The Chinaman (11 page)

Pham was washing bean sprouts in the kitchen sink and he grunted a greeting as Nguyen walked by. Pham had agreed to buy the restaurant and had already paid Nguyen in cash. The bank had agreed to transfer the mortgage on the property to him and after a long but good-hearted argument over the value of the kitchen equipment and the food in the fridges Nguyen had agreed to accept thirty thousand pounds. Nguyen didn't ask where Pham had got the money from, but he had relatives in Manchester who had probably helped out. He was planning to switch to Vietnamese cooking, though Nguyen doubted that it would be a success, so far away from the West End. He and his wife had decided when they first moved to London that they were more likely to make money if they kept to a Chinese menu, even though they personally found the cuisine bland and boring. Still, it was up to Pham now. Nguyen had promised to be out by the end of the week but he knew that Pham was keen for him to go as soon as possible so that he could move into the flat upstairs.

After putting the rest of his purchases away in the garage, Nguyen sat at his table and crossed off the list everything he'd already bought. There were three items left: two kinds of acid and glycerine. He knew how to make the acid he needed from other quite innocuous and easily available materials. It was messy, but possible, but there was no need because this was England not Vietnam and here there were firms where you could buy chemicals, no questions asked. He took a well-thumbed copy of Yellow Pages and looked up Chemical Manufacturers and Suppliers. After three calls he had found one firm who would supply him with concentrated acids (for etchings, he'd said) and he arranged to collect a gallon of glycerine from another firm. Nguyen thought it prudent not to buy all three from the same supplier.

Fisher stopped the car and switched off the engine and the lights, allowing the darkness to envelop them like a shroud. He and O'Reilly waited until their eyes became used to the blackness, listening to the clicking noises from the engine as it cooled. They were parked at the end of a lonely lane not far from Bexley station, half and hour's drive south-east of central London. Both men were dressed in dark pullovers, jeans and black shoes, outfits that wouldn't stick out at night but which didn't obviously mark them out as burglars. If they were unlucky enough to come across the police then they'd just pretend they were a couple of queers looking for a bit of privacy. That had been Fisher's idea, and O'Reilly hadn't been exactly bowled over by it.

‘Look, I promise not to kiss you,' Fisher had joked.

O'Reilly had laughed nervously.

‘Not on the mouth, anyway . . .' O'Reilly had winced and Fisher knew he'd hit a nerve so he let the joke drop. He mentally filed O'Reilly's over-reaction for future reference, a possible weak point. Fisher did that with everybody he came into contact with, memorising their strengths and weaknesses and the buttons that had to be pressed to get the desired responses.

‘Are you right?' he asked O'Reilly.

O'Reilly nodded. They got out of the car and Fisher led the way, climbing silently over a stone wall and walking across the dew-laden grass. O'Reilly's foot knocked against something hard that crunched and rolled, and then he heard a rustling noise behind him, something small scamppering through the grass and making snuffling sounds. Hedgehogs, he realised. There were dozens of them, rolling into tight, spiked balls whenever they sensed the two men.

They reached another wall, this one taller than the first, and they had to scramble over. It surrounded a graveyard, close-clipped grass and gravelled paths, the gravestones a mixture of old stone crosses, chipped and weather-worn, and new, clean-cut marble. To their left was a grey stone church with a steeple. In the distance a vixen barked, and her call sparked off a cacophony of howls from dogs in the nearby housing estate. The two men dropped down into a crouch, their backs against the wall, while Fisher got his bearings.

He pointed towards a white concrete angel with spreading wings. ‘This way,' he said, and took O'Reilly along the grass verge, past the angel and between two waist-high tombs, the sort vampires might lie in to sleep away the daylight hours, safe from sunlight. They walked through the drooping branches of a willow and then Fisher headed over to five tombstones lined up in front of the boundary wall like a stud poker hand. He kicked the one in the centre.

‘There it is,' he said. ‘Help me get it up.'

