Dragonfish: A Novel

by Vu Tran

  It took Betty two long seconds before she nodded. “Yes, that’s right.” She spun the wheel again and looked back quickly at us. Her beaming had lost none of its wattage, but there was a new depth in her eyes, a stillness.

  The ball landed on 17 this time. My heart jumped, but Mai gave no reaction. It was like she had expected it. As she watched Betty count out her winnings, about $1,800, she started speaking Vietnamese to her in a measured voice.

  At the roulette table next to us, a gaggle of young dudes in khakis and starched shirts were clapping and cheering. I wondered at first if Betty had heard Mai over the noise, but as she pushed four towers of blue chips toward her, she shook her head like she was apologizing and murmured, “I don’t know anything.”

  Mai kept at it, her Vietnamese voice tinged with a formal sincerity I hadn’t heard yet. She wasn’t asking questions. She was revealing things.

  The humor drained from Betty’s face. She glanced around us. “I don’t know anything,” she said again, soberly this time, and put up a hand as if declining a gift.

  A man appeared behind her, in another impeccable double-breasted suit, the pit boss no doubt, brandishing a ringed hand on the felt. He said politely to Mai, “Excuse me, miss—mind if I check your ID there?”

  She had it ready for him, apparently used to this. He examined it, then handed it back to her. “Thanks so much. Some people look a little young, is all. You have fun now, miss—but you can only speak English to the dealer, okay?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Mai said. “We have a friend in common.”

  “That’s fine, but English only, all right? You all enjoy yourself.”

  As he walked away, Betty finally looked up from the table, her smile tired now, her silence purposeful.

  Mai whispered to me over her shoulder, “What’s my mother’s birth date?”

  “We need to go.”

  “Just one more bet.”

  I told her June 15, and she promptly placed an entire stack of chips each on 6 and 15.

  “Jesus, how much are you betting?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know—five hundred on each, I think.”

  Betty focused on me now like I’d really been the one interrogating her. When the roulette ball landed, she announced “thirty-five” in a small voice and cleared the table of more than half the chips Mai had won in the last spin.

  “I’ll cash out,” Mai said. “In blacks, please.” She took out the business card I’d returned to her and placed it on the felt, her phone number faced up.

  Betty counted out her remaining chips, announced the cash-out to the pit, and set nine black chips—$900 total—in front of Mai. “Thank you for playing,” she said and mustered one last halfhearted smile for us.

  Mai stood from the table, palmed four of the chips, stacked the other five on the card, and slid it toward Betty. “For you. Please tell Happy to call me at that number. Tell her it’s Hong, and that I really need to speak to her.”

  Betty looked wary of both the tip and the card.

  A man in a black turtleneck and a sport coat appeared at the table with a blond half his age and twice his height, his hand on the small of her back. In one smooth movement, greeting them as she had greeted us, Betty scooped Mai’s $500 tip into her tip bin and slipped the card into her vest pocket.

  As we walked away, I glanced back and caught her eyeing us. I asked Mai, “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her Happy’s in trouble and needs our help. Did you see her face?”

  “You can’t go around right now giving strangers your number. There’s no telling who or what she knows—or if she’s even loyal to Happy.”

  “She doesn’t need to be to deliver the message.”

  “You’re taking too many chances.”

  “I was right, though. You saw her face. A middle-aged Vietnamese woman dealing in a casino? Good odds she’s been here a while and knows every Vietnamese woman who works here, who they’re married to, who they love and hate. She’ll deliver the message.”

  We elbowed our way through a thick crowd of people waiting in the lobby for the start of some live music show. Mai bumped the arm of a guy twice her size, who muttered after her, but she kept walking like nothing had happened.

  We returned to the elevator, and again we rode it alone. Mai stared at the elevator doors as though she could see some distant destination through them.

  It wasn’t recklessness. She was too deliberate for that. What worried me was her unpredictability, always another plan or urge withheld. It had loomed inside her mother too, that same shadowy sea creature right beneath the surface of the water. You’re alone in the company of such people.

