Dennis Tafoya - The Dope Thief

Ray knocked, and Ho’s wife, Tina, let him in. There were three kids sitting at the breakfast table and an old woman stand ing at the kitchen counter and some kind of wild exchange going on. The smallest girl had a cereal bowl on her head and was banging it with a spoon. The old woman was making angry faces and talking a mile a minute in Vietnamese. Ray guessed it had some-thing to do with how kids should act at the table. Tina led him out into an enclosed porch looking out at a neatly trimmed lawn. She pointed outside to where Ho stood over an older man Ray took to be Ho’s father, kneeling in a patch of garden.

“There he is, arguing with his father about bitter melon.” Ray shrugged and smiled. Tina threw her hands up. “Don’t ask.” She gestured to a recliner. “Want some coffee, Ray?”

“No, I’m good, Tina, thanks.” She went back inside.

Ho was short and rail thin, with glasses that gave him a studious look. He nodded his head toward Ray and smiled. He exchanged some more words with the man in the garden and came around to the outside door of the porch. He waved to Ray to follow him, and they walked back to the kitchen, where there was now a high- pitched argument about breakfast foods going on. Ray figured Grandma was pushing for something healthy, holding a heavy frying pan and pointing it at the kids, who were pouring cereal with a wild abandon. Two dogs scrambled to get the cereal that hit the floor. Ray thought it was funny how much you could get without knowing the words at all.

Ho let Ray go ahead of him down the stairs and locked the door behind them. He clicked on the light, and Ray settled on a leather couch. The room was furnished tastefully, with a slate bar and dark furniture, muted prints of Chester County on the walls. There was a massive safe on one side of the room and a locked metal gun cabinet next to it. Ray figured this was the safest room in Philly and felt some tension go out of the muscles in his shoulder. He put the bag on the table and waited for Ho, who grabbed a bottled water from a minibar and offered Ray one.

Ho pointed to the bag with his bottle. “How’s business?”

Ray raised his eyebrows. “That’s an interesting question. I’m hoping you can help there.”

Ho sat down and opened the bag. His eyes got wide. “Christ.” Ho had been in the country since he was two and had only the ghost of an accent that surfaced in clipped consonants when he was agitated.

“Yeah, wow is right. Plus a nice haul of cash.”

“But?”

“But, there was a mess, and someone put their eyes on me and Manny.”

“This was that thing in Upper Bucks, right? It was on the news.”

“Somebody with an interest in the place shows up just as we’re leaving. We see him, he sees us. Plus, he finds a walkie- talkie we left on the ground, starts talking to us. Telling us how easy it’s going to be to find us. Two guys ripping off dealers.”

“He got a good look?”

Ray shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was dark, it was raining. But man…”

Ho took the bag off the table and knelt by the safe.

“He said something?”

“He was just so fucking sure of himself. Like it was a matter of time.”

“That’s our game, though, isn’t it?” Ho turned the dial on the safe with small, precise movements, then pulled the steel handle and opened it. He took a canvas sack out of the safe and began transferring the dope from the bag Ray had brought to the sack. “What we do, how we make money. In what I do, in what you do. It’s the image you project. You play a role, right? It’s what keeps people from doing something stupid, at least most of the time.” He put the canvas sack in the safe next to some neat stacks of currency from different countries. “But it’s all an illusion. The illusion of reputation, the illusion of control.” He pulled a colorful bill from the stack and put it on the table between them. “Even this, when you think about it.”

Ray bent over and looked at the bill closely. It was beautiful in the way foreign money was often beautiful next to the monochromatic green of U.S. bills. He picked it up and turned it over. One side was a subtle pink and showed some kind of government building and had “1000” printed on it, the only thing Ray understood. The other side, a soft blue, showed men riding elephants.

“Where’s it from? Looks like Asia?”

Ho smiled ruefully. “ Vietnam. Actually South Vietnam, about 1975.” Ray held it out to Ho, who waved it away. “Keep it.”

“What’s it worth?”

“About five bucks, to a collector. Which is my point. Even money is just a note from the government saying, ‘We promise this piece of paper is worth something.’ It’s just a bet, right? On that illusion, or projection or what ever it is.” Ray folded the note and put it carefully in his shirt pocket. Ho pointed back up the stairs. “My old man left South Vietnam with a couple million dong. That’s what the note is, it’s a thousand South Viet nam ese dong. By the time he got to the States the money wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. He talked to a guy from the State Department and the guy told him to wipe his ass with it.”

“But he kept it.”

“I guess it’s a reminder. At the end of the day you can’t depend on anything. Everything changes, everything ends. All you got is what you got up here.” He pointed to his head. The sound of high voices in argument bled through the ceiling. Ho smiled. “And family.”

Ray knew how Ho felt about family. He remembered Ho telling him about his parents taking him out of Vietnam right after the war, when he was barely a year old, his mother and father carrying him in their arms in a leaky boat across the China Sea. His father had been a colonel in the army, and they were on a boat with about fifty people who wanted him dead. The army and navy dissolved, and deserters were cruising around in stolen patrol boats and one of them attacked the boat and machine- gunned everyone. Ho’s parents hid with him among the dead. They drifted around the ocean for days with no water until a Taiwanese trawler picked them up.

Ray tried to picture the ferocity of that kind of love, and he thought about his father and mother and about how maybe family could be one of those things that just ends. Maybe it was all six kinds of bullshit, and you just made a choice about what illusion to believe.

RAY ASKED IF Ho had any idea who the guys were, running a dope lab in a farm house in Bucks County. Ho shook his head.

“I have two guys I ask about that shit. It’s not an exact science, I just ask them what you ask me, if you go to a certain cor-ner on a certain street, does anyone have a problem with that? They tell me no, or yes, and if it happens I down some of the money I take off you to them. Usually, they’re happy to have less competition.” Ray described what he had seen of the guy and the car, the New En gland accent. Ho nodded and said he’d quietly ask around.

Ray put his hand up. “For Christ’s sake don’t let this get back to you. Maybe it was all talk, but this guy sounded crazy. All I need is enough information to get to this guy before he can get to me and Manny.”

“You need anything? Guns, ammunition?”

“Guns I got. My old man used to say you didn’t need more guns than you got hands, and I got more than that.”

Ho looked thoughtful for a minute, then held a finger in the air. He went to a closet with a steel door and pulled a ring of keys out of his pockets. After a second he found the right one and snapped open the door, stepped inside, and was gone for a minute. When he came out he had what looked like two dark blue sleeveless sweaters, each wrapped in plastic. He handed them to Ray, and he felt how heavy they were. Bulletproof vests.