The Nomination Page 12

  “ALL RIGHT, MAC Cassidy, my new trusted friend. You left a few hours ago, and I have had my third nap of the day, and now I am sitting here in my wheelchair with your tape recorder for company. I shall try to tell you what you think we must have for our story. As you will soon understand, much of this is painful for me to recall and to make public. However, I am not ashamed. My life is what it is, and it is time to tell it, although I cannot imagine that anybody truly cares. I do hope you make some money from this. I am telling it for other reasons.

  “I have asked Jill to bring me here into my sunporch and then to leave me alone. I think if she were nearby I would feel inhibited. I know I would feel inhibited if you were here. This is better. I sense your presence, and it is comforting. You are a dear, sad man, and now I can tell you that had I not felt good karma when you visited me today, when we met for the first time, when I touched your hand and looked into your eyes, I had planned to call Ted and tell him that I had changed my mind, that I had decided not to do this. But your karma is good. So let us begin.

  “It is very pretty here right now. Spring is the best time of year, don’t you think? The afternoon sun is shining on the hillside. A few minutes ago, two deer walked through my garden. “All right. I am wasting your tape. It is hard to begin, so I am babbling. I am taking a deep breath, dear Mac Cassidy. All right.

  “Although I am a citizen of France, I was not, as I have allowed the public to believe, born in Paris.

  “My mother was a peasant, a native of Annam, which was a province of what was then called French Indochina—Vietnam, of course, as it has always been properly called. She lived in a village northwest of Saigon. That village no longer exists. I do not know what its name was. You would never have found it on a map even when it did exist.

  “When the Japanese occupied Indochina, my mother, then a young girl of no more than five or six, fled her village with her family. They made their way to Saigon where she was put to work in a factory run by the Japanese. When the war ended and the French occupation returned, my mother was taken into the home of a French diplomat as a maid. There she learned how to speak French, and she learned manners, and she acquired ambition and a taste for luxury. She remained with that family for many years as a maid and the French diplomat’s mistress, for that was how it worked if a young woman wanted to keep her job, and inevitably she became pregnant. When her condition became obvious, the diplomat’s wife banished my mother from their house.

  “She returned to her village pregnant and poor and alone and unhappy. I was born there. I have never known the year, never mind the date, of my birth. Sometime around 1960, as well as I can figure. My name was Li An. I didn’t become Simone Bonet for many years. That part of my story comes later.

  “My early childhood memories are few and confused. I mainly remember being hungry and ill. I remember heat and rain and biting insects, and in my head I carry pictures of enormous oxen and skinny yapping dogs and flooded rice fields. I have no memory of being held or rocked or sung to by my mother. She died when I was quite young. I see her face still. It is the face of a tragic old woman. Her hair was long and dull and tangled, her eyes large and dark and frightened, and her skin was pale and gray and stretched tightly over the bones of her face. As well as I can figure, she was not much past thirty when she died.

  “Am I boring you, Mac? I hope not. In my mind, I see you smiling at me, encouraging me to go on, pretending you are fascinated. Well, this is my story. I cannot tell you a better one. I shall continue.

  “After my mother died, I lived with relatives. Cousins and aunts. I remember very few young men in our village. Most of the boys went to battle before they became men. My country was always at war. There were the French, of course. Also the Vietminh, the nationalists of Ho Chi Minh. The people of my village had no politics, did not understand or care about politics. We had no leisure for politics. Everybody worked hard to grow enough food to eat.

  “My cousins told me stories about my mother, and I assume they were true, how she had returned from Saigon to the village in disgrace, how she had been refused comfort by our local Catholic priest, how I had been born with her disgrace in my blood. It was from my cousins that I pieced together my mother’s story. I wish I remembered her better. I wish I could find love for her in my heart. But I did not truly know her. I have no sense that she loved me. She is a phantom to me.

