Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (Cape Island Mystery)

by Randall Peffer

  Finally he clicks it off. “You’re shitting me, right? This is the wrong tape? Gibberish.”

  “No. Prem. He is telling everything. He saw Nikki go into Alby’s. Heard them fight. Heard Alby call out hurt. Saw Nikki run away and the fire.”

  “Who is this Nikki? Where is she now?”

  Michael pulls a pink promotional flier for the Follies from his brief case. It has a picture of Tuki, Silver, and Nikki leaning back to back in evening dresses, flashing vampy, come-hither looks. He takes a pen and circles Nikki’s face. “She left P-town about a week ago with her boyfriend, a bartender from the Follies named Duke. They were in a big hurry. We think they were heading for San Francisco.”

  The detective takes a look. Nods like he remembers her from the interviews that went down after the fire and murder. Fingers the tape player in his hand.

  “This whole thing is in Thai?”

  “You want me to translate?”

  Votolatto rubs his temples with the thumb and index finger of both hands. “I hear my boat calling me! Get outta here. Go home, will you?”

  FIFTY-THREE

  His father is lying back down on the floor of the wheelhouse in the Rosa Lee. His head and torso are inside a cabinet under the steering wheel. He growls as he rips out a bundle of corroded wiring to the engine instruments. “Tommy?”

  “No, it’s Mo, Dad.”

  After the loneliest Saturday night he can remember—no Fil, no Tuki, suffocating heat and humidity, not much sleep—he has taken the detective’s advice. He has come home. Home to New Bedford. New England’s premier fishing port. A Portuguese colony on the fringe of America. He thinks that maybe, just possibly, he will find some answers here.

  “Cristo, the prodigal son. Perry Mason. I thought you were my brother.” The fisherman wiggles out from inside the cabinet, sits up. He is a man of spit and sinew with piercing black eyes. The Sox T-shirt and jeans give his taut body something of a James Dean look. Longish salt-and-pepper hair shags a bit over his ears. It takes his eyes a minute or two to adjust to the sunlight in the wheelhouse. “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So to what do I owe the pleasure of seeing the distinguished young attorney aboard my humble barco de peixe? You ready to come back out fishing?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “I heard about your problems.”

  “Shit.”

  “Sorry, pal. Nu Bej is a pretty small town. Word travels fast when a nice Portagee boy gets cold feet on the eve of his wedding.”

  “I need to talk about Vietnam.”

  “Because of that flit client of yours?”

  “Hey!” He shoots his father a hard look. “Don’t be like that! I came here for help, okay?”

  Caesar Decastro gets to his feet. He sits down in one of the two swiveling captain’s chairs that look out from the wheelhouse. “Take a load off.”

  Michael drops into the other chair. “I’m all screwed up.”

  “You want to level with me? You got a thing for this drag queen client of yours?”

  “It’s not what you think. She’s from Vietnam. Her father was an American Marine. She is one of the boat people.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. I think about Vietnam a lot these days.”

  “You were never there. You weren’t even born when—”

  “But you were there.”

  His father’s shoulders stiffen. “Yeah, so? You hear me bragging about it? You ever see me marching in any parades, hanging out at the Legion?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you got going between you and this client of yours, but leave me out of it. I’ve heard enough, buddy boy. You want to wreck your life and Filipa’s, too? You ever think what she must be going through right now? You ever—

  He squeezes his eyes shut. “Stop! Just stop it, will you? Come on. Can we please talk without you getting up in my face and judging? I’m in trouble here!”

  The older man rubs his chin, stares out through the windows at the harbor. Streaks of red are rising on the sides of his neck. He grabs a pack of Merits sitting beside the compass, taps out a cigarette, lights it with a silver Zippo. His hand is a little shaky.

  “Dad?”

  “Look, Mo, I’ve told you all of my stories of ‘Nam a hundred times over. I didn’t massacre anyone. I got no secrets. I was just a dumb kid in a soldier suit they told to watch out for our boys on liberty. I was an MP, for Christ’s sake. In Saigon. And not for long. I never got up country or into the delta. Worst fight I witnessed was when a couple of drunk Marines thought they could whip a whole bar full of grunts.”

