When I returned to the Asia Hotel there was a message from the Police at reception to call. I did so immediately on my cell and spoke to the Detective’s mobile. ‘Please come in and take your passport, sah.’
‘How is the investigation?’ I asked wearily,
‘Slowly. You should leave Bangkok now, go home.’
I sat in the lobby’s faux-leather sofas doing my best to ignore American wives and their doddering husbands in tennis gear that made them look ridiculous. Right now Skip would be flying over London clouds, my passport was free to me and the Police were supposedly busy with their investigation - why shouldn’t I leave while I still could? I wanted to go home, maybe this chapter was over; all the numbers had been called, only Gerald King was left to explore. I’d got as far as I might with the Australian, Maybury. If I’d gone back to Bang Kwang he’d have probably started mumbling again about the coming of the darkness and the horned god of the forest, or whatever it was his old brain was wired to.
But we all have choices, always, no matter how stark it seems. Either I went to Hanoi on a wing and prayer to find his friend Gerald King, and continued exposing myself to danger, or I went back home. But hadn’t they got to Nana? Who would they go for next? In my paranoiac state I figured no one was safe.
And besides, I couldn’t go home; if I did I’d never find out why it had happened. Some kind of explanation might begin to heal the sores with time, but to not know a thing had to be worse… to live in fearful expectation and choking anxiety. I felt a numbness pass across me like a leaden sheet - I needed to go back to the market one last time.
That evening I rang the taxi driver who’d helped me escape from Chattuchak; his real name aside of ‘King Kong Mighty Penis’, was Sing Tao and he seemed pleased I’d kept his card. We rode through the polished streets past the business district spangled in the last light of the sunset - except half of them were carpeted in smoke, like a Time magazine cover gone wrong. Scrunched up in the back of the cab I noticed a red t-shirt; he hadn’t tried to hide it. ‘You support Thaksin, Sing?’
‘Not really, they all as corrupt as each other, but he the best hope for the people in the countryside. My family live near Chiang Rai.’ His face looked as if it had had worms dragged through the pores, so wide and dark were the scars of his teenage acne. Fortunately the eyes told a different story – friendly, maybe even to be trusted.
‘You okay now mistah, you run into goodfellas again?’
‘No, I haven’t seen them. Have you?’
He shrugged and dragged on his cigarette, I noticed he had a little shrine blu-tacked above the dash, a fat golden Bhudda. ‘Yeah, I seen one of them, man in suit, bad man I think.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Oh I not know, he at the market place. I not know what he sell. But he not Thai… we nearly at Chattuchak now, but it will be shut, yes?’
‘The man in the grey suit you mean?’
He nodded, ‘Yeah him not Thai, Lao I think.’
‘What does he sell?’
He was quiet a moment, ‘Forbidden things.’
We were driving through a shantytown of corrugated shacks; charcoal figures stood beside around fires and my stomach was full of fear. We’d be at the market soon, why did I want to go back? Sing waited in his car as I crept through the empty market. Most of the stalls were closed and padlocked, the alleys empty with a light wind that billowed the canopies. I couldn’t see anyone. I found my way through the darkness by following the widest paths and also the smells; I knew I was heading in the right direction when the pitch of the animal feed came to meet me and I could hear the scraping of animal claws on glass. But no one was there and I was forced to turn tail and head for the taxi.
I tipped Sing double the fare and left him on the hotel ramp in his dirt-grey Mercedes. Then I made a call to Jeffries who was on his way out of the Embassy.
‘You’ll get your passport tomorrow Alain, and once again if there’s anything I can do to help... By the way, I read your pieces from time to time in The Bangok Post, I loved that one about Greece and Odysseus.’
I hung up without responding. I had a Coke, twiddled Nana’s ornamental key in my fingers and looked at the posters of lady boys that would be performing in the hotel later that night. I hated Bangkok, a playground that had taken the theme of pleasure too far. I knew Skip would understand my not going to his funeral - I had to go to Hanoi, even if it was just a hunch that Maybury’s friend King could help me. While the Bangkok Police were busy with the political divisions of the city, the heroin pushers, yaa baa crazies, farang junkies and sex gangs, they’d never get to Skip; he was just a dead boy gathering dust in a ‘pending’ file.
