by Terry Irving
"No drums and dancing?"
Holding two steaming cups, she walked over to the sofa and sat. "No, we have that, too. When I was a kid, I loved the drum festivals – felt like I could dance all day. I guess the mixture should have been confusing, but somehow, it wasn’t. It was just the way our family did things."
Rick dug out the Zippo from his pocket and set the flame to the posters under a new set of logs. Then he came back to the couch and took a cup from her. "Now, that sounds good. Tell me about your best Christmas ever."
Mrs Jin pushed the door from the kitchen with her back, swept into the private dining room, and placed the elegantly prepared duck on the small table. It was perfect – the skin crisp, the slices paper-thin, green onions and plum sauce on either side. She had done it all herself – the staff were enjoying their single day off. She only cooked one dinner a year and only for one man.
The room was perfect. The candles dim enough forthe aged velvet wallpaper to look brand-new, the flames dancing through the crystal glasses and reflecting off the polished silver. None of the usual cheap stainless steel utensils or thick functional glassware would be used tonight.
She watched with a well-hidden lurch of fear as he appraised the dinner, then relaxed as he looked up at her, and gave her a smile so slight that it would have gone unnoticed by anyone else.
"It’s perfect. Please join me."
She bowed slightly and sat at the other side of the table. "I’m glad. I keep my promise for another year."
He raised a glass of wine and toasted her. "To another year." They drank, and then he said, "You know, you don’t have to do this."
"I know." She took another tiny sip of wine, careful of her lipstick. "It’s the doing of what I do not have to do, but which I want to do, that makes it worthwhile."
Her father drags her by the arm through the smoke. Soldiers are piling bodies under the bridge, but the shooting has stopped. She thinks that maybe they will get by unnoticed.
Then there is the soldier in green, and his rifle comes up and steadies on her face. Her father begins to beg – speaking the English he’d learned at the camp gates.
"Here, good girl. Good for you, GI. You take girl. I go." He shoves her forward and pulls her ragged shirt at the shoulders so it slips down and reveals her smooth, childish chest.
The soldier looks at her, and she expects the smile – that horrible smile that would mean another deal was made, another time of pain and fear about to begin.
There is no smile. There is nothing on his face at all.
Her father becomes desperate. He rips her shirt apart, pulls it off completely, and shoves her naked body toward the soldier. "Good girl. Good for you."
The soldier looks calmly into her eyes, and she thinks she can see just the shadow of a very different smile. He turns and shoots her father in the forehead.
She clamps her mouth shut to keep from screaming and stands rigid and shaking with her eyes wide open, fixed on his face. She hears dull thumps behind her and smoke begins to spread. Overhead, two jets scream past, rockets slamming into the others still crowding the road.
Then the soldier reaches out his hand and makes a gesture. It isn’t the clutching, greedy grab that always means the beginning of a bad thing. It isn’t a demand, just an offer.
She puts her hand up, and he takes it in his. Then he leads her off into the smoke, away from where her father lies. At one point, he stops and digs through his pack, finally finds an almost-new green T-shirt, and pulls it over her naked body.
It is a long walk, and, after a while, her leathery bare feet bleed, and she begins to limp. He picks her up, making sure that the big T-shirt still covers her entire body, and carries her.
Eventually, even terror can’t win over exhaustion, and she sleeps.
It is night when he puts her down in front of the big doors and she comes awake. He pounds on the carved wood until the nuns open a crack and peer out. Without a word, he puts his hands on her shoulders and guides her forward. The nuns know better than to hug her, but they take her by the hand and lead her inside. He gives them money, then turns and walks away. She watches him until the doors close.
Mrs Jin – there had never been a "Mr Jin" – took another sip of wine and watched as he began to eat. It had taken many years to find him again, years where she had grown, learned, and begun to play in the dangerous games between nations. She’d kept the T-shirt with his name stenciled across the chest, and finally, she stood in front of him in a Saigon restaurant, bowed low, and offered him Christmas dinner.
