The Price of Blood Part 31

"Trust me on this," she said in that heels-dug-in tone.

They stared at each other. She wasn't going to give it up. Deal with it later. She tucked the heavy pistol in her tote bag. Broker kept the Beretta.

It took Broker thirty seconds and two quick hugs to say good-bye to Mike and Irene.

Their concerned faces made brief cameos in his rearview mirror. His tires chewed clods of dirt and splattered the pine trees with gravel shrapnel. Broker and Nina exchanged exhausted demented smiles. Off to see the Wizard.

"Makes sense." Broker pounded the steering wheel with his injured left hand, oblivious to the pain. "He had Waldo Jenke to watch his back in the joint but now he's on the run and he's hurting bad."

"So he can't go far," said Nina.

"Family." Broker grinned. "He's Italian." He ran the stop light in Devil's Rock and smoked past the fifty-five mph speed limit sign doing twenty mph over.

"Now we'll get some answers," he said. "The cards are going to fall where they f.u.c.king fall."

"Fine with me." Nina grinned wryly.

"What?"

"You're like a kid, we could be charging into an ambush and you're happy," said Nina. "That's why I came to you. No one else would be nuts enough to go for this."

He was happy. The doubts and insecurities of an hour ago had evaporated. It was a quest. Now blessed by a strange serendipity.

They ga.s.sed up at the Holiday Station in Tofte. As he got back behind the wheel he handed a travel cup of coffee and a Wisconsin road map to Nina and asked, "You know who Loki was?"

"Norse G.o.d."

"Yeah." Broker wedged his coffee cup between his thighs and tore the cellophane off a beef jerky with his teeth and spit it out the window. "He liked to play pranks. He made an arrow out of Mistletoe and deceived Odin's blind son into shooting it into his brother Balder. Balder's death set the G.o.ds on the path to Ragnarokk."

"Like kaput," said Nina.

"Right. The end." Broker grinned. "So it kind of makes sense that Jimmy Tuna's holed up in a place called Loki, dying and laughing."

"How could you be a cop for all this time and still think like this?" asked Nina.

Broker shrugged it off. But he saw by her watchful eyes that it was meant as a serious question. Well, they had some serious talking to do.

He lit a cigarette and settled behind the wheel. "Besides my dad the four men who shaped my life were LaPorte, your dad, Tuna, and Trin. After knowing them, how the h.e.l.l was I supposed to go back and have an ordinary life?

"It's like a riddle. How could they be so solid and then fly apart in this gold scam?" He eyeballed her. "What if we find out they were all in it together? Except for Trin, who was in jail."

"The army never cared about the bank. They censured Dad for desertion. I'm not saying he wouldn't knock off an enemy bank. I'm saying he wouldn't leave you up s.h.i.t creek to do it," she stated simply.

"C'mon. You barely knew him. He was always gone."

"He told me once that the most important thing was for kids to grow up in a home where there was nothing to hide. He was there even when he wasn't there. He was an ordinary guy, Broker; being an officer was a big deal for him. It didn't come easy."

"So we both have our myths."

Nina sipped her coffee and stared at the twinkling horizon of Lake Superior. "When I was seven he came back to Georgia on leave and we went to Michigan to visit Mom's relatives. It was deer season and Dad went hunting with two of my uncles. I said I wanted to go along and he agreed to take me.

"We went up north, into a big woods beyond some farms. There wasn't even much snow. I remember that he had this red Elmer Fudd hunting hat with the funny flaps over the ears. He took out a county map and showed me the roads and where we were going. Then he gave me his compa.s.s and explained what to do if I got separated and lost. Go west until I came to a road. Then go to a farmhouse and ask to use the telephone.

"But we didn't get separated. We didn't see any deer either. The sky changed and the wind came up and the snow...suddenly it got so cold it hurt and we couldn't see."

"Whiteout," said Broker.

Nina nodded. "From nowhere. A real live killer blizzard. We weren't dressed for it. I was too young, I didn't know how bad it was. He gave me a job, which was to read the compa.s.s. Then he unzipped his parka and put me inside with my arms and legs around his waist. He belted me in and then zipped the coat over me. Every few minutes he'd unzip and ask me to show him the compa.s.s.

