Back Bay Blues

by Peter Colt

  Chapter 23

  I woke up in a bed. My mouth tasted like caterpillars had partied in it all night long and left me with a fuzzy tongue. My left arm was bandaged, and I had an IV stuck in the right one. My head hurt and my body was sore. Something in the room stunk to high hell; then I realized it was me. I had been running around, working up a sweat, then dragged myself through the bilge of a forty-year-old unused ship, and then I had crawled through marsh mud and bled on myself, which had only added to the stench.

  It took me a few tries to sit up. My left arm still didn’t want to work, and I didn’t want to disturb the IV in the right one. I managed to scoot into a sitting position when Chris walked in.

  “Hey, you’re awake. Cool.” He checked the IV and looked at my dressing and then sat down in a chair by the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “A little rough, but I’ll be okay. Can I have some water?” My mouth was parched. Chris handed me a glass, and I drank deeply. “How bad is my arm?”

  “You took a through and through from a high-velocity round, 9mm?” I nodded. “The bullet didn’t strike any major blood vessels, or you wouldn’t be here. The bone is intact. The damage was mostly muscular. You’ll have to wear a sling, but you should be back to normal in a couple of weeks.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Yeah. What nearly killed you was the infection. The wound got infected, probably from particles of dirty clothing left by the path of the bullet or your being covered in mud and whatever sewer you bathed in. Who knows? I gave you some antibiotics with the IV. You have a bunch of large bruises, but nothing is broken. I am still not sure what happened, but I am pretty sure that you shouldn’t be alive. It seems like you are trying to get yourself killed one inch at a time.” Concern showed on Chris’s face. “You know, Red, the whole point of surviving the war isn’t to get killed at home.”

  “I wasn’t trying to.” I was not used to people showing concern for me. My mother wasn’t around, and my father was not the type to fuss over me.

  “What happened?” Chris unhitched his furrowed eyebrow some.

  “No shit, there I was. . . .” We both smiled, because it was a long-running joke that all war stories started with that line. I told him about my adventure aboard the John Q. Adams, the heroin. He laughed when I referred to them as Keller and the Vicious Vietnamese. He shook his head when I told him about hiding under the dock in the cold waters of Suisun Bay. He frowned when I told him about my roaming the empty ship and then about my swim to shore.

  He told me that I had been asleep for almost fourteen hours. He had done a nice job of cleaning and dressing the wound. He lit a cigarette and put it in my mouth. He disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a tray with toast, scrambled eggs, and a large glass of orange juice. Chris put the tray down and then squeezed the IV bag from the top, forcing the liquids into me quickly. I suddenly felt cold as the IV fluids rushed into me. Chris took out the IV and covered the site with a large Band-Aid.

  Chris handed me the tray and told me to go slow. I started with the toast, which was evenly buttered. There is nothing worse than toast with just a spot of butter in the middle. The eggs were soft, almost creamy. He had cooked them slowly over low heat. Chris explained to me at great length the advantages of scrambling eggs over low heat while I ate the very subject he spoke of. It was a French technique and it was good. When I finished breakfast, I took a long shower and washed the marsh stink off me. I took note of some interesting bruises from where my body had made contact with the water during my graceless fall.

  Chris replaced the dressing on the wound. I could see the puckered entrance wound. Chris saw me looking at it. “You probably would have bled more except for hypothermia.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “While you were in the water waiting for Keller and his folks to clear out, your body temperature was dropping. To compensate, your body started to draw the blood from your extremities and pool it in your torso. That is why people lose fine motor skills when they are cold. While you started to bleed from the wound, your body was actively countering it by shunting the blood to your torso, away from the wound. Then you were still too cold to warm up when you got out, and you were able to put that half-assed pressure bandage on the wound. Hypothermia may have saved your life. You are one lucky son of a gun.”

  Chapter 24

  Boston in mid-March was still wet and cold. There was slush everywhere, and the wind reminded me of why no one moved north to retire. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I lived someplace with palm trees. I had gotten in on a late flight and slept late into the day. It took longer to wash and dress because I had to do everything one handed. It was late afternoon by the time I got moving.