- 13 -
The guide book said it was once called the city of ‘The Soaring Dragon’. I didn’t care what it was called so long as I was out of Bangkok - any place would be preferable. As the Vietnam Airlines plane glittered in the early morning light, I looked down with distaste on the great sprawling city they claimed was the hub of South East Asia. Somewhere down there, something terrible had happened that would stay with me forever. You never get burgled when you’re in, it’s always when your guard is down. I kept thinking that if I’d been there I could have stopped it, could have at least taken a few of them down in an honest fight. The morgue, the market and face of Lucan Maybury wasting away in the humid walls were all burned on my sub-conscious.
Mum had cried when I told her I was staying on for another week, ‘… But what about the funeral?’ she’d asked, ‘surely you don’t want to miss that?’
I’d spoken to Skip’s Dad on the phone from Suvarnabhumi Airport. Again I promised him I’d find out what happened; it was a foolish pledge to make, magnanimous and blind. He said Skip was to be buried in two days time. The first available flight for me had been the next day, but by the time I’d get back to London and made the trip to Devon, it would be too late anyway, he’d be in the ground. As we left the city behind and I saw the corduroy of ploughed fields and gleam of the Gulf of Thailand I tried to believe I had the stomach for what might lie ahead.
I woke to a harsh rain pouring down at Noi Bai airport. It was the best sleep I’d had in the last week. As the plane taxied toward the terminal I could see the figures of soldiers in peaked caps and moss-green uniforms. I looked around for western faces but couldn’t see any. Outside, taxi drivers jostled for business, when they saw me coming they sauntered over, ‘Hey American, you want ride?’ Their faces were paler than the Thais and harder looking. And Jesus, it was cold.
‘I’m not American.’
The rain fell in swathes, by the time we got to the cab my clothes were soaked and I was shivering. We passed through shimmering paddy fields in the early morning light, the land flat as far as the eye could see. Figures in silk pyjamas and coolie hats were bent over planting rice seeds. In the distance I saw a water buffalo with a child on its back, guiding it with a stick, while a woman stretched her arms to the sky, rubbed her nose and smiled. So this was the land my father came to.
Forty minutes later we were by the outer city-limits. Withered crones crouched at roadside stirring noodles in black enamel pots, everywhere there seemed to be orange flowers for sale in blue and white china vases. There was something different in the air, not just the drop in temperature, more a sense of insectile industry and purpose; everyone seemed to be engaged in an act of motion, like thousands of worker ants embroiled in some hidden plan. And everywhere I looked I saw an army of bicycles heading toward us. I’d always wanted to come to Hanoi; maybe I’d missed its best days when the place was still relatively undiscovered, but I was almost glad to be here, grateful that I was finally acting upon my own initiative.
The cabbie dropped me by a place called Hoan Kiem Lake, bordered by wide boulevards. Deadfall of flame trees blew in tiny pirouettes across my feet as I sat by the water. Then a shoe-shine boy wi
th his kit and rag hanging from his pocket came to see if I wanted my trainers polished, his eyes black as buttons. I smoked a Salem and watched a young couple holding hands as they walked across a red-laquered bridge toward a temple in the middle of the lake. At the side of my bench an old man with a spidery beard was practicing Tai Chi, his stringy arms graceful as a heron. I decided I’d go to the old quarter, it was cheap and Lonely Planet said there would be plenty of places to stay.
‘Hey mister, you just arrived?’ A boy approached me with a bold smile, ‘You like buy a book, Graham Greene, Quiet American, Bao Ninh, Sorrow of War?’’
‘No that’s ok, I’ve already read them,’ I lied.
