The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  No one ever used the major’s Christian name, except to introduce him to an audience, and I didn’t doubt that it had been a long time since a woman had addressed him with tenderness. He abruptly stopped his shaking, as if the nerves that had betrayed him had been severed, and stared wonderingly at Tan. White pinprick suns flickered and died in the deep places behind his eyes.

  “Where are you from, Martin?” she asked, and the major, in a dazed tone, replied, “Oakland…Oakland, California. But I was born up in Santa Cruz.”

  “Santa Cruz.” Tan gave the name a bell-like reading. “Is it beautiful in Santa Cruz? It sounds like a beautiful place.”

  “Yeah…it’s kinda pretty. There’s old-growth redwoods not far from town. And there’s the ocean. It’s real pretty along the ocean.”

  To my amazement, Tan and the major began to carry on a coherent—albeit simplistic—conversation, and I realized that he had never spoken in this fashion before. His syntax had an uncustomary informality, and his voice held the trace of an accent. I thought that Tan’s gentle approach must have penetrated his tormented psyche, either reaching the submerged individual, the real Martin Boyette, or else encountering a fresh layer of delusion. It was curious to hear him talk about such commonplace subjects as foggy weather and jazz music and Mexican food, all of which he claimed could be found in good supply in Santa Cruz. Though his usual nervous tics were in evidence, a new placidity showed in his face. But, of course this state of affairs didn’t last.

  “I can’t,” he said, taking a sudden turn from the subject at hand; he shook his head, dragging folds of skin across his neck and shoulders, “I can’t go back anymore. I can’t go back there.”

  “Don’t be upset, Martin,” Tan said. “There’s no reason for you to worry. We’ll stay with you, we’ll…”

  “I don’t want you to stay.” He tucked his head into his shoulder so his face was hidden by a bulge of skin. “I got to get back doin’ what I was doin’.”

  “What’s that?” I asked him. “What were you doing?”

  A muffled rhythmic grunting issued from his throat—laughter that went on too long to be an expression of simple mirth. It swelled in volume, trebled in pitch, becoming a signature of instability.

  “I’m figurin’ it all out,” he said. “That’s what I’m doin’. Jus’ you go away now.”

  “Figuring out what?” I asked, intrigued by the possibility—however unlikely—that the major might have a mental life other than the chaotic, that his apparent incoherence was merely an incidental byproduct of concentration, like the smoke that rises from a leaf upon which a beam of sunlight has been focused.

  He made no reply, and Tan touched my hand, signaling that we should leave. As I ducked through the tent flap, behind me the major said, “I can’t go back there, and I can’t be here. So jus’ where’s that leave me, y’know?”

  Exactly what the major meant by this cryptic statement was unclear, but his words stirred something in me, reawakened me to internal conflicts that had been pushed aside by my studies and my involvement with Tan. When I had arrived to take up residence at Green Star, I was in a state of emotional upheaval, frightened, confused, longing for my mother. Yet even after I calmed down, I was troubled by the feeling that I had lost my place in the world, and it seemed this was not just a consequence of having been uprooted from my family, but that I had always felt this way, that the turbulence of my emotions had been a cloud obscuring what was a constant strain in my life. This was due in part to my mixed heritage. Though the taint associated with the children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers (dust children, they had once been called) had dissipated since the end of the war, it had not done so entirely, and wherever the circus traveled. I would encounter people who, upon noticing the lightness of my skin and the shape of my eyes, expressed scorn and kept their distance. Further fueling this apprehension was the paucity of my memories deriving from the years before I had come to live with Vang. Whenever Tan spoke about her childhood, she brought up friends, birthdays, uncles and cousins, trips to Saigon, dances, hundreds of details and incidents that caused my own memory to appear grossly underpopulated by comparison. Trauma was to blame, I reckoned. The shock of my mother’s abandonment, however well-intended, had ripped open my mental storehouse and scattered the contents. That and the fact that I had been six when I left home and thus hadn’t had time to accumulate the sort of cohesive memories that lent color to Tan’s stories of Hue. But explaining it away did not lessen my discomfort, and I became fixated on the belief that no matter the nature of the freakish lightning that had sheared away my past, I would never find a cure for the sense of dislocation it had provoked, only medicines that would suppress the symptoms and mask the disease—and, that being so masked, it would grow stronger, immune to treatment, until eventually I would be possessed by it, incapable of feeling at home anywhere.

