Nine Days

by Fred Hiatt

  Suddenly a vise was squeezing my chest. It couldn’t be, I told myself. You would have heard them being taken off the truck.

  Oh, yes? I answered myself as the vise squeezed harder. How about while you were dozing in the shed? You have no idea whether anyone was still in that truck. You might have—

  Ignoring the pain, ignoring the thugs, I forced myself to my feet—or to my foot, since there was no way I could put any weight on the leg that had been pinned. I hopped past the end of the office building toward the courtyard, not even thinking of the men any longer, praying please, please, please, let them not have been on the boat. Please.

  As I rounded the corner I could make them out in the early gray light: the girls. Ti-Anna was helping them out of the truck, one by one, and sending each one silently across the stones to our shed. That was when, I admit, I think I started to cry—out of relief, and gratitude, and then pain and fright and whatever chemicals a broken leg can send squirting through your body.

  I had hopped halfway toward the truck before Ti-Anna saw me. She came running over and grabbed my hands. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered back. “I thought all of them might be dead. All I meant to do was burn the dock, so that …”

  She was staring at me, not hearing my words.

  “What’s happened?” she said. “You’re all clammy. And”—she leaned in again—“that smell!”

  “I think it’s just burned hair,” I said. I recognized the odor from chemistry lab. “And I might have broken my leg.”

  I leaned on Ti-Anna’s shoulder and we started toward the truck. A group of girls was waiting patiently.

  “When I heard the explosion, I thought I better get them off the truck, so they couldn’t just be driven away again,” Ti-Anna said. “At least this might slow things down.”

  “Still no police?”

  She shook her head.

  “Look what I found, way at the back.”

  Leaning against the tire was a plastic bag crammed with flip-flops and sandals and slippers. How thoughtful: they’d be ready to begin their slave labor as soon as they got to wherever they were going.

  I don’t know how Ti-Anna had persuaded the girls to listen to her, but now she hoisted herself into the truck and resumed her shepherding. As each girl prepared to jump off, Ti-Anna handed her a pair of shoes—I noticed Ti-Anna was wearing pink flip-flops with little yellow flowers—and directed her across the courtyard.

  Finally, every hammock was empty. Ti-Anna climbed down and refastened the tarp. We hobbled after the girls, with me leaning on her shoulder.

  “How’s your head?” I whispered.

  “Better,” she said.

  Now that I knew I hadn’t murdered a boatload of innocent young women, the pain from my leg came flooding back, and I thought I might pass out again.

  There was barely space to sit in the shed, but a few wide-eyed girls silently made room. Ti-Anna eased me onto the nets. I felt a wave of nausea from the stench of rotting fish and the closeness of a hundred girls who had been treated like livestock.

  When Ti-Anna pulled out the phone, I managed to croak out an objection.

  “Ethan, if the police are coming, we’d better let them know what to expect—how things have changed since you talked to Sydney.”

  “Well, okay, but—well, don’t tell her how the fire started,” I said.

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “There was a guy on the boat,” I whispered, looking away as I told her.

  She lowered the phone and slid down onto the nets, so we were sitting side by side.

  “Maybe he jumped off in time,” she said softly.

  “Maybe,” I said, and hoped it was true. I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t, though given the suddenness of the explosion I didn’t think much of his chances.

  “Ethan,” she persisted in the same soft voice. “You did the right thing. You may have saved a hundred girls from horrible lives—and pretty short lives, for a lot of them.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes and heard her say, “But only if the police get here soon, before those monsters realize their truck is empty. Where are they?”

  She made her call then, and explained what she could to Sydney. I heard her say, “Yes, and we’re going to need an ambulance too.”

  And then—I can’t say if it was right away, I was losing track of time, but it seemed that way—there were odd two-tone sirens heading toward us, and lots of lights and noise. I thought I saw a Vietnamese woman wearing a Dallas Cowboys ball cap staring down at me, and figured I had passed from confusion into total hallucination.

