The Price of Blood (20 page)

A
T 7:55 A.M. BROKER LEANED IN THE SHADOW OF the gallery at the front door of the Doniat. Waiting on a cab and wondering if Cyrus LaPorte would show. Across the street, black kids in blue jumpers and slacks, white shirts and blouses, were herded by nuns toward the colonial whitewash of an Ursaline mission.

He’d treated himself to an expensive pair of sunglasses and wore them now to disguise his bloodshot, sleepless eyes. The gold bars were tucked into the locked trunk of his rented car. Before dawn, he’d left the vehicle in the airport police garage at the New Orleans airport. He’d cabbed back into the city.

His sports coat was open, the stump of the Colt was loose in the holster, and his airline ticket was tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He wore the black T-shirt with the city’s name spelled in dead alligators. He was drinking a Jax beer for breakfast.

The big navy-blue Seville with tinted windows came around the corner so fast and low on its suspension that it raked sparks off the bricks and almost demolished a languidly moving mule-drawn carriage full of tourists. The school kids had excellent drive-by reflexes. They scattered and ran for cover.

Broker smiled and took another sip of beer. He was enjoying himself. His thumb, still wrapped in adhesive, hardly bothered him.

The car doors sprung open. Virgil Fret, his face as chalky as uncut cocaine, hopped out of the driver’s side and did a little stationary dance like he had to take a piss. His hand hovered to his baggy shirt. Cyrus LaPorte was entombed in the back seat in burgundy upholstery like an albino in an air-conditioned cave. His color seemed off, but that could have been the tinted glass.

Broker ignored Virgil and pointed his beer bottle at LaPorte. “Get out and stand in the sun,” he said in a cordial voice.

“Think you’re pretty smart,” said LaPorte, pushing up and out of the seat. He was ashen in the thick morning heat. Icy with control.

“Stand back from him, General,” said Virgil Fret. Sniffing, hitching up his crotch, opening and closing his spare muscular fingers.

“Leave us be, Virgil,” said LaPorte, exasperated.

“Tell him to get back in the car,” said Broker.

“Get back in the car,” ordered LaPorte. Twisting in a tight flurry of catnip reflexes, Virgil started to protest. “Now, you nitwit,” growled LaPorte. The punk dropped his shoulders and got back in the car. LaPorte turned to Broker. “You have something that belongs to me.”

“You got a beef? Call the cops.”

“You’re out of your depth, Broker.”

“Don’t think so. You’re the one coming up empty in a hundred feet of salt water.”

LaPorte executed a thin frosty smile. “It’s too big for you. I know my way around over there. You don’t.”

“Watch me.”

LaPorte squinted at him and burst into incredulous laughter. “No shit, you waited around just to
taunt
me?”

Across the street the school kids milled in front of the mission, antsy in their uniforms. It was nice out, they were eager for school to end. Through the Caddy’s tinted windows Virgil’s fitful shadow bounced on the seat.

Broker smiled and wondered how he was doing as a pirate. “No,” he said, “to caution you. You saved my life once, so I figure you deserve a warning.”

“
You
,” sputtered LaPorte, “threatening
me
!”

“That’s right. It’s you and me now. Winner take all, General, and if you go to Vietnam you’ll never come back. Consider yourself warned.”

Broker sat the empty beer bottle down on the curb as his cab pulled up. LaPorte couldn’t stop himself from seizing at Broker’s bag. Broker didn’t resist. The weight told LaPorte it contained only clothing. He dropped his arms to his sides in frustration. Broker opened the cab door and tossed in his grip. He turned and smiled. “It’s been fun. Anytime you need a hand, just let me know.” He left LaPorte looking like he might eat the tires off that Caddy and, hopefully, furious enough to make a mistake.

They followed the cab. They followed him into the airport. LaPorte left Virgil stranded at the metal detector and came down the concourse to check the flight number.

When Broker got to the actual airplane door he flipped his badge and talked to the attendant. When he’d dropped off the rental car he’d made arrangements with the airport police. He explained that he was a Minnesota state investigator and he had to get back into the terminal without going back up the walkway. The attendant nodded and directed him to the maintenance stairway. Broker went down the stairs and rode a baggage cart back to the terminal.

He threaded through a subterranean warren of baggage conveyors and went for a phone.

He dialed Nina’s in Ann Arbor. No answer. Damn. He paced in a break area and drank a cup of coffee. An airport cop met him with a concourse buggy and whisked him underground to his car.

An hour later Broker had his baggage checked and was waiting in the underground on another flight to the Twin Cities. He thought of calling Ed Ryan to keep an eye on his aborted Northeast flight into Minneapolis-St. Paul, to see if anybody interesting turned up to meet it. He decided against it. Too many people were already involved.

