There were no signs of the hut’s inhabitant and Michael was about to move on when he heard an enormous squawk behind him. He turned to find himself facing the boy whose path they had already crossed. He now held a live chicken which he carried upside down by its feet.
“Ask him where everybody is.”
“You mean like take me to your leader?”
“Just ask,” Michael said.
Kate addressed the boy in a few simple Mandarin words, and the boy responded. “He said the green creatures came. They inserted probes into the children. Then they beamed the village elders into their golden space ship.”
Michael just looked at Kate.
“I’m kidding,” she smiled. “He said most people left the village when the government told them this land would be flooded in a hydroelectric project. Only his grandparents and a few of the older people have stayed behind.”
The boy then said something else.
“He asks if we are friends with the American man who came here many months ago.”
Michael felt a jolt of pure electricity run up his spine. If there were Americans way out here, he knew he wanted to hear about them. The boy continued to speak, Kate translating.
“He says there was a man that looked something like you, only older, with gray hair, but the eyes, the blue eyes were the same. The man came here and asked a lot of questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
Kate translated. “He says he doesn’t know. He says he only saw the man speaking with his grandfather. He couldn’t hear well.”
“When did he come?”
Again Kate translated. “He thinks about three months ago.”
Michael felt something that he hadn’t felt for some time, something that felt like hope.
“Where is his grandfather? I want to speak with him.”
The boy didn’t seem to require a translator. He simply looked to Kate and uttered three short syllables.
“He says to follow him.”
***
The boy led them past several more open doors, to another hut, in many ways identical to the ones they had passed. The difference was that this hut showed activity both inside and out. An old woman, her silver gray hair shorn, swept off the dusty stones in front of the door. The fresh scent of stir fried vegetables hung in the air, a steady chopping sound echoing out from within. The woman smiled at the boy before straightening her tired back in the presence of the strangers. Despite her smile, Michael guessed that she was less than pleased with the intrusion. She called inside the hut and the chopping ceased, Kate taking over in Mandarin.
“Hello. We met your grandson on the path.” Both Michael and Kate smiled as the old woman eyed them warily. “He said an American that looked a lot like this one,” Kate pointed to Michael, “came here many months ago.”
If the old woman looked disinclined to help before, she was positively tight lipped now. Michael observed what seemed to be the particularly Chinese habit of smiling under duress. Whatever this woman knew, he doubted very much she’d be sharing it with them, and by the looks of that smile, he suspected the kid would get a few whacks with the end of her broom as well. Michael spoke to Kate without turning to her.
“No way she’s talking.”
“Not a chance.”
“So what now?”
Kate smiled back at the old woman and stepped past her, poking her head into the open doorway. Michael appreciated Kate’s initiative, but wished there was another way. It was after all this woman’s home she was entering uninvited. As fate would have it, though, Kate did little more than bob her head into the shadowy interior before she bobbed right back out again, staring into the face of a man who looked older than time itself. The man carried a worn pocket knife in one hand, a long green onion in the other. Michael wasn’t sure if the old man intended to whip Kate with the onion or cut her eyes out with the knife, but he did neither. Instead, he simply stepped into the sunlight and appraised his visitors. The old woman was quiet, the boy observing silently from the path. Even the chicken stopped squawking.
Kate opened her lips and began to say something in Mandarin, but the old man put a finger to his lips. Kate was silent and the old man, who looked like he had been crying, rubbed his tired fingers over his sweaty brow and up through his long strands of greasy hair. The action revealed a keloid scar which started near the middle of his forehead and looked as though it kept on going right over the top of his skull. The scar was clearly old and had obviously been sewn up with little concern for the finesse of modern plastic surgery. From the steely stare in his wizened eyes, though, Michael could tell that aesthetics of the wound were long forgotten, even if its cause had not been. The old man uttered a word, flicking the wet green onions like a switch as he did.
“What did he say?” Michael quietly asked Kate.
“He said, go.”
“Ask him about the American.”
Kate began to translate, but this time the old man’s answer wasn’t a word, but a gruff scream. “He says to go, now.”
Michael looked to the old lady, then back at the man with the scar. It was most likely her husband, possibly her father, but it was hard to tell. Either way it didn’t matter. The chicken squawked behind them, Michael fairly certain that they would learn no more. Not under these circumstances. Not on this visit.
“Then let’s go,” Michael said, and as he turned, he cast a second glance at the pocket knife the old man held between his thumb and fingers. The rust colored blade was extended, its tip broken off, no doubt from hard use. But what caught Michael’s eye wasn’t the blade, or the way the old man held it. It was the insignia embossed on the piano black handle exactly where the Swiss Cross would have been be located had it been a Swiss Army knife. Except, Michael noted, it wasn’t a Swiss Army knife. It was a German Army knife. And it wasn’t embossed with a Swiss Cross. It was engraved with a silver swastika. The Nazi emblem glinted in the midday sun, still shiny after all these years.
Chapter 29
When he was eighteen, Michael’s father taught him about honor. Michael’s grandfather had just died and Michael was due at the funeral. The problem was, Michael was away at college. There was no way to go to the funeral without missing his final exams. Michael had been reasonably close to his grandfather and he knew that he wouldn’t want him missing his finals. Not for his funeral. Not when he was already dead. But not going would look bad. Michael knew it would. It would look bad to his aunt and uncle, his cousins, and everybody else. Michael asked his dad what he thought he should do and his dad told him to do what Grandpa would. So Michael thought about it. Then he drank a Black and Tan and hit the books. Michael skipped the funeral. And he knew his grandfather was smiling in his grave. Because honor isn’t about doing what’s popular. It’s about doing what’s right. And Michael’s dad gave him the permission to do that.
***
Less than ten minutes had passed, but Michael knew that the image of the Nazi pocketknife had been seared into his brain for an eternity. He sat with Kate, straddling the motorcycle at the base of the crooked karst, staring down the path to the village of Yangkok below. They needed to think, they needed to regroup, but most importantly they needed to find a means of getting the old man to share what he so obviously knew.
“There you are talking about how we have to work smart. How we need a bird to catch our fish for us. Well we got our bird, Michael. That was him down there with a scar the size of Cuba running down his forehead. What are we doing here?”