  Then someone was doing something to my leg, and someone else was poking my arm. My last thought, before I passed out, had something to do with how upset Ti-Anna had been when she thought I was dead.

  Chapter 34

  When I opened my eyes, Ti-Anna was perched on the edge of my bed.

  “Finally,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said, or tried to say. I cleared my throat and tried again. “How long have you been sitting there?”

  She smiled. “A while.”

  I was propped up in a single bed in a small room, very white, very clean. Leaves outside the window—we must be on the second or third floor. Whitest of all was my leg, with a cast from thigh to ankle. My palms were bandaged, and a couple of gauze pads were taped to my arms. But no tubes—that seemed like a good sign.

  I found myself wondering whether you could get pho bo in a hospital in Haiphong.

  “How’s your head?” I asked.

  “You asked me that already,” Ti-Anna said. “It’s fine.”

  Then I noticed a little girl sitting on a chair in the corner, absolutely still. She was holding a rag under one arm, and staring at Ti-Anna.

  “Who’s that?” I whispered.

  “One of the girls from the truck,” Ti-Anna said. “She won’t let me out of her sight.”

  “She looks like she can’t be more than nine or ten.”

  Ti-Anna nodded. “I know. Though Sydney says she could be a malnourished thirteen.”

  “Monsters,” I said. Had Ti-Anna used that same word not long ago, or had that been part of some nightmare?

  I lay back and closed my eyes. I noticed that my back was sore, I supposed from being thrown onto the seawall.

  “Why is she holding that rag?” I whispered.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” Ti-Anna said. “She doesn’t understand English. It’s her doll.”

  I opened my eyes. The girl was still staring at Ti-Anna. I guessed if you looked really hard, you could imagine the rag was a doll.

  What monsters, I thought once more.

  “So how do you feel?” Ti-Anna asked.

  “Hungry,” I said. “I wonder what you have to do to get breakfast around here.”

  “You slept through breakfast,” she said. “And quite a bit more. Are you up to talking with Inspector Tranh? She wants to ask you a few questions.”

  Before I could answer, an older Vietnamese woman wearing a Cowboys ball cap walked in, with Sydney right behind. So it hadn’t been a hallucination.

  Ti-Anna put her hand on my arm and whispered, “Don’t worry.” Sydney introduced the inspector, who thanked me.

  “This is a gang we’ve been trying to stop for a long time,” she said to me, in English that was only lightly accented. “They always managed to stay one step ahead. Until you and Miss Chen led us to them.”

  She noticed me eyeing her cap.

  “You are from Redskins territory, if I am not mistaken, Mr. Wynkoop,” she said. “Does my cap offend you?”

  The truth is I’ve never been one of those I’m-from-Washington-so-I-have-to-hate-Dallas people, but she seemed so delighted at the idea of offending me that I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  “I’m not a big Cowboys fan,” I admitted.

  “Too bad,” she chortled.

  She said the gang had been moving girls from Laos and Cambodi
a into Vietnam and beyond, but always taking different roads and leaving from different little harbors, disappearing before police caught wind of the latest shipment.

  “The girls you helped rescue were from Laos, and they are on their way home,” she said.

  “Why not her?” I asked, pointing to the girl who was now clutching Ti-Anna’s hand.

  “She was reluctant to separate from Ti-Anna,” Sydney explained, “so the inspector let them both ride with you in the ambulance to Hanoi. We’re trying to find a relative in Laos to come fetch her.”

  “Hanoi?” I said. Now I was really confused.

  Inspector Tranh jumped in. “When the emergency technicians were able to stabilize you last night, we decided, after some conversation with Ms. Sydney, to transport you here for surgery. This is our best hospital. I called for a second ambulance and let the ship captain go in the first to Haiphong Hospital.”

  “The ship captain?” I asked, glancing over to Ti-Anna.

