The Point Team (4 page)

Katie hated loose ends, and began to clean house after the project. She called her cameraman and sound man to thank them for
the great job they had done on backup equipment after their best gear had been stolen, but Roger was already on assignment
in South Africa and Jake in France. She carefully alphabetized and filed all documents she had, in case the authenticity of
anything on the show was questioned later. These days a news reporter was
expected to verify what he or she said if it was challenged. Katie was patient and methodical. She came across a battered
photocopy of a typed letter.

Cher Eugénie,

My typping is godawful but you cant read my wriiting. Here in Okinawa on top secret meeting. Waste of time as usual I suppos.
Damn machine. I can spell better than it can. Hope to see you in a couple of weeks or so, dear wife. In the meantime be careful
of my son and heir (will it be a daughter? I wish I could run my fingers over your beautiful big tummy right now and feel
the baby kicking. If it’s a boy, we must call him Eric after my brother who drowned. I suppose you will want to give a girl
a French name like your own. Id prefer her to have a real Vietnamese name. Think of the arguments we will have….

Be careful, love.

Frank

“Lt. Frank Vanderhoven, U.S. Air Force,” Katie mumbled as she gazed at the top of the sheet of paper. “Vanderhoven … I wonder.”

She put in a call to the network’s library and in three minutes had a reply.

“Son of William V., shot down over Vietnam in late 1972, one of the last of the American flyers to be killed, had married
into a wealthy Saigon family, fate of wife and son unknown. Need anything else, dear?”

“Please. The address and private phone number of William Vanderhoven.”

Katie called the number she was given and was told curtly by a male voice that Mr. Vanderhoven did not give interviews to
the media.

“Then we’ll have to do a piece on his Amerasian grandson without giving him a chance to review it,” Katie threatened. “You
sure you want to take responsibility for that, Mr.—what’s your name?”

“Boggs. K. V. Boggs. I will review the matter with Mr. Vanderhoven and contact you directly.”

He hung up on her. She only smiled. She had slapped down the officious bastard. Old Vanderhoven would see her, she had no
doubt of it. Not even a crusty old billionaire was beyond the reach of national TV if they found a chink in his armor.

One of the newscast backroom staffers filled her in on old William’s bio. He was a real billionaire, who held the controlling
majority of shares in the family’s chemical and banking businesses. Known for his personal viciousness and lack of ethics
in his business dealings, he had just divorced his seventh wife. She was twenty-six, he eighty-four. One son had been drowned
in a boating accident at Princeton, and the other had been shot down over Vietnam. There were no known direct descendents
apart from a grandson who had been left behind in Vietnam at the fall of Saigon. The old man was known to have made no will
and to have energetically opposed anyone who presented himself as a possible successor in any of the family businesses. In
fact, the old man’s insistence on maintaining entire personal control caused a major drain of top executives who finally gave
up hope of ever getting due recognition and took their skills and knowledge to rival firms. She didn’t have a chance of talking
with him. More important people than she had tried and failed.

Her office phone rang. Her assistant had just varnished her nails, so Katie picked up the phone herself.

“K. V Boggs here. Mr. Vanderhoven has never heard of you or seen you on television, Ms. Nelson. I’m afraid I can’t say the
same for myself. I explained to him who you were. Will you be on the news this evening? You will? With what subject will you
deal?”

“Tobacco smoking in public places.”

“Oh dear,” Boggs said with mock sympathy, “I’m afraid that will be a touchy subject.”

The phone went dead.

Ten minutes later Boggs was on the line again. “Mr. Vanderhoven recognizes the freedom of the press and the media, I must
stress that, Ms. Nelson. However, in your commentary this evening, he would appreciate it if you mentioned the fact that cigar
smokers have civil rights, too.”

Katie laughed, “Sure.”

“It’s no laughing matter with Mr. Vanderhoven, I assure you,” Boggs’ voice primly answered her. “He will expect you for dinner
tonight. Please wear something suitable, Ms. Nelson. Will 8:15 sharp be suitable?”

“Sure.”

“Be punctual.”

The phone went dead again.

Perhaps old Vanderhoven had a heart of gold and needed a crud like K. V Boggs to protect him from the world. Somehow she doubted
that.

