The Price of Blood (28 page)

B
ROKER NODDED. “RAY’S CIGARETTE CASE.”

Nina’s eyes narrowed. “Mom gave it to him for Christmas.”

They leaned close, undeterred by Tuna’s putrid breath. He arched as if electrocuted and fell back and groped feebly and muttered, “Big one…”

Nina’s fingers flew over the towel on the crate. “Hold this.” She slapped the cooking spoon in Broker’s hand like a scalpel.

“That’s too much,” said Broker as she shook the heroin into the spoon and thumbed the plastic lighter. They watched the powder turn gummy in the heat, bubble.

“Sorry about the dirty needle, Jimmy,” Nina said under her breath as she inserted the syringe and drew back the plunger. “Okay.” She took a breath.

Broker fastened the rubber tie around Tuna’s left arm. Last time he’d shot in the right. Then he held the arm straight down and with both hands tried to duplicate the motions of clenching Tuna’s fist.

“Not much of a vein,” said Nina, judging her target.

“Hit him,” said Broker.

The needle punched into the flour-colored parchment of Tuna’s arm. She pulled back the plunger and got a watery blossom of blood in the clear liquid. She shoved the shot home. Total concentration. Nothing but steady. She was field-grade material, all right. She could send men to their deaths. No problem.

Tuna’s jaw unhinged and fell slack. His tongue got stuck in the dry rot of his cheeks. Nina reached for a napkin next to the food plates and wet it with San Miguel and swabbed his lips. “C’mon, Jimmy,” she crooned. She could have been coaxing an infant.

This time Tuna didn’t vomit. Broker imagined the cancer chasing down the jet of heroin like a sparkle of tracers in the dark cavern of Tuna’s brain.

“Joke,” gasped Tuna. “Joke’s on Cyrus.”

“We got him back,” said Nina.

Tuna blinked and then smiled with immense calm. “Man, she’s something, ain’t she,” he said and stared at the bloody needle in Nina’s hand. “They teach you that at OCS?”

“What about Ray’s gold cigarette case?” asked Broker.

“Evidence,” said Tuna and nodded out. They shook him.

One eye rolled open. “That night…morning really…when Cyrus showed up, Ray wouldn’t do it. You know Ray. By the book. Insisted on getting the orders in writing. Made Cyrus write it down, sign it. Op order to go for the gold…get it?”

Broker and Nina locked eyes.

Tuna giggled. “Saw him fold it in a piece of radio battery plastic, tuck it in his cigarette case, and button it into his chest pocket. All comes down to me fucking up. I was supposed to take it off him…forgot when the shooting started.”

Nina made a face but did not look away.

“He rolled out. But he fell into the
cargo net
. Snake city, fire coming in. The guys on the ground had the gold on the forklift, tipped it into the net on top of Ray. Get it?”

“If he stole it why’s he buried with it,” recited Nina.

“You got it, he’s on the beach under the gold, orders should be there with his…remains. Evidence,” he pronounced, again. Then he surged up toward Nina. “You still got that copy of the UCMJ, the article I underlined?”

“Yes I do,” said Nina.

“Figuring that out kept me going after I got the cancer. Now go out there and burn Cyrus at the fucking stake for everybody to see. That’s my act of contrition. My gift to you…” said Tuna. He turned to Broker. “You keep her on track over there. Do this right and you and Trin can get moderately rich. But to nail Cyrus the gooks have to catch him digging it up. So promise me, they get most of it.”

Broker nodded.

Tuna croaked again. “Map.”

Broker held up the map. Tuna blinked. “There’s this gook graveyard, on a hill over the dunes. And this little cove—here.” He stabbed the map. “It’s about four klics north of Trin’s vet’s home.” Tuna cackled. “Jimmy Tuna’s Memorial Home for Crippled Viet Cong. I love it. See the cemetery symbols?” Broker saw them. “Three of those old graves, with the big round walls…hope they’re still there.”

Broker nodded. “Get me something to write with,” he said urgently.

