Vinh Tien said, “Will you at least listen?”
***
Vinh Tien’s village was sixty miles south of the DMZ, the arbitrary buffer between north and south that degenerated into a free-fire zone. Always a good student, Vinh was away at the Catholic school, where they trained those who would become doctors, the day the rangers came to question his people about the weapons. AK-47s an informant said they were stockpiling for the Cong.
We have no weapons, they replied.
“You do,” the rangers insisted.
“You have been fed tales. We do not.”
Back and forth until there was no going back. Until eighty of his people—Vinh’s mother and the uncle who’d raised him included—were herded to a pen meant for livestock and given a final chance to reveal the cache before a nervous ARVN short-circuited and the rest joined in. Among the massacred: Giang Minh Huong, Vinh’s childhood sweetheart whom he’d married that spring.
When they had both turned seventeen.
Vinh heard about it from a boy who’d been wood-gathering and was drawn to the shots; no one else alive had seen it firsthand. Because as the rangers fled with their overheated M-16s, the American fighter planes called in due to “fierce resistance” napalmed the rest into a pyre that rose three hundred feet into the summer sky.
Squatting later in the still-warm crematorium, Vinh Tien had slashed his palms, pressed the ash into the wounds, vowed revenge. For five years—October ‘71 through April ‘75—he lived the Cong’s Spartan life. Dispatching in a cold rage whatever enemies he and his comrades-in-arms could infiltrate, isolate, destroy.
Americans? Yes, Americans—who by their complicity had turned his heart to charcoal.
Then it was over and he went back to his village, or what was left of it, a few families trying not to starve. And there was Giang’s cousin Li, who’d been away at school as well. And it must have been fated, because they were married next fall, almost to the day that Vinh’s wife, mother, and uncle were massacred in the pens.
***
“You know the rest,” he told Wil. “The new government, their distrust because we were South. Even those who had bled for them.”
Wil said nothing.
“When I learned of your service there, I knew I must speak with caution. That is not generally my way.”
Wil nodded, Mia’s words a broken record: You two might even have traded shots. Playing to the image of a red-spattered ship’s deck, a shipmate and friend cooling in a jungle’s steaming heart.
Vinh Tien’s eyes stayed on the horizon. As though reading Wil’s thoughts, he said, “Do you not think what it cost to ask an old enemy for help?” He drew a long breath. “How would you have felt? I apologize for last night, for deceiving you. But not for what I once thought was right.”
The evening Amtrak air-horned a warning and clacked off south.
He said, “None of it matters. My son matters. Can you see that?”
“I think so,” Wil said.
“We expatriates sometimes think of each other as Viet Kieu, after our poem about a young seeker adrift in a hostile land. But this is not a hostile land. It is a good one.”
He paused to pet Matt.
“Perhaps someone smarter than I can tabulate what we owe, those of us who fought. I only know this country gave me a chance to begin again.” He rose to leave. “War kills the dead but once, Mr. Hardesty, they have that advantage over us. I am sorry you cannot help with my Jimmy. He was a good son.”
Vinh Tien’s hand was turning the knob, when Wil said, “Mr. Tien, Matt and I were wondering. Do you know the taste of lapsang souchong?”
11
The next day was Friday, the day before Desfile de Los Niños, the kids’ parade down State that Devin always got a kick out of. Wil left the house at nine-thirty, figuring ten would be about right to find Luc Tien at home—the dragon in his lair, as Vinh had put it. He nosed the Bonneville out onto 101, felt her hesitate before the surge.
Running on borrowed time.
Like some people he knew.
The morning itself was beautiful—clear as a viewpoint, the pressure dome holding: eighty-eight due for later. Off shore, the islands stood out in etched relief: ridges in sunlight, canyons looking as if they’d been raked with a garden claw. Anacapa’s graceful arch, if you knew where to look.
His window scope had brought it in over yet another lapsang, Wil wanting the tea’s boost to carry over from last night: Vinh Tien opening up from a perspective he had never thought to hear, Wil reciprocating in kind. Not the bads—those remained a censored letter, the cuts saying more than the remaining passages. No, this was more about the commonality of heat and travail, irrationality and chaos, humanity and hope. A walk in the mine field, but a start.
