Man in the Middle (17 page)

“I guess he was slicker than I anticipated. Basically, a very arrogant person, overconfident, high IQ . . . not the type who scares easily. He exposed nothing . . . until the very end.” She saw that I was surprised she had picked up on that, and asked, “Why do the guilty ones always fish?”

“Be careful. He could just be curious, concerned for a dead member of his staff, or wondering how this is going to play with the press.”

“You really believe that?”

I smiled.

She asked, “Did we accomplish anything?”

“Personally, I found his glibness reassuring.”

“You’ll have to explain why that’s a good thing.”

“For the hunter, the complacent prey is always best.”

She nodded and thought about that. “That’s a good one. Chinese proverb?”

“My Irish grandmother.” She smiled, and I noted, “Here’s what’s important. Mr. Tigerman confirmed that he has something to hide. We should assume that people higher in the chain of command also share that secret.” I looked at her. “For instance, he and your boss are in this together.”

“Do you think?” She scratched her head and scrunched up her face. “Boy . . . I never picked up on that.”

“I’m just saying, be careful how much you disclose to Waterbury. His loyalty is to the people who gave him his job.”

“I know that. What’s next?”

“I don’t know what’s next for you. I’m hungry.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. I’m famished.” She asked, “What do you usually eat? Raw meat?” She thought this was funny and laughed.

I smiled back.

She said, “Let me guess. A meat, potatoes, and beer guy?”

“Right food groups, wrong order.”

“Great. I know the perfect place. Give me a lift to my car, then follow. It’s less than two miles from Daniels’s apartment building.”

As we drove, I used my cell to call Phyllis and exchange updates. She informed me that a team of NSA technicians was working furiously on decoding the suspicious file drawers. I advised her to call them every thirty minutes, be a complete pain in the ass. She warmly thanked me for telling her how to do her job, and asked how our meeting went with Tigerman. So I told her, she laughed, reminded me to watch my backside, and signed off. Phyllis is not a micromanager—which I like—but it occurred to me that she knew this case might piss off a lot of powerful people. And further, it occurred to me that “watch your backside” might mean, if you step on the wrong toe, you’re on your own. You have to pay attention with these people.

Anyway, we found Bian’s car, she started it up, and I followed her for about two miles and into the narrow parking lot of a small, worse-for-wear strip mall on Columbia Pike. She parked, and I parked next to her. As I got out of my car, she approached me, saying, “I hope you like Vietnamese cuisine.”

I started to climb back into my car. But she reached over and grabbed the door before I could close it. She laughed and said, “Come on. You’ll like it, I promise.” She grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the car. Wow. She was strong.

“I hate fish.”

“So do I. Fish are disgusting. Trust me.”

I was
really
hungry, and out of the corner of my eye, about two blocks from where we stood, was the golden arch of salvation. I started to make a dash before Bian grabbed my arm. “Come on. I know the lady who owns this place. She needs the business.” She added, “I’ll get you a fortune cookie.”

“I thought that was Chinese food.”

“All right. I’ll read your palm.”

The illogical red-lettered sign over the entrance read, “Happy Vietnamese Cuisine.” Regarding that, I asked her, “How can the food be happy?”

“What?”

“Happy . . . it says
happy
cuisine.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Anyway, we crossed the parking lot and entered through a glass door with Asian letters on it, into a small, cramped restaurant; all in all, it resembled a low-scale pizzeria: plastic tables, plastic chairs, checkered tablecloths, but for those seeking a genuine Asian ambiance, on the walls were a few cheesy paintings of sampans and short people plucking rice in misty bogs. The smell was overpowering. I said to Bian, “Call the cops. There’s a corpse in here.”

She laughed. “It’s fish sauce. A delicacy, actually, like a Vietnamese gravy. You squeeze the oils from the fish, store it in a closed vat, and let it simmer for a few weeks. The taste is very tart.”

“The smell is very awful.”

“Is this really the same tough guy who was too manly to use disinfectant at an indoor murder scene?”

“That was only a rotting corpse.”

