by Maureen Tan
My twelve-hour workday finally ended.
I went into the utility closet in the kitchen, this time not only retrieving my jacket, but unplugging my cell phone. That perk was compliments of Mrs. Yang. I’d asked her permission and offered to pay for the trickle of power my cell phone charger needed. When questioned, I told her the truth—there was no electricity where I lived. She’d asked nothing more, simply pointed to the outlet low on the closet wall.
The restaurant had been closed for several minutes. Mr. Yang had his business checkbook out on the counter and was organizing invoices that needed to be paid. His Saturday, I thought wearily as I made my way through the dining area, was going to be even longer than mine.
As I reached for the handle of the front door, Mr. Yang cleared his throat. This, I’d learned during my first hours at the Red Lotus, was his signal for anyone within earshot to pay attention. Mrs. Yang, the elderly cousin and the twins were in the kitchen sharing a meal. Which meant that Mr. Yang wanted to talk with me.
I turned my head.
He lifted his dark eyes from his paperwork and looked squarely at me.
“Vincent Ngo is not a good man.”
“Why?” I asked.
Mr. Yang shook his head, apparently having no intention of expanding on his cryptic message. Then he flicked his fingers to encourage my progress out the door.
One of the perks of working late at the Red Lotus was an after-hours meal that was free. And good. But by dinnertime, I’d known I couldn’t face the prospect of spending any more time than was absolutely necessary. So the elderly cousin, who I think suspected that the twins were being less than pleasant, had fixed me the Vietnamese equivalent of a po’boy—banh mi. He had stacked crumbled shrimp cake, cucumber slices, cilantro and shredded green chilies between the split halves of a long French loaf and cut it into sections so that I could easily eat my sandwich between waiting on customers.
So, although I was footsore and weary when I approached my house, my stomach was comfortably full. And I still had enough energy for my nightly commune with Lucky.
His missing eye seemed not to affect his ability to grab morsels midair and it was an indication of how entertainment-deprived I was that I found his skill fascinating. So I spent a few minutes each evening breaking up pork-filled steamed buns and tossing him pieces as I carried on a one-sided conversation.
“I’m staying in tonight,” I told Lucky that night. “My feet are sore. Does that ever happen to you? I suppose, though, with only three legs, you’re twenty-five percent less likely to have blisters.”
On the other side of the porch railing, Lucky wagged the stump of his tail, apparently approving my nonsense math. I tossed him another bit, deliberately throwing it so that it would land close to the railing.
He hesitated, too fearful to step out of the shadows to pick it up.
“Come on,” I said. “You can do it. No one’s going to hurt you.”
Finally, when the temptation was too much, he stepped forward quickly. For a moment he fixed his single eye on me and lifted his lips to expose a lot of teeth. Then he snatched up the morsel and retreated.
“Clearly you have issues with trust,” I said, lobbing the last piece well into the porch area. “But don’t we all.”
I walked down the driveway to the back door and let myself inside.
By now the house was familiar territory. I no longer needed my flashlight to navigate after dark. Even the open staircase wasn’t a problem—nine steps up and the tenth put my foot on the landing. Another six steps and I was standing in front of the bedroom door.
I usually carried the flashlight anyway, placing it on the counter nearest the back door so that it was readily at hand when I returned home. And I always carried it upstairs with me when I retired for the night. Mostly, I used it when I crossed the living room. The beam of light sent the house’s inches-long roaches scuttling for cover.
Once on the steps, the roaches were more scarce and a misstep rarely produced a crunch underfoot. But I never leaned against the loose wallpaper as I went up the stairs. Instead, I’d learned to stay at the center of each step, away from the unprotected edge on my right and the wallpaper that moved beneath my hand on the left.
I made my way upstairs to the bedroom, eager for a long bath and the softness of my bed. After a week’s practice, I was an expert at pretending that the thick-shelled, antennaed nasties despised the cleanliness of my bedroom and the isolation of the bathroom. Only once had reality contradicted my fantasy. On Wednesday, I’d stepped from the shower, reached for a towel and received a painful, pinschered bite for my efforts. That hadn’t stopped me from showering, but now I never grabbed too quickly for anything.