"He kept going on a compa.s.s heading through that storm. Sometimes he counted to himself, over and over. One, two, three, four." She smiled. "You know, like cadence. Finally he found a fence line and he walked along it for hours, with one hand on the barbed wire. When he found a mailbox and a driveway his glove was torn to b.l.o.o.d.y shreds. I don't remember the things he said. I remember that he kept me warm and he smelled like sweat inside his coat and he didn't leave me and he didn't quit and he kept his rifle."

She turned to him and spoke with uncomplicated conviction. "I didn't have to spend a lot of time with him to know him."

Broker clicked his teeth. "I believed in LaPorte. I even went down to New Orleans still half believing in him."

"You were blinded. You're about to get your sight back. LaPorte's Darth Vader. And Bevode is his monster and Tuna is a trickster. I have no idea who Trin is." She smiled and spoofed him. "All we need is a princess, huh?"

She unfolded the road map and studied the index. "Loki. Population forty-three." She referenced the locators and put her finger on a spot. "How long will it take us to get there?"

"About three hours once we cross into Wisconsin at Duluth and we're about forty minutes out of Duluth."

She looked at the sky. "Do we want to roll into Loki in the dark? I doubt that Tony Sporta lives in the cheese factory. And we're both shot. We need some sleep."

Broker exhaled. "You have a point."

She raised up in the seat. "What's that up ahead, on the left?"

"Sloden's Resort. A real yuppie tourist trap. They have shops, ma.s.seurs, two restaurants. I think they even have baby-sitters for your cat."

Nina drew her fingers through her slack unwashed hair. "If there's a room, let's spend the night. My treat."

43.

NINA REMOVED A TUBE OF LIPSTICK FROM HER purse, medicated her dry lips, and mugged in the rearview mirror. She ogled Broker's mild frown and exclaimed, "What?"

They were closer now and Broker pointed to the large road sign that said: VACANCY and ROOMS STARTING FROM $79.00. The parking lot was half full, divided with white lines like a shopping center. "No problem finding a room. Season doesn't really start up here until June fifteenth," he explained. "School's not out yet." With a touch or irony he added, "This part of the year is called the 'quiet time' in resort lingo."

"Just what I had in mind," said Nina.

They parked the Jeep and carried their bags across the parking lot, past the tennis court and toward a kiosk-looking office that had a registration sign above the door. On the way, they skirted little islands of curbed gra.s.s with barbecue grills cemented into them. Seeing the transplanted suburban grills made Broker think that Sloden's was the kind of place that Fatty Naslund wished someone would build in Devil's Rock, probably on Mike's land-until Fatty lifted a bowling bag full of gold.

There was an auditorium, meeting rooms, and a health spa, with two saunas, an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, a hot tub, and a workout room. The units were Cape Cod, cookie-cutter clapboard, smartly painted Prussian Blue and cream and as monotonous as a rank of Continental soldiers. Just right for fussy city people who didn't want to get too near the woods.

The young lady at the registration desk showed them a map of the grounds and explained that the gravel Lakewalk along the sh.o.r.e led to a mini-mall where they could find an espresso and pastry shop and a boutique.

"Good," said Nina. "I can go shopping."

Broker wasn't listening. He watched traffic on the highway. Since they'd turned into the resort no other car had entered the parking lot. Maybe she had lost them in Lansing.

Nina discovered that there was a hair salon in the resort proper, next to the video arcade. She fingered her head of copper straw and issued an appeal that brought a sympathetic response from the receptionist. Broker grinned. Colt .45 in her bag and she was girl-talking. The receptionist quickly dialed a number and cajoled somebody into staying late for an appointment.

Then Nina splurged and took the third most expensive room in the joint, with a king-sized bed, full bath, and a Jacuzzi overlooking Lake Superior. "Spectacular view," said the brochure.

They signed in and got the key and carried their bags up to their room. The king-sized bed looked good. But Nina insisted on going shopping. It was nearly five-thirty, her appointment was at six.

They practically ran the Lakewalk. In the boutique, Broker blundered into a jangling deja vu ambush when Nina stepped out of a dressing room wearing a snug, dark purple dress with price tags hanging off it. She said, "Do you think this is too tight?"

Little alarms flashed in the back of his mind. Many mornings when he was a married man, Kimberly would come down the stairs and say exactly those words.

"It's fine," said Broker, backpedaling.

"What about the way it fits here?" She ran her fingers along the taut material over her left hip-where the Iraqis shot her-and she continued, word for word what his ex-wife used to say: "Give me an honest opinion."

"I think you should get it," said Broker.

"Just tell me how it looks when I walk away, from behind."

