A Perfect Cover

by Maureen Tan

  My mouth began watering.

  “We can take my car,” he offered.

  I shook my head. I knew that the place he’d mentioned was only a few blocks away.

  “Let’s walk. And enjoy air that doesn’t smell of shrimp.”

  We sat opposite each other on the booth at the front of the diner and watched cars and trucks whiz by on Chef Menteur Highway as we made small talk and waited for our food.

  I told him I wanted to be an artist. To be famous.

  “But I don’t think Squirt’s much of a name for an artist,” I told him. “But it’s a nickname. My real name’s Lai Sie.” I said it the way Uncle Tinh did. Lie See. And it sounded as Vietnamese as it was. “My dad was Vietnamese. He died a while back.”

  Then Tommy told me what I already knew, a bit of gossip that the elderly cousin and Mrs. Yang had shared after he’d come into the restaurant to introduce himself.

  “My dad ran off years ago. Just after my kid sister was born.”

  “Did your mom remarry?”

  Tommy shook his head.

  “You’re lucky, then,” I said. “Mine remarried and changed our last name to Johnson. The name sucks, just like my stepfather. I hate him. I’m thinking of going back to my real last name. Nguyen. Lai Sie Nguyen. It sounds pretty good, don’t you think? I mean, it’s the kind of name an artist could have.”

  Tommy took the bait as I had hoped he would.

  “Hey, that’s too cool,” he said. “My last name’s Nguyen. It’d be a great artist’s name.”

  “I figured your name was Yang, like your uncle’s,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Our families are related by marriage. An in-law married to an in-law kind of thing. That’s why the Yang twins are always hinting around about me taking them out. Because we’re not really cousins. But before I’d go out with either of them, I’d date my kid sister. And there’s no way I would do that. She’s a spoiled brat. A classic Vietnamese-American princess. Give her a few years, she’ll make the bitchy twins look like amateurs.”

  And that was the opening I’d been steering him toward.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I have an older brother and two younger half brothers. My older brother’s okay, but Jimmy and Luke…” Instead of finishing the sentence, I shuddered. “So it’s just you and your sister?”

  I tried not to hold my breath. Would he lie? I wondered.

  “I had an older brother, too. He was killed last month.”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry,” I said, and then pushed a little harder. “Some kind of car accident, I suppose…”

  I reached out, clumsily, to pat his hand. And I was sorry. Not that it stopped me from probing an obviously fresh wound. I watched the spark disappear from Tommy’s eyes and he seemed to age as the sadness returned to his expression.

  Squirt reacted as she was supposed to.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean—” I said, deliberately stumbling over my words. “I mean, it’s none of my business—I mean, you must think that I’m just like—”

  I tried to pull my hand back, but he caught it, held on to it.

  “It’s okay. We’re friends, Squirt. So I don’t mind telling you.”

  I deserved the pang of guilt and pure self-loathing that I felt.

  “My brother was murdered,” he said.

  “My God! Why?”

  I was watching his face carefully, moved my fingers so they pressed ever so slightly across the pulse on his wrist. I saw a flicker, a movement, the slightest shift in posture that betrayed his willingness to share a confidence. And my every instinct told me that he knew something about his brother’s death.

  At that moment the waitress arrived with our food.

  Tommy pulled his hand away from mine, segued the movement into taking a very full plate from the waitress, and the moment of weakness, his moment of temptation, passed.

  “I don’t want you to think that Tri was some kind of crook or something,” he said once the waitress left. “He was like you. He wanted to be an artist. He was always trying to help people. Especially people just arriving in this country. That’s what got him ki—”

  He picked up the glass of Dr Pepper he’d ordered and drowned the impulse to share a confidence in a couple of big gulps.

  “It’s just, well, sometimes bad things happen to people who only deserve the best,” he said, firmly closing the door on the subject of his family.

