Dragonfish: A Novel (19 page)

Mai spoke up. “So she told you about me, but did she ever tell Sonny? If he met me back on the island, he must have asked her about me. Hey, where’s that daughter of yours? What she doing nowadays? The subject must have come up at least once in two years of marriage.”

Victor didn’t reply immediately. He glanced at me like I already knew the answer. “She told him you had died in a car accident
when you were six. She didn’t want him knowing anything about you. To protect you.”

This brought on an exasperated chuckle from Mai as she sat back in her chair. In the dim light, she resembled the dolls on the wall behind Victor. Her smile was as baffled as theirs, and it both stiffened her face and made it seem brittle.

“Why did she start writing me, then? Did she tell you that?”

“Well, she asked me to follow her to her room, and that’s the first thing I saw, the letters on the desk. She said she’d been coming to the room for months to write you. Long letters, apparently—that she hadn’t sent yet. It was the only place she could do it. I figured she wanted me to deliver them to you or something. But then she reached into her knapsack and pulled out a gun and set it on the bed in front of me. She said the hotel was the only place in town she felt safe. And she needed to feel safe, if only for one evening a week. Then she told me that she was leaving Mr. Nguyen, that I knew what he had done to her that night and that he had done other things too and would never ever let her go. She’d have to leave town without him knowing. She could manage that, but she had to do something else before she left. Something for you. For that, she needed my help.”

“The money,” Mai said.

“She knew about Mr. Nguyen’s safe at the restaurant, inside his office. Where he keeps cash from business dealings and all his gambling. I’ve seen him put tens of thousands of dollars in there at a time. She had figured out the combination, and all she needed from me was the code to the alarm and copies of the keys to the restaurant and the office. She offered me twenty thousand. The rest she was leaving for you.”

Mai sat there stiffly. “One hundred thousand dollars,” she murmured, as if to herself, and no longer with that gleam of
shock and desire she showed at the hotel. She was appraising, it seemed, the price of her forgiveness.

I could have told her that money had always been about freedom for her mother, that she had made me return her engagement ring so she could put the money in the bank instead—but I felt out of place at the moment sharing something like that, or saying anything at all.

Victor was massaging his brow, adjusting himself in his chair. He’d been recounting everything with a self-assured, strangely nostalgic calm, but Mai’s mention of the one hundred grand had plummeted him back to earth, where the implications of what he’d done must have hit him hard again.

“She had a plan, if that’s what you want to call it.” He sounded impatient. “In a week, once I got her the keys and the alarm code, she was gonna go get all the money in the safe, leave it in a suitcase in that hotel room for you, then leave town. She kept insisting it was all very simple. All I had to do was pretend I didn’t know anything. Just keep following her like normal, like I still didn’t exist to her, and when everything went down, just do whatever Mr. Nguyen and his son ordered.” Victor’s voice tightened, like he was straining to understand his own story. “I told her, though. They already knew about the hotel room. Was it really the safest place? All she said was that it had to be that room. And that she trusted me.”

He put up a hand like one of us had tried to interrupt him. “I know what you’re thinking. Why me, right? How was she so sure I’d go along with all this? That I would trust her and go betray a man I’d been obeying for—how many years now? He’d cut my throat if he had to.”

He was shaking his head feebly now.

“Do you need the money?” Mai said.

“Who doesn’t need the money? The money had nothing to do with it. It still doesn’t.”

Fleetwood Mac’s “As Long As You Follow” had started playing on the jukebox, the opening guitar chords tingeing Victor’s last words with a melodramatic air.

The bartender was leaning over the bar and chatting quietly with the cowboy, like old friends, like co-conspirators. They were the only other people in the place now. The two young women had left some time ago, and their absence somehow reminded me that I was in the desert, in a bar among strangers.

“Why did you do it then?” Mai finally asked Victor. She had dropped her interrogating tone.

I couldn’t quite manage her sincerity yet. When he didn’t reply immediately, I said, “You know he’s a bad man. You always knew that.”

Both of them turned to me like they’d forgotten I was there.

