from the corner of highways 1 and 9. He’d been this way before.
When Trin stopped the van and got out, Broker didn’t know the place. Then he saw the stone griffin. Now it was upright, clean, the centerpiece of a carefully tended garden. Bonsai. The shapes of animals: an elephant, a deer, a lion.
The stone slab still guarded the door. And now the terraces and patios were meticulously landscaped with flowering bushes. The back of the estate was walled off and drenched in hanging vines. Broker couldn’t see the small hill where the graves had been. A crushed gravel driveway meandered through the gardens and a gleaming black Toyota Land Cruiser was parked at the end of it. The letter A was prominent on the license plate.
Trin stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck. He called out in Vietnamese. Broker took his arm to lead him away.
“No,” insisted Trin. “They are home. The car is here.” He yelled again. There was movement on the patio, in the shade of a trellis dripping with flowers. A middle-aged man wearing gray slacks and a white shirt open at the throat stepped from the shadows. He held a newspaper in his hand. He put on sunglasses.
Trin barked at him and his musical native tongue now sounded like wooden blocks being pounded together by an angry child. This time Broker put a firm hand on Trin’s arm and yanked him back.
The man on the patio responded curtly in a voice tired, but husky with authority. A lean woman in a dark pants suit joined him on the patio. She had wide cheeks and broad lips and beautiful jet-black hair. Even at a distance, Broker could feel the strike of her precise eyes. Two little Communist flags.
She made a dismissive, shooing underhanded gesture toward Trin. And went back in the house.
Now infuriated, Trin shouted and whipped a handful of American currency-Broker’s unreturned change from the market-from his pocket and brandished it. The man waved his newspaper in a weary disgusted gesture and retreated inside the house.
Trin pulled away from Broker and started up the driveway. Broker was on him; from the corner of his eyes he saw people coming into the street. Trin yelled one last time, then spit on the money in his hand, and contemptuously flung it at the ground. Crumpled twenty-dollar bills, pocket change, and assorted pocket lint littered the driveway. Spent, he let Broker drag him back to the vehicle.
“Calm down, goddammit,” seethed Broker. Trin sulked behind the wheel, turned the key, and drove quickly from the neighborhood.
“What was that all about?” Broker demanded.
“He’s a pig,” spat Trin. “They’re both pigs. Big-shot Communists. He works in the customs office. She’s the fucking mayor of Dong Ha. When I got out of the camps I discovered that the party had given them my house. I offered to pay if he would allow me to visit the graves.”
“Trin, we have more important things to worry about.” Broker’s nerves were way past anxiety. He found himself riding shotgun with a time bomb of folly. He wondered if any Americans of a diplomatic stripe lived in Hue City, the nearest big town.
“I’ll show him,” muttered Trin with a fatal glow in his hot eyes.
They turned on Highway 1 and drove south, and Broker really began to worry. Could be worse than folly. A lot worse.
61
They were about a mile south of Quang Tri City and Broker realized that he was looking for a bridge. A bridge that Jimmy Tuna had blown up twenty-three years ago. Trin slowed as he came up to another North Vietnamese Arlington on the right side of the highway. He pulled on to the shoulder and put the van in neutral.
Trin addressed his outburst in Dong Ha in roundabout fashion. “Look at this fancy cemetery. And these are only the northerners they couldn’t identify to send home. The losers are not allowed cemeteries. We cannot look for our missing. Some of us cannot even visit our family graves. We all smile and say ‘yes’ but sometimes it gets very hard. Very hard,” he repeated, gripping the steering wheel.
“Trin, Jesus,” Broker ran his hand through his hair, “you have to control yourself.”
“I will,” said Trin, determined. “You saved my life that night in Hue. They were going to put me up against a wall.”
“The militia? Do any of them speak English?” Broker asked gently.
Trin’s eyes flashed. “I’m all right now, Phil. I can do this. I used to do things like this all the time.” He closed his hand around the tiger tooth that hung around his neck and made a fist.
As Trin put the van in gear and pulled back onto the road his expression was carved in black teak. The worst possible thing had happened. He had lost face. In front of a foreigner. And, considering what Trin had been through, Broker could have accepted the mood swings in an ordinary man. But he wasn’t willing to grant Trin the luxury of being ordinary.
But what if he was?
They drove on without speaking. Trin turned left before they came to Tuna’s bridge and drove toward the coast on a gravel road. The cars, trucks, and hordes of motorbikes disappeared and they were in the countryside among more traditional traffic: water buffalo, bicycle, and foot.
The land now conformed more to the pictures in Broker’s memory, except for the concrete struts of electric powerlines and telephone lines strung through the rice paddies. And the red flags hanging from the houses. They passed another cemetery with a bleached crop of stone under a red cement star.
Broker cranked down the window and turned off the air conditioning. “We won’t have AC where we’re going. I better get used to it.” Trin nodded and opened his window.
The air was a swimming pool. The breeze was an itching pepper of red dust. Broker’s determination to wear his sweat like a pro ran out his pores. He reached for an omnipresent liter of bottled water.
But Trin’s spirits revived in the rice fields, away from the noisy highway. He worked a jigsaw on the dusty roads, weaving in and out of plodding farmers and school kids on bikes. Twice they stopped. To snack on bananas and then for some iced Huda beer. But really they paused to watch the traffic behind them. Two hours into the fields and farms Trin decided they were not being followed.
“Interesting,” said Trin, more centered now. “Cyrus can’t afford to trust even one Vietnamese.”
Then he drove to a riverbank and they waited for a small car ferry powered by a sampan with dual out- boards. Slowly they crossed the muddy river. On the other side they waited an hour. When no one else used the ferry they stopped looking over their shoulders and drove straight for the coast.
The country began to change: patchy white sand diluted the green palette of tree line and paddy and then the trees thinned out. The green and white gingham landscape became more solitary as the farmhouses and fields bordered in the reddish earth leaked away. They went by another stark grid of rectangular cement coffins guarded by a truncated pillar.
“Quang Tri,” said Trin absently.
Through a veil of sweat, Broker saw thickets of traditional graves everywhere he looked. Mounded earth. Circular walls. Square walls. Painted, unpainted, weeded, unweeded. Even his unseen destination was a grave, lined with gold bars and Ray Pryce’s bones. He wondered if the heat and the pressure had finally boiled away his rocky North Shore good sense. He was out here all alone in this foreign land with a tormented alcoholic for a guide. Jimmy Tuna’s ghost held him captive and pointed the way. Nina’s life rolled like dice.
He had crossed oceans and continents and now he wondered if he had blundered across the Buddhist frontier into a swarming landscape where the dead still cast shadows.
And Broker, who didn’t dream, except in Vietnam, reminded himself that he didn’t believe in ghosts.
Except in Vietnam.
Come sundown, he mused, the Quang Tri night must draw a crowd; betel nut-chewing ghosts with big, knobby rice-paddy toes who squatted gook-fashion and haggled in their jabber talk; slim, elegant cosmopolitan city ghosts who conversed in French, or swore like legionnaires, and the Japanese and Mongol would-be conquerors and how many million Chinese grunts from the Middle Kingdom who made a one-way trip down here…
And the most recent members of the club, gangs of young rubbernecking American GIs who wandered