When I called Beauprix that night, I was leaning against my pillows and thinking seriously about sleep. I was too tired, really, to focus on drawing. But as soon as I hit his number on my speed dial, I had, from habit, picked up my sketch pad and pencil from the nightstand.
As we conversed, I doodled.
I asked him about the hijacking.
He, too, had been intrigued by the abandoned cargo.
“Any idea what was taken?
“No. But it sure wasn’t drugs. I had Remy check with one of his buddies in vice. He said that the drug dog showed no interest in the truck’s interior. Or its exterior, for that matter.”
Which left a human cargo as a likely shipment, I thought. And then I asked myself if my recent experience as part of such a shipment might be influencing my judgment. So I didn’t mention my suspicions to Beauprix. But talking about the hijacking reminded me of something I’d heard the day before and had forgotten to tell him.
“Friday morning, during the Benevolent Society’s meeting, I overheard them talking about a shipment they were expecting to arrive. It was headed up north.”
I drew a frowning Vietnamese elder riding a dragon, using a chopstick for a crop.
“Is it relevant, do you think?” he said. “After all, they’re businessmen and New Orleans is a port city.”
His tone solicited feedback rather than making a judgment. So I told him of their shift to speaking French once they were assured Squirt didn’t understand that language.
“They were secretive, which makes me suspect that there was something about the shipment that was out of the ordinary.”
“It’d sure help to know what, if anything, went missing from that truck,” he said.
And I agreed.
Then I told him about Vincent Ngo.
“It was weird, Anthony. Everyone I met was talking about that hijacking. Speculating about the cargo like we are. Or sympathizing with the driver. Or, at the very least, talking about the crime rate in New Orleans and what was the city coming to. Then Vincent came in and simply shrugged off the news. But it was late afternoon when I talked to him. Maybe he was just tired of hearing about it. But that wasn’t really what I found disturbing.”
I described Vincent’s anger about being a Vietnamese immigrant.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” I said. “Maybe I’m looking too hard, reading too much into it. I get the impression he’s working hard to impress Squirt. He wouldn’t be the first guy to fall for a streetwise kid who’s ten, twelve years his junior. Anyway, there’s definitely something about him that doesn’t feel right. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.”
Then I told him about Mr. Yang’s warning.
Without focusing on details or style, I drew Vincent and Mr. Yang, put a wok piled full with dollar bills, coins and gift envelopes between them. And added a flame beneath it.
“Though I can’t for the life of me figure out how it’s all connected,” I continued.
I must have sounded apologetic.
“But your gut tells you there’s some link between them,” Beauprix said.
“Yeah.”
As we’d spoken, my pencil had moved on, leaving my conscious mind behind. After a few more minutes of conversation, I happened to focus on my drawing pad and saw tha
t I’d begun obliterating Vincent’s face with a feathered mask. I shook my head, certain that Vincent had nothing to do with the attack. Not only didn’t it make sense, but I was good at recognizing body types. There was no way Vincent had been one of the men who’d attacked me. What the drawing meant was that my conscious mind apparently agreed with my subconscious. And both agreed with Mr. Yang. Vincent Ngo was not a man to be trusted.
“…instincts,” Beauprix was saying, and I realized that I’d stopped listening to him.
“Sorry,” I said. “Bad connection. I lost you there for a moment. Would you mind repeating that?”
“What I was saying is that if you feel there’s something going on there,” he said, “then it’s worth checking into.”
The vote of confidence coming from Beauprix felt better than it should have. You’re falling for a voice on the phone, I scolded myself. Never mind that the voice was deep and gentle and encouraging.
