The Price of Blood (40 page)

“I
T’S ALL RIGHT,” SOOTHED BROKER AS HE CRADLED Nina in the backseat. She opened one eye.

“Don’t bullshit me, Broker,” she croaked.

“It’s better,” he allowed.

He had sponged her off and opened Trin’s first-aid kit and had attempted to clean up the ear. Then he’d wrapped her in a blanket. Like a morbid footnote to the mad night, he remembered that the rest of her ear resided in a little glass jar, pickled in rice alcohol, in the house on the coast.

He dribbled mineral water on her caked lips and used his bandanna to clean more of the ugliness from her face. He didn’t know what to use to medicate the emotional wounds on the inside.

Unconditional love, maybe.

Fitfully, Lola stirred against her binds and moaned from the floor. Trin drove Highway 1 north out of Hue with agonizing restraint, cautious, now, of drawing attention. The headlights made a weaving tunnel of illumination that was regularly invaded by impassive Vietnamese crouched over handlebars. Occasionally a truck. It took forever to get to the turnoff to the coast. As the black farmland closed around them, Broker entertained paranoid fragments of the past: driving through the countryside at night with the lights on. Unarmed.

They were in the paddies now, going slow. Shadowy bicycles jostled the van. Nina turned in his arms, dug her face against his chest, and used her forehead for leverage to push herself up.

“She’s coming around,” said Broker.

With her face still buried in his chest, her marble cold hand worked up his throat and chin and felt his face. “Just barely,” she said in a hoarse voice.

“How you doing?”

“Sloe gin,” she muttered. “First time I had a horrible hangover, was sloe gin. I feel like sloe gin. ’Scuse me, open a window. I gotta puke.”

Broker quickly pulled back the sliding side window and helped her lean out. Her ribcage heaved and she retched down the side of the car. He pulled her back in and wrapped her in the blanket. “Got anything to drink?” she said in a dry voice.

“Water.”

“That Trin up there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Give us a drink, Trin,” said Nina. “Got this horrible taste in my mouth.”

Trin reached under the front seat and handed back an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid. “Watch it. That’s home-made rice whiskey, it might not mix with what they gave you,” he cautioned.

“Gimme,” said Nina. She fastened her hand around the bottle. Broker smiled. A dicey smile. He’d been afraid she’d be in shock. Trauma. By the thin light of the moon he could see the set of her jaw. She was one pissed female human.

Nina gagged on the first swallow of whiskey and lurched toward the window. But she kept it down and went back for a second jolt. She handed the bottle to Broker. “Drink with me,” she said. He did. The moonshine brought tears to his eyes. He handed the bottle back to Trin, who took a long swig, corked it, and stuffed it back under the seat.

“Who’s that on the floor?” said Nina, arching her neck.

“Madame LaPorte. She led us to you. We’re not real sure we trust her so she’s not traveling first class.”

“You found it.”

Broker nodded. “It’s something.”

Nina shuddered and Broker took her in his arms again. “You all right?” he asked foolishly.

“Hell, no, I’m not all right. Got a cigarette?”

He put a cigarette in her lips and popped his Zippo. She steadied on the tobacco, drawing it deep into her lungs. Exhaled.

“You remember anything?” asked Broker.

“The bad parts. There weren’t any good parts.”

“Knock on wood. We might have a fighting chance now.”

“I’m for fighting,” said Nina. She smoked and gazed out the window. They were into the sand now and moonlight twinkled on the dunes. Willows spun crepuscular shadows around the stark geometry of a North Vietnamese cemetery.

She said slowly, “They burned me with cigarettes. I didn’t tell them shit. Gave ’em a lecture on the fucking Code of Conduct.” Gingerly her hand went to her festered left ear.

“I saved it for you,” said Broker absurdly.

“What?”

“You know.”

“Fuckers.” Her voice was still hoarse, but stronger. He could feel her cinching herself by an act of will into a tight knot of leather and stitched canvas and buckles.