  I had no remedy for these anxieties other than to throw myself with greater intensity into my studies, and with this increase in intensity came a concomitant increase in anger. I would sit at Vang’s computer, gazing at photographs of my father, imagining violent resolutions to our story. I doubted that he would recognize me; I favored my mother and bore little resemblance to him, a genetic blessing for which I was grateful: he was not particularly handsome, though he was imposing, standing nearly six and a half feet tall and weighing—according to a recent medical report—two hundred and sixty-four pounds, giving the impression not of a fat man, but a massive one. His large squarish head was kept shaved, and on his left cheek was the dark blue and green tattoo of his corporate emblem—a flying fish—ringed by three smaller tattoos denoting various of his business associations. At the base of his skull was an oblong silver plate beneath which lay a number of ports allowing him direct access to a computer. Whenever he posed for a picture, he affected what I assumed he would consider a look of hauteur, but the smallness of his eyes (grayish blue) and nose and mouth in contrast to the largeness of his face caused them to be limited in their capacity to convey character and emotional temperature, rather like the features on a distant planet seen through a telescope, and as a result this particular expression came across as prim. In less formal photographs, taken in the company of one or another of his sexual partners, predominately women, he was quite obviously intoxicated.

  He owned an old French Colonial in Saigon, but spent the bulk of his time at his house in Binh Khoi, one of the flower towns—communities built at the turn of the century, intended to provide privacy and comfort for well-to-do Vietnamese whose sexual preferences did not conform to communist morality. Now that communism—if not the concept of sexual morality itself—had become quaint, a colorful patch of history dressed up with theme-park neatness to amuse the tourists, it would seem that these communities no longer had any reason to exist; yet exist they did. Their citizenry had come to comprise a kind of gay aristocracy that defined styles, set trends, and wielded significant political power. Though they maintained a rigid exclusivity, and though my father’s bisexuality was motivated to a great degree—I believe—by concerns of business and status, he had managed to cajole and bribe his way into Binh Khoi, and as best I could determine, he was sincere in his attachment to the place.

  The pictures taken at Binh Khoi rankled me the most—I hated to see him laughing and smiling. I would stare at those photographs, my emotions overheating, until it seemed I could focus rage into a beam and destroy any object upon which I turned my gaze. My eventual decision, I thought, would be easy to make. Anger and history, the history of his violence and greed, were making it for me, building a spiritual momentum impossible to stop. When the time came, I would avenge my mother and claim my inheritance. I knew exactly how to go about the task. My father feared no one less powerful than himself—if such a person moved against him, they would be the target of terrible reprisals—and he recognized the futility of trying to fend off an assassination attempt by anyone more powerful; thus his security was good, yet not impenetrable
. The uniqueness of my situation lay in the fact that if I were able to kill him, I would as a consequence become more powerful than he or any of his connections; and so, without the least hesitancy, I began to plan his murder both in Binh Khoi and Saigon—I had schematics detailing the security systems of both homes. But in the midst of crafting the means of his death, I lost track of events that were in the process of altering the conditions attendant upon my decision.

  One night not long after my seventeenth birthday, I was working at the computer in the trailer, when Vang entered and lowered himself carefully in the chair opposite me, first shooing away the marmalade cat who had been sleeping there. He wore a threadbare gray cardigan and the striped trousers from an old suit, and carried a thin folder bound in plastic. I was preoccupied with tracking my father’s movements via his banking records and I acknowledged Vang’s presence with a nod. He sat without speaking a while and finally said, “Forgive my intrusion, but would you be so kind as to allow me a minute of your time.”

  I realized he was angry, but my own anger took precedence. It was not just that I was furious with my father; I had grown weary of Vang’s distant manner, his goading, his incessant demands for respect in face of his lack of respect for me. “What do you want?” I asked without looking away from the screen.

  He tossed the folder onto the desk. “Your task has become more problematic.”