"Well, it does kind of show off your..." Oh s.h.i.t.

"So it is too tight or..."

Broker spun on his heel and went outside before he got pulled into the vortex of the F-word. Not the one that stood for "unlawful carnal knowledge," the one that ended in at.

He smoked a cigarette and watched the highway, the resort parking lot, and the Lakewalk. Finally Nina came out of the shop with an armful of bags and immediately set off across the road. He jogged to catch up. She headed for a strip of stores: a grocery, a liquor store, and a sporting goods-bait shop. She headed for the door with the prominent neon sign that blared GUNS.

With the same easy aplomb she'd shown among the dresses and the shoes, she bought two pistol cleaning kits, one for a 9mm and one for the Colt, and a box of Federal .45 caliber, 230 grain ball rounds.

As they left the store and hurried across the highway, Broker asked, "What the h.e.l.l are you doing?"

"You had hollow points in the Colt," she explained in a professional voice that sounded like, you dumb s.h.i.t.

"Aw, G.o.d," groaned Broker.

Then she convinced him that Bevode Fret and company were nowhere in sight and that they certainly weren't going to s.n.a.t.c.h her from the beauty shop. So Broker carried all the shopping bags up to the room. He stripped and stayed under the shower for twenty minutes and emerged from the bathroom clean and shaven. He changed the bandage on his thumb. The swelling had gone down. He experimented with making a fist.

He put on his only change of clothes, the light sport jacket he'd worn to New Orleans, cotton slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, and worn loafers. All slightly wrinkled.

He took a Heineken from the small refrigerator and sat out on the balcony to revive himself with the "spectacular view" of a dead flat Lake Superior. A loon motored by, some gulls dived, three ducks landed. He tapped his index finger at the circle Nina had drawn around Loki, Wisconsin, on the map. Then he stared at a castle of clouds and thought about Nguyen Van Trin.

Right after he first arrived in Vietnam. Before the Big Offensive. Before he'd learned to wear his sweat. The older, red-haired major on the team, whom the others called "Mama Pryce," sat him down.

"You notice there's graves all over the place? The Vietnamese have this thing about graves," Pryce said. "And they have these lunar holidays when they go fix up their graves. Well, we are in the middle of one of those lunar holidays and I want you to take the Jeep and drive Colonel Trin, the commander of the regiment, over to the old Dong Ha combat base. There's still some American units stationed there and some of our guys live in the house where he was born. You know, sorta go in and smooth it and help him dress up the family cemetery."

In a more optimistic time the combat base had looked like primitive Rome. A legion of U.S. Marines had built it on seven hills that overlooked a muddy river. Now it had reverted to the South Vietnamese and resembled a military slum transplanted from Mars. Nothing but rusty barbed wire, collapsed barracks, and clouds of gritty red dust blowing over the gummy red hills.

Broker found Colonel Trin to be the most foreign presence he had ever known. With his flat face, his cold, brown wraparound Asian eyes and scars lumped on his high, wide cheeks, he could have been a bronze Sphinx. Broker also noted that he smelled strongly of onions and garlic. And the Sphinx did not speak. And Broker had no Vietnamese language skills. Considering the late hour, the army had canceled the course. So he just drove the Jeep. Trin sat stiffly in the pa.s.senger seat and pointed. Two shovels, a mattock, a hoe, and a rake clattered in the back.

Trin directed Broker down a maze of dusty roads until they came to a very old and roomy country home of masonry and tile that was misplaced in the military debris. Garden terraces were choked with weeds and blurred out in the adobe-colored dirt. An outbuilding had taken a direct artillery hit. A dusty Jeep and a three-quarter-ton truck were parked haphazardly on the patio.

Trin jerked his hand toward the house. Broker picked his way up the path, past boles of orange, rust-fused barbed wire, soggy heaps of C-ration cardboard and an ornate, stone-carved griffin that was toppled on its side. As he neared the door he had to detour around an upright, ornamental stone slab that barred direct entrance.

Broker stepped around the screen and yelled, "Anybody home?" No answer. He went in. The damp walls dripped with marijuana fatigue and, in the central room, he found three U.S. army enlisted men sprawled on cots. Their gear lay heaped in mildewed piles, their rifles were dirty. Pin-ups from Playboy and Cavalier made a solid t.i.t-heavy collage of the walls. A can of C-Ration ham and mother f.u.c.kers-lima beans-heated on a small kerosene stove. The smell of bubbling beans mingled with the alb.u.min stench of urine. Somebody was taking a p.i.s.s in the next room.

