The Price of Blood (29 page)

T
HE PLANE IS FULL OF PEOPLE WITH BLACK HAIR AND those wraparound brown eyes. No idea what they’re talking about. Everything is backward and upside down. Sleep has slipped between the cracks of a dozen time zones. Nina is coping better. She snoozes on his shoulder. No-smoking flight. His mouth and his nerves ache for a cigarette
.

He stares at the Northwest Far East magazine he finds in the seat pocket. The centerfold is a brightly colored map of the world. Like a Rorschach. The Asian continent is a spotted beast rearing out of the crouched leg of Africa with Europe in its hip pocket. North America is an afterthought cropped and running off the page left and right
.

Marginal
.

No calling 911 where he’s going
.

The flaps jerked, their ears swelled and popped, and Hong Kong emerged from a layer of dirty clouds. Cement high-rises streaked by like smoke, window lights for sparks. They banked sharply and the pilot kicked the big 747 through a fighter-jet turn, passing—it seemed to Broker—right between the tall buildings.

Cramped and numb they lumbered out the door and the clouds were burning tires and the air was rancid dishwater that stuck to Broker’s cheeks. China was a fractured sensation. His first steamy look at the oldest engine in the world.

Customs queues, immigration, and a six-hour wait for the Air Vietnam desk to open for business. The terminal was a racket of Chinese. They hired a cab and escaped into the neon constellations of Kowloon and Mercedes gridlock on the streets. The working-class sections zipped by like the sets for
Blade Runner
. Across the bay, Hong Kong nestled against the mountains like a silver money clip. They found a glittering glass and chrome restaurant. Outside the air smelled like a vat of stewing sweat and dirt and blood. Like money. Inside, they found the cleanest, most well-dressed people in the world. Hydroponics mannequins. Scientifically bred in posh display windows until they’d grown into their perfect tailoring.

After the most expensive meal of their lives they took another cab back to the airport. Beyond conversation, too nerved up to sleep, they paced and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and waited.

A smiling young woman in a blue blazer happily took their money and stamped their tickets for Hanoi. After another round of customs and immigration, an airport bus ferried them out to a smaller white jet with a blue flying crane logo on the tail section.

A slender Air Vietnam hostess in a flowing blue au dai and filmy white trousers checked their boarding passes. Broker remembered the subtle magic of the garment that covered and revealed. He marked the panty line on her flank, the slip of bare midriff. They boarded the plane.

Vietnamese voices flowed like forgotten poems. The plane became a miniature time machine and it wasn’t just in his imagination. He cocked his head and heard—impossibly—an Elvis Presley tune from the sixties piped in on the intercom. He couldn’t stop his youth from shinnying up and peeking from the corners of his eyes.

Doing it on purpose. Like they know
.

Gritty, exhausted, Nina hugged his arm and laughed.

The exuberance didn’t last long. A hulking Caucasian giant barred their path. Six four, dressed in flip flops, and an ensemble of blue shorts and a T-shirt that looked like underwear or pajamas. He exhaled a nightmare breath of booze.

The upright pig-giant had twinkling gimlet eyes and spoke an accented dialect of the English language known only to his drunken tribe of one. He could have been Bevode Fret’s libido unchained and walking around…

But he was an Aussie, stoned on nitrous oxide maybe.

He chirped, leering at Nina.

“Fuck off, mate.” Broker stabbed a sharp finger into his bloated midsection. The pig-giant fluttered his left hand in an inebriated incantation and backed off and rolled deeper into the plane, a blue hazard that the Vietnamese hostesses steered adroitly to a berth.

Nina and Broker flopped to their seats. The frantic tempo of Hong Kong dissipated on Air Vietnam. Only half the seats were filled. A hostess handed Broker a steamed perfumed towel with a forceps.

