The Price of Blood (33 page)

B
ROKER BRACED HIS HIP AGAINST THE BUCKING wall of the lavatory and aimed a stream of urine at the blue enamel French pissoir set into the dirty linoleum floor. The train lurched and he hit his shoe.

He still had the piece of Nina’s ear in his pocket. He had a headache. They were three hours out of Hanoi, traveling south on narrow-gauge prewar French track behind a Romanian locomotive.

The Australian tour from Air Vietnam was on board, having a party in the hall. Broker gathered that they had been to a snake village outside Hanoi that afternoon and had dined on cobra.

“Archie ate the fucking blood,” crowed a feminine voice down the hall.

“Drank it.
With
a generous squirt of rice whiskey.”

“Now he’s virile.”

“Poison dick.”

Broker pushed through the revelers and eased into his compartment. Trin sat on one of the beds chatting in French with the young couple, Swiss backpackers, who shared the berth. The woman had a tour book open on her knees. Trin handed Broker a huge unlabeled bottle full of clear liquid.

“Snake wine, a gift from the Aussies,” said Trin. “Go ahead. It’ll help you sleep.”

Broker took a slug of the concoction that tasted like fuel oil mixed with formaldehyde. A shadow fell across the compartment and the hulking Aussie filled the doorway. If his ear bothered him he didn’t show it. Apparently snake wine and cobra blood had given him the gift of speech.

“Hi,” he said in a sleazy high-pitched voice, plopping down on the bed across from the Swiss lady and oblivious to everyone else in the cramped space. He began pulling out a thick wad of dong, Australian currency and dollars. “I was wondering if I could buy Sheila here for the night?”

The young woman reddened and drew closer to her shocked companion. Trin exhaled. Broker took another slug of snake wine.

“You won’t regret it,” said the Aussie, leering. “I’m unforgettable. Whadya say…”

Broker reached over and cuffed him with the bottle on the ear that Bevode had pounded the chopstick in. “I think you better leave,” he said.

Pain moved slowly through the dinosaur nerves. The Aussie vaguely tendered the ear with a massive left hand. “Who do you think you are?” he muttered.

“The Lone Ranger.” Broker pointed to Trin. “This is my Indian companion, Tonto.” Trin helpfully flicked out his gravity knife and smiled.

“Fuckin’ Yank,” mumbled the Aussie. He staggered to his feet and felt his way back into the hall where the party slowed down to a groan to mark his passage.

The Swiss couple thanked Broker and scurried out of sight into the upper berths. Trin and Broker sat, silent, rocking to the motion of the train. They passed the bottle back and forth. They lit cigarettes.

They’d been over it all for hours, waiting for the train. Broker said it again, “We have to involve the police.”

“No. We get off at Quang Tri City, pick up the van, get some presents, and pay a visit to the militia post at Cua Viet. They’ll be our reaction force.”

Broker, gloomy captive to police methodology, made the routine assumption. “She could be dead already.”

“No.” Trin was obstinate. “She is part of the barter. We barter for the gold. I am good at bartering.”

“Look, I can understand you wanting to keep this in your little circle of influence. But it’s suddenly got pretty fuckin’ serious.”

Trin whispered. “The gold, Phil. If it’s there, we can take some, hide it on the boat. It’s Tuesday. We meet Cyrus at noon on Thursday—”

“You saw that guy. It’s her life.”

“It’s my life too,” Trin erupted. “You just fly in and create this…situation in my life. You can fly away, too. Americans are good at that. Making a big mess and then flying away. What about me? I’m stuck.”

He stood up and furtively hacked the air with his hands. “Since the tourists I’m better off. In a good month with tips I can make three million dong. That’s three hundred bucks. Usually it’s more like two hundred. A bicycle cost thirty. Ordinary people make two million dong a year. Two hundred dollars. I lived like that, after I got out of the camp. Bartender. Laborer. Desk clerk. Dammit, Phil. I don’t even own a car. This is my chance.”

“We won’t ditch her for the gold,” Broker said emphatically.

“No. We do it all. We get some. We get her back. Get Cyrus arrested…we can do it. But if we go to the police—” Trin drew his finger across his throat.

Trin stood his ground in the rocking compartment, stubborn and desperate. Broker turned his head and gazed through the heavy screen on the open window into the inky Tonkinese night. He could barely hold the outline of the sadness that gripped him. Couldn’t penetrate it. If he tried to picture her face and what she was going through right now he started to unravel. He ached from helpless anger. If they had gone to the MIA people she would be…

But he had to go with his hunch. Now he was chained to it.