They knelt down together, scraping away the soil to slip their hands underneath the stone and then they pushed it up, grunting with the strain until it came off the ground with a wet, slurping sound. They stood the stone upright and then leant it against the wall. The smell of damp, stale earth filled O'Reilly's nostrils and made him want to gag. Fisher scraped away the soil like a dog looking for a bone. Less than a foot down his fingers touched plastic and he pulled up a polythene-covered parcel which he handed to O'Reilly. There were two other bundles, one of which was obviously a rifle, but Fisher ignored them. All they needed this time was Semtex. They unwrapped the parcel and took out half the packages of explosive, six in all. They took three apiece, rewrapped the rest and put them back in the shallow hole before pushing the damp soil back and replacing the gravestone. They checked the surroundings to make sure that they were still alone in the graveyard, and then they left as silently as they'd arrived.

Nguyen drove his Renault van down the alley behind the shop, the early morning sun glinting off the bonnet. He'd already opened the two wooden gates that led to the shop's back yard where they usually unpacked deliveries and transferred the food into the freezers in the garage. He parked the van and switched off the engine. He had put on a pair of old overalls after he'd bathed that morning, and he pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. The van was white, three years old and mechanically sound. It had always been parked outside because the garage was used for storage, so it was rusting a little, and it had taken a few knocks from other cars. The name of the restaurant and the telephone number had been drawn in black paint on both sides. Nguyen had painted each letter himself, slowly and carefully, it had taken him hours, but it was the work of minutes to spray over them with a can of white spray paint. He sprayed the paint thinly so that it wouldn't run and he waited thirty minutes before giving it a second coat, and then a third to make sure that the lettering was completely covered.

While the third coat dried he transferred the tool box, bottles and bags from the garage, methodically crossing the contents off the list in his exercise-book so that he was sure he hadn't forgotten anything. It was all there, the acids, the bags of fertilizer, the bottles of antifreeze and cans of oil. He'd forgotten nothing. When he'd finished he used a screwdriver to prise the lid off the can of black paint and, resting a brand new artist's brush against a piece of garden cane, painted on a new set of letters and numbers. As he worked he suddenly felt as if he was being watched and he turned and looked at the upstairs window. A curtain twitched. It could have been Pham wondering what he was up to, or it could have been the wind. Nguyen stared up at the window but saw nothing so he returned to the painting.

When the final letter was in place he stood back and admired his handiwork. It was good. Almost as good as before, even though it had taken him about half as long. ‘Green Landscape Gardeners' it said, along with a London telephone number he'd taken from the Yellow Pages. The white paintwork around the lettering looked whiter than the rest of the van, but driving through the city streets would soon fix that up. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and he whirled around, but this time the curtains weren't moving and there was still no one there.

He went into the house through the back door and up the stairs. His suitcase was already packed. He picked it up and was on the way to the door when he had a sudden urge to kneel and pray before the shrine. He got down on his knees and used his Zippo to light a stick of incense. He closed his eyes and breathed in the perfume and tried to empty his mind, to steel himself for the trials to come.

The incense filled his lungs. It was the same rich scent that always reminded him of his parents' farm, the room where he'd been born so many years ago. When was it? Could it really have been so long ago? Could it really have been 1943? Where had the years gone, how had they slipped by so easily? He could still picture every inch of the small family farm, close to the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.

Nguyen shuddered and opened his eyes. They were moist and he wiped them with the back of his hand. It was time to go.

He carried the bag downstairs, not bothering to say goodbye to Pham. He put the case in the back of the van, locked the doors and drove the van out of the yard. He headed north, towards Stranraer in Scotland and the ferry to Northern Ireland. Before he left London he stopped at a garden centre and loaded up the van with bags of peat and more fertilizer, a selection of bedding plants, and a spade and a fork.