He wiped the grime from his face and felt time slow down.
It’s going to be different now
…

Australian voices. Broker glanced back and saw them crowd the aisle. A tour. He gathered that the snoring piggiant was one of their number. He dozed for a while. Woke with a start and wondered if he had dreamed the episode with Jimmy Tuna. They were served a meal. Broker drank a cup of coffee and studied a map of Vietnam in a glossy Air Vietnam magazine.

The country was shaped like an S hook hanging off the belly of China, wrapped around Laos and Kampuchea: fat on the ends, thin in the middle. They’d land in Hanoi, near the top of the S and then head for the skinny panhandle in the center. To Hue City on the Perfume River. And in Hue there would be a police station.

He’d only accepted one cliché in his life: that cops were cops the world over. They understood each other. But they were
Communist cops
where he was going. And they worked for the only government in the world that had whipped the United States of America in open warfare.

He tried to put himself in the place of a Vietnamese cop listening to a wild story coming from the lips of an American tourist. They probably would have an office guy assigned to hearing complaints from the tourist trade. An office guy would phone his boss. And on up the line until someone who had LaPorte’s money in his pocket would hear the story.

It was like everything else. Cops were cops. Except when they weren’t.

So it all depended on Trin. And the minute they opened their mouths their
lives
would be in his hands. With this disconcerting thought for a lullaby, Broker dozed.

And then. Not that long. The now familiar sensation and pressure in the ears. The jet grumbled in the air and slowed for descent. Looking down from an aircraft together with the word Vietnam had always meant an aerial view of a smashed landscape. Lunar craters. Broker took a look. Just green fields, treelines. Not one crater. Rustic farmland.

“Any advice?” asked Nina.

“Don’t touch the kids on the head, don’t wave at people, don’t put your feet on the table.”

“How’s it feel coming back?”

“Not coming back. Going to,” said Broker.

Nina poked his shoulder and then pointed out the window. Three stubby MiG 21s lined up on a black cement apron. Green rice fields and red dirt stretched on either side. Broker saw the tiny conical straw hats, the women stooped in shiny black pantaloons. Then, reality tapped his eyes. A Communist flag fluttered over a tiny mustard-walled colonial-style terminal.

Hong Kong was a movie he’d watched. Just colored lights. Down there it was going to be sweat, orangebrown
bazen
dirt, and buffalo shit. Hard core. Third World. Real.

Nina leaned back in her seat and stared straight ahead. Getting ready. Broker supplied the word like he was lighting a fuse.

“Trin.”

A
RED FLAG WITH A YELLOW STAR FLUTTERED under a dirty brass sun.

Broker stepped into the climate with one hand clenched on Jimmy Tuna’s map inside his security belt. The paradoxical heat and humidity wilted right through him like radiation and made him feel
young
. Excited, he took in the iron land that monsoon rains had turned to rust. The airport was in the middle of nowhere. Just fields, bicycles, and water buffalo.

Two buses pulled toward the aircraft. As they turned and opened their doors to admit the arriving passengers, Nina leaned against his shoulder and laughed. Absurdly, garish blue Pepsi logos adorned their sides.

The bus drove them across the runway and, slow motion, in the heat, they entered the terminal. On scuffed tile floors, they queued up for the customs station and the ragtag X-ray machines beyond. Weary officers wore brown uniforms that were too tight or too loose. They stood behind antique wooden counters and shuffled papers and stared mainly at their hands. Broker didn’t see a single gun being worn in the building.

A crowd of Vietnamese taxi drivers pressed against the doors and windows. Broker searched for the face of a man he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

Nina pulled him by the arm toward a hand-held sign floating above the crowd.
Phillip Broker/Nina Pryce. Vietnam Hue Tours greets you
!

“Huh?” said Broker.

Nguyen Van Trin, at five feet four inches, needed the sign. He came up to the top of Nina’s ears but his grin was six feet tall. Trim down the nose, slant the eyes and Trin could have posed for one of the stone faces on Easter Island. He’d picked up a few more scars on his drum-tight kisser since the last time Broker had seen him.