  “At least, that’s who we think he is,” the inspector said. “An injured older gentleman who washed up on shore.”

  So I wasn’t a murderer after all.

  “As we reconstruct the events of the night, we believe he must have been carelessly smoking on deck, just before they were to set out,” the inspector continued.

  She gave me a look, I thought, or maybe I imagined it. I didn’t say anything.

  “It seems he will survive, but due to his injuries, we have not yet been able to speak with him. Also, a couple of the ringleaders may have escaped in the confusion,” the inspector was saying. “Which is why we could use your help.”

  Leaving out only the small detail of the gasoline canister, I described what I had seen and heard as best I could, including the ship’s name and Filipino flag, the odd language I had heard through the window, the men I’d seen on the wharf after the explosion.

  The inspector barked some orders to someone outside my room, and a few minutes later a policeman came in and began speaking to me in a language I couldn’t understand.

  “Was this what you heard?”

  I said I didn’t think so. “Not Filipino,” she said to herself. She dismissed the policeman and called for someone else. After a while a man in civilian clothes came in and spoke to me, equally unintelligibly.

  “That sounds more like it,” I said.

  “Thai,” she pronounced. “The girls were probably destined for Bangkok. No wonder they needed so much fuel.”

  She spoke quietly with her Thai-speaking deputy for a few minutes and then returned to me.

  “Mr. Wynkoop, you have been most helpful,” she said.

  An orderly came in with what I guessed was meant to be lunch but looked like some glop you wouldn’t serve your dog. Sydney saw my face and burst out laughing.

  “I’m sure they thought they should cook you something Western,” she said and, turning to the inspector, explained, “Ethan has become a fan of Hanoi-style pho.”

  The inspector, taking charge yet again, barked some orders to the orderly, who whisked the offending tray away.

  “Enjoy your pho,” she said as she adjusted her Cowboys hat. “Thank you again for your heroism. In the future, please be careful with fire on windy days.”

  And with that, Inspector Tranh was out the door.

  Chapter 35

  “Now,” Ti-Anna said briskly. “Want to hear what else you’ve been missing?”

  It wasn’t really a question, so I didn’t bother to reply.

  Sydney had met our ambulance at the emergency room, Ti-Anna recounted, and the two of them had waited until I came out of surgery and they knew I was going to be okay. Then Ti-Anna had persuaded Sydney to go with her back to the house she’d been kidnapped from. The police had been through it by then, but they hadn’t paid any attention to—

  “The photographs,” I said.

  Ti-Anna nodded. She stood and walked over to the window. The girl with the doll followed with her eyes. I knew Ti-Anna was thinking again of the expression on her father’s face.

  “They’re high quality,” she said. “You could easily identify the Chinese agents. You can even read the license plate on one of the cars. Mr. Ky said it’s from Kunming, in southwest China. Not that far from the border.”

  “Mr. Ky?”

  “From the Vietnamese secret service or something. They’re going to let us do a press conference tomorrow morning,” Ti-Anna said. “You’ve got to get yourself cleaned up by then, okay?”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but just then the pho arrived.

  “You’re going to be fine, by the way, though it was a bad break—more than one, actually,” she said. “That’s a temporary cast. In a few days you’ll need to have a different one put on.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined crossing a Hanoi street on crutches. I thought about trying to explain this cast to my mother. I thought about the giant spool, and how lucky I was that it hadn’t landed a little higher up.

  On the other hand, it would have been even luckier if it hadn’t landed on me at all.

  I ate my noodles and slept for a while. When I woke up Ti-Anna and the little girl were gone, having left a polo shirt and pair of sweatpants they must have bought for me.

  I decided to see if I could get the hang of the crutches. Pretty soon I was swinging the length of the corridor, much to the dismay of the nurses, who seemed to think I should be in bed for another week or two. After a while my armpits hurt enough to take my mind off my other bumps and scrapes.

  Day Seven: Saturday

  Hanoi

  Chapter 36

  The next morning I practiced some more, slept some more, practiced, dozed, practiced.