  “There was more,” I said. “You said something else to her.”

  Mai passed a hand through her hair. “I said they’ll hurt Happy again if we don’t help her. They’ll kill her next time.”

  When the elevator opened, she marched toward the Jeep. It took me some effort to keep up with her.

  13

  THREE MILES EAST of the Strip, we disappeared into a dusky neighborhood of low apartment buildings, gravel lawns, and famished pine trees, a few of them lazily adorned with Christmas lights. Mai turned into an alley that led to a small walled-off parking lot behind her complex. She parked beside a rusty VW bus with two flat tires and cut the Jeep’s engine. I had to adjust to the quiet, slot machines still ringing in my ears.

  I followed her through a gate with a hole where the knob should be. Her complex looked more like an abandoned motel: two stories of crusty peach stucco wrapped around a dusty gravel courtyard and a lit-up swimming pool half filled with greenish water and leaves, its bottom a brown blanket of scum.

  Chicano music drifted from somewhere in the darkness.

  We clanged up a metal staircase to the second-floor balcony that led around the building. She led me past dark windows, vacant inside perhaps or nobody home. Across the courtyard, two young black men stood smoking on the opposite balcony, leaning out of the shadows, their murmurs echoing across the way in some African language.

  We turned the corner and approached a Mexican man on a plastic stool with a beer in his hand and a small boy in his lap, wrapped in his coat. I smelled grilled onions. When we passed their window, I saw a woman working the kitchen stove and three more children crowded around a small TV on the carpet, beneath a painting of the Virgin Mary framed with Christmas lights. Mai and the man nodded at each other, and the boy watched us intently as we made our way past and arrived two doors down at Mai’s apartment.

  When she inserted her key, I said, “Let me go in first. How many rooms are there?”

  “Just my bedroom. The kitchen opens to the living room.”

  I flipped on the lights, smelled the cold odor of cigarettes. I pulled out my gun and gestured for her to stay by the doorway.

  Her place was small, the walls completely bare and the brown shag carpet dark enough to hide stains. The only furniture, shoved into the center of the living room, was a leather recliner, a coffee table littered with a pizza box and soda cans, and a fancy big-screen TV as tall as Mai. In the cramped kitchen, my jacket snagged on the chipped edge of the Formica counter, which looked more yellowed than yellow and held a microwave and a rice cooker and nothing else.

  The walls of her bedroom were also bare, her bed a mattress on the floor, a tangle of yellow sheets. Beside the head of the mattress was a lamp and a cardboard box of file folders as well as piles of books stacked against the wall.

  I came back out to wave her in. I picked an empty cigarette pack off the floor and set it on the counter. “You get robbed recently, or did you just move in?”

  Mai closed the front door, locked it. “I live simply,” she said and walked past me into her bedroom. She opened the closet, pulled out a black suitcase, and started throwing clothes inside.

  “Take only what you absolutely need,” I reminded her. “Once everything cools off, we can get someone to come back for the rest of your stuff.”

&nb
sp; “I can get new stuff.”

  “Won’t your landlord wonder?”

  “I’ve always leased month to month. He’ll be more than happy to take the big-screen.”

  I noticed a bunch of poker manuals among her books, some Hemingway and Chandler novels, a few books on yoga and Eastern spirituality.

  My foot knocked over an ashtray and I apologized, picking up the cigarette butts despite it not mattering. I checked my watch. It was nearly 7:00. Victor said we had until 8:30, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  “Can I ask a question?”

  “Why do I live in a shit hole?” She set the file folders atop the clothes. The top one had “Bankroll” written on it, the others neatly labeled too, by far the most meticulous things in the apartment.

  “You spend money like you have it.”

  “Didn’t when I got to town four years ago. This was the only place I could afford and it’s been good enough for me.”

  “Kinda shady, no?” I peeked through the mini blinds at the alley below, shrouded in an orange-tinged darkness.

