No, you’re not. You’re just a typical Vietnamese man. Or half-Vietnamese man. It doesn’t matter. You’re all the same. You take us for granted. You assume we’ll cook your food, wash your dishes, launder your clothes, giggle at your dumb jokes, swoon at your poetry or love songs that you love to write until the day you marry us, when you’ll never write us another poem or love song again, since you’ll be writing them to your girlfriends. You think we’ll always be there to make love to you, have your kids, raise them on our own, do the shopping, listen to your complaints, massage your egos, keep the accounts, work for extra money, tolerate your parents, serve your mothers, ignore your mistresses, mend your clothes, find your keys, agree with all your nonsense, walk at least five steps behind you, take care of you when you’re old, and, finally—finally—finally—die after you, just to make sure someone will cry at your funeral, throw you a big wake, tend your shrine and visit your grave, remember you every day, and then, when we die and join you, do the whole goddamned thing all over again forever.
Even though her voice trembled with fury, the barrel of the Luger never wavered. As a Vietnamese man, or half-Vietnamese man, you knew, deep in your gut, all the way down to your balls, in a rare moment of honesty occasioned by how these balls were not rolling as they properly should, that she was right. You, as a representative of Vietnamese manhood, deserved her fury, for everything you had ever done to Vietnamese women every day of their lives. You’re right, you said. And I’m sorry. Very sorry.
Do you think the Boss was ever going to marry me? the luscious secretary said.
Yes, absolutely, yes. He was in love with you—
Don’t lie to me. I don’t care about him loving me. Getting married would just mean that he carried out his part of the bargain. Now that’s not going to happen. The least I deserve is his money. Don’t you agree?
You nodded vigorously and made more affirmative noises. The luscious secretary took you to the Boss’s bedroom, where she had been sleeping before you woke her up, and pointed at a bookshelf next to the walk-in closet. The Boss did not read French, and yet these shelves were fully stocked with French books. Scanning them quickly, you were happy to see that the French did not just read philosophy and fancy literature, the highbrow tomes that one could display along with top-shelf liquor. These books and these authors deserved to be accompanied by only beer and carafes of house wine. They were French originals or French translations of authors who wrote the kinds of trashy bestsellers found in airports and convenience stores, the pulp that was so lowbrow it simply slid down from the reader’s forehead to rest as a mustache on the upper lip. No need to name names, however. Why bother, when the Boss had not read these authors, since he never read anything except his invoices and ledgers.
Pull on that shelf, the luscious secretary said, waving her gun.
Like human beings, guns had a nasty tendency to go off without warning, so you said, in your most polite voice, Maybe you could take your finger off the trigger?
She pointed the gun at you, keeping her finger on the trigger, and you pulled on the shelf, which rolled forward on invisible wheels hidden beneath its base. When you rolled the bookshelf to the side, the safe was revealed, a gray iron box the size of a small refrigerator, tucked into the wall in a space next to the walk-in closet. All right, smart guy, the luscious secretary said. Show me what you got.
You had only one idea, and now you made your second bet.
Ever notice the clocks in the Boss’s office and here? you said.
They never worked. He was too lazy to replace their batteries.
No, not too lazy, you said with a breezy confidence that would soon be revealed as either genius or folly. Clues. Reminders. Just in case he forgot the combination. You said this without gloating, because if you gloated, she would—judging from her expression—shoot you. Possibly not to kill, but certainly to maim you for life. Seven fifty-nine, you said, cracking your knuckles. Or seven-five-nine.
Prove it.
The lock of the safe was a tumbler that had to be spun clockwise and counterclockwise. You knelt down to be eye level with the mechanism and set to work, trying not to sweat as you dialed the tumbler back and forth. Seven to the right once, fifty to the left twice, nine to the right once. The handle of the safe did not budge. Your armpits started to sweat as you tried seven to the left, fifty to the right, nine to the left. The handle still did not budge. Now your head was sweating, and you were acutely aware of the luscious secretary sitting in an armchair to your left, legs crossed, her hand with the gun resting on a knee, her finger still on the trigger, her body still in a see-through nightgown that would have compelled the pope to look. Hell, God Himself must be gazing at this very moment on one of His most perfect creations as you tried every other combination of seven, five, fifty, and nine that you could think of over the next few minutes. At some point you lost track of the combinations and simply spun the dial randomly over and over, playing yet another version of roulette.
Hey, Einstein, said the luscious secretary. Why don’t you try nineteen-fifty-nine?
Someone hit the stop button to the world and everything and everyone froze for a few moments. Inside your head the hour hand of the clock rotated a complete circle, from seven in the morning to nineteen hundred hours at night. Then play resumed and you spun the dial to nineteen to the right once, fifty to the left twice, nine to the right once. The handle of the safe clicked and shifted easily when you pulled on it, and the door to the safe opened with a hush.
