Gods Go Begging (5 page)

“Dud bé giao bah bih quy,
” she said with a laugh, but she hesitated in opening the door, because the boy he was with gave her an odd, uncomfortable feeling. His smile seemed false. She had never seen the boy before, but somehow she knew who he was. He was leering through the glass like one of those spirit faces on the Miriamman Hindu temple. As a child, she would take the long route to Ben Thanh market to avoid seeing those strange, eerie faces. Now one of them was staring down at her and pleading to enter her restaurant.

“There are two more people at the door, Persephone.” There was an odd quaver in Mai’s voice. “Should I let them in?”

That night on Potrero Hill all manner of pasta was cooking on fifty stoves and hotplates. Dancing and diving in pots filled with water, olive oil, and salt were white squares of ravioli, tangled strings of spaghetti, and curling waves of fusilli. There were gnocchi and cappellini, even shells, wagon wheels, and bowties, shimmering above the flame. Some pasta was undercooked; some was cooked far too long. Some was thrown against the wall beside the stove, where some of it stuck.

Eventually all of it was drained and put on plates and smothered with the wonderful Amazonian sauce. The scent that once had its epicenter at Twentieth and Missouri now emanated from scores of homes, tiny rented rooms, and crowded efficiency apartments.

It was while this small world was eating that the spell was broken. It was while they were tasting their sumptuous meals that the chilling screams pierced the night air. Most who heard the screams rose to lock their doors, then returned to their delicious food. But some people, either out of curiosity or out of fear, walked to their windows and looked out into the street. These people saw a crying woman running furiously up Twentieth Street from Missouri, her arms and her dress flying. Some noticed that her panties were down around her right ankle and that they flew off as she ran. Her eyes were wide with fear. Only one witness, a homeless man, could see the invisible war that raged at her back as she ran.

The witnesses watched as she went directly to the pay phone on the north side of the street. All of those who stayed at their windows saw him as he ran up behind her. He was running and hopping on one leg as he attempted to put on a white athletic shoe with his left hand. In his right hand there was a large black gun.

Two witnesses said that they recognized the woman as the lady from the Amazon Luncheonette, though neither could recall her name. They related that she seemed utterly terrified. Three tearful witnesses said that she spoke breathlessly into the telephone, while another said that she spoke a few words directly to the young black man with the gun. All the percipient witnesses related that they saw her drop the phone, then step back until her shoulder blades were pressed against the wall.

All of them looked on helplessly, transfixed by horror as the young man slowly raised the ugly weapon to eye level, aimed at the pretty woman’s face, then fired a single shot into her head. One sobbing witness said that the killer had pulled a nylon stocking over his face, but she was sure that she saw him smile as the victim dropped to one knee, then onto her back.

For a few moments the gunshot stopped every meal within ear-shot. Mothers in the Potrero projects ran to their babies’ rooms to make sure they were still breathing. Winos on the sidewalk felt the perimeters of their own benumbed bodies for a wound. Though dozens saw what happened after the first gunshot, only seven would eventually come forward.

All of them were doubly shocked when they saw the small Asian woman come running at full speed, screaming as she appeared from the southwest corner of the block. She was barefoot and her long black hair was trailing behind her like a flag. None of the petrified witnesses could decipher her screams, but all heard two distinct words shouted over and over again at the top of her lungs.

“I think it was something like ‘tan lens,’ ” said one shivering witness. “Tan lens. Foreign words, probably gook words.”

“No, it was more like ‘ten lands,’ ” said another who dabbed her eyes with a small towel.

They told the officers that she had headed in a straight line, directly toward the woman who was bleeding to death beneath the telephone. Those who gave statements said that she seemed to ignore the man with the gun, that she must have seen him aiming it right at her head as she ran. He was standing no more than ten feet from the body.

“She run past him like he wasn’t there. I ain’t never seen the like,” said a man who lived above the nature-food store. “She run up to where the other lady was and she threw herself right on top of her. She didn’t care spit about that man and his bullets.”

Four stunned witnesses reported that the dying woman had slowly lifted her arms from the sidewalk and thrown them around the Asian woman. Two of the four stated that the dying woman had been moving her mouth as though she was saying something to her friend. All of the seven who came forward to give statements said that the gunman had walked up even closer to the women, taken careful aim, and fired into the back of the smaller woman. The flash from the muzzle had lit up the dark street. Some said that it had lit up the low clouds overhead, turning the world a ghastly yellow. Both victims had jerked for a few moments, then gone still.

“Never seen nothin’ so cold as that,” said a sad widow who lived in a third-floor studio. “Nothin’ cold as that.”

The young gunman had then run into the middle of the street and brazenly pointed his gun at all the faces that were framed by window shades and curtains and were backlit by lights that had once presided over a peaceful dinner. The eyewitnesses had ducked or receded into their homes. Some had turned off their lights and returned to their windows, while some had gone back to their darkened, cooling meals. Others who had seen the horrible acts of savagery in their street would not eat for days.

All the witnesses would agree on one thing: that someone had screamed a single name into the night air: “Calvin!” Those who had returned to their vantage points saw another young man step from the blackness of shadows, thirty or forty feet away from the phone booth. Loud words had been passed between the gunman and his accomplice, then the second boy had taken the gun, held it in front of himself for a moment, and run off toward the hill that rose up behind the Amazon Luncheonette. The shooter had followed at a slower pace, his frigid eyes turned toward the two women lying on the sidewalk. One witness swore that the one called Calvin had pulled the trigger. This same witness swore that someone had called out the word “forever.”

