He looked back toward the entrance, but saw only blackness. He was almost to the next turn when he first heard the breathing: fast, shallow, wet. His hands tightened on the gun and flashlight, his back shuddered in a spasm of nerves. At the turn, the sound came louder, nearly synchronized with his own rapid breath. He brought himself to the corner and waited, gun raised, stinking of death and of a fear beyond death, wondering why things get funneled down to such narrow, to such irrevocable moments. It was your choice, he thought. You could be a thousand miles away if you wanted to be, washing your hands, foreseeing reasonable futures, tending curable wounds. The simple awful truth is that somehow, this is where you set out to end up. Sometimes the best thing you can do is the worst thing you can imagine.
He stepped out, flashlight held up and away from his body, aiming down the short barrel of the .45 at Thach. The man was sprawled against a rock wall, legs out, trunk propped up, head back. The eyes were open in the ruined face. His shirt was torn away. His left hand was jammed up under a thick, protective vest that had slowed the high-velocity bullets, but not stopped them. His right hand lay on his lap, clutching a pistol. Thach blinked, coughed, moved his head slightly.
Finish it, Frye thought. Finish what your brother started twenty years ago. He could feel the darkness moving in around him. His vision blurred. His breathing matched Thach’s, as if both were geared to the same engine.
The colonel coughed again. His voice was faint, drowned. “Who are you?”
“His brother.”
Thach groaned, closed his eyes, then stared up at Frye.
Their breathing was still locked together — meshed, one. Frye couldn’t break the rhythm, then he didn’t want to, as if it were something to hold onto, some stabilizer in a body that without it would disintegrate. “Who are your allies in Little Saigon?”
The colonel shook his head, coughing lightly. His eyes regarded Frye from the twisted, bloody face, but there was something satisfied, almost amused in them.
“Who are they?”
“I won.” Thach stared down at his pistol as across some unpassable distance. His hand began to move. Frye inhaled slowly, deeply, disengaging himself from Thach’s breathing. Then he was falling. Up? Down? A swirl of vertigo and pressure, a disassembly, a melting away. He felt the gun slipping from his hand. He braced himself on the mine wall. The scene before him broke into kaleidoscopic shards that rotated, rearranged themselves, fractured again. And in the center of it alclass="underline" Thach’s face, a moving hand, a bloody finger slipping inside a trigger guard, a barrel rising slowly toward him as Frye steadied the .45 and blew Thach forever out of this world and into the next.
For a long while, Frye stood there. Slowly, the walls receded. The pounding in his ears began to fade away. His breathing slowed, and his focus started to sharpen again. As he looked down he saw not one man lying before him, but two. He saw Huong Lam, the kid who brought Li to Bennett, the kid who sent three bottles of French champagne to a man he admired too much in war to oppose in love. He looked again and saw Thach, the monster who had cut down Tuy Xuan and Bennett and countless others. And finally, he saw Charles Edison Frye, who, like Lam and Thach and Bennett, had become just another willing drinker of the same endless bloody cup.
He dug the silver wave necklace from his pocket and tossed it onto Thach’s chest.
Chapter 29
Frye island. Hyla Wept and Edison stormed. Frye could look neither of them in the face. The family doctor, a stout Swede named Nordstrom, filled everyone but Frye with sedatives. Edison called Lansdale and bellowed nonsense. Frye called Minh, Wiggins, and the Newport Beach surf report. To the first two he gave the location of the slaughter. He almost called Cristobel.
Li, still wearing her peasant pajamas, walked into the den and shut the door. Frye could see her through the glass of the French doors, first spitting her tranquilizers into a wastebasket, then taking up the telephone, her face downcast. She made eight calls. Then she motioned Frye in, and they sat next to each other on the sofa. Her eyes were dull as sun-baked glass. She took his hand. “Xuan, too,” she said. “And Nguyen Hy. And even Eddie Vo.”
Frye listened, removed again from himself while Li talked, the names of the dead slamming into him like speeding trucks. Her hands were cold and tight.