He had looked at her with the same quiet in his eyes – that look of inner silence.
"It’s been a long time. I’d be delighted to share Christmas with you."
CHAPTER 30
Tuesday, December 26, 1972
In Kansas City, Harry Truman had died during the night. In a Washington already in post-Christmas slow motion, his passing was noted by government offices that simply didn’t reopen and flags that flew at halfmast. The bombers started their raids again – giving Hanoi hell in the old man’s memory.
Rick turned off the radio and said, "More guys are going to die. Those B-52s can’t maneuver worth a damn."
Across the room, Eve was braiding her hair. "Then I guess it’s time to get going, Trooper."
Rick was heading up to Capitol Hill to retrieve the evidence and contact Dina while Eve ran down some people in AIM to find if they had a safe way of getting out of the city. He figured that whoever was searching for them was used to seeing two on a bike. Splitting up might change the profile.
At the door, she came up and put her arms around him. "Stay alive, will ya?"
He pulled out the Zippo and showed it to her.
She stepped back and looked at it doubtfully. "You know, as war magic goes, it’s not exactly traditional. On the other hand, tobacco is a big part of our magic."
"There you go." He did the trick on his jeans and lit a Winston. She took the cigarette from his lips, took a drag, and, starting from his legs, blew the smoke over his entire body. Then she kissed him and put the cigarette back in his mouth.
"Good as I can do." She hugged him fiercely and then abruptly released him and headed to the kitchen. Rick watched her go. He couldn’t quite take the ceremony seriously, but he didn’t think it was a joke, so he just turned and headed down the stairs.
There was a phone booth on the corner of K Street. He noted the phone number and walked on until he found a second pay phone in front of a drugstore. He saw that it was the old model, so he dropped in a nickel and immediately pounded the coin return button with the palm of his hand. The nickel slipped across the levers inside and registered as a dime. The emergency tone in the receiver switched to a regular dial tone – another nickel saved from the clutches of Ma Bell.
He called Dina’s apartment, asked for Paul Robeson, and went through the minus-one, plus-one routine she’d laid out. He hung up and walked back up to the first phone booth just as it rang.
"Don’t you think this is just a bit too James Bond?" he said.
"Absolutely not," Dina answered. "Remember, I know what a phone tap sounds like, and I’ve got a tap on my home phone now. It’s kicking the hell out of my love life. Speaking of love lives, where is Eve? I just wanted you to meet her, not steal her away forever."
"I think it’s more the other way around. She kidnapped me."
"Right. All you damn men are the same." Dina sighed dramatically. "Oh, well; in my heart, I knew she wasn’t going to change and fall for me, so mazel tov to the two of you. Since you’re a hopeless goyim, I’ll also say ‘good luck’. OK, back to work."
They agreed that Dina would locate Corey and arrange to meet as soon as Rick recovered the papers and the film. Rick hung up, walked back to the rear of the building, and extricated the BMW from its niche behind the Dumpster. He kicked it over, letting it warm up while he buckled his helmet. It was a bit colder than the past several days, but still above freezing. Riding would only be pain
ful, not dangerous.
He pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the Capitol, the dome almost invisible against a backdrop of cold gray clouds.
Parked on Eighth Street in the 240Z, Nguyen Vien and Tung Quan were watching the parade of gaily dressed men and women walk up and down the sidewalks. Vien was a mess, with his arm bandaged and splinted and his skin pale from the blood he’d lost in the explosion. Quan had a small bandage on the bullet wound in his shoulder, but otherwise he had recovered – at least physically.
Emotionally, his failure had blossomed into an almost uncontrollable rage fueled by the contempt he thought that the courier had shown by letting him live. He wanted the motorcyclist dead and, preferably, only after a long period of significant pain.
First, they had to find him. The last time they saw the courier was here on 8th Street, so they were going to sit here until they spotted him again. They smoked cigarettes and made crude comments about all the women passing by.