  She shrugged. “I don’t go for walks at night.”

  “Pretty sure we passed a drug deal down the street—those two kids on their skateboards.”

  “Par for the course around here. Muggings too. A stabbing or shooting now and then. Doesn’t make me nervous anymore. If a man can live here with his wife and kids, I can too.”

  “Easy to say until shit happens to you.”

  “What makes you think it hasn’t?”

  She went to the bathroom, and I heard her rummaging through drawers.

  On the way to her place, she had asked if I liked being a cop. Her first personal question since we met. I told her that it depended on the day, that some days it’s just one idiot human being after another. When she asked if I had ever saved anyone’s life, I told her about the guy I once pulled from a burning car and how he survived despite third-degree burns to half his body. He’d also just robbed a convenience store, led me on a high-speed chase, and T-boned a minivan, killing a mother and her nine-year-old daughter. I’d wished at the time that he had burned in his car, but I didn’t tell her that. Helping the wrong people often felt as bad to me as hurting the wrong people.

  She came back with some toiletries and what looked like a wooden statuette of Buddha, which she shoved into the outer pocket of the suitcase.

  She finally went to her books, packing first a small stack of worn paperbacks. The Narnia Chronicles.

  “I read those way back,” I said. “Can’t remember any of them except that one where they go through the wardrobe.”

  “I’ve read that one eight times.” She snatched a cigarette from a pack on the windowsill and lit up as she picked through the other books. “This is gonna be tough.”

  “Don’t take forever.”

  “We still got more than an hour, don’t we?” She offered me the cigarette and went back to the books, sometimes lingering on a cover for a few seconds before making her decision. “Yeah, I used to go into my aunt and uncle’s closet and look for a door behind their clothes. I wanted so bad to find one. Just walk into another world like the kids in the book. Close the door behind me, never come back.”

  “Was that the kid in you, or was that LA?”

  “Both.” She threw in a book on meditation, then a book on the stock market. “LA never felt like home to me. Neither does Vegas, but at least here you can be anonymous. Everyone’s from somewhere else. Passing through for a few days, a few years. Being temporary can be a good thing.”

  “Maybe. Being permanent ain’t possible anyway.”

  “Permanence is overrated.”

  She zipped the stuffed suitcase, stood up, and looked around. She took back the cigarette. I glanced again at my watch but didn’t want her to stop talking. It was calming to hear her so chatty and relaxed, so perversely in denial of the circumstances. She smoked with her arms half crossed, her rigid posture giving her an air of both authority and wariness. The elbows of her leather jacket were frayed like her jeans and cowboy boots, but she wore it all well, with hushed purposefulness, as though she had chosen this uniform—the haircut too, the lack of makeup—to moderate her beauty. Help her blend into the background.

  She said, “Do you miss her?”

  “Depends on what’s missing.”

  “Okay, what do you not miss about her—besides all the crazy shit she did.”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was never a fan of all the praying and churchgoing. All that devotion to God. I indulged her, of course, but I haven’t set foot inside a church since she left.”

  “It’s a Vietnamese thing. Ingrained in all of us. Total waste of time.”

  “That wasn’t it. Your mother always seemed like she was hoping for a fucking revelation or something. You know what I do miss? When she wasn’t being so goddamn serious. When we traveled, on our road trips, she lightened up then. She hated leaving town at first, but she got to liking it over the years. It put her at ease—being on the road, seeing new things.”

  “I get that,” Mai said. “Wish I did it more.” She bent down to stub out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I’ve been saving up for a trip to Vietnam. I want to travel the entire country. Start in Saigon and go up to Hanoi, maybe find an apartment by Halong Bay. Live there for a year and see how it goes. That’ll all be easier now. Shit, I almost forgot.”

  She went back into her closet and returned with her hand in the belly of a small stuffed bear. She pulled out a passport, slipping it into her back pocket, and tossed the gutted bear on her bed.

