The Price of Blood (34 page)

“Trin,” said Broker irritably.

“This won’t take long,” said Trin. The road dipped and turned hilly. The homes were dense at first, wall to wall. Then they spread out, more expensive. And then Broker managed to orient himself, using their travel time from the corner of highways 1 and 9. He’d been this way before.

When Trin stopped the van and got out, Broker didn’t know the place. Then he saw the stone griffin. Now it was upright, clean, the centerpiece of a carefully tended garden. Bonsai. The shapes of animals: an elephant, a deer, a lion.

The stone slab still guarded the door. And now the terraces and patios were meticulously landscaped with flowering bushes. The back of the estate was walled off and drenched in hanging vines. Broker couldn’t see the small hill where the graves had been. A crushed gravel driveway meandered through the gardens and a gleaming black Toyota Land Cruiser was parked at the end of it. The letter A was prominent on the license plate.

Trin stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck. He called out in Vietnamese. Broker took his arm to lead him away.

“No,” insisted Trin. “They are home. The car is here.” He yelled again. There was movement on the patio, in the shade of a trellis dripping with flowers. A middle-aged man wearing gray slacks and a white shirt open at the throat stepped from the shadows. He held a newspaper in his hand. He put on sunglasses.

Trin barked at him and his musical native tongue now sounded like wooden blocks being pounded together by an angry child. This time Broker put a firm hand on Trin’s arm and yanked him back.

The man on the patio responded curtly in a voice tired, but husky with authority. A lean woman in a dark pants suit joined him on the patio. She had wide cheeks and broad lips and beautiful jet-black hair. Even at a distance, Broker could feel the strike of her precise eyes. Two little Communist flags.

She made a dismissive, shooing underhanded gesture toward Trin. And went back in the house.

Now infuriated, Trin shouted and whipped a handful of American currency—Broker’s unreturned change from the market—from his pocket and brandished it. The man waved his newspaper in a weary disgusted gesture and retreated inside the house.

Trin pulled away from Broker and started up the driveway. Broker was on him; from the corner of his eyes he saw people coming into the street. Trin yelled one last time, then spit on the money in his hand, and contemptuously flung it at the ground. Crumpled twenty-dollar bills, pocket change, and assorted pocket lint littered the driveway. Spent, he let Broker drag him back to the vehicle.

“Calm down, goddammit,” seethed Broker. Trin sulked behind the wheel, turned the key, and drove quickly from the neighborhood.

“What was that all about?” Broker demanded.

“He’s a pig,” spat Trin. “They’re both pigs. Big-shot Communists. He works in the customs office. She’s the fucking mayor of Dong Ha. When I got out of the camps I discovered that the party had given them my house. I offered to pay if he would allow me to visit the graves.”

“Trin, we have more important things to worry about.” Broker’s nerves were way past anxiety. He found himself riding shotgun with a time bomb of folly. He wondered if any Americans of a diplomatic stripe lived in Hue City, the nearest big town.

“I’ll show him,” muttered Trin with a fatal glow in his hot eyes.

They turned on Highway 1 and drove south, and Broker really began to worry. Could be worse than folly. A lot worse.

T
HEY WERE ABOUT A MILE SOUTH OF QUANG TRI City and Broker realized that he was looking for a bridge. A bridge that Jimmy Tuna had blown up twenty-three years ago. Trin slowed as he came up to another North Vietnamese Arlington on the right side of the highway. He pulled on to the shoulder and put the van in neutral.

Trin addressed his outburst in Dong Ha in roundabout fashion. “Look at this fancy cemetery. And these are only the northerners they couldn’t identify to send home. The losers are not allowed cemeteries. We cannot look for our missing. Some of us cannot even visit our family graves. We all smile and say ‘yes’ but sometimes it gets very hard. Very hard,” he repeated, gripping the steering wheel.

“Trin, Jesus,” Broker ran his hand through his hair, “you have to control yourself.”

“I will,” said Trin, determined. “You saved my life that night in Hue. They were going to put me up against a wall.”

“The militia? Do any of them speak English?” Broker asked gently.

Trin’s eyes flashed. “I’m all right now, Phil. I can do this. I used to do things like this all the time.” He closed his hand around the tiger tooth that hung around his neck and made a fist.

As Trin put the van in gear and pulled back onto the road his expression was carved in black teak. The worst possible thing had happened. He had lost face. In front of a foreigner. And, considering what Trin had been through, Broker could have accepted the mood swings in an ordinary man. But he wasn’t willing to grant Trin the luxury of being ordinary.

But what if he was?