  When I had touched down at Logan, I had taken a few minutes to scan the crowd. No one seemed to be following me or be interested in me at all. People gave me space because of the black cloth sling that Chris had made for me. We had said good-bye at the airport with my thanks, a hug, and an agreement to stay in touch. Chris had saved my life, just like I had his and he mine in the war. We felt no need to make a big deal about it. That was what it meant to be part of a brotherhood. You knew—not thought—that your brother would be at your side no matter how bad, how dangerous, or how certainly fatal the situation was. It was the only certainty in lives like ours.

  I had plenty of time to think on the plane. Keller was not stupid, and he would figure out fairly quickly that I was alive. What I was wondering was if he would figure out that I was not a threat to him. I couldn’t prove anything and would look like a crazy person if I told anyone. Who would believe that the U.S. government was smuggling and selling drugs to buy arms to fight a covert guerilla war in South America?

  Keller probably wasn’t a problem, but Colonel Tran and his badly dressed sidekicks were. He seemed to have made a pretty heavy emotional investment in killing me to walk away leaving that unfinished. It wouldn’t take him long to figure out that I was alive and well, back in Boston, irritating the shit out of him.

  I wanted to talk to Nguyen about the Adams. It was neat being on the ship he sailed out of Saigon in. I wanted to tell him about my trip to Suisun Bay. I had a couple of questions and wanted some good Vietnamese food. Plus, I hadn’t seen Nguyen in a while, and I was running short of friends in the last few years.

  I dressed with care: loafers, because I couldn’t tie my own shoes; jeans; blue button-down oxford shirt; and a khaki blazer. I had the Chief’s Special, loaded with hollow points, holstered on my right hip. It was riding high, canted forward in a leather thumb break holster. I had a speed loader of hollow points in my right jacket pocket. I slipped Thuy’s little Colt .25 into the sling on the side closest to my body. I was trying to compensate for my injuries by carrying a noisemaker. My arm didn’t hurt as much today, but that had more to do with some pills that Chris gave me than anything else.

  I had parked the Maverick three blocks away on the street. A quick walk around and check reassured me that no one had planted any grenades or mines on it. It started up with a healthy roar, and I muscled my way into Boston traffic. If you looked at the straight-line distance from Boston to Quincy, it was a ten-minute drive, but the traffic, road construction, and slushy roads meant that it was early evening by the time I arrived at The Blue Lotus. I drove past it, parked several stores down, and walked back.

  When I walked in, I was struck with a wave of nostalgia. In my mind I could clearly see, smell, and feel what it had been like to walk in the restaurant for the first time two years ago. It had been warm, run down, and welcoming, the type of place where you would go with your wife and kids, if you had them. The smells of exotic food cooking had been overwhelming, and the atmosphere had been welcoming. This place had fed me, provided shelter against the cold, and provided me with friendship, possibly even a sense of family. And as I usually did, I was about to fuck all that up.

  The restaurant was uncharacteristically empty
. If I had been expecting Linh to greet me, I was wrong. Nguyen walked out of the kitchen. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  “Ah, Round Eye Private Eye shows up. What happened to your arm?” He used all of the same slurs but they were without much humor this time. His eyes took in the .38 on my hip. Nguyen didn’t miss much.

  “Oh, some of Colonel Tran’s associates managed to shoot me in the arm. The funny thing is that the last Vietnamese man to shoot me was an NVA. I got shot by one of my former allies this time.” Nguyen shrugged. He was used to allies turning out to be fickle. A lot of people had changed sides in Vietnam; that was to be expected from decades of war.

  “You do have a way of making the Colonel angry at you.” He smiled.

  “I guess I do, don’t I? On the other hand, he blew up my car.” And the girl in it. “I really liked that car.”

  “Car was old. You get new car.” He said it the same way he told me about coming to America and starting his life over. You have a country, you flee the country, you have a new country. You start over. It was that simple for Nguyen.

