by Chuck Logan
Broker crawled furiously on all fours to the edge of the hole and squinted down his flashlight beam. Trin’s eyes and teeth glowed in a mask of dirt and sweat. His right hand was snarled in metal that dazzled chrome-yellow in the electric light.
“It’s gold!” shouted Trin. He tried to scramble up the walls of the pit, one hand extended with his fistful of trophies, the other trying to clamp a long, shallow sand-packed wooden box to his side.
Broker almost pitched in. Reaching, clawing at Trin’s wrist. Exhaustion evaporated. Weight was nothing. He almost catapulted Trin and the crate into the air. They rolled over on the lip of the pit and laughed like boys. Up off all fours they danced on their knees as Trin waved his right hand under Broker’s eyes. Dozens of gold circles dripped from the damp sand in his fingers. Hundreds more winked in the sandy box.
“What are they?” yelled Broker.
“Vietnamese credit cards,” yelled Trin. “Gold rings!”
He pawed the sand in the ammo box. Everywhere his fingers moved the sand, metal gleamed. “Thousands of gold rings.” He plucked out a thin sheet, then a wafer that looked like a yellow domino. “Leaves,” he said. “Taels. There must be a hundred pounds of gold in this box!”
Suddenly Trin went rigid. “Listen,” he hissed. They killed the flashlights. Broker strained his ears. Trin’s eyes bulged. Mercury saucers in the dark. Instinctively they both hunched forward and absurdly threw their arms protectively around the heap of gold. A distinct, sharp clacking, above them, on the slope, by the graves. From a carefully stored inventory of nightmare sounds, Broker specified: the click of bamboo on bamboo. VC semaphore in the night.
Trin’s chest heaved in relief. “Trung Si signaling. He’s coming in.”
Gingerly, they struggled up on rubber knees. The darkness shuffled above them and the old sergeant swung down the beach on his crutch. The hunting rifle was slung over his shoulder.
A moment of sheer paranoid panic that was as old as pirates and buried treasure and betrayal knifed Broker as Trung Si unlimbered the rifle. But the old man was just easing his back. Trung Si muttered to Trin.
Trin began to laugh and then he cupped his hand over his mouth. In a quiet controlled voice he said, “He could hear us yelling halfway to Quang Tri City. He says we should shut the fuck up. Sound carries out here.”
Grumbling, Trung Si braced on his crutch and lowered himself to the edge of the pit. Carefully he laid the rifle and the crutch across his lap. He massaged his leg. Trin switched on his flashlight and played the beam across glitter at his feet.
Trung Si coughed and hawked a wad of phlegm. Then he put a cheroot-looking cigarette, rolled from raw homegrown tobacco, to his lips. He took a cheap plastic lighter from his tunic and lit the fag. He blew a stream of smoke and grumbled something.
“What?” asked Broker.
“It’s a saying,” said Trin. “You find gold, you pay with blood.”
“Back home we call that a curse,” said Broker. The intoxication had subsided. He squatted and sifted his fingers through the golden trinkets. “Rings?”
“People don’t trust banks or currency; those rings are the basic denomination. Easy to carry. We don’t deal in dong for big items, it’s too clumsy. A television set is, say, eight gold rings.” He picked up the tael. “Ten gold rings.”
“That’s today,” said Broker. “The stuff we’re looking for was buried twenty years ago.” Broker shook his head. “This isn’t it.”
“So? It’s loot. A lot of robbery took place on the roads when the war ended. It’s gold,” protested Trin. “That’s only one box. There’s lots more…stacks.”
“The pieces I saw were bigger.”
“You saw?”
“Yeah, at Cyrus’s house in New Orleans.”
“You never told me—” Trin moved closer.
“I’m telling you now. A lot bigger, about six, seven pounds, with Chinese writing on them.”
Trin seized Broker’s elbow. “Writing?” The flashlight illuminated their faces from below, pocketing their features. Halloween masks.
“Chinese characters, you know…” Broker made a tangled ideogram with his finger in the dark.
“Fuck me dead,” gasped Trin in perfect sixties slang. He leaped back into the pit.
