Restless Soul (20 page)

“Nang, I want you to tell me all about Lanh Vuong. You were going to do that, remember, before we were rudely interrupted by your uncle’s thugs.”

Nang was still shaking from the wild ride in the city. She’d pulled onto a narrow road that cut through farmland. She wanted to avoid any major routes for a while, as plenty of witnesses would have described her and the Jeep to police.

“Lanh Vuong,” she repeated. “Tell me about him.”

“I called him Uncle Lanh when I was a boy, but he was not a true uncle.”

“Go on.” She stopped and let the engine idle, and she unhooked her seat belt and stood, pulling the maps out from under her. If she hadn’t sat on them, they would have blown out. Other papers had, and she’d nearly lost the jerricans and her backpack with the skull pieces, too. Stretching forward, she knocked the glass out of the window frame, making it easier to see. “I’d guess it was a 9 mm,” she mused as she began to drive again.

“Lanh Vuong is an important—” Nang picked through his brain for the appropriate word “—exporter of goods from Vietnam.”

“Smuggler,” Annja corrected under her breath. “How did he get in the business, Nang?” An odd question for her to ask, she thought, but something niggled at a corner of her mind.

“Because of the Vietnam War, I think. Before I was born, before my father and Uncle Kim were born, Uncle Lanh was a soldier in the North Vietnamese army. An important one, a colonel. He was in his forties then, and he led many men to battle.”

So he was in his eighties, or perhaps ninety now, definitely an old man, Annja thought. She waited, listening to the wind blow across the hood and welcoming it cooling her. It dried the sweat on her face; she’d sweated rather profusely during the erratic race from the antiques shop and out of Chiang Mai.

“Uncle Lanh was captured by American fighting men in the war. Some of his men were captured also, and all of them were put in a prison in South Vietnam. A bad prison, Uncle Kim told me. For forty years.”

Annja’s eyebrows rose. “Forty years?” How was that possible? She’d thought prisoners on both sides were released after the war, though to this day reports lingered of MIA American soldiers still rumored to be held in the heart of the country.

“Papers were lost, and the prison changed hands,” Nang said. “Uncle Kim said Lanh was supposed to be free after the war, but the lost papers kept him in prison. Until the prison closed and everyone left inside was freed.”

“A forgotten man,” Annja said.

“A bitter man with no love left for his country. Vietnam was bad to my uncle Lanh.”

“So he took from it,” she surmised. “In the past few years of his freedom, he has taken relics.”

“What is the wrong in that? Uncle Lanh was owed for all the years in prison. A lifetime he spent in a cell.”

“Uncle Lanh is a thief and a smuggler,” Annja said. And probably worse. Those in the operation under him showed no compunction against killing, so likely Lanh hadn’t, either.

“There were places, Uncle Kim said, where ancient golden treasures were hidden during the war. Monks did not want the temple riches to fall into American hands and so they hid them in the jungle. Uncle Lanh knew of the places, and much of it was still there when he got out of prison. So Uncle Lanh and a few of the soldiers who served under him regained the treasures and sold them to wealthy men in other countries. Getting them out of Vietnam was the dangerous part, he once told me. But he had ways, and people looked the other way when he gave them gold. He sent the gold to Laos and Thailand, to hidden places in the mountains. Then buyers were found and the treasures moved on. And when those treasures were gone he found more.”

Nang kept talking without more prodding, as if he wanted someone to know about Lanh and the operation. He spoke about it with a sense of pride and clearly believed that it was all justified because of the prison time Lanh had served.

“He took things from temples. Not a lot at any one time, but all together a lot since his freedom. Also from a museum once, he told me. And from burial places. Uncle Kim said the dead did not need their gold. Lahn needed the gold, though, gold and diamonds and emeralds. Uncle Lahn said he would be dead soon enough because he was so old, and that he would enjoy the gold while he still lived. It became, I think, the only thing he loved. Gold and money. Everything else he hated.”

“You don’t need to be involved with all of this, Nang. The world is full of opportunities and—”

“This is what my family does. This is all I know,” he said angrily.

And this is all
I
know, she thought. Seeing something through to its end, putting the last piece of the puzzle into place and righting any wrongs along the way. It wasn’t all she knew before she picked up the sword, but it was her life now. Along her previous path she would have made a few phone calls and let some international authorities find Lanh Vuong. She would never have been involved in a chase scene on Chiang Mai’s streets, or a sword fight in the antiques store. She certainly wouldn’t have been driving across Thailand, and now Laos, and within several hours into Vietnam.