He scrunched his face up and winked, pretending to shoot me with an invisible gun. A red leaf from a flame tree blew across my face as a little man on a cyclo appeared. He was about fifty, had on a blue jumper and with his earnest face he reminded me of a Russian propaganda poster. I climbed on his bicycle taxi and we lurched into the chaos of cross-town traffic.
‘You like to go War Crimes Museum? Lenin Park?’ His breathing stuttered as we stopped, started and threaded our way into the old quarter.
‘No, just the old quarter please… What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Van Duong. ‘Van’ mean successful in Vietnam, but I not successful,’ he patted me on the back gently, puffing away at the pedals, ‘Not successful ever since war. I used to be a doctor but after Americans leave, Communists send me here. So now I drive cyclo rest of my life, no more medicine for me… I from Saigon originally!’ he chuckled.
The smell of onion and coriander wafted by as we stopped at a t-junction; withered brown faces on bikes with baskets of apricots, girls in white ao dais, glossy black hair tied in red ribbons, knapsacks bouncing on narrow shoulders. We rode on past a peeling pagoda crowned in dragons and maned lions; the merchants’ quarter. There were men bent over welding torches, the occasional flash of gas-blue flame through a doorway. On another street, masons were engraving funeral tablets.
I took a room in a tube house on a street with fading fronts and wooden shutters. When I tried to remember the route we’d taken my mind was a jumble. I took a shower and changed my clothes. I was here to see Gerald King and only that, so I might as well get started. After that I would go home and face the rest of my life.
As I caught another cyclo to the French quarter on the other side of the lake, the streets opened up and it seemed, as we emerged from the high, narrow streets, that I was leaving one city and entering a very different one. The French had been here since the 1870’s before the Vietnamese finally ejected them after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in ’54; the battle Dad fought in. The signature of their architecture lay all around in the broad streets and Parisian-style buildings; marble balconies, shuttered townhouses, ivy dripping down stucco facades - you can say what you like about the Frogs but they’ve got natural style we can only dream of.
I went for a coffee in the first Western-looking café I could find. While the waiter disappeared off to order me a club sandwich I tried to locate Gerald King in the restaurant’s phone book. It shouldn’t have been this easy; he obviously had nothing to hide, which made me think I’d probably been wasting my time. Among the Vietnamese names, it stuck out like a sore thumb: King.G/ Internet Café/Hang Bac.
A wave of excitement leapt through me. I called his number,
‘Chao ong?’ Said a woman’s voice.
‘Hello, is Gerald there, please?’
‘Who wants him?’ she asked roughly,
‘A friend of Lucan Maybury.’
The phone was passed following an exchange in what I took to be Vietnamese. ‘This is Gerald King at the Internet café, how can I help you?’ His voice was a little gruff.
‘Mr King, I’m Jacques Deschamp’s son and I’ve come to Hanoi to see you…’ No answer, so I continued, ‘Um, Lucan Maybury, I went to visit him in Bang Kwang, and he told me to look you up.’
I was out of breath. I thought he might put the phone down. He sounded like he’d had his breath stolen too. ‘Lucan huh?’ he said vaguely, then to my relief, ‘Yeah, sure be good to meet you, Alain, come on over. Hey, anyone else know you’re here, I mean, did you tell anyone you were coming to meet me?’
‘No, I’ve only been in Asia a few days.’
‘Hmm… one more question: where did your mum and dad live when you were a kid? Just the name of the town will be sufficient?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The name of the town please.’ He said tersely,
‘Richmond. Why do you ask Mr King?’
‘Great,’ He said, his voice switching to a more upbeat pitch. ‘Just checking, I’m not paranoid or anything but I know everyone’s out to get me.’ I think he’d told that joke before. I barely managed a smile.
‘Is there any time that’s convenient for me to pop over?’ I asked.
‘You free this afternoon?’
I said I was and he gave me the address.