“Okay,” said Broker. Useless to talk. He rolled on his side and faced the compartment wall. Ghoulishly his hand crept to his pocket where the portion of Nina’s ear and the earring made a tiny lump. Coil by sweaty coil the snake wine choked off the lurching light and he fell asleep to the clack of the wheels.

Broker never dreamed. Now, as he woke drenched in a cold sweat, shivering, he amended that truism.

Except in Vietnam.

He had dreamed that he and Nina and Ray Pryce and Jimmy Tuna were crossing a swift river on the back of a giant frog. Except Jimmy had the body of a scorpion. In midstream, Jimmy smiled and stung the frog and they all drowned.

He stared at his hands. His fingers itched and had broken out in a bubble of raspberry blisters. Fungus. Hadn’t troubled him since 1975. Slowly he peeled the dirty bandages from his injured thumb. All but forgotten about it. Amazingly, the swelling had gone down. With a pink tickle, the stitched edges of the wound were healing. He took hydrogen peroxide and a fresh dressing from his bag and repaired the bandage.

He checked his watch. He’d slept almost nine hours. Be daylight soon. They must be getting close to the former DMZ.

The old neighborhood.

He was familiar with the slim waist of Vietnam that pinched between the Laotian mountains and the South China Sea: 60 kilometers across at its narrowest point. The Ben Hai River ran along the 17th Parallel; the old demarcation line that partitioned North and South Vietnam in the 1954 Geneva Accords. The Demilitarized Zone had buffered the river, 5 kilometers to the north and south.

Broker didn’t know Saigon. He knew the province that lay below the DMZ. Quang Tri. Highway 1 linked the two main towns along the coastal plain, Dong Ha and Quang Tri City. West out of Dong Ha, Highway 9 ran the gauntlet of gory Marine firebases: Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, Ca Lu, the Rock Pile, and finally Khe Sanh. Hue City was 60 kilometers south on the highway from Quang Tri City, into the next province, Thua Thien. The large port city of Danang lay another 160 kilometers below Hue.

Quang Tri was poor and mean tough. It had lepers and bubonic plague and the temperature could hit 120 degrees in the summer. The red dirt had soaked up a lot of blood. It had been Vietnam’s main killing ground for ten years. He remembered a paragraph in a guide book: seven thousand people had died digging for scrap metal in Quang Tri after the war ended. Mines. Unexploded ordnance…

And now Broker was back. To dig.

And his backup and main means of support lay sprawled on the opposite bunk with the empty bottle of rice wine between his knees. A book lay open on Trin’s chest,
The Sorrow of War
, a novel by a disgruntled North Vietnamese veteran, a black-market English translation the Hanoi street kids hawked along with postcards.

He stared out the grated window. Steaming ground fog, hot as a kitchen stove, obscured the land. A sleepy porter trundled by the door pushing a cart. Broker croaked, “Cafe.”

With a tall, almost clean, glass of thick black coffee he whipped his raw throat into shape with nicotine and watched the dawn come.

The land burned through the wet cotton mist. The ten shades of green furnace he remembered. Brilliant and still vaguely hostile, it hurt his eyes after the smoky, overpopulated inferno of Hanoi. He separated the green into shapes and marveled—not the blasted hills and craters of memory. Pine and eucalyptus trees, planted in orderly farm rows, as far as he could see. Rice fields wandering between them hemmed by dikes of rich red earth. Farmers, hoes on their shoulders, trickled into the fields.

A boy wearing a neat white shirt with a red scarf ran from a farmhouse, schoolbooks under his arm, and raced down the dirt path toward the tracks. Excited, he waved at the passing train. Broker almost smiled. So kids still did that someplace in the world.

The conductor leaned in the corridor, looking out a window. Broker fumbled in broken Vietnamese to inquire when they would cross the river that ran through the old DMZ. “Song Ben Hai khong adoi?”

The conductor pointed to his wristwatch and held up his hand, fingers spread, and said, “Five minutes,” in English. He nodded to the south. “Quang Tri,” he admonished solemnly. Broker leaned back and sipped his coffee.

They had planted a million pine trees in the DMZ.

The sun came up and the heat rolled over him like freeway traffic and left his bones as soggy as Cyrus’s squashed cat. It was Quang Tri all right. The train chugged past a huge military cemetery and its long shadow rippled over thousands of square stone markers laid out in neat rows around a cement spire engraved with a red star.