  The folder contained the personnel file of an attractive woman named Phuong Anh Nguyen whom my father had hired as a bodyguard. Much of the data concerned her considerable expertise with weapons and her reaction times, which were remarkable—it was apparent that she had been bred for her occupation, genetically enhanced. According to the file her senses were so acute, she could detect shifts in the heat patterns of the brain, subtle changes in blood pressure, heart rate, pupillary dilation, speech, all the telltales that would betray the presence of a potential assassin. The information concerning her personal life was skimpy. Though Vietnamese, she had been born in China, and had spent her life until the age of sixteen behind the walls of a private security agency, where she had received her training. Serving a variety of employers, she had killed sixteen men and women over the next five years. Several months before, she had bought out her contract from the security agency and signed on long-term with my father. Like him, she was bisexual, and, also like him, the majority of her partners were women.

  I glanced up from the file to find Vang studying me with an expectant air. “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

  “She’s not bad-looking,” I said.

  He folded his arms, made a disgusted noise.

  “All right.” I turned the pages of the file. “My father’s upgrading of his security implies that he’s looking ahead to bigger things. Preparing for the day when he can claim my trust.”

  “Is that all you’re able to extract from the document?”

  From outside came voices, laughter. They passed, faded. Mei, I thought, and Tranh. It was a cool night, the air heavy with the scent of rain. The door was cracked open, and I could see darkness and thin streamers of fog. “What else is there?” I asked.

  “Use your mind, won’t you?” Vang let his head tip forward and closed his eyes—a formal notice of his exasperation. “Phuong would require a vast sum in order to pay off her contract. Several million, at least. Her wage is a good one, but even if she lived in poverty, which she does not, it would take her a decade or more to save sufficient funds. Where might she obtain such a sum?”

  I had no idea.

  “From her new employer, of course,” Vang said.

  “My father doesn’t have that kind of money lying around.”

  “It seems that he does. Only a very wealthy man could afford such a servant as Phuong Anh Nguyen.”

  I took mental stock of my father’s finances, but was unable to recall an excess of cash.

  “It’s safe to say the money did not come from your father’s business enterprises,” said Vang. “We have good information on them. So we may assume he either stole it or coerced someone else into stealing it.” The cat jumped up into his lap, began kneading his abdomen. “Rather than taxing your brain further,” he went on, “I’ll tell you what I believe has happened. He’s tapped into your trust. It’s much too large to be managed by one individual, and it’s quite possible he’s succeeded in corrupting one of the officers in charge.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “No, but I intend to contact my government friends and suggest an investigation into the trust. If your father has done what I suspect, it will prevent him from doing more damage.” The cat had settled on his lap; he stroked its head. “But the trust is not the problem. Even if your father has stolen from it, he can’t have taken much more than was necessary to secure this woman’s services. Otherwise the man who gave me this”—he gestured at the folder—“would have detected evidence of other expenditures. There’ll be more than enough left to make you a powerful man. Phuong Anh Nguyen is the problem. You’ll have to kill her first.”

  The loopy cry of a night bird cut the silence. Someone with a flashlight was crossing the pasture where the trailer rested, the beam of light slicing through layers of fog, sweeping over shrubs and patches of grass. I suggested that one woman shouldn’t pose that much of a problem, no matter how efficient she was at violence.

  Vang closed his eyes again. “You have not witnessed this kind of professional in action. They’re fearless, totally dedicated to their work. They develop a sixth sense concerning their clients; they bond with them. You’ll need to be circumspect in dealing with her.”

  “Perhaps she’s beyond my capacity to deal with,” I said after a pause. “Perhaps I’m simply too thickheaded. I should probably let it all go and devote myself to Green Star.”

  “Do as you see fit.”

  Vang’s expression did not shift from its stoic cast, but it appeared to harden, and I could tell that he was startled. I instructed the computer to sleep and leaned back, bracing one foot against the side of the desk. “There’s no need for pretense,” I said. “I know you want me to kill him. I just don’t understand why.”

