Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"I'm glad you liked it," said his sister. "What about you, GC?"

Giancarlo and Lucy exchanged a look. "Oh, definitely the best day, superterrific," lied Giancarlo out of love for his brother. Only Lucy knew how much he disliked shooting.

She mooched around the house for a while after that, made herself some tea, smoked a cigarette in the garden. Then she went into the house and, like the good girl she was, called her mom.

But was not surprised, nor disappointed, when Dan Heeney answered the phone.

"Oh, I was thinking about you," she said.

"Really?" This was actually the first time that a girl had said that to him. "How come?"

"I was out with the boys and a bunch of gangsters shooting machine guns today and I thought, 'Oh, I'll probably talk to Dan when I call Mom tonight and he'll ask me what I was doing and I'll say that, and he'll say, "No, really." ' "

"You're making this up." He laughed.

"Yeah, or, 'You're making this up.' No, really. My strange life. What's hopping in McCullensburg?"

"Oh, well, I don't know where to start. There's so much to do. We caught B.B. King's concert at Amos's roadhouse and brothel. Pavarotti's at the VFW hall. Most nights I just drop in at Rosie's to check out the wits and glitterati who assemble there nightly-Woody, Jay, Leo. It's like People magazine."

She laughed. "I mean really. "

"Oh, really? I'm studying matrix algebra and astrophysics. Working on my world-famous pyramid of Iron City beer cans. Waiting for this damn thing to resolve."

"My dad'll fix it."

"Yeah, that's what my dad thought," Dan snapped bitterly, "and look what it got him."

Lucy thought that between the two dads, hers struck her as the more competent fixer. She let the thought pass, but the mere mention of the case strummed the ever-tuned strings of responsibility in her, and she said, "Well, it'll work out somehow. Is my mom there?"

"No, as a matter of fact, she's out."

"Out? Where is she? It's pretty late."

"Oh, you know-McCullensburg, the city that never sleeps. I don't know where she is exactly. She had some whacked-out idea about using a big magnet to troll the river for the murder weapon. She thought she'd figured out exactly where it is. I thought it was kind of dumb, myself."

"It probably was. She can go off on an idea sometimes. That's how she lost her eye, you know."

"I didn't. What happened?"

"This was before they got married. She started obsessing about my dad's ex. She thought they were getting back together. Then she found an envelope addressed to him, from the city where the ex was living, and she opened it to see whether anything was really going on, and it was a letter bomb, meant for my dad, from this maniac. The funny thing was, she was the DA's expert on letter bombs at the time."

"Weird. She's sort of a strange woman, if you don't mind me saying so."

"Not at all. Which makes it odd that she has such perfectly normal children. Look, I'd like to chat more, but I hear my host is arriving. Would you do me a favor? Have her call me when she gets in-it doesn't matter how late it is. Okay?" She gave him the house number.

"Sure. Fine. By the way, you said you'd work on us getting together this summer. Any progress?"

"I promised my dad I would stay away until they catch the bad guys. Because of the twins."

"Uh-huh. Well, I guess it's going to have to be back at school."

"Oh, I don't know," said Lucy, "two Karps on the case, those guys're doomed."

Midnight. Lucy sat cross-legged on a cushion in the plain finished basement of Tran's house, using yenhok needles to prepare a pill of black Chinese opium for her host, who was reclining on a couch. She manipulated the tarry mass over the blue flame from a brass alcohol lamp, shaping and heating it all the way through, as he had taught her. It was curiously relaxing work. The lamp provided the room's only light.

She placed the pill in a long, carved pipe, brass-bound bone with an amber mouthpiece, and handed it to him. He took two long sucks from it and fell back against a cushion.

"You are good at this," he said after a while. "An opium chef as we call it. Do you feel corrupted?"

"Not at all. It seems a very innocent pleasure. And I like to see you relaxed."

"You're a good girl."

Another long pause. "And I am a very bad man. But when I take nha phien with you, I seem to float into another world, as if I am living a story different from the actual story of my life. As in the Tale of Kieu, the story of Kieu and the bandit chieftain. Do you remember that?"

"Yes. The bandit chieftain was really a decent man, forced by necessity into a cruel life. I always thought of you when I read it."

"Our sorrowful national epic. We Vietnamese are connoisseurs of sorrow, you know. We make the Russians look like the French. Or the happy Americans, the fortunate people. My hope is that the boys I bring over will in time learn something about this."

"Who are they?"

"Sons of my old comrades. Southerners, of the NLF. I find as many of them as I can, and whoever remains of the people I served with, and their families. We were all disgraced after the war. Insufficiently grateful to our northern comrades, too many bourgeois tendencies, our grandfathers could read, perhaps. We had imagined we were fighting for a better life, so we all had to be reeducated. It turned out that what we were fighting for was to give absolute power to a bunch of fat bastards who sat out the war in Hanoi bunkers. Imagine our surprise!"

"How can you get them out?"

"Oh, in Vietnam now anything can be arranged with money. The country is one great bazaar. The granddaughters of the Vietcong are selling themselves to fat Germans in Saigon hotels. Nothing changed. All the wars, twenty years of them, so that the pimps can be Vietnamese instead of French. Or Americans. You should have dropped dollars from your bombers instead of bombs; it would have been cheaper." He took another long drag and closed his eyes.

"You don't have to continue in this life," she said. "You could go anywhere. Start over."

"I do start over, my dear. Every night when I smoke my pipe I have a beautiful and quite different life."

"And then you kill more people."

"In fact, the last time I killed anyone it was rescuing you, do you recall? From those Chinese in that shop by the beach."

She felt a flush of shame. "I'm sorry, Uncle. I was being a prig. Who am I to judge you?"

He said nothing for several minutes. "No, I am far from offended. I believe that had I not met you and your mother, I would not have been a real person anymore. As it is, my goal is to keep violence"-he drifted for a moment-"to a minimum. If I died before I had to kill another person, I would be happy."

At this he fell silent. She stayed with him, drifting off herself into a semisleep, touched a little by the drug fumes, a state that provided just a taste of the famous silky dreams.

From which she was startled by a ringing phone. She climbed the stairs to the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

"Hai ba ba, nam sau bon bay."

"Lucy?"

"Yeah. Dan?"

"Uh-huh. What was that?"

"The number in Vietnamese. Is my mom okay?"

"Yeah, well, that's why I'm calling. It's two-thirty and she's not back. I called Poole's and she's not there either. I checked the cops and the hospital, too. I'm a little worried and you said to call…"

"Yes. Thank you. Do you know where she went?"

"She said something about the bridge on Route 130, north of town."

"Okay, good, I'll take it from here. You should get some sleep."

"You'll take it…?" he exclaimed, disturbed by the coldness in her tone. "What're you going to do?"

"Call my dad, for starters. Don't worry about it."

"Aren't you worried?"

He heard a long sigh over the wires. "Of course I'm worried. But I'm used to this. In my family we don't get all upset when someone goes missing. My dad calls it Karp Disaster Mode. I have to go now."