  “Oh, Mac. I was a peasant girl, half French. My people hated the French. They oppressed and exploited us. Life was hard for everyone. For me, it was especially hard. I do not tell you this for your sympathy. But perhaps it helps to explain me and who I became. I was an orphan and a bastard child and an outcast. The older women in the village were not unkind to me. But I was an extra mouth to feed. I was always ill. I could not work like the other children, and I needed care.

  “Whether it was from kindness or from the desire to get rid of me I do not know, but one of the women, whose brother had found work in the city, managed to tell lies and get me enrolled in a Catholic school in Saigon. I cannot tell you the year. I suppose I might have been eight or nine. I lived with many other girls. We slept on straw pallets in a large hot room.

  “I worked in the kitchen where, for the first time in my life, I had enough food to eat. I especially remember the bread, that overpowering aroma in the very early morning when it was baking in the big stone ovens. And the soup, with bits of chicken or fish in it, and the oatmeal and the milk and the eggs. It was wonderful. It was the first time in my life I did not feel hungry all the time, although I remained a very skinny child.

  “I was taught by French nuns. I remember them being kind and patient. I believed they were saints in their great black gowns. I learned to read and write, first in French, then in English. I learned some music and geography and arithmetic. And religion, of course.

  “It was, in a way, a good time for me. But I was not a happy child. The other children mocked me because I looked different from them. I was a mixture of European and Vietnamese, and I imagined that the nuns did not approve of me, blamed me for my mother’s sins, although they were always kind.

  “All of this is the truth as well as I can remember it. It is difficult for me to recall and painful for me to recount. It reminds me of those childhood feelings, the burden of shame that I could never escape, my fears, my illnesses, the emptiness where my mother should have been. The lack of love, the resentment I always felt from her. It was—it has always been—a hole in my soul. I hated her.

  “There, Mac. I have said it. I have never spoken of my hatred for my mother before. I never acknowledged it. But there it is. Telling you this story has enabled me to confess that to you. For me it is a revelation. For your book, I suppose it is not important. But, yes. I hated my mother. I still hate her for giving me birth and then for abandoning me. It is irrational, I know. But there it is.

  “I am suddenly tired, dear Mac. I suppose it is my disease. Or perhaps it is because I find telling you this painful and difficult. I will try to continue my story for you later. Now I must nap again.”

  A HALF HOUR after he’d tried to call Katie, his cell phone rang.

  He glanced at the screen. It was his own home number.

  He pressed the button and said, “Honey? That you?”

  “Hi, Daddy. I’m sorry. I was in the bathroom when you called and I didn’t hear it ring and I didn’t notice the light blinking ’til just now, and . . .”

  “It’s okay, kiddo.” Mac chuckled as he felt a wave of relief wash over him. Katie was okay. For now, anyway. “You’re entitled to go to the bathroom, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I know how you worry,” she said.

  “I don’t worry,” he lied.

  “Yeah, you do,” she said, “Anyways, I made some chicken cacciatore when I got home. I hope that’s okay?”

  From one of Jane’s old recipes, no doubt, Mac thought.

  “It sounds great,” he said. “We’ll do the pizza thing another time.”

  �
�Drive carefully,” said Katie.

  “I always do.”

  “Seatbelt buckled?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be talking on the phone and driving, so I’m going to hang up now. Love you. Bye.”

  “Bye, honey,” he said. “I love you, too.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Jessie spent two days getting everything ready.

  Deciding what to bring had been a challenge. She figured she’d never be back to her apartment, so what she left behind would be gone forever. She didn’t want to clean out the place. She guessed that sooner or later Howie Cohen would send some other assassin to sit in a car across the street, and after a few days, he’d break in to see what he could learn. She wanted him to see the apartment of someone who’d gone on vacation and would be back.

  Fortunately, Jessie Church was not a sentimental person. That’s why she was good at undercover work. Possessions were replaceable. So were friends. If you didn’t get too close to people, you could walk away from them.