A block behind them, Mrs Jin was sitting in the front window of a Chinese restaurant watching them – and the rest of the street. The owner of the restaurant owed her money, so there had been no trouble getting the right seat, and no questions about why she was blocking their best table without ordering anything but a pot of tea.
At the moment, she was wondering if she should have kept the two Vietnamese men on the job. They had done badly – shamed her in front of the man she wanted most to impress. However, it was difficult to find good people in Washington. Certainly, there were many killers, but the young black men were bad about taking orders and terrible about keeping quiet afterward. No, it was better to give Vien and Quan a chance to redeem themselves.
She scanned the street again, watching the young men in leather and denim meet and mingle. She wondered how they could be so free right here in the nation’s capital, especially when the White House had practically declared open war on men who loved men. Just last month, she had been paid to follow a newspaper reporter for days with orders to prove he was homosexual. She knew that the search was fruitless on the first evening when she saw how his wife and children greeted him. That didn’t stop her from completing the job – political money was just as good as anyone else’s, she thought.
Rick parked on G Street just south of the gay bar and left his helmet and heavy gloves locked to the bike. He walked up 8th Street, trying to watch everything and everyone around him.
It was early enough that the bar was still locked. He knocked on the thick green paint of the door and waited, then knocked again. Finally, he heard the lock click, and the door opened; the owner gave him a suspicious glare and let him in.
"I need to go get something we left upstairs," Rick explained.
The owner shrugged his shoulders without saying anything and went back to stacking beer in the big coolers behind the bar. Rick took that as permission and made his way to the upstairs apartment. The can of film and the printouts were behind the dirty tub where he’d left them. He untucked the back of his shirt, loosened his belt, and stuffed the photos flat against his back. Then he tightened the belt over them and tucked the shirt back in. With the leather jacket, it was hard to tell he was carrying anything.
Before he left, he looked out the window. He spotted the 240Z immediately and then saw that one of the Vietnamese men was already heading toward the bar. For a moment, he felt regret that he hadn’t taken care of this one earlier. Then he shook his head.
No more killing.
On the other hand, the man in the street had his hand in his jacket pocket. Clearly, he didn’t have the same feelings of restraint. It was time to leave.
First, he put the papers and the film back behind the tub. He wasn’t going to take any chances with them flying out at high speed – he’d seen a courier lose a multivolume legal brief when he hit a pothole coming down Pennsylvania Avenue. Extremely sensitive and quite expensive documents had fluttered down like a heavy snow.
In his motorcycle boots, he made a lot of noise coming down the back stairs, and the owner had straightened up from the cooler and was giving him an annoyed stare by the time he came into the bar.
"Don’t open the front door," Rick said. "A guy with a gun is looking for me. Is there another way out of here?"
The owner looked disgusted. "Did you really have to drag your goddamn troubles to my place? Dina really owes me a big one." Then he pointed back over Rick’s shoulder. "There’s a door all the way back through the storeroom. There’s an alarm on the door that’ll go off and alert the cops, but frankly, I think that’s probably a good idea right now." He started to bend down. "I’m going to just lie quietly on the floor until the police show up. Just don’t steal anything on your way out."
"Thanks a lot." Rick spun around and headed down the short hall. "I owe you."
"Damn right you do."
A fist began to hammer on the door.
As soon as Rick opened the back door, a loud, clanging bell went off overhead. He was in another narrow alley crowded with trash barrels and piles of old boxes.
He jogged over to his bike, kicked it to life, and took off without bothering to put on his helmet or gloves. He turned south on Eighth Street and passed the Marine Corps barracks, which always triggered the same question in his mind. How did the short-haired, wide-shouldered White House Marine guards get along with the "Great Gay Way" just a block north? Not well, he suspected.
At the south end of 8th, he turned right on M Street. Then he pulled over to the side and took the time to put on his helmet. Being stopped by the DC police could really be dangerous today.