Progress, I thought. The weak sun on my face, the air cool and honest, I sat down on the patio and had a cheese baguette. The bread smelt as if it’d been baked in a shop on the Left Bank. It felt better for doing something. It might turn out to be a dead lead, but Gerald was all I had left to go on. Over the street I could see the meringue-white pile of the Metropole Hotel; another grandiose hangover from the days of French Indochine. A leggy Asian girl cut the engine on her scooter and parked it up on the pavement before me. It was unusual to see an oriental over five seven and this girl must have been almost my height. She had a Nikon camera round her neck with a long zoom. It looked expensive. I noticed the sunlight on her deep black hair as it fell freely down her back, her wide hips, muscled breastbone and athletic shoulders.
Her skin was tanned, an olive colour peppered in freckles. She took a table in the shade at the back of the patio by the creeping ivy, and ordered a drink. The waiter winked and puckered his lips as he came past me. I couldn’t blame him; she was the loveliest looking woman I’d seen in a long time, and more than this, she possessed that rare thing these days – presence. She drank her beer from a tall, frosted glass, her fingers long and brown, the nails painted black. I pretended to read my only book, Papillon, and looked out toward the lake where the shoeshine boys were hawking passers-by. It’s not very often a woman makes me stop everything I’m doing but this girl had something, you had to look at her.
Maybe it was the almond-shaped eyes, or the fact they were blue. I watched her changing camera lenses, insouciantly flicking her hair as she did so. Her fingers worked dexterously as she handled the kit. As she crossed her naked legs I noticed a plaster on her ankle.
She looked up and caught me gawping and for a moment we were rabbits in headlights. She smiled through a pair of full lips, mouthed as if to say hi and looked away. I glanced awkwardly at my book, disgusted with myself for even thinking about things like that. Then to my disappointment, she got up and left, her drink half empty. Like I said, I was a walking hex.
A little after two pm I went to the Internet café run by Gerald King. The twisting form of a frangipani tree had lost its blossom beside the shopfront, a big man leant against it with a cigar in his mouth looking up at the sky and brushing thinning grey hair from his weathered face. When he saw me walking down the street, he narrowed his eyes and blew out a whorl of smoke as if he were looking at a ghost.
‘Alain? You have to be Alain Deschamps. Jesus, you gave me a shock, I thought it was your old man I was looking at for a moment!’ His accent was Deep South.
King extended a hand. Not a marine handshake at all, more like a damp fish folding about me. I grinned at him, I loved hearing people who knew my old man say I looked like him, for a brief moment it connected us together, almost giving me the sense he was still my father. I glanced to the cool interior of his café; some blonde Nordic types w
ere tapping away in the corner of the room, their faces lit by flat screens. ‘Thanks for seeing me. I should have called before I left Bangkok.’ As he let go of my hand I noticed one of his teeth capped in gold.
‘Hey don’t mention it, any friend of Jacque’s is a friend of mine, or Maybury for that matter… especially Jacques’ progeny. Tell me, Lucan, how is he?’ He said his face darkening as he ushered me inside. I wondered why he was uncomfortable with our being in the open street.
‘Well, I don’t know what he was like before he went in, but not so good, Mr King.’
King brushed his fringe back. ‘Ah Lucan. God bless him and make it pass quickly… better to die than serve a life sentence in that stinking hellhole. You know, sometimes I think it would be easier for him to just end it - he’ll never get a king’s pardon. Hey Cherry. Cherry? There’s someone I want you to meet!’
He called over his denim shoulder to a round, flat-faced woman operating the till. She looked at me and back to King with a wary glance then smiled politely. I got the impression there was some resistance to my being there.
‘Look at us standing around when you’ve come so far to meet us. Can I get you a beer, son?’ he said apologetically.
He drank Budweiser, I had a Dr Pepper with ice. Despite the cool in the air I noticed a patina of sweat across his forehead as if we were in a separate climate. ‘How long have you lived here, Mr King?’
‘Call me Gerald, please. Ah about ten years. After the war I moved around a bit, couldn’t get settled… it did that to you. So I went to Bangkok, pissed a few years away in the bars… went back to the Big Sleazy… but just couldn’t handle it. And then,’ he looked over at his wife going through some paperwork, ‘then I met Cherry and we came here to Hanoi.’
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