The Price of Blood Part 43

"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 a.s.sumption. "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 f.u.c.kin' 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, s.h.i.+vering, 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 st.i.tched 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 part.i.tioned 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 sc.r.a.p 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 pus.h.i.+ng a cart. Broker croaked, "Cafe."

With a tall, almost clean, gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 pa.s.sing 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 wrist.w.a.tch 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.

"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 s.h.i.+rt open at the throat stepped from the shadows. He held a newspaper in his hand. He put on sungla.s.ses.

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 a.s.sorted pocket lint littered the driveway. Spent, he let Broker drag him back to the vehicle.

"Calm down, G.o.ddammit," 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 f.u.c.king 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.

61.

THEY 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 fas.h.i.+on. "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 pa.s.sed 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 Sh.o.r.e 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, k.n.o.bby rice-paddy toes who squatted gook-fas.h.i.+on and haggled in their jabber talk; slim, elegant cosmopolitan city ghosts who conversed in French, or swore like legionnaires, and the j.a.panese 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...