  “But you were there. You saw things.”

  His father takes a long drag, flicks the cigarette out the open door into the harbor. He squints his eyes and stares at Michael, trying to get a handle on the source of his son’s uneasiness. And his own. “Look, I’m going to tell you the honest-to-god truth for once, okay, pal? ‘Nam wasn’t like those half-assed adventure stories I used to tell you when you were a kid. Not like the pictures you liked to look at in my photo albums. All those amazing temples, wise-looking monks with their shaved heads and orange robes. Not like those pictures of buddies hanging out shooting hoops in the sun on a ball court, or chilling with a cooler of brews on a beach. Smiling old men on bicycle rickshaws. Those pictures are a load of crap. Window dressing. Vietnam was one big cluster fuck from start to finish, Mo. You never knew what was going on there. Like nobody was accountable!”

  His father’s words come with such force that Michael squirms in his seat and wonders where this raw anger is coming from. Suddenly, he is sorry that he has come here, that he has started something that he cannot control. But he has to ask things. He has his questions. They have been burning a hole in the back of his head since he was just a boy. And now he cannot ignore them any longer.

  “So why do you keep those photo albums? Why did you tell me about what a sweet place it was? About how, in a way, it reminded you of the old country, Portugal. What great people, what amazing people, you used to say. So loving and carefree. So simple. Why?” His voice is starting to tremble.

  Caesar turns his head away, looks out at the lumpers toting boxes of fish off another trawler at the dock, loading them into a box truck. “I don’t know. Because I’m a Portagee, Mo. Because Portagees are dreamers. I need to tell myself that it was worth going over there. Worth giving up two years of my time on Earth to the army. Worth missing the beginning of my only son’s life. Worth all the trouble for our country. For everyone. Like your mother. I went over there and left her pregnant. And, damn me to hell, I knew. I left her without money or a wedding ring … any kind of support. My god, she waited for me. How the hell do you explain that?”

  “She’s a great lady.”

  “You got that right! And I was a stupid little shit, who thought he was a badass. Christ, I enlisted. I wanted to go. Join the army and see the world.”

  He looks at his father’s face. It seems gaunt, almost bone. And he feels a question that he has been avoiding most of his life tearing at his vocal cords.

  “I looked at those pictures in the album so many times. There was a picture of a girl dancing on a bar in a G-string. And two other pictures of her. One in a red dress standing in some kind of native boat, like a big canoe, waving. I remember how dark the sky looked. The other picture she was swinging in a hammock in a room somewhere. She had on a Red Sox shirt. There was a little kid with curly hair in her arms. They were stuck behind some other pictures. They fell out one time. And I found them. She was Vietnamese. I always wondered … Did you have a girl over there?”

  For about thirty seconds his father does not answer. It is so quiet on the boat, you can hear gusts of wind whistling through the antennas overhead. When he speaks again there is a torn note in his voice.

  “Her name was Meng. She was one of the Hmong people, the Montagnards. A refugee from the fighting in the hill country, a nursery school teacher. She had a place in Ch
olon. Up the Ben Nghe Channel. Chinatown.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  It is almost dark. The mist is starting to rise over the water. She is standing in a narrow wooden boat, nose to the landing on the river. The current sweeps rafts of flowering white water hyacinths downstream along with the muddy flood of the monsoon; egrets hitch rides on bits of broken houses, abandoned rice barges, the occasional body. Everything flows away to the South China Sea. The boatman sits in the stern in black pajamas, a paddle across his lap, staring at him with unmasked resentment.

  “Come, la. I take you home now,” she says. He cannot remember how long he sat in the bar watching her dance to the ballads of Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, talkin’ ‘bout my girl. But he feels drunk now. His service shirt is unbuttoned to the waist, the MP chevron on his sleeve is stained with lipstick, rice whiskey, and Budweiser. There is a green beret stuffed in his hip pocket, a .45 snapped into the black holster on his hip.

