Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

“How are you?”

“Ah, well…” He affected a Gallic shrug. His once intense brown eyes now reminded Broker of tired wood, still hard, but flat and brittle. His body was husky and durable, round with muscle and deeply tanned, like he’d been working outside. He wore baggy cotton slacks, loafers, and a black T-shirt; his black hair was a little shaggy. Unmasked in this intimate moment, he was frail around the eyes. Studying the ashes of Trin’s smile, Broker gauged: They broke him .

“Jimmy Tuna sends his regards,” said Broker.

“How is he?” asked Trin, confused but smiling.

“Dying.”

Trin nodded politely, then, sensing Nina’s scrutiny, he turned to her, touched his cheek, and pointed. “Freckles,” he said. “Like Ray.”

Nina pursed her lips. She accepted Trin’s solemn handshake.

“We have to talk about my dad,” she said frankly.

“Yes,” said Trin casually, “but not here. Do you have other bags?”

“Just what we’re carrying,” said Broker.

“The car’s over here,” said Trin, making a display of taking Nina’s shoulder bag and leading them to a gray tourist van with Vietnam Hue Tours stenciled on the side. The driver was a lean, waspish northerner in a dark shirt and slacks who nodded enthusiastically. “This is Mr. Hai, our driver for Hanoi,” explained Trin. “Mr. Hai speaks English; he used to listen to Americans talk on the radio all the time, right, Mr. Hai?”

Hai nodded and declaimed, “Alpha Bravo Charley.” He held the door open for Broker and Nina. “Uniform Victor Whiskey.”

“So how was your flight?” asked Trin.

“Quiet,” said Nina. “The plane was only half full.”

“Yes and no. Air Vietnam makes room for ghosts,” said Trin.

A man in NVA green and a pith helmet came straight at Broker on a bicycle. His stomach tightened. The man smiled broadly and rode by and Broker’s eyes began to absorb the visual judo chops. Red flags draped like bull-fighter capes from the front of the dusty hooch-shacks that lined the road. Wicker walls. Banana thatch roofs. Fields of rice. Women in straw hats bent to the grain. In the fields, surrounded by ancestral grave mounds, a crude billboard displayed a syringe and warned against AIDS in English and Vietnamese.

“I don’t see men in the fields,” said Nina.

“Men prepare the land, women handle the rice,” said Trin. He gazed at the stooped laborers and said quietly, “Heart to earth, back to sky.”

Mr. Hai drove with his horn, brushing off clouds of bicyclists. They passed a putting motorscooter with wicker cylinders of live pigs trussed on the back, behind the driver.

Broker read aloud a sign in English. “‘Tourist information. Souvenirs’?” He shook his head, then a billboard announcing a new luxury hotel. “English? In Hanoi?”

“The language of commerce,” said Trin philosophically. Nina leaned forward. Trin lowered his hand over the seat, below the driver’s line of sight in the rearview and stayed her question with firm pressure on her forearm. His eyes wandered toward the driver. Nina understood, leaned back. “What is the population of Hanoi?” she asked.

Trin replied in his best tour guide voice, “Three million, about two and a half million more than it can handle.” He smiled. “Curtis LeMay said he was going to bomb Hanoi back to the stone age. He failed. But Hanoi has put itself in the stone age with overdevelopment.”

Nina nodded politely.

The van beeped monotonously as it entered swarms of scooters and bikes and the rickshaws known locally as cyclos. No rules governed the swelling human cataract; everybody preferred the middle of the road, both directions. The open fields disappeared and they were in narrow streets among two-story tenements.

Broker continued to process. He saw his third Marlboro billboard in twenty-four hours: the first had been in English, which is to say American, in Seattle; the second was in Hong Kong, a hundred feet high and splashed with Chinese calligraphy. The one he saw now had the same hard-riding lung cancer cowboy but was in the Romanized Vietnamese alphabet. The letters were familiar, the sounds they made utterly alien. Like anagram puzzles.

Then they plunged into a sea of people on wheels who moved less like traffic than like blood through arteries and capillaries and, sealed in their air-conditioned bubble, they shouldered into the heartbeat of Hanoi.

The hotel was a white stucco jukebox with a spitting lime neon band wrapping its marquee. A grinning youth in a long blue coat and a captain’s hat rushed to open the plate glass door. “Three star, joint venture. The plumbing works. CNN on satellite dish,” recited Trin as they got out of the van.

Hanoi was bells, horns, raw sewage, fish sauce that smelled like bad feminine hygiene, a million charcoal fires, Samsung and Sony signs, and Socialist Realist hammers and sickles bursting in Peter Max colors on billboards. Flimsy new construction competed with rundown French Colonial and sooty aging brick with twist-up pagoda tile roofs. Down the alleys: Confucian shadows.

Too much for jet-lagged senses.

Trin chatted briefly with the driver. The van pulled away. Broker and Nina clung to the reception desk in the hotel lobby. Another slender life raft of English. They handed over their passports. Europeans jammed the lobby; French and German languages predominated. Trin joined them at the desk.

“The driver will pick us up in the morning. We’ll see some sights before we catch the train to Hue,” he said.

“Train?” asked Broker.

“Yes, it’ll give us time to get reacquainted,” said Trin. He advised them to change some dollars for dong, which they did. Broker put a wad of currency in his pocket the size of a small roll of toilet paper.

“Will you join us for a drink, Mister Trin?” he asked formally for the benefit of the hotel staff behind the counter.

“Thank you,” said Trin, bowing slightly.

A grinning bellhop escorted them up the elevator and to adjoining rooms on the third floor. Nina turned pointedly to Broker. “You going to tell him?”

“I’m going to tell him,” said Broker.

Trin listened with a bland smile. His smile was echoed by the hovering bellhop.

She turned to Trin. “You two have some catching up to do. I’m going to take a shower.” She took her bag from the bellhop and entered her room. Broker and Trin went next door to Broker’s room.

They waited while the bellhop opened the drapes and turned on the air conditioner. Broker tipped him with a dollar bill and closed the door behind him.

Trin, watchful, keyed up, hid behind a shrug. “Sorry, Phil, caution is an old habit. Tour guide is my main income when I can get away with it. Explain to Nina that a good guide must be friendly with Americans. But it’s not a good idea to be familiar with them the minute they get off the plane.”

Broker opened the mini icebox and tossed Trin a chilled green can of Tiger beer, then opened one for himself. They sat in chairs across a low table in front of the window. Below them the Kamikaze traffic coursed through an intersection. Children kicked a soccer ball in a park across the street.

For a full minute there was silence as he debated how to start. How to span two decades. Outside, cloud cover cut the sun and the window oscillated between transparent and opaque. Their reflections flirted, barely visible in the glass. Then disappeared.

“So, how is it hearing Vietnamese being spoken again, Phil?” Trin asked slowly.

Broker stared at the trees around the park. They looked like massive Bonsai, foreign and tortured, like they’d been traumatized by bombs. “Not sure yet. Everybody’s so…friendly. All the signs in English. I’d think they’d hate our guts here.”