Nina grinned. “Danny had these guys time their patrols to convoy us. It was great.”
Broker handed Larkins the room key. “Go on. Get some sleep.”
Larkins grinned. “Don’t suppose anybody will tell me-”
“Nope,” said Nina. “That wasn’t our deal, Danny.”
“Okay. Pay me, show me the way to the elevator.”
Nina hugged the huge cop. He lolled out his tongue and panted like a horny dog on a cocktail napkin. “One last thing,” he leered at Nina. “Promise me you won’t abort our love child.” Nina rolled her eyes and walked Larkins to the elevator, digging in her purse.
When she came back she stared at Broker and his black bag, blinked, and said, “What happened to you?”
“I got a haircut?”
She frowned. “You have a hickey on your neck.”
Broker smiled tightly. “C’mon, let’s find someplace to talk.”
J.T. sat in the corner of an empty banquet room dubiously drinking room-service coffee. Broker slid his bag under a table and paced. The tables had been set. Lights reflected off crystal and hurt his eyes. Folded winged napkins looked like squadrons of origami warming up on aircraft carriers.
Nina marched to a window and opened it to let out Broker’s cigarette smoke. The growl of jet engines entered the room on that cool, bluesy, up-all-night, morning air.
“So.” She spread open a manila folder full of computer printouts on the table next to Broker. “Tuna came through the bank ten days ago. He withdrew twenty thousand and left the account open. There’s another twenty thousand still in it.”
“So where is he?”
“I haven’t got a clue. He’s been sending checks for eighteen years to an address in Italy. Paying the taxes on a farmhouse in Tuscany. The banker showed me the correspondence.”
Broker shook his head. “He’s too sick to travel to Italy. Where would he get a passport?”
“That’s what I thought,” said Nina. “There’s these canceled checks to someone named Ann Marie Sporta. They start in 1988 and stop in 1993. About fifteen thousand all together. They were stamped at a bank in Madison, Wisconsin. What do you think?”
Broker rubbed his eyes, glanced at the checks. “Don’t know. What else?”
“The jackpot,” said Nina “It’s all in his records at the bank, canceled checks, letters, accounting forms. Since nineteen eighty-nine, when things started loosening up with Vietnam, he’s been donating heavily to something called the Southeast Asian Relief.”
“Define heavily?” asked Broker.
“Oh, about fifty thousand bucks-”
“To some…relief charity?” Broker shook his head.
“The SAR is just a go-between the banker found, you can’t just send money to someone in Vietnam. So he used this aid organization headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. Guy named Kevin Eichleay runs it. Nam vet. Was a medic in the Air Cav. He ships over medical supplies. Runs tours of vets who rehab hamlets, hospitals, stuff like that. I called him up and said I wanted to donate some money. Then we drove like hell to Lansing with those two guys following us.”
“You should have waited for me,” said Broker.
Nina arched an eyebrow and went on. “Poor Kevin,” she smiled, “he’s a low-key, salt-of-the-earth dude and I came cooking into his office like the Pillsbury bake-off. Larkins freaked him a bit, but he quieted down when I got my checkbook out. For five hundred bucks and a few hugs I got the whole story. Told him Tuna and my dad were in the army together. That I was going to Nam to look for my dad’s remains. Man, I threw the book at him.”
“What the fuck is this?” grumbled J.T. suspiciously.
Broker held up a hand. Patience.
Nina spread a sheaf of official looking Xeroxes down on the hotel table like four aces. They bore strange stamps in Vietnamese. Stars and sheaves of rice. “Approvals that Kevin negotiated on trips he made. From a local People’s Committee all the way up to the Vietnamese General Assembly. Get this: For the last five years Tuna has been sponsoring an old vets’ home for Viet Cong amputees. Guess who runs it?”
Broker shook his head. “Oh boy,” he said softly.
“You got that right,” said Nina. “Nguyen Van Trin manages it. Tuna worked through the banker to bankroll Kevin to go to Nam in eighty-nine to find Trin. I showed Kevin the phone number in Hue and he confirmed it as the number Trin uses.”
“Where’s this home located?” asked Broker slowly.
“On the beach, in Quang Tri Province, exactly where Tuna wanted it built,” said Nina mysteriously. She placed both hands on Broker’s shoulders and shook him with infectious excitement. “And, Tuna bought them a serious boat to go fishing with. Kevin said it was way too much boat, big enough to run heavy cargo on the high seas. But Tuna insisted on it. That’s what most of the bread went for. Permits for the boat. The Vietnamese government went through a sensitive period about people with boats.”
“God, he had it all planned, for years,” said Broker.
“Yep. Put everything in place and then he got cancer,” said Nina.
“Trin.” Broker said the name like an incantation.
“Yeah,” said Nina. “How much does he know?”
“Whoa. Wait. Man, what the fuck is this?” J.T. stood up, raising his hands to dodge the high-energy splinters zipping off Broker and Nina.
“You don’t want to know,” said Broker.
“I want to know,” said J.T.
“Okay.” Broker reached down and unzipped his bowling bag. With a flourish he whipped out a glittering bar of gold and tossed it across the room.
J.T. caught it, hefted the surprising weight and groaned, “Oh oh…”
“Wow,” said Nina. “You got into his safe!”
“Huh?” J.T. blinked.
“There’s this guy who thinks he’s a pirate and he’s looking for a sunken treasure,” explained Broker.
“Except it’s not sunken, it’s buried,” added Nina. She startled. “Or is it? Where’d he find the gold?”
“By the chopper. But only seven ingots and they’ve had a crew over there churning up the bottom.”
“I don’t get it,” said Nina.
Broker shrugged. “Maybe it’s in two locations?”
J.T.’s eyes went first to Nina, then to Broker, and back to Nina again. “Right,” he said.
“It’s all dirty and we’re going to bust his ass,” explained Broker, throwing his hands in the air.
“A pirate.” J.T. glowered at the gold ingot in his hand. “A treasure.” He shook his head. “In Duluth?” he asked incredulously.
“In Vietnam. If you can get a week off you can come with us,” said Broker.
“Fuck that. Once was enough.” J.T. carefully put down the gold bar on the table and said, “You’re right, I don’t want to know. I’ll just help you
“Talk to what guy?” asked Nina.
“Bevode Fret,” said Broker, stashing the bar back in the bag.
“Talk?”
“Yeah, the kind of talk that’ll keep him in traction for a while,” said Broker.
Nina said, “Not a good idea. We lost those guys in Lansing but they
Broker shook his head, he’d been looking forward to this. “Bevode gets his comeuppance. If somebody heavy is tailing us they’ll stick out like a sore thumb in Devil’s Rock.”
“Along with me,” said J.T. with a calm demented smile.
Nina folded her arms. “We already screwed up once. If I didn’t know Danny, where would we be?”
Broker grimaced and rubbed his eyes. “If LaPorte can buy prison guards he can probably penetrate a commercial airline’s scheduling computer. We aren’t going to lose whoever’s following us for long. And we’re all going to the same place.”
