’ he continued.
I let the “niggers” bit go. Dinosaurs eventually die out, I thought, and he’s the last of a certain breed… leave him to his twisted, outdated beliefs. ‘It’s really odd that you should turn up now though, just when I’m thinking of writing a book on my dad.’
‘He’d have been proud of that! How will you end it, the book I mean?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’ll be a difficult book to end cos we still don’t know what happened to him.’
Again I was a little surprised by the comment, it caught me offhand with the slyness of a right hand lead. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to spend any more time with him. And I didn’t like the intimation.
‘I suppose I’ll just have to see where my research takes me.’
‘For those of us who made it through,’ he continued, seemingly oblivious to my discomfort, ‘certain people become special to us, like talismans. Your dad was like that, a lot of people loved him you know?’ I was back under his spell, he’d known my father and that was all it took to control my marionette strings. He stopped midflow. ‘Don’t worry about looking at my face, I’m used to it. I look like freakin’ tree bark!’
‘Are the lights dim enough for you?’
‘Lights are fine, so long as I keep the shades on. It’s only daylight gives me a real problem.’
‘May I ask what happened to you?’
‘Sure, I got fragged by a shot of magnesium at Khe Sanh, kind of screwed around with my corneas. Bright lights burn the shit out of me.’
‘Sounds like you went through a lot.’
‘All for a black, muslim sympathizer who thinks he’s Jesus.’
Obama. Here we go,
‘Some people left the war with nightmares, but my only problem is I look like a freakin nightmare! I don’t have no problem sleeping though.’
‘You know what they say - a man with a free conscience sleeps like a baby.’
He grinned, ‘I don’t have a conscience, Alain, that’s how I do my sleeping. Say, that photo on the wall, the kid in the gloves. That you?’
‘Yeah.’
His eyes trained on my hands. I have hands like a painter and wrists like a violinist. ‘What were you fighting at middle weight?’
Pretty canny, I thought. Boxers can often tell a lot about someone physically with a quick look at them. ‘Super middle.’ I answered.
‘What was your card?’
‘Fifteen fights, two losses, five knockouts.’
He shook his head and roared with laughter. ‘You’re Jacques son all right! He had the meanest left hook I ever saw - and I saw a few fighters in my time.’ As he laughed I began to forget about his burnt face and oddly sensitive eyes. I wanted to like him.
‘So you were in the same outfit as my dad?’
‘Different regiment, but I went through some heavy duty with your old man,’ He looked at his palms. ‘We thought we’d have Vietnam licked in a couple of months with a little advice from the French - so we used your old man to help us with the VC.’
He was speaking of another time about a man who looked at me from the mantle-piece like a half finished puzzle. ‘I didn’t really know my dad, Mr Casbaron. He disappeared when I was a child. I loved him more than anything but I never had time to get to know him as an adult.’
�
��Life is cruel.’ He exhaled slowly and looked at the fire. I knew he was thinking about Dad. He smiled at me sadly, ‘I probably know a little more about you than you think - your old man talked a lot about you.’
I leant forward, my palms moist with sweat. I wanted to hear that very much. I knew my dad loved me, but that snake inside my head had often posed the question- if he loved you so much then why did he go back again? Why did he test his luck?
Mum was gone a long time. I was beginning to think she was doing it on purpose when I heard her heels in the tiled hallway. ‘So, have you two got acquainted then?’
She handed Casbaron a drink, which he took in both of his hands, the cut-crystal dwarfed by his titan fingers. Out came the yellow teeth as the smoked liquid disappeared in almost a single gulp. He set down the glass and rubbed his hands. Mum sat down opposite him and for a moment there was an uncomfortable silence. Casbaron however, seemed in no way uncomfortable. ‘Where do you live these days Sammy, you said you were going back to Bangkok?’ She asked.
‘Bangkok, Saigon… Asia’s my home.’ He looked at the conservatory, tracing the slow motions of the mobile dinosaurs. ‘These are beautiful, Penelope.’
Mum blushed like a little girl, perhaps there was something not altogether unattractive about the man sat in her chair? No, he was hideous, but his presence - an unusual kind of charisma - radiated from him in the flames’ incandescence.
‘Thank you. What is it you do Sammy?’ I asked.
The neck moved on its base like a rotating howitzer, ‘Oh I have my fingers in all sorts of pies… imports and exports, shall we say? Also I work with NGOs in Laos.’
‘What’s an “NGO”?’ asked Mum.
‘Non-government-organization. I do it for free, setting up orphanages, helping raise money for UXO – sorry, unexploded ordnance – victims. Way I see it, the US dropped a whole lot of pain and we have to amend for it.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
He shook his head somberly and the orange light explored the fissures of his face. ‘The US aerial war machine dropped more bombs on the little country of Laos in a nine years, than were dropped in the entire Second World War. 30% of this ordnance failed to detonate on landing, so it sleeps like a hidden menace until it gets trodden on by kids in rice fields and jungles.’
‘That’s terrible.’ said Mum, drawn in.
‘Yup- especially when you see the victims, their legs blown clean off, their lives ruined. 12,000 have died from these bombs since the war ended, and the number keeps going up.’
‘How lovely to be doing something useful with your life.’
Casbaron looked at Mum and sighed, lifting his glasses so we could peek at his mice-like eyes. ‘Penelope, I’m an old man and I’ll level with you, I’m dying of the big ‘C’. It’s beyond repair. Every hour that I do something worthwhile takes me a step closer to my maker.’
Maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its scabby cover I thought. Those curious watering eyes of his, the misty blankness within them; try as I might, I couldn’t read him at all, couldn’t tell if I liked him or felt repulsed by him.
