Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

“There are lots of guns, never very far away. Just criticize the government. You’ll see,” said Trin.

Nina sat quietly, meditating on the street scene. She toyed with one of the silver earrings, turned and smiled. “You know. If the people doing it are crazy enough, it just might work,” she said.

They came out of the dense side streets and onto a broad French boulevard on which thousands of people waited patiently in line. Trin pointed at the top of a gray stone pyre that poked through the trees. They parked and waited while Trin ran into an office. He returned with tickets and slipped a guard a U.S. dollar. The guard escorted them to the head of the line. American tourists were allowed to take cuts. Broker averted his eyes from the squints of dour peasant veterans, their shirts clanking with medals, who stood patiently in the sun.

They joined a procession of elementary school kids who wore white shirts, blue trousers and skirts, and had red scarves tied around their necks. The kids walked in orderly ranks minded by their teachers.

“Pioneers,” sniffed Trin. “Communist youth movement.”

The shrine rose in blocky tiers of pharaonic Russian granite. Soldiers in red-trimmed rust-brown uniforms stood mannequin-stiff at attention. White gloves. Gleaming carbines. Huge urns of bonsai flanked the carpeted entrance. Trin smiled tightly. “I’ve never been in here.”

“Me either,” said Broker. The joke died on their faces under the quiet brown gaze of the Young Pioneers. Feeling like someone being initiated into a solemn pagan ritual, Broker walked up the steps, around a corner and shuffled down a ramp into the chilled, dimly lit inner sanctum. Nina squeezed his hand. “This is our first real date,” she whispered reverently. Holding hands, they filed past the glass sarcophagus that held the frail, embalmed cadaver of the little man with the goatee who had stared down the Free World.

Back in the sunlight Trin fidgeted and lit a cigarette in an explosion of nerves. He muttered in Vietnamese. Broker put a hand to his shoulder. “You all right?”

Trin bared his teeth. “We said a lot of things. He said a single thing, ‘Vietnam is one.’” Trin exhaled and recited under his breath. “The mountains can be flattened, the rivers can be drained, but one truth remains: Vietnam is one.” Trin shook his head ruefully. “That guy was focused.”

“I know somebody like that,” said Broker playfully.

Nina punched him softly on the arm, then she raised her hand. “Listen,” she said.

Broker cocked his head and heard music in the trees. A PA speaker played Hanoi Muzac near the tomb. The procession of Young Pioneers marched away to a twanging rendition of “Oh Susannah.”

Broker stared at Trin. Trin shrugged and shook his head. “On traditional instruments, too.”

Nina laughed, really starting to enjoy herself. “I’m beginning to see how this place could screw up your mind.”

Trin reverted to tour guide, leading them past an opulent French Colonial building to the contrasting austere wood house on stilts where Ho had lived, pointing out the pool where the carp would come when he clapped his hands.

“There’s a debate in the party,” said Trin on the way back to the van. “In his will President Ho specified that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered on three mountain tops. Maybe he will finally get his wish and be liberated from that Russian meat locker.”

“Now what?” asked Nina.

“The military museum,” said Trin, giving directions to Mr. Hai. The museum was a few minutes away, through the swarm of bicycles. Nina sat up abruptly and said, “Hello! Is that what I think it is?”

“Absolutely,” said Trin. “The last statue of Lenin in the world, I think.” The statue dominated a square directly across from the museum.

“I should have brought a camera,” said Nina. Trin immediately dug in his bag and produced an Instamatic.

“I want you two in front of the statue,” said Nina. Trin had Mr. Hai pull over and explained the simple camera mechanism to Nina. They got out and a swirl of street kids surrounded them like blown gum wrappers. Selling postcards. Trin brushed off the kids and they walked up the shallow steps into the paved park toward the obstinate charcoal-gray statue. Paralyzed in larger-than-life bronze and contradictions, Lenin clasped his right lapel in one hand and knit his sooty devil’s eyebrows.

Nina, camera in one hand, shooed a group of kids playing soccer out of her way. She directed Trin and Broker to stand back a few paces, took several snapshots, and then moved down the steps to get a wide-angle shot.

Broker put his arm around Trin’s shoulder. It was very warm. A spoon band of cicadas clacked in gaps in the traffic. Foliage swooned in the breeze. A bright trickle of sweat ran from Trin’s hairline down his temple and into his scars. Mr. Hai wove across the busy street toward the military museum ticket booth. A tall tourist meandered, adjusting his direction so as not to interfere with the picture-taking. Nina was bent forward, her purse dangling from her shoulder, camera extended, elbows out. A spear of sunlight pierced Broker’s eyes from one of her earrings.

He blinked sweat.

They both sensed it ahead of conscious thought. Something in the languid summer tempo on the square showed its teeth. Trin and Broker dropped to a slight forward crouch. Broker’s right hand flashed instinctively to the small of his back.

The anonymous black car angled from a cloud of bicycles and rolled over the curb. At the same moment the tall Caucasian in sunglasses, floppy shorts, and a tourist cap accelerated from his amble across the square. The car and the trotting man converged on Nina. Not fast, but very smooth. Professional.

Broker and Trin were moving. Starting to shout.

Too late.

The rear door of the car swung open and the jogging man wrapped Nina in his arms and toppled with her into the open door. The car revved its engine, the window on the driver’s side rolled down. Broker, running flat out, saw Virgil Fret, patches of his sweaty scalp showing through his stringy red hair, lean out from the driver’s side. Grinning like a Bicycle deck joker, Virgil flipped Broker the bird. They could make out a struggle in the back seat through the windows. The door was not quite shut. An object flew out the door and flopped on the paving stones. Then Virgil popped the clutch and the car burned a squealing double track of rubber off the cobble apron.

Broker and Trin collided in a cloud of exhaust where the car had been a second before. Broker stooped and snatched up the purse Nina had thrown from the car. Trin whipped off his sunglasses and tried to catch the license plate as the car disappeared into a tornado of traffic.

“Did you get it?” yelled Trin.

“No,” panted Broker. He opened the purse and saw that it contained the copy of the U.S. Code, her passport and money. Then-

“ Wait .” Broker’s frown resembled Lenin’s bronze wrinkles.

Across the street, down a block, he saw a lean raw-boned man wearing a safari shirt round the corner. Hatless, his head and shoulders bobbed, fearsome as a Roman eagle, above the crowd of Vietnamese pedestrians.

“Be cool,” said Broker. “They’re sending someone to deal. We don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves.” He pulled a wad of currency from his pocket and passed fifty thousand dong notes out to the kids who had been playing soccer and who now stood wide-eyed in the vacuum of the kidnapping. The kids grabbed the bills; fifty thousand dong was the biggest denomination of Vietnamese currency, worth five bucks. They squealed and raced away.

The man paused and leaned on a wall in a patch of shade. When he saw the kids leave, he heaved his shoulders off the wall of the Dien Bien Phu Military Museum and casually raised a comb and thrust his hips in a posture that only American narcissism would strike. The long, oiled blond hair glittered in the sun.