by Ian Hamilton
The other emails were one from Maria, saying that Toronto was already a lonely place; the daily missive from May Ling; and one, dotted with capital letters, from Mimi. We spent the day looking at houses and I can’t believe how patient Derek is. All he seems to want is for me to be happy. I’ve turned into this GAS MACHINE, but he doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he doesn’t seem to mind anything connected to the pregnancy, including FOUR TRIPS TO THE BATHROOM EVERY NIGHT, BOOBS THE SIZE OF BED PILLOWS, AND SCREWING DOGGY-STYLE. Lucky me. Thanks to you.
Ava smiled. Thanks was the last thing she deserved. She had been desperate to keep them apart.
She skimmed quickly through the other messages and then put the phone back into her bag. She hadn’t replied to anyone except Michael and Amanda. Toronto seemed very far away, and Ava was beginning to feel the disconnection that took over whenever a job began.
( 12 )
The flight to Ho Chi Minh took two and half hours and the plane landed on time, just before three o’clock, at Tan Son Nhat airport. It parked near the runway and waited for buses to ferry the passengers to the terminal. “This is going to be murder,” the businessman sitting next to Ava said.
She shrugged, but the same thought had flashed through her head. On her only other trip to Ho Chi Minh, it had taken more than two hours to deplane and clear Customs and Immigration. The airport had been built in the 1950s, and even operating at peak efficiency it couldn’t effectively process the massive influx of tourists and businesspeople. The Customs and Immigration staff seemed to be in a permanent state of work-to-rule.
The buses came and the airline made a fuss about letting the first-class and business-class passengers off first. They were conveyed to the terminal, and to Ava’s delight it was brand-new. She began to feel more optimistic about their chances of getting through the airport quickly. But as soon as Ava saw the line, her optimism faded. It began almost as soon as they entered the terminal, snaking up the stairs that led to the arrivals hall. “Fuck. We’ll be here for three hours or more,” the man beside her said.
Ava took some deep breaths. There was no point in getting agitated over something over which she had no control. Then she saw a policeman walking down the stairs holding a cardboard sign over his head that read AVA LEE. God bless Uncle, she thought. She stepped out of line and waved at him. He smiled and motioned for her to climb the stairs towards him. As she passed her fellow passengers, she heard muttering. None of it was complimentary.
“My name is Tran,” the cop said. He was in his early thirties, she guessed, tall and slim, his dark hair slicked back. He was in uniform, not plain clothes as Uncle had said, a gun on one hip, a phone and truncheon on the other. The bars on his shoulders indicated he was a lieutenant.
“I’m Ava Lee.”
He looked down at her. “You aren’t what I expected. Younger, and a lot more informal,” he said in excellent English.
She looked down at her training pants and Adidas jacket. “These are my travelling clothes. I need to shower and change into something more professional. And I’m older than I look.”
“Let’s get out of this place,” he said. “The air conditioning hasn’t broken down yet but it does most days, and then these people in line start getting really cranky. You almost need riot control sometimes.”
Ava fought back a sarcastic comment. “I’ll follow you,” she said.
They walked into an arrivals hall that was filled to bursting. He pushed his way to the far end, Ava tucked in behind him. There was an empty booth with the words DIPLOMATIC CORPS above it. Tran stepped into the booth and asked for her passport. She passed it to him and then watched with bemusement as he opened it and stamped it with a flourish. “You have that authority?” she asked.
“They know who I am,” he said.
They had to fight their way through the throng waiting for the arrivals. It was hot, and as they got close to the door, hotter still. She could only imagine what it would be like for the people inside if the air conditioning did pack it in.
Tran had come in a police car that was parked by the curb. He opened the trunk and she put her bags inside, directly on top of two shotguns. “Front or back seat?” he asked.
“I don’t want to pull up at the Park Hyatt looking like I’ve just been arrested,” she said.
He opened the front door and then walked around to his side before she got in.
“I’m not sure what your schedule is,” he said as she sat next to him.
“Hotel, shower, change. And then I want to go to the house where Lam is.”
“The place is only about a fifteen-minute drive from the hotel, in good traffic.”
The words good traffic were delivered the same way they were in Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila — as wishful thinking. “You don’t have to wait for me,” she said.
“I know, but I will anyway. Your boss in Hong Kong is well connected here. I’ve been told to make sure you get everything you want, within reason.”
“Define within reason.”
“Lam’s brother is a doctor, a famous surgeon, actually. He should be treated with respect.”
“I know of no other way of dealing with people,” she said.
“Good.”
He pulled away from the terminal and started to drive towards the city. The Hyatt was almost in the middle of District 1, only about six kilometres from the airport. Ava saw at once why he had mentioned the traffic. It was brutal: what seemed like thousands of motorbikes, cyclos, and bicycles in one steady, impenetrable stream, cars crawling along in their wake. She remembered the motorbikes. They never seemed to stop coming, and in a city with hardly any traffic lights, crossing the street took agility, guts, and good luck. Ava had quickly learned to attach herself to locals and to follow their every bob and weave. “We may be an hour or so getting to the hotel,” Tran said.
