The Price of Blood (36 page)

“God, this is so crazy.” Trin’s face glowed in the last sputter of sunset. “I’ve wanted to do something like this all my life.”

He pulled the gold tiger tooth from his pocket and held it in both hands. Shoulders touching, they laughed and leaned forward. Down below, the long shadow of the shovel planted in the sand crept slowly toward the sea.

W
HEN IT WAS DARK THEY RUBBED ON MOSQUITO repellent, picked up their tools, and walked down to the beach. Like the flute player’s march, the night was older here, blacker. Looking up, Broker did not know the stars. A steady breeze came off the sea.

Trin stamped a circle around the shovel and pulled it from the sand. A lopsided moon delineated their faces. Trin drove the shovel into the sand.

Broker hefted the mattock and gauged the ache in his taped thumb. He swung into the packed sand and grunted. He’d be all right.

Besides the sea, the only sounds were the thud of the mattock loosening the sand and the sigh of sand on steel as Trin’s shovel moved it aside. When they had made a hole six feet in diameter they both worked on their knees with the short shovels. Sweat and sand made a sodden paste of Broker’s T-shirt and their breath came in short, regular bursts. Giddy, Broker imagined a grown elephant frozen, tusks extended, in full rampant charge just below his feet. He calculated the circumference of a B-52 crater, about thirty-feet across.
Poof
. A powder of crimson ash would sprinkle down on the South China Sea.

“Remember how Jimmy loved booby traps?” said Broker.

“Dig,” said Trin.

After a while they passed a slippery water bottle and fell back, resting their dripping backs against the damp sand. Shoulder deep in the pit and bugs had started to find them. Trin reached up into his bucket and jammed a bundle of incense sticks into a shelf of sand. Lit them. The smoke sought them out and curled, tickling their drenched bodies, and seeped into the dark.

Broker wondered if Mama Pryce was really down there, below his feet, and if he could read smoke after twenty years.

It was getting impossible for both of them to work in the pit. Trin stayed in the hole. Broker lowered a bucket on a rope and hauled out loads of sand. The hole was now six feet deep, narrower at the bottom. Trin had hacked a place for the lantern and looked like a copper cave dweller toiling in the weak light.

Exhausted, they took a break and staggered down to the sea and fell in. Back on the beach, they sat, gobbling the rice balls Trung Si had prepared for them as they dried off. Washed them down with bottled water.

“Beach could have shifted,” said Broker. “It could be anywhere.”

“Start another hole,” said Trin.

They were getting slap-happy. But they started a second pit. It was close to midnight. They had been digging for almost four hours. An hour into the second site Trin decided to return to the first pit. Broker resumed hauling up the buckets.

Ludicrous. The waves breaking on the sand chanted, cynical—
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
. Broker dug on the desperate word of a dead man who his whole life had loved to play jokes. The veins had turned to acid wires in his arms, his tendons were yanking out of his joints; fingers were webbed, cramped, fusing together.

Trin had stopped digging and sprawled back on his haunches, arms dead at his sides. Spent. The pit angled now, back toward the three graves like evidence of slipping focus. The walls kept caving in. The lantern sputtered and died. Trin refilled it. Broker sprawled with his head hanging over the edge.

“I think we’ve had it,” said Broker deliriously. Below him, Trin giggled. Broker pushed up on his elbows and rolled over and stared up at the stars. Low in the south he thought he saw the Southern Cross.

He’d always been a working-stiff existentialist. Attuned to the buttons and unbuttonings of the absurd. He and Sisyphus were asshole buddies. Digging up beaches, pushing boulders. Same same. Just keep moving it down the line. He fumbled for a cigarette. His cramped fingers snapped the fragile paper cylinder. Shreds of flying tobacco tickled his nose. His Zippo spun from his grasp and dropped into the pit.

Trin giggled louder. Broker heard the Zippo click open, heard Trin thumb the wheel. A flicker. Flame danced in the hole.

Broker hunched his head. Something flew out of the pit. It fell into the sand at his feet with a heavy thud. His hips and lower back protested, but he forced himself up. Carefully. His spine was a balancing act. A precarious stack of rocks. He crawled for the object. An oblong piece of wood. Dense. Intact, with screws in it.

“Huh?”

Trin giggled again.

Broker pawed for a flashlight and switched it on. He saw fragments of stenciled letters under a coating like a transparent tar-like substance, crusted with sand. Numbers: 155.

“Wha?” he muttered, pawing at the panel of wood.

“Ammo case. For artillery rounds. The wood looks like it’s been treated with preservative. Creosote maybe,” panted Trin. He giggled hysterically again.

Broker crawled furiously on all fours to the edge of the hole and squinted down his flashlight beam. Trin’s eyes and teeth glowed in a mask of dirt and sweat. His right hand was snarled in metal that dazzled chrome-yellow in the electric light.

“It’s gold!” shouted Trin. He tried to scramble up the walls of the pit, one hand extended with his fistful of trophies, the other trying to clamp a long, shallow sand-packed wooden box to his side.

