Nguyen starts to speak, but Poke cuts him off with a lifted hand.
“And if you wouldn’t be interested in that, can you send me to someone who would?”
Nguyen says, “The person is American?”
“Yes.”
Nguyen looks out the window. “There have been a lot of Americans.” His English is perfect, if a bit prim. “There has been a lot of war. We are the only country ever to defeat America, China, and France. If we spent our time thinking about past wars, we would lack the energy to meet the needs of the present.”
“On September seventeenth, 1975,” Rafferty says, biting down on the words, “in the middle of the rainy season, two American soldiers and a CIA adviser, plus four Vietnamese troopers, entered a small village in the Delta, not far from Ninh Kieu. There were only two men living in the village then, both in their late sixties. Everyone else was either a woman or a child. By the time the squad left, five or six hours later, everyone in the village was dead. They forced everyone into a hut and blew it up.”
Nguyen continues to look out at Bangkok.
“They were herded into the hut like cattle,” Rafferty says. “Before the explosives went, off the people in the hut prayed to Buddha and Jesus.”
“So, obviously,” Nguyen says, “if you know that, not everyone died.”
“They also killed three boys,” Ming Li says. Her cheekbones are flushed with color. “They shot them point-blank through the forehead. They cut an ear off one of them. They were children.”
“Yes,” Nguyen says colorlessly. “I can see how that might affect you more than the deaths of the adults.”
Ming Li puts her cup down noisily and stands up. To Rafferty she says, “Come on.”
“Please,” Nguyen says. “Sit. More coffee?”
Rafferty inclines his head toward Ming Li’s chair, and after a moment she sits and says, “No.”
Rafferty says, “No, thank you.”
Ming Li’s mouth tightens, but she says, “No, thank you.”
Nguyen turns away from the window to face them and stretches his legs out in front of him, crossing one sock-clad ankle over the other. He sits back in his chair an inch or two, unbuttons his jacket the rest of the way, and studies Ming Li long enough to make her fidget. “You’re what-sixteen?”
“Eighteen,” Ming Li says.
“I think not.”
Ming Li shrugs and dips her index finger into her coffee and puts the finger in her mouth. It’s a tiny insult.
With his eyes still on her, Nguyen says, “Does my son have that?”
“Have what?” Rafferty asks.
“I am not an entirely unintimidating man,” Nguyen says. “Not many people have stood up to walk out of the room during a conversation with me. Telling me, in essence, to go fuck myself. You know my son, apparently. Would he do that?”
“Would he do what? Be brave? Rude? Impulsive?”
Nguyen looks down at his tie and straightens it a tiny amount. Without looking up at them, he says, “Unconventional.”
Rafferty says, “I don’t know. There are things we can’t know about people until the time comes and they either have what’s necessary or they don’t.”
“It’s a terrible thing to be a father,” Nguyen says. “There are so many ways to do it wrong.” He glances again at Ming Li. “So yes, the murder of children does affect me.”
“He’s a good kid,” Rafferty says, surprising himself. “I love my daughter more than life itself, and I’m glad she chose Andrew.”
Nguyen gives him a quarter-inch nod. “Thank you. But I think he chose her.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Rafferty says, “but I doubt it.”
“I’ve been unhappy about it, to tell you the truth. Miaow is … perhaps too interesting. And not Vietnamese, obviously. And her family situation, if you’ll excuse my saying so, is irregular.”
“But it’s solid,” Rafferty says.
“And this is why it’s so difficult to be a father,” Nguyen says, as though Poke hasn’t spoken. “On the one hand, I want my son to obey me. It’s his filial duty. On the other hand, I’m secretly pleased when he behaves in a way that, as I said before, essentially tells me to go fuck myself. I worry about him being too docile. The world wipes itself on docile people.”
“He dyed his hair to match hers,” Rafferty says. “I’ll bet he didn’t ask permission.”
Nguyen almost smiles. “I wondered where the color came from.”
“It’s Miaow’s way of trying to be different.”
“Actually,” Nguyen says, and this time he lets the smile all the way out, “I don’t think that being different is going to be one of life’s problems for your daughter.”
“I don’t mean different from other people,” Rafferty says. “She’s got that aced. I mean different from herself, different from who she sees herself to be.”
Nguyen closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them again. “Of course.”
“This is all really sweet,” Ming Li says, “but we’ve sort of got an agenda?”
Nguyen looks at her again, leaning forward slightly as though to see her better. “You’re … what, little Auntie?” he asks. “Half Vietnamese?”
“Half Chinese, half American. Poke’s part Filipino. We share a father. What else do you want to know?”
“If you grew up in America,” Nguyen says, “your attitude is typical. If you grew up in China, you must know that you’re being extremely rude.”
Ming Li sits up and puts her hands in her lap and inclines her head. “I’m sorry.”
“On the other hand,” Nguyen says, “I admire you for it. But still, a conversation must be allowed to shape itself, to allow each of us to discover whom we’re talking to. Don’t you agree?”
“You’re completely right. I forgot myself.”
“Well, we’re past that now. Who were the survivors?”
“Two women and three children,” Rafferty says.
“How did they escape?”
“An American soldier got them out.”
“A white knight,” Nguyen says. “Or perhaps a black one. It’s a shame there weren’t more of them.” He looks down at his legs, uncrosses his ankles, and recrosses them the other way, with the left on top. “This was a terrible crime, but it happened decades ago. In wartime. Even if there’s no legal statute of limitations on war crimes, there’s an emotional limit. I have to tell you that I don’t know whom you should talk to. Vietnam is a different country than it was in the 1970s. And, as you may know, the snatch-and-snuff teams, as your soldiers called them, were partly an imitation of tactics used by the army of North Vietnam. Neither side had a monopoly on terrorism.”
“Well,” Rafferty says, “that’s a very even-minded attitude.”
“The heat of passion has cooled,” Nguyen says.
“Let’s see if we can’t strike a match,” Rafferty says. “About a week and a half ago, one of the survivors was murdered in the United States.”
Nguyen lifts his eyebrows. In a face as controlled as his, it looks to Rafferty like a tectonic shift.
“By the same man,” Rafferty continues. “Or, rather, by people working for him.”
“Can you prove that?”
“I can make an excellent case.”
“Was she still a citizen of Vietnam?”
“I don’t know. But her sister and her sister’s daughter are. And the two children who got away. And this man is after them, too. Now, today. Here, in Thailand.”
Nguyen fingers the knot in his tie, and Rafferty is certain he has no idea he’s doing it. His eyes are on his feet but focused about halfway down, on something only he can see. “And what do you want from me, Mr. Rafferty?”
“I may lose this fight. If I do, I just want to know that somebody else is going to kill him.”
“You must want it very badly.”
Rafferty says, “I do.”
“When I saw you at the door,” Nguyen says, “my first impulse was to make you wait for coffee while I called the police.”
“Yeah, I was getting a little antsy out here.”
“It would have been difficult for me to explain to Anh Duong why I turned Miaow’s father over to the police.”