64
TRIN’S VOICE RODE A HYSTERICAL BATSHIT VIETNAMESE bobsled down in the pit. The silica flew. Above ground, Trung Si totally lost his phlegmatic peasant reserve. He scrambled to his foot and his crutch and, despite his earlier cautions about keeping it quiet, jabbered in the night.
Broker was double lost. Strange land. Strange tongue. Stuck in the dark with crazy people. One of whom was armed. He strobed his flashlight back and forth between the pit and the agitated old man who now had gone peg-leg wild and was stumping in the sand, swinging the rifle at the ready in all directions.
Trin’s shovel hacked with manic energy at sodden wood and sand. Crazy man here, chopping down a beach. The sound carried hollowly up from the pit. His excited voice exceeded all previous pitch, close now to the tonal frenzy of the flute player’s music.
In a stab of light Trung Si dropped his rifle and waved his arms, covering his face, warning Broker. Objects flew out of the hole, thick, oblong. One. Two. Trin’s voice maxed out on a triumphant fever shriek. Broker stepped back as another dark shape lobbed through the dark.
Panting, greased with sweat and dirt, Trin scrambled up from the hole. Trung Si had plopped back down on the sand and yelled, crawling one-legged, collecting the three sand-gummed ingots that Trin had thrown from the pit. Trin yanked him upright and arm in arm, clutching the heavy bars, they did a three-legged race down to the edge of the sea. Broker followed them as their electric torches swung like giddy miniature searchlights. They continued to rave as they collapsed in the water and scrubbed at the ingots. Then they crabbed their way to the edge of the surf.
Kneeling in the wet sand, Broker shook them by the shoulders. Trin went down on all fours. He lined the three ingots up in a row in the soft smooth sand and bent, his flashlight held over them like a caricature of Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass. Trung Si protested and picked up the center bar, moved the left one in and put the bar down at the end of the row. Broker gathered that they were arguing about an ordering sequence.
“Speak English, goddammit!” he shouted.
Like an Asian Laurel and Hardy, Trin and Trung Si comically hushed their voices. Trin rocked back on his heels and grinned. “French would be more appropriate,” he crowed in a whisper.
“That’s them,” said Broker, pointing at the ingots. Both flashlight beams now pinned the yellow rectangles to the inky sand. The indestructible sheen of gold perfectly complemented the desperate night. Gleaming, wrapped in soft ribbons of surf and nervous muscular brown hands sluiced by sea water, the ingots were about seven inches long, three to four inches wide and more than an inch thick. A panel was stamped in a decorative border with stacked Chinese characters, three on two of the ingots, four on the third.
Trin shook himself, fell on his back and fluttered a hand on his chest. “It’s too big for me,” he said.
“It’s gold, like I told you,” said Broker.
“It’s not just gold,” said Trin in wonder.
“Okay, it’s old Chinese gold,” said Broker.
Trin jackknifed up into a sitting position, pounded the sand with his fist and declared, “Not Chinese. Ours!”
Broker, weary of dramatic outbursts, got up. “I’m going back to the hole to get some coffee and my cigarettes. You calm down.”
Trin and Trung Si commenced a brusque debate in Vietnamese. Broker helped Trung Si return to the pit and reunited him with his crutch and his rifle. Muttering to himself, the old man hobbled back up the slope and disappeared into the dark. Broker then returned to the beach. He poured a cup of coffee and tried to take its comfort. He faced Trin. They sat cross-legged, the ingots between them.
In the distance they heard an engine start. The van.
>
“What’s going on? Can that old guy drive?” asked Broker.
“He uses the crutch on the clutch, he’s fine. Phil—he’s going for the boat,” said Trin in a grim voice.
“So we’re going to do it,” said Broker.
“How many boxes should we take? Ten? Fifteen?”
“As many as we can. How many are there?”
“A lot.”
They lowered their eyes. No flashlights. The metal picked up a faint iridescence from the moon, pecked by tiny points of starlight. Like the moving lines of surf.
Calm now, Trin composed himself. “That hole is a lot deeper than you think,” he said. He tapped the first ingot. “Gia Long, third year, eighteen oh-three.” His finger moved to the second bar. “Minh Mang, fifth year, eighteen twenty-five.” The third. “Tu Duc, tenth year, eighteen fifty-eight.”