“No rush.”
“Wouldn’t matter if there was, though I could put on the siren and save us ten minutes.” He laughed.
“Where did you learn English?” she asked.
“Here. My mother was a language teacher and she taught me French and English at home. I went to university in Australia, so that helped as well.”
Ava sat back in her seat and watched the more nimble motorbikes dart around them. Some of them were taxis and had girls perched on their back seats, looking elegant in their ao dais and ao ba bas. It amazed Ava that so many women wore traditional clothing — the ao ba ba like silk pyjamas; the ao dai a high-necked, long-sleeved, fitted silk and cotton tunic with a mandarin collar and slits down each side, worn over long, wide-legged pants. There were more Japanese and German cars on the street than she remembered from her first trip; fewer of the cars were old Renaults, a hangover from the French colonial days.
They skirted the Reunification Palace, which had been the presidential palace before the fall of Saigon in 1975. There was a tank sitting on the front lawn, a tribute to the communist forces who had crashed the palace gates, and a Huey helicopter on the roof, symbolizing the flight of the Americans and their Vietnamese allies. Tran nodded in the palace’s direction. “You should visit there,” he said.
Every local she had met on her previous trip had said the same thing. “I have,” she lied.
Traffic opened up a little as they neared the Hyatt, and it was just past four when Tran pulled into Lam Son Square and entered the circular driveway at the front of the hotel. “I’ll leave my car here. I’ll be at the bar when you’re ready to leave.”
She checked in and managed to get a room on the top floor, the ninth, where she would have a good view of the city and, she hoped, the Sai Gon River. The hotel was advertised as five-star and it didn’t disappoint. Her room was spacious; the wooden floors gleamed; the bed was covered in a snow-white duvet that looked as if it could swallow her. She unpacked quickly, leaving her change of clothes on the bed, and then stripped and went into the bathroom. It had a walk-in rain shower that she almost leapt into. She showered for five minutes, may
be longer, luxuriating in the gentle spray and soaping head to foot.
When she came out and reached for a towel, she saw herself in the mirror that took up most of a wall. She was proud of her body. Genes had given her beautiful proportions and breasts that were firm and high despite their size. The rest of it was her doing — more exercise than diet, though. She was lean and muscular. She turned sideways. Her tummy was still completely flat; her bum was hard if not quite round. The only imperfection she could see was the scar on her thigh, and she was even beginning to like it. She pulled her hair back, stretching her body like a cat.
Ava dressed in the bedroom: white bra and panties, black slacks, and a white Brooks Brothers shirt with a modified Italian collar and French cuffs, which she fastened with the green jade links. Her shoulder-length hair was still a bit damp from the shower, so she brushed it with vigour until it felt dry. She pulled it back with the ivory chignon pin, which seemed to sparkle in contrast to her silky jet-black hair. She then took black mascara and red lipstick from her makeup bag and applied them lightly.
She stepped back and looked at herself again in the mirror above the dresser. She hardly recognized herself. More than two months of shorts, T-shirts, tracksuits, no makeup, hair tied back, and no jewellery had created a perception of herself that a five-minute shower, a change of clothes, a little makeup, and her hair properly fixed had crushed. She knew she looked good, and she felt good. Maybe she was ready to go back to work after all.
Tran sat at a small table in the bar, a glass of what looked like sparkling water in front of him. He was positioned so he could see everyone entering the room, and Ava felt his eyes on her the second she stepped into it. However, it wasn’t until his attention moved to her face that he seemed to realized it was her. He stood quickly, a sheepish grin on his face. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“Can we go?” she asked. She drew more stares as they walked through the lobby. Her walk was unhurried, her shoulders square, her breasts ever so slightly thrust forward. Tran kept looking sideways at her.
The police car was parked directly across from the main entrance. Tran opened the front door for her, and this time he waited until she got in before closing it after her. As they pulled away from the Hyatt, Ava said, “Tell me everything you know about Lam.”
“Which one?”
“Both, I guess.”
Traffic was even denser now than the hour before, and Tran had to sit at the curb for several minutes before he could pull out and into Lam Son Square. Ava saw him reach for the siren button. “I’d rather you didn’t,” she said.
“Just for a few minutes. If I don’t use it, we could be in this two-block area for at least twenty minutes.”
“Okay.”
The screech inside the car wasn’t as bad as she had imagined it would be. Outside it must have sounded louder, because cars and even motorbikes began to peel to one side, creating enough of a lane for Tran to scrape through. When they finally reached a boulevard where traffic was moving at a normal pace — which still meant slowly — he turned off the siren.
“Tell me about Lam the surgeon first,” she said.
Tran pulled a toothpick from his chest pocket and began to dig at his teeth. Ava wondered if that was a ploy to buy time while he figured out what he should and shouldn’t say.
He began to speak in a monotonous, rehearsed voice. “The family is from a village in the south. The father was a farmer and non-political. All he wanted to do was farm and raise his three sons. Sometime in 1973 he decided that Nguyen and his cronies, the Americans, weren’t going to win the war, so he began to quietly help his brothers from the north. It was a practical matter, I think, not ideological. But in any event, by the time the famous tank from the north crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace on April 30 to end the war, Lam had friends on the winning side. And he wasn’t a man who was shy about asking his friends for favours.”