Tuna shook his head. “Don’t mark the map.” He grinned. “Trin’s rules, remember. Memorize the location. Center grave. Fix on the grave to your right, shoot an azimuth, one hundred and sixty-three degrees. Walk eighty-two steps. I paced it off. And dig.”

“You getting this?” said Broker, looking up.

“Got it,” said Nina.

There was an interval of silence while Tuna rested. All things revolved unsaid. Just eyes.

“That’s it. Now go,” Tuna blurted. He reached up and pulled Broker close by the arm. For a second his old strength flowed with the heroin. “Wait. Tell Tony not to bury them. And gimme the Colt. When the time comes I’ll have Tony leave me down there with the rifle and the pistol. Send for the sheriff so none of this rubs off on you.”

Nina nodded and handed Jimmy the .45. He squinted. “When push comes to shove, go with Trin, you understand?”

“I understand,” said Broker.

“Now you better split,” said Tuna. “Tony and me will fix it all here. Don’t worry, they won’t get to me. Be nice, though, if a few more of them would come through the woods into that field.” He lurched in his chair, fumbled at the rifle leaning against the rail, picked it up, and locked his eye to the scope. He scanned the trees. “Coming. Hear ’em in the grass. Black maggot sonsabitches.”

Broker stood up and tucked the map under his shirt. He hefted the Mini-14 and turned to Tuna. “Does this square it for killing Ray?”

“Fuck you, Broker.” He grinned and brandished the rifle. “Get outta here and let me die in peace.”

“That’s it, let’s go,” Broker yelled to Nina.

They ran.

Halfway across the field she stopped and held him by the arm. “What did he mean? Trin’s rules?”

“Trin’s first rule: Trust no one,” said Broker. “Now run.”

They jogged down through the springy alfalfa and into the oak grove. Jimmy Tuna’s raucous stoned laughter and the crack of the Carcano echoed through the trees, over the roar of the cicadas. Crazy. Shooting at sunspots.

A beleaguered Tony Sporta, breathing heavily, his overalls smeared with mud, waved to them from across the swamp. They plowed into the deep drag trail that now furrowed the sunken causeway, sinking past their knees. The two bodies lay in the muck just ahead.

“C’mon, c’mon. Leave ’em be,” yelled Sporta, waving them on. “I gotta go get some logging chains for weight.”

“There’s been a change,” yelled Broker. “No logging chains.” Sporta held his cupped hands to his ears and then stomped in a circle, swearing.

As they dragged their feet through the mire and struggled, half stepping, half slithering, over the corpses, Nina panted, “Remind you of anything?”

Broker frowned and she started chanting something under her breath, upbeat and vaguely familiar.

“Country Joe and the Fish,” said Broker. He scanned the trees. The Mini-14 floated in one hand, the other touched the tiger tooth under his shirt for luck. The mud sucked at his feet.

Next stop, Vietnam
.

T
HEY HAD A MAP. THE MAP WOULD DRAW CYRUS like honey. Broker popped the clutch. Rubber scorched. Tony Sporta had thrown them the Beretta and Nina’s purse and shooed them from his office. Now he ducked a volley of gravel and, still swearing mightily, waved them on with a final gesture of good riddance.

They were wearing slimy hip waders of mud. Broker’s tennis shoe slipped off the accelerator.

Nina yelled over the grinding engine, “We
have
to run this by the U.S. Mission in Hanoi. Catch him red-handed. Arrange to get him…extradited.”

Broker rolled his eyes and yelled back, “The United States doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the Vietnamese government, goddammit. They haven’t even
set up
an embassy yet. I want Cyrus, Nina; I want him bad. But it has to go down right or he’ll weasel away. We have to check out Tuna’s story first. Locate the stuff. See if the orders are with…the remains.” He swiveled his head to see the road behind. “Is there anybody following us?”

“No. I’ve been watching,” she went on without missing a beat. “There’s an advance team in Hanoi. There’s the U.S. liaison office. I have a number—”

“Slow down.”