He had a last cigarette in New Orleans, out of sight, in a baggage handler laughing-place behind a deplaning ramp. Then he tried Nina’s again. No answer. He tried J.T.’s home but got the machine. Everybody was stuck in between. Hoping that Danny Larkins was on the job, he boarded his airplane.

“S
HE DIDN’T CALL YOU?”

“Nah, man, nothing,” said J.T. who had gone out to meet Nina’s plane and checked the manifest when she wasn’t on it. J.T. was working, so Broker had to keep paging him. They were having their sixth phone conversation in five hours. It was 11:45
P.M.
Broker leaned, exhausted, over a telephone in the lobby of the Minneapolis Airport Holiday Inn. His arm ached from lugging the heavy bowling bag. He had taken a room when he got in, early afternoon. Nina was nowhere in sight. Had left no messages.

Broker thought about calling the Michigan State Police, but decided to wait and tried her apartment again. Nothing.

He had called the Liberty State Bank in Ann Arbor just before they closed and a tight-ass banker had given him a lecture on the Right to Financial Privacy Act. Broker’s name over the phone was not enough to authenticate his identity. The banker would not confirm or deny that Nina Pryce had been in his office. He called J.T. again.

“I need a favor,” said Broker.

“I thought I was already doing you a favor,” said J.T. in that apprehensive voice.

“Could you get free for a day? I made three reservations for a hop to Duluth. We can rent a car and get to Devil’s Rock.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Leaves at five—”

“In the morning?”

“Yeah. There’s a guy in county up in St. Louis, he gets out noon tomorrow, thirty-six-hour rule. I’m going to fuck him up and…well, if you aren’t there I just might overdo it.”

“This an open case?”

“This is personal.”

“And it’s got to do with Nina being missing?”

“Could be. I shouldn’t have left her alone.”

“You going to tell me about it?”

“Ah, there could be a problem with perjury.”

Silence. “Airport Holiday Inn.”

“Right.”

“Fly to Duluth.”

“Yeah, J.T.”

“Fuuack. Gimme an hour.”

At 2:15
A.M.
Broker kneed J.T., who was dozing next to him, and shot out of the couch in the Holiday Inn lobby when Nina Pryce marched through the door in the company of a guy with a handlebar mustache who looked like a side of buffalo squeezed into jeans and cowboy boots. Bobbing in a porcupine quill aura of caffeine and adrenaline, hair frizzed, pupils enlarged; she crowed in hollow-cheeked triumph, “I’m in the wrong business. I should be the freakin’ detective.”

“Where the hell have you been?” demanded Broker.

“Meet Danny Larkins. Hello, J.T.,” said Nina.

“Always a pleasure.” J.T. yawned. Broker’s hand disappeared into Larkins’s giant hoof.

“Two guys,” said Larkins. “They picked us up in Ann Arbor and followed us to Lansing.”

“Lansing?” mumbled Broker.

“I’ll explain,” said Nina. She stared quizzically at Broker’s lopsided posture and at the bowling bag grafted to his right hand.

“We lost them at the Lansing airport when we got on the shuttle to Detroit. I was the last guy on the plane and they did not board,” said Larkins.

“You get a description?” asked Broker.

“I saw them, Broker, you can ask me,” Nina interjected.

Larkins yawned. “One’s tall, Caucasian, middle-aged but strong like a carpenter. Looks like a fucking hound dog. Wore sunglasses. The other was ordinary white bread. They stayed in their car, a gray Nova. They must have thought they were the president with a state cruiser in front and behind.”

Nina grinned. “Danny had these guys time their patrols to convoy us. It was great.”

Broker handed Larkins the room key. “Go on. Get some sleep.”

Larkins grinned. “Don’t suppose anybody will tell me—”

“Nope,” said Nina. “That wasn’t our deal, Danny.”

“Okay. Pay me, show me the way to the elevator.”

Nina hugged the huge cop. He lolled out his tongue and panted like a horny dog on a cocktail napkin. “One last thing,” he leered at Nina. “Promise me you won’t abort our love child.” Nina rolled her eyes and walked Larkins to the elevator, digging in her purse.

When she came back she stared at Broker and his black bag, blinked, and said, “What happened to you?”

“I got a haircut?”

She frowned. “You have a hickey on your neck.”

Broker smiled tightly. “C’mon, let’s find someplace to talk.”

