The Price of Blood

Formed in Indian file, they went off the track and snaked through the dunes, toward the sea. Trin and Trung Si were in the lead. Then five hard-faced middle-aged men in softly straining artificial limbs. Broker saw at least one empty sleeve among them. They all carried primitive weapons: machetes, rice sickles, butcher knives. Despite their handicaps they moved with precision, instinctively keeping an interval. Stopping every few steps to listen. Broker pushed Lola in front of him as he and Nina fell into the rhythm of the night discipline.

As they neared the beach they halted at the clack of bamboo. Another paraplegic hobbled from the shadows. He conversed tensely with Trin and Trung Si. When Nina started to ask a question Broker warned her to be silent. The stony intonation of Trin’s whispers informed him that, for better or worse, this was now a Vietnamese show.

Slowly they approached the house on the slope over the beach. The cripples sprawled carefully in the cover of the dunes while Trung Si hopped spry and silent on his crutch to a covering position and leaned over his rifle. Trin crept down to the house.

Five tense minutes passed. Then a low whistle sounded from the beach. Trung Si swung up on his crutch and waved his rifle. The cripples pushed themselves up and went down on line. Broker and Nina followed.

The place had been trashed. Shards of crockery and utensils were strewn in the trampled vegetable garden. Trin and his men gathered at the flagpole next to the porch.

Nina’s fingers spasmed on Broker’s biceps. Her nails broke the skin.

In the moonlight they could make out the legless mass of the flute player’s body. Trin held up a fuel oil lantern and Trung Si lit the wick. The soft yellow light revealed that the dead man’s neck was grotesquely stretched in a noose knotted in the flagpole lanyard. A chopstick had been pounded almost out of sight into his left ear.

“Meeow.” A low growl thickened the inflection of the voices around the flagpole. Smoldering dark eyes swung toward the three white people in the yard. Lola shied back, straining against the tape on her wrists. Nina grabbed her by the hair and shoved her forward and forced her to her knees in front of the flagpole.

Flies stormed around Lola’s face and she averted her head from the barnyard stench. Trung Si swore. They saw that the Viet Cong flag had been taken down. It lay in the dirt, filled with feces. More flies clustered in black twitching furrows on the dead man’s body. Among the crawling insects they saw patches of skin upbraided, hanging in flaps.

One of the vets began brushing the flies away. Another steadied the corpse while another cripple cut the rope with a machete. Slowly they lowered the body to the earth.

Broker exhaled. Whipped and lynched. You find gold, you pay in blood. The flute player and Billie Holiday could have played a duet.

Trung Si tapped Broker on the shoulder and pointed out to sea. At first Broker thought he was pointing at the stars and then he picked out the faint regular line of electric lights hugging the horizon. A boat lay off the coast.

Then Trung Si spoke to Trin and Trin swore vehemently in his native tongue. Not in the heat of anger, but out of something much deeper and deliberate and sinister.

“That man. Trung Si was on his way back from hiding our boat. He saw them leave. Six white men in a power-boat. They carried AR-15s. That man had a whip.”

Then he moved in a certain scary way and Broker, who believed that Vietnamese all hid deadly stingers under their friendly smiles, braced himself.

The gravity knife appeared in his hand and the long blade pressed against Lola’s cheek, snaked it up under her gag, and cut it. He ripped the tape from Lola’s face.

“Jesus Christ,” gasped Lola. “Do something about the smell.”

“Lying bitch!” Trin slapped her face. Then he placed his tennis shoe in her back and pushed her off her knees, face forward into the reeking flag. Her neat white outfit wasn’t white anymore.

Trin squatted and yanked Lola’s hair, bringing her face up level with his. “Talk. Fast.”

Lola struggled to her knees and shook off Trin’s hand with an arrogant toss of her head. She stared at the murderous circle of faces that ringed her.

“I don’t know.”

“How’d they find this place?” demanded Broker.

Lola, finding herself in close proximity to excrement and the cloying bronze-sweetness of human blood, screamed it this time, “I don’t know!”

An angry debate erupted among the vets in Vietnamese. Trung Si shouted at Trin. Trin shouted back. They had formed a circle around Lola.

Nina shivered through another spasm of delayed shock, clinging involuntarily to Broker’s arm. In a hoarse whisper, she said, “Something’s wrong.”

Broker nodded. They were in the dark, outside the circle. There were times when body language said it all. They overheard Trin seethe at Lola in English, “People are dead, that changes things.”

Broker and Nina shifted uneasily.

Trin issued crisp orders in Vietnamese. Two of the vets pulled Lola away. Trin turned to Broker and Nina. “We have to get out of here.”

“Your turn to talk,” Broker said pointedly to Trin.

He regarded him through lidded eyes. “You wanted to lure them in. I told her that if she’d give us Nina back, we’d bring her along and show her where it is. She didn’t say anything about this.” He curled his lips at the carnage surrounding them. His face was utterly cold and foreign. He’d locked them out.

Nina and Broker remained silent while the vets tended to their dead comrade. The lantern light caught on a now familiar glint. His mouth had been stuffed with gold rings. Several of the glittering circles dropped from his lips like round, dead words.

With peasant practicality the vets held the body upside down and shook it gently, cleaning the gold from his mouth.

“This is my fault. I let them get a step ahead of us,” said Trin slowly.

Across the yard Trung Si was talking in a steady intense voice to his housemates.

“It’s time to wake up that militia post,” said Broker.

Trin nodded. “Trung Si will take the van. We’ll go ahead and wait near the site. On foot. We can’t take the truck, we’d need the lights and lights would give us away.” Trin went into the house as they talked. One of the vets stuffed items in two roomy backpacks. Broker saw the little glass vial, undisturbed, on the shelf. He put it in his pocket.

Trin slung one of the packs to his back. He tapped Broker on the arm and pointed to the other one. Broker put it on.

“Food. Water,” said Trin.

“We need weapons,” said Nina.

Trin did not respond. He held Trung Si’s deer rifle, the butt resting on his hip. He made hurry-up motions with his free hand. Just before they extinguished the lantern, he turned to Broker. He did not make eye contact.

“Lola has a radio to direct them in.”

“What?”

“In her purse. I’m sorry, Phil.” Trin pulled his shirt aside and drew a shiny 9mm pistol. So Virgil had had a gun after all. “Do as I say and it will turn out all right.”

Broker glanced out to the sea, to the faint running lights on the vessel. The lights looked back like multiple all-knowing eyes. He sagged. He had violated Trin’s basic rule…

He had trusted Trin.

They left Trung Si at the van. Trin removed Lola’s purse from the back. Slowly Trung Si turned the vehicle around and drove away with the lights out. Broker and Nina filed off through the dunes. Trin walked behind them, the pistol hanging in his hand.

70

The march through the dunes took forever. They had to stop frequently. Artificial legs weren’t meant to go