He followed Tai into the suite’s main room, where another Asian man sat on a couch, with a laptop on his knee and a telephone headset on his head. He was shoeless, wearing a T-shirt and blue silky gym shorts. “My partner, Phem,” Tai said.
Phem didn’t look up from his laptop but said, “What’s up, eh?”
He said the “eh” perfectly: Canucks, Virgil thought, not Vietnamese.
Tai pointed at a chair, and Virgil settled in and said, “Have you ever heard of the Vietnamese, uh, what would you call it… custom? The Vietnamese custom of putting a lemon in a man’s mouth, as a gag, before they execute him?”
Tai had arranged his face in a smile, which vanished in an instant. “Jesus Christ, no. What’s up with that?”
“You guys are from…”
“ Toronto,” Tai said. “Born and raised.”
“But your parents must have been from Vietnam?”
He nodded. “ Saigon. Got out just before the shit hit the fan. I spoke Vietnamese until I was three, lucky for me. Hard language to learn later on,” he said. “It helps when you’re running around the rim. Phem the same, except he started English a little later.”
“The rim?”
“The Pacific Rim,” Tai said.
“Ah… so… well, heck, I just about used up my questions,” Virgil admitted. “That lemon thing is really bugging me. Have you seen the stories on TV, or the papers, about the guys who were murdered and left on veterans’ memorials?”
“Something about it, but we usually mostly read the financial pages.”
Phem nudged Tai, tapped his computer screen. Tai leaned over to look and said, “No way,” then turned back to Virgil.
“There’s some connection with Vietnam,” Virgil said. “One of the murdered men was going to meetings with a Vietnam vet group, and he’d talked to Sinclair, and I know nothing about Vietnam. Hell, I’ve never been much further away from here than Amarillo, Texas.”
Tai said, “ Amarillo? You ever have the chicken-fried steak at the Holiday Inn?”
“Oh, Lord, I
“That always has some soldiers hanging around?”
“Ah, man, that’s the one…”
They talked about the effects of the chicken-fried steak for a minute, the effects lasting, depending on which direction you were going, at least to Elk City, Oklahoma (east), or Tucumcari, New Mexico (west).
When the talk died down and he couldn’t think of any more sane questions, Virgil stood up, took out a business card, and handed it to Tai. “Well, shoot. If you have the time, ask some of your Vietnamese friends about lemons. Give me a call.”
Tai tilted his head back and forth. “Mm. I think that would be… inappropriate… for people in our position. But I’ll tell you what you could do. You could call a guy named Mr. Hao Nguyen at the Vietnamese embassy in Ottawa, and ask him. Don’t tell him you got his name from me, for Christ’s sakes.”
“Who is he?”
“The resident for the Vietnamese intelligence service,” Tai said. He stepped across to the telephone desk, picked up a small leather case, took out a business card, wrote on the back with a gold pen, and passed it to Virgil. He’d written,
“Really? You know that sort of stuff?” Virgil asked.
“The embassy isn’t that big,” Tai said. “You go through a process of elimination, figuring out who is really doing what. Whoever’s left is the intelligence guy.”
“Really.”
Tai was easing him toward the door. “No big secret. Don’t tell him you talked to me. That would hurt. I would be interested in his reaction.” He giggled. “Really get his knickers in a bunch.”
“I’ll give him a jingle,” Virgil said.
Just before he went through the door, he let Tai see that he was checking the facial scars: “Play a little hockey?”
“High school goalie. Started my last two years,” Tai said.
“A Patrick Roy poster above the bed?”
Tai smiled and shook his head. “There are actually several cities in Canada, Mr. Flowers. Pat Roy was a hell of a goalie, but he played for Montreal. If I’d put up a Pat Roy poster, I’d have been strangled in my sleep. By my brother.”
“Shows you what I know about hockey,” Virgil said as the door closed behind him. The lock went
“And don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” Virgil said to the empty corridor.
As he was going down in the elevator, he realized that Phem had said three words to him: “What’s up, eh?”
Back in the truck, Virgil looked at the business card: Nguyen Van Tai, Bennu Consultants. An address on Merchant Street in Toronto.
DIDN’T WANT TO do it; did it anyway.
Mai Sinclair said she went to a dance studio in the evening.
It was almost evening.
He parked two blocks down from the Sinclairs’ condo, half the truck behind a tree. He could see the front porch clearly. He settled down, took out his cell phone and called the information operator, and got the number for the Vietnamese embassy.
A woman answered, and Virgil said, “Could I speak to Mr. Hao Nguyen? I’m not sure I’m pronouncing that quite the right way.”
“I’ll see if Mr. Nguyen is in.” No problem there.
Nguyen came on a moment later, a deep voice with a heavy Vietnamese accent: “Mr. Nguyen speaking.”
“Mr. Nguyen, my name is Virgil Flowers. I’m a police officer with the state of Minnesota down in the U.S. I was told that you might be able to help me with a question.”
“Well… Officer Flowers… I’m a cultural attache here. I’m not sure that I’m the person…”
“You should know,” Virgil said. “What I need to know is, when the Vietnamese execute a criminal, or whatever, do you guys stick a lemon in his mouth to keep him from protesting?”
“What?”
“Do you stick a lemon…”
“Is this a joke?”
“No, no. We’ve had two murders down here, that I’m investigating, and both of the dead men had lemons stuck in their mouths,” Virgil said. “I was told that Vietnamese executioners sometimes did that, you know, like firing squads, to keep the man quiet.”
“Why would I know something like that? Who told you to call me?”
“Well, I was told that you’re really the resident for Vietnamese intelligence, and that it’s something you would know.”
“What? Intelligence? Who would tell you such a thing?”
“Just a guy I met down here,” Virgil said.
“I don’t understand a single thing you are saying. I am hanging up now. Good-bye.” The phone banged down.
“Sounded like a big ‘Yes’ to me,” Virgil said aloud.
HE KILLED MORE TIME with his camera, and was looking through a long lens at the Sinclair apartment when Mai came out, forty-five minutes later, carrying a gym bag. Watched her walk away.
He let her get another block down the street, then started the truck, eased onto Lincoln. She walked four blocks, then over to Grand, where she became involved in a curious incident.
Two skaters turned the corner, slipping along on their boards, hats backward, long shirts, calf-length baggy