It was 1972. n.o.body saluted second lieutenants. "What?" said one of the Gls. Two others ignored Broker. A fourth came through the door b.u.t.toning his fatigue trousers.

Base rats. Attached to some signal outfit.

Broker had been taught in officer candidate school never to lay a hand on an enlisted man. So he turned to the one who had spoken and booted him to the floor, overturning his cot.

"Outside," said Broker.

They formed a huddle. "What's going on?" demanded the black one. Broker squinted at them. They thought it was a democracy. They were like the kids back home, sucking down dope, going to concerts, and thinking life was supposed to be fair. Broker, young and dumb, still thought it was the army at war.

But in deference to the times, which were bad, he didn't push it. They measured him and saw that he was made out of piano wire and ax handles and that he wore the flap to his holstered .45 unsnapped. And that was enough. They whispered among themselves. One of them offered a sloppy salute.

Broker ignored the salute and explained. "A Vietnamese colonel, whose house you're p.i.s.sing in, wants to look after some things. So take your a.s.ses down the road for a few hours."

As they filed out, one of them said, "f.u.c.kin' gooks."

When they were gone, Colonel Trin walked stiffly into the building carrying a small green canvas satchel. His face remained a graven image as he visited each room. Then he went out the back door and through the brush toward a gentle, overgrown hillock that the Gls used for their garbage dump. Broker went back to the Jeep and grabbed the tools.

When he returned, Colonel Trin had stripped off his tunic and had stooped to work, graceful with muscle and scar tissue. He kicked at rusty cans and cardboard and worse, he yanked handfuls of tall weeds. A pendant swinging from a chain around his neck caught a flash of sun. It got in the way and Trin s.n.a.t.c.hed it off and put it in his pocket. He looked up and saw that Broker was staring at the thick raised scars on his back and chest. Broker lowered his eyes and pulled off his fatigue shirt and stood, barechested, hefting the mattock, looking for a way into the job.

Trin narrowed his hooded eyes for a brief second and then took Broker by the arm and put him to work clearing brush away from a low, round cement wall that surrounded a weed-choked earthen mound. The round wall did not go full circle. There was an entrance and it was ceremonially blocked by an upright cement slab that was smaller than but similar to the one in front of the main house's front door. Another dozen mounds were spread through the brush.

Broker swung the mattock. He hoped to make up for his goof-off countrymen tossing their garbage on other people's graves.

They worked side by side through the siesta hour as the red earth fought them like a bed of coals. Broker was getting a sense of the Vietnamese colonel: He was a worker. And he hardly sweated drop one. Broker put out fluids like a hunk of fatback pork in a skillet, but he was determined to keep up. Soon he became dizzy in the heat and had to go to the Jeep for the water can. He brought the container back with him and offered a canteen cup to the short, indefatigable Asian.

Trin straightened up, took one sip, and returned the cup. When their shadows were longer than they were tall, they'd cleared the hill of brush and weeds. Broker had raked the garbage into a pile closer to the house. As Trin expertly used a shovel and a hoe to shape the grave mounds, Broker smoothed the ground between them.

Then the warlike colonel kneeled and took a fistful of incense from his small satchel. He lit the joss sticks and jammed them in the soft dirt of the nearest grave mound.

Buddha stuff. Broker looked around the barbed-wire skirted hills. He saw piles of tin and plywood, the collapsed housing of departed Americans. And then he began picking out the subtle, neglected earthen mounds. Ancestor worship. They were everywhere and some of them were probably there and looking old when Jesus Christ was just learning to swing a hammer.

And Broker, who had an N, for "none," stamped on his dog tags in the s.p.a.ce reserved for a religious affiliation, was stumped at what to do next. So he gathered up the tools and walked back to the Jeep.

Colonel Trin returned with his tunic b.u.t.toned and his stern eyes shaded by the brim of his military cap. He pointed the way back to Dong Ha. Except he had Broker turn off short of the compound and down a side street dense with twittering, smiling people. Trin pointed one last time. A restaurant.

When they were seated, Trin removed his cap and ran his hand through his thick black hair. His smile came sudden and disarming and warm, like his previous face had been a mask that had dropped off. He withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered one to Broker.

Broker declined. He didn't smoke-yet. He was two weeks away from laying on the ground all night next to dead bodies that had swelled all day in the sun.