Heaven was quiet when you arrived two hours later. Everyone is exhausted, sir, said the obsequious housekeeper, and you wondered how she had been spared a role in the orgy. You slipped her a hundred francs to let you in and found the eschatological muscle sleeping on the couch in the waiting room, an open volume of Journey to the End of the Night rising and falling on his bare chest, the television tuned, as always, to an intellectual talk show. A pale slash cut diagonally across his biceps, a new Band-Aid that you had not seen the night before. Upstairs, Madeleine was sleeping, and you opened her door without knocking. She was under the covers of her queen-sized bed, hair fanned around her head, face clear of makeup or any other sign of the fantastic orgy of the night before, except for the bruises around her neck from the hands of BFD. You thought about waking her up, but this was not about you. Instead you left the Monoprix shopping bag that you took from the Boss’s kitchen cabinet next to Madeleine. Inside was half the money the luscious secretary had let you take from the Boss’s safe, which was not to say it was half the money in the safe. Both of you had stared at the bricks of francs in the safe, each wrapped in a paper band with the sum total value written in blue ink. There were also clear plastic sandwich bags packed with bundles of gold ounces and taels, each individually packaged in plastic, each package printed with the issuer’s name. The number of ounces or taels was also written on each bag in thick, indelible black marker. As with the bricks of cash, this, too, was in the Boss’s handwriting.
I think we’re rich, you said, hoping that the luscious secretary would not double-cross you and blow your brains out with a shot to the temple. You’d been dead for so long that now you wanted to live. There’ll be plenty even after we go fifty-fifty.
Did I say fifty-fifty? the luscious secretary said, coyly covering her mouth with the hand not holding a gun. Oops! Silly me. I meant seventy-thirty.
Seventy-thirty? You kept your cool and said, Without me, that safe wouldn’t even be open. Let’s say fifty-five, forty-five.
The luscious secretary cocked her cannon. Let’s say seventy-five, twenty-five, and you walk out of here with your balls where they belong.
This was how you ended up giving Madeleine half of 25 percent of the Boss’s cash savings. The gold was not included, as the luscious secretary went on to clarify before she made you count the money, which took quite a long time, considering there was so much of it, and even though you pointed out t
hat the Boss had helpfully wrapped and priced all the bundles. I just want to make sure we get everything right, the luscious secretary said calmly, daring you to look as she uncrossed and recrossed her legs while you knelt by the safe counting the cash. Part of you was nostalgic for Saïd and his uncompromising commitment to his word, but part of you was thankful that 25 percent of a lot of money was still quite a bit. After you had finished counting the last of it, you said, Can I use the bathroom?
The luscious secretary rolled her eyes and escorted you to the toilet in the hallway. Like most French apartments you had seen, even the spacious ones, the Boss’s had only one toilet, which was fine by Vietnamese standards but primitive even by middle-class American standards. Americans, smartly enough, believed in having a backup in case of backups. They had an anxiety about seeing shit, but not about getting fat; for the French, it was the opposite. As for the Vietnamese, we could not get fat even if we tried, given how poor the country was, leaving us no choice but to be pleased with having even one toilet, given the condition of the country’s sewage system. But what was the French excuse? They must simply relate differently to excrement, which was already proven by their laissez-faire treatment of canine crap. Shit was the secret of every society, and how a society treated its shit told a stranger a great deal, to which a skeptic such as the luscious secretary might say, What a crock of shit. But what she actually said when you tried to close the door behind you was: Keep it open.
But—
Keep it open. You won’t show me anything I haven’t already seen.
Yes, but I, you know, need to, uh—
Oh, for God’s sake. The luscious secretary looked rightfully disgusted. I don’t need to see that. Keep the door open a crack and don’t try to lock it or I’ll shoot you through the door.
You had no desire to die on the throne like Elvis, and your plan was not to escape from the windowless toilet anyway. Keeping the door mostly closed sufficed for your plan, which was to remove the apartment key from the key chain also holding the Boss’s car key. Since the door was open a bit, however, allowing the luscious secretary to eavesdrop on your personal sordid drama, you unzipped your pants, lowered the seat, sat down, and pretended to go through the motions as you fumbled with the Boss’s ring of keys. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, going through the motions induced a real motion, or perhaps it was an emotion that moved you, surprising you as your emotions sometimes did, the force of it so sudden and so real—Oh my God, said the luscious secretary from outside the door—as you coincidentally reminded yourself of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, how every action generates an equal and opposite reaction, so that even as one orifice made its presence heard aft, another orifice erupted with a groan of pain mingled with relief and surprise, for you did not know you had it in you, this mortal coil slithering forth from your innards with no seeming end, a sediment most foul accumulated over years, its thickness, density, and noxiousness suggesting that this dead beast of the bowels was the stubborn stuff that your body found impossible to fully digest—Could you stop? the luscious secretary cried—the dark matter of your darkest interior, the biblical abomination hidden in the recesses of the crevices of the twists and turns of the long and winding guts that so many people have hated—I mean, Jesus Christ, said the luscious secretary—until at last it appeared that you had unscrewed this corkscrew, but while it curled cryptically beneath you, as unique as an industrially contaminated snowflake, as individual as your morally soiled self, no two manifestations of one’s interior ever being exactly the same, the sudden vacuum left behind by the rapid departure of your intestinal inhabitant hurt nearly as much as the evacuation, leaving you whimpering as you flushed away your colonic calamity, only to hear the toilet gurgle instead of gulp, and when you saw how the poor, tortured Gallic toilet had gagged on your refuse, you quickly closed the lid in horror and humiliation, washed your hands of any trace of waste, fixed an apologetic smile on your face, and strolled out with the key to the apartment in your hand, which the disgusted but still luscious secretary directed you to leave on the stand by the door so she would not have to touch it herself.
