“Where’d he go?”
“Eddie who?”
“Eddie Vo, goddamn you!”
“Eddie Vo. He run fast by the window. I saw him. That way.” She pointed.
Nha spilled in, her eyes wide.
Frye kicked open the door and ran along the shops. Nha trailed behind him. When he came to the end of the sidewalk he jumped the cinderblock wall and looked out to the drainage ditch that ran behind the plaza. Moonlight wavered on the brackish water. The field was laced with power poles.
There was silence and darkness, and nothing moved.
He climbed back down, panting. “It was Eddie.”
“Are you all right?”
“Goddamn that little prick. How can he just disappear like that?”
“He’s just faster than you are.”
“You’re one helluva big help, Nha.” Frye’s breath came in gasps.
“If he’s gone, he’s gone. Come with me. Minh will be here soon and you’ll be in trouble again.”
“No.”
Frye went back to the Dream Reader and asked to use the telephone. She was sitting at her small round table, as always, it seemed, watching the people pass her storefront.
Frye couldn’t get Minh, so he told the Watch Commander that Eddie Vo was back in Saigon Plaza. He called Frye Island and told his father, who rang off immediately to call the FBI and Pat Arbuckle. There was no answer at Bennett’s house.
The back of Frye’s head was moaning in pain. He felt the lump with his fingertips. “Let’s get out of here, Nha.”
“Climb the wall and we’ll cut through the field. You don’t want to be around if Minh comes.”
Nha unlocked the front door of her house and let them in. Standing under the bright kitchen lights, she examined the back of Frye’s head, which she termed “battered.” She wrapped ice in a towel and held it to his throbbing skull. “No one is here but my father. Let me see if hell look at it — he’s knowledgeable about wounds.”
Frye sat in the living room while Nha went to the study.
A second later, he heard it.
The scream was high, full of comprehended terror. It was loud enough to sink into his bones.
He burst into the study to a vision so obscene he could only believe that he was dreaming.
Nha was on her knees, bowing to the floor and rising as if in worship. Her scream had risen in pitch to a keening that could come only from the darkest region of her heart.
Xuan sat on the couch, just as he had a few hours before, hands crossed on his lap, knees apart. His head was six feet away, resting on the desk blotter, glasses still on and eyes barely open, as if trying to read the small print. It looked as if his body had been dipped in a vat of blood.
Frye was sure that Nha’s screaming and the sirens wailing in his own eardrums were enough to bring down the walls. Come down, he thought, come down and bury us and make this all untrue.
He stood there for a moment, blinking, married to Nha’s screams. Nothing would go away.
Chapter 13
For the next two hours Frye controlled events from over his own shoulder, a hovering, objective, third party to himself. It was just after one in the morning.
He got the other Frye to answer questions and control his urge to vomit. He tried to counter the other Frye’s drowsiness and the constant grinding of his jaw. He watched with detached interest as CSI Duncan finally walked from the study, bearing a plastic garbage bag, tied and tagged. The gurney slid by silently a few moments later. The other Frye just stood there in front of him with tears running down his cheeks, and he thought: The kid needs a break.
The other Frye dealt with Minh rather admirably, he thought, answering his questions patiently, then finally standing up and telling the detective to go fuck himself and talk to someone else. The other Frye bummed a smoke from someone and went outside.
The other Frye watched as the FBI descended and Special Agent Wiggins in his lawyer’s suit took charge. He nodded when Wiggins took him into one of the girls’ bedrooms and explained that no one, repeat, no one must know that Xuan was beheaded. This, in order to catch the perp. He refused to sign whatever it was they asked him to sign.
The other Frye saw the horror in Madame Tuy’s eyes as an agent escorted her and her daughters into a waiting car.
Both Fryes watched as they wheeled Nha to the ambulance on a stretcher, her body cold and pale as ice, a shock so deep that the faces of the paramedics said she really might not make it.
Then it was two o’clock. The two Fryes slowly joined again and melted into the bucket seat of the Cyclone. The car either moved, or the road slid under it — he wasn’t sure of the mechanics — but Bolsa Avenue began to pass along the windows.
Little Saigon crept by on either side, a tunnel of lights and shops. First there were two of everything, but he wiped his eyes and then there was only one.
Outside the Committee to Free Vietnam headquarters, Bennett’s van waited in the parking lot.
Frye pulled in and parked next to it. For a long while he just sat there, wondering why he was just sitting there.
He found himself outside the well-lit lobby. The door was cracked open, Frye tried it — locked, but not pulled shut. He went in. Posters of entertainers — Li among them, maps, three desks and typewriters, three phones, and a collection of cheap patio chairs. A South Vietnamese flag hung against the far wall. Another wall supported a military shrine of some kind: a glass case containing an empty uniform pinned to a backboard as if still occupied by its owner. The boots, medals, holster, pistol, and belt were all in place. A dark walnut door leading further into the building was shut.
Frye stood there, trying to quell the visions that kept swirling before his eyes.
But displayed in a case beside the uniform were three photographs that brought them on even stronger. In the first picture a naked man was being led by two soldiers. Behind them were thatched roof bungalows and jungle. In the second, the man was kneeling before a man with a sword. In the third he was still kneeling, but his head lay on the ground beside him and dark streams of blood ran down his chest.
Colonel Thach stood above his victim in post-pivotal grace, legs bent, arms and sword extended, like Reggie sending one out of Yankee Stadium. His face was a hideous grimace. Below the photographs was a simple card, thumbtacked to the wall, that said IN MEMORY OF GENERAL HAN, RESISTANCE LEADER — 1935–1986.
Frye slumped into a patio chair, staring into the horrible face of the colonel. I’d give just about anything in the world, he thought, to make this all go away.
A muffled thud issued from somewhere beyond the lobby. Frye wondered why his heart didn’t beat faster, why a surge of adrenaline didn’t break loose inside him, but all he felt was numb. Another thud, voices.
He stood up, turned off the lobby lights, and cracked the wooden door.
The back room was a warehouse, expansive and tall, with open rafters and industrial lights hung from chains. There were shelves stacked with pamphlets and literature, rows of books, boxes and cartons of indeterminate content. A portable podium with microphone, a public address system, and a couple of television monitors were placed along the near wall. At the far end of the big room Crawley and Nguyen loaded crates from a pallet into a red van. Coffin-shaped, but shorter, Frye thought. Legs and arms. Hands and feet. Heads are not replaceable.
Bennett stood nearby, watching, a short automatic weapon in his hands. He held it up, sighted on some target in the rafters, pulled the trigger. Frye heard the dry ping echo toward him. Bennett placed the weapon into a crate and Donnell hammered on the lid.
Frye wondered at how unsurprised he was. Deep down inside, he told himself, I knew he was lying all along.