J.T. sat in the corner of an empty banquet room dubiously drinking room-service coffee. Broker slid his bag under a table and paced. The tables had been set. Lights reflected off crystal and hurt his eyes. Folded winged napkins looked like squadrons of origami warming up on aircraft carriers.

Nina marched to a window and opened it to let out Broker’s cigarette smoke. The growl of jet engines entered the room on that cool, bluesy, up-all-night, morning air.

“So.” She spread open a manila folder full of computer printouts on the table next to Broker. “Tuna came through the bank ten days ago. He withdrew twenty thousand and left the account open. There’s another twenty thousand still in it.”

“So where is he?”

“I haven’t got a clue. He’s been sending checks for eighteen years to an address in Italy. Paying the taxes on a farmhouse in Tuscany. The banker showed me the correspondence.”

Broker shook his head. “He’s too sick to travel to Italy. Where would he get a passport?”

“That’s what I thought,” said Nina. “There’s these canceled checks to someone named Ann Marie Sporta. They start in 1988 and stop in 1993. About fifteen thousand all together. They were stamped at a bank in Madison, Wisconsin. What do you think?”

Broker rubbed his eyes, glanced at the checks. “Don’t know. What else?”

“The jackpot,” said Nina “It’s all in his records at the bank, canceled checks, letters, accounting forms. Since nineteen eighty-nine, when things started loosening up with Vietnam, he’s been donating heavily to something called the Southeast Asian Relief.”

“Define heavily?” asked Broker.

“Oh, about fifty thousand bucks—”

“To some…relief charity?” Broker shook his head.

“The SAR is just a go-between the banker found, you can’t just send money to someone in Vietnam. So he used this aid organization headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. Guy named Kevin Eichleay runs it. Nam vet. Was a medic in the Air Cav. He ships over medical supplies. Runs tours of vets who rehab hamlets, hospitals, stuff like that. I called him up and said I wanted to donate some money. Then we drove like hell to Lansing with those two guys following us.”

“You should have waited for me,” said Broker.

Nina arched an eyebrow and went on. “Poor Kevin,” she smiled, “he’s a low-key, salt-of-the-earth dude and I came cooking into his office like the Pillsbury bake-off. Larkins freaked him a bit, but he quieted down when I got my checkbook out. For five hundred bucks and a few hugs I got the whole story. Told him Tuna and my dad were in the army together. That I was going to Nam to look for my dad’s remains. Man, I threw the book at him.”

“What the fuck is this?” grumbled J.T. suspiciously.

Broker held up a hand. Patience.

Nina spread a sheaf of official looking Xeroxes down on the hotel table like four aces. They bore strange stamps in Vietnamese. Stars and sheaves of rice. “Approvals that Kevin negotiated on trips he made. From a local People’s Committee all the way up to the Vietnamese General Assembly. Get this: For the last five years Tuna has been sponsoring an old vets’ home for Viet Cong amputees. Guess who runs it?”

Broker shook his head. “Oh boy,” he said softly.

“You got that right,” said Nina. “Nguyen Van Trin manages it. Tuna worked through the banker to bankroll Kevin to go to Nam in eighty-nine to find Trin. I showed Kevin the phone number in Hue and he confirmed it as the number Trin uses.”

“Where’s this home located?” asked Broker slowly.

“On the beach, in Quang Tri Province, exactly where Tuna wanted it built,” said Nina mysteriously. She placed both hands on Broker’s shoulders and shook him with infectious excitement. “And, Tuna bought them a serious boat to go fishing with. Kevin said it was way too much boat, big enough to run heavy cargo on the high seas. But Tuna insisted on it. That’s what most of the bread went for. Permits for the boat. The Vietnamese government went through a sensitive period about people with boats.”

“God, he had it all planned, for years,” said Broker.

“Yep. Put everything in place and then he got cancer,” said Nina.

“Trin.” Broker said the name like an incantation.

“Yeah,” said Nina. “How much does he know?”

“Whoa. Wait. Man, what the fuck is this?” J.T. stood up, raising his hands to dodge the high-energy splinters zipping off Broker and Nina.

“You don’t want to know,” said Broker.

“I want to know,” said J.T.

“Okay.” Broker reached down and unzipped his bowling bag. With a flourish he whipped out a glittering bar of gold and tossed it across the room.

J.T. caught it, hefted the surprising weight and groaned, “Oh oh…”

“Wow,” said Nina. “You got into his safe!”

“Huh?” J.T. blinked.

“There’s this guy who thinks he’s a pirate and he’s looking for a sunken treasure,” explained Broker.

“Except it’s not sunken, it’s buried,” added Nina. She startled. “Or is it? Where’d he find the gold?”