They drove on without speaking. Trin turned left before they came to Tuna’s bridge and drove toward the coast on a gravel road. The cars, trucks, and hordes of motorbikes disappeared and they were in the countryside among more traditional traffic: water buffalo, bicycle, and foot.

The land now conformed more to the pictures in Broker’s memory, except for the concrete struts of electric powerlines and telephone lines strung through the rice paddies. And the red flags hanging from the houses. They passed another cemetery with a bleached crop of stone under a red cement star.

Broker cranked down the window and turned off the air conditioning. “We won’t have AC where we’re going. I better get used to it.” Trin nodded and opened his window.

The air was a swimming pool. The breeze was an itching pepper of red dust. Broker’s determination to wear his sweat like a pro ran out his pores. He reached for an omnipresent liter of bottled water.

But Trin’s spirits revived in the rice fields, away from the noisy highway. He worked a jigsaw on the dusty roads, weaving in and out of plodding farmers and school kids on bikes. Twice they stopped. To snack on bananas and then for some iced Huda beer. But really they paused to watch the traffic behind them. Two hours into the fields and farms Trin decided they were not being followed.

“Interesting,” said Trin, more centered now. “Cyrus can’t afford to trust even one Vietnamese.”

Then he drove to a riverbank and they waited for a small car ferry powered by a sampan with dual out-boards. Slowly they crossed the muddy river. On the other side they waited an hour. When no one else used the ferry they stopped looking over their shoulders and drove straight for the coast.

The country began to change: patchy white sand diluted the green palette of tree line and paddy and then the trees thinned out. The green and white gingham landscape became more solitary as the farmhouses and fields bordered in the reddish earth leaked away. They went by another stark grid of rectangular cement coffins guarded by a truncated pillar.

“Quang Tri,” said Trin absently.

Through a veil of sweat, Broker saw thickets of traditional graves everywhere he looked. Mounded earth. Circular walls. Square walls. Painted, unpainted, weeded, unweeded. Even his unseen destination was a grave, lined with gold bars and Ray Pryce’s bones. He wondered if the heat and the pressure had finally boiled away his rocky North Shore good sense. He was out here all alone in this foreign land with a tormented alcoholic for a guide. Jimmy Tuna’s ghost held him captive and pointed the way. Nina’s life rolled like dice.

He had crossed oceans and continents and now he wondered if he had blundered across the Buddhist frontier into a swarming landscape where the dead still cast shadows.

Quang Tri
. More than bones were buried here. Empires.

And Broker, who didn’t dream, except in Vietnam, reminded himself that he didn’t believe in ghosts.

Except in Vietnam.

Come sundown, he mused, the Quang Tri night must draw a crowd; betel nut-chewing ghosts with big, knobby rice-paddy toes who squatted gook-fashion and haggled in their jabber talk; slim, elegant cosmopolitan city ghosts who conversed in French, or swore like legionnaires, and the Japanese and Mongol would-be conquerors and how many million Chinese grunts from the Middle Kingdom who made a one-way trip down here…

And the most recent members of the club, gangs of young rubbernecking American GIs who wandered through these graveyards whistling sixties’ tunes. Dummies who never got the word about the Buddhist recycling program…

In from the sticks and utterly lost in the big city of death.

There were still occasional farms, set among meandering white furrows garnished with green.

“Sweet potatoes,” explained Trin. “The only thing that really grows out here.” He slowed and pointed. Two rusty teardrop-shaped projectiles lay by the side of the road, marked by a stick and strip of white cloth. Old mortar rounds.

They left the meager farms behind and entered rolling dunes patched with scrub, spindly willow trees. The desolation was interrupted only by the remnants of abandoned hamlets, their outlines softened by the shifting sand. And one more military cemetery—out all alone in the dunes.

“We’re almost there. You can smell the sea,” said Trin. And Broker saw it, a band of glittering blue-green between the dunes. The dizzy relief of a breeze swayed the spindly willows.

“Now we walk,” said Trin. They got out and Broker carried two of the beer cases. Trin hauled the other case, the smokes, and the camera. They plodded toward a red flag flying over the willows and came through the trees onto a sand beach. The sea blended placidly into a deceptively calm, baked-enamel blue sky. A buckled cement ramp poked from the sand, all that remained of the old Cua Viet Riverine base. Down the beach Broker saw a tall, new white lighthouse.

Two young men in tan shirts, brown trousers, and bare feet hailed Trin from the beach. He called back. One wore a wide-brimmed brown hat with a visor and had green epaulets on his shoulder and a red armband.

“Militia sergeant,” said Trin. “He’s a good guy.”

Three more young soldiers were in the small head-quarters tucked into the willows. On the way in Broker marked the radio cord draped from a field antennae that leaned, unsteady on its sloppy guide wires. Inside, Trin stacked the beer and handed over the cigarettes amid much deferential gab and more than a few bows.

The radio lead came in through a window and stopped. No radio. A stout, padlocked chest-high wooden bureau took up one whole wall. Maybe the radio was in there, with the guns. The militia had no apparent means of transportation besides their feet. Nobody was armed. Nobody seemed concerned. Maybe they weren’t really soldiers. Maybe they just all bought their clothes at the same place.

The militia insisted they sit down for tea at a rickety table. Ho Chi Minh smiled down on them like a big-eyed alley cat from a calendar tacked to the wall. “The camera,” said Trin. Broker took the camera from its cardboard box and fumbled in the heat. Sweaty fingers dripping on the instructions, he loaded the film.

All smiles, the militia straightened their tunics; one of them combed his hair; the sergeant struck a matinee idol pose. Broker hoped the camera worked.

“They
have
guns?” Broker wondered.

“Oh yes. AKs and grenades and one RPD machine gun,” Trin assured him.

The camera worked. Broker continued to take pictures as more members of the militia platoon arrived. He handed over the sheets of film as they popped out. The militia boys clustered around, chatting happily as their pictures swam up from the chemistry. “Do they have a radio?” he asked.

“Yes. Locked up, with the guns.”

Broker wondered if the Communist party trusted them with the key. “Do
we
have a radio? At the home?”

“No. We have a truck. We’ll send somebody in the truck or the van, at the right time.”

Broker clicked his teeth. They had pimples. They were kids. “What are you telling them?”

“Oh, just talk, about their families.” Seeing Broker’s consternation, Trin reassured him. “Don’t worry. They’ve never been shot at before, so they’ll be very eager. When we tell them that American pirates are stealing antiquities they’ll be tigers.”

“Antiquities?”

“Yes. There has been a big party campaign about foreigners taking our treasures, since eighty-nine.”

Broker wasn’t reassured. He sat in an isolation booth of language, with flies crawling on his fingers. Trin smiled. The militia smiled. Heat-induced paranoia scripted the casual conversation.
This dumb fucking American is going to show me where a fortune is buried on the beach. Some more dumb Americans have a big boat. The hole the treasure is in will be big enough to bury them all
…

When Trin’s socializing was concluded, they left the camera and the last roll of film with the militia and walked back to the van. They backtracked up the sandy road and turned left and drove through the dunes.

“This is a long drive,” said Broker after almost an hour bouncing on a rutted cow path.

“Not far,” Trin minimized. “Five kilometers.”

They turned again and headed back toward the sea. Trin stopped and pulled the emergency brake. “See. Not far.” They left the van at the pylons of an unrepaired bridge and trudged the rest of the way, coming out of the willows onto a beach. Ribbons of breakers eased into a small cove. A decrepit fishing sampan was moored to a rickety dock, rocking gently in the surf. A baleful Chinese eye glared on the bow. A sail was furled to a boom off the mast.

“A sailboat?” Broker groaned.

“It has a motor,” said Trin quickly. Immediately Broker went down to inspect the boat. He climbed over the gunwale and made a face. What looked like the rusty vertebrae of a mechanical dinosaur filled the stern of the boat. An automotive engine, off a Willis Jeep maybe, coupled to some kind of marine transmission with some kind of universal joint. A fifty-five-gallon drum served as the gas tank. He kicked it. Empty. The stirrups next to the motor were absent a battery. The boat was like the militia: unusable. He glanced at Trin dubiously.

“It runs,” said Trin. Then he pointed to a whitewashed building that sat on higher ground among the willows. A different flag tossed from a pole in the sea breeze: red and blue with a yellow star. The first VC flag Broker had seen.

“He can make it run,” said Trin. A scarecrow shadow in sweat-stained gray cotton separated from the shade of the porch. His left pant leg hung empty as he hobbled on a crutch down a lane between rows of vegetables. As they walked up the beach to meet him, Broker shielded the sun with his hand. The old man’s skin was a mahogany shrivel over knotty muscle, his stringy gray hair was tied in a pigtail. His right eye gleamed like a Greek olive in a salad of scar tissue. A black patch covered his left eye.

“That’s Trung Si, my old battalion sergeant major when I was in the Front. Welcome to Jimmy Tuna’s home for down-and-out Viet Cong,” said Trin with a sardonic hung-over grin.