Avenger

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 to torture and death. Even the fact of being a head teacher with a college degree would have guaranteed execution.

What he had learned during 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 laid 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 organisation could handle procedures from that point on. 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, naturalisation, 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 cafŽ, 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 through 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 stu

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 lycŽe 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-worshiped 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?"

"B52s."

"Go on."

"Then the first Americans came. Under Ke

"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 Doan and Le Duc Tho. They had none of the i

"Yes."

"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 De Doan. 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."