Katie decided not to change the blue dress she had worn for the newscast. The producer had given her flak for its neckline
being too low, but old Vanderhoven would probably enjoy a glimpse of her boobs. He was eighty-four, so she hadn’t much to
worry about.

Her taxi dropped her at the canopy of the Fifth Avenue apartment building north of the Metropolitan Museum. A uniformed man
opened her taxi door, and she paused a moment to listen to the breeze in the trees of Central Park across the avenue before
she swept through the glass doors held open for her by other uniformed doormen. Two more assisted her to the elevator as another
phoned upstairs about her arrival. The apartment door was opened by a severe-looking man in black tie.

“Mr. Boggs?” Katie said, and offered him her hand.

“Mr. Boggs has gone for the day, madam. I am Simmons. A servant.” He had not taken her hand.

A little flustered, Katie was shown into a huge dark-paneled room with Old Master oils and a crystal chandelier. A fierce-looking
old man with bulbous eyes and large
white mustaches stood before blazing logs in a huge stone fireplace.

He had a drink in his hand and nodded to a sideboard of bottles and glasses. “Help yourself, girl.”

Katie did. To a hefty Jack Daniels and two ice cubes.

“I met your grandson in Ho Chi Minh City.” Katie always believed in strong opening lines.

“A little Marxist, I suppose, singing hymns to Lenin?”

“Quite the opposite, Mr. Vanderhoven. He hates it there and wants to get out.”

“Every damn relative I have wants something. Sons die on me. Wives cheat and rob me.”

Katie smiled “You might be luckier with grandchildren. A new generation.”

The old man guffawed. “I liked what you said about cigars.”

Katie was a bit nonplussed about this sudden change of subject, as well as the fact she had stated her belief that cigar smokers
had no special rights in enclosed spaces with other people.

“I don’t smoke,” Vanderhoven added.

“I thought you smoked cigars,” she said.

“You were meant to.” He crossed the room and poured himself another drink. “Do you expect me to play Daddy Warbucks to this
Orphan Eric from Vietnam? I think you have me miscast in your script, young lady.”

His body was frail and his skin was wrinkled and discolored, but his movements were quick and his dark, piercing eyes were
those of a young man. His eyes!

“You have the same arrogant, contemptuous expression in your eyes as your grandson, Mr. Vanderhoven. I could have told you
were related by that appraising look you give a person.”

The old man seemed genuinely interested. “If that’s the case, the boy is a throwback. His father looked more like his mother.
My second boy also. Cold English eyes. I’m from Dutch farming stock on Staten Island—almost next to
the Vanderbilts. We were here when this was New Amsterdam!”

“I’ve never heard of the Dutch being known for burning, fierce eyes,” Katie said.

“Burning? Fierce? Woman, you are flattering me.”

“Only a little.”

“Tell me about this grandson of mine while we eat.”

She followed him into a dining room, where they sat at opposite ends of a long, narrow table with almost twenty feet of mahogany
between them. Katie sloshed down wines and swallowed leek soup, snails, veal, asparagus spears—let herself go. She noticed
that when she described Eric in a tear-jerking, sentimental way, the old man looked bored, and that when she called the youth
boastful and overbearing, the old man laughed and said the kid sounded like a Vanderhoven. She kept Eric’s theft of her video
and sound equipment for a grand finale. Vanderhoven admitted to being mightily impressed.

“You know, Katie, I’ll be damned if my collection of ex-wives are going to inherit my fortune. And they very well might if
I don’t make some provisions for it.”

“I would be more than willing to go back to Vietnam and locate the boy for you, Mr. Vanderhoven.”

“Very kind of you, Katie.”

“In exchange for exclusive TV rights on the story. We’d need that in writing in advance.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Katie decided not to overplay her hand and left soon after dinner.

As soon as she was out the door, the old man punched numbers on his phone. “Boggs? Who runs Vietnam these days? You don’t
know his name? Well, find out and get in touch with him.”