  “That car and I had a lot of miles together. I liked that car.” I had liked it, also the girl. It wasn’t right that she got killed by a bomb meant for me. Someone had to answer for the girl. It hadn’t been love, it never could have worked, but she shouldn’t have died like that.

  “Come on, Round Eye, let’s drink to your dead car.” He went behind the bar, and I sat down sort of sideways. I wanted to be able to watch the door. I could still see Nguyen. My gun side was to the bar. Nguyen pulled a very old, very dusty bottle of French cognac down from the shelf. He poured us each a snifter. We toasted and I took a sip.

  “Why are you here, Andy?” Gone was even the appearance of friendliness. Also missing was the singsong pidgin English and heavy accent. He had stopped pretending to be a poor sailor, a common man. It had been his version of bread rolls and mustard, fake Chinese food, filler material.

  “Well, I’m here for a story. You see, when Colonel Tran’s associates shot me, I was on board the John Q. Adams. The very ship you left Saigon on.” Someday I will be able to sit down with a friend for a drink and it won’t turn into an interrogation.

  “I take it your being there wasn’t a coincidence?” He left the bottle on the bar.

  “No, it wasn’t. I was led to it by a dead journalist named Hieu.” Nguyen grunted and shrugged his shoulders. I took another sip of the excellent cognac and wondered what it would do when mixed with the pills Chris had given me. I didn’t much care. Today was as good as any day to drink, to fight or to die. I just wanted to hear the story, to know why three people had been murdered. The cognac burned its way down into my belly. Then I started my part of the story.

  “It turns out Hieu was from Saigon. He had a friend there who was in the South Vietnamese Navy, named Pham Duc Dong. I have seen pictures of them together in Saigon. Young men, before the war got to them. Pham was a promising RVN Navy staff officer, a logistician. The picture was before Hieu ended up in a communist reeducation camp, and he still could smile at the promise of life. Hieu was murdered, shot several times, not far from here. Pham was stabbed in his car in Chinatown.

  “You asked me if I expected you to know all of the Vietnamese in the area?” Nguyen hadn’t said anything, his hands flat on the bar, staring at me through his clear aviators. “Except, of course, you did know these two Vietnamese, didn’t you?” His eyes met mine, assessing me, trying to gauge how much of a threat I was.

  “Yes, I did know them. We were friends in Saigon. We went to the same Lycée Français. How did you put it together?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many times people have asked me that. You would think that people think me dumb.” Nguyen laughed.

  “No, Round Eye, you are many things, but dumb isn’t one of them.” He dragged on the cigarette and the tip glowed. It made me want one, too.

  “The answer was on TV last night. I knew you were involved. I just couldn’t quite make all of the pieces fit, and then there it was on the TV.”

  “The answer to this?” He seemed puzzled.

  “Yes, Magnum P.I. was on, and I was watching hoping to get tips on how to make my mustache look better.” Nguyen smiled in spite of the moment. He was still tense, coiled tightly, a human spring under incredible pressure. “It was one of the ones that showed Magnum in his dress uniform and above his left breast was a brass trident clutched in an eagle’s talon, the emblem of the U.S. Navy SEALs. Then I remembered a picture I saw in Pham’s house. Him in uniform, Hieu clearly a civilian, and another man in an RVN Navy uniform. A man wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses with a brass trident in an eagle’s talon above his chest. I didn’t recognize you because the glasses were mirrored, you had longer hair, and your face wasn’t as drawn as now.

  “I am guessing that Pham was in charge of moving the gold out of the country. It was too late to fly it out—the communists had shot the runway at Tan Son Nhat airport all to hell. But there was still the fleet. No one would look at a tired old Liberty ship filled with fleeing refugees. He wanted to make sure it would be safe and that the plan would work. Why not ask his old friend from the Lycée Français who was in the RVN Navy SEALs, who had been trained by and worked with the Americans, to watch over it? After all, the ships were going to rendezvous with the U.S. Navy. There must have been someone else watching it, too.” Nguyen’s shoulders slumped. He sighed and picked up the glass of cognac and took a large swallow of it.

