She was now thirty-one years old, and although she spoke English fluently, there was still a trace of singsong in her speech, and occasionally she misused idiom or slang. A stranger in a strange city, virtually alone in the world, she dressed like an American — high heels today, and a linen suit the color of wheat, to complement her shining black hair and dark eyes — but she moved as if she were gracefully and delicately padding on sandals over the stones of an ancient village, and in her eyes there was a look of lingering sorrow.
She herself did not live in Little Asia.
She rented a condominium out on Sabal Key.
The people who lived here in the development, she explained, were mostly newcomers, most of them working in restaurants as either dishwashers, busboys, or waitresses. Many, too, worked in light-industry factories, where they performed unskilled labor for minimum wages — or less, if the owners could get away with it. Ten or twelve people often shared these one-family wooden shacks that had been thrown up in the early twenties, when there was still an important fish cannery in Calusa and housing was needed for the cheap black labor imported from Georgia and Mississippi.
The shacks sprawled across the scruffy land in fading, flaking Christmas colors, some green, some red, all up on stilts because flooding was common in Calusa even this far from the Gulf. An automobile was essential here; public transportation existed, but buses were infrequent and unpredictable. One of the first things these immigrants bought was a car, usually chipping in for one they could share on their way to and from work, a wreck as faded as the shacks in which they lived. Mai Chim wondered why so many poor people drove faded blue automobiles. Always faded. Always blue. A phenomenon. On her lips, the word sounded Oriental. Phenomenon. She smiled when she said it. A phenomenon. The smile illuminated her entire face and set her brown eyes to dancing. Matthew could imagine her mother beaming this same smile in a safer, more innocent time.
Tran Sum Linh, one of the men who’d claimed he’d seen Stephen Leeds on the night of the murders, lived in one of these shacks with his wife, his six-year-old son, and three cousins — two of them male, one of them female and a cousin only by marriage — who had recently moved cross-country from Houston, Texas. He was thirty-seven years old, a former lieutenant in the ARVN, who had escaped Vietnam by boat to Manila shortly after the fall of Saigon. He was certain that if ever he went back to his country, he would be arrested and executed. He was trying to make a life here. He worked in a supermarket at the South Dixie Mall, stacking and sprinkling fruit and vegetables in the produce department, for which he earned four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. He did not like getting involved in this business that had happened, this murder of his three countrymen, but he knew it was his obligation to tell the truth. He said all this to Mai Chim in his native tongue; he spoke only several words of English.
They were sitting outside Tran’s shack, he on the low steps that led up to the front door, Mai Chim and Matthew on folding chairs he had carried out of the house. Tran was wearing thong sandals, grey shorts, and a white Disneyworld T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of the minarets of Fantasyland. Matthew was wearing a suit and a tie; he felt like a jackass in this heat.
“This was at eleven o’clock, or perhaps a little past eleven,” Mai Chim said. “It was quite hot, do you know, that night…”
…translating simultaneously and apparently literally, judging from her stilted and somewhat formal phrasing…
“… almost identical to that of my own country during the summer monsoon, the rainy season, do you know? The rain…”
… is heaviest between June and November when typhoons blow in off the South China Sea, But there are monsoons winter and summer, and there is no true “dry” season, except relatively. All of Vietnam lies entirely below the Tropic of Cancer, and the climate is therefore hot and humid all of the time, some eighty degrees Fahrenheit every month of the year, heavy rainfall all year round except during April and May.
“Vietnam is tropical, do you know? So we have mosquitoes and ticks and leeches, same as the Malay Peninsula. And we have, too, crocodiles and pythons and cobras and tigers and leopards and wild dogs…”
In the Mekong Delta, where Tran grew up as a boy and fought as a teenager and a man, the land was — and still is — extremely fertile and well cultivated. Tran’s father was a farmer, as was his father before him and Tran after him. Rice was their crop. Their little village — situated on a levee close by the Song Vam Co River — consisted of bamboo houses with thatched roofs, narrow streets laid out in a grid pattern, a bamboo fence around the entire site. During the summer monsoon, when the land was flooded, the only dry ground was on the levees and the dikes. Whenever there was a break in the rain, the family would sit outside the farmhouse with its small vegetable garden. Often on a hot, steamy night, Tran would look out over the flooded rice paddies to the mountains beyond Saigon and dream of wisdom beyond years, wealth beyond imagination. On just such a night, in the city of Calusa, Florida…
He has been sitting outside with the others in his family for, oh, it must have been almost two hours, do you know? His wife — two years older than he, but this is considered auspicious according to the horoscope — has already put their son to bed and then gone to bed herself because she must be at the factory at eight tomorrow morning. Tran sits outside with his three cousins. The men are smoking. The woman, who is quite homely, is dozing. In a little while, she and her husband, Tran’s older cousin, also go inside to bed.
Tran and the other man talk softly.
Smoke from their cigarettes swirls up on the air.
On U.S. 41, not two blocks away from the development, there is the hum of traffic, trailer trucks heading south to pick up Alligator Alley for the east coast, passenger cars driving down to nearby Venice or farther south to Naples or Fort Meyers.
The night is gentle.
Soft.
Tomorrow there will be deadly dull toil for subsistence wages, but for now there is the soft, gentle night.
At last, Tran’s younger cousin rises and yawns and goes into the house. The screen door slams shut behind him. Tran sits alone on the steps with his thoughts and the hot, still moistness of the night. The moon is full. He remembers nights like this on the delta, the rice fields stretching away to the horizon under an orange moon floating above.
He smokes.
He drifts.
He sees the man first from the comer of his eye.
A flicker of bright color, almost as if a sliver of moon has broken off and fallen to earth, glowing for an instant and then gone.
The house Tran and his family are renting is situated one row east and one house south of the one shared by the three men who were first accused and later cleared of raping that farmer’s wife. In his native Vietnam, before the Communists took over, murder and aggravated assault were among the most serious crimes, punishable by from five years in prison to death by guillotine, a means of execution inherited from the French occupiers. Tran further knows that rape in his country was considered aggravated assault, and he assumes that the crime is equally serious here in his adopted land.
He does not know how the Communists deal with such matters now, and he cannot possibly know that sexual battery — as rape is politely known in the Bible Belt state of Florida — is punishable by anywhere from fifteen years to death in the electric chair, depending upon the age of the victim and the amount of force threatened or applied. But it is his strong belief that crimes committed by any member of an ethnic or racial group reflect upon all members of that group, and therefore he is pleased that his countrymen have been exonerated of the crime. He knows them only slightly, but he thinks of them as decent, hardworking men, which — he freely admits to Matthew through Mai Chim — may be a biased opinion.