He pushed it. Below him, on the wall beside the wardrobe, a rectangular section of the wall panel slid quietly away. A window appeared, looking into a small room that was closed off from the main part of the club. One table set for four, chairs, paintings, a dusty arrangement of silk flowers. A mirror directly across the room gave him no reflection of his own face. One-way glass, he thought. Private dining, with a not-so-private window. To keep customers from stealing chopsticks?
He pushed the button and watched the panel slide back, then stepped down and replaced the chair at Li’s makeup table. Then he hit the light switch, opened the door and walked straight into the sergeant’s belly. A big hand pushed him against the wall, his head hitting hard. “I told you to sit, asshole.”
“I got bored.”
The sergeant — his nameplate said Marxer — spun Frye around, handcuffed him, patted him down, then spun him back. “You’re interfering with a felony investigation. Walk.”
Frye moved down the hallway and into the big room. Crawley stood up. Bennett looked over and shook his head. Detective Minh approached, pocketing his notepad. Frye studied the smooth thin face, the wavy black hair, the feminine mouth, and pale blue eyes. Marxer yanked him to a stop. “Kid’s been prowling around all night,” he said. “He was in the dressing room just now.”
“What’s your name?” asked Minh.
“Charles Edison Frye.”
“What were you prowling for?”
“A bathroom.”
Minh glanced at Marxer, then back to Frye. “Let him go. Sergeant. He looks the type who couldn’t find a bathroom, and he can’t piss with his hands behind his back.”
Marxer twisted him around. “Stay where I can see you.”
Bennett padded up to them, fists down, arms taut for each pivot, angling his way through the debris. “Try to cooperate with these guys, Chuck.”
Marxer took his time uncuffing Frye, giving his wrists a good jerk. Minh took out his notepad. “Over here in the booth, Chuck. I’ve got some questions for you.”
During the next hour Frye answered questions, answered them again, then answered more. What struck him most was that Minh wrote for a while with his left hand, then with his right, then with his left again. And he seemed to keep changing faces: he’d look Vietnamese, then American, then like a man, then like a boy or a woman. He’s supposed to be the perfect recipe. There were only a few cops left in the cabaret when Frye was finally pointed to the door.
Five minutes later, half a mile from the Asian Wind, Frye walked up the ramp to his brother’s house. It was just after two in the morning. The lights were on. Figures moved behind the curtains. Donnell Crawley opened the door.
Crepe paper hung from the ceiling, a little stack of presents sat on the coffee table, in the dining room was a cake and a pyramid of bright red party hats. Bennett slammed down the phone and started pacing. He looked at Frye with an unmistakable darkness to his face. It always means fury, Frye thought. Kim sat on the couch, with a notepad open on her lap. Nguyen Hy hovered near the dining room, dialing a cordless telephone. Near the door sat two large pieces of leather luggage, and a silver Halliburton case. “I just called Pop and Mom,” Bennett said quietly. “They’re... okay.”
Frye sank onto the couch, suddenly tired. In the long silence that followed, he realized what a gaping hole Li had left — in the house, in his brother, in himself. So much of her here, he thought, so much to extrapolate the loss from. “Li taking another trip, Benny?”
“She was.”
“Where?”
Bennett kept pacing, fists clenched, pivoting his stumps between his big arms, landing with muffled thuds. Frye marveled for the millionth time at this odd locomotion, which reminded him of apes, bar-dips, pain. But with Benny it’s all grace and strength. Like a bumblebee, he doesn’t know he can’t do it. Bennett’s van was the only thing he had configured for his loss — hand levers for brakes and gas. But his home and office, the entire rest of his life, denied that Benny was different.
No one had answered Frye yet. Finally, it was Kim. “She was going to Paris, Chuck. To see friends.”
Frye gathered from this exchange that he was clearly not to be in the know. Bennett never told him much. It had always been that way. For a moment, Frye could see the child in his brother’s haggard face, the child who was always making the plans, starting the projects, and gathering the information that made up a boy’s private world. Benny, he thought, always up to something. When Frye had discovered the hole dug near the beach at Frye Island, hidden under sheets of cardboard that were sprinkled with a light layer of sand, it was days before Bennett admitted that he was digging to China. When Frye had been blamed for the disappearance of certain bedsheets, it was weeks before they were discovered stretched and stapled to form the wings of Bennett’s “pedal-craft.” Bennett had emerged from the boathouse on the contraption, peddling furiously to lift himself and the stolen sheets to freedom. The aircraft dropped like a brick as he steered it off the dock, leaving Bennett to gasp in the center of a spreading ring of percale cotton and cold Newport Harbor water. When Bennett developed a little limp that slowly got worse — Frye had imitated, it convincingly — it was days before Hyla found out that he’d stepped on a nail that had gone straight through his foot. Benny hadn’t told her — he knew a tetanus shot was called for, and he hated needles. When Bennett enlisted in ROTC, he’d called from Tucson to say he’d done it. When he joined up early to fight in Vietnam, he’d called from Florida to say good-bye. When he’d married a Vietnamese peasant named Kieu Li, he’d phoned from Hong Kong to announce that he was now a husband.
Always his own agenda, thought Frye. Benny’s the kind of guy who’d call from the moon to say he’d become an astronaut.
When he came home from the war, Bennett told him even less, but since then, Bennett had become a minor public figure. He’d started out with the Frye Ranch Company in property management, graduated to development, become a vice-president in the commercial division. The press had always loved Bennett: disabled war hero, business wiz, and half of an interracial marriage to singer Kieu Li. His awards piled up, his civic involvement deepened and his fortune grew, though he lived modestly. With the rumors of Edison’s retirement, Bennett had become heir apparent to the biggest real estate empire in the state. Frye could remember one night at Bennett’s house when his brother had confided that he and Li couldn’t have children. It was typical of Bennett: a short statement followed by no explanation. Frye had managed to deduce that Bennett was impaired. He assumed that his brother’s sterility at least partly explained his ceaseless energy in business, his deep involvement with the refugee community, his silent intensities. From the first time Frye saw Bennett after the war, it was apparent to him his legs were not all that his brother had left in Vietnam. It was something in his spirit, in the depth of focus in his eyes, in the smothered pain that shone from them. It was the look of a man who had lost something even more precious than flesh, and knew it. Frye had seen it in some of Benny’s friends. It was a look of loss, a look of regret, a look of longing.
But even now, Frye thought, it’s Benny’s style to never announce his plans. He just does what he does, and tells you later if he feels like it. Two years in Vietnam, and he rarely speaks of it. He told about meeting Li, falling in love, marrying her in Saigon. He told about some of his patrols, about the Vietnamese friend who’d go down into the tunnels when nobody else would. He told about the drinking and the drugs, the freaks and the killers. But somehow, Bennett himself always seemed to slip into the background. The rest of it stayed locked inside, privately tended.