“What is a bad man to you, Officer?” Victor said.

I saw then why he was good at his job. He could slip on that coldness like it was a second face.

I’d forgotten about the small black backpack by his feet. He unzipped it and pulled out a videotape, which he set gently on the table.

“I haven’t told you the whole story.”

V
ICTOR
, I
COULD SEE NOW
, was a reluctant criminal. He enjoyed his job as much as I enjoyed Vegas but kept at it for that most Asian of reasons: obligation. To his brothers probably, who looked up to him. To his family back home, who relied on the money he sent them. And of course to Sonny, who had taken him in and made him a man, programmed to honor duty over desire. I could see it in his eyes every time he looked at Mai. The kid had never truly desired anyone, and this strange new thing he felt made him both defiant and naive. The most annoying kind of criminal.

He nudged the videotape closer to us, like it was some sinister artifact, and I could imagine it all from there: years of him thoughtlessly obeying orders, doing whatever needed doing and looking the other way, and suddenly one morning from his car he sees his boss’s wife, who he’s never met before, standing in the window of their home. She’s watching her husband, his boss, walk to the car that will whisk him away to all the ugly things he does during the day, without her, and she knows this. Her arms are crossed, her stare cold and yet strangely tender, like she is
saddened by something she also hates. She frightens him actually, though he feels this inexplicable urge to protect her. She reminds him of his mother or his sisters back home, and maybe also those desolate women he saw in the refugee camp. Every morning he comes to pick up his boss, she’s standing in that window like some troubled ghost haunting the house.

Then one morning, though he’s far away behind sunglasses and tinted windows, she sees him. He can feel her judging him. Her arm is in a cast and she knows now that he has hurt people, stolen from them, perhaps even killed them—all for his boss who’s done terrible things too, including all the things he has done to her.

So when he is ordered without any explanation to follow her, he does so with redemption on his mind. It’s the naive hero in him, the good son. Every day he trails her down the aisles of grocery stores, through the afternoon crowds at shopping malls and casinos, and into half-empty movie theaters, until one afternoon she leaves a letter at someone’s apartment, and when he returns that night and sees who this someone is, he finally understands. All that wandering through the city has been a circling around this young woman, her long-lost daughter, who’s even more beautiful and perhaps more alone.

And so maybe he falls in love with this younger version of her. Or maybe the whole thing makes him think of his dead father and the mother he might never see again. Or maybe it just makes him angry, that people have to carry around secrets like this.

When she appears at his side in the empty hallway of the Coronado hotel, it feels like they’ve been silently speaking to each other all this time. She starts telling him the story he’s been waiting for. In room 1215, she reveals the letters on her desk, the gun in her knapsack, and the fear in her heart. One day soon, she says,
intentionally or not, his boss will kill her. She has to leave him, but she wants to punish him too, this man who’s probably given Victor everything he has. When she asks for his help, he refuses, so she reaches again into her knapsack and pulls out the videotape, puts it into the VCR. She goes into the bathroom with her rosary and asks him to knock on the door when he is done. He must watch it all, she says. To the very end. And then she’ll tell him everything else.

T
HINGS HAD STARTED GOING BAD
a year back, when Sonny’s poker game went sour. He’d come home from his sessions moody and drunk, starting arguments and slamming doors for no reason. She had no idea how much he was losing, but the thing he always blamed was his luck. It baffled him, enraged him. He kept telling her about it, repeating the same bad-beat stories in different ways, like he was trying to convince her of how outrageous it all was. She tried to sympathize but had to steel herself against anger that felt directed more and more at her, like he believed on some level that her presence in his life had somehow affected the way the universe was treating him.

She admitted to Victor that she’d blamed herself too for a time, that her own dark moods often scared her more than Sonny’s did and had come to pollute both their lives. A year in the desert had dried up whatever hope and happiness the move there initially promised. She felt walled in by all the mountains, oppressed by the barrenness of the land, the emptiness of the sky, and all that constant sunlight. She told me once that she preferred the nighttime to the daytime because at night most things are hidden, and it made her feel safe. Back then, that made no sense to me.