“Emperors,” said Broker slowly as he recognized the names and placed them in context. A shuttle of magic moved in the night. Hemming them in. His skin shrunk two sizes and prickled and cinched around the testicles. “No shit!”
“No shit. This wasn’t stolen from a bank. It isn’t just…money. This is Imperial gold. Part of the treasure of the Nguyen emperors. No one has seen gold like this for over a hundred years except in a museum in Paris.”
“Goddamn, Trin. I thought the French took it all…”
Trin nodded. “When they looted the Hue Citadel in eighteen eighty-five. Looks like they missed some.” Trin shook his head. His hands groped the air. “You see. It’s…big.” He clicked his teeth. “Bigger than us.”
“Real treasure,” said Broker, now understanding Cyrus’s morbid obsession. And he saw how, in his fractured way, Jimmy Tuna was making his amends.
“If they knew about this in nineteen seventy-five Hanoi would have parked a division of tanks on it,” said Trin slowly.
“Okay,” Broker blurted. “Jimmy and Cyrus found the stuff and got it as far the bank. They phonied it up as a pallet of ammo. It just sat there after Hue fell.”
Trin exhaled. “God, I probably walked by it a dozen times myself. Just sat there for over a month?”
“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Ask Cyrus.”
Trin struggled to his feet. Broker joined him. They wobbled, supporting each other.
“So,” said Broker.
“So, we have to keep Highway One open for one more day.” Trin’s voice threw a resonating thespian echo down the empty beach. “We just get Nina away from Cyrus and then draw Cyrus here and call the militia when he’s digging it up.” It was three in the morning. The plan had the teeth of a butterfly assault on Mount Rushmore.
“That’s all,” said Broker, reeling. They both had the gold delirium tremens.
“C’mon. We’ve got to haul some boxes down to the water. And they’re heavy. Then we have to fill in that hole,” said Trin. “And meet Cyrus at noon in Hue. And not tell anybody else.”
“Trung Si knows,” said Broker.
Trin wearily brushed sand from his shirt. “Trung Si will keep his mouth shut. He’s more worried about the curse of found gold.”
“Once we load the boat, where we going to hide it?”
Trin shrugged. “Let Trung Si worry about that. He was a guerrilla all his life. He’s hid stuff from the Japanese, the French, the Americans…”
Arm in arm, they staggered back up the beach.
65
TRIN’S LATEST MOOD SWING TOOK HIM, TARZAN fashion, clear across his personal jungle. When he spoke to Trung Si and Broker as they loaded the gold, he sounded just a little bit like he was talking to more than two people. Like maybe he caught glimmers of his entire old VC battalion lined up there on the beach. And this weird light came in his eye, like he was communing with the whole mystic Vietnamese nation: living, dead, and unborn. All convened there by the sea, as numerous and without end as the faded stars.
It was just a little weird, and maybe it was just being balls-out exhausted, but it put Broker a tad on edge. Not that he could tell for sure in the shape he was in. Working like maniacs, they had filled in the pit.
It was midmorning when they finally got underway to the hallucinatory Rube Goldberg thump and fart of the improbable sampan motor. They slumped on the smelly deck. They had loaded thirteen heavy crates into the boat, using a winch that Trung Si had rigged from the mast. Now the old peasant sat at the tiller, his pigtail snapping in the wind, a cheroot clamped in his teeth throwing sparks, his one eye fixed off the bow.
It might work if they could get Nina clear. And Lola was the only hope of that. On the other hand, they’d just found ten tons of gold. They weren’t thinking that clearly. Broker tried to hold the plan in his head. The militia post was a good hour’s drive on a bad road. No telephones. And once they involved those guys it could get, like Nina had said, hairy. A bunch of teenage farm-boys let loose with automatic weapons.
Broker had one ingot in a burlap sack along with the top to the first ammo box Trin had dug up. Chips. To bargain for Nina.
They unloaded the first box they found, the one with rings, gold leaf, and taels, at the vet’s home. Trin told Broker and Trung Si, with that faraway look in his eye, that the stuff in the pit belonged to the People of Vietnam, and the People of Vietnam would not begrudge them setting aside an additional hundred pounds of gold rings for their trouble.
