Avenger (11 page)

Honeyman Fleischer prided itself on its impeccable liberal credentials, avoided Republicans, and to prove its lively social conscience, fielded a pro bono department to undertake legal representation for no reward for the poor and vulnerable.

That said, the senior partners saw no need to exaggerate and kept their pro bono team to a few of their lowest-paid newcomers. That autumn of 1978, Cal Dexter was as lowly in the legal pecking order at Honeyman Fleischer as one could get.

Dexter did not complain. He needed the money, he cherished the job, and covering the down-and-outs gave him a hugely wide spectrum of experience, rather than the narrow confines of one single speciality. He could defend on charges of petty crime, negligence claims and a variety of other disputes that eventually came to a court of appeal.

It was that winter that a secretary popped her head round the door of his cubby-hole office and waved a file at him.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Immigration appeal," she said. "Roger says he can't handle it."

The head of the tiny pro bono department chose the cream, if ever any cream appeared, for himself. Immigration matters were definitely the skimmed milk.

Dexter sighed and buried himself in the details of the new file. The hearing was the next day.

It was 20 November 1978.

Chapter NINE

The Refugee

THERE WAS A CHARITY IN NEW YORK IN THOSE YEARS CALLED Refugee Watch. "Concerned citizens' was how it would have described its members; 'do-gooders' was the less admiring description.

Its self-appointed task was to keep a weather eye open for examples of the flotsam and jetsam of the human race who, washed up on the shores of the USA, wished to take literally the words written on the base of the Statue of Liberty and stay.

Most often, these were forlorn, bereft people, refugees from a hundred climes, usually with a most fragmentary grasp of the English language and who had spent their last savings in the struggle to survive.

Their immediate antagonist was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the formidable INS, whose collective philosophy appeared to be that 99.9 per cent of applicants were frauds and mountebanks who should be sent back whence they came, or at any rate somewhere else.

The file tossed onto Cal Dexter's desk that early winter of 1978 concerned a couple fleeing from Cambodia, Mr. and Mrs. Horn Moung.

In a lengthy statement by Mr. Moung who seemed to speak for them both, translated from the French which was the French-educated Cambodian's language of choice, his story emerged.

Since 1975, a fact already well known in the USA and later to become better known through the film The Killing Fields, Cambodia had been in the grip of a mad and genocidal tyrant called Pol Pot and his fanatical army the Khmer Rouge.

Pot had some hare-brained dream of returning his country to a sort of agrarian Stone Age. Fulfilment of his vision involved a pathological hatred of the people of the cities and anyone with any education. These were for extermination.

Mr. Moung claimed he had been headmaster of a leading lycee or high school in the capital, Phnom Penh, and his wife a staff nurse at a private clinic. Both fitted firmly into the Khmer Rouge category for execution.

When things became impossible, they went underground, moving from safe house to safe house among friends and fellow professionals, until the latter had all been arrested and taken away.

Mr. Moung claimed he would never have been able to reach the Vietnamese or Thai borders because in the countryside, infested with Khmer Rouge and informers, he would not have been able to pass for a peasant. Nevertheless, he had been able to bribe a truck driver to smuggle them out of Phnom Penh and across to the port of Kampong Son. With his last remaining savings, he persuaded the captain of a South Korean freighter to take them out of the hell that his homeland had become.

He did not care or know where the Inchon Star was headed. It turned out to be New York harbour, with a cargo of teak. On arrival, he had not sought to evade the authorities but had reported immediately and asked permission to stay.

Dexter spent the night before the hearing hunched over the kitchen table while his wife and daughter slept a few feet away through the wall. The hearing was his first appeal of any kind, and he wanted to give the refugee his best shot. After the statement, he turned to the response of the INS. It had been pretty harsh.

The local Almighty in any US city is the District Director, and his office is the first hurdle. The Director's colleague in charge of the file had rejected the request for asylum on the strange grounds that the Moungs should have applied to the local US Embassy or Consulate and waited in line, according to American tradition.

Dexter felt this was not too much of a problem; all US staff had fled the Cambodian capital years earlier when the Khmer Rouge stormed in.

The refusal at the first level had put the Moungs into deportation procedure. That was when Refugee Watch heard of their case and took up the cudgels.

According to procedure, a couple refused entry by the District Director's Office at the Exclusion Hearing could appeal to the next level up, an Administrative Hearing in front of an Asylum Hearing Officer.

Dexter noted that at the Exclusion Hearing, the INS's second ground for refusal had been that the Moungs did not qualify under the five necessary grounds for proving persecution: race, nationality, religion, political beliefs and/or social class. He felt he could now show that as a fervent anti-Communist and he certainly intended to advise Mr. Moung to become one immediately and as head teacher, he qualified on the last two grounds at least.

His task at the hearing on the morrow would be to plead with the Hearing Officer for a relief known as Withholding of Deportation, under Section 243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

In tiny print at the bottom of one of the papers was a note from someone at Refugee Watch that the Asylum Hearing Officer would be a certain Norman Ross. What he learned was interesting.

Dexter showed up at the INS building at 26 Federal Plaza over an hour before the hearing to meet his clients. He was not a big man himself, but the Moungs were smaller, and Mrs. Moung was like a tiny doll. She gazed at the world through lenses that seemed to have been cut from the bottoms of shot glass tumblers. His papers told him they were forty-eight and forty-five respectively.

Mr. Moung seemed calm and resigned. Because Cal Dexter spoke no French, Refugee Watch had provided a lady interpreter.

Dexter spent the preparation hour going over the original statement, but there was nothing to add or subtract.

