T. Parker - Little Saigon

“Here, I brought you these, too.” He set a folder of some of his articles on her bed. Attached to each were his notes on the subject, interview stuff, notes to himself before writing. “I thought while you had some time you could read the preliminaries, then see the way they went into the articles. Maybe give you some idea of how you get a bunch of information on something, then whack it down to a size you can work with. For your writing, you know. The articles aren’t especially good — in fact I got fired for one of them — but you can see the process.”

She actually smiled this time, white teeth and pink lips. “You’re putting me to work already, Chuck.”

“I don’t want you getting into trouble here. Idle hands, and all that.”

“Well, I haven’t been a complete vegetable. Here is for you.” She gave him a folded sheet of yellow paper. He could see the imprint of her writing on it, the long delicate script. “You can read it now if you like to.”

“It’s beautiful. It’s perfect.”

“My poetry professor would say it reeks of sentiment.”

“He’s never written anything this good.”

Detective Minh’s face appeared in the doorway. Frye watched him smile, then disappear.

“He’s been here every day,” she said. “And so have the FBI. At first it was questions. Now, it just seems they are here to keep the reporters away. It was difficult to get them to let me see you, but I became emotional.”

Frye sat beside her.

She sat up straighter, fingered the pendant. “Chuck, you must help me. I need you to help.”

“Anything.”

Nha looked out the window as she spoke now. “My mother and sisters have not gone back into our house. So it is undisturbed. In the living room, there is an altar. Small and red, near the piano.”

“I remember it.”

“Inside the altar, behind the fruit, there is something I want you to take and destroy. Burn it for me. And please, do not ask me to explain.”

Frye considered, studying her pale profile against the pillow.

Nha reached for her purse beside the bed and lifted it with some effort. The key she handed him had a piece of red yarn attached. “It will open the patio door in the back yard. Please, be careful.”

Frye went through the Tuys’ side gate, around to the back of the house, and ducked under the yellow crime-scene ribbon. The late afternoon sun beat against the drawn curtains. It was hot inside, and everything looked the same as he remembered. He breathed deeply and felt dizzy.

The shrine was just where it had been, with the same fruit and incense. He knelt and pulled out an orange, an apple, a tangerine.

He whirled away and stood, hearing a sound from the kitchen.

Then the stillness descended again, the unperturbed silence of the dead.

He knelt again and felt inside the altar. Nothing. Just a small square space, rough wood, unpainted. He reached in farther and felt it there, taped to the roof of the little shrine. The masking tape rasped away and the canister fell into his palm.

Black plastic with a gray top. Inside, a strip of film negative. He held it up to the faint light. Writing of some kind, eighteen exposures in all. The print was too small to read.

He rolled the strip back into the container and slipped it into his pocket, then replaced the fruit.

For a moment he stood in Xuan’s study. He looked at the blood-soaked sofa and desk. What in the world, he wondered, could possibly be worth this?

In the good light of the cave-house, Frye studied the negatives under his magnifying glass. It was typewriting, done on an old machine, with the characters in poor alignment and the tops of the t’s and f’s missing. The typist kept dropping the cap key before completing the stroke, so the big letters hovered above the lines as if trying to float away.

The eighteen frames were of six pages that described a detailed monthly itinerary of Thach, a description and clumsy drawing of an apartment, and an aerial photograph of a military camp.

Frye read it through, twice. It seemed that Thach spent one week a month at home, and the other three at the compound. Thach is not approachable at camp. While at home, he remained inside the apartment almost all the time. He slept in a room in the west corner, bathed and shaved in a bathroom with a window looking south. Thach is not approachable during this time. The street outside is too busy. His door is always watched.

Subordinates brought food each day at four in the afternoon, and Thach prepared it himself. He ate alone. The apartment was built around a courtyard, in which he read during the day when the weather was conducive. Thach is not approachable at this time. At night, he viewed films of the war, making extensive notes on a large pad. The writer speculated that he was working on a book. Thach made from fifteen to twenty phone calls each day, none lasting for more than two minutes. Twice a week while at his apartment, he received a prostitute. She was always the same girl, delivered always by the same taxi. She would stay for two hours, then leave. The writer noted that at least one of Thach’s men was constantly posted outside the apartment door, and the others busied themselves with errands. One guard always slept there. At no time was Thach completely alone. Recommend that Thach not be approached at home.

The drive north, which Thach made early in the morning on the second Sunday of each month, was a distance just short of one hundred and fifty kilometers. One of his men would drive, while Thach sat in the passenger seat.

Because of the acute angle in the road twenty-one kilometers from the Saigon city limit, Thach’s vehicle must nearly stop in order to make turn. This turn is sixteen meters south of the An Loc Bridge. On the north shoulder of the road, thick underbrush and tall palms provide dense cover. Because Thach sits on the passenger side, he is exposed at this moment. When the trip is undertaken during favorable weather, the vehicle top is removed. He is exposed at kilometer twenty-one. He is approachable at this place and time. Resistance sympathy is high in this area now, both entry and escape would be possible. The road to Loc Ninh is not heavily traveled.

Frye read the material again, taking mental note of the particulars, then burned it in his sink.

Thach, he thought, with your monster’s face. Writer of books, user of whores. Recluse, traveler. Dispatcher of assassins. Target.

Frye was rinsing the ashes down his drain when someone knocked at his door. He looked through a side window to see Burke Parsons standing on his porch. Burke must have seen the blinds move: he cocked his head at Frye and waved.

Parsons thudded across Frye’s living room floor in his cowboy boots, hat in hand. “Hope you don’t mind me just bargin’ in like this, Chuck. You know, back in Texas, you got a open door policy with your friends. It’s a insult if they call you first.”

“It’s okay. I’m heading over to Mom’s and Dad’s for dinner in a while.”

“I won’t be but a minute. Reason I came is Rollie Dean Mack. I saw him after the fights that night and mentioned you. What I think is he didn’t rightly know what he was doing when he yanked that advertising from the Ledger. That’s what he acted like, anyhow. So I just told him I’d met you and what a good guy you were, and he seemed a little ashamed at blowing his stack and all. Anyway, he owed me one, so I called it in, and he said he’d be willing to start up those ads again if you’d just lay off his fighters and quit trying to interview him. I told him to just tell you himself, but he ain’t ever gonna talk to you. Says he hates reporters. So I got volunteered. Makes him feel important when someone else does his work, I think.”