The Claimant Read online

  Your son and I arrived in Da Nang late spring ’69. We were both only in country two months. Our squad was ambushed on a Search and Destroy. I actually felt your son fall against my body a few seconds before I was hit. His fall knocked me over. I was never sure if I was covered with his blood or mine. I don’t remember much after that except I was taken out in a MEDEVAC chopper (or so I was told; I have no memory whatsoever about this). I guess your son wasn’t flown out because the wounded always had priority over the dead.

  When I came to in the military hospital in Saigon, I was told your son did not make it. I know our squad, what was left of it, went back for the bodies two days later, but the bodies were gone. No one knew for certain if they were POW or dead, but we all assumed they were dead.

  I was in and out of Walter Reed for years (broken legs, rehab, etc.), but what I wanted to tell you is that on one of my Walter Reed stints I met this guy who’d also been in Da Nang in spring ’69. He’d also been shot up on a Search and Destroy (not the same one as ours). He was delirious for he doesn’t know how long, but when he came to, he was in a fishing village being tended by South Vietnamese who were on our side. There were two others, one American, one Australian, all of them too shot up to walk. They never knew if they were kept by the village for insurance or out of the goodness of their hearts. It used to be a VC village but the VC abandoned it, and whenever the VC came through again, the whole village hid in the old VC underground tunnels and carried their wounded with them. They blocked off the entrances and the VC must have forgotten where the tunnels were or believed they’d collapsed.

  My ward mate in Walter Reed said the other American called himself McVie. (I think your son may have actually believed he’d become McVie and was determined that McVie would survive.) My ward mate said they spent so much time underground that they learned to see in the dark. For a long time, not one of the three could walk – they had seven broken legs and arms between them and they all had broken ribs – but the villagers carried them around on bamboo stretchers. Carried lots of their own folk, too.

  This guy said he thinks they were there for at least two years, maybe three, maybe more. Hard to keep track, he said, but he remembers three rainy seasons, the tunnels flooded, mostly spending time underground, mostly delirious, mostly not expecting to live, always hungry, never anything but fish and kelp and maybe some rice to eat, but the Vietnamese kept making them drink their own potions and damned if he hadn’t come to believe their medicines were better than ours. They got so they could get around on bamboo crutches although they all looked like skeletons, he said.

  He said it was the children that kept them human. He said he misses the children. He knew at least two of them were his own. He’d made a vow that when he got out of Walter Reed, he was going to go back to help the children.

  Their minders knew the end was close and they knew they weren’t on any VC honor rolls, so one night the whole village, children and injured vets and all, took off in their own fishing boats. Thought they could get to the Philippines, no moon, no flotation devices, typhoon season. All the boats went down in the South China Sea, but anyone who managed to cling to wreckage long enough was picked up by a passing Australian ship – the HMAS Sydney, he thinks.

  This guy in Walter Reed got flown back to L.A. from Manila in July ’73. He showed me a lock of hair from his Vietnamese woman that he’d kept in a silver pillbox on a chain round his neck. His woman drowned. His two little sons drowned too. He didn’t have any pictures. He didn’t know what happened to the other two vets, but he thinks he remembers seeing them on the ship. He thinks maybe they were taken from Manila to Saigon, to the embassy, or maybe they went on to Australia.

  I regret to tell you this guy died in Fall ’73. He used to have nightmares and rave at nights, like most of us in the ward, so I can’t swear how reliable he was. But there’s stuff he couldn’t have made up, so I wanted to let you know that your son might not have died in Vietnam, that he might have left there in a fishing boat, but after that who knows what might have happened? He may have drowned or he may still be alive, and if he didn’t return home there’s a chance he’s living in Australia and doesn’t remember who he is. One of the doctors in Walter Reed told me that hypothermia from near drowning always causes amnesia. It can be temporary or permanent, depending on how long the survivor is in the water and how cold the water is. The survivors were pulled out of tropical waters, a hopeful sign.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ben Wheeler

  3rd Infantry, 2nd Battalion, Charlie Company

  The Vanderbilt lawyers tracked down the writer of this letter and found him working as a UPS driver in Decatur, Georgia. He could give no further information than he had already given in his letter. He remembered that the man who died in Walter Reed was Lee Jackson from Memphis, Tennessee. Lee Jackson’s family was located. They shared his stories of deprivation, his gratitude to the village, the lock of hair from his Vietnamese lover, but they could provide no further information on McVie or the wounded Australian, to both of whom, they said, their son constantly talked in his nightmares.