Two of the witnesses recognized the shorter boy. One witness knew his mother. He had certainly been an accomplice, nothing less. A single witness stated that she had seen a third man kneeling near the bodies in the time between the killers’ escape and the arrival of the police. He had been an older man, not a boy. When pressed for a description of this man, she could give none, and she soon began to doubt in public that she had seen him at all. In truth, she knew exactly who he was.

Few people on Potrero Hill would finish their dinner while the street outside was glutted with idling ambulances and police cars. For long hours on end, the night air on the hill would be stunned senseless by the rude noise of radios and the intrusive glare of spinning and flashing lights. The unnatural, ghastly white of flashbulbs would push the night away for instant after time-freezing instant. Chalk marks would circle bodies and expended casings. A perimeter would be created, using yards of yellow plastic tape. A little boy would point excitedly toward Persephone’s panties beneath a car.

The street would fill with spectators who would crowd together for comfort, to gasp and gossip at the ghastly amount of blood at the scene, and at the police department’s clumsy attempts to separate the embracing women. Some of the wiser spectators would smile discreetly and nod knowingly between themselves that the inseparable women were lesbians. Didn’t their last mortal acts on earth prove it?

“Stone lesbians.”

“Loin-lickin’ lezbins.”

Children would climb to the nearby roofs to watch as the chief medical examiner and his assistant finally arrived to survey the scene and to remove the bodies. They too would struggle with the bodies for a while, then give up and place them both on a single gurney. A trail of lemon grass and blood would lead to the ambulance.

Gloved fingers would sift and comb rudely through the Amazon Luncheonette for shards and scraps of physical evidence. Wooden boxes of yellow onions and African peppers would be shoved aside. Bottles of spices would be knocked over and spilled. A barrel full of nuóc mám would be upended. The sweet, pungent scent would fill the neighborhood for weeks. A young police officer would drop the photographs of two soldiers into an evidence bag. The glass that had once protected the photos would be swept into a corner. The night’s proceeds from the sale of sauce would follow the photos into the bag. A Catholic Bible written in Vietnamese would be placed in a manila envelope.

There were other strange items on the floor that had probably been pulled down from the wall or swept from the top of the vanity: a melted Chinese watch, some melted glasses, and a purple heart, among many other things. Rather than ask which items might be of importance, the young cop dumped it all into the evidence bag. From the new glass front door of the Amazon Luncheonette, the fingerprint technician would lift two perfect sets of prints, palms and all. On the sidewalk in front of the luncheonette was an empty pot and a lid with even more usable latents. The light of morning would see a wide band of yellow tape drawn across the front door like a banner across a wreath.

No one on the hill would ever admit it, but in their heart of hearts they deeply resented the terrible death of the Amazon women. Random killings and drive-by shootings over in the housing projects were one thing. They usually involved stupefied drug addicts and rough squads of remorseless, fatherless children—tiny mercenaries who had accepted the risk. They were acceptable losses. But these two women were valiant warriors who had armed themselves against gossips, braced themselves against liars, and girded their loins to do battle with a male world. They had carefully surrounded themselves with ambitious plans and used their shared female strength to fight off every mean stare and unkind remark. The pathway to their door had been mined with aspirations.

In their most secret hearts, some people on the hill began to resent the women themselves. They whispered among themselves that Persephone Flyer and Mai Adrong had reached too high. They had overreached. The women had erected an amazing fortification to fend off attacks of loneliness, pessimism, and failure.

“You can’t tempt God like that,” they said. “You can’t raise a temple that high.”

“Fire from heaven will strike you down,” said an old retired minister. “His fire will strike you down.”

Theirs had been a castle. All the local serfs could build their homes next to it, find comfort in its presence. Yet this grand, imposing fortress had been so easily breached. the people on the hill would shiver for months at the very thought of the two lovely women, torn and sundered by a mysterious God. They would avert their eyes whenever they passed by the Amazon Luncheonette. They would shoo away the memory the way they shooed away a house cat that has brought home a suffering bird.

“Rock breaks scissors,” the dumbfounded would say. “Stupid kills beautiful.”

“You see”—a mother would wave a finger at her two young daughters—“you can’t go getting above your raising. You can’t go being what you ain’t.”

No one on the hill would admit it, but what they resented was the death of hope.

After a few minutes of labeling plastic bags, the chief examiner returned to his microphone to sum up.

The chief examiner turned off the overhead light and the microphone and mechanically removed his gloves and mask. He used his lab coat to wipe his brow. This had not been a good day. He had shared a secret with someone whom he had never even bothered to know, and the fact embarrassed him. On days like this, his days in the military seemed idyllic. As captain of the graves detail in Da Nang, he had gone for whole months at a time without speaking with a subordinate.

He reached into a cabinet and pulled out a large tube of Super Glue that his assistant would use to close all the openings and replace all the reflected body parts on both cadavers. The mortician would do the rest, unless, of course, there was to be a cremation.

The assistant turned off the microphone at his station. After he had weighed the brain and entered its weight on his protocol, a thought had suddenly occurred to him. “You know,” he said in a strange tone, “consciousness is a weird thing. People who are blind, deaf, and dumb are most certainly conscious. There is self-awareness even when physical sensation ceases. Even dreamers with no external stimuli are aware of themselves as an embodied being.”

It was a continuation of an ongoing conversation he’d been having with the chief examiner. It was always a very one-sided conversation. The chief medical examiner wasn’t much for small talk.

“I’ve read somewhere that the basic level of self-awareness might be sustained by as few as five neurons firing in harmony within the cortex or the corticothalamic net.” He looked closely at the folds of the brain as he spoke.

“Out of billions, just five neurons are enough to keep the pilot light on! Is that what conscious life is, just five harmonizing sparks? Is it possible they could be listening? Could they be watching us cut them up?”