“Guanxi.”
“Of course. The family, like many, is Vietnamese Chinese. They know the importance of guanxi, and Lam used his. He didn’t ask for a lot. His sons were very bright and all he wanted was for them to have as much education as they could manage. The oldest brother is the neurosurgeon. He is a very capable man, and also a great nationalist. He has been offered positions overseas that would pay him ten or maybe a hundred times more money than he makes here, but he has chosen to remain . . . something that has not gone unnoticed.”
“You said three sons?”
“Yes, the middle son died about ten years ago in a car accident.”
“I see.”
“The father and the mother are dead now as well, so that leaves the surgeon and his younger brother. The surgeon has a wife but no children, so the brother is very important to him.”
“I understand,” Ava said.
“The brother left Vietnam twenty years ago to attend school in Canada, and he never came back here to live. He visited from time to time — I have the records with me if you want to see them. He usually stayed for about a week, and it seems all he did was spend time with the family. He has no criminal record: a file that is completely blank,” he said, and then glanced at Ava. “I have to tell you, I was a little surprised when my boss asked me to look into him, especially when the request originated with your boss in Hong Kong. The things we normally do for Hong Kong — and for other friends in China — usually involve people who the police know intimately, and for the wrong reasons.”
She was slightly taken aback by his mention of “your boss in Hong Kong” again. Is he fishing for something? she wondered. “I find you extremely well spoken,” she said. “You had a good education, didn’t you.”
“Australia. I told you.”
“BA?”
“Master’s.”
“So you should be able to understand that I never talk about my boss, or my boss’s business, or my boss’s friends.”
“I wasn’t —” he began.
“No need to explain. Let’s just drop it,” she said. “And as for the Lam brothers, I have no need to speak to the surgeon, but if I do, I’ll be respectful. The younger Lam is a bit more of a challenge, since we think he stole or lost more than thirty million Canadian dollars. How many dong is that?”
He looked at her with a touch of anger in his eyes, and she knew she shouldn’t have taunted him about the dong, one of the world’s weakest currencies. “About fifty-four billion,” he said sharply.
“Well, in any currency, it’s a lot of money,” she said. “He stole it or he lost it — I’m not sure which. I just need to find out.”
“He doesn’t live or act like a man with a lot of money. We’ve been watching him for the past few days. He hasn’t left his brother’s house. He gardens, he goes for walks . . . One of my men thought he saw him crying.”
“I’ll try not to bring him to tears,” she said.
The house was on a side street in a commercial area just outside District 1. Ava didn’t see any street sign where Tran made his turn, and she didn’t see anything but warehouse walls and garage doors until they neared the end. The house was sealed off from the main road by the street. It was red brick, two storeys, with a window on either side of the door and four windows across the second floor. Ava looked around and couldn’t see any other residences. “What a strange place for a house,” she said.
“This street used to house some of the minor officials from the French embassy when we were still a French colony. When the French left, we razed the street on both sides and built those warehouses. Somehow this house survived.”
A black wrought-iron fence ran along the property line at the front of the house. There was a red-brick walkway about twenty metres long, flanked by grass, flowerbeds, and what looked like several small vegetable gardens. A small man or boy was working in one of the gardens, his back to the road.
Tran stopped the car well short of the fence. “That’s your man, I think,” he said.
Ava opened her bag and took out her not
ebook and a pen. She opened the car door and walked towards the fence, her shoes clattering lightly on the concrete. The figure in the garden didn’t move. “Mr. Lam, my name is Ava Lee, and I’ve come all the way from Toronto to speak with you,” she said as she neared him.
She saw his back stiffen. She could have unlatched the gate and walked through, but all her senses told her to wait for him to react. He resumed his gardening.
“I’m an accountant, like you and your friend Joey Lac. I’m not here to do you any harm. I simply want to talk to you.”
Now he turned, glancing over his shoulder first at her, then at the police car. A look of panic leapt into his eyes. He started to struggle to his feet. “Mr. Lam, the police simply drove me here as a courtesy. They have no interest in what happened in Toronto, no part in any of this at all.”
He began to walk towards the house.
“Mr. Lam, please don’t go. I would like you to invite me onto the property so we can speak. And I have to tell you, I won’t leave until I get that chance. So let’s make this easy on both of us, shall we?” And then she said loudly, “Please.”
He stopped. Ava counted to ten and then said again, “Please.”
When he turned towards her, she was shocked at how gaunt he was. He had hollows in his cheeks, his eyes were rimmed with shadows. If it hadn’t been for his thick moustache she might not have recognized him. One thing was certain: he sure didn’t look like a successful con man.
“Come in,” he said.
( 13 )
She opened the fence and started up the walkway. He went on ahead to the front door, opened it, and then stood in the doorway until she reached it. Ava held out her hand.
He looked at it suspiciously. “I knew they’d send someone. I knew eventually they’d find me, especially after I saw that woman at the hotel.”