She stared at me. “Be nice or there’ll be another corpse.” Anyway, the lady who ran the place spotted Bian and trotted with bouncy, mincing steps across the floor toward us. They embraced, exchanged cheek pecks, and Bian and she began conversing together in Vietnamese. Mentally, it took a moment for me to adjust to Bian’s bantering in this strange tongue, with all its gymnastic consonants and antic musical quality—like listening to a record suddenly skip from 33 to 78 rpm. I wonder how we sound to them.

After a moment, the woman led us to a table at the back, directly beneath a large painting of a thatch-roofed village on stilts populated by little people with thatched saucers on their heads. I mean, if you let your imagination roam, you could almost feel the sweat form on the back of your neck.

The woman apparently spoke little English. “You sit . . . you sit . . . you sit . . .” she said, looking at me.

I sat, I sat, I sat.

Bian mentioned to me, “She’s the owner,” then said something to her and the woman laughed. The owner was basically mid- to late sixties, wore a scarlet silk ao dai—the traditional female garb—and had at one time been what Grandpa Erasmus would call a real looker. She was still slender and very attractive, but she had hard years on her, evidenced by her tired eyes, her deeply creased face, and a pronounced stoop in her shoulders. Bian informed me, “I told her you don’t like fish.”

“Whatever. I
hate
fish.”

“She called you a typical American. No taste buds.”

I smiled at the older woman and informed her, “My ancestors are Irish.” This, of course, excuses a wide range of human flaws and abnormalities.

Bian translated this, the woman nodded knowingly and mentioned something in reply. Bian laughed and said something back.

Bian informed me, “She said she knows about the Irish. Bloodthirsty savages, sloppy drunks, and weepy poets.”

“What did you tell her?”

“You’re no poet.”

They exchanged more words, and Bian chuckled. The lady poured water in our glasses while Bian informed me, “She says you are very handsome in a very Caucasian way.” She added, “She wonders if you have a wife.”

“Oh . . .”

“I told her you had asked many women to marry. They all said no.”

The two of them erupted in laughter. Women have a weird sense of humor.

Bian then explained something to the woman, who looked at me, and said, “Can do . . . can do.” She then said something to Bian, who nodded. The woman rushed off and disappeared into what I presumed was the kitchen where all the poor dead fish went to be squashed into putrid oils.

I looked at Bian. “Where did you learn Vietnamese?”

“Where it’s best learned.”

“Berlitz?”

She smiled, sort of. “Saigon. I was born there.” She shook out her napkin and placed it on her lap. “Have you been to Vietnam?”

I shook my head. “My father vacationed there. Twice. He came back with wild and not wonderful stories about people shooting at one another, mines, bombs.” I added, “He returned the second time with a story about somebody who shot
him
.”

“I see.”

“How did you get here?”

“That’s a long and very boring story.”

“Nothing about you is boring.”

She looked at me. “Is that a compliment?”

“Consider it an observation.”

“Well . . . my father was an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. A major, in the Rangers. It was different for him than for American officers who rotated in and out on twelve-month tours. He fought the entire war. Twelve straight years.”

“It was
his
country.”

She gave me a knowing nod. “I’ll bet that had something to do with it.”

“You don’t look old enough to remember that.”

“I wasn’t, and I don’t. He and my mother were married in 1967. They waited and waited . . . they didn’t want to bring a child into such a miserable existence. I was born in 1973.”

“The year before the war ended.”

“You mean for America it ended. Not for us. And I think he knew the final ending wasn’t going to be satisfying. But I suppose he decided he’d waited long enough for a child . . . that . . . if he kept putting it off . . .” She played with her chopsticks. “It’s a strange thought. I’ve always harbored the sense I was conceived as an act of fatalism.”

I said nothing.

“My family is Catholic. Worse, my mother’s family were rich, decadent landowners. By physical necessity and political conviction, they were staunchly anticommunist, and they knew what defeat would mean. My father fought until the very end, until 1975.”

“Then he left?”

“That . . . No, that proved impossible.”

“Why not? A lot of Vietnamese came here. Go to San Diego. They’re thinking of renaming it Nha Diego.”

“Those were the lucky ones.”