Nina grabbed the wheel as Broker overdrove the shoulder and swiped ten yards of weeds growing at the lip of a ditch. “You slow down.” She glanced in the back-seat where the Mini-14 lay, locked and loaded, in plain view. “Isn’t it against the law to drive around with that rifle uncased?”

Broker ignored her and reached across her knees and clawed his cell phone from the glove compartment. The battery was dead. And no spare. They’d left the other one with Tuna. He slowed down to seventy-five when he saw an Amoco station up ahead at a crossroads. He braked precipitously, leaving another smoking swatch of Goodyear products in Wisconsin.

“Jesus,” muttered Nina, bracing.

“Phone,” said Broker.

“What?”

“Tickets. Visas. Phone.” He left the motor running and the door open as he ran for the pay phone. After he picked up the receiver he realized it was a toll call. He still had a wad of hundreds in his pocket from New Orleans. Two dimes and six pennies.

He ran back to the Jeep. “I need quarters.” Nina dug in her purse, handed him two coins. He used one of the quarters to call an operator and place a collect person-to-person call to Don Larson’s office in Stillwater.

A woman answered and told the operator that Don Larson wasn’t in the office, he had taken his daughter to the dentist. Broker ran back for the car, jumped behind the wheel, and suddenly just sat there.

“Now what?” asked Nina, who still bounced with forward momentum.

“What are we doing?” Broker proposed calmly.

“It looks to me like we were running for our lives,” she said.

Broker shook his head. “If there were more of them they would have stormed the cabin. Short of that, they wouldn’t have let Tony come up there after the shooting.”

Nina thought about it.

Broker continued. “LaPorte can’t afford to let anybody in on this. Bevode told me. It’s a small, hand-picked group. The Fret family. Which is now diminished by two.”

“Maybe they don’t care about us. They know where Tuna is.”

“Tuna’s beyond intimidation. No.” Broker shook his head. “If I was LaPorte I’d put my money where it buys more, like in Vietnam. He’s probably paid so much in bribes over there that he’s a majority stockholder in the Communist party.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m serious. He’ll just hook into their diplomatic service and get our visa forms. Air Vietnam is a state-run company, so he’ll probably connect with them too. When we get tickets, he’ll have his hands on a manifest.” Broker leaned back and slid his wallet from his pocket. He dug around, handed Nina a card and then shut his eyes. “He knows where I’m going, anyway.”

“The Century Hotel, Hue City. Who wrote this room information?” she asked.

“Lola LaPorte. Can you decipher psychological traits in handwriting?”

“No.”

“Neither can I. I used to know this very serious FBI lady who could, but she transferred to San Francisco.” Broker grinned. “She told me I was a fugitive from modern psychology.”

Nina sank deeper in her seat and extended her hand. “Give me one of those health food cigarettes.”

Broker opened one eye.

She explained. “I only smoke when I drink too much, which is usually once a year on my birthday. And in special circumstances.” She grimaced.

“Like when you shoot somebody.” Broker handed over his cigarettes and said, “I’m thirsty, what about you?” Nina agreed so he tracked mud into the station and bought a cold six-pack of Mountain Dew. When he came out, Nina said, “Yuk, I never drink that stuff.”

“We’re nodding out. It’s loaded with caffeine and it’s cold.”

They slouched down in the seats like two teenagers sneaking cigarettes and sipped from the green cans.

Broker suggested, “We finish our pop, try to clean up, drive leisurely to Hudson, Wisconsin, and check into a motel—just in case I’m wrong and LaPorte has someone watching my house. Don should be back by then. We find out about our travel plans, go shopping—”

Nina sat up. “You have the map.”

Broker tapped his pocket. “I have the map.”

“Then let’s get going before we fall asleep.”

Broker started the Jeep and pulled back on the road. He was silent for a few minutes and then, keeping his eyes straight ahead, he said, “That was some shooting…”

Her voice came back, a flat conditioned response, “Guys are always surprised. It’s because we don’t bring bad habits or macho posturing to the firing line. And we’re good at taking instruction.”

Broker said it again, “That was some shooting,
Pryce
.”

“Thank you.”