  She left behind all of her books, all of her framed photographs, all of her paintings, and all but a dozen of her favorite CDs, which would keep her company on the road. She left most of her clothes hanging in her closet. She left her television and her audio system. She left her file cabinet the way it was, packed with old receipts and statements and tax forms, all in the name of Carol Ann Chang. Nothing there would suggest where she had gone.

  She ended up bringing only the clothes that she could stuff into her backpack. She packed her Sig Sauer 9mm Parabellum and her little backup gun, a Colt Mustang .380, along with her cameras and her laptop computer and a few boxes of cartridges, everything carefully wrapped and cushioned, in her small duffel. The Sig was on top where she could reach it if she needed it.

  She was leaving behind thousands of dollars worth of stuff. Nothing that couldn’t be replaced. No regrets. It was just stuff.

  She went to the post office and filled out a form instructing them to hold her mail. She’d pick it up when she got back, she wasn’t sure exactly when, she said. She chatted up the woman behind the counter, telling her that she hadn’t had a vacation in a long time, that she planned to drive down the coast, visit some friends in San Luis Obispo, spend some time in L.A., maybe continue on down to Coronado, she wasn’t sure. She was playing it by ear, she said, no schedule, no deadline, just getting away from it all for a while, and the woman had chuckled and said she sure wished she could do that.

  Howie Cohen was no dummy. You had to be pretty smart to keep an international child sex operation going for nearly twenty years, the way he had, and even though it was Jessie who had taken him down, she had no illusions. He’d made an uncharacteristic mistake, underestimated her, let his guard down with her, trusted her, and it had cost him twenty-five to life. It was an aberration, and she knew he’d never let it happen again.

  She didn’t like what she’d had to do to get the goods on him. But she didn’t regret it.

  So she knew he’d assume that she had killed the first assassin he’d sent, and he wouldn’t necessarily believe the evidence and the stories she was leaving behind about taking a vacation. He’d quickly guess that she was on the run, and he’d probably assume that the last direction she’d be headed would be south. Howie Cohen understood misdirection as well as Jessie did.

  That left north, east and west. It was a big country, a big world, and Jessie intended to lose herself in it.

  First Jessie Church had become Carol Ann Chang. Now she was entering her second personal witness protection program.

  JESSIE WALKED OUT her front door after supper on Thursday with her backpack over one shoulder and her duffel strap over the other. She strolled down 24th Street to where she’d left her car. She stopped on the sidewalk and talked with a few people she knew, smiling happily, yes, she was off on a little vacation, heading south, following the coast, no big plans, mainly just get away, relax, pamper herself.

  She drove with the carry-on-sized duffel on the passenger seat where she could reach into it if she needed to get her hand on the Sig nine and still keep her eyes on the road. She headed northeast, and a little less than four hours later she parked her car against some bushes on the shadowed side of the lot and paid cash for a room for one night in a cheap motel on the outskirts of Reno. She was wearing her sunglasses and her Oakland A’s cap, and she kept her face averted from the surveillance camera. When she registered, she signed her name S. Stone, left the phone and address lines blank, and made up the numbers on her car registration.

  The clerk, a skinny bald man about seventy years old, was absorbed in a Law & Order rerun on the little television on his counter. He didn’t even glance at the form. He took her money and gave her a key and mumbled, “It’s around back. Just leave the key on the dresser when you leave.”

  In her room, she took off all her clothes, went into the bathroom, and cut her hair short. She hacked up the hunks of hair into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. Then she applied Clairol blonde coloring according to the directions on the box, including her eyebrows.

  An hour later, when she looked at herself in the mirror, a different Jessie Church looked back. From now on she wouldn’t wear her A’s cap. Anyone who noticed her would remember the short-haired blonde.

  “HELLO, MAC. IT is evening here. It has been a warm sunny day, and I am sitting out on my deck with a blanket over my lap. I’m sipping a mug of tea, and the sun is just sinking behind the western hills. It is very peaceful, and the air smells sweet. Soon it will become chilly and Jill will wheel me inside.

