The Price of Blood

50

“Thirsty,” said Tuna. He fanned his mouth. Parched. Nina darted into the cabin and returned with two open bottles of iced beer. He nodded and asked very politely, “Tony brought me some cherries last night, in a bowl in the icebox?” Nina turned promptly and returned with the large bowl of cherries. She placed them on the table next to Tuna’s chair and handed him one of the chilled bottles. She tucked the extra between his legs in the baggy folds of his trousers.

Tuna drank one beer in a long dreamy gurgle. He set the empty aside and picked up the fresh bottle. He held the ice-sweating glass to the inside of his papery left forearm and sighed. Then his other hand fumbled on the table for a pack of Pall Malls. In slow motion he lit one and inhaled. Exhaled and coughed violently.

“Shit’s probably in my lungs,” he said as heroin merriness flooded his sunken cheeks and twinkled in his cratered eyes. Seeing the corpselike figure animate with the strange current of energy and thinking about the rednecks laying stiff in the shade of an oak tree had the perverse effect of making Broker hungry. He chewed one of the ham and cheese sandwiches and washed it down with San Miguel.

Tuna began to eat the cherries, ferrying them one by one in his taloned hand, savoring them with a gluttonous sucking of lips and tongue. He spit the pits onto the deck where they collected like tiny red bodies. Ants formed industrious columns, going after the shreds of pulp.

Nina smiled tightly. “I wish there was some way we could record this.”

The stoned laughter that gushed from Tuna’s cherry-stained lips sounded like a flock of insane birds. There was some of the muscular oily humor of the old Tuna in that laugh. “How many words you think I got left? A thousand? Five hundred? I’ll do my talking to people, not a goddamned machine.”

“Okay,” said Nina, crossing her arms and waiting patiently.

Tuna cackled and his eyes and voice went into a glide. “Paget’s disease,” he whispered. “Four Purple Hearts and I walked away from each of them. Fucking Indians have casinos. Nigger kids got high-top tennis shoes, nine millimeters, and crack franchises. I got a fortune in gold and I get cancer. In prison…”

He smiled luridly. “The medical book says, get this,” he quoted: “‘The dread complication of Paget’s disease is osteosarcoma, which fortunately occurs in fewer than one percent of the patients.’” He sucked on his Pall Mall. “That’s quite a word-dread.”

He bit his cracked lips. “It’s in my rectum now. And my bladder. And my kidneys. When it gets to my lungs… hat roi.”

Hat roi was the Vietnamese phrase for “all gone.”

“Like taking a crap through a turnstile.” Tuna tried to laugh and began coughing again.

His eyes moistened. “We had some great days, Phil. Quang Tri City. That was like a chapter out of the fucking Bible. Nobody even knew. Remember?”

“Yeah, Jimmy.”

Tuna took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll give it to you straight. We left you and Trin…” He spun out the Vietnamese name and the sound twisted on the hot afternoon like a cool shadow. “Hell, we did more than that. We gave them Trin. We knew Pryce was crazy enough to go try to get him out.”

“Pryce didn’t know?” demanded Broker.

“Mama Pryce. You kidding? Him and Trin didn’t know shit.” Tuna chortled. “Trin’s gonna freak…”

Broker couldn’t imagine anything more distant from an angel than this talking corpse. But he’d just sprung Broker from Purgatory and put an avenging sword in his hand. Broker took a clean breath of fire.

Now Tuna looked Nina straight in the eye. “I killed your father. The plan was Cyrus’s. But I pulled the trigger. He was dead before we got to Hue.”

Nina stared at him, stone cold. Her voice buckled down tight. “And the pilots went along with this?”

“They were Air America, Cyrus’s cronies from Laos. Hell, by then they’d flown more dope than the Medellin cartel.”

“Go on,” said Nina. Tip of the iceberg.

“After we hit the bank I changed the plan a little,” said Tuna. He hefted the empty beer bottle and smiled helplessly. Nina averted her face. Broker went into the house and returned with two more bottles. When Tuna had taken a drink, Broker asked his main question: “Why’d you do it, Jimmy?”

Tuna squinted. “Cyrus don’t like losing. Guess I don’t either. It was plunder. We were soldiers. We wanted it, so we took it, goddammit.”

Broker shook his head slowly. So under the pomp and medals, LaPorte was just another asshole. A desire to crank the bracelets down on a retired general took precedence over dreams of gold. Automatically, he started asking questions like a cop.

“So how did you do it physically? Move all that gold out of the bank without drawing attention? There wasn’t time that night.”

Tuna cackled. “Haven’t you figured it out? Wasn’t in the fuckin’ bank. It was crated up on a pallet in ammo boxes in back of the bank. The Commies didn’t even know it was there. That’s why they didn’t raise hell about it. That was the beauty of the thing. Nobody knew it existed.”

“Ammo boxes?” Broker was stymied.

“Look,” said Tuna. “We had it disguised as a pallet of artillery rounds. We’d managed to get it as far as the courtyard of the bank. Then the Commies took Hue in March, remember? It just sat there for a month. All the gear the ARVNs left laying around when they split-who’d notice another pallet of ammo?”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Ask Cyrus, he got onto it. We didn’t steal it. We found it. Spent two years looking for that stuff. He was like a crazy man. That’s how it all started.”

Broker shook his head. “Ten tons of gold just sat there for over a month?”

“It ain’t just gold…”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see,” said Tuna. A spark of dark humor ignited in his tortured eyes.

“What about my dad, Jimmy?” Nina said in a level voice.

Tuna looked at her frankly. “You know about the original mission? How we were going in to bust Trin out of jail?”

Nina nodded.

“After Phil went in by boat, Cyrus personally changed the plan.”

“But he was down the coast off Danang,” said Broker slowly.

“He was, huh. Did you see him there?”

“I heard him on the radio…”

“He was on the radio, all right. In a light observation chopper about a mile from our boat. Cyrus could fly helicopters, you recall. He was gone from the fleet off Danang for a little over an hour, long enough to land and talk to Pryce. Then he popped back. Our guys off Danang thought he was out trying to spot refugees in the water.” Tuna cocked his head. “You remember anything about that minesweep? Like how the only Americans on it were you, me, Pryce, and the helicopter pilots? Like, no other witnesses.”

Quietly Nina said, “How’d it happen?”

“Simple. Cyrus gave Ray new orders. Made it sound like it came down from on high. First go in and sling out the pallet and bring it back to the boat, then pick up Phil and Trin.”

“New orders,” said Nina.

“Yeah, except we never meant to go back.” He paused, trying to wet his parched lips, staring at Nina. “Out of spit,” he said.

“What about the radio call that was in the inquest record? Someone made a net call saying my dad had changed the orders and requesting clarification,” said Nina.

“He was already dead. I made the call to shift the blame on him. It was planned that way. When we got to the bank, in the confusion, he got dumped out the door.”

“At the bank?” asked Broker, leaning forward.

“Yeah. We had two guys on the ground with a big forklift. They maneuvered the pallet in the net, scrambled