  The lawyers diligently searched Australian naval records and found that the HMAS Sydney had made its final trip back from Vietnam in early 1972, whereas medical records showed that Lee Jackson did not reach Manila until much later that year, so his memory of which ship had picked him up was clearly faulty. All naval records of ships leaving Manila in 1973 were checked. None had refugees or non-Australians on board when they reached Sydney. The lawyers did find a record of a cargo ship that had left Manila in May ’73 and had docked in Darwin in June before proceeding on to Perth. They could find no detailed disembarkation records in Darwin, Darwin being the Big Easy of the Top End of Australia. All equatorial cities are alike, the research team explained to the lawyers, who explained it in turn to la comtesse before presenting all this evidence to the court. The bureaucracies of equatorial cities, they explained, live life on the Slow Easy and do not take for granted that efficiency is a virtue, nor can they see any compelling reason for doing today what one might just as well put off until tomorrow or next week or next year. They do not consider record-keeping a high priority.

  In Perth, the lawyers (or, rather, the legal team to which the American lawyers had subcontracted the search in Australia) did find detailed records. The team checked out every name on the list of those who had disembarked from the cargo ship that had sailed from Manila. They tracked down and interviewed every last one. Not one had been shipwrecked in the South China Sea. Not one had even been in Vietnam.

  The investigative team did pick up anecdotal evidence in Darwin that a handful of men had skipped ship in that city and had probably hitchhiked south by cattle-transporting road trains, possibly to Alice Springs and on to Adelaide, possibly to Cairns or to Brisbane, or so the guessing and betting went in Darwin bars. None of those who had failed to return to the ship had been reported as missing because Darwin was not the kind of place where informing on anyone for any reason short of homicide was considered honourable or acceptable behaviour.

  The Darwin pub tales, however, caught the attention of the lawyers for both sides of the Vanderbilt affair. It was not until the countess was sued by the family that a legal defence team extended its inquiries and spared no expense in the search. Paid bounty hunters, by following every capillary creek of every tributary rumour, by following stock routes, by visiting every cattle station from Katherine to Alice Springs, from Channel Country to the Darling Downs, located a possible candidate on a small cattle station in the valley of the North Pine River in the rural district of Dayboro, north-west of Brisbane, capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia.

  The possible heir – in response to what was described much later, in the court of investigative journalistic persistence, as entrapment and trickery – agreed to be interviewed on camera. This interview became the claimant’s proxy appearance in court. He spoke to judge, jury, reporters and packed public gallery from a huge video
screen set up by the lawyers for la comtesse, or so it was assumed at the time, though in hindsight the client on whose behalf those lawyers were so diligently working became ever more obscure.

  The video begins with an aerial view of the lush coast of southern Queensland. The lens hovers above the Pacific, the white-sand beaches, the rich coastal lowlands, the range of mountains which hugs the coast, the rivers that rise in those mountains. The camera pans in towards rich pasture inside an ox-bow loop of river. The slopes of the Great Dividing Range loom close, jagged and dense with rainforest. The sky is cloudless and of a blue so intense (though so normal in Queensland) that the Manhattan jury assumes a tinted lens must surely have been employed. The lens slowly zooms in towards clusters of grazing cattle and then descends like a plane coming in to a runway, closer, closer, to reveal a low one-storey house with wide verandas on all four sides. The house, shaded by eucalypts, is made of champagne-coloured sandstone. Helidon sandstone, a voiceover explains. The same gorgeous pale honey-coloured stone from which the University of Queensland is built. This is Christopher Farm.

