She closed the book and placed it neatly in its proper place on her bedside shelf. A satisfactory ending, the kind she liked, and she was glad that Claudine had moved on from merely arranging her own life to arranging those of her friends. This was also Lucy’s ambition, especially when her friends were in some trouble and the arranging might offer some Kim-style skulking and even a measure of violent adventure.
Mary had, of course, been sensible in her Mary way: children did not catch killers, especially not oriental professional killers, but now that she had her friends again, Lucy was not slow to imagine plots by which some satisfactory conclusion to the Asia Mall murder case could be brought about. Lucy’s interest in this was not principled but personaclass="underline" those murdering bastards had nearly messed up her life and should pay for it with their heart’s blood. With these and similar thoughts, of a violence rather more common among young girls than their parents suspect, she drifted off to sleep.
And awoke full of energy, more than she had felt in weeks. She fed, toiletted, and dressed in mere minutes, and was out of the house at just past seven and on her way to her mother’s office while her brothers were still having their wake-up whine. The fine weather continued, but now she noticed it as for the first time, balmy springtime in the city, and was buoyed up by it, and it lent bounce to her step as she trotted down Broadway to Walker.
Bello amp; Ciampi had a suite on the second floor of an undistinguished loft building otherwise devoted to galleries and the sale of oriental rugs. The firm name was painted in gold on the large semilunar window around the portrayal of a staring eye, with investigations-security below, which Lucy thought unbelievably tacky. Her mother had surrendered part of the space when the firm had contracted with Osborne and Harry Bello had moved uptown. She had an anteroom for her secretary-receptionist, one large room behind the big window with the sign on it, a toilet with shower, and a couple of windowless cubbyholes in back. One was fitted out as a kitchen, and Tran lived in the other.
Crying out a greeting in Arabic to Mr. Habibi, who ran the rug emporium on the ground floor, she ran up the steps and pounded on the door. She knelt and shouted through the brass mail slot and peeked through it, and shortly she saw a pair of feet in rubber zoris approach.
Tran greeted her and walked back through the office to his room, which contained a neatly made-up iron cot, a particle-board wardrobe, a pine table, a wooden swivel chair, and a small block-and-board bookcase, its lower shelves full of books, mainly paperbacks, in French, English, and Vietnamese. On its top shelf sat a twelve-inch black-and-white TV, with a coat hanger antenna, and a cheap clock-radio cassette player. The walls were bare and white. Tran sat in the chair, and Lucy perched herself on the edge of the bed. The office, and Tran’s quarters within it, were among Lucy’s favorite places. She had been coming here since early childhood, and it was here that she had developed her taste for snooping. She still came to snoop into Tran’s doings, and to spy on her mother, that sink of iniquity, and it did not occur to her that her presence here also allowed her mother to keep tabs on her, both directly and through Tran. Lucy was a capable conspirator, an extraordinary one for her age, but she was not quite ready for the major leagues, where both Mom and the Vietnamese had long been players.
“What are you doing?” she asked after the usual long silence.
“I am playing pyramid, as you see. Is there something wrong with your vision?”
“I meant, what are you doing today?” Silence, the flap of cards. Peevishly she said, “You always play that stupid game. You never win.”
“So you imagine. I like this game because it is almost impossible to cheat at it, and almost no hands play out. It is thus a good model of real life in both respects.”
“One can cheat in real life,” said Lucy. Tran raised his head from the cards and gave her one of his famous looks. Lucy had trained herself to meet her mother’s gaze, which was powerful enough, but Tran’s eyes were in a class of their own, with a range that ran from Santa-like merriment to the matte black merciless gaze of a large shark. For an instant it was like staring at hot anthracite; then it softened and he said, “Only about trivial things, money or romance. I was speaking of the essentials, that is, life itself. In any case, today I must see the boyfriend of one of our clients, who has persisted in unpleasant behavior.”
“Will you pound his lights out?”
“Certainly not,” replied Tran prissily. “I am a feeble and elderly oriental person and do not, as you say, pound out the lights of people. No, I will simply indicate to him in a variety of ways that he is being followed, and that neither his home, nor his place of work, nor his auto, is secure, should anyone wish to do him an injury, and I will further indicate that such intrusions will cease when he ceases his unwanted attentions toward his former mistress.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“In that case, we will threaten him with a visit from you. He will crumple like a dry leaf. Please be careful with that book.”
Lucy had been examining the objects set on the shelf affixed to the wall behind the head of the cot, in perfect disregard of her host’s privacy. She palmed a couple of Camels from a pack there, flipped through a little notebook, and opened the book in question, an octavo volume printed on vellum paper like a good Bible, bound in soft blue leather, much battered and stained. She had seen it innumerable times but had never focused upon it until now. It was, she saw, in the Vietnamese language. She read the title aloud, “Truyen Kieu.” Someone had written something on the flyleaf in ink, but it had run and faded and she could not make out its meaning.
“ ‘The Tale of Kieu,’ ” she translated. “What’s it about, refugees?”
“In a way. Vietnamese who have fled Vietnam are called Viet-Kieu because kieu means migrant, but the association is there, because Kieu had to flee her home also. She is our patron saint, you might say. A girl who suffered much.”
“It’s about a girl?”
“So the title suggests. It is the Vietnamese national epic.”
“Yeah? Can I borrow it?”
Tran pinched his nostrils and looked uncomfortable. “Hmm. I don’t know. Except in prison, it has not been out of my possession for many years. It was a gift.”
“Who from?”
“From Linh. My wife.”
“Oh. Did she write in the front? What does it say?”
He spoke in Vietnamese. “It says, ‘Naturally, when two kindred spirits meet, one tie/Soon binds them in a knot nothing can tear loose. From your kindred spirit, Linh. Tet, 1956.’ The lines are from the poem itself.”
Lucy put the book carefully back on the shelf. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I thought it was just a book. I don’t really read Vietnamese very well either.” She was acutely uncomfortable now. Some vast and heavy and awful thing seemed to lurk at the corners of her consciousness, like a formless bogey out of a dream. It was once again the faint apprehension of the suffering of Asia, something she touched a dozen times a day, and drew away from, and ignored like other Americans. She wished very much to pull away from it again, to resume the persona of a cheeky little girl poking about the room of a crotchety old uncle, but a feeling came over her then, a feeling like watching the odometer of a car turn over to produce a clean line of white zeros, and she understood that this was no longer possible for her.
“You must have been really sad when. .” she began, and then stopped, appalled. She didn’t know how to talk about stuff like this, as she had just at the moment realized. The times when she had chattered on, casually asking him about his life, now recollected, filled her with hot shame.
He sensed this and was kind. “I was sad, of course, but I did not find out about it until some time later. I was buried alive for four days, in a tunnel. When I came out, I was not the person I was before. Perhaps I could not have gone back to being a husband and a father in the same way, or at least that is what I told myself. And they were simply gone; it was not as if I had to bury them. They were in the canteen at Bac Mai Hospital, and it received a direct hit from a thousand-pound bomb. From a B-52, you understand. They fly so high that there is no warning. Alive and unafraid at one instant, dead the next. There are many worse deaths.”