  He knows going into the boat is a mistake. There is a reason the army has guards posted along the roads to Cholon. On the bridges over the klongs, too. Navy swift boats patrol the waterways. Cholon is teaming with people, rats, vice, crime—off limits to GIs. But he knows. He has heard. This is how they go. His brothers … with their women. By boat, in the dark, up the Ben Nghe Channel to another world, away from the killing, the savagery, the generals. To Chinatown. To drown in the wet, golden loins of Asia for a while.

  She stretches out her arm, beckons him to the boat. He sees every inch of her body calling to him from beneath that red dress. It is nothing more than the thinnest veil. A film, really.

  “This is bad,” he says. “Are you sure …”

  “Quiet,” she says.

  The boatman is nervous. He says the army shoots the ferrymen sometimes.

  His eyes dart around, expecting to see the flash of a gun any second, the ambush beginning.

  “Come.” She extends her hand to him again.

  In the distance he hears a harmonica whining, Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone.” The music seems to be rising from the river. Coming closer. Suddenly a swift boat growls out of the gathering mist and darkness from downstream, its search light flicking along the river banks.

  She pulls him into the boat, onto its damp floor, her body molding to his. The .45 is in his right hand when the search light flashes overhead, then is gone with the last strains of Dylan.

  “Fucking hell,” says a faint voice on the swift boat. Who knows why.

  The ferryman dips his paddle, backs his boat out from the landing. The current catches the craft and rushes it downstream. Coppery lights of charcoal cooking fires glow like fallen flares up and down the shore, wisps of smoke vanish into the violet sky of the coming night.

  “Do you love me?” she asks. She says a name. It sounds like his father’s. And his own.

  The noise and energy of Cholon at night are tremendous. Even behind the concrete walls of this one-room apartment, he can picture everything: Throngs crowding in and out of the glow of kerosene lamps hanging over the tables of the night market vendors, the clucking shouts of auctioneers, the tables displaying sunglasses, counterfeit watches, tubs of steaming shrimp, live fish swimming in pickle jars. Beneath the shrill whistling of caged birds, music like the howling of cats echoes from tin ny speakers. An ancient man with a long, stingy beard is on his knees in the street, dissecting a six-foot-long monitor lizard for a crowd shouting at him prices they will pay for the liver, the gall, the heart, the testes. The scents of charcoal braziers, curry, ginger, peppers, roasting peanuts, and frying fish filter through the wooden slats of the window shutters. The world is panting, sweating, selling its soul beyond these walls. Yet knows nothing of him in here.

  “Everything be okay. Rest now.” She lights a candle and a joss stick with a match. The room begins to glow. “You lie down.” She nods to the large hammock hanging across the corner of the room from eyebolts sunk into the dirty green walls. She changes into a red satin robe.

  The hammock is almost the only thing in the room except for a clothesline, a pole fan, a dresser with a carving of a Buddha with big breasts, a songbird in a wooden cage, and a console TV/stereo. In the center of the room is a Formica table with folding chairs. A dha with a dark jade handle lies on a counter by the small kitchen sink. On the walls are the faces of children. Scores of them—Vietnamese children, white children, black children … beautiful children with huge, bright eyes. They are photos clipped from magazines, some snapshots too, taped to the plaster. He keeps thinking that this must all be a figment of his imagination. He is passed-out drunk. Dreaming. And maybe he is going to die here.

  She puts her hands softly on his chest, slides his unbuttoned khaki shirt off his shoulders, presses him down into the hammock until he is sitting back, reclining. Half in, half out. Her legs straddle his knees.

  He is burying his face in the black silk of her long hair when a back door to the room bursts open.

  In an instant he has his .45 drawn, pointing.

  She is off him like an explosion. “No shoot!”

  Standing in the shadows is a child. Two or maybe a little older. A nest of black curls frames its beaming face. She scoops it into her arms, but its eyes never leave him.

  He pops the clip out of his weapon. Then, for some reason he cannot understand, he rolls both pieces into his stinking khaki shirt and hugs the bundle to his chest.