“Trin, you sonofabitch.” Awkwardly, they clasped arms.

“It’s me,” said Trin and his easy English came through the foreignness of the place like hope. But his voice had lost its deep resonance. Now sardonic, cautious. The old military fire had long extinguished.

“How are you?”

“Ah, well…” He affected a Gallic shrug. His once intense brown eyes now reminded Broker of tired wood, still hard, but flat and brittle. His body was husky and durable, round with muscle and deeply tanned, like he’d been working outside. He wore baggy cotton slacks, loafers, and a black T-shirt; his black hair was a little shaggy. Unmasked in this intimate moment, he was frail around the eyes. Studying the ashes of Trin’s smile, Broker gauged:
They broke him
.

“Jimmy Tuna sends his regards,” said Broker.

“How is he?” asked Trin, confused but smiling.

“Dying.”

Trin nodded politely, then, sensing Nina’s scrutiny, he turned to her, touched his cheek, and pointed. “Freckles,” he said. “Like Ray.”

Nina pursed her lips. She accepted Trin’s solemn handshake.

“We have to talk about my dad,” she said frankly.

“Yes,” said Trin casually, “but not here. Do you have other bags?”

“Just what we’re carrying,” said Broker.

“The car’s over here,” said Trin, making a display of taking Nina’s shoulder bag and leading them to a gray tourist van with Vietnam Hue Tours stenciled on the side. The driver was a lean, waspish northerner in a dark shirt and slacks who nodded enthusiastically. “This is Mr. Hai, our driver for Hanoi,” explained Trin. “Mr. Hai speaks English; he used to listen to Americans talk on the radio all the time, right, Mr. Hai?”

Hai nodded and declaimed, “Alpha Bravo Charley.” He held the door open for Broker and Nina. “Uniform Victor Whiskey.”

“So how was your flight?” asked Trin.

“Quiet,” said Nina. “The plane was only half full.”

“Yes and no. Air Vietnam makes room for ghosts,” said Trin.

A man in NVA green and a pith helmet came straight at Broker on a bicycle. His stomach tightened. The man smiled broadly and rode by and Broker’s eyes began to absorb the visual judo chops. Red flags draped like bull-fighter capes from the front of the dusty hooch-shacks that lined the road. Wicker walls. Banana thatch roofs. Fields of rice. Women in straw hats bent to the grain. In the fields, surrounded by ancestral grave mounds, a crude billboard displayed a syringe and warned against AIDS in
English
and Vietnamese.

“I don’t see men in the fields,” said Nina.

“Men prepare the land, women handle the rice,” said Trin. He gazed at the stooped laborers and said quietly, “Heart to earth, back to sky.”

Mr. Hai drove with his horn, brushing off clouds of bicyclists. They passed a putting motorscooter with wicker cylinders of live pigs trussed on the back, behind the driver.

Broker read aloud a sign in English. “‘Tourist information. Souvenirs’?” He shook his head, then a billboard announcing a new luxury hotel. “English? In Hanoi?”

“The language of commerce,” said Trin philosophically. Nina leaned forward. Trin lowered his hand over the seat, below the driver’s line of sight in the rearview and stayed her question with firm pressure on her forearm. His eyes wandered toward the driver. Nina understood, leaned back. “What is the population of Hanoi?” she asked.

Trin replied in his best tour guide voice, “Three million, about two and a half million more than it can handle.” He smiled. “Curtis LeMay said he was going to bomb Hanoi back to the stone age. He failed. But Hanoi has put itself in the stone age with overdevelopment.”

Nina nodded politely.

The van beeped monotonously as it entered swarms of scooters and bikes and the rickshaws known locally as cyclos. No rules governed the swelling human cataract; everybody preferred the middle of the road, both directions. The open fields disappeared and they were in narrow streets among two-story tenements.

