Trin collapsed back on a lawn chair and took a long swig of beer. “You have no idea,” he sighed.
“Cool it on the booze.”
“It’s just beer. I know what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure I know what you’re doing.”
“Trin’s laugh was intricate with fascination. “Imagine that we’re all jumping off a balcony over a swimming pool. We all have ropes around our necks. All the ropes are different lengths. Some of us will splash harmlessly into the water. Some of us will hang. We won’t know until we take the dive.” Trin smiled and drained his beer.
Broker wished he had Ed Ryan, J.T. Merryweather, and an ATF entry team.
But he didn’t.
He had Trin.
Across the street, “Hotel California” started to play again.
They went into the room and Trin called the desk and requested a six o’clock wake-up call. They were asleep the minute their heads hit the pillows.
At six the telephone woke them. Broker, cinder-eyed, stumbled to the bathroom and climbed in the tub and sprayed away grime with tepid water from the hand-held shower. He rubbed his chin whiskers. No shaving kit. He put on the T-shirt Lola had given him at the citadel. It was the only article of clean clothing in sight. He was glad for his short hair, which he combed with his fingers.
At six-thirty they split up. Trin took the van to scout the villa again during Broker’s meeting with LaPorte. He’d pick Broker up in front of the restaurant at eight sharp. Then they’d hit the villa.
Broker joined the strollers on Le Loi. A cyclo driver rose lizard-like from his cab and approached. “Buddha cigarette?” he offered in a casual voice.
“Didi mau-fuck off,” said Broker. Apparently smoking grass had survived the revolution. The disco across the street was still playing the same damn song. Maybe it was the new Communist anthem. He hailed a cyclo. The driver nodded when he said La Cafard and they set off.
Hue was still a city of bicycles and some of the old Le Loi ambience lingered; except, now, the clouds of female students on their bikes were dingy from exhaust from all the motorbikes. Now the bursts of flowering frangipani, flamboyants, and the tall old tamarinds squeezed between the new billboards. The same bleached Colonial buildings lined the avenue like the mustard and ivory bones of France and somewhere in the city, according to Trin, the last Vietnamese mandarin sat in the dark behind shuttered windows and chain-smoked and guarded his dusty Imperial mementos.
The cyclo driver’s sturdy legs propelled Broker beneath gaudy neon tiaras strung from light poles. Across the river, the ramparts of the flag tower were decked in more lights that were layered like a wedding cake. The lights popped like flash cubes for the eyes and blunted the dragon teeth in the sunset forming over the Annamite Mountains.
Rock and roll pumped from the cafes and a group of teenage girls strutted to the beat in designer jeans. Some of them wore red pins with little yellow stars.
The rosy early evening air was sticky as cotton candy and Hue swung its ass in American denim and sweated to American music and Broker, way past irony, stared straight ahead as he trundled down the midway of Coney Island Communism.
67
Cyrus Laporte waited on the gangplank to LA Cafard dressed in a beige desert shirt, khakis, and Teva sandals over cotton socks. He smelled of talc and shaving lotion and he had the red bandanna tied around his tanned throat. He was smiling. Lola was not with him.
“So what’s going to be, another tantrum. Or can we talk?” asked Cyrus.
“Talk,” said Broker. His shoulders slumped. He didn’t have to act exhausted.
“Good. Let’s have a drink at the bar,” said Cyrus. “They resurrected some of the old decor as part of the open door policy.” They both pulled up stools. “Try a Huda beer, they bottle it here in town,” he said.
Behind the bar three mildewed movie posters were framed under glass. They harkened back to the war, when the old restaurant had been on the riverbank and was an American haunt.
The first poster advertised
Cyrus raised his glass to the posters and proposed an old toast: “From quiet to ugly to stupid in one generation.” He took a sip of beer and glanced around. “Remember how Gaston, the old proprietor, liked the movies. He used to say ‘America is a movie the rest of the world watches in the dark.’” Cyrus LaPorte smiled. “Not anymore.”
Broker stared into his glass of beer. They were getting ready to kill him, and Trin and Nina. Maybe Lola was going to help. Maybe she was in harm’s way herself. Maybe Trin was being bought off by Cyrus and Lola. Trin was right about one thing: They all had ropes around their necks. Apparently LaPorte thought he had the longest rope, so he was indulging his charming raconteur side.
“How did you get onto this stuff? Jimmy wouldn’t say,” Broker asked finally.
“Pure accident,” said Cyrus. “In seventy-three an ARVN captain brought me a gold ingot he’d found in the river bed near the mouth of the Perfume. He wanted help getting his family to the States.
“We spent the next year combing the river location that captain gave me, just Jimmy and I. And we found it. Maybe when the French looted the citadel one ship sunk, got buried when the river changed course. Or maybe the Vietnamese had hidden it. Who knows?
“We dug it out and crated it, box by box. Bringing in a boat would involve other people. But I could get a helicopter. With Jimmy, and a couple of Air America guys I trusted, I was going to sling it out. Hide it in Laos. Then activity in the sector picked up. We had to move it. We snuck it into Hue. Then we disguised it as an ammo pallet. I was in Danang arranging for the helicopter when the Commies came down and took the city.”
LaPorte pursed his lips. “So I was only taking back what was mine by right of discovery. On hindsight, my method was regrettable.”
Perhaps he meant that as an apology. Broker used it as a cue. He let his shoulders sag, ground his teeth, and gave in.
“Can you keep Bevode under control?”
Cyrus toyed with his glass. “Can you keep Nina Pryce quiet?”
The questions passed each other in the soft evening air. Unanswered. LaPorte said, “Meet me at seven in the morning, in front of the Century Hotel. I’ll be sitting there alone, in the car with Nina. She gets out. You get in.”
“A trade,” said Broker.
“That way if she talks-”
“If she doesn’t, what happens to me?”
“That depends. The girl is a problem. But maybe we can work it out. Cheer up. You might wind up liking hanging out with us.”
They ordered coffee.
“So how’d Jimmy do it?” asked Cyrus.
Broker shrugged. “The chopper set down on the coast and they stashed the load in a ravine, blew a small hillside to cover it, and took off again.”
Cyrus’s pale ice eyes did not waver. He didn’t care. Nothing mattered except getting closer to the gold.
“It’s worth a lot more than its weight, isn’t it?” said Broker.
LaPorte nodded. “You have no idea. There are Cham artifacts mixed in with the gold that are a thousand years old. They’re priceless. The trick is to keep it off the market, release it bit by bit to museums all over the world. That’s how you make the money. What about the bars I found in the water?”