Broker parked in a secluded rest area and they changed out of their sopping clothes. After cat-washing in the men’s lavatory, he dug in his travel bag and emerged barefoot in his loafers, wearing rumpled cotton slacks and a fresh T-shirt. Nina waited by the Jeep in clean jeans, the ruffled, faded green blouse she’d worn that morning in the hospital, and sandals. They stripped the muddy seat covers and Broker unloaded the rifle, folded down the backseat, and stuck the weapon under it.

When they were back on the road, Nina leaned over and dabbed at a smudge of swamp on Broker’s cheek with her red bandanna. “So you really think LaPorte will be waiting for us at the airport in Hanoi?”

Broker nodded. “Close. I picked up a Vietnam tourist book in New Orleans and read it on the way back. The Hanoi terminal is tiny, on a military airstrip an hour’s drive outside of the city. So it’s probably a pretty secure area. Lots of customs cops for sure. He’ll probably spot us there and follow us. That’s why we need an expediter like Trin. We’ll have to go to ground, fast. We can’t do that on our own. We don’t even speak the language.”

Nina stared out the window. Holstein dairy cows, large and stupid as black-and-white-spotted balloons, bobbled in a pasture. “And you’re definitely against contacting any Americans.”

“We tell nobody nothing until we get a feel for what it’s like over there—”

“Okay, then you better tell me everything you know about Nguyen Van Trin.”

Broker tried to visualize Trin as the green Wisconsin dairy land zipped by. “He’s a guy who always went his own way. He comes from Mandarins. His family owned a cement factory near Hue City. A rich kid. He spent four years at Georgetown getting a degree in business and English lit. So he speaks better English than both of us put together.

“He went home and freaked out his parents by becoming an apprentice monk. In 1966 he was real involved in the Buddhist Uprising in Hue. The Buddhists were crushed. Trin said what the Buddhists needed was more guns. So he joined the Viet Cong.

“He switched sides after the Tet Offensive. That’s when he got involved with your dad. They had this notion they could split the Viet Cong away from Hanoi. It was pretty esoteric stuff. He was a pretty disillusioned guy by the time I met him.”

Nina squinted. “Can we
trust
him?”

Broker smiled. “He told me something once. ‘When you share an idea it grows another brain and a set of hands and a pair of feet to walk around on. It can get away from you.’”

“That’s what Jimmy meant when he said ‘Trin’s rules,’ huh? Sounds like another disillusioned young man took them to heart,” said Nina, poking him in the arm.

Broker shrugged. “Trin said it was a dilemma. To work a good plan you can’t trust anyone. But what can you accomplish all alone? He said he wouldn’t be a robot or a puppet. That’s what he called the Communists, robots. Just disciplined hands and feet, no brains. He saw the Saigon government as puppets of the West. So, he was screwed in the middle.”

“Sounds like a real upbeat guy.”

“Yeah, but Cyrus LaPorte, standing on Jimmy Tuna’s shoulders, wouldn’t come up to Trin, and he’s about five four.” Broker turned to her. “Your dad said Trin could run an army or a government.”

“Dad trusted him?”

“You got it. That’s all we’ve really got to go on. Their friendship. Twenty years ago. Nina, I didn’t know these guys. Not even your dad. Not really. I was a young dumb stud. I risked my neck just to get a nod from them. LaPorte, Ray, Trin, even Tuna—they were—are, well, smarter than I am.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Nina. “I
do
know that when it really mattered you ran right at a forty-four mag to draw fire away from me.”

Broker clicked his teeth. “Not real smart.”

Nina perused him. “Dad had rules too; he used to say: ‘The map is not the terrain.’ There are all these brilliant people and they think up these boffo schemes and when the plans all fall apart—because they always do—someone like you holds things together.”

“So fuck a bunch of office guys,” said Broker with a broad grin.

“Absolutely.”

Broker stepped on the gas and whisked down a ramp onto Interstate 94 and exceeded the speed limit to Hudson, Wisconsin.

“Where the hell have you been?” said Don Larson on the phone.

