Dragonfish: A Novel

by Vu Tran

  A ceiling fan spun slowly above his head, dragging shadows across his face. Who knew if the kid truly regretted the shit he’d done for Sonny, but it was clear he didn’t enjoy it anymore. It occurred to me that Suzy had not only been exposing his boss to him, she’d been confessing all the dark ugly things about herself too, the same thing that Victor—maybe without intending to—had just done with us.

  He checked his watch and said to Mai, “I’d say you have until eight thirty tonight. At nine my brother and I will be replaced at our post. Mr. Jonathan’s orders. Go home, Chi Mai, and get everything you need, then go back to the Coronado. Park on Ogden Avenue and use the south entrance. My brother won’t see you there. Get your money in room 1215, all of it, and leave town. Go somewhere far away. I’m heading back to the hotel now to do my job, but I will see to it that you’re safe. On my brothers’ lives, I won’t let anyone stop you.”

  He ended with something else in Vietnamese, saying it like some soldier going off to war.

  I was stirring now, and he turned to me with some of that toughness he’d shed in the last hour or so. “You can’t go though,” he said. “Not yet. Our orders were to watch you tonight and, if nothing happens, let you go in the morning. If you return to your hotel room now and do nothing, then nothing’s going to happen. I’ll give you your car keys at noon tomorrow.”

  “That’s it—they just let me go?”

  “Miss Hong—she isn’t coming. You’ll be useless to them, don’t you see? And you’re a cop. They can’t hold you here forever.” He looked at me for the first time with something approaching pity. “You’ve been an insurance policy, Officer. That’s as much as I know about it.”

  He grabbed his backpack and gave Mai one final glance before walking toward the exit.

  11

  WE’D BEEN IN THE BAR for almost two hours, and the sun was already setting, the Strip lit up now and aglow amid a sky of sudden gathering clouds that smeared orange below and tinged the air blue.

  The bar’s back lot was still mostly empty. A few men had parked their car near us only to wander over to the strip club next door, where the neon lights had become a flashing signpost in the twilight.

  The Jeep’s flimsy vinyl top did little to keep out the cold. I zipped up my jacket and asked Mai if it was okay that I smoked.

  She was sitting behind the steering wheel with her keys in her hand, her eyes focused on the Stratosphere Tower in the near distance, rising above the surrounding buildings. It was a copy of the Space Needle in Seattle except much taller, both more regal and more vulgar.

  I wasn’t sure what we had to discuss first. If Victor’s last words were to be believed, then I’d been given a reprieve, possibly absolution—at the very least a little time now to consider our next step. But my unease had deepened. Leaving town was still a no-brainer. The thought of leaving behind everything Victor just told us, though, was like tugging at a shackle.

  Mai spoke up. “Did you believe all that—about my mother?”

  “A lot not to believe.”

  “Yeah, but that she sees things? Forgets she’s fucked someone?” She glanced at the duffel bag at my feet. I had shoved the videotape in there, buried it in my clothes.

  “God, don’t say it like that,” I said, but I could see she was asking me sincerely, as if for confirmation. “What do you want me to tell you? I went through similar shit with her for eight years.”

  She seemed ready to say something, but then gestured for a drag of my cigarette. She exhaled smoke through her nose, holding on to the cigarette as she continued eyeing the Stratosphere. The neon lights next door flashed red and blue across her face.

  “I’ve seen things too,” she finally said. “Things like that. When I was a kid, I used to see my dad every once in a while. Standing in the doorway of my room at night. Or by the tree below my window. I never saw his face exactly, but I knew it was him because he was bald. Didn’t scare me. Over the years I got used to it. That’s one thing she and I have in common.”

  She handed back the cigarette. “You think I’m fucked-up too, don’t you?” She wasn’t looking at me. “It’s been less frequent the last ten years. I sometimes forget that it happens at all. But every time he appears, it’s like she does too, and I end up thinking about them both. Usually happens around the holidays. My very own ghosts of Christmas past.”

