‘You Americans seem to think it was a victory for us. Not true. It was devised in Hanoi, wrongly attributed to General Giap, who was in fact impotent under Le Duan. It was imposed
on the Vietcong as a direct order. It destroyed us. That was the intent. Forty thousand of our best cadres died in suicide missions. Among them were all the natural leaders of the South. With them gone, Hanoi ruled supreme. After Tet, the North Vietnamese Army took control, just in time for the victory. I was one of the last survivors of the southern nationalists. I wanted a free and reunited country; yes, but also with cultural freedom, a private sector, farm-owning farmers. That turned out to be a mistake.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, after the final conquest of the South in 1975 the real pogroms started. The Chinese. Two million were stripped of everything they possessed; either forced into slave labour or expelled, the Boat People. I objected and said so. Then the camps started, for dissident Vietnamese. Two hundred thousand are now in camps, mainly southerners. At the end of 1975, the Cong Ang, the secret police, came for me. I had written one too many letters of objection, saying that for me, everything I had fought for was being betrayed. They didn’t like that.’
‘What did you get?’
‘Three years, the standard sentence for “re-education”. After that, three years of daily surveillance. I was sent to a camp in Hatay province, about sixty kilometres from Hanoi. They always send you miles from your home; it deters escape.’
‘But you made it?’
‘My wife made it. She really is a nurse, as well as being a forger. And I really was a schoolmaster in the few years of peace. We met in the camp. She was in the clinic. I had developed abscesses on both legs. We talked. We fell in love. Imagine, at our age. She smuggled me out of there; she had some gold trinkets, hidden, not confiscated. These bought a ticket on a freighter. So now you know.’
‘And you think I might believe you?’ asked Dexter.
‘You speak our language. Were you there?’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Did you fight?’
‘I did.’
‘Then I say as one soldier to another: you should know defeat when you see it. You are looking at complete and utter defeat. So, shall we go?’
‘Where had you in mind?’
‘Back to the Immigration people of course. You will have to report us.’
Cal Dexter finished his coffee and rose. Major Nguyen Van Tran tried to rise also but Dexter pressed him back into his seat.
‘Two things, major. The war is over. It happened far away and long ago. Try to enjoy the rest of your life.’
The Vietnamese was like one in a state of shock. He nodded dumbly. Dexter turned and walked away.
As he went down the steps to the street, something was troubling him. Something about the Vietcong officer, his face, the expression of frozen astonishment.
At the end of the street passers-by turned to look at the young lawyer who threw back his head and laughed at the madness of Fate. Absently he rubbed his left hand where the one-time enemy’s hot nut oil in the tunnel had scalded him.
It was 21 November 1978.
CHAPTER TEN
The Geek
By 1985 Cal Dexter had left Honeyman Fleischer, but not for a job that would lead to that fine house at Westchester. He joined the office of the Public Defender, becoming what is called in New York a Legal Aid Lawyer. It was not glamorous and it was not lucrative, but it gave him something he could not have achieved in corporate or tax law, and he knew it. It was called job satisfaction.
Angela had taken it well, better than he had hoped. In fact, she did not really mind. The Marozzi family were close as grapes on the vine and they were Bronx people through and through. Amanda Jane was in a school she liked, surrounded by her friends. A bigger and better job and a move upmarket were not required.
The new job meant working an impossible amount of hours in a day and representing those who had slipped through a hole in the mesh of the American Dream. It meant defending in court those who could not begin to afford legal representation on their own account.
For Cal Dexter poor and inarticulate did not necessarily mean guilty. He never failed to get a buzz when some dazed and grateful ‘client’ who, whatever else his inadequacies, had not done what he was charged with walked free. It was a hot summer night in 1988 when he met Washington Lee.
The island of Manhattan alone handles over 110,000 crime cases a year and that excludes civil suits. The court system appears permanently on the verge of overload and a circuit blow-out, but somehow seems to survive. In those years part of the reason was the 24-hours-a-day conveyor belt system of court hearings that ran endlessly through the great granite block at 100 Center Street.
Like a good vaudeville show the Criminal Courts Building could boast ‘We never close’. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that ‘all life is here’ but certainly the lower parts of Manhattan life showed up.