The Price of Blood pb-1

by Chuck Logan

  Broker hefted the heavy bag in his right hand and said, “Let’s walk.” He turned and led then up the limestone ramp and stopped at a parapet that overlooked a strip of grass, the moat, a grassy park, and the street along the river. Some kids kicked a soccer ball directly below them.

  “If I remember right, the Nguyen emperors used to stage exhibition fights in that pagoda,” said Cyrus, leaning his heavy forearms on the parapet. “Tigers against elephants. Fixed fights. They declawed the tigers.” He grinned. “How about we put you and Bevode in there.” He turned to his wife. “You’d probably get off on that.”

  “I don’t particularly like to see men fight, but then, I’ve never really seen them do anything else,” she replied in a bored voice.

  Broker reached into his bag, withdrew the ingot, and slapped it, blazing in the sun, down on the parapet wall.

  “Holy God, son, not out here.” Cyrus covered the bar with his hands and stirred nervously, looking around. The shadow of the huge flag rippled his arid features.

  “Why not? It came from here,” said Broker as he slid the bar back in the bag.

  Cyrus cleared his throat and wrung his hands. “Ah, Lola, why don’t you and Trin take a little walk and let me and Phil talk some business.”

  Trin smiled his exquisite smile. With a cynical dapper bow that was in extreme contrast to his shabby clothing, he extended his hand, guiding the way. Lola grinned and they sauntered off down the wall. Smiles all around. A convention of pirate flags.

  Cyrus wheeled and grabbed Broker by the arm. “I don’t know, son. Trin on the play.”

  “Jimmy found him.”

  “I wouldn’t trust the fucker.” Cyrus squinted. “He has a history of changing sides.”

  Broker roughly removed Cyrus’s hand. “I’ll worry about Trin.”

  “Do that,” said Cyrus. “So, talk.”

  “You give us Nina. Nina stays with Trin, out of the way. I take you to the gold. We get a tenth. Finder’s fee.”

  “The girl will talk,” said Cyrus, shaking his head.

  “Best I can do. Take it or leave it.”

  “How long’s your visa good for, Phil?”

  “What?”

  “Twenty days, thirty at most. Then they’ll throw you out of the country. I’ll still be here.” Cyrus smiled. “And so will Trin.”

  Broker needed some kind of edge. And fast. He leaned over the rampart and called down to the kids playing below, “Hey!”

  They skidded on the grass and looked up. Broker’s hand came out of the sack and heaved the ingot over their heads. It glittered, turning end over end and went slurp in the moat. Bull’s-eye in a puddle of lotus and lily pads.

  “Jesus,” LaPorte gasped.

  Broker stepped in close and snatched Cyrus LaPorte’s left earlobe and twisted. “Jimmy told me in great detail all about that night. Nina’s the only thing keeping you alive, old man.” He released his hold. LaPorte staggered back, massaging his ear.

  “Think about it,” admonished Broker as he brought the piece of ammo box lid out of his bag and slapped it into Cyrus’s stomach with a loud whack. “Meet me again. Tonight. Cafard’s still there, on the river. Seven o’clock.” He grinned. “For old times’ sake.”

  Then he swept up the shopping bag Lola had left and walked away, motioning to Trin to join him.

  “How did it go?” Trin asked.

  “I played crazy. I’m meeting him at Cafard’s at seven for another round. It don’t look good.” As they descended the ramp he opened Lola’s bag. It contained a gray T-shirt with the slogan GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM printed across a red Communist flag.

  “Nice touch,” said Trin, inspecting the shirt. “She’s… big.” He sighed thoughtfully. “Screwing an American woman must be like separating a pile of bacon that’s been left out in the sun.” He curdled his lips. “Sticky.”

  “You must have had a great conversation.”

  Trin nodded. “I told her about my life-long ambition to open a big combination liquor and video store in Los Angeles.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She knows where Nina is. She asked, if she helps us free Nina and runs from Cyrus, will we take care of her. I told her yes. She left a note in the bag on the shirt receipt.”

  “Keep walking,” said Broker.

  66

  “It’sa trap,” said Broker.

  “Of course it’s a trap, but what kind of trap?” said Trin, who had once been a connoisseur of traps and was now a guzzler of Huda beer. He tapped the hurried, scrawled note: “My Thong Kiet Villa, 21 My Thong. Rm 102. I take her a meal, 8 or 9. Try to get guards to break for supper. Get me out of here. When Bevode back. We’re all dead.”

  “We’re” was underlined.

  “I know that street. It’s secluded.”

  The note lay on the cramped table between Broker’s tonic water and Trin’s beer. They’d stopped near the Citadel Gate to eat in a restaurant that looked like a garage with the door pulled up. A tiny fan was screwed to the wall and moved the heat around like a toy airplane propeller.

  A cat so emaciated that it had to be HIV positive dragged a huge, fat, dead rat across the dirty floor. Broker sat up. He had seen that cat and that rat before. Their great, great grandfathers…

  He looked around. “This is the pancake place. We used to come here in seventy-two,” he said.