Of what, who knew?
He glanced again at the map Vinh provided, then at the Rincon’s morning glass-off. Not even the kids were out there today. On the right summer had left the backbone of mountains a dust-green flecked with sandstone—dried-up seedpods and wildflowers, scented air and backlit grasses the rewards of getting out into the August chaparral, the walkable creekbeds. He made a note to do more of that, the obvious ever elusive. Like the miles of blue flowers spilling from the dividers. Until a day like this when you swung your gaze and wondered where they’d come from and what else you’d been missing.
He passed Santa Claus Lane—holdover from a more innocent era—then left the freeway, up and past Montecito’s country-urban commerce. Through foothills showing hints of terra-cotta behind high hedges and onto Mountain Drive…which marked a steeper rise, and where he pulled over to check the map again.
Peppery hints rose in the stillness: warm eucalyptus, dust rising from his tires, the dry bright edge to an indrawn breath. He found it, then—a pinkish-buff Santa Fe slab-side behind a matching wall tight to the flank of the hill—parking where new blacktop led up through cacti and succulents, finely-crushed white, red, and pink rock. Squawk-box with a button built into the barred iron gate.
When a male voice answered, he told it Wil Hardesty wanted to see Luc Tien about his nephew.
Pause. “What about his nephew?”
“Maybe you should ask him.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
But in just under ten minutes, a beefy Asian man approached the gate in a white golf cart. White polo shirt over a ham neck, black shorts over tree-trunk thighs, short hair shaved on the sides. Robb embroidered on the shirt.
“You got ID?” he asked.
Wil showed him his P.I. and driver’s license.
The big head tilted, photo to face. “Local, huh? You packing?”
Wil did a turn with his arms out; still, Robb patted him down once he’d cracked the gate. They rode in silence past specimen cholla, barrel and Bishop’s Hat, ocotillo and opuntia, some good-sized palo verde, other spikey things that eluded him. Not a blade of grass, just the colored rock, a giant Indian sand painting.
Two men resembling Robb were hosing down three metallic-gray GMC Yukons backed from their garage bays. More were stationed around the perimeter. The cart stopped then and Robb nodded to a taller man coming out of the house: black-rimmed sunglasses and the same black shorts, Sonny on his white polo, longish hair banded off into a nub. Looking Wil over, he nodded at Robb, who left in the cart.
“Your lucky day,” he said, leading Wil through the house, a tiled airy space with Santa Fe-style furniture and fabrics. Navajo rugs in glass frames, Monument Valley and Grand Canyon scenes lit by recessed spots, bent-iron chandelier, expansive glass doors opening out on a parallel universe.
“That way,” Sonny said.
After the cool of the house, the sun had a push. Then the flagstones gave way to a dark-bottomed swimming pool fed by a series of terraced spillways. Model-bodied women in thong bottoms lay around the fringe; as Wil passed, they shot looks at him before settling back. Pale Asian men in wraparounds also regarded him—looking embarrassed without their holsters.
&nbs
p; But maybe it was just him.
Sonny had walked beyond them to a group of gardeners working the floral periphery. Wil let his gaze return to the men around the pool sighting in on him, wondering which was Luc Tien and how it might start.
“Mr. Hardesty…”
One of the gardeners had raised up beside a plaque that read, HE WHO PLANTS A GARDEN PLANTS HAPPINESS. Untucked blue chambray with the sleeves rolled up, knee pads, roundish sunglasses pushed up into damp black hair. Even white teeth in a face that reminded Wil of the actor who played in The Lover, that blade-steel quality, his smile now looking as if a contingent of Sunset editors had arrived to give him a landscaping award. He wiped sweat off his face and neck with a navy-and-white kerchief.
Then he said, “So you want to talk about Jimmy…”
***
“You ever in your life see two brothers so different?”
Luc Tien was holding out a dog-eared photo as a houseboy dressed like Sonny only in long pants left them limeade in thick Mexican glasses.