“What I wish to do is die,” she said. “But I can’t do that. There is a debt to the living. The first thing one learns in war is that sometimes death is a luxury.”
“Who are Thach’s allies here?”
“He said nothing about them.”
“He had help.”
Li breathed deeply and sat back. “Communist agents, buried deep in the life of Little Saigon. I don’t know who they are. They have been very careful over the years.”
“What about Dien?”
“I suspected him for a long time. It is possible. But it’s possible too that he is simply a profiteer, an aging thief.”
“Someone is going to come for that ransom money.”
“You should leave it here.”
“Then they’ll come here to get it, I don’t want those people in my mother’s house.”
“That much cash is like a magnet. You will attract them.”
Frye realized fully that the suitcases in the trunk of his car were a portable curse, a beacon for the killers who had helped Thach plan his mission. It’s their payment, he thought: Thach didn’t do it for profit, not even for two million bucks.
Li told him what had happened in the last six days — being taken underground at the Dream Reader, coming up blindfolded somewhere else, a two-hour ride in the trunk of a car with ropes and a gag cutting into her flesh, then the endless days of Thach’s interrogation, the dirt and thirst in the closet where they kept her.
“Why didn’t you recognize him until tonight?”
“I never really saw him,” she said. “He was always in partial darkness, or wearing sunglasses. The light was painful to his eyes. It was so strange. He began by questioning me about the resistance positions, but he didn’t really seem to care. He gave up so easily. At the time I thought I was wearing him down, but now I know that Kim would be supplying him with all this information soon. So he talked of Saigon and An Cat, and prodded me into memories. He was very curious about Lam and Bennett and me. He wanted to know every detail of the meetings. Most of all, he wanted to know how I felt about the two men. Who I loved more, and why, and how I came to my decision to go to Bennett. More than once, I wondered if this man could be Lam. But it seemed impossible. For days I sat there on the stool in the dark, remembering.”
Li squeezed his hand and looked up with her dull eyes. “I acted as I believed, Chuck. And if Bennett told me a lie to kill my love of Lam, then it was a lie that I believed even before he spoke it.”
Then Li hugged herself and bowed over. She began to sway gently. Frye watched the tears hit the black cotton of her pants. From across the living room, Edison and Hyla looked in through the French doors.
Frye took a long shower, then sat with his mother and father and Li for a while. No one said anything. An hour later, he walked out to the dock. The night was cool now and a thin fog hovered over the water. The house lights across the bay shone through, magnified, dulled. Hyla’s keening issued from the bedroom.
He could feel his brother inside himself, tangible, actual. He could remember it all perfectly, every look and every word that Bennett had given him. I can feel you, Benny, he thought, I can almost see you. Like right there, just fifty yards off the dock here when we caught that blue shark and tried to stuff it with newspaper. When we made those wings out of wood and Mom’s dress and you tried them out from the roof and broke your ankles. The way you looked when you were mad, eyes all big and the pupils little and, you fucker, you’d heave me down and stuff sand in my mouth or hit me in the stomach so hard I’d gasp for breath while you laughed and gasped along with me. The way you’d get even madder if any other kid but you tried to do that to me. I remember the way you looked in that Little League uniform, the way you got the socks to stay up and look like the pros, the way you batted like Yasztremski. The way you pitched the playoff game with your left arm in a cast and still got a three-hitter against Orange. I remember the way you looked for the proms, with those stupid sideburns halfway down to your chin. I remember the way you rode that big old board in storm surf and got your picture in Surfer magazine. I remember the way you went and fought. They didn’t even have to draft you. I remember the way you stood up for me at my wedding, even though you didn’t have much left to stand on. I see now that you lost more than your legs over there, you lost part of your heart too, and that’s the wound that wouldn’t heal, that’s what was hardest to live without. I can see how you tried. And I see now the way you never gave up trying to make it all mean something, the way you just plain wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left, and that’s what it came down to, brother, nothing left of you at all.