Avenger

But he and Angela had visited, borrowing Mr Marozzi’s car, and shown Dexter Senior his only grandchild. When the end came it was sudden. A massive heart attack felled the building labourer on a worksite. His son attended the humble funeral alone. He had hoped his dad could attend his graduation ceremony and be proud of his educated son, but it was not to be.

He graduated that summer and pending his Bar Exam secured a lowly but full-time position with Honeyman Fleischer, his first professional employment since the army seven years earlier.

Honeyman Fleischer prided itself on its impeccable liberal credentials, avoided Republicans, and to prove its lively social conscience, fielded a pro bono department to undertake legal representation for no reward for the poor and vulnerable.

That said, the senior partners saw no need to exaggerate and kept their pro bono team to a few of their lowest-paid newcomers. That autumn of 1978, Cal Dexter was as lowly in the legal pecking order at Honeyman Fleischer as one could get.

Dexter did not complain. He needed the money, he cherished the job, and covering the down-and-outs gave him a hugely wide spectrum of experience, rather than the narrow confines of one single speciality. He could defend on charges of petty crime, negligence claims and a variety of other disputes that eventually came to a court of appeal.

It was that winter that a secretary popped her head round the door of his cubby-hole office and waved a file at him.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Immigration appeal,’ she said. ‘Roger says he can’t handle it.’

The head of the tiny pro bono department chose the cream, if ever any cream appeared, for himself. Immigration matters were definitely the skimmed milk.

Dexter sighed and buried himself in the details of the new file. The hearing was the next day.

It was 20 November 1978.

CHAPTER NINE

The Refugee

There was a charity in New York in those years called Refugee Watch. ‘Concerned citizens’ was how it would have described its members; ‘dogooders’ was the less admiring description.

Its self-appointed task was to keep a weather eye open for examples of the flotsam and jetsam of the human race who, washed up on the shores of the USA, wished to take literally the words written on the base of the Statue of Liberty and stay.

Most often, these were forlorn, bereft people, refugees from a hundred climes, usually with a most fragmentary grasp of the English language and who had spent their last savings in the struggle to survive.

Their immediate antagonist was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the formidable INS, whose collective philosophy appeared to be that 99.9 per cent of applicants were frauds and mountebanks who should be sent back whence they came, or at any rate somewhere else.

The file tossed onto Cal Dexter’s desk that early winter of 1978 concerned a couple fleeing from Cambodia, Mr and Mrs Horn Moung.

In a lengthy statement by Mr Moung who seemed to speak for them both, translated from the French which was the French-educated Cambodian’s language of choice, his story emerged.

Since 1975, a fact already well known in the USA and later to become better known through the film The Killing Fields, Cambodia had been in the grip of a mad and genocidal tyrant called Pol Pot and his fanatical army the Khmer Rouge.

Pot had some hare-brained dream of returning his country to a sort of agrarian Stone Age. Fulfilment of his vision involved a pathological hatred of the people of the cities and anyone with any education. These were for extermination.

Mr Moung claimed he had been headmaster of a leading lycée or high school in the capital, Phnom Penh, and his wife a staff nurse at a private clinic. Both fitted firmly into the Khmer Rouge category for execution.

When things became impossible, they went underground, moving from safe house to safe house among friends and fellow professionals, until the latter had all been arrested and taken away.

Mr Moung claimed he would never have been able to reach the Vietnamese or Thai borders because in the countryside, infested with Khmer Rouge and informers, he would not have been able to pass for a peasant. Nevertheless, he had been able to bribe a truck driver to smuggle them out of Phnom Penh and across to the port of Kampong Son. With his last remaining savings, he persuaded the captain of a South Korean freighter to take them out of the hell that his homeland had become.

He did not care or know where the Inchon Star was headed. It turned out to be New York harbour, with a cargo of teak. On arrival, he had not sought to evade the authorities but had reported immediately and asked permission to stay.

Dexter spent the night before the hearing hunched over the kitchen table while his wife and daughter slept a few feet away through the wall. The hearing was his first appeal of any kind, and he wanted to give the refugee his best shot. After the statement, he turned to the response of the INS. It had been pretty harsh.

The local Almighty in any US city is the District Director, and his office is the first hurdle. The Director’s colleague in charge of the file had rejected the request for asylum on the strange grounds that the Moungs should have applied to the local US Embassy or Consulate and waited in line, according to American tradition.

Dexter felt this was not too much of a problem; all US staff had fled the Cambodian capital years earlier when the Khmer Rouge stormed in.

The refusal at the first le

vel had put the Moungs into deportation procedure. That was when Refugee Watch heard of their case and took up the cudgels.