  I waited for him to respond, and when he did not, I said, “You were my mother’s friend—that’s reason enough to wish him dead, I suppose. But I’ve never felt that you were my friend. You’ve given me…everything. Life. A place to live. A purpose. Yet whenever I try to thank you, you dismiss it out of hand. I used to think this was because you were shy, because you were embarrassed by displays of emotion. Now, I’m not sure. Sometimes it seems you find my gratitude repugnant…or embarrassing in a way that has nothing to do with shyness. It’s as if”—I struggled to collect my thoughts—“as if you have some reason for hating my father that you haven’t told me. One you’re ashamed to admit. Or maybe it’s something else, some piece of information you have that gives you a different perspective on the situation.”

  Being honest with him was both exhilarating and frightening—I felt as though I were violating a taboo—and after this speech I was left breathless and disoriented, unsure of everything I’d said, though I’d been thoroughly convinced of its truth when I said it. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’ve no right to doubt you.”

  He started to make a gesture of dismissal such as was his habit when uncomfortable with a conversation, but caught himself and petted the cat instead. “Despite the differences in our stations, I was very close to your mother,” he said. “And to your grandfather. No longer having a family of my own, I made them into a surrogate. When they died, one after the other…you see, your grandfather’s presence, his wealth, protected your mother, and once he was gone, your father had no qualms against misusing her.” He blew out a breath, like a horse, through his lips. “When they died, I lost my heart. I’d lost so much already, I was unable to bear the sorrow I felt. I retreated from the world, I rejected my emotions. In effect, I shut myself down.” He put a hand to his forehead, covering his eyes. I could see he was upset, and
I felt badly that I had caused these old griefs to wound him again. “I know you have suffered as a result,” he went on. “You’ve grown up without the affection of a parent, and that is a cruel condition. I wish I could change that. I wish I could change the way I am, but the idea of risking myself, of having everything ripped away from me a third time…it’s unbearable.” His hand began to tremble; he clenched it into a fist, pressed it against the bridge of his nose. “It is I who should apologize to you. Please, forgive me.”

  I assured him that he need not ask for forgiveness, I honored and respected him. I had the urge to tell him I loved him, and at that moment I did—I believed now that in loving my family, in carrying out my mother’s wishes, he had established his love for me. Hoping to distract him from his grief, I asked him to tell me about my grandfather, a man concerning whom I knew next to nothing, only that he had been remarkably successful in business.

  Vang seemed startled by the question, but after taking a second to compose himself, he said, “I’m not sure you would have approved of him. He was a strong man, and strong men often sacrifice much that ordinary men hold dear in order to achieve their ends. But he loved your mother, and he loved you.”

  This was not the sort of detail I’d been seeking, but it was plain that Vang was still gripped by emotion, and I decided it would be best to leave him alone. As I passed behind him, I laid a hand on his shoulder. He twitched, as if burned by the touch, and I thought he might respond by covering my hand with his own. But he only nodded and made a humming noise deep in his throat. I stood there for a few beats, wishing I could think of something else to say; then I bid him good night and went off into the darkness to look for Tan.

  One morning, about a month after this conversation, in the little seaside town of Vung Tau, Dat quit the circus following an argument with Vang, and I was forced that same evening to assume the role of James Bond Cochise. The prospect of performing the entire act in public—I had previously made token appearances along with Dat—gave rise to some anxiety, but I was confident in my skill. Tan took in Dat’s tuxedo jacket a bit, so it would hang nicely, and helped me paint my face with Native American designs, and when Vang announced me, standing at the center of our single ring and extolling my legendary virtues into a microphone, I strode into the rich yellow glow of the tent, the warmth smelling of sawdust and cowshit (a small herd had been foraging on the spot before we arrived), with my arms overhead, flourishing the belt that held my hatchets and knives, and enjoying the applause. All seven rows of the bleachers were full, the audience consisting of resort workers, fishermen and their families, with a smattering of tourists, mainly backpackers, but also a group of immensely fat Russian women who had been transported from a hotel farther along the beach in cyclos pedaled by diminutive Vietnamese men. They were in a good mood, thanks to a comic skit in which Tan played a farm girl and Tranh a village buffoon hopelessly in love with her, his lust manifested by a telescoping rod that could spring outward to a length of fourteen inches and was belted to his hips beneath a pair of baggy trousers.