The Beauty of Humanity Movement (33 page)

“What happened to your father in the end?” H
ng asks.

“The Fall of Saigon,” she says.

So the man escaped the North only to be killed later in the South.

“Was he much older than your mother?” H
ng asks.

“Eighteen years.”

There had been twenty-one years between him and Lan. Was it a matter of just three less? Could they have had a daughter like the lovely young woman sitting in this room with him right now? Might something between them have lived?

T
has just dropped off his new German clients at the Metropole two hours earlier than scheduled. He doesn’t know whether it was the couple or the driver he was forced to work with since Ph
ng called in sick to work this morning, but the day has lacked any particular joy. The couple seemed unimpressed with his list of famous German composers. “Ich glaub, mich laust der Affe,” they said, which T
thought must be the German equivalent of
really
, except with more words.

T
finds himself at the bar where he and Ph
ng have a beer at happy hour on days like this when tourists have had their fill and just want to leave the dirt of Hanoi behind in their hotel pool. Sometimes, if Ph
ng has some thinking to do, you can find him here alone. But happy hour isn’t particularly happy for T
without Ph
ng. In fact, everyone in the place looks rather bored and unhappy, and T
feels like a very big loser until he is relieved by the ring of his cellphone.

He answers it loudly. But who is this speaking? It is some lady called Miss Maggie Lý who speaks Vietnamese with a strange accent. She says she’s calling from the Sofitel Metropole. Have the Germans complained about him to the hotel management?

“It’s about your Mr. H
ng,” she says.

Oh no, thinks T
, is the old man in some kind of trouble? Has he shamed himself on hotel grounds?