  “Finally got one four years ago and still haven’t used it,” she said. “I’ve never even been to Mexico.”

  A cell phone rang, but it wasn’t mine. Mai rushed to retrieve hers from her purse and threw me an eager look.

  She answered it in a low voice and listened intently. Yes, she replied in Vietnamese and then asked a question. After a long pause, another yes. Then, eyeing me, she said, “Okay, okay,” and hung up.

  “Was it her?”

  She nodded. “She’s at a pay phone across the street. She’s coming over right now.”

  “How did she know to come here?”

  “Betty must have described me.” Mai hit the light switch and doused us in darkness. “Stay in here and I’ll answer the door. She sounded nervous. It might scare her to see you right away. Let me talk to her first.”

  “She could have anyone with her.”

  “Well, if she does, you can come out and shoot them.” She nudged me back a step, leaving the door slightly open.

  With my gun again in hand, I watched her through the narrow opening. She stood waiting at the edge of the kitchen. After five minutes that felt like twenty, footsteps finally approached and stopped outside the front door. Two quick knocks. Mai disappeared from view.

  I heard the front door open and Mai say “Hello, big sister” in Vietnamese. A soft voice replied in kind, but I couldn’t make out if it was Happy, only that it was a woman.

  The front door closed, the lock clicking loudly.

  They continued speaking in Vietnamese, their voices closer now, Mai’s calm and careful, the other quick and hushed. Mai started explaining something in a reassuring tone. She sounded like someone else entirely when she spoke her mother tongue.

  Suddenly I heard my name. A silence followed. Mai’s voice called out for me. I wedged my gun into the back of my jeans. My heart was thumping, and for a moment I thought it was possible someone else had come.

  When Happy saw me, she looked more confused than frightened. Under her black peacoat, she was wearing a uniform identical to Betty’s. Her bow tie was askew, her arms at her side with one hand holding on to the strap of her handbag, which nearly touched the carpet.

  “She was at the casino after all,” Mai explained with pride. “She’d just left her shift and was about to leave the casino when Betty caught up to her.”

  I said to Happy, “How much does Betty know?”

  “S
he don’t know nothing,” Happy replied quickly, still eyeing me with suspicion. “I tell her somebody hit me. That it.”

  I inched closer. Despite her makeup and her glasses I could see the shadowy bruises around her left eye and the left corner of her mouth.

  “She and me—we not good friend.”

  “Then why did you tell her about it?”

  “Three day I not leave the house and she come find me. She live in my neighborhood. Why you in Las Vegas, Bob?”

  “Sonny. He made me come here and find Suzy for him. I found Mai instead.”

  This made even less sense to her, but I didn’t feel like explaining.

  She said, “You know she is . . .”

  “Suzy’s long-lost daughter? Yeah. Found that out about three hours ago. Don’t think Sonny planned on anything like that.”

  My mention of Sonny again brought a flash of venom to her eyes.

  “Did his men do that to you?” I said.

  She blinked away the question. “Why you try find me? I don’t know nothing.”

  “Did you know about Suzy’s plan?”

  “What plan? She don’t tell nothing to me. They come and they say about the money, but I don’t know nothing about the money. They hit me and they say they kill me and they kill Suzy too, but I not say nothing.” She looked at Mai. “That why I come to you Tuesday—to get you tell your mom leave town.”

  “You didn’t let me explain that day,” Mai said. “My mother and me have never talked or seen each other or anything. I got a few brief letters from her last month and that’s it. I don’t even know what she looks like.”

  Happy was quiet for a moment. Then she shook her finger at Mai and said something in Vietnamese, like she was gently chiding her.

  “Hey, come on,” I said. “English.”

  “I ask her why she not leave town. That what I say to her Tuesday. She need to go too.”

  Mai was avoiding my eyes. She hadn’t mentioned that part to me. I couldn’t blame her for ignoring the wild exhortations of some strange woman at her door, but even at this point, such dire warnings seemed like invitations to an adventure for her.