  The posts and decking of the screened veranda are made of rainforest hardwoods (silky oak, black wattle, mango), polished, gleaming and dark. There is a rainwater tank of corrugated and galvanised metal on high wooden stilts and wood platform, close to one side of the house. Cattle graze on rich pasture. Two Australian cattle dogs, one bluish in colour, one red, are in boisterous combat or play. There are two horses inside a split-rail fence. The lens zooms next towards one of the horses, towards the figure of a man who now appears in close-up, a man casually leaning against his horse, the reins loose in his hands. This man is wearing frayed and faded jeans, an open-necked denim shirt, an Akubra hat. He is good-looking, tanned, fit, with a lazy, genial smile. He gives the impression of someone who would come off well in anything from a wrestling match to a cross-country run to a triathlon.

  He could be an actor, he could be the Marlboro Man, except for the slightly awkward jut of one leg, which might be a prosthetic carefully disguised by the denim jeans or might simply be a leg once broken and never properly set and healed. There is a large welt of a scar that runs like the knuckles of low hills from below his open-necked shirt and covers the left side of his neck, stopping just short of his left ear.

  This is the man whom the press consistently and inaccurately labels the claimant.

  In the video, a voice from off-camera asks: What is your name?

  ‘My name is Christy McLew,’ the man says with a nasal Irish-Australian drawl.

  What is your occupation?

  ‘I’m a cattleman and a butcher,’ Christy McLew replies. He gestures to indicate the land between the range of hills and the loop of the river. ‘I’m the owner of Christopher Farm, which you see around you.’ He laughs and one has the sense that he may be laughing at the cameraman or at his interrogator or perhaps at an audience whom he assumes to be watching somewhere out there, who knows where? He may be mocking his viewers. ‘But I’m not a cattleman in the usual Aussie sense.’

  He waits, and the off-camera voice obliges by asking: What do you mean by the usual Australian sense?

  ‘I mean individual cattle stations bigger than the state of Texas. I’m not one of those. My herd is so small I’m a joke. My station runs to forty hectares.’

  How does that translate into acres? asks the off-camera voice (which speaks with an American accent).

  ‘Acres? Oh … I’d have to work that out. Let me see … um, about a hundred acres, I think. Which is a joke. When we meet in the Dayboro pub, my neighbours call me a nutter, but they tolerate me. They’re great blokes. They think I’m wacko because of the permaculture thing.’

  What do you mean by ‘the permaculture thing’?

  ‘Natural farming. I let nature grow her own pasture. My cattle are grass-fed. I don’t use feed lots, which are cruel to the cattle and cause kidney damage, force-feeding them, fattening them up for maximum weight and profit. Not great for the health of the beef consumers either, but it will probably be a couple more decades before everyone realises that. I’m a subsistence farmer. I have two hired hands. My slaughtering is done by a small family firm in Dayboro and I personally do my own butchering and my own cuts, from sides and quarters, all the way down to tenderloin and chops. I supply direct to a handful of restaurants and upmarket butchers in Brisbane, and of course to the local butcher shop here in Dayboro. I believe in small scale and I believe in humanely raised cattle. You understand?’

  Interesting. Does the name Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt mean anything to you?

  ‘What?!’ A silence of several seconds ensues. The cattleman appears shocked, even stunned. ‘I thought this was for a documentary about natural farming methods,’ he says.

  Does the name Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt mean anything to you?

  The viewer notes a slight grimace on Christy McLew’s lips – or perhaps not a grimace but some fleeting expression of … what? It is hard to gauge its meaning.

  ‘I would prefer not to reply,’ the cattleman says.

  Did you know that Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt died over a year ago?

  Christy McLew turns away from the camera and rests his forehead against the flank of his horse. Seconds pass before he turns back. ‘I live off the beaten track. The only news I get is from the pub.’