Then Trung Si chugged off to hide the boat and their piece of the treasure. They cleaned up, sort of, washing in the sea, pulling on a change of clothing. Tripping with fatigue, they got in the van and headed for Hue City. They left the treasure of the Nguyen emperors in the keeping of a one-legged, half-blind, ex-Viet Cong peasant sergeant who had one old French bolt-action rifle and eight rounds of ammunition. And an uncommunicative, legless flute player. The rest of Trin’s vets still had not returned with the truck.
Trin sped down the sandy track looking out at the dunes. He grumbled, “I knew we should have buried some weapons out there, in Vietnam it just makes sense to have some weapons buried out there…”
Then Trin launched into an impromptu discussion of Trung Si’s curse. Dramatically, he thrust the tiger tooth under Broker’s nose. “It’s like your native Indians. Except with us it’s the Chams. In the fifteenth century we conquered and annihilated them, our Manifest Destiny. The March to the South.
“One of my ancestors rode an elephant through the Emperor’s Gate in the Hai Van Pass on that invasion. He brought this tooth back among his booty. The gold in Vietnam was mined in Champa, south of Danang. Still is. So if you find gold it’s probably Cham gold. Therefore cursed with their blood.”
Broker shrugged, he was way past curses. And things like reasonable doubt and probable cause, not to mention consequences. They were inappropriate Western concepts anyway. His dad always said he didn’t have the sense that God gave a goose, so he wasn’t particularly afraid. He liked the…velocity.
Trin, who probably had acquired the wisdom in middle age to be afraid and who had probably waltzed, a few times, with little green men on various bar counters, hunched over with his eyes level with the top of the wheel like a ninth-grader, elbows raised and driving sixty, sometimes seventy, miles an hour, sending bicycles and water buffaloes scurrying toward the ditch.
They sped through Quang Tri City. In the market, the sun ricocheted off a thousand conical straw hats and pounded platinum knitting needles into the raw sun spots Broker had on loan for eyes. He had never been so tired in his whole life. He had ten tons of gold on one shoulder and Nina Pryce’s life on the other.
Trin looked just as crushed and Broker hoped he was carrying the same load but he wasn’t 100 percent sure. Not even close. And for today’s work they needed 120 percent.
Trin skidded onto Highway 1 and aimed the van south, toward Hue City, down the center of the road, and stepped on the gas. He did not budge for anything on wheels.
“You got any speed?” asked Broker.
“All out,” said Trin.
They turned and grinned at each other. Th
ey had always been unsuited for ordinary life. They were probably rushing headlong toward doom.
They were probably happy.
Broker must have fallen asleep with his eyes wide open because suddenly a huge Tiger Beer billboard leaped in the windshield and Trin swerved left. Vaguely he noticed the dusty russet limestone walls of the Imperial Citadel rise across a muddy lotus-choked moat. Different now, masked by new houses.
Hue. The Nguyen emperors had made it their Imperial capital for a hundred and fifty years. Had to be here to understand the romance of the city and the war. A feudal castle, the hills upriver studded with Imperial tombs.
The Perfume River divided the town. The citadel complex took up the left bank; moated and surrounded by thick ramparts it contained the Forbidden City, the palaces and offices of the mandarins. Across the river, the right bank housed the Colonial facade of the old French administration, universities, and medical schools. A college town, a cultural icon: everyone had thought that the city was untouchable. In the late afternoons flocks of schoolgirls in their flowing white au dais rode their bicycles down Le Loi Street past the old French buildings. In 1968 the Communists chose it for their most dramatic battleground: Tet.
Broker blinked back the reverie when he saw a red flag the size of a fucking basketball court flutter from the citadel’s famous flag tower.
Trin’s battalion died on that tower during Tet, left behind to burn in the bombs. That’s when Trin quit the revolution. And when he discovered that the Communists had rounded up three thousand of Hue’s intellectuals and officials, and their families, including his own father and mother, and marched them into the jungle. Beat them to death with shovels after forcing them to dig their own graves.
My Lai had been worth a Pulitzer. The Hue massacre never made the front pages.
It was 11:30 A.M.
Trin turned again. An exuberant cluster of hammers and sickles burst on another billboard. Happy Worker, Happy Soldier, Happy Student, Happy Farmer. Oh boy.