“What happened to the unlucky ones?”

“The northerners had a lot of time to prepare for their conquest. During the war years, with the help of their southern spies, they compiled long lists of South Vietnamese officers and politicians who were, in their view, corrupted. My father was on a list of people who would benefit from . . . the phrase was ‘reform and reeducation.’ Two days after the surrender, he was taken to a camp to be taught how to
think
in the new Vietnam.”

“I’m sorry.”

A little too offhandedly, she replied, “Don’t worry about it. This all happened a long time ago.”

“Do you know the definition of a long time ago?” She appeared not to know, so I told her, “In somebody else’s lifetime.”

She did not acknowledge this, but coolly sipped from her water. Eventually she said, “Well . . . my mother remained in Saigon for the next three years. Waiting. As the wife of a traitor, she wasn’t employable with the new state, nor did anybody want to get on the wrong side of the new government by hiring her. Don’t ask about the things she had to do to get by.”

We looked at each other a moment.

She said, “Understand that nobody knew initially what these camps were, how they operated . . . We were told these weren’t penal colonies, they were humane facilities to help the Vietnamese build one society, a brave new nation. It sounded so stupidly communist, for a while, everybody believed it.”

“Did you hear from your father?”

“External contact was forbidden—we were told it would taint his reeducation effort.”

“And you were how old? Three . . . four?”

“Three, the year my father went into the camp. Six when an army comrade of my father’s came to Saigon and found us. He had just been released from the same camp. He told us my father had been dead for two years. To inspire other recalcitrant prisoners, he volunteered to be publicly beaten to death.”

“I see.”

“So we left. We arrived with the last big wave of boat people,” she said as though this were the end of the story rather than the beginning.

I didn’t know how to respond to this. Like nearly all Americans, I had no frame of reference for what Bian had experienced, for how she had suffered. The closest I came were my own pop’s years away at war, the first of which occurred in the early sixties, when I was too young to be frightened for him, or what his loss might mean for little Sean.

His second tour was in 1971—I was ten, friends had lost their fathers, other fathers had returned home missing body parts, and others came back mentally and emotionally different. So I knew. I will never forget the day we dropped Pop at Dulles International Airport for his flight to San Francisco, where he would catch the Southeast Asia express, the strained look on Mom’s face, or how hard Pop squeezed me before he uttered his deeply felt parting advice—“Be good, do everything Mom says, or I’ll come back and kill you.”

What followed was the year of long days and forever nights. Every night I offered the same shopworn deal as so many other kids in my shoes: Dear God, bring Pop home healthy, and I will never commit another sin.

Well, as I mentioned, Pop came back alive, albeit on a stretcher. Boy, was I ever relieved I had stipulated
healthy
—had I stupidly gone for the more exclusive “alive” or “in one piece,” I would’ve lost the best part of my teenage years.

The point is, as Americans, we send our fathers off to war, they are away for a finite period, and while they are gone, we, their families, live in constant dread but also relative tranquillity. Except that they may never come back, they might as well be on an extended business trip.

“What about your mother?” I asked her.

“Still alive. Our boat was picked up about a hundred miles from the Philippines. The voyage was not . . . well, it wasn’t pleasant.” She looked away a moment. “We spent a few weeks in a hospital, then a settlement camp outside Manila before the American embassy arranged visas and flights to America. A lot of Vietnamese had come before us, mainly to Southern California, Louisiana, and here, around

D.C. The State Department made our choice for us. This was where we ended up.”

The old woman emerged from the kitchen trailed by a skinny Vietnamese teenage boy with purple hair, nose ring, punk clothes, and wobbly arms hauling a large tray. His parents probably had a tale somewhat like Bian’s, joining in the diaspora, fleeing a nightmare and coming here to provide this boy a better life, a good education, promising opportunities. Seeing him now, I’ll bet they were having second thoughts.

He set the tray down on a folding stand, and he and the lady began laying out plates on our table. It was mostly boiled vegetables and starchy rice, with two plates filled with stuff that looked scaly and smelled awful. I gave Bian an accusing look. “You said you hated fish.”