  It seems that the death of Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt is of considerable interest to you.

  ‘It is not of interest. I was not on close terms with the deceased.’

  But you knew him?

  ‘In a manner of speaking. But no, I never felt I knew him.’

  Did you know that the only legitimate son of Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt is the sole heir to his estate?

  ‘Frankly, no. I assumed he would have disinherited his son. And believe me –’ and here there is a disarming shrug, a curious toss of the head, raised eyebrows, a particular kind of ironic smile much remarked upon by the analysts of body language – ‘I would imagine his only son would feel nothing but relief on that score. I’d hazard a guess that the heir would run to Timbuktu to escape the inheritance of the Vanderbilts if he could.’

  Did you know that the Vanderbilt family believes that the heir was killed in Vietnam?

  ‘I did know that. And the family is correct. The heir did die there. He never left Vietnam.’

  How would you know that?

  ‘Ah, well …’ Christy McLew laces and unlaces the reins around his fingers. He is visibly nervous. ‘I crossed paths with him there.’

  You yourself were in Vietnam?

  ‘I was. I was there when Vanderbilt died.’

  Does the name Isabelle de la Vallière Vanderbilt mean anything to you?

  Again there is a lengthy pause. The man in the Akubra turns away from the camera and fondles the neck of his horse.

  ‘Yes,’ he says eventually.

  In what sense does this name mean something to you?

  ‘She was Vanderbilt’s mother,’ the man says, or so subtitles claim; though the words are muffled and indistinct because the man has one foot in the stirrup and is swinging his other leg (the oddly disjointed one) over the horse. The horse rears, gallops away from the camera and jumps the fence. The video ends with the horseman disappearing into the distant blue-green haze of the forested slopes.

  The video produced a sensation in court and in the press, especially since la comtesse collapsed in the gallery and had to be carried out by gurney to an ambulance. A reporter managed to reach the stretcher as the ambulance doors were being closed. He thrust a microphone almost into the invalid’s mouth. ‘Countess, is that man your son?’ he demanded.

  The eyes of the countess fluttered. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, before the paramedics roughed up the reporter and slammed the ambulance doors in his face. The breathy yes of the countess was recorded, amplified and much replayed – posthumously – on radio and TV. This was her last public word.

  In spite of the most valiant efforts of the lawyers and their Australia
n retainers, Christy McLew could not be located again. He could not be reached by the press. He had gone into hiding. Local farmers could shed no light. When questioned, they smiled and shook their heads. Never heard of the Vanderbilt claimant, they said. We live off the beaten track, they said. We get news on the bush telegraph. It’s always a few weeks old.

  Of course, the Vanderbilt lawyers claimed, the cattleman cannot be located because he does not exist. He’s an actor or a digital concoction. He is the special-effects manifestation of his mother’s desperate state of denial and grief.

  The lawyers for la comtesse claimed to have received official word, via a priest who served as local notary in Dayboro, Queensland, that the cattleman in the video had not the slightest wish to claim any inheritance which the court might inappropriately bestow and which (should it be legally required) he would be more than happy to sign over to the Vanderbilt widow.

  Unfortunately the fine print of Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt’s will ruled out this option. Though his wife was granted permission to live in the Fifth Avenue penthouse until her demise, she was awarded no money towards its upkeep nor, indeed, any income at all. Indeed, since her personal inheritance – a chateau and vineyard in France – was in disrepair and no longer producing income, the countess had been obliged to sell a number of her paintings and much of the antique furniture from her chateau in France. Upon her death, the New York penthouse and all other Vanderbilt assets were bequeathed to Lawrence Gwynne’s son, or to his son’s issue, or – if his son were to produce no offspring – to Lawrence Gwynne’s nephew William Jeremiah – known as Billy, son of Lawrence Gwynne’s deceased older brother, Harold Cornelius – and to his nephew’s heirs.