“That red-headed creep tried to rape me.” She shook her head ruefully and dragged on the cigarette. By the flare of the cigarette tip she saw the expression on Broker’s face. “Don’t worry, fire base cervix didn’t get overrun…here.” She tried to smile. “Might have in Minnesota, though.” She turned and gazed out the window. “Little shit tried to rape me,” she said, forcefully this time. “But the only thing he could get up was cocaine up his nose. I laughed at him. That’s when he burned me.”

“That was Bevode’s little brother. We took care of him.”

“Fuck him and his limp little dick,” she muttered.

Broker winced at her truculent vulgarity. But she needed it now. If there was a part of her childhood left that remembered playing with dolls it had died in that room.

They drove on in silence broken only by Lola LaPorte’s gagged protests. Nina used Broker’s bandanna to give herself a quick cat-wash. She excused herself and crawled over Lola to the back of the van with the bottle of water and performed a crude douche. She returned at least ritually cleansed. Broker helped her into her clothes.

A farmhouse up ahead was illuminated by an improbable glow. When they went past, they saw a family gathered on a sleeping platform in front of a big color TV.

“Huh,” said Nina. “Is there electricity out here?”

“Batteries,” said Trin.

“
That’s
the beginning of the end of Vietnamese culture,” pronounced Nina dryly and they all laughed. Shaky. But a laugh. She was trying to let them know she was all right. Not a burden. They drove for a long time in silence and there were no more houses.

Then Trin arched in the front seat and yelled. “Oh-oh.” Just before he killed the headlights Broker saw the tree felled across the road.

The barrel of a rifle poked through the open driver’s window. The van was surrounded by limping side-slanting shadows, crabwalkers.

A low discussion commenced in Vietnamese. “It’s all right,” Broker told Nina, recognizing Trung Si behind the rifle.

“It’s not all right,” said Trin very coldly.

Trin cut the tape on Lola’s feet so she could walk and pushed her toward Broker. She tried to pull away, the whites of her eyes bulging in the moonlight, mummified protests coming from her gagged lips. Nina shoved her roughly ahead.

Formed in Indian file, they went off the track and snaked through the dunes, toward the sea. Trin and Trung Si were in the lead. Then five hard-faced middle-aged men in softly straining artificial limbs. Broker saw at least one empty sleeve among them. They all carried primitive weapons: machetes, rice sickles, butcher knives. Despite their handicaps they moved with precision, instinctively keeping an interval. Stopping every few steps to listen. Broker pushed Lola in front of him as he and Nina fell into the rhythm of the night discipline.

As they neared the beach they halted at the clack of bamboo. Another paraplegic hobbled from the shadows. He conversed tensely with Trin and Trung Si. When Nina started to ask a question Broker warned her to be silent. The stony intonation of Trin’s whispers informed him that, for better or worse, this was now a Vietnamese show.

Slowly they approached the house on the slope over the beach. The cripples sprawled carefully in the cover of the dunes while Trung Si hopped spry and silent on his crutch to a covering position and leaned over his rifle. Trin crept down to the house.

Five tense minutes passed. Then a low whistle sounded from the beach. Trung Si swung up on his crutch and waved his rifle. The cripples pushed themselves up and went down on line. Broker and Nina followed.

The place had been trashed. Shards of crockery and utensils were strewn in the trampled vegetable garden. Trin and his men gathered at the flagpole next to the porch.

Nina’s fingers spasmed on Broker’s biceps. Her nails broke the skin.

In the moonlight they could make out the legless mass of the flute player’s body. Trin held up a fuel oil lantern and Trung Si lit the wick. The soft yellow light revealed that the dead man’s neck was grotesquely stretched in a noose knotted in the flagpole lanyard. A chopstick had been pounded almost out of sight into his left ear.

“Meeow.” A low growl thickened the inflection of the voices around the flagpole. Smoldering dark eyes swung toward the three white people in the yard. Lola shied back, straining against the tape on her wrists. Nina grabbed her by the hair and shoved her forward and forced her to her knees in front of the flagpole.