Broker almost pitched in. Reaching, clawing at Trin’s wrist. Exhaustion evaporated. Weight was nothing. He almost catapulted Trin and the crate into the air. They rolled over on the lip of the pit and laughed like boys. Up off all fours they danced on their knees as Trin waved his right hand under Broker’s eyes. Dozens of gold circles dripped from the damp sand in his fingers. Hundreds more winked in the sandy box.

“What are they?” yelled Broker.

“Vietnamese credit cards,” yelled Trin. “Gold rings!”

He pawed the sand in the ammo box. Everywhere his fingers moved the sand, metal gleamed. “Thousands of gold rings.” He plucked out a thin sheet, then a wafer that looked like a yellow domino. “Leaves,” he said. “Taels. There must be a hundred pounds of gold in this box!”

Suddenly Trin went rigid. “Listen,” he hissed. They killed the flashlights. Broker strained his ears. Trin’s eyes bulged. Mercury saucers in the dark. Instinctively they both hunched forward and absurdly threw their arms protectively around the heap of gold. A distinct, sharp clacking, above them, on the slope, by the graves. From a carefully stored inventory of nightmare sounds, Broker specified: the click of bamboo on bamboo. VC semaphore in the night.

Trin’s chest heaved in relief. “Trung Si signaling. He’s coming in.”

Gingerly, they struggled up on rubber knees. The darkness shuffled above them and the old sergeant swung down the beach on his crutch. The hunting rifle was slung over his shoulder.

A moment of sheer paranoid panic that was as old as pirates and buried treasure and betrayal knifed Broker as Trung Si unlimbered the rifle. But the old man was just easing his back. Trung Si muttered to Trin.

Trin began to laugh and then he cupped his hand over his mouth. In a quiet controlled voice he said, “He could hear us yelling halfway to Quang Tri City. He says we should shut the fuck up. Sound carries out here.”

Grumbling, Trung Si braced on his crutch and lowered himself to the edge of the pit. Carefully he laid the rifle and the crutch across his lap. He massaged his leg. Trin switched on his flashlight and played the beam across glitter at his feet.

Trung Si coughed and hawked a wad of phlegm. Then he put a cheroot-looking cigarette, rolled from raw homegrown tobacco, to his lips. He took a cheap plastic lighter from his tunic and lit the fag. He blew a stream of smoke and grumbled something.

“What?” asked Broker.

“It’s a saying,” said Trin. “You find gold, you pay with blood.”

“Back home we call that a curse,” said Broker. The intoxication had subsided. He squatted and sifted his fingers through the golden trinkets. “Rings?”

“People don’t trust banks or currency; those rings are the basic denomination. Easy to carry. We don’t deal in dong for big items, it’s too clumsy. A television set is, say, eight gold rings.” He picked up the tael. “Ten gold rings.”

“That’s today,” said Broker. “The stuff we’re looking for was buried twenty years ago.” Broker shook his head. “This isn’t it.”

“So? It’s loot. A lot of robbery took place on the roads when the war ended. It’s gold,” protested Trin. “That’s only one box. There’s lots more…stacks.”

“The pieces I saw were bigger.”

“You saw?”

“Yeah, at Cyrus’s house in New Orleans.”

“You never told me—” Trin moved closer.

“I’m telling you now. A lot bigger, about six, seven pounds, with Chinese writing on them.”

Trin seized Broker’s elbow. “Writing?” The flashlight illuminated their faces from below, pocketing their features. Halloween masks.

“Chinese characters, you know…” Broker made a tangled ideogram with his finger in the dark.

“Fuck me dead,” gasped Trin in perfect sixties slang. He leaped back into the pit.

T
RIN’S VOICE RODE A HYSTERICAL BATSHIT VIETNAMESE bobsled down in the pit. The silica flew. Above ground, Trung Si totally lost his phlegmatic peasant reserve. He scrambled to his foot and his crutch and, despite his earlier cautions about keeping it quiet, jabbered in the night.

Broker was double lost. Strange land. Strange tongue. Stuck in the dark with crazy people. One of whom was armed. He strobed his flashlight back and forth between the pit and the agitated old man who now had gone peg-leg wild and was stumping in the sand, swinging the rifle at the ready in all directions.

Trin’s shovel hacked with manic energy at sodden wood and sand. Crazy man here, chopping down a beach. The sound carried hollowly up from the pit. His excited voice exceeded all previous pitch, close now to the tonal frenzy of the flute player’s music.

In a stab of light Trung Si dropped his rifle and waved his arms, covering his face, warning Broker. Objects flew out of the hole, thick, oblong. One. Two. Trin’s voice maxed out on a triumphant fever shriek. Broker stepped back as another dark shape lobbed through the dark.

Panting, greased with sweat and dirt, Trin scrambled up from the hole. Trung Si had plopped back down on the sand and yelled, crawling one-legged, collecting the three sand-gummed ingots that Trin had thrown from the pit. Trin yanked him upright and arm in arm, clutching the heavy bars, they did a three-legged race down to the edge of the sea. Broker followed them as their electric torches swung like giddy miniature searchlights. They continued to rave as they collapsed in the water and scrubbed at the ingots. Then they crabbed their way to the edge of the surf.