  “Your tape recorder is sitting on the table beside me, winding around silently. I have been screwing up my courage all day. I am trying to confront my past. I know our book means so much to you. But I think I already regret ever agreeing to do it. Now I do it for you. You and Ted Austin. I hope our book will make you rich.

  “I have been telling you about my boring childhood. I cannot imagine that you will include any of this in your book, but you encouraged me to just ramble, and I know that is what I am doing.

  “I left the nuns’ school in Saigon when the American soldiers began to arrive. I simply walked away one afternoon. And I never returned. Things had changed at the school. Food became scarce. The nuns were all afraid of what was happening in our country. I was no longer happy there. I was just a skinny girl, eleven or twelve years old, I think. I had tiny little breasts and no womanly curves. But I was taller than the Vietnamese girls, and my skin was fairer, thanks to my French father, and I suppose I would have been considered attractive.

  “Mac, I was an absolute virgin when I left the school. No one had ever touched me. I had never even touched myself. I had looked at the other girls. I wondered if they experienced the strange feelings that haunted me. The only men I knew were priests, and they were not fully men. I was very naïve. The nuns sometimes spoke to us of sin. But I did not understand what they were saying, because they did not speak plainly and I had no experience, no source of knowledge.

  “A woman in the city—Mai Duc was her name—found me on the streets. She brought me to her house and fed me and offered to let me stay with her. She was, of course, a madame, and her house a bordello, although I did not understand that. She was kind to me, and I instantly loved her.

  “Mai Duc taught me about my body and about men’s bodies. She was gentle and patient. She gave me much pleasure, and when she felt it was time, she arranged for a man to take my virginity. He was an American, and wealthy, I’m sure. I later learned that men paid Mai Duc a lot of money to be with very young girls, especially those who were still virgins. I recall that this man had white hair and wore sweet-smelling cologne, but I have no other memory of him.

  “I had no particular feelings about any of this. I don’t remember much about it. I was doing what I needed to do to survive. I would do anything Mai Duc wanted me to do. I had no morals about it, no personal feelings. I had no sense that I was doing anything wrong. If Mai Du
c wanted me to do it, then that was the right thing.

  “After that first man I began to work for Mai Duc. I used what she had taught me, and the men paid her. She bought me clothes and gave me a place to sleep and food to eat, and I was comfortable and happy. She showed me beauty tricks and sex tricks, and she showed me how to use condoms and how to be clean, and I felt no shame.

  “Mai Duc took the place of a mother for me. She loved me and cared for me and I happily obeyed her. I knew she was using me to make money for herself, but that did not seem in any way incompatible with the love I felt she gave me. In Vietnam, the children always worked for the family. Mai Duc was my family. She taught me to be proud to be Vietnamese.

  “There were many Americans in Saigon at that time, and every week there seemed to be more of them. They were gentle, innocent men—boys, really—and when they were drunk, as they often were, they were generous and undemanding. It felt good, being honest and businesslike. There was no lying, no shame for me. You are probably disgusted with me, Mac, but those were perhaps the happiest years of my life.

  “I know that must sound strange to you. I was a prostitute. It seemed to be my calling. But, yes, it was a good time for me. The American men were mostly homesick and lonely and frightened. And young. They were not all that much older than me. I believe my youth was attractive to them. They were so young and inexperienced. They liked the fact that I spoke English, that we could converse. They liked to tell me about the girls they knew back home. I think they saw me as innocent, like the girls they idealized from their childhood. I gave them comfort. It fulfilled me. Their pleasure was my pleasure.

  “Those American boys—now I cannot remember a single one of them as an individual. But when I was with one of them, he was all I thought about. And when he left me, soon there was another, and then another. They all became one for me, one collective boy for me to love and comfort.

  “Mac, I should feel ashamed, I know. But I don’t. This is my life. Will these memories be good for your book, this confession of mine?