“You’ll get the money. All you want.”
“You don’t know how much I want.”
“I still need a gun. You promised me you’d get one. Plus twenty rounds, minimum.”
She let out a harsh breath of smoke. “Ammunition is hard to come by.”
“I can’t wait any longer. This has to be-”
They both froze as the door creaked open. The police, thought Siang, automatically reaching for his knife.
“You’re so right, Mr. Siang,” said a voice in the darkness. Perfect English. “It has to be done. But not quite yet.”
The intruder moved lazily into the room, struck a match and calmly lit a kerosene lamp on the table.
Chantal’s eyes were wide with astonishment. And fear. “It’s you,” she whispered. “You’ve come back…”
The intruder smiled. He laid a pistol and a box of.38-caliber ammunition on the table. Then he looked at Siang. “There’s been a slight change of plans.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE WAS FLYING. High, high above the clouds, where the sky was so cold and clear, it felt as if her plane were floating in a crystalline sea. She could hear the wings cut the air like knives through silk. Someone said, “Higher, baby. You have to climb higher if you want to reach the stars.”
She turned. It was her father sitting in the copilot’s seat, quicksilver smoke dancing around him. He looked the way she’d always remembered him, his cap tilted at a jaunty angle, his eyes twinkling. Just the way he used to look when she’d loved him. When he’d been the biggest, boldest Daddy in the world.
She said, “But I don’t want to climb higher.”
“Yes, you do. You want to reach the stars.”
“I’m afraid, Daddy. Don’t make me…”
But he took the joystick. He sent the plane upward, upward, into the blue bowl of sky. He kept saying, “This is what it’s all about. Yessir, baby, this is what it’s all about.” Only his voice had changed. She saw that it was no longer her father sitting in the copilot’s seat; it was Guy Barnard, pushing them into oblivion. “I’ll take us to the stars!”
Then it was her father again, gleefully gripping the joystick. She tried to wrench the plane out of the climb, but the joystick broke off in her hand.
The sky turned upside down, righted. She looked at the copilot’s seat. Guy was sitting there, laughing. They went higher. Her father laughed.
“Who are you?” she screamed.
The phantom smiled. “Don’t you know me?”
She woke up, still reaching desperately for that stump of a joystick.
“It’s me,” the voice said.
She stared up wildly. “Daddy!”
The man looking down at her smiled, a kind smile. “Not quite.”
She blinked, focused on Guy’s face, his rumpled hair, unshaven jaw. Sweat gleamed on his bare shoulders. Through the curtains behind him, daylight shimmered.
“Nightmare?” he asked.
Groaning, she sat up and shoved back a handful of tangled hair. “I don’t usually have them. Nightmares.”
“After last night, I’d be surprised if you didn’t have one.”
Last night. She looked down and saw she was still wearing the same blood-spattered dress, now damp and clinging to her back.
“Power’s out,” said Guy, giving the silent air conditioner a slap. He padded over to the window and nudged open the curtain. Sunlight blazed in, so piercing, it hurt Willy’s eyes. “Gonna be a hell of a scorcher.”
“Already is.”
“Are you feeling okay?” He stood silhouetted against the window, his unbelted trousers slung low over his hips. Once again she saw the scar, noticed how it rippled its way down his abdomen before vanishing beneath the waistband.
“I’m hot,” she said. “And filthy. And I probably don’t smell so good.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” He paused and added ruefully, “Probably because I smell even worse.”
They laughed, a short, uneasy laugh that was instantly cut off when someone knocked on the door. Guy called out, “Who’s there?”
“Mr. Barnard? It is eight o’clock. The car is ready.”
“It’s my driver,” Guy said, and he unbolted the door.
A smiling Vietnamese man stood outside. “Good morning! Do you still wish to go to Cantho this morning?”
“I don’t think so,” said Guy, discreetly stepping outside to talk in private. Willy heard him murmur, “I want to get Ms. Maitland to the airport this afternoon. Maybe we can…”
Cantho. Willy sat on the bed, listening to the buzz of conversation, trying to remember why that name was so important. Oh, yes. There was a man there, someone she needed to talk to. A man who might have the answers. She closed her eyes against the window’s glare, and the dream came back to her, the grinning face of her father, the sickening climb of a doomed plane. She thought of her mother, lying near death at home. Heard her mother ask, “Are you sure, Willy? Do you know for certain he’s dead?” Heard herself tell another lie, all the time hating herself, hating her own cowardice, hating the fact that she could never live up to her father’s name. Or his courage.
“So stick around the hotel,” Guy said to the driver. “Her plane takes off at four, so we should leave around-”
“I’m going to Cantho,” said Willy.
Guy glanced around at her. “What?”
“I said I’m going to Cantho. You said you’d take me.”
He shook his head. “Things have changed.”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“The stakes have.”
“But not the questions. They haven’t gone away. They’ll never go away.”
Guy turned to the driver. “Excuse me while I talk some sense into the lady…”
But Willy had already risen to her feet. “Don’t bother. You can’t talk sense into me.” She went into the bathroom and shut the door. “I’m Wild Bill Maitland’s kid, remember?” she yelled.
The driver looked sympathetically at Guy. “I will get the car.”
THE ROAD OUT OF SAIGON was jammed with trucks, most of them ancient and spewing clouds of black exhaust. Through the open windows of their car came the smells of smoke and sun-baked pavement and rotting fruit. Laborers trudged along the roadside, a bobbing column of conical hats against the bright green of the rice paddies.
Five hours and two ferry crossings later, Guy and Willy stood on a Cantho pier and watched a multitude of boats glide across the muddy Mekong. River women dipped and swayed as they rowed, a strange and graceful dance at the oars. And on the riverbank swirled the noise and confusion of a thriving market town. Schoolgirls, braided hair gleaming in the sunshine, whisked past on bicycles. Stevedores heaved sacks of rice and crates of melons and pineapples onto sampans.
Overwhelmed by the chaos, Willy asked bleakly, “How are we ever going to find him?”
Guy’s answer didn’t inspire much confidence. He simply shrugged and said, “How hard can it be?”
Very hard, it turned out. All their inquiries brought the same response. “A tall man?” people would say. “And blond?” Invariably their answer would be a shake of the head.
It was Guy’s inspired hunch that finally sent them into a series of tailor shops. “Maybe Lassiter’s no longer blond,” he said. “He could have dyed his hair or gone bald. But there’s one feature a man can’t disguise-his height. And in this country, a six-foot-four man is going to need specially tailored clothes.”
The first three tailors they visited turned up nothing. It was with a growing sense of futility that they entered the fourth shop, wedged in an alley of tin-roofed hootches. In the cavelike gloom within, an elderly seamstress sat hunched over a mound of imitation silk. She didn’t seem to understand Guy’s questions. In frustration, Guy took out a pen and jotted a few words in Vietnamese on a scrap of newspaper. Then, to illustrate his point, he sketched in the figure of a tall man.
The woman squinted down at the drawing. For a long time, she sat there, her fingers knotted tightly around the shimmering fabric. Then she looked up at Guy. No words were exchanged, just that silent, mournful gaze.