  Her smile was vacant. She dragged her finger along the top of the dash and left a clean trail in the dust.

  “You ever go talk to someone?”

  She chuckled. “You mean like a therapist? You kidding? Vietnamese don’t believe in therapy. I vaguely remember my uncle taking me aside about this time twenty years ago and telling me that my mother had to leave town and would be gone for a long while. It took him all of five minutes. He said it like it was something I already knew. I don’t think it upset me at all though. I forget what happened in the following months, if he or my aunt ever explained anything more to me, but I do remember it feeling natural to be without her. ‘Gone for a long while’ meant she’d come back at some point, so I didn’t think any more of it. It’s weird, right? That I would just accept the unexplained disappearance of my mother? That’s how it was for a few years.

  “It wasn’t until my fourth Christmas there, when I was watching the end of It’s a Wonderful Life—you know, when Jimmy Stewart gets his old life back and runs home and hugs and kisses the hell out of Donna Reed and all his kids on the stairs? That’s when it hit me that she was gone for good. No one in the family ever mentioned her. It was like she never existed. I started crying then and got real angry—at her, at my aunt and uncle, at my cousins too. Everyone thought I was crying because of the movie.”

  She stuck her key into the ignition but left the key chain dangling there.

  “That’s rough, kid,” I said. “I can’t imagine.” I offered her the last of the cigarette.

  She shrugged, finished the cigarette, and put it out in an ashtray filled with gum wrappers and loose change. She nodded at the Stratosphere. “You know that’s the tallest observation tower in the country? At the top they got a moat and two tall metal fences to keep people away from the edge, but last year some guy still managed to climb the fences and jump off. Fell over a thousand feet. His body hit the roof of the parking garage before landing in some bushes by the valet parking. God knows why he did it. There’s a story going round about people seeing his ghost in the elevators. I rode them up to the top a few weeks ago, to see if I might bump into him. Then I realized I had no idea what he looked like. He could’ve been one of the men in the elevator.”

  Her eyes went again to the top of the Stratosphere and followed the phantom falling body down the tower’s white walls. She was playing with a casino chip, blindly flipping it across the knuckles of her right hand so that it seemed to move on its own.

  “More suicides here than anywhere in America,” she mused. “I hear about hotel maids finding dead guests in their rooms all the time. In bed, in the bathtub, on the toilet.”

  A green minivan pulled up to the strip club and a middle-aged guy stepped out in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt and walked to the entrance like he knew the place well, like he regularly went alone to ogle tits and ass at five in the evening. He could have been my father thirtysomething years ago, heading to the store for milk and coming home with a bottle of Jack.

  I said to Mai, “We should get going.”

  She turned to me. “What did Victor mean at the end there—you being an insurance policy?”

  I’d been waiting for her to ask, though I was loath now to explain it out loud.

  “Means that if your mother shows up and they had to hurt her to get their money back, kill her even, they can always blame me, the jealous and bitter ex-husband—tell the police what I did five months ago, that I came back to steal his money, steal his wife, whatever. The story’s adaptable. That’s why my car is here and the hotel room is in my name, paid with my damn credit card too. Just in case they need a story. A
nd if they don’t and your mom doesn’t show, then I am useless to them like Victor said. Sonny would’ve at least had some fun with me.”

  Mai was staring out the windshield and still knuckle-rolling the poker chip, her face alive now with concentration.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Seems like you’re much more a liability than insurance. Say my mother shows up and you find out about the money and everything. There’s no way you send her back knowing all that. You sneak her out of the hotel and out of town in a cab or something—and with the money too. They end up losing everything.”

  “Yeah, but if I sneak out your mother, I flush out the money. That’s when they swoop in. The money’s what they want, don’t you see? Sonny doesn’t give a shit about getting your mother back. They need me to disobey them.”