He craned his neck, looking for reference points. He had operated on every foot of this red dirt along the train tracks between Dong Ha and the DMZ. But now, with things growing everywhere and all the new construction—the war wasn’t just over: it was gone.

Except in America…

Broker shook Trin. “I’m lost,” he said. “A sign just said Gio Linh and I can see a road that has to be Highway One. We must be coming up on Dong Ha but I don’t recognize a thing. There’s…houses.” They crossed the Cam Lo River. A ticky-tacky patchwork of roofs and TV antennas everywhere. Places where he’d fought were now Vietnamese subdivisions.

Trin stared uncomprehending, crushed in the snake wine blues. He shrugged and grimaced and reached for a plastic liter of mineral water. He rinsed out his mouth, spit out the window, poured some water on his hands, and washed his face. Then he sat with his head in his hands.

Half an hour later the train stopped at Quang Tri City and they got off. A driver and another van was supposed to meet them. “Expect delays,” said Trin with a weak smile. “He lives a few blocks away, we’ll walk. Now we’ll find out if we’re being followed.”

They strolled through a small lorry park and Broker saw that the boxy, thirties-style, French Renault buses were still in operation, painted bright blue and yellow. They continued on toward a small bustling open market. Several kids on bikes circled them, shouting, “Lien So.”

Trin, hungover, grumbled, “They think you’re a Russian.”

Broker thumped his chest and said, “Co Van Mi,” American adviser. The kids’ hard faces broke into smiles.

“We called Russians ‘Americans without dollars.’ They were no fun,” said Trin. He went on to explain how Quang Tri City had never recovered from 1972. Dong Ha had replaced it as the provincial capital. He stopped and pointed to four bullet-and artillery-ravaged walls. Saved as a memorial. “We call this the Lucky House,” he shrugged. “The only thing left standing.”

Broker gazed at the place where he’d been young. He didn’t recognize it. Which was okay. He wasn’t young anymore.

“You want to see where the citadel was?” asked Trin.

Broker shook his head. Looked around. “They can’t use a white guy to tail us, not here,” said Broker.

“More likely a Vietnamese, on a motor bike. Keep a sharp watch.”

They turned down a side street past the market and Trin talked rapidly with a man who sat in the shade of his porch. Trin handed the man some money. “Our driver. I’m giving him the next two days off.” Broker followed him in back of the house and they got in a gray van with Vietnam Hue Tours printed on the side.

“The van will draw attention,” said Broker.

“But it will help us if we get stopped by some unfriendly militia, along with this.” He tapped the travel itinerary folded in his chest pocket.

They drove to the congested market and got out. Trin marched ahead, happy at the prospect of spending Broker’s money. He swaggered through the heaping stalls, yelling in Vietnamese. Broker stuffed a wad of dollars into his hand and, thus empowered, Trin seemed to grow several inches. They emerged from the market with three cases of Tiger beer, four cartons of Dunhill cigarettes, and a Polaroid camera and film. “Very important,” said Trin about the camera. “You’ll see.” He held his index finger up in that disturbing grand gesture that now annoyed Broker.

“Before we head for the coast, there’s a stop I want to make,” said Trin abruptly. And Broker, with no leverage, realized that he was no longer the center of his own tragedy.

They got in the van and Trin drove north up Highway 1, toward Dong Ha. Out of their way.

Once desolate expanses of rice paddy had separated QTC from Dong Ha. Now the road was clogged with new brick buildings and worldspeak billboards: Sony, Samsung, Honda. The air was pure motorscooter exhaust. Only the red flags separated the scene from anywhere Developing World squalor. Glum, Broker held his tongue. Waited.

The road got wider, the buildings reached a three-story crescendo of pastel clutter. Trin stopped. “There,” he pointed. Broker saw a vast children’s playground behind a chain-link fence. Slides, swings, merry-go-rounds.

“Do you recognize where you are?” asked Trin. Broker shook his head. Trin grinned. “They built the playground on the site of my old regiment’s base camp. We’re at the intersection of Highway One and Highway Nine. The bridge and the river are right up there, next to the market.”

Broker looked at a tall modernist structure of white concrete. The market. Dong Ha was unrecognizable, overrun with people, motorscooters, and houses. Trin made a U-turn and drove south, finally. Then he pulled a hard right and they were off, down a crowded street.