“But I do not hate like my uncle Lanh does. I do not hate everything. You, though, I hate you.”

Had Lanh Vuong hated enough during the war to use the skull bowl? Annja wondered.

“Read this map to me.” Annja sat the one of Northern Vietnam on Nang’s lap. “Read about Hue. Tell me all about Hue.”

She genuinely did want to know about the city she was driving to, and she wanted to keep his mind occupied at the same time.

Nang was clearly terrified of her, and she did nothing to ease that feeling. She’d left the gun in the back room of the antiques shop and appeared unarmed to him. He’d seen the sword during the race through Chiang Mai’s streets, but she didn’t have it now, so it would seem that she’d dropped it when the Jeep nearly flipped over. Still, he made no move to escape or call for help as they took a narrow road over the border in Laos and passed a farmer leading an ox.

The map shook in his hands.

Annja felt bad for him…but not bad enough to let him out of the Jeep. Annja might need his help to translate and to find the antiques shop in Hue, which he’d admitted to visiting on more than one occasion to see his “uncle” Lanh.

Her stomach rumbled, apparently taking issue with the food she’d bought a half hour earlier and wolfed down. Annja had wanted to keep her strength up and so had ordered, in effect, three meals. Next to a gas station was a noodle shop, and her reluctant passenger had ordered
neua gai,
steamed chicken on rice. She’d been hungrier, ordering the same, plus
loog chin plaa,
fish meatballs, which had a softer texture than beef meatballs, and
giaw plaa,
dumplings stuffed with chopped fish. Normally, Annja had a cast-iron stomach, but with every rut and bump in the road she hit, her meal threatened to make a reappearance.

“It is seven hundred kilometers,” Nang said, oblivious to her discomfort. “From Chiang Mai to Hue.”

“Good to know.” Annja had filled up the tank, and the two jerricans in the back; she didn’t know when the next service station would present itself. “Tell me more.”

“Hue has a population of…” He paused and leaned forward, trying to read the tiny print as they bounced along. “Three hundred and fifty thousand, a little more. It covers five thousand square kilometers.”

A big city. Good thing she’d brought Nang with her, after all, as navigating a large foreign city she’d never been to might be daunting.

“It has many districts. Phong Dien, Quang Dien, A Luoi, Nam Dong, Huong Thuy, Vang…”

She let his voice trail to the back of her mind. She’d pay more attention when the subject became more interesting or relevant.

She knew the dirt road they drove down was not on her map, but that she’d eventually come to something larger that would be. The grass that lined the edges was tall and broad and a brilliant green that gave way to paler green trees in the distance with wide, sweeping fronds. It was more of the primitive beauty that she’d noted around the Thins village, but the village she approached looked much poorer. The homes were made of severely weathered planks that looked as if a strong wind would take them down. Several of them were two levels high with rickety-looking outer stairs leading to the second floor. The villagers who made their way between the buildings were dressed simply, many of them in white, and none of the men wearing shirts.

The next village looked little different, though there were children playing. They wore colorful shorts and shirts that had seen better days.

“This part of the country is poor,” Nang told her.

The road narrowed and rice fields appeared on both sides. Men and women worked them, and a boy led an ox across the road, forcing Annja to slow. There were puddles and deep ruts, and the Jeep bounced with the passing miles. Far to the south were forested mountains wreathed in gray clouds. One formation looked like the humps on a camel’s back.

“Nang, tell me some more about Hue.”

“Uncle Kim would take me to the palaces on the bank of the Perfume River when I was a child. Emperors and mandarins had built them. More than a hundred very old buildings along that river. Tombs of the Nguyen kings there also. Lanh took from some of those tombs. My favorite was the Khai Dinh tomb, but the Gia Long and Minh Mang I also remember.” He was relaxing, talking about the city, but only a little. The map still shook in his hands. “Good food in Hue—mostly vegetables, though. Beautiful pagodas. Tourists like the pagodas. He took me to Da Nang also, my uncle Kim. It is north of Hue and not as rainy. Hue is a very rained-on city.”

Lovely, Annja thought. An opportunity to find myself in another torrential downpour. She’d been rained on quite enough the past few days, and the clouds over the Laos mountains looked as if they could open up at any moment.

