by Jay Brandon
Daniel gave a stupid little American shrug and walked faster. He veered away from the building as he came to its comer, but there was no one lurking in the side street. He hurried across the street and up the next block. From there he was closer to his own shop than to the two Vietnamese behind him. He looked back once more, hoping they weren’t following him.
The street behind him was empty. Daniel stopped. There was no car pulling away. Khai and his round-faced henchman had just vanished. There had been time between Daniel’s looks back for them to walk around the comer and out of sight, but the disappearing act made him uneasy. He walked on slowly. The street was still remarkably unpopulated. He could feel eyes on him from within the other shops.
As he passed the pawnshop of his Vietnamese rival the man stepped outside. The pawnbroker was rather heavy, and tall for a Vietnamese, as tall as Daniel. He stared unpleasantly at Daniel for a moment and Daniel felt guilty. But he returned the stare with a degree of irony as well. I spared your life, he thought. You don’t know how easily you could disappear.
The man showed no gratitude. Daniel slipped inside his own shop and was relieved to find no one but Thien there. The boy stared at him. “Turned out to be nothing,” Daniel said lamely. He didn’t notice that Thien showed no relief at all.
Daniel walked idly around the store, ending up behind the plastic-enriched glass shield that separated the counter and cash register from the customer area. He slipped his hand under the counter and his confidence grew slightly.
But you didn’t just beg off from the kind of deal Khai had offered. Just hearing the offer had implicated him. He watched the window.
It wasn’t Khai or any of his men who arrived next, though. It was Carol. Daniel had almost forgotten. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see it was just after five. Daylight lingered on the street but it seemed shredded. It would blow away soon, leaving cold November dusk. When Carol stepped out of her car at the curb, she was the brightest object for miles. Daniel smiled involuntarily. He was out from behind the counter to meet her as she came in the door. They were running late, he knew, but there was no hurry in her. Her cheeks were bright from the wind and her hair was flung back. She put her arms around him and kissed him, a daytime, public kiss, but for a moment it surrounded them with an invisible cone of intimacy. They had been married for a year but sometimes when she took him by surprise he still felt in the first flush of an affair, lust just turning to romance.
“You look great,” he said, which was true, but what he meant by it was that she looked out of place in his dumpy shop. With summer past, her blond hair had darkened to pale brown, though individual strands of it were still golden. She walked lightly, almost bouncing, happy about something.
“How’s business today?”
“Booming,” she said. “People want to get out of town for Christmas. Go to some warm beach where only the waiters speak English.”
Daniel nodded, though what she said conjured up only TV images for him. He was sure it evoked specific personal memories in Carol.
Across the shop, Thien had at first turned discreetly away but then his sidelong glance had turned into an open stare. When he saw Carol turn to him he said, “Hello, Mrs. Greer.”
“Hello, Thien. Found anything besides trash in that pile?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Thien held up Madame Bovary, in which he had made visible progress if you believed where his finger held his place in the book.
Carol walked over to him, apparently not noticing how the boy’s cheeks flamed when she drew close, and looked at the title. “Well, I’d like to offer you some keen insight, but you’re already over my head.”
“Not true, Thien,” Daniel said. “She was an English major.”
“Whose creed was ‘Learn just enough for the final, then forget even that.’ We’ve got to run,” she added.
“I know. Thien, can you lock up? Don’t stay too long. I may drop back by later on.”
But it didn’t occur to him to be worried about the Vietnamese boy. Daniel assumed he was carrying the contagion of danger away with him.
As he watched Daniel Greer sidling away from him, his pace speeding up as he drew farther away, Khai said to Chui in Vietnamese, “Find out all there is to know about him.”
“We already—”
“That was not enough. Now I want everything."
Chui nodded. When he looked up Khai was moving, almost to the corner behind them already. Chui hurried to catch up. Khai’s movements were always like that: abrupt, unanticipated. You couldn’t keep up with him. His thoughts were often the same way. As now. What did he care about the American pawnbroker? Americans made Chui uneasy.
They had left the car three blocks away. After they had walked two they saw two Vietnamese men ahead of them. One was their own man, Nguyen, whom they had left watching the car. The second was now a rag doll of a man, hanging limply from Nguyen’s hands. When they drew closer they saw that Nguyen’s thin cord was twisted around the man’s neck. He was unconscious if not dead. Nguyen lowered him silently to the sidewalk. He gestured with his head, and Khai and Chui leaned out to look around the comer. There was their car, parked on a dead-end street that almost never saw traffic. The car was pointed away from them. Its hood was open. At first they saw nothing but part of a moving arm under the hood. They both jerked back out of sight as a nervous face popped up from under the hood, peered around, then disappeared again.
Nguyen gestured contemptuously at the fallen Vietnamese. “This one was the lookout,” he mouthed.
Khai showed no reaction. Possibly the shadows of his eyes deepened slightly as he lowered his head. He made a sudden motion with his hand and Chui, gun drawn, hurried around the corner. Nguyen and Khai were right behind him. He ran almost silently but flat-out. When he was within a few feet of the car, he hurled himself into the air, slamming his whole body down on the hood.