  Then he lifted up one of the French fries, which were hot and crispy brown, and started telling me about a potato dish that was the specialty of the restaurant he worked in. Within moments, his enthusiasm for life seemed to return and he proceeded to tell me everything I already knew about the kitchen and food at Tinh’s City Vu.

  I was, as always, a good audience. I listened carefully, futilely, for any useful information. Then, near the end of our meal, he lowered his voice and spoke conspiratorially.

  “Do you know what I really want to do?”

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “What?”

  “I want to be a chef. Not just a cook like my Uncle Yang or the cousin. A real chef. Like my boss, Mr. Tinh. He’s my friend, too. I want to train in Paris, learn how to create, um, masterpieces like he does. For now, all I can do is read about it. And sometimes watch Mr. Tinh work. But someday, when I’ve saved enough money…”

  I would mention the boy’s ambition to my uncle when I had an opportunity, I decided. I owed Tommy that much. As he spoke, I tried to remember if I had ever been so young. And knew that I never had. Post-war Vietnam, the desperate journey by boat and the refugee camp had taken that from me. Then I recalled the way that Tommy had looked earlier, when he’d thought about his brother, when he’d pulled his hand away from mine. And I realized that he, too, had left childhood behind. For the past few minutes he had simply been revisiting it.

  When the check arrived, Tommy went to pay the bill and I objected.

  “You won the contest,” I said. “So it’s my treat.”

  We argued for a minute, then compromised by paying for our own meals. Just outside the truck stop entrance, we stood for a few more minutes and I turned down Tommy’s offer to walk me home. The highway noises made it difficult to hear, so we leaned in close to each other as we talked.

  “I had a great time,” Tommy said finally. “A really great time.”

  Then he bent forward and landed a wet kiss full on my lips.

  That night, I told Beauprix about the money I’d seen changing hands—the red envelopes from the Benevolent Society and the extortion payment. I mentioned that the argument about the extra one hundred dollars had been interrupted and the Young Businessmen had left without it, but I didn’t tell Beauprix what the interruption was. No point in making him think I was a pyromaniac.

  “The two payments are odd,” he said. “And I agree with you. One was definitely protection money. But I can’t imagine what the other was for.”

  Though I knew he couldn’t see me, I shook my head.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re middlemen in some transaction.”

  “That’s as good an explanation as any, I suppose. Do you think these guys are our murderers?”

  “Certainly, they’re cocky enough to kill,” I said. “And they have the community so intimidated that they weren’t worrying about witnesses. Maybe it took a few murders to reach that point.”

  He must have heard the hesitation in my voice.

  “But?” he prompted.

  “They have a motive for murder, but why attack and mutilate each of the victims’ hands?” I said. “Besides, the Nguyen family doesn’t own a business in Little Vietnam. Tommy told me his mother works at a coffee warehouse. Why would they pay—or not pay—protection?”

  Then I told Beauprix what Tommy had said about his brother. And implied that the information I had about Tri’s artistic abilities also came from that source.

  “Maybe it’s because of the kind of work I do,” I said, “but Tommy’s comment about
his brother’s desire to help people just arriving in this country and the technical ability Nguyen Tri obviously had suggests the possibility that he was counterfeiting breeder documents.”

  Beauprix wasn’t familiar with the term, so I explained to him how desperate undocumented immigrants were for proof of citizenship or permanent residency in the United States. And how unscrupulous employers and criminal organizations could force illegal immigrants into virtual slavery by withholding documents and threatening to turn the immigrants over to the INS.

  I didn’t tell him about Uncle Duran’s accusations or about finding Uncle Tinh’s unlisted number written in the Nguyens’ phone book. I told myself that I didn’t want Uncle Duran’s suspicions to taint Beauprix’s perspective as it had mine. That I wasn’t trying to protect Uncle Tinh from suspicion for the sake of preserving a childhood relationship. Then I admitted that I wasn’t very good at lying to myself.