“Anything else?”

He gave her a blank look.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about the city?”

“I attended school there. It was the capital of the Nguyen lords.”

She had no idea what that was, nor was she particularly interested. But she wanted to keep him talking. “Go on, Nang.”

“Hue was the national capital until near the end of the Second World War. That was when Bao Dai abdicated as emperor and a new government was established.”

“That would be the communist one.”

“Saigon in the south became the new capital. And Hanoi in the north. Saigon is called Ho Chi Minh City now.”

“Hue looks like it sits on the border between North and South Vietnam.” Annja had noticed that from craning her neck and looking at the map when he had it opened.

“The Battle of Hue was in 1968, the year my older brother was born. The city was hurt very bad by American bombs. Only in recent times are some of the buildings being restored. But some will never be fixed.”

She came to a wider road and took it, snaking around a rice field and passing an impressive-looking temple. Her stomach had finally settled down, and she wished she had bought some candy bars or nuts at the gas station. At least she’d picked up a few cans of Cheerwine cherry cola and a six-pack of Red Bull. They’d cost her four or five times what she would have paid for them in New York. She reached behind Nang’s seat.

“Want one?” She gave him a cola and pulled out two Red Bulls for herself.

It was hot, even after the sun set, and despite their speed clouds of gnats stayed with the Jeep, sticking to her skin. She liked the smell of the country, though mostly what she picked up was damp earth. It was preferable to the smog of Chiang Mai and the ugly odors of the antiques shop and the alley.

She let herself breathe deep.

“You are not going to let me go, are you? You are going to kill me and leave my flesh to rot,” Nang said.

Annja stayed silent. Let him remain in fear of her to keep him cooperative. She didn’t like herself very much at this moment. Several moments later, she said, “We’ll see, Nang. We’ll see.”

To avoid a checkpoint along the road, Annja cut across a field, nearly miring the Jeep in mud. Her passport might have sufficed to get her across the border without too many questions, but she couldn’t risk Nang causing problems.

She took him into the restroom with her when they stopped at a gas station a few miles over the Vietnam border. It was a small town, and the station had been ready to close. The owner accepted her Thailand baht, but charged her extra because he would lose some money in converting it to dong. She’d needed Nang to translate for her, and she hoped he hadn’t said anything foolish like, “Help, I’ve been kidnapped by a mad woman.”

She loaded up on candy bars and chips, which was all the fare for sale, and ushered Nang back into the Jeep, watching him while she filled the tank. If her calculations were correct, she wouldn’t have to stop for gas again until they were headed back out of the country. Correction, she thought, until
she
was headed back. She’d leave Nang in Hue and hope against hope that he would find a different calling than smuggling. Maybe he would have to if she could catch Lanh Vuong and return him to prison.

“Are you married, Nang?”

“No.”

“Is there someone you—”

“No.”

She wondered how Luartaro was doing and if he’d been able to return to the treasure cave with the authorities. She wished she could have called him from the antiques store to tell him what was going on and where she was going. Maybe if there was a consulate in Hue she would stop and try to reach him.

When Nang fell asleep, she coasted to the side of the road and extricated the map from his hands. She found a small flashlight in the glove box and used it to check her route. Annja was proficient at reading maps, but the inset map for Hue was tiny and listed only major roads. She would wake Nang when they reached the city.

Hue sat in central Vietnam, perched on the bank of the Huong River and a dozen miles inland from the port of Bien Dong. She guessed it was a little more than four hundred miles south of Hanoi, which she knew would have a consulate or embassy.

“Nang, tell me more about this city.” Annja nudged him awake. He looked angry at being disturbed. “What is that?” She pointed to an ornate building at the edge of the city, set back from a main road she turned on.

“Hue has many monuments, and that is one of them. I do not know the name. But that building, that one—” He waved his arm at a much larger structure, the ornate top of which rose higher than all the buildings around it. Through gaps in the other buildings, she saw that the massive one was walled. “That one is called the Citadel. Once there was an entire city inside it, a forbidden place where only emperors and their concubines and guards were permitted. The punishment for trespassing was death. It is a tourist attraction now.” He paused. “You are going to kill me, are you not?”

“And what is that building?”

“The Thien Mu Pagoda, the largest one in Hue. It is the symbol of the city. Some of the royal tombs are behind it. The tombs were built while the rulers still lived. Some look like miniature palaces.”