Broker continued to process. He saw his third Marlboro billboard in twenty-four hours: the first had been in English, which is to say American, in Seattle; the second was in Hong Kong, a hundred feet high and splashed with Chinese calligraphy. The one he saw now had the same hard-riding lung cancer cowboy but was in the Romanized Vietnamese alphabet. The letters were familiar, the sounds they made utterly alien. Like anagram puzzles.

Then they plunged into a sea of people on wheels who moved less like traffic than like blood through arteries and capillaries and, sealed in their air-conditioned bubble, they shouldered into the heartbeat of Hanoi.

The hotel was a white stucco jukebox with a spitting lime neon band wrapping its marquee. A grinning youth in a long blue coat and a captain’s hat rushed to open the plate glass door. “Three star, joint venture. The plumbing works. CNN on satellite dish,” recited Trin as they got out of the van.

Hanoi was bells, horns, raw sewage, fish sauce that smelled like bad feminine hygiene, a million charcoal fires, Samsung and Sony signs, and Socialist Realist hammers and sickles bursting in Peter Max colors on billboards. Flimsy new construction competed with rundown French Colonial and sooty aging brick with twist-up pagoda tile roofs. Down the alleys: Confucian shadows.

Too much for jet-lagged senses.

Trin chatted briefly with the driver. The van pulled away. Broker and Nina clung to the reception desk in the hotel lobby. Another slender life raft of English. They handed over their passports. Europeans jammed the lobby; French and German languages predominated. Trin joined them at the desk.

“The driver will pick us up in the morning. We’ll see some sights before we catch the train to Hue,” he said.

“Train?” asked Broker.

“Yes, it’ll give us time to get reacquainted,” said Trin. He advised them to change some dollars for dong, which they did. Broker put a wad of currency in his pocket the size of a small roll of toilet paper.

“Will you join us for a drink, Mister Trin?” he asked formally for the benefit of the hotel staff behind the counter.

“Thank you,” said Trin, bowing slightly.

A grinning bellhop escorted them up the elevator and to adjoining rooms on the third floor. Nina turned pointedly to Broker. “You going to tell him?”

“I’m going to tell him,” said Broker.

Trin listened with a bland smile. His smile was echoed by the hovering bellhop.

She turned to Trin. “You two have some catching up to do. I’m going to take a shower.” She took her bag from the bellhop and entered her room. Broker and Trin went next door to Broker’s room.

They waited while the bellhop opened the drapes and turned on the air conditioner. Broker tipped him with a dollar bill and closed the door behind him.

Trin, watchful, keyed up, hid behind a shrug. “Sorry, Phil, caution is an old habit. Tour guide is my main income when I can get away with it. Explain to Nina that a good guide must be friendly with Americans. But it’s not a good idea to be familiar with them the minute they get off the plane.”

Broker opened the mini icebox and tossed Trin a chilled green can of Tiger beer, then opened one for himself. They sat in chairs across a low table in front of the window. Below them the Kamikaze traffic coursed through an intersection. Children kicked a soccer ball in a park across the street.

For a full minute there was silence as he debated how to start. How to span two decades. Outside, cloud cover cut the sun and the window oscillated between transparent and opaque. Their reflections flirted, barely visible in the glass. Then disappeared.

“So, how is it hearing Vietnamese being spoken again, Phil?” Trin asked slowly.

Broker stared at the trees around the park. They looked like massive Bonsai, foreign and tortured, like they’d been traumatized by bombs. “Not sure yet. Everybody’s so…friendly. All the signs in English. I’d think they’d hate our guts here.”

“Things changed,” said Trin with shrill gunshot abruptness. Then his demeanor softened. “Actually, Americans are new to them here in Hanoi. The only personal contact they had with you—besides the bombs—were the Senator John McCain’s falling by parachute into the local lakes, and Jane Fonda. Down south it will be different, where the Lieutenant Calleys left their mark.” He offered a cigarette and as Broker accepted it he saw that they had a ritual to perform. He drew the chain from around his neck and handed Trin the tiger tooth.