I looked around the bedroom. More interesting to look at than the insipid floral prints that the home’s owner seemed to favor, I’d gotten into the habit of tearing finished work from my pad and taping it to the walls. I used the drawings as an immediate reference, periodically rearranging and retaping them, grouping them by relevance. I updated portraits by taping new ones over the old. One person: one portrait.
Except for Anthony Beauprix.
His face looked at me from several drawings. Smiling. Laughing. Solemn. Angry. And I’d drawn his hands. They were square and strong, with blunt fingers and manicured nails. If I shut my eyes, I remembered more about him than a mere photographic memory should have provided. The slightly spicy smell of his cologne, the confidence of his touch, the passion in his voice…
My God, I thought, suddenly understanding what should have been obvious. No matter that my taste in men had always run toward smooth-skinned Asians who looked good in tight jeans. Or that I figured I carried enough psychic baggage of my own that I deliberately avoided emotional involvement with anyone in law enforcement. Or that I preferred to date Washington professionals—cool, ambitious men who treated women not only as equals but as competitors. Despite all of that, I showed every sign of being in love with an overprotective, chauvinistic, white Southern cop.
Lacie Reed, I told myself, you have lost your mind. Face it, you’re reaching out to him just because he’s available. Because you’re tired of pretending to be a teenage girl. With him, you don’t have to be on guard, don’t have to pretend that you’re someone you’re not. Undoubtedly, that’s what’s stressing you out and making you emotionally vulnerable. Emotionally stupid.
Never mind that, for all the times I’d spent not just weeks, but months alone undercover, I’d never before felt inclined to fall in love.
Chapter 16
On Sunday, I went to early Mass at the neighborhood’s Catholic church and spent some time lingering on a residential block I hadn’t visited before. Then I took advantage of my time off from the Red Lotus and watched one of the busier streets in Little Vietnam.
Little Vietnam was its own small town. Though major purchases and special occasions might be spent in New Orleans proper or, more likely, across a less trafficked bridge to Slidell, most of the people who lived and worked in the little community also shopped, banked and went to school here. And ate and gossiped and prayed here. The odds were good that anyone I’d seen at the Red Lotus I would, sooner or later, see driving or walking on one of the major routes through the community.
I multitasked by doing a week’s worth of dirty clothing at the coin op laundry while watching traffic move along Dwyer Drive. Later, because the weather was beautiful, I sat on a bench in a small park on Saigon Drive. I dipped a carry-out order of bahn khoa—a rice-flour crepe stuffed with shrimp, chicken, sprouts and onion—into peanut sauce, sipped an iced tea and watched the traffic there, too.
When I returned home at dusk, I congratulated myself on a successful day. I had managed to match two faces I’d seen at the Red Lotus—two members of the Young Vietnamese Businessmen’s Association—to specific cars and license plate numbers.
Sunday evening, I rested.
On Monday, I went back to work at the Red Lotus. That day, I added more blisters to my feet and a few handfuls of loose change and dollar bills to the jar I kept in my bedroom. And I was able to surreptitiously bag one of Vincent’s teacups and tuck it in my jacket pockets. I would pass it on to Beauprix. It would, I was sure, yield a nice set of prints. But, before I called him, I was intent on adding several more teacups to the collection.
That night, despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t sleep. Mostly because I was lonely. Talking with Beauprix had helped, but our relationship lay in an odd limbo between professional and personal. And I couldn’t, anyway, tell him the details that had torn my sense of family apart.
My adoptive parents had retired to Europe. To live and work in the vineyards of Spain. It was their dream. They had loved me, raised me, taught me that there were people in the world I could trust. But, for the past five years, they’d been little more than quick e-mail messages, occasional letters and a phone call at Christmas.
I hadn’t really missed them because I had my uncles. Both of them. And my work. Before this was over, I asked myself, would I have lost not only my job but the friendship of both of my adopted uncles? Not that I had a choice. Helping Uncle Tinh had been the right thing to do. The only thing to do.
