Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Customs queues, immigration, and a six-hour wait for the Air Vietnam desk to open for business. The terminal was a racket of Chinese. They hired a cab and escaped into the neon constellations of Kowloon and Mercedes gridlock on the streets. The working-class sections zipped by like the sets for Blade Runner . Across the bay, Hong Kong nestled against the mountains like a silver money clip. They found a glittering glass and chrome restaurant. Outside the air smelled like a vat of stewing sweat and dirt and blood. Like money. Inside, they found the cleanest, most well-dressed people in the world. Hydroponics mannequins. Scientifically bred in posh display windows until they’d grown into their perfect tailoring.

After the most expensive meal of their lives they took another cab back to the airport. Beyond conversation, too nerved up to sleep, they paced and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and waited.

A smiling young woman in a blue blazer happily took their money and stamped their tickets for Hanoi. After another round of customs and immigration, an airport bus ferried them out to a smaller white jet with a blue flying crane logo on the tail section.

A slender Air Vietnam hostess in a flowing blue au dai and filmy white trousers checked their boarding passes. Broker remembered the subtle magic of the garment that covered and revealed. He marked the panty line on her flank, the slip of bare midriff. They boarded the plane.

Vietnamese voices flowed like forgotten poems. The plane became a miniature time machine and it wasn’t just in his imagination. He cocked his head and heard-impossibly-an Elvis Presley tune from the sixties piped in on the intercom. He couldn’t stop his youth from shinnying up and peeking from the corners of his eyes.

Doing it on purpose. Like they know .

Gritty, exhausted, Nina hugged his arm and laughed.

The exuberance didn’t last long. A hulking Caucasian giant barred their path. Six four, dressed in flip flops, and an ensemble of blue shorts and a T-shirt that looked like underwear or pajamas. He exhaled a nightmare breath of booze.

The upright pig-giant had twinkling gimlet eyes and spoke an accented dialect of the English language known only to his drunken tribe of one. He could have been Bevode Fret’s libido unchained and walking around…

But he was an Aussie, stoned on nitrous oxide maybe.

He chirped, leering at Nina.

“Fuck off, mate.” Broker stabbed a sharp finger into his bloated midsection. The pig-giant fluttered his left hand in an inebriated incantation and backed off and rolled deeper into the plane, a blue hazard that the Vietnamese hostesses steered adroitly to a berth.

Nina and Broker flopped to their seats. The frantic tempo of Hong Kong dissipated on Air Vietnam. Only half the seats were filled. A hostess handed Broker a steamed perfumed towel with a forceps.

He wiped the grime from his face and felt time slow down. It’s going to be different now …

Australian voices. Broker glanced back and saw them crowd the aisle. A tour. He gathered that the snoring piggiant was one of their number. He dozed for a while. Woke with a start and wondered if he had dreamed the episode with Jimmy Tuna. They were served a meal. Broker drank a cup of coffee and studied a map of Vietnam in a glossy Air Vietnam magazine.

The country was shaped like an S hook hanging off the belly of China, wrapped around Laos and Kampuchea: fat on the ends, thin in the middle. They’d land in Hanoi, near the top of the S and then head for the skinny panhandle in the center. To Hue City on the Perfume River. And in Hue there would be a police station.

He’d only accepted one cliche in his life: that cops were cops the world over. They understood each other. But they were Communist cops where he was going. And they worked for the only government in the world that had whipped the United States of America in open warfare.

He tried to put himself in the place of a Vietnamese cop listening to a wild story coming from the lips of an American tourist. They probably would have an office guy assigned to hearing complaints from the tourist trade. An office guy would phone his boss. And on up the line until someone who had LaPorte’s money in his pocket would hear the story.

It was like everything else. Cops were cops. Except when they weren’t.

So it all depended on Trin. And the minute they opened their mouths their lives would be in his hands. With this disconcerting thought for a lullaby, Broker dozed.

And then. Not that long. The now familiar sensation and pressure in the ears. The jet grumbled in the air and slowed for descent. Looking down from an aircraft together with the word Vietnam had always meant an aerial view of a smashed landscape. Lunar craters. Broker took a look. Just green fields, treelines. Not one crater. Rustic farmland.

“Any advice?” asked Nina.

“Don’t touch the kids on the head, don’t wave at people, don’t put your feet on the table.”

“How’s it feel coming back?”

“Not coming back. Going to,” said Broker.

Nina poked his shoulder and then pointed out the window. Three stubby MiG 21s lined up on a black cement apron. Green rice fields and red dirt stretched on either side. Broker saw the tiny conical straw hats, the women stooped in shiny black pantaloons. Then, reality tapped his eyes. A Communist flag fluttered over a tiny mustard-walled colonial-style terminal.

Hong Kong was a movie he’d watched. Just colored lights. Down there it was going to be sweat, orangebrown bazen dirt, and buffalo shit. Hard core. Third World. Real.

Nina leaned back in her seat and stared straight ahead. Getting ready. Broker supplied the word like he was lighting a fuse.

“Trin.”

A red flag with a yellow star fluttered under a dirty brass sun.

Broker stepped into the climate with one hand clenched on Jimmy Tuna’s map inside his security belt. The paradoxical heat and humidity wilted right through him like radiation and made him feel young . Excited, he took in the iron land that monsoon rains had turned to rust. The airport was in the middle of nowhere. Just fields, bicycles, and water buffalo.

Two buses pulled toward the aircraft. As they turned and opened their doors to admit the arriving passengers, Nina leaned against his shoulder and laughed. Absurdly, garish blue Pepsi logos adorned their sides.

The bus drove them across the runway and, slow motion, in the heat, they entered the terminal. On scuffed tile floors, they queued up for the customs station and the ragtag X-ray machines beyond. Weary officers wore brown uniforms that were too tight or too loose. They stood behind antique wooden counters and shuffled papers and stared mainly at their hands. Broker didn’t see a single gun being worn in the building.

A crowd of Vietnamese taxi drivers pressed against the doors and windows. Broker searched for the face of a man he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

Nina pulled him by the arm toward a hand-held sign floating above the crowd. Phillip Broker/Nina Pryce. Vietnam Hue Tours greets you !

“Huh?” said Broker.

Nguyen Van Trin, at five feet four inches, needed the sign. He came up to the top of Nina’s ears but his grin was six feet tall. Trim down the nose, slant the eyes and Trin could have posed for one of the stone faces on Easter Island. He’d picked up a few more scars on his drum-tight kisser since the last time Broker had seen him.

“Trin, you sonofabitch.” Awkwardly, they clasped arms.

“It’s me,” said Trin and his easy English came through the foreignness of the place like hope. But his voice had lost its deep resonance. Now sardonic, cautious. The old military fire had long extinguished.