Flies stormed around Lola’s face and she averted her head from the barnyard stench. Trung Si swore. They saw that the Viet Cong flag had been taken down. It lay in the dirt, filled with feces. More flies clustered in black twitching furrows on the dead man’s body. Among the crawling insects they saw patches of skin upbraided, hanging in flaps.

One of the vets began brushing the flies away. Another steadied the corpse while another cripple cut the rope with a machete. Slowly they lowered the body to the earth.

Broker exhaled. Whipped and lynched.
You find gold, you pay in blood
. The flute player and Billie Holiday could have played a duet.

Trung Si tapped Broker on the shoulder and pointed out to sea. At first Broker thought he was pointing at the stars and then he picked out the faint regular line of electric lights hugging the horizon. A boat lay off the coast.

Then Trung Si spoke to Trin and Trin swore vehemently in his native tongue. Not in the heat of anger, but out of something much deeper and deliberate and sinister.

“That man. Trung Si was on his way back from hiding our boat. He saw them leave. Six white men in a power-boat. They carried AR-15s. That man had a whip.”

Then he moved in a certain scary way and Broker, who believed that Vietnamese all hid deadly stingers under their friendly smiles, braced himself.

The gravity knife appeared in his hand and the long blade pressed against Lola’s cheek, snaked it up under her gag, and cut it. He ripped the tape from Lola’s face.

“Jesus Christ,” gasped Lola. “Do something about the smell.”

“Lying bitch!” Trin slapped her face. Then he placed his tennis shoe in her back and pushed her off her knees, face forward into the reeking flag. Her neat white outfit wasn’t white anymore.

Trin squatted and yanked Lola’s hair, bringing her face up level with his. “Talk. Fast.”

Lola struggled to her knees and shook off Trin’s hand with an arrogant toss of her head. She stared at the murderous circle of faces that ringed her.

“I don’t know.”

“How’d they find this place?” demanded Broker.

Lola, finding herself in close proximity to excrement and the cloying bronze-sweetness of human blood, screamed it this time, “I don’t know!”

An angry debate erupted among the vets in Vietnamese. Trung Si shouted at Trin. Trin shouted back. They had formed a circle around Lola.

Nina shivered through another spasm of delayed shock, clinging involuntarily to Broker’s arm. In a hoarse whisper, she said, “Something’s wrong.”

Broker nodded. They were in the dark, outside the circle. There were times when body language said it all. They overheard Trin seethe at Lola in English, “People are dead, that changes things.”

Broker and Nina shifted uneasily.

Trin issued crisp orders in Vietnamese. Two of the vets pulled Lola away. Trin turned to Broker and Nina. “We have to get out of here.”

“Your turn to talk,” Broker said pointedly to Trin.

He regarded him through lidded eyes. “You wanted to lure them in. I told her that if she’d give us Nina back, we’d bring her along and show her where it is. She didn’t say anything about this.” He curled his lips at the carnage surrounding them. His face was utterly cold and foreign. He’d locked them out.

Nina and Broker remained silent while the vets tended to their dead comrade. The lantern light caught on a now familiar glint. His mouth had been stuffed with gold rings. Several of the glittering circles dropped from his lips like round, dead words.

With peasant practicality the vets held the body upside down and shook it gently, cleaning the gold from his mouth.

“This is my fault. I let them get a step ahead of us,” said Trin slowly.

Across the yard Trung Si was talking in a steady intense voice to his housemates.

“It’s time to wake up that militia post,” said Broker.

Trin nodded. “Trung Si will take the van. We’ll go ahead and wait near the site. On foot. We can’t take the truck, we’d need the lights and lights would give us away.” Trin went into the house as they talked. One of the vets stuffed items in two roomy backpacks. Broker saw the little glass vial, undisturbed, on the shelf. He put it in his pocket.

Trin slung one of the packs to his back. He tapped Broker on the arm and pointed to the other one. Broker put it on.

“Food. Water,” said Trin.

“We need weapons,” said Nina.

Trin did not respond. He held Trung Si’s deer rifle, the butt resting on his hip. He made hurry-up motions with his free hand. Just before they extinguished the lantern, he turned to Broker. He did not make eye contact.