  “Aren’t those all unnecessary risks? They’d know that. Sonny’s a poker player, after all. You gamble when the odds are in your favor, when the payoff is worth it. If the money’s all he cares about, bringing you here makes no sense. Victor and his brothers could have easily waited at the hotel for her themselves. Why add another potential liability if it’s not absolutely necessary?”

  I was startled by how thoroughly she was thinking through all this. Part of me appreciated it. Part of me was annoyed.

  “Sonny’s a poker player all right,” I said. “You think he won’t do anything to get back a hundred grand?”

  She looked at me sharply. “You think gamblers care only about money?”

  “This one shoved a woman down the stairs and tried to put a kitchen knife in my fucking chest. You know he once chopped off a guy’s hand with a cleaver?”

  “Even Hitler had a pet dog, a woman he loved.”

  “What exactly are we arguing about here?” I glanced at the time and felt like snatching the keys from her and driving the Jeep myself.

  “If it’s just about the money, then Sonny would be smarter than this.” She spoke clearly, as if this was what she had intended to say all along. “So maybe it’s just about my mother. He might actually love her enough to take all these dumb unnecessary risks.”

  “That’s some logic.”

  “It’s not logical. That’s my point. He’s on tilt. He’s the guy at the poker table who’s been losing big in bad ways, and now he’s playing emotional. He’s making decisions he’d never normally make because all he cares about is getting back what he lost—and that’s not always money. What I’m saying is: this whole thing only makes sense if Sonny really does want you to bring my mother back to him.”

  “And so what if he does? It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s got nothing to do with what we do next.”

  “It does. It makes it easier to trust everything Victor said.”

  “I trust no one,” I said, realizing at last what she’d been working toward—and what I had to do now. “I’ll stay,” I declared. “You go. I’ll make sure Sonny gets all his money back, and then he’ll have no reason to care about me or you or anyone.”

  She was wielding her sudden silence with one hand gripping the steering wheel, staring past it like a sulking child.

  “Come on now,” I told her. “Do I really need to tell you that taking the money is a horrible fucking idea?”

  “It’s simple.”

  “It’s insane.”

  “Victor—the way he talked to me. It’s a Vietnamese thing. I trust him.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I don’t trust the situation.”

  “You wait it out at the hotel until tomorrow like Victor said. What can they possibly do to you there? I’ll take the money with me tonight and go to LA and wait somewhere for you, and when you get there, I’ll split it with you.”

  “Jesus Christ, I don’t want the goddamn money. And have you forgotten I’m a police officer?”

  “You told me you already did some bad shit here.”

  “What, am I on some downward spiral? I’m not some good cop gone bad, kid.”

  “I leave with nothing, then. I let these guys drive me out of town—these guys who think I died twenty years ago.”

  “That’s exactly what you do. Look, even if Victor was telling us God’s truth, you take that money and you’re asking for them to find out about you. Remind yourself what they did to Happy—what Victor did. How the hell is he protecting you by telling you to skip town with stolen fucking money? Take me back to the hotel and let me handle this. And forget LA. It’s not far enough. Go to Oakland. A police buddy of mine will put you up. He won’t ask questions. Once I get home and this all blows over, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  The poker chip was now buried in her fist. Her eyes still averted, her voice calm again, she said, “You think it’s just about the money. And it is. Of course it is. But that money means something to me, Robert.”

  Her using my name, like we were familiars, reminded me that we had only met three hours ago. She had seemed fully American to me, but what I heard now was that melodramatic tone that immigrants can’t help sometimes, the Vietnamese especially, like a lament for their old country haunting the back of their throat. In her mother’s story, she saw more than just her own ghostly visions, she saw her own loneliness too, her mother’s true legacy.

  I swallowed and tried my best not to sound condescending: “I get that. I do. But you can’t be sentimental about this.”

