Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Trin nodded. “When they looted the Hue Citadel in eighteen eighty-five. Looks like they missed some.” Trin shook his head. His hands groped the air. “You see. It’s…big.” He clicked his teeth. “Bigger than us.”

“Real treasure,” said Broker, now understanding Cyrus’s morbid obsession. And he saw how, in his fractured way, Jimmy Tuna was making his amends.

“If they knew about this in nineteen seventy-five Hanoi would have parked a division of tanks on it,” said Trin slowly.

“Okay,” Broker blurted. “Jimmy and Cyrus found the stuff and got it as far the bank. They phonied it up as a pallet of ammo. It just sat there after Hue fell.”

Trin exhaled. “God, I probably walked by it a dozen times myself. Just sat there for over a month?”

“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Ask Cyrus.”

Trin struggled to his feet. Broker joined him. They wobbled, supporting each other.

“So,” said Broker.

“So, we have to keep Highway One open for one more day.” Trin’s voice threw a resonating thespian echo down the empty beach. “We just get Nina away from Cyrus and then draw Cyrus here and call the militia when he’s digging it up.” It was three in the morning. The plan had the teeth of a butterfly assault on Mount Rushmore.

“That’s all,” said Broker, reeling. They both had the gold delirium tremens.

“C’mon. We’ve got to haul some boxes down to the water. And they’re heavy. Then we have to fill in that hole,” said Trin. “And meet Cyrus at noon in Hue. And not tell anybody else.”

“Trung Si knows,” said Broker.

Trin wearily brushed sand from his shirt. “Trung Si will keep his mouth shut. He’s more worried about the curse of found gold.”

“Once we load the boat, where we going to hide it?”

Trin shrugged. “Let Trung Si worry about that. He was a guerrilla all his life. He’s hid stuff from the Japanese, the French, the Americans…”

Arm in arm, they staggered back up the beach.

Trin’s latest mood swing took him, Tarzan fashion, clear across his personal jungle. When he spoke to Trung Si and Broker as they loaded the gold, he sounded just a little bit like he was talking to more than two people. Like maybe he caught glimmers of his entire old VC battalion lined up there on the beach. And this weird light came in his eye, like he was communing with the whole mystic Vietnamese nation: living, dead, and unborn. All convened there by the sea, as numerous and without end as the faded stars.

It was just a little weird, and maybe it was just being balls-out exhausted, but it put Broker a tad on edge. Not that he could tell for sure in the shape he was in. Working like maniacs, they had filled in the pit.

It was midmorning when they finally got underway to the hallucinatory Rube Goldberg thump and fart of the improbable sampan motor. They slumped on the smelly deck. They had loaded thirteen heavy crates into the boat, using a winch that Trung Si had rigged from the mast. Now the old peasant sat at the tiller, his pigtail snapping in the wind, a cheroot clamped in his teeth throwing sparks, his one eye fixed off the bow.

It might work if they could get Nina clear. And Lola was the only hope of that. On the other hand, they’d just found ten tons of gold. They weren’t thinking that clearly. Broker tried to hold the plan in his head. The militia post was a good hour’s drive on a bad road. No telephones. And once they involved those guys it could get, like Nina had said, hairy. A bunch of teenage farm-boys let loose with automatic weapons.

Broker had one ingot in a burlap sack along with the top to the first ammo box Trin had dug up. Chips. To bargain for Nina.

They unloaded the first box they found, the one with rings, gold leaf, and taels, at the vet’s home. Trin told Broker and Trung Si, with that faraway look in his eye, that the stuff in the pit belonged to the People of Vietnam, and the People of Vietnam would not begrudge them setting aside an additional hundred pounds of gold rings for their trouble.

Then Trung Si chugged off to hide the boat and their piece of the treasure. They cleaned up, sort of, washing in the sea, pulling on a change of clothing. Tripping with fatigue, they got in the van and headed for Hue City. They left the treasure of the Nguyen emperors in the keeping of a one-legged, half-blind, ex-Viet Cong peasant sergeant who had one old French bolt-action rifle and eight rounds of ammunition. And an uncommunicative, legless flute player. The rest of Trin’s vets still had not returned with the truck.

Trin sped down the sandy track looking out at the dunes. He grumbled, “I knew we should have buried some weapons out there, in Vietnam it just makes sense to have some weapons buried out there…”

Then Trin launched into an impromptu discussion of Trung Si’s curse. Dramatically, he thrust the tiger tooth under Broker’s nose. “It’s like your native Indians. Except with us it’s the Chams. In the fifteenth century we conquered and annihilated them, our Manifest Destiny. The March to the South.

“One of my ancestors rode an elephant through the Emperor’s Gate in the Hai Van Pass on that invasion. He brought this tooth back among his booty. The gold in Vietnam was mined in Champa, south of Danang. Still is. So if you find gold it’s probably Cham gold. Therefore cursed with their blood.”

Broker shrugged, he was way past curses. And things like reasonable doubt and probable cause, not to mention consequences. They were inappropriate Western concepts anyway. His dad always said he didn’t have the sense that God gave a goose, so he wasn’t particularly afraid. He liked the…velocity.

Trin, who probably had acquired the wisdom in middle age to be afraid and who had probably waltzed, a few times, with little green men on various bar counters, hunched over with his eyes level with the top of the wheel like a ninth-grader, elbows raised and driving sixty, sometimes seventy, miles an hour, sending bicycles and water buffaloes scurrying toward the ditch.

They sped through Quang Tri City. In the market, the sun ricocheted off a thousand conical straw hats and pounded platinum knitting needles into the raw sun spots Broker had on loan for eyes. He had never been so tired in his whole life. He had ten tons of gold on one shoulder and Nina Pryce’s life on the other.

Trin looked just as crushed and Broker hoped he was carrying the same load but he wasn’t 100 percent sure. Not even close. And for today’s work they needed 120 percent.

Trin skidded onto Highway 1 and aimed the van south, toward Hue City, down the center of the road, and stepped on the gas. He did not budge for anything on wheels.

“You got any speed?” asked Broker.

“All out,” said Trin.

They turned and grinned at each other. They had always been unsuited for ordinary life. They were probably rushing headlong toward doom.

They were probably happy.

Broker must have fallen asleep with his eyes wide open because suddenly a huge Tiger Beer billboard leaped in the windshield and Trin swerved left. Vaguely he noticed the dusty russet limestone walls of the Imperial Citadel rise across a muddy lotus-choked moat. Different now, masked by new houses.

Hue. The Nguyen emperors had made it their Imperial capital for a hundred and fifty years. Had to be here to understand the romance of the city and the war. A feudal castle, the hills upriver studded with Imperial tombs.

The Perfume River divided the town. The citadel complex took up the left bank; moated and surrounded by thick ramparts it contained the Forbidden City, the palaces and offices of the mandarins. Across the river, the right bank housed the Colonial facade of the old French administration, universities, and medical schools. A college town, a cultural icon: everyone had thought that the city was untouchable. In the late afternoons flocks of schoolgirls in their flowing white au dais rode their bicycles down Le Loi Street past the old French buildings. In 1968 the Communists chose it for their most dramatic battleground: Tet.