It was a long, tiring drive to Stranraer, but Nguyen knew there was no real alternative. He needed the equipment and supplies in the van, so flying was out of the question. He had thought he'd be able to take a ferry from Liverpool direct to Belfast, but he'd discovered that the route had been cancelled some months earlier. The only car ferries now operating seemed to be from Stranraer to Larne in County Antrim, north of Belfast, or from Holyhead in Anglesey across to Dun Laoghaire, near Dublin in the South. Either route would mean hours behind the wheel, but he had reservations about driving through Southern Ireland and across the border. Better, he thought, to go direct to Northern Ireland and not worry about Customs or passports. He drove through the night and slept in the van during the morning before catching the ferry.

When he arrived at Larne he saw two men in a Ford Granada being taken to one side and their car searched by four men in bottle-green uniforms while a Labrador retriever sniffed around and wagged its tail, but he wasn't even given a second look. He knew why, it was nothing more than racism working in his favour. He was Oriental and the fighting in Ireland was between Caucasians.

He drove the van from the ferry terminal south to Belfast city centre. It was late evening and he had to find somewhere to stay. He stopped at a filling station and filled up with petrol and then bought a street map. He asked the teenage girl if she knew where there were any guest-houses but he couldn't understand her when she replied. He asked again and this time she spoke more slowly, as if he were a child, but the accent was so strange he couldn't follow what she was saying. He smiled and paid for the petrol and the map and left, none the wiser. He was starting to realise that he was, after all, in a different country.

There were other reminders. The police wore green uniforms and drove around in heavily fortified blue-grey Land-Rovers with metal screens protecting the sides. And there were soldiers everywhere wearing camouflage uniforms and helmets and carrying automatic rifles at the ready, barrels aimed at the ground. The army used green Land-Rovers, open at the top so that the men in the back were exposed but able to react quickly. It made good sense, Nguyen thought.

He drove by what he thought was a prison until he saw a sign that said it was a police station. He was so surprised that he stopped to look at it. He had never in his life seen such a thing, not even in Saigon. Thick metal mesh fences surrounded the building which had what appeared to be a gun turret on one corner. The top of the fence was a tangle of barbed wire and all the windows were firmly shuttered. It was a fortress. He had been considering asking a policeman to suggest a place to stay, but from the look of it the police in Northern Ireland were not geared up for handling general enquiries from the public. They were in a state of siege.

There were posts at each corner of the building, and on the top were surveillance cameras covering all the approaches.

There was a metallic rap against the passenger window of the van and Nguyen jumped. An unsmiling face under a peaked cap glared at him. He knocked on the door again with the barrel of his handgun. Nguyen leant over and wound down the window.

‘Can I be of help to you, sir?' the policeman asked. Another officer appeared on the driver's side of the van. In the rear-view mirror he saw two more.

Nguyen smiled and waved the map at them. ‘I need somewhere to stay tonight. Do you know anywhere?'

The officer was already relaxing. He slid his gun back into his holster.

‘Give me the map,' he said. Nguyen switched on the small reading light and the policeman jabbed a finger in the bottom left-hand corner. ‘See this road here, Wellington Park?'

Nguyen nodded.

‘There are a few places there, quite cheap.' He handed the map back to Nguyen. ‘You'd best be on your way. And in future don't hang around in front of police stations in a van. We're a touch sensitive about that sort of thing. Understand?'

‘I am sorry,' said Nguyen. ‘Thank you for your help.'

The policemen grouped together and watched him go, four stout figures in dark-green bullet-proof jackets.

Nguyen followed the map until he reached Wellington Park. He drove slowly down the road, looking left and right. He soon saw a guest-house but it had a sign in the window saying ‘No Vacancies'. Further down the road there was another house with a sign saying ‘Vacancies' and Nguyen stopped the van in front of it.

It was dark now and the van appeared yellow under the streetlights. Nguyen pressed the doorbell and waited. The front door was wooden with two vertical strips of dimpled, frosted glass. Through the glass he saw a light come on and a figure ripple towards him. The door opened to reveal an overweight elderly woman with close-cropped grey hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. She was wearing a blue and white diamond-patterned dress and a plain white apron and was drying her hands on a red tea-towel.