player. The rest of Trin’s vets still had not returned with the truck.
Trin sped down the sandy track looking out at the dunes. He grumbled, “I knew we should have buried some weapons out there, in Vietnam it just makes sense to have some weapons buried out there…”
Then Trin launched into an impromptu discussion of Trung Si’s curse. Dramatically, he thrust the tiger tooth under Broker’s nose. “It’s like your native Indians. Except with us it’s the Chams. In the fifteenth century we conquered and annihilated them, our Manifest Destiny. The March to the South.
“One of my ancestors rode an elephant through the Emperor’s Gate in the Hai Van Pass on that invasion. He brought this tooth back among his booty. The gold in Vietnam was mined in Champa, south of Danang. Still is. So if you find gold it’s probably Cham gold. Therefore cursed with their blood.”
Broker shrugged, he was way past curses. And things like reasonable doubt and probable cause, not to mention consequences. They were inappropriate Western concepts anyway. His dad always said he didn’t have the sense that God gave a goose, so he wasn’t particularly afraid. He liked the…velocity.
Trin, who probably had acquired the wisdom in middle age to be afraid and who had probably waltzed, a few times, with little green men on various bar counters, hunched over with his eyes level with the top of the wheel like a ninth-grader, elbows raised and driving sixty, sometimes seventy, miles an hour, sending bicycles and water buffaloes scurrying toward the ditch.
They sped through Quang Tri City. In the market, the sun ricocheted off a thousand conical straw hats and pounded platinum knitting needles into the raw sun spots Broker had on loan for eyes. He had never been so tired in his whole life. He had ten tons of gold on one shoulder and Nina Pryce’s life on the other.
Trin looked just as crushed and Broker hoped he was carrying the same load but he wasn’t 100 percent sure. Not even close. And for today’s work they needed 120 percent.
Trin skidded onto Highway 1 and aimed the van south, toward Hue City, down the center of the road, and stepped on the gas. He did not budge for anything on wheels.
“You got any speed?” asked Broker.
“All out,” said Trin.
They turned and grinned at each other. They had always been unsuited for ordinary life. They were probably rushing headlong toward doom.
They were probably happy.
Broker must have fallen asleep with his eyes wide open because suddenly a huge Tiger Beer billboard leaped in the windshield and Trin swerved left. Vaguely he noticed the dusty russet limestone walls of the Imperial Citadel rise across a muddy lotus-choked moat. Different now, masked by new houses.
Hue. The Nguyen emperors had made it their Imperial capital for a hundred and fifty years. Had to be here to understand the romance of the city and the war. A feudal castle, the hills upriver studded with Imperial tombs.
The Perfume River divided the town. The citadel complex took up the left bank; moated and surrounded by thick ramparts it contained the Forbidden City, the palaces and offices of the mandarins. Across the river, the right bank housed the Colonial facade of the old French administration, universities, and medical schools. A college town, a cultural icon: everyone had thought that the city was untouchable. In the late afternoons flocks of schoolgirls in their flowing white au dais rode their bicycles down Le Loi Street past the old French buildings. In 1968 the Communists chose it for their most dramatic battleground: Tet.
Broker blinked back the reverie when he saw a red flag the size of a fucking basketball court flutter from the citadel’s famous flag tower.
Trin’s battalion died on that tower during Tet, left behind to burn in the bombs. That’s when Trin quit the revolution. And when he discovered that the Communists had rounded up three thousand of Hue’s intellectuals and officials, and their families, including his own father and mother, and marched them into the jungle. Beat them to death with shovels after forcing them to dig their own graves.
My Lai had been worth a Pulitzer. The Hue massacre never made the front pages.
It was 11:30 A.M.
Trin turned again. An exuberant cluster of hammers and sickles burst on another billboard. Happy Worker, Happy Soldier, Happy Student, Happy Farmer. Oh boy.
They roared across the bridge toward the right bank. Trin pointed to a floating restaurant. “Cafard,” he said. Their old hangout. Used to be on the shore. Now on the water. Where Broker hid in the cellar. They ran the stoplight on the other side, whipped another right onto Le Loi Street. Trin scattered bicycles and leaned on his horn. Little pops of recognition struggled in the swampy fatigue behind Broker’s eyes. Colonial gingerbread along river- front. The grassy promenade along the river. A monument to Annamite troops who served in World War I. That’s where he and Trin had hid on that rainy night twenty years ago and took their swim in the river. Now stands were set up and women were selling stuffed animals, videos, postcards.
They pulled through a gate and stopped amid the carefully tended gardens of a Colonial monstrosity. Trin smiled. “Five Le Loi. The last stop on Jimmy Tuna’s itinerary. C’mon.”
Smiling, they confirmed reservations. Broker handed over his passport and for fifty bucks, U.S., Trin got it right back. No sense letting the cops know they were in town. They were led to the single round room on the third floor. Broker tipped the bellboy who had nothing to carry and sat on the bed and stared at the phone. It was 11:49.
His numb filthy fingers pawed his wallet from his jeans and smeared the snowy white card Lola LaPorte had given him in New Orleans a million years ago. He dialed the switchboard at the Century Hotel. Trin opened the icebox and found it stocked with Huda beers. He tossed one to Broker.
“Connect me to the Imperial Room,” said Broker.
He opened the can and took a swig and didn’t miss a beat when the cool, husky voice of Lola LaPorte came on the line like magic.
“Hi, Morticia, kiss any alligators lately?”
“It’s him,” she said, aside. Then, directly into the receiver, “Where are you?”
“Wherever it is it’s hotter’n shit and they go in for really big red flags with yellow stars.”
“I’m looking at the same flag.” She paused. “Broker, we had to detain Nina. We didn’t know what you were up to. She’s…all right.”
“Sure she is.”
“Okay. Bevode got carried away as usual. Cyrus has apologized to her and even discussed plastic surgery. She’s here. Okay.”
“At the hotel?”
“In Hue.”
“Where’s Bevode?”
“Cyrus thought it would be a good idea to keep you and him separated so he sent him…away. On the boat. You’ll be dealing with us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you have anything to tell us?” She sounded like she was holding her breath.
“Tell Cyrus I got something with sand on it, not salt water.”
“He says he found it,” she said, offstage again. Her voice was like being on the beach again, Pandora’s box springing open: imprisoned Cham curses fluttering out like monarch butterflies.
Cyrus LaPorte came on the line, breathless with excitement. “Just what have you got?”
“Ming Mang’s mad money, in a hole in the sand on the beach,” said Broker.
“How?” Incredulous.
“Easy, we followed the map.”
“What map?”
“The one we got from Jimmy, dummy,” said Broker.
“You didn’t need to kill those boys,” Cyrus said hotly. “I don’t buy this story the Wisconsin cops put out. Jimmy Tuna in his last gasp nails two men.”
Broker yawned. “Fuck you, Cyrus. You should have stayed home.”
“He’s dead, Jimmy, the cancer got him,” said Cyrus.
“Yeah, well. Look, we have to work out some ground rules,” said Broker. “I want to see Nina, then you can have a look.”
“When?”