I rolled over in my bed, spent a few minutes torturing my pillow into a more comfortable lump and stared at the ceiling as my thoughts turned to the Yangs. Usually, when I considered the Vietnamese part of my dual heritage, I couldn’t help but think of myself as bui doi, as someone who would never belong. But my time at the Red Lotus, working with Mr. and Mrs. Yang and the elderly cousin had somehow changed my perspective. Like so many of the people I’d encountered in Little Vietnam, I was Viet Kieu. Vietnamese in the land of golden landscapes. That was the last thing on my mind when I drifted to sleep.
On Tuesday, my apron pockets were full of change and more customers were leaving than arriving by the time Vincent came in. When I served his meal, only he and two other customers remained. I poured him more tea, then walked down to the far end of the counter where the two businessmen were finishing up their lunch. After asking if I could get them anything more, I left them each a check, then gathered up the scatter of dirty dishes and carried them to the kitchen. The cousin was there, standing with his back bent, his arms elbow-deep in sudsy water.
“A busy day,” the elderly man remarked in Vietnamese as he took the dishes from me. “Good for business.”
“Hard on the feet,” I said.
He gave me a soapy wave.
“And on the hands.”
I laughed as, through the kitchen door, I caught a glimpse of an entering customer out of the corner of my eye. A tourist, I thought immediately. A Caucasian with dark hair. He was dressed in faded blue jeans and a yellow sports shirt. I stepped back into the restaurant area just in time to see him take a seat at the table near the door with his back to me.
What the hell was he doing here?
Mr. Yang was sitting on a tall stool in front of the cash register reading his paper. Responding to the bell, he jerked his head in the direction of the new customer without once looking up.
I filled a teapot with oolong tea and carried it, a clean teacup and paper napkin-wrapped utensils to the table. Beauprix’s attention seemed to be on the battered menu.
If I had known you were coming, I could have slipped you Vincent’s teacup, I thought. As it was…
He looked up as I began to set the table and there was nothing in his face or manner that implied recognition.
“Good afternoon, sir. Would you like to order?” I asked in English and made a point of popping the gum I was in the habit of chewing openmouthed.
He gave his head a little half shake and smiled politely.
“Yes, miss. The mein ga, please.”
He gave me his order in passable V
ietnamese.
No doubt my shocked disbelief showed on my face. I was glad that I had positioned myself beside Beauprix’s chair so that my back, too, was to Vincent and Mr. Yang.
I shook my head, replied in Vietnamese, wondering how fluent he actually was.
“There’s not much left, sir. Part of it spilled earlier today.”
“Mot mieng khi doi bang doi khi no,” Beauprix said. It was an old Vietnamese proverb: a bite when hungry is worth a bowl when full.
As my eyes widened, Beauprix’s smile broadened.
Smart-ass, I thought as I glared down at him.
“I hope you still believe that when you reach the end of a very meager bowl,” I said, keeping my voice pleasant.
I returned to the kitchen, reached for one of the large bowls that were stacked on the shelf above the stove, filled it with a generous portion of noodles. Resisting the urge to spike the meal with oil infused with hot peppers, I added what remained of the chicken soup to the bowl and put it on a small tray. Beside it, I placed tiny, separate dishes of green onion, chopped celery and chopped hot peppers. I smiled at Vincent as I walked past him on my way to unload the tray at Beauprix’s table.
“Enjoy your meal, sir.”
I returned to the counter, began washing its Formica surface with a bleach-soaked rag and tried to pretend Beauprix was just another customer.
“He speaks our language well,” Vincent remarked. “I wonder where he learned it? He’s too young, I think, to have been a soldier in Vietnam.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said pettishly, “as long as he pays his bill and leaves a decent tip.”
Vincent left the restaurant before Beauprix did, which was just as well. Because, along with the tip, Beauprix left a packet of M&M’s Peanut. I opened it, poured the candy out in my hand, and laughed. I didn’t know how he’d managed it, but inside the characteristic yellow wrapper, all of the M&M’s were blue. There were enough of them, I supposed, to trade for a foot rub.