“Lola has a radio to direct them in.”

“What?”

“In her purse. I’m sorry, Phil.” Trin pulled his shirt aside and drew a shiny 9mm pistol. So Virgil had had a gun after all. “Do as I say and it will turn out all right.”

Broker glanced out to the sea, to the faint running lights on the vessel. The lights looked back like multiple all-knowing eyes. He sagged. He had violated Trin’s basic rule…

He had trusted Trin
.

They left Trung Si at the van. Trin removed Lola’s purse from the back. Slowly Trung Si turned the vehicle around and drove away with the lights out. Broker and Nina filed off through the dunes. Trin walked behind them, the pistol hanging in his hand.

T
HE MARCH THROUGH THE DUNES TOOK FOREVER. They had to stop frequently. Artificial legs weren’t meant to go cross-country. Broker didn’t like it. The silence. Lola had been gagged again. Her two guards walled her off. Trin trod at the back of the tiny column with the rifle and the pistol.

“What the fuck’s going on with him?” whispered Nina.

“I don’t know. Are you strong enough to run if you have to?” asked Broker.

He could feel her wince in the dark. “That bad?” she said.

“It’s possible,” said Broker. He shifted the pack to ease the straps cutting into his shoulders.

The man hobbling behind them muttered something. Broker heard his machete blade zing casually against some brush. The sound made the tiny hairs alert on his neck. Under guard, along with Lola.

He wondered if Trin had decided to fuck a bunch of white people. Lure Cyrus in. And then dump all the hon-keys in one hole. Broker’s mind raced. Christ,
he’s after Cyrus’s boat? He wants it all
.

Paranoia gamboled from the stunted shadowy trees and brush and joined the line of march. They hobbled past familiar landmarks. The abandoned hamlet and then the Spartan ranks of North Vietnamese headstones. Not far ahead they heard the waves breaking on the sand.

Communication was now exclusively in Vietnamese.

Machetes and wickedly curved rice sickles very much in evidence, the vets indicated that they should stop and rest in the cover of the three old round graves on the bluff above the cove. The packs were opened and food and water were doled out.

Trin stayed aloof. Not speaking. A shadow in the moonlight, he’d handed off the rifle to one of the vets and kept the pistol handy.

“It’s down there?” asked Nina.

“About a hundred and fifty yards,” said Broker.

“Maybe we shouldn’t get spooked. It could work,” said Nina, speaking with her mouth full. They scooped rice and fish from banana leaves with greasy fingers and washed it down with bottled water. Fuel. Their eyes had totally adjusted to the dark. The moon cast the surrounding terrain in silver relief.

“If he puts the militia up here, they have a perfect field of fire down that beach.” Her voice was absent, practical.

“Yeah,” said Broker. “But will we be up on the bluff here or down on that beach when the shooting starts?” He focused on Trin’s shadow. He’d freed Lola’s hands. And returned her purse. Now they were walking together down to the beach.

The man with the rifle hobbled over to them and casually tapped the muzzle against Broker’s knee.

“Watch it,” said Broker.

“Yes,” said the man politely, his smile delineated in the moonlight. Then he chided them in Vietnamese, “Ngu. Ngu.” For emphasis, he transferred the rifle to one hand and reclined his cheek in the palm of the other. “Ngu.”

Broker nodded. Exhaustion took precedence over anxiety. “Whatever happens, we need some rest.”

As the man with the rifle stood guard or watch over them—or both—they squirmed, getting comfortable in the warm sand at the base of the old cement wall.

“How’re you making out?” he asked.

“I’m hurting some,” she said frankly, “and I still have those downers in my veins, but I can hack it.”

Anger snaked in his chest. “I’ve done everything…wrong,” he blurted.

“Shhh,” she said, touching her finger to his dry lips.

He threw his arm protectively around her and she curled into his chest. Physical necessity almost immediately plunged them into a deep sleep…

Beside a grave, on the pirate beach, in the graveyard of the iron elephants.