After a chicken salad and bottle of Chilean red, Mum took the empty plates into the kitchen. He’d been with us an hour and a half when she yawned and said she was going to bed. She was through with the war and didn’t want to hear any more about Dad. She had her own memories and they were sacrosanct.
‘Well goodnight then.’ He said with a slight southern drawl shaking her hand, ‘It’s been a pleasure.’
I kissed Mum on the cheek, hugged her and whispered, ‘Thanks.’
We both watched her disappear up the broad spiral stairs and Sammy Casbaron looked over the table at me with concern, ‘Hey Al, you don’t think my being here has upset your Mom?’
With his thick black hair and burnt anvil face, I finally realized it was the Three Stooges he’d reminded me of all evening; faintly comical, visually tragic. He must be pushing seventy, maybe older? Throughout his short stay with us, he’d been at pains not to talk about the war in front of my mother; in fact I thought he’d been more than courteous in that respect. Problem was, I knew little more about my father than when he’d first arrived. He didn’t seem to want to talk about him. I was beginning to wonder why he’d bothered looking us up at all and whether he himself had gotten anything out of the evening?
He poured himself another liberal brandy and swished it about nonchalantly.
‘It’s ok,’ I said, ‘she gets a little emotional when Dad is mentioned.’
‘Fairplay. So you were saying, this book you’re thinking of writing?’
I hadn’t noticed it all evening, but this was perhaps the first time he’d actually asked me something about myself other than questions about boxing; general man questions like fitness levels, whether I got scared before I went in the ring. He seemed to want to know every fight, the way I boxed, as if to establish a pattern. Did I always lag in the third round? Was I quick starter from the bell? ‘Ah, the noble art.’ He’d said more than once.
‘I’m going to Bangkok in a few weeks time with my best mate. I’ve got a few people to call, people like you who knew Dad.’
He looked up at the ceiling, toward the muffled footfalls and winked at me conspiratorially. ‘Pussy there’s cheaper than Coca Cola - you’ll love it! A man can come half a dozen times in a night with a stack of greenbacks in his pants and still have half of it left in the morning. Bang bang - kop chai lai lai! Old habits die hard. Bangkok was boom boom town, our R and R from Uncle Sam for sweating in them fuckin boonies.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You want to write something on Jacques Deschamps then you’d better get with the lingo. Rest and Recovery, blow-job and beer, suckie-suckie for a dollar Mister man!’
I felt my fists bunch. I could picture him in some filthy brothel, half a dozen naked Thais draped on him like kittens suckling a burnt cat. His lumpen face seemed to have animated with a shot of nostalgia.
‘I don’t think I want to know about that, thanks.’
He looked at me apologetically, ‘Sorry kid, I forget myself.’
Kid?
‘I don’t know much about what Dad did out there, Sammy. I think he tried to keep it separate from Mum to protect us. I know it was secret, whatever it was he was involved in. Maybe that’s why he disappeared.’
He lifted up the shutters of his shades and looked at me briefly. Something within that unnatural stare reached into me, challenged my triumphs in the ring and every risk I’d ever chanced, categorizing me as a child; not an equal to sit at his table of rotting VC corpses. The vain, embellished pride of an old soldier.
‘Look me up when you get out there. It aint right to talk about it here, not in your Mother’s house.’
I questioned the authenticity of his motive for keeping quiet. I swallowed and forced myself to ask, ‘Were you with him when he died?’
He scratched his chin, seemingly relishing the question. Then he looked away, his gaze lost in the well of the past. ‘I’m afraid not, got a little too hot for me - gooks crawling around Prabang when your Father’s number was called.’
‘”Prabang”?’ I asked. Wasn’t that the place written on the map I’d found in Paris?
‘Yeah Luang Prabang.’ He said, resenting the interruption. ‘I was upcountry then, nothing but jungle and cannibals, bats and fuckin bamboo. Fugazi place to be assigned to.’
‘So where was my dad?’
‘Your Father was a strategic adviser - there were plenty of ‘em out there at Long Tien. That was the CIA air base in central Laos.’
‘He was a strategist?’
He chuckled, ‘I wouldn’t call it just that. We were assassins.’
The word froze in my gut as I tried to reconcile the eyes in the photo to the half-blind pensioner before me
with stinking breath and razored teeth. Assassin?
‘A bunch of us were sent to rout Uncle Ho’s boys smuggling men from North Vietnam through Laos to Saigon. no one was supposed to be in that country, it was in the Geneva convention, not one Yank or Charlie. Laos was neutral, see?’ His lips split in a grimace of disgust. I noticed his hands shaking.
‘If the gooks hadn’t broken that accord we would never a gone there and your Pop would have been drinking this with us now. But they did, and we went for them chopstick motherfuckers with vengeance. After I got burnt, I was out the picture on the ground so to speak. I just flew planes to and from Saigon with Air America.’
I couldn’t have cared less about him. ‘Who was it that actually found Dad’s stuff. Do you know?’
He looked at me with an intimacy that crossed the line of personal space. I felt like we were in a dugout, the heat of the jungle and VC drawing nearer. ‘His clothes and dog tag were found up river in Laos. We looked for him – god knows we looked - for months… sent out patrols, flew sorties over the forests but the jungle seemed to have hidden him. Trees grow pretty darn quick out there, kid.’
‘So Dad wasn’t supposed to be in Laos, officially speaking?’
He scratched at his charred chin, ‘None of us were.’ Casbaron drained the last of the brandy from the tumbler. ‘Your Dad was hooked up with an individual who went insane within a month of being there.’
‘And was he to blame for his death?’
No answer. Come on you old bastard! ‘Who was he, this Colonel? Do you remember?’
He crunched the wasted muscles in his neck with a slow snap, as if forcing himself from a bad dream, ‘Course I remember, how could I forget? But like I said, this is the not the time or place to be talking about that… I’m sorry.’
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