Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“What if he doesn’t?”

“In that case, we will threaten him with a visit from you. He will crumple like a dry leaf. Please be careful with that book.”

Lucy had been examining the objects set on the shelf affixed to the wall behind the head of the cot, in perfect disregard of her host’s privacy. She palmed a couple of Camels from a pack there, flipped through a little notebook, and opened the book in question, an octavo volume printed on vellum paper like a good Bible, bound in soft blue leather, much battered and stained. She had seen it innumerable times but had never focused upon it until now. It was, she saw, in the Vietnamese language. She read the title aloud, “ Truyen Kieu. ” Someone had written something on the flyleaf in ink, but it had run and faded and she could not make out its meaning.

“ ‘The Tale of Kieu,’ ” she translated. “What’s it about, refugees?”

“In a way. Vietnamese who have fled Vietnam are called Viet-Kieu because kieu means migrant, but the association is there, because Kieu had to flee her home also. She is our patron saint, you might say. A girl who suffered much.”

“It’s about a girl?”

“So the title suggests. It is the Vietnamese national epic.”

“Yeah? Can I borrow it?”

Tran pinched his nostrils and looked uncomfortable. “Hmm. I don’t know. Except in prison, it has not been out of my possession for many years. It was a gift.”

“Who from?”

“From Linh. My wife.”

“Oh. Did she write in the front? What does it say?”

He spoke in Vietnamese. “It says, ‘Naturally, when two kindred spirits meet, one tie/Soon binds them in a knot nothing can tear loose. From your kindred spirit, Linh. Tet, 1956.’ The lines are from the poem itself.”

Lucy put the book carefully back on the shelf. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I thought it was just a book. I don’t really read Vietnamese very well either.” She was acutely uncomfortable now. Some vast and heavy and awful thing seemed to lurk at the corners of her consciousness, like a formless bogey out of a dream. It was once again the faint apprehension of the suffering of Asia, something she touched a dozen times a day, and drew away from, and ignored like other Americans. She wished very much to pull away from it again, to resume the persona of a cheeky little girl poking about the room of a crotchety old uncle, but a feeling came over her then, a feeling like watching the odometer of a car turn over to produce a clean line of white zeros, and she understood that this was no longer possible for her.

“You must have been really sad when. .” she began, and then stopped, appalled. She didn’t know how to talk about stuff like this, as she had just at the moment realized. The times when she had chattered on, casually asking him about his life, now recollected, filled her with hot shame.

He sensed this and was kind. “I was sad, of course, but I did not find out about it until some time later. I was buried alive for four days, in a tunnel. When I came out, I was not the person I was before. Perhaps I could not have gone back to being a husband and a father in the same way, or at least that is what I told myself. And they were simply gone; it was not as if I had to bury them. They were in the canteen at Bac Mai Hospital, and it received a direct hit from a thousand-pound bomb. From a B-52, you understand. They fly so high that there is no warning. Alive and unafraid at one instant, dead the next. There are many worse deaths.”

“Then why did you come here?” Lucy demanded angrily, tears starting. “Why don’t you hate us?”

Tran’s eyes were mild and somewhat surprised, and he answered, “As to why I came here, this is the land of opportunity, and I badly needed opportunity. My life in my country was over in a way that I hope you will never be able to comprehend. Also, when my family was killed, my country was at war, the whole country, not a small band of confused young men as with America. My wife and daughter were part of the war. The Americans bombed a hospital. Why should they not? I assure you that had I access to a B-52, I would have bombed every hospital from here to California.”

She started to object, but Tran turned on her a riveting stare. He said, “Listen to me, because this is important. Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise, as the Americans did, and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so that they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that , then they should fight no more. Your mother understands this, which is why I am able to work for her. With these men, you know, she asks, she pleads, she begs them, she warns them so that they can have no doubts, she offers help. Then, if this is to no avail, suddenly, overwhelming, merciless violence.”

At the mention of her mother and how terrifically great she was, again , Lucy felt herself withdrawing attention. Tran sensed this as well, and resumed snapping his cards.

“I have to go to Chinese school,” said Lucy, getting up.

“If you like, I will go with you. I have business in that area.”

They walked in companionable silence to Mott Street and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association Building, where they had the Chinese School. Tran said, in English, “Watch yourself, beautiful. Don’t take any wooden nickels,” and was rewarded by the astounded look on her face as she passed in through the door. He watched a great deal of TV late at night, for he had slept badly for a very long time, and when his eyes were too tired for reading he switched on the set. He preferred the films of twenty-five years ago and earlier, because the actors spoke more slowly and the plots were simpler and the violence was not so lovingly portrayed, and sometimes a phrase would stick in his mind and he would repeat it to hear how it sounded in his mouth. He was slowly learning American, of an antiquated type that, as it happened, was well suited to his personality.

Tran went over to an address on Bayard Street, where he squatted against a wall near a grocery store and waited. It had not been particularly difficult to find Leung; gangsters have office hours like other professionals. It was necessary only to know where to inquire, and Tran knew.

The grocery opened for business: the proprietor and his sons set out bins and stocked them with fresh vegetables, and hosed down the shining produce and the sidewalk in front of the store. The man noticed Tran but ignored him, only taking care not to get him wet. All along the street, shopkeepers were doing similar things, moving window grates back, setting racks of clothes or boxes of cheap items out on the street, adjusting awnings, accepting deliveries from the usual worn, stinking trucks painted with big characters.

At just past eight, a short, stocky man wearing white cook’s pants and a dark zipper jacket came to the door of Li’s, opened it, and began moving in the crates that had been delivered earlier in the morning. Tran crossed the street and spoke to the man in Cantonese. The grocery store owner, coiling his hose, watched the interaction with mild interest. The short man appeared to object. Tran leaned closer, took something from his trouser pocket, and slid it into the pocket of the man’s jacket. He gripped the man’s shoulder in either reassurance or menace; it was hard to tell from across the street. After a few moments, however, the short man nodded and smiled, and then both men worked together to take the cartons into the restaurant. The grocer knew what had happened. The older guy had asked for a job, and the restaurant guy had turned him down, because he didn’t need a guy, because, as everyone on the street knew, Li’s was a tong place and not a serious restaurant at all, but the old guy had slipped him some cash so that the restaurant manager would carry him on the books, so that the old guy could claim employment, so he could bring relatives over, or people he said were relatives. It was wan shai kaai , making a living, the usual mild chicanery of Chinatown. The grocer himself had done any number of similar things. He forgot the incident, and began pricing his vegetables with little paper signs.