fighter capes from the front of the dusty hooch-shacks that lined the road. Wicker walls. Banana thatch roofs. Fields of rice. Women in straw hats bent to the grain. In the fields, surrounded by ancestral grave mounds, a crude billboard displayed a syringe and warned against AIDS in
“I don’t see men in the fields,” said Nina.
“Men prepare the land, women handle the rice,” said Trin. He gazed at the stooped laborers and said quietly, “Heart to earth, back to sky.”
Mr. Hai drove with his horn, brushing off clouds of bicyclists. They passed a putting motorscooter with wicker cylinders of live pigs trussed on the back, behind the driver.
Broker read aloud a sign in English. “‘Tourist information. Souvenirs’?” He shook his head, then a billboard announcing a new luxury hotel. “English? In Hanoi?”
“The language of commerce,” said Trin philosophically. Nina leaned forward. Trin lowered his hand over the seat, below the driver’s line of sight in the rearview and stayed her question with firm pressure on her forearm. His eyes wandered toward the driver. Nina understood, leaned back. “What is the population of Hanoi?” she asked.
Trin replied in his best tour guide voice, “Three million, about two and a half million more than it can handle.” He smiled. “Curtis LeMay said he was going to bomb Hanoi back to the stone age. He failed. But Hanoi has put itself in the stone age with overdevelopment.”
Nina nodded politely.
The van beeped monotonously as it entered swarms of scooters and bikes and the rickshaws known locally as cyclos. No rules governed the swelling human cataract; everybody preferred the middle of the road, both directions. The open fields disappeared and they were in narrow streets among two-story tenements.
Broker continued to process. He saw his third Marlboro billboard in twenty-four hours: the first had been in English, which is to say American, in Seattle; the second was in Hong Kong, a hundred feet high and splashed with Chinese calligraphy. The one he saw now had the same hard-riding lung cancer cowboy but was in the Romanized Vietnamese alphabet. The letters were familiar, the sounds they made utterly alien. Like anagram puzzles.
Then they plunged into a sea of people on wheels who moved less like traffic than like blood through arteries and capillaries and, sealed in their air-conditioned bubble, they shouldered into the heartbeat of Hanoi.
The hotel was a white stucco jukebox with a spitting lime neon band wrapping its marquee. A grinning youth in a long blue coat and a captain’s hat rushed to open the plate glass door. “Three star, joint venture. The plumbing works. CNN on satellite dish,” recited Trin as they got out of the van.
Hanoi was bells, horns, raw sewage, fish sauce that smelled like bad feminine hygiene, a million charcoal fires, Samsung and Sony signs, and Socialist Realist hammers and sickles bursting in Peter Max colors on billboards. Flimsy new construction competed with rundown French Colonial and sooty aging brick with twist-up pagoda tile roofs. Down the alleys: Confucian shadows.
Too much for jet-lagged senses.
Trin chatted briefly with the driver. The van pulled away. Broker and Nina clung to the reception desk in the hotel lobby. Another slender life raft of English. They handed over their passports. Europeans jammed the lobby; French and German languages predominated. Trin joined them at the desk.
“The driver will pick us up in the morning. We’ll see some sights before we catch the train to Hue,” he said.
“Train?” asked Broker.
“Yes, it’ll give us time to get reacquainted,” said Trin. He advised them to change some dollars for dong, which they did. Broker put a wad of currency in his pocket the size of a small roll of toilet paper.
“Will you join us for a drink, Mister Trin?” he asked formally for the benefit of the hotel staff behind the counter.
“Thank you,” said Trin, bowing slightly.
A grinning bellhop escorted them up the elevator and to adjoining rooms on the third floor. Nina turned pointedly to Broker. “You going to tell him?”
“I’m going to tell him,” said Broker.
Trin listened with a bland smile. His smile was echoed by the hovering bellhop.
She turned to Trin. “You two have some catching up to do. I’m going to take a shower.” She took her bag from the bellhop and entered her room. Broker and Trin went next door to Broker’s room.
They waited while the bellhop opened the drapes and turned on the air conditioner. Broker tipped him with a dollar bill and closed the door behind him.
Trin, watchful, keyed up, hid behind a shrug. “Sorry, Phil, caution is an old habit. Tour guide is my main income when I can get away with it. Explain to Nina that a good guide must be friendly with Americans. But it’s not a good idea to be familiar with them the minute they get off the plane.”
Broker opened the mini icebox and tossed Trin a chilled green can of Tiger beer, then opened one for himself. They sat in chairs across a low table in front of the window. Below them the Kamikaze traffic coursed through an intersection. Children kicked a soccer ball in a park across the street.
For a full minute there was silence as he debated how to start. How to span two decades. Outside, cloud cover cut the sun and the window oscillated between transparent and opaque. Their reflections flirted, barely visible in the glass. Then disappeared.
“So, how is it hearing Vietnamese being spoken again, Phil?” Trin asked slowly.
Broker stared at the trees around the park. They looked like massive Bonsai, foreign and tortured, like they’d been traumatized by bombs. “Not sure yet. Everybody’s so…friendly. All the signs in English. I’d think they’d hate our guts here.”
“Things changed,” said Trin with shrill gunshot abruptness. Then his demeanor softened. “Actually, Americans are new to them here in Hanoi. The only personal contact they had with you-besides the bombs-were the Senator John McCain’s falling by parachute into the local lakes, and Jane Fonda. Down south it will be different, where the Lieutenant Calleys left their mark.” He offered a cigarette and as Broker accepted it he saw that they had a ritual to perform. He drew the chain from around his neck and handed Trin the tiger tooth.
Trin cradled it in his hand. “Thank you. This has been in my family for over four hundred years.” Broker thought, but could not say:
Broker’s old Zippo appeared in Trin’s hand. Broker took the lighter, turned it to read the sentiment engraved on the side and winced.
“You were young,” said Trin. He looked out the window. “I had to bury that for fourteen years.” He smiled bitterly. “I dug it up in eighty-nine when the door opened to the West.”
Broker tapped the Zippo on the table. “How are you doing, Trin?”
Shadows gathered in the lumped scar tissue on Trin’s left cheekbone. “What did the girl mean-you have something to tell me? What am I mixed up in, Phil?” he asked softly.
The Zippo clicked nervously on the table. “You have a family? Kids?” asked Broker.
“My wife formalized our divorce in seventy-five, after Liberation. She stayed with the winning side. She has never let me forget I didn’t. My son and daughter grew up with her, here in Hanoi. Now they’re both in school, in France.” Trin narrowed his eyes. “No family. No kids. Would it make a difference?”
Broker clicked his teeth. “Sorry, but I have to ask…”
Trin smiled sadly. “You’re evaluating me, Phil.”
“Yeah, sorry,” sighed Broker.
“The student has become the teacher?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“What do you do for a living, Phil?”
“I’m a policeman.”
“Really? You hated the army. I’d have thought you were too independent to put up with…structure.”
“An undercover policeman.”
Trin took a long meditative drag on his cigarette. “I see. Are you here working on a case?”
“You could say that.”
