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-bloodbath, 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 café 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 draughtsmanship 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 lycée 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.’
‘You were still single?’
‘No, I had married my first wife. We had three children.’
‘They are still there?’
‘No, all dead.’
‘Disease?’
‘B fifty-twos.’
‘Go on.’
‘Then the first Americans came. Under Kennedy. Supposedly as advisors. But to us, the Diem regime had simply become another puppet government like the ones imposed under the Japanese and the French. So again, half my country was occupied by foreigners. I went back to the jungle to fight.’
‘When?’
‘Nineteen sixty-three.’
‘Ten more years?’
‘Ten more years. By the time it was over, I was forty-two and I had spent half my life living like an animal, subject to hunger, disease, fear and the constant threat of death.’
‘But after 1972, you should have been triumphant,’ remarked Dexter. The Vietnamese shook his head.
‘You do not understand what happened after Ho died in 1968. The party and the government fell into different hands. Many of us were still fighting for a country we hoped and expected would have some tolerance in it. The ones who took over from Ho had no such intention. Patriot after patriot was arrested and executed. Those in charge were Le Duan and Le Duc Tho. They had none of the inner strength of Ho, which could tolerate a humane approach. They had to destroy to dominate. The power of the secret police was massively increased. You remember the Tet Offensive?’
‘Too damn well.’
‘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.
That night in July 1988 Dexter was working the night shift as an on-call attorney who could be allocated a client on the say-so of an over-busy judge. It was 2 a.m. and he was trying to slip away when a voice summoned him back to Court AR2A. He sighed; one did not argue with Judge Hasselblad.
He approached the bench to join an Assistant District Attorney already standing there clutching a file.
‘You’re tired, Mr Dexter.’
‘I guess we all are, your honour.’
‘No dispute, but there is one more case I’d like you to take on. Not tomorrow, now. Take the file. This young man seems to be in serious trouble.’
‘Your wish is my command, judge.’
Hasselblad’s face widened in a grin.
‘I just love deference,’ he rejoined.
Dexter took the file from the ADA and they left the court together. The file cover read: ‘People of the State of New York versus Washington Lee’.
‘Where is he?’ asked Dexter.
‘Right here in a holding cell,’ said the ADA.
As he had thought from the mugshot staring at him from the file, his client was a skinny kid with the air of bewildered hopelessness worn by the uneducated who are sucked in, chewed up and spat out by any judicial system in the world. He seemed more bewildered than smart.
The accused was eighteen years old, a denizen of that charm-free district known as Bedford Stuyvesant, a part of Brooklyn that is virtually a black ghetto. That alone aroused Dexter’s interest. Why was he being charged in Manhattan? He presumed the kid had crossed the river and stolen a car or mugged someone with a wallet worth stealing.
But no, the charge was bank fraud. So, passing a forged cheque, attempting to use a stolen credit card, even the old trick of simultaneous withdrawals at the opposite ends of the counter from a dummy account? No.
The charge was odd, unspecific. The District Attorney had laid a ‘bareboned’ charge alleging fraud in excess of $10,000. The victim was the East River Bank, headquarters in midtown Manhattan, which explained why the charge was being pursued on the island, not in Brooklyn. The fraud had been detected by the bank security staff and the bank wished to pursue with maximum vigour according to corporate policy.
Dexter smiled encouragingly, introduced himself, sat down and offered cigarettes. He did not smoke but 99 per cent of his clients dragged happily on the white sticks. Washington Lee shook his head.
‘They’re bad for your health, man.’
Dexter was tempted to say that seven years in the state pen was not going to do great things for it either, but forbore. Mr Lee, he noted, was not just homely, he was downright ugly. So how had he charmed a bank into handing over so much money? The way he looked, shuffled, slumped, he would hardly have been allowed across the Italian marble lobby of the prestigious East River Bank.
Calvin Dexter needed more time than was available to give the case file full and proper attention. The immediate concern was to get through the formality of the arraignment and see if there was even a remote possibility of bail. He doubted it.
An hour later Dexter and the ADA were back in court. Washington Lee, looking completely bewildered, was duly arraigned.
‘Are we ready to proceed
?’ asked Judge Hasselblad.
‘May it please the court, I have to ask for a continuance,’ said Dexter.
‘Approach,’ ordered the judge. When the two lawyers stood beneath the bench he asked: ‘You have a problem, Mr Dexter?’
‘This is a more complex case than at first appears, your honour. This is not hubcaps. The charge refers to over ten thousand dollars, embezzled from a blue-chip bank. I need more study time.’
The judge glanced at the ADA who shrugged, meaning no objection.
‘This day week,’ said the judge.
‘I’d like to ask for bail,’ said Dexter.
‘Opposed, your honour,’ said the ADA.
‘I’m setting the bail at the sum named in the charge, ten thousand dollars,’ said Judge Hasselblad.
It was out of the question and they all knew it. Washington Lee did not have ten dollars, and no bail bondsman was likely to want to know. It was back to a cell. As they left the court, Dexter asked the ADA for a favour.
‘Be a sport, keep him in the Tombs, not the Island.’
‘Sure, not a problem. Try and grab some sleep, huh?’
There are two short-spell remand prisons used by the Manhattan court system. The Tombs may sound like something underground but it is in fact a high-rise remand centre right next to the court buildings and far more convenient for defence lawyers visiting their clients than Riker’s Island, way up the East River. Despite the ADA’s advice for a bit of sleep, the file probably precluded that. If he was to confer with Washington Lee the next morning he had some reading to do.
To the trained eye the wad of papers told the story of the detection and arrest of Washington Lee. The fraud had been detected internally and traced to Lee. The bank’s Head of Security, one Dan Witkowski, was a former detective with the NYPD and he had prevailed on some of his former colleagues to go over to Brooklyn and arrest Washington Lee.