by Jay Brandon
His cheeks still burned from the encounter with his father. The old man’s scorn had branded him. Khai was perhaps a legend in the making: a legend of an emperor in exile, cast out of his own narrow comer of the world only to find a greater conquest within his grasp. But the old man was a legend already. Within the boundaries of his world he had accomplished everything it was possible to accomplish. Everyone in Saigon knew him. Even the Americans when they came had to learn to deal with Ngoc Van Khai. He was more powerful than a provincial governor. He was, in a way, the shadow government of Saigon itself. His black market was more efficient and more prosperous than the official government.
The final page of the elder Khai’s legend was that when the fall finally came, when no one emerged from South Vietnam unmarked, he did. He had not only escaped, he had escaped still a rich man. He was an exile, but he lived as well as he ever had. Now he was like a collapsed star, vastly shrunk in size but with its gravity intact. The old man never left his house—outside was a foreign land he did not acknowledge—but within the house the grip of his power was absolute.
The father’s secret was that in making his last, boldest move—his escape from Vietnam—he had used up all his daring. He had none left. Having lost the security he knew, he cared for nothing now except what little security he had left. He wanted no trouble. It was Khai who had been bold enough to reach outside the house, to make the family name feared once again. The thought of prison if it all failed now had hardly crossed Khai’s mind. The old man’s contempt was the punishment he feared.
No one would have dared cross Ngoc Van Khai in his prime. Khai must enjoy the same respect. He must inspire the same fear. The Vietnamese pawnbroker had learned that. The Americans would learn it now.
The Mozart had stopped. The music in his head had turned Wagnerian. Khai rose and went out. So soft was his tread it caused no ripples across the surface of his abandoned tea.
Chapter 7
CAROL IN MEMORY
His house seemed so alien now. Everything seemed insubstantial, like the hastily assembled set to a bad community theater play. All cast-off, mismatched furniture and knickknacks no one would have in a home. How could she ever have lived there? He expected to touch the wall and feel it ripple—canvas nailed to a framework of two-by-fours.
And when the sun went down it seemed that the house sat all alone on a prairie where the wind whistled by unchecked for a hundred miles. Daniel made another drink and felt sorry for himself.
Carol.
It felt as if they had sent him to a motel room somewhere and told him to wait for a call. But the phone didn’t ring. What did they want from him? He hadn’t heard back from his mysterious caller. He wanted instructions, a plan. They could have told him to catch a plane for Borneo and he would have done it.
Carol.
She was becoming mythical to him. He hadn’t quite given up the idea that she had arranged this herself, gotten a friend to call him and keep him from making an uproar while she eased away, back into her own world.
At least she was all right now. He didn’t have to worry about that any more. If it had been a random Saturday night rape or robbery, they would have discarded Carol by now, and no one would have called him. If she’d been kidnapped, as it appeared, they would take care of her as long as she was important to them.
Unless she’d been snatched by some sadist, or a group of them, with long-term lusts. Periodically Daniel would be attacked by images of Carol crying, naked, beyond exhaustion and humiliation but still alive, still in pain, surrounded by indistinct but priapic figures of men. He would shut his eyes then open them again quickly, staring at some homey, familiar object, humming to drown out his thoughts. He would have to get up and walk until the images receded. Let her be dead, he thought once. If she’s not safe at least let her not be in pain.
Today he had called her office to say she was sick. They hadn’t contradicted him. So she wasn’t, at least, going about her normal life. It wasn’t only his own life that had fallen off track. He was frightened both for Carol and that he had done something wrong. Should he have told the cop about the phone call? Did the cop already know?
He made another drink. How long would this go on? He’d had to drink himself to sleep the past two nights. Without it he just lay there, the darkness an endless movie screen of horrible images. Last night he’d let Ham inside to sleep on the floor by his bed. Another warm creature to make the house seem more real. But he’d forgotten the dog was there and when he got up in the middle of the night he stumbled over him, scaring the hell out of both of them.
He heard the wind sliding by the windows like some stealthy beast. He didn’t have the stereo or TV on, of course. That would interfere with his listening. Daniel longed for the sound of footsteps along his sidewalk, a furtive knock on the door. Gunfire would have been satisfactory. At least if he was attacked he would know he hadn’t been bypassed. He could do something then, something other than drink and pace and hum to drown out the images.
By midnight time had stopped its jerky stops and starts and smoothed out into a powerful nightfiow that swept him past one o’clock and toward oblivion. He could sleep now. He stumbled down the hall, liquor making the house feel almost whole again.
Daniel dreamed, but it was more than a dream, it was a memory of a scene that had actually happened about two years earlier, reproduced with perfect clarity and precision. At some level of consciousness, though, he knew he was only dreaming; tears streamed down his face as he slept.
“I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have sprung them all on you at once.”
He was sitting behind the wheel of his car parked in front of her parents’ house, sulking. Carol had opened the passenger door and leaned in to apologize. He kept staring ahead for several seconds.
“I shouldn’t have been so abrupt,” he finally said.
