Read Online The Son by Marc Santailler - Free Book Online

evening.’
    â€˜Who’s your leader? Vo Khanh?’
    â€˜Yes. But he wasn’t at the farm, he had to stay at the restaurant.’
    â€˜Alright. What did you do up there?’
    â€˜I told you. We went for bushwalks. Had some discussions.
    About Vietnam, in the old days, and what the communists have done – all the people they’ve killed, or put in prison, like my grandfather.’
    â€˜Were many of you there?’
    â€˜Not many. About a dozen.’
    â€˜All Vietnamese?’
    He nodded again, unhappily. ‘Apart from me. But they seem to trust me.’
    â€˜Any firearms?’
    He looked uncomfortable.
    â€˜Come on Eric. I need to know. It’s just between you and me.’
    â€˜I fired a rifle a couple of times. Really, that’s all there was to it! Stop questioning me like this! There’s nothing wrong with what we did.’
    â€˜Maybe not. But there are laws against private armies in this country.’
    I relented. I could see I was pushing him to the limit, and I didn’t want to break whatever slender trust remained between us.
    â€˜Alright,’ I said. ‘Now I’ll tell you about your father. I would have told you anyway. But thanks for talking to me so frankly. I won’t tell your aunt. What has she told you about him?’
    â€˜Hardly anything,’ he said miserably. ‘I don’t even know his name. She says she can’t remember. I think his first name was David, I seem to remember my mother saying it when I was little, but I’m not even sure.’
    â€˜You’re right,’ I said. ‘His name was David. David Harper. He worked in the embassy, in Saigon. The Australian embassy. Did you know that?’
    â€˜I wondered, after you said you knew him.’
    â€˜I replaced him there when he was killed. He was a diplomat. A second secretary in the political section.’
    â€˜What’s that? Some kind of spy?’
    I smiled wrily. Out of the mouths of babes …
    â€˜No,’ I said reassuringly, with the ease of the practised liar. ‘That’s just a general name, for the part of an embassy that deals with official relations between the two countries.’
    â€˜How – how was he killed?’
    â€˜He’d gone down to the countryside, to the Mekong delta, on some embassy business. He came back late along a dangerous stretch of road and his car was shot up by the Viet Cong. It was just an accident of war.’
    I remembered Hao’s phrase.
    â€˜I was in Saigon when it happened,’ I went on. ‘Doing language study. I didn’t know him before I went to Vietnam, but we became good friends there.’
    â€˜What was he like?’ He wasn’t interested in my reminiscences.
    â€˜He was – how can I best describe him to you.’
    I had thought more about David in the past few days than in the previous ten years, but I still had to force my mind to remember him.
    â€˜He was two years older than me. Fair-haired, a bit taller, very handsome. Very popular with the girls too, as I remember. I didn’t know your mother so well. I know now he was planning to marry her before he left Saigon, but of course he was killed before that. What else. He got on well with Vietnamese, his house was always full of Vietnamese friends, and he gave some of the best parties in town. I remember that too. He was full of life, always getting into the thick of things, he hated standing still and doing nothing. He was intelligent, courageous, quick-witted–’
    I was gilding the lily a little. David had been all of those things, but he’d also been superficial at times, not always concerned with the effect he had on others, and a bit slapdash in his work too, as if he was too busy keeping up with life to have much time for detail. I guessed there’d been a few broken hearts in Saigon when he’d settled on Hien. But I wasn’t lying when I said I had liked him. There