“M
ITCH
, you fool, you’ve messed it up again!” Eric Vanderhoven turned in anger on the other boy beneath the heat radiated from the
galvanized zinc roof of the bamboo hut in the compound of Les Pleiades. “Look, it’s completely out of focus. You couldn’t
see their faces because of the shadows on the last take you did. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Mitch stared at the TV screen attached to the videotape player and twisted his mouth miserably. “I tried my best.”

“Say ‘I done my best!’ You don’t even speak good English.” Eric gave him a push.

“I done my best,” Mitch said contritely.

“It ain’t good enough.”

Mitch and Red exchanged a glance behind Eric’s back. But they did no more than that. Even together they were no match for
Eric, and each knew he would be readily betrayed by the other for just a nod of approval from Eric. The fourth boy had chickened
out of the venture after Eric had received death threats over the videotape player. The smugglers had given them two days
to pay. Now they swore they would kill Eric for cheating them.

“When we’re finished with it, we’ll sell it and give all
the money to them without taking our cut,” Eric explained. “That will satisfy them. In the meantime we gotta be careful.’’

Things had not gone as smoothly or as quickly as they had thought. Even when they had filmed a sequence they were happy with,
bad lighting or a poor shooting angle often made it impossible for a viewer to figure out what was going on. They did not
have a videotape editing machine and would not have known what to do with it if they had. So Eric shot and reshot, bought
more blank videotapes on the black market, and picked up skills by trial and error. In spite of all their mistakes, they were
building up a documentary of life in Ho Chi Minh City which no Western journalist would ever be permitted to even become aware
of.

“Listen,” Eric would tell Red and Mitch, “we’re not doing this just to entertain people in America. One of us is in most of
these scenes. When the American public see how half-American, half-Viet kids have to live here—especially us three—they’ll
put pressure on Hanoi and we’ll be rescued.”

“How are we going to get these tapes to America?” Red asked.

“When we finish filming, we’ll sell off the equipment and watch the hotels for Western reporters. Katie Nelson might even
come back. I guess we owe them to her. Although I think she’s kind of dumb. What she wanted was pictures of cute kids in funny
straw hats planting rice with a big smile on their faces. You know, even in America they have dumb people—not just here. Anyway,
we can’t choose. Whoever we come across that we think we can depend on, we give him the tapes to get to America. We’ll worry
about that when the time comes. First, we gotta finish the tapes. Here, give me a hand putting this stuff away.”

They lifted sections out of the earth floor of the hut. A few inches of earth covered a framework of wooden slats
which covered a shallow hole excavated in the floor. They packed the videotape player and TV set in plastic bags and covered
them. The camera and sound equipment were in another hole. Red unplugged the long cable that carried electricity from an outdoor
outlet of the big house to the hut, wound it carefully, and stowed it in another hole.

Eric asked Red, “Are the others still working in the garden?”

Red nodded.

“You explain to each one of them what happens if they breathe a word about any of this?”

Red drew his finger across his throat. He was not smiling.

Mitch asked, “You still want to film something about the way we live in these huts?”

“Of course,” Eric said. “Americans will be upset by that. They’ve never heard of people living in huts. They all have big
houses with huge plate glass windows.”

“What about the way they treat black people?” Mitch asked. “Hanging them in trees and not letting them live with whites.”

“Do you believe that crap Hanoi puts out?” Eric asked incredulously. “That’s propaganda. Everyone in America can do what he
likes. He has a big car. A big house. Lots of dollars. If we three were in America, we would all have Cadillacs.”

“I’d prefer a jeep,” Red said.

“If that’s what you wanted,” Eric assured him.

“You mean we’re thirteen years old and we could drive our own cars?” Mitch asked a little doubtfully. He suspected that Eric
at times exaggerated a little when he was talking about America, but Eric talked with such authority that Mitch never quite
had the courage to voice his doubts.

“In America you get your driver’s license at twelve,” Eric told him.

“Twelve!” Red repeated in awe. “Over there I could have been driving for a year by now!”

“Sure,” Eric said. “You could pick up your telephone and call one of your girl friends and take her to a drive-in movie tonight
with a case of beer in your Cadillac or jeep.”

Mitch and Red looked at him, silenced and overawed by the possibilities of their lives in America. As Eric had explained,
all they needed to do was complete these videotapes…