  “You know, Round Eye, Colonel Tran and his CIA friends were all very stupid to underestimate you. Yes, you are right, Pham came to me. He offered me safe passage out of Saigon for me and my family if I would guard the gold. He thought that they would offload it, and it would go into a bank either here or in the Philippines, eventually Switzerland. Colonel Tran sent a nephew of his to watch out for it as well. He would never have trusted someone who wasn’t family.

  “After we left Saigon, and the initial fear for my family, the danger, had passed, I started to worry about the future. I had a family and had nothing that I could do to support them in America. Tran’s nephew had similar thoughts, and he suggested that we steal some of the gold. Tran’s nephew kept watch while I took the gold bars, wrapped them in flour sacks, and then hid them in the ballast compartment. The plan was that we would go on deck when it was late, and everyone was sleeping and throw the lead bars used for ballast overboard.

  “He was a foolish man and liked to drink and liked to brag. My family’s future was at stake, and I couldn’t trust him, so one night, we went on deck with the lead bars in a sack. I stabbed him from behind, my hand over his mouth, pulling his head back, taking his balance away from him, the way we were taught by your SEALs. I put lead bars in his pockets and threw him overboard. Everyone believed that he fell overboard while drunk. Which he often was.

  “I wanted to get off the ship in the Philippines. The Philippine Islands are big and reminded me of Vietnam. It would be easy to get lost there. My family and I could start again. I had one hundred pounds of gold hidden in the ballast area, so we could live well. But I was supposed to watch over the gold. If I jumped ship then in the PI, I would give the game away. Colonel Tran would know I killed his nephew. He would hunt me for the rest of my life. It had to be America, then. My family could never be safe anywhere else.

  “My first sight of America was magnificent. We saw California, growing from a dark line on the horizon to hills and shore. I sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz off my port beam, and into the navy yard. We anchored in the bay, near the pier. They wanted to keep the refugees on the ship, contained until they were ready for us. We were in America now. Finally, we would be safe.

  “I waited till it was late at night and slipped onto the deck. I took the gold, each bar in a flour sack, and I tied rope to the ends. I crawled down the anchor chain, below the waterline. I tied off the sack six feet underwater to the links and repeated the trip four times. Then I swam ashore.

 
; I found a spot onshore. It was several hundred yards in, a park or parade ground. I buried the gold near a tree that I would recognize easily. I used a statue and the stars as reference. I made the trip four times and was exhausted. I got back to our little cabin and slept for forty-five minutes; then we were taken off the ship and processed as refugees. I was lucky—both An and I could speak English. We were given an apartment, and I was able to find a job washing dishes. Two weeks later, I used a tourist map and found the park. A week after that I made my way to the tree. It took me four nights, but the gold was in our apartment. I had secured a future for my family.

  “I laugh thinking of how the cockroaches climbed over gold bars, our clothes that were secondhand. We had long blocks of cheese and cardboard squares of eggs, thirty eggs in a square, that your government gave us. We had a fortune in gold but were living in poverty in a smelly apartment building in Oakland.

  “I found a second job in a garage. I did all the worst jobs. I worked day and night at two jobs. An made sure that Linh and Tuan were cared for. I found older Vietnamese and Chinese who had been in America longer and found out where I could discretely sell gold. I shaved pieces off one of the bars. It required great discipline to sell the first bar a little bit at a time. We saved money and I bought a station wagon—it had that imitation wood on the side—and after being here two years, we drove east, toward the sunrise.

  “One of the Americans who trained me and went on missions with me and died in my arms was from a place called Quincy. He had told me many times of his home. I later learned that the ship was named for the man who gave his name to the city. I had heard about snow, but it was so much more beautiful than I imagined. The cold was unimaginable. In Quincy, I arrived with the money, which I told everyone was my savings from working two jobs. We never spent too much and I tried to blend in—an average, middle-class American.