  “This is Dung,” she says. “Dung, say hello to Michael.”

  Snap out of it, he thinks. Wake up, brother!

  FIFTY-FIVE

  “I’m not proud of it. She was just a kid. So was I. It was a different time. The world felt like it was spinning out of control. We thought any day we would be sitting in a bar or walking down the street and a car bomb or a sniper would take us out. It happened to people all the time. We wanted to live a little before we died. Can you understand that?”

  Michael pictures again the coppery lights of charcoal cooking fires, fallen flares up and down the dark shore of the Mekong. “Were you in love?”

  His father leans back, rubs the back of his neck with the fingers from both his hands.

  “Not like with your mother … no. She was poor and homeless when she got to Saigon. Not there a week before the pimps were on her like flies, had her trussed up in a bra and G-string, hustling tricks for rent and food money in a bar called Wild Bill’s. She had a kid, a toddler by another GI. So it was complicated. But I didn’t care. He was long gone. And I missed your mother so much. I felt so bad about leaving her with you in her belly. I just wanted a woman to make me feel like everything was going to be alright again. And I wanted to take her off the street. She deserved better. That picture of the girl dancing on the bar. I took it the day I met her. So there. Now you know.”

  The air smells of charcoal, roasting peanuts, pepper.

  “You lived together?”

  “Just a few months. She had this one-room flat in Cholon. The army didn’t feature that sort of thing. But they knew what was happening. There were a lot of couples like us in Chinatown. It had been going on for so long when I got there, you could see many Amerasian kids in the streets. They spoke English.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got new orders. To the Philippines.”

  Cage birds are whistling, shrill, staccato notes.

  “The war was going badly. There was all hell to stop it back home. Someone up top decided our fraternizing with the locals was out of control. The press had started to write about it (the hooch girls), and the army didn’t like the heat. They decided to pull the plug on all the love nests. Coming off duty one night, a sergeant major grabbed a bunch of us MPs who were shacking up. He said, ‘You got orders. Go to the barracks, pack up your gear, and get on the bus to the airport.’ Just like that, we were history. No chance to say goodbye.”

  The old man on his knees in the street is dissecting a monitor lizard, pulling out the liver, the heart, the testes with his fingers. Offering them up in hi
s bloody hands.

  “You ever see her again?”

  The fisherman gets a wet look in his eyes. “We always told each other live for today. We knew it wouldn’t last forever. I sent her my checks for a few months. She never wrote. But I didn’t expect her to. Writing English was hard for her. I felt the loss, unbelievable saudade. But I hoped she had found someone new. Someone from her own country who could cherish her forever, take care of her and the child. But really, who would have her with that half-American kid? Even in Cholon. I worried about her a lot. Then I heard from your mom that you were born. My only child, my son. I felt like I had been given a new life. A chance to start over. We named you after my father. And I never looked back.”

  “But sometimes you remember?” Shadows of figures are crowding in and out of the lamp light in the night market. The hot, fetid smell of the river seeping through the streets, the open windows.

  “Yeah, kid. Sometimes it gets to me, if you want to know the truth. I’m not proud of myself for what happened with Meng. I should have been loyal to your mother. And honest with Meng. She never knew about your mom. But it’s over. That was a long time ago. In another country. Nothing I can do about it. So I tell my half-cocked lies about adventure in the mysterious Orient…. And I try to let it all go. I suggest you let it go, too. Just quit this case, will ya? Give it up before it tears you to pieces.”

  “I can’t.” His words echo in the steel wheelhouse. They sound to him like bawling cats. He closes his eyes and sees a Vietnamese woman waving, beckoning from a small boat. And Tuki in a pink terrycloth robe. She sits on the ledge of a window, a chain-link screen across the opening. Her knees are pulled up under her chin, her dark hair falls in a ringlets over her shoulders and arms. For a while no one speaks.

  “Jesus. You know what?” Michael’s eyes open, suddenly big as plums. He does not know where these words are coming from. “I was thinking that this trouble I’m having is all about Vietnam. But I’m not so sure anymore.”