The case would be heard not in a real court, but in a large office with imported chairs for the occasion. Five minutes before the hearing, they were shown in.

As he surmised, the representative of the District Director re-presented the arguments used at the Exclusion Hearing to refuse the asylum application. There was nothing to add or subtract. Behind his desk, Mr. Ross followed the arguments already before him in the file, then raised an eyebrow at the novice sent down by Honeyman Fleischer.

Behind him, Cal Dexter heard Mr. Moung mutter to his wife, "We must hope this young man can succeed, or we will be sent back to die." But he spoke in his own native language.

Dexter dealt with the DD's first point: there has been no US diplomatic or consular representation in Phnom Penh since the start of the killing fields. The nearest would have been in Bangkok, Thailand, an impossible target that the Moungs could never have realized. He noted a hint of a smile at the corner of Ross's mouth as the man from the INS went pink.

His main task was to show that faced with the lethal fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge any proven anti-Communist like his client would have been destined on capture to torture and death. Even the fact of being a head teacher with a college degree would have guaranteed execution.

What he had learned in the night was that Norman Ross had not always been Ross. His father had arrived around the turn of the century as Samuel Rosen, from a shtetl in modern Poland, fleeing the pogroms of the Tsar, then being carried out by the Cossacks.

"It is very easy, sir, to reject those who come with nothing, seeking not much but the chance of life. It is very easy to say no and walk away. It costs nothing to decree that these two Orientals have no place here and should go back to arrest, torture and the execution wall.

"But I ask you, supposing our fathers had done that, and their fathers before them, how many, back in the homeland-turned-blood bath, would have said: "I went to the land of the free, I asked for a chance of life, but they shut their doors and sent me back to die." How many, Mr. Ross? A million? Nearer ten. I ask you, not on a point of law, not as a triumph for clever lawyer semantics, but as a victory for what Shakespeare called the quality of mercy, to decree that in this huge country of ours there is room for one couple who have lost everything but life and ask only for a chance."

Norman Ross eyed him speculatively for several minutes. Then he tapped his pencil down on his desk like a gavel and pronounced.

"Deportation withheld. Next case."

The lady from Refugee Watch excitedly told the Moungs in French what had happened. She and her organization could handle procedures from that point. There would be administration. But no more need for advocacy. The Moungs could now remain in the United States under the protection of the government, and eventually a work permit, asylum and, in due course, naturalization would come through.

Dexter smiled at her and said she could go. Then he turned to Mr. Moung and said: "Now, let us go to the cafeteria and you can tell me who you really are and what you are doing here."

He spoke in Mr. Moung's native language. Vietnamese.

At a corner table in the basement cafe Dexter examined the Cambodian passports and ID documents.

"These have already been examined by some of the best experts in the West, and pronounced genuine. How did you get them?"

The refugee glanced at his tiny wife.

"She made them. She is of the Nghi."

There is a clan in Vietnam called Nghi, which for centuries supplied most of the scholars of the Hue region. Their particular skill, passed down the generations, was for exceptional calligraphy. They created court documents for their emperors.

With the coming of the modern age, and especially when the war against the French began in 1945, their absolute dedication to patience, detail and stunning draftsmanship meant the Nghi could transmute to some of the finest forgers in the world.

The tiny woman with the bottle-glasses had ruined her eyesight because for the duration of the Vietnam war, she had crouched in an underground workshop creating passes and identifications so perfect that Vietcong agents had passed effortlessly through every South Vietnamese city at will and had never been caught.

Cal Dexter handed the passports back.

"Like I said upstairs, who are you really, and why are you here?"

The wife quietly began to cry and her husband slid his hand over hers.

"My name," he said, 'is Nguyen Van Tran. I am here because after three years in a concentration camp in Vietnam, I escaped. That part at least is true."

"So why pretend to be Cambodian? America has accepted many South Vietnamese who fought with us in that war."

"Because I was a major in the Vietcong."

Dexter nodded slowly.

"That could be a problem," he admitted. "Tell me. Everything."

"I was born in 1930, in the deep south, up against the Cambodian border. That is why I have a smattering of Khmer. My family was never communist, but my father was a dedicated nationalist. He wanted to see our country free of the colonial domination of the French. He raised me the same way."

"I don't have a problem with that. Why turn communist?"

"That is my problem. That is why I have been in a camp. I didn't. I pretended to."

"Go on."

"As a boy before World War II, I was raised under the French lycee system, even as I longed to become old enough to join the struggle for independence. In 1942 the Japanese came, expelling the French even though Vichy France was technically on their side. So we fought the Japanese.

"Leading in that struggle were the communists under Ho Chi Minh. They were more efficient, more skilled, more ruthless than the nationalists. Many changed sides, but my father did not. When the Japanese departed in defeat in 1945, Ho Chi Minh was a national hero. I was fifteen, already part of the struggle. Then the French came back.

"Then came nine more years of war. Ho Chi Minh and the communist Vietminh resistance movement simply absorbed all other movements. Anyone who resisted was liquidated. I was in that war too. I was one of those human ants who carried the parts of the artillery to the mountain peaks around Dien Bien Phu where the French were crushed in 1954. Then came the Geneva Accords, and also a new disaster. My country was divided. North and South."

"You went back to war?"

"Not immediately. There was a short window of peace. We waited for the referendum that was part of the Accords. When it was denied, because the Diem dynasty ruling the South knew they would lose it, we went back to war. The choice was the disgusting Diems and their corruption in the South or Ho and General Giap in the North. I had fought under Giap; I hero-worshipped him. I chose the communists."