  She was shaking her head slowly. “No, you don’t get it. Stealing that money . . . it’s the only thing she’s ever done for me. And she owes me, goddamn it. For twenty years, she’s owed me. If I don’t go get it and that asshole gets it all back, then everything that’s happened the last two months, everything I found out today—it won’t mean anything. It’ll be like the last twenty years all over again, except now I’ll know exactly what I’ve lost.”

  For once, I had no response. It was like being full and arguing the ethics of stealing food with someone dying of hunger.

  She said, “I’m going back to that hotel room and hauling that suitcase out of Vegas with me. You can help me or not, but I’m doing it.”

  She turned on the ignition and the Jeep roared to life, trembling violently. She turned to me and her expression was part wary kindness, part obstinate bravado, like she was both asking me to help her and telling me to fuck off.

  I sat back in my seat and sighed. “Let’s go get your stuff first.”

  Without another word, she thrust the Jeep in gear and we lumbered out of the parking lot. But then she braked at the mouth of the exit, despite the road being clear. She sat there gripping the steering wheel, staring up the road as the blinker flashed the other direction.

  “What is it now?” I said.

  She raised her voice above the engine. “Happy. She knows I exist.”

  “Don’t worry. She took a beating to protect you. If she didn’t tell them then, she’ll never tell them.”

  “But what else might she know about my mother? Where she’s going. What else she’s done—or might do. We don’t even know if she’s left town yet. We’re just assuming she has.”

  “Make up your mind, girl. You want the money, don’t you? Then let me worry about everything else.”

  “You want to know too. You’re dying to know. We could ask Happy.”

  “I told you—I don’t know where she lives or even what her number is.”

  “But I know where she works. She was wearing a casino uniform that afternoon.” Mai pointed up the road at the Stratosphere. “There’s a chance she could be there right now.”

  I looked at the tower, its neon-red antennae piercing the thick clouds. I was shaking my head, but I wasn’t sure at what.

  “What if she ends up disappearing too?” Mai persisted. “This might be our only chance to talk to her. You want to risk losing your only chance to find out the rest of the story?”

  “What rest of the story?”

  “You haven’t figured it out yet. She’s the woman Sonny was having an affair with. She’s my mother’s best friend—her only friend—and yet my mother g
oes to Victor for help instead of her?”

  Mai had turned on her other blinker, and her eyes flickered at me with certainty now—with enthusiasm. I thought of how her stubbornness was a kind of fearlessness, a reveling in the unknown.

  We tumbled out of the parking lot and onto Paradise Road. I was clenching the Jeep’s grab bar. It had never crossed my mind that Happy might be involved with Sonny, but deeper than my shock was the suspicion that I’d been wrong about this and possibly many other things.

  “Some best friend,” Mai said as she steered us toward the Stratosphere.

  “I should’ve known,” I muttered, though I suspected it would always baffle me why that stupid woman—or any woman—would take up with a man like Sonny.

  part four

  This man who once saved your life, he is not a bad man. Nor a good one. I have long given up on what it means exactly to be either, but I am confident now that you must know one to know the other. Perhaps this is the other reason why I’ve often thought of him alongside your father. You did too, long ago.

  How it turned out then that he, who saved you, ruined me is something I must also explain to you, except I don’t know how. It feels like it happened twice without me knowing it. Even as I sit here writing these words decades later, a world away in America, in a desert far from the sea, I am still living on that island where he first met me and I first came to need him. Everything that has happened since seems a shadow of what happened there. Even everything that has led me here to this quiet room.

  But let me say one thing. Let me write it down so that it will never again be a question in my own mind. If I have suffered, it has been because of myself. I blame nothing and no one else.

  The Sunday after he fished you out of the ocean, I took you to Mass at the island chapel, and during communion I remained seated, abstaining for the first time in my life. You wouldn’t stop looking at me, confused that I wasn’t doing something you’d always seen me do. You had no understanding yet of the sacraments and how communion is only for those in a state of grace. You had no idea that days before I had closed my eyes while the ocean was swallowing you whole.