The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

paddies as long and as hard as before – for as little return. There were more rules and regulations. Enterprise and initiative were frowned upon. What little education existed had been replaced by re-education and indoctrination. The new religion was the atheist state but, as the French had failed to establish Catholicism, so the communists could not exorcize the Buddha, or the dozens of other schisms and sects. The history and essence of the East lay too deeply in the hearts of the people.

Here, as elsewhere in the world, racism and bigotry had always existed. But now it had the blessing of the state. As the Asians in Africa and Europe, and the Jews in Europe and America, are the object of jealousy and hatred, so the ethnic Chinese in south-east Asia are envied and despised – for their flair in commerce and trade, their stubborn refusal to discard an ancient heritage many generations removed. Now, under the communist authorities in Vietnam, hatred of the Chinese had been institutionalized. The Chinese community was harassed and persecuted. They were blamed for the country’s economic ills, driven from their businesses and their homes. Four years after the war had ended, fear still stalked many streets.

Tran Van Heng was one such ethnic Chinese, driven in late middle age to the very edge of despair. It was from this man that McCue hoped to receive help.

The American squatted just beneath the cover of the rush matting, fear fluttering in his belly like butterflies caught in a net. He had exchanged his ragged black pyjamas for a pair of neatly pressed dark trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt. He had shaved, and his face felt strangely naked. Serey and Ny had returned with the clothes from a market in town shortly before dark. Now they sat in the cabin behind him, boiling up rice over a small stove. But he wasn’t hungry.

They had arrived at Long Xuyen in the late afternoon and berthed near the harbour among dozens of other sampans upon which hundreds of Vietnamese ate and slept, lived and died in a floating ghetto. Their presence there was unremarkable, and went virtually unnoticed. During the last hours of daylight, McCue had stayed out of sight, sitting with Elliot in the rear half of the cabin, waiting, hoping, for Serey and Ny to return.

Lights from the gently bobbing flotilla were reflected now on the dark waters. The smell of cooking rose like hope above the stink of human waste. The murmur of voices and the tinny scratch of transistor radios drifted gently through the night. From the direction of the harbour, the persistent twang of Vietnamese pop music blared from some waterside café. McCue felt a hand touch his arm. He turned to find Ny crouched beside him.

‘When you go?’

‘When I finish this cigarette.’ It was the third he had smoked since he’d made himself the promise.

‘You scared?’

He nodded. ‘Sure am.’ He glanced beyond the sleeping figure of Hau in the bottom of the boat to where Serey was dishing out bowls of rice. Her face bore a serenity, as if she knew that after everything she had been through nothing could harm her now. ‘I wish I was brave like your Mamma.’

Ny smiled. ‘You brave, too. You eat later.’

‘Sure. Later.’ He threw his cigarette into the dark and heard its brief hiss as it hit the water. The last thing he felt, before he clambered across several boats to the wooden landing stage, was the gentle squeeze of her hand on his arm. He carried the touch with him like a lover’s last kiss, not knowing when, or if, he might feel it again.

He felt acutely vulnerable. Unarmed and alone, a strange face in a land where his countrymen had suffered a humiliating defeat. Curious eyes fell upon him as he walked through the lit area of the harbour, then flickered away in feigned indifference. Curiosity was not encouraged by the authorities. Cafés and some shops were still open, their yellow lights burning harshly in the dark. He hurried away from the lights of the harbour, seeking the dim anonymity of the backstreets.

It was nearly ten years since he had last been here, and yet little seemed to have changed. The crumbling French colonial homes with their peeling shutters and broken balconies; the jumble of market stalls and cavernous dark shops; the rusted iron gates and dilapidated signs painted with extravagant Chinese characters; all remained much as memory had preserved them. The narrow streets of broken pavings and pitted tarmac, the evil smells that rose from cracks in the sidewalk. All appeared to have ignored the passage of time. He passed the terrace of a café where three men in his unit had been blown apart when a bomb planted by a shoeshine boy had exploded. It was in darkness now, closed for the day. And although its windows had long since been replaced and its terrace patched, the walls still bore the scars of the explosion.

In the main square the Catholic cathedral still stood, a poignant reminder of another age. In the streets off it, the homeless still slept in doorways and huddled against walls. Sullen-faced boys, and clusters of pasty-faced teenage girls clutching babies, called to him, jostling him as he went by, arms outstretched, begging for alms. A straggling rank of idle trishaw drivers grew suddenly animated, squabbling and fighting among themselves for his business. He shook his head and pushed quickly through, not wishing to attract attention. But suddenly he stopped, reigniting hope of a fare, and the drivers clustered around. Two uniformed and armed policemen stood under a light at the far end of the street. They had seen him, and were looking his way. With no streets off, he could not avoid them without turning back. In his alarm he turned to the nearest of the trishaw drivers. ‘You speak English?’

‘Yes, yes, speak English,’ he said eagerly. ‘You Russian?’

He hesitated. ‘Yes. Can you take me to Chinatown?’

‘Sure.