Trin cradled it in his hand. “Thank you. This has been in my family for over four hundred years.” Broker thought, but could not say:
Well, it’s been laying in my underwear drawer for almost twenty
…

Broker’s old Zippo appeared in Trin’s hand. Broker took the lighter, turned it to read the sentiment engraved on the side and winced.

Lt. Phil Broker. Quang Tri City. 1972
.

When I die reincarnate me as a 2,000-pound bomb
.

“You were young,” said Trin. He looked out the window. “I had to bury that for fourteen years.” He smiled bitterly. “I dug it up in eighty-nine when the door opened to the West.”

Broker tapped the Zippo on the table. “How are you doing, Trin?”

Shadows gathered in the lumped scar tissue on Trin’s left cheekbone. “What did the girl mean—you have something to tell me? What am I mixed up in, Phil?” he asked softly.

The Zippo clicked nervously on the table. “You have a family? Kids?” asked Broker.

“My wife formalized our divorce in seventy-five, after Liberation. She stayed with the winning side. She has never let me forget I didn’t. My son and daughter grew up with her, here in Hanoi. Now they’re both in school, in France.” Trin narrowed his eyes. “No family. No kids. Would it make a difference?”

Broker clicked his teeth. “Sorry, but I have to ask…”

Trin smiled sadly. “You’re evaluating me, Phil.”

“Yeah, sorry,” sighed Broker.

“The student has become the teacher?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“What do you do for a living, Phil?”

“I’m a policeman.”

“Really? You hated the army. I’d have thought you were too independent to put up with…structure.”

“An undercover policeman.”

Trin took a long meditative drag on his cigarette. “I see. Are you here working on a case?”

“You could say that.”

Trin exhaled and his eyes wandered out the window. “Pieces come back. Ever since Jimmy found me. It’s like a bad dream. Cyrus is here…”

Broker nodded. “In Hue, checked into the Century Riverside Hotel. The Imperial Suite.”

Trin sagged. “He has a big boat off the coast. I read it in the newspaper. It’s been on the state TV.”

“You’re getting warm.”

“Jimmy,” said Trin. He bit his lip.

“Too bad Jimmy can’t make it to the reunion,” said Broker.

Trin stared at his hands. “The last time we were together we almost got killed. When Jimmy called he told me Ray did get killed. I saw that helicopter fly off with a heavy load in its sling. There are…crazy rumors.”

“Not rumors,” said Broker.

Trin looked up and perspiration beaded on his forehead. He spoke very slowly as his eyes scoured Broker’s face. “A convict in an American prison sends an intermediary to find me six years ago. He sets me up running a convalescent home for disabled Front veterans. He specifies exactly where he wants the home built on a deserted strip of coast in Quang Tri Province. He has me buy a boat. A fairly large boat. Because I am helping disabled Liberation Front fighters I am allowed to do all these things. To spend money. Otherwise, because I fought for the South, I can be a hotel clerk, a waiter, or a cyclo-boy. Or, because I went through the camps, there’s a program for former southern officers. I can immigrate to America if I have a sponsor.

“And then, when Jimmy is ready to come himself, he develops a fatal disease.” Trin’s eyes were getting hotter. “And a secret policeman comes in his place with the daughter of a dead friend. Is the girl supposed to make it all palatable?”

They stared across the table.

Trin took another drag on his cigarette and his wooden eyes kindled. “Once you asked me why my men burned slips of paper before going into battle. I never answered you.” He paused and picked up a sheet off the hotel notepad on the table and took a pen from his pocket. He slapped the pen down on the sheet. “They were writing prayers. Write a prayer for me that tells me why you’re here.”

Broker squinted, saw that he was serious. “Okay,” he said. He picked up the pen and printed: W
e know where Ray is buried under ten tons of gold. Cyrus doesn’t
.