The Price of Blood

portfolio and withdrew a wrinkled printed page and handed it to Broker.

He unfolded a page from an April copy of Newsweek, a page of news briefs. Two pictures were circled in black magic marker. One showed the spare, distinguished features of Gen. Cyrus LaPorte, U.S. Army, Ret. The other was of a sleek, white, unusually outfitted ocean-going vessel. The headline said: COLD WARRIOR MAKES AMENDS.

Broker read the lead, “Gen. Cyrus LaPorte of Vietnam fame and scion of a wealthy New Orleans family has been playing Cousteau. His latest project has him loaning his personal oceanographic vessel, the Lola, to Greenpeace to conduct pollution surveys off the coast of Vietnam in the wake of stories of unrestricted oil drilling…”

“He sold you?” Broker narrowed his eyes as he scanned the rest of the article.

“That’s right. That page, for five grand. And this note was in the envelope he left me.” She handed Broker a folded sheet of notebook paper. It contained three stark sentences scrawled in a shaky hand: “Find Broker.” Under it. “Have Broker find Trin. All arranged.” Numbers. And one more word, underlined, like a punch in the nose: “Hue.”

Trin. Jesus Christ. Broker staggered back a step, blinking.

“So here I am,” said Nina with a shrug. “I found you but I just lost him.”

“Tuna?”

“He skipped town on me. He’s out, early medical release because of the cancer. He disappeared with five thousand bucks of my money.”

“You got robbed by a guy dying of cancer in prison. Wonderful.”

“I wrote him a check. For his funeral expenses, I thought. He switched release dates on me. When he didn’t show up I thought he might be in New Orleans…”

He stared at her. She wasn’t dumb. Yesterday people could have been hurt, maybe killed, as a result of her cavalier walk-on appearance. No. It’s just that her wild fantasy was more important.

She went to the back of the truck and tried to open the hatchback door.

“What are you doing?” Broker demanded.

“Loading my stuff.”

“Uh-uh. Not this time. Look. My dad’s…busted up. He and Irene are in a real financial jam. I need to spend some time alone with them-”

“You’re alone with everybody always!” She stepped forward and lifted her chin aggressively. “I talked to J.T. while you were in the office. He says you’re so far out there they’re thinking of sending you to a shrink. You haven’t had a performance review in two years because you refuse to show up at your supervisor’s office. I wonder? Could it have something to do with what happened twenty years ago? That you refuse to deal with. You could be anything, but you make a career of hiding out and setting people up, gaining their trust and then busting them.”

Unconsciously, Broker patted his chest pocket for a cigarette. Nina reached in her purse and passed him the crumpled Gauloises. Hennessy cognac and the French fags-Broker had a precise memory of the last time he’d seen Ray Pryce take a Gauloise from the gold cigarette case that his wife, Marian, had given him. They were standing on the rolling deck of a Vietnamese minesweep that lay off the coast of Vietnam; it was April 29, 1975.

Just like Ray used to do, Broker tapped the short, fat French cigarette on his thumbnail and put it to his lips. Nina clicked the lighter and stated, “Dammit, don’t you get it. General LaPorte’s been over there posing as an environmentalist taking pictures of the bottom of the South China Sea.”

Broker inhaled the strong tobacco and tightened the bolts on his masking smile to ward off Nina’s raving attempt to raise the dead. More than that, he resented her confident quick-study routine. Her zeal. Her confidence. She was starting to have that effect on him. The urge to prove her wrong was almost a sneer behind his lips.

“He found it, that’s what Tuna’s getting at,” she asserted. “I have a map with a coordinate. I have a sonar image of a wrecked U.S. Army Chinook helicopter, laying in one hundred feet of water off the coast of central Vietnam. I snuck it from LaPorte’s office last night in New Orleans. That’s why he’s after me. The genie is out of the bottle, Broker.”

“The Hue gold,” said Broker in a hollow voice.

“The Hue gold. Ten tons of it. Which my father did not steal.”

11

For all he knew, the Hue gold really was a myth. He had, after all, never actually seen it. No one had. But that one elongated syllable-gold-got stuck in his ears and reverberated in the drafty acoustics of the underground garage.

And, damn, the confident look on her face pissed him off. Watching him nibble around the hook. Finally he put the note in his pocket and grumbled, “You better come with me.”

She nodded, loaded her bags, and hopped into the Jeep.

Broker pulled into a FINA station, filled the Cherokee with super unleaded and continued through town without speaking. Tuna alone he could discount. But Tuna and Trin…He stopped at a tobacco shop and bought a carton of cigarettes, American Spirits.

“Starting smoking again, huh? You nervous?” said Nina.

“They don’t have chemical additives. They’re good for you.”

“I get it. Health food cigarettes-”

“Shut up,” said Broker.

At his place, he ignored several neighbors who came out to stare at him. Stepping around smashed furniture, Nina heated water and made instant coffee. They took the coffee into his backyard and gazed down the river valley.

“Aren’t you going to clean up?” she asked.

“Up north.”

“What about breakfast?”

“We’ll stop on the road. Right now I just want to get out of town.”

“Oh. Look.”

Five carnival-striped hot air balloons, which had launched out of Lakeland, south of town, sailed low up the river. Absurd embellishments presented on the day, Broker thought that they should trail Monty Python’s Flying Circus captions. Like the number five written in the sky…

There had been five of them. Ray was dead. Tuna was dying. That left three…What would it be like, seeing LaPorte after all these years?

He had glimpsed him occasionally on television. Usually on MacNeil-Lehrer, brought on as a military expert during Grenada, Beirut, Panama, the Gulf War. He had a reputation as a frosty critic of the overreliance on technology in the touchy-feely volunteer army.

Slowly Broker withdrew the folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket and smoothed it on his thigh.

Find Trin.

He looked up. Nina watched him carefully fold the note and tuck it in his chest pocket. “Well, I’m going to take a shower, after I pour some Spic ‘n’ Span in the tub,” she said.

Alone in the backyard, he lit a Spirit and sipped his coffee and watched the airships trail over him like gaudy pageantry. Their shadows billowed over his shrubbery and one shadow swallowed him briefly before it passed on.

Broker had accustomed himself to pulling the blinds of his life to ply his trade in darkness. Now, with Nina’s sudden intrusion in his life, he was confronted with the naggingly obvious thought he always avoided: The darkness might just be a shadow cast by an object, in this case, an unresolved event.

Even calloused by almost two decades of police work, he had never made peace with Ray Pryce’s desertion.