I don’t know why it had taken this long for my nerves to kick in, but as soon as the door clicked shut, I clenched my jaw. It struck me that the Mexican spoke three languages, including Vietnamese apparently, and something about this — the fact that he belonged completely to this absurd situation — was both comical and deeply troubling.
I said to Junior, “Your father has expensive pets.”
“He is not here, Mr. Robert,” he replied and ashed into an ashtray he held in his other hand — yet another overly formal mannerism. He gestured at the entire room. “But I have brought you to meet his fish. You may already know that they are not. . particularly legal. This one here”—he pointed at a whiskered creature over two feet long, with a golden, undulating body, glimmering in the light—“is an Asian arowana. A dragonfish. Very endangered in the wild. They’re supposed to bring good luck, keep evil away, bring the family together. Asians always love believing in that. Our clients will pay over ten thousand for a gold one like this.”
He glanced at me for a response. I gave him nothing. His arrogance with all this was confusing, but more than anything it was beginning to annoy me.
He watched the fish intently. “You’ve heard of caliche?” he said with his back to me. “It’s a dense bed of calcium carbonate in the desert soil. Harder than concrete. They must often use special drills to remove it. Because of caliche, my father spent a fortune building all this. Being underground, you see, that’s very important to him. He comes down here two or three times a week, sometimes for an entire day, to smoke and listen to music, to be alone with his fish, remove himself entirely from the world. For all his flaws, he is a man who values peace.”
“Maybe he just values a nice hiding place.”
“A person can hide anywhere, Mr. Robert. Even right out in the open. You do, don’t you? How long could you stand it down here, all alone, with nowhere to hide, with no one but you and yourself?”
I took a step toward him and heard the Mexican shuffle his feet behind me. I spoke to Junior’s back. “I’ve met your fish. Why else have you brought me here?”
He turned around, expelling smoke through his nostrils. “I have brought you here to tell you a story.” He licked his lips and brushed ash from his breast. “You see, my father appreciates these fish because they are beautiful and bring him a lot of money. But they also remind him of home — they bring home to him. It is the irony, you see, that is valuable: a tiny tropical ocean here in the middle of the desert; all these fish swimming beneath sand. The casinos in this city sell you a similar kind of irony, but what we have here is genuine and real, because it also keeps us who we are.”
“Who you are? You and your pops run a Japanese restaurant.”
“Be quiet, Mr. Robert, and listen.”
He put out his cigarette and walked over to take a seat in one of the dolphin chairs. He grabbed a remote off the table and pressed a button and the music faded into the soft purr of the aquarium pumps. Unbuttoning his jacket, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he offered me the face of a boy but sounded like an old man.
“Twenty years ago,” he said, “my parents and I escaped Vietnam by boat. Ninety people in a little fishing boat made for maybe twenty. We were headed for Malaysia. On our sixth night at sea we hit a terrible storm and my mother fell overboard. No one saw it. It was too dark and stormy, and the waters were too violent for anyone to save her anyway. I was seven at the time. I will not bore you with a tragedy. I will only say that her death hardened my father, made him more fearless than he already was.
“In any case, after nine days, our boat finally made it to the refugee camp in Malaysia, on a deserted island off the coast. The first day my father and I were there, a few ruffians in the camp made themselves known to us. My father was once in a gang back in Vietnam and had also fought in the war, so he was not afraid. He ignored them. A week later, one of them stole my rice ration. He slapped me several times, pushed me to the ground, ripped the sack out of my hand. For one last scare, he grabbed my wrist and ran a knife across it, barely cutting the skin. I ran to my father, bawling, and before he said a single word, he too slapped me. Shut me up in an instant.”
Junior peered at his hands for a moment, like he was studying his nails. His sudden sincerity felt real, except I couldn’t locate its purpose.
He went on: “He took me by the arm and dragged me to the part of the camp where the ruffians hung out, near the edge of the forest. There was hardly anyone around except three young men kneeling and playing dice outside their hut. One of them was the man who had attacked me. My father made me point him out, then had me stand under a palm tree. He ordered me to watch. On a tree stump nearby, someone had butchered an animal and left the bloody cleaver and my father grabbed it and marched up behind the man and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The man fell forward, dazed, and his two friends pounced at my father, but he was already brandishing the cleaver. They backed off. My father grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and dragged him to the tree stump. In one swift motion he placed the man’s hand on the stump and threw down the cleaver and hacked off three fingers. The man screamed. Suddenly there were voices around us, faces appearing in doorways, from behind the trees. I heard a woman shriek. The man was kneeling on the ground, stunned and whimpering, clasping his bloody hand to his chest. His fingers — the three middle ones — still lay on the tree stump. His two friends could only stare at them. My father flung the cleaver away and bent down and muttered something in his ear. Then he wiped his own hand on his pants and held mine as we walked back to our shack. We stayed in that camp for three more months before we came to the States. No one ever bothered us again.”
Sonny Jr. stood from the chair and walked over again to the stingrays. He took out the linen napkin and wiped the glass where his finger had pointed at the arowana. “I still occasionally have dreams about that afternoon,” he said, as if to the fishes. Then he turned to me thoughtfully. “But I’m not telling you this story so that you’ll pity me. I simply want you to understand what kind of man my father is. I want you, in your own way, to respect it. He will hurt you, Mr. Robert. If he doesn’t do it this time, he will find you some other time and hurt you then. No matter what.
“So please, think of this conversation — this situation between us — as an exchange of trust. I have brought you down here, an officer of the law, to see my father’s illegal business. This rather foolish gesture should convince you of my good intentions. Please trust that I am trying to help you. I’m offering you the door now and trusting you to forget your plans in this city, to go home and not say a word of what you have seen. A man of your sentiments should appreciate the sincerity of this offer.”
I watched him neatly fold the napkin and place it back in his pocket. His fastidiousness seemed overdone, just like his words. He’d both shown me his hand and told me how to play mine, but it all still smelled like a bluff. The kid knew he was smart, and in my experience if you let people think they’re smarter, they’ll try a little less to outsmart you. Easier said than done though.
I walked over to the couch and sat down. I hadn’t smoked since Suzy left me — another part of my detox plan, since smoking together was one of the few things we never stopped doing. But now I took a cigarette from the pack and lit up.