Pausing in the doorway, you said, Do you think I could have a pair of the Boss’s shoes? You were in your socks and explained how, as you were about to leave the warehouse, the Mona Lisa had said, I still like your shoes, and you had been forced to give him the Bruno Magli footwear that could have paid for a month’s rent. The luscious secretary said, Just take them and get out, and you, continuing to heroically not see through her see-through nightgown, flashed her your most dashing bad-boy grin and said, You know, we kind of make a great team, to which she replied, Remember what I said about your balls.
And this was how you ended up with the key to the Boss’s car, which you had separated from his house key while in the bathroom, anticipating the luscious secretary’s demand for it. You looked down one last time at Madeleine’s face and saw her eyes twitching behind her eyelids, and you wondered whether she was seeing a dream or a nightmare. Before you closed the door behind you, you imprinted her sleeping face on the soft wax of your memory, hoping her face would mask the wide-awake visage of the communist agent. Whatever had happened to her, wherever she was, you knew that she could still see you.
CHAPTER 19
Above the open door, OPIUM was spelled out in the red neon typeface that adorned Chinese take-out boxes, a font whose name might be chop suey, ching-chong, or ah-so-asshole. At least the Boss had shown some class and did not have a gigantic gong inside, ready to be struck by an artificially bucktoothed servant every time a guest entered. Instead you heard the same jazz quartet that had played at the orgy and was now swinging here, having had the opportunity, unlike you, to go home and rest. This was true for Lousy as well, who had ditched his harem guard costume for a more contemporary look, a mixture of Parisian bohemian and Nazi chic: basic black turtleneck, black slacks, black leather jacket, and black boots. The look perfectly suited the vibe of OPIUM, for what OPIUM represented was not the ancient or even just slightly older Orient of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, when French and British monopolists, the original global drug runners and pharmaceutical warlords, had forced the natives at gunpoint to buy their opium. Oh, no! This was the new and modern Orient, where opium was both cool and quaint, chic and cute, addictive and undemanding. Opium was the whole package and the perfect lover. No wonder why some people, like you, preferred the remedy.
Where’s the Boss? said Lousy, who was manning the velvet rope and artificially creating suspense by lining up a long queue of patrons. The females were quite a sight, all legs, and the males were quite a smell, more heavily dipped in cologne than the women were in perfume. As for you, you had gone back to your aunt’s apartment after leaving Heaven, and there you had changed into the only decent outfit you owned, a slim-fitting, secondhand dark gray suit with a three-button jacket that dated from the early 1960s, which clashed with the pastel shirts and exaggerated silhouettes of both the men and the women, their shoulders inflated with enormous pads large enough for eagles to land on. The suit was a gift from the now-too-rotund Maoist PhD, who had worn it in his university days when he rocked out to Johnny Hallyday. Your aunt had not been home, and you had taken advantage of her absence to wake yourself up with a shower, which also washed the sweat, smoke, fear, and taint of death from your body. Then you had drunk the last of the civet coffee and left the suitcase with the Boss’s money and the videos of the orgy under the sofa where you slept, the tapes worth much more than the cash. Even with the coffee, you felt light-headed by the time you parked far enough from OPIUM so that none of the dwarfs would see you arrive in the Boss’s car.
Where’s the Boss? Lousy shouted again.
How the fuck do I know? Last I saw him, he had just killed the Algerian. Then I went home.
The excuse would buy you some time. All you wanted was enough time to survive the evening, see Lana and kiss her hem,
then come face-to-face with the faceless man and somehow manage to pull off a magic trick and save him from Bon’s vengeance. You entered OPIUM and the smell licked you, the languorous ceiling fans stirring the pheromonal trails of cologne and perfume, the smoke from cigarettes, hookahs, and your own homeland’s water pipes, and the haze of the incense burning in a censer carried around the club by a petite woman whose face was masked by a veil ripped from the pages of The Arabian Nights. You did not see Lana as you scanned the sexy crowd, but you did see a few women who had gotten into the spirit of OPIUM and draped their feminine faces with the silky black veils proffered by the incense bearer.
The mix of scents and your own light-headedness and exhaustion made you dizzy, and the only cure for that was a drink, which was the cure for most things. You passed the banana trees and birds of paradise, the rattan armchairs and red lanterns, the rice paper screens and framed calligraphy, and waited your turn at the bar among a crowd of giggling young things demanding drinks served in ceramic Buddhas and graced with tiny paper umbrellas that could provide shade for crickets or for the withered little worm of your morality. When it was finally your turn, you said, or croaked, I’d like the Guilt and the Shame, please.
The what?
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