Several blocks later he pointed out Quoc Hoc High School, Hai Ba Trung High School, a series of old French-style buildings, mandarin houses and the Hue Museum of Royal Fine Arts.

Annja spotted several businesses that were still open, despite the late hour. Some had signs in English and French for the tourists. One advertised all-night foot massages, another
banh khoai
and
com hen,
which Nang explained were savory pancakes and mussels served on rice.

Annja was hungry again and ate the last candy bar.

“How far are we from the antiques store, Nang?”

He was shaking again; the neon lights of the bars they drove by showed that he was sweating profusely.

“Tell me the best way to get there.”

In halting words, he did.

It was in an old part of the city; the buildings looked beat up, and half the ones on the block were closed and boarded up. There was a tavern on the corner, the only business open along the street, with a winking light that advertised Bia Hoi beer. Laughter spilled out of its propped open door, but it looked as if the patrons were sparse—so were the cars on the street. She circled the block, seeing the antiques store in the middle, and found an alley to pull into.

“You will kill me now?”

“Does your uncle Lanh speak English?”

“And French. He learned in prison.”

“Does he live nearby?”

Nang looked up. There was a low light in one of the windows. “He owns the building, the block. He lives up there, above his store.”

“Get out.” She reached over and unsnapped his seat belt. “Get out.”

He slid out, stumbling in his nervousness.

“Go home, Nang. Go somewhere.”

He stared at her, barely visible in the light that spilled into the alley from a lamppost.

“I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to hurt you. Just—” She didn’t have to say anything else. He took off running, turning the corner past the alley, his feet slapping against the sidewalk. “I hope I don’t regret that,” she said to herself.

Nang could well stop somewhere, the tavern even, and call Lanh to warn him…or call some of his uncle’s muscle. He probably would call, but hopefully after she’d concluded her business and was headed back out of the city. Better she got rid of Nang now than worry about him while she confronted the smuggling mastermind.

She could make out next to nothing in the alley; the light coming from the far end was faint like the first hint of dawn. There were backs of buildings and staircases leading to second floors, and plenty of insects that she couldn’t see but could hear and feel all around her.

Not a single light burned in any windows in the back. There were stairs directly behind the antiques shop, sturdy and narrow and incongruous to the rickety appearance of the front of the building. As she climbed, the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes following her, she touched the sword with her thoughts. Hopefully she wouldn’t need it against a man in his eighties or nineties, but she would be prepared nonetheless. The steps were not steep; in fact, they were lower than usual, perhaps made to accommodate an old man’s failing legs.

At the top, the door looked sturdy and resisted her attempts to force it open. Finally, she summoned the sword, and carefully used the blade to worry at the hinges until she could get it open. Unless he was deaf, he had to have heard her. She noticed as she passed through the door frame that she’d tripped a silent alarm.

“Wonderful,” she muttered. It would either be keyed to a police station or private security firm, or perhaps—like the antiques store in Chiang Mai—to thugs who would come roaring up with guns ready.

The kitchen was dark, but she could pick through the shadows enough to make her way toward the doorway. The kitchen smelled of dirty dishes and food that had been left out. She wrinkled her nose and picked up the scent of something far worse.

Insects were thick inside the apartment, too.

“No.” She entered a hall and felt around for a light switch, turning it on and holding the sword out in front of her.

He was lying on the couch as if he’d fallen asleep, a newspaper flat against his chest and flies buzzing around his face. He’d been dead for at least a few days. Annja dismissed the sword and cupped her hand over her nose, trying to cut the smell. She saw a chair near the couch and dropped into it.

Lanh Vuong had been a small man who looked ancient. The wrinkles were deep, and the skin thin like parchment, the hands twisted with arthritis to the point they looked like the claws of a bird—claws that were thick with gold rings. Three thick gold chains hung around his bloated neck. She looked away from the corpse, feeling the candy bars rise.

Annja felt sick to her stomach, and cheated of answers. She’d driven through three countries to confront him and to demand answers about the skull bowl and the smuggling operation. She’d dragged a frightened henchman with her—who might at this very moment be calling in thugs.

Lanh Vuong’s death had robbed her of any feeling of completion.

“No. No. No. No.” She sat there for several minutes, then pushed herself up and looked around for a phone, still cupping her hand over her nose.