“Not lately,” Wil said.
Luc Tien placed the photo back in the album, back in its drawer. “Different fathers. Mine was French, a Legionnaire who came and went—what happens when your mother’s a whore.”
He slid the drawer shut.
“Vinh didn’t mention that? You have to forgive my brother. He’s closed-minded about some things.”
Wil sipped the tart drink. They were on sectionals with bright pillows scattered for effect. Luc Tien still glowed from his work. Which had led to a discourse about the entire landscaping scheme, some of the names spinning them off into their botanical histories, Wil trying to get a take on the man consistent with Vinh Tien’s observations and coming nowhere close.
Not even.
“You can take the Vietnamese gardener out of the soil,” Luc Tien was saying as he worked dirt out from under a nail, “Never the soil from the gardener. I cultivate orchids out back, if you appreciate such things.”
“Another time, thanks.”
“A passion of mine, indulged by an interest in Asian-backed films. I won’t bore you, but through circumstances, a talent company fell to me. At the urging of my investors I accepted some modest roles before moving into production and distribution. Not the way my brother did it, of course. Or would have you believe.”
“I assumed not.”
“You can put that in the bank.” He paused to drink. “Jimmy, who you came here to ask about, and for which you get a pass this time since I was expecting it, was a particular bone of contention between us. As Vinh is ever willing to point out.”
He took a cigarette from an embossed leather box on the table, offered one to Wil, lit up as Wil was shaking it off. Jetting smoke at the ceiling, he said, “Vinh is lucky I don’t sue him. Did he let on where he acquired the money to leave Vietnam? No, I didn’t think so. Well, guess who?”
“He mentioned giant clams. Among other things.”
Luc Tien waved his free hand as though dismissing the subject. “The whole thing with Jimmy has been so depressing. A young couple with everything to live for, their unborn child?” He wiped his face with the kerchief. “Jimmy always was more son than nephew.”
Wil said, “I was told he met his fiancé here.”
Luc Tien smiled until it dropped away. “Wen worked for me, yes. Until Jimmy took a fancy to her, and that ended that.”
“Ended what?”
Limeade, an intake of smoke. “Nothing and no one you’d find interesting.”
“Like the others around your pool?”
“Invited guests and their companions, Mr. Hardesty. Here to enjoy our magnificent climate.”
“Mr. Tien,” Wil said, deciding to cut to it. “Have you any reason to believe what happened to Jimmy and Wen was anything other than an accident?”
“No. Have you?” Blue exhale.
“What did Jimmy do in return for your hospitality?”
Luc Tien rolled ash in an onyx dish. “Are you truly interested? Or is this my brother again?”
“What I find is what I find. Vinh aware of that.”
“Poor Vinh.” The headshake again. “Jimmy loved it here. From an early age, he chose to assist with my horses, to help around the property. Later on it was drive me places and keep me on course. The boy had an agile mind. He was wasted on my brother.”
“Did you pay him?”
“Of course I paid him—as I would pay anyone who rendered me a service. Even you.” Grinning more broadly as he said it, the blade’s tip showing through. He took a long inhale, let the smoke aura. “And now I believe your pass is ending.”
As Luc Tien rose, Sonny appeared behind him.
“I have to admit it, I’m curious,” Wil said. “Why cactus?”
Luc Tien regarded him as though deciding, then walked him to a slate wall down which water trickled into a pool. Wil saw half-a-dozen painted wood figures rising from the water—winged females in gold tiaras and colorful dress. Arms outstretched, their bases were anchored beneath the surface.
“Roi Nuoc,” Luc Tien said. “Water puppets, very Vietnamese. As you may have noticed, about the only thing here that is.” The kerchief appeared to wipe his smile back on. “Floods were a problem back when the art of puppet plays was introduced. But my people are ingenious. Their answer? Incorporate the floods into the performance.”
He signaled to Sonny, who came forward, eyes on Wil, who met them.