He had just been introduced to her old friends en masse. Sometimes a newcomer meets a group and is absorbed into it so fluidly it seems the group had felt his absence even before they knew of his existence. All of them, newcomer and old group, suddenly feel themselves complete, old friends waiting to happen.
This had not been one of those occasions.
Carol slid into the car and closed the door. He had waited a full minute to see if she’d follow him out. The car was running but he hadn’t put it in gear. It was poised at the top of the circular driveway, and the cobblestones seemed to itch to be rid of it. Tires this worn had never sat on this driveway before.
She said, “They don’t really intend to be mean. It’s just that they feel awkward too so they have this— manner they fall back on.”
He considered that. “I guess I do too.”
She nodded. “You act like an asshole.”
“Hey! Is this your apology?”
“You know what I mean. You start acting more bumpkinish than you really are.”
Did she really know him that well, so soon after they’d met? “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said. “How do you know, maybe I really am.”
She smiled at him and moved a little closer. “Maybe you are. But you also start acting superior, like under the cloddishness you have some secret.”
He looked at her. His arm was extended along the back of the car seat toward her. “I do,” he said.
She had a knowing smile, as if she shouldn’t ask the question but couldn’t help it. “And what’s your secret?”
“That the best woman there loves me.”
He said it lightly enough that they could laugh their way past it, but he wanted the bantering to end then, and it did. Lying in the bed alone, Daniel was crying like a five-year-old with a run-over puppy. In the dream-memory Carol came into his arms. “I do,” she said.
As he held her he looked past her at the imposing brick front of her parents’ house that rose up two stories with an angled dollop on top that could have been another half story or just architectural filigree. White columns made the house look even more i
mperial. That had been another mistake of Carol’s, having him go here to River Oaks, the richest neighborhood in town. Houston was Daniel’s city but he felt like a tourist here, gawking at the houses. But her parents were out of town, she’d said, and their house seemed like the best place to have the party introducing him to her friends. When he’d gotten there it had turned out her parents weren’t just out of town, they were in Europe, where they went annually. That had somehow made it worse. He’d gone immediately into his tough-kid-from-the-gutter routine. He was entitled to it, he’d grown up in a neighborhood where these pansies would have locked their car doors as they drove through, but from his stance one would have thought he’d just battled his way out of Hell’s Kitchen. It was true her friends had treated him a bit as if he’d come into the room pulling off work gloves and tracking manure on the carpet, but he’d asked for it.
Who cared about them, anyway? He wasn’t engaged to them. He kissed Carol. She responded. They broke apart after a while and sat there as if they were driving down the highway. “The butler can clean up without your supervising, can’t he?” Daniel asked.
Carol put her hand on his leg. “Let me just go in and say good-bye.”
“Good. All the jerks’ll swoon with envy.”
“You overestimate my allure,” she said, almost demurely.
No, he didn’t. He’d seen men looking at her at the party. He wondered how many ex-boyfriends she had there. As she walked away, back toward that damned beautiful house, he was overcome by his familiar fear, that once she got inside with her old friends the joke would be over. He’d sit here like a dope waiting to see her again but never would. She turned to wave at him and he smiled back, but guardedly. When the door slammed behind her he was sure he’d never see her again.
That sound of the door slamming was the only thing in the dream that was real, that was contemporary. His subconscious mind had found the memory and assembled the dream in a split second in order to explain that sound and keep him dreaming. It was the sound of his own front door slamming back against the wall.
The noise woke Daniel anyway. Wind filled the house like men rushing down the hall toward him. He lay and waited. When nothing happened he got up and walked boldly down the hall to the living room. Moonlight made the room ghostly. The front door stood open. He walked to it and looked out. Wind howled down the street. There were no lights in the houses. His car and Carol’s stood in the driveway, cold as iron.
He not only had forgotten to lock the door, he hadn’t even closed it fast. When the wind changed direction the door had blown open. Wind was the only caller. Daniel stood in the doorway and looked at his empty yard. No wife, no attackers. No comfort of any kind. The dream covered him in tatters. He remembered the way he’d felt then, and he thought he knew the way Carol had felt, the day he’d met her snotty friends and she had come away with him. They had been in love then. He remembered the triumph of that feeling.
Damn it, they were still in love. Daniel was holding the front door, gripping it so hard his fingers tingled. He had been in a daze ever since Carol had vanished, but the daze burned off now, there in the dark doorway. He thought of Carol. If it was this bad for him, how much worse must it be for her? Her kidnappers had made a fool of him, thinking they could keep him quiet forever with one phone call. And he had been hampered by ignorance, by not knowing whether Carol had vanished willingly or been taken. But now he knew, and he was going to get her back. No matter what he had to do—whether he had to be charming or devious or pay money or kill someone— he was going to get her back.
“Khai may be evil,” Thien responded to his father, “but he is here. He is a fact. If the sun was evil, does that mean its rays would not fall on us?”
“To join him is not the answer. To become one of his—”
“That is the only way he can be dealt with. If I—”
“No! He can be lived with, like a season of bad weather. He does not dominate our lives.”