The man must have heard something coming. He managed to get his head but not his hands out from under the hood just before it came down on him. His hands were caught underneath. He flung his head back and screamed, until Nguyen slapped him hard across the face. Until then the man’s reactions had been automatic. When his eyes opened and he saw Khai standing next to him, the pain must have left him, as his heart stopped. The man’s head lolled to the side. Shock was setting in. He began to gibber in fear. Nguyen slapped him again.
It was impossible to tell from Khai’s face that he was anything more than annoyed. He seemed to be talking to the would-be saboteur when he spoke.
“This must stop,” he said.
#
Later, after she was gone, what Daniel remembered about Carol was her ease. Nothing perturbed her. She did everything easily, without forethought. While he hesitated, she acted without looking. It made him crazy sometimes, but it was one of the things he loved about her.
She never looked as if she felt out of place, no matter where she was. Daniel didn’t feel at home in the seedy neighborhood of his pawnshop or in this crowded, VIP reception, but Carol moved through both as if born to them.
She had been born to this. They had barely walked in when half the mob surged toward them and took her away from him. One or two halfheartedly included him in the greetings, but when they pulled away he was alone, which was what he preferred. He got a drink and roamed through the crowd trying to pretend he belonged, and knowing he was fooling no one.
The affair was being held in a bank lobby that soared five stories tall. It had the square footage of a football field. The thirty-foot-tall Christmas tree that would decorate the place for the next month was already up, but in this expanse of space it could almost go unnoticed in its corner. The tree was not the center of attention. The inanimate center of attention was the sculpture in the center of the room that provided the occasion for the party. Daniel stood and peered at it for a while, one of only three or four people doing so. The sculpture was nonrepresentational, a huge chunk of pitted black metal that looked
as if it had been stretched almost to its breaking point. The metal seemed to scream. It was wrinkled and broken throughout. Daniel decided it looked like an eighty-year-old coal miner who had stepped out of a spaceship airlock into a hostile gravitational field that had sucked the air out of his body and stretched it to twice its normal height. The title didn’t offer him any clue to the sculpture’s identity. It was called “Desiccation.”
The animate center of the party was of course Raymond Hecate himself, Carol’s father. Daniel went looking for him, not because he wanted to talk to him but because he wanted to see the man in his glory. He found him in the center of a crowd, all of whom seemed to be listening to him. One of them was a television reporter with a microphone. Hecate stood out in the winter- dressed throng. He was wearing a white tennis sweater that set off his teeth, his tan, and his full head of white hair. He was in his mid-fifties, so the hair still looked premature. Propped on top of his head was a pair of sunglasses that looked like skylights in his skull. Daniel was too far away to hear what he was saying, but he was obviously delighting the crowd.
Raymond Hecate had never overcome the handicap of having been born rich. He went through life thinking some virtue of his own was responsible for that status. Even those who liked him realized there was something of the spoiled child about him. Take this business of always dressing like a golfer or a tennis player, even on semiformal occasions such as this one. It did make him distinctive. Food and drink and sun had given him a florid complexion that passed for health. But in the struggle between his appetite and his vanity, appetite was beginning to edge ahead. He tried to exercise away the pounds but didn’t quite succeed. His stomach was solid but extensive. He was the kind of man who would die on a racquetball court. Soon, Daniel hoped.
In the old days, Carol had told him, her father did things lavishly but privately—bought a company while playing golf with its owner, took unheralded vacations to the Orient, threw huge parties that went unreported in the papers. Back then it seemed privacy was the greatest luxury. Now that he was not only rich but a first-term city councilman as well he did everything publicly. Like now: throwing a party that was half press conference to celebrate his donating some ugly and expensive sculpture to the city after displaying it in the lobby of his bank.
Daniel didn’t push through Hecate’s sycophants to join him, even when he saw Carol propelled through the crowd to give her father a big hug. Hecate greeted her boisterously, displaying her. He would be less than thrilled to share the moment with his son-in-law, though. Hecate treated Daniel as if “pawnbroker” was a genetic defect he hoped wouldn’t be passed on to the grandchildren. And it seemed such a random thing that he was even in the pawn business. It was a matter of happenstance and stubbornness. When he was twenty he had dropped out of college because it seemed so purposeless, but so had everything that followed, vague years of parties and friends drifting away and odd jobs. He’d landed in the pawnshop and found it suited him. Haggling was a skill fed by indifference. Slowly he began to care about getting the better of a deal, but he could keep the caring hidden.
Mr. Jacobs, the old man who owned the shop, saw it in him. “You have the fever,” he said slyly. Daniel denied it, but he didn’t drift on to another job.
There was another aspect to the fever. The way your heart blossomed when the doorbell tinkled and someone walked in carrying a package. Anything could live in that package. It always turned out to be a gun or a camera or a music box, but in that first minute it could be the treasure of the Hapsburgs. You waited for someone desperate to walk in with a lifetime’s jewel he didn’t know he had. One night after a year on the job Daniel had awakened from a dream in which a fat old woman had put a piece of statuary in his hands and asked the standard “How much?” But he didn’t hear her in his awe at what he held. It was a foot-tall porcelain figure of—what? As he began to wake the treasure began to shrink. It was exquisite but it lost definition as he lost the dream. He woke with a feeling of terrible beauty and loss, and the memory of a small perfect something dwindling away.