Suddenly, he heard the heavy, almost flatulent sound of the Datsun’s engine making a double-clutch downshift as it swung onto M Street only yards behind him.
Time to dance.
CHAPTER 31
The BMW thunked up through the gears, but Rick knew the sports car could take him in a straight-line speed contest. That being the case, he should probably avoid engaging in one. He came off the throttle just a bit and threw what he hoped looked like a frantic glance over his shoulder.
They were closing fast. Perfect.
Abruptly, Rick hit the rear brake, kicking it into a screeching slide to the left. Then hard pressure on the front brake really brought his speed down, the Earles forks pushing the handlebars up. At the last second, he released both brakes, dropped the front down, swept into an easy half- right turn, and accelerated up New Jersey Avenue.
He could hear the Datsun’s brakes slam on, but the tires stopped squealing almost immediately. They’d realized they couldn’t make the turn and were going to take the next right and cut around the block. With that thought, he took a fast left and blew right past them going the other direction just as they came around the corner.
Another shriek of tires. That driver isn’t bad, he thought as he watched in the side mirror. There’s not a lot of room for a bootlegger turn with all those cars parked on both sides. There was a crash of metal on metal behind him and the wailing of a car alarm.
OK, the driver wasn’t all that good.
The sports car slowly gained on him as he whipped to the right – weaving through a gas station and surprising a couple of drivers at the pumps – then north into the spaghetti of ramps where South Capitol Street merged with the Southwest Freeway. There wasn’t much traffic, but you could always count on at least some tourists to be driving around in a daze.
Rick spotted the blue-and-gold license plate of a Pennsylvania driver in front of him and shot past on the right as the driver slowed in confusion at an unmarked split at the top of the ramp. He knew the poor guy was going to slow there, because it had taken Rick months to master those stupid ramps.
Heading down and into the eight-lane tunnel under the Mall, he met still less traffic, because the road didn’t go anywhere. Sam Watkins said that someone had the bright idea of routing I-95, and the massive river of traffic flowing up and down the East Coast, and squeezing it straight through the middle of DC. The protests over
the plan had resulted in the cancellation of the rest of the road, leaving only a tunnel to nowhere.
The Datsun must have worked out the ramps: Rick could hear the engine echoing off the tiled tunnel walls. He swerved across three lanes and onto the exit marked "US Capitol". He could hear the Datsun gaining on him as he tore up the ramp.
He made an illegal right turn coming out of the tunnel, hauled the big bike right again onto E Street, and right again at the end of the bridge over the highway. Three DC cops were sitting, smoking, on their Vespas, outside the Pension Building, and one of them gave him a small wave as he thundered past. The cop knew the scooter could never catch up even if he tried.
A hard left and Rick was in Chinatown. Since these brightly colored restaurants were open, it was one of the few places in the city where the streets were filled with pedestrians. He thumbed the horn button, but there were just too many people. Behind him, he could hear the Datsun getting closer, moving faster in the clear space he left behind.
Then his only remaining side mirror exploded.
He shot a look back and saw the passenger’s head and shoulders poking up through a sunroof and taking aim again. They clearly weren’t worried about collateral damage.
He began to swerve to throw off the man’s aim, but that only forced him to slow down. He slammed into a right turn, the bike so low that the crash bars in the front were grinding sparks from the pavement. A block ahead, he could see the temporary board barriers that marked a Metro dig. He frantically checked on both sides, but they were blocking the entire street.
Standing on the pegs, he peered ahead and into the dig, hoping it wasn’t deep – just a short drop onto soft dirt where he could still drive.
No luck – he couldn’t even see the bottom.
Straight ahead, Rick saw a gap in one of the barriers. Stretching across the dig was an I-beam that braced the timbered walls against the pressure of the surrounding earth. Only a foot wide and looking smaller by the second, it offered a slim chance of escape.