“Shopping,” said Broker, looking at a plastic bag from an outdoor store they’d found in a mall near the Best Western motel in Hudson. Nina stood in the bathroom doorway, sleek and bright in a towel and a wreath of steam.

“I’ve got your visas and your passports. I expedited them so it costs extra. But to schedule a flight it would help if I
knew when you want to leave
.”

“How about tonight? It’s real urgent, Don.” They read him the number off Nina’s credit card.

Larson groaned. “So I eat at my desk tonight. Okay. Twin Cities to Seattle…” Broker heard the patter of a computer keyboard as Larson talked. “Connect to…Hong Kong or Bangkok?” he asked.

“Whatever opens up first.”

“Then Air Vietnam to Hanoi. Give me a number where I can reach you and stay close to the phone. If something pops up you’ll have to jump on it.” He paused. “You get your shots?”

“No.”

“Take two hours, go to Ramsey. It’s serious malaria country where you’re going. Then stay at a number where I can reach you.”

Broker gave him the room extension and hung up the phone.

“So?” asked Nina, fluffing her hair with a towel.

“So,” said Broker, “tell me, when’s the last time you wore your hair long?”

“Don’t do this to me, Broker.” But he caught an edge of a smile as she spun away.

Four hours passed in a whirlwind. They’d used his badge to speed getting a full round of inoculations for Vietnam at the Ramsey Travel Clinic in St. Paul. Nina submitted to the shots and filed the prescriptions reluctantly, explaining how she had refused to take the experimental biological and nerve agent antidotes in the Gulf. She’d put her faith in her gas mask. “See,” she said, “no rashes or night sweats—”

“Just a three-foot-wide stripe of purple ambition down your back,” Broker commented.

They went back to the motel and called Larson. He had them on an evening flight to Seattle but was having trouble with the Hong Kong connection. They ate takeout and watched the phone and packed. They were traveling light, one carry-on apiece. Broker studied himself in a mirror in his baggy new tropical shirt with lots of pockets and armpit vents. He cut the brand name off it with fingernail clippers and had just pried the piece of bone off the tiger tooth when Larson called. They were through to Hong Kong after a six-hour layover in Seattle. They’d have to scramble from there but it shouldn’t be a problem if their paperwork was in order. Air Vietnam’s line in Hong Kong was down but Northwest reservations told him that the airline always had empty seats.

They left the motor running at the travel agency, thanked Don Larson profusely, grabbed their passports and visas and tickets and drove like hell.

Two hours later the Jeep was tucked away in the long-term parking ramp at Minneapolis-St. Paul International. Broker felt the empty place in the small of his back where his Beretta used to live. They’d left the guns in the car.

They buckled their seatbelts. Broker glanced around and maybe it was fatigue-induced hallucinations or maybe it was clarity but it looked like the 747 was crammed with all of Rodney the arms dealer’s rude, over-weight dumbed-down extended American family off on a mission to sink Seattle with cellulite.

After takeoff, Broker unfolded himself from the cramped economy seat and got up. “My feet hurt,” he explained to Nina. Which was true. From kicking Bevode and swamp walking. But he also wanted to check out the passengers to see if anyone resembling the Fret family was onboard. He saw a lot of physiognomy that suggested latent serial killers and depressed gene pools but none of them with the long jackass bone structure of the Frets.

He returned, restacked himself in the Procrustean seat and fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the flaps cranked down as the jet made its landing approach. Nina, still fast asleep, snuggled on his shoulder with her hand warm where her fingers curled around a dead tiger’s gold-tipped fang against his chest.

After they landed in Seattle they took a bus into town and ate at a restaurant with so many ferns that it felt like jungle survival training in Panama all over again. At four in the morning, Seattle time, so slap-happy they were making stale Dorothy and Toto jokes, they remembered that they hadn’t called Trin. They left their incomplete flight information with the hotel desk clerk at the number in Hue. They’d arrive in Hanoi on the first open flight from Hong Kong. Trin would have to fill in the Air Vietnam blanks. In the background, Broker could hear the alien bells and growls of Vietnamese afternoon traffic. Then they showed their passports and boarded their flight.