When Mr. Jacobs died Daniel had the chance to buy the pawnshop at a fire-sale price, and he took it. The fever had cooled in his blood by then but something else had taken hold: the desire to be his own boss. He was near the end of his twenties, which seemed very old to start over in another company. After a year or two of it he could see he was never going to make his fortune as a pawnshop owner, but after being his own boss that long he couldn’t stand the thought of working for someone else.
About that time he had met Carol, which had made him wish his whole life had been different. But if he’d been just like everyone else that she knew she would never have noticed him.
But look what noticing him had done for her.
He went back to wandering through the party, skittering through the fringes of conversations. When he heard “Vietnamese” mentioned he stopped. The man speaking must have been a newspaper editor or someone else with access to undisclosed news.
“Well, did you hear that latest one yesterday? They kept it quiet for a day but it’ll be in tomorrow’s editions. Found three of them in the basement of a house over near Allen Parkway Village. Three men with their hands tied behind their backs and hanging upside down from a pipe.”
“Dead?” someone asked.
“Damn straight. Their heads were hanging in a trough of water. They’d drowned. And the fiendish thing about it was they were tied so that they could bend their heads far enough back to just barely bring their noses out of the water. They wouldn’t drown until they didn’t have the strength to hold themselves out of the water any more. Might have taken a whole day. Course they didn’t last as long as they might have because they’d been beaten too.”
“My God,” the other man said, echoing Daniel’s thought. “Who would do something like that?”
“Well, that’s another funny thing. You know they used to think it was the Klan, somebody like that, like that trouble they had down with those shrimp fishermen on the coast. But now they think maybe it’s the Vietnamese themselves.”
“Doing it to each other, you mean?”
“Exactly right.”
“But why?”
“Who knows? Maybe something they had going on in Vietnam that they just brought over here with them. They’re just like animals anyway. Let ’em all kill each other, I say.”
“Yes, but—”
Daniel drifted away. As the man said, who knew? But Daniel had a better idea than most. He knew what Khai was, a gang leader. There must be others like him, rivals for each other’s power. In a way it was a relief to realize that. Khai would have bigger things on his mind than Daniel.
He negotiated the crowd like a white-water raftsman, following the currents but turning aside whenever he ran the risk of running aground on some friend of Carol’s he had met before. He didn’t realize he was looking for Carol until he found her, ahead of him in the crowd, her back to him. He slowed down to watch her as he approached obliquely. She hadn’t seen him. He could imagine he was seeing her for the first time, wondering how to approach such an out-of-reach woman. He was smiling.
Carol was talking to Jennifer Hardesty, one of her oldest friends. Like Raymond Hecate, Jennifer was wearing sunglasses atop her head. Like him, she looked like a fashionable twit. Daniel and Carol had had Jennifer to their home one disastrous time since their wedding, after which Carol had tacitly agreed to meet her old friend only for lunch, for shopping, or on occasions such as this. It was clear they loved to talk to each other. Daniel couldn’t imagine why. It made him nervous about his wife to know that she still so thoroughly enjoyed her rich bitch friend.
Jennifer was holding a clear plastic glass containing amber liquid. It must have been her severalth, from the sway of her shoulders. And alcohol removed any patina of politeness from the dislike in her eyes when she saw Daniel.
“Hello, Jennifer.” He put his arm around Carol and she leaned into him slightly.
“Danny Boy,” said Jennifer, and they just stood there. Daniel didn’t apologize for interrupting their conversation and he didn’t attempt to start a new one. After a long minute Jennifer clattered her ice against her teeth and went looking for another drink.
“That was rude,” said Carol, but not harshly.
“That’s okay, I have thick skin.”
“I meant you. But it’s okay, Jennifer has thick skin too.”
“To match her head. Why don’t we get out of here?”
“Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”
They started walking. Daniel still had his arm around her shoulders, and his fingers began lightly stroking her arm. She slipped her arm around his waist.
“We’ve already put in our token appearance. Isn’t that all you said we had to do? I thought we could go eat at some low Mexican dive I know and make it an early night. We have a busy day tomorrow.”
Carol’s eyes were no longer scanning the crowd as they neared the door. She was looking down, smiling. “I think you mean for us to have a busy night first,” she said.
“What?” he said innocently. He inclined his head toward her, she whispered something, and they went out the door laughing. They didn’t look back to see Raymond Hecate’s eyes following them, or the glare on his flushed face.
Nor did they notice the two Vietnamese men across the street who became more alert when Daniel and Carol emerged from the bank.
Later that night, after their argument, after Carol had gone off to bed, Daniel sat up on the couch for almost an hour, watching television with the sound almost inaudible. He was thinking about how much he had changed in the year they’d been married. He had gone into it not expecting it to last. For the first few months he had acted not cool toward her, but holding a certain reserve for himself; not making any lasting commitments.