  There was silence on my phone as Beauprix considered what I’d told him.

  “It’s a stretch,” he said finally. “But you may be on to something. Any idea why Nguyen Tri was killed?”

  I had no answer for that, but I had another question.

  “Do you recall what the other two victims did for a living?”

  Though I knew Beauprix was at home, he replied as if the files were open in front of him. Confirming my belief that he’d looked over those three files so often he’d memorized their contents.

  “The woman, Vo Bah Mi, worked at the courthouse,” he said slowly. “In records.”

  “That would give her access to death certificates—dead people tend not to notice when someone else begins walking around using their vital information. What about Yu Kim Lee?”

  “A printer,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice.

  For a time we talked uninhibitedly about ideas and possibilities, celebrating the knowledge that my time undercover was already paying off, allowing ourselves to feel optimistic. We were on to something and we both knew it.

  When Beauprix said good-night, he was already yawning.

  I said goodbye and felt the usual stab of loneliness when he disconnected.

  Before I went to sleep that night, I spent some time considering the number scrawled in the Nguyens’ phone book and I prayed that Uncle Tinh would not turn out to be a point of connection between three victims.

  Chapter 15

  I heard about the hijacking before I got to work on Saturday morning.

  Every morning before the Red Lotus opened, I stopped at the bakery down the street, one that was rival to the place where I hadn’t gotten a job. I was usually one of the first customers of the day. As I sat at one of the little tables and dipped pieces of warm French bread into chicory-laced coffee, I watched the story unfold on the little TV behind the counter.

  Late Friday night, a fully loaded semi-truck had been hijacked just after leaving the Jourdan Road Terminal. And the truck hadn’t merely been hijacked, an unremarkable occurrence in one of the world’s largest port cities. There’d been a shoot-out.

  The Jourdan Road Terminal was located near the intersection of the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal and the Intra-coastal Waterway. It overlooked the Turning Basin, an expansive area of deep water ideal for maneuvering the massive container ships. Though it was several miles away in a heavily industrial area, it was still “over the high rise” in East New Orleans. Thus, the news item was of more immediate interest to the people in Little Vietnam than any of the day’s happenings in the city.

  According to the report I watched on the television, the trucker had been cruising north on Jourdan Road bound for the entrance to I-10 when the road was blocked by a stalled car. When he stopped his rig, several men wielding sawed-off shotguns jumped out of hiding.

  The trucker was enthusiastic about sharing his moment of fame.

  “Those fellas pulled me out of the cab, made me lay facedown on the shoulder of the road. All of ‘em had ski masks on, but they sounded like foreigners. Asians, maybe. Or Arabs. But that wasn’t the worst of it. One of them’s already up in my rig when this other car comes squealing up. Four, maybe five guys pile out, hit the ditch on the other side of the road.

  “They start blasting away at each other like they was somewhere in Iraq. What with bullets flying this way and that, I keep my head down. Then, ’bout the time I hear police sirens, a car start burnin’. It belonged to the second bunch of guys, I think.”

  I went to work and, within minutes, the morning paper and a procession of customers who spoke excitedly about the event filled in the remaining details.

  By the time the police arrived, the combatants had scattered, leaving the driver alone and uninjured on the shoulder of the road. And the truck was gone. The police said the car that had burned was stolen and the fire that destroyed it was caused by some kind of incendiary device.

  Within an hour of the hijacking, the police found the rig abandoned. The locks on its steel doors had been pried open, but the cargo was still inside the trailer. According to the police, the driver, a representative of the shipping company, and everyone who came into the Red Lotus, this was definitely odd.

  I suspected that I wasn’t the only one who wondered why cargo hadn’t been listed on the manifest. I could think of only two possibilities—drugs or humans.

