Nina looked over her sheet. The Vangs wanted to consult her about “insurance.” Kao had given no street address, listing his residence just as South Lake Tahoe. No phone either. Nina insisted and explained that the address, along with the entire conversation, would remain confidential. Finally Dr. Mai gave her the address of an apartment near the casino district.
In answer to her first questions, Dr. Mai told her that the Vangs owned a convenience store in the tiny shopping center anchored by the Grand Auto Store, about a mile from Nina’s office. He showed her a lease made out to Kao and See Vang. She had never been in there, but something tugged at the edges of her memory.
“How long have you been in the U.S.?” she asked Kao.
“Twelve years,” answered Dr. Mai. “Very difficult. No money. Two children. These are very hard workers. Work all day and night.”
“I am curious as to why you came to see me,” Nina said with a smile. “There are many lawyers.”
“You were recommended.”
“By whom?”
“By others in our community.” He gave no names.
Nina felt absurdly flattered. Apparently her recent notoriety was paying off. She picked up her pen. “How can I help you today?”
Dr. Mai talked with Kao for a moment, then said, “An insurance claim. A business policy. You can help with this?”
“Is it in litigation? Has someone been sued?”
“No. This is-this is private.”
Kao launched into a short speech, talking to Dr. Mai rather than Nina. Energetic and quick-moving, he was what some people might call the mercurial type. A big Fossil watch, sunglasses peeking from his pocket. All-American in some ways. Nina had trouble reading his mood. Was he nervous? Worried? Afraid? Anyway, smiles were miles away.
“Kao would like to know if you would be able to work quickly. Can you begin immediately?”
“I have some time, I’m not in trial at the moment. But how much is the claim amount?”
“He doesn’t know yet. You will help him decide.”
“What is the reason for the claim?” She began her habitual note-taking, copying down fragments of sentences, making a few of her own observations.
“A fire.”
“You brought the policy?”
“And other papers. Police reports also.” Ah, Nina thought. Police reports equal a crime. Again, memory nagged at her. A crime involving a liquor store. She had overheard one of the deputy D.A.’s talking about it. She couldn’t pull it back into consciousness. But the emotional content of the memory remained. Something chilling.
She pushed back her chair, crossed her legs, balanced the pad across her lap, and said, “Tell me about it.”
Their story was all the more wrenching because of the matter-of-fact way in which Dr. Mai spoke.
Kao and his family had worked and saved for a number of years to earn the start-up expenses to open a store. When they had found a well-placed business for sale eighteen months earlier, they were overjoyed. The purchase took everything they had. After much happy discussion, they named their new venture the Blue Star Market.
Their original plan called for a grocery store, but liquor sold better, so they stocked liquor, but they also sold imports from Southeast Asia-canned food, spices, toys, candy, clothing and hats, magazines and newspapers from Thailand and Vietnam. The store had been modestly successful from the start. People came from Reno and Fresno, where over twenty thousand Hmong lived, to find familiar items unavailable outside San Francisco otherwise. Tourists from all over enjoyed stopping in to look at the exotic items and usually left with something.
Their twelve-year-old boy, Boun, worked there after school with See Vang. Their daughter did not, for unexplained reasons. Kao worked two shifts, from ten to two in the midday and again from seven to midnight.
Dr. Mai explained that the Northern California refugee community viewed Kao Vang as a big success story. The family bought a Jetta. All the Hmong people in the area knew about the store.
One night, about a year earlier, a man-“A Hmong man?” Nina asked, but got no answer-entered the store. Waiting until the other customers had gone, he put a six-pack of Budweiser on the counter, pulled out a gun, and told Kao to open the cash register. As this story unfolded, Kao sat tensely beside Dr. Mai. Now Dr. Mai paused and Kao spoke his first English words: “I say, ‘Go to hell!’ I reach to take gun-” He spoke in a thick, garbled voice.
The robber shot Kao in the face and sauntered out, leaving Kao bleeding but still conscious on the floor behind the counter. Showing unusual presence of mind, the robber had hung the CLOSED sign and locked the door behind him.
Kao came close to dying. But minutes later, Boun found him and called 911. While they waited for the medics, the boy wrapped his father’s head in his shirt and held it gently in his lap.
Immediate surgery took care of the initial repairs to Kao’s shattered jaw. Some weeks later, surgeons inserted pins. Two months after that, he underwent further surgery designed to rehabilitate his speech. Unfortunately, that didn’t work very well, but at least now Kao could make himself understood.
Then Kao went back to work. But he had a new attitude.
“Could you identify the robber?” Nina asked. “Did they make an arrest?”
Dr. Mai shook his head impatiently. “No identification,” he said. Nina wrote on her pad, “Knows the guy? But closed society, these people don’t want to go outside.” She was guessing. She couldn’t tell what Dr. Mai was thinking or how a Hmong would handle being shot in the face.
“That must have been very painful,” she said gently to Kao. Dr. Mai translated. Giving his injured jaw a smack with his own hand, Kao shrugged to show his obliviousness to pain. Nina wrote, “Brave guy.”
“Go on,” she said.
For the sake of his wife and son, Dr. Mai said, Kao bought a gun to keep under the counter. Several months passed. In early June, just before closing, a man came into the store, keeping his face hidden under a cap. But Kao Vang, alone behind the counter, knew immediately who he was.
“The same man?”
“Yes. Back again.”
This time Kao was ready. When the man pulled out a gun, Kao already had his hand on his own gun. No time to think. He pulled out his gun and shot the robber point-blank in the chest.
This time Kao punched in 911. Then he called his family.
“Yes,” Nina said. “I remember this story.”
The Tahoe police detectives made out the report, clapped Kao on the shoulder, and recommended no further action. The dead man had thirteen previous felony convictions including two assaults with a deadly weapon in the course of a robbery. But the police also took away Kao’s gun. Two days later he got his first E-mail. The one-word message, a sort of declaration of war, came in his own language. “Revenge,” it read. Family or friends of the robber probably wrote it.
Dr. Mai said, “Kao couldn’t sleep anymore. His jaw hurt all the time. He was afraid to leave his wife alone in the store. He didn’t know what to do.”
Nina wrote all this down. She looked up to see Kao adjusting his jaw again as though it had slipped off its track. Dark, intense eyes studied her. When his hand came down she noticed that his jaw was not symmetrical.
“Kao and his family came to me. We decided he must continue. Friends came to the store to help. Kao worked hard.”
The July fourth holiday brought tourists and heat to Tahoe. Kao woke at four o’clock the next morning to a phone call from a fire marshal who yelled that his store was on fire. By the time they got there, the interior of the store had been gutted by quick and successive plagues of flame, smoke, and the rescuers’ water and foam.
Everything was ruined. All the Vangs’ stock had been reduced to rubble. Cash register, counters, display shelves, bottle glass, melted candy pieces, and ashes jumbled together in blackened heaps.