  Sydney, Ti-Anna and the girl with the doll showed up after lunch. They helped me downstairs and out the door, where a black government car was waiting. The driver dropped my crutches into the trunk as I settled in the front seat and swung my leg in. The girl with the doll sat in back, between Sydney and Ti-Anna.

  “Would somebody explain what’s happening?” I asked, when we were on the road.

  Sydney laid out the plan: we would go public with evidence that Chinese agents had lured one of their country’s most famous exiles into a trap in Vietnam, and then kidnapped him and driven him (we supposed) across the border and into a prison in the provincial capital of Kunming. People would be so outraged that the Chinese government would have to admit that they had him in custody.

  “And let him go?” I asked

  “Well …” Sydney hesitated. “Ideally, of course. But if not that, or not right away, at least admit they have him. Maybe eventually they’d allow him to have visitors, and announce the charges against him. Which would be a big improvement from having no idea where he is at all.”

  “Or whether,” Ti-Anna said.

  That was a conversation-stopper.

  Sitting in the front of a car driving down a crowded Hanoi street turned out to be almost as terrifying as being one of the pedestrians dodging it. My theory that drivers were judiciously measuring the steady pace of pedestrians crossing in front of them? From this angle I wasn’t so sure. Our driver honked and drove and honked some more, and apparently assumed that everyone would get out of his way. Which I guess they did, most of the time.

  “Meanwhile, you might wonder why the Vietnamese government is letting you do this,” Sydney suggested, which made me feel stupid, because I hadn’t wondered at all.

  “To thank us for helping to catch the traffickers?” I guessed.

  When I’d checked out of the hospital, they had told me the government was graciously picking up the bill, because I had performed a service to law and order and to the unshakeable bonds of friendship between their people and our people, and so forth and so on.

  “Well, that might be part of it,” Sydney said, in a tone that suggested that in fact it had nothing to do with it whatsoever. “More likely, they’re furious that Chinese agents would pull a stunt like this on their territory. They won’t say any
thing publicly—and they won’t be on the podium with you guys—but just letting this happen will show the Chinese how they feel.”

  “Us guys?” I asked. What were they expecting me to do?

  “Us guys?” Ti-Anna asked, with a slight quaver. “Aren’t you going to be with us?”

  “You’ll do fine,” Sydney said.

  And we did. Or rather, Ti-Anna did, because she did most of the talking, sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese, depending on who was asking the questions.

  There were a lot of TV cameras, and a lot of reporters, mostly Vietnamese, but not only. The BBC was there, and the Associated Press, and some Hong Kong networks, and even a crew affiliated with CNN.

  Ti-Anna explained how the Chinese agents had set a trap, and why her father might have fallen for it—that he believed so passionately that his countrymen deserved to live in freedom, and was so dedicated to democracy in China, that he would have jumped at any chance to cooperate with people inside the country who felt the same way, even if maybe common sense was telling him to be careful.

  She showed the photos, which some officials had helpfully enlarged to poster size. And then she explained how we’d fallen into the same trap, and how she’d been told that her disappearance would serve as a warning to anyone else who wanted to challenge the Chinese government, and how she’d been drugged and driven away.

  I explained how I’d followed her on the roof of her truck, and what I’d found inside it when we finally got to the harbor. I described what happened to the ship the girls were meant to travel on.

  Mostly the reporters were interested in Ti-Anna. And she was amazing—calm, clear, even eloquent.

  “Your father would be proud,” I whispered when it was over and we were just sitting up there, waiting for the TV lights to be switched off and for someone to unclip the little microphones from our shirts.

  She smiled, and seemed to know I was right. The girl with the doll, who’d been reluctantly standing off to the side with Sydney, came running onto the podium to reclaim Ti-Anna’s hand.

  I thought that from here on in we could coast home, and that the scariest thing awaiting me now would be my parents.