Annja got a good look at the furniture. Beautiful antiques, every piece, many hinting at a French origin, and most of it well maintained. The carpet was threadbare in places, however, partially covered up by an expensive-looking Turkish rug that dominated the center of the living room. The apartment was small—the living room, kitchen, single bedroom and a bath all compact. There was another room, this with a stackable washer-dryer and a desk. The message light on the telephone blinked red.

Annja sat at the desk, the smells of laundry soap helping to cut the odor of the old man’s corpse. She remembered the phone number of the consulate in Chiang Mai and once again called it. Lanh Vuong would not mind if she added to his phone bill. She wanted to call the lodge, too, and see if someone there would get Luartaro for her. But it was late, too late for an indulgence like that.

After being transferred from person to sleepy person, Annja was connected to Pete Schwartz.

“I’m surprised you’re still working,” she said. “Oh, it’s because of me, isn’t it? Sorry. Really, I am sorry.” She quickly related the story of her mad dash to Vietnam, leaving out her borrowing of Nang. “I wasn’t sure who to call about all of this.”

She had no contacts in Hue or Hanoi, and no computer to connect to her network of internet associates. Lanh Vuong didn’t have a computer that she’d seen, though there might be one downstairs in the antiques store. That would be her next stop. She didn’t want to take the time to search the apartment.

“And I didn’t want to call the police just yet, Pete.” She’d have too much explaining to do.

Pete told her there was a U.S. Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City, and an embassy in Hanoi—both too far away to be convenient, though he gave her phone numbers for some men he knew there and told her to call them—immediately.

“I’m coming back to Chiang Mai,” Annja said. “I’ll be leaving soon. Hey, you don’t need to yell at me.” She wanted to look through the antiques store below for…what? Maybe for any records of the smuggling operation or artifacts. Maybe for a list of names of people buying the relics or working for Lanh Vuong. Maybe a laptop or hard drive she could take with her and dig through later. Something to put the last pieces of the puzzle in place.

“Yes, I’m coming right back. Right away,” she told Pete when he pressed her to leave and to let the local authorities sort things out—not a “vacationing American archaeologist with a nose for trouble looking to get herself tossed in a foreign jail.”

“You can stop yelling. I’m heading back now,” Annja said.

Well, soon, she thought. A trip downstairs first. She considered calling the lodge to find Luartaro, again dismissing the notion because of the late hour. She considered calling the consulate or the embassy, too, as Pete had suggested, as well as Doug Morrell to see if a crew was on its way to Thailand to film the teak coffins.

Instead, she pushed the button to listen to Lanh Vuong’s messages. She figured she might learn just how many days ago he died based on the age of the messages. It was an old-style answering machine, with a cassette tape in it. She didn’t think they made those anymore. The tape was full.

There were nineteen messages, the first was five days ago, so he’d not been dead longer than that. Most of them were in Vietnamese, and she could pick out only a few words, not enough to yield anything useful. But there were four messages in English, all from the same man—Sandman, he called himself.

“I’m worried about you, old man,” Sandman said. The voice was scratchy and distorted because the tape had been used so much. “You haven’t returned a single call.”

Another message said, “I wanted to tell you this face-to-face, but you’re obviously not around. Something’s rotten inside.”

The next said, “Old man…pick up the phone. Are you there?”

The last was from the previous day. Sandman was worried about his friend and would have someone stop by to check on him tomorrow…which would be later that day. It was after midnight.

Annja paced in the tight confines of the room. She should leave—after a quick look downstairs—hop in the Jeep and return to Chiang Mai to tie up any loose ends with the authorities and the consulate. She shouldn’t cool her heels in a dead man’s apartment waiting for someone called the “Sandman.”

She left the apartment, turning off the lights as she went, stopping to look in the refrigerator and taking out a block of cheese and a bottle of ginger ale. The rest of the items looked either fuzzy with the first hints of mold or unidentifiable. She took the back staircase down, eating the cheese as she went. It was sharp cheddar, and it helped to cut the smell of Lanh’s corpse.

She retrieved a small flashlight from the Jeep. The back door to the antiques shop required a little work to open, and she managed to bypass the alarm—it was an older security device that anyone with a little thought could dismantle. She closed the door behind her and flicked on the flashlight.

A shiver coursed through her.

At the top of a hutch-style desk across a crowded and cramped back room sat a skull bowl.