Black Diamond - Martin Walker [94]
“I can’t say I remember, but I’ve read the history,” Bruno said.
“As you can imagine, the whole émigré community in Paris was obsessed with the war, and none more than Linh,” Bao Le said. “We were all Vietnamese patriots, but we despised the Saigon regime and hated the way the Americans fought the war. But we also detested the Communists in Hanoi. Except for Linh. She became committed to the Vietcong. She wasn’t a Communist, but she felt going back to the war was the only practical way to be a patriot.”
“She could have been right, looking back,” said Tran. “If I’d have been born then, I might have made the same decision.”
Bao Le looked at Tran thoughtfully. “Who knows?” he said. “History takes a long time to work out who was right and who was wrong. We make the best choices we can at the time. And she was very young.”
“When did she run away?” Bruno asked.
“In seventy-four, when she turned eighteen and was able to get a passport. She flew to Warsaw and then to Hanoi to volunteer for the war. The embassy in Paris had given her a visa. But when she arrived, they didn’t know what to do with her. She was a distant member of the royal family, half French and with French citizenship. They sent her to train as a nurse. We know from the handful of letters we received that she was with an army unit when they took Saigon the following year. And she was with the same unit when they were ordered into Laos and later into Cambodia. She was an outspoken critic of both those forgotten little wars, so she got into trouble and was sent to a reeducation camp.”
“A concentration camp, more like,” said Tran.
“It was a terrible place, but we, or rather our friends in Vietnam, managed to track down two people who had known her there. One was another woman, another prisoner, who told us that Linh had been raped by the guards and become pregnant and had the baby in the camp. The other, an army medic who was also a prisoner but worked in the hospital, said there was no baby, and he was sure he would have known. That’s all we have, except that Linh was released at the beginning of 1979 and sent back to the army and was killed later that year when the Chinese invaded in the border war.”
“A tragic story,” said Bruno. He didn’t know what else to say. “A nightmare for Hercule. And for you.”
“We don’t know if she had a baby, but they were all given new revolutionary names, with no indication of the mother, or the father, come to that. It was part of the way the Communists tried to abolish history. The records show that over twelve thousand babies were born in that camp, and we’ve been trying to trace them. But many of them have changed their names. I can’t say I blame them. If my name was ‘October Revolution’ or ‘Patriot Vengeance’ I’d change it too. But it’s the only plan we have, to trace as many as we can and check their DNA.”
“How many have you been able to test so far?” Bruno asked.
“Just over three hundred.”
“Perhaps the child would have had some of its grandfather’s genes,” Bruno offered. “It might stand out.”
“Can you imagine how many Vietnamese orphans of that period had American fathers? Tens of thousands of them look Western.”
Bruno slumped into a chair, thoroughly frustrated. “Is there anything we can do?”
“We just have to keep trying. We’re even advertising. You can put notices in the Vietnamese newspapers now, and they have whole sections of people searching for family members who got separated. There are information brokers, private investigators,” said Bao Le.
He looked at his watch and then at Bruno. “You said something about catching a train. I have a car and a driver outside. We’ll get you to the station.”
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Nicco,