  As I’d expected, working all day with the twins was a trying experience. Most workdays at the Red Lotus, I made a point of thinking and acting like the teenage girl I was supposed to be. But on Saturday, I made an exception for the twins. They oozed cheerful camaraderie in my direction whenever anyone was looking. But when I was the only one within earshot, I was treated to their extensive, if not particularly creative, vocabulary of obscenities and slurs. They apparently didn’t know the term bui doi. But American slang had given them plenty of alternatives.

  Squirt was tempted to knock them silly. Lacie Reed ignored them.

  Vincent came in around 2:00 p.m., looking particularly sexy in a black turtleneck and slim black jeans. His appearance was not lost on the twins, who paused in their work to watch him cross the restaurant.

  “Did you hear about the hijacking?” I asked when he settled into his usual seat at the counter. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

  Vincent shrugged dismissively.

  “Gang stuff,” he said. “I have something more important I want to tell you about.”

  I cast an eye in Mr. Yang’s direction. As usual, he didn’t look happy that I was talking with Vincent. But he was even more unhappy when one of his daughters abandoned her customers and rushed to pour Vincent tea. Mr. Yang chased her back to work, loudly scolding her for being lazy.

  Vincent ignored them. The adult in me couldn’t suppress a smile.

  “I’m writing a book,” Vincent said after I took his order.

  Over the past week I’d discovered that Vincent had been raised in New York City, was well-educated and widely read, and had interesting perspectives on social and political issues that Lacie Reed considered important. As I watched him interact with the residents of Little Vietnam, I wasn’t surprised that his social activism and “northern” sensibilities kept him from fitting in. He might be respected, I thought, but he certainly wasn’t understood. During our much-interrupted conversations over the lunch counter, I often regretted that I couldn’t react to his ideas in the context of my own beliefs and experiences. Instead, I privately admired his patience as he explained concepts to the bright but uneducated teenager I was supposed to be.

  I stayed in character as I reacted to his announcement.

  “Wow. A real author. What’s your book about? Finding jobs for people?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. About being Vietnamese in America.”

  “Is that so different from being anything else in America?”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “We didn’t come here as ignorant, starving peasants. In our country, we were well-educated and affluent. We were used to having th
e good things in life.”

  To placate Mr. Yang who was still scowling, I neatened the area beneath the counter as I listened to Vincent talk. His voice was passionate and angry, but there was something about his delivery that made me suspect that this was an often-repeated complaint. I didn’t contradict him by remarking that his description fit only a fraction of Vietnamese immigrants.

  “Even in America, not all of us have that,” I said as I opened another package of paper placemats emblazoned with the characters of the Chinese horoscope and added them on top of a dwindling stack.

  For a moment the hard lines of his face softened.

  “No, not all, Squirt. But many were raised to expect that success—wealth, power, position—would be ours as a matter of right. In Vietnam, it would have been.”

  “And here?” I said, wondering but not asking about his background. Certainly he was no bi-racial child of the vanquished enemy. Maybe he’d been born to some high-ranking Vietnamese bureaucrat. Or businessman. Or an officer in the South Vietnamese army.

  Instead of answering me, Vincent held out his empty teacup, tapping it with his finger in the style of someone with high social status.

  I hurried to refill it, as any intimidated child would.

  Vincent took a careful sip of the hot liquid, then looked at me over the rim of the cup. His expression was hard and dangerous.

  “Here, in America, there can be success. But only for those who are smart enough to find it. And strong enough to keep it.”

  I stood very still, almost holding my breath, maintaining a reaction appropriate to Squirt—awe mixed with admiration and more than a little fear.

  “I am strong. And smart,” I volunteered.

  At that, like the sunrise after a long and terrifying night, Vincent’s smile came out. Then he ordered the special, which on Wednesday was bap cai don thit—meat rolls in cabbage leaves.

  I smiled back, made a point of letting Squirt’s body relax. But when I left to attend one of the other customers, it was not difficult for my adult mind to imagine his eyes staring at my back. No matter that he seemed to genuinely care about Squirt, my every instinct told me not to trust him.