She went back on her old medication, but it no longer helped
her sleep as it once had, so she turned to sleeping pills, even during the day. Mixing that with alcohol made things worse, and she was doing that daily now, just as she had with me. Two or three beers at lunch. A bottle of wine every evening.

Her bad dreams returned. They crawled around inside her all day. She started seeing the people from her dreams. They would walk past the bedroom door or the bedroom window, trail her on her walks through the neighborhood in the middle of the night, vanish behind trees and fences and into shadows. She dreaded the nighttime now—a choice between not sleeping at all or taking pills that would unleash all the terrors inside her.

But Sonny didn’t care. He had no interest in her nightmares or her visions. He slept soundly, I imagine, through all her trembling in the night, her nonsensical murmuring, her waking up with a start and grabbing your arm, your hand, ready to tell you all the horrible things she’d just dreamed. She had no one to tell them to now. Maybe that’s why she got to hating him so.

She started arguments over things she barely cared about, like which lights should stay on or how hot the tea should be. She couldn’t stop herself. As soon as she began antagonizing him, it was like some pulse inside her would quicken and overtake her with an intensity she no longer felt for anything else. I remember it well. That dark eruption of fire in her eyes. A rage I’ve since suspected felt good on some level. She used to lock herself in the bathroom after our arguments and weep quietly for as long as an hour, and I wonder now if—more than shame or sadness—it was out of relief that she was still alive inside.

I doubt Sonny had patience for talking things through, for seeing doctors or finding solutions. They simply stopped doing whatever it was that had made them happy that first year of their marriage, if they were ever happy. They even stopped making
love, an urge that had apparently dried up in her. With me, she used to blame her medication or her drinking or her period. Who knew what reasons she gave Sonny, but I doubt if any would have made a difference.

The night of the fall, she awoke to him kissing her hard on the mouth. He’d come home late from the casinos, his breath reeking of alcohol. She pushed him off her, and that’s when she saw the kitchen knife in his hand. He stood up, completely naked. He demanded she take off her clothes. When she refused, he plunged the knife into their mattress. When she tried to run from the room, he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her back to the bed. In their struggle, she grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the door and whacked the knife from his hand. He screamed out in pain, cursing her as she fled the room. At the top of the stairs, he caught her again by the hair, but she turned and kicked him in the groin, which was when he grabbed her face and shoved it like he was taking off her head. She remembered stumbling back and gripping the top of the bannister, then losing her grip and nearly all memory of what happened thereafter.

She awoke on a hospital bed with Junior sitting beside her. He looked even more severe than usual. He insisted his father was devastated, had not known what he was doing, would never do anything like it again. Junior would see to it. He’d make him quit drinking. He’d move back into the house with them both if necessary. She just had to try to forgive him and say nothing to the police. He swore to protect her from then on.

Who knows whether she actually believed him, but in that hospital bed she must have already been planning her escape from them both. She told Victor that the first time Sonny saw her at the hospital with her arm in a cast, he knelt and wept in her lap. For months, he stopped raising his voice around her, came home
early to eat dinner and watch TV with her, and went to bed with her every night. He treated her again with that quiet kindness he showed no one else, not even his own son. But she knew it wasn’t going to last. She was just biding her time until her arm healed.

And then, out of the blue, I charged into Vegas with my death wish and must have wrecked all her plans. Was she lying to Sonny when she promised to stay with him if he spared me? Or was she trying to contain the damage, the rage I had reawakened? No wonder she never reached out to me. No wonder she put all her trust in a confused Vietnamese kid, a reluctant thug.

What finally broke her, of all things, was perfume. She’d never worn it in her life, and one day she smelled it on his clothes in the closet. It could have been knee-jerk jealousy, residual love even, or simply one betrayal too many—but this rage, her own, she could not contain. She drove at once to the restaurant to confront him, and only when he vehemently denied everything was she sure that it was true. He was a liar, but he’d never been able to lie to her.