  Trin smiled. “The same. Still the best banh khoai in Hue.” Broker ate four of the pleasure cakes with rice, chili peppers, garlic, and raw vegetables, some of which he could identify. The peanut sauce he did remember. He pushed his plate away and felt stronger.

  Trin’s second beer arrived and he said, “Since we could both be dead tonight it’s time to tell me everything.” He leaned across the table. “Nina is after more than just having the militia arrest Cyrus for stealing antiquities, correct?”

  Broker nodded. “Remember that cigarette case Ray had? Jimmy says Ray made Cyrus put the order to go after the gold and ditch us in writing. And sign it. Ray put it in the case. Ray’s under the pallet with the orders that can implicate Cyrus. Cyrus still thinks Ray is on the bottom of the ocean.”

  “What fate would Nina like for Cyrus?” Trin asked solemnly.

  The beer talking. Pumping up his grandiose bent. Broker exhaled. “She wants him tried by the U.S. military for murdering her father.”

  “More likely he’ll wind up in a Vietnamese prison.”

  “I think she has her heart set on Leavenworth Penitentiary. Or a firing squad.”

  “That makes it harder. She’s very demanding.” Trin nodded profoundly and his dark eyes were merry with alcohol and mystery. “I like the way this woman thinks. She must be saved.”

  Back on the street the motorscooters darted, edgy in the fierce afternoon heat. Broker looked longingly at a husky, sober traffic cop, neatly turned out in his crisp uniform and whistle. He turned to Trin.

  “Why don’t we go to your place, I’d like to see it.”

  Trin shook his head and stared straight ahead. “It’s nothing, not worth your time.”

  Broker leaned back, uneasy. Translation: There was no apartment in Hue.

  They cruised the back streets and found the address on My Thong Street. It was perfect. Like Lola’s hair. And her offer of help.

  The villa was screened by a six-foot hedge that continued out on either side of the driveway. Peeking up the drive they could see the blue van parked in the yard. The lot next to the villa was under construction and there was room for a vehicle to slip in and hide between the walls of the new building and the hedge.

  “A government-run tourist villa,” said Trin. “Probably one housekeeper on duty. I doubt there are any other guests. Cyrus has probably taken all four rooms.”

  “If there’s a guard, and he’s armed, we have a problem.”

  Trin protested. “A gunshot in Hue? There would suddenly be so many police…No, I think if there’s a guard he’s a sacrificial offering. Expendable.”

  Trin se
emed to know a whole lot all of a sudden. Since his chat with Lola. Broker ran the possibilities. Trin and Lola against the world. Trin, Lola, and Cyrus against him. “What if it’s Bevode Fret?”

  “That man has no finesse. Cyrus wants to bring off something smooth. That man would ruin everything.”

  They drove the streets to eat up time. They paused at the ViaCom Bank and inspected the cement apron in the back where the pallet of gold had sat from March 19, when the Communists took the city, until Jimmy Tuna and Ray Pryce choppered in on April 30, 1975.

  The former MACV compound, where Trin had been held prisoner, was two blocks away. Painted smartly in government brown it was now a military hotel. Back on Le Loi, they stopped so Broker could confirm the location of the new La Cafard. Now La Cafard floated, two brightly lit donuts connected by planks and gangways. Sampans docked next to it.

  They returned to the guest house and walked out on the broad veranda that overlooked the Perfume River. Trin swung his beer and pointed below them. “This used to be corps headquarters. That’s the tennis court where General Troung used to play with Westmoreland.”

  Broker was now seriously worried about Trin’s alcohol intake as well as his reliability. His face had reddened to a permanent pepper flush a few shades hotter than the huge Communist flag that tossed in the breeze across the river. The flag kept time to a disco on Le Loi Street that blared “Hotel California” in the foundry heat. Trin grinned and toasted him with his beer can.

  What if Trin was dying to stir his crank in a pile of round-eyed bacon grease? Or maybe he wanted to get all the concerned Americans in one place and then let the militia shoot them all on the beach. It was possible that he really wanted to open a liquor store in California…

  Broker’s head hurt. “It’s a trap,” he repeated.

  “For sure. That’s given. They know we’re at the same game,” Trin said jovially. “We’re in Vietnam, where traps were invented.” He waved the beer can dramatically. “The question is what kind of a trap and is it better than our trap.”

  “They could jump us when we go for Nina-”

  “That would still leave the messy business of getting us to talk. We might stand up under torture,” Trin said in a detached voice. “Or die under it. That’s not a lock. Cyrus used to like things sewn up. No. Lola is the key. If she helps us get Nina out and wants to come with us…We could show her the gold in gratitude. Then use her to signal them in. If she wants to go with us, then we’ll know!” Trin jabbed his index finger oratorically in the air. “Better for us. It saves us the trouble of having to reestablish contact after we get Nina.”

  “I forgot what a devious guy you are,” said Broker.

  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. Cafard was an expression the French had used to convey being far from home in all this heat. The Blues.

  The first poster advertised The Quiet American with Audie Murphy. Then came Marlon Brando in The Ugly American. The third had John Wayne with his love handles on parade in the Green Berets.

  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.

  Where was Bevode?

  “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?”