As he was being ushered out, Luc Tien said, “If it’s not pouring rain in my country, the sun’s steaming it out of the ground. Go tell my brother to get a life, Mr. Hardesty. You’ll be doing him a favor.”
12
Deciding to take his own advice for once, Wil changed into trail runners, fed Matt, tied a bandanna around the dog’s neck. Then he drove them to the base of the mountains, the Rattlesnake Canyon trailhead he and Devin used to hike. For a while they crunched along to afternoon insect hum, birds in the underbrush, the scent of fennel. Foxtail and manzanita in the dry parts, watercress and bay when they’d cross what remained of the creek.
Hawks swept off the ridgelines, joyrode the thermals. As if it were understood up here, the few hikers they met smiled back, their own dogs taking the obligatory interest in Matt before the rustles and scurries proved too much.
Two miles in, they emerged at a bird’s-eye view of the islands through his field glasses. Despite the day and their surroundings, Wil’s thoughts went to Jimmy and Wen as the November cold became their cold, the blackness their blackness forty miles out by San Miguel. Then to the brothers Tien, their sad dance with one other—a dozen questions forming around each—until he left the sea for the road below, stopping the glasses at a curve down from where he’d left the Bonneville.
Focusing now on what appeared to be two men.
Shadow-figures at this distance.
Wil braced the glasses against a boulder. One man appeared to be smoking as he leaned against a blue-gray car hood; the other was looking up the mountainside through his own field glasses…
Looking at Wil…
Which was absurd, of course. The looker could be pinned on anything in his general direction and it would appear the same. Still…
For a while, neither he nor the occupants altered their stance, even as cars passed below on the narrow road. Then the man with the field glasses broke it off, said something to the smoking man before they got in and drove away.
Nothing, Wil thought—birdwatchers.
The trails and wetlands were full of them.
And the way Matt frolicked when they resumed the hike and how Wil’s own mood lifted just watching him, it was as if the two men and the blue-gray car were no more than thin clouds: there one minute, cresting a far ridge the next.
13
It might have been his preoccupation with Luc Tien, the whole brother thing with Vinh, but it wasn’t until after their morning walk, Matt running gulls as Wil eased yesterday’s hike out of his calves, that he became aware of it. Phone ju
st off on the nightstand, the Winslow and the Caputo reverse stacked, line of dust where the TV had been repositioned slightly off line.
Jacked, Wil checked the places where he kept his rebuilt service .45 and the Colt Mustang .380 purchased last year for backup. They were undisturbed. Same with files, closets, drawers, though neatness in these areas had a way of deferring to expediency.
He fixed oatmeal, took it out on the deck.
If somebody were on his case, why? As far as Jimmy and Wen, he was in barely deep enough to matter. And to whom—Luc? Wil hadn’t exactly made the man nervous; more to the contrary, a confidence bordering on arrogance. Not that Luc had opened up about much.
So, who? Why?
Questions 2, answers 0.
Post-cleanup, he and Matt drove the twelve miles to Santa Barbara, exiting at the Bird Lagoon, hotspot for watercolorists, except in September when the algae count rose and the fish followed suit. They passed bladers and joggers, sand courts with diggers and spilers already out, the gauntlet of palms and hotels, a showpiece park with a carousel. And, approaching their turn, the harbored sailboat masts angling back the 10 AM sun.
Wil eyed them, anything but in the mood. American Riviera, the travel touts called it, all the red tile and bougainvillea you could eat. Or maybe it was just the way he felt when some sonofabitch had been inside his house.
Their turn became a street lined with older mixed-front buildings—counterpoint to the arches and art walks that defined the town to visitors—up another block and a half to a cluster with its own small lot. Working space with bay doors adjoining a take out/sit-down eatery: ISLAND SEAFOODS on the low sign.
He let Matt out on his leash and they checked the restaurant first. Couple of employees doing prep…unset tables…grills and hoods reminding him of a the place his parents had tried making a go of in the sixties. Topsiders they’d called it before his mother’s blood-level took it and his old man across the yellow line and into a lorry full of Pendleton Marines.
Burning Moon Page 5