While he was there, a man named Todd Barry called from the New York Times Magazine and said he’d talked to Sinclair about it, and that they could use twenty-five hundred words each for two articles, to run sequentially, on the Great Caterpillar Heist amp; Vietnam’s Revenge. Virgil told him he could have the stories in two weeks. Barry asked him if he was sure he could get permission from all the sources. Virgil said, “Fuck a bunch of permission,” and Barry said, “We could get along.”
THEN MAI called from Hanoi.
When she called, Virgil was sitting in a country bar talking to a woman named Lark, an opium addict who was accused of boosting thirty thousand dollars’ worth of toddler jeans out of a Wal-Mart supply truck as the truck had sat unattended overnight in a Wal-Mart parking lot. According to the local cops, Lark had driven her boyfriend’s Ford F-350 Super Duty up beside the tractor-trailer, cut her way through the side using a Sawzall run off a Honda generator, and then filled up the longbed pickup with the toddler clothing. She was not believed to have had time to get rid of the loot, but nobody could find it. They were hoping that a thoughtful threat from Virgil might help, since Virgil had at different times arrested her boyfriend, father, and brother.
When Virgil’s phone rang, he looked at it, saw the “Caller Unknown,” opened the phone, and said, “Yes?”
“Virgil?”
He picked up her voice and turned away from Lark, into the booth. “Mai? Where are you?”
“ Hanoi. In a pastry shop.”
“Who got shot?” Virgil asked.
“He was a college boy who supplied the boat and the vehicles,” Mai said. “He was supposed to go back to school, but now he’ll have to find another school. He’s here.”
“Hurt bad?”
“The bullet broke his leg,” she said. “I had to carry him. When we were in the truck, I looked back at you and saw you aim, but you didn’t shoot.”
“Ah, there was a farmhouse in the background. I couldn’t see what was behind you.”
After a moment, she giggled and said, “You could have thought of something more… I don’t know. Sensitive? Romantic? You didn’t shoot me because you thought you might hit a cow?”
“Well, Mai, I was pretty… intent,” Virgil said. “I would have put your little round butt in jail if I could have.”
“Mmm. How is Mead?”
“Mead’s fine.”
“I could not believe your governor’s press conference,” Mai said. “I was in Victoria when I began to see news stories about it. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Get you in trouble back home?” Virgil asked.
“No. You know, here, what’s done is done. Then you go on. I would have liked to have told you about the people who were killed in Da Nang,” she said. “The old man was my grandfather. The woman was my aunt, the little children were my cousins. I never knew any of them. My father, in his whole life, was insane with the grief of them dying. They went through the whole war, and then, just as the victory arrives, they are killed by American criminals. When this chance came, well, our whole family took it. Justice too long delayed.”
She waited for a reaction. Virgil finally came up with “There would have been a better way to handle it.”
“Well-my great-uncle is dying,” Mai said. “Nothing but old age, and he is famous here, the head of our family, so his life is good enough. But this justice was his one last wish. We didn’t have too much time; he will die this autumn, I think.”
“So what do you want from me?” Virgil asked.
“Closure. Say good-bye. I liked dancing with you, Virgil. I liked sleeping with you. We’d be friends if we could be, but we can’t.”
“Mmm,” Virgil said.
“So when you get rich and start to travel, if you ever come to Hanoi -give me a ring,” she said. “Or even a good neutral country. China.”
“I wouldn’t go to China if I were you. To Hong Kong,” Virgil said.
Another bit of silence. “Virgil-what did you do?”
“I talked to that Chinese cop again,” Virgil said. “He’s a little annoyed that Vietnamese intelligence came into Hong Kong and murdered a guy without even a courtesy card.”
“Oh, Virgil. Goddamnit. He knows who I am?”
“Yeah, we squeezed that out of Mead,” he said. “So, if I were you, I might hesitate before going in there. For a while, at least.”
Then she laughed. “Virgil… you were a surprise.”
“So were you, Mai.”
“Good-bye,” she said.
And she was gone.
“OLD GIRLFRIEND?” Lark asked. She had her legs up on the opposite seat, two empty Grain Belt bottles by her elbow; clicked her front teeth with her silver tongue stud after asking the question.
“Not exactly,” Virgil said. “Now, Lark, about these goddamn baby pants…”
THE TAIL END of August was hot. Davenport got in a lot of trouble working a new case, and called for help. Virgil went north, in the night, and found the entire east side of St. Paul in darkness. Some cog or gear in the power system had given up under the strain of the hundreds of thousands of screaming air conditioners, and popped.
The BCA was a puddle of light, minimal services-not including the air-conditioning-running off an emergency generator. He checked in with the duty man and was told that Davenport, Del, Shrake, and Jenkins were out on the street somewhere, looking for a crazy guy in a wheelchair. “You’re welcome to wait in Lucas’s office, but I don’t think he’s coming back. Not soon, anyway.”
Virgil went up to the office, walking down dark hallways; only the emergency lights were working in the halls. Davenport still had some power. Virgil got a fan going, pointed it at Davenport ’s chair, turned on Davenport ’s small flat-panel TV, and sat back in the chair.
The convention had arrived. The parties had started, the champagne was flowing, the Young Republicans were barfing in the Mississippi, the anarchists were flying the black flag in Mears Park, and Daisy Jones was anchoring the street action. She was so excited that her glitter lipstick was melting.
He was taking it all in when Sandy leaned in the door. “God, it’s hot,” she said. She had a plastic bottle of Coke in her hands, sweating with condensation.
Virgil said, “Get yourself a fan.”
“You’ve got the only fan in the building. Who has fans in an air-conditioned office? Lucas, that’s who.” She was barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and a taffeta girly-style skirt. She looked a little dewy, and pretty good.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Research,” she said. She took off her glasses, put them on a bookcase. “Can’t believe this heat. It’s still eighty-five out there, and it’s midnight.”
“You heard that Mai called me?”
“I heard,” she said. She twisted the cap off the Coke, took a drink, leaned back against the doorway, and rolled the cold bottle against the side of her face and neck.
“Hot,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, screw it,” she said. She put the bottle on top of the bookcase, pulled her arms through the sleeve holes of her T-shirt, popped the back snap on her bra, pulled the straps over her hands, pushed her hands back through the sleeves, and then pulled the bra from under the shirt and put it on the bookcase next to the glasses. “That’s better.”
“Gotta be comfortable,” Virgil said. “That’s the important thing.”
“Damn right,” she said.
Virgil stood up and stretched, yawned, said, “Where’d you get the Coke? The machine’s still working?”
“Yeah.”
They ambled down the hallway together to the canteen room, where Virgil got a Diet Coke, then back toward Davenport’s office. She said, “I don’t think there’s anybody else in the building except the duty man.”
They were under the glass skylights when they caught the brilliant flash to the west, and lingered there, elbows on the banister over the courtyard, looking up through the glass at the clouds churning above the bright city lights.