“No thanks. I’m listening.”
“I’ll admit it, Frye, when I first heard about Xuan, I thought the same thing you did. Two prominent resistance leaders... removed in the same week. But I did my homework on Xuan, bless his heart. He’s one of those Vietnamese who sees a Communist behind every bush, and remember this is the FBI talking. He organized his own secret police back in ‘seventy-eight, to screen the refugees coming in. People were beaten. People disappeared. You know what he was saying then? Thach. Thach is behind it all. Guy had a regular fixation, Frye. And I’ve got evidence now that Tuy Xuan may have been involved in some questionable dealings with the local gangs.”
“What kind of dealings?”
“He’s an activist. He enlists support in Nguyen Hy’s so-called Committee to Free Vietnam. They fund a ‘resistance’ over there. I’d speculate he got some funding from the gang kids’ families, and the gang kids went to get it back. It’s damn easy to throw suspicion, if you want to leave a signature. Look at yourself, it worked on you, didn’t it?”
“Who? The Dark Men? Ground Zero?”
“I don’t know, at this point. I’m not sure it matters. Let’s just say we’ve got early indicators that Xuan and the criminal youth element were tied. So we’re not talking politics here. We’re talking plain old dollars and cents. You know something, Chuck? The refugees are smart. They know that they can point fingers at Hanoi and we good Americans will go along with them. We hate Communists in this country, don’t we? Well, the refugees know that. They play on our own fears, and every time someone gets their pocket picked, they blame Hanoi. The gangs know that. Eddie Vo knows it.”
“Gang kids beheading an old man? Hard to swallow.”
“There was a gang working here in the early eighties. Their leader was infamous for doing just that. His nickname was Chop, for God’s sake. So it’s not hard for me to swallow at all. Unless, of course, you know something about Li or Xuan that you’re not telling us.” Wiggins sat down, looking at Frye innocently.
“Something like what?”
“The pipeline to Vietnam. The ‘prosthetics’ that Bennett and Li send over there.” Wiggins smiled. “He told me he was sending over plastic limbs, and I laughed in his face. Which isn’t easy to do to a man who hasn’t got any legs.”
Frye said nothing.
Wiggins smiled. “Hey — I don’t care. I think it’s great. Send all the guns and ammo he can afford. That’s the question, though. How does he afford it? Where’s he get the money?”
“You got me.”
“Knew I would, Chuck. Just knew I would.”
“Funny how we got back to politics again.”
“Fleecing money from homesick refugees isn’t politics. It’s theft.”
“General Dien is the master of that game, from what I hear.”
“And Nguyen Hy is a close second. Bennett and Li are just a little too close to Hy’s CFV for the... contact not to rub off. You know — sleep with pigs, you pick up their smell. And sooner or later, the suckers find out and what happens? Heads roll. So, if you’ve got any information on how that pipeline is financed, I’d sure like to know. I might be able to keep something like this from happening again. Talk about good copy, Chuck. You help me, and I’ll help you on this one. We could show just who’s taking money out of Little Saigon and where it’s going — or not going. But if you’ve got any ambition to write about some Vietnamese colonel cutting off heads in California, Chuck, I have to ask you to run it by this desk first. Would you do that?”
“No. I’d end up with my byline on the same kind of lies you let the other papers print today.”
Wiggins’s face darkened. “Chuck, let me put it another way. Stay the fuck out of Little Saigon and forget about Colonel Thach. I’ll give you the first tip for your big exposé. The main reason we didn’t release the MO on Xuan’s murder isn’t because we’re afraid of starting a riot in Little Saigon, though that’s a possibility. The main reason is that Colonel Thach can’t even leave his apartment in Ho Chi Minh City anymore. He’s in protective isolation — a better term for it is house arrest. The new Hanoi Politburo doesn’t trust him. He’s an old war machine and they know it, and they also know they can’t control him. They’ve been sitting on him since June. His ice is too thin for the kind of skating you’re talking about.”
Frye considered. “That’s exactly what Hanoi would tell you, if Thach were running an operation like this, isn’t it?”
Wiggins sighed and looked at Frye as if he were a moron. “Hanoi didn’t tell us that, Chuck, We’ve got more reliable sources than those lying bastards. So lighten up. Let the FBI do its job and you do yours. What the hell is your job anyway? Besides hustling Tuy Nha?”
“I don’t have one, exactly.”
“Well, you’re so hot to trot, why don’t you go find one?” “I’m working on it.”
Bill Antioch presided over the empty MegaShop, drinking his ever-present health shake. “Got you all signed up for the Masters at Huntington, Frye. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m also telling everyone you’ll be at the showing of Radically Committed Saturday night. At the Surf in Huntington. Any truth to that rumor?”
“It’s my movie, I guess I ought to be there.”
“Gnardical.” Bill gave him four comp tickets.
“How are we doing today, Bill, from a sales angle?”
“We’ve sold one bar of wax.”
“Large or small?”
Frye surveyed the shop. Bill had straightened things, dusted, arranged the boxes and boards, taken down the faded Christmas signs, put the wetsuits back on the rack by size. MegaT-shirts were marked down to three for ten bucks. This stung, but Frye said nothing. The windows were clean. The first inklings of retail hopelessness crept over him as he reached behind the counter for the phone.
He called Elite Management and got the usual put-off from the receptionist. She said that Rollie Dean Mack would return his call, but Frye had heard that one before. He tried again to get the address.
“It’s like no way, unless you have an appointment,” she said. She sounded like a certified surf-bunny, about age eighteen, loose-jawed, heavy on the schwas. “We don’t give out our business address unless we’re expecting you. Elite isn’t, like, geared to the publuck.”
Frye slammed down the phone. Then it hit him. “Advertising.”
“Can’t afford it,” said Antioch.
“No. Elite ran advertising in the Ledger, on Wednesdays, so that means someone had to go over the veloxes with them on Tuesday morning.”
“Cool.”
He called the Ledger and asked for display advertising, Dianne Resnick. Dianne once liked Frye, who occasionally wrote puff pieces to make her advertisers sound better than they were. Frye did this because Dianne had great legs, and because exaggerating the virtues of hopelessly third-rate companies was just plain fun. He brought a desperate, manic enthusiasm to these pieces, which read like a cross between Hunter Thompson and Alexander Haig. The all-seeing Ronald Billingham had edited the hell out of them.
Dianne answered the phone in her sales voice, soothing and eager to please. Frye explained that he needed to know where Dianne sent the ad proofs for Elite Management. The pulling of these ads was understandably a sore spot with Dianne, who was now out fifty-six dollars and seventy-eight cents a week in commission. “You still make ten times a week more than I did, Di,” he said.
“That’s because I bring money to this paper. Any nerd can write copy.”
“I did my best to tout those greedy mutants passing themselves off as businessmen. You have to admit that. It would mean a lot to me if you could give me that address, Dianne.”