“Are you still alive, Frye?”
“Yeah.”
With his flashlight on again he went fifty feet to where the tunnel opened into another small room. A camping lantern hung from one wall. He found a pack of matches on top of it, worked the pump a few times, and lit the wick. The room coalesced in a soft orange glow. A sleeping bag lay on the earth, neatly flattened. He pulled it open. Inside, pheasants flew across a background of red flannel. “It’s Eddie’s,” he said. “I saw it in his room. When he was sneaking through the plaza, he had a bag with him. He’d gone home to get something to sleep on.”
Beside it was a white sack with a half-eaten hamburger inside. Frye held it and felt a truly unpleasant coolness settle on his nerves. Next to the sack sat a white bowl filled with what looked like used napkins. Minh smelled them.
On the other side of the sleeping bag was a candle in a small brass dish. The wax had melted into a pool, now hardened. Frye reached out to touch it, but Minh’s hand clamped over his. Propped up against the dish was a thin gold earring. Minh reached out with a handkerchief and picked it up. “It looks like the one I found in his house. He brought her here first. It explains the earth on her clothes.”
“You don’t want to hear this, Minh, but Eddie Vo never brought her here at all.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he wouldn’t. That’s all.”
“Then who did, Frye?”
“I don’t know.”
A small stack of Vietnamese magazines and newspapers sat beside the candle. Sacks from fast-food restaurants were piled next to one walclass="underline" several days’ worth of rations. Leaning beside them was a short, sawed-off shotgun. The barrel was rusted, the old wooden stock dark and beaten. The box of .20-gauge ammunition that sat beside it was brand-new. Frye examined the red plastic cylinders — high base, expensive. Next to that, another lantern and a can of fuel.
A trickle of sweat started at his neck and dribbled all the way down his back.
Something rumbled overhead; the floor vibrated. Cars, he thought — cars in Saigon Plaza. He could feel his pulse rising, a fresh wash of sweat break over his scalp. He checked his watch: ten minutes down. The lantern mantles glowed brightly, charging the room with clean, white light. Frye turned down the gas.
The tunnel continued, a neat hole in the far wall. He put the flashlight in his belt and unhooked the lantern. Thirty steps later the tunnel emptied into a concrete passageway with a dark sluggish stream moving slowly along the bottom. Spikes of old re-bar sprouted from the side walls, leaving brown stains and skewed shadows in the lamplight. From the darkness in either direction came liquescent echoes, intermittent splashes. Mud slid and shifted under his heels. He looked back and held up the lantern to see his footprints refilling with ooze.
It was then that he saw the man, maybe fifty feet away, crouched too, looking at Frye with a shocked, feral face.
“Halt! Police!” Minh pushed down on Frye’s shoulder with one hand and aimed his revolver with the other.
The man never looked back. He just turned, loped down the tunnel into the darkness and disappeared.
Minh charged ahead. Frye stood there, listening to the splattering from the detective’s shoes. Finally he commanded his heavy legs to move, the echoes of Minh’s footsteps still sounding in his ears.
When he caught up with him a moment later, Minh was standing in the mud, gun at his side. “Gone,” he said. “Like all the rest of them. Stay close, Frye.”
“Don’t worry.”
A hundred yards down, the river narrowed and disappeared through a grate. The concrete walls and ceiling tapered to almost nothing. Frye could hear the constant rush of the water, spilling over to wherever it went. He stopped a few yards short, unable to go any further without wading. Holding up the lantern, he could see that the grating was stuffed with captured debris — branches, a dripping black tumbleweed, a car tire, something that looked like a patio chair. The end of the line, he thought, for everything.
He held up the lantern again, looking for a connection, a way in or a way out, but all he saw was solid concrete, an aging drain system doing its thankless subterranean job.
“What do you think, Frye?”
“There’s got to be a way. Another trapdoor maybe, or a ladder. Something.”
“Lead on. Your luck is good so far.”
Frye turned and headed back out, still hugging the cool wall. Minh sloshed behind him. Frye tapped with his knuckles, about waist-height as he went, hoping. “Must be on the other wall.”
Landing on a pile of trash that formed a small island in the middle, he made the other side in two jumps and worked his way back down the wall, tapping, lantern held high and casting its bright glow against the stained and pitted concrete.
His fingers found the trapdoor before his eyes did; it was hidden that well. But it gave a hollow thud when he hit it, and a bit of concrete dust fell from the plywood that had been cut to fit the opening, then smeared with cement to look like the rest of the wall. He pried it with a car key. It scraped toward him, then fell, dangling from the hole by a piece of rope.
Looking up the steeply angled, narrow tunnel, Frye shuddered. He pointed to the smudges the man had left.
“I’ll go first now,” said Minh.
Frye stood for a moment, eyes closed again, trying for confidence, or at least composure. He checked his watch: twenty minutes down. With a deep breath he gave Minh the lantern, then followed him inside.
Knees, elbows, concrete cold on the belly, not even enough room to raise his head all the way. Halfway in, he decided this was a big mistake. The lantern flickered and hissed ahead of him. Minh cursed.
Then Frye began to scramble, his elbows burning and his knees aching, but the harder he tried, the tighter things got. He finally had to just stop everything and listen to his own breathing for a moment and feel the precise thudding of his heart against the tunnel floor and try his best to think about something else. He thought of Cristobel, stark-raving nude, beckoning him. His face was hot against the cement. I hate this place, he thought, never again down here, never again. He inched forward, one calibrated movement at a time, putting his faith in the infinitesimal degrees of progress. He could see Minh, thirty feet ahead. The detective was on his back, pressing up with his arms. Something gave; his arms straightened. Frye heard a cover slide away.
Minh worked his arms and shoulders through the opening. He slipped through; Frye followed.
It smelled worse than anything he’d smelled in his life, unimaginably foul. When Minh settled the lantern on flat ground, the glow fell on rounded shapes that scurried into shadows and vanished. A high buzzing filled the air around him, a sense of motion in the upper reaches of the cavern. He choked down the urge to vomit and pulled the rest of his body into the chamber.
It was bigger than either of the first two rooms, with a high ceiling that glittered, Frye saw as he raised the lantern, with the shifting bodies of flies. A rat waddled before him and he kicked it. The rodent seemed to melt into a corner, tail disappearing, snakelike. The walls were earth, supported by a makeshift network of uneven beams laced with rope. Scrap lumber, he thought, tied instead of nailed, so no one would hear the construction from above. Three lanterns hung from the ropes. A cooler stood in one corner. He stepped over, stirring the flies overhead, and opened it. A couple of soft drinks floated in a few inches of water.
“Thirsty, Minh?”
“Shut up, Frye.”
He almost gagged again. He closed his eyes and concentrated against it. He finally took off his shirt and wrapped it around his face, tying it snug behind his head. A few feet from the cooler lay a stack of announcements for the Freedom Rally. Li’s hopeless face wavered in the lantern light.