Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

His house seemed like a French colonial mansion.

Uncle Thanh was stooped. He wore a perpetually bewildered look. He was ancient to me, although he was only in his fifties. Uncle Thanh sold food and drink from a wheeled cart, of which he was immensely proud. It was made of hardwood that he polished with a rag until it shone like glass. On the scrap-metal canopy not a speck of rust was tolerated, even during the monsoons when rain fell as if from a faucet. In joking tones, the Americans had nicknamed his cart and the thousands in Saigon like it as “Howard Johnsons.” Uncle Thanh neither knew nor cared what they had meant.

Every predawn, Uncle Thanh went to the Central Market for his merchandise—bread, meat, produce, pastries, whatever was available that he could afford. My mother helped him cook the meats and prepare sandwiches. Later in the day, he cooled bottles of soda and beer in the lower compartment with chunks of ice bought from men who pedaled their wagons in a furious race against the vertical sun.

I begged my mother to let me go with Uncle Thanh. Once a week she relented and permitted me to miss school to do so. I think she was relieved that I became attached to him. I regretted that my mother and I were not closer. It was not for lack of love. It was because she had so many other worries. Of her children, I could fend for myself the best.

Times were difficult, not that they had ever been easy. Food and drink were scarce, customers scarcer. Instead of the Americans and the French who preceded them, we had the Soviets, plump and unhappy, the color of lard. They were known as Americans Without Dollars.

Suddenly Uncle Thanh’s business improved. He had new merchandise to sell: American cigarettes. Vietnamese-made Ruby Queens tasted like asphalt and smelled like a car fire. Diplomats, journalists, and Party officials would pay 200 dong for a package of Salems or Winstons. To put that in perspective, my schoolteacher earned 600 dong per month.

Thanks to his newfound income, Uncle Thanh could afford to pay a few dong per week to a policeman for the privilege of moving his cart to an improved location, half a kilometer from home but very near Dong Khoi, the avenue of the rich.

During the French war, this elegant strip of bars, restaurants, and shops was Rue Catinat. In the American War it was Tu Do, or Freedom Street. Now it was Dong Khoi, the Street of Simultaneous Uprisings.

When Uncle Thanh thought my ears were old enough to hear such language, he said that since the flesh and sin trade had not diminished, Dong Khoi was commonly referred to as the Street of Simultaneous Erections. This was an unimaginable street where an evening of nightclub fun would cost six months’ wages for a laborer.

Uncle Thanh worked at the side of a theater. The cinema was out of business, doors nailed shut, pictures of Sabu on the marquee plastered over with posters of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the People’s Army and hero of Dien Bien Phu. Uncle Thanh could see Dong Khoi and customers could see his cart.

It was there that Comrade Vo approached him.

“Comrade Thanh,” he said. “I am happy to meet you. I am pleased you are so prosperous.”

Uncle Thanh presented a broad, jittery smile. Vo was our neighborhood political cadre. He was a northerner, dark and rat-faced and not much taller than I. Vo had simply moved into the home of Uncle Thanh’s friend, Minh, an office clerk. There had been whispers about Vo, hushed fears. Uncle Thanh avoided the stories as he sought to avoid the cadre himself.

“I came to see you,” Vo went on, “for I have wondered why I do not see you at political discussion meetings, either you or your lovely sister.”

Uncle Thanh replied so quietly that I could barely hear him. “I humbly think I am too old to be of value.”

“You are too old for improvement?” Vo asked incredulously. “You have lived under the puppet boot of imperialist decadence and you cannot change your thinking through education and self-criticism?”

Uncle Thanh lowered his eyes. I had never seen him so frightened and this frightened me.

“How is your son, Pham?”

Uncle Thanh looked up. He maintained his silence. I knew it hurt him to speak of Pham, whose crime had been to rise in the South Vietnamese Army to the rank of captain. After Liberation, he had been sent to the countryside for reeducation. Other officers in Thieu’s army had been reeducated and released. Pham had not.

“Your son fought bravely but wrongly, Thanh. Reports indicate that Pham is not receptive to new ideas.”

Uncle Thanh shrugged. “We receive few letters from him and I do not understand politics.”

“Perhaps I could contact his instructors. I can inquire of his progress and tell them he would be coming home to a family with proper revolutionary attitudes.”

Uncle Thanh bowed. “Thank you, Comrade.”

“Your daughter, Thi. She concerns me too.”

Uncle Thanh’s head came up with such a start that I flinched. I didn’t know Pham. Thi either. But I did know Thi had been a typist at USMACV Headquarters. She had many American friends, spoke their language, read their books, and wore Western clothing. She had escaped in one of the last helicopters to lift off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in 1975.

Thi married a Vietnamese man in San Francisco. They had good jobs and plenty of money. The Winstons and Salems came from Thi.

“I have little contact with her,” Uncle Thanh lied.

Comrade Vo smiled, looking through him. “Yes, of course. It is sad, not your fault that she was contaminated and corrupted. Nonetheless, those of mean spirit could say you are influenced by her cowardice and counterrevolutionary path.”

Uncle Thanh said, “I harm nobody.”

Vo walked around his cart. He slid open the lowest drawer and took from the compartment two packages of Salem cigarettes. Just helped himself.

“The road to socialist purity is arduous,” Vo said. “The end of the journey will not be reached until everyone is equal. In Ho Chi Minh City, this journey has proven especially grueling. Neocolonial reactionaries here cling to their decadent ways.

“However, patriotic sacrifice does not require that pleasure be shunned altogether. Our neighborhood citizens meet to learn the joys of revolutionary socialism after a long day of toil.

“Perhaps if I provide good cigarettes, the people will be more relaxed and amenable to improvement.”

Vo frowned at the Salems. “California tax stamps on the seals. Is that not the American province where many of the bad elements resettled?”

Uncle Thanh shrugged again.

Shaking his pinhead, Vo walked off. Was there anything about Uncle Thanh and his family Vo had not learned? When Vo was out of sight, I ran to the corner and peeked. The political cadre had lit up and was puffing like a chimney.

Uncle Thanh and my mother faithfully attended the political discussion meetings. They would come home, and we children expected if not revolutionary fervor at least a recounting of what they’d been taught. They were as silent as stones. I am certain Vo would regard the silence as a bad attitude, but Vo was not told. Uncle Thanh and my mother were not raising rodent informers.

It did not take me long to figure out why Uncle Thanh was not talking; the meetings made him angry. I made him smile when I asked if Comrade Vo was really giving out cigarettes at the meetings. It was a tight cold smile issued without comment.

Uncle Thanh did not appreciate being told what to do. I loved him for that alone. I almost convinced myself that I had inherited the trait from him. But I could not have, for Uncle Thanh was no more my mother’s brother, my biological uncle, than Uncle Ho.

When six share two rooms, you learn the facts of life at an early age. In the nights when the moon was fat, I would peek through a crack in the curtain that separated their bed from ours. I saw my mother straddling Uncle Thanh, rocking and gyrating, biting a knuckle so she did not cry out.