“By the chopper. But only seven ingots and they’ve had a crew over there churning up the bottom.”

“I don’t get it,” said Nina.

Broker shrugged. “Maybe it’s in two locations?”

J.T.’s eyes went first to Nina, then to Broker, and back to Nina again. “Right,” he said.

“It’s all dirty and we’re going to bust his ass,” explained Broker, throwing his hands in the air.

“A pirate.” J.T. glowered at the gold ingot in his hand. “A treasure.” He shook his head. “In Duluth?” he asked incredulously.

“In Vietnam. If you can get a week off you can come with us,” said Broker.

“Fuck that. Once was enough.” J.T. carefully put down the gold bar on the table and said, “You’re right, I don’t want to know. I’ll just help you
talk
to that guy and quietly depart.”

“Talk to what guy?” asked Nina.

“Bevode Fret,” said Broker, stashing the bar back in the bag.

“Talk?”

“Yeah, the kind of talk that’ll keep him in traction for a while,” said Broker.

Nina said, “Not a good idea. We lost those guys in Lansing but they
know
where Bevode is. You go after him, they’ll pick us up again.”

Broker shook his head, he’d been looking forward to this. “Bevode gets his comeuppance. If somebody heavy is tailing us they’ll stick out like a sore thumb in Devil’s Rock.”

“Along with me,” said J.T. with a calm demented smile.

Nina folded her arms. “We already screwed up once. If I didn’t know Danny, where would we be?”

Broker grimaced and rubbed his eyes. “If LaPorte can buy prison guards he can probably penetrate a commercial airline’s scheduling computer. We aren’t going to lose whoever’s following us for long. And we’re all going to the same place.”

“We have to ditch them if we find Tuna,” said Nina.

“
When
we find Tuna,” said Broker. “It’s in here.” He sat down at the table and spread out the contents of Nina’s folder. He pushed the Italian correspondence aside. He wondered if a man dying of cancer would try to make it to Vietnam. Tuna had prepared this for a long time.

An hour of eye-strain went by as Broker scanned through the records looking for incidental payments that could have gone for a forged passport and ID. Nina’s Reeboks squeegeed on the glossy floor, pacing behind him. J.T. snored lightly, stretched out on three chairs. Finally Broker turned to the checks issued to Ann Marie Sporta. He looked at his watch, got up, and went looking for a phone, hoping that Ed Ryan had gone to bed early the night before.

In silence, red-eyed and grumpy, they drove north from Duluth in a rental car. They stopped in Two Harbors and Broker called Fatty Naslund. He told Fatty to meet him north of town at C.R. Magney State Park, near a violent waterfall called the Devil’s Kettle, where they had played as kids.

Then he called Tom Jeffords at the Devil’s Rock police station and made an arrangement concerning Bevode Fret. Then he called Ed Ryan, who had been shaken out of bed by Broker’s first call and was now at the ATF office and who was grumbling about Broker having used up all his chits. But he was working the computers and talking to the FBI. Broker hung up the phone and found Nina and J.T. sound asleep in the car. Broker drove to the park on stale adrenaline fumes and black Amoco station coffee.

The Kettle was reputed to be bottomless, and while he waited, Broker toyed with the concept of throwing Bevode Fret into it. Another reason to have J.T. along.

Fatty Naslund drove up cautiously in his T-Bird, avoiding mud holes. When he got out he grimaced at the mud splatters along the rocker panels.

He arched a disapproving eye at the rented car and the unmoving forms curled on the seats. “That’s a black guy and a white woman?”

“They’re with me,” said Broker.

Fatty straightened his cuffs. Just the reflex motion. He had been working out and wore a ribbed T-shirt ordered out of a Patagonia catalogue. He was a compulsively lean, neat man who kept a rowing machine in his office at the bank so he could work up a sweat while he watched Rush Limbaugh on cable. He had been perversely nicknamed Fatty by the other kids because he was the banker’s son. Now he lived in fear of excess body weight, had little calipers to pinch and measure his body fat, and went once a month to a clinic in Duluth to submerge in a tank and compute his fat-to-muscle ratio. Fatty was fastidious. He still thought copper pennies counted.

“Little unusual, isn’t this?” said Fatty, striding toward the picnic table where Broker sat. He grinned his best chamber of commerce grin. His brilliant white teeth were so healthy they looked like they had definition and veins in them.

Broker unzipped the bowling bag and methodically removed the seven flat ingots of gold and stacked them in a blazing pyramid in the early morning sun. Fatty’s eyes went wide then cranked down to suspicious slits.

Then Broker took out the Colt, racked the slide back, and sat it beside the metal bars.