They were seated over dinner at the kitchen table. Thien’s mother and sister kept their eyes lowered, as if by lot seeing they could be not present.
“He will not pass like bad weather,” Thien said. “Can we beat him?” He paused slightly longer than one does for a rhetorical question, but then answered it himself. “No. Then we must deal with him.”
“Not this way. Not by offering up my son like a sacrifice.” At first the voice of Thien’s father had been authoritative. Gradually it had shifted to persuasive. “You have prospects. You can leave here, go to university. You can become someone who never has to worry about such petty tyrants as Tranh Van Khai.”
“Leave here forever, and leave all of you behind to suffer under him? Besides, there are always Khais, everywhere. Father. Before one can prosper one must survive. The best way to survive this neighborhood is to be one of them.”
“You are too smart,” said his father.
“If I am smart I can rise so much the faster. I can become his right hand. And I can protect all of you.” Thien’s father rose. For a moment he looked more like the army officer he had been than the clerk he was. “What makes you think we would accept help from one of his?” he said, and put down his napkin and walked out.
Thien squeezed his mother’s hand. “It will not be a question of accepting,” he said quietly. “When I am in position help will come like the rays of the sun.”
He went out, closing the door softly, defying his father as unobtrusively as possible. It was past dusk. He walked the streets boldly, as if he owned them already. He wanted to call attention to himself.
The neighborhood of the pawnshops was empty. On week nights the restaurants closed early. There might still be dishwashers inside, but customers had long since departed. In Linh’s pawnshop a light still burned. What was the old man doing—collecting fingers, trying to reassemble a wife? Linh was the foolish opposite extreme from Thien’s father. He had thought Khai could be defeated through mere defiance. But defiance without power was suicidal babbling. Linh had discovered that. Now he wanted to go back to being a sheep like all the rest of them, but it was too late.
Daniel Greer’s pawnshop was dark. The American’s situation was puzzling. Last night Thien had taken a bus to Daniel’s home address and through careful spying had discovered that though there were two cars in the driveway, there was no wife in the house. Where was she? Both pawnbrokers were missing their wives. It made sense that Khai was behind both disappearances. But what did he want from Daniel Greer?
Thien was standing on the corner, leaning back against the brick wall, watching the American pawnshop as if it would open to reveal its secrets. He stood too long in the dark. An arm snaked around the comer from behind him. Before he saw it the arm’s hand was around his neck, and Thien was yanked around the corner.
There was another one there. They threw him up against the wall, the back of his head cracking hard against the bricks. Tears sprang to the comers of his eyes.
Khai’s two men laughed when they saw who it was. “Past your bedtime,” one of them said.
“Lost in the street, little boy?” said the other.
“What are you doing here?” Thien asked. They looked at each other, wide-eyed at his audacity.
“Making a delivery,” one of them said, showing a small wrapped package. Thien stared at it.
“Making a delivery where?” he asked.
“You don’t know?” said the shorter Saigon cowboy, the rougher one, the one who had held his neck. “Doesn’t everyone in the neighborhood know?”
Linh’s then. For a moment Thien had thought it was a package for Daniel.
“Take me back with you,” Thien said. “I must talk to Khai.”
“Khai?” They laughed at him again. “Children do not work for Khai,” said the taller one. “Khai eats children for breakfast.”
“I don’t care about his perversions,” Thien said, startling all three of them. “I want to offer my help. I can help him.”
They were
amused. “How?” the taller one asked.
He didn’t know. His tongue raced faster than his mind. “Tang’s men. Won’t they strike back any time now? I can infiltrate them. I can find out—”
“Tang.” He had amused them again. “Tang is a sick old dog in the gutter. Soon he will be washed into the sewer.”
If this wasn’t an empty boast then it was news. Thien didn’t take time to absorb it. “The American pawnbroker, then. Khai wants something from him. I can get it. I can find out—”
Now he was boring them. “What could Khai want from the American?” the shorter one asked. The taller one was already turning away.
“Come,” he said to his partner. “We must get back.”
“I’ll come too,” Thien said, falling in step behind them.
Casually, without even looking back, the shorter one backhanded him across the face. Then the man must have thought the satisfaction was worth doing the job properly. He turned and drove his fist deep into the pit of Thien’s stomach. The boy bent over, gagging. Khai’s man pushed him aside, tripping him. Thien’s head hit the wall again and he fell to the sidewalk.
“Come,” said the taller one again, so the other left off, grinning. “Good-bye for now, little brother.” He spat.
Thien heard their footsteps pattering away. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe. By the time he could the two men were long gone. Thien lay on the sidewalk looking up at the starless sky. The pain had turned to warmth. The sky was the face of Khai’s thug.
“When I am your master,” Thien said aloud, “you will owe me both your balls. And I shall have them.”
One memory kept recurring to Daniel. When he had asked the faceless voice on the telephone how much money they wanted for Carol’s return, the man had almost chuckled. “You don’t have enough,” he had said. That phrase kept running through his mind. “You don’t have enough.” “You don’t have enough.” He tried to squeeze every drop of inflection out of the memory. You don’t have enough money.