Kneeling in the wet sand, Broker shook them by the shoulders. Trin went down on all fours. He lined the three ingots up in a row in the soft smooth sand and bent, his flashlight held over them like a caricature of Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass. Trung Si protested and picked up the center bar, moved the left one in and put the bar down at the end of the row. Broker gathered that they were arguing about an ordering sequence.

“Speak English, goddammit!” he shouted.

Like an Asian Laurel and Hardy, Trin and Trung Si comically hushed their voices. Trin rocked back on his heels and grinned. “French would be more appropriate,” he crowed in a whisper.

“That’s them,” said Broker, pointing at the ingots. Both flashlight beams now pinned the yellow rectangles to the inky sand. The indestructible sheen of gold perfectly complemented the desperate night. Gleaming, wrapped in soft ribbons of surf and nervous muscular brown hands sluiced by sea water, the ingots were about seven inches long, three to four inches wide and more than an inch thick. A panel was stamped in a decorative border with stacked Chinese characters, three on two of the ingots, four on the third.

Trin shook himself, fell on his back and fluttered a hand on his chest. “It’s too big for me,” he said.

“It’s gold, like I told you,” said Broker.

“It’s not just gold,” said Trin in wonder.

“Okay, it’s old Chinese gold,” said Broker.

Trin jackknifed up into a sitting position, pounded the sand with his fist and declared, “Not Chinese. Ours!”

Broker, weary of dramatic outbursts, got up. “I’m going back to the hole to get some coffee and my cigarettes. You calm down.”

Trin and Trung Si commenced a brusque debate in Vietnamese. Broker helped Trung Si return to the pit and reunited him with his crutch and his rifle. Muttering to himself, the old man hobbled back up the slope and disappeared into the dark. Broker then returned to the beach. He poured a cup of coffee and tried to take its comfort. He faced Trin. They sat cross-legged, the ingots between them.

In the distance they heard an engine start. The van.

“What’s going on? Can that old guy drive?” asked Broker.

“He uses the crutch on the clutch, he’s fine. Phil—he’s going for the boat,” said Trin in a grim voice.

“So we’re going to do it,” said Broker.

“How many boxes should we take? Ten? Fifteen?”

“As many as we can. How many are there?”

“A lot.”

They lowered their eyes. No flashlights. The metal picked up a faint iridescence from the moon, pecked by tiny points of starlight. Like the moving lines of surf.

Calm now, Trin composed himself. “That hole is a lot deeper than you think,” he said. He tapped the first ingot. “Gia Long, third year, eighteen oh-three.” His finger moved to the second bar. “Minh Mang, fifth year, eighteen twenty-five.” The third. “Tu Duc, tenth year, eighteen fifty-eight.”

“Emperors,” said Broker slowly as he recognized the names and placed them in context. A shuttle of magic moved in the night. Hemming them in. His skin shrunk two sizes and prickled and cinched around the testicles. “No shit!”

“No shit. This wasn’t stolen from a bank. It isn’t just…money. This is Imperial gold. Part of the treasure of the Nguyen emperors. No one has seen gold like this for over a hundred years except in a museum in Paris.”

“Goddamn, Trin. I thought the French took it all…”

Trin nodded. “When they looted the Hue Citadel in eighteen eighty-five. Looks like they missed some.” Trin shook his head. His hands groped the air. “You see. It’s…big.” He clicked his teeth. “Bigger than us.”

“Real treasure,” said Broker, now understanding Cyrus’s morbid obsession. And he saw how, in his fractured way, Jimmy Tuna was making his amends.

“If they knew about this in nineteen seventy-five Hanoi would have parked a division of tanks on it,” said Trin slowly.

“Okay,” Broker blurted. “Jimmy and Cyrus found the stuff and got it as far the bank. They phonied it up as a pallet of ammo. It just sat there after Hue fell.”

Trin exhaled. “God, I probably walked by it a dozen times myself. Just sat there for over a month?”

“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Ask Cyrus.”

Trin struggled to his feet. Broker joined him. They wobbled, supporting each other.

“So,” said Broker.

“So, we have to keep Highway One open for one more day.” Trin’s voice threw a resonating thespian echo down the empty beach. “We just get Nina away from Cyrus and then draw Cyrus here and call the militia when he’s digging it up.” It was three in the morning. The plan had the teeth of a butterfly assault on Mount Rushmore.

“That’s all,” said Broker, reeling. They both had the gold delirium tremens.

“C’mon. We’ve got to haul some boxes down to the water. And they’re heavy. Then we have to fill in that hole,” said Trin. “And meet Cyrus at noon in Hue. And not tell anybody else.”

“Trung Si knows,” said Broker.

Trin wearily brushed sand from his shirt. “Trung Si will keep his mouth shut. He’s more worried about the curse of found gold.”

“Once we load the boat, where we going to hide it?”

Trin shrugged. “Let Trung Si worry about that. He was a guerrilla all his